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.
An eight-year-old girl named Ruqaya, from a Muslim family, gave a pro-jihad speech yesterday in Sydney. Her words sound stilted and rehearsed, but still, how could anyone let their young daughter go onstage and advocate jihad? Brainwashing, of course.
In the video, though, the Aussie cops seem overly eager to grab up the demonstrators. Also, since yesterday I’ve heard that the authorities have visited the family of the boy who held up the “Behead those who insult the prophet” sign, and have determined that things are okay.
Ruqaya delivered her speech to an audience of 600 at a conference called Muslims Rise, hosted by an Islamic group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. It was held in Bankstown in Sydney’s west on Sunday.
Muslims Rise advocates the restoration of the Islamic caliphate – a global government for all muslims, operating under strict sharia law.
Ruqaya was one of nine speakers in a considerable line-up, which included a controversial keynote from Taji Mustafa, described by the Opposition as a “hate preacher”.
“My dear brothers and sisters in Islam, as the world gathers against the believers in Syria … seeking to hijack our sincere and blessed uprisings, children in Sydney would like to send their message of hope and support to the Muslims of (Syria), especially to the children and mothers,” Ruqaya said in her speech.
“These uprisings have demonstrated that this umma (global Muslim community) is alive and well, her love is for jihad, she is unshackled herself from the fear which she held, and she yearns to once again live under the banner of (the Islamic state).
“Children as young as myself can be seen on the streets joining the uprisings, risking their lives to bring food, water and medicine to their wounded family members, some of them never returning to their mothers … Nobody is too young,” she said.
This is one of the funnier animal posters I’ve seen recently: it’s a science-themed LOLGoat! And very clever it is, too.
Three points:
1. No, this is not Photoshopped.
2. Yes, they are goats, not sheep
3. They aren’t heterozygoats at a “color” locus (though they’re undoubtedly heterozygoats at many DNA positions in their genomes).
As alert reader Linda Grilli informs me (she raises and breeds goats, and also has four black cats and another named Clawed Monet), these are Cou Noir French Alpine dairy goats, which sometimes have this striking pattern (“cou noir” means “black neck”). Here’s another specimen from The Young Dairy Farmer’s Wife site, shorn for show:
The violence continues in the Middle East over the movie “Innocence of Muslims,” about whose making much remains mysterious. But one thing is for sure: the U.S. government had nothing to do with it. Despite that, Muslims offended by the movie continue to riot and kill: today in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed 14 people, including 10 foreigners, and an Egyptian cleric issued a fatwa calling for the death of everyone involved in the movie. The unrest will continue and more will die, all testimony to the vicious xenophobia inherent in “the religion of peace.”
I haven’t been able to find the whole movie, but I’m putting up the 13-minute trailer below. It’s simply dreadful: amateurish acting, fake backgrounds, and a blatant attempt to cast Islam in the worst possible light compared to Judaism or Christianity. In fact, it’s so awful that it’s hard to believe that anyone, including Muslims, sees it as a threat to their faith. Nevertheless, it is, for it insults Mohamed.
The film portrayed Mohammad as a fool, a philanderer and a religious fake. In one clip posted on YouTube, Mohammad was shown in an apparent sexual act with a woman. For many Muslims it is blasphemous even to show a depiction of the Prophet.
So merely making a movie about Mohamed, even if he’s cast in a favorable light, could also ignite riots?
Watch this clip from “Innocence of Muslims” and see if it isn’t the most dreadful stuff you’ve ever viewed:.
BUT, for Muslims,or others who are offended, consider this: movies just as bad as this one, showing Jews as money-grubbing, evil, Christian-killing devils, are regularly shown on television in the Middle East without protest. One of them is described atCiF Watch (which also describes some others):
Al-Shatat (“The Diaspora”) is a $5.1 million, 30-part “mini-series” produced by state controlled Syrian television. It was broadcast during Ramadan in 2003 by Hezbollah’s satellite television network available to millions of viewers throughout the Middle East and was also shown in Iran in 2004 and in Jordan during 2005 on Al-Mamnou.
The film, based in part on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, depicts a classic anti-Semitic blood libel. A Rabbi, played by an Arab actor, directs a member of his synagogue to help him:
1) kidnap the son of his Christian neighbor;
2) bring the boy to the synagogue;
3) slit the boy’s throat;
4) drain the boy’s blood into a basin;
5) use the blood to make Passover matzoh bread;
6) serve the matzoh to the members of the synagogue.
Here’s a clip from the movie showing the abduction and killing of the boy, and the eating of the blood-infused matzoh (unleavened Jewish bread eaten at Passover). WARNING: it’s a bit gross, though one sees not the throat-slitting itself but the receiving vessel of blood.
Now why aren’t all aren’t Jews rioting throughout the world about this and similar movies that are regular fare on Middle Eastern television? Why didn’t Christians riot after seeing “The Life of Brian”? Why didn’t the US government condemn “The Diaspora”?
The difference here is that many Muslims are quick to take offense, and to perpetrate filthy crimes, when they perceive an offense to Islam. I, too, was offended by “The Diaspora” (it’s not funny like “The Life of Brian”, and is based on the discredited “Protocols”), but I have no urge to riot and kill, nor to issue fatwas against the filmmakers. The reasonable response to movies like “Innocence of Muslims” and “The Diaspora” is to air them and criticize them. As you see from the clips above, both movies actually discredit themselves.
Contra Joe Hoffmann, the proper response is not to roll over and coddle offended Muslims. If we did that, Islam would be the only religion in the world that is immune from criticism. The proper response is to continue to throw light on all the excesses of faith, and to question their tenets. (We should also take apart the movie, which is awful and bigoted). And we should never give in to murderous thugs.
You’ll possibly know of ligers from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004), in which a lad was obsessed with drawing them. Ligers are hybrid offspring from the cross of a male lion and a female tiger (the offspring of the reciprocal cross is called a “tiglon“). But you probably haven’t heard of—or seen—a liliger, which is the offspring of a hybrid female liger and a male lion. In genetic parlance, it’s the offspring of a hybrid backcross.
They breed the female hybrids because male ligers are sterile, conforming to Haldane’s Rule, named after geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who first noticed this regularity. (H’s Rule is the generalization that if you hybridize two species and only one of the two sexes of offspring is sterile or inviable, that sex will almost invariably be the one having unlike sex chromosomes, or “heterogametic”. In mammals and my fruit flies, the hybrid males are XY [females xx] and thus are the susceptible sex, but in birds and butterflies it is the females who have unlike sex chromosomes and thus liable to be sterile or inviable as hybrids. I spent a lot of my career working on the genetic and evolutionary basis of Haldane’s Rule.)
According to the BBC News Europe, where you can find a short video(I can’t embed it), the liliger, named Kiara, has been adopted by the zoo’s resident cat because the mother can’t provide enough milk. That itself may be a deleterious symptom of hybridization. Although the film clip mentions criticisms of breeding such hybrids, saying they are of no conservational value and take up zoo space, I think they are of genetic and evolutionary value, for they tell us how well the genes of tigers and lions can cooperate in producing an offspring, and what maladaptive symptoms might arise from that hybridization. The data on hybrids between mammals, particularly ones as distantly related as lions and tigers, are still scant.
Here’s a screenshot from the video:
BTW, the common ancestor of lions and tigers lived about 3.7 million years ago. You can get this kind of information from the wonderful site TimeTree, where you can plug in any two species (including humans) and find out when their common ancestor lived, as well as the data used to determine that time. Your common ancestor with cats, for example, lived about 94.4 million years ago.
From Deviant Art(h/t: Matthew Cobb again), we have this lovely picture of dromaeosaurs, drawn to scale with a dapper human (Fred Astaire?) to the right.
Dromaeosaurs are small bipedal theropod dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous. At least two species may have flown or glided (these include the famous “four-winged” Microraptor gui, #1 and sitting on Fred’s hand), and many were covered with feathers. They aren’t considered the ancestors of birds, or even in the same group of theropods that gave rise to birds, but are currently regarded as a sister group—closely related to the group that was ancestral to modern birds.
Now the colors are completely speculative, and the feather arrangements best regarded as “informed speculation,” but they probably looked pretty much like this (click to enlarge). One doesn’t usually think of these “raptors” as cute, but they seem so with colors and fuzz!
Microraptor gui, fossil. Note the feathers on all four appendages (I’ve added arrows to show them on front- and hindlimbs):
Now this is conceptual art that I like. On Sept. 12, 5 planes printed out the first 1,000 digits of pi using skywriting and digital presentation. The printing stretched over a 100-mile path (see below) encircling San Francisco Bay. According to Open Culture,
“. . . the Pi project was the brainchild of ISHKY, an eclectic collaboration of artists, programmers and scientists looking to explore ”the boundaries of scale, public space, impermanence, and the relationship between Earth and the physical universe.”
To hear more about it, see the top video at the Open Culturesite, which I can’t embed. Here are some photos:
Over Golden Gate some bridge (may be Photoshopped):
And the route:
Now if this appeared two hundred years ago, and I was living then, I would take it as provisional evidence for a deity.
Here’s a short video of the printing. Skywriting sure has improved since I was a kid! But I hope some reader can explain how this is done.
First, though, a short astronomy fact: Saturn in fact has 62 moons, and 53 of them have been officially named. (As Johnny Carson would have said, “I did not know that.”) Here’s a figure from NASA’s Cassini Solstice Mission to Saturn:
Have a look at Enceladus, top center, and then at the picture below. This is fantastic:
Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, seen shooting geysers water into space from its south polar region in this mosaic composite photograph. Photo by Michael Benson.
Krulwich explains what’s going on:
What we have here is a moon — a small one (slightly wider than the state of Arizona) — circling Saturn.
If you look closely, you will see a small splay of light at its top, looking like a circular fountain.
That’s because it is a fountain — of sorts. A bunch of volcano-like jets are sending fantastically high geysers of water vapor up into the sky, so high that you can see them in this remarkable print by Michael Benson, back lit by light bouncing off of Saturn.
It turns out this moon, called Enceladus, is a snowball containing what may be a sea of liquid water, warmed by the squishes and stretches of Saturn and other moons that pass nearby (plus it may have a hot, rocky core.) All that gravity pushing and pulling on this little ball squeezes the liquid inside so it shoots up through some fissures at the top.
Nobody knew these fountains were there until the Cassini spacecraft flew near enough to Enceladus to find them. But now comes the amazing part.
Some of that water vapor turns into ice and the crystals fall like snow back onto the moon at a rate of 0.02 inches a year; but some ice is thrown so high, it joins a ring around Saturn, one of the outer rings, labeled “E.”
Take a look at this image of the same moon, Enceladus — it’s the dark spot inside the bright flare — getting real close to the E ring. According to Sascha Kempf of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, this moon is “feeding” water crystals into Saturn’s ring.
Enceladus making Saturn’s E ring. Photo by Michael Benson from a digital transmission sent by the Cassini probe. It appears in Benson’s about-to-be published book Planetfall: New Solar System Visions.
Krulwich continues:
Who knew that a moon could spray ice onto a planetary ring? Before these photos were taken, scientists thought teeny meteorites, called micrometeoroids, would slam into Saturn’s moons kicking up dust (adding to dust from a long exploded moon) and that’s how the rings were formed.
Nobody imagined that the rings would be fed by geysers.
But that seems to be what’s happening to the E ring. According to Kempf, the ring will carry those ice nuggets around Saturn for an orbit or two, until they meet the moon again and are recaptured. But some crystals just keep circling and circling for 50, maybe 400 years.
The E ring is astonishingly thin. Its debris is thousands of miles across, but often only 3 meters (about 9.3 feet) high. A giraffe traveling on this ring would poke out like a giant.
Yes, who knew? Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn’t come close.
And, as lagniappe, reader Sigmund sent me a photo this morning taken by the Mars rover; it appeared on the Curiosity’s Twitpic feed. This is a partial solar eclipse occurring when the Martian moon Phobos passed in front of the Sun. Curiosity took it looking up from the surface of Mars.
Curiosity tweets, anthropomorphically, “Phobos takes a bite out of the sun: My week included taking pics of a Martian lunar transit. How ’bout you?”
Reader Veronica Abbass wrote a short post on Canadian Atheist called “A parade and an apology,” and posted this picture and caption:
Yesterday [Sept. 15], Peterborough, Ontario held its 10th Pride parade. Members of CFI Canada participated in the parade and were surprised to see three men standing on the curb carrying big yellow signs that said,
“I’m sorry for the way we Christians have treated you.”
It’s a good week that starts with both atheists and Christians supporting gays.
