House passes anti-BDS bill by wide bipartisan margin: three of “the squad” (along with 13 other Democrats) dissent

Why Evolution Is True

If you don’t know about B.D.S. (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, the New York Times article below, from Saturday, will give you the basics. As for the title question, well, it’s not answered; the article gives the views of both supporters and detractors of BDS.

I’ve always thought the movement was anti-Semitic, but even if you don’t agree, it’s clearly aimed not just at pressuring Israel to arrive at a land settlement with Palestine—an aim, if not a tactic, that I agree with—but to eliminate the state of Israel completely, at least as a Jewish state. In the end, the movement’s aims will result in a big “Israel” with an Arab majority, and that would be the finish, not just of a Jewish state, but of the Jews themselves. And that is the movement’s aim.

Here are the aims of BDS as the Times shows them:

Modeled on the fight…

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Cockatoo removes bricks securing the lid of a trash can

Why Evolution Is True

Finally, to end your Saturday, here’s a video from Australia of a cockatoo shoving three bricks off of a garbage bin to get at the noms inside. It reminds me of a cat knocking stuff of a table, but the cats do it just to mess with people, while the cockatoo is creatively foraging:

We’ve recently moved into Helensburgh, NSW, Australia. A very beautiful area but we’ve got these clever/pesky Cockatoo’s [sic: the greengrocer’s apostrophe!]. Lots of people put rocks and bricks on their bins to keep them out but these birds have learnt to push the bricks off to get the rewards.

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The “grievance studies” hoax: a forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education

Why Evolution Is True

The “grievance studies” hoax conducted by Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay is now so well known that it has its own Wikipedia page. I’m sure most of you know some details: the trio wrote and submitted 20 papers to journals dealing with what they call academic “grievance studies”: cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies. At least seven of the papers were published, including the famous “dog park rape culture” paper, and one even won a prize.  And one of the accepted papers was larded with extensive quotations from Mein Kampf.

Just this week Boghossian, the only hoaxer who has a formal academic position, was disciplined by Portland State University, which, although it didn’t fire him, ordered him to take training in “protection of human subjects.” Until he does that and then convinces the University he understands the rules, he cannot do sponsored research, work on human subjects, or apply for…

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Readers’ wildlife photos

Why Evolution Is True

Today we have a potpourri of photos of urban wildlife, starting with five from Diana MacPherson. Every contributor’s notes are indented. Don’t neglect the animals in your backyard—especially the ducks!

Here are some pictures I took from March through June.

Baby English House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) snoozing together waiting for their parents to feed them.

Brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) wandering through the yard in May.

Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) contemplates the day in May.

Close up of Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) eating seeds from bird feeder. You can see the damage he did in the ripped-up hole in the picture. That feeder was totally trashed.

Full image of Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) eating seeds from bird feeder.

Here are two photos from Garry VanGelderen:

Blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) in my feeder.

Chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina

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Blooms and Brushstrokes, A Floral History of Australian Art, by Penelope Curtin and Tansy Curtin

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’ve been thinking about this latest beautiful book from Wakefield Press during my (almost) daily walk with Amber*…

You might think, with Melbourne in the depths of winter, that our suburban gardens would be a bit bleak.  But you’d be wrong: already there are jonquils and daffodils in the avenue; there’s a stunning white camellia lush with blooms next door; purple and white hardenbergias are weaving through the fence in our street’s most ambitious garden (created by a Vietnamese couple who are an inspiration to us all); on the trellis outside my library window there is one stubborn spray of white jasmine that has no business flowering in July; and there’s a wattle just about ready to burst into bloom — early next week, by the look of it.   I’ve tried photographing these gorgeous splashes of colour that brighten a dull day, but really, they need an artist to…

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Matt Meselson describes his most famous experiment (with Frank Stahl)

Why Evolution Is True

In 1958 Matt Meselson, whom I knew slightly at Harvard (he was a terrific guy), performed, along with Frank Stahl, an experiment that John Cairns called “the most beautiful experiment in biology”. What he and Stahl did (see description here) was to use density-labeled components of DNA to choose among which of the three methods of DNA replication floated at the time was correct (people didn’t know how DNA replicated in 1958; this experiment settled the issue):

In “semi-conservative replication”, each strand of DNA unwinds and makes a copy of itself, so that each DNA helix in the next generation of DNA has both a parental strand and a new strand synthesized from nucleotides and sugars. “Conservative” replication involves each double strand making another whole double strand.  “Dispersive” replication involved the DNA breaking, with each break synthesizing new DNA, matched to the other strand, in bits. They’re portrayed…

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An ancient bird with an extraordinarily long toe

Why Evolution Is True

There’s a new paper in Current Biology that details the finding of a very unusual bird in Burmese amber—a bird with one huge toe and weird bristles on its feet. You can read it with UnPaywall by clicking on the screenshot below (pdf here, reference at bottom).

The specimen, uncovered by amber miners five years ago, consists of a lower right leg and foot, as well as some feathers (both those attached to the leg and flight feathers free in the amber). It dates back about 99 million years, to the middle Cretaceous, when flying birds had already evolved from reptiles. Since it was a new species (the first ever described from amber), the authors gave it the binomial Elektorornis chenguangi, with the genus name meaning “amber bird”.  Phylogenetic analysis places the species in the Enantiornithes, a bird family that went extinct without descendants at the K/T…

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Rare Book Week 2019: Medieval and Early Modern Marginalia

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Sue from Whispering Gums and I have faced off many a time over the issue of marginalia: she does, and I don’t — but *chuckle* she would have won hands down today because this morning’s Rare Book Week event about marginalia was fascinating:)

The event was presented by Dr Anna Welch from the State Library of Victoria, and what she showed us was that marginalia is much more than jotting down a few thoughts on the sides of a page.  Some marginalia helps to establish the provenance of a book, while other examples offer commentaries on the text, and not always serious commentary at that…

In the back of a beautiful 17th century book bound in vellum there was some droll doggerel about St George and his dragon, while in a book called Egypt and the Pyramids (1814) by the scholar who decoded the Rosetta stone, someone who was ‘showing…

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“Modern” Homo sapiens may have been in Eurasia as long as 210,000 years ago

Why Evolution Is True

The conventional wisdom about the migration of Homo out of Africa, where the genus originated, involves the spread of Homo erectus about 2 million years ago across Eurasia, with that species appearing to have gone extinct without issue.

After that, the Neandertals, which split from the lineage producing “modern” (i.e., living) H. sapiens about 800,000 years ago, moved to Europe some time between then and 600,000 years ago. (For convenience, I’ll call Neanderthals “Neanderthals” and “modern H. sapiens” as sapiens, though I think they’re both subspecies of H. sapiens.)

Then, it was thought, sapiens moved into Europe and then Asia beginning about 60,000 years ago, with Neanderthals becoming extinct around 40,000 years ago, though having left a genetic legacy within sapiens. (That ability to produce fertile hybrids between H. sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neanderthalensis is why I consider both lineages to be subspecies of the…

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Rare Book Week 2019: The Medieval Darwin, presented by Dr Anne Holloway

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Spouse and I made a rare trip to the CBD today for a Rare Book Week event.  There are no trains running from our side of the city into the CBD and roads are blocked off all over the place because of Victoria’s Big Build so getting there was every bit as horrible as we had expected, but it was definitely worth it.

The session was called The Medieval Darwin, presented by Dr Anne Holloway from Monash University, and I loved every minute of it.  This was the blurb:

Charles Kingsley paved the way for twentieth-century fantasists such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is equally well known for his enthusiasm for Darwin, and his role in the professionalisation of History. Through his works held at Monash Special Collections, Anne Holloway will explore the re-purposing of medieval ideals developed during the crusades to frame and communicate Darwin’s ideals…

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