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.
I hate to say this, but Hili is still talking about herself as if she’s a god! As if Andrzej is not another being, but a convenient pillow. But somehow I don’t think Andrzej minds. (I’m dubious about this “spiritual” stuff, though!)
Hili: I am a blissful, spiritual being.A: I can hear that. You haven’t purred so loudly for a long time.
Hili: Jestem uduchowiona.
Ja: Słyszę, dawno tak głośno nie mruczałaś.
by Matthew Cobb
This was posted on YouTube way back in the days of steam-powered black and white TV (like in, ooh, 2009). So Bubbles will now be a big rabbit. It garnered about 15,000 hits, at a time when that was LOTS. [EDIT: I have now traced it back to 2008 on a dead AOL video page…] It just popped up in Tina’s FB feed, so here you are, the lovely tail of Snagglepuss the cat and Bubbles the baby rabbit.
As I biologist I can work out why the cat would pick up the baby rabbit (right size, maybe mewing noises and maybe not too weird a smell). But what about the rabbit kit (that’s the term)? Mother rabbits normally feed their offspring for about 2-4 minutes *a day*. So they have a very powerful nipple search pheromone which enables the kits to find and latch onto their mother, and which isn’t even shared by hares (I presume they have their own). I don’t know of any equivalent pheromone in cats, and certainly cat mothers are a lot more attentive about their babies (they don’t have burrows). So how did Bubbles cope with a) cat milk b) frequent provision of food and c) no rabbit nipple search pheromone?
PS The ‘tail’ thing was a joke.
h/t: Michael ~
A baby rhino goes for a car but then backs off:
http://giant.gfycat.com/SardonicObviousGuanaco.gif
~
I cannot abide football, for it’s brutal and the action occupies just a few minutes of a one hour-game (which often lasts 2.5 hours or more with time-outs, half-time, and commercials.
Reader Diane G. called my attention to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, which, although four years old, surely applies today. It shows that—get this—there are eleven minutes of action in an NFL (National Football League) game in the U.S.:
According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.
In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there’s barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays.
So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps. In the four broadcasts The Journal studied, injured players got six more seconds of camera time than celebrating players. While the network announcers showed up on screen for just 30 seconds, shots of the head coaches and referees took up about 7% of the average show.
If you watch a professional football game, you’ll be occupied watching commercials five times longer than you’ll be watching action on the field.
Yes, I know that football is a big deal in the U.S., especially in universities and colleges (no time was provided for action in those games, but if they’re televised, which the important ones are, I’d guess the ratio of action to total time would be about the same.
I don’t understand the love for football, especially given this. Yes, a good run or pass play is satisfying or even thrilling, but you wait long and hard for one of those. Now you might object that soccer has even less action in terms of scoring goals, but that’s bogus. In soccer there are always 90 minutes of pure action, and even when a goal isn’t being scored, the play is often beautiful, and emotions can run high.
~
Over at her website Heather’s Homilies, Kiwi reader Heather Hastie continues her critique of Reza Aslan’s Muslim apologetics with a second part: “It’s not the facts, it’s how you present them: The Reza Aslan tactic.”
As before, go read it (and comment) on her site, where Muslim apologist Neal “It’s Not Religion” Godfrey has given some ineffectual pushback in the comments. Heather takes up a recent op-ed by Aslan in the New York Times (that kerfuffle on Bill Maher’s show has given him a lot of attention, which he’s milking for all he’s worth), and an appearance by Aslan on Chris Hayes’s show on MSNBC.
Aslan rightly points out that “extremist” Islamic views, though significant among Muslims everywhere in the world, aren’t dominant everywhere in the world. True, as the statistics below show. Howevever, he tends to emphasize the less extremist countries, and has to be continually reminded of the overall picture, which, as a 2013 Pew Report on Muslim beliefs show, is dire. In addition, Aslan blames bad actions such as female genital mutilation (FGM) not on Islam, but on “culture”: African culture, ignoring the fact that many branches of Islam codify FGM as a duty, and have spread it throughout Asia (more on that later).
Here are the Pew statistics AGAIN:
Beliefs on the immorality of six behaviors. Note the high percentages for drinking alcohol, abortion, and euthanasia, behaviors that, I think, are not immoral at all (though of course excessive drinking can be injurious to one’s self and family):
Here is the level of support among Muslims for imposition of sharia law in Islamic countries. Further data from the poll shows that in at many places, many Muslims want sharia law also applied to non-Muslims (see below):
Below are the data among Muslim supporters of sharia law who say that it should apply only to Muslims. Although it’s higher than 50% (by a hair) in some places, what this means is that between 30 and 49% of supporters (excepting those who have no opinion) think that sharia should also apply to non-Muslims:
Among Muslims who favor sharia as official law—and that is between 56% and 99% of Muslims in places where Islam is the “official religion”—here are the data on those who think that apostasy should be punished by death. Remember, even a “low” figure of 15% is between one is six and one in seven people:
Finally, the same results, but in this case it’s stoning as the penalty for adultery. Even among southeastern European Muslims who favor sharia (around 15% to 20%), from a fifth to more than a quarter favor this barbaric punishment.
In Malaysia, a country that Aslan touts as benign, it’s 60% of sharia-believing Muslims, and the latter includes 86% of all Muslims surveyed. In other words, more than half of Malaysian Muslims, at a minimum, favor stoning as punishment adultery (to get the minimum, we multiply those favoring sharia by those favoring such punishments among sharia believers. Roughly same percentage—more than 50% of Malaysian Muslims—favor the death penalty for apostasy. Not exactly a benign country, at least regarding Muslim beliefs!
BUT, and here’s where Aslan really turns weaselly, he thinks we should not worry about beliefs, but only actions. Here’s the exchange between Aslan and Hayes as reported by Heather:
Aslan: Frankly, look, I’m gonna be honest with you, if you are some kind of ultra-orthodox Muslim who believes every word of the Qur’an is literal and that gays are going to hell, and that anyone who converts should be killed, I don’t have a problem with you, as long as it’s just your beliefs. I don’t care what you believe. It’s actions we should be focusing on.
Hayes: Mmm.
“Mmmm” is right! What Aslan is neglecting is that when Islam does get the upper hand, beliefs become actions. Further, how can what you believe not condition (or reflect) other feelings that have consequences, like how you regard women or non-Muslims or sex in general? And, of course, when these actions are carried out, Aslan tends to impute them to culture or politics, not the tenets of Islam. Finally, Aslan “doesn’t have a problem” with anyone who thinks that leaving Islam is a capital crime? Not a wee bit of a problem? Doesn’t that condition how Muslims feel about non-Muslims?
A moment later, Aslan walks this back a bit:
Aslan: We need to condemn actions, not beliefs. You can criticize beliefs if you want.
“If you want”!!!! As if it’s largely a matter of indifference what those beliefs are. It’s as if Aslan were saying to Southerners, “I don’t care if you think blacks are inferior so long as you don’t lynch them.”
Beliefs always have consequences, even if only to further divide humanity. Yes, we should be concerned that in many places Muslims favor stoning people for adultery, or killing them for apostasy, even if they don’t do it. That is a repudiation of Enlightenment values that will only serve to keep such believers mired in a medieval mentality, and at odds with much of the world.
~
C. J. Werleman (b. 1973, Wikipedia bio here) is a writer, commentator, and atheist who has lately used the pages of Salon to attack Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and Sam Harris for Islamophobia, misogyny, and other sins. These old privileged white males (Sam has been accused recently of “aging”) apparently don’t understand, as Werleman does, that the perfidies of organizations of ISIS don’t reflect Islam, but culture and Western oppression. Here are three of Werleman’s attack-dog pieces in Salon, just from September:
“Atheists don’t get terrorism: Why Sam Harris fails to understand the Islamic ‘threat'”
“Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and atheist’s ugly Islamophobia”
“What atheists like Bill Maher have in common with medieval Christian Crusaders”
Werleman is the atheist’s Reza Aslan.
Salon, of course, odious clickbaiting venue that it is, positively laps up Werleman’s stuff. But perhaps the lapping is through, for if a blogger called “Godless Spellchecker” is correct, Werleman is guilty of some pretty unethical behavior: blatant plagiarism of other people’s words, something you can fail a course for in college (or, in the case of journalists, lose your reputation).
The Godless Spellchecker website has previously accused Werleman of “dubious ethics, misrepresentation, and unoriginal hackery“, and from what I’ve read of Werleman’s posts, I judge him guilty on all those counts. But the new accusations are far more serious.
The latest post on the site is called “Is C. J. Wereleman a plagiarist?” I believe the Conventional Wisdom of such rhetorical questions used as titles is “No,” but in this case it appears to be “Yes”—given the Godless Spellchecker’s comparison of Werleman’s prose with that of earlier works.
To see the magnitude of the problem, here’s a few excerpts from Godless Spellchecker’s piece, including comparisons of Werleman’s prose with previously published pieces by other people:
. . . The above article mentions Dr. Peter Boghossian (@PeterBoghossian), which subsequently prompted a conversation between us. During our conversation, Dr. Boghossian called attention to some things he’d identified in CJ Werleman’s writing that I hadn’t previously considered, and so I decided to conduct an independent investigation to determine whether or not CJ Werleman is guilty of actual plagiarism. (Parts of Dr. Boghossian’s letter have been reprinted here with his permission.)
I’m not an Investigative Journalist or academic, so knowing how and where to begin was a problem. Then I quickly remembered Google exists. I lifted choice sections from some of the articles Werleman published on prominent platforms such as Salon and Alternet. I paid specific attention to paragraphs containing information that would usually require a certain level of knowledge and diligence on the part of the author. My findings raise some serious questions. I shall provide examples below.
The following examples assume all of the dates and names stated on these articles are accurate:
Take this article from Fareed Zakaria: ‘America’s educational failings’ from The Washington Post dated May 1st 2014 and the following passage:
“The United States had a wide gap between its best performers and worst performers… And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents.”
And then compare it with this from Werleman’s article published days later at Salon and Alternet:
“The United States has a wide gap between its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents….”
There is no indication that this isn’t Werleman’s original writing or any citation given.
Two other examples:
Take an extract from this article: ‘In Public Education, Edge Still Goes to Rich’ from Nov 2013 By Eduardo Porter:
‘The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students.’
Then compare it with this extract from Werleman’s article on Alternet dated June 2014:
‘Among OECD nations, America remains an outlier, one of the few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children are afforded more funding than those serving poor students. Among the 34 OECD nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students‘
and this:
There is also this line from Why Men Love War by William Broyles Jr. in Esquire, November 1984 (also reprinted in May 2014 as part of a retrospective):
“There is a reason for every war and a war for every reason.”
The line is also used in the first paragraph of Werleman’s article: Why Do We Lust for War? On Alternet:
“There is a reason for every war and a war for every reason.”
There is no indication that this isn’t Werleman’s original writing or any citation given.
Although the last one has fewer words, it irks me even more, for it’s an attempt to use a pithy bon mot to start an article.
These aren’t the only examples that look like outright plagiarism: the Godless Spellchecker gives several more. While I haven’t checked the original sources cited in every example given of Werleman’s purported plagiarism, I’ve checked all three of the ones cited above, and Wereleman’s unattributed copying is accurately represented by Godless Spellchecker.
Those three are enough to suggest that Werleman has repeatedly engaged in plagiarism. That doesn’t, of course, mean that all his words are plagiarized, and they surely aren’t, but this level of unattributed copying is enough to get someone fired as a journalist at a reputable venue.
Let’s see if Salon considers itself reputable in this way. If their investigation shows these accusations to be correct, it should take action against Werleman. And we should no longer regard him as a reputable journalist. I never thought of him as a thoughtful journalist, but I didn’t think of him as an unethical one either.
And I’d expect Werleman to issue a statement explaining every single instance of this apparent copying.
