Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as Supreme Court Justice, but narrowly

April 7, 2022 • 2:45 pm

This headline is just up in the NYT, reflecting Jackson’s approval by the Senate to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The good news is that a well qualified liberal has been appointed to a hopelessly benighted and conservative Court. Click to read: 

The bad news: the vote was 53-47. with only 3 Republican Senators breaking ranks to vote “yes” (Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah). Kudos to them.

Historically, if a President’s nominee was well qualified, both sides would largely vote “yes”.  There are only two reasons why so many Republicans would oppose Jackson. The first is because they are sworn to oppose anything Biden wants. You know the second, and I don’t want to believe it or to go there.

Well, at least we won one. The Republican cross-examination of Jackson, which I watched for several hours in Antarctica, was reprehensible.

Word and phrases I despise

April 7, 2022 • 1:45 pm

I believe all of these words or phrases are new, but since I don’t keep track I can’t be positive. At any rate, here are the latest four entries in my list of words and phrases I cannot stand. I offer these, of course, expecting readers to respond with their own linguistic bêtes noires.  I will use examples from the HuffPost when I find them, as that’s the epicenter of despiséd words and phrases.

1.) “Perfect storm“.  This comes from a “nor’easter” turned hurricane off New England in 1991; it killed 13 and caused millions of dollars in damage. The Perfect Storm resulted from a concatenation of unusual meteorological conditions, and now is used by chowderheads to mean “a bad situation caused by the co-occurrence of several contributing factors.” It’s perhaps better known as the title of a 2000 movie about the storm.

There are two problems here. The first is that the phrase is shopworn, a cliché that is no longer especially cute or especially evocative. Second, it’s often used just to mean “concatenation”, even of good things, as in this HuffPost article (click all screenshots to read):

When someone uses this phrase, I consider them grammatically lazy. Because it can mean either good or bad stuff, it’s lost its original meaning. And there are simpler and less cutesy phrases that can substitute, like “bad outcome of many causes”  As Orwell said, avoid shopworn phrases.

2.) “Deep dive.” Doesn’t this sound erudite and official? Well, guess what, there’s nothing it says that the phrase “close look” or “closer look” doesn’t say as well. Those who use it”deep dive” are grammatical sheep, employing the phrase because everybody else is. Let’s take a “deep dive into empathy,” meaning “discussing empathy in detail”:

Don’t brand yourself a linguistic ovid by emitting this odious phrase.

3.) “Sammie” “or “sammy” for “sandwich”. This is one of those attempts to be cute that fails badly. In fact, used in the singular, you save no syllables by saying “sammie” for “sandwich.” Further, when I hear the word, I think of Jews, often nicknamed “Sammy” if their real name is Samuel. (I had an uncle Sammy.)

Here’s a comestible that’s been doubly debased by that name:

There are many people who don’t like their own names shortened this way. Matthew Cobb goes by “Matthew”, not “Matt” or “Matty”; Richard Dawkins is “Richard,” not “Dick.” We respect their choices. Please respect the tasty sandwich by not calling it a “sammie”! This is one of those words that I may even correct if I hear someone say it. For example, if someone says to me, “Would you like a sammie?”, I may reply politely, feigning ignorance, “Do you mean a sandwich?”

4.) “Firestorm”, meaning “big kerfuffle” or “brouhaha”.  And we’re very close to #1 again, because many of the benighted use “firestorm” in the same way they’d use “perfect storm”.

In fact, a firestorm is what happens when fire and wind meet in a particularly dangerous conflagration. If it’s just a ruckus or kerfuffle or controversy, call it that. Don’t be like this HuffPost slacker, reaching for the nearest metaphor to describe Hillary’s emails:

Again, I’m with Orwell, who opposed stale metaphors, and this one has all the appeal of a week-old slice of Wonder Bread left out on the counter. Best to make up your own metaphors, if possible, and if not, well then avoid trying to be au courant.

Your turn. And get off my lawn!

University of Illinois now requires diversity statements for tenure and promotion

April 7, 2022 • 11:45 am

I’m not sure whether this new requirement is legal, since the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the flagship campus of a state (governmental school), but that University is now, according to Inside Higher Education (IHE), beginning to require diversity statements for all faculty members who want to be considered for tenure or promotion (and who doesn’t?) The statements are optional now, but in two years will be mandatory.

This requirement, detailed in the article below seems to me inappropriate on several counts:

a. It changes the job of professors in a way to make them engage in social engineering as well as of education. While universities should certainly foster a welcome climate for minorities and not discriminate against them, and (in my view) can engage in limited forms of affirmative action, it should not enlarge the job of the faculty to comport with certain social goals that the university deems desirable.

b. It is a form of compulsory speech or viewpoint discrimination, since if you don’t adhere to a prescribed form of social engineering involving minorities, your prospects will suffer and your job will be endangered. When you take a job at a university, and presumably at the U of I, you have not signed on to doing this work.

c. There are other forms of nonacademic work that could be promoted in this way, but are not. For example, you might be forced to submit “poverty alleviation statements” showing what you’ve done to help the poor, or “outreach statements”, that demonstrate how you’ve tried to educate society about your academic work, or any number of statements documenting how you’ve tried to do nonacademic things to achieve social goals the university deems “desirable”.  You could, for example, teach illiterate adults to read. But people who do this other work do it without the promise of reward, or of any expectation of reward. I give any number of free talks on evolution to nonacademic groups, high schools and so on, and often do it for free. I do that because I love it (it’s fun!(), because I do want to educate people about how great evolution is, and because I do feel an obligation of payback since the public has funded my research. But I expect no professional reward for this, nor do I feel that this should be required.

d. Although racial equality is both desirable and essential, the job of engineering that falls to the government, and even though universities are organs of the government, their job is education. If university professors were forced to engage in forms of social engineering that the government favors, the purpose of a university would not only be diluted, but corrupted. Imagine if professors had to submit statements, under a Republican administration, documenting how they had not promoted critical race theory. Academic freedom requires that professors have the freedom to work on what they want, and if they’re rewarded, it should be for fulfilling the traditional academic duties of teaching, research, and administration (committee work). They should not be rewarded for fulfilling “diversity goals”, nor penalized for not fulfilling them. Remember, just saying in your diversity statement that “I have treated all students equally and engaged in no discrimination” is deemed completely insufficient as a diversity statement. Saying that will, in fact, take you out of the running if you apply for a faculty job at the University of California.

And, as I implied in (b) above, perhaps this kind of practice is illegal as a form of government-compelled speech. I am not sure because this kind of DEI statement is already required when applying for jobs in many places, as in the state universities of California. But even if it’s legal, it’s not appropriate for a university. This was the viewpoint of Stanley Fish’s book Save the World on Your Own Time.  The Amazon blurb summarizes his thesis, with which I agree:

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?

In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, oragents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish suggests that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that the professor so chooses. Fish insists that a professor’s only obligation is “to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal.”

If you are compelled to do DEI activities, this will perforce bring political views into your academic work and change the nature of your job.

Click to read the IHE piece:

The interesting (but hardly novel) aspect of the U of I’s promoting this policy is that it avoids the elephant in the room: these policies are in place to increase “equity”—to equalize the proportion of different ethnic or minority groups in society with the proportion existing among the professioriate. They are largely about that slippery social construct of race, but also include gender and LGBTA groups (see below). To quote from the article:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will soon require all faculty members to submit a diversity statement to be considered for tenure or promotion.

Andreas C. Cangellaris, UIUC’s provost, announced the change this week, saying that in order to meet the goals of its current strategic plan, the university must “catalyze innovation and discovery, find novel and proactive ways to educate students from all walks of life, and develop ever-deeper connections with the public we serve.”

All of that requires that UIUC “recognize and support a wider range of contributions to the excellence of our institution,” Cangellaris added.

Note the implication that the university should serve “the public” when it should do that only by “serving the students”, not by striving for particular social goals.

Note as well the euphemism “students from all walks of life”. But surely if your DEI statement is about trying to increase the number of underrepresented conservatives or Republicans in your university, you would probably be demoted (just kidding, but you’d gain no promotion or tenure for that). There’s more:

Numerous institutions or specific departments now require faculty job applicants to submit a diversity statement. Others encourage professors to include their diversity, equity and inclusion work in their tenure and promotion portfolios. Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis even approved a new DEI-related track to tenure and promotion last year. But few institutions of UIUC’s size and research profile have considered requiring diversity statements—and, effectively, DEI work—from all professors who hope to be tenured or promoted.

William Bernhard, executive vice provost for academic affairs, said UIUC began working to update its tenure and promotion policy more than two years ago, to better align it with the strategic plan. The policy update also carves out a clear place for DEI contributions in the tenure and promotion process, he said, as individual faculty members or departments had long been “squeezing” this work into the service criterion of their faculty reviews.

But “service” for an academic has always meant one thing: service to the University, usually by serving on committees or bodies of governance. It has never meant striving to meet socially desirable goals.

Here’s how the U of I’s statement works (it’s voluntary through 2024-2025 academic year, and will be mandatory after that):

The provost’s office describes the new DEI requirement as a one-page-maximum personal statement detailing “specific individual and/or collaborative activities aimed at supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as access.” Candidates should “include a discussion of the context, importance, and impact of their contributions along with their future plans for contributions. The candidate may choose to organize the statement by topic, activity, domain (e.g., research, teaching, and service), or in another manner.”

The policy says that the departments’ evaluations of teaching, service and research and future potential “must, where appropriate, consider the candidate’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activities and their impact.”

Note that neither race or gender is mentioned here, and there is simply NO definition of what “diversity, equity, inclusion, and access” actually mean. Shouldn’t they specify what they mean by these terms to help candidates forge their statements? (They do give examples below.)

Then they pretend that by adding these statements, and making them mandatory, they’re not really “changing one’s research focus.” But the statement below by Bernhard is cant, pure and simple:

Bernhard said this adjustment period is designed to give all faculty members time to think about how DEI fits into their work.

“Think” my tuchas!  The period is to get faculty off their tushies and start doing the kind of DEI that the University wants (and everyone knows what they want.) My emphasis below:

“There are many different ways to make contributions, and you can make contributions in research or teaching or service. And the centrality of those contributions is going to vary enormously,” he said. “For some candidates whose research centers on these topics, it’s going to be very important and very central to their case. For others, maybe it’s not going to be as central, but there are still things that they can do. Maybe it’s changing when the lab group meets to be at a more family-friendly time. That’s a contribution.”

Bernhard continued, “We really want to underscore we’re not expecting anyone to change their research focus to say that they’ve done a DEI activity. Research is research and you’re guided by your disciplinary challenges and your interests and funding availability and all of those things.”

This is a lie. Of course they expect people to either start doing DEI activities or, if they don’t, lie about it and pretend that they do.  In fact, they give a list of activities that they consider will help you get promotion and tenure.
  • A labor and employment relations professor establishes a campuswide gender-in-higher-education research initiative
  • A medical school professor attends a workshop on culturally responsive approaches to recruit groups underrepresented in medical research
  • A history professor creates a student advisory panel to provide input into the representation of diverse perspectives in courses departmentwide
  • A media professor includes a module in their course on the history of media coverage of issues that impact LGBTQ+ communities in the Midwest
  • A chemistry professor organizes seminars, workshops or informal discussions about supporting the growing number of nontraditional students who are enrolling in undergraduate courses in the department

These are all expectations that you will change your research or teaching focus to favor underrepresented minorities. And hardly any of these courses or activities would be undertaken unless the university were putting its students under the gun.

The whole point of this—to get faculty to engage in academic or nonacademic activities that conform to the University’s social-justice “values”—is summarized in Bernhard’s statement:

. . . Burbules said this is “going to look different for different people. It’ll be less central for some people than for others. But the intention here—the headline is—everybody is expected to contribute to this campus value in some way.”

I presume the campus value is “achieving equity”. But I don’t, and never have, seen that as part of my academic job.  Yes, I’ve engaged in charitable activities that serve underrepresented groups but I’m not going to stoop to describe them because it’s a form of virtue flaunting. And I would not want to penalize a mathematics professor because he’s not engaged in activities to recruit more “nontraditional” students.  While I believe racial and sexual equality (of opportunity) is a valuable social goal, it’s one that should be in the government’s hands, not among the criteria for academic excellence. And when the government does it, it should start with a big overhauling of social policy, including with social and legal changes beginning at birth. But for the rest, while I applaud those professors who do DEI work on their own volition, I don’t denigrate those who choose to concentrate on more academic ventures.

Under no circumstances should DEI statements be required for hiring, promoting, or tenuring professors. As Stanley Fish said, “save the world on your own time.”

h/t: Larry

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 7, 2022 • 9:15 am

We’re going to ease back into the Reader’s Wildlife Photos feature, though it might not be daily—at least for a while.  But it’s appropriate that our first contributor in a month is one of our most diligent regulars, Mark Sturtevant. Mark’s captions are indented (links are also his), and be sure to click on the photos to enlarge them.

Here are caterpillars that were photographed during July last summer.

First up are inchworms from the family Geometridae. Most are twig mimics as larvae, and that can make them hard to identify. I have no idea what the little green one is in the first picture, and not even BugGuide could identify it.

The next one should be pretty easy. This remarkable twig mimic is the larva of the oak beauty (Phaeoura quernaria). I find several of these each summer around our crabapple tree, which is one of its many host plants.

Another one that I see a lot is found on goldenrod. This is the larva of the common grey (Anavitrinella pampinaria).

The very colorful inchworm shown next was definitely new to me. The kind folks at BugGuide were able to identify it, though. This is Lycia ursaria, aka the stout spanworm moth. The adults of this species are pretty robust in form.

Next is the odd but rather beautiful funerary dagger moth caterpillar (Acronicta funeralis). They are described as being seldom seen, although I did find one last season too. Youngsters are bird dropping mimics, and they often sit in this curled up position to enhance that special look of a glob of bird poo. But mature ones like this continue the pose even though the effect is now quite lost.

Here is a cluster of very young promethea moth caterpillars (Callosamia promethea). There were an equal number of empty eggshells nearby on the same leaf, so these had only recently emerged. They stick together like this while young, but as they mature they will gradually disperse. Promethea moths are in the giant silk moth family Saturniidae. If these caterpillars survive, they will steadily transform into lovely blue-green caterpillars the size of your thumb, and the adult moths will look like smaller versions of our giant cecropia moth. You can see all of this in the link above.

Next are two examples of a caterpillar that is a dead leaf mimic. They are the larvae of black-blotched schizura, Oedemasia leptinoides. That second one looks like it’s about ready to pupate.

Caterpillars of the Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) are shown next. When at rest, they commonly fashion a silk pad to sit on. Their false eye spots are thought to make them resemble the head of a green tree snake. When disturbed, they will evert a forked osmeterium, which both resembles a forked tongue but it also produces a repellant aromatic smell.

Finally, the insects shown in the last two pictures are yellow-necked caterpillars (Datana ministra). In certain parks, the young are commonly seen in hefty masses like this on walnut trees. This mass, which was equally distributed on both sides of the leaves, must have weighed about a pound. As they mature, they will disperse a bit more in the trees, but they remain quite gregarious so if one is seen, there will be several more nearby. The last picture is showing a mature caterpillar in its defensive posture, and it’s one of my favorite caterpillar pictures.

Thank you for looking!

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 7, 2022 • 7:45 am

Welcome to a chilly Thursday: April 7, 2022. It’s National Beer Day. And Wikipedia gives us the annual beer consumption per year (I don’t know if they counted just adults or everyone, but I don’t think it matters much for the ranking. The Czechs take top billing, while the U.S. is number 20. The article lists 61 countries, with Indonesia weighing in at a pathetic consumption of 0.7 liters of beer per person per year. I could drink the average Lithuanian’s yearly consumption of beer during one dinner! But oy, those Czechs:  140 liters per person per year; that’s nearly twice the annual consumption of the US and 1.4 times the consumption of Germany.

Stuff that happened on April 7 includes (I’m truncating this section from now on as it’s time-consuming):

  • 451 – Attila the Hun sacks the town of Metz and attacks other cities in Gaul.
  • 1141 – Empress Matilda becomes the first female ruler of England, adopting the title ‘Lady of the English’.
  • 1724 – Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion, BWV 245, at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
  • 1805 – German composer Ludwig van Beethoven premieres his Third Symphony, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna.

Two great pieces of music premiered on this day. Here’s a portrait of Beethoven painted in 1820 when he was still alive, so this is surely what he looked like:

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820
  • 1922 – Teapot Dome scandal: United States Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leases federal petroleum reserves to private oil companies on excessively generous terms.
  • 1940 – Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp.

Here it is (it doesn’t show the M.G.s):

  • 1943 – The Holocaust in Ukraine: In Terebovlia, Germans order 1,100 Jews to undress and march through the city to the nearby village of Plebanivka, where they are shot and buried in ditches.

The Ukraine (and the Jews) don’t get a break. Out of thousands of Jews who lived in that town before the war, only 50-60 survived.

  • 1955 – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health.
  • 1968 – Two-time Formula One British champion Jim Clark dies in an accident during a Formula Two race in Hockenheim.

Here’s a short bio of one of the greatest drivers of all time, and, by all accounts, a truly nice human being. Many consider him the best racing driver of all time.

For an excellent movie about this massacre, see the 2004 movie “Hotel Rwanda“.  It’s a very, very good film.  Over half a million people were killed in a bit more than three months. Here’s the trailer.

  • 2020 – COVID-19 pandemic: China ends its lockdown in Wuhan.
  • 2020 – COVID-19 pandemic: Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly resigns for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic on USS Theodore Roosevelt and the dismissal of Brett Crozier.
  • 2021 – COVID-19 pandemic: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announces that the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant has become the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States.

Notables born on this day include:

Here’s a portrait though he’s not one of my favorite poets:

  • 1897 – Walter Winchell, American journalist and radio host (d. 1972)
  • 1915 – Billie Holiday, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 1959)

Greatest jazz singer ever, male or female. Here she is wearing her customary gardenia. She died at only 44

CIRCA 1939: Jazz singer Billie Holiday poses for a portrait in circa 1939 with a flower in her hair. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
  • 1929 – Joe Gallo, American gangster (d. 1972)
  • 1931 – Daniel Ellsberg, American activist and author
  • 1954 – Jackie Chan, Hong Kong martial artist, actor, stuntman, director, producer, and screenwriter.

I’ve never seen a Jackie Chan movie, but here are 6 minutes of highlight fight scenes:

Those who kicked the bucket on April 7 include:

  • 1614 – El Greco, Greek-Spanish painter and sculptor (b. 1541)

El Greco painted elongated figures. Some historians have attributed this to a case of astigmatism, asserting that he painted the way he actually saw people.  Explain in the comments why this can’t possibly be true:

Barnum (below) is often credited with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but there’s no record that he ever said that.

  • 1947 – Henry Ford, American engineer and businessman, founded the Ford Motor Company (b. 1863)
  • 1968 – Edwin Baker, Canadian co-founder of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) (b. 1893)
  • 1968 – Jim Clark, Scottish race car driver (b. 1936)
  • 1972 – Joe Gallo, American gangster (b. 1929)
  • 2020 – John Prine, American country folk singer-songwriter (b. 1946)

I was never a big fan of Prine, though many were. In fact, this is the only song he wrote that I really like:

I don’t have time to reprise the news reports today, but presumably you can see the major news for yourself. Here’s the NYT headlines (click to read):

And the NYT’s headlines:

As Ukrainian leaders stepped up their demands on Western allies to provide further support, NATO foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Thursday to discuss expanding military aid to Ukraine, and the European Union was considering yet another round of sanctions on Russia, including a possible ban on Russian coal.

Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, who was also in Brussels, said his agenda for the NATO meeting contained only three items: “Weapons, weapons and weapons.”

Ukraine has said that more military supplies from Western countries are needed to save lives and defeat Russian forces, which have pulled back from most of northern Ukraine but are believed to be refocusing for a fuller offensive against the east and south. But the NATO allies’ discussions were expected to focus on how to help Ukraine without entangling the alliance in direct combat with Russian forces.

Meanwhile, Mariupol still has not been evacuated by the Red Cross despite repeated Russian promises that a humanitarian convey would be let through

*The NYT has video footage of an armored Russian vehicle shooting at an unarmed bicyclist in Bucha, Ukraine. Although you can’t tell from the video what happened to the cyclist. Evidence collected after the fact strongly suggested he was killed. It’s not just Putin who should face war-crimes charges, unless these soldiers argue that they “were just following orders.”

*To match that, the Russians are using a new type of land mine in Ukraine that is brutal. The POM-3 mines are launched by rockets, and fall to earth. You don’t have to step on them to trigger them: a human walking nearby can detoate the mine, which can throw lethal fragments up to 50 feet away. This is not only barbaric, but will make the job of clearing unexploded mines unbelievably harder.

*The Washington Post reports that both of Putin’s adult daughters, Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, are to be sanctioned as well.  What’s not clear is whether they are his daughters, as nobody at the Kremlin, including Putin, has admitted that they’re his offspring.  Nor have they. But the U.S. suspects that some of Putin’s wealth is hidden among his relatives, like these two daughters. An excerpt:

Identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as Putin’s children, both women appear to work with and benefit from the Russian state apparatus. According to the department, Tikhonova is a tech executive whose work supports the Russian government and the country’s defense industry, and Vorontsova leads state-funded genetics research programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin and are personally overseen by Putin.

Here is a photo and caption of the two from the Indian Express:

(From Indian Express): Russian President Vladimir Putin has two children, Maria and Katerina, from his marriage to Lyudmila Putina, a former Aeroflot steward whom he divorced in 2013. (Reuters)

*Matthew sent me a link to a piece on the BBC News with a really wonderful finding: a fossil has been found of a dinosaur that was probably killed by the famous asteroid strike, with its death due directly to the strike on the death the object hit Earth!

Scientists have presented a stunningly preserved leg of a dinosaur.

The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota.

But it’s not just their exquisite condition that’s turning heads – it’s what these ancient specimens purport to represent.

The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth.

The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began.

Very few dinosaur remains have been found in the rocks that record even the final few thousand years before the impact. To have a specimen from the cataclysm itself would be extraordinary.

. . .Along with that leg, there are fish that breathed in impact debris as it rained down from the sky.

We see a fossil turtle that was skewered by a wooden stake; the remains of small mammals and the burrows they made; skin from a horned triceratops; the embryo of a flying pterosaur inside its egg; and what appears to be a fragment from the asteroid impactor itself.

“We’ve got so many details with this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like watching it play out in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day,” says Robert DePalma, the University of Manchester, UK, graduate student who leads the Tanis dig.

I don’t think this finding has been reviewed in a scientific journal, but will be presented on a show by David Attenborough. And some scientists think that the other findings implying death on the Day of Impact, like early fish with particles stuck in their gills, could have resulted from the post-impact fallout.  So right now we have a suggestive but not conclusive hypothesis, but not one that’s passed formal scientific review. It’s pretty clear that the impact had a major influence on the death of the dinosaurs, but the excitement is about Death on the Day of Impact, not the causal influence of the impact itself on extinction.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hungry. That is “dog bites man” news.

Hili: The bowls are empty.
A: So what can I do?
Hili: Fill them up.
In Polish:
Hili: Miseczki są puste.
Ja: Co mam zrobić?
Hili: Napełnić.

x

From Jesus of the Day. Another problem with poor grammar and punctuation:

From Facebook:

Umm. . . is this a good idea? That damn cat will be walking or running around underneath your bed all night. (from Beth):

From Masih:

From Geth, who says “The eyes follow you around the room.” (He is half the staff of two black cat sisters.)

Look at the speed of that color change! The most amazing this is that the pigment cells are caused by the squid’s perception of its environment, and yet are instantaneous:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, detailing a successful escape from the camp on this day in 1944:

Tweets from Matthew. Translation of the first one: “There was a giant salamander.” Indeed! This is in a river near Hiroshima, Japan. I don’t think this is a radiation-produced mutant!

This is depressing but true: read the NYT story here.

These are free-swimming marine gastropods (molluscs):

A parrot trying (successfully) to be a cat. Be sure to watch till the end:

I have NO idea what’s going on here but I’m pretty sure that bird doesn’t eat mustelids. Maybe the stoat-like creature’s just practicing it’s “play dead” behavior.

 

How do we tell left from right?

April 6, 2022 • 12:15 pm

I’m sure this topic has been covered by scientists before, but I haven’t researched it, so I’m raising it as a naive question.

First, it’s easy for you to tell up from down because down is where your feet are and up is what you see when you look away from your feet and toward the sky. Or you could drop something; the direction it falls is “down”.

It’s also easy for you to tell your front from your back. Your front is what you see when you look down, and the other side of your body is your back.

But how do you tell right from left at any given moment?

Now of course there are a number of cues that we could use to tell right from left. The side our heartbeat is most detectable by touch is on the left (unless you have situs inversus!), I wear my watch on my left wrist and my ring on my right hand, and so on. If you drive a car in the US, the steering wheel is on the left side.

But we don’t actually use these cues. When someone tells you “turn right” when you’re asking directions, you just know which way to go.  But HOW?

Presumably we learn right from left when we’re kids: a parent presumably points out your right hand and says “that’s the right hand” and vice versa. But again, what cues do we use now? Surely not the hands! (I’m sure the answer is out there somewhere, but if a reader provides it, many of us will have learned something.)

That’s my question, but it’s related to a genetics question that I pondered for years before any answer was ever given. It’s about asymmetry in animals.  There are basically two types of ways a bilaterally  symmetrical animal can be asymmetrical in some ways. I’ve posted on this three times before (here ,here, and here), so have a look at those posts. Here’s just a brief summary.

1.) Fluctuating asymmetry. Individuals are asymmetrical for some features, but the direction of asymmetry varies from individual to individual. Handedness in humans is this way, though it has a genetic component, too, making right-handed people more common. Lobsters have asymmetrical claws: one is a “cutter” and the other a “crusher”, and it’s random whether the crusher claw is on the right or left. (We know, by the way, how this comes about. Young lobsters start their lives with identical claws, but the claw that is used most often provides more neurological activity, and that activity irrevocably creates the asymmetry, which lasts for life.The most-used one becomes the grinder.) Some species of flounders are randomly flat on the left or right sides, though all start off being vertically postured fish who develop into flat fish, with the eye on the bottom migrating to the top. Many human facial features are examples of fluctuating asymmetry: the right sides of our faces are not the same as the left, but the kind of differences differ in direction from person to person. Fluctuating asymmetry is also called “anti-symmetry” since the sides are different, but not in a consistent direction.

2.) Directional asymmetry. This is what always puzzled me. There are some basically bilaterally symmetric animals, like us, in which there are some asymmetries that are directional. That is, the right side always differs from the left in a consistent way. The narwhal tusk (a hyper-developed canine tooth) is always on the left side, some owls use directionally asymmetrical ears as a way to locate prey, I’ve mentioned the human heart before, and there are many examples. (In some flounder species, individuals are always right-flat, while individuals of other species are left-flat.)

The question I always had about this rests on the observation that because every individual is directionally asymmetrical the same way, that asymmetry must somehow rest on genes for those traits that are active in development. But how does a gene know it’s on the right or left side so it can turn on or off? Given a bilaterally symmetrical individual, it’s easy to genetically specify “front” and “back”, and “up and down”, but once those are specified, then the internal features of the organism should be identical on the right and left side. So how does a gene for say, hyper-development of the canine tooth “know” that it’s on the left side to become activated? There has to be some consistent physiological or metabolic difference between the right and left sides of an animal to provide the relevant developmental cues.  But how could that occur?

We’re beginning to find out now, though we’re far from a complete understanding of the phenomenon. There are two suggestions I know of, based on either the asymmetry in the way embryonic cilia beat (causing an asymmetry in the flow of embryonic fluid) or in the “handedness” of our constituent amino acids. I describe these in the second post I wrote in the series.

Of course, once a single directional asymmetry has evolved in an animal or plant, then the evolution of further directional asymmetries can evolve using developmental cues provided by the first one.

But this is irrelevant to the question above, so I repeat it:

How do you know the difference between left and right?

Once again: Was E. O. Wilson a racist? His closest colleague says “no way”!

April 6, 2022 • 10:00 am

The accusations that biologist E. O. Wilson was a racist began with an unhinged article in Scientific American, which gave no evidence at all and, as a sign of its scholarly deficiencies, also accused Gregor Mendel of being a racist! Oh, and, based on semantics alone, it also claimed the statistical “normal distribution” was racist!

Of course, the racist hit-piece mode began before that, perhaps with the horrific death of George Floyd or even before that. And while in some ways the “racial reckoning” is a good thing, it’s also had bad side effects, including the rush to label many famous scientists of the past as racists, when in lots of cases the evidence was either thin or (as in the case of T. H. Huxley, in the opposite direction).

There have since been more scholarly arguments claiming or at least implying that Ed Wilson was a racist (see my post here and an NYRB paper here), as well as some defenses of Wilson, including here and the piece by Wilson’s close colleague Bert Hölldobler I’m highlighting in this post.

The more rational attacks on Wilson, though, have suffered by leaning too hard on Wilson’s association with Canadian psychologist J. Phillippe Rushton, who certainly seemed to have been a racist. Wilson sponsored a paper in PNAS coauthored by Rushton, wrote a favorable review of a paper Rushton tried to publish (but rejected another one), and wrote a letter of support for Rushton when he was about to be fired. (See also Greg’s addendum to my post here.) What people don’t seem to realize is that the paper sponsored by Wilson also had as a co-author Wilson’s protégé Charles Lumsden, whose work Wilson was constantly trying to promote. Rather than supporting Rushton’s ideas, Wilson’s sponsorship could be seen as a way of advancing Lumsden’s career.  And defending Rushton against being fired could be also be seen as a simple defense of academic freedom, or, as Hölldobler does below, as a reflection of Wilson’s own trauma about being attacked on ideological grounds.

All in all, I simply can’t sign onto the slogan “Ed Wilson was a racist” based on what I know of him, what I knew from associating with him, nor from a few guilt-by-association accusations ignoring the possibility that Wilson was probably trying to promote his own colleague Charles Lumsden, not support Rushton’s racism. Nor will I run with those who imply that Wilson supported racist ideas because he was sympathetic to racism.  For right now, it’s best to await further analysis that involves a broad reading of Wilson’s correspondence.

When that full correspondence is eventually sifted (it hasn’t been), we’ll know more. Using my Bayesian sense, for now I’d say that it’s way premature to call Wilson a racist, or imply that he was sympathetic to racism, but we should remain open to the evidence. From what I know of his own work, in fact, I see not a smidgen of racism, which to Wilson’s detractors seems to rest solely on Wilson’s association with Rushton or his advocacy of sociobiology, which Wilson denied promoted racism (see below).

So here we have another defense of Ed against these accusations by perhaps his closest professional colleague, Bert Hölldobler, another ant biologist who shared a floor at Harvard with Wilson.  Bert co-wrote the magisterial book The Ants, with Wilson, and, knowing Bert, I can say that by no means was he an uncritical admirer of Wilson. Bert took strong issue, for example, with Wilson’s late-life conversion to group selection as an explanation of human behavior—and many other evolutionary phenomena. But he was well placed to assess Wilson’s character and the accusations against it.

Hölldobler does so in the magazine piece below published on Michael Shermer’s Skeptic site and Substack site. The two pieces are identical, and you can see them by clicking on either of the screenshots below.  Shermer has a preface in the Substack site that there is more to come:

Note from Michael Shermer: In response to the calumnious and false accusations of racism and promoting race science against the renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, made shortly after his death (so he can’t defend himself) by the New York Review of Books, Science for the People, and Scientific American, I asked his long-time collaborator and world-class scientist Bert Hölldobler to reply, since he worked closely with Wilson for decades. I have penned a much longer and more detailed analysis of the affair, which will be published in the coming weeks. Watch this space and subscribe here.

And Michael prefaces Bert’s piece at the Skeptic site with this subtitle:

Is there vigilantism in science? Was the renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson wrongly convicted of racism and promoting race science in the court of public opinion? Yes, says his long-time collaborator and world-class scientist Bert Hölldobler.

(Hölldobler and Wilson are in the photo below.)

 

Bert keeps a low profile about personal stuff like this, so it’s both remarkable and a testimony to the strength of his feeling about Wilson that he wrote this rather long defense of the man. While Bert doesn’t suggest that it’s possible the PNAS affair was motivated by Wilson’s desire to promote Lumsden rather than Rushton, he does indict Wilson for his favorable review of Rushton’s paper in Ethology and Sociobiology (Lumsden wasn’t an author), which Bert calls “a serious misjudgment”. As for Wilson’s trying to prevent Rushton’s firing, Bert argues—and this may be true—that he was motivated more by trying to prevent others from being persecuted as Wilson himself had been (by Gould, Lewontin, and other Leftist biologists, argues Hölldobler).

And, familiar with Wilson’s own views and his vast record of publication, Hölldobler vehemently denies that Wilson wrote anything that was racist. Indeed, he says, Wilson decried racism.

Read the piece and decide for yourself, but I’ll give a few quotes by Hölldobler. I am not an unthinking fan of Bert dedicated to supporting him or Wilson, but did know both men, admire their work, and think that before you start slinging terms like “racist” against one of the most distinguished ecologists and evolutionists of our era, or implying he was sympathetic to racism and racists, you should read Bert’s piece.

I’ll give more quotations than usual in case you don’t want to read the paper—though you should.

Sadly, there are some quotes that don’t put my advisor, Dick Lewontin, in a very good light. But I don’t reject them, for I know well about Lewontin’s ideological biases.  I also know for a fact that Lewontin despised Wilson and, when I interviewed Lewontin about his life, the discussion about Wilson was the one part he wouldn’t let me put on tape.

Here Bert accosts Lewontin for denying that there was any evolutionary/genetic basis for human behavior:

It was a point that Dick Lewontin himself acknowledged when he showed up at my office the next day, apparently eager to soften what he had said. Although I respected Lewontin as a scientist and colleague at Harvard, I did not appreciate his ideologically driven “sand box Marxism.” When I asked why he so blithely distorted some of Ed’s writings he responded: “Bert, you do not understand, it is a political battle in the United States. All means are justified to win this battle.” In fact, it is nonsense to claim that Ed Wilson’s comparative and evolutionary approach to behavior in any way endorses racism. This was a case of a scientist’s views being distorted to suit someone else’s ideological goals.

The “money quotes” by Bert below are in bold:

I always thought that a basic tenet of collegiality is to first discuss differences of opinion in person, especially when the opposing party are members of the same university, even the same department. The Lewontin lab was located on the third floor of the MCZ-Laboratories (Museum of Comparative Zoology), and Wilson had his office on the fourth floor. What prevented Lewontin, Gould, and other members of Science for the People from coming up and knocking on Ed’s door to discuss with him their disagreements? In a letter written to the New York Review of Books and sent on November 10, 1975, Wilson explained that he felt “that actions of the letter writers represent the kind of self-righteous vigilantism which not only produces falsehood but also unjustly hurts individuals and through that kind of intimidation diminishes the spirit of free inquiry and discussion crucial to the health of the intellectual community.” Thus, Science for the People launched its political war, and as is so often the case with ideologues, they erected a straw man to tear down with bravura.

I could go on with many more apposite quotes. The point is I never found one statement in his writings that would indicate that Ed Wilson followed a racist ideology. This was the invention, or rather the falsehood, created by the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), members of which physically attacked Ed at the beginning of an invited lecture he was to deliver at a meeting of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). This is intellectual fascism. In fact, even Lewontin made clear that Wilson is not a racist. As Lewontin said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson on December 3, 1975: “Sociobiology is not a racist doctrine, but any kind of genetic determinism can and does feed other kinds, including the belief that some races are superior to others. However, this is very far from Wilson’s intuition. Because Wilson is concerned with the universals of human nature — his chief point is that we are all alike.”

Here’s Hölldobler on Wilson’s defense of Rushton—the pivot on which the accusations of racism rest:

Having now looked at the work by Rushton with greater attention, it is clear to me that Ed could not have paid much scrutiny to Rushton’s work but rather was motivated by the impression he got from Rushton’s own description of his plight, namely, that he was being persecuted by far-left wing ideologues, as Wilson himself had been after publication of Sociobiology. Note too that Rushton had strong academic credentials as a former John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Society. Nevertheless, Ed’s recommendation of a manuscript submitted by Rushton to the journal Ethology and Sociobiology, in which Rushton wrongly applied Wilson’s r-K selection model, was in my opinion a serious misjudgment. When Wilson encouraged Rushton to pursue this line of investigation and advised him not to be discouraged, at one point warning him “the whole issue would be clouded by personal charges of racism to the point that rational discussion would be almost impossible,” my guess is that Wilson’s response was colored by his own and painful experience and decision to continue with his work despite vicious attacks from Science for the People, rather than an in-depth examination of the of Rushton’s paper. If we could ask Ed today, I am sure he would say: “I made a mistake, I was wrong.” But a misjudgment made when reviewing a paper for a journal does not make Ed Wilson a racist or a promoter of race science!

Bert points out Wilson’s own arguments that biology does not justify racism:

In fact, in a note to Nature (Vol. 289, 19 February 1981) Wilson wrote “I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour. As I stated in On Human Nature (1978), I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations.” In the 2004 edition of his book On Human Nature Wilson wrote: “most scientists have long recognized that it is a futile exercise to try to define discrete human races. Such entities do not in fact exist. Of equal importance, the description of geographic variation in one trait or another by a biologist or anthropologist or anyone else should not carry with it value judgements concerning the worth of the characteristics defined.”

And the money quote at the end. Here Hölldobler assesses the most serious and scholarly attack on Wilson as a racist, the paper in NYRB by Borello and Sepkoski:

In the recent New York Review of Books article, “Ideology as Biology,” by the historians of science Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski, I feel the authors make too much out of Wilson’s encouragement of Rushton which, as I said, was probably motivated more by his own painful experiences with politically provoked distortions of his work and unfair attacks, than by in depth scrutiny of his correspondent’s views. Looking at Rushton’s work today, when most experts agree that these kinds of IQ tests are biased and have to be taken with a grain of salt, Wilson’s positive response to Rushton’s pleas appears to me naive. I assume that he realized this later too, because to my knowledge he never cited Rushton’s work nor mentioned it in conversations I had with [Wilson].

Given Wilson’s numerous articles, books, lectures and public statements, which contain nothing even remotely supportive of racism, it seems unfair to zero in on this limited correspondence with a single colleague to be waved like a red flag to tarnish a scholar’s reputation. This may not be what Borrello and Sepkoski intended, but their disclaimer that they wanted to distance themselves from any scarlet letter activism and “cancel culture,” was gainsaid by the prevailing theme of their analysis that Ed Wilson was closely aligned with a racist, which in today’s culture of hyper-sensitivity to all matters of race and racism, they had to know would scuttle the reputation of one of the greatest scientists of our time. Such self-righteous vigilantism is highly unjust and distortive.

Greg echoed this sentiment in his addendum to my post that you can find here.

Overall, my present judgment is that attacks on Wilson, calling him a racist or implying he was, are tendentious and supported almost entirely by his association with a man who was a racist, Rushton. But in Wilson’s own work, as Bert notes above, there is not a line “even remotely supportive of racism.” If Wilson was a racist, why this absence of evidence, and the guilt-by-association ploy? Yes, Bert says that Wilson’s favorable review of Rushton’s paper was a misjudgment, and one that Wilson would probably admit today. But if that’s pretty much all that the critics have got, then we can let the dog bark but let our caravan move on.

Why is there such a rush to judgment here? Why the winnowing out of a long and productive life of a few bits of equivocal evidence to indict someone as a racist? Is this going to eliminate racism, or accomplish anything—even if such accusations were true (and I’m not convinced they are)?

I’m not going to psychologize any of the authors who attack Wilson or trawl through the history of biology trying to sniff out racism in figures like Mendel and T. H. Huxley, concluding that they were either racist themselves, sympathetic to racism, or “racist-adjacent.” But trying to exhibit your own virtue, or to place yourself on the “right side of history”, can be a powerful incentive. And that, at least, must explain a lot of the recent attacks on famous evolutionary biologists as racists.