Most important cats of 2012

December 31, 2012 • 6:23 am

Today I’ll present a few year-end summaries of various matters, but of course the most important involves our friend the felid. Here’s a selection from BuzzFeed‘s: “The 30 most important cats of 2012.”

Many of our friends are at the site, like Venus the chimera cat and the sad Tard, but here are a few that you might not know. Do go over and see them all, though, for there are some good ones, like the cat mother nursing a passel of baby hedghogs. that I haven’t space to show.

Republican cat:

Boat cat

The cat from hell: Alarm Clock Cat.  If you have a cat, you’ve experienced this on a lower level:

Girlfriend cat:

Girlfriend cat

Captain Jenkins, piloting his box:

Jenkins

A drunken man singing Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” to his cat:

Colonel Meow, the furriest cat alive:

Col Meow

And, of course, we can’t leave out the dolorous Henri. Here’s his prizewinning “Paw de deux”:

But my favorite of all, which I forgot to highlight this year, is a series of photographs (also at Buzzfeed) documenting the loving relationship between an 88-year-old Japanese grandmother and her odd-eyed white cat. The photos are by Miyoko Ihara, and they’ve been made into a book, Misao the Big Mama and Fukumaru the Cat, which you can buy online. It’s a great present for ailurophiles.  Here are a few from the BuzzFeed site; the whole series on that site will, if you’re a softy like me, warm your heart. And there are many more pictures than the five I’ve shown:

Young Fukumaru

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h/t: Grania

Swag!

December 30, 2012 • 11:44 am

Today’s the last day of Koynezaa (actually 11:45 tomorrow evening, for that is 24 hours after the time I was born), and thanks to the many readers who have sent good wishes that I’ve completed another orbit around the sun, and remain alive.

Here are two particularly nice presents I got. The first is a greeting from Hili, the recently adopted tabby of Andrzej and Malgorzata, who run the Polish rationalist website Racjonalista. Every day Hili and Andrzej have a dialogue in which Hili expresses her queenly attitude and superiority to humans. Today Hili’s dialogue was a birthday greeting!

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Picture 2And an anonymous reader sent me some lovely physical swag: pictures, buttons, and a hand-drawn cartoon. Here are two of the buttons, based on Richard Dawkins’s tweet touting this site:

buttons

And this is fantastic, though I’m really not that standoffish!

CartoonThanks to all!

New York Times: where were the humanists after Newtown?

December 30, 2012 • 10:26 am

A short piece from Friday’s New York Times, “In a crisis, humanists seem absent,” deserves a read and a bit of thought.  It’s basically a bit of hand-wringing about why humanists and secularists weren’t visible and providing consolation after the Newtown massacre. The question the article poses is this: why weren’t secularists able to fulfill people’s needs in time of grief?

The funerals and burials over the past two weeks have taken place in Catholic, Congregational, Mormon and United Methodist houses of worship, among others. They have been held in Protestant megachurches and in a Jewish cemetery. A black Christian youth group traveled from Alabama to perform “Amazing Grace” at several of the services.

This illustration of religious belief in action, of faith expressed in extremis, an example at once so heart-rending and so affirming, has left behind one prickly question: Where were the humanists? At a time when the percentage of Americans without religious affiliation is growing rapidly, why did the “nones,” as they are colloquially known, seem so absent?

To raise these queries is not to play gotcha, or to be judgmental in a dire time. In fact, some leaders within the humanist movement — an umbrella term for those who call themselves atheists, agnostics, secularists and freethinkers, among other terms — are ruefully and self-critically saying the same thing themselves.

“It is a failure of community, and that’s where the answer for the future has to lie,” said Greg M. Epstein, 35, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of the book “Good Without God.” “What religion has to offer to people at moments like this — more than theology, more than divine presence — is community. And we need to provide an alternative form of community if we’re going to matter for the increasing number of people who say they are not believers.”

Darrel W. Ray, a psychologist in the Kansas City area who runs the Web site The Secular Therapist Project, made a similar point in a recent interview. As someone who was raised as a believing Christian and who holds a master’s degree in theology, he was uniquely able to identify what humanism needs to provide in a time of crisis.

“When people are in a terrible kind of pain — a death that is unexpected, the natural order is taken out of order — you would do anything to take away the pain,” Dr. Ray, 62, said. “And I’m not going to deny that religion does help deal with that first week or two of pain.

“The best we can do as humanists,” he continued, “is to talk about that pain in rational terms with the people who are suffering. We have humanist celebrants, as we call them, but they’re focused on doing weddings. It takes a lot more training to learn how to deal with grief and loss. I don’t see celebrants working in hospice or in hospitals, for example. There are secular people who need pastoral care, but we abdicate it to clergy.”

To be fair, the paper does note that “the families of each Newtown victim chose religious funerals”, and that the interfaith service perforce excluded humanists.  It adds that humanist groups did raise money for the Newtown victims and organized gun-control rallies. Nevertheless, the tenor of the article is that somehow humanism has failed:

Still, when it comes to the pastoral version of “boots on the ground” — a continuing presence in communities, a commitment to tactile rather than virtual engagement with people who are hurting — the example of Newtown shows how humanists continue to lag.

That lag persists despite significant growth in the number of nonbelievers. A recent national study by the Pew Research Center found the share of “nones” had risen to about 20 percent of Americans from 15 percent in just five years. The humanist movement of the last decade has had eloquent public intellectuals in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Yet, in the view of internal critics like Mr. Epstein and Dr. Ray, humanism suffers in certain ways for its valorization of the individual. The inside joke is that creating a humanist group is like “herding cats.”

“You can’t just be talking about cowboy individualists anymore,” Dr. Ray said. “We have to get out of this mentality we’ve been in over the past 50 years of just saying how stupid religion is. We have to create our own infrastructure.”

I think this is unfair in several ways.  It is indeed true that religion fulfills some people’s needs, including that of consolation after death. Nobody denies that. What we question is whether those needs can be fulfilled without the superstition that accompanies religion (a superstition that has innumerable bad side effects), and without offering the false hope that those who die will live again in heaven—or fry in hell. I say “yes we can,” pointing to the example of Scandinavia, where people’s needs seem to be met without superstition. Yes, many Scandinavians adhere to the rituals of faith, getting married, going to memorial services, and other such things, in church.  Yet, according to Phil Zuckerman, most of those Scandinavians who sporadically enter a church are embarrassed by talk of the supernatural.

It would be interesting to look at the aftermath of the Norway shootings last year, when 69 people were killed in an attack on a summer camp, and eight more in a car bombing, with both attacks coming in a single day.  Norway is populated largely by atheists and agnostics (according to Wikipedia, only 32% believe in God, though another 47% profess belief in a “spirit or life force”; and Phil Zuckerman estimates the proportion of atheists to be between 31% and 72%).  How did areligious Norway deal with a comparable tragedy? Did they have faith meetings and assert that the dead were being “brought home?”  Or did they find solace in more secular ways? Did Norwegians wind up not handling the tragedy as well as Americans because Norwegians aren’t believers? I doubt it, but perhaps some Norwegians can weigh in.

At any rate, we have to remember that secularists were not asked to help with the public ceremonies and consolation, and that, since over 90% of Americans believe in God, most of the parents, friends, and relatives of the Newtown victims wanted religious consolation, not some damn humanist who didn’t mention the afterlife. Before there can be secular help with this, people must be prepared to receive it.

I think that’s where the Times gets the “j’accuse” part backwards.  The humanists weren’t there because they weren’t wanted, and because people are too religious to consider any kind of consolation that doesn’t invoke God or the afterlife.  Only after religion wanes can humanists operate more effectively in providing solace.

Nevertheless, many—most prominently Philip Kitcher and the less palatable Alain de Boton—have urged nonbelievers to contrive alternative, secularist ways to meet the needs now fulfilled by faith.  I’m not so sure that this is such a pressing issue; I think that religion will wane of its own accord, and that helping that along is our most pressing task.

And, as that happens, people will come naturally to ways of consolation without God.  I’m not sure what kind of program to propose. What I am sure of is that secularism can satisfy people’s deep needs, for it does so in Scandinavia and much of Europe.  And the way it’s done there is to replace religion with a society in which people and the government care about each other, where there is health care, more forms of social security, and a greater sense that everyone is in it together. The absence of an afterlife doesn’t seem so pressing when society rather than an invisible sky father helps you deal with your troubles.

Where were the humanists after Newtown? Keeping our heads down, as was meet, and trying to forge a more just society, which is the real way that people can find consolation without God.

A terrific popular article on the evolution of whales

December 30, 2012 • 6:14 am

In both my evolution class and general talks for laypeople, I use the evolution of whales as a great example of predicted and then discovered transitional forms. Those creationists who claim that “there is microevolution but not macroevolution” are simply unable to deal with this wonderful series of fossils, documenting the transition between a terrestrial “even-toed” animal (artiodactyl), and modern marine whales, showing all gradations of the transition. And most of the change took place over only about 10 million years, a remarkably short time for such a pronounced change in body form and lifestyle. Remember that our divergence from chimps took place about 6 million years ago, and we’re much more similar to chimps than are whales to their terrestrial ancestors! (The closest living relative to whales, by the way, is the hippo, which can serve as an example of how a “half-terrestrial/half aquatic” animal can be perfectly adapted to its environment—something creationists claim is impossible argues against natural selection producing whales.

I’ve put below the diagram of whale evolution I use in my talks (I was kindly given permission to use it by Ken Miller, and the sources are shown on the slide). Note that not only do we see all sorts of intermediate stages, but independent dating of those fossils shows them to occur in the precise temporal order expected if they were transitional forms. (The tree below shows the time when each form diverged from its ancestor.) The rear legs get smaller, the nostrils move atop the head to form the blowhole, the earholes and hair disappear, a new auditory apparatus forms, the pelvis separates from the spine, and so on.  It’s all described in Why Evolution is True.

Whale phylogeny

But it’s described even better in a new article in National Geographic, “Valley of the whales,” by Tom Mueller (free online!).  I often recommend articles for my readers, but I demand that you read this one. It’s a wonderful combination of travelogue and scientific exposition of one of our best transitional series, and it’s extremely well written. It describes my colleague Phil Gingerich and his team’s work in the Wadi Hitan, a desolate section of the Egyptian desert only 100 miles from the Pyramids of Giza.   There (and also in Pakistan) lies a rich treasure of early whale fossils. Mueller describes the scene, the finds, and what scientists now know about the evolution of whales from artiodactyls. The writing is concise and clear, and that’s why I’d like you to read it. Here’s a specimen:

The common ancestor of whales and of all other land animals was a flatheaded, salamander-shaped tetrapod that hauled itself out of the sea onto some muddy bank about 360 million years ago. Its descendants gradually improved the function of their primitive lungs, morphed their lobe fins into legs, and jury-rigged their jaw joints to hear in the air instead of water. Mammals turned out to be among the most successful of these land lovers; by 60 million years ago they dominated the Earth. Whales were among a tiny handful of mammals to make an evolutionary U-turn, retrofitting their terrestrial body plan to sense, eat, move, and mate underwater.

That is what I call good popular science writing: lively and not dumbed down.

Here’s another:

Around 45 million years ago, as the advantages of a water environment drew whales farther out to sea, their necks compressed and stiffened to push more efficiently through the water, behind faces lengthening and sharpening like a ship’s prow. Hind legs thickened into pistons; toes stretched and grew webbing, so they resembled enormous ducks’ feet tipped with tiny hooves inherited from their ungulate ancestors. Swimming methods improved: Some whales developed thick, powerful tails, bulleting ahead with vigorous up-and-down undulations of their lower bodies. Selection pressure for this efficient style of locomotion favored longer and more flexible spinal columns. Nostrils slid back up the snout toward the crown of the head, becoming blowholes. Over time, as the animals dived deeper, their eyes began to migrate from the top toward the sides of the head, the better to see laterally in the water. And whale ears grew ever more sensitive to underwater sound, aided by pads of fat that ran in channels the length of their jaws, gathering vibrations like underwater antennae and funneling them to the middle ear.

Though finely tuned to water, these 45-million-year-old whales still had to hitch themselves ashore on webbed fingers and toes, in search of fresh water to drink, a mate, or a safe place to bear their young. But within a few million years whales had passed the point of no return: Basilosaurus, Dorudon, and their relatives never set foot on land, swimming confidently on the high seas and even crossing the Atlantic to reach the shores of what is now Peru and the southern United States.

Mueller’s piece is accompanied by a lovely photo gallery with pictures by Richard Barnes. Here’s a few that I’ve chosen.

Here’s Wadi Hitan; the path is there for visitors to inspect the whale fossils in situ:

Valley of Whales

Here’s Gingerich with a portion of fossil whale jaw protruding from the rock.  Would that all paleontologists could have their fossils so easily accessible!

Gingerich and jaws

Mohamed Samah (left) is Wadi Hitan’s head ranger, and is shown putting together the skeleton of a Dorudon (fourth from the bottom in the first diagram above).  The article notes that this area, because of its wealth of important fossils, has earned status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Dorudon in situ

A skeleton of Malacetus from Pakistan (47 mya, not shown in my diagram), assembled in the basement of the University of Michigan. The caption notes that it had webbed feet and walked awkwardly on land, much like a sea lion. Note the elongated skull and reduced rear limbs.

Malacetus skelton

The two pictures I like best are below, for they present undeniable visual proof of evolution. This is Basilosaurus (see diagram above), a 37-million-year-old fossil from Wadi Hitan. This was a fully aquatic beast. And although it might not have been a direct descendant of Malacetus, it shows roughly the amount of morphological  change that occurred in those 10 million years—a lot!  Look at how the forelimbs have become paddles, the tail has become long and flexible, and, especially, how the rear limbs have almost disappeared (they’re the tiny bones flanking the mid-section of the tail). But they’re still recognizable: rock-hard evidence that whales evolved from land animals—something amply confirmed by DNA sequencing.

Basilosaurus entire

Below is one of the pair hind limbs of Basilosaurus: each is 18 inches long—on a 50-foot skeleton! The femur, tibia, fibula, and tarsals are clearly recognizable. Gingerich surmises that these tiny limbs may have been used as “stimulators or guides for coopulation,” but it’s also possible that they were completely without function: remnants on the way out or simply something that remained as a byproduct of other important aspects of development.

Creationists often deny that these vestigial limbs are evidence for evolution, noting that they could function in copulation. But that’s ridiculous, for we not only see their gradual shrinkage over time, but—more important—why would the Creator make a “copulation guide” that had every bone homologous to those of the fully-functioning hind limbs of their ancestors, and of modern tetrapods? To deny that this is evidence for evolution shows the intellectual dishonesty of creationists.

Remember, vestigial traits need not be nonfunctional to serve as evidence of evolution.

Basilosaurus,legs

There is a weird bit at the end of Mueller’s piece—some accommodationist testimony that doesn’t seem to belong in the article.

Ironically, Gingerich himself grew up in a strictly principled Christian environment, in a family of Amish Mennonites in eastern Iowa. (His grandfather was a farmer and lay preacher.) Yet at the time, he felt no clash between faith and science. “My grandfather had an open mind about the age of the Earth,” he says, “and never mentioned evolution. Remember, these were people of great humility, who only expressed an opinion on something when they knew a lot about it.”

Gingerich is still baffled by the conflict that many people feel between religion and science. On my last night in Wadi Hitan, we walked a little distance from camp under a dome of brilliant stars. “I guess I’ve never been particularly devout,” he said. “But I consider my work to be very spiritual. Just imagining those whales swimming around here, how they lived and died, how the world has changed—all this puts you in touch with something much bigger than yourself, your community, or your everyday existence.” He spread his arms, taking in the dark horizon and the desert with its sandstone wind sculptures and its countless silent whales. “There’s room here for all the religion you could possibly want.”

I’m not sure why Phil is baffled by the conflict between science and religion: their methodologies and conclusions are totally at odds, and here he absolutely conflates “religion” with “awe at the wonder of the universe.” Finding fossil whales is not the same thing as finding Jesus.  The whole interpolation is gratuitous and jarring. I suspect that National Geographic stuck it in to soothe those readers whose worldview has been jarred by such convincing evidence for evolution. (Many “liberal” religionists still are uncomfortable with evolution, though they profess to accept it.) This seems to be the magazine’s way of saying, “Look readers: you can still have your faith and fossil whales, too!”

But I’m not going to come down hard on Gingerich for this.  He’s a terrific guy, a crack scientist who has made pathbreaking discoveries, and we’ve both worked not only against creationists, but as severe critics of Gould and Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibrium.  So who says that I can’t join forces with accommodationists?!

Go read the piece!

h/t: Jon

I’ve reached the New Testament!

December 29, 2012 • 1:36 pm

I had to take a Bible break for a while, for reading it straight through proved too much for my frail constitution. But I’ve finally reached the New Testament, 849 pages into the 1108-page book, and things are picking up. (Oy, the books of the minor prophets were deadly: one after another crying out that the Lord would smite Israel for improper worship!).

Just a few observations from what I’ve read so far in Matthew.

1.  Many of the wonderful and moral sayings of Jesus are, with some thought, not so inspiring after all. Why, exactly, should I love my enemy? What if my enemy does horrible things?  Why, when someone hits me, am I supposed to turn the other cheek and let him hit me again? Wouldn’t it be better to run away, or smite him back? After all, someone who smites might think twice if he’s smitten back. “Resist not evil”? Why not combat evil?  And, of course, Jesus importunes the multitudes repeatedly to take no thought for the morrow, for the Lord will provide. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink” is something I’m simply not going to follow. Anyone who followed Jesus’s commands strictly would give up his job, stop providing for the family, and stop saving money. Is there any Christian who does that? Certainly not the vast majority in my country!

2. Speaking of the multitudes, the book of Matthew repeatedly talks about how many multitudes followed Jesus around and witnessed his miracles.  For example, five thousand men (“beside women and children”) got loaves and fishes. Now if that many people witnessed Jesus’s deeds, then he would not have been an obscure apocalyptic prophet, and would surely have been mentioned by contemporary historians. After all, it was because King Herod heard of Jesus that John the Baptist lost his head. Ergo, while a historical Jesus may have existed—and I still am not convinced—Christians have a hard job explaining how, if he worked miracles for the multitudes, the historians ignored him.

3. How do Christians explain these words of Jesus to his disciples (Matthew 16:28)?

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Is that some kind of metaphor?

4. Granted, much of what Jesus said involves good advice (though nothing that secularists couldn’t come up with, or did), but there’s also bad stuff, too. Here he works a miracles for a woman only after she begs him and acknowledges him as master.

From Matthew 15:22-28 (King James version):

22 And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.

23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.

24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.

26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.

27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.

28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.

Jesus is being a jerk here, calling the woman a “dog” because she was a Canaanite. He certainly inherited some of the arrogant and preening attitudes that his father amply displayed in the Old Testament.

Jesus kills an entire herd of innocent pigs by imbuing them with demons cast out of two passersby (Matthew 8:28-34)
Animal abuse: Jesus kills an entire herd of innocent pigs by imbuing them with demons cast out of two passersby. Possessed pigs run down a cliff and drown in the sea. (Matthew 8:28-34)

The hottest place on Earth

December 29, 2012 • 11:19 am

. . . is now Death Valley, California, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times. The previous world record, from Libya, has been deep-sixed:

After a yearlong investigation by a team of climate scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, announced this fall that it was throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah on Sept. 13, 1922. It made official what anyone who has soldiered through a Death Valley summer afternoon here could attest to. There is no place hotter in the world. A 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch here is now the official world record. [JAC: that’s 56.6ºC].

And while people were not quite jumping up and down at the honor, the 134-degree reading has inspired the kind of civic pride that for most communities might come with having a winning Little League baseball team.

“For those of us who survive here in the summer, it was no surprise that it’s the hottest place on the world,” said Charlie Callaghan, a Death Valley National Park ranger who personally recorded a 129-degree day here a few years back.

The opening wall panel in a new exhibition at the National Park Service visitor center off Highway 190 has been unveiled with a burst of superlatives: “Hottest. Driest. Lowest.” (Lowest refers to a spot in Death Valley, Badwater Basin, which at 282 feet below sea level is the lowest place in North America.)

I spent months working in Death Valley as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Caifornia at Davis, trying to find out how far flies can fly (the desert is good for that), but I always worked in the cooler months—March and April when the highs hover around 80º F.  I once went in summer to see if there were any flies there, and planned to camp out, but the temperature was over 120º F (49º C) and I was forced, despite my penurious state, to buy an air-conditioned motel room. There were no flies to be found: they could not have survived, much less bred, in that heat. My theory was that they repopulate the desert oases every spring from the nearby mountains, and this was supported by our finding that flies could fly up to 16 km overnight in the desert.

But that’s another story.  Here are a few pictures from my last trip to Death Valley— in March, 2005. Click photos to enlarge.

The valley as you approach it from the pass over the Panamint Mountains.  It looks ominous, and when it’s hot it’s like descending into a furnace (click pictures to enlarge). Those white patches in the distance are salt flats, remnants of an ancient saline lake.

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The reason I visited last time was that there had been rare spring rains, and heavy ones, which not only caused flooding but produced an even rarer bloom of desert wildflowers.  In nearly every other year there is almost no vegetation save creosote and saltbush. I’ve always wondered where the insects come from to pollinate these flowers (yes, many are insect-pollinated), given that they bloom only once a decade or so.

DSCN1866

The salt flats in the center of the valley, the remnants of an ancient Pleistocene lake (Lake Manly), are the most desolate parts of the park, completely lacking vegetation. Yet even here one can catch errant flies—almost certainly flies that bred in distant oases and got lost. During this visit, the rains had collected in the flats, turning them into an eerie landscape of salty knobs poking above the brine. This area is called “The Devil’s Golf Course.” The first time I visited I found a golf ball in the salt, which I kept and christened “The Devil’s Golf Ball.”  There is usually not this much water there, so I had to hop among the salt nodules.

DSCN1859

Finally, there are fish there! Pupfish, to be exact: the endemic Death Valley pupfish Cyprinodon salinus.  There are also at least two other species in the same genus in outlying areas of the park, and three other species in the Death Valley area. These fish have been genetically isolated from each other since the lake dried up about 10,000 years ago. They’re a good example of genetic divergence in geographic isolation (“allopatric speciation”) and have survived because the pools and streams are permanent, though subject to severe diminution when it’s hot.

These are unimpressive-looking fish, but quite an evolutionary marvel. Here are some fish in shallow Salt Creek, near the visitor’s center.

DSCN1839_2

I think Death Valley is one of the most beautiful places in the U.S. It has almost no vegetation, but the beauty and geology are eerie and unparalleled anywhere on Earth. And it’s only a few hours via car to the wonders of the Sierra Nevada.  The best time to visit is the spring. When I went in July, though, there were dozens of tourists, all European and mostly German.  For some reason the Germans like the heat.  They all congregated around the swimming pool, diving in when the heat became intolerable, and they were all beet-red from sunburn. The Times piece notes this:

Ben Cassell, who runs the Panamint Springs Resort on the west side of Death Valley, said that even before the long-awaited official recognition, his summer rooms typically were booked up by the spring, mainly by Europeans seeking temperatures they cannot find back home.

“The Europeans love to visit in the summer when it is the hottest,” he said. “The Americans tend to go in the spring for the flowers.”

The European tourists, he said, “definitely are looking for the extreme.”

“We get people who get upset that today it’s 120, and the day before they got here it was 121,” he said. “They want to have bragging rights.”

Go visit!

Islamic “justice” in Mali

December 29, 2012 • 7:44 am

Things are going to hell in Mali, and a UN force will soon invade the country to restore order. Among the horrible things taking place in that country is the imposition of sharia law by the rebel Islamist government. The  New York Times had a chilling piece yesterday on what happens when the Muslim faith gets the upper hand.

BAMAKO, Mali — Moctar Touré was strapped to a chair, blindfolded, his right hand bound tight to the armrest with a rubber tube. A doctor came and administered a shot. Then Mr. Touré’s own brother wielded a knife, the kind used to slaughter sheep, and methodically carried out the sentence.

Souleymane Traoré had his right hand cut off by Mr. Touré’s brother, a police chief in the Islamist-held north.

“I myself cut off my brother’s hand,” said Aliou Touré, a police chief in the Islamist-held north of this divided nation. “We had no choice but to practice the justice of God.”

Such amputations are designed to shock — residents are often summoned to watch — and even as the world makes plans to recapture northern Mali by force, the Islamists who control it show no qualms about carrying them out.

After the United Nations Security Council authorized a military campaign to retake the region last week, Islamists in Gao, Mr. Touré’s town, cut the hands off two more people accused of being thieves the very next day, a leading local official said, describing it as a brazen response to the United Nations resolution. Then the Islamists, undeterred by the international threats against them, warned reporters that eight others “will soon share the same fate.”

This harsh application of Shariah law, with people accused of being thieves sometimes having their feet amputated as well, has occurred at least 14 times since the Islamist takeover last spring, not including the recent vow of more to come, according to Human Rights Watch and independent observers.

But those are just the known cases, and dozens of other residents have been publicly flogged with camel-hair whips or tree branches for offenses like smoking, or even for playing music on the radio. Several were whipped in Gao on Monday for smoking in public, an official said, while others said that anything other than Koranic verses were proscribed as cellphone ringtones. A jaunty tune is punishable by flogging.

At least one case of the most severe punishment — stoning to death — was carried out in the town of Aguelhok in July against a couple accused of having children out of wedlock.

Flogging for a cellphone ringtone, and stoning to death—a horrible way to go—for having a child while unmarried! Only religion could mandate things like that. And the amputations can be prolonged, too:

Moctar Touré had his hand amputated several weeks later. He said it took 30 minutes, though he fainted in the process, awakening in the hospital bed where the Islamists had placed him afterward.

Mr. Touré said his brother had insisted that the sentence be carried out.

“They asked my own brother three times if that was the sentence,” Mr. Touré said. “He’s the commissioner of police in Gao, and he wants to die a martyr,” Mr. Touré said quietly. “He joined up with the Islamists when they came to Gao.”

Here is Souleymane Traoré, whose right hand was amputated by Mr. Touré’s brother, a police chief:

jp-mali1-popupPhoto by Joe Penney for The New York Times

You may have qualms about the proposed invasion, which was unanimously approved by the UN security council (and will apparently use troops from five African nations), but I don’t see any alternative to restore stability in Mali.  It’s the lesser of two evils.