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WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE

Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution
and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and
cats.




WORLD’S TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL BIRDS: ONE PERSON’S LIST

March 16, 2024 • 11:30 am

Here from World Data and Info, which seems to specialize in lists, is a list of
the world’s ten most beautiful birds. Here they are in order and at the video
times they appear:

> Chapters :
> 00:00 Highlight
> 00:38 Golden Pheasant
> 01:28 Macaw Parrots
> 02:21 Mandarin Duck
> 03:29 Peacock
> 04:41 Blue Jay
> 05:49 Atlantic Puffin
> 07:00  Flamingo
> 08:12 Keel-billed Toucan
> 09:24 Victoria Crowned Pigeon
> 10:46 Turaco



I can’t quarrel too much with the list (but seriously, the blue jay?); however,
they left off the one bird I consider the world’s most beautiful: the male
Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno),. I’ve had the luck to see several of
these in the wild in Central America. The metallic green color, combined with
the bright red breast and that long, dangling tail, make for a fantastic sight.
Here’s one:

Sidney Bragg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

and a video:



There’s also the lilac-breasted roller (Coracias caudatus):

Adam John Bourke, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Feel free to beef about the video selection and to suggest your own most
beautiful birds.

Posted on March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in birds,
lists, video16 Comments Posted at 11:30 am


CATURDAY FELID TRIFECTA: MAKING YOUR CAT’S BIRTHDAY CAKE; NEW UK LAW AGAINST
“COAXING CATS”; CAT ENCOUNTERS STAFF WEARING GIANT CAT COSTUME ; AND LAGNIAPPE

March 16, 2024 • 9:30 am

Is your cat’s birthday coming up? Here are two articles on how to make your
moggy a cat-friendly birthday cake. The first is from The Spruce (click to
read):



And this one is from PetsRadar (also click), whichs gives eight different
recipes of varying degree of laboriousness. I’ve put an easier one below, which
is similar to the one from the link above.



From the Spruce, an easy tuna-cake recipe that takes only 5 minutes and costs
$10 (but you’ll need a piping bag):

> What you’ll need:


> EQUIPMENT / TOOLS
> 
>  * 1 1/4 Measuring cup
>  * 1 Plate
>  * 1 Piping bag
>  * 1 Knife
>  * 1 Birthday candle (optional)


> MATERIALS

 * > 1 cup Canned albacore tuna

 * > 1 cup Cooked, unseasoned chicken

 * > 1 cup Pureed sweet potato

 * > 1 cup Mashed potatoes

 * > 1 Catnip

It comes out looking like this (there’s catnip sprinkled on the top):

Screenshot from video, cake by Heddy Hunt, One Things Producer

And here’s another one from the second site, a salmon and sweet potato cake. But
they left out the salmon and gave a tuna recipe. So I went to the Daily Paws and
got their recipe, which this site supposedly copied. But they screwed up. Here’s
the good recipe; I think any cat would like it so long as they like sweet
potato:

> Ingredients 

 * ½ 5-ounce can chunk-style skinless, boneless salmon in water, drained well
 * ¼ cup finely chopped cooked chicken or turkey breast
 * ¼ cup mashed sweet potato
 * 1 teaspoon rice flour
 * 2 tablespoons plain yogurt*
 * 1 teaspoon natural creamy peanut butter* (optional)

> Directions:
> 
> Step One
> Line a small baking pan with wax paper.
> 
> Step Two
> Place salmon in a medium bowl. Flake chunks into very small bits. Add chopped
> chicken and mashed sweet potato and mix well. Stir in rice flour.
> 
> Step Three
> Place a lightly greased 3-inch round cutter on the baking pan and spoon 1/3
> cup salmon mixture into the ring. Using fingers, firmly pat mixture out into
> an even layer. Carefully remove ring and repeat with remaining salmon mixture.
> Place pan in freezer for 15 minutes to firm up the patties.
> 
> Step Four
> To assemble cake, place one patty on a small plate. Spread with the peanut
> butter and top with another patty. Decorate top of cake with the yogurt,
> letting it run down the sides of the cake to create the drip cake effect.
> 
> Recipe courtesy of Daily Paws

And the Daily Paws video showing you how to make it:



 

I hope at least one reader will make a cake for their cat’s birthday (doesn’t
every cat have a birthday?). Weigh in if you’ve made one.

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

Archived from the Times of London, we hear about a law to ban “coaxing of cats.”
It’s bizarre but probably of marginal value.

Click to read:

 



Some excerpts:

> Listen, cat people are a bit shady. Not very, just a bit. I know this because
> I’m a cat person and in the right circumstances, I can be a bit shady. Most
> cat people are consciously or unconsciously aware of their shadiness and don’t
> do things like coax random cats off the street with dishes of cream and
> teaspoons of tuna. Because although we quite want to (because we are shady),
> we know that it is wrong.
> 
>  
> 
> But there are always deviants who spoil things for everyone. Every area has a
> local catnapper, who doesn’t think what they are doing — coaxing random cats
> off the street with cream and tuna — is bad.
> 
> And this is why the new Pet Abduction Bill is important. The bill, which is
> supported by the government and making its way through parliament, would make
> abducting a cat or dog punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine — or
> both.
> 
> But there are always deviants who spoil things for everyone. Every area has a
> local catnapper, who doesn’t think what they are doing — coaxing random cats
> off the street with cream and tuna — is bad. And this is why the new Pet
> Abduction Bill is important. The bill, which is supported by the government
> and making its way through parliament, would make abducting a cat or dog
> punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine — or both.
> 
> Pet abduction with regards to felines is defined in the bill as “causing or
> inducing the cat to accompany the person or anyone else” or “causing the cat
> to be taken”.
> 
> Due to the evidence required to convict, the crime of pet abduction as it
> relates to cats will be difficult to enforce and many will be wondering why
> the government has bothered.
> 
> Max Hardy is a criminal barrister. He says: “As a general rule offences that
> are effectively unenforceable make for unhelpful additions to the statute
> book. Some take the view that the existing Theft Act legislation sufficiently
> encompasses any situation in which a pet is stolen or an attempt is made to
> steal.”
> 
> OK, but we the public think of “stealing” as a sudden snatching or taking
> permanently. Most cats are “stolen” by non-permitted feeding or, in other
> words, “inducing”.
> 
> “It may be that the new offence will be considered to be sending a message
> that taking or trying to take a pet is a worse crime than taking an inanimate
> object,” Hardy says. “One assumes the message will go out that food should
> never be provided to or left out for a pet that is not your own. That does
> have the potential to mitigate neighbour disputes, if nothing else.”

Oy, I’ve been guilty in days of yore of feeding a neighbor’s cat.  Good thing
I’m not in Britain!  And here’s some stuff about British cat law:

> This is one reason cat people appreciate cats so much: because they have free
> choice, if they choose you it’s a sort of blessing. This is also why,
> historically, cats were not seen in the eyes of the law as “property” in the
> same way dogs were — because who can keep tabs on a cat?
> 
> This changed in 1968 with the Theft Act and now cats enjoy the same “property”
> status as dogs. In 2021 the government announced plans to make microchipping
> mandatory — all cats must be chipped by the time they are 20 weeks old.
> 
> The Theft Act, the mandatory chipping and this new abduction law are all
> important to any cat owner who has an outdoor cat. Indoor cat owners wag their
> fingers and say, “This is why I keep my cat indoors,” but a) this isn’t always
> practical, and b) being trapped in a house is the personal nightmare of
> outdoor cat owners and it is why they can’t inflict it on their pet. No one is
> right or wrong in this debate and if you choose to have an outdoor cat, you
> can still object to others seducing it away from your home.

The lesson: don’t feed a friendly moggy, even if it lives next door:

“I steals your food” by MacJewell is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of
this license, visit here.

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

This is probably not a great thing to do to your cat, but somebody went to a
great deal of trouble to make a costume fitting a human but looking like the
cat. There are even paw-like slippers and gloves.  What do you think the cat
will do when it sees its staff as a huge doppelgänger?

Watch that tail bush out in fright! But then the cat shows some ambitendency and
winds up aggressive—and then even friendly! I think it smells its staff inside
the costume.



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

Lagniappe: synchronized kitties:



h/t: Ginger K., Merilee


Posted on March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in Caturday
felids6 Comments Posted at 9:30 am


READERS’ WILDLIFE PHOTOS

March 16, 2024 • 8:15 am

Once again I beg, implore, beseech, and plead readers for more wildlife photos.
I know some of you have them sequestered away! Send ’em along if they’re good.
Thanks!

Today’s selection of photos is from Uwe Mueller.  His notes and IDs are
indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

> These photos were taken on the East Frisian island of Spiekeroog, Germany.
> 
> A slightly worried looking Greylag goose (Anser anser) passing by. Maybe it
> mistook my camera for a gun:



> A pair of Barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) flying over in the evening sun:



> A flock of Brants (Branta bernicla) taking off:



> This House sparrow (Passer domesticus) sat in a bush only 4 feet away from me
> and didn’t care at all about my presence as its focus was clearly on
> delivering its morning melody:



> A Common pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) searching for food in the dunes:



> This Western jackdaw (Corvus monedula) came closer and closer while searching
> for food in the grass of a levee. So I laid down with my camera and took
> pictures. Finally it was only a few feet away and took an interested look at
> the weird guy laying on the ground with that thingy in his hand making
> clicking noises:



> A fly-over of a Grey heron (Ardea cinerea):



> A Carrion crow (Corvus corone) that was nesting near our vacation apartment
> and collecting material for it:



> A Eurasian magpie (Pica pica) in the dunes:



> Most photos were taken with a Sony Alpha 7R III with a Sony 200 – 600mm lens,
> apart from the House sparrow which was shot with a Panasonic FZ-83.

Posted on March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in birds,
photography, Readers' wildlife6 Comments Posted at 8:15 am


SATURDAY: HILI DIALOGUE

March 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, March 16, 2024 and, until sundown,
cat shabbos. Foodwise, it’s National Artichoke Heart Day. Here’s a festive way
to serve these puppies:

“skewer kebabs with marinated vegetables artichoke hearts sweet peppers
bocconcini cheese and vinaigrette dressing in personalized mason jars” by
PersonalCreations.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this
license, visit here

It’s also Black Press Day (the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal was
founded on this day in 1827), Curlew Day, National Corndog Day, Freedom of
Information Day,Maple Syrup Saturday, Day of the Book Smugglers in Lithuania,
honoring those who smuggled books in Lithuanian (in Latin alphabet) into the
Russian empire, where those books were forbidden between 1864 and 1904, and
Saint Urho’s Day for Finnish Americans and Finnish Canadians (the Saint is
totally fictional, created by Finnish-Americans in Minnesota to connect to their
heritage). Finally, it’s National Panda Day, which is surely a day of cultural
appropriation.  But baby pandas are the world’s cutest animals. Here’s a short
compilation:



Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by
consulting the March 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Those of us who want Trump to go on trial for his interference in the Georgia
election case just got a break. The judge in that case ruled yesterday afternoon
that district attorney Fani Willis, who was accused of nepotism for hiring her
boyfriend and using his salary go go on joint vacations, can stay on the case—so
long as her “former” (?) boyfriend, Nathan J. Wade, withdraws from the case.

> The ruling by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court cut a middle path
> between removing Ms. Willis for a conflict of interest, which defense lawyers
> had sought, and her full vindication. The judge sharply criticized her
> for dating Mr. Wade, whom she hired as a special prosecutor on the case,
> calling it a “tremendous lapse in judgment.”
> 
> Ms. Willis and her office did not immediately respond to the judge’s ruling.
> With delays mounting, the case is now unlikely to come to trial before the
> 2024 presidential election, when Mr. Trump is almost certain to be the
> Republican nominee.
> 
> Here are the details:
> 
>  * Judge McAfee said that disqualifying Ms. Willis was not necessary when “a
>    less drastic and sufficiently remedial option is available.” But he
>    concluded that “the prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the State
>    selects one of two options.” Either Ms. Willis can step aside, along with
>    her office — including Mr. Wade — or he can leave, allowing the case to
>    proceed without further distraction. See highlights of the ruling.
> 
>  * Although the decision is a setback for Mr. Trump and his 14 co-defendants,
>    likely leaving in place the district attorney who has been pursuing the
>    case for more than three years, Ms. Willis emerges from weeks of
>    embarrassing hearings and headlines with a bruised reputation that could
>    color the views of a future jury, making convictions more difficult.
> 
>  * Mr. Trump and his co-defendants could appeal the judge’s ruling, as could
>    Ms. Willis, further delaying the proceedings and leaving the matter
>    unresolved indefinitely. The state’s Republican-led Senate is also
>    reviewing the conflict-of-interest accusations, and lawmakers have
>    empowered a new oversight commission to investigate and potentially remove
>    prosecutors.

Well, Willis’s reputation is badly damaged, but I trust not her prosecutorial
skills. And Wade did the right thing, withdrawing from the case.

*It’s bad enough that Russia has committed an undeniable and unconscionable war
crime by invading Ukraine and taking over part of its land, but it’s also trying
to make the citizens of occupied Ukraine get Russian passports—and even fight
for the Russians.

> Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population
> of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing
> hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship ahead of elections Vladimir
> Putin has made certain he will win, an Associated Press investigation has
> found. But accepting a passport means that men living in occupied territory
> can be drafted to fight against the same Ukrainian army that is trying to free
> them.
> 
> A Russian passport is needed to prove property ownership and keep access to
> health care and retirement income. Refusal can result in losing custody of
> children, jail – or worse. A new Russian law stipulates that anyone in the
> occupied territories who does not have a Russian passport by July 1 is subject
> to imprisonment as a “foreign citizen.”
> 
> But Russia also offers incentives: a stipend to leave the occupied territory
> and move to Russia, humanitarian aid, pensions for retirees, and money for
> parents of newborns – with Russian birth certificates.
> 
> Every passport and birth certificate issued makes it harder for Ukraine to
> reclaim its lost land and children, and each new citizen allows Russia to
> claim a right – however falsely – to defend its own people against a hostile
> neighbor.
> 
> The AP investigation found that the Russian government has seized at least
> 1,785 homes and businesses in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions alone.
> Ukraine’s Crimean leadership in exile reported on Feb. 25 that of 694 soldiers
> reported dead in recent fighting for Russia, 525 were likely Ukrainian
> citizens who had taken Russian passports since the annexation.
> 
> Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said “almost 100% … of the
> whole population who still live on temporary occupied territories of Ukraine”
> now have Russian passports.
> 
> Under international law dating to 1907, it is forbidden to force people “to
> swear allegiance to the hostile Power.” But when Ukrainians apply for a
> Russian passport, they must submit biometric data and cell phone information
> and swear an oath of loyalty.
> 
> “People in occupied territories, these are the first soldiers to fight against
> Ukraine,” said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer who helped Ukraine bring a war
> crimes case against Putin before the International Criminal Court. “For them,
> it’s logical not to waste Russian people, just to use Ukrainians.”

Is somebody going to force Russia to the ICJ for war crimes? You could even
consider this a genocide since Ukrainians are as much a “race” as are
Palestinians.  People seem to have forgotten about Ukraine vs. Russia in all the
brouhaha about Israel versus Hamas.

> 

*As always on Saturdays, I’ll steal three four items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly
news summer at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: I serve at the pleasure
of barbecue. (It’s worth subscribing to the site just for Nellie’s posts alone.

> → Biden is very sorry for saying illegal but also not sorry in the
> slightest: After his successful State of the Union, Biden had some apologies
> to make to the base. He had sounded too normal for them. See, when Marjorie
> Taylor Greene heckled him to “say her name” during the address, he did: “I
> know how to say her name. Lincoln—Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who
> was killed by an illegal.” This upset his party. Not because he got the
> victim’s name wrong (it’s Laken Riley), but because of the word he used to
> describe her suspected killer. So Biden went on MSNBC to express his
> apologies. “An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal. I should
> have used undocumented.” The interviewer prompts further: “So you regret using
> that word?” Biden: “Yes.” Now that’s mildly funny but what makes it good is
> that then there was backlash to the apology, so now there’s a whole news cycle
> about how The President Did Not Apologize. Weird you’d even suggest it.
> 
> Here’s principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton: “I want to be really
> clear about something: the president absolutely did not apologize. There was
> no apology anywhere in that conversation. He did not apologize. He used a
> different word.” Meaning, the word yes, to say whether he was or wasn’t sorry?
> 
> Captured in a single moment, we have the whole beautiful hodgepodge of the
> Biden border philosophy: a flash of normalcy, a cave to the doctrinaire base,
> followed by an obvious and random lie from a government official.
> 
> → All the AIs are making the same mess: Asked to make “a picture of German
> soldiers in 1945,” Adobe’s new artificial intelligence program, Firefly, spat
> out a gorgeous group of smiling all-black Nazis. The urge to make all images
> into a diverse trans-inclusive rainbow is kind of a sweet one, in a
> “communists erase history make better history” sort of way. But then these
> in-house tech activists keep getting upset when they realize that it might
> mean diverse trans. . . Nazis. No, no, it was just supposed to be
> that Mozart is now a blind Hispanic woman! Ted Bundy was obviously a bad white
> man. The Founding Fathers are diverse—interesting—but Nazis are all blond,
> pure blond. How do we teach the computer the difference?
> 
> → I wouldn’t personally bet my entire career on this, but okay: America’s
> favorite unhinged right-wing correspondent has decided to stake her “entire
> professional reputation” on the President of France’s wife being secretly
> male. Some might say her entire professional reputation—this being Candace
> Owens—is not much. But that’s not fully true: Candace Owens has a large
> audience and is employed by a pretty mainstream conservative news site, The
> Daily Wire. She isn’t a fringe character, inconvenient though that fact may
> be. So, yes, it’s an odd wager.

> There’s a lot that’s funny about Brigitte Macron. Like, I don’t know: that she
> met Emmanuel Macron when he was a kid and she was his teacher, and they fell
> in love, and now he’s president and she’s first lady of France? But that’s not
> wild enough for our #unfettered Candace. Needing to be as lunatic as possible,
> Candace Owens simply must go all the way: BRIGITTE IS A MAN. Brigitte and her
> brother are actually the same person! She’s secretly the father of five! Now,
> as someone always open to conspiracies, I did look into this. I did some
> Googling. I did some Reddit. And I can say—with the total confidence of a
> woman who’s taken a long walk through Reddit’s sweaty tunnels—that it’s just
> not true.

I don’t understand why anybody pays attention to Candace Owens, who’s a ranter. 
Oh hell, one more from La Bowles:

> → Congratulations to Guernica: The literary magazine Guernica has fallen into
> chaos, unpublishing a piece and seeing mass resignations among its staff. Why
> did it happen? The article was by a peacenik leftist Israeli, the sort who
> refused to serve in the IDF and volunteered to drive Palestinians from Gaza
> and the West Bank to get medical care. In her essay she wrestles with all her
> complicated emotions around the war. Read the archived version here; it’s
> lovely. But in this quadrant of America today, there are no innocent Israelis.
> Jews alone are a little sus. So the piece was pulled and many,
> many Guernica staffers resigned over it ever having been published. Many!

*John McWhorter declares in his latest NYT column, “No, the SAT isn’t racist“:

> That’s three down: Last week Brown University reinstated standardized testing
> as a part of its admissions requirements, following Yale and Dartmouth, which
> did the same earlier this year. For all that we have heard about how
> standardized tests propagate injustice, the decisions at these Ivy League
> schools are antiracism in action, and should serve as models for similar
> decisions across academia. (M.I.T. was an even earlier re-adopter of testing
> requirements, in 2022.)
> 
> . . . Of course, for years, the leading idea has been precisely the opposite:
> that the proper antiracist approach is to stop using standardized tests in
> admissions.
> 
> , , , Given this perception, the wave of schools letting go of the SAT after
> 2020 seemed to many like an acceleration of social justice long overdue. But
> lately evidence has mounted, steadily, that the SAT is in fact useful in
> demonstrating students’ abilities regardless of their economic backgrounds or
> the quality of their high schools. Some studies show scores correlate with
> student performance in college more strongly than high-school grades, and that
> without the standardized test data it is harder to identify Black, Latino and
> lower-income white kids who would likely thrive in elite universities. It was
> precisely this evidence that led the Dartmouth president, Sian Beilock, to be
> first out of the gate this year in daring to go back to using the test in
> admissions. I nominate her as Antiracist of 2024 so far.

Remember that Bill Maher gave her a 2024 Cojones Award the other day. More:

> . . . ideas have a way of undergoing mission creep. What an unspoken idea
> implies, a resonance in the air, eventually manifests itself as an openly
> asserted new position. In that vein, there is a short step between
> acknowledging that disadvantage makes it harder to ace the test — which is
> self-evidently true — and a proposition that is related but vastly more
> questionable: that Blackness is culturally incompatible with the test.
> 
> This is the ultimate source of the idea getting around in the education school
> world and beyond that it is “white” to cherish hard work, objectivity, the
> written word and punctuality. This conviction reveals itself both among white
> people (as in the creator of a graphic to this effect that the Smithsonian
> National Museum of African American History and Culture put online for a spell
> during the pandemic) and among Black people (such as a Black parent recalling
> a Black co-worker openly saying that standardized tests are unfairly imposed
> on Black kids because they “can’t do math,” with the implication of this as a
> general assumption).
> 
> And in turn, this sense of which whitenesses Black people will supposedly
> struggle with — math, objectivity, etc. — is the seedbed of university
> departments’ current conviction that attracting more Black majors and graduate
> students means loosening requirements. Hence classics without Greek or Latin,
> musicology without playing an instrument and physics without “white
> empiricism.”
> 
> The people promulgating ideas like these are well intentioned. They think of
> themselves as clearing away outdated notions of merit, which sometimes do bear
> re-examination. But all of it together constitutes a general cultural mood
> that alarms me. The SAT as racist, objectivity as white privilege, making
> academic training easier to attract Black majors and graduate students — there
> is a family relationship between them. Namely, an assumption that it is
> graceless or unfair to require Black people to grapple with detail, solve
> puzzles and make sense of the unfamiliar. At least, we are not to be expected
> to engage in such things nearly as much as, say, white people.

McWhorter finds this view of African-Americans “a diminished, not to mention
depressing, and downright boring racial self-image. It just doesn’t correspond
with so very much that Black people do, and are, and seek and always have.”  It
is—it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.

*The latest issue of the prestigious journal Cell has a section on sex and
gender. I’ll go through it later (not here, I hope!), but here are some of the
contents

Cross-disciplinary collaboration between scientists and science and technology
ttudies (STS) scholars offers a way to find solutions to this problem.





Science has an interview with some of the authors or the articles above, and I
found this exchange telling:

> Q: Do you feel that your trans identity helps you do better science? How so?
> 
> . . . . J.M.: In one of my recent papers, I talk about how, if we don’t assume
> that animals have binary sex, we can actually become better evolutionary
> biologists. And I don’t think I would have been asking those questions if I
> wasn’t nonbinary. I’m always going for areas that are blurry and gray because
> I’m standing in a place that’s outside the binary.

This is not only wrong, but an example of reading into nature what you want to
see in humans. First, J. M. will become a worse evolutionary biologist by
neglecting the sex binary, because J. M. will be unable to understand stuff like
sexual selection, sexual dimorphism, and differential parental care. And note
that the author is denying the truth—the binary nature of sex—because this
person is “standing outside the [GENDER] binary.”  This is how your “lived
experience” gets turned into a bogus biological “truth.”

I’ve now read several articles in the journal, and they’re more or less what you
expect from those who want to bend biology towards ideology. If you want to know
why there are many more than two sexes, and why that buttresses gender activism,
this is the issue for you.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are dissing UNRWA, which deserves it:

> Hili: I’m worried about the humanitarian crisis.
> A: Which one?
> Hili: There is a disaster of a shortage of virgins in Paradise for the
> martyrs.
> A: Leave it to the United Nations. UNRWA will deliver.



In Polish:
> Hili: Jestem zaniepokojona kryzysem humanitarnym.
> Ja: Którym?
> Hili: Jest dramat niedoboru dziewic w raju dla męczenników.
> Ja: Zostaw to Organizacji Narodów Zjednoczonych. UNRWA dostarczy.

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

From BuzzFeed:



 

From the Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (I hope they’re excepting Austin and
all the BBQ joints):



*Bill Maher put this up yesterday (h/t Debra).



From Masih: more puritanical religionists in Iran harassing women for their
(lack of) headscarves:





Found on Facebook:  Read more here. Apparently they were infuriating about the
NYT’s promotion of “genocide.”





From Barry, This is Kiffness with another song, but is it ragtime or klezmer?





I guess “not of color” means “high achieving”. The schools should just be
honest. 





From Malcolm: cheer-up kittens:





Man, this cat hates the vet’s:





From the Auschwitz Memorial, a five year old Jewish boy gassed upon arrival.





Tweets from Dr. Cobb. Big hamster is Russia; little one is Ukraine:





Matthew is doing a deep dive on Francis Crick for the upcoming biography:





Posted on March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in Hili
Dialogue13 Comments Posted at 6:45 am


THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH ADOPT POSSIBLY ILLEGAL TACTIC OF USING
“DIVERSITY STATEMENTS” WHEN FUNDING NEW POSITIONS

March 15, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yes, this is an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, but if you neglect all of
their op-eds, which of course lean right, it will still be your loss.  Click to
read (it’s archived here). It shows that the NIH—and not for the first time—is
requiring diversity statements to hire researchers, a requirement that may well
be illegal.

Click to read:



Here are a few paragraphs on what’s happening at the NIH:

> Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University
> is able to support several professors in fields including genetics,
> computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the
> university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each
> applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive
> significant weight in the evaluation.” [JAC: note that every applicant has to
> submit a DEI statement.]
> 
> It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while
> hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has
> pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional
> Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds
> diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.
> 
> Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages
> of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics
> and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda,
> prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical
> scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.
> 
> The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements”
> for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a
> diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley.
> It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First
> programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico,
> which I discussed in these pages. Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.
> 
> That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and
> gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It
> likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of
> dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

Berkeley’s rubric is dire, and I’ve described it before (see also this statement
by FIRE). It requires you first to give  your understanding of what diversity is
and your philosophy of,it then your background in promoting diversity (Ceiling
Cat help you if you don’t have one), and then finally tell your you will promote
diversity in your positions. You’re scored separately in each area, and the
three scores added up to give a total.  Remember, diversity is construed as
racial or gender diversity, with race being most important, and if you start
talking about “viewpoint diversity,” you might as well forget about the job. 
Likewise, you fail if you espouse Martin Luther King’s philosophy of
“colorblindness.”  King became passé a long time ago.

Here’s how Sailer described a similar rubric for USC and UNM in an earlier
piece:

> The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who
> espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an
> “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat
> everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might
> choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs
> afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines
> diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different
> nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”
> 
> The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial
> diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that
> it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented
> individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make
> them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of
> segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

Because of a lower funding rate of black than of white or Asian scientists
applying for grants, the NIH tried in 2021 to remedy this by boosting grant
ratings of minorities by asking them to tick a box specifying their race. The
plan was that even if a minority applicant’s grant score fell below the funding
range, the ticked box would give them a boost, allowing program officers to
leapfrog the minority grants back into the range where they might be funded.
(This would be, of course, at the expense of researchers who had higher grant
scores.)

But as Science reported just a month later, this plan failed and the NIH was
forced to eliminate the magical box:

> The National Institutes of Health has yanked a notice from three NIH
> institutes that aimed to encourage grant proposals from minority scientists.
> Researchers who saw the notice as a way to help bridge a funding success gap
> between Black and white scientists are dismayed by the move.
> 
> . . .Some observers hoped that if the notice were expanded across NIH, it
> could help raise success rates for Black scientists. But earlier this year,
> NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER) barred more institutes from joining
> the notice because it was “confusing” and institutes already had leeway to
> fund “outside the payline” to “bring in diverse scientific perspectives,” the
> agency said.
> 
> NIH rescinded the notice “for clarity in communications,” an OER spokesperson
> says. “We decided that issuing a general notice that encompassed all NIH
> better communicated our intent.” That new notice, issued 25 October,
> encourages applications from underrepresented groups, but won’t enable
> researchers to tag their applications.

It wasn’t rescinded solely for “clarity in communications,” as you see, but
likely because it was unfair and probably illegal. Yes, it’s great to encourage
members of underrepresented groups to apply for grants, but handing out money
preferentially to such groups prioritizes identity over merit—and in the crucial
area of biomedical sciences. (Actually, two papers published in 2019 and 2020 in
Science showed that there appeared to be no gender or racial bias in reviewers’
scores of NIH grants, and also that funding rates for minorities were lower
largely because they applied in areas having lower funding rates (see also this
2020 paper).

At any rate, DEI statements, which may be a way to hire based on race, could be
illegal for that reason alone (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits
race-based hiring). They could also be illegal on First Amendment grounds, since
the way they’re judged involves a form of compelled speech, which is also
illegal. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action
in college admissions could and likely will also be applied to race-based hiring
of faculty and race-based awarding of grants.  There’s a note to this effect at
the top of an NIH program statement from last July:

> Note: Summarized here is the most recent NIH Advisory Committee to the
> Director (ACD) discussion of UNITE. However, it is recognized that the recent
> Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision regarding affirmative
> action may be at the front of consciousness. NIH adheres to federal law and
> does not make funding decisions based on race. NIH awaits further evaluation
> and interpretation of the SCOTUS decision to determine whether there is the
> need to modify any current policies or practices.

“May be at the front of consciousness”? What does that mean? “We have to find
ways around it?”

The only question is whether these DEI statements are used as a proxy for race,
as they well could be. But even ifr they aren’t, they’re probably still illegal.
To see why, read my colleague Brian Leiter’s article in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, “The legal problem with diversity statements,” which has the subtitle
“Public universities can’t make hiring decisions based on political viewpoints,”

Posted on March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in
affirmative action, DEI matters, science funding20 Comments Posted at 11:30 am


MIMICRY IN BUTTERFLY FLIGHT BEHAVIOR

March 15, 2024 • 10:00 am

I’ve discussed many types of mimicry over the years, and one of them is
Müllerian mimicry, in which a group of species, often not that related, come to
mimic each other in appearance. In this form of mimicry, the different species
are all aposematic: that is, they have bright warning coloration and obvious
patterns, all evolved to deter predators.  (The form of mimicry is named after
the German zoologist Fritz Müller.)

The way it usually works is that a group of species, often butterflies, are
subject to predation, but are also unpalatable since they ingest plant compounds
that are either toxic or can be converted to toxic ones. (Determination of
unpalatability may involve tests with caged birds, observation of what a
butterfly eats, or even, in the case of macho biologists, eating the butterfly
itself, though human taste may not mimic butterfly taste).

At any rate, each species develops aposematic patterns and colors, which lets
the predator know to stay away from the butterfly. This evolves not for the
genetic sake of the bird, of course, but for the butterfly, as such coloration
and obvious patterns give the aposematic individual a survival advantage over
others. (How this occurs, which makes the initial individual conspicuous and
perhaps more likely to be caught, is somewhat of a mystery, but there are some
hypothesis that have been experimentally supported.)

Once you get some species of butterflies in one area that have warning colors
and patterns, natural selection can then act to make their different colors and
patterns come to resemble each other. That’s because if a bunch of toxic
butterflies look alike, the predator learns to avoid them more readily (it has
more chances to learn). Ergo, mutations in individual butterflies of different
species that lead to a convergence in their appearance will be favored, reducing
the chance of individuals being eaten by birds. This can lead to quite unrelated
species of butterflies adopting similar colors and patterns.  (Of course, all
the lookalike Müllerian species, which can be quite unrelated—even including
both butterflies and day-flying moths—must live in the same area, because this
convergent evolution requires reinforcement by predators that can encounter all
the mimics.)

Here’s a group of six unrelated butterflies that are part of a Müllerian mimicry
ring. Each species is in a different genus! Moreover, there’s a moth species in
there, too! Can you spot it? (answer at bottom).  The photo is courtesy of Dr.
Mathieu Joron, whose webpage is here, and is used with permission.

From site: The photo shows Müllerian mimicry of various Ithomiinae, a day-flying
moth and Heliconius numata from San Martín, Eastern Peru. This sub-ring of the
tiger ithomiine mimicry ring occurs commonly between 500 and 1800 m altitude on
the Eastern slopes of the Andes from Ecuador to Bolivia. Top row: Hypothyris
meterus meterus, Mechanitis mazaeus ssp. Second row: Hyposcada anchiala mendax,
Heliconius numata bicoloratus (Nymphalidae: Heliconiiti). Third row: Chetone sp.
(Arctiidae: Pericopinae), Melinaea “marsaeus” mothone. All are Nymphalidae:
Ithomiinae unless otherwise stated. See also details of other ithomiine — H.
numata mimicry rings from San Martín, Mathieu Joron’s web page and the paper by
Joron et al. on the maintenance of mimetic polymorphism in Heliconius numata.
(photo © Mathieu Joron 2001)

Note that there’s no need for species to be related to each other for this to
happen, as the evolution of similar color patterns happens independently in each
species, all mediated by visually hunting predators. A single Müllerian mimicry
ring can involve true bugs (Hemiptera), wasps, beetles, and butterflies.

And different populations of a single species, if they live in different places
that have other species of aposematic butterflies, can evolve different patterns
in those different places to look like the local deterrents. Here’s an example
of single species (the top four species are all Heliconius numata) that mimic
other aposematic species in the genus Melinaea in different areas.  Remember,
the top four drawings are all members of the same species, but living in
different areas. Further the caption notes, “the bottom four are H.
melpomene (left) and H. erato (right), which mimic each other.” Thus in the
bottom four we see two cases of Müllerian mimicry.

As you see, things can get quite complicated.

Source:Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006,
e341 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040341l; CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Butterflies in the genis Heliconius are particularly famous for showing
Müllerian mimicry, and feature largely in a new paper from PNAS. What the
authors were studying was not the the patterns and colors of butterflies in
Müllerian mimicry rings, but mimicry of their behavior.  It’s easy to see
resemblance in color and pattern, but biologists have largely neglected the very
real possibility that because predators can see behavior as well as appearance,
mimics might evolve to resemble each other in behavior, too.  This is well known
in salticid “jumping spiders”, which have evolved to mimic the walking behavior
of ants. (Predators hate ants since they sting and often taste bad as well.)
There’s a video of an ant-mimicking salticid at the bottom.

In this paper the author studied 29 species of heliconiine butterflies and 9
ithomiine species, belonging in total to 10 mimicry rings. They wanted to see if
there was, in each mimicry ring, an evolution of similar “flight behavior”,
because predators can see not only how a butterfly looks, but, when it’s on the
wing, how it flies. They found that there was indeed evidence in each Müllerian
mimicry ring that the species had evolved similar flight behaviors. Clearly,
natural selection had altered flight behaviors within a ring to make the species
flap more like the other ones, with the explanation being that predators learn
to avoid not only certain color patterns, but also certain ways of flying.

(Note: I am imputing bird avoidance to their learning which species are toxic,
but there’s no reason why birds cannot undergo genetic evolution via selection
to innately avoid certain colors and behaviors since individuals with genes
tending to cause such avoidance will be favored. (This is presumably because
getting sick after a meal is something that natural selection would eliminate by
favoring gene forms that instinctively avoid certain appearances and behaviors.)

Read the paper by clicking on the title, or see the pdf here.



I will be brief since the analysis is complicated, involving all kinds of
corrections for wing size, relatedness, habitat, and other factors; and I’ll
just give the conclusions.

For several members of each species, the authors used cameras to measure three
aspects of flight:

 1. Flapping rate of the wings
 2. “Up angle” (the angle between the wings of an individual at the top of its
    upstroke)
 3. “Down angle” (likewise, but with the angle measured at the bottom of the
    downstroke)

And, lo and behold, when you correct for relatedness, wing size, ecological
area, and other factors, the authors still found significant similarity between
members of each of the ten mimicry rings they measured. This held, though, only
for the first two parameters: flapping rate and up angle. There was little
convergence among members in down angle, for reasons that aren’t clear (perhaps
birds can’t see it as well. Here’s the authors’ tentative  ad hoc explanation:

> . . . down wing angles respond differently to selection exerted by predators
> and may be indicative of greater aerodynamic constraint on this trait. Fuller
> characterization of flight may provide stronger evidence of whether different
> components of flight are evolving under different selection pressures.

Here’s a figure from the paper showing the ten Müllerian mimicry rings they
studied, each ring indicated by a different color. The groups’ conventional
names are given by the key at upper left. The “tiger group” is the most famous.

(From paper): Diversity and convergence of wing patterns among the heliconiine
and ithomiine taxa whose flight patterns have been measured. Background color
indicates the 10 mimicry groups. Transparent (Ithomiine) 1: Ithomia salapia
travella, 2: G. zavaleta; Tiger (Ithomiine) 3: Melinaea marseus phasiana, 4:
Tithorea harmonia, 5: Mechanitis polymnia, 6: Melinaea menophilus zaneka, 7:
Mechanitis messenoides deceptus, 8: Melinaea mothone mothone, 9: Hypothyris
anastasia honesta; Tiger (Heliconiine) 10: Heliconius ismenius bouletti, 11: H.
p. butleri, 12: Heliconius hecale felix, 13: Eueides isabella nicaraguensis, 14:
H. pardalinus sergestus, 15: Heliconius numata bicoloratus, 16: Heliconius
numata aurora, 17: Heliconius ethilla aerotome; hewitsonii-pachinus 18: H.
pachinus, 19: Heliconius hewitsoni; cydno–sapho 20: Heliconius cydno chioneus,
21: Heliconus sapho sapho; Blue 22: Heliconius doris viridis blue, 23:
Heliconius wallacei flavascens, 24: Heliconius leucadia pseudorhea, 25:
Heliconius sara sara, Postman 26: Heliconius timareta thelxinoe, 27: Heliconius
melpomene rosina, 28: H. e. favorinus, 29: Heliconius erato demophoon, 30:
Heliconius melpomene amaryllis; Orange 31: Eueides lybia olympia, 32: Eueides
aliphera aliphera, 33: Dione juno juno, 34: Dryadula phaetusa, 35: D. iulia;
Dennis rayed 36: Heliconius elevatus pseudocupideneus, 37: Heliconius burneyi
huebneri, 38: Heliconius aoede cupidensis, 39: Heliconius melpomene aglaope, 40:
Heliconius doris viridis, 41: Heliconius eratosignis, 42: Heliconius demeter
joroni, 43: H. e. emma; Red and white 44: H. himera; Zebra 45: H. charithonia.
Butterflies images are from the Neukirchen Collection, McGuire Centre, Florida;
https://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/ (Andrew Warren);
http://www.sangay.eu/esdex.php/ (Jean-Claude Petit).

But it gets even nicer, for the authors also looked at flight similarity between
isolated populations of the same species that were members of different mimicry
rings, which, as I said above, can happen They used populations of two species,
Heliconius melpomene and H. erato. Again, different populations of each species
appear to have evolved similar flapping rates and up angles (but not down
angles) to species of the different mimicry rings they’ve joined.

The ages of these conspecific populations can be estimated from molecular data
as less than half a million years, so the flight mimicry can evolve quite
rapidly. As for the other species, well, some of them are not that related,
being separated by up to 70 million years from their common ancestor.

The upshot: Müllerian mimicry is often thought of as visual phenomenon because
it’s mediated by visually hunting predators.  And it is, but the emphasis on
vision has led biologists to concentrate on easily-discerned colors and patterns
(birds have color vision). Yet vision can also detect behaviors—in this case
flight behavior. This isn’t really a brand-new discovery, because mimetic
behavior has clearly evolved in other cases. As I said, we see Batesian mimicry
in which salticid spiders, which are edible, have evolved to walk like ants that
are avoided by predators (see below).  But the important lesson of this paper is
that biologists studying visual mimicry should not neglect to look at behavior
of animals and not just their appearance.

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

To end, here’s a remarkable case in which an edible jumping spider has evolved
to not only look very similar to weaver ants, which are avoided by predators,
but also to walk like ants.  This is a case of Batesian rather than Müllerian
mimicry, but it does show mimetic evolution of behavior.



 

Answer to question above: Which species is the moth in the first picture above?
It’s Chetone sp.! (Bottom left.)

Posted on March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in animal
behavior, evolution, lepidopterans19 Comments Posted at 10:00 am


READERS’ WILDLIFE PHOTOS

March 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we divert from wildlife for a day so we can read Athayde Tonhasca Júnior’s
test-and-photo post of bizarre scientific papers. Athayde’s narrative is
indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Nullius in verba

> The Royal Society‘s motto, adopted in 1662 and loosely translated as ‘take
> nobody’s word for it’, is a reminder that scientific advancement and knowledge
> come from evidence. A while back, we looked at some unusual titles of science
> papers. Here we explore data gathering done in unorthodox or quirky fashion.
> 
> The common knowledge that “every child in Germany knows that ‘storks bring
> babies'” inspired Professor Helmut Sies to look for an explanation for West
> Germany’s demographic problem. He found an almost perfect correlation (r =
> 0.982) between the number of breeding storks and the number of newborn babies
> (Nature 332: 495, 1988):



> Feline pesematology (from the Greek pesema, for ‘fall’), could help us
> understand why cats have nine lives. Professor Jared Diamond explained in
> layman’s terms the findings of Whitney & Mehlhaff from 132 careless tabbies
> who plunged from windows two or more storeys high in New York (High-rise
> syndrome in cats. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 191:
> 1399–1403, 1987). 90% of them survived despite landing on hard pavements. “A
> kitty named Sabrina fell 32 storeys onto a sidewalk and suffered nothing worse
> than a chipped tooth and mild chest injuries” (How cats survive falls from New
> York skyscrapers. Natural History 8: 20-26, 1989). It’s all about physics: “a
> cat falling in the atmosphere reaches a terminal velocity of about 60 mph
> (compared with 120 mph for adult humans) after only about 100 feet. As long as
> it experiences acceleration, the cat probably extends its limbs reflexively,
> but on reaching terminal velocity it may relax and extend the limbs more
> horizontally in flying-squirrel fashion, thus not only reducing the velocity
> of fall but also absorbing the impact over a greater area of its body. This
> may explain the paradoxical decrease of mortality and injury in cats that fall
> more than 100 feet” (Why cats have nine lives. Nature 332: 586-587, 1988):



> Benno et al. proposed that “anyone who has watched a penguin fire a ‘shot’
> from its rear end must have wondered about the pressure the bird generates”.
> So, they set out to investigate the artillery power of the chinstrap
> (Pygoscelis antarctica) and Adélie (P. adeliae) penguins. Their results
> suggest giving these birds a wide berth, lest you be hit by a “material of
> higher viscosity similar to that of olive oil”. They concluded their paper
> with a warning to other penguin researchers and a hint to funders: “It is
> interesting to note that the streaks of the faecal material radiate from the
> edge of the nest into all directions (no preference is noticeable). Whether
> the bird deliberately chooses the direction into which it decides to expel its
> faeces or whether this depends on the direction from which the wind blows at
> the time of evacuation are questions that need to be addressed on another
> expedition to Antarctica” (Pressures produced when penguins pooh –
> calculations on avian defaecation. Polar Biology 27: 56–58, 2003):



> Entomologist John Wesley Brown left no doubts about his views regarding rules
> for naming species (Nomenclatural nonsense – flying in the face of a farcical
> code. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 55: 1 -7, 2001):



> ‘Yes’ was Lorna O’Brien’s answer to Caleb Brown’s question, which he posed in
> the last line of his and Henderson’s paper: A new horned dinosaur reveals
> convergent evolution in cranial ornamentation in Ceratopsidae. Current Biology
> 25: 1641–1648, 2015.



> In 1962, Tusko, a male Indian elephant, was enjoying a quiet life at the
> Oklahoma City Zoo until discovered by psychologist Louis Jolyon West and
> colleagues in search for a subject for a psychedelic experiment. They injected
> Tusko with a massive dose of LSD and recorded the outcome: “Tusko began
> trumpeting and rushing around the pen… his restlessness appeared to increase
> for 3 minutes after the injection; then he stopped running and showed signs of
> marked incoordination. His mate (Judy, a 15- year-old female) approached him
> and appeared to attempt to support him. He began to sway, his hindquarters
> buckled, and it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain himself
> upright. Five minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell
> heavily onto his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus.” The
> men of science suspected things were not going according to plan – whatever
> the plan was – so they injected Tusko with a huge dose of Thorazine, an
> anti-psychotic drug. It didn’t work: one hour and 40 minutes after the start
> of the experiment, Tusko was dead. The authors’ conclusion, reproduced in the
> image, was that acid ain’t groovy, man; far out. Their paper (West et al.
> Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: its effects on a male Asiatic elephant. Science
> 138: 1100-1103, 1962) inspired Alex Boese to title his book on outrageous
> experiments from the history of science: Elephants on Acid: and other bizarre
> experiments. Besides trippin’ elephants, Louis West’s other academic interest
> was mind control trials at the CIA-sponsored Project MKUltra, an organisation
> that would leave James Bond’s SPECTRE feeling jealous and amateurish.



> Possibly the shortest scientific note ever published. Tropical ecologist Dan
> Janzen‘s acknowledgment that colleagues who refuted one of his hypotheses
> (Schubart & Anderson. Why don’t ants visit flowers? A reply to D. H. Janzen.
> Biotropica 10: 310-311, 1978) were probably right.



> Stack & Gundlach (Social Forces 71: 211-218, 1992) gave academic support to
> what many of us have long suspected: Country Music can kill you. These classic
> country songs of all time could have gone in the paper’s appendix:
> 
> I keep forgettin’ I forgot about you.
> You done tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat.
> How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
> If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.
> I still miss you, baby, but my aim’s gettin’ better.
> I’m so miserable without you, it’s like having you here.
> Please bypass this broken heart.
> I liked you better before I knew you so well.
> Get yore tongue outta my mouth ’cause I’m kissing you goodbye.
> My wife ran off with my best friend and I sure do miss him.
> She got the ring and I got the finger.



> In a properly designed randomized controlled trial, Yeh et al. found that
> jumping from an aircraft with or without a parachute makes no difference for
> survival (Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from
> aircraft: randomized controlled trial. British Medical Journal 363: k5094,
> 2018). The next image gives a possible explanation for this statistically
> robust result:



> The authors’ point was that you don’t need randomized controlled trials to
> draw reasonable conclusions about certain observed effects. “Advocates of
> evidence-based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions
> evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might
> benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine organised
> and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover
> trial of the parachute.”:



> Hollywood is taking too long to snap up Yap et al.’s creepy creation: the
> Necrobotic, a robot built with the carcass of a dead spider (Necrobotics:
> biotic materials as ready-to-use actuators. Advanced Science 9: 2201174,
> 2022):



> In this age of alternative facts and personal truths, Hoogeveen et al.’s
> reported ‘Einstein effect’ is heartening: “our results strongly suggest that
> scientific authority is generally considered a reliable source for truth, more
> so than spiritual authority. Indeed, there are ample examples demonstrating
> that science serves as an important cue for credibility; the cover of Donald
> Trump’s niece’s family history book is adorned by ‘Mary L. Trump, PhD’;
> advertisements for cosmetic products often claim to be ‘clinically proven’ and
> ‘recommended by dermatologists’, and even the tobacco industry used to appeal
> to science (for example, ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other
> cigarette’).” All good, but the paper’s methodology is the best. See next
> item.



> Hoogeveen et al. tested their hypotheses by using the New Age Bullshit
> Generator (http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/), which “combines new age buzzwords
> in a syntactically correct structure resulting in meaningless but
> pseudo-profound sounding text”. Have a go at it, it’s great fun. Deepak
> Chopra, Paulo Coelho and Jordan Peterson must have dipped into it:



> Brave guinea pigs for the sake of kids’ welfare. Not many people would be keen
> to gobble down Lego pieces and have their SHAT (Stool Hardness and Transit)
> and FART (Found and Retrieved Time) scores investigated (Journal of
> Paediatrics and Child Health 55: 921-923, 2019):



> Lastly, this from Australia: Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) are thriving
> (Medical Journal of Australia 209: 490-494, 2018). “It is believed that Mamils
> have evolved from the dawn patroller species, typically found in droves
> throughout the nineties and noughties on golf courses”. Now, “Sydney’s Mosman
> allegedly has more Mamils per square metre than the Tour de France.” “The
> group bonding… is good for mental health: it may foster stronger bonds between
> men and have positive effects on their wellbeing and morale, as Mamils are
> having a wheelie good time.” Excellent health news despite the disturbing
> aesthetical side effects:



Posted on March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in
photography, Readers' wildlife, Science9 Comments Posted at 8:15 am


FRIDAY: HILI DIALOGUE

March 15, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to cat shabbos, which begins at sundown tonight: Friday, March 15, 2024.
It’s also the dreaded Ides of March. Foodwise, it’s National Peanut Lovers’ Day,
and at least they got the apostrophe in the right place.  Here’s how they make
Skippy:



It’s International Day Against Police Brutality, World Consumer Rights Day,
National Pears Hélène Day, and National Egg Cream Day, celebrating the largely
Jewish-American-NYC drink that contains neither eggs nor cream. Instead, it’s
usually made with milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup (ideally, Fox’s U-Bet
Chocolate Syrup).

Jason Perlow, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And because it’s Friday, I have to include Allen Sherman’s classic song,
“Seltzer Boy”.  The YouTube notes say that this is “Allan Sherman’s great 1962
Jewish parody of folk singer Odetta’s recording of the African-American ‘Water
Boy,’ which she performed in concert with Harry Belafonte in 1960.”  I love it,
and the rhymes are terrific.



And for the Ides of March:  The Death of Julius Caesar (1806) by Vincenzo
Camuccini.  No blood!

Vincenzo Camuccini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by
consulting the March 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*From the Free Press we hear that “Female athletes sue NCAA over transgender
competitors in sport.”  The presence of Lia Thomas, a trangender female, in
competition and also in the locker rooms with biological women are what prompted
this suit, which turns on the general principle of the unfairness of allowing
transgender women (biological males), who after transitioning still retain some
athletic advantages of men over women, compete against biological women:

> Over a dozen female athletes are suing the National Collegiate Athletics
> Association for letting transgender athletes compete against them and use
> female locker rooms in college sports.
> 
> At the center of the class-action lawsuit is Lia Thomas, the trans athlete who
> dominated the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships while a student at the
> University of Pennsylvania. The suit states that both the NCAA and Georgia
> Tech, which hosted the event, knowingly violated Title IX, the federal statute
> that guarantees equal opportunity for men and women in college education and
> sports.
> 
> The lawsuit, the first federal action of its kind, seeks to change the rules,
> rendering any biological males ineligible to compete against female athletes.
> It demands the NCAA revoke all awards given to trans athletes in women’s
> competitions and “reassign” them to their female contenders. It also asks for
> “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and
> anxiety, expense costs and other damages due to defendants’ wrongful conduct.”
> 
> The suit, organized by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, also states
> that the NCAA’s decision to let Thomas compete against women is based on the
> “illegal premise” that “testosterone suppression and personal choice alone can
> make a male eligible to compete on a women’s sports team.” It says the
> association’s rules allow “men to compete on women’s teams with a testosterone
> level that is five times higher than the highest recorded testosterone level
> for elite female athletes.”
> 
> Males who have gone through puberty—even after undergoing hormone suppression
> treatment—retain a biological advantage over women “which no woman can achieve
> without doping,” says the suit, which was filed by 16 plaintiffs—including
> twelve swimmers, two track athletes, one tennis player, and one volleyball
> player.
> 
> Riley Gaines, who famously tied with Thomas in the 200-yard freestyle final at
> the 2022 Championships, told The Free Press that by allowing biological males
> to compete against women, the NCCA “undermines everything that Title IX was
> created to protect.”
> 
> “The NCAA’s most basic job is to protect the fairness and safety of
> competition,” she said, “but instead the NCAA has been and continues to openly
> discriminate against women.”

Ten to one the ACLU will submit an amicus brief on behalf of the NCAA
defendants.  I sure hope the FFRF doesn’t! Here’s a 20-minute video from the
Free Press about the suit:



*I’m by no means a big fan of Netanyahu, but I’m also tired of the U.S. telling
Israel not only how to run the war, but also how to run its internal affairs.
Now Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, has excoriated
Netaynahu and told Israel to gin up a new election to get rid of the guy.  Can
you imagine if Israel tried to control who was our President in this way?
“America better impeach Joe Biden”?  At any rate, yes, there will eventually be
elections, and given the Israeli public’s dislike of Netanyahu and his being
held responsible for the security weaknesses of October 7, Bibi will be out on
his tuchas. But what gives Schumer the right to try to run Israel?  From the
WaPo:

> Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for the Israeli
> government to hold a new election in a speech warning that Israel risks
> becoming an international “pariah” under the leadership of Prime Minister
> Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet.

> Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States and a
> staunch ally of Israel, said he thinks Israelis understand “better than
> anybody that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of
> the world” and would choose better leaders if elections were held.

> “I believe that holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would
> give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the postwar future,”
> Schumer said Thursday in a speech on the Senate floor, in remarks that did not
> set an exact timeline for a new election. Schumer, who opened his speech
> saying he felt “immense obligation” as a Jewish American to speak, stressed
> that the outcome of that election would be up to the Israelis — not Americans

> The call, from one of Congress’s strongest supporters of Israel, marks the
> clearest signal to Israel yet that frustrations over Netanyahu’s handling of
> the war in Gaza are boiling and could even threaten the future of the close
> relationship between Israel and the United States.
> 
> President Biden has frequently expressed frustration with Netanyahu in recent
> months, but he has never publicly suggested that Israelis replace him. The
> prime minister is deeply unpopular at home after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7,
> and he has tangled with U.S. officials over his hampering of humanitarian aid
> into Gaza and his stated desire to conduct a ground invasion in the crowded
> city of Rafah, which the United States thinks would lead to an unacceptably
> high level of civilian casualties. He also has explicitly rejected U.S.
> entreaties to discuss a pathway to a two-state solution.

I’m sorry, but U.S., entreaties to discuss a pathway for a “two state solution”
is stupid, and a ground invasion into Rafah, if Hamas is really to be knocked
back on its heels, is mandatory. Simple bombing will kill many more civilians
than will a ground invasion.  If the U.S. really wants Israel to defend itself
by eliminating Hamas, then it should stop trying to run the war and Israel’s
politics. Weigh in, yes; make demands, no.  I wonder what the U.S. thinks would
be an “unacceptably high level of civilian casualties” to eliminate Hams.

*More on this topic. Here we have another official telling Israel how to run the
war (and perhaps lose it): Secretary of State Anthony Blinken emitting one of
the most misguided statements I’ve seen from the U.S, about the war (click on
headlkine from the Times of Israel below).



One would think that “job number one” should actually be threefold: destroying
Hamas—which after all is the aim of the war—rescuing the hostages, and
protecting Israelis. Protecting Gazan civilians is, in my view, #4.  And, after
the war, Israel has to tighten up its security so this can’t happen again. But
no, Blinken means protecting Palestinian civilians, which of course if taken
seriously as Job Number One should mandate Israel’s immediate withdrawal from
Gaza.

It’s clear from the outset that the civilians that need to be protected are
Palestinians, which is okay except that Israel is still under fire big time from
Hezbollah and Hamas is still firing rockets, mistreating Israeli hostages, and
killing the IDF.

> Protecting and aiding civilians must be “job number one” for Israel in the
> war-battered Gaza Strip, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
> 
> “Where there is a will, there is a way,” Blinken told reporters after a
> virtual meeting with ministers on a new maritime corridor for aid into Gaza.
> 
> “We look to the government of Israel to make sure this is a priority.
> Protecting civilians, getting people the assistance they need — that has to be
> job number one, even as they do what is necessary to defend the country and to
> deal with the threat posed by Hamas,” Blinken said.

Blinken is an idiot, and I swear that he doesn’t care if Israel wins or loses.
Some ally.  More:

> Blinken spoke with his counterparts from Britain, Cyprus, the European Union,
> Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on an initiative announced last week for
> the US military to build a temporary pier in the Mediterranean to bring in
> aid. US army vessels departed a base in Virginia on Tuesday, carrying about
> 100 soldiers and equipment they will need to build the temporary port on
> Gaza’s coast.
> 
> . . . The US has also been warning Israel against a ground offensive in the
> southernmost city of Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold, unless it has a plan to
> protect civilians.

Yes, Israel has a plan but Hamas, of course, doesn’t want Palestinians to leave;
the more deaths of Palestinian civilians, the better for Hamas.  And trying to
minimize the assault on Gaza by drawing “red lines” is the same as making Israel
fight Hamas with one hand behind its back.  As Douglas Murray said in a video
interview/discussion in South Africa today (do watch it if you can), every death
of a Palestinian civilian can be put at the door of Hamas.

*Now a group of people from ten countries have made a formal complaint to the UN
Human Rights Council about sharia law and its oppression of women.

> It isn’t often that you hear about formal complaints to the UN Human Rights
> Council (UNHRC) about the violation of women’s human rights occasioned by the
> Sharia. According to human rights activist Deepti Mahajan, who runs the
> Coalition CHINGARI, 80 signatories from the US, Canada, Israel, India, the UK,
> Austria, Australia, Netherlands, Russia, and South Africa signed a petition to
> the UN Human Rights Council (myself included).
> 
> CHINGARI advocates for Hindu girls and raises awareness about their abduction
> and forced conversion in Pakistan. The issue has been covered over the years
> at Jihad Watch. At least 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forcibly
> converted to Islam each year, despite growing awareness and even protests.
> 
> Mahajan stated that signatories include “Muslims, ex Muslim women and men,
> victims of Sharia, intellectuals, professors, journalists, and professionals.”
> 
> The complaint to the UNHRC was submitted in time for International Women’s
> Day, and the formal press release is below. You’ll notice the many themes
> covered by Jihad Watch on a regular basis. The UN Human Rights Council is
> “responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the
> globe,” according to its own website, but fails repeatedly. Click HERE for the
> UNHRC’s current membership.

The complaint is at the bottom, and then there’s a list of items under “Action
requested” that starts with this:

> i. Request a single consolidated response from the Organization of Islamic
> Cooperation (OIC), including one standardized, worldwide codification of the
> Sharia and an explanation as to why Sharia should not be considered a
> fundamental cause of violation of women’s human rights.
> 
> ii. Appoint two non-Muslim rapporteurs, one who is a Special Rapporteur on
> Freedom of Religion or Belief and the second, a Special Rapporteur on Violence
> against Women, to mandate them to work in a coordinated manner and report to
> the Human Rights Council on the following issues:

Now this is doomed to failure, of course; there are too many Muslim countries
controlling the votes of the UN.  It seems a futile exercise, but one has to
keep fighting against sharia and its oppression of women. It’s happening in
Iran, so far with little success for women’s rights, but the government has been
put on notice.

*The NYT chooses “22 of the funniest novels since Catch-22“. That book came out
in 1961. I haven’t read many of the suggestions, but here are the few I did
read:

> Portnoy’s Complaint
> Heartburn
> American Psycho
> Bridget Jones’s Diary

That’s just four out of 22, and the other eighteen I haven’t heard of. But they
left out. But where is A Confederacy of Dunces, which came out in 1980? And I’m
sure I’m forgetting some others. Readers should weigh in below.

*From Sam Harris’s Instagram; he’s speaking on Yasmine Mohammed’s podcast about
the attention to the Israel Hamas war. Of course there are a lot of comments
about his “misguided” stand,



Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains today’s dialogue: “Hili thinks that
this world is too crazy and irrationality always seems to win. She wants to move
to another world. If the theory of multiverses is correct there must be a better
one.”

> Hili: Is the theory of multiverses correct?
> A: I don’t know but I can’t rule it out.
> Hili: Can we move to one?



In Polish:
> Hili: Czy teoria wieloświatów jest poprawna?
> Ja: Nie wiem, ale nie mogę tego wykluczyć.
> Hili: A czy możemy się przeprowadzić?

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

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs. I’m hoping this is a mistranslation:



Sent to Jez from his daughter Ana. The sign at the top is real, and shows the
dangers of poor grammar and punctuation:



From BuzzFeed:



From Masih: a new video:





From Orli: an outrage in Chicago. Read it all:





A pun from gravelinspector:





From Barry, one of the weirdest video tweets I’ve ever seen:





From Malcolm: a paralyzed cat taught to walk. Very heartwarming, and what a
lovely woman!





From the Auschwitz Memorial, a seven-year-old French girl gassed to death upon
arrival:





Two tweets from Dr, Cobb. First, what animal do you see? (Hint: put some
distance between you and the picture.):





At least they’re not making crocs!





Posted on March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 by whyevolutionistruePosted in Hili
Dialogue56 Comments Posted at 6:45 am


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