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.
Today we have a second installment for Caturday—a great new tee-shirt featuring kittehs and science. It’s designed by Richard Smith, who produced two other shirts I’ve featured before.
You can buy “Science kitteh” here for only $20.44. Be sure to check out the title of the peer-reviewed paper.
If you’re myopic or presbyopic, the title is “Genetics and speciation”: the shirt was designed in my honor. Buy it NOW!
Thanks, Richard!
This isn’t a recording of my debate with John Haught over the compatibility of science and faith, but rather a post-debate discussion I had with the writers of The Evolving Scientist, a website produced by biology graduate students at the University of Kentucky.
Two days ago, I sat down with the group and recorded an hour-long podcast about science and religion (you can also hear it here and subscribe to the iTunes feed here).
It touched on many things, including my post-mortem of the debate with Haught, the origins of religion, the canard of “scientism,” and so on.
This is a smart group of students who asked good questions. And they’ll let me know when the video of the debate comes online.
UPDATE: The server appears to have crashed (there are too many of you!), but the iTunes feature seems to work okay.
When I was in Kentucky, an alert student brought to my attention the fact that the state’s governor, Steven Beshear, had just proclaimed this November “King James Version of the Bible” month. Here’s the official proclamation (click to enlarge; you can download the pdf file here).
Note how the language is twisted to emphasize the “secular” contributions of the Bible: how it has entered into American culture and has been the source of many now-familiar phrases. This “secular effect” ploy is often used to defend the placing of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and schoolhouses.
This is so clearly unconstitutional that it screams for an ACLU lawsuit and an injunction. Let’s hope the relevant lawyers and organizations (FFRF, are you listening?) get on this one.
Ten to one they’d never proclaim “Qur’an Month” or “Torah Month” in Kentucky.
James Joseeph “Whitey” Bulger (“g” pronounced as “j”) was a notorious Boston mobster who engaged in racketeering, promotion of illegal gambling, and murder. He also served for a while as an FBI informant, but went on the lam in 1994 when his indictment for racketeering was imminent.
The Martin Scorsese movie “The Departed” was based largely on Bulger’s life, with Jack Nicholson playing the Bulger-ish character. (Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, and Matt Damon were also in the movie, which I and others highly recommend.)
Bulger remained on the run for 17 years, but was finally captured last June in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living as a recluse. How was he caught? Cats tipped off the authorities, helped by Anna Bjornsdottir, a former Miss Iceland, who was Bulger’s neighbor. According to CBS News:
A Boston Globe investigation reveals it was Miss Iceland 1974 who was the tipster who collected the $2 million reward for information to the arrest four months ago of notorious alleged Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.
Bulger, formerly No. 1 on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list, was discovered when he went outside to help feed a stray cat. Bulger, who almost never went outside, was seen there and remembered by the former Miss Universe contestant and actress, Anna Bjornsdottir, Bulger’s sometime neighbor.
. . . Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, who spent months tracking down details of Bulger’s life as a fugitive, said on “The Early Show,” that Bulger’s apartment building wouldn’t permit pets, so he had to go outside to feed the cat.
Murphy said, “Apparently, Whitey liked the cat. … He would be out there this morning while his girlfriend fed this cat.”
The CBS video report is here (it’s preceded by a brief ad).
I don’t know who this person is, but this is a photograph of a photograph that I found hanging on the wall at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, California. If you’re ever in the area, say driving on Route 395 down the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada (I consider this the most beautiful stretch of highway in America), do stop in Independence and visit this small but fascinating museum of Owens Valley history.
And be sure to stay at the Winnedumah Hotel, an old and atmospheric place where the cowboy movie stars like Gene Autry used to stay while filming in the nearby Alabama Hills. (Right across the street is the Inyo County Courthouse, where Charles Manson was arraigned for the murders of Sharon Tate and several others.)
At any rate, hanging on the wall of the museum for many years was this photo of “Hominy’s famous Jewish CHAMPION of the Lariat and Saddle.” A Jewish cowboy! But I had to laugh, for he looks just like a yeshiva bocher stuffed into ill-fitting cowboy clothes.
Sadly, when I went back to the Museum several years ago, the photo was gone, and nobody remembered it. I begged them to find it so I could have it, but no dice. The Jewish Champion Cowboy is lost to history.
Since I’ve posted about stromatolites before, I hope that readers remember what they are. As a refresher, though, they’re the oldest convincing traces of life on earth: fossilized colonies of cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) which date back 3.5 billion years ago—only a billion years after the Earth had formed. While fossilized stromatolites have been found in many places, living ones can exist only in a very few places on Earth. Wikipedia notes:
Modern stromatolites are mostly found in hypersaline lakes and marine lagoons where extreme conditions due to high saline levels exclude animal grazing. One such location is Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia where excellent specimens are observed today, and another is Lagoa Salgada, state of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where modern stromatolites can be observed as bioherm (domal type) and beds. Inland stromatolites can also be found in saline waters in Cuatro Ciénegas, a unique ecosystem in the Mexican desert, and in Lake Alchichica, a maar lake in Mexico’s Oriental Basin. Modern stromatolites are only known to prosper in an open marine environment in the Exuma Cays in the Bahamas. Stromatolites can also be found in the hyper-saline inland lakes on San Salvador Island, Bahamas.
According to the BBC, though, living stromatolites have just been found in a place frequented by bazillions of tourists—the Giant’s Causeway, a formation of basaltic hexagons in Northern Ireland:
In a small grey puddle tucked into a corner of the world famous Giant’s Causeway, scientists have made an extraordinary find.
A colony of stromatolites – tiny structures made by primitive blue-green algae.
Stromatolites are the oldest known fossils in the world.
The tiny algae or bacteria that build them are also thought to be the most ancient life form that is still around today, after more than three billion years.
What makes the discovery in Northern Ireland so remarkable is that until now these structures have been found mainly in warm and often hyper saline waters which discourage predators.
The stromatolites in the Giant’s Causeway are in a tiny brackish pool, exposed to the violence of waves and easy prey to the animals that are already living amongst them.
The find was purely accidental, suggesting that perhaps living stromatolites occur in other places but simply haven’t been found. It’s also a very young colony—only one layer thick. The ancient fossilized ones (see below) are composed of many layers of bacteria separated by sediment.
The colony at the Giant’s Causeway on Northern Ireland’s wind-swept north coast was found by accident.
Scientists from the School of Environmental Sciences at the nearby University of Ulster were looking for very different geological formations when Professor Andrew Cooper spotted the stromatolites.
“I was very surprised”, explained Professor Cooper.
“I was walking along with a colleague looking at something else. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted these structures which, had I not seen them before in my work in South Africa, I probably wouldn’t have known what they were.”
The colony is very young, just a layer thick, so it’s recently formed. One thing that is puzzling scientists is why its chosen this spot.
“There is some unusual set of circumstances that occurs just here that doesn’t occur even 10 metres away along the beach,” said Professor Cooper.
The place is sure to be flooded with gawkers looking at this ancient life formation, so I hope the local authorities are doing something to protect the area.
Here are living stromatolites in Shark Bay, Australia:
And some fossils, clearly showing the layers:
This awesome photo was produced by Sigmund to replace a previous picture of my “groupies”—a nonexistent band of minions invented by John Haught to explain why he lost our debate—that might have induced episodes of epilepsy.
I have to say, though, that in this one I come off more as Roger Ebert than as a rock star.
I’m always especially distressed when Jews show the same kind of religiously-motivated insanity as do adherents to other faiths. As the BBC reports in this video, one group of Orthodox Jewish girls in Jerusalem, who go to school attired very modestly, have nevertheless been assaulted, both verbally and physically, by ultra-Orthodox Jews who think that the girls’ attire is “sluttish.” (Have a look at their “revealing” clothes.)
The ultra-Orthodox Jews even hurl feces at the girls.
This at last puts paid to my misguided notion that religious Jews aren’t as looney as religious Muslims or Christians.