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.
Today’s Christmas edition of WEIT features only persiflage because
From the Antipodes, where it has been Christmas for a while, reader Peter of Brisbane sends us this photo with the caption:
My niece’s three month old kitten, Toby, all tired out from playing.
And one more of Toby:
One of the students Andrzej and Malgorzata mentored, now in graduate school, returns to Dobrzyn for a visit:
Hili: Studies, research, doctorate, all very nice, but do you know how long it’s been since you last petted meRadek: I know, I will try better.
In Polish:
Hili: Studia, badania, doktorat, wszystko ładnie, ale czy wiesz jak dawno mnie nie głaskałeś?
Radek: Ja wiem, ja się poprawię.
I wish you all a festive celebration, with no lucubrations but plenty of libations. Two readers have sent animal-themed greetings to the rest of us.
Tom sent a photo of a gorgeous snowy owl that he took yesterday at Wolfe Island, Ontario. I’ve superimposed his caption on the photo to make it into a card:
Some info about this owl (which Tom identified as a male):
I had 14 Snowys out there yesterday. Based on the eBird info (plus my observations in the field yesterday), as varied as the plumages were, it’s a pretty good/scientific guess they all were hatched last summer in the eastern Arctic. Like many large raptor species around the world, Snowy Owls are quite variable — lightly to heavily marked. But also, like many other species, there are a combo of proportions, size, and plumage that can be used (carefully, but not completely) to age and sex them. They exhibit sexual dimorphism, with the females being larger than the males.
At the risk of being a downer, I can’t help but add this photo from The Bruce Mactavish Birding Blog (also noted by Tom), showing a Snowy Owl nest with unhatched eggs—and 70 killed lemmings! They sure know how to stock up!
And reader Vera sent a lovely and foxy painting that was created by one of her relatives:
This is a painting by my great-uncle Count Vladimir Leonidovich Mouraviov, my maternal grandfather’s brother, who was a professional painter specializing in nature, wildlife and hunting scenes in the Russian wild. Unlike my grandfather, Vladimir chose not to leave Russia after the Revolution and continued to paint. His work was very popular and continues to fetch a very high price. He died in 1940, the same year that my grandfather died.
I thought you might like to have this reproduction of one of his paintings of a Russian fox! Season’s greetings to you all!
For it came to pass that Hili-Cat was visited by a heavenly apparition on this blessed Christmas eve:
Hili: What the hell?! It must be an angel.
In Polish:
Hili: Co do diabła?! To musi być anioł!
There are two items of interest from the excellent book site fivebooks.com, which, as you may know, has a lot of interviews with experts, each of whom recommends five books in their area of interest for the public.
My friend Sophie Roell, an editor at the site, has collected a series of five interviews on the history of Christmas, which she calls “The Christmas story: Christianity’s weakest link.” Her summary of the interviews includes this:
. . . I am completely fascinated by what early Christian historians say about the Christmas story. Was Jesus born in Bethlehem? Highly unlikely. Was he born in December? No mention of any date in the Bible. It may well have been April. Were there three wise men? The Bible doesn’t actually say so — in fact it says almost nothing about these men at all, who could have numbered anything from 2 to (according to one text) several hundred moving together as a small army.
If you enjoy celebrating Christmas (as a Christian, or, in my case, an eclectic pagan ancestor-loving atheist) I really encourage you to have a look at our Christmas interviews which look in a bit more detail at this stuff.The first interview we did was with Brent Landau, an early Christian historian who knows a lot about the ancient texts from this period (get in touch with him if you need something translated from Syriac, an ancient Christian language related to Aramaic which probably won’t feature on Google Translate for a while). His topic was The Real Christmas Story.My colleague, Alec Ash, meanwhile, spoke to Bruce Forbes about Christmas History more generally. One of the books he chose is called 4000 Years of Christmas — so I’ll let you do the maths on exactly how much Christmas has to do with the birth of Jesus Christ…
This, is, I believe Sophie’s first public admission of her atheism, which has been developing over the years.
There is also a very long interview on free will and moral responsibility with Paul Russell, a philosopher from the University of British Columbia. (The interviewer is Nigel Warburton.) When I printed out the interview it was sixteen pages long, but very engaging reading. Russell recommends five books, including Dennett’s Elbow Room, and is critical of nearly all of them. He winds up adhering to a sort of compatibilism based on Greek philosophy, which incorporates both “fate” (determinism), but also moral responsibility. I really don’t get it, but the book summarizing this view is Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity.
The book I most want to read among the five is Bruce Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility, which is not only incompatibilist (i.e., he sees no way to harmonize free will and determinism), but also claims, as do I, that this discards the idea of moral responsibility. One thing Russell said when discussing this book struck me as being right on the mark:
But being wrong and being morally responsible are two different things. We want to prevent wrong conduct in the same way that we want to prevent all kinds of other unpleasant things that occur: illness, hurricanes, fires. Ethical behaviour that fails our standards is not something we should be emotionally responding to in a retributive manner. We should aim to understand its roots, its causes, and try to improve things in the future.
This illusion by “Brusspup” (Facebook page here) is pretty amazing, and it’s not computer generated but it’s real. You’ll see at the end how the dino was made to create the illusion—and you can make your own using the links below. It’s easy; you just print the figures, cut them out, and fold.
The creator adds this information:
I created the song in this video. A download link for the song will be available shortly.
You can visit my profile on iTunes for other songs I’ve created.
Song name: The last sun.
Thank you to my friend Kath for creating the T-rex design!
I’ve included a link for you to print out your own. The trick looks best through a camera. If you close one eye and move back and forth it works pretty good too.GreenT-Rex image
Red T-rex
Blue T-rexThis is based on the famous dragon illusion which was inspired by Jerry Andrus. I’ve always wanted to try this illusion with several of these at once. I wanted to use 20 or 30 but after I tried a test with only 12, I realized 20 or 30 was going to be too many. So another thing I’ve always wanted to try was to have a large version. The original file was about 9 feet X 9 feet. I had to split the image into 4 files so the printer as my local print shop could print it. I traced all of the pieces on cardboard which I used to build a support structure for the prints. I used small pieces of cardboard and hot glue to make the structure really solid. One problem that I had was that the paper for the large dragon was really shiny. So if you look closely you can see the reflection of the eyes on the “top” and side panels. I bought some matte spray to try and minimize the reflections. It worked a little. Over all I was happy with the results.
The t-rex design is an original design used with the Gathering for Garder 3D dragon template. The original 3D template design (dragon) was inspired by the work of Jerry Andrus to celebrate Gathering for Gardner 3.
h/t: Michael, Matthew
Here, from last Sunday’s New York Times, is the list of their selection of “The 10 bet books of 2013”: 5 fiction and 5 nonfiction. Clicking the title link will take you to the NYT review of that book.
FICTION
AMERICANAH
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.By turns tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third novel takes on the comedy and tragedy of American race relations from the perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant. From the office politics of a hair-braiding salon to the burden of memory, there’s nothing too humble or daunting for this fearless writer, who is so attuned to the various worlds and shifting selves we inhabit — in life and online, in love, as agents and victims of history and the heroes of our own stories.
THE FLAMETHROWERS
By Rachel Kushner.
Scribner, $26.99.Radical politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle racing all spring to life in Kushner’s radiant novel of the 1970s, in which a young woman moves to New York to become an artist, only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest movement that shook Italy in those years. The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces.
THE GOLDFINCH
By Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown & Company, $30.Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” follows the travails of Theo Decker, who emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief that come what may, art can save us by lifting us above ourselves.
LIFE AFTER LIFE
By Kate Atkinson.
A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown & Company, $27.99.Demonstrating the agile style and theatrical bravado of her much-admired Jackson Brodie mystery novels, Atkinson takes on nothing less than the evils of mid-20th-century history and the nature of death as she moves back and forth in time, fitting together versions of a life story for a heroine who keeps dying, then being resurrected — and sent off in different, but entirely plausible, directions.
TENTH OF DECEMBER
Stories
By George Saunders.
Random House, $26.Saunders’s wickedly entertaining stories veer from the deadpan to the flat-out demented: Prisoners are force-fed mood-altering drugs; ordinary saps cling to delusions of grandeur; third-world women, held aloft on surgical wire, become the latest in bourgeois lawn ornaments. Beneath the comedy, though, Saunders writes with profound empathy, and this impressive collection advances his abiding interest in questions of class, power and justice.
NONFICTION
AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED
The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
By Alan S. Blinder.
The Penguin Press, $29.95.Blinder’s terrific book on the financial meltdown of 2008 argues that it happened because of a “perfect storm,” in which many unfortunate events occurred simultaneously, producing a far worse outcome than would have resulted from just a single cause. Blinder criticizes both the Bush and Obama administrations, especially for letting Lehman Brothers fail, but he also praises them for taking steps to save the country from falling into a serious depression. Their response to the near disaster, Blinder says, was far better than the public realizes.
DAYS OF FIRE
Bush and Cheney in the White House
By Peter Baker.
Doubleday, $35.Baker succeeds in telling the story of the several crises of the Bush administration with fairness and balance, which is to say that he is sympathetic to his subjects, acknowledging their accomplishments but excusing none of their errors. Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, is fascinated by the mystery of the Bush-Cheney relationship, and even more so by the mystery of George W. Bush himself. Did Bush lead, or was he led by others? In the end, Baker concludes, the “decider” really did decide.
FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL
Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
By Sheri Fink.
Crown, $27.In harrowing detail, Fink describes the hellish days at a hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina, when desperate medical professionals were suspected of administering lethal injections to critically ill patients. Masterfully and compassionately reported and as gripping as a thriller, the book poses reverberating questions about end-of-life care, race discrimination in medicine and how individuals and institutions break down during disasters.
THE SLEEPWALKERS
How Europe Went to War in 1914
By Christopher Clark.
Harper, $29.99.Clark manages in a single volume to provide a comprehensive, highly readable survey of the events leading up to World War I. He avoids singling out any one nation or leader as the guilty party. “The outbreak of war,” he writes, “is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse.” The participants were, in his term, “sleepwalkers,” not fanatics or murderers, and the war itself was a tragedy, not a crime.
WAVE
By Sonali Deraniyagala.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.On the day after Christmas in 2004, Deraniyagala called her husband to the window of their hotel room in Sri Lanka. “I want to show you something odd,” she said. The ocean looked foamy and closer than usual. Within moments, it was upon them. Deraniyagala lost her husband, her parents and two young sons to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Her survival was miraculous, and so too is this memoir — unsentimental, raggedly intimate, full of fury.
For some reason I don’t have much desire to read any of these. There are so many other books that I haven’t yet read, and the older I get, the less appealing I find fiction.
But note the absence of science books from the list. What’s worse is the Times’s list of “100 notable books of 2013.” There is but a single science-related book, and that one’s about medicine (and written by a Times reporter!):
THE CANCER CHRONICLES: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery. By George Johnson. (Knopf, $27.95.) Johnson’s fascinating look at cancer reveals certain profound truths about life itself.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the only science that interests people much is medicine, and when lots of interesting science books have been published in 2013 (try here, here, and here, for instance).
Because I’ve spent almost all my spare time reading about religion and theology, I’ve had precious little time for pleasure reading this year. And I can’t think of a single work of fiction on my 2013 list. Thank Ceiling Cat, those days are largely over and I can go back to reading whatever I want.
I suppose my favorite book of the year remains Robert Caro’s latest volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power. the meticulously researched and wonderfully told tale of how Lyndon Johnson, a figure of fun as Kennedy’s Vice President, took over after JFK was shot and, becoming once again the power broker he was as Senate majority leader, strong-armed the Congress into passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This multivolume set, which Caro continues to write, still strikes me as the best political biography ever produced save The Last Lion, William Manchester’s unfinished biography of Winston Churchill. (Manchester died before he finished it.)
As for “fun” books, my favorite was Fallen Giants, an unsung but absolutely wonderful history of Himalayan mountaineering by two university professors who are also mountaineers. Nothing I have read compares to it in comprehensiveness, and a bonus is that the book is superbly written. If you love mountains, this one’s a must. Trust me. Thanks to Andrew Berry for sending this as a Coynezaa gift. (Coynezaa by the way, is my personally invented holiday that comprises the six days between Christmas and my birthday. Like Chanukah, I’m supposed to get a present every day, but I never do. 🙁 I think everyone should invent one holiday per year—aside from one’s birthday—that celebrates them.)
For “intellectual” books, Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science?: A Critique of Religious Reason would be hard to beat. It’s dense, but is the best dismantling of modern arguments for theism that I’ve seen. At its end, religion has been laid low, even the “sophisticated sort,” and one is left in awe of Philipse’s analytical abilities.
Now it’s your turn. (You didn’t think you’d just come over hear and passively absorb stuff, did you?) Name the best book you’ve read all year and explain why it was so good.
A bevy of trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator), captured in Idaho by reader Stephen Barnard (click to enlarge):
And somebody tell us what the dark birds are—juveniles?
The species is described in Wikipedia as “the heaviest bird native to North America and, on average, the largest extant waterfowl species on earth.” How big are they? (my emphasis):
Adults usually measure 138–165 cm (54–65 in) long, though large males can range up to 180 cm (71 in) or more. The weight of adult birds is typically 7–13.6 kg (15–30 lb), with an average weight in males of 11.9 kg (26 lb) and 9.4 kg (21 lb) in females.The wingspan ranges from 185 to 250 cm (73 to 98 in), with the individual wing chords measuring 60–68 cm (24–27 in). The largest known male Trumpeter attained a length of 183 cm (72 in), a wingspan of 3.1 m (10 ft) and a weight of 17.2 kg (38 lb).
