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.
1. The New York Times reports that both suspects have been located and surrounded in a town near Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris:
French security forces have surrounded a town northeast of Paris where the two suspects in Wednesday’s terrorist attack at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo appear to be barricaded at a printing business in an office building with at least one hostage, the authorities said.
Earlier, the police said the suspects had stolen a car and exchanged automatic-weapons fire with the police.
2. And this just came in from my CNN email news feed:
The two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack spoke to police by phone and said they wanted to die as martyrs, French lawmaker Yves Albarello told a TV station.
Albarello is the local member of parliament for the district where a police operation is taking place.
I suspect that “dying as a martyr” involves not suicide, but a glorious death in a gun battle with police. Let’s hope they capture the suspects alive and that no police are killed during that operation. France has no death penalty, so I’d prefer to see these killers spend the rest of their young lives in jail than expire thinking they’re going to get those virgins in Paradise.
Well, it may be cold where you are, but I doubt it’s as cold as Chicago. The temperature yesterday when I awoke, which will be the same as today, was -6° F (-21°C), and with the wind it will feel like -20°F today (-29°C). I broke out my balaclava to prevent my face from freezing on the ten-minute walk to work, something I do about once a year. But tomorrow we’ll have a balmy 16°F (-9°C), so it will be positively tropical. I heard yesterday that parts of southern Canada were colder than Antarctica!
It must be a sign of my dotage that I write about the weather (do I dare to eat a peach?), but I’m really not that bothered by the cold except, like yesterday, when it’s so extreme that it hurts your face a lot to be outside. I’m told, however, that it’s mild enough in Dobrzyn for Hili to go outside for an hour or more. And there the Furry Princess of Poland is philosophizing, but in a solipsistic way:
Hili: Without cats there would be no puppeteers.
A: Why do you think not?
Hili: Someone must have watched a cat and seen how fine it is to pull strings.
In Polish:
Hili: Bez kotów nie było by kukiełkarzy.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Musieli nas podglądać i zobaczyć jak wspaniale jest pociągać za sznurki.
You can judge the honesty and commitment to free speech of a journalist or newspaper by whether or not they’ll publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a relevant article. If they do, they’re showing what they must show to help readers understand what so offended the Muslim killers. If they don’t, they’re cowardly, afraid that they’ll suffer the same fate as the Charlie Hebdo staff. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali said, now is the time for every paper and outlet to publish those cartoons.
But, joining the cowardly BBC and Torygraph, Jennifer McGuire, editor-in-chief and general manager of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News online, explains why they didn’t publish any of the cartoons. It’s not a convincing defense. Here’s the relevant part of her defense, called “To publish or not to publish?”
News editors around the world grappled with the same dilemma yesterday: to show or not to show the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons linked to the mass murder in Paris.
At CBC News, we opted on the side of discretion [JAC: AKA “fear”]: to show some of these incendiary cartoons, but hold back from showing the ones most likely to offend Muslims because they depicted the Prophet Muhammad.
We had a great deal of company in making that decision, as organizations such as CNN and the BBC adopted a similar approach.
Others, such as The National Post, made a different choice, and made a point of publishing the cartoons.
If you spent any time on social media yesterday, you’d think that both choices represented some sort of declaration of war: if you published, you were obviously against Islam; if you didn’t, you were obviously against freedom of speech – or at the very least, a censoring coward.
Sorry to let the rabble-rousers on both sides down, but the truth is that neither is the case.
You can be a fierce devotee of freedom of expression who feels outrage against extremists and solidarity with French journalists, yet still decide that you can cover the story clearly and thoroughly without publishing material that could offend Muslims or even incite hatred toward them.
You can also be committed to respect for all religions and believe in social justice, yet still decide that this attack on democratic values and freedoms was so outrageous that taking a stand by publishing the cartoons is the right thing to do.
Sorry, Ms. McGuire, but you’re a news outlet, and the cartoons are news. Readers want—deserve—to see exactly what aroused the ire of Muslims enough to make them commit murder. It is your obligation to show those cartoons. And they are satirical, not pornographic—exactly the kind of stuff that political cartoonists produce. But of course those satirists are making fun of politics, not religion, and politicians don’t kill them in retribution. And really, “respect for all religions”? Even the ones that incite hatred and murder? Do you really respect extremist Islam?
Your additional “explanation” is not convincing:
Recognizing that both choices are okay does not make one a nihilist; it makes one a realist.
No, it makes one a craven coward. It shows you to be someone afraid of Muslim ire. By capitulating to terrorists’ wrath in a way they wouldn’t do for any other faith, the CBC has helped those terrorists attain their goal. McGuire has, by refusing to publish the cartoons, given the Muslim extremists exactly what they want.
McGuire isn’t afraid of offending Muslims; she’s afraid that the terrorists will go after the CBC.
Here are some of my favorite photos among the winners of Underwater Photography Guide’s 2014 Ocean Art Contest (for all the winners, go here; and if you want the details, click on “story of the shot” beneath each photo).
First prize for “Marine Life Behavior” went to Borut Furlan. As The Big Blue notes, it shows a rarely seen event:
One of the more remarkable events in nature is the spawning and incubation process of the Mediterranean cardinal fish [Apogon imberbis] whereby the female transfers her eggs to the mouth of the male in the blink of an eye. [JAC: The eggs have obviously been fertilized beforehand, probably by an intromittent organ of the male. The link above says that there are about 20,000 eggs, and that the male clearly can’t eat until they hatch.]
The male then broods up to 90 eggs in its mouth for 30 days, during which time it doesn’t eat.
Photographing the egg transfer is nearly impossible, since it can occur in less than two seconds. So it is understandable that underwater photographer Borut Furlan had no idea what he had shot in a semi-dark cave of the Adriatic Sea off Croatia—until he reviewed the photo on the camera’s screen.
This one, “Underwater—Kirra Point”, by Ray Collins, which won the Best of Show, is pretty amazing. His story:
I love to make images underwater. The sand on the Gold Coast reflects light really well so it is one of my favourite local places to shoot. On this morning I was trying to show the clarity and surroundings while composing for the wave to go past me.
“Follow me,” by Montse Grillo, was shot off Tenerife, and took fourth place in the wide-angle category:
“Tiny refuge”, by Ron Watkins, was taken off Kona, Hawaii, and shows some fascinating biology. It won first place in the Macro category. Note: a pyrosome is a colonial tunicate, so this fish is inside an invertebrate for protection.
While in Kona, I went out on a Black Water Dive with Kona Honu Divers where we were attached to a 40′ vertical line in over a thousand feet of water at 10PM. While suspended in the black water you observe life forms that you have never seen before or even imagined that surface in the shallows. Every dive is an adventure and full of life. This juvenile carangids seeks the refuge of a tiny pyrosome as a temporary commensalism for protection against predators in the dark. After viewing the image on the computer, I also noticed that the fish had a few room mates in the pyrosome.
“Eyes”, by Uwe Schmolke, won honorable mention in the Portrait category, and shows one of this website’s favorite invertebrates, a mantis shrimp:
Finally, here’s “Eyes bigger than the stomach,” which won Jack Berthomier a first place in the Compact Marine Life Behavior (?) category. It was shot off New Caledonia, and here’s the story:
I was able to see this scene three times in three years time. The first time, it was a big Hydrophis (about 130 cm) – took a few shots and one of which was selected 2nd at Ocean Art in 2013. The second time I saw one Hydrophis, it was a smaller one but unfortunately all botched shots because it bit my swimfin twice… The third time I was able to shoot one (the selected photo) measured approximately 60 cm. When I first saw it, it was at the surface and was just beginning to swallow its prey. Very few divers were lucky enough to watch this kind of scene, and apparently no other shot of this kind has been taken. This sea snake is very poisonous and can be murderous and also very agressive. (sic)
The site has many other outstanding underwater photos, and the quality of these photos has increased year by year, perhaps due to an improvement in equipment. Go have a look at the other good snaps I didn’t have room to show.
That’s right, the man who has 2.8 million followers on Twi**er, for no obvious reason save his wealth, has put his foot it in again. His solution to the terrorist attacks in Paris: give the French more guns!
If Trump had his way, the citizens of Europe would be just as armed as those of Alabama. All the employees of Charlie Hebdo would have had guns, and thus could clearly have taken down the two murderers armed only with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.
Here are of The Donald’s tw**ts from yesterday:
This is a guy who wants to be President of the U.S. God save America. Oh wait. . . . that’s not possible.
Bill Donohue is the Muslim of Catholicism. What I mean by that is that he thrives on offense, and though he doesn’t kill anybody when he’s offended, he’s made a career out of raging at those who insult the Pope, the Church, preachers and nuns, or anything associated with the Vatican Mafia. So far Catholics have been loath to criticize him, but his latest piece at the Catholic League site, “Muslims are right to be angry“, may change that. For in it, Donohue pins a fair amount of blame on the murders on the Charlie Hebo journalist and cartoonists themselves. The only way I can account for this lapse in judgement is from Donohue’s own personal history. For he’s spent so much time defending his own religion against perceived smears that he’s now taken it on himself to defend Islam, too, and so sees the satirical cartoonists as just as offensive as those who criticize Mother Teresa.
In his first paragraph, Donohue gives the game away. He pays lip service to morality by decrying the murders (he more or less has to; who would approve of them?), but then shows where he’s going:
Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.
With that out of the way, Donohue goes off the rails, arguing that Charlie Hebdo brought the murders on themselves by “intentionally insulting” Muslims in a vulgar way. The bolding below is mine (indeed; the whole thing should be in bold):
While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them.
Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. In 2012, when asked why he insults Muslims, he said, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me.” Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive. Muhammad isn’t sacred to me, either, but it would never occur to me to deliberately insult Muslims by trashing him.
Anti-Catholic artists in this country have provoked me to hold many demonstrations, but never have I counseled violence. This, however, does not empty the issue. Madison was right when he said, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”
A touchstone for a right-thinking person in this tragic situation involves whether or not they blame the magazine itself for the murder of 12 people. If they do, they should be ridiculed or dismissed, for they’re claiming that if you make fun of people’s faith, you’re complicit in your own murder.
That’s like blaming rape victims for dressing in a way that supposedly provoked their attack. Donohue, in fact, is not acting like the person who tells women that their chances of being raped may be higher if they wear scanty clothing or walk in unsafe places; he’s acting like the person who says they deserve what they get. The people at Charlie Hebdo understood the dangers, and went ahead and published anyway. As cartoonist Stephan Charbonnier said, “I would prefer to die on my feet than live on my knees.”
By claiming that Charlie Hebdo committed an “abuse of liberty,” Donohue aligns himself with every fascist and tyrant who would stifle the criticism of authority. And he’s made himself irrelevant. The proper response to this tragedy by any enlightened person is to defend the right of free speech and condemn those who kill to prevent it.
But we have a palliative article, and, surprisingly, it’s in the New Yorker, which has been notoriously soft on religion. I would have expected the magazine to decry the killings but avoid blaming religion. But they pin the blame directly where it belongs: on the excesses of faith. In George Packer’s website pice “The blame for the Charlie Hebdo murders“, you’ll find stuff that you rarely see in a major journalistic venue. Read and cheer:
The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.
They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.
Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of a great religion.
He’s talking about you, Ben Affleck, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Pape, Krista Tippett, Karen Armstrong, and the rest of the unctuous Islamic apologists.
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique. Charlie Hebdo had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism. For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.
. . . The cartoonists died for an idea. The killers are soldiers in a war against freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to offend—against everything decent in a democratic society. So we must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day.
Why I see this incident as a watershed moment in the war on terrorism is that it’s almost impossible to pin the murders on anything but blind adherence to religious faith. The murders come directly from the belief that making fun of or even depicting the prophet is a capital offense. Why else would the terrorists target Charlie Hebdo instead of, say, French government offices? If the murders are due to colonialism or simply angry males looking for an outlet, it’s hard to see why the target is so obviously connected with Islam. What may have changed with this tragedy is people’s willingness, as we see in Packer’s piece, to recognize that religion causes people to do bad things. That has been obvious to most of us for some time, but has been adamantly resisted by religionists like Karen Armstrong, who are incapable of finding any harmful consequences of faith, and liberals who, in their desire to coddle the underdog, will blame Muslim violence on the colonialism and oppression by the West.
Yes, some of that violence is undoubtedly due to other factors besides religion. But the time is past to say that all of it is. Right now the West is not occupying the Middle East, and much of the violence we see is not only inflicted by Muslims on other Muslims, but, as in this case, is explicitly justified in the name of Islam. It’s only when we recognize this that we can fully apprehend the problem.
I don’t know how to address the problem of terrorism save by increased surveillance and intelligence. But I do know that the way not to solve it is by demonizing free speech. For if we do that, we become like the enemy—and then we are truly lost.
The ball is now in the court of the media. If the press responds to this by not reprinting the cartoons, by not defending the principle that Charlie Hebdo was defending, then we have given in. Then they have won. Those three men yelled, “Allahu Akbar.” They yelled, “The Prophet is avenged. Charlie Hebdo is dead.” Our duty is to keep Charlie Hebdo alive. Our duty is to make sure that they realize that the Prophet is not avenged.
In 2006, when Jyllands-Posten in Denmark published the Muhammad cartoons, the mainstream media made the decision not to reprint those cartoons, to respect the sensibilities of Muslims and to avoid Muslim rage. This time it would be the biggest mistake for the Western press to repeat that—absolutely the biggest mistake.
. . . But the most important point I want to make is about what the press does now. When you’re all sitting in your editorial rooms and you’re reflecting on this, when you’re asking yourselves, “Should we reprint these cartoons or not? Should we print cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad? Should we use satire to depict these things?” Please ignore those voices saying, “Please let’s not provoke.”
I would urge everyone in the media to take a stand now. An entire magazine has been wiped out. If you think they won’t one day come for you, too, just because you abstained from mocking the Prophet, then you are gravely mistaken.
Reader pyers from the UK sent a photo of a bird at his feeder that brings up a cool evolutionary story. Birders and biologists have known for more than 40 years that this species, the Eurasian blackcap, may be splitting into two species before our eyes, as birds going to their original overwintering ground have now split into two different groups overwintering in different places.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First I’ll show the photo and then let pyers tell a lot of the story, supplementing his comments with what I know about this case. It may involve a form of evolution that creationists say simply doesn’t happen: new species forming before our eyes—in real time!
Pyers’s comments are indented, mine are flush left.
This not brilliant photo (it is dark and gloomy outside today); it’s of a Eurasian Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) having a nom at my bird feeder.
Here’s a bit of evolution in action, which I hope will interest you.
Now normally this wouldn’t be considered for any of your wildlife photos – except for one thing: it shouldn’t be here [in the UK] – at least not in winter!
Blackcaps are normally summer visitors to the UK but is a new(ish) change to their behaviour.The normal migratory route for these birds is to Spain & tropical Africa, but over the last 50 odd years (say from the 1960’s) a small population from Germany, where they breed, has come to overwinter in the UK because of human-provided food (like my feeder) . What is fascinating is that the change in their behaviour is genetic and has evolved over a very few generations. My only slight complaint is that they are rather thuggish birds, even if they have a beautiful song, and are perfectly capable of bullying a robin (which are normally the birds which deserve an ASBO).
What pyers doesn’t add is that the birds from Spain and Africa both return to the summer breeding grounds a bit later than the birds from the UK, because the latter have less distance to cover on the return. Since birds form mating pairs soon after they get to the breeding grounds, the change in migration, perhaps based originally on small genetic differences, has led to two subpopulations that mate largely among themselves, so that gene flow is reduced between the two groups. Early-arriving birds mate with other early-arriving birds, and the same assortative mating goes for the late arrivals. That means that the interbreeding that normally prevents genetic differentiation is minimized, and the two differentially-migrating populations can diverge from each other by either natural selection or random genetic drift.
One might indeed suspect that, subject to different selection pressures—including adaptation to very different food and temperatures—the two groups of birds might indeed diverge by selection. And that seems to be what’s happening. There are already genetic differences in body form. The south-migrating birds have pointer wings (favoring flight for long distances) as oppose to the rounder wings of the UK-migrating birds. And the southern migrators also have shorter and stouter beaks, which may reflect a difference in diet (fruit, insects, and pollen for the southerners, suet, seeds, and other human-provided foods for the UK migrators).
These body-form differences are supplemented by other genetic differences that have accumulated: DNA analysis of birds on the breeding grounds can tell where they have overwintered with about 85% accuracy.
Over time (and this has happened in only a few decades), the blackcap species may eventually fragment into two groups that, while breeding in the same location, mate only with members of their own group and not with those from the other. Since this would have a genetic basis (the genetic propensity to migrate one way versus the other is probably increasing over time, since stragglers wouldn’t find good overwintering grounds), what we would have is speciation: the formation of two reproductively-isolated groups descended from an original common ancestor. Certainly what we see now is what evolutionists call speciation in statu nascendi—speciation in the “nascent state”.
Creationists say that we have no cases of this, but, as I show in WEIT, we surely do, especially in certain plants—something that Greg will write about shortly. And we have lots of cases of species that are likely in the process of forming, as in the blackcaps. But pyers has more to say:
I have 2 issues. Firstly: as I said, they are thuggish birds so what effect will they have on the native birds?, and, secondly, this is a human driven change (not deliberate, I know) so what are the long-term chances for the bird? (I am not suggesting that we in the UK stop putting feeders out—we DO love our garden birds—but over thousands of years).
You can find more here on the change to the Blackcap.
