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.
By Grania
Jerry asked me to let everyone know that he’s been asked to be on MSNBC’s The Last Word tonight with Lawrence O’Donnell. They’ll be discussing ISIL and its religion.
It airs at 10pm, and you can catch up with the show on its website if you miss it. [Note by GCM– that’s 10 PM Eastern; it’s 9 PM in Chicago, and so on.]
All I know about this is come from the notes accompanying the YouTube video, but given what you see, the description rings true:
Cockatoo Imitates Couple Arguing
Peaches was owned by a couple that eventually got a divorce and of course, I’m sure there was a few disagreements. Peaches now mimics a couple arguing, even aggressively moving her head as if pointing to the one she is arguing with.
I am so glad that biologist Piotr Naskrecki gave me permission to post up his copyrighted photos without asking permission, because he takes some great pictures, and always tells us about the relevant biology. I’ve featured his work several times before (see this post on the cat mantis, for instance), but he just posted a picture on Facebook that stopped me in my tracks. It’s the praying mantis Idolomorpha dentifrons, and is featured in a post from August, 2013 on his biology-and-photography website The Smaller Majority.
First, the photo (all captions are Piotr’s), taken in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park:
And a long photo, described thusly:
Earlier this year I ran across a gorgeous male specimen of Idolomorpha dentifrons on the Cheringoma Plateau of Gorongosa, but had troubles photographing it in a way that would properly convey its incredibly elongate morphology. In the end I took a series of vertical photos of its head and front legs that I stitched together in PS, and here is the result. Male empusids are unusual in having pectinate antennae, the kind usually seen in silk moths and other insects with well-developed pheromonal communication, where the female emits sex pheromones and males follow the faint scent trail. Not surprisingly, such behavior was recently demonstrated to be present in empusids (Gemeno et al. 2005. J. Ins. Behav. 18: 389-403).
I’ll add one more photo of another bizarre species in the small family Empusidae: the striking Devil’s mantis:
The leaf-like morphology can be seen in the Devil’s mantis (Idolomantis diabolica), arguably one of the most striking and beautiful praying mantids in the world. The body of immature individuals resembles a dry, withered leaf, except for the brighter colors on the underside of the raptorial front legs. Adults turn pale green and white, and the pattern on their front legs becomes brightly red, resembling vivid petals of a flower. There is a reason for this – Devil’s mantids are specialized hunters of pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, and presumably this bright coloration fools some insects into coming dangerously too close.
I haven’t said much about the latest measles outbreak or about the many ignoramuses who refuse to vaccinate their children on dubious grounds, for I take for granted that most of the readers here are smart and acquainted with the evidence for the safety and efficacy of vaccination. I will, however, just mention two bits of vaccinaton-related lunacy and one of sanity.
First, the sanity. In an almost unheard-of move to reverse U.S. religious exemptions for medical care, the Los Angeles Times reports that both U.S. Senators from California—Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (peace be upon these Democrats)—have urged their state to pass legislation eliminating all exemptions from inoculation save those based on medical grounds (i.e., weakened immune systems). Governor Jerry Brown has offered tentative support for this legislation. Now let’s have California also ditch its many other dangerous religious exemptions, like allowing teachers to avoid getting tested for tuberculosis if they have religious reasons. (Yes, that’s the rules.)
On to the lunacy: Queen’s University, a very good school in Ontario, Canada, has been found to harbor a course that warns against vaccination. Have a look at the professor’s slides attacking inoculations. The school and the Canadian government are investigating.
Also at PuffHo you can watch a short but cringe-inducing video of Kristin Cavallari (once star of the odious “reality” series “The Hills,” now a fashion designer) explaining to the public why she doesn’t get her kids vaccinated. She trots out all the usual tropes, including an increase in autism and the use of mercury compounds in vaccines (no longer true), and winds up asserting that it’s up to the parents to decide about vaccination—”to each their own.” (She also says she’s “read too many books” to not oppose vaccination. She’s clearly been reading some wonky books.)
*******
Well, when it comes to public health, it’s clearly not “to each their own”, because what each one does can affect the health of many others. And that’s today’s lesson, one that involves, sadly, a United States Senator. This particular Senator thinks that it should be optional whether restaurants require their employees to wash their hands after a bathroom break, for that’s an unwarranted government intrusion into the public sphere. It should be up to the restaurant.
Can you guess what party the senator belongs to?
Yes, you’re right—it’s Republican Thom Tillis, the junior U. S. Senator from North Carolina. And, according to The Raw Story, this is what he said on Monday in a speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center:
“I was having this discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,” Tillis recalled. “Let an industry or business opt out as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employment, literature, whatever else. There’s this level of regulations that maybe they’re on the books, but maybe you can make a market-based decision as to whether or not they should apply to you.”
Tillis said that at about that time, a Starbucks employee came out of one of the restrooms.
“Don’t you believe that this regulation that requires this gentlemen to wash his hands before he serves your food is important?” Tillis was asked by the person at his table.
“I think it’s one I can illustrate the point,” Tillis told the women. “I said, I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as the post a sign that says ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restrooms.’ The market will take care of that.”
“That’s probably one where every business that did that would go out of business,” he added. “But I think it’s good to illustrate the point that that’s the sort of mentality that we need to have to reduce the regulatory burden on this country.”
Yes, by all means let the market decide!
Bad, bad idea. Those rules are in place to protect the public—a public that may not be curious enough to read all the signs on the walls. There is no good case to be made for allowing people the option of risking their health when others don’t do what they should. Remember Typhoid Mary?
I’d love to ask Tillis if he also favors getting rid of the laws mandating vaccinations for schoolchildren, as that’s also government intrusion (after all, the kids can just wear warning tags saying, “I didn’t get my shots”). Is he against quarantining patients with contagious diseases like Ebola, which is clearly an unwarranted restriction of their liberty?
h/t: Stephen Q. Muth, Tom H.
We heard Stephen Fry’s response when asked what he’d say to God were he to meet Him, but Richard Dawkins actually got the chance. Here he is in a new video with Mr. Deity. There are a lot of “ingroup” references here, so listen carefully. It’s one of the better Mr. Deity videos I’ve seen in a while.
One plaint: I don’t think the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe would be only 2 inches long if it didn’t loop down around the aorta. It would, I think, be substantially longer than that.
There’s a mock ad at the end, which is okay, but you won’t miss much by stopping at 5:50.
by Greg Mayer
The University of Wisconsin—including the great “public ivy” research campus in Madison, the second doctoral campus in Milwaukee, and eleven comprehensive baccalaureate-masters campuses around the state—has long been inspired by the “Wisconsin Idea“, the notion that higher education exists to serve the public, improve the human condition, and seek the truth. This idea was long ago enshrined by the legislature in the stated mission of the University. But no more. In his latest budget proposal, Governor Scott Walker proposes removing “public service”, improving the “human condition”, and “the search for truth” from the mission of the University, and to make the primary purpose of the University to be meeting “the state’s workforce needs”.
Here’s the proposal from Wisconsin Senate bill 21 (p. 546):
SECTION 1111. 36.01 (2) of the statutes is amended to read:
36.01 (2) The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs, to discover and disseminate knowledge,
to extendknowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campusesand toserveand stimulate society by developingdevelop in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose.Inherent in this broad mission are methods ofinstruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educatepeople and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is thesearch for truth.
Here is fearless “sifting and winnowing” in the search for truth proclaimed by the University’s Board of Regents in 1894:
“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.”
Although it’s enshrined in plaques on each UW campus, this slogan is to be abandoned in favor of what Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago long ago derided:
The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens. …
The present primacy of public relations in the management of universities, the view that they must ingratiate themselves with the public, and in particular with the most wealthy and influential portions of it, the doctrine that a university may properly frame its policies in order to get money and that it may properly teach or study whatever it can get financed — these notions are ruinous to a university in any rational conception of it. [From here and here (also this).]
The proposal even repeals the legislative finding that the University is established in the “public interest”, and replaces it with a grudging acquiescence to a constitutional mandate (p. 545):
SECTION 1110. 36.01 (1) of the statutes is amended to read:
36.01 (1)
The legislature finds it in the public interest to provideIn recognition of the constitutional obligation to provide by law for the establishment of a state university at or near the seat of state government, and for connecting with the same, from time to time, such colleges in different parts of the state as the interests of education may require, there is hereby created a state system of higher education…
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I’ve received both emails and comments about my post from two days ago flogging Faith Versus Fact and telling you how to order it. Readers in places like New Zealand, the UK, and Australia wanted to know how they could order the hardcover, which comes out May 19.
First, a correction: I gave a number of ordering links, one of which, it turned out, was an error, though not on my part. Although Amazon UK does list the book on its site, it is not allowed to do so, as English-language rights were sold for publication and distribution only in the U.S. and Canada. That meant that you could order it only from sites in those countries. The Amazon UK link will shortly be taken down (temporarily), so don’t pre-order from them—yet. If you have, check with them.
But, in view of what seems to be an appreciable number of non-U.S. and non-Canadian anglophone readers who would like the book, yesterday I transferred all English-language rights to Viking/Penguin Random House. That means that they can distribute it far more widely, and the book will, I hope, soon be available for order or pre-order in a lot more places outside north America. Here’s what I heard from the sales division of my publisher:
International readers will be able to buy the print book from all the major international online retailers (so all the international Amazon sites, plus online retailers in the UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa, India and Asia).
They will also be able to order the book from local booksellers.
The ebook will be available on all Amazon sites, Apple iTunes, Kobo, Google, as well as from smaller digital retailers (those that are serviced by the digital aggregators).
So, especially if you want an e-book, it will be dead easy to get. The deal with be implemented very soon, so be patient. You can check your local online retailer and see if and when when the book is listed.
As before, I’m asking readers to pre-order the book, for all advance sales count towards first-week sales, which are the most important ones. (If you haven’t done so already, and live in Canada or the U.S., go here for to preorder.) I’m told that Amazon doesn’t charge you until the book is shipped, so you’ve nothing to lose. I
‘ll also ask ask my local bookstore to stock signed copies, so you might be able to order autographed copies from them (no extra charge, but cat drawings will not available on those). More about that later.
Thanks for your indulgence.