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.
We’ll close out the weekend with two funny cat videos.
Some cats behave not just like royalty, but very entitled royalty who view humans as mere utilities.
And yet they are bashful when faced down by critters a quarter of their size.
Perhaps they are firm believers in “Four legs good, two legs servant”
h/t: Dom
by Greg Mayer
Cat Fancy, after nearly 50 years, is about to cease publication. The December 2014 issue, out now, seems to be the last, so you may want to get a copy. Cat Fancy has been for decades the “serious” magazine about cats– cat breeding, cat welfare, and, well, cat fancy. It is going the way of many print magazines (i.e. extinct), but Abraham Riesman of New York magazine also attributes its demise to changing tastes in what people like about cats: once it was grace and breeding, now it’s viral videos of funny things cats do; once people wanted to know how to pick the right flea collar, now it’s how to pick a cat person for dating. The I Can Has Cheezburger and lol cats approach has done in the more more staid point of view of the older magazine.
The publishing company that owns Cat Fancy is going to publish an alternative cat magazine called Catster, which is supposed to appeal to the more modern cat lover. The picture below has appeared widely on the internet as a cover of the new magazine, but it is such an obvious, over-the-top parody of Buzzfeed-style clickbait, that I cannot credit the claim that this is an actual magazine cover, and I assume it’s a mocking knockoff by someone who preferred the old Cat Fancy.
A quick look on the internets shows that there are a number of British cat magazines: Catworld, Your Cat, and The Cat. I cannot really say anything about the content of these, but at least there will be some English-language cat magazines still in existence come the new year.
h/t The Dish
by Grania
If somebody were to ask me this question, my short-hand, non-researched reply would be: probably not.
I think that humanity currently seems set to become more and more secular as religiosity drops in the newer, younger generations; global birth rates start to show signs of coming under control and even slowing, which we know tends to have a positive effect on poverty; and as poverty decreases, so does religiosity. All these indications are pretty positive.
But humans are pattern-seeking mammals, and we have a tendency to believe the strangest things for very bad reasons, even if they are fairly smart and well educated; so I tend to think that religion will stick around for a number of reasons.
Over at BBC Future, Rachel Nuwer takes a look at the question referring to what various books and papers have to say on the subject, and they tend to bear this out in their research.
The main points they make are are:
Phil Zuckerman, Living the Secular Life: “Humans need comfort in the face of pain and suffering, and many need to think that there’s something more after this life, that they’re loved by an invisible being, there will always be people who believe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they remain the majority.”
Robert McCauley, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not: Robert argues that religious explanations for how the world works “make sense” intuitively to people, whereas the scientific ones are sometimes difficult to understand, or difficult to accept.
Joseph Bulbulia, The Ecology of Religious Beliefs: Joseph points out that insecurity and suffering in a population gives them a reason for wanting to believe that religion is worthwhile and even positive for them.
Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: the more religious people are, the higher the fertility rate, and even inside religion, the more fundamentalist sects tend to have higher fertility than liberal ones.
Jonathan Lanman, The Importance of Religious Displays for Belief Acquisition and Secularization: younger generations tend to follow the lead of the previous generations.
The general theme seems to be that religion is not going to go away, but I can only hope that future versions are de-clawed and denatured so that they no longer can be used to inflict suffering on fellow humans.
by Grania
Writers at io9 have collected some of the big breakthroughs in science this year.
Among their picks were Enceladus’ hidden ocean, the artificially expanded genetic alphabet, new burial mounds found at Stonehenge, a really big dinosaur named Dreadnoughtus Schrani, womb transplants (oh, thank goodness!) and the supercluster Laniakea, although you should also read Ethan Siegel’s article about this story over at Starts With A Bang.
This is the one that made me snicker the most, if only because of the caption:
Very impressive and full of potential, these are tiny robots that self-assemble 2-D shapes in slow-moving swarms. Ed Yong wrote a great piece on how it works here.
Not a bad year for science. What science stories caught your eye this year?
Today Hili is in her role as editor in chief, or perhaps she is falling into apotheosis. Either way, any Sunday that includes a four-footed friend to cuddle is a good Sunday.
A: Do you think you are making my work any easier?
Hili: Yes, in a sense, I make it possible for you to ponder things.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy ty sądzisz, że mi ułatwiasz pracę?
Hili: W pewnym sensie tak, pozwalam ci na spokojne zastanowienie się.
by Greg Mayer
The five living species of rhino, along with the several species of tapir and horse (which include the zebras and asses), are members of the great mammalian order of odd-toed ungulates, or Perissodactyla. Perissodactyls were formerly much more species rich; today, most ungulates (hoofed mammals) are even-toed, members of the Artiodactyla, which includes cattle, deer, antelope, sheep, goats, pigs, etc.– the dominant large land herbivores of our world. Of those perissodactyls still with us, the rhinos have suffered the most at the hand of man, and all five species have been or are critically endangered.
The most endangered of rhinos is the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) of central Africa, a subspecies of the white rhino, and its condition became extremely precarious last Sunday when the San Diego Zoo’s male northern white rhino, Angalifu, died at the age of 44 from old-age related ailments. There is now only one male northern white rhino left alive, along with 4 females (singleton females at San Diego and in the Czech Republic, all the rest, including the male, in Kenya).
Rhino horns are prized for their use in Eastern “medicine”, and their value has led to remorseless hunting that has driven many species nearly to extinction.
When I first began following such things about 1970, the other African rhino, the black rhinoceros, Diceros bicornis, was in relatively good shape, while the white rhino, both the northern subspecies in central Africa, and the southern subspecies (C. s. simum) in southern Africa, was critically endangered.
The news since then has been good, bad, and bad. The good news first. Thanks to strong conservation efforts, including captive/ranch breeding, the southern white rhino has bounced back, and there are over 20,000 of them now. The first bad news is that black rhinos have declined tremendously: although up a bit lately, they are down to about 5,000, a loss of over 90% since 1970. And the worst news of all is that the northern white rhino has declined to now just 5. In addition to the death of Angalifu, another male died earlier this fall. It seems to me that the only way to preserve any living representation of the northern subspecies at all now would be through crossing with the southern subspecies. Although captive/ranch breeding has not worked well for northern whites, it has for southern whites. I would assume that blood and tissue sample have been taken to assure that the genomic information at least could be saved, even if the living species cannot be. The loss would be compounded by the fact that some consider the northern white to be a separate species, so that its extinction would not merely be the loss of a local population, but of a more genetically distinct form.
Further info on rhinos can be found at the International Rhino Foundation and Save the Rhino, two conservation organizations, and at the Rhino Resource Center, a wonderful site which contains a wealth of information, including a huge database of the primary literature on rhinoceroses (many with full text) and many rhino images. The site was created by Kees Rookmaaker, an historian of biology, who is also one of the chief contributors to Darwin and Wallace Online, two of our favorite websites, edited by our old friend John van Wyhe.
In the following video, made by the San Diego Zoo earlier this fall, one of their curators discusses the causes of the rhinos endangerment. Ironically, he is expressing hope that the San Diego pair might breed, in light of the death of one of the two males in Kenya.
* News reports have been inconsistent in their identification of which of the San Diego Zoo’s two northern white rhinos, Anaglaifu the male and Nola the female, are depicted in photos and videos. Identification of the individual(s) in pictures has been hampered by the fact that rhinos can be easily sexed only when seen from behind, and that the Zoo has trimmed their horns on various occasions. I believe the animal in the photo at top is Angalifu, while the animal with the concave-downward horn featured in most of the video is Nola. The San Diego Zoo surely knows, but they have not published side by side photos.
by Grania
Here’s a drive-by editorial submission to the Atheist Ten Commandments list by “It is”.
Seeing as the original No. 4 was about a person’s right of control over their own body, I’m not sure how the unborn is supposed to exercise this control, particularly during the time before it actually has a brain capable of holding a notion of control or autonomy. As we all know where that statement is going, I guess we can also adduce that the amendment would be: all people have a right to control over their own body, except pregnant women; because pregnant women are, as we all know, not really people, they are vessels of the state.
End Note to “Is it”:
Hypothesizing is not the same thing as transcending.
You can’t just state that humanity’s ability to form hypotheses was not made by humanity until you can show teensy letters etched into our cells on a molecular level that say: Made in Heaven, by God (™) or something similar.
Atheists generally don’t actually think lists calling themselves The Atheist Ten Commandments are actually the laws by which they must live their lives. We regard them as points for discussion.