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.
I guess that many of you will have seen this, but to my surprise, I see we have never posted it here. This is from 2010:
What’s noteworthy is that give or take a few anachronisms (T. rex and Stegosaurus were not alive at the same time), this is reasonably accurate – in particular it has a Dimetrodon-like organism as Homer’s ancestor, which indeed it was (or rather, it was our ancestor).
It does however skip over the transition to an early chordate and then to a bony fish in a remarkably brief time. And it suffers from the terrible sin of presentism, whereby the last few hundred years take up as much time as scores of millions of years deep in the past.
But hey, you know what? Humans don’t have yellow skin and bug eyes. It’s a cartoon, folks!
For once, I think, the National Rifle Association (NRA)—a group of unrepentant evildoers—is feeling beleaguered. Americans, traumatized by a series of terrorist shootings here and abroad—many involving assault weapons—are starting to wonder if largely unrestricted access to guns is really so great after all. The governor of Connecticut has just issued an executive order banning sales of guns to those on the “no fly” list—about the weakest kind of gun reform we can enact, yet one opposed by Republicans. And the New York Daily News, a tabloid but also the fourth most circulated paper in America, has come out swinging against the NRA and in favor of gun control.
The headline after the Paris attacks:
The headline the San Bernardino shootings:
Of course the NRA being the unreflective and odious organization that it is, they immediately mustered one of their flaks, Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host, commentator, and author of that famous screed Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, which makes her eminently qualified to be the Voice of Evil. And so she put out a video, which I’ve embedded below and which The Washington Post describes like this:
After the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the Daily News deployed all of its tabloid cover in an attack on what it called America’s “gun scourge” and the “cowards,” meaning the politicians, hiding “behind meaningless platitudes” instead of fixing the problem. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS” was the headline. Now the National Rifle Association has fired back, with its own screaming headline, directed at the Daily News specifically and the “Godless Left” in general. Narrated by a grim-faced Dana Loesch, and interwoven with video footage of what appears to be first responders, the NRA video leaves no stone unturned and none of its demons unscathed as it connects the dots, as the video’s introduction says, between “the global alliance of elitists, media activists, Hollywood celebrities, campus radicals and political power mongers who have openly attacked sacred American values and the people who cherish them with ruthlessness, contempt and downright hatred,” and who share “the same fanatical fervor to tear apart the foundations of America as the terrorists who threaten our very survival. Only hours after an attack of radical jihadi terror on American soil,” says Loesch, a conservative radio host, in the video, “the New York Daily News became the loudest, vilest, most condescending voice for what many people call the Godless Left. “These false prophets at this failing excuse for a newspaper claimed to enjoy special knowledge of God’s plans somehow … even as they mocked the entire concept of religion. But they weren’t alone. As a horrific act of terror unfolded in real time, the majority of Americans turned to earnest prayer for the dead, the wounded, their families and the world — while political and media elites joined forces to insult and mock and disparage them … and in so doing, laid bare the utter moral depravity of the Godless Left.”
Here’s the five-minute video, which doesn’t miss a single right-wing talking point, including God, the “media elite,” “the moral depravity of the godless left”, and “the Queen of the movement,” Hillary Clinton. Obama is criticized for asking for the prohibition of assault weapons. The “godless left” is even blamed for creating the San Bernardino massacres, by promoting an environment in which the shooters’ neighbor didn’t want to report suspicious activity.
I can only imagine what Europeans would think of that video! But it embodies everything you need to know about the NRA
If you can handle any more of Loesch’s gun-nuttery, here’s a one-minute video in which she argues why a good American Mom should have a gun:
Loesch says “I am the National Rifle Association of America,” which is extremely scary. But the sick thing is that it’s true. I can only hope to see a day when the NRA loses all its credibility. Once an organization promoting gun safety, it’s now become a vicious pit bull defending the rights of anybody to have a gun of any kind, including assault rifles.
I’m pleased to see that reader Sastra has won the Jesus and Mo contest, in which people were asked to give the captions in the last frame of this cartoon:
The artist notes this:
This is the winning entry in the J&M script-writing competition. Sastra’s entry stood out from among a strong field for it combination of profundity and brevity. Congratulations, Sastra! Your signed book will be winging its way to
you soon.
Last year reader Rodger Atkin sent an uncamouflaged photo of the lovely Oleander Hawk-Moth (Daphnis nerii; see it here). This year it’s on vegetation, and somewhat harder to spot. Can you find it? (Enlarge photo for help.)
Reader John Crisp, who lives in Ethiopia, sent these photos on November 21 along with this note:
All these photos were taken between 6 am and 8.30 am this morning on Lake Tana, Western Ethiopia, where I have lived for the last four years. I hope the captions are self evident.
Stephen Barnard has decided to build a nest box for his pair of kestrels. He sent a photo and adds the terse comment, “Now I have to decide where to put it.” That means a location that is out of full sun, is good for photography, and near an area with lots of prey. He has a place in mind. Here’s their future home (maybe we’ll have kestrel chicks soon. . .):
Today is the penultimate Hump Day before the start of both Christmas and Coynezaa, so get your shopping done now. For those shopping overseas, twenty years ago today the name “Euro” was adopted. On December 16, 1866, Wassily Kandinsky (one of my favorite painters) was born. Today marks actor Liv Ullman’s 77th birthday, and it’s the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa—a place I’d love to visit before too long. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is bragging (as usual) and making Cyrus feel bad:
Hili: Cats are the most magnificent outcome of evolution.
Cyrus (to A.): Do you think so too?
POOR CYRUS!
In Polish:
Hili: Koty są najwspanialszym efektem ewolucji.
Cyrus (do mnie): Też tak uważasz?
Meanwhile, Reader Sarah, traveling in Spain, found a Hili lookalike (she regularly visits Hili and her staff). Sarah’s notes and photo:
You might think at first glance that this is a picture of Hili, but in fact it is a cat I saw a couple of weeks ago in Guadalest in southern Spain. When I showed it to Malgorzata she said they could be littermates by the look of this Spanish cat. Interesting the way the coloring and patterns can be so similar over a large geographical area. There are no doubt many cats between Guadalest and Dobrzyn that also look like this.
Andrzej has provided a photo of the real Hili in a similar position so we can compare. Looks pretty similar to me, though the Spanish cat’s ears aren’t as prominent, it has whiter cheeks, and its white bib is larger.
How could I have forgotten to note this morning that Christopher Hitchens died on this day four years ago? Fortunately, reader Barry reminded me, and pointed me to this short but poignant memorial by James Looseley in today’s Montreal Gazette. Looseley concentrates solely on Hitchens’s critiques of religion, which is what most affected the writer, but just look through Hitchens’s array of books, or his essay collections, to see the breadth of his knowledge, the elegance of his writing, the sharpness of his extemporaneous wit, and his ability to say something interesting and novel about just about everything.
Although I met the man only once, and briefly, I spend a lot of time rereading his pieces and watching his videos. We have no unbeliever today that can muster up such erudition and rhetorical artillery, so it’s true that in at least one way he’s irreplaceable. He was the Orwell of our time—but he spoke better.
Here’s one bit I offer up in memoriam; it shows, in just one minute, many facets of the man:
