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.
You’d expect something stupid from this repulsive man, but this is even worse than you could imagine. In the video below, Craig argues that the Newtown shootings actually remind us of the Miracle of Christmas (e.g., the “Massacre of the Innocents“: Herod’s murder of Bethlehem’s male children when he discovered he was tricked by the Wise Men—a prophecy of Jeremiah). Apparently the recent slaughter is God’s way of reminding us of “what Christmas is for, what it’s all about.” And it’s almost as if Craig thinks that God engineered the murders to that end.
For Craig, the shootings reassure us that God takes the world’s sufferings on himself, entering into the world to do so. If asked why God didn’t enter into the world to prevent the killings in the first place, Craig would almost certainly reply that this were God’s will—an argument he made to justify the Biblical slaughter of the Canaanites. Remember that Craig is one of the few theologians who accept the “divine command” theory of morality, whereby whatever God dictates is good by virtue of his dictation, no matter how odious it seems to us.
In the end, it all convinces Craig that “there is hope, and that God has provided it for us.”
How. . . theological of him to glean such a message from this tragedy! Does the Holocaust also bring him such reassurance?
Jennifer Warnes (b. 1947) is best known for popular music; as Wikipedia (link preceding) notes:
Between 1979 and 1987, Warnes surpassed Frank Sinatra as the vocalist performing the most songs to be nominated for anAcademy Award for Best Original Song (four times) and to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song (three times). Her biggest hits include “Up Where We Belong” (a duet with Joe Cocker from the 1982 film, An Officer and a Gentleman) and “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” (a duet with Bill Medley from the 1987 film, Dirty Dancing).
But the songs mentioned above are schlock. This one, “Right Time of the Night” I count as country, at least in terms of style; it also reached #17 on the American Country and Western chart. (Note also, in the version below, that Warnes is accompanied by steel guitar and wearing cowboy boots.) The song was written by Peter McCann and released by Warnes in 1976. Here she is performing it on “the Midnight Special” a year later:
As with the above song, some will maintain that the next isn’t really a country song, either. Well, all I can say is that Shania Twain (b. 1965 as Eilleen Regina Edwards) is regarded as primarily a country artist. This enormously popular song, “You’re Still the One“, was written by Twain and her producer (and husband) Mutt Lange in 1997. (They were later divorced, and, in a big tabloid scandal, Twain married the husband of the woman for whom Lange left her.) The song was apparently written to dispel rumors of marital troubles between Lange and Twain.
But forget the personal stuff: many country stars have had, well, “colorful” lives. This song won Twain two Grammys for Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance.
Oh, one scientific point. As the BBC reports, a paper in the journal Vision Research showed that, among white women, Twain had the perfect facial proportions, making Twain, according to the researchers, the most attractive Caucasian woman in the world, and beating out contenders like Angelina Jolie and Elizabeth Hurley. They did not examine proportions below the neck, such as the famous (and disputed) evo-pych measure “waist to hip ratio.” But enough; we’re concentrating today on her music:
Some have argued on this site that Gordon Lightfoot (b. 1938) is not a country singer; and, indeed, he crossed over to pop/folk music early in his career. But for those of you who dispute his country cred, have a listen to a cut from what I think is one of the best albums ever recorded (and his first), “Lightfoot!”—an album so rare that I can’t even find it for sale on a brief internet trawl. When it came out in 1966, I damn near wore out my LP with repeated playing. And the music is country.
Every song on that album (including his most famous ones, “The First Time” and “Early Morning Rain”) is a gem. There are several I could have highlighted here (including the beautiful “Changes“, written by Phil Ochs, or the Biblical ballad “Pride of Man“, written by Hamilton Camp; listen at the links). But I like this one best, which I believe was written by Lightfoot. It’s “Sixteen Miles,” a song of lost love. I can’t find a live performance, so here’s the recording:
Note that both Lightfoot and Twain (as well as many other folk and country musicians) are Canadian. I can’t document this, but my impression is that Canada has contributed to North American popular music more than one would predict from its population.
The Geological Society (London) is having a special meeting today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown hoax. There will also be a tour of a new special exhibit at the Natural History Museum (which also has a nice Piltdown website). It was exactly 100 years ago today that Charles Dawson, a Sussex antiquarian, along with Arthur Smith Woodward and Grafton Elliott Smith, both accomplished biologists, announced the discovery of the remains of a heretofore unknown hominid in a gravel pit in Piltdown, East Sussex.
A reconstruction of the Piltdown skull. Bone dark, reconstructed elements in white. Note that the skull consisted of parts of the braincase, nasals, and a right mandible, with no connections between the parts. Note also that the mandible is missing the anterior teeth.
Dawson claimed that the right mandible (broken anteriorly) and the braincase pieces had been recovered from the gravel pit. It appeared to show that in the Pleistocene of Britain there occurred a large-brained but ape-jawed ancestor of man. Many of Britain’s most prominent paleontologists, anatomists, and zoologists concurred with this analysis.
The “Piltdown gang”. Standing: F.O. Barlow, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Seated: A.S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W.P. Pycraft, and Sir E. Ray Lankester.
From the start, however, there was controversy as to whether the man-like cranium and ape-like jaw were from the same species. The fact that the intervening parts of the skull were missing made it impossible to demonstrate the case morphologically. Regardless, the general conclusion was to accept the association of the jaw and cranium. When Australopithecus was discovered in Africa by Raymond Dart in the 20’s, the significance of his find was underestimated since the African form had a man-like jaw and an ape-like cranium– the opposite of Piltdown. As further discoveries showed that Piltdown man was aberrant, it came to figure less prominently in accounts of human evolution.
Beginning in the late 1940’s a series of investigations were begun that explained the source of the anomaly– the Piltdown remains were not only not associated, they were relatively recent, had been stained to look old, and filed down to change their appearance– they were a deliberate forgery! In 1953, J.S. Weiner, K.P. Oakley, and W. Le Gros Clark published their results in a Natural History Museum monograph (reference below), and, appropriately, presented their results a few days later at a meeting of the Geological Society. A longer monograph appeared two years later.
Meeting of the Geological Society on 25 November, 1953, at which K.P. Oakley presented evidence for the fraudulent nature of the Piltdown specimens (Daily Mail; the Mail only identifies the photo as of the meeting at which the hoax was exposed; The Times for 26 November 1953 gives the further details of the meeting).
There had, in fact, long been doubts about the provenance of the Piltdown specimens. In 1914, W.K. Gregory (1914: 190-191) expressed it pretty directly:
It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a negro or Australian skull and a broken ape-jaw, artificially fossilized and “planted” in the gravel-bed, to fool the scientists. Against this suggestion tell the whole circumstances of the discovery as above related.
At the time, Gregory accepted the story of discovery. The following year, G.S. Miller strongly stated that the specimens were not associated, declaring unequivocally that the jaw was simian, the cranium human. More elliptically, he wrote (1915: 1):
Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together.
Colin Groves was told that Miller actually thought it was a hoax, but that decorum prevented him from saying so without proof, and so he contested the find on scientific grounds; it would be interesting to see what is written in Miller’s papers about the matter (perhaps someone has already looked). Another American zoologist, W.D. Matthew, readily accepted Miller’s conclusions (Matthew in Eastman et al., 1916: 107):
In the present reviewer’s opinion [W. D. M.] Dr. Miller’s argument is convincing and irrefutable; the jaw belonged to a chimpanzee and the skull to a species of man comparable with that represented by the Heidelberg jaw. It is hardly to be expected, however, that this conclusion will be readily accepted by the European writers, who have with but few exceptions committed themselves more or less deeply to the opposite view.
And, changing his previous view, so did Gregory (1916: 313):
In an earlier paper (1914) I have reviewed the controversy over the Piltdown remains (Eoanthropus dawsoni), emphasizing the entirely human character of the brain-case, the essentially ape-like character of the lower jaw and teeth and the doubts as to their association already expressed by several authors.
While I take no delight in the predicament of those taken in by the hoax, I do delight in the fact that Miller, Gregory, and Matthew were among those to see the true nature of the material: I have had occasion to refer and use their work in my own researches and teaching, and Gregory is one of my academic grandfathers.
After the exposure of the hoax, the incident became chiefly of historical rather than scientific interest, and the question of who perpetrated the hoax has been of recurring interest. Suspicion first fell on Dawson, but has included Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith, Teilhard de Chardin, and even Arthur Conan Doyle! Miles Russell of Bournemouth University has discovered that Dawson was involved in a number of frauds and fakeries, and an extensive summary of his case against Dawson is online. He is speaking today at the Geological Society, and has just published a new book on the subject (reference below).
In addition to the new exhibit and the conference, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum is leading a team that will conduct further tests on the bones that they hope will allow them to produce more definitive evidence of who was involved in perpetrating the hoax. Both the conference and the further testing have drawn considerable media interest in the UK (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC, Daily Mail). Further online information on the Piltdown story can be found at the late Richard Harter’s website, a Clark University site with transcripts of many original papers, and at the Talk Origins archive.
Dawson, C., A. Smith Woodward, and G.E. Smith. 1913. On the discovery of a palæolithic human skull and mandible in flint-bearing gravel overlying the Wealden (Hastings Beds) at Piltdown, Fletching (Sussex). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 69:117-147. (transcription)
Eastman, C.R., W.K. Gregory, and W.D. Matthew. 1916. Recent progress in vertebrate paleontology. Science New Series 43:103-110.
Gregory, W. K. 1914. The Dawn Man of Piltdown, England. American Museum Journal 14:189-200. (pdf)
Gregory, W.K. 1916. Studies on the evolution of the Primates. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35:239-355. (pdf)
Matthew, W.D. 1916. Note on the association of the Piltdown skull and jaw. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35:348-350. (in Gregory, 1916)
Miller, G.S. 1915. The Jaw of the Piltdown Man. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 65(12):1-31. (Biodiversity Heritage Library)
Russell, M. 2003. Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson. Tempus Books, Stroud, UK. (Amazon)
Russell, M. 2012. The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed. History Press, Stroud, UK. (publisher)
Weiner, J.S., K.P. Oakley, and W.E. Le Gros Clark. 1953. The solution of the Piltdown problem. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 2:139-146. (Biodiversity Heritage Library)
I think there’s something to this, and my guess is that the metal clip activates the behavior—apparently still present in adults—of kittens who suddenly become quiescent when their mother carries them by the scruff of their necks. That behavior, of course, is adaptive for the kitten: if your mom is transporting you to new quarters, or removing you from danger, you don’t want to make trouble by squirming.
This doesn’t look too painful; perhaps some reader will try it and tell us if it works. DO NOT lift an adult cat by the scruff of its neck, though, for that could cause injury.
Teachers in the U.S. don’t make much money: they’re woefully underpaid despite their onerous work and responsibility for educating the next generation. But there’s not enough money to pay teachers like Katilin Roig, who saved her classroom during the Newtown shootings. She describes what happened in this interview with Diane Sawyer. Listen to how well she protected her kids:
And although much of the attention on this tragedy has focused on the children, let’s not forget the heroism of those teachers who didn’t make it as well—the ones who died in acts of pure altruism, defending their charges.
In contrast, here’s the odious John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, paying lip service to the tragedy while calling for less gun control and freer access to semiautomatic weapons. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, who has four children, isn’t having it. Then read the comments on YouTube, which largely support Lott.
It’s gonna be a tough job to pry the guns from Americans’ cold, dead hands.
My German friend Florian Maderspacher, who works for Current Biology and has moved to America, sent me the link to these gun ads, along with a note (and permission to publish it):
I really want to like America, I live here, but what happened last Friday and the grounds on which that grew make it very very hard..
“Wichita Lineman” was written by Jim Webb and recorded in 1968 by Glenn Campbell (b. 1936). It’s a ballad, but it’s still a country song, and a beautiful one (there are two more Glenn Campbell songs to go on my list, more than any other artist’s). One of my friends in college was in fact a lineman in the Midwest, and said that the song perfectly expressed what goes through one’s mind when climbing poles alone on the prairie, and in love.
Charlie Rich, aka “The Silver Fox” (1932-1995) is most famous for the song below: “Behind Closed Doors,” written by Kenny O’Dell and recorded by Rich in 1973. It nabbed him two Country Music Awards and a Grammy for best male country performance. It’s a great song, with wonderful piano accompaniment.
There are some songs that grow on you, and start off okay but eventually turn into favorites (“A day in the life” by the Beatles was one of those for me), and there are some songs that you know on first hearing are fantastic. This is one of those. I was stunned the first time I heard LeAnn Rimes (b. 1982) sing “I Need You,” and realized instantly that it was a classic, worthy of sitting next to all the great songs of country music. Yes, it’s country-pop, but so what?
This is not a romantic love song, but a Christian song; the love object here is Jesus. But it’s still a fantastic song, recorded in 2000 Rimes was only 18, and released on the album Jesus: Music From and Inspired by the Epic Mini-Series.
I know the readers are weighing in with their suggestions, criticisms, and the like, and that’s great. Do remember that I don’t listen to a lot of country music, and what reaches me comes largely through its overlap with pop/rock.
