Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Hili plays hob with the laundry again:
Hili: Look, I threw down just one towel.A: I do appreciate your good manners.
Hili: Patrz, zrzuciłam na ziemię tylko jeden ręcznik..
Ja: Doceniam twoje dobre maniery.
This is part 2 of Religious Animal Craziness. You couldn’t make stuff like this up.
It’s bad enough that various species of Christianity and Islam persecute people for being gay, but now religion has injected its poison further—into supposedly homosexual felids. The Nigerian newspaper Leadership reports (and I give their piece in full, with bolding mine; I haven’t tried to fix all the misspellings and errors):
A middle-aged woman (names withheld) yesterday in Lafia, Nasarawa State, publicly disowned her cat whom she had kept as a pet for seven years for what she termed “an unnatural sexual behavior” which she finds disturbing and “a contradiction of the laws of nature.”
By this, the cat has made a record as the first cat to be so publicly declared gay and disowned by its owner.
The cat, named Bull, was alleged to be in the habit of making sexual advances only to other male cats in the house even though there are several other female cats.
Neighbours attested that none of the other cats born while the cat was in the house has it’s due colour [sic], lending credence to the fact that it has not been able to mate with other female cats in its home or anywhere in the environ.
The cat owner who expressed a strong belief in the divine purpose of creating male and female of every creature to fulfil an ordained purpose of procreation said, “anybody interested in this gay cat can have it because I have no further use of it.”
The cat’s renunciation which attracted members of the public was however dramatic as no one wanted to take ownership of such a cat.
After its rejection, many residents of the area have been th[r]onging the house located on Gboko Street, Tudun Gwandara area of Lafia, the state capital to see things for themselves
When LEADERSHIP visited the area people, especially youths, were seen in groups cracking joks about the incident.
I love the “name withheld” part. It’s a good thing this woman doesn’t own bonobos.
h/t: Ginger K
Please don’t expect deep thoughts today, as Professor Ceiling Cat is working hard. The last two posts of the day will be semi-humorous ones about religious lunacy and animals.
This first one, from the BBC, shows how far journalists in Islamic countries will go to avoid offending Mulsims.
Look at the picture of these pigs, which was from the International Edition of the New York Times published in Malaysia. It accompanied an article on the rising demand for pigs in the U.S.
WHAT? The faces of the pigs are blacked out (the normal picture in other NYT editions is below); the culprit was the Malaysian firm KHL printers.
That’s not the only porcine censorship that was exercised. As the Malay Mail Online adds:
A front-page story in the international NYT yesterday featured a picture of piglets standing in the snow, but the printers of the Malaysian edition, KHL Printing Co, concealed the faces of each animal.
A continuation of the story about rising demand for pigs reared in the open, on page 19 of the paper, received the same treatment and saw the faces of two adult pigs blacked out.
To wit:
Of course the censorship was done to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities:
A handful of pigs’ faces have been censored in the Malaysian edition of the International New York Times, it seems.
The black marks were the work of Malaysian printing firm KHL, which blotted out the faces in a story about farming in the United States, according to the Malay Mail. A representative said it was their policy to obscure pigs because Malaysia was “a Muslim country”.
There is no law banning pictures of pigs in Malaysia – a secular country with many faiths – but local media are careful not to offend Muslims who make up two-thirds of the country’s 28 million people, the Malay Mail says.
The image as it appeared in other countriesA government spokesperson said the images were not outlawed, but that publishers should bear in mind “the sensitivities of various cultures”. There appears to be increasing concern about offending Muslims in the country – last year a TV provider ran a warning ahead of a documentary about Pope Francis, and allegedly cut the words “Ya Allah!” from an Indian film this month.
In 2005 the children’s film Babe was banned from cinemas because of its subject matter, and the similarity of the title to the Malay word for pig – “babi”. Complaints from viewers saw the ban overturned, however, and it appeared on television the following year.
While the Malay Home Ministry has since declared that depicting pig faces does not violate the law, they didn’t say anything about this censorship.
Muslim oversensitivity is well known: remember the British teacher in the Sudan who allowed her class to name a teddy bear “Muhammed,” and was then imprisoned for 8 days and deported, while a mob of 10,000 took to the streets calling for her death? And of course it’s forbidden in many places to depict not only the prophet himself (viz., the Danish cartoon flap), but any human being. But PIGS???? Muslims won’t eat pork, but does it really distress them so much to see the faces of pigs?
This is institutionalized insanity.
h/t: Steve
On January 9 I wrote about the sad case of Marline Munoz, a paramedic from Texas who died in November of a pulmonary embolism, but was pregnant at the time. She a living will stating her desire for no artificial means of keeping her alive after brain death, but her pregnancy kept the hospital from turning off the respirator. According to Texas state law, a woman’s legal prerogative about end-of-life care is overruled if she “is diagnosed with pregnancy.” The hospital stated it would not go against that law.
There was quite a bit of discussion about whether the state had the right to do this, although I argued that the initial wishes of Munoz, and the postmortem wishes of her husband and family—both of whom wanted to take her off life support—trumped any interest or rights of the State of Texas. Munoz is, even now still below the 24-28 weeks threshold that Roe v. Wade suggested for the legal period of abortion. I thus saw it as a legal no-brainer.
Now, according to multiple news sources, a Texas district judge agrees, and has ordered Munoz removed from life support, and the hospital agreed today to abide by the judge’s decision. According to USA Today:
On Friday, State District Judge R.H. Wallace ruled that [Munoz] “is deceased” and therefore not subject to a state law that prohibits withdrawal of treatment from a pregnant person. The judge said the Fort Worth facility, John Peter Smith Hospital, had until 5 p.m. Monday to remove Munoz from life support.
The hospital issued a statement Sunday saying it had kept Munoz on life support to follow “the demands of a state statute” and has decided that “the hospital will follow the court order.”
The only thing that puzzles me is the hospital’s original claim that there was a state statute overruling the wishes of someone who is brain-dead, and yet the judge decided that Munoz could be taken off life support because she is brain-dead.
What makes this case even more bizarre is that medical opinion already suggested strongly that the fetus would not be born either normal or even alive because of Munoz’s condition. But Texas nevertheless persisted:
Both the hospital and the family agree that Marlise Munoz meets the criteria to be considered brain-dead — which means she is dead medically and under Texas law — and that the fetus could not be born alive at the current stage of pregnancy. But the hospital had said that it had a legal duty to protect the fetus.
Munoz’s attorneys have said medical records show the fetus is “distinctly abnormal.”
Move along now, folks: there’s nothing to see here. The wishes of Munoz and her family have been respected, and Texas and its insane restrictions on reproductive rights have lost. The state’s desire to stick its nose where it didn’t belong made the plight of the Munoz family a lot harder.
h/t: Ben Goren
Everyone’s favorite Saviour pays a call on the very Jewish Sarah Silverman. They discuss women’s reproductive rights, and Sarah disses Texas’s insane anti-abortion restrictions. Then, at the end, Jesus and Sarah appear to canoodle a bit—such blasphemy!
This is a new video, but in the 5 days since its first posting it’s gotten 750,000 hits.
Ms. Silverman is now the Official Website Comedian™.
h/t: Steve
Here is a parti-colored budgie (“budgerigar”, origin of that name unknown), Melopsittacus undulatus, a native of Australia but of course now found as a pet bird throughout the world. This one is divided is divided transversely in half by color, which makes it very rare—or at least so argues the YouTube video.
How did this come about? The video suggests “tetragametic chimerism“, the fusion of two distinct zygotes (different eggs fertilized by different sperm). Apparently this condition is more common in animals than we know, and is also found in marmosets (“most marmosets are chimeras, sharing DNA with their fraternal twins”) and even humans. It’s not easy to detect unless you do DNA sequencing from different parts of an animal, or the fusion occurs between twins of unlike sex, which can lead to abnormal manifestations of secondary sexual traits (and ambiguous genitalia), or, most readily, when the fused “twins” have different pigmentation, as in this case:
Since birds lay eggs, if this is a chimera it would have resulted from an egg with a double yolk, each yolk representing a different fertilized zygote.
Now I suppose it’s possible that this is not a chimera but a mutation affecting color that occurred at the two-cell stage, but I consider that unlikely given that the color differences are not just the blue/green of the body feathers, but the yellow/white on the head.
The video calls this budgie “one of nature’s most beautiful mistakes,” but reader Su, who sent me the video link, commented “I say not!” The video also notes that “You will probably never see one of these as perfectly divided in any animal group,” but that’s also not true. Remember the “half-sider” cardinal, one of the all-time most linked-to posts on this site?:
We’re not sure whether that bird is a chimera, a mutation, or a “gynandromorph”, in which one of the sex chromosome got lost at the two-cell stage (see the discussion at the link).
h/t: Su
Reader Jonathan informs me that there will be a television documentary, “Questioning Darwin,” on the HBO (“Home Box Office”) Channel on Monday, February 10 at 9PM.
It’s not clear to me whether this is only a one-part show (I think that’s the case), nor what tenor it takes, but, as the only living American who doesn’t get cable t.v., I’ll be unable to watch it. If you do (and you should, along with the free livestreamed Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate on February 4), report back here. (One reader wrote me in jest that if Ham won the debate, the headlines would be “Ham on Nye”.)
The trailer for the show, below, doesn’t give much information about what line the show will take. I don’t recognize any of the talking heads; do you?
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: When did I eat last?A; About an hour ago.
Hili: Time for a little something.
In Polish:Ja: Nad czym się tak zastanawiasz?
Hili: Kiedy ja ostatnio jadłam?
Ja: Jakąś godzinę temu.
Hili: Czas na małe co nieco.