Saturday: Hili dialogue 2

November 23, 2013 • 12:28 pm

The internet is back up in Dobrzyn, Poland, and I’ve received a new Hili dialogue, which I’ll post just to put things back in order.  Here’s today’s:

A: What are you thinking about?

Hili: I wonder if there is some feline analogy which would make me understand your tragedy of a breakdown of your Internet connection?

A: It might be a lack of cream in the fridge.

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In Polish:

Ja: Nad czym tak myślisz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy w życiu kota jest jakaś analogia, która może mi przybliżyć twój dramat awarii Internetu?
Ja: Chyba tylko brak śmietanki w lodówce.

~

More good things by Wallace

November 23, 2013 • 11:46 am

by Greg Mayer

We’ve already posted some things to read by and about Alfred Russel Wallace in honor of Wallace Year, including a list by me and a recent list by fellow Wallace-ophile Andrew Berry. There’s another item that I can recommend to WEIT readers, which I had known about and forgotten to mention, but Matthew has kindly reminded me of it: the Journal of Zoology has published a “virtual issue” of a number of Wallace’s papers.

Dactlylopsila trivirgata, the striped possum of the Aru Islands.
Dactlylopsila trivirgata, the striped possum of the Aru Islands. The nominate subspecies is endemic to Aru; other subspecies occur in New Guinea and Queensland.

The issue consists of 10 articles, by Wallace or scientists working on his collections, originally published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (later renamed the Journal of Zoology). The papers are technical– species descriptions, faunal lists– rather than synthetic statements of Wallace’s views. But papers such as these are the building blocks out of which Wallace constructed his zoogeographical and evolutionary theories. The article on Wallace’s search for the bird of paradise, a delightful scientific travelogue in the style of The Malay Archipelago, is perhaps the most entertaining of the collection.

The picture above is from an account of the mammals of the Aru Islands, including descriptions of new forms, by the famous zoologist J.E. Gray,  based on Wallace’s collections. In this paper, Gray named and described the striped possum, not only erecting a new species for it, but a new genus as well. The Aru Islands * lie on the great Sahul Shelf which connects New Guinea and Australia, and it is thus not surprising that striped possums were later found in New Guinea and Queensland, as all these were connected by dry land during Quaternary glacial periods. The striped possum (a marsupial, of course) is thus a nice building block for the general conclusion that the fauna of the Aru Islands is of Australian affinity, and that former land connections are of great importance in understanding the distribution of animals, especially mammals.

There are many fine plates, like the one above, in these 10 articles. I’m not sure how long Wiley (the current printer for the Zoological Society of London) will maintain open access at its site, but the articles are all out of copyright, and most or all are freely available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (direct link to the Proceedings here), and of course also at Wallace Online and The Alfred Russel Wallace Page.

* This link is to a nice paper comparing Wallace’s visit to Aru today.

Correction: Texas still holds up one textbook

November 23, 2013 • 10:52 am

My report yesterday that the Texas School Board had approved every submitted biology textbooks (a report I got from the Texas Freedom Network) was inaccurate, as noted by biologist and textbook author Ken Miller in a comment on yesterday’s post. As he noted:

Jerry, unfortunately your column is not quite true. One textbook was held up by the Board, and has still not been approved. Guess which one?

I knew the answer from his note, of course, but he supplied the link from the New York Times: “Texas education board flags biology textbook over evolution concerns.”

The book is, of course, one of which Miller is an author. It’s a very good book, and one of the most popular in the U.S. And it’s been held up because it contains supposedly questionable stuff about—evolution.

On Friday, the state board, which includes several members who hold creationist views, voted to recommend 14 textbooks in biology and environmental science. But its approval of “Biology,” a highly regarded textbook by Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, and Joseph S. Levine, a science journalist, and published by Pearson Education, was contingent upon an expert panel determining whether any corrections are warranted. Until the panel rules on the alleged errors, Pearson will not be able to market its book as approved by the board to school districts in Texas.

What were the “errors”? As expected, they were picked out by a creationist who has no formal training in biology:

The alleged errors that will be reviewed by the new expert panel were cited by Ide P. Trotter, a chemical engineer and financial adviser who is listed as a “Darwin Skeptic” on the website of the Creation Science Hall of Fame and was on a textbook review panel that evaluated Dr. Miller and Mr. Levine’s “Biology” last summer. Mr. Trotter raised numerous questions about the book’s sections on evolution.

“I think I did a pretty good review, modestly speaking,” said Mr. Trotter, speaking from his home in Duncanville, a suburb of Dallas. He said Dr. Miller and Mr. Levine’s textbook “gives a misleading impression that we have a fairly close understanding of how random processes could lead to us.” He added, “If it were honest, it would say this is how we are looking at it, and these are the complexities that we don’t understand.”

Here’s the info on Trotter that I published in a previous post:

  • Ide Trotter is a longtime standard-bearer for the creationist movement in Texas, both as a source of funding and as a spokesperson for the absurdly named creationist group Texans for Better Science Education. Trotter, listed as a “Darwin Skeptic” on the Creation Science Hall of Fame website, is a veteran of the evolution wars at the SBOE and is participating the biology review panel meetings this week. He testified before the board during the 2003 biology textbook adoption and again in 2009 during the science curriculum adoption. In both instances, Trotter advocated including scientifically discredited “weaknesses” of evolution in Texas science classrooms.

The Times continues:

Ronald Wetherington, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Southern Methodist University who has already looked over Mr. Trotter’s complaints, described them as “non sequiturs and irrelevant.”

“It was simply a morass of pseudoscientific objections,” Dr. Wetherington said.

It’s a sad day when a yahoo like Trotter can hold up the dissemination of a superb textbook in biology. Knowing Miller and Levine, I am sure the stuff on evolution is solid, and the school board, lacking expertise in biology, simply couldn’t adjudicate Trotter’s complaints and fobbed them off on a committee.

It is an embarrassment to both the U.S. and, especially, Texas, that out of eleven people chosen to vet biology textbooks for the state, six of them—more than half!—were creationists like trotter. No other First World country would do anything like this. I hope Pearson refuses to yield and make corrections, and that the “panel of experts”—I don’t know who they are—will find the creationist objections unfounded.

Miller and I have had our differences over accommodationism, but I’m with him 100% on this issue, and on keeping the material in his text.  I’m sure he has to keep quiet about his own feelings until this issue is resolved, but we know from his other books that he has no truck with creationism.

~

Paducah!

November 23, 2013 • 9:14 am

I’m on a trip and my brain hurts (I drank moonshine last night), so until I get back to my office in Chicago you’ll have a diet consisting largely of persiflage.

“You can’t pooh-pooh Paducah:
That’s another name for Paradise.”

Those lines, taken from the video below, are the exaggeration of the century. In reality, Paducah is more like the photograph below, taken by a student coming from Puerto Rico to study at Murray State. This is not a joke, but a real pair of signs stuck on the rear window of a pickup truck (of course) parked at the Paducah Wal-Mart (of course). You can imagine how a foreign student or, indeed, any rational person would react to this. It’s all the insanity of conservative America compressed into one square foot.

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I’m 100% sure that this Bible-thumping white person is “bitter” because we have a black president.

On the drive from Paducah to Murray State when I arrived, I saw a Confederate flag flying high and proud by the highway (there was no American flag next to it). I was taken aback but my hosts said that it was nothing out of the ordinary. This is a very red state.

Still, Paducah, Kentucky, is notable for one thing: it’s where John Scopes, of Scopes Trial fame, is buried. He and his family were actually from Paducah. On my way home today (I’m flying from Paducah), I hope to visit the cemetery and photograph his headstone. After all, how many people have made a pilgrimage to Scopes’s grave?

And reader Stephen Barnard (of Idaho photography fame) sent this clip of the swing song “Paducah”; the YouTube notes say this:

This is one of MANY great numbers from the Busby Berkeley 1943 musical “The Gang’s All Here” with Carmen Miranda. One of the era’s best musicals, with some of Hollywood’s worst acting. It’s a hoot!

Indeed, Goodman shows his chops on the clarinet—he was the greatest jazz clarinetist of all time (Artie Shaw was a close second)—and Carmen Miranda swans around singing, sadly not wearing one of her trademark fruit hats. The lyrics are dumb but funny, and Goodman sings some of them—unless his  voice is dubbed.

I’ve discovered that some of my friends (and I) like to say “Paducah” because it sounds funny.

Caturday felid trifecta: How to do yoga with your cat, Sumatran tiger cubs on view in D.C., and a lion cub plays with leaves

November 23, 2013 • 8:11 am

Thanks to our ailurophilic readers, news about cats large and small keeps pouring in. Here are three highlights from the last week.

First, an instructional video about how to do yoga with your cat. Now you and your moggie can bond by exercising together—not that cats need relief from stress:

Second, twin Sumatran tiger cubs (a male and a female) were put on display for the first time four days ago at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.  The Last Word on Nothing gives details and photos, including the following info:

The twin cubs, a boy and a girl, were on display for the first time yesterday at the zoo here in Washington, D.C. A little after 10 a.m., keepers opened the metal door at the bottom of a short concrete set of stairs. First the mother’s round face appeared in the stairwell, then a tiny pair of ears, then both cubs.

An audience of 70 or 80 people, armed with cameras ranging from smartphone to telescope-sized, watched as the two cubs wandered, sniffing at dry leaves, trying out the stairs to the higher levels of the sloping exhibit. The lion roared from next door, a few dozen feet away but out of sight. One of the cubs jumped on a black piece of wood. One stood on its hind legs, stretching to reach up one of the enclosure’s mighty oaks with its front claws.

As they got more comfortable, they turned toward important kitten activities like scampering and pouncing. Sometimes one would lie on its back to bat at the other with its oversized paws. Solid kitten business.

Here is a videos of the event (note: this subspecies of tiger is critically endangered):

If you didn’t see my earlier posts on the cubs (Sukacita and Bandar) being given their obligatory swimming test before being put on display, go here and here.

Finally, I proffer some unspeakably cute pictures of Karis, an 11-week-old lion cub at the Blair Drummond Safari Park in Scotland, having a high old time playing with leaves. You can see more photo in the Daily Mirror:

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Karis-an-eleven-week-old-lion-cub-plays-in-fallen-leaves-brushed-up-by-keepers-in-her-enclosure-at-Blair-Drummond-2827270

Karis-an-eleven-week-old-lion-cub-plays-in-fallen-leaves-brushed-up-by-keepers-in-her-enclosure-at-Blair-Drummond-2827264

Karis-an-eleven-week-old-lion-cub-plays-in-fallen-leaves-brushed-up-by-keepers-in-her-enclosure-at-Blair-Drummond-2827267

h/t: Su, Michael

Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 23, 2013 • 7:21 am

How can a moggie compete with Dr. Who?

Unfortunately, the internet is down in Dobrzyn, Poland today, and so I’ll dig back in the Hili Files and present the very first Hili dialogue. It’s from Aug. 21, 2012, when she was just a wee kitten.

These will all eventually appear on the Hili Tumblr site (just revamped, with a new “Ask Hili” box if you have questions for her).

A: Hili, let’s go and see what you really like to eat.

Hili: Just a moment, I have to show this mouse who is in control here.

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The Day of the Doctor

November 23, 2013 • 6:37 am

by Matthew Cobb

As Jerry has already indicated, today marks the 50th anniversary of the BBC TV science fiction programme, Doctor Who. Unlike Jerry, who has never seen a single episode, I am old enough to remember the First Doctor (played by the curmudgeonly William Hartnell, and the subject of a delightful drama the other night). The 50th anniversary programme will be broadcast around the world, including in cinemas in 3-D for those lucky enough to have tickets.

Less than 9 hours to go! My teen daughters are getting themselves ready by bingeing on old episodes. You can do the same by watching the original opening sequence, which absolutely scared the willies out of us back in the day. The theme was by Ron Grainer, but the amazing arrangement was by the genius pioneer of electronic music, the fabulous Delia Derbyshire:

Here’s a neat fan-made video that sums up the last 50 years and should whet your appetites:

To mark the anniversary, probably the top-ranking biology scientific journal, Cell, has a nice article about Doctor Who, which you can read for free here.

Meanwhile, the other week, my colleague, particle physicist and TV science populariser, Brian Cox, gave a lecture from the Royal Institution on The Science of Doctor Who, which was broadcast on BBC2. You can watch it in its entirety here (it’s mainly about physics):

Texas textbook update: all books approved by school board; creationists lose big time

November 22, 2013 • 5:13 pm

The Texas Freedom Network has emailed us that the last-minute delays about adopting a problematic textbook (too much evolution, I suspect) have been resolved: the Texas School Board simply adopted everything:

Despite last-minute efforts by some board members and political activists to derail the adoption of two textbooks, the State Board of Education today voted to adopt all of the proposed instructional materials up for adoption for high school biology and environmental science. Throughout the adoption process, publishers refused to make concessions that would have compromised science instruction on evolution and climate change in their textbooks, said Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of today’s vote, which is a huge win for science education and public school students in Texas,” Miller said. “Four years ago this board passed controversial curriculum standards some members hoped would force textbooks to water down instruction on evolution and climate change. But that strategy has failed because publishers refused to lie to students and parents demanded that their children get a 21st-century education based on established, mainstream science.”

The board voted to adopt all textbooks and instructional materials submitted by 14 publishers for high school biology and high school environmental science. None of those textbooks call into question the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and climate change science.

The bad old days in Texas are over, methinks.