2011 Jefferson Muzzle Awards for abrogating free speech

January 6, 2012 • 12:14 pm

Each year the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression serves up its “Muzzle Awards” for attempts to limit free speech.  This year’s selection is a doozy; there are eight but I’ll just highlight a few.

The Jefferson’s center commented thus:

Although there have been conflicting reports about who initially suggested removing the video, it is clear that the decision was ultimately approved by Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough. The incredibly short period between Donohue’s criticism and Secretary Clough’s capitulation is puzzling because it was surely anticipated that some might object to ‘Hide/Seek’ because of its subject matter of the gay and lesbian experience in modern society. In a commentary on the incident, staff writer Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote, “Clough’s decision, made hastily and, it seems, over the objections of his curators…showed an astonishing lack of perception about the humanities as well as the dynamics of museum culture.”

  • As the Center notes, “On December 30th, twenty-one-year-old Aaron Tobey put into effect a plan he devised to protest the invasion of privacy he felt the new security measures represented. In preparation for a trip from Richmond, Virginia, to Cincinnati, Ohio, Tobey used a marker to write the text of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution (which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government) on his bare chest, with the intention of displaying both his chest and the amendment to the folks manning the security checkpoint at Richmond International Airport. When he reached the conveyor belt, Tobey removed not only his shoes, but also his shirt and sweatpants. As he stood attired only in the Fourth Amendment and a pair of running shorts, he was detained by the TSA and then arrested, handcuffed, questioned, and charged with disorderly conduct.”
Here’s the miscreant, cuffed and detained:

Tobey was charged with a Class 1 misdemeanor, but the charges were later dropped by the Henrico County Attorney since Tobey’s actions did not constitute a crime.

I really abhor the way the TSA runs its show. Yes, we may need better screening, but my personal experience is that these people behave like bullies, yelling and ordering people about. They are too enamored of their own power.

These incidents may seem trivial (do read about the five others, which are equally distressing), but unless we protect our constitutional rights when they’re threatened even this minimally, we’re enabling even greater erosion of our freedom of expression.

Fantastic origami animals

January 6, 2012 • 8:45 am

Via Buzzfeed come these stunning origami insects made by artist Brian Chan, and they’re made from a single sheet of uncut paper.

I’ve never seen origami so detailed and realistic. Here are a few examples, and you can see more here (go have a look).

Flying grashopper:

Helmet beetle:

Fiddler crab:

Salamander:

And, for P.Z., despite his continual harassment via “Anti-Caturday” posts, here’s The Attack of the Kraken:

Finally, a mayfly:

And lest you think this is a hoax, here’s the single-sheet outline for the mayfly.  I’m told you can design things like this now on the computer:

Andrew Brown goes badly wrong on assisted suicide

January 6, 2012 • 6:00 am

I’ve been saying for a while that Andrew Brown’s public and painful slide into incoherence suggests that it’s time for the Guardian to let him go.  His latest example, a post called “Assisted suicide is never an autonomous choice,” shows the peculiar combination of stupidity and obstinacy that is Brown’s forte.

His argument, as far as I can make it out, seems to be that the decision to end one’s life in the face of intolerable pain or illness should be an autonomous one, but it can’t be because it’s made in the context of friends, family, and a harsh, depersonalizing society.  See what you make of this argument from Brown:

It’s already abundantly clear that Britain has hundreds of thousands of old people whose lives are worth very little to anyone else, and who are neglected at best, abused at worst. Let’s suppose that only one in a thousand of them thinks their lives are hardly worth living – and that’s a very low estimate. That still means hundreds of people who would take the chance of assisted suicide if it were offered without pain or condemnation; and if we treat their decisions as wholly autonomous there is no reason to argue with them.

But we know that in fact their actions and decisions would not be really autonomous. They are reactions to a world that others have made, and that we all have a part in.They are reactions to a world that others have made, and that we all have a part in. The fraudulence of this kind of autonomy talk is obvious when it’s applied to poverty. Rich and poor alike are free to choose to sleep under the bridges. We can all now see the damage that was done to society in the last 30 years by talking about choices that the powerless just don’t have as if they were real. When Tony Blair’s old flatmate Charlie Falconer extends this style of argument to judgments about life and death, the only sane response is to call it nonsense. [Falconer headed a British commission that recommended, when strict conditions were met, the option of assisted suicide for the terminally ill.]

What is Brown trying to say?  I have no idea, except that he doesn’t favor assisted suicide because other people advise one about it, or influence one’s decisions.  Yet I know from reading about the issue that those decisions, while often made in consultation with doctors, psychiatrists, and loved ones, seem completely autonomous.  Very few people will urge their friends, patients, or loved ones to take their own lives.

At any rate, someone with personal experience in this area, Eric MacDonald, takes Brown apart by recounting the heartbreaking story of the assisted suicide of his wife, Elizabeth, who took her life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland after years of horrible suffering from multiple sclerosis. In “Andrew Brown is an idiot. It’s time for him to go,” (this is very strong stuff from Eric!), MacDonald analyzes the meaning of “autonomy” in such a decision:

If assisted suicide is never an autonomous choice, is any choice ever truly autonomous in the sense desiderated? I think the answer to that is no, and because he cannot see this is the reason why it seems to me that Andrew Brown is now teetering inelegantly towards idiocy.

The subtitle of his article states: “There are many who consider their lives no longer worth living. Yet it’s fraudulent to ignore the part we all play in those feelings.” And this is just silly. We don’t have to ignore the part that we play in people’s feeling that the quality of their life is so low that they consider their lives no longer worth living, in order to hold that the decision to ask for assisted suicide can still be a perfectly autonomous decision. If a person cannot make this decision autonomously, then the meaning of ‘autonomy’ itself is in question.

And then he tells Elizabeth’s story. It’s graphic, heartbreaking, and leaves no doubt that her decision was absolutely autonomous.

For anyone with a long-term partner, the saddest thing in life is to lose that partner. When it’s through a long, debilitating, and terminal illness, it’s much worse.  If someone is rational and wants to end that kind of suffering via assisted suicide, a merciful society should allow it, with the proper precautions and strictures, of course. To deny someone this right—and yes, it is a right—because their decisions “cannot be autonomous” is the height of stupidity and cruelty.

If you read only one thing on assisted suicide this year, read Eric’s post.  Many of us will face this issue ourselves, and need to think about it.

Rushdie on Hitchens

January 6, 2012 • 4:26 am

UPDATE: See Occam’s comment below for the Rushdie-Le Carré-Hitchens exchange and some bonus photographs.

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This essay, in February’s Vanity Fair, is a belated remembrance by Rushdie of his beloved friend; his previous statement was, I believe, limited to a Twitter post.  And to those who cheaply memorialized Hitchens in condescending ways, such as “Yes, he was an atheist. Yes, he wrote eloquently. But that’s about it”, Rushdie reminds us that Hitchens, at no small risk to himself, defended Rushdie during the fatwa associated with The Satanic Verses.  That was of a piece with Hitchens’s lifelong campaign to defend freedom of expression against its enemies on both right and left.

The le Carré dispute [JAC: read about that one!] took place during the long years of argument and danger that followed the publication of my novel The Satanic Verses and the attack upon its author, publishers, translators and booksellers by the minions and successors of the theocratic tyrant of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. It was during these years that Christopher, a good but not intimate friend since the mid-1980s, drew closer to me, becoming the most indefatigable of allies and the most eloquent of defenders.

I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me.

The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-heel shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of British and American conservatives (Podhoretz and Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both  sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the Right, I was a cultural “traitor” and, in Christopher’s words, an “uppity wog,” and in the opinion of the Left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the Cardinal of New York, the British Chief Rabbi, and John Berger and Germaine Greer “understood the insult” and failed to be outraged; and Christopher went to war.

He and I found ourselves describing our ideas, without conferring, in almost identical terms. I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle, it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offence-culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt…understood.

He, too, saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence; that, across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes – blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, “insult” and “offence.” And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me. Where they burn books they will afterwards burn people. (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine’s line, in his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Qur’an.) And on September 11, 2001, he, and all of us, understood that what began with a book-burning in Bradford, Yorkshire, had now burst upon the whole world’s consciousness in the form of those tragically burning buildings. . .

. . . Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the Right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American Conservatism for long. When he bared his fangs and went for God’s jugular, just as he had previously fanged Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, the resulting book, God Is Not Great, carried Hitch away from the American Right and back towards his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency. He became an extraordinarily beloved figure in his last years, and it was his magnificent war upon God, and then his equally magnificent argument with his last enemy, Death, that brought him “home” at last from the misconceived war in Iraq.

Go after his views on Iraq, if you will, but do remember Hitchens’s tireless defense of something we all stand for—freedom of expression—even at risk of assassination by Muslim fanatics.  And he was never happier than when that free expression was turned against himself.

There’s more; go read the piece. There is a group of anecdotes at the end, and the last one is very sad.

h/t: John Danley

Fish mimics a mimic octopus

January 5, 2012 • 9:31 am

I have never heard of an animal mimic mimicking yet another animal mimic, but that’s what a new paper in Coral Reefs (reference and free link below) describes.

I’ve written before about the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), which has extraordinary abilities to alter both its color and its shape (see video at link above) to mimic not only its background, but also other species like lionfish, sea snakes, and soles, all of which are poisonous and all of which have an “aposematic” (warning) pattern of stripes.

Predators have hence learned to avoid this pattern, which then forms the basis for the evolution of “Batesian mimicry” by the octopus. (In that form of mimicry, a palatable animal evolves a pattern resembling that of a distasteful or dangerous species so as to gain protection from predators who have learned to associate the aposematic pattern with foulness and so avoid it.  The black-and-orange striped pattern of “hornet moths” is an example.). As a potential predator of hornets (many of you have swatted them, I bet), you would certainly shy away from this harmless moth, a Batesian mimic:

Hornet Moth Sesia apiformis (Clerck, 1759). This one's found in England.

Now, however, we have a new form of mimicry in which a palatable species imitates and associates with another palatable species. Here’s from the short, one-page paper:

The Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) is a remarkable imitator, apparently assuming shape and behaviour similar to models as diverse as poisonous Lionfish, Soles and Sea Snakes (Norman et al. 2001). All of those models share in common stripped brown and beige or black and white colour patterns. During a diving trip to the Lembeh Strait (North Sulawesi, Indonesia) in July of 2011, the third author filmed a Mimic Octopus for about 15 min and recorded an unexpected relationship: the Black-Marble Jawfish (Stalix cf. histrio) followed the Mimic Octopus for several minutes, remaining very close to the octopus’ arms. . . The colour of the Jawfish matched the banded pattern and colour tone of the octopus.

The jawfish is apparently a weak swimmer, and uses the octopus as a cover, apparently to move around more freely.  In some areas, though, the jawfish occurs without the octopus, so the authors regard this as a case of “opportunistic mimicry”.  It would be interesting to see (this isn’t mentioned in the article) whether the jawfish’s pattern has changed in areas where its range overlaps the octopus, which would indicate that some of that mimicry is based on evolutionary change in the fish rather than its just learning (or evolving) to behave in such a way that takes advantage of its pre-evolved pattern.

At any rate, here’s the video of the behavior. The jawfish (initially highlighted in the circle) is remarkably camouflaged.

And here’s the Black-Marble jawfish:

h/t: Matthew Cobb

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Rocha, L. A., R. Ross, and G. Kopp.  2012. Opportunistic mimicry by a jawfish. Coral Reefs. Online: DOI: 10.1007/s00338-011-0855-y (free at the link).

A new year of creationist nonsense

January 5, 2012 • 8:03 am

It looks as if the yahoos will still be with us in 2012, trying to worm their creationist nonsense into the public schools. But of course since it all stems from religion, and religion is still with us, what do you expect? Here, from Yahoo News, is a roundup of what we can expect from two states this year:

New Hampshire House Bill 1148 would “require evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.”

The second proposal in the New Hampshire House, HB 1457, does not mention evolution specifically but would “require science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire [sic] results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established, and that scientific and technological innovations based on new evidence can challenge accepted scientific theories or modes.”

The rationale?

Republican State Rep. Gary Hopper, who with his Republican district mate John Burt introduced HB 1457, told the Concord Monitor that the theory of evolution teaches students that life is nothing but an accident.

“I want to introduce children to the idea that they have a purpose for being here,” Hopper told the newspaper.

They can introduce that idea in their churches if they want, or brainwash kids in the home, but not in our schools.

You can find Bill 748 here.  The relevant sentence is this:

XXXVII. Theory of Evolution. Require evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.

Those of you in New Hampshire should write your legislators to protest this incursion of both religion and politics into science.

Here’s how one teacher envisions the results of the other bill:

“Bill 1457 turns skepticism into bewilderment,” said Zen Faulkes, a biology professor at the University of Texas, Pan America. “It would ask teachers to say to students, ‘Don’t commit to the hypothesis that uranium has more protons than carbon,’ or ‘Remember, kids, tomorrow we might find out that DNA is not the main molecule that carries genetic information.’ Evolution is as much a fact as either of those things, so it should be taught with the same confidence.”

Also from Yahoo News:

  • “Indiana’s proposal, state Senate Bill 89, would require that “the governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, includingcreation science, within the school corporation.” [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]”.

State Senate Bill 89 (click the link to view) mandates that “the governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.”

h/t: Seth

New children’s book on evolution

January 5, 2012 • 4:52 am

Laurence Pringle’s children’s book on evolution, Billions of Years, Amazing Changes: The Story of Evolution is just out. I can recommend it not because I wrote the foreword (which is very short), but because it’s well written, well illustrated by Steve Jenkins, and I vetted it for scientific accuracy as well as making suggestions to the author about useful things to include. I think the final version came out nicely.

If you’re curious, the Amazon link above gives you the chance to look inside for a fairly thorough preview.

I think the book is intended mainly for children in school grades 4-8 (ages 10-14 in the U.S.). If you have a younger child and want to teach them about evolution, I can recommend Pringle’s book, and then Dawkins’s when they’re a tad older.

Jim Crow died

January 5, 2012 • 4:51 am

No, I’m not announcing the end of segregation: James F. Crow was a giant in modern evolutionary and population genetics, and he died yesterday at the age of 95.

I’ll remember him for several things, the foremost being his fantastic textbook with Motoo Kimura: An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, the book that taught me the theory underlying evolutionary genetics. It took me a year’s hard slogging to work through the equations, but it was the most rewarding learning experience I ever had in graduate school. The book was long out of print, but I see you can once more obtain it from Amazon at the link above. If you’re a grad student in evolutionary genetics, get it and work through it.

Crow also wrote a widely read introduction to genetics, Genetics Notes, which has been used throughout the world.

He was instrumental in developing the neutral theory of population genetics, which worked out the consequences of genetic variants (“neutral mutations”) that had identical fitness, and whose fate in populations was thus determined by stochastic effects alone.  But he was also a genetics polymath, doing seminal work on inbreeding, medical genetics and the estimation of mutation rates, and the evolution of sex.

Finally, he was a fantastic mentor and teacher. His list of former postdocs and graduate students reads like a Who’s Who of population genetics.

And he was a terrifically nice guy, without an ounce of arrogance or cant in him.  I know of nobody who disliked him, and I can’t say that about any other evolutionary biologist (except, perhaps, Peter and Rosemary Grant).

I remember that after I wrote a paper in Evolution on Sewall Wright’s shifting balance theory with my colleagues Michael Turelli and Nick Barton—a paper that severely attacked an extremely popular and influential evolutionary theory concocted by one of Crow’s friends and Wisconsin colleagues—Jim wrote me a nice note saying that he thought we were right, and that Sewall had been misguided all along (Wright was dead by then, of course)! That was a nice boost for a young faculty member.

We’ve lost one of the great ones, and although I didn’t know him well, many of my colleagues did. We will all miss him, and the field will miss him even more.

To read more about Crow, skip the Wikipedia article, which doesn’t give a full flavor of his accomplishments or his personality, and read the short essay in Genetics by his student Dan Hartl, “James Crow and the art of teaching and mentoring.” It’s free at the link above.

Oh, and he was an accomplished violinist, too: