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’d have another contest about this, but a) it’s too easy and b) I have to ration my book supply. Still, you’ll look really smart if you explain why I’m just now putting this photo on this website, giving the relevant referents. No prize except a warm handshake.
Over at his website, James Randi attacks the notion that the Belgian man who supposedly emerged from a 23-year coma, claiming that he was conscious all the while, is now engaging outsiders using facilitated communication. A “helper” holds the guy’s hand while he supposedly chooses letters on a keyboard.
Anybody who has looked at these videos with an objective eye, rather than sympathetically, sees immediately that something is fishy. The typing seems to be done by the facilitator, not by the patient. The problem is highlighted in Randi’s post when he links to a video showing that the “facilitated communication” occurs when the patient seems to be asleep:
I’m enraged. Several perceptive persons have sent me to msnbc.com – where we can see Dr. Nancy Snyderman relating a story. It’s a heartrender, described thus by Dr. Snyderman:
“A mother [in Belgium] says her son has emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state to say he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed.”
No, that is not what the man said, Dr. Snyderman. That’s what an incompetent layperson typed for him! I ask you to first go to http://tinyurl.com/y8lku48, and note the section of the video from 12 to 35 seconds, then come back here.
This is the same problem that plagued similar studies of “facilitated communication” in autistic children. As far as I know, they turned out to be bogus. It’s sad, but the will to believe is strong.
UPDATE: Orac doesn’t believe it either.
h/t: Butterflies and wheels
Although the video is only seven seconds long, it’s important: this is the first film ever taken of the elusive Borneo bay cat, Catopuma badia, the world’s rarest cat. (The film, courtesy of the Global Canopy Programme, is on the link. Click on the lower left, not the upper left.)
The species is endemic to Borneo, and was first collected by Alfred Russel Wallace. The ears are curiously short, and there is nice striping on the head. It’s small (6-8 lb., the size of a house cat), is a denizen of tropic forests, and is rumored to eat monkeys. Tigerhomes.com says this about its status as a species:
It has been always been questioned whether the Bay Cat was a separate sub-species or an island version of the Asian Golden Cat. In 1992 a female Bornean Bay Cat was caught on the Sarawak border near Kalimantan and taken to the Sarawak Museum. The cat later died in captivity but was preserved and detail blood analysis and genetic testing proved this cat was indeed a unique species and therefore a highly endangered one.
I’m not sure how this proves species status. If the Bay Cat were sympatric (i.e., had an overlapping range) with the Asian Golden Cat, and they were fixed for different genetic variants, this would indeed prove a lack of interbreeding, confirming the species’ status as distinct. (I’m using the “biological species concept” here, according to which two species are distinct if they live in the same area in nature but don’t exchange genes.) But it’s not clear whether this is the case with these cats.
From the website:
Rare, elusive, and endangered by habitat loss, the bay cat is one of the world’s least studied wild cats. Several specimens of the cat were collected in the 19th and 20th Century, but a living cat wasn’t even photographed until 1998. Now, researchers in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, have managed to capture the first film of the bay cat (Catopuma badia). Lasting seven seconds, the video (see below) shows the distinctly reddish-brown cat in its habitat.
For three years Andrew Hearn and Jo Ross of the Global Canopy Programme have been surveying Borneo’s wild cats with camera trapping; these include the Sunda clouded leopard, the marbled cat, the flat-headed cat, the leopard cat, and the bay cat, which is the only species of the five that is wholly endemic to Borneo. As well as recording the first video of the bay cat, they also took the first photos of the animal in Sabah.
Fig. 1. Captive bay cat. Photo by Jim Sanderson.
Fig 2. In the wild. From the website: “Researchers suspect there are less than 2,500 mature bay cats left in the wild. The species is endemic to Borneo and rampant deforestation is the main threat. Copyright: Global Canopy Programme. Photo by Jo Ross and Andrew Hearn.”
h/t: Don Strong
I am delighted to see a pungent exchange between Robert Wright in the New York Times and Christopher Hitchens in Slate. (It’s about a week old, but I’m just back). Wright explicitly blames American belligerence against Islam as the force producing the Fort Hood shooting spree by Major Nidal Hasan.
The title of Wright’s piece is “Who created Major Hasan?”, and of course the answer is “America!”
The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism — or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Fort Hood is the biggest data point we have — the most lethal Islamist terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. It’s only one piece of evidence, but it’s a salient piece, and it supports the liberal, not the conservative, war-on-terrorism paradigm. . .
That’s a reminder that, contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn’t an intrinsically belligerent religion. Still, this sort of stereotyping won’t go away, and it’s among the factors that could make homegrown terrorism a slowly growing epidemic. The more Americans denigrate Islam and view Muslims in the workplace with suspicion, the more likely the virus is to spread — and each appearance of the virus in turn tempts more people to denigrate Islam and view Muslims with suspicion. Whenever you have a positive feedback system like this, an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.
This is all part and parcel of Wright’s apparent bid for the Templeton Prize, most recently displayed in The Evolution of God.
Well, I’m not in favor of stereotyping individual Muslims, but as for Islam, well, it does seem to be an intrinsically belligerent religion. Read the Qur’an — you’ll find plenty of belligerence there. And if you object that the Old Testament is belligerent, too, look then all the imams calling for jihad. And how many Muslims stood up to protest the widespread jubilation in the Middle East that ensued after 9/11, or stood up to defend the right of Danish newspapers to publish cartoons mocking Mohamed?
Nor was I in favor of invading Iraq — here I differ from Hitchens — and now it looks as if we’ve been stalemated in a Vietnam-like situation in Afghanistan. We should simply get out, because we won’t — and can’t — win. But regardless, Hitchens is on the mark when he goes after Wright:
Very well, then; the case for Maj. Hasan the overburdened caseworker seems to have evaporated. Robert Wright, among others, is big enough to admit as much. Wright, now emerging as the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based (see his intriguing new book The Evolution of God), now proposes an alternative theory of Maj. Hasan’s eagerness to commit mass murder. “The Fort Hood shooting,” says Wright, “is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism—or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan.” I know that contributors to the New York Times op-ed page are not necessarily responsible for the headlines that appear over their work, but the title of this one—”Who Created Major Hasan?”—really does demand an answer, and the only one to be located anywhere in the ensuing text is “We did.”
Everything in me revolts at this conclusion, which is echoed and underlined in another paragraph of the article. Why, six months ago, did “a 24-year-old-American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam—fatally shoot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.? ABC News reported, “It was not known what path Muhammad … had followed to radicalization.” Well, here’s a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Wright describes this clue-based deduction of his as an illustration of the way that “an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.” Though I can’t find much beauty in his prose there, I want to agree with him.
For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.
It is he, who I am taking as representative of a larger mentality here, who uses equally inert lingo to suggest that Maj. Hasan was “pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” That’s a nice and shady use of the word “perception.” Might it not be equally true to say that Hasan was all-too-easily pulled over the edge, having already signaled his devout eagerness for the dive, by a cleric who makes a living by justifying murder of Muslims and non-Muslims alike?
etc. Do read both pieces.
What’s with The New York Times lately? Accommodationism there is rampant, particularly in the op-ed section, where Nicholas Kristof published a mushbrained piece praising (God help me) Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright’s books, and criticizing atheism as “irreligious intolerance.” It’s almost as if the paper made a calculated decision to coddle religion, for that’s what their readers want.
UPDATE: Thomas Friedman has a piece in today’s New York Times placing the blame more properly where it lies.
It always amuses me when an accommodationist tells the faithful that no, there is no conflict between science and religion, at least not if they stopped believing in just those things that cause a conflict. In a Darwin-anniversary piece on CNN, Michael Shermer comes out as an accommodationist, and more: he suggests that people really should modify their beliefs if they conflict with science:
All of these fears are baseless. If one is a theist, it should not matter when God made the universe — 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened.
Likewise, it should not matter how God created life, whether it was through a miraculous spoken word or through the natural forces of the universe that He created. The grandeur of God’s works commands awe regardless of what processes He used.
Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them? Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian or a devout Muslim. To these folks, scripture is scripture, and it matters that it is true. If, as recent work suggests, prayer doesn’t work, should Shermer tell the faithful that it doesn’t matter whether or not they pray?
This piece disappointed me, as I’ve long admired Shermer’s writings, and applauded loudly when he went after Bill Maher’s anti-vaccination stance. But lately he’s been assuming the faitheist mantle more and more often (could it be because of Templeton sponsorship?).
It would be lovely if Shermer would admit that, in the real world, the only kind of religion not at war with science is deism.
I will be back Friday and, I hope, resume posting. Thanks to Matthew and Greg (who has been ill with pneumonia) for filling in for me. I have some tales and some swell holiday snaps.
In the meantime, what is all this about the proper pronounciation of “van Gogh”?” None of us use the proper pronounciation for foreign names! Do you say “Firenze” for “Florence,” “Moskva” for “Moscow”, and “Par–ee” for “Paris”? A Russian once told me the proper pronounciations of “Tolstoy” and “Dostoevsky,” which only slightly resemble how we Americans pronounce those names. Let us not chastise one another for using the English/American pronounciations of foreign names, for none of us adhere strictly to that rule. Let he who is without sin cast the first noun!
In the meantime, I have seen many Tintorettos, Giottos, Bellinis and the like. Rembrandt and van Gogh have them all beat.
Happy Thanksgiving (make mine pasta)!
Best American Painters
Winslow Homer
Thomas Eakin
Georgia O’Keefe
Edward Hopper
Jackson Pollock
The Netherlands produced three of my dozen favorite painters (see below), an amazing yield for so small a land. Amsterdam houses museums for two of them—Rembrandt and van Gogh—and the Rijksmuseum also has a few specimens from the limited output of Vermeer. But perhaps a sunny Saturday was not a good time to visit the van Gogh Museum: regardless of the month, weekends bring out flocks of locals and tourists. And the Dutch are tall, so that seeing the paintings among them is like examining a distant deer through thick forest. But go one must, for if you like van Gogh — and who doesn’t? — you’ll find loads of his works — an orgy of color and line filling two of the building’s three floors. If you’ve been to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, you may think you’ve had a good ration of van Gogh, but you haven’t.
Here you find many public favorites: his room at Arles, a vase of irises, another of sunflowers, The Potato Eaters, self-portraits, landscapes from southern France. There is one of his last paintings, Wheatfield with Crows. And other fantastic pieces: a stunning near-monochrome still life and a lascivious portrait of almond blossoms writhing, almost sexually, across a cerulean blue sky. You can locate the most famous paintings by the knots of visitors before them, but many masterpieces inhabit the interstices.
What you see in person, but miss in reproductions, is the thick impasto that makes the museum-shop postcards such poor replicas of the originals. The paint is laid on in thick dollops, like frosting rising high above the canvas — so high that it makes its own highlights. And many of van Gogh’s paintings, as he admitted to his brother, were done quickly, perhaps to exorcise the demons of anxiety and depression that plagued him in his final years.
Van Gogh’s output in the last three years of his life (1888-1890) is astonishing. Despite his depression, for which he was famously hospitalized, he turned out painting after painting, all of them great. The thick lines of paint that sometimes appear in his earlier works now are ubiquitous, lined up like armies of worms marching across the canvas. Nobody else had seen like that before.
Many of van Gogh’s letters are also on display, revealing not only superb penmanship (and lots of drawings: he worked out many of his ideas in these screeds), but a surprising eloquence. He was clearly not an unlettered proletarian of native genius, but a learned and deeply thoughtful man. And he worked hard: many letters, especially to his brother Theo, describe Vincent’s torturous efforts to get things visually right. How sad that when he finally did, he nevertheless imagined himself a total failure, and ended his life.
van Gogh shot himself in the chest soon after finishing Wheatfield with Crows (it is not, as is often believed, his last painting), and many have commented on the symbolism: a road disappears into a field, and death-presaging birds rise from the wheat while a menacing black sky looms like a veil. One wonders whether van Gogh had already planned his suicide, and was painting in desperation. The work reeks of haste and anxiety — the crows are ciphers, each bird four quick strokes of a black-daubed brush, two upside-down “v”s.
Near the end of the exhibit is van Gogh’s last letter, unfinished, in French, and addressed to his brother. It was found on Vincent’s body, and Theo later annotated it in memoriam of “that tragic day.” In several places the letter is spotted with light orange stains; the accompanying label suggests that this may be Vincent’s blood but that the matter is unclear. The geneticist in me cried out for forensic analysis.
Favorite painters (i.e., the best painters,in order)
1. Rembrandt
2. van Gogh
3. Picasso
4. Michelangelo
5. da Vinci
6. Dürer
7. Johannes Vermeer
8. Raphael
9. Caravaggio
10. Monet
11. Turner
12. Toulouse-Lautrec
Wild cards:
Kandinsky
Feininger
A few favorite paintings:
The Isenheim Altarpiece; Mathias Grünewald
Las Meninas; Velázquez
Guernica; Picasso
Virgin of the Rocks; da Vinci
Rain, Steam, and Speed: the Great Western Railway; Turner.
The Prophet Hannah; Rembrandt
Wheatfield with a Reaper; van Gogh
Self Portrait at 28; Dürer
I see that Matthew has tried to plug the gap produced by yesterday’s missing felid, putting up an estimable post about pine martens. But here, albeit a day late, is a real felid.
Meet Timor, a Bengal cat owned by the friend of a friend. Unlike Adam, he doesn’t want to relinquish his rib. This cat would certainly be at home in Chicago.
Here’s the owner’s description of Timor and his predilection for pork ribs:
Although usually a sweet and gentle feline, Timor is crazy for pork ribs. He will defend them against anyone or anycat. Note his rather impressive canines. Moreover, he doesn’t stop growling until he’s completely shattered the bone and consumed every last morsel. At most that takes 10 minutes. There are 4 cats in this household: Timor, Sunda, Wallace and Henry. Being catered to by nerdy biologists (bat biologist Betsy Dumont and entomologist Sean Werle), they are named for Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and two of the islands near Wallace’s
line. Henry and Timor are Bengals, and Wallace and Sunda are rescued strays. Wallace (the grey cat in the video) is the alpha cat in every other setting, but no one messes with Timor when he has a bone.
h/t: Betsy and Hempenstein.
