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 am coming down with a cold, dispirited about the many rude emails that have been posted (or have attempted to be posted) in the last few days, and so will probably limit myself to light entertainment today. I leave for Mexico tomorrow.
I am compelled to post the latest video of the dolorous and existential cat Henri, back with a new presentation called “L’Haunting”.
“This is not a happy time of year for a black cat who does not suffer fools.”
The ending is ineffably sad.
Greg Lukianoff is president of the estimable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which monitors and campaigns for free speech on American college campuses. One of their main activities is lobbying against speech codes, codes that I consider both unnecessary and undemocratic in universities. After all, students are about 18 when they arrive at an American university, and that’s old enough to be able to tolerate speech, hateful or not, without beefing about being “offended.”
Moreover, one of the main values of college, as I see it, is to expose students to a diversity of viewpoints, which is the only way to examine if yours are correct. It’s a growing experience that absolutely requires freedom of expression, even if you don’t like what you hear.
In the October 24 issue of the New York Times, “Feigning free speech on campus,” Lukianoff bemoans the increasing suppression of the First Amendment on campuses:
Colleges and universities are supposed to be bastions of unbridled inquiry and expression, but they probably do as much to repress free speech as any other institution in young people’s lives. In doing so, they discourage civic engagement at a time when debates over deficits and taxes should make young people pay more attention, not less.
Since the 1980s, in part because of “political correctness” concerns about racially insensitive speech and sexual harassment, and in part because of the dramatic expansion in the ranks of nonfaculty campus administrators, colleges have enacted stringent speech codes. These codes are sometimes well intended but, outside of the ivory tower, would violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. From protests and rallies to displays of posters and flags, students have been severely constrained in their ability to demonstrate their beliefs. The speech codes are at times intended to enforce civility, but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.
You might wonder why students on campuses don’t have the same Constitutional rights as Americans as a whole. Well, public universities do, but schools like the University of Chicago aren’t required to abide by the Constitution when it comes to speech.
As Lukianoff notes:
In a study of 392 campus speech codes last year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where I work, found that 65 percent of the colleges had policies that in our view violated the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to free speech.
How does this play out? Lukianoff gives a few chilling examples. My own alma mater for graduate school is one:
Last year, incoming Harvard freshmen were pressured by campus officials to sign an oath promising to act with “civility” and “inclusiveness” and affirming that “kindness holds a place on par with intellectual attainment.” Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor and a former dean of Harvard College, was quick to criticize the oath. “For Harvard to ‘invite’ people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and sets a terrible precedent,” he wrote on his blog. “It is a promise to control one’s thoughts.”
This is at Harvard, for crying out loud: American’s flagship university! Here are two more:
Last month, Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., forbade students toprotest an appearance by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Why? According to university policy, students must apply 10 business days in advance to demonstrate in the college’s tiny “free speech zone” — and Mr. Ryan’s visit was announced on a Sunday, two days before his Tuesday visit.
Also last month, a student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was blocked from putting a notice on her door arguing that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney was fit for office. (She successfully appealed.) And over the summer, a federal judge struck down the University of Cincinnati’s “free speech zone,” which had limited demonstrations to 0.1 percent of the campus.
Sadly, my own school has had a FIRE speech-code rating of “red” for some time, primarily because of its policies against “hate speech” and speech that is biased. “Red” means this:
A “red light” institution has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.
Several other of our policies, including free speech zones and the right of the university to remove posting in student residences that are deemed offensive, are rated “yellow light,” meaning “policies [that]restrict a more limited amount of protected expression or, by virtue of their vague wording, could too easily be used to restrict protected expression.
This distresses me. If someone wants to make a speech on campus calling me a “dirty Jew,” then by all means let them. I’ll defend myself with other speech, and defend their right to insult my religion, politics, or anything else. Speech-code policies turn campuses into mini Islamic Republics, in which anybody can be offended and force authorities to stifle whatever bothers them. College students are adults, and should have the same rights as American adults who aren’t in college. They aren’t babies whose sensitive feelings need to be coddled.
Even more sadly, the students don’t feel safe to speak out. The most distressing part of Lukianoff’s piece is this:
A 2010 study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities of 24,000 college students and 9,000 faculty and staff members found that only 35.6 percent of the students — and only 18.5 percent of the faculty and staff — strongly agreed that it was “safe to hold unpopular positions on campus.”
Which misguided administrators have created regulations that make students wary of taking unpopular positions? It’s political correctness gone wild.
The Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) has a special issue on the genomics of adaptation that it’s making available for free to everyone. You can see the contents here; they include these articles, which can be accessed directly from my links.
Introduction: The genomics of adaptation
by Jacek Radwan and Wieslaw BabikResearch article: Genomic consequences of multiple speciation processes in a stick insect
by Patrik Nosil, Zach Gompert, Timothy E. Farkas, Aaron A. Comeault, Jeffrey L. Feder, C. Alex Buerkle and Thomas L. ParchmanReview: How does adaptation sweep through the genome? Insights from long-term selection experiments
by Molly K. BurkeReview: Gene duplication as a mechanism of genomic adaptation to a changing environment
by Fyodor A. KondrashovReview: The probability of genetic parallelism and convergence in natural populations
by Gina L. Conte, Matthew E. Arnegard, Catherine L. Peichel and Dolph Schluter
I’ve asked readers to avoid embedding videos in their comments (which happens simply when you paste in the URL from YouTube), as it eats up bandwidth and makes the comments section unwieldy. My impression is that readers do this inadvertently, thinking that only a link and not the whole video will appear.
If you have a video you want to highlight, could you please just remove the “http” part of the URL? It’s easily restored by readers who want to see the video.
kthxbye
I’m staying with friends in Cambridge who have another visitor, too: Seamus Malin. You soccer fans might recognize the name, since Seamus was a soccer announcer for 40 years, working at ESPN, ABC, NBC, and CBS. Altogether he covered soccer in seven World Cups and three Olympic games, and watched or broadcast thousands of games, both live and on television. He’s in the National Soccer Hall of Fame for his broadcasting.
Although I’m a soccer neophyte, I took advantage of Seamus’s presence and affability to ask him, since he’s seen so much soccer, to tell me what he considered the best players, games, and goals. Here is his list, divided up by category. Players are ranked in order of quality, with the best at the top. For each player I provide a link to his Wikipedia entry and to a YouTube video of his performance. And for each player I give his nationality and the clubs he’s most commonly associated with.
Seamus has seen every one of these guys play.
The seven best nonactive players (again, in descending order of greatness):
Pelé (from Brazil; Santos). Video.
Diego Maradona (from Argentina; Boca Juniors, Barcelona, Napoli). Video.
Bobby Charlton (from England; Manchester United). Video. Seamus was at this game, which he considers Charlton’s greatest day of glory.
Alfredo Di Stéfano (from Argentina; Real Madrid). Video.
Ferenc Puskás (from Hungary; Real Madrid). Video. A rare left-footed player.
(next two added later)
Franz Beckenbauer (from Germany; Bayern Munich). Video. Seamus says he’s the only player in the history of the game to have won World Cups as a captain (not just a player) and later as a coach. Video.
Johan Cruyff (from the Netherlands; Ajax and Barcelona). Video.
As Seamus told me, “Nobody can argue with any of these choices.”
The eleven best active players:
Lionel Messi (From Argentina; Barcelona). Seamus considers him the best player of all time, better than Pelé were the latter to be fast-forwarded to today’s game. I’m embedding a “best of” video for Messi; this guy is fast! Note: turn the music off before watching; it’s offensive and I noticed it only much later.
Cristiano Ronaldo (From Portugal; Real Madrid). Video.
Falcao (Radamel Falcao García; from Colombia; Athletico Madrid). Video.
Andrés Iniesta (From Spain; Barcelona). Video.
Xavi Hernandez (From Spain; Barcelona). Video.
Iker Casillas (goalkeeper, Real Madrid). Video. The only goalkeeper on this list.
Neymar (Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, from Brazil, Santos). Video.
Zlatam Ibrahamovic (From Sweden; Paris St-Germain). Video.
Wayne Rooney (from England; Manchester United). Video.
Andrea Pirlo (from Italy; Juventus). Video.
Robin van Persie (from the Netherlands; Manchester United). Video.
Seamus notes that people may argue with his choice of Pirlo.
Seamus’s “best game”:
Seen live in person, as a fan. The 1966 World Cup Final in London, which England won 4-2 in overtime against West Germany. Germany scored in the 90th minute to send the game into overtime. England, however, made a controversial goal (the ball bounced down after it hit the crossbar, and it’s unsure whether it crossed the goal line). And, according to Seamus, existing video isn’t capable of settling the issue. Video of the highlights is here.
Seen live in person, as a broadcaster: The 1992 gold-medal Olympic game played in Barcelona. Spain beat Poland by a score of 3-2, with the winning goal coming in the 90th minute. According to Seamus, 90,000 people were in the stadium, providing a rousing atmosphere that carried the Polish team to their best. Further, King Juan Carlos arrived at halftime, which is the first time the Spanish national team had played in hostile Catalonian Barcelona. Seamus was broadcasting the game for NBC, though only the highlights were shown on American television. Some of the highlights are shown on this video.
Viewed on television: The 1970 World Cup semi-final between West Germany and Italy, played in Mexico, which the Italians won in overtime by a score of 4-3. The score at the end of regulation time was 1-1, but then 5 goals were scored in a thrilling free-for-all overtime. Sadly, Italy went on to lose to Brazil in the final. The video is here.
Best team ever: The Brazil national team in 1970, which beat Italy 4-1 in the World Cup final. Seamus considers this the benchmark for any cup final game. This video shows some highlights of Brazil’s World Cup performance.
Best individual performance in a game seen live: Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final game against England. (Argentina, which won the game 2-1, went on to win the final.) Maradona made one illegal goal using his hand (the infamous “Hand of God” goal) which wasn’t spotted by the referees, and then made another fantastic and genuine goal dribbling by a half-dozen defenders. Seamus was the NBC studio host of this game, and the studio technology was able to show the illegality of the first goal much more clearly than the referees were able to discern. This video shows both goals:
Seamus has amended this to add Cruyff’s performance for the Netherlands against Argentina (4-0 for Netherland) in the 1974 World Cup. Cruyff was brilliant, scoring one goal, setting up the other, and completely dominating the game. Video highlights are here.
Seamus has also added a special category:
Best performance by a duo seen live: This occurred in the 1960 European Cup Final, with the final score Real Madrid 7, Eintracht Frankfurt 3. Puskás scored 4 goals for Real Madrid and Di Stefano scored 3 (see list of top five non-active players). This combination of talent, according to Seamus, produced one of the most thrilling games he’s ever seen. As Wikipedia notes, “It is widely regarded as one of the greatest football matches ever played,” and was watched by 125,000 people in the stadium. The highlights, showing all the goals, are in this video.
Many thanks to Seamus for imparting this information to me. Here’s a photo of him I took yesterday afternoon:
It’s almost unnecessary to add that because I know I have many soccer-loving readers, you’re welcome to agree, disagree, and add your own opinions in the comments. Seamus might weigh in himself if you ask him questions or take issue (politely, I might add!) with his judgments.
Here’s a brand-new cartoon of the antics of the irrepressible cat created by Simon Tofield:
h/t: Michael
That is not moving naturalism forward.
by Matthew Cobb
Last night, Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) tweeted this great photo of a bizarre Ugandan ant, Calyptomyrmex (species not given, but maybe piripilis – if so, it’s about 2-3 mm long), which he took on a recent trip to Africa. Alex wrote on his website: “Calyptomyrmex is a small myrmicine genus found in Africa, Asia, and Australia. These robust, ornamented ants inhabit rotting wood and leaf litter in forested habitats. Little is known of their biology.”
Alex had disturbed the nest, so this worker was delicately picking up one of her sisters or nieces:
Ed Yong (@edyong209) was intrigued by the striking bobbles (aka “the ornate, spatulate hairs”) all over the ant and invited Alex to speculate what their function might be. The answer was “I’m guessing they retain soil odors: it’s smell-camouflage for hunting unsuspecting prey in dark spaces in the leaf litter.” I’m not convinced (something about an odour camouflage doesn’t quite ring true to me, though I couldn’t put my finger on why). It would be possible to test the hypothesis by seeing whether you could extract smells from the bobbles, using a tiny fibre and a technique called Solid Phase Micro-Extraction (SPME). Of course, you’d have to see whether a nude ant had absorbed significantly less of the soil odour.
Many Calyptomyrmex ants have these bobbles to one degree or another – some of the bobbles are small and thin (in the preserved specimens at least), others are bubbly.
So, WEIT readers, what do you think of this funky ant?
Here’s another, in the wild:
And here’s one in a white box:
Thanks to Alex for permission to reproduce these photos. If you want to buy copies of these or any of his thousands of other fantastic photos, head on over to his website!
You see Jerry, Twitter is useful!