Readers’ wildlife photos

May 22, 2023 • 8:15 am

I am seriously worried about the dearth of wildlife photos on hand. We have enough to last for about five days, and then that’s it. I urge you to send in your good wildlife photos if you have them.  (For submission guidelines, see the “how to send me wildlife photos” post on the left sidebar. Summer is coming in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means lots of sun, which prompts the appearance of flora and fauna.

Today’s photos are from UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison. featuring her recent trip to Finaland. Her narrative and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

 

Oulu, Finland, May 2023

While in Finland in early May to attend a meeting at Oulu University, I had the opportunity to see one of nature’s marvels:  the arrival of migratory songbirds to their high-latitude breeding grounds.   At the edge of the Baltic Sea, at 65°N, and well-forested, southern Lapland is a prime destination for many migrants as well as a thoroughfare for others headed for the Arctic. Never before had I heard woods ringing with birdsong and observed new species arriving every day. The pace felt frantic: birds in constant motion singing, feeding, chasing, nest-building.  Every morning I headed to the parks and trails at sunrise — 4:30 am! — clutching the very helpful Merlin bird ID app.

Here’s Oulu; a very Finnish scene blending water, forest, traditional-style buildings, and industry (the giant Stora Enso paper mill):

Here are a few of the birds….

Great Tit (Parus major):

Eurasian Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus):

Eurasian Robin (Erithacus rubecula):

Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs):

Greenfinch (Carduelis chloris):

Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula):

Redwing (Turdus iliacus):

Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella):

Wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe):

Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major):

Here are two adorable small mammals that have become rare in much of Europe…

European Hare (Lepus europaeus):

Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris):

Here’s my main birdwatching haunt, Hupisaarti City Park, at dawn with European Hare in foreground and Oulu Lutheran Cathedral in background:

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 22, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Monday, May 22, 2023, and National Vanilla Pudding Day (tapioca’s better).

It’s also Harvey Milk Day, as the murdered gay rights activist was born on this day in 1930, International Day for Biological Diversity,Sherlock Holmes Day (Arthur Conan Doyle was born on this day in 1859), United States National Maritime Day, and World Goth Day. If you’re a goth (are there any left?), you can find a list of today’s Goth Day events here. And here are photos from Wikipedia of a male and female Goth:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 22 Wikipedia page.

And there’s a Google Doodle today; if you click on it below, you’ll find that it celebrates the 69th birthday of Barbara May Cameron (1954-2002), described on Wikipedia as “a Native American photographer, poet, writer, and human rights activist in the fields of lesbian/gay rights, women’s rights and Native American rights.” You can’t get more intersectional than that.

Here’s a photo:

Da Nooz:

*Ukraine’s repeated claims that it still held onto the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and was making gains, have been muted lately. And now it looks as if that silence denotes the dismal fact that the city has been pretty much taken over by the Russians.

Ukrainian forces have lost effective control of the eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukraine’s top commander in the region said, as Moscow declared its first significant conquest since last summer after months of relentless fighting that has cost thousands of lives and obliterated the city.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy said Ukrainian forces were clinging to a tiny part of Bakhmut and advancing around its flanks, but acknowledged that the city was largely under Russian control.

The city’s capture would mark the only significant success of a monthslong Russian offensive that has severely depleted its military.

The question of who really won the battle of Bakhmut, military strategists say, will be decided not by control over the shattered city but by the next phase of the war. Kyiv fought street by street and at great cost to grind down Russian forces and prepare its forces for its own offensive aimed at seizing back territory occupied by Russia. Fighting has also cut into Ukrainian forces after Kyiv committed additional units to its defense.

And a quote from President Zelensky:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that Bakhmut was “only in our hearts,” hours after Russia’s defense ministry reported that forces of the Wagner private army, with the support of Russian troops, had seized the city in eastern Ukraine.

Speaking alongside U.S. President Joe Biden at the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, Zelenskyy said the Russians had destroyed “everything.” “You have to understand that there is nothing,” he said.

“For today, Bakhmut is only in our hearts,” he said. “There is nothing in this place.”

How many Ukrainian cities will turn into “nothing”?

*Ezra Klein at the NYT explains why “Liberals are persuading themselves of a debt ceiling plan that won’t work.” Although he thinks the whole idea of a debt ceiling is nonsense, he also argues that two solutions limned by the Democrats are equally dumb:

Now two more unconventional tactics are proving particularly popular in the liberal imagination.

In one, President Biden simply declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, pointing to the 14th Amendment, which holds that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Five Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are circulating a letter calling on Biden to do just that. On Friday, 66 progressive congressional Democrats sent the president their own letter making a similar case.

In the other, the Treasury Department uses a loophole in a 1997 law to mint a platinum coin of any value it chooses — a trillion dollars, say — and uses the new money to keep paying the government’s debts.

In remarks after a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Biden said he was “considering” the argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. The problem, he continued, is that “it would have to be litigated.” And that’s the problem with all these ideas and why, in the end, it’s doubtful that Biden — or any Democrat — will try them.

The legality of the debt ceiling or a trillion-dollar platinum coin doesn’t depend on how liberals read the Constitution or the Coinage Act. It depends on how three conservatives read it: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are the closest the Supreme Court now comes to having swing justices.

. . . My point is not that more conservative readings of these laws are right in some absolute sense. It’s that no such absolute sense matters. We just watched this Supreme Court wipe out decades of precedent to overrule Roe. It has repeatedly entertained cases that even conservative legal scholars thought farcical just a few years earlier. I still remember Orin Kerr, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, telling me at the beginning of the Obamacare case that there was “a less than 1 percent chance that the courts would invalidate the individual mandate,” only to update that to a “50-50 chance” as the court prepared to rule.

The Supreme Court does what it wants to do. Does it want to let the Biden administration dissolve the debt ceiling using a novel legal theory?

As he notes, Biden making a move that might be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court is a dumb move. His ending: “Republicans are the ones threatening default if their demands are not met. They are pulling the pin on this grenade, in full view of the American people. Biden should think carefully before taking the risk of snatching it out of their hands and holding it himself.”  But I’m wondering if it would do nearly as much damage if Biden refused to compromise and we defaulted then. Remember, he promised during his campaign to reach across the aisle and bring the country together. Or has everyone forgotten that?

*If you’ve visited Tikal in Guatemala (I have twice, and you must if you’re ever in the country), you’ll be stunned at the site of a huge Mayan city rising out of rain forest: green as far as you can see. It was a major city for fifteen centuries, but we know that others are buried in the forest, which quickly covers up ruins.  But there are many of these—as the Washington Post reports, at least 417 are being mapped by archaeologists.

Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.”

Scientists say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America, was far more advanced than previously thought.

Mapping the area since 2015 using lidar technology — an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy — researchers have found what they say is evidence of a well-organized economic, political and social system operating some two millennia ago.

The discovery is sparking a rethinking of the accepted idea that the people of the mid- to late-Preclassic Maya civilization (1000 B.C. to A.D. 250) would have been only hunter-gatherers,“roving bands of nomads, planting corn,” says Richard Hansen, the lead author of a study about the finding that was published in January and an affiliate research professor of archaeology at the University of Idaho.

. . .Before the lidar study, archaeologists, biologists and historians had identified about 50 sites of importance in a decade. “Now there are more than 900 [settlements]. … We [couldn’t] seethat before. It was impossible.” Hernández says.

Among the multistory temples, buildings and roads, images of Balamnal, one of the Preclassic civilization’s crucial hubs, were revealed for the first time. It dates back to 1,000 or possibly 2,000 years before the most famous, and well-excavated, Maya site of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which was constructed in the early A.D. 400s.

Excavations around Balamnal in 2009 “failed to recognize the incredible sophistication and size of the city, all of which was immediately evident with lidar technology,” Hansen says. Lidar showed the site to be among the largest in El Mirador, with causeways “radiating to other smaller sites suggest[ing] its administrative, economic and political importance in the Preclassic periods.”

The only way into the region is by helicopter or a 40-mile hike through the jungle, so for now tourists are few. Here’s a photo from the article with the WaPo caption:

(from WaPo): The La Danta pyramid in northern Guatemala. Deep in the jungle, researchers have found evidence of a well-organized system of hundreds of ancient Mayan cities. The discovery suggests the ancient civilization was far more advanced than previously thought. ( Andres Turcios and Mirciny Moliviatis/FARES)

*Okay, here’s a new movie you’ll have to see when it comes out in October: “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Di Niro: a team that’s worked together seven times before. As CNN reports,

Their latest project, true-crime drama “Killers of The Flower Moon” starring DiCaprio and De Niro, premiered at the swanky Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and the post-screening reception was instantly impressive with a minuteslong standing ovation.

A video posted to the Cannes Film Festival’s YouTube channel shows the audience inside the Grande Theatre Lumiere exuberantly applauding the movie for at least seven minutes, with more applause coming after director Scorsese thanked the audience.

“Thank you to the Osage,” Scorese said, adding “everyone connected with the picture – my old pals Bob, Leo, all of us together” and described filming the movie as a “very alive” experience.

. . .The cheers and applause grew louder for DiCaprio, De Niro and Lily Gladstone, who were all in attendance at the premiere. Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion also star in “Killers.”

Based on the bestseller by David Grann, the film is a true-crime story “set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.”

The three and a half hour film marks Scorsese’s first-ever foray into the Western genre and premiered out of competition at Cannes. It has so far received positive reviews.

It’s based on a true story: that of the “Osage Indian Murders” from 1910 to the 1930s. I had no idea about this! The Osage discovered oil on their lands, many got rich, but Congress decreed that each Osage have a white guardian to manage their finances. You can imagine what that led to!  Here’s a trailer about the movie (Robbie Robertson composed the music), which is based on an eponymous book:

And here’s a half-hour video documentary about the real incidents:

*Here’s some juicy gossip, and I’ll be brief, as you can read the story for itself. Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein!

Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to persuade Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase. The implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men.

“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates.

. . . The new details about Epstein and Gates reveal a layer of complexity to their relationship, and shed new light on how Epstein operated. In the years between his 2008 conviction and death, Epstein packed his days meeting with politicians, businessmen, academics and celebrities. He provided favors and sought to use the connections for his own purposes. And when the relationships soured, he could turn against people.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I believe Hili is dissing either his editors or the other family cats:

A: Do you like to sit here?
Hili: Yes, this is the best place to throw pearls before swine.
In Polish:
Ja: Lubisz tu siedzieć?
Hili: Tak, to jest najlepsze miejsce do rzucania pereł przed wieprze.

And a picture of the affectionate Szaron, taken by Paulina:

And here is Mishka, Anna Krylov’s lovely British shorthair. Look at those eyes—they are the color of honey.

********************

From reader David:

From Facebook:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih: Iranian protestors protesting the execution of protestors:

I found this one (read more about the Torch Lady here).

. . . I found this one, too. (I discovered a way to find some good tweets without following anyone):

From Gravelinspector, a lovely Egyptian carving:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a nine-year-old boy gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who had a rough time in Heathrow this morning. Always check your order before you press the “pay” button!

Independent only seconds after birth (there’s no parental care, as I recall):

Kitties supervising the construction of their own cat-hole:

Another Babylon Bee spoof of the Israel/Palestine conflict:

May 21, 2023 • 1:30 pm

First let me assure you that I KNOW that the Babylon Bee site is a spoof “fake news” site. It’s not hard to discern if you go there. But many of the articles are worth reading because they evoke a chuckle and are frequently anti-woke. Here’s one. First, though, I’ll add that it’s well known that the Associated Press, like much of the MSM, is biased in reporting against Israel and in favor of Palestine. If you think I’m making that up, read this article in The Atlantic by a former reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the AP.

Click to read, but I’ve reproduced the entire piece below (the Bee allows it if you don’t benefit commercially.)

 

 

GAZA – In an embarrassing blunder on camera, a Middle East reporter for the Associated Press Forgot to remove his green Hamas headband and ski mask before going live to cover Israel’s latest airstrike.

“This is a shocking war crime,” said AP’s foreign correspondent Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed Mohammed. “Israel is now blatantly attacking journalists. Behind me is the building that was our Gaza bureau of operations before the evil Jews demolished it. Death to Israel. Allahu Akbar.”

The journalist quickly caught himself and realized he was still wearing his terrorist headgear before frantically ducking out of frame.

“Sorry folks, technical difficulties. As I was saying, Israel and its supporters in the United States have a lot to answer for in the deliberate targeting of the free press.”

He then tried to cut the feed but pressed the wrong button and blew himself up.

Required academic DEI statements challenged in court, and Wisconsin ditches them

May 21, 2023 • 11:30 am

A law school prof once told me that he thought that required DEI statements for hiring academics was illegal: a violation of the First Amendment.  As “compelled speech,” analogous to loyalty oaths, this is a violation of the First Amendment that’s less well known than “the government cannot prohibit you from saying what you want.” Instead, it’s “the government cannot force you to say things you don’t want to say” stipulation, also legally part of the First Amendment.  That’s why no schoolchild can be forced to utter the Pledge of Allegiance.

When I asked the prof if universities could be sued for requiring academic job applicant to produce a DEI statement, I was told that yes, it could, but it would probably require someone with “standing”. That is, someone who had been personally injured by the DEI-statement requirement.  And that, of course, would be hard to do: you’d have to prove, for instance, that you were not hired because your DEI statement was insufficient.  Now there may be such cases, but can you imagine anybody who sued on these grounds could have a ghost of a chance of even having an academic career? Not these days, unless you want to teach at Bob Jones University.

And so, up to now we haven’t had lawsuits against compelled speech represented by required DEI statements. We don’t require them at the University of Chicago, but of course there are ways of trying to find out where a candidate stands on DEI without having a paper record.

As a First-Amendment hard liner, I personally object to DEI statements. They don’t tell us anything about a candidate’s suitability for an academic job, any more than knowing where they stand on abortion or the war in Ukraine. They are loyalty oaths—oaths that pledge fealty to the latest form of DEI. (You can bet that an applicant who parrots Dr. King’s statement that people should be judged by their character instead of their color is simply not going to be hired.) But I didn’t see any way to get rid of these statements save via universities realizing that they violate the Constitution, standing up for free speech, and ditching them voluntarily.

But all of a sudden these lawsuits seem to be in the air, though the first one seems to come from an applicant without standing. We also have another report that the University of Wisconsin system has deep-sixed required DEI statements.  (Click on the screenshots to read; quotes from articles are indented.)

A) The University of California System; article from Higher Ed Dive:

The skinny (which is skinny):

  • A former University of Toronto psychology professor sued the University of California system Thursday over its use of diversity statements in its hiring process.
  • These statements typically detail job applicants’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, and how they have furthered these ideals in their careers. But the ex-professor, J.D. Haltigan, in court documents alleged they are “loyalty oaths,” likening them to the ones that proliferated during the Cold War.
  • A UC spokesperson declined to comment Thursday, saying the system has not yet been served with the lawsuit.

Critics like Haltigan argue the statements force job applicants to pledge to progressive views. His lawsuit, alleging constitutional violations, is being backed by a conservative nonprofit, the Pacific Legal Foundation.

Specifically, he is suing UC President Michael Drake, as well as officials at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Haltigan applied for a job.

“The University administration ensures conformity and compliance by promulgating detailed rubrics and guidelines that tell applicants exactly what to say and what not to say in their Statements,” the lawsuit states.

Haltigan may have standing if he can make a reasonable case that he was denied a job at UC Santa Cruz because his diversity statement was insufficient. But the next article suggests that this isn’t the case:

Another article, from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, says that Haltigan’s statement was targeted not just at the UC System but at this particular campus (UCSC):

An excerpt:

Haltigan, who earned his doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of Miami, is currently an independent scientist and Pennsylvania resident and is being represented by Sacramento-based attorney Wilson Freeman with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

“We’ve been keyed into the issue of DEI statements for a couple of years,” said Freeman. “We think it’s an important issue propagating, what we see as, a sort of orthodoxy throughout the academy. We think it’s a threat to the First Amendment and academic freedom. We think it’s especially bad at the University of California.”

While searching for jobs earlier this year, Haltigan came upon an opening he felt he was qualified for at UCSC. After reviewing the university’s requirement to include a diversity, equity and inclusion statement with the job application, Haltigan wrote about it on an online blog with the viewpoint that DEI statement requirements for academic job applicants have, “contributed to creating a corrosive and hostile environment that is intolerant of viewpoint diversity and is anathema to high-quality research and teaching.”

If you read his diversity statement linked above, you’ll see it’s actually called “Against the use of DEI Statements in Faculty Job Searches”, and includes stuff like this:

However, I believe that the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in evaluating candidates for positions in higher education and academia are anathema to the ideals and principles of rigorous scholarship, and the sound practice of science and teaching—all of which public universities were created to uphold. DEI statements have become a political litmus test for political orientation and activism that has created an untenable situation in higher academia where diversity of thought—the bedrock of liberal education—is neither promoted nor tolerated. Public trust in our universities has been severely diminished as a consequence. As the noted American sociologist and sociocultural scholar Philip Rieff noted decades ago in relation to the vogue for politically engaged teaching and scholarship “inactivism is the ticket.”

But then the possibility of him being hurt in this process is nil, for Haltigan hasn’t yet applied for the job. Apparently he wants to, and wrote the statement above in anticipation that he would. But without palpable damages, can he really sue? Bolding below is mine.

The lawsuit states that Haltigan is “committed to colorblindness and viewpoint diversity. He objects to DEI orthodoxy and believes individuals should be considered based on individual merit.” and also that, “If Dr. Haltigan were to apply for this position, he would be compelled to alter his behavior and either remain silent about the many important social issues addressed by the DEI statement requirement or recant his views to conform to the dictates of the university administration.”

Freeman said that Haltigan, who has not yet applied for a job at UCSC, just wants to be able to without a DEI statement attached.

“All that he wants is to be considered with respect to his qualifications for the position,” said Freeman. “So, an ideal outcome would simply allow him to be considered on his merit. We think that the First Amendment academic freedom demands that outcome, and hopefully we’ll get that.”

Freeman and the legal team with the case are preparing to move for a preliminary injunction in the coming weeks and anticipate the university’s response. According to Scott Hernandez-Jason, assistant vice chancellor of communications and marketing at the university, because the defendants have not yet been served with legal papers, UCSC officials did not have a comment about the lawsuit.

I guess he doesn’t want the job, and perhaps is simply trying to gin up a test case.  Apparently the suit has been filed, but the defendants haven’t seen it yet. It’s all deeply weird.

B) The University of Wisconsin eliminates required DEI statements (from Wisconsin Public Radio):

I may have mentioned this before, but the UW system is getting rid of DEI statements because the Republican state legislature is refusing to fund the state universities if they require such statements:

The University of Wisconsin will no longer require diversity, equity and inclusion statements from job applicants, UW System President Jay Rothman announced Thursday.

The move comes after Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has threatened to cut state funding to Wisconsin’s public universities. Specifically, Vos has criticized DEI programming at UW as an attempt to “indoctrinate” students with taxpayer dollars.

It’s common for universities to ask potential faculty to submit statements describing how they’ve used their work to further diversity, equity and inclusion. Rothman did not provide an estimate of how many UW positions have previously required such statements, but described the number as “limited.”

“We remain absolutely committed to the principles of DEI,” Rothman told reporters Thursday. “But when some people believe mandatory diversity statement in employment applications are political litmus tests, then we are not being inclusive.”

That’s almost funny: the President of the UW system declaring that DEI statement are NOT INCLUSIVE.  Well, he has a point in that if you have ideological views opposed to the most “progreessive” version of those statements, and what you say doesn’t really bear on your qualifications as a faculty member, then yes, you’re excluding people with certain ideological views.

Rothman made another statement that sounds sensible (my emphasis):

Lawmakers are currently in the process of drafting the state’s next two-year spending plan, after the Legislature’s Republican-led finance committee scrapped almost all of the budget proposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. The new fiscal year takes effect July 1. In the meantime, the Republican-controlled Committee on Colleges and Universities has been holding a series of hearings on what conservatives charge is liberal bias and a lack of intellectual diversity on UW campuses.

Rothman used the final hearing Thursday to express support for academic freedom and free speech at UW. He also took the opportunity to announce to lawmakers the planned elimination of DEI statements.

UW officials have no plans to back budget cuts for positions or programming dedicated to DEI, Rothman told reporters Thursday. He also said the elimination of DEI statements would not preclude university officials from asking about the promotion of diversity and inclusion during job interviews. And, he said, that definition of diversity should be broad.

“It is time to expand what we think of inclusion to include issues around veterans, disability status, socioeconomic status, first generation students status, and viewpoint diversity, in addition to dealing with underrepresented groups in our society,” Rothman said. 

Yes, by all means foster diversity, which is, as the Bakke case ruled, an inherent good in a university. But ethnic diversity is only one type of diversity, and if diversity is an inherent good—as opposed to being done for reparations to minority groups—it must be so because it fosters viewpoint diversity, which is surely be the main form of diversity you seek in a student body.

At any rate, no school should require DEI statements. They are unconstitutional and, in the end, inimical to the functioning of a university.  This is why the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), while not opposed to efforts to increase diversity, strongly opposes any such efforts that impede academic freedom and freedom of speech. Those include DEI statements in hiring and promotion of academics.

A major problem in animal phylogeny seems to have been solved

May 21, 2023 • 9:30 am

As a new article in Nature (title below) notes, there are five major groups of animals that arose early in animal evolution and persist today: ctenophores (comb jellies), sponges (Porifera), placozoans (small, simple multicellular organisms), cnidarians (jellyfish, corals, sea anemones), and bilaterians (all other animals ranging rom molluscs to vertebrates). We have a pretty good notion of when their ancestors branched off from each other in evolution (this is in effect their relatedness, expressed in their phylogeny, or family tree), except for one question:  which group’s ancestors branched off first? That group would be called the “sister group” of all living animals. (It could also be called “the outgroup among all groups of animals”.)

DNA sequencing has shown that it’s either the ctenophores or the sponges (the most common candidate), but it’s been very difficult to decide between the two because there’s been so much time since the ancestors of modern sponges and ctenophores branched off from the other groups—700-800 million years—that too many DNA changes have accumulated to allow a firm DNA-based resolution. (DNA is now the best way to go to resolve these trees.) Every few years then, someone attempts another DNA-based phylogeny of animals, and the outgroup keeps changing between sponges and ctenophores.

Why is this an important question? Not just curiosity alone, for its resolution bears on understanding an important fact: like all other animals except sponges, ctenophores have nerves and muscles. This would seem to show that ctenophores are grouped with the other animals, while sponges branches off early, and then nerves and muscles evolved in the ancestor of all other animals.  This convinced many that sponges were the outgroup. If ctenophores, on the other hand, were the sister outgroup that branched off first, that would leave us with a puzzle: why are sponges the one exception, lacking nerves and muscles, among all other animals?  Here are the two possibilities for the outgroups, with “N&M” showing where nerves and muscles evolved. (I’ve put the dots and “N&M” stuff in myself.)

A.  Ctenophore outgroup: The ancestor of ALL animals did have nerves and muscles, but sponges lost them.

or

B.  Sponge outgroup: Nerves and muscles evolved after the ancestor of sponges had branched off from the ancestor of all other animals. (No loss of already-evolved characters required.)

The left side shows “A”, with the common ancestor of all animals having nerves and muscles, but then they were lost in the ancestor of living sponges. The right side shows possibility “B,” with the ancestor of all living animals (red dot) lacking nerves and muscles, which appeared later in the common ancestor of all living animals after that ancestor had branched off from the ancestor of sponges.

As you can see, “A” posits two evolutionary events: the evolution of nerves and muscles in the ancestor of all living animals, and then their loss in the sponge lineage, while “B” posits nerves and muscles evolving evolving just once: in the ancestor of all non-sponge animals.

However, if “A” is the case, you could posit another scenario in which ctenophores independently evolved nerves and muscles from other groups of animals, while the ancestor of all animals lacked them.

The diagram below shows a common ancestor of all animals (red dot) lacking nerves and muscles, and then they evolved twice independently: in ctenophores, and then also in the other groups that branched off later from the common ancestor with sponges. Thus, if A is correct and ctenophores are the outgroup, there are still two explanations for the nerve/muscle presence in animals: either they were in the ancestor of all living animals and then lost in the ancestor of sponges, or they didn’t occur in the animal ancestor but then evolved twice independently (N&M shown where the evolution happened). As you can see, if the red-dot ancestor lacked nerves and muscles, but all modern animals save sponges have them, AND ctenophores were the sister group, then nerves and muscles must have evolved twice OR (as you see above), all early animals had them but the ancestor of sponges lost them. So the left side of the diagram above OR the diagram below show the two evolutionary possibilities for where muscles and nerves occur.

This is why resolving the outgroup is important: it leads to different hypotheses about how evolution worked. Again, the alternatives are A with the ctenophore outgroup, in which cases nerves and muscles were either lost in sponges or evolved twice independently; or B, with the sponge outgroup, in which case nerves and muscles evolved just once—in the common ancestor of all other animals.  Because “B” seems more parsimonious to many, that has been the consensus scenario.

But now the consensus seems wrong: new data show pretty convincingly that ctenophores do appear to be the outgroup, and sponges are more closely related to all other living animals than are ctenophores.  You can read about this by clicking on the screenshot below, or going to the pdf here (reference at bottom).

 

The analysis was very clever. Instead of just looking at large amounts of DNA in the animals, they looked at the order of DNA sequences (genes) on the chromosomes.  Over the last 800 million years, that DNA has been shuffled around as chromosome fuse or bits of chromosomes come loose and stick to other chromosomes (translocations).  In either case, chunks of DNA then get shuffled around among chromosomes and on a given chromosome by inversions.

But this gives us a way to see which groups have undergone unique fusion/translocations and shuffling events, for once this takes place in a common ancestor, it is unlikely to be undone by a reversal of all the processes that lead to genes being ordered as they are now.  Thus, if you see a group of animals that share a common gene order different from that of another lineage, you can be pretty sure that that group is more closely related to each other than to that other lineage.

And that’s what the authors did: they not only sequenced or took sequences from entire genomes of all the animal lineages above (including two species of ctenophores), but ordered genes along chromosomes. (This isn’t hard to do: you get the DNA as a sequence, and the DNA sequence on one chromosome will not run on to the DNA sequence on another chromosome.)  They not only looked at all animal lineages, but also single-celled groups that are less closely related to animals, like amoebas and choanoflagellates (these aren’t considered “animals” but whose ancestors are considered outgroups to all living animals).

The results were pretty unequivocal: they found several chunks of DNA that were shared by the single-celled relatives and ctenophores, but also four ordered chunks of genes that were shared by all living multicellular animals except for ctenophores.  That is, sponges shared gene chunks with vertebrates, cnidarians, and placozoans, but those chunks were in completely different places in the ctenophores.

The conclusion: the chunks found their shared locations in modern animals after they had already branched off from the ancestor of modern ctenophores. Ctenophores are thus the outgroup, and we’re less closely related to them than to sponges. The scenario in A above is the correct one.  (The three groups at the top of the diagram below are single-celled non-animal organisms that are distantly related to animals.) As you see, the ctenophores branched off from all other living animals before any other animal group, making them less closely related to modern animals than are sponges.

Now this analysis may be wrong, but given the irreversibility of moving gene chunks around repeatedly, shared gene chunks on chromosomes almost certainly means shared ancestry. I’m pretty confident, then, that this paper has resolved the long-standing controversy about the “outgroup” of all animals.

But this leaves us, of course, with two questions.  Did the ancestor of all living animals have muscles and nerves, and sponges simply lost them, or did nerves and muscles evolve twice independently?

Each of these comes with another puzzle. The first one is this: why did sponges have complex and highly evolved set of features to sense the environment and move about, but then lost it?  The second one is even more puzzling: how could such complex features evolve twice independently?

UPDATE: I forgot about this but was reminded. Another trait shared by ctenophores and all other animals save sponges is the gut:  a digestive channel formed by “gastrulation”—invagination of the embryo.  Thus we have to account for the disappearance of three features in sponges or the independent evolution of guts, nerves, AND muscles.

While we know that the best information we have is scenario “A” above, we don’t know whether sponges lost their gear or that gear evolved twice independently.  The authors of the paper don’t discuss this, but in a NYT article on the piece by Carl Zimmer, he finds a hint that nerves and muscles may have evolved independently in ctenophores and in all other animals that have them:

Instead, researchers are looking now to comb jellies to see how similar and different their nervous systems are from those of other animals. Recently, Maike Kittelmann, a cell biologist at Oxford Brookes University, and her colleagues froze comb jelly larvae so that they could get a microscopic look at their nervous system. What they saw left them baffled.

Throughout the animal kingdom, neurons are typically separated from one another by tiny gaps called synapses. They can communicate across the gap by releasing chemicals.

But when Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues started to inspect the comb jelly neurons, they struggled to find a synapse between the neurons. “At that point, we were like, ‘This is curious,’” she said.

In the end, they failed to find any synapses between them. Instead, the comb jelly nervous system forms one continuous web.

When Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues reported their findings last month, they speculated yet another possibility for the origin of animals. Comb jellies may have evolved their own weird nervous system independently of other animals, using some of the same building blocks.

Dr. Kittelmann and her colleagues are now inspecting other species of comb jellies to see if that idea holds up. But they won’t be surprised to be surprised again. “You have to assume nothing,” she said.

That is, there are differences between the nerves in ctenophores and in all other nerve-bearing animals: the former appear to lack synapses. This suggests that nerves could have evolved independently, and taken two routes, one route lacking a gap (the synapse) between the nerves.  As for the muscles, neither the paper nor Zimmer deals with whether there’s some fundamental differences between how muscles are structured or how they work between ctenophores on the one hand and all other muscle-bearing animals on the other.

As usual, we’ve probably settled one evolutionary question but it’s raised several others. People now will be devoting more attention to nerves and muscles in animals.

As one of my friends, who teaches introductory biology in a major university, said, “Well, I guess I’ll have to revise my lecture notes. For years I’ve been telling students that while the outgroup of all animals isn’t known for sure, it is most likely the sponges.”

Here’s a ctenophore shown on Wikipedia. They are really cool animals, and if you want to see a bunch of them, go to the Monterey Aquarium in California, where they have a mesmerizing display:

 

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Readers’ wildlife photos

May 21, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today is Sunday, which is Themed Bird Photos by John Avise Day. Today we celebrate corvids; John’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Crows and Ravens

American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are two widespread and well-known North American members of the family Corvidae.  Because both species are medium-sized and all black in plumage, they can be somewhat difficult to distinguish from one another.

But the Raven is larger-bodied, scruffier around the head and neck, and has a wedge-shaped rather than squared-off tail (most evident in flight).  The two species also differ in their vocalizations, with the Crow issuing clean “Cah Cahs” while the Raven issues more throaty “Kraaahs or Brrrocks”.

This week’s photos, all taken in Southern California or Wyoming, compare some different views of these two close cousins.  Crows and Ravens may not be the most beautiful of birds, butthey certainly seem to be among the most intelligent.

American Crow:

Another American Crow:

American Crow in flight:

American Crow holding a feather:

Yet another American Crow:

Flock of American Crows coming in to roost:

Common Raven:

Another Common Raven:

Common Raven in flight:

Another Common Raven in flight:

Common Raven head portrait:

Mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):

Crooning pair of Common Ravens:

Fight silhouettes of a Common Raven chasing an American Crow:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 21, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greetings on the Sabbath, the onemade for Christian cats: it’s Sunday, May 21, 2023, and National Strawberries and Cream Day. Try this recipe: roasted strawberries with crème fraîche  and flaky sea salt (you can use sour cream):

It’s also International Tea Day, National Waiters and Waitresses Day, Rapture Party Day, Stepmother’s Day (but which stepmother?), World Baking Day, Saint Helena Day, celebrating the discovery of Saint Helena in 1502, and World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I am happy about this news: President Biden, who had refused to hand over sophisticated F-16 American-made fighter jets to Ukraine, has changed his mind, and now will allow Ukrainian pilots to train in the jets. Zelensky has been asking for these planes for months.

Now Mr. Biden, who in February rejected F-16 fighter jets as unnecessary, met in Hiroshima on Friday with leaders of other major democracies and told them that he would allow Ukrainian pilots to be trained on the American-made warplanes. He added that in a few months, the allies would figure out how to begin delivering modern Western fighters to a Ukrainian force struggling to keep an aging, dwindling fleet of pieced-together, Soviet-made fighters in the air.

It all raises the question: Are there any conventional weapons in the American or NATO arsenals that the president would not, eventually, provide to Ukraine?

Washington’s pattern of saying no before saying yes has repeated itself enough times over the past 15 months that Ukrainian officials say they now know to ignore the first answer and keep pressing. But White House officials say the shifting positions reflect not indecision, but changing circumstances — and changing assumptions about the risks involved.

“When it comes to the question of escalation, of course, the United States government is a learning organism,” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said on Saturday morning in Hiroshima. “This conflict has been dynamic. It has unfolded over time.” So, he said, Mr. Biden’s decisions have kept up with Ukraine’s changing needs.

In the weeks after the invasion, the teetering Ukrainian government needed Stinger missiles and other anti-tank systems. When the war shifted to the south and the east of the country, with big open plains, they needed artillery and air defenses — and 155-millimeter howitzer shells. And while Mr. Biden does not believe fighter jets will play an important role in the conflict for a while, providing them is part of thinking about how to defend Ukraine for the long term — after the current phase of the war is over.

Well, I understood it would take at leaast a year, and probably more, to train Ukrainian pilots in the F-16s. Let’s hope the planes are still needed when the pilots are ready to fly. But it’s too late for the city of Bakhmut, which, Zelensky claims, has been completely destroyed, even as he argues that it’s not completely in the hands of the Russians.

*Speaking of the planes, the Russians don’t like Biden’s announcement at all, and have made threats about Biden’s gesture.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister has warned Western countries of “enormous risks” if Ukraine is provided with F-16 fighter jets, Russian state media TASS reported Saturday.

The comments come after US President Joe Biden gave his backing for Ukrainian pilots to be trained to fly F-16s, reversing his previous position.

F-16s are considered high performance weapon systems with a range of 500 miles (860 kilometers), and would be an upgrade to the aircraft currently in Ukraine’s fleet.

Responding to the move, Alexander Grushko said: “We see that the Western countries are still adhering to the escalation scenario.

“It involves enormous risks for themselves. In any case, this will be taken into account in all our plans, and we have all the necessary means to achieve the set goals.”

*The issue on which Republicans are most vulnerable is, of course, abortion. Despite a hefty majority of Americans agreeing with the stipulations of the now-overturned Roe v. Wade decision, Republicans have rushed to get abortions banned nearly completely. Now they’re starting to realize that they made a mistake.

Immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican lawmakers were quick to embrace so-called “trigger” bans designed to take effect as soon as the decision was released, while others rushed to pass additional restrictions that would halt the procedure in their states, sometimes backing proposals that did not include exceptions for rape or incest.

Now, almost a year later, lawmakers in some Republican-led states have started coalescing behind bans that allow most abortions to continue — a reaction, some Republicans say, to the sustained political backlash to abortion restrictions that has been mounting since the landmark decision in June.

While the 12-week bans have so far only passed in two states — North Carolina and Nebraska — the proposal has also gained traction with some national antiabortion groups who say they’re supportive of restricting abortions as far as a state can, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has also been pushing for, at minimum, national limits on abortion at 15 weeks.

But the approach has drawn sharp criticism from others in the antiabortion movement, who argue the 12 or 15 week bans don’t do enough to stop what they see as widespread murder, allowing more than 90 percent of abortions to continue. Some Republican lawmakers and antiabortion advocates remain adamant that the only path forward is to aim to eradicate abortion completely nationwide.

How voters respond to these new bans could impact how abortion plays out as an issue in the 2024 presidential election. With little polling on the 12 week proposals, it’s unclear whether voters will buy Republican arguments that these kinds of bans are a “main

Twelve weeks is three months: one trimester. And abortions during that period were legal under Roe v Wade. I favor a standard even laxer than Roe, but at least 12 weeks is twice as long as the period beyond which abortion is banned in “fetal heartbeat” states.

*Martin Amis, novelist and bet buddy of Christopher Hitchens, died at the young age (my age!) of 73. And I bet he smoked, because he sure drank and died of the same disease that killed Hitch:

Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla. He was 73.

His wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer — the same disease that killed his close friend and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens in 2011.

Mr. Amis published 15 novels, a well-regarded memoir (“Experience,” in 2000), works of nonfiction, and collections of essays and short stories. In his later work he investigated Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror and the legacy of the Holocaust.

He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) — which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work.

. . . Mr. Amis’s literary heroes — he called them his “Twin Peaks” — were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, and critics located in his work both Nabokov’s gift for wordplay and gamesmanship and Bellow’s exuberance and brio.

I just remembered that I have an autographed novel by Amis fis, though I can’t remember where I got it. I haven’t read it, either.

I have a collection of books autographed by luminaries I’ve met over the years, and looking through them to find the Amis novel, I once again encountered my first edition of The Double Helix by Jim Watson. I found it for only nine bucks in a dusty bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, and immediately snapped it up. They didn’t know what they had!  Later, when I chatted with Watson, I asked him to autograph it, and he did so, adding my name. Looking online, I now see that this book, autographed and in good condition with the original dustcover, is worth between five and eight thousand bucks!  When I die it will be thrown out, so I should either sell it or donate it to a library. But what library cares about whether a donated book is autographed? But I was happy I recognized the first edition, and it’s in near-pristine condition.

*From Jez: An article in the Guardian describes how a couple in Essex sued after 18 water buffaloes escaped from a nearby farm, rampaged through their garden, and eight of them fell into the swimming pool. The damage was extensive.

An Essex couple have spent 10 months seeking compensation after 18 escaped water buffaloes stampeded through their garden, with eight of them taking a morning dip in their new swimming pool.

Andy and Lynette Smith, who are retired, say that their garden and pool were ruined after the animals, which weigh about 600kg each, got out of a rare breeds farm and on to their property, causing more than £25,000 worth of damage.

Eight of them ended up falling into the £70,000 pool, triggering a stampede that wrecked fencing and flower beds. The animals were rescued unharmed by the farmer.

The incident happened when an electric fence failed last July, allowing the herd to breach a wooden fence and hedge separating their field from the Smiths’ garden.

“When my wife went to make the morning tea, she glanced out of the kitchen window and saw eight buffaloes in the pool,” said Andy Smith. “She called 999 and was told the fire brigade don’t accept hoax calls. It took some persuading to get them to take us seriously. When they arrived, one of the buffaloes, spooked by their hi-vis jackets, headed straight at them.”

“Buffaloes are top-heavy and the porcelain tiles round the pool were slippery so they lost their grip and once they were in they couldn’t get out again,” said Smith. “The previous afternoon, we had had hosted a pool party for our young grandchildren and their friends. If the invasion had happened hours earlier, it could have been very serious.”

The farm’s insurer, NFU Mutual, accepted liability, but failed to agree a settlement for nearly a year.

“This pool was our retirement luxury bought when I sold the business, which I’d spent years building up. It was earned by a lot of sweat and toil, but after the buffaloes’ swim it was leaking 75 gallons a day and was unusable.”

However, after being contacted by the Guardian, the insurer eventually agreed to cover the full £25,000 repair bill.

NFU Mutual sucks!  They wouldn’t even pay the damages until after the Guardian contacted them. Buffaloes creating havoc!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is educating Andrzej in feline ornithology:

Hili: Try to look at this bird from a different perspective.
A: What perspective?
Hili: A feline one.
In Polish:
Hili: Spróbuj spojrzeć na tego ptaka z innej perspektywy.
Ja: Z jakiej?
Hili: Z kociej perspektywy.

. . . and a picture of the affectionate Szaron. I used to cuddle him on this couch:

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From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Beth:

From Masih. The execution of three protestors in Iran has triggered more demonstrations:

From Malcolm, who would like one of these tables. So would I, but they aren’t going to be cheap!

From gravelinspector. The “Harlem Hellfighters” are new to me (read the whole tweet):

From Barry: a tapir smiles for the camera:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a whole family exterminated:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who is now back in Manchester, just in time to see Man City throw it all away (or so he says).  The first one he’s captioned as “Lucky fish, cross eagle”:

This is the thought we both have when we see something like this. Matthew sez: ” “And all this is somewhere in their tiny heads, in intricate neural and chemical networks, and ultimately in their genes! Amazing!”

And a very pampered kitty!: