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.
The “Earth News” section of the Telegraph has a nice series of pictures of insect eyes: “Bug-eyed: Macrophotographs of insects by Ireneusz Irass Walędzik”. They’re wonderful. The series has 18 pictures, and I’ll show seven. Not all are identified in the Torygraph, so readers with entomological expertise can add their IDs. All photographs are credited to Ireneusz Waledzik/Caters News:
h/t: P.
today would have been Christopher’s 64th birthday had he lived. As we all knew, nobody has emerged to replace him, for his combination of eloquence, erudition, independence, and effectiveness in debate cannot be matched. In his honor, I post this nice picture of the good Hitchens (a photo I hadn’t seen) sent by reader Grania:
We needn’t go over this dumb anti-atheist argument again, except to note in passing that Peter Hitchens, the One Who Went Wrong, has an extremely MILITANT column in the Mail Online called “Atheism kills, persecutes, and destroys. Wicked things are done in its name.” This man obviously has no sense of nuance. That’s also evident from how he begins his column, with an attack on a pseudonymous commenter, possibly fictional, named “Mr. Bunker”:
And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him. Whenever I encounter his debating style, a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne), issues from an even-more-improvised chimney. A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away. Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters ‘Bunkerism. World Headquarters’ This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.
This is simply bad writing: a heavy-handed, tedious, and overwritten depiction of a stereotype. Whatever genes for good writing segregated in the Hitchens lineages, Peter didn’t get ’em.
He goes on (and I’ll mercifully omit the text) to refute Mr. Bunker’s claim that “no crime has ever been committed ‘in the name of atheism.'” Hitchens trots out the usual tropes about the Bolsheviks, quoting others to show that they made “this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action.” Certainly some religious figures were persecuted by the communists, but I doubt that the Doctors Plot was motivated by atheism. And they didn’t get rid of modern genetics—and persecute and execute scientists like Vavilov—because they were religious. Really, the harm done in the name of atheism is miniscule compared to the harm done to keep Lenin and Stalin in power. Contrast that with the harm done directly in the name of faith in the Inquisition.
Stalin killed at least 20 million Russians, Lenin millions more. How many of those died simply because they were religious? And was Stalin a murderous tyrant because he was an atheist, or simply because he was an evil man? I opt for the latter. Atheism does not turn good people bad. In contrast, as we know from Professor Weinberg, “for good people to do evil—that takes religion.”
Hitchens then segues to the Nazis, but that canard has long ago been made into confit, so I’ll pass it over. Hitchens ends his piece in a way that’s far more “militant” than anything ever said by Richard Dawkins. Remember the following words when you hear the tired old phrase “militant atheist” shoved in your face:
The exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’) that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing, violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action. If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it ‘gods’ )?
Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law, have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs, in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed.
Hitchens notes that he goes into greater detail about atheist evil in his 2010 book, The Rage Against God. I think I’ll give that one a miss, but I’m sure some brave readers have wallowed through it.
Yep, the awesome cat (plus kitten friend) are back again. Another great cartoon by Simon Tofield.
h/t: Michael
By Matthew Cobb
h/t @JohnRHutchinson on Twitter
I couldn’t monitor the views to see the odometer click over, as they change too quickly, and I was in the air anyway. But yay for us!
I have a ton o’ bat photos and videos: there were something like 18 species at the Bat Center in Michigan. I’ll process them and get the videos on YouTube, but for the nonce here’s a vampire bat I photographed just a few hours ago (click to enlarge, click again to see the full view of those rapier-like teeth):
We don’t often see the classic Twin Peaks phrase “wrapped in plastic” taken so literally—but a Redditor posted the above photo of an Orthodox Jewish man who did just that on a recent flight. Poster “FinalSay” initially assumed the man was covering up because he was in front of women, but others pointed out that it is much more likely that the man is a “Kohen”, who are holy priests (or descended from them).
Kohens are prohibited from flying over cemeteries (“A kohen initially was not supposed to approach any dead body, and if he did so he became ritually impure”), which as you can imagine, could be a major problem for travel. According to Haaretz, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the leader of the Lithuanian Haredi community in Israel, “found a solution to this issue, ruling that wrapping oneself in thick plastic bags while the plane crossed over the cemetery is permissible.”
I once thought that Jews weren’t as ludicrously religious as adherents to many other faiths, but that notion is slowly slipping away! It comes from my bias, of course, for I am of Jewish ancestry, and consider myself a secular Jew.
Now I once thought that I too was a “kohen” (a member of the “kohanim”, which are the supposed male descendants of Aaron (from the tribe of Levi), a designated “priestly caste” of Jews whose duties originally included animal sacrifice but are now limited to proffering special blessings, handling the Torah (first five books of the bible in a scroll) and so on. The designation of this patrilineal caste traces back to the first four verses of Exodus 28.
Many Jews named “Cohen,” “Cohan,” and, perhaps, “Coyne” (possibly a change intended to disguise Jewish origins) are indeed of the kohanim lineage, and, curiously, kohanim do have a unique Y-chromosome DNA signature, veryifying the patrilineal passing on of the duties and the name (this does not, of course, prove anything about the truth of the Bible—merely that a single lineage was given special duties and a special monicker).
My own name, Coyne, has always puzzled me. It’s a common Irish name, but my parents and relatives are Jewish, leading me to suspect that at some point “Coyne” was an alteration of “Cohan” or “Cohen,” for it was common long ago, when my relatives immigrated to the U.S., for Jews to change their names to something that looked goyisch. I subsequently found out though, that my paternal great-grandfather was named Peter Coyne, as you can see in this wedding announcement from 1879 that my cousin dug up:
BROOKLYN UNION-ARGUS
Monday, 27 January 1879JEWISH WEDDING.
The wedding of Miss Pauline ZOFFER and Mr. Peter COYNE took place at the Jewish Synagogue, at Boerum and State streets, at 3:30 P. M., yesterday, and was celebrated by a reception at Nilsson Hall, Fulton street and Gallatin place, at 5 o’clock. A large number of friends of the two families were present in response to cards of invitation from the parents of the bride and groom, and the occasion was one of agreeable festivities.
I found this announcement puzzling, for the name “Coyne” was, although presumably Jewish (I’m assuming this was not a mixed-religious wedding), was in use as early as 1879. But could there possibly be some Irish in my lineage as well: a tint of green in the Coyne gene pool? Did Peter Coyne have Irish paternal ancestors?
I was curious about that, and so, when I started writing WEIT, I got my Y-chromosome tested to see if it carried the kohen genotype. I did this because I intended to start off the book with the idea that our curiosity about evolution, and our own place in the genealogy of life, was simply an extension of many people’s curiosity about their own genealogy within modern humans. Evolution is our family tree writ large.
It turned out that I am one of the many fake kohanim: those with a variant of the name but lacking the DNA signature of membership in the priestly caste. I have to admit I was a tad disappointed, for I would have felt slightly elevated had I been a true kohen (isn’t that stupid for an atheist?). But what this did confirm is that, at least for my Y chromosome, I am not in the least Irish: my Y DNA was indicative of pure eastern European Jewish ancestry. (All kohanim are named “Cohan” or “Cohen,” but not all people with those names are kohanim. It’s the same way with the Indian name “Singh”: all Sikhs are named Singh, but not all Singhs are Sikhs.)
At any rate, this DNA mishegas didn’t make it in to WEIT, as I eventually decided that conceit was a bit twee, but I did, at least, gain some notion of my ancestry, confirming what I thought all along. The Peter Coyne of 1879 still mystifies me; I know very little of my remote ancestry, particularly on my father’s side.
And I no longer think my name is Irish, for, of course, male names are transmitted precisely with Y-chromosome DNA, as if the names themselves resided on that chromosome. (They don’t, of course, but both are passed on from father to son.)
I would, however, like to get more than my Y-chromosome DNA tested. You can now obtain comprehensive tests of most of your DNA from places like 23andme for around $100-$150. If you can spare that dosh, I’d urge you to do it: the technology and databases are growing exponentially, and you’ll learn a ton of stuff from simply sending in a bit of your saliva or a cheek swab. You’ll learn about not only your ancestry but, if you’re brave, you can find out what disease genes you’re carrying as well. (That wasn’t available at the time, and I’m not sure I want to know!)