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’m not a big fan of d*gs, but I make an exception when it comes to foxes. They’re cute (almost catlike), furry, have magnificent tails, and are smart and wily. This video from Discovery, showing foxes hunting rodents under several feet of snow, shows their remarkable hearing. It’s unbelievable that they can feed themselves this way, but the narrator says they succeed 75% of the time. Watch its ears twitching as it homes in—like mammalian radar.
The YouTube description below implies they use the magnetic field, but I have no idea how that would work. The explanation in the video is obscure.
A red fox pinpoints field mice buried deep beneath the snow, using his sensitive hearing and the magnetic field of the North Pole to plot his trajectory. For more North America, visit http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/nor…
This time the child, a girl, was reared in an Amish home, which means she has virtually no chance of escaping that bizarre religious milieu. It also means she will die. According to Yahoo News, a 10-year-old Amish girl with leukemia has apparently disappeared, probably spirited away by her parents so she wouldn’t receive chemotherapy:
A 10-year-old Amish girl with leukemia and her parents haven’t contacted a guardian appointed two months ago to make medical decisions for the girl after her parents stopped her chemotherapy treatments, the guardian’s attorney said Wednesday.
It’s unclear whether the girl has resumed treatments, and there are indications that the family has left its farm in rural northeast Ohio.
The girl, Sarah Hershberger, has not restarted treatments at Akron Children’s Hospital, said Clair Dickinson, the guardian’s attorney. He said it’s not known whether she is undergoing chemotherapy anywhere else.
Doctors at the Akron hospital believe Sarah’s leukemia is treatable but say she will die without chemotherapy. The hospital went to court after the family decided to stop chemotherapy and treat Sarah with natural medicines, such as herbs and vitamins.
An appeals court ruling in October gave an attorney who’s also a registered nurse limited guardianship over Sarah and the power to make medical decisions for her. The court said the beliefs and convictions of her parents can’t outweigh the rights of the state to protect the child.
The family has appealed the decision to both the appeals court and the Ohio Supreme Court.
Messages seeking comment were left Wednesday with attorneys representing the family.
One of the attorneys, John Oberholtzer, told The Medina Gazette he has been in contact with the family but does not know its whereabouts or whether the girl is being treated.
Dickinson, the guardian’s attorney, said that shortly after the appeals court ruling, a taxi was sent to the family’s home near the village of Spencer in Medina County, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland. The taxi was to take the Sarah to the hospital in Akron, but someone at the home said the family was not there, Dickinson said.
Sarah’s condition is treatable—indeed, possibly curable—but she asked her parents to stop chemotherapy. Her last chemo session was in June, and according to doctors she will die in less than a year without further treatment. But she’s not competent to make that judgment, and there’s also the possibility of a). religious pressure from her parents and the community influencing her “decision,” and b). the fact that chemo makes one sick, which of course would make a child averse to it. It makes you sick, but often cures you.
And I don’t know how an attorney in good conscience can defend what the Hershbergers are doing. I know everyone deserves representation, but how could a lawyer with a conscience defend parents whose reckless actions will kill their child?
Andy Hershberger, the girl’s father, said this past summer that the family agreed to begin two years of treatments for Sarah last spring but stopped a second round of chemotherapy in June because it was making her extremely sick.
Sarah begged her parents to stop the chemo and they agreed after a great deal of prayer, Hershberger said. The family, members of an insular Amish community, shuns many facets of modern life and is deeply religious.
Hospital officials have said they are morally and legally obligated to make sure the girl receives proper care. They said the girl’s illness, lymphoblastic lymphoma, is an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but there is a high survival rate with treatment.
I didn’t know much about the attitudes of Amish toward medical care, but several sites, including Amish America, note that their attitude toward modern medical care is mixed. Some abjure it; others use it. But in general they use it less than do non-Amish, and often resort to alternative or herbal treatments for religious and cultural reasons. Unfortunately, Sarah Hershberger’s parents apparently belong to the last class, and that will cost her her life.
In An Amish Paradox, Hurst and McConnell detail use of institutional medicine among the various Amish affiliations in the Holmes County, Ohio settlement.
Hurst and McConnell report that Amish are generally less likely to undergo annual checkups or engage in preventative care. A reluctance to go to the doctor can result from various factors, including a desire to avoid needless medical costs, a generally higher pain threshold (as reported by doctors treating the Amish) and a failure to understand the importance of, or reasons for professional treatment.
The authors also note that more conservative Amish are less likely to seek medical care, and more likely to delay treatment, especially when physical symptoms are absent or minimal.
There is something ineffably sad about children like Sarah. By accident of birth they are brought up in families afflicted with religious delusions, and there is no way for them to escape (except, perhaps, during or after the famous Amish Rumspringa, when children get a taste of non-Amish life). They will perpetuate the delusions, and so the cycle continues. And in Sarah’s case, those delusions will take her life. This makes me very angry, and even more so when the religious parents are pretty sanguine about this child abuse, attributing medical-abuse deaths to the will of god. It doesn’t have to be that way. Woo is always bad, but only in religion is it fatal.
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Finally, this is relevant but a wee bit off topic: a parody “commercial,” from Upworthy, showing what it would look like if vaccines were advertised like other drugs.
And another addendum: Dr. Edzard Ernst has posted a scathing “tribute” to Prince Charles and the royal’s incessant promotion of quackery and “alternative medicine” (Charles just turned 65).
Warning: GROSS! Do not watch if you can’t take an exploding whale spewing its guts everywhere. (You’ll watch anyway)
I pondered long and hard about putting this up, but decided to because it shows not only the internal organs of a sperm whale, but the tremendous gas pressure that builds up inside a dead cetacean (there are in fact several videos of exploding whales on YouTube). But don’t think this one was killed; according to the notes, it was a washed-up whale that died of “natural causes”:
Sperm Whale explodes in the Faroe Islands while a man is trying to open his stomach. Sperm Whales are not killed in the Faroe Islands, this one died from natural causes..
This footage was originally shot by the Faroese national television. http://www.kvf.fo
Now I’m not sure why the guy was trying to open his stomach, unless they were trying to get ambergris or something, nor why anybody would be foolish enough to attempt this. But reader gravelinspector, who sent me this video, gives some useful answers:
I would have thought that with the prevalence of exploding whale videos on the Internet, people wouldn’t need telling this, but … well it actually looks as if this was a part of a disposal team, with appropriate PPE (Personal protective Equipment). I’d have used a long-handled knife though – probably something for forestry trimming, 6ft long – to vent the problem. At arm’s length. From the upwind side.
We’ve had several of these in the last few years in the Aberdeen area. And boy, do they stink! For a 10-tonne mini-whale, “something” could include a lorry (there is a video warning you to not take the lorry through the middle of a city though – you can guess!), but much bigger than that and you have no real choice but to cut it into pieces there and then.
Here is a postprandial moggie with a strange name, replete with Thanksgiving bird and described by staff member Thaddeus Aid.
I just had to defend my turkey dinner from my daughter’s cat. It was a wild tale of the great white hunter stalking his prey. Thankfully my fully cooked bird did not succumb to his prowess.
Later all the cats got to share some of the leftover turkey. The d-g had to subsist on leftover steak.
I got more info on this cat and the others:
The cat’s name is Fatty Boom Boom (my daughter named him through a series of names starting with Parsnip and Hashtag but ending with that, so we didn’t know what he was going to be called for a week or so). The photo is tonight, post hunt and noms.
The other cats are Monster (wife’s cat, named by my son when he was 4), General Mayhem (my cat, though he was purchased as a gift for my wife, also the only cat I have ever not been allergic to), and Mischief (another daughter’s cat). All shared in the turkey bounty.
Here’s General Mayhem:
And Fatty again, with Mischief and Monster:
Time for my own bird, and a good bottle of Rioja. Happy Thanksgiving, folks; I’ll be here all week!
Well, it’s not really an ant but a wasp—a wasp in the hymenopteran family Multillidae, also called—for obvious reasons—”velvet ants.” (Ants and wasps are fairly closely related; in fact, ants evolved from early wasps.)
In these wasps the females are wingless and the males winged, and their colors and patterns are aposematic: that is, they are “warning” patterns that tell predators to stay away. Predators presumably learn these patterns readily, for velvet wasps have extremely painful stings.
But isn’t this a cute little girl?
From One Big Photo, with the big photo taken by Chris Lukhaup.
I’m not an expert on this group (or any group of insects save Drosophila), but Wikipedia notes this:
They exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism; the males and females are so different, it is almost impossible to associate the two sexes of a species unless they are captured while mating. In a few species, the male is so much larger than the female, he carries her aloft while mating, which is also seen in the related family Tiphiidae.
Here’s another view, from photo by DrSarahJensen via Flickr:
Velvet ants come in all sorts of striking colors and patterns, presumably aposematic; go here to see some.
This letter to the editor, which originally appeared on Twi**er, has been the subject of discussion on reddit, where it’s claimed that the paper is The Lake City Reporter in Florida. I can’t vouch 100% for its authenticity, but I provisionally judge it as real. For one thing, there’s a “Kenny Merriken” who has a YouTube channel with three hyper-religious videos, including “Messiah loves homosexuals” (have a gander at that one!).
There’s two types of Darwinian bullying here: social Darwinism, in which stronger kids are supposedly empowered by evolution to beat up the weaker, and secular bullying, i.e. the removal of the Bible from public school classrooms. Merriken is apparently unaware that the latter “secular bullying” is mandated by the Constitution and settled law.
The whole letter is pretty incoherent, but I suppose small-town papers have to publish every bit of nonsense that comes in as a letter. After all, there’s no downside to publishing nonsense like this.
What I’m learning from the publication of letters like this—and they appear in more respectable papers as well—is that editors feel no responsibility at all to vet letters for outright misrepresentations and lies.
