Why Evolution is True Feed

The hunger strike by pro-Palestinian students at Brown University—students aiming to get their school to divest from companies “associated with human rights abuses in Palestine”—didn’t work. It lasted just eight days, and then the students abandoned their fast unto death because their demands were deemed “obsolete”.  But now, it appears, the anti-Israel faction, likely to be students have adopted a new stratagem: issuing vile and violent threats against the campus Jewish organization of Hillel. This is of course part of the antisemitism fulminating on American college campuses.

Note: I’ve received an email from a Brown Vice-President, who, eager to protect his school’s reputation, admonished me that we don’t know if the hate emails originated from the campus. That’s indeed true, but I think that’s the most likely source, and I’m using Bayes’ Theorem here.

Here’s the letter that the President of Brown sent yesterday to the University community.

From: President Christina H. Paxson 
Date: Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 9:49 PM
Subject: Threats to the Brown-RISD community

Dear Members of the Brown and RISD Communities,

We are writing to address the terrible threats against the Brown-RISD Hillel Weiner Center that our campuses were notified about this morning. Employees there received deeply disturbing antisemitic emails that included threats of violence against them personally and Brown-RISD Hillel.

Our primary concern is for the safety and security of members of the Brown and RISD communities, including the Brown-RISD Hillel community. Threats of violence against anyone on our campuses are completely unacceptable, and we are committed to working with law enforcement to do everything possible to help identify and prosecute the perpetrator(s).

This comes at an especially difficult time of distress on our campuses. Our students, faculty and staff continue to grapple with the deaths of Israelis, Palestinians and others in the wake of the October 7 attacks, as well as a despicable act of violence against a member of the Brown community here in the United States last November, and increases in reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate targeting national origin and identity both nationally and on our campuses.

This is a time to reflect on who we are as educational communities that value human dignity and reject violence, racism, discrimination and intimidation. Our fervent hope is that, in this difficult time, each of us in the Brown and RISD communities renews our commitment to eschew all forms of hatred and work toward mutual understanding.

Our ongoing focus is making sure that members of our communities are protected and feel safe. As shared in campus safety alerts sent earlier today, the departments of public safety for both Brown and RISD continue to work with the Providence Police Department to investigate the source of the threats and ensure the ongoing safety and security of Brown-RISD Hillel. Part of their swift and immediate response was to reach out to federal, state and local law enforcement authorities, and to coordinate with the Rhode Island State Fusion Center, which gathers and shares information about threats between law enforcement agencies.

While we have been assured that, given the nature of the emailed threats, there is no evidence of ongoing concern for personal safety (and operations in the building can continue), robust security plans are in place to ensure the security of the building and the operations that take place there. Safety plans are also in place for the individuals who received the threats.

If at any time you learn about threats to yourself or others, please contact the Providence police, as well as public safety at your respective campus — NUMBER REDACTED for Brown community members and NUMBER REDACTED for RISD community members.

Sincerely,
Christina H. Paxson
President, Brown University

Crystal Williams
President, Rhode Island School of Design

I don’t see this as a violation of institutional neutrality so much as an attempt to quell disturbances and calm people on campus. And, as if to avoid taking a stand, Paxson and Williams include the obligatory denunciations of “Islamophobia” in their letter.  But one thing is certain: those who favor the Palestinian side of the conflict are far more hateful and violent than those favoring the Israeli side.

Note: The “despicable act of violence against a member of the Brown community here in the United States last November” refers to the shooting of three Palestinian college students who were walking in Vermont, an unconscionable act that left the Brown student, Hisham Awartani, paralyzed from the chest down. That’s a terrible fate and I wish him well. But as far as I know, there’s no evidence that this was an “Islamophobic” shooting, and the accused perp, 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton, remains in custody pending trial.

What we have below (click on headline for free access) is a review in Nature by Denis Noble of a new book by Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, which has garnered good reviews and is currently #1 in rankings of books on developmental biology.  The Amazon summary promises that the book will revise our view of life:

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.. . .

I haven’t read it yet, though I will (I have several books ahead of it, including the galleys of Richard Dawkins’s new book, for which I’m to provide a blurb). Instead, I will review a review: Denis Noble’s review published a few days ago. (That’s the screenshot below.) Admittedly, it’s a review of a review, but Noble gives his take on the book’s importance, and in so doing reveals his own idea that neo-Darwinism is not only impoverished, but misguided in important ways.  And, as usual, Noble proves himself misguided.

In some ways it’s unfortunate that Noble was chosen as a reviewer, as the man, while having a sterling reputation in physiology and systems biology, is largely ignorant of neo-Darwinism, and yet has spent a lot of the last decade trying to claim that neo-Darwinism is grossly inadequate to explain the features and evolutionary changes of organisms. You can see all my critiques of Noble here, but I’ll just quote briefly from the latest to give you a flavor of how he attacks modern evolutionary theory:

In an earlier post I wrote, “Famous physiologist embarrasses himself by claiming that the modern theory of evolution is in tatters“, I emphasized five assertions Noble made in a 2013 paper in Experimental Physiology, and then I criticized them as being either deeply misguided or flat wrong. Noble’s claims:

1. Mutations are not random
2. Acquired characteristics can be inherited
3. The gene-centered view of evolution is wrong [This is connected with #2.]
4. Evolution is not a gradual gene-by-gene process but is macromutational.
5. Scientists have not been able to create new species in the lab or greenhouse, and we haven’t seen speciation occurring in nature.

I then assessed each claim in order:

Wrong, partly right but irrelevant, wrong, almost completely wrong, and totally wrong (speciation is my own area).

And yet Noble continues to bang on about “the broken paradigm of Neo-Darwinism,” which happens to be the subtitle of his new article (below) in IAI News, usually a respectable website run by the Institute of Art and Ideas.

And yes, Noble’s banging persists in his review of Ball’s book. The criticisms I level will be against Noble’s claims, as I can’t verify whether he’s accurately characterizing Ball’s views or spouting his (Noble’s) own misguided views.

The problem with Noble;s review is twofold: the stuff he says is new and revolutionary is either old and well known, or it’s new and unsubstantiated.  Here are a few of his quotes (indented and in italics) and my take (flush left):

First, Noble’s introduction to the book, which is okay until Noble tries to explicate it:

So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code,” writes Ball, life might as well be “sprinkled with invisible magic”. But, reality “is far more interesting and wonderful”, as he explains in this must-read user’s guide for biologists and non-biologists alike.

On to Noble’s asseverations:

When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence.

Well, the genome is more or less a blueprint for life, for it encodes for how an organism will develop when the products of its genome, during development, interact with the environment—both internal and external—to produce an organism.  Dawkins has emphasized, though, that the genome is better thought of as “recipe” or “program” for life, and his characterization is actually more accurate (you can “reverse engineer” a blueprint from a house and engineer a house from a blueprint—it works both ways—but you can’t reverse engineer a recipe from a cake or a DNA sequence from an organism.)  The DNA of a robin zygote in its egg will produce an organism that looks and behaves like a robin, while that of a starling will produce a starling.  You can’t change the environment to make one of them become the other. Yes, the external environment (food, temperature, and so on) can ultimately affect the traits of an organism, but it is the DNA itself, not the environment, that is the thing that changes via natural selection. It is the DNA itself that is passed on, and is potentially immortal. And the results of natural selection are coded in the genome. (Of course the “environment” of an organism can be internal, too, but much of the internal environment, including epigenetic changes that affect gene function are themselves coded by the DNA.)

As for genes not having a “pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence,” this is either wrong or old hat.  First, it is true that at this point we don’t always know how a gene functions from its DNA sequence alone, much less how it could change the organism if it mutates. This is a matter of ignorance that will eventually be solved. As for “pre-set function”, what does Noble mean by “pre-set”?  A single gene can participate in many developmental pathways, and if it mutates, it can change development in unpredictable ways, and in ways you couldn’t even predict from what that gene “normally” does. The gene causing Huntington’s chorea, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, has a function that’s largely unknown but is thought to affect neuron transport. But it also has repeated sections of the DNA (CAGCAGCAG. . . . .), and mutations that increase the number CAG repeats can cause the disease when they exceed a certain threshold.

But the “Huntington’s gene” is not there to cause disease, of course. It interacts with dozens or even hundreds of other genes in ways we don’t understand. What is its “pre-set” function? The question is meaningless. And was does “pre-set” mean, anyway?

The second sentence in the bit above is garbled and ambiguous, and at any rate doesn’t refute the notion that the genome is indeed the “instruction manual for life.”

But wait: there’s more!

Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes. For example, mutations in almost 300 genes have been identified as indicating a risk that a person will develop schizophrenia.

It’s therefore a huge oversimplification, notes Ball, to say that genes cause this trait or that disease. The reality is that organisms are extremely robust, and a particular function can often be performed even when key genes are removed. For instance, although the HCN4 gene encodes a protein that acts as the heart’s primary pacemaker, the heart retains its rhythm even if the gene is mutated.

“Polygeny,” or the view that traits can be affected by many genes, is something I learned in first-year genetics in 1968. But some “traits” or diseases are the product of single genes, like the trait of getting Huntington’s Chorea of sickle-cell disease.  But many diseases, like high blood pressure and heart disease, can be caused by many genes. And it’s not just diseases. Whether your earlobes are attached to your face or are free is based on a single gene, and eye color, to a large extent, is too (see this list for other single-gene alternative traits).

As far as the HCN4 gene goes, mutations may allow it to have a rhythm, but many mutations in that gene cause abnormal rhythms.and can even bring on death through heart attacks. No, the gene is not robust to mutations, and I can’t understand where Noble’s statement comes from. It appears to be wrong. (I am not attributing it to Ball here.)

More:

Classic views of evolution should also be questioned. Evolution is often regarded as “a slow affair of letting random mutations change one amino acid for another and seeing what effect it produces”. But in fact, proteins are typically made up of several sections called modules — reshuffling, duplicating and tinkering with these modules is a common way to produce a useful new protein.

This is not a revision of the “classic” view of evolution because we’ve known about domain-swapping for some time. For example, the “antifreeze” proteins of Arctic and Antarctic fish can involve changes in the number of repeats in the enzyme trypsinogen, which normally has nothing to do with preventing freezing. Or, antifreeze proteins can arise via the cobbling together of bits of different known genes, or from bits of the unknown genes, or even be transferred via horizontal acquisition from other species.  Yes, this happens, but it’s not the only way by a long shot that evolution occurs. In fact, now that we can sequence DNA, we’ve found that many adaptive changes in organisms are based in changes in single genes or their regulatory regions, and not swapping of modules. Here’s a figure from a short and nice summary by Sarah Tishkoff from 2015 showing single genes involved in various adaptations that have occurred in one species—our own. The traits are given at the top, and the genes involved are by the symbols. For example, though several genes can involve skin pigmentation, mutations in just one of them can make a detectable change.

 

Global distribution of locally adaptive traits. Adaptation to diverse environments during human evolution has resulted in phenotypes that are at the extremes of the global distribution. Fumagalli et al. have integrated scans of natural selection and GWAS to identify genetic loci associated with adaptation to an Arctic environment.ILLUSTRATION: A. CUADRA/SCIENCE AND MEAGAN RUBEL/UNIV. OF PENNSYLVANIA

At any rate, we can nevertheless regard shuffling of domains (or even horizontal gene transfer from other species) as mutations, and the new mutated gene then evolves according to its effect on the replication of the gene. No revision of neo-Darwinism or its mathematics is involved. New ways of changing genes haven’t really revised our view of how evolution works, even when we’re talking about the “neutral theory” instead of natural selection.

These mutations, by the way, contra Noble, are still “random”—that is, they occur irrespective of whether they’d be useful in the new environment—and although they can make big changes in the organism’s physiology or appearance, can nevertheless evolve slowly.  A gene with a big effect need not evolve quickly, for the rate of evolution depends not on the effect on the organism’s appearance, physiology, and so on, but on its effect on the organisms’s reproductive capacity. And these things need not be correlated.

Later in the book, Ball grapples with the philosophical question of what makes an organism alive. Agency — the ability of an organism to bring about change to itself or its environment to achieve a goal — is the author’s central focus. Such agency, he argues, is attributable to whole organisms, not just to their genomes. Genes, proteins and processes such as evolution don’t have goals, but a person certainly does. So, too, do plants and bacteria, on more-simple levels — a bacterium might avoid some stimuli and be drawn to others, for instance. Dethroning the genome in this way contests the current standard thinking about biology, and I think that such a challenge is sorely needed.

Ball is not alone in calling for a drastic rethink of how scientists discuss biology. There has been a flurry of publications in this vein in the past year, written by me and others2–4. All outline reasons to redefine what genes do. All highlight the physiological processes by which organisms control their genomes. And all argue that agency and purpose are definitive characteristics of life that have been overlooked in conventional, gene-centric views of biology.

This passage verges on the teleological.  For surely organisms don’t have “goals” when they evolve.  If a mutation arises that increases the rate of replication of a gene form (say one increasing tolerance to low oxygen in humans living in the Himalaya), it will sweep through the population via natural selection. If it reduces oxygen binding, it will be kicked out of the population. Can we say that increased oxygen usage is a “goal”? No, it’s simply what happens, and I suspect there are other ways to adapt to high altitude, like getting darker skin. To characterize organisms as evolving to meet goals, as Noble implies here, is a gross misunderstanding of the process.

Yes, the organism is the “interactor”, as Dawkins puts it: the object whose interaction with its environment determines what gene mutations will be useful. But without the “replicator”—the genes in the genome—evolution cannot occur.  The whole process of adaptation, involving the interaction of a “random” process (mutation) and a “deterministic” one (natural selection), is what produces the appearance of purpose. But that doesn’t mean, at least in any sense with which we use the word, that “purpose” is what makes organisms alive.

But the appearance of “purpose” as a result of natural selection brings up another point, one that Dawkins makes—or so I remember.  I believe that he once defined life as “those entities that evolve by natural selection.”  I can’t be sure of that, but it’s as good a definition of life as any, as it involves organisms having replicators, interacting “bodies”, and differential reproduction. (According to that definition, by the way, viruses are alive.)  So if you connect natural selection with purpose, one might say, “Life consists of those organisms who have evolved to look as if as if they had a purpose.”  But I prefer Dawkins’s definition because it’s more fundamental.

At the end, Noble says that this “new view of life” will help us cure diseases more readily:

This burst of activity represents a frustrated thought that “it is time to become impatient with the old view”, as Ball says. Genetics alone cannot help us to understand and treat many of the diseases that cause the biggest health-care burdens, such as schizophrenia, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. These conditions are physiological at their core, the author points out — despite having genetic components, they are nonetheless caused by cellular processes going awry. Those holistic processes are what we must understand, if we are to find cures.

I haven’t heard anybody say that “genetics alone can help us treat complex diseases”. You don’t treat heart disease by looking for genes (though you can with some cancers.) But genetics can surely help! For genetic engineering is on the way, and at least some diseases, like sickle-cell anemia, will soon be “curable” by detecting the mutated genes in embryos or eggs and then fixing the mutation with CRISPR. And advancesin genetics are surely helping us cure cancer—see this article.  But of course some diseases, even those with a genetic component, need environmental interventions: so called “holistic” cures. There may, for example, be a genetically-based propensity to get strep throat. But if you get it, you don’t worry about genes, you take some penicillin or other antibiotic. (Curiously, the form of Streptococcus that causes strep throat doesn’t seem to have evolved resistance to the drug!)

Overall, I don’t see much new in Noble’s take on evolution—just a bunch of puffery and regurgitation of what we already know. Perhaps people need to know about this stuff in a popular book, but, after all, Noble’s piece was written for scientists, for it appears in Nature.

Despite repeated claims in the last few years that neo-Darwinism is moribund or even dead, it still refuses to lie down. Happy Darwin Day!

Addendum by Greg Mayer: For those interested in the distinction between the blueprint (wrong) and recipe (on the right track) analogies for the genome, I wrote a post explicating the difference, citing and quoting Richard, here at WEIT; the post also explains why the Wikipedia article about “Epigenetics” is definitionally wrong; see especially the link to this paper by David Haig.

Development is epigenetic by Greg Mayer One of the points I stress to students in my evolution class is that development is epigenetic: organisms develop from a less differentiated state to a more differentiated state. In modern terms, genes, the intraembryonic environment, and the extraembryonic environment interact to produce the organism through a sequence of stages going from an undeveloped to a mature state. . .

Today we finish off Athayde Tonhasca Júnior’s recent trip to Venice (the first part is here). His notes are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

One of the history’s delights is the opportunity to pull a thread of successive events that help us understand better today’s world. These fabulous bronze horses inside St Mark’s Basilica (the ones on the facade are replicas) were pilfered from Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, when the city was sacked by Frank crusaders and Venetians in 1204. The Fourth Crusade was kicked off by Pope Innocent III – an ironic name if ever there was one – who had no idea of the shitstorm he was unleashing. Despite his angry threats of excommunication, the Crusaders, who were supposed to go to Jerusalem, stormed Constantinople and massacred their Christian brethren in an orgy of rape, disembowelments and decapitations. The city was razed to the ground and the Byzantine Empire never recovered, becoming easy pickings for the invading Ottomans in 1453. For a cut of the profits, the Venetians provided transport and gave all the logistical support to Innocent’s road trip from hell – so you could say they are largely responsible for Constantinople becoming Istanbul. Incidentally, the Venetians had the perfect leader for this rapacious adventure: the nonagenarian and blind Doge Enrico Dandolo (you can read the details in Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune, an excellent account of Venice’s history). To this day, the Fourth Crusade is a sore subject for Orthodox Christians:

Another souvenir pinched from Constantinople: The Four Tetrarchs, probably depicting the four rulers that took over the Roman Empire in 293 AD. The Byzantines considered themselves Greek-speaking Romans (Romaioi), so Rome’s past was their past. Notice the mismatched foot in one of the figures; the original bit broke off when the statue was hacked away. The heel of the missing foot was discovered in 1960, and it’s on display in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum:

Some armies would go to war with their dull and ugly artillery pieces. Not the dazzling Venetians, as attested by this 1643 culverin (an early type of cannon).

The End. These pens in the Naval Museum were used by Napoleon Bonaparte to sign the treaty of Campo Formio on 17 October 1797, thus ending five years of war between the French Republic and the First Coalition. France and Austria swapped several bits of territory, redrawing the map of Europe. In the process, Venice was swallowed by Austria. After 1,100 years, La Serenissima was no more:

Venice’s resident population dropped below 50,000 in 2022, down from 66,000 20 years ago and 175,000 in the 1950s. Locals are leaving, fed up with mass tourism and the cost of living. But there’s plenty of old Venice still left:

Rotund tourists may struggle in a calle stretta (a narrow alley; calle Varisco is 53 cm wide). These alleys branch out in every direction and don’t lead you to any specific place; they are used by residents to get home. Many of these thoroughfares are not on the maps and are beyond phone signal reach, so good luck finding your way. While you wander around baffled and disorientated, stay on good terms with the natives by keeping to the right and in a single queue:

A helpful but scarce street sign: ‘the whores’ gate’, where presumedly clients were serviced while standing up against the calle‘s walls:

Venice’s historic centre comprises 121 islands linked by 435 bridges. Shopping, public transport, ambulances, rubbish collection, home delivery, postal service and everything else depend on the canals network:

Having a go at describing our wine during a midday victualling: meandering, medium-bodied, bordering on the reckless at the quantum level. Hints of peach-pits, boysenberries and biodynamic hand-cultivated cacao from a coastal Tuscan villa; cleansing, metallic tannin waltzing with sweet-sour rosehip and balsamic vinegar; co-habiting with sumptuousness that does not bully a goat spleen escabeche. An approachable companion for self-medication any time of day (h/t many sources). Ok, I was a little off. Some wine people must have great fun composing these pretentious servings of tripe. In rural Italy, you can’t go wrong by ordering description-free vino della casa (house wine). It may come in a faceless bottle or jug but is invariably good. No respectable restaurant will risk its reputation with the locals – never mind tourists passing by – by offering plonk. That principle doesn’t apply to big cities:

  You can eat well and not be ripped off in Venice – or anywhere else. Stay clear of tourist hangouts, bypass the dreadful menù fisso (fixed price but little choice) and don’t trust reviews – most of them are written by people used to overcooked pasta and abominations such as pineapple pizzas and spaghetti Bolognese. Instead, follow the locals. We had two excellent meals in this unassuming osteria, which is patronised by neighbours and vaporetto (public waterbus) workers.

The superb Renaissance-kitsch Torre dell’Orologio (Clock Tower), built in 1496/1497. The two bronze figures on top are hinged at the waist to strike the bell on the hour. They are supposed to be shepherds, but are known colloquially and politically-incorrectly (Italians are not oversensitive about these matters) as ‘the Moors’ because of their dark patina. Below them is the winged lion of St. Mark, followed by Virgin Mary with her offspring flanked by two blue panels: the left shows the time in Roman numerals, while the right indicates 5-min intervals in Arabic numerals. Finally, the clock, displaying the time, the phase of the moon, and the dominant sign of the Zodiac. The clock’s mechanism beats any Casio: it has been working since 1753:

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and  “From the River to the Sea,”  but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech. He also recommends that readers watch his video (here), and notes two time stamps for when he talks about telos and identitarianism.  I should have listened to his talk, but I couldn’t find it and I assumed that the UnHerd talk was correct. My apologies to Jon.

I should add that while discussing this correction, Jon noted that he does feel that a university should have policies against calling directly for violence, even if it those calls are protected by the First Amendment.  Here we differ, as I think calls for violence should be permissible except under the stipulations of the courts: they become impermissible if they are not likely to incite imminent lawless violence. If they aren’t likely to do this, I’d say to allow them; Jon would apparently disagree.

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A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI.  New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the five things that needed attention. To wit:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

I’ve always opposed DEI because, though its proponents may be well meaning, the acronym has now become synonymous with compelled speech, attacks on freedom of speech (via “hate speech”), authoritarianism, policing of speech, censorship, and racism. By the latter I don’t just mean racism against “majority” groups, but, recently, the anti-Semitism growing on college campuses. I’m convinced that hatred of Jews is somewhat egged on by DEIers, who, with their view that Jews are “privileged” and “white adjacent”, while their opponents are oppressed people of color, have promoted antisemitism on campus.  And schools like my own are reluctant to punish those who demonstrate against Israel even when those protestors violate college regulations. It doesn’t looks good to sanction people who demonstrate on behalf of “the oppressed.”

Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university (see his famous talk at Duke here). But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.” It’s a short piece, based on a talk at UNC, which I haven’t found.

Here are two excerpts, which are, in effect, most of the piece:

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.

. . . He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:

Privileged people have power. Power is evil. They use their power to oppress the good people. What a sick thing to teach 18-year-olds coming into college in a multi-ethnic democracy. But that’s what we’ve been doing, especially at elite college campuses since 2014-2015, since the DEI revolution… The inevitable outcome in terms of antisemitism is Jews are white, Jews are oppressors, it’s okay to kill Jews because that’s just resistance.

Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.

“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.

There’s no doubt DEI is divisive, and I’ve often thought that the “D” really stood for “divisiveness” and the “E” for “exclusion”, for DEI encourages racial and gender animosity. It does not bring people together, but rather encourages people to not only see their gender or race as the most important part of their character but, importantly, sets up a hierarchy of oppression, which is inherently divisive.

It’s intriguing that Haidt’s mind seem to have been changed largely by “the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.” In saying that, he’s also saying that universities shouldn’t have complete free speech—at least the kind that allows genocidal slogans against the Jews. (These would be chants like “Globalize the intifada” or “From the river to the sea, yadda, yadda.”) If he’s really saying that some kinds of speech are intolerable on campus, I wish he’d be clearer about what kind of speech he means, and who would police it.  After all, if Haidt really favors “Truth University” over “Social Justice University,” he must then feel that some kinds of speech are incompatible with seeking truth. My own view is that speech should be free, but the university has a right to set the times, places of speech, and to regulate rules of when speech violations university regulations by acting to actually harm the dissemination of knowledge. Finally universities must stipulate that permitted speakers can’t be deplatformed or shouted down.

But there remain good reasons to abolish DEI beyond the fact that it may encourage hatred of Jews (and the use of specified pronouns, which isn’t comparable at all).  Pinker gives some of them above.  If we want to get rid of illegal prejudice and bullying on campus, there can be an apparatus for doing that. But that’s not the same thing as DEI.

Given how deeply DEI has sunk its hooks into American universities, though, having huge budgets and armies of bureaucrats, fulfilling Pinker and Haidt’s call won’t be easy.

As for Republican legislatures helping run American universities, I know where Haidt’s coming from, but I’m not on board with that, either.

For some reason there’s been a spate of recent articles on why some cats fetch (I had one that did it, too). Click on the headlines below to read. I’ll give a short anser for each one.

From The Atlantic (link goes to archived version):

Their “byproduct” hypothesis:

Evolutionarily speaking, that sort of checks out. Fetching is just a sequence of four behaviors: looking, chasing, grab-biting, and returning. Versions of the first three are already built into predators’ classic hunting repertoire, says Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute, who’s had her own fetching cat. Returning is perhaps the wild card. Christopher Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, told me that, as solitary creatures, cats have little natural incentive to share what they catch. He hasn’t spotted much retrieval behavior in the feline species he’s studied in nature—or in the half dozen house cats he’s had throughout his life

 

But cats already have some of the behavioral ingredients for carrying fetched cargo. As Sarah Ellis, the head of cat mental wellbeing and behavior at International Cat Care, points out, feline mothers bring live prey back to their kittens to teach them how to hunt, and cats of both sexes have been known to move their food to safer spots before chowing down. (Ellis has had multiple fetching cats.) Maybe, Dickman told me, as cats were repeatedly invited into human homes and praised for eliminating pests, some of their retrieval-esque behaviors were rewarded—and possibly amplified. House cats with access to the outdoors are sadly infamous for hauling home wild birds, rodents, amphibians, and reptiles. And for indoor-only cats, chasing a furry object, gnawing on it, and bringing it to a secure spot may playfully scratch a predatory itch that might otherwise go unsated.

From What Your Cat Wants:

They don’t know! But they also include a video of a fetching cat. Mine was like this: he never brought the fetched object all the way back to me.

So why do cats fetch? We don’t know! It is likely this behavior is part of the predatory sequence of behaviors. There are two parts to this behavior – the pursuit of the object when it is tossed, and the retrieval. Some cats seem to do both (the true fetchers), most cats will pursue moving objects (likely predatory behavior), and some cats will carry objects to home or their owner (including cats who like to bring home things like clothing and toys). As previously mentioned, bringing objects home could be related to bringing killed prey home for a safer place to consume it. However, in the case of fetching behavior, the retrieval seems more likely to be a “request” for the human to engage in more toy tossing! So perhaps this is a truly social play behavior rather than strictly predatory.

A pretty good fetch:

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A post shared by Mikel Delgado (@mikel.delgado)

From the BBC:

The research was first published in the science journal Scientific Reports.

Many cats instinctively like to play, the report says, and owners are being urged to think more about the types of activities they could do to keep their pets happy and active.

It found cats generally prefer to be in control of the game and do not require training to play.

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex School of Psychology, said: “Cats who initiated their fetching sessions played more enthusiastically with more retrievals and more fetching sessions per month.

“This perceived sense of control from the cat’s perspective may be beneficial for the cat’s welfare and the cat-owner relationship.

“I’d encourage owners to be receptive to the needs of their cat by responding to their preferences for play – not all cats will want to play fetch, but if they do, it’s likely that they will have their own particular way of doing so.”

The survey gathered information from 924 owners of 1,154 cats (994 mixed-breed and 160 purebred) that play fetch to better understand the behaviour.

The vast majority of cats (94.4%) showed an instinctive ability to play fetch from a young age, whether it was retrieving toys or common household items.

From Scientific American:

The fun hypothesis:

 In some instances, owners described a scenario in which they dropped or accidentally launched an object, and their cat spontaneously fetched it. In other accounts, domestic felines simply brought their owners a cat toy or other random item, which the human then tossed aside—and a throw-and-retrieve cycle began. “We had an overwhelming number of people say their cat was not trained to do this behavior,” says Jemma Forman, lead study researcher and a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex in England. “We even had some people say that their cats had trained them to play fetch.”

As a caveat, Serpell says humans are likely giving cats unconscious reinforcement by engaging with them in throwing an object in the first place, providing interaction and social reward. Contrary to popular sentiment, domestic cats are, in fact, very much attuned to their humans.

A good fetch of a tinfoil ball by a hairless cat (from the article above):

For your delectation, the Nature “Science Reports” story is here, and it’s also been covered by The Guardian, too.

Reader Jon Losos sent a photo of his own cat, Nelson, fetching a toy:

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This is bizarre but also funny. Someone had a cake made that looks just like their cat. Then they cut into its head in front of the moggy. . . . . .

Look at the cat’s expression!

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We met Felix, the Huddersfield Station Cat, in 2016. a moggy so famous that she has her own Wikipedia section along with another station cat, Bolt.   Here’s the short bit from Wikipedia:

The first station cat, Felix, joined the staff as a nine-week-old kitten in 2011. Since then she has patrolled the station to keep it free from rodents, and even has her own cat-flap to bypass the ticket barriers.  In 2016 Felix was promoted to Senior Pest Controller and local artist Rob Martin painted a portrait of her which now hangs in the station. In 2019 Transpennine Express named a Class 68 locomotive (68031) after Felix.

Felix was probably the most famous cat in Britain, and you can read the details about her in the sad article below announcing his death early last December:

A train station cat which became famous across the world has died.

Felix has been a pest controller at Huddersfield Station since 2011, but it was today confirmed that “she peacefully went to sleep” in the company of the station’s staff.

The moggy shot to fame after a Facebook page dedicated to her life was created by a commuter in 2015 and quickly attracted more than 170,000 followers.

She made several television appearances including on Good Morning Britain and her first biography for charity, Felix The Railway Cat, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Here’s the announcement of her death:

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Felix.

On Sunday, she peacefully went to sleep, in the loving comfort of Angie Hunte (Station Manager) and Jacqui Cox (Station Team Leader).

We will miss her dearly pic.twitter.com/5ThAk5fzyW

— Felix and Bolt (@FelixhuddsCat) December 5, 2023

Here’s a video of the pre-mortem Felix:

You can find the Facebook page of Felix and Bolt here.

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Lagniappe: Reader Reese sent two photos of his cat Rocky:

Rocky likes to bathe while I fill the birdbath.

From Doc Bill: “Here’s a photo of Kink the Cat fetching “Mousie. 2007.”

h/t: Jon, Ginger K., Reeese, Pyers

Today we have some mountain photos (and a flower) by reader Jim Blilie. His narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here’s another set of my landscape photos for your consideration.

These are another set from Washington State, where I have lived most of my adult life. I moved here in 1984 to enjoy the outdoors and spent my 20s and 30s mountaineering, sea- and whitewater-kayaking, and back-country 3-pin skiing.  We still enjoy hiking; but my climbing and skiing days are long in the past. I have tried to make sure that none of these are repeats; but it’s possible one or two slipped through my review.

First, a summit shot, looking south, from Whitehorse Mountain, which is prominently visible from the northern Puget Sound area and looms above Darrington, Washington.  We made a winter ascent in February 1986.

Next is a shot of Mount Rainier from near Tacoma, Washington, taken in January 1990:

Also taken in January 1990, a shot of Lake Washington at sunset:

Climbers on the Easton Glacier on Mount Baker.  March 1990:

Aerial view of the crater of Mount Saint Helens, taken from a Cessna 72 (the old fashioned way), March 1990:

View of the rising moon and some islands from the top of Mount Constitution on Orcas Island, July 1990; Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter:

View of the summit crest of Mount Rainier, taken on a climb in February 1988:

A view of Mount Adams, out current neighbor, from the north from the Goat Rocks Wilderness, October 1986:

Climbers on Desperation Peak in the eastern Olympic Mountains, July 1989:

Grass Widow flowers (Olsynium douglasii), taken on Mount Erie, near Anacortes, Washington, 1990:

Misty mountain ridges in the central Cascades, September 1990:

Finally, a ringer.  Me on the summit of Dome Peak, August 1986.  I did the Ptarmigan Traverse that month with a group of climbing friends, climbing seven peaks along the route:

All images are scanned Kodachrome 64 with minor global adjustments in Lightroom, except for the photo of Mount Rainier which is scanned Fujichrome.

Equipment:  Pentax ME Super and K-1000 camerasPentax M 20mm f/4 lens
Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens (this was a superb after-market lens)
Pentax A 400mm f/5.6 lens with matched 2X teleconverter
Pentax A 35-105mm f/3.5 lens
Could be one or two other Pentax M series lenses, not 100% sure

Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we’ll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We’ll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We’ll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we’ll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The audio isn’t great, but you should be able to hear what’s said.

As background, you might first read Steve’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Steven Pinker’s five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” which is now free online (my take on it is here).  This was published before Claudine Gay was fired as President, and perhaps Harvard will now enact some of Pinker’s suggestions.  These include adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

I won’t summarize the video, as there’s a lot of stuff discussed here, and if you have a spare hour you can listen for yourself. In general, it deals with “cancel culture” and also goes through Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” and why he suggests a panoply of specific reforms.

h/t: Daniel

If you’re not familiar with American colleges, the “dean’s list” is usually a list of all the students who get a high grade-point average during a year or a semester, an average above some cutoff that varies from school to school. You can tout “being on the Dean’s list” as an index of your academic merit, and it usually appears on your college transcript, something that you can show potential employers or graduate schools as a sign of your achievement.

But the creation of deans lists is waning for two reasons. First, with grade inflation, in many places the average grade is so high that nearly all students can get on the dean’s list. The average grade at Yale is an A, with the grade-point average being 3.7 out of 4. It’s 3.8 at Harvard—nearly everyone gets straight As.

The second reason is that ranking students in this way, by academic merit, is deemed to violate equity, as minority students (except for Asians) tend to get lower grades. The solution? Eliminate the rankings entirely, so that students who don’t do as well aren’t “stigmatized.” This is what just happened at Cornell, according to the student newspaper The Daily Sun. And the University explicitly gives “equity” as the rationale:

Click to read:

From the paper:

Starting Fall 2023, incoming Cornellians, including the Class of 2027, became ineligible to receive the Dean’s List distinction on their transcript.

The move away from the Dean’s List came after discussion within the Faculty Senate regarding equity concerns.

The Faculty Senate’s Resolution 182: Regarding the Award of Honors and Distinctions to Cornell’s Undergraduate Students, passed in May 2022, sought to create a more fair and equitable learning environment for students.

“[The proposal] is aimed at creating consistency across the undergraduate colleges and schools in the award of academic honors and distinctions and balancing recognition of high-achieving students against amelioration of an unhealthy level of competition at Cornell,” the Faculty Senate wrote in the resolution.

Cornell will officially stop listing the honor on student transcripts by Spring 2026, thereby leaving only two Ivy League universities — the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University — maintaining the tradition.

. . .Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges each have their own set of requirements for students to earn a place on the Dean’s List, including different credit and GPA requirements. For example, The College of Architecture, Art and Planning requires a minimum GPA of 3.8, while the Nolan School of Hotel Administration requires only a 3.3. In the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there are different GPA requirements for each class year, with first-year students needing a lower GPA than other students in the college.

When asked about the reasoning behind the Dean’s List requirements at each individual undergraduate college, Cornell and individual college administrations each declined to comment.

Note that the paper don’t mention grade inflation, nor does the University’s resolution to get rid of the dean’s list.

Oh, and there’s one more thing they’re eliminating, which I always thought was a good practice: listing the median grade (the grade that divides the students into two groups of equal size) on the transcript. This also helps graduate schools and potential employers deal with grade inflation, as they can see if a college is giving really high grades to everyone.

The removal of the Dean’s List comes in conjunction with Cornell’s decision to remove median grades from student transcripts, a similar measure previously used to show how well students performed in comparison with fellow students in each class.

“There’s a lot of pressure already on students, so this is just one less thing to worry about,” Tawfik said. “There are more important things to be focusing on.”

I can understand eliminating dean’s lists when they’re meaningless, as when grade inflation entitles every student to be on them (“all must have prizes”), but in general Cornell’s elimination simply reflects the trend in society to favor equity above meritocracy.  While I favor efforts to provide everyone with equal opportunity (a VERY hard task), the elimination of indices of merit will eventually trickle down to us all, making us unable to judge the qualifications of people whom we interact with: doctors, pilots, and so on.

Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people.  The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website.  Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).

Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:

Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.”  I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that.  But she grew up with Jews and with  knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:

Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.

The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”

She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.

Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.

On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.

But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.

What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”  

The Globe story continues:

Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks?  And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”?  You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive.  No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval.  The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.

Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”.  Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples).  And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did.  Click to read his site.

An excerpt:

Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.

But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.

I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.

So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.

The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.

I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.

It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again.  Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?

Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):

Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.

We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.

Robert Lang, physicist, origami master, and reader, took a trip to Antarctica on a very small boat, and sent a seven-part series of photos, which I’ll put up over time.  Here’s batch 1; Robert’s captions and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (I suggest enlargement!)

Antarctica, Part 1: Water, Ice, and Rock

Over the Christmas holidays, I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica, as one of six passengers on a 65-foot ketch-rigged sailboat that spent 14 days traveling along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Our trip began on King George Island, in the South Shetlands, an island chain 60 km off the coast; Elephant Island, where most of Shackleton’s men waited to be rescued, is at the northern end of this chain.

The entire trip was spectacular, with some incredible wildlife sightings, which I will duly share in subsequent installments of this contribution to RWP. But let me start with a few landscapes, just to convey the beauty and harshness of this stunning land.

To begin, this is the boat we traveled on, the Ocean Tramp (photo taken on about the 3rd day of the trip). Channeling my inner Frank Hurley, I’ve converted the photo to black-and-white.

Hurley was the photographer on Shackleton’s Endurance, which met its fate a bit farther south than we reached and was on the other (eastern) side of the Antarctic Peninsula, in the Weddell Sea, which, due to a gyre in the prevailing currents, is covered in sea ice year-round. It being mid-summer for us, we never experienced anything thicker than brash ice (broken-up bits), but they still made for some wonderful vistas.

I had envisioned the Antarctic being all flat, featureless ice plain, but of course that’s on the ice shelves and the main continental plateau. The Antarctic Peninsula is basically an extension of the Andes, and it and its islands are incredibly rugged, with rime-covered peaks, snow-filled couloirs, and ice cliffs that plunge a hundred feet or more straight into the water. Places where one could actually access the shore are few and far between.

One place where a landing is possible is a cove called Yankee Harbor, on Greenwich Island, still in the South Shetlands. There’s a long gravel spit that extends into the harbor which is home to many penguins and seals (photos to come); the mountains of Livingston Island are in the distance.

There are many islands along the peninsula, which provide some protection from ocean swells coming from the west; some are low and rounded, others high and jagged. Many of the channels between them are narrow with soaring walls and spires to either side. One of the more famous is the Lemaire Channel, between Booth Island and the mainland, and one of the famous landmarks at the entrance of “The Lemaire” is Una Peaks, also called “Una’s Peaks”, or Una’s (something a bit more anatomical), named for the same reason the Grand Tetons in Wyoming got their name.

Passage through the Lemaire is never guaranteed, depending on the ice conditions. This time it was a calm day and nothing worse than a bit of brash ice to push through.

The Argentine Islands are a low archipelago of islands on the western side of the Peninsula. Because they are surrounded by relatively shallow water, the waters to their west collect icebergs that run aground as they drift by, creating some spectacular combinations of sky and water. You can see here the Ocean Tramp, with the “graveyard of icebergs” stretching off into the distance.

The icebergs provided an endless variety of shapes and shades of white and blue. This one, taken in another iceberg graveyard near the stacks of Spert Island, seemed to call for the name “The Fickle Finger of Fate.”

Scale is hard to ascertain in the Antarctic. To give a sense of the scale of this iceberg, note the zodiac near the cave. We dared not enter the cave or even get too close, as icebergs have a habit of rolling over when one least expects or desires.

The ice and mountains tended to lie on a monochromatic palette of whites and blues, but it being midsummer, the sun barely set. Sunsets were long and low, which created glorious golds and pinks—if you were up and out at 11:30 pm, and if the weather was clear. The Peninsula is famous for long stretches of dreary overcast, but we had some gorgeous clear days and the occasional clear sunset.

OK, enough with the inanimate matter. Coming next: Penguins!

There’s a Harvard University “wiki” (whatever that is) that gives “Memorial Minutes” for various deceased members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  Just two days ago they published the memorial for my own thesis advisor, Richard Lewontin, known to all of us as “Dick” or “The Boss.”  You can find it by clicking on the headline below, which takes you directly to the memoriam.

The minutes begin with a summary of Dick’s accomplishments, and you can read those in his Wikipedia bio. But the only things Wikipedia says about Dick as a person is this, given under “personal life“:

As of mid-2015, Lewontin and his wife Mary Jane (Christianson) lived on a farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. They had four sons. He was an atheist.

Lewontin died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 4, 2021, at the age of 92.

This is substantially wrong. Dick and Mary Jane had a second home in Brattleboro, and they would often go there on the weekends and for long periods during the summer (but not in winter). They never “lived” there for a long time. Also, the Brattleboro place, which I visited, was not a farm, but a “log castle” as we called it: a fancy log cabin that Dick helped build himself.  There was no farming done.

Further, Dick didn’t die at his home in Cambridge, which he’d sold when he and Mary Jane moved into an assisted living facility, where they died within three days of each other. (This was a mercy, as they were always very close and I couldn’t imagine either living without the other.)

Click below to read the full thousand-word “minute”; I’ve excerpted just the last two paragraphs that talk about Dick as a person:

The last two paragraphs:

Lewontin was a superb counterexample to the assertion that brilliant scientists tend to disappoint in the classroom. His teaching career was as distinguished as his research one, and he inspired generations of students with his courses in evolution, population genetics, and biostatistics. His many honors included being elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968. (He resigned in 1971 because of the Academy’s support of secret military research.) In 1994, he won the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists; in 2015, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences (shared with theoretical geneticist Tomoko Ohta); and, in 2017, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America. Dick Lewontin was one of those people who demand attention. Complex, deeply opinionated, and often loudly outspoken, he inevitably provoked strong feelings in others. Those who had been through his lab were typically loyal devotees but others bridled at his penchant for perhaps overly acerbic criticism and at his insistence that politics and science could not (and should not) be disentangled. Acid criticism and hardball politics were on full display when he and Stephen Jay Gould—who famously described Lewontin as “the most brilliant scientist I know” —launched a relentless and bitter campaign against their departmental colleague Edward O. Wilson, condemning the genetic determinism implicit in Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson’s conclusions were, they claimed, overly simplistic and liable to misuse in rationalizing racism, sexism, and other injustices. For Dick Lewontin, social justice and science were intertwined and inseparable. Respectfully submitted, Andrew Berry Hopi Hoekstra John Wakeley Daniel L. Hartl, Chair

A few comments. Yes, Dick was a terrific teacher. I remember when I was his t.a. in “Population Genetics” and he’d finished all his planned lectures one period before the course ended. When he came to the last class, he asked the students what they’d like to hear about for the final session. One student said, “Linkage disequilibrium,” and, to my amazement, Dick delivered, without notes or planning, a perfectly structured lecture on the topic (the association of different forms of genes with different forms of other genes). The lecture ended exactly after an hour and 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Also, there was a pretty strict division between Dick’s graduate students and Dick’s politics.  He never discussed politics with us unless we asked for it, that was reserved for his conversations with Dick Levins and his students, or with Gould. And most of us had little interest in his Marxism, but we were all immersed in the battle royale between Wilson (and Trivers) on the one hand and Lewontin and Steve Gould on the other. After all, Wilson’s lab was only one floor above ours, and their politically based battle about biology affected us all. It turns out that although Dick was a political ally of Gould in the “sociobiology wars”, in reality Dick couldn’t abide Gould as a person. I found this out when I interviewed Dick for a few hours some years before he died. I did this at the behest of the journal Current Biology, but the interview became so long that it couldn’t be published.  (I had many, many questions!) And Dick revealed a lot of stuff for the record, including the animosity that he held for Gould.

But it’s all water under the bridge now. When we worked in Dick’s lab—and he was only about 44 when I arrived there—it was inconceivable that his imposing presence would one day be gone. But of course no man is immortal, not even The Boss. Still, all of us who worked in his lab remember him as if he were still here. As the old Jewish saying goes, “Let his memory be a blessing.”  It is.

Here’s a picture of Dick and I at the assisted living facility, taken in 2017 by Andrew Berry. I am paying him proper homage.

Here’s a picture taken by Andrew Berry on the same day, with the information below (“Cadbury Commons” is the assisted living facility):

Here’s a photo I took (at Cadbury Commons) Oct 2017 He’s reading a letter from Sally Otto, then president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, announcing the establishment of a graduate student fellowship in his name.

My own obituary for Dick on this site is here, and I’ve put up several posts about other folks’ remembrances of Dick. But there are three central websites, sent to me by Andrew, that have collated information and photos about and remembrances by others:

General website https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home

Recollections: https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home/stories-thoughts-memories

 

Photos: https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home/photos-of-rcl

Reader Smoked Paprika called our attention to this live-feed YouTube “video”; it lets you listen to the Supreme Court’s hearing of Trump’s appeal of the Colorado decision keeping him off the ballot. This is a big deal.

Yesterday I got an email from a factotum of young-Earth biblical creationist and ex-con Kent Hovind, a man apparently desperate to debate evolutionists. (He spent eight years in the can for tax evasion, despite the fact that he complains in the video below that evolution erodes morality!) Here’s what I got:

Dr. Coyne,

I’m writing to ask if you’d like to Debate Dr. Kent Hovind? He is willing to travel to your University or you can come down to his Theme park where we’ll put you up in a Cabin and provide meals, even pick you up from the airport if need be. Or it can be done over zoom if that would be better for you. If your interested call PHONE # REDACTED for Dr Hovind or ext 4 for tech support to schedule you in. Check out the video NAME OF FACTOTUM REDACTED I replied simply, “No, thank you.” Note the superfluous question mark after the first sentence and the absence of the apostrophe in “your”.

I’ve debated a creationist exactly once, and it went fine (it was before the meeting of the Alaska Bar Association!). But since then I decided not to debate them any more, as such engagements give their views a scientific credibility it doesn’t deserve. It’s like debating a flat-earther.  At any rate, the video is below.

In this 51-minute comedy video, Hovind gives a running commentary on a filmed discussion about evolution I had with Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor for their “Freethought Matters” series at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.  Hovind’s main point is that a). evolution is a religion, not science, and b). there’s no evidence for evolution.  I find the video vastly amusing, because Hovind keeps saying the same thing over and over again, including invoking young-earth creationism—including the existence of Noah’s flood. And only Ceiling Cat knows how many times he asserts his claim that evolution is a religion. Well, it surely isn’t in the sense of religion involving the supernatural, but I suppose he means that, to those of his ilk, evolution (like Hovind’s Christianity) is based not on evidence, but pure faith. Yet he doesn’t explain why evolutionists are so keen to accept a scientific fact that’s buttressed by no evidence at all. Are we all in some sort of anti-religious cabal?

Hovind’s mind dump includes claims like these:

The fossil record doesn’t exist, there are “just fossils.” Hovind advances the long-refuted claim that evolutionary change as seen in the fossil record is bogus because the fossils are dated by the sedimentary layers they’re in, and the layers are dated by the fossils they contain; ergo the fossil evidence for evolution begs the question. Apparently Hovind hasn’t heard about radiometric dating! In contrast, he believes that the fossil record itself constitute evidence for the Great Flood.  But, of course, the order that organisms appear in the fossil record isn’t consonant with their simultaneous extirpation by God’s Flood. (Why are fish some of the earliest vertebrates to be found? Shouldn’t they be up at the top, left as the waters recede?  And why are fish way lower down than whales? And so on.)

The evidence for evolution from embryology somehow “justifies abortion”.

Evolution can’t be true because “nobody’s ever seen a cow produce a non-cow.”  In other words, he thinks that evolutionists accept an instantaneous form of massive evolutionary change—a “macromutational” or “saltational” event. Nope, not true.

At points in Hovind’s tirade, he actually admits that evolution could have happened. For example, at about 15:38, he admits that all butterflies may have had a single common ancestor. Well, that’s an admission that all butterflies not only evolved from that ancestor, but that different species of butterflies evolved.  So evolutionary change as well as speciation happened, but of course Hovind would say that all the descendants of that common ancestor are “still butterflies”. In other words, he admits there is evolution, but that it has limits: one “kind” can’t evolve into another “kind.”  But no creationist has ever advanced a good reason what these limits are; there’s a whole sub-field of creationism (“baraminology“) that repeatedly tries and fails to discern the created “kinds.”

Hovind also admits that there is evolutionary change in bacteria as they become resistant to antibiotics, but dismisses that as  not real evolution because it represents a loss of information; and of course a resistant bacterium is still a bacterium. But Hovind is full of it: some antibiotic resistance involves appearance of new “pumps” that get rid of the antibiotic before it harms the bacterium, the appearance of new enzymes, and the ‘horizontal’ acquisition of genes for resistance from other bacteria or viruses. To claim that the evolution of bacterial resistance involves the inactivation of some enzyme or feature is to espouse ignorance.

Finally, he notes that by teaching evolution, I’ve destroyed the faith of “who knows how many students.” I doubt it, but if learning scientific truths dispels faith, that’s not the fault of science. Nor is dispelling faith my aim in teaching evolution.

I know that this post is giving Hovind the attention he so desperately craves, but it’s salutary for us to occasionally see the kind of willful ignorance that pervades the young-creationist movement.

But what’s truly scary is not Hovind, who’s amusing, but something I mention in my FFRF discussion: 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years, and another 33% think that humans evolved, but God guided the process. That makes 73% of Americans—nearly three out of four—accepting some form of divine intervention in the development of life.  Sadly, only 22% of Americans believe that “humans evolved but God had no part in the process.”

The results of the 2019 Gallup poll are shown below the video. Note that the question asked was only about humans, and some exceptionalists may think that while all other creatures evolved in a naturalistic way, humans were the one species created by God. Even granting that, it’s clear that the genus Homo is way, way older than 10,000 years!

From a 2019 Gallup poll:

 

I vowed, after I retired, to travel more, and to relatively exotic places.  I’ve managed to take a few good trips in the last few years, which I’ve documented here (Antarctica, the Galápagos, etc.), but Covid largely put the kibosh on travel.  Now I’m ramping up again, and would like to crowdsource some travel destinations.  Here’s my travel schedule for the time being, but two of the three trips are work-related:

May: Amsterdam and environs to give a talk and a separate interview/discussion. (one week)

August: South Africa to visit Capetown and then Kruger to see the animals (one month)

October: CSICon Conference in Las Vegas to give a talk (four days).

Two of these trips are work-related, but I take work trips only to nice places or alluring meetings, and it would be a pleasure for me to visit Amsterdam again as well as to go to the CSICon conference, the Skeptical Inquirer meeting.   However, this still omits the longer and purely recreational trips I’d planned to take. Therefore here I’m asking readers to suggest destinations for me.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

• A trip of several weeks to a month
• A destination that’s not a place I’ve been before (yes, I’m sure nobody knows all the places I’ve seen, but many know of some)
• Some place that’s fairly exotic and not a classic tourist destination (i.e., Thailand compared to Italy).  Examples:  a few places I’ve contemplated include southeast Asia, the Yucatan, Argentina, and Australia (the last one seems to me to require a trip of several months, so I’ve shied away from Oz although it attracts me greatly). But that’s a very small sample.
• A place where I can travel independently as opposed to in a group. (Cruises are an exception if it’s to a place like Antarctica or the Arctic where you more or less need to travel in a group on a ship.)
• Ideally, it should have good (local) cuisine

I don’t require luxury as I travel not too differently from how I did when I was younger and penurious.

I’m no spring chicken, and so want to go to the “harder” destinations when I’m still relatively healthy. I’ve always feared that my greatest regret on my deathbed would be not to have experienced the diversity and glories of this planet, which is so varied, beautiful, and fascinating.

If you give suggestions, any other ancillary information (reasons why I should go, things to see, etc.) would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Source

The University of Chicago is well known for adopting the principle of “institutional neutrality”—the dictum that our university should take no official position on ideological, political, or moral matters except in the rare situation that such matters directly affect the workings of the school. This principle is embodied in our “Kalven Report.” We see this as a way to avoid chilling the speech of people who fear professional punishment for speaking out against what they see as “official positions.” We also regard this as an important part of our Freedom of Expression policy, which includes not only Kalven but the “Chicago Principles” that guarantee free speech itself.

Although over 100 schools have adopted the Chicago Principles, the number adopting institutional neutrality—the Kalven Principle—remains stuck at just three: the University of Chicago, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University.  Another school—Columbia University—may be about to adopt a Kalven-ish stand, but still, that’s only four schools out of about 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America.

Why the difference between the willingness of schools to adopt free speech but not institutional neutrality? It has to be that schools feel that they must weigh in on issues of the day—that if they don’t, and  an issue is seen as important and calling for a “right” response, they’ll be seen as bad actors if they keep their yap shut instead of affirming that they’re on the right side of history.  This view is shortsighted (“right” views, of course, change over time) and also inimical to freedom of speech.

At any rate, three important organizations, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), the Heterodox Academy (HA), and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have now joined to endorse institutional neutrality. They’ve produced a short open letter about the issue, which you can read by clicking on the headline below:

The gist of the open letter, which is longer:

It is time for those entrusted with ultimate oversight authority for your institutions to restore truth-seeking as the primary mission of higher education by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations.

In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.

Most critically, these stances risk establishing an orthodox view on campus, threatening the pursuit of knowledge for which higher education exists.

As the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967 states, a policy of institutional neutrality is premised on the defining mission of the university: to pursue truth through “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” And to accomplish this mission, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

Furthermore, the report recognizes, “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.” In short, individual faculty members and students are the “instrument of dissent and criticism.” The university, on the other hand, “is the home and sponsor of critics.”

Where to draw the line between institutional neutrality and position-taking is a matter of careful prudential judgment. But, as the Kalven Report notes, there should be “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” Smart observers will recognize good faith efforts to apply this principle.

Agreed. Nobody says that Kalven is perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than having no policy so that that universities or departments can issue official endorsements or condemnations of political and ideological views. That is precisely what got the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn in trouble when they testified before a House committee: on some issues there were official departmental statements, while on others there were not. It was largely this inconsistency that led to the fracas around their Presidents’ testimony in Congress—and to the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill.  The University of Chicago wouldn’t even be considered for such an inquiry.

To me, the unity of these organization on the Kalven issue means that colleges have to have a good reason for NOT adopting institutional neutrality. I’m hoping that my constant harping on this issue may inspire some administrators or faculty to get neutrality considered by their schools.

FIRE also issued a press release (click below) with quotes from the leaders of all three organizations.

Here are statements endorsing neutrality from the heads of HA, FIRE, and AFA:

“A top-down, father-knows-best mentality is absolutely no way to support the next generation of free thinkers. Students and faculty deserve the freedom to experiment with different perspectives and explore entirely new ways of thinking without the college claiming to have done all the thinking for them.”

— Greg Lukianoff, FIRE President and CEO

“American colleges and universities need to keep the pursuit of knowledge their principal mission. A public pledge by the overseers of colleges and universities that their schools will take no stance on the controversies of the day will also go a long way to restoring public confidence in the integrity of higher education.”

— Lucas Morel, Chair of the Academic Committee of the AFA

“Colleges and universities should be extraordinary places for the pursuit of knowledge. By adopting neutrality, university leaders empower students and professors to debate tough questions for themselves, allowing them to express heterodox opinions and consider unsettling data, without fear of being silenced or punished.”

— John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy

About this issue I’ll just say one more thing: “If not now, when?”

No real “short lists” for Nobel Prizes are announced by the awrding group, but apparently, according to this Jerusalem Post article, one man, Norwegian political scientist and peace scholar Henrik Urdal,  announces his own shortlist for the Peace Prize, a list that is said to be “widely regarded.” Well, his list this year includes actors as bad as previous recipients Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. It actually includes UNRWA, the acronym for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Although there’s one UN organization to handle refugees from throughout the world (UNHCR), UNRWA is the only UN group to handle refugees from a specific area, Palestine. And it doesn’t promote peace, but hatred and terrorism.But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The background:

Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Henrik Urdal has published a short list for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is the organization responsible for selecting the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. However, nominations may be submitted by any persons who are qualified to nominate.

Each year, PRIO’s Director presents his own shortlist for the Nobel Peace Prize. The PRIO Director’s view on potential and worthy Nobel Peace Prize laureates is widely recognized and has been offered since 2002. Urdal presents his seventh list since he began his position of director in 2017.

And some on the “short list”. I don’t know if these are actual nominees that Urdal somehow got hold of (unlikely, but there are leaks), or his own guesses about who will will—and perhaps who he thinks will win:

At the top of the list is the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, followed by the International Court of Justice, UNRWA and Philippe Lazzarini, Article 36 and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is the organization responsible for selecting the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. However, nominations may be submitted by any persons who are qualified to nominate.

. . .Urdal said regarding his top choice, “Democracy is on the ballot this year as more than half the world’s population live in a country heading to the polls, albeit not exclusively in democracies. Research shows that democratic states are more peaceful and stable. As elections are a cornerstone of democracy, election observers play a pivotal role in shaping perceptions about the legitimacy of electoral processes. A Nobel Peace Prize awarded to election observers sends a strong message about the importance of free and fair elections and their role in peace and stability.”

The ICJ was chosen for the second spot because of its ability to promote peace through international law and because of the importance of multilateral collaboration for peaceful relations from Urdel’s perspective, according to the organization’s website. PRIO mentions the Court’s decision to order Israel to “take action to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip.” It also mentions its role in March 2022 by ordering Russia to suspend military operations in Ukraine immediately.

. . . . UNRWA and its Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, were nominated due to UNRWA’s “fundamental” effort to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Urdal argues that a Nobel Prize to the agency would “send a strong message about its role in supporting the lives of millions of Palestinian women, men, and children.” This is in spite of the allegations that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 attacks as members of Hamas.

Now the International Court of Justice, which has little power to enforce its decisions, nevertheless has made some decent ones, like issuing an arrest warrant for Putin for kidnapping Ukrainian children and ordering Russia to stop military actions in Ukraine. However, should an organization to get plaudits for decisions that will never be implemented? I would think that the Nobel Peace Prize would be given to people who who actually create peace, like Nelson Mandela (co-recipient with F. W. De Clerk) and Malala Yousafzai.

But that’s not how it works. Apparently the committee often awards this prestigious prize to people for “game tries to make peace”, accounting for Prizes that went to terrorist Yasser Arafat’s prize (co-awarded to Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) and Henry Kissinger (co-awarded to Lê Đức Thọ).  As for why Barak Obama got a Peace Nobel, well, your guess is as good as mine. What did he even do to make peace? While Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics have a mixed record (I know of several Medicine and Physiology prizes awarded for false discoveries), it’s not nearly as bad as the record of Peace Prizes.

At any rate, journalist and, really, anyone interested to look at the record knows that UNRWA has been complicit with Palestinian terrorism for years, allowing Hamas to put rockets on its school grounds and build tunnels under schools, teaching Palestinian children in UNRWA schools to hate Jews and glorify martyrdom, and actually employing members of Hamas as UNRWA employees. UNRWA fired several of its employees for actually participating in the October 7 massacre in Israel (they were filmed), and there are pretty good estimates that 10% or more of the 13,000 UNRWA employees actually belonged to Hamas. (The schoolbook issue is absolutely documented!).  The UN is taking these allegations seriously and is conducting a thorough investigation of UNRWA, though that’s a bit like having  Hamas investigate whether it actually committed terrorism. And of course in my view the actions of the International Court of Justice towards Israel—not even slapping Hamas on the wrist—are not particularly laudable.

Now is not the time to award either the Court or, especially UNRWA, a Nobel Peace Prize. I suspect Urdal’s views reflect his own sympathies rather than an assessment of reality, but who knows? At any rate, perhaps in some years they simply shouldn’t award the Nobel Peace Prize at all, as the list of Laureates is very mixed. After all, in biology you don’t get a Prize for simply thinking up a good experiment. You get it for doing experiments that advance our understanding of science. Likewise, shouldn’t Peace Prizes be awarded for people who actually bring about peace? It’s okay to wait a while to see if a group or person actually accomplishes something. After all, science prizes are often awarded years after a discovery is made—this being done to see if the discovery turned out to be both real and important.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “dizzy 2,” is labeled “a resurrection today from 15 years ago.”  And it’s a good example of the real use of “begging the question,” often misunderstood to mean “raising the question.”

 

I recently finished Douglas Murray’s The War on the West, and thought it pretty good.  Its thesis is that the Woke, and extreme Leftists in general, are espousing an activism of destroying all of Western culture, which, including music, literature, capitalism, politics, food, and so on, is seen as uniformly deplorable as it’s largely the produce of white European men. (The chapter on “cultural appropriation” is particularly good.) You’ll especially appreciate it if you like examples of stupid wokeness.

Now I’m not 100% in agreement with Murray that Western culture is superior in nearly every way, but neither am I sure that he really believes that. I know he’s more xenophobic than I, thinking that anti-British immigrants should be expelled from the UK, but I can live with some disagreement. But I do like his approbation for Israel in the current war, an approbation expressed quite eloquently. At any rate, I think you should read the book, ideally after having finished his earlier The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity.

Speaking of those who hate America, I think this is instantiated in a pro-Palestinian rally that just took place in Dearborn, Michigan. There are videos at the link for verification, and you can go to the site by clicking on the Middle East Media Research Institute headline below (MEMRI is reliable, and it’s run by my friend Yigal Carmon):

A summary (note that Linda Sarsour showed up):

On November 29, 2023, the New Generation for Palestine, founded by Michigan comedian Amer Zahr, held a rally marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Dearborn, Michigan, which was streamed live on the organization’s Facebook page. Abdullah Hammoud, mayor of Dearborn, spoke at the event, he said that Dearborn is a “city of resistance.” He said that the question is not whether his community will vote for Biden or Trump in the 24 presidential elections, but whether Biden listens to them, or to constituents who stuff his pockets with money. Master of ceremonies, Adam Abusalah, a former congressional aide to Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) and campaigner for Biden in the 2020 elections, addressed President Biden and said: “You are a cancer in our country.” Later in the event he led the crowd in the chant: “Genocide Joe!” Osama Siblani, editor and publisher of the Arab American News, said that a new generation has emerged, who will “clean” the U.S. Congress and White House of the bloodthirsty killers. He said: “We are on the road to a great victory here in D.C. and there in Palestine.” Siblani pledged: “No vote for Biden and no vote for Trump!” Political activist Linda Sarsour said that there will be a “permanent ceasefire” between Hamas and Israel, because Israel has lost the war. Co-master of ceremonies, Lexis Zeidan, concluded the rally, saying: “It doesn’t end with a ceasefire, that is the bare minimum, it ends with the dismantling of the terrorist racist State of Israel.”

As Malgorzata said, “I’m horrified: these are people who hold public office in America and yet hate America.” Indeed. these people seem to be Islamists. Indeed, if you read the Qur’an, a good Muslim must also be an Islamist. Note that there’s a call to dismantle Israel. Yes, that’s what they mean by “From the river to the sea. . . “. These people are not ignorant of the meaning of that phrase, even if some college students are.

Douglas Murray would say that these people should be expelled from America given that their aim seems to be to destroy the country and recast it in an Islamic mole. I can’t go so far as to call for deportations, but, like Malgorzata, I’m horrified. Genocide Joe, indeed!

This morning I received an email from a colleague that said this about the New York Times‘s article on King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

In the NY Times report there is one sentence mentioning that he is using homeopathy as part of his suite of treatments.

UPDATE: My colleague, who is reliable, swears he saw this in the NYT yesterday, and is baffled that the sentence is gone today.  Readers with a bent for sleuthing might try finding the original article at an archived site.

Well, I can’t find that sentence in the NYT article this morning, nor in the archived version posted right after midnight. Yet we know the King is an advocate of homeopathy. The Guardian of December 17 last year noted that the King had appointed an advocated of woo, including homeopathy, as head of the “royal medical household”:

Yet last week we heard that the head of the royal medical household is an advocate of homeopathy. Dr Michael Dixon has championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.

The link above goes to an earlier Guardian article, noting that the head of the royal medical household is not the same thing as thje king’s doctor:

Dr Michael Dixon, who has championed faith healing and herbalism in his work as a GP, has quietly held the senior position for the last year, the Sunday Times reported.

While Dixon, 71, is head of the royal medical household, for the first time the role is not combined with being the monarch’s physician. Duties include having overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family – and even representing them in talks with government.

There are a lot of people online who are somewhat gleeful about this diagnosis, saying that they’re hoping that King Charles puts the rubber to the road and uses alternative therapies, like homeopathy, but the Daily Fail and other sites note that even Dixon doesn’t think that homeopathy can cure cancer:

[Dixon]  thrown his support behind offering treatments such as aromatherapy and reflexology on the NHS.

In one paper he authored, he referenced an experiment suggesting Indian herbal remedies which had been ‘ultra-diluted’ with alcohol might be able to cure cancer, although Buckingham Palace has staunchly denied Dr Dixon himself believes this can work.

A statement from the palace at the time of his appointment read: ‘Dr Dixon does not believe homeopathy can cure cancer.

‘His position is that complementary therapies can sit alongside conventional treatments, provided they are safe, appropriate and evidence based.’

Dr Dixon, who has reportedly prescribed plants to patients such as devil’s claw and horny goat weed, has also written papers suggesting Christian healers may be able to help people who are chronically ill.

He has a kindred spirit and staunch supporter in the shape of King Charles, who has himself been outspoken on how he believes alternative medicine can help people with illnesses, and was appointed patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 2017.

As for me, I have no beef with King Charles, and my first thought when I heard he had cancer was that it was a shame, as he’d waited so long to become King and if he died from this, it would have been a long wait for a short reign. I hope he gets well. What kind of person would want the King to die because he advocates medical woo?

But he should never have promoted that woo, and I’m sure he won’t be using it in his new course of treatment.

Mark Sturtevant has contributed another batch of insect photos today. I’ve indented his captions and IDs, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more arthropod pictures, and this should complete the set from two summers ago. I am always behind in sharing these to various online sites since I go out a lot to the woods and fields of Michigan, where I live.

One of our larger Caddisflies is the Northern Caddisfly (Pycnopsyche sp.). Caddisflies are related to butterflies and moths, and they can look a lot like moths, but there are differences such as having hairs on their wings rather than scales. Caddisfly larvae are sort of like caterpillars, but they are aquatic and most species carry around a protective case made from either plant matter or pebbles, woven together with silk. Larvae from this genus mainly fasten together a bundle of twigs to use as a portable home.

Here is a short video about the larvae, showing that they can be quite artful in making their cases, and that their use of sticky silk under water is actually very remarkable.

Next up is a Locust Borer (Megacyllene robiniae). These wasp-mimicking beetles are common visitors on goldenrods in late summer, and their larvae tunnel into black locust trees. Since we have both in the yard, I always see these around.

Next is a European Praying Mantis (Mantis religiosa), photographed from a stage on our dining room table. Nothing too special here, but this was done for the purpose of photographing a nerdy detail about Mantids. Unfortunately, the Mantid that I found was a male, and that meant he would be a complete pain in the a** because males constantly want to move around to hunt for lady Mantids. This one frequently flew off from the dining room table, and I’d have to go chase it down. Nevertheless, the nerdy detail was eventually photographed.

Here is that detail – a specialized patch of bristles on the inside of their front femur. Mantids regularly groom themselves, and they even have a special structure on their front legs just for cleaning their large compound eyes. This has been an item of considerable discussion on one of the macrophotography web sites, and the subject has even led to a couple Facebook memes. The internet is weird that way.

Here is a video of a grooming mantis. The moment it uses its eye brush starts at 35 seconds in. It’s not that dramatic, but I geek out on it.

Moving on, here is a large Nursery Web Spider (Pisaurina mira), so-named because females build a web nursery at the tops of plants for their young. I was trying to photograph the spider with my wide-angle macro lens, but at that moment it decided to surprise me by suddenly clambering up onto the camera. I like the result.

As this set was done very late in the season, with fall moving in, there are now other late-season subjects to share. Around the yard at that time there will always be several Very Gravid Orbweavers in their webs. A couple different species are possible, but I think this one is the Shamrock Orbweaver (Araneus trifolium). I also took this one indoors to do a manual focus stack portrait by using the amazing Venus 2.5-5x super macro lens.

Here are Yellow Jackets on wind-fallen apples in the backyard– another sign that the season was ending (*sniff*). On the left is an Eastern Yellowjacket (Vespula maculifrons), and on the right is a German Yellowjacket (Vespula germanica). As is pretty common, the two species soon begin to fight over the same apple, even though there are dozens of the damn fruits on the ground that I will have to pick up later. These contests look rather dramatic, but their stingers never come out.

And finally, here is a focus stacked wide angle macro picture of autumn trees. The perspective shot is done by leaning against a tree and shooting straight up while nudging the focus a little each time. The set of pictures — maybe 8 or so, are then merged with software to give this deep focus picture.”