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.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 6, 2022 • 7:40 am

I have landed will produce a truncated Hili dialogue today as I recover from my trip and get up to speed. Greetings on a Hump Day (“Araw ng ubok”, as they say in Filipino), April 6, 2022: National Caramel Popcorn Day. And of course the absolute best caramel popcorn in the world can only be obtained at Garrett’s Popcorn Shops in Chicago. (You can order it in tins, but it’s best freshly popped. What you really want is half caramel popcorn and half cheese corn, which Chicagoans in the know call “Garrett mix.” It sounds weird, but it’s absolutely scrumptious:

One more time: please add any events, births, or deaths on this day that you find worthy of note: consult the Wikipedia page for April 6.

Here’s the banner headline from today’s New York Times (click on screenshot to read):

Here is their news summary:

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine pushed world leaders to impose more “powerful sanctions” on Russian banks and energy companies as he criticized their response to the invasion of his country. Hours earlier, he showed the U.N. Security Council a graphic video of what he called war crimes committed by Russian forces against civilians in the city of Bucha.

“Now is a crucial moment, especially for Western leaders,” said Mr. Zelensky in a translation of his evening speech to Ukrainians. “After what the world saw in Bucha, sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers’ war crimes.”

While Russia has denied committing war crimes, European leaders are scheduled to vote on Wednesday on measures that could cut off imports of Russian coal. It will be a test for the continent, which depends on oil, natural gas and coal from Russia. So far, Europe remains divided on blocking Russian gas.

Biden has announced a new ratcheting-up of sanctions on Russia, though it involves restrictions on only two banks. And the Red Cross convoy supposed to bring aid to and evacuate people from Mariupol STILL hasn’t it through, thanks to Russian interference. It seems like at least two weeks since they’ve been trying, but the latest report, yesterday, says this: “The latest hurdle for the convoy came on Monday, when members of the team were detained on the outskirts of Mariupol. The team was released Monday night.”

Finally, it’s no been confirmed that Russians wantonly killed civilians in areas around Kyiv. The NBC Evening News last night had a heartbreaking piece on some of these murders, showing the dead, their graves, and interviews with some who were there. Apparently Russians just broke into apartments looking for males, and some of them were summarily executed in the streets. One woman recounted how her husband was simply taken in to the streets, stripped of his warm clothing, and shot in the head. I hope, but do not expect, that Russian leaders will be tried for war crimes for incidents like this (and many others.

*There is also lots of non-war news, most of it not as depressing.

*The bad news is that Oklahoma is set to pass the strictest abortion law in the county, which is so unconstitutional that I can’t believe it passed. Here’s what PBS New Hour says, which also calls the bill “A tipping point in the fight against Roe v. Wade”

Oklahoma’s state House voted 78-19 to pass a near-complete ban on abortions in mid-March, legislation that would go farther than the Texas six-week ban on which it was modeled.

Under the Oklahoma bill, abortions would be banned immediately after conception unless it met one of two exceptions: “to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency” or if the pregnancy was the “result of rape, sexual assault, or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.”

The bill, which abortion rights advocates call the strictest anti-abortion bill in the country if passed, is now headed to the state Senate next week for a vote. [JAC: This was from March 31 so it may be passed this week, and the state’s governor has vowed to sign it if the Senate passes it, which of course it will:

Oklahoma’s state House voted 78-19 to pass a near-complete ban on abortions in mid-March, legislation that would go farther than the Texas six-week ban on which it was modeled.

The law would make performing an abortion a felony, but only the doctor would be punished, and could get up to ten years in stir.

*Thanks to many people who reported that some of Darwin’s notebooks, which were priceless bits of science history, and had been stolen from the Cambridge University archives, were mysteriously returned. The BBC reports:

Two “stolen” notebooks written by Charles Darwin have been mysteriously returned to Cambridge University, 22 years after they were last seen.

The small leather-bound books are worth many millions of pounds and include the scientist’s “tree of life” sketch.

Their return comes 15 months after the BBC first highlighted they had gone missing and the library launched a worldwide appeal to find them.

“I feel joyous,” the university’s librarian Dr Jessica Gardner says.

. . But who returned the two postcard-sized notepads is a real whodunit. They were left anonymously in a bright pink gift bag containing the original blue box the notebooks were kept in and a plain brown envelope.

The wrapping (all photos from Cambridge University Library):

On it was printed a short message: “Librarian, Happy Easter X.”

The note:

And one of the two missing notebooks contained the first sketch by anyone of a tree showing a genealogical relationship between species, along with Darwin’s famous “I think” comment (below).

This was a major heist, and wasn’t even announced until 15 months ago. Those notebooks (one show below the diagram) are worth millions of pounds:

Notebook “B”. There’s a lot more in the article, so do read it if you’re a Darwin or evolution aficionado.

*Reader Steve sent a link to a paper in ScienceAlert reporting that Ecuador has become the first country in the world to recognize the rights of individual animals, though there are animal-welfare laws in many countries.

While some countries struggle to uphold human rights, Ecuador has forged ahead and ruled wild animals possess distinct legal rights, including the right to exist.

This 7-2 court ruling in February was a landmark interpretation of the country’s “rights of nature” constitutional laws and elevated the legal status of nonhuman animals.

“In America, the rights of nature sounds like a fringe idea, but people don’t realize how mainstream it is around the world,” Kristen Stilt, an expert in animal law, told Inside Climate News.

The case involved a woolly monkey named Estrellita that was a pet for 18 years in a home, and learned to socialize with the family. The locals then seized the monkey and put it into captivity, where it had a cardiac event and died:

Before hearing of her death, Burbano filed a case to get Estrellita back, citing the distress Estrellita was likely experiencing, having been so abruptly torn from everything familiar to her.

The case relied on scientific evidence of the cognitive and social complexity of woolly monkeys (Lagothrix sp.) to argue Estrellita “should at minimum possess the right to bodily liberty” and the “environmental authority should have protected Estrellita’s rights by examining her specific circumstances before placing her in the zoo.”

The court ruled that both the authorities and Burbano [the family who had her] violated Estrellita’s rights, the former for failing to consider her specific needs before relocating her and the latter for removing her from the wild in the first place.

Oh, and a bit more. Ecuador is leading the world in animal-right legislation!

The decision follows a landmark ruling in Ecuador last year that found mining in a protected cloud forest violates the rights of nature.

Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature at a constitutional level back in 2008.

I hope reader/biologist Lou Jost, who works in Ecuador, will comment on this.

*You may remember that in his latest book, John McWhorter gave three cures for racism, and that was all, he said, was needed. They were teach everyone to read using phonics, end the war on drugs, and stop making everyone go to college. He expands on the latter in his latest column in the New York Times, “College became the default. Let’s rethink that.” He not only criticizes college as a requirement to succeed in the work force, but also attacks the notion that you have to finish high school before you go to college (that’s what McWhorter did). An excerpt:

True, in-class instruction, with its required attendance and the availability of professors for questions, has its advantages, as does the experience of spending four years interacting with a wide range of people. But the question is whether those advantages are so very important as to justify continuing to think of college, including the expense and debt involved, as a default American experience. There is no sacrosanct reason for keeping students in high school through 12th grade, and even less for enshrining eight further semesters of formal education as something we quietly pity people for having done without.

We think of four years of high school and four years of college as normal, because it’s what we know. But we could be a society of solidly educated people if we improved and bolstered public education while reclassifying a college education as a choice among many. Call this a pipe dream — I realize it wouldn’t happen overnight. But I suspect quite a few would see Botstein’s idea as valuable if we rolled back the tape and started over. That kind of hypothetical is invaluable to assessing where we are and where we might like to go.

*A piece read. On March 31 writer Margaret Atwood was awarded the sixth annual Hitchens Prize, to honor “writers whose work exemplifies “a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.”  I didn’t even know there was a Hitchens Prize, but you can see more details and a list of the five other winners here.

The Atlantic reprinted Atwood’s speech in response, called “Your feelings are no excuse“, mostly reprising her interactions with Hitchens, imagining what he’d think of today’s messes, and limning the ways they were similar. (h/t Stephen). A quote:

Having feelings was not a thing back then. We would not have admitted to owning such marshmallow-like appendages, and if we did have any feelings, we’d have considered them irrelevant as arguments. Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. If they were, men who murder their wives because they’re feeling cranky that day would never get convicted.

You can’t exist as a writer for very long without learning that something you write is going to upset someone, sometime, somewhere. Whether you end up with a bullet in your neck will depend on many factors—there are lots of bullets, and some necks are thicker than others—but let us pause to remember that the most important meaning of freedom of expression is not that you can say anything you like without any consequences whatsoever but that the bullet should not be your government’s, and it should not be fired into your neck for an expression of political views that don’t coincide with theirs.

The New York Times should have adopted this concept of freedom of speech instead of using their own misguided definition in their pompous op-ed on the topic. To them, freedom of speech gives people “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” Only a bunch of doofuses could write that.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in their usual repartee:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m searching for a smart answer to your question.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Szukam mądrej odpowiedzi na twoje pytanie.

From Nicole: the best cat poem ever! And drawings!:

From Divy:

I posted this on Facebook two years ago, but can’t remember where I got it:

He’s infallible, you know!

From Barry, who uses this as an example of places where secular education never took hold in America:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. Chocolate bilbies have long been a fashion at Easter in Australia, but now there’s a monotreme. I’d eat the bill first:

I’ve never heard of this cuvée, but I guessed the wine would be good, and one comment on the thread says as much:

I haven’t read this paper yet, but I suppose it suggests that the cost of being colorful, either in both sexes (as in macaws) or in one sex (birds of paradise), is less when food is abundant. But I don’t see why that should be, unless “when life is easier” also means “there’s less chance of predation.” But I refuse to buy the argument that bright colors are fripperies. They could be to help you recognize other individuals of your species or, in the case of sexual selection, could appeal to female preferences:

This is fantastic!:

Sound up. I’m surprised at how much music is being made outside by Ukrainians as the Russians try to destroy their country. Sound up.

I have landed, part II

April 5, 2022 • 1:17 pm

I am finally home, with a lot of unpacking to do and affairs to settle. Plus we may have a nesting mallard (probably Dorothy, as Honey hasn’t been seen in two weeks). Putin, her beau, sits in the pond quacking forlornly, which probably means she’s built a nest on a ledge.  So far we have only a single pair of ducks.

But I digress: here are three items I noticed on the short bus trip from downtown to Hyde Park.

A.) Look who’s making a lot of dosh headlining at the famous Chicago Theater! (Note red arrow.) Not only that, but he bills himself as “DR. Jordan Peterson,” despite the fact that he has a Ph.D., not an M.D. (and he shouldn’t be using Dr. in either case). I’m not jealous, as I don’t need dosh or want that kind of fame, but I was vastly amused.  He’s becoming the Deepak Chopra of Generation Z. (I have to say, though, that his advice to stop and pet any cat you encounter is very sound.

B.)  I’ve posted about this grammatical error before, though I think some misguided readers defended its use. It’s on all the Chicago buses.

It’s wrong because you can’t sit there if you have both a disability and are accompanied by a senior.  What it should have said is simply “for seniors or people with disabilities.” In fact, that’s exactly what it says on the similar Chicago subway (“el”) sign, where they clearly employed someone who knew their grammar.

C). For some reason the sign below, which was on the bus right above the seat shown in “B”, offends me. Look at that: “Send referrals and make money.” That is, you get PAID if you send somebody for an HIV test to the University of Chicago Hospital.  Yes, the test may be free, but if you’re diagnosted as positive, somebody, including the hospital, is going to make some money. And the person who sent you gets a bounty!

Notice, too, that two black gay men are depicted in the background, which shows whom this ad is targeting. I didn’t like that, either; why do they need a picture? Lots of people from all walks of life get HIV tests.

In fact, why shouldn’t the hospital offer bounties to those who refer anybody who might have a disease, like diabetes or heart disease? Why just HIV? It’s unseemly, I tell you, these bounties.

I have landed

April 5, 2022 • 6:34 am

While Matthew was posting the Hili dialogue, I was in the air, but have just landed at Houston’s International Airport, tired as a dog. (How come people don’t say “tired as a cat” when cats sleep far more than dogs?)

Thanks Ceiling Cat for my Global Entry, which is cheap (I think $100 for 5 years, and gets you completely through the customs line immediately as well as throwing in TSA Pre-Check for free.  I recommend it highly.)  Now, since my next flight to Chicago is in about 3.5 hours, I’m going to try to get on an earlier flight.

I’m HOME!  Here’s a photo of a man wrecked, but I watched “Pride and Prejudice” and “King Richard” before I zonked out (no real sleep though).  Both movies were okay (I love Keira Knightley, and Will Smith put on a respectable but not, in my view, an Oscar-worthy performance.)

No makeup!:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2022 • 6:03 am

Jerry is in transit so his British amanuensis is filling in. Normal service will soon be resumed.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering the fundamental question of cat existence.
A: What are you waiting for?
Hili: I’m thinking whether to go in or out.
Ja: Na co czekasz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy wejść, czy wyjść.

 

Apart from the horror of the war, the big news of the day is that two of Darwin’s notebooks, including one with the famous ‘I think’ diagram in it, have been mysteriously returned safe and sound to Cambridge University library, together with this enigmatic note:

 

Here’s Dr Jessica Gardner, one of the librarians, with one of the notebooks:
No one knows who the culprit is. Adam Rutherford denies all knowledge: