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.
It was 23 hard hours of traveling for Professor Ceiling Cat yesterday, and all that after only three hours of sleep. He’s a tough moggie! But, when he awoke this morning, he saw a vision of Chicago, with the rising sun setting a few of the buildings aflame.
A: What are you looking at?Hili: I see the future, I see the garden under deep snow.
In Polish:
Ja: Na co patrzysz?
Hili: Widzę przyszłość, widzę w ogrodzie głęboki śnieg.
Here’s a fantastic safety video from Air New Zealand: a takeoff of Lord of the Rings which, of course, was filmed largely in that country.
And the information from YouTube:
As the official airline of Middle-earth, Air New Zealand has gone all out to celebrate the third and final film in The Hobbit Trilogy – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Starring Elijah Wood and Sir Peter Jackson; we’re thrilled to unveil The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made.
Special cameos by Sylvester McCoy, Dean O’Gorman and Weta Workshop co-founder Sir Richard Taylor. Directed by Taika Waititi. Enjoy!
You have to admit that it’s a pretty epic safety video, one that will make jaded passengers sit up and pay attention!
Also, doesn’t Elijah Wood bear a resemblance to a younger version of one of our favorite Horsemen?
This is not the first time that Air New Zealand produced unusual safety ads. One from 2009 features the pilot and cabin crew bedecked in nothing but body paint (all naughty bits are strategically hidden), while another from two years later features the bizarre Richard Simmons and a bunch of athletic passengers. But the Middle Earth one is the best.
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Now here’s a brave woman: a Pakistani who goes by the name of “Eiynah” and is described in Pakistan Today this way:
Eiynah is a Pakistani-Canadian blogger/illustrator who writes about sexuality in Pakistan. She dreams of a progressive motherland and is also a children’s book author. She blogs at http://www.nicemangos.blogspot.com, and tweets at @Nicemangos
And in yesterday’s issue of Pakistan Today, you’ll find her piece: “An open letter to Ben Affleck“. As a few quotes below will show, she goes after Affleck for trying, as she argues, to minimize the plight of Muslim women like her. Just a bit to give you the flavor:
Noble liberals like yourself always stand up for the misrepresented Muslims and stand against the Islamophobes, which is great but who stands in my corner and for the others who feel oppressed by the religion? Every time we raise our voices, one of us is killed or threatened. I am a blogger and illustrator, no threat to anyone, Ben, except for those afraid of words and drawings. I want the freedom to express myself without the very real fear that I might be killed for it. Is that too much to ask?
When I wrote a children’s book that carried a message of diversity and inclusivity for everyone, my life changed. My book, ‘My Chacha (uncle) is Gay’ has the innocent anti-homophobia message, ‘Love belongs to everyone’. This was not palatable to many of my Muslim brothers and sisters.
Since that project I have been declared an ‘enemy of God’ and deemed worthy of death. All because I want to help create a world where South Asian children too can have their stories told, so they too can know that love comes in all forms, and that that’s okay. My Muslim brothers and sisters were hit hard by this work because it addresses the issue of homophobia within our own community. It is not something they can pass off as ‘Western’ immorality. Just like they deny that any issues exist within the doctrine of Islam, many deny that homosexuality exists amongst good, ‘moral’ Muslims. Just like that, millions of people’s existence is denied. Please do not defend people who think this way, and let me tell you Ben, many ‘good’ Muslims do think this way.
What you did by screaming ‘racist!’ was shut down a conversation that many of us have been waiting to have. . . You became an instant hero, a defender of Islam.
Well, maybe Affleck became a hero to those who willfully overlook the excesses of Islam that are not confined to only a small percentage of Muslims, but to me he’s an ignoramus—and a dangerous one. A 2013 Pew Poll showed that 76% of Pakistani Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land (and that’s 86% of those Muslims) favor the death penalty for those who leave Islam. That’s at least 50% of all Pakistani Muslims. 89% of that 86% (a minimum of 77% of Pakistani Muslims) favor stoning to death as punishment for adultery. And 88% of that 86% (minimum of 76%) favor corporal punishment for crimes like theft. This is not a small minority or a “fringe,” at least in Pakistan. And Eiynah hits that point hard.
In your culture you have the luxury of calling such literalists “crazies”, like the Westboro Baptist Church, for example. In my culture, such values are upheld by more people than we realise. Many will try to deny it, but please hear me when I say that these are not fringe values. It is apparent in the lacking numbers of Muslims willing to speak out against the archaic Shariah law. The punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, etc, are tools of oppression. Why are they not addressed even by the peaceful folk who “aren’t fanatical, who just want to have some sandwiches and pray five times a day? Where are the Muslim protestors against blasphemy laws/apostasy? Where are the Muslims who take a stand against harsh interpretation of Shariah? These sandwich-eating peaceful folk do not defend those suffering in the name of Islam, Ben, and therein lies our problem.
This is just part of her letter, but I also wanted to put up the ending, because it’s snarky—but in a good way:
If I were allowed to meet a man that is not my father, brother or husband unchaperoned, I would have loved to discuss this over drinks (which I am also not allowed to have) with you. So, you see, things must change.
Sincerely,
Eiynah
The website is apparently produced from Lahore, so I’m at a real loss to understand how this letter got published (Eiynah must be a pseudonym) given the state of Islam there. But I’m also chuffed that it got published.
h/t: Marcel ~
Due to lack of time, I’ve seen only the first two hours of this three-hour (!) video of Sam Harris talking to Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks show, but it was pretty absorbing. Give it a try and see if you can last the whole three hours.
Cenk, who previously had both Reza Aslan and C. J. Werleman on the show, and was apparently sympathetic to them, gives Sam a remarkably hard time about his views, particularly (in the first hour) about the idea the Islam is inherently worse than other faiths. But Harris gives as good as he gets ,and the often rapid back-and-forth is instructive. If you have the time to watch it all, do report on the last hour in the comments.
Here you go: three hours of semi-antagonistic palaver:
Sam gives his take on the debate on his website:
I recently sat down with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks to discuss my most controversial views about Islam, the war on terror, and related topics. It was, of necessity, a defensive performance on my part—more like a deposition than an ordinary conversation. Although it was a friendly exchange, there were times when Cenk appeared to be trying very hard to miss my point. Rather than rebut my actual views (or accept them), he often focused on how a misunderstanding of what I was saying could lead to bad outcomes—as though this were an argument against my views themselves. However, he did provide a forum in which we could have an unusually full discussion about difficult issues. I hope viewers find it useful.
Having now watched the full exchange, I feel the need to expand on a couple of points. . .
Sam then goes into the recent decline of journalistic ethics, as judged by deliberate misreprentation of Harris’s views, but, at the end, extends a note of charity by apologizing for misrepresenting Glenn Greenwald’s views on “collateral damage.” I’ve love to see Reza Aslan or C. J. Werleman tender such an apology.
The problem I have with Uygur in this piece (besides his constant interruption of Harris) is threefold. First, he seems bound to defend Islam as being no worse than any other religion (this may come from his familial roots in Islam, though he’s an atheist).
Second, Ugyar just won’t accept that religion itself can be the main reason for malevolent acts. Though he admits that religion can play a role in acts like suicide bombing, he just can’t bring himself to admit that it could be a major role. In the case of things like the death penalty for apostasy or the acts of ISIS, you’d have to be pretty Robert Pape-ish to deny religion as the overarching cause. After all, the death penalty for apostasy is in the Qur’an, and how can you even have a death penalty for apostasy without a religious dictate?
Finally, as Sam notes above, Uygur seems to hold Harris himself responsible for misrepresentation of his views, as if somehow Harris could predict how his words would be truncated or twisted in the service of Islamophilia or simple Harris-hatred. That’s just not fair.
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Reader John Harshman sent some last-minute photos that will allow me to slip in a “Readers’ wildlife” feature while I’m on the move (at the moment in the Sofia airport). These are photos from his recent trip to Australia:
First, a four-part sequence of mating Pacific black ducks (Anas superciliosa). If you know mallards, the ritual is almost identical. The pictures were preceded by a lot of mutual head-pumping, in which the head is held horizontally and the neck is moved rapidly down and up. Then (photo 1) the female lowers her neck and half-submerges her body. The male climbs on top, grabs her neck feathers in his bill (photo 2), and things you can’t see in the picture happen underwater. Then the male dismounts (photo 3), whereupon (photo 4) he swims in a circle around her. In mallards, the female takes a bath during this circle, but the black duck didn’t; I don’t know if that’s typical. Also, the male only did a half circle, while mallards are sticklers for a full circle, and I don’t know if that’s typical either.
Next, a great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis) at his bower, and a shot of the decorations, which include all sorts of white things: snail shells, various plastic items, quartz pebbles. He also likes aluminum foil, though there’s none in the picture.
JAC: Note that this is an example of sexual selection producing not a trait of a bird itself, like bright color, elaborate plumage, or fancy courtship behavior in males, but a structure. And that structure (not a nest; it’s used purely to impress females) is what Dawkins calls part of the bird’s “extended phenotype.” (I suppose it does reflect “courtship behavior”.)
I remember once hearing that the more elaborate the bower, the less elaborate the male himself, as if there were no need for gaudy and costly plumage if the male spent so much effort on these elaborate female-attracting structures; but I don’t know if that negative correlation still holds.
And here are a pair of what must rank as one of the most colorful birds in the world.
Finally, just for thrills, a couple of rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) at a birdbath. I like the reflections.
Lagniappe: California condors (Gymnogyps californianus) iat Big Sur:
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by Matthew Cobb
Now you can see this Eurasian (or European) nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus), can’t you?
These are the birds we have in the UK, Europe and Asia – they are here in the summer, eating night-flying insects, and then migrate. Early this morning on the BBC (less early than it should have been, because Europe put its clocks back last night, as Jerry discovered in Bulgaria), there was a nightjartastic episode of an excellent series called The Living World.
This 22-minute programme describes the behaviour, calling (“churring”) and habits of the nightjar, which, it turns out, follows the migration routes of my equal favourite bird, the swift (Apus apus). I would urge you to listen to the programme, which will transport you into the beautiful atmosphere of dusk on a Somerset heath in early September. You’ll learn that nightjars aren’t just about amazing camouflage.
Click here and then press ‘play’. No matter where you are in the world, you can listen (you’ll find loads of fascinating episodes on the series website covering the last seven years).