Karl Giberson says that evolution’s had a bad year, but he really means that Christianity did

January 3, 2014 • 1:08 pm

Over at the January 2 issue of The Daily Beast, Karl Giberson argues that “2013 was a terrible year for evolution.” As you may know if you’re a regular here, Giberson was a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College for 15 years as well as Executive Vice-President of the accommodationist and Templeton-funded organization BioLogos.  That organization was created to make evangelical Christians friendlier to evolution by convincing them that evolution wasn’t inimical to their faith. But it failed miserably, and Giberson left, most probably because his resolutely pro-science approach didn’t sit well with BioLogos‘s increasing desire to avoid offending the Evangelicals, including, among other stuff, lots of ridiculous discussion about the possible historicity of Adam and Eve. Giberson also left Eastern Nazarene College, but more on that later.

I will give this to Karl: he has been uncompromising in his insistence on accepting evolution as it is, rather than twisting it to fit Christian preconceptions. He’s refused to buy into Evangelical apologetics such as the ludicrous “federal headship” model, in which Adam and Eve, instead of being our literal ancestors, really existed but were appointed by God as Titular Ancestors who somehow infected all their contemporaries with Original Sin. But Giberson is still wedded to religious superstition, and that, combined with his unwarranted attacks in HuffPo on Professor Ceiling Cat, made him lose the affectionate title of “Uncle Karl.”

In his Daily Beast post, Giberson argues that 2013 was a bad year for evolution, citing several facts and incidents:

Evolution did not fare well in 2013. The year ended with the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Doubt as Amazon’s top seller in the “Paleontology” category. The state of Texas spent much of the year trying to keep the country’s most respected high school biology text out of its public schools. And leading anti-evolutionist and Creation Museum curator Ken Ham made his annual announcement that the “final nail” had been pounded into the coffin of poor Darwin’s beleaguered theory of evolution.

Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.

Well, in fact the Gallup poll that Giberson cites first really shows only nondirectional fluctuations around the acceptance of creationism: the real trend is a small but significant increase in the number of Americans who accept fully naturalistic evolution—that not guided by God. Here are some data from the 2012 Gallup Poll that I discussed last April:

gallup-2012

This does show that creationism is indeed up 6% since 2010, but it’s the same as it was in 2006 and a tad lower than in some previous years. So it hasn’t been a terrible year for evolution in this respect, just a normal year. What heartens me, though, is a 6% increase since the poll began in 1982 in those who believe in naturalistic evolution. And that looks like a genuine trend, even though only 1 in 6 Americans still view evolution the way scientists do. (Note that in both cases the question asked referred to human evolution.)

Indeed, if you accept the results of the recent Pew Poll (summarized and analyzed by Greg Mayer on this site; see his latest update here), the statistics are even more encouraging, with 60% of Americans accepting some form of evolution instead of the 47% seen in the Gallup Poll. Further, the Pew Poll shows that among all American evolution-accepters, 53% accept naturalistic and only 47% God-guided human evolution. This is in marked contrast to the Gallup Poll, where the breakdown is 32% and 68% respectively. I don’t understand this disparity, since the two polls were not taken that far apart and the results differ more than both polls’ degree of sampling error. At any rate, if you believe the Pew Poll (I am dubious), things are looking even rosier than Giberson thinks.

Giberson decries the increasing Democrat/Republic polarization with respect to evolution, as the disparity between acceptance of “Darwinism” between the parties increased from 10% in 2009 to 24% in 2013 (Dems of course accept evolution in larger numbers). And, really, I don’t care much about how much the parties accept evolution so long as the U.S.’s overall acceptance of evolution is increasing. Republicans are, by and large, igorant science-denialists anyway. Nor do I care about Ken Ham’s pronouncements, which mean absolutely nothing.

As for Darwin’s Doubt, the ID book in which Stephen Meyer attributes the Cambrian Explosion to Jesus, well, it was bought largely by the choir, which is large.  The same choir has also made Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box a perennial good seller.

But, as a pessimistic secular Jew (a redundancy, I suppose), I still see good news about evolution. Creationists lost their final battle in Texas, proving unable to sway the state to adopt biology textbooks that emphasized the “problems” with evolutionary biology. Ball State University canned its science course that forced intelligent design (and Christianity) on captive students. Amarillo College in Texas did the same. Creationists had no victories in 2013, and evolution is slowly but surely insinuating its nose into the American tent.

And one of the reasons it’s doing so is that religion is on the wane, for as religion goes, so goes creationism. (Although there are religions without creationism, there is no creationism without religion.) And so Karl bemoans the fact that Christian youth are leaving the church in droves, and for an excellent reason: they perceive the church as anti-science:

An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

Viewed from “outside,” the phenomenon alarms and even enrages church leaders. Children are nurtured carefully in their faith through Sunday school, church, summer programs, and at home—and are then sent to expensive private evangelical colleges with the expectation that this faith will be protected as the children mature into well-educated adults. But often students are educated out of their childhood faith and even into no faith at all—at a cost of $40,000 a year. That is a disaster of the first magnitude, as it implies, in the theology of most evangelical parents and leaders, that their children have lost their salvation and will spend eternity in hell if they don’t recover their faith.

What’s so “alarming” about that? Despite historians of science claiming that the “conflict thesis” between science and religion is bogus, Christians know otherwise, and vote with their feet. If people leave the faith because they see it as “anti-science,” then so much the better: religion loses adherents and science gains them. Too bad about the children losing their salvation, but I can’t be bothered with that because there’s no evidence for either salvation or hell.  It’s only people like Giberson who consider this a disaster, and he’d be better off if he relinquished the last vestiges of his superstition.

Sadly, he’s been unable to do this, perhaps in part for the reasons he gave in his book Saving Darwin, which I reviewed (giving this quotation from Giberson) in The New Republic:

As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated, were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God, and we attend church together regularly. Most of my friends are believers. I have a job I love at a Christian college that would be forced to dismiss me if I were to reject the faith that underpins the mission of the college. Abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.

I’m not sure that, especially to a scientist, those are “compelling” reasons to believe in what’s palpably not true, but they’re compelling reasons to pretend to believe in God.

But we all know from yesterday’s post how wrenching it can be to leave a faith community, and I feel for Giberson.  I feel for him even more because in fact he was in the end forced to leave his teaching job—not for abandoning his faith but for insisting on teaching evolution. And in the Daily Beast piece, for the first time, he recounts the sordid tale. I’ll give just a snippet:

Those of us teaching evolution at evangelical colleges are made to feel as if we have this subversive secret we must whisper quietly in our students’ ears: “Hey, did you know that Adam and Eve were not the first humans and never even existed? And that you can still be a Christian and believe that?”

. . . That was my life for my last 15 years as a faculty member at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, after my books, articles, and lectures made me the focus of fundamentalist rage. Productive scholarship that would be highly valued at other institutions became instead a major liability. Administrators complained that I was too controversial and creating public relations problems—not because they disagreed with what I said but because I was no longer just whispering it quietly in the classroom. Youth pastors informed the admissions office at the college that they were discouraging students from attending the college because it promoted evolution. Affiliated churches withheld financial support. Donors went elsewhere with their money.

I spent countless hours in the office of a succession of college presidents, explaining why Christians needed to make peace with evolution, no matter how painful. I was forced to communicate and even meet with hostile external constituents to defend well-established science against people who knew nothing about it beyond the challenges it posed to their interpretation of the Bible. One such watchdog group, the Reformed Nazarenes, rejoiced when I finally left the college.

Yes, that took courage, and, having exchanged emails with Giberson over the years, I think he knew it was coming.  He has, however, found a more congenial home teaching science writing at Stonehill College, a Catholic school in Massachusetts.

So it wasn’t a bad year for evolution, really, but it was a bad few years for Giberson, and I feel for him. His life did go a bit off the rails, but because he stuck to science, not because he gave up Christianity.

What happened to Giberson has happened to other science-friendly evangelicals at Christian schools, and you can sense the bitterness in his last paragraph:

Truth, alas, seems to resemble a commodity at such institutions, to be purchased by the highest bidder or the most powerful political leader. Accepting evolution and teaching it to students are entirely acceptable until some powerful constituency says they are not.

I wish at some point Karl would realize that science and religion are inimical, for their ways of finding “truth” are completely odds with one another. How can you teach evolution and dismiss the historicity of Adam and Eve on the one hand, and believe in the virgin birth, the Trinity, and the Resurrection on the other? How can you buy the solid evidence for evolution on the one hand (evidence that, says Giberson, is “now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory”), and on the other believe the fairy tales of a man-made book from a prescientific era?

It doesn’t make sense.  What I’d like to say to Karl is this, “Your Christianity doesn’t make sense, for there is as little evidence for your religious beliefs as there is massive evidence for evolution. Why on earth do you continue to buy into superstition when you insist in the classroom on the hegemony of empirical truth? Join us as a happy heathen, and you will be free.”

But of course that would send his life off the rails. And believe me, I appreciate that. I just find it ineffably sad.

Readers’ wildlife photos: song sparrow

January 3, 2014 • 10:53 am

If sparrows were rare, we’d find them far more beautiful than they seem to us now. Stephen Barnard sends us a photo of one with this caption:

A newly discovered subspecies of Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia narcissus, contemplating its reflection. (It’s actually eating midges.)

RT9A5501 - Version 2 (1)

I love its various shades of brown, white and gray, and those attractive stripes on the head.

What, if anything, is wrong with the Pew poll on evolution acceptance?

January 3, 2014 • 10:07 am

by Greg Mayer

I posted on Wednesday about the new Pew poll on evolution acceptance, focusing on the divergence between the Pew results and those from 2012’s Gallup poll of the same issue. In both polls it is possible to divide respondents into three classes that can be thought of as those that accept “naturalistic evolution”, those that accept “theistic evolution”, and those that accept “creationism”. The Pew poll shows a greater preponderance of the first two (32% and 24%, respectively, with 32% creationist) than does the Gallup poll (15% and 32%, respectively, with 46% creationist). I considered how differences in wording between the two polls might have affected their results, but could not come to any convincing explanation for the disparity.

The Pew poll was also noticed in the general media (e.g. MSNBC, Reuters, NPR, Christian Science Monitor), and most of these have emphasized in their stories the fact that creationism is much more popular among Republicans than Democrats and independents (a plurality, 48%, of Republicans are creationist, while 43% accept evolution), and that the popularity of creationism among Republicans has increased notably since the last time Pew polled this question in 2009 (at that time, a majority of Republicans, 54%, accepted some form of evolution, while 39% were creationist). The headline from the Christian Science Monitor, “Percentage of Republicans who believe in evolution is shrinking”, is representative.

A number of commentators– for example Andrew Sullivan, David Graham at the Atlantic, Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress, Allapundit at Hot Air, and Francis X. Clines and Paul Krugman at the New York Times– have also taken note of the Pew poll, and offered various suggestions as to what has happened to increase Republican support for creationism since 2009. (Only Allahpundit took up the question I found most interesting– why did the Pew results diverge from those of Gallup; he also noted differences between Pew and recent Yougov and Harris polls as well.) The two logical possibilities are that Republicans have shifted their views, becoming more creationist; or that creationists have shifted their party allegiance, more of them becoming Republicans, while those who accept evolution have become independents or Democrats.

Both of these type of shifts, of Republicans to creationism and of party allegiance, could be happening, and both have been suggested by one or another of the commentators. Beauchamp, for example, suggests that out-of-power Republicans are rallying to the “team” position, while also noting that white evangelical Protestants have shifted their party allegiance toward the Republicans. Graham pointed to some evidence that scientists have also shifted, and are less likely to be Republicans now than in the past.

While most commentators have offered interpretations or explanations of the Pew results, Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School has questioned the results themselves, and complained about the media’s headlining of the Republican embrace of creationism. His complaints received increased attention because they were tweeted by noted science journalist Carl Zimmer, who wrote that Kahan had “pick[ed the Pew poll] apart”. Jerry, with a nod to Zimmer, has taken note of Kahan’s piece in an addendum to my post.

So does Kahan land any blows on the Pew poll? Well, yes and no. He criticizes Pew for not releasing the full crosstabs on their poll, and on this point I share his frustration. In the Pew press release, there’s a link for the “Full Report“, but this leads to a pdf consisting of the press release plus a subset of the exact questions with answers. It would have been nice to know how party affiliation correlated with naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, for example.

But Kahan then goes on to make two further complaints, neither of which stand up. First, he says that if we knew what percent of Democratic respondents could be classed as accepting naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, this would change the entire cast of the results, from a “ha ha ha!” at Republicans’ expense, to…. ?; it’s not entirely clear what, but it apparently would be “complicated and interesting”. But knowing this about Democrats would not change the main news about party allegiance: 48% of Republicans are creationists. No matter how the Democrats divide on naturalistic vs. theistic evolution, it’s not going to stop Republicans from looking really bad.

The only way to really alter the import of the Pew results on evolution acceptance and party allegiance is if the numbers are actually wrong, not just misinterpreted, and that’s the complaint that Kahan takes up next. Now, both Allahpundit and I considered the possibility that Pew’s numbers are wrong in the sense that, given other polling data, Pew’s numbers may not be good estimates of true public opinion. But Kahan apparently believes Pew’s numbers don’t add up on their own terms, that there is some “logical inconsistency” in the numbers. He arrives at this conclusion by arguing that since the percentage of Democrats and independents accepting or rejecting evolution has not changed, but the percentage of Republicans who are creationists has gone up, then it should be the case that there should have been an overall decline in acceptance of evolution:

And logically, in that case, the % of the U.S. public overall who now say they are “creationists” would have had to gone up–especially insfoar as the proportion of the population identifying as Republican has increased a lot since 2009 …[note: assuming we include “lean Republican” “independents” in the totals, as we should if we are trying to give an accurate senes of partisan identification]. [Kahan’s brackets– GCM]

But according to Pew there has been no change in overall acceptance, leading Kahan to conclude:

So, something does not compute.

At a minimum, Pew has some ‘splainin to do, if in fact it is trying to edify people rather than feed the apptetite of those who make a living exciting fractious group rivalries among culturally diverse citizens.

But Kahan is wrong about three things here. First, the proportion of the population that identifies as Republican has not increased a lot since 2009. In Pew’s own surveys, the proportion of Republicans since 2008 has varied from 24% to 25% (these exact numbers are shown in Kahan’s post).  According to Gallup, Republican numbers are tending down, not up, over the last few years. There is thus no reason to think that the proportion of Republicans has gone up. In Pew’s 2009 survey of evolution acceptance, the unweighted proportion of Republicans was 25%, right in line with its other estimates, so there’s no sign that Pew’s evolution acceptance polls underestimate this proportion.

Second, Kahan says independents who “lean Republican” should be counted as Republicans, but that’s not what Pew did, and Kahan’s wishes as to how he would want them counted does not affect Pew’s numbers.  Kahan is right that a fuller release of data would be interesting, but no inference of logical inconsistency in the Pew data can be based on this.

And third, Kahan has equated the statistical concept of “the same” with mathematical equality. In algebra, if x + y = z, and you increase y while holding x constant, then the sum, z, must increase. This is in outline form the argument made by Kahan (where x and y represent political subdivisions, and z the overall number). But if x, y, and z are statistically estimated quantities with errors of measurement, then it is possible for x to show no significant change and for y to increase significantly, yet z still show no significant change. This would be especially so if the magnitude of y is small relative to z (and the proportion of Republicans is the smallest of the three main political respondent classes). Thus, there is no contradiction between Democrats and independents being statistically unchanged, Republicans showing a significant change, yet the overall result is also statistically unchanged.

The inference that Kahan tries to make is further undermined by the fact that the overall acceptance of evolution is not the weighted average of just Democrats, independents, and Republicans (where the weights are their estimated proportions in the population), but the weighted average of Democrats, Republicans, independents, other parties, no preference, and refused. There are too many unknowns to be solved for; it’s not x + y = z, but t + u + v + w + x + y = z, and thus  knowing just how Democrats (or Democrats+independents) and Republicans have responded is not sufficient to infer the overall response. (I tried figuring out some of these numbers for the 2009 survey from the summarized results by making assumptions to reduce the number of variables, but when I checked my resulting approximations against the actual numbers in the full Pew data set, I was noticeably off.)

So, Kahan is right that it would be useful to have the full data set, but wrong i) that having that full data set would change the apparent embrace of creationism by Republicans; or ii) that it is possible to infer logical inconsistency in the released data. There could be errors in Pew’s calculations of proportions and tests of statistical significance, but that cannot be inferred from the given data.

But is there something nefarious in Pew’s failure to release some of the data, rather than all of it? Kahan clearly thinks there is. He writes:

…this sort of deliberate selectivity (make no mistake, it was deliberate: Pew made the decision to include the partisan breakdown for only half of the bifurcated evolution-belief item) subsidizes the predictable “ha ha ha!” response on the part of the culturally partisan commentators who will see the survey as a chance to stigmatize Republicans as being distinctively “anti-science.” …

Pew lulled those who are making the [“ha ha ha ha ha!”] response into being this unreflective by deliberately (again, they had to decide to report only a portion of the evolution-survey item by political affiliation) failing to report what % of Democrats who indicated that they believe in “naturalistic” evolution. [Democratic results were not selectively withheld; no political breakdown was provided for this question.]  …

Right away when I heard about the Pew poll, I turned to the results to see what the explanation was for the interesting — truly! — “shift” in Republican view: Were Republicans changing their positions on creationism or creationists changing their party allegiance?

And right away I ran into this logical inconsistency.

Surely, someone will clear this up, I thought.

But no.

Just the same predictable, boring “ha ha ha ha!” reaction.

Why let something as silly as logic get in the way of an opportunity to pound one’s tribal chest & join in a unifying, polarizing group howl?  [All brackets mine– GCM)]

But Kahan’s inference of logical inconsistency cannot be sustained, and thus his speculations as to motive are merely expressions of his own prejudices.

So why didn’t Pew release all the data? Pew’s policy is to release their full data sets a few months after issuing its reports: that’s how I was able to get the full details for the 2009 survey. There may be all sorts of reasons why Pew doesn’t release all its data (most perhaps having to do with the fact that gathering and analyzing such data is most of what they do, and they want first crack at and the chance to publicize their own data before everyone else does), and we won’t be able to check for ourselves to see if Pew made any errors for a few months. But there’s not the slightest hint of error in the released data, and though I don’t know what “tribe” Kahan imagines himself to be a member, if there’s any pounding and howling going on here, it certainly isn’t being done by Pew.

h/t Matthew Cobb

This may not end well

January 3, 2014 • 6:53 am

On February 4, Bill Nye the “Science Guy,” will debate creationist Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. (The link gives details.) The topic is “Is creation a viable model of origins?”, and admission is $25. That’s a lot of dough!

My worries are these. First, Nye is likely helping fund the Creation Museum. Had I been Nye, I would have suggested some other recipient of the money. Not only that, but why hold such debates in a Temple of Ignorance instead of on neutral ground?

Second, Nye is giving special credibility to Ham. After all, The Science Guy is known and beloved by many Americans as a popularizer of science. Why debase himself this way?

My third worry, then, is this will look great on Ham’s c.v., but not so much on Nye’s. It is my practice not to debate creationists for reasons #2 and #3. Nye can attack creationism on his own, as he has been doing with great effectiveness. Debates are not the way to help people accept evolution.

Finally, does Nye have experience in debating creationists? It is almost entirely an exercise in rhetoric, not a search for truth, and is Nye prepared to deal with the “Gish Gallop”?

Screen shot 2014-01-03 at 4.20.39 AM

Finally, there’s no doubt that Ham will try to pack the house with his fellow creationists. To that end, I urge my friends in Kentucky, particularly those at the nearby University of Kentucky, to show up to support real science, despite the ridiculous $25 admission fee.

h/t: Ben Goren

Isaac Asimov’s predictions for 2014

January 3, 2014 • 4:45 am

Roughly 50 years ago, on August 16, 1964, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay in the New York Times predicting what the world would be like fifty years hence. (He was inspired by the World’s Fair of 1964, to which my sister and I were taken by our parents.) It’s a longish piece, and concentrates on increasing population pressure as well as the ability of technology to deal with that pressure and also improve our lives.

I’ll highlight just three of his predictions, one mostly right, on partly right, and one wrong.

This is what he got mostly right:

In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000.

He was accurate on most of these. In fact, he slightly underestimated the world’s population, which is now 7.1 billion (see the U.S. and world population clock here), while the population of the U.S. is 317,309,000 and that of the Northeast Corridor is about 49.6 million.

This one wasn’t quite right:

The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran” (from “formula translation”).

That hasn’t quite come to pass, although MOOCs are making inroads into conventional teaching and most high-school students don’t know computer programming, due largely to the fact that computers are already user-friendly. And we still have conventional subjects in schools.

The next one is mostly wrong, due largely to Asimov’s inability to foresee the rise of the Internet and its ability to dispel boredom:

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.

Yes, psychiatric drugs like antidepressants are on the rise (20% of Americans take them), but psychiatry is not our most important medical speciality, for most of its medications are dispensed by general practitioners.

More important, the world is becoming plugged in: when you walk down the street in an industrialized country, or ride in a bus or train, notice how many people are using their cellphones, iPads, iPods, or computers. Google Glass, the wearable computer, is next. This is the way the whole world will go. (My theory, which is mine, is that eventually the whole world will be like New York City.) Connectivity has brought tremendous advantages: think of the ability to access information at your desk instead of a making a laborious trip to the library. And electronic journals and instant publication have markedly sped up the progress of science. Well, perhaps we won’t be as bored, but we may lose the skills of interpersonal communication.

Asimov made many other predictions. In general I think he did pretty well—certainly better than I would have—but it’s remarkable how many other people got stuff wrong, usually predicting a more technologically advanced or ideologically repressive society than we have now. Remember Nineteen Eighty Four (written in 1949), or The Jetsons cartoon series, which supposedly took place in 2062?

h/t: OpenCulture via reader Jim E.

Friday: Hili dialogue (with bonus photos)

January 3, 2014 • 1:30 am

Hili is showing curiosity beyond the timing of her meals. Fortunately, her questions are answered with great perspicacity.

Hili: What is religion?
A: It’s a cuckoo egg planted by wild imagination in the nest of reason.
(Photo: Professor Ceiling Cat)
1536526_10202449706871286_2048413053_nIn Polish:
Hili: Co to jest ta religia?
Ja: To takie kukułcze jajo dzikiej wyobraźni podrzucone w gnieździe rozumu.
(Zdjęcie: Jerry A. Coyne.)
And don’t forget to follow The Hili Dialogues, on Tumblr, which go way back to when she was a kitten (see the archives). There is also an “Ask Hili” feature, in which you can send her personal questions suitable for a cat. 

Some bonus photos: I was looking for Hili yesterday afternoon, knowing she was inside, and it was pointed out to me that she was in fact the lump under the blanket on the d*g’s bed. I pulled the corner back to see. (The white streak to the right is an electric cord.)

2
1
Hili is fully aware of her newfound fame as The Most Famous Cat in Poland, and is now trying to give Maru a run for his money:
Maru hili

A day in Dobrzyn, with added cat

January 2, 2014 • 10:50 am

Here are just a few photographs from yesterday, and of course the Queen takes precedence.

Dinner was a delectable pork roast with apples, mashed potatoes (with pork-roast gravy), pickled coleslaw (a cross between coleslaw and sauerkraut) and a good Polish beer.

Dinner

Upstairs lives a teacher at the local school, Gosia, and her daughter, along with their black cat “Fitness” (so called because he was rescued as a kitten outside a health club). Fitness and Hili do not get along: although they used to tolerate each other, Fitness now chases Hili when they are together. Thus they are not allowed outside at the same time. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, Gosia puts a two-sided sign on the front windowsill that gives Fitness’s status.

“Fitness is at home” (happy face): Hili can go out.

Fitness in

“Fitness is outside” (sad face): Hili should not go out.

Fitness out

The Queen, waiting for noms. She is on a diet because she’s been putting on weight lately. This is a difficult exercise because Hili noms rodents outside (see yesterday’s post), so any deficit of cat food at home is compensated by her increased and uncontrollable consumption of rodents.

Waiting for noms

Hili helps me with the dishes:

Hili helping me wash dishes

It is time to weigh her. Andrzej on the scales with Hili: 73.5 kilo.

Hili weighed 1

Andrzej without Hili: 69 kilos. Weight of Hili: 4.5 kilos (9.9 lb). Not too bad, but a tad fluffy.

Hili weighed 2

Walkies: A man and his cat:

P1050023_2

Hili will climb when you tap a branch. She’s quite agile in the trees, but doesn’t have many “down” genes.

P1050030

It is not too cold here (about 0° C), but after a few hours outside, Hili announced her desire to come in by the usual trick of jumping onto the windowsill.  When I went out to let her in, she remained on the windowsill, and when I asked Malgorzata about this, she said, “Hili wants to be carried in.” Sure enough, Malgorzata went outside, fetched the cat and carried her inside. What a diva that cat is!

Hili at window

Bedtime for moggies. Hili crawls under Malgorzata’s legs when she’s resting on the couch.

Asleep on M's feet