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.
Being in academics all my life, I’ve of course heard of people who would, for a fee, do research for your undergraduate papers, or even write them for you. In fact, there are even sleazy online companies that sell pre-written papers on a diversity of topics. Pay your money, do no work, and you might even get an A.
But, thanks to alert reader Diana MacPherson, this is the first time I’ve heard of companies that will research and even write your Ph.D. dissertation—or a journal article—for you. The Cloud Consulting Company of Toronto, Canada, has placed this ad on a job-search website:
Yes, it pays a lot, but it seems illegal to me, for it’s fostering a duplicitous practice: passing off the work of others as your own. Can this possibly be legal? Even if it is, it’s unethical, but I bet a lot of unemployed academics would be attracted.
If you follow U.S. politics, especially the doings in Washington, D.C. you’ll know of Ana Marie Cox, who achieved internet fame with her snarky political blog Wonkette. That site, and her writing, was known for its sharp tone, its humor and sarcasm, and for breaking more than one important political story. Cox gave up that website in 2006, went to work for GQ magazine, and now writes for the Guardian.
Given her history, I was astounded to see an announcement that she had become a devout Christian. I first thought this was a joke (and perhaps it is, though I doubt it), but her confession and rationale is laid out in her Feb. 28 post on the Daily Beast, “Why I’m coming out as a Christian.” It’s even more astounding because Cox was known for her incisive analysis of politics, but has now abandoned all that to throw herself unquestioningly into the arms of Jesus. Anyone who’s followed Cox will be astonished to read this statement: “I try, every day, to give my will and my life over to God. I try to be like Christ. I get down on my knees and pray.”
And she abjures any rational approach to the topic: for example, why she became a Christian rather than, say, a Muslim or a Jew. (She describes her mother as an “agnostic ex-Baptist” and her father as “a casual atheist.”) Some quotes:
I am not smart enough to argue with those that cling to disbelief. Centuries of philosophers have made better arguments than I could, and I am comfortable with just pointing in their direction if an acquaintance insists, “If there is a God, then why [insert atrocity]?” For me, belief didn’t come after I had the answer to that question. Belief came when I stopped needing the answer.
That’s simply abandoning any rational approach to faith—but I guess that’s why I call it faith! “What reasons do I have for my belief? Jeeez, I dunno, but you can check Aquinas and Tertullian.” And as for not needing the answer to questions like, for instance, why God allows evils like the Holocaust, one would think that an inquisitive believer would at least think about that question. After all, it bears on the very nature and moral dicta of the being you worship! “Not needing the answer” to a question that important is like saying, “I’m a devout Muslim, so I don’t need to understand why Allah wants us to stone women and kill apostates.”
Apparently the reason Cox became a Christian is simply the Jamesian notion that she feels the presence of God, and knows that she has a personal relationship with him. This is the classic reason offered in The Varieities of Religious Experience for why people become religious. It’s not the arguments, but the feelings:
Here is why I believe I am a Christian: I believe I have a personal relationship with my Lord and Savior. I believe in the grace offered by the Resurrection. I believe that whatever spiritual rewards I may reap come directly from trying to live the example set by Christ. Whether or not I succeed in living up to that example is primarily between Him and me.
My understanding of Christianity is that it doesn’t require me to prove my faith to anyone on this plane of existence. It is about a direct relationship with the divine and freely offered salvation. That’s one of the reasons that when my generic “There must be something out there” gut feeling blossomed into a desire for a personal connection to that “something,” it was Christianity that I choose to explore. They’ll let anyone in.
Belief without good reasons: the classic definition of faith. The problem here is that she gives no reason for accepting Christianity as the “right” faith, and also for buying into its notion of salvation via faith alone. Why is that any saner than becoming a Scientolgist and embracing thetans, Xenu, and diagnosis of spiritual problems with an e-meter, or becoming a Raelian and adopting belief about aliens in UFOs who make crop circles? Any “gut feeling” can blossom into full-blown delusion without the check of reason. Is it that Cox’s form of Christianity is a lazy person’s faith, requiring only acceptance of Jesus as savior, and not any real work, to ensure a spot in Heaven? Or was it Christianity’s lax criteria for acceptance? (It’s much harder, for instance, to become a Muslim or a Jew.)
Without the least mote of criticality, Cox accepts the Christian doctrine—which is not universal, by the way—that salvation comes through faith, not works. That doctrine claims that had Hitler accepted Jesus right before he died, he would have found his place in heaven, regardless of the evils he had done. And Cox buys into that:
One of the most painful and reoccurring stumbling blocks in my journey is my inability to accept that I am completely whole and loved by God without doing anything. That’s accompanied by a corresponding truth: There is nothing so great I can do to make God love me more.
Because before I found God, I had an unconsciously manufactured higher power: I spent a lifetime trying to earn extra credit from some imaginary teacher, grade-grubbing under the delusion that my continuing mistakes—missed assignments, cheating, other nameless sins—were constantly held against me.
. . . What Christ teaches me, if I let myself be taught, is that there is only one kind of judgment that matters. I am saved not because of who I am or what I have done (or didn’t do), but simply because I have accepted the infinite grace that was always offered to me.
That doesn’t sound like salvation through faith really constituted such a problem for Cox, given that the idea of “freely offered salvation” was one of the things that attracted her to Christianity. But any thinking person must ask herself this: what kind of God would welcome you into heaven, no matter how many evil deeds you’d done in your life, so long as you accepted Jesus as savior before you died? How can a lifetime of killing Jews and making war, for instance, be completely effaced with a final change of mind about God?
Cox doesn’t care: she’s stopped needing those answers. She’s happily abandoned any notion of having good reasons for one’s beliefs, and immersed herself in the warm bath of unquestioned faith. And she’s happy about it, averring that since she found Jesus she is “happier, freer, and healtier in body and spirit” than she’s ever been.
Well, more power to her. Scientologists, Raelians, and, indeed, adepts of most spiritual delusions would say the same thing. But the caveat of George Bernard Shaw still applies: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.” Well, I wish Cox good luck. She once was sharp, but now she’s found.
A week ago I posted about a vile incident at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), in which Rachel Beyda, a Jewish sophomore student who was up for membership of the student council’s judicial board, was interrogated and initially rejected solely because she was a member of Jewish organizations, which supposedly conferred on her a lack of “objectivity” and “divided loyalties.”
There’s a short video of the council’s interrogation and deliberation here, and a longer one below, which you can watch if you want (it’s 44 minutes long). The initial vote that rejected Beyda—by a vote of 4-4-1—takes place at 16:10. The faculty advisor then weighs in at about 34:19, admonishing the students that being Jewish does not constitute a “conflict of interest.” The second vote, in which the council finally approved Beyda unanimously, takes place at 43:40.
Can you imagine a member of any other minority group who would receive this kind of treatment in a liberal American university? Even a Muslim—a member of a group said to be a target of “Islamophobia”—would never be interrogated this way. Can you imagine a student group rejecting a Muslim because she had “divided loyalties,” or a black student because she “was black, belonged to black student groups and thus had ‘divided loyalties’? Only Jews receive this kind of treatment by students—and it’s because of the overweening hatred of Israel (which devolves upon Jewish students) among many college students.
Until recently, anti-Semitism on campus was not much discussed, even though in America hate crimes against Jews are 5-6 times more frequent than against Muslims (twofold if you weight the data by population size), and they occur fairly often on campus. There are two reasons. First, people have the impression that anti-Semitism simply isn’t a going view in the U.S., and so ignore it. Second, anti-Semitism is now folded into a more socially acceptable view: anti-Zionism. But not all Jews are unthinking adherents to Israel’s policies: many Jews in the U.S. are critical of some of Israel’s doings (I’m one of these), and, regardless, you shouldn’t hold all Jewish students responsible for things that Israel does. If some Jewish students agree with Israel’s actions, and you want to disagree with those views, by all means do so; but don’t discriminate against people like Beyda simply because they’re Jewish. What we see in the above meeting is simply anti-Semitism (Israel isn’t even mentioned!), although the bigots, as usual, deny their bigotry.
The president of the student council, Avinoam Baral, who had nominated Ms. Beyda, appeared stunned at the turn the questioning took at the session and sought at first to rule Ms. Roth’s question out of order. “I don’t feel that’s an appropriate question,” he said.
In an interview, Mr. Baral, who is Jewish, said he “related personally to what Rachel was going through.”
“It’s very problematic to me that students would feel that it was appropriate to ask that kind of questions, especially given the long cultural history of Jews,” he said. “We’ve been questioned all of our history: Are Jews loyal citizens? Don’t they have divided loyalties? All of these anti-Semitic tropes.”
. . . The session — a complete recording of which has been removed from YouTube [JAC: it’s back, and I posted it above] — has served to spotlight what appears to be a surge of hostile sentiment directed against Jews at many campuses in the country, often a byproduct of animosity toward the policies of Israel. This is one of many campuses where the student council passed, on a second try and after fierce debate, a resolution supporting the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement aimed at pressuring Israel.
“We don’t like to wave the flag of anti-Semitism, but this is different,” Rabbi Aaron Lerner, the incoming executive director of the Hillel chapter at U.C.L.A., said of the vote against Ms. Beyda. “This is bigotry. This is discriminating against someone because of their identity.”
Indeed it is. As I said, Israel wasn’t even mentioned! But Beyda took the high road:
Ms. Beyda, 20, who is from Cupertino and is president-elect of the Jewish sorority Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi, said she did not want to comment on her confirmation hearing because of her role on the Judicial Board, whose duties include hearing challenges to the constitutionality of actions of the council.
“As a member of the Judicial Board, I do not feel it is appropriate for me to comment on the actions of U.C.L.A.’s elected student government,” she said by email.
Rachel Beyda. Photo: Emily Berl for The New York Times
Fortunately, the chancellor of UCLA stood up for Beyda:
The university’s chancellor, Gene D. Block, issued a statement denouncing the attacks on Ms. Beyda. “To assume that every member of a group can’t be impartial or is motivated by hatred is intellectually and morally unacceptable,” he said. “When hurtful stereotypes — of any group — are wielded to delegitimize others, we are all debased.”
In an interview on Thursday, Chancellor Block said he viewed this as “a teaching moment. These are students that are learning about governance. I think they all learned about what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. The campus has come together on this.”
Well, that assessment might be a bit optimistic. Although the four students who initially voted against Beyda wrote a letter of apology to the UCLA student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, have a look at it:
Maybe I’m being uncharitable here, but this sounds largely like a notapology. The classic notapology trope—”we are truly sorry for any words used during this meeting that suggested otherwise”—seems to put some blame on the interpreter for construing what the signers’ words “suggested.” Further, as Steve Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University wrote on the academic-issues discussion website The Faculty Lounge:
. . . it was not much of an apology:
Our intentions were never to attack, insult or delegitimize the identity of an individual or people. It is our responsibility as elected officials to maintain a position of fairness, exercise justness, and represent the Bruin community to the best of our abilities, and we are truly sorry for any words used during this meeting that suggested otherwise.
Really? What exactly were their intentions when they challenged Rachel’s impartiality, solely because she is Jewish? And what alternative “words used during this meeting” could possibly have made it any better? The problem was not the language of their questioning, but rather the sentiment behind it.
Undergraduates need to be forgiven for their mistakes, but they also need to learn from them. In this case, the four objectors seem to have learned very little, as they appear to be completely blind to their own implicit expression of anti-Semitism, even after it has been pointed out to them.
Indeed: no Muslim, Mormon, gay, or black student would have been challenged about their “objectivity”. That issue is reserved for Jews.
Bigotry of any sort is unacceptable, and we (and the students above) need to learn the difference between discriminating against someone solely because of their background, ethnicity, or sexuality on the one hand, and challenging their beliefs or actions on the other.
Moar birds today. We have two from regular Diana MacPherson:
This photo is a female red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) on the fat. You can tell she is a female because the top of her head is not red. People often see these birds and notice the red neck and cap and wonder why they are called red-bellied woodpeckers. Here you can see her red belly.
I finally managed to get a picture of the Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus). Here the hawk is sitting in a maple tree in my backyard watching for birds. At the time, there was a nuthatch on the fat and a few juncos in the weigela who were completely frozen. The hawk went after a junco but missed then flew off into a further maple tree. You can tell this is the sharp-shinned hawk because of the grey of its feathers and the yellow on its beak. The similarly sized cooper’s hawk isn’t grey.
And five shots from Stephen Barnard, who apparently still has time to take pictures despite tooling around in his new toy.
A house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus): a drab name for a colorful bird. They’re numerous at the feeder, along with Red-winged Blackbird, Goldfinches, Chickadees, Tree Sparrows, Song Sparrows, and the occasion Kestrel dive-bombing them.
Yet more red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis). . . soaring this afternoon [last Monday]:
And I guess we’re adding artwork to this feature. Reader Ken Elliott contributed a nice drawing of an eagle with this explanation:
[Yesterday’s] artwork display from Lou Jost in the “Reader’s Wildlife Photos” post reminded me of an ink drawing I had done a couple of years ago of an eagle. I’ve attached it in case you think it’s worth sharing.
I apologize for not knowing the species of eagle portrayed as I am not any sort of expert or knowledgeable person in regard to the specifics of species. My inspiration was simply the captured image of this eagle.
We have three—count them, three—cat videos this morning. Two of them are from Russia, which gets my award for the country producing the best cat videos.
Remember Nora, the piano-playing cat? She was a gray moggie who somehow decided to sit on the piano bench and hit the keys. She became an internet sensation, and now has her own website, where you can see and hear her many videos. But this is the best one—the Catcerto, where Nora on video is accompanied by an orchestra in a five-minute original composition. It, too, has its own site, and here are the notes:
CATcerto is the a project created by Lithuanian conductor, composer and artist Mindaugas Piecaitis. The world premiere was first performed on 5th June, 2009 by the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra in Klaipeda’s Concert Hall (Lithuania). It gained recognition in international media: BBC, Lithuanian TV, Baltic TV and the First Baltic Chanel (russian).
Mindaugas Piecaitis composed and directed the Catcerto for Nora The Piano Cat™ and orchestra, where Nora, the soloist, was brought in via video.
On this site you will find interviews with Mindaugas Piecaitis and Nora The Piano Cat. We also present a selection of videos from the rehearsal, the premiere and links to the people that made this a sucess. [sic]
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Catcerto (which I’m sure I’ve posted before), starring Nora on the keyboard:
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“Staff, staff—let down your towel!” Here is a Russian Rapunzel cat, whose owner has figured out a great way to bring it in from outside. The Russian and translation from YouTube:
Таким образом наш кот Мэйсон попадает к себе домой.
Подписывайтесь на наш канал, ставьте лайки и пишите комментарии))
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Thus our cat Mason gets to his home.
Subscribe to our channel, put the huskies and write comments))
Huskies?? I ask Malgorzata (who speaks Russian) for an explanation, and she said this:
You are absolutely right, “huskies” it is not. Funny, Lajka was the name of the dog which went into space a long time ago. But “lajk” is phonetic for English “like” and the author wants people to click on “like” on their channel. But the translator must have had an association with the dog Lajka and somehow ended with “huskies”. Hilarious!
What makes it even more bizarre is that Laika wasn’t a husky! But I digress—the video:
And a screenshot:
Curiously, reader Su found an identical solution in this gif from the Cheezburger site:
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Yep, it’s turtles and cats all the way down. Who knows if the turtle is playing (do reptiles do that?) or being aggressive toward the cat?
Good news! The temperature is expected to rise to 43°F today—over the freezing point!—and even 51°F later in the week. Can it be that winter is having its last gasp? I’m told that signs of spring are already on their way in Poland, too (there was a bit of snow yesterday), and Hili looks for the Door to Spring. Her dialogue is particularly good today.
The Infinite Muhn-keh Cage show is tonight; wish me luck!
A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m checking the weather because yesterday there was an illegal winter.
A: But the snow melted afterwards.
Hili: It could change its mind during the night.
In Polish:
A: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Sprawdzam jaka pogoda, bo wczoraj była nielegalna zima.
Ja: Ale potem śnieg się roztopił.
Hili: Mógł w nocy zmienić zdanie.
I usually end the work week’s post (and remember, Americans, that you lose an hour of sleep on Saturday night when the clock moves forward) with a few upbeat animal bits. I’ve collected four for today, thanks to the endless stream of readers who inundate me with felinilia.
First, we have a video by reader Taskin, “Cat Concerto starring Gus”. Apparently she waited for months to be able to film Gus’s noodling on the piano. His effort here sounds a bit dolorous and melancholy, like “Gymnopédie”:
Second, a cartoon showing a good idea: the cards your cats would buy for you—if they had money:
Reader Sarah in Oakland reports that her cat bed count—the felids who occupy her and her partner’s bed at night—now ranges from six to eight. A photo from Wednesday evening is below. All of these cats were strays, which Sarah took in, fed, had neutered, and took to the vets. They’re still semi-wild, but they know where to go to get noms and a warm sleep.
From noon around the circle we have Surprise, Cat!, Tib Tab, Siameezy, Gray Cat, Professeur Chippeur (“Chippi”), and Mean Pretty Tabby (Sarah is creative with names). I would have thought it would be impossible to sleep with such a crew, but it seems to work.
Finally, Stephen Barnard from Idaho has taken delivery of his car, and I’d asked him for a picture of his d*g in the car. It just arrived, and here is “Deets versus Cobra” (the note said “He was a little nervous”):
