Why Evolution is True Feed

Posting may be light today as I have an event to attend. But please send in your photos. I have about two batches left, and today I’m featuring the work of people who sent me only one or a few photos.  Their comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Lee Jussim

A young muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) dining among pondscum:

Three from Claudia Baker.

On a winter’s walk one day last year, I came across this barred owl (Strix varia) high up in the branches of a tree. Just out there in the bright sunshine, having a snooze, open for anyone to snap a picture. What a beautiful sight. Made my day. The interweb says “originally a bird of the east (where I live), during the twentieth century it spread through the Pacific Northwest and southward to California”. They are fairly prolific around here (Ontario) and, according to a birding friend of mine, they are crowding out the other owls, especially the Barn Owl.

On an old spruce stump along my road, I spotted this fungus. When I tried to identify it, it was very confusing as there are so many. I think it is a Ganoderma lucidum, but I’m not sure. Perhaps a reader can weigh in. Sure are beautiful.

From Jon Alexander:

I just stumbled on some photos of a pigeon (Columba livia domestica) I took in 2013 from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York City. (I straightened a couple today.) Not exactly the best photos of wildlife, but I like them. I don’t remember if I put a cracker there or if someone else put it there. But I imagine that some pigeons may have learned that crackers might be had with a little effort (or an updraft).

This is from Richard Pieniakowski.  I have many good pictures from him, but must download them from a Google Drive. This is from October, and a barred owl, like the one pictures above.

I just wanted to share this photo of a Barred Owl I captured the other day with you. I think that readers would appreciate looking at this silent hunter.

And from Reese Vaughn, a duck (I think it’s a mallard hen, Anas platyrhychos):

Betty Brown Duck graces the deck on the resaca in Brownsville, Texas. The Williamsons, Kay and John, are her staff. I have asked if she is a mallard hen and how long they have been feeding her — she swims up for food on an elaborate deck that belongs to my friends Kay and John Williamson and they call her Betty Brown Duck. They may be able to send more pictures. Every morning they feed a swarm of nutria, fish, and water birds.

This article in The Atlantic, a very good piece, is written by Theo Baker, who, only a sophomore, is already a skilled journalist. (His reporting also helped bring down Stanford’s President for promulgating bogus research.)  The article is long but engrossing, and describes the intense friction between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli (mostly Jewish) students at Stanford, a school that in recent years has been damaged by an infestation of ideology. (Remember the deplatforming of conservative Judge Duncan, which led to the firing of Stanford’s equity dean?)

Baker takes the trouble to interview almost everyone concerned, including Stanford’s President Saller and Provost Martinez, as well as a number of students on both sides, and in the end manages to convey the view that, as it is here in Chicago, most of the trouble is being fomented by aggressive, angry, and loud pro-Palestinian students. (Baker seems to be Jewish.) But the incidents he describes are fascinating and well researched.

You might be able to read the article by clicking below, but if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here. 

I’ll give just one excerpt, but you really should read the whole thing. If I don’t miss my guess, Baker has a good career in front of him.

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of  [temporary President] Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

The image of a rabbi and imam, weeping as they’re trying together to protect the Jewish students, is unforgettable. It reminds me a bit of the Four Chaplains during World War II who went down with their ship.

h/t: Susan

Luana and I have been trying to get an accurate figure for the difference in VOLUME between a human sperm and egg, which of course reflects a difference in metabolic investment in making them.  I’m talking now about cytoplasmic volume, not length, as the disparity in length isn’t that relevant (in some flies, the sperm are longer than the fly!).

The figure bandied about is a volume difference of ten million, but I don’t believe that. All these figures trace back to one assertion on a Northwestern University site, but the paper it cites doesn’t give any such figure (or any figure).  Everybody quotes that figure, but it seems way too large for me. However, it might be accurate.

So, I’m crowdsourcing the answer. I have no prize here except for approbation (and I’ll put the winner and correct answer below).

Question: What is the difference in cytoplasmic volume between a human sperm and a human egg?  A reference to a respectable source must be included.

Thank you!

There’s more DNA-dissing is going on, this time in a piece in Aeon arguing that it is bad for society and for biology to think of the cell as an assembly line of molecules controlled by a “boss” in the nucleus. The cell, after all, is more socialistic!

Author Charudatta Navare, whose short bio is given below after his name, advances his thesis that the cell is NOT an entity “controlled” from the top down by the capitalistic nucleus, as if the cell were a “factory” with its sweating workers—the contents of the cell—lashed by the whip of the nuclear DNA.  To Navare, that’s simply an invidious capitalistic/patriarchal/classist metaphor. Instead, the “workers”, including everything in the cytoplasm like the ribosomes, mitochondria, vacuoles, vesicles, endoplasmic reticulum, and ribosomes, are independent entities with their own heredity, all cooperating in a genial manner to make the cell function smoothly. As Navare asserts, “the nucleus is only a tiny subset of the hereditary material.” The cell, it seems, is more like a collective farm than a car factory.

The message, which Navare repeats at length, is THE CELL IS NOT A HIERARCHY.  The motivation for the misguided view that the Big Boss Nucleus controls the workers is, consciously or not, to read into nature the  hierarchy of modern patriarchal society. To Navare, the hierarchical view of the cell not only buttresses a maladaptively structured society, but, most of all damages biology by distorting our understanding.

Navare’s big mistake is this: the nucleus, which contains the genes, really is the boss. Even the mitochondria, which replicate themselves and contain their own genes, interact intimately with the nucleus to perform a number of functions. (The mitochondria, as you may know, are derived from original endosymbiotic bacteria that have, though evolution, been integrated into the cell as an essential organelle. Chloroplasts, essential for photosynthesis, have a similar origin and interact with the nuclear in the same way.) But both of these organelles can function only with the help of nuclear genes. And they’re the sole exception to the notion that prganismal DNA is the recipe for the cell and the organism.

The rest of the organelles in the cytoplasm, then, ultimately derive from genes, as does the spatial organization of the egg that helps set off development. This is not to say that random factors, like chemical concentration in different parts of the egg, can influence development, but at bottom, yes, everything in the cell save the mitochondria and chloroplasts ultimately come from the DNA in the nucleus. Without the Nuclear Boss, the workers lose their jobs and the factory goes kaput.  Figuring out how this all evolved, of course, is a difficult issue. But evolve it did, via changes in the DNA.

Click below to read the article in Aeon:

Here’s the thesis (Navare’s words are indenteed):

In short, the textbooks paint a picture of a cellular ‘assembly line’ where genes issue instructions for the manufacture of proteins that do the work of the body from day to day. This textbook description of the cell matches, almost word for word, a social institution. The picture of the cytoplasm and its organelles performing the work of ‘manufacturing’, ‘packaging’ and ‘shipping’ molecules according to ‘instructions’ from the genes eerily evokes the social hierarchy of executives ordering the manual labour of toiling masses. The only problem is that the cell is not a ‘factory’. It does not have a ‘control centre’. As the feminist scholar Emily Martin observes, the assumption of centralised control distorts our understanding of the cell.

A wealth of research in biology suggests that ‘control’ and ‘information’ are not restricted at the ‘top’ bu

t present throughout the cell. The cellular organelles do not just form a linear ‘assembly line’ but interact with each other in complex ways. Nor is the cell obsessed with the economically significant work of ‘manufacturing’ that the metaphor of ‘factory’ would have us believe. Instead, much of the work that the cell does can be thought of as maintaining itself and taking ‘care’ of other cells.

Why, then, do the standard textbooks continue to portray the cell as a hierarchy? Why do they invoke a centralised authority to explain how each cell functions? And why is the imagery so industrially loaded?

It’s capitalism and the patriarchy, Jack! But in fact, the textbooks make DNA the boss because it is the boss. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself:

All of this coded information in the cytoplasm leads us to ask: why do modern textbooks, which are supposed to present the standard, well-accepted knowledge of the day, continue to portray the cell as hierarchical in structure? Why do science journalists continue to refer to the codes and programs of genes in the nucleus when discussing how life develops and evolves?

I believe that the hold of the centralised view comes from how it resonates with the human social order. The nucleus providing instructions and the cytoplasm performing the labour of ‘nurturing’ sounds ‘natural’ and even ‘obvious’ in a patriarchal society. The central nucleus ordering its ‘underling’ cytoplasm to actually carry out tasks sounds obvious in a class-stratified society.

. . .The reason we find centralised functioning everywhere is not necessarily because it is everywhere. It just appears to be everywhere because of the lens through which we view the world. When scientific narratives, using all the authority of science, project the social hierarchy onto nature, they can reinforce the same hierarchy as ‘natural’. The centralised model from cells to animal social groups suggests that everything in nature is centralised, and that centralisation works. The ‘truth’ about nature is influenced by our values, and this ‘truth’ can then play a role in doubling down and reinforcing the same social values in the world.

. . . I believe that the hold of the centralised view comes from how it resonates with the human social order. The nucleus providing instructions and the cytoplasm performing the labour of ‘nurturing’ sounds ‘natural’ and even ‘obvious’ in a patriarchal society. The central nucleus ordering its ‘underling’ cytoplasm to actually carry out tasks sounds obvious in a class-stratified society.

And this metaphor, says Navare, damages our understanding of biology. I can’t think of how, since scientists have been beavering away at understanding the cell, and I haven’t sees them impeded by a bad metaphor. Perhaps they have, but I can’t think of one example.  Navare keeps saying that the view is an impediment, but gives no examples of how.  Here are more of his lucubrations:

How science conceptualises the cell also gives us insight into how we think of scientific objectivity. We often think that, when values interfere with science, the quest for truth and accuracy is put at risk. Scientists are supposed to leave their values and beliefs outside their labs. However, research in feminist science studies suggests otherwise. One does not necessarily need to be free of values to do good science, but denying their influence undermines the quality of scientific work. Instead of denial, reflecting on values and biases would help researchers steer clear of the pitfalls. Self-reflection can help scientists identify how their values are shaping their science, and think of better experimental designs that could ‘catch’ their assumptions before they compromise results.

. . .But the trouble with doubling down on this kind of metaphor as a stand-in for science is that assumptions about how a cell ought to function prevent us from understanding how the cell really functions. What is more, when science projects social hierarchies onto the cell, it also reinforces the notion that social hierarchies are ‘natural’.

In fact, Navare says that there are other metaphors that could serve equally well:

. . .Unfortunately, the centralised and hierarchical metaphor, so pervasive in textbooks, is often the only one for the internal workings of the cell.

One alternative metaphor for the cell nucleus, I tentatively suggest, could be a ‘collaborative notebook’. The cell keeps this notebook, and all the cell’s components use it to keep track of their activities and help maintain the cell. The cell ‘writes’ in the notebook, writes in the ‘margins’ and ‘refers’ to its own notes. Cellular organelles sense each other’s needs and take ‘care’ of each other. While the ‘factory’ metaphor attributes control and information to the nucleus, the ‘nucleus as a collaborative notebook’ shows agency on the part of the cell. While the factory metaphor makes the cell seem obsessed with ‘production’, alternative metaphors can highlight the mutual aid among the cellular components and the labour of maintaining the cell.

Try as I might, I fail to see how the Notebook Metaphor is more helpful than the “factory”metaphor, but of course it fits right into the Kropotkin-esque tendency to see mutual helpfulness (one could also see it reflectiong socialism). But truth be told, I’m not that enamored of the factory metaphor, either. All I care about is how the cell works, and you can’t do that without appreciating the overweening effects of genes whose action produces almost everything in the cell, influences how the organism develops, and is, in the end, the result of the selection among genes. Every adaptive aspect of development, including cell structure and function, depends on adaptive changes in the DNA put in place by natural selection (this holds also for how the mitochondria and cytoplasm interact with nuclear DNA).

Here’s how Navare minimizes the effects of genes.

The nucleus, of course, does make some hereditary contribution, and we understand it in great detail. But the nucleus is only a tiny subset of the hereditary material. If we don’t even search for hereditary information in the egg cell – if we never describe that information as hereditary – we will keep propagating the idea that biological inheritance is restricted to the nucleus alone. Now I’m not sure what he means by “hereditary material.” Yes, the mitochondria and cytoplasm do replicate themselves by fission (and duplication of their DNAz0, but none of the other organelles are self-replicating, or “hereditary” in that sense. The organelles and cytoplasmic constituents, like vacuoles and ribosomes, are made by recipes written in the DNA (ribosomes, for example, the site of protein synthesis,m are largely made of RNA sent out from the nucleus). Without the DNA coding for proteins, we have no enzymatic pathways, no means of constructing organelles, and no way of building up the constituents of a cell.

Now this is not to say that the construction of a cell or an embryo doesn’t require anything other DNA, but it does require the products of DNA. For example, how does a fertilized egg know which end is going to be the head end and which the tail? And given that, what about the back from front? (Once these are determined, of course, left versus right has already been specified.) It is because the mother’s DNA makes RNAs that are distributed asymmetrically in the egg, and those differential distributions of RNA, via the proteins they make, are what starts the anterior-posterior and dorso-ventral axes from forming. Now these RNAs are moved through the egg cell by microtubules, part of the “cytoskeleton”, so the microtubules must also be there in the egg. But ultimately, it’s the DNA that contains the recipe for these microtubules—and of course the axis-forming RNA.

And all of this has evolved by natural selection causing the differential proliferation—of genes.  In the end, everything save some parts of the mitochondria and chloroplasts, is the product of evolution, and that means of changes in DNA.  In both evolution and development, it’s DNA all the way down. Even the response of an organism to its environment, like cats growing longer hair in the winter, is an evolved response based on changes in genes in the DNA. The environment is the cue, but the response lies in the genome.

One more example of gene-dissing:

We are told that the genes contain blueprints to make proteins. However, genes do not contain all the information needed to make proteins. They only specify a one-dimensional protein chain; the three-dimensional structure that the proteins take, which is vital for their function, is determined by the cellular environment as well. Further, the way proteins behave also varies with where they are in the cytoplasm. The genetic ‘information’, on its own, is nowhere near enough for the cell to function.

No the proteins largely fold on their own once they are made. But does Navare not realize that the information that makes the linear structure of a protein into a three-dimensional structure rests largely already in the linear arrangement of amino acids, which creates the linear structure of a protein? Once that’s made, the proteins largely fold spontaneously into the appropriate three-dimensional structure, which is of course crucial for enzymes to work and proteins like hemoglobin to function. But without the correct linear structure, specified by the DNA, the right spontaneous folding won’t happen. So again the DNA is largely the boss, and has evolved to produce proteins that fold up the right way. The DNA is even more bossy because sometimes proteins are helped in their folding, or retain their folding, through their interaction with enzymes. What are enzymes? Proteins made by DNA.  Again, it’s DNA all the way down.

That aside, Navare manages to get in a timely word for how DEI can help our understanding as well:

Science is undoubtedly a human endeavour. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway describes science as a conversation between partial perspectives that each individual gets from the vantage point of their position. As Just’s science shows, people with different life experiences might have different perspectives and may ask different questions. [JAC: E. E. Just, one of the only well known black scientists working in the early 20th century, made notable contributions to understanding the cell.] Admittedly, the connections between scientists’ backgrounds and their work are not always so direct. But the social position of scientists can still serve as one of the factors that influence their work. We often say science is self-correcting. We think that science changes its views when new information comes to light. But this new information doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It doesn’t emerge only from new techniques. It is also generated when diversity and representation are important in their own right from the perspective of equity, diverse perspectives would benefit science most of all. Objectivity is not an individual burden but a collective one. While diversity and representation are important in their own right from the perspective of equity, diverse perspectives would benefit science most of all. Objectivity is not an individual burden but a collective one.

And clearly class has conditioned our view of the cell as well:

Historically, the majority of scientists have been male, upper class, and belonging to the dominant castes and races. It is possible that the social position of scientists helped them relate to the notion of a nucleus that continues discharging instructions while taking for granted the knowledge and skills required in actually doing the work. The Nobel laureate David Baltimore described genes as the ‘executive suite’ and the cytoplasm as the ‘factory floor’. The executive suite appears more valuable and deserving of more remuneration, while the toiling masses on the factory floor are thought to be merely executing the instructions, undervaluing the wealth of explicit and tacit knowledge and skill.

Poor Baltimore, bamboozled by a view of the cell. I guess it was all the dosh that comes with a Nobel Prize that has warped his viewpoint.

There’s a feminist point of view, too, one that presumably sees the cell as more cooperative than a patriarchy would make us think:

Science is often described as objective and value-free, but philosophers of science have pointed out that values can guide the questions that scientists ask, the hypotheses they make, and the way they interpret their results. The field of feminist science studies, in particular, has called into question the sole role of the nucleus where heredity is concerned.

. . . . How science conceptualises the cell also gives us insight into how we think of scientific objectivity. We often think that, when values interfere with science, the quest for truth and accuracy is put at risk. Scientists are supposed to leave their values and beliefs outside their labs. However, research in feminist science studies suggests otherwise.

There are no references for either of these statements.  My own view is that we need to draw scientists from throughout society (giving everyone equal opportunities to suceed), but concentrating on merit, which also includes the ability to “think outside the box”. That said, with one exception I haven’t seen fruitful sex-, class- or race-specific ways of approaching biology. The one exception my feeling that women evolutionists helped us concentrate more on female preference as opposed to male traits in sexual selection.

Finally, Navare issues a dire warning of the dangers inherent in a metaphor that, in the end, is only a metaphor. (Bolding is mine.)

If we are unable to conceive of the cell, the basic unit of organisms like ours, without coercive hierarchies, we will never fully appreciate the complexity of nature. If we fail to imagine society without a centralised authority, we will find it difficult to understand or empower the oppressed. Unless we reflect on our assumptions, our science will be loaded with so many landmines it may never unravel all the mysteries of life.

In the end, Navare manages to connect the “factory” view of the cell with oppression in society.  We can only free workers from their chains if we free our view of the cell as having a DNA Boss. This, of course, is music to the ears of “progressives”.

Sorry, I can’t agree. If you can find one example of how our understanding of life has been impeded by the “factory” metaphor—which after all isn’t something that biologists hold in their heads as a controlling mantra while they do research—do let me know.

Scotland has passed a new hate crime act, formally called the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021, which takes effect, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day (April 1).  It was passed in 2021, though, which accounts for its name.

The whole law is here, and part 3 is the most contentious part, including this (click to enlarge).

Note that it is a crime to make statements about age, disability, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or “variation in sex characteristics”, stuff that a “reasonable person” would find “threatening”, “abusive”, and even “insulting”.  You don’t even have to have the intent of stirring up hatred.

Further, look at (2)aii above. You are committing a crime even if you “communicate to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”.  So, for example, if you email a friend that a guy you don’t like “must have a small dick” (a common insult for males, but also abusive because it makes fun of “variation in a sex characteristic”), or say to someone “Jack is a dotty old codger”, which insults someone on the grounds of age, then those might be offenses.

Also, as one reader said, “Part of the reason why people are so worried is that the guidance that Police Scotland have issued seems to be somewhat different from what the law itself says. It’s a download document 29 pages long.”  Looking at it briefly, I find two things extra worrying.

First, even if what you do doesn’t amount to a “crime,” it’s supposed to be reported and the coppers will investigate it, probably putting your name on the record (bolding below is mine):

While it is accepted that not every hate report will amount to criminality, officers are required to take preventative and protective measures even when a non-criminal offence is apparent. Seemingly low level or minor events may in fact have a significant impact on the victim. Crime type alone does not necessarily dictate impact or consequences of the action. Repeated targeting of a person, whether by the same perpetrator or not, can lead to what is known as the ‘drip drip’ effect i.e. although seemingly minor incidents, the repeated nature could affect the person’s ability to cope. Each individual will be affected differently.

Further, as implied above, intent doesn’t matter; it’s the effect that does.  And that, of course, leaves the act open to all kinds of “I’m insulted” complaints:

For recording purposes, the perception of the victim or any other person is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident or in recognising the malice element of a crime. The perception of the victim should always be explored, however they do not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief and police officers or staff members should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of malice and ill-will is not required for a hate crime or hate incident to be recorded and thereafter investigated as a hate crime or hate incident by police.

If you want an example of something that creates a slippery slope of crime, the bit above is it. For what is seen as “threatening”, “abusive”, and especially “insulting”, will depend on the “victim’s” perception.. Especially ridiculous is the (2)aii provision that restricts your freedom to insult a person to someone else, without insulting the “victim” directly. This is going to create a mess, and I hope it’s tested in the courts soon after it goes into effect.

I’m hoping this ludicrous law won’t be enforced as written, or really enforced at all, for in America this law would violate the First Amendment, except insofar as you harass someone repeatedly, defame them, create an atmosphere bigotry in the workplace, or say something publicly that incited “imminent and lawless action.”

Another reader said this, though I haven’t checked on the assertion:

“In the meantime, Police Scotland have published a list of third-party locations where people will be able to report hate crimes – it includes a sex shop in Glasgow, a mushroom farm, and the address of a council office block that was demolished a few years ago… What could possibly go wrong?”

The police, trying to explain to a befuddled public how the law will work, have confected an example that involves, of all people, J. K. Rowling, who has committed NO hate crimes.  Read the Torygraph report by clicking the headline below (probably paywalled), or find the piece archived here:

 

Excerpts from the Torygraph are indented. The picture above was part of the article and was surely not part of the police example, and I’m not certain about the decorative part on the left. But, based on the story below, I take the text on the left to be accurate.

Police officers who invented a trans-hating “parody” of JK Rowling [above] must be stripped of any role in enforcing new hate crime laws, more than 200 women have said.

In an open letter, female signatories expressed “disgust” that a fictional character called “Jo”, alleged to be modelled on the Harry Potter writer who called for trans people to be sent to gas chambers, had been created by serving Police Scotland officers.

Of course Rowling hasn’t come close to posting videos urging putting LGBT people in gas chambers, much less asserting that they all have “mental health conditions.” This example comes close, in my view, to defaming Rowling. But let’s read on:

They said the revelation had left their confidence in police to fairly enforce hate crime legislation at “rock bottom” and claimed the narrative created reinforced offensive “tropes” that gender critical women were comparable to Nazis.

At an official police “youth engagement” hate crime event last month, attendees were presented with a “scenario” in which Jo, an “online influencer” with a large social media following, is “passionate” about her beliefs such as there being only two genders.

“Jo” is what Rowlings friends call her, but is also the derisive name that her haters use.

The story escalates with “Jo” stating that trans people “all belong in the gas chambers”. Attendees were then asked to consider whether “Jo” had committed a hate crime.

The letter, signed by high-profile political figures, academics and gender-critical campaigners, said the story reinforced offensive claims about women who believe biological sex should take precedence over self-declared gender identity.

Such women are often compared by trans rights activists to racists while they also regularly face unfounded accusations of having links to the far-Right.

 

In a letter, the women said the “Jo” character had clearly been “a thinly veiled parody of the author JK Rowling, who in recent years has championed the sex-based rights of women and girls”.

“We write to you to express our disgust that public servants, not least those charged with enforcing the new offences created by the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, were responsible for this material,” the women’s letter, to Jo Farrell, the chief constable, stated.

“It plays into long-standing, offensive tropes that women who are concerned about the erosion of their sex-based rights are akin to Nazis.”

The row comes just days before Scotland’s new hate crimes laws are enforced.

Trans, non-binary and cross-dressing people, though not biological women, will receive new protections under the legislation which critics claim will be “weaponised” against gender critical women such as Rowling and erode freedom of speech.

The 235 signatories, who include Johann Lamont, the ex-Scottish Labour leader, former Labour MSP Elaine Smith and Sarah Pedersen, a professor at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, called on Ms Farrell to launch an investigation into the creation of “Jo”.

. . . . The Time for Inclusive Education campaign group, which jointly ran the hate crime event, last week revealed that Police Scotland officers have invented the “Jo” scenario “based on their expertise”.

Police Scotland has declined multiple opportunities to deny that the “Jo” character was based on Rowling, whose first name is Joanne and is called Jo by her friends.

Meanwhile, the organisation has so far refused to release training materials for officers charged with enforcing its hate crime law.

The article further reports that the cops won’t let anybody view the training materials until April 9, more than a week after the law takes effect, and further claims that the slow police response violates the UK’s Freedom of Information Act.

Knowing Rowling, she’ll take action against being defamed in this way. After all, the training materials above may constitute a hate crime itself; abusing Rowling because of her statements about sex and gender. If you think the name “Jo”—as well as the beliefs used to attack the “online influencer with a large following”—doesn’t refer to Rowling, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

Oh, woe is Scotland!

h/t: Christopher, Jez

 

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “quirky,” shows a common theme of this strip: the boys instantiating something that they’re decrying at the same time.  It is, of course, an example of the hypocrisy of religion.

Once again we’re running dangerously low on photos, and I ask contributors to step up and send me some. Thanks!

Today’s batch comes from reader Uwe Mueller, and were taken in Bergisches Land, the part of Germany where he lives. Uwe’s captions and notes are enclosed, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus),  These are living near my place and I shot this one from my balcony last year (shot only with the camera, of course). Interestingly we also have a big colony of feral pigeons living here but both species never mix. The feral pigeons stay on the streets between the houses, the wood pigeons are living in the trees in the nearby forest:

Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus).  Shot at the same day as the wood pigeon. These are common visitors at my balcony where I feed them:

Great tit (Parus major).  Another visitor at my balcony who is also nesting here:

Song thrush (Turdus philomelos).  As their name suggests these are great singers. Currently it is their time and I can hear them everywhere:

Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes).  A little bird that is quite difficult to spot. It loves thick bushes and avoids open spaces. To get it in open sunlight as in this image is a rare opportunity:

This Great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) is feeding its chickens. The male woodpecker is recognizable through its red neck which the female doesn’t have. Another visitor at our balcony but they are extremely cautious. The smallest hint of a movement behind the glass of our windows and they immediately take off:

A young Great spotted woodpecker. Their top of the head is completely red during young age:

A European robin (Erithacus rubecula) singing as loud as it can:

This is one of the worst papers on genetics I’ve seen in the last 15 years, and although it’s from 2019, this same kind of palaver keeps coming around again and again, and in exactly the same form. And so when a reader sent me the link, I reacted instinctively. The laws of physics mandated that, like a starving leopard encountering an antelope, I must fall on it and rip it to pieces.  So here goes. (Yes, Carole Hooven is right: males tend to have the killer instinct more than do females!)

The piece is intended not for professionals but for laypeople, and appeared in Nautilus, a quarterly magazine on science and its relationship to and implications for society. Founded by a big grant from the John Templeton Foundation, it does publish solid science articles, but sometimes the Foundation’s purpose (to find evidence of God in science) shines through. This occurs through promoting bizarre science, like panpsychism, or touting dubious reconciliations between religion and science. This paper falls into a third class: doing down “modern” genetics to imply that there’s something terribly wrong with our modern paradigm. (Evolution is a related and favorite target.)

The author, Ken Richardson, seems to have derived most of his genetics from fringe figures like Denis Noble and James Shapiro, with the result that the casual, non-geneticist reader will buy what these people are selling: genes are of only minor significance in both development and evolution.

Richardson is listed in the article as “formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University (U.K.). He is the author of Genes, Brains and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence.”

Read it by clicking below, or find the article archived here.

I was torn between ignoring this paper—for the author deserves no attention—or taking it apart. I decided on a compromise: to show some of the statements it makes that are either flat wrong or deeply misguided. Richardson’s quotes are indented, and my take is flush left. Here’s how he starts:

The preferred dogma started to appear in different versions in the 1920s. It was aptly summarized by renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a famous lecture in Dublin in 1943. He told his audience that chromosomes “contain, in some kind of code-script, the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.”

Around that image of the code a whole world order of rank and privilege soon became reinforced. These genes, we were told, come in different “strengths,” different permutations forming ranks that determine the worth of different “races” and of different classes in a class-structured society. A whole intelligence testing movement was built around that preconception, with the tests constructed accordingly.

The image fostered the eugenics and Nazi movements of the 1930s, with tragic consequences. Governments followed a famous 1938 United Kingdom education commission in decreeing that, “The facts of genetic inequality are something that we cannot escape,” and that, “different children … require types of education varying in certain important respects.”

The “strengths” and “permutations of genes” was not widely viewed as the underpinnings of different races. Yes, racial hierarchies were constructed based on supposed genetic constitution, but not the image of the “code script”.  It was the claim that racial differences were inherited, regardless how inheritance worked—much less the unproved notion of “code script”—that buttressed the Nazis’ eugenics program.  But somehow Richardson manages to connect the Nazis with the genetic code at the very beginning of his paper. But this is a minor quibble compared to what follows.

Richardson then uses what he sees as the disappointing performance of the GWAS (Genome-wide Association Studies) method (used to locate, from population surveys, regions of the genome responsible for various traits, which helps narrow down the location of “candidate genes”):

Now, in low-cost, highly mechanized procedures, the search has become even easier. The DNA components—the letters in the words—that can vary from person to person are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. The genetic search for our human definition boiled down to looking for statistical associations between such variations and differences in IQ, education, disease, or whatever.

For years, disappointment followed: Only a few extremely weak associations between SNPs and observable human characteristics could be found. Then another stroke of imagination. Why not just add the strongest weak associations together until a statistically significant association with individual differences is obtained? It is such “polygenic scores,” combining hundreds or thousands of SNPs, varying from person to person, and correlating (albeit weakly) with trait scores such as IQ or educational scores, that form the grounds for the vaulting claims we now witness.

Today, 1930s-style policy implications are being drawn once again. Proposals include gene-testing at birth for educational intervention, embryo selection for desired traits, identifying which classes or “races” are fitter than others, and so on. And clever marketizing now sees millions of people scampering to learn their genetic horoscopes in DNA self-testing kits.

So the hype now pouring out of the mass media is popularizing what has been lurking in the science all along: a gene-god as an entity with almost supernatural powers. Today it’s the gene that, in the words of the Anglican hymn, “makes us high and lowly and orders our estate.”

Although GWAS studies are hard and require big samples, and give genomic regions rather than genes there have been some notable successes in both medical genetics and agriculture, as one would expect in the past five years (see this Twitter thread for some examples).  The implication throughout the paper is that the failure of GWAS to locate individual genes responsible for traits shows that the variation of genes themselves aren’t responsible for the variation in traits. There must be something else!

But that’s completely wrong. We already have a way to judge the influence of genetic variation on trait variation, and that is heritability analysis. Heritabilities (symbolized as h²) range between 0 and 1, and are a measure of the proportion of variation for a trait in a given population caused by the variation among the genes in that population (the rest is due to environmental variation, interactions between genes and environments, and other arcane factors). But the point is that heritabilities calculated from our earlier crude methods are nearly always higher than heritabilities estimated from GWAS analysis, simply because GWAS (but not h²) misses a lot of variable gene sites that have small effects, and isn’t good at detecting effects of rare alleles. But the more we use GWAS, the more variation we find, and, for well studied traits like height, heritabilities estimated from traditional methods are now converging with heritabilities estimated from GWAS.

And heritabilities of most traits, which are most extensively studied in humans, are often quite high. Have a look at this list, for example, which includes cognitive traits, behavioral traits, and physical traits. Most heritabilities range between 0.2 and 0.8, which means that for a typical trait, between 20% and 80% of the inter-individual variation in a population is due to variation of genes. When asked to guess the heritability of an unknown trait, I’d usually say, “well, probably about 50%”.  That seems, for example, to be close to the heritability of IQ in a population.

This shows that genes are highly important in explaining human variation, just as they are variation in animals and plants. This phenomenon was well known ages ago. If genes weren’t important in variation, selective breeding of dogs, plants, pigeons, and so on would be almost useless. Here’s a famous quote from Darwin’s in The Origin:

“Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

If genes weren’t important in variation, animals (and plants, which of course have been bred out the wazoo) wouldn’t be so plastic. Ergo genetic variation is important in explaining the variation of organisms.

Despite this, Richardson makes the following statement, which would astound most geneticists:

. . . . it is now well known that a group of genetically identical individuals, reared in identical environments—as in pure-bred laboratory animals—do not become identical adults. Rather, they develop to exhibit the full range of bodily and functional variations found in normal, genetically-variable, groups. In a report in Science in 2013, Julia Fruend and colleagues observed this effect in differences in developing brain structures.

Full range? Really? Yes, there is still variation among clonal individuals raised in identical environments, but not nearly as much as among genetically variable individuals raised in different environments! Clonal populations show a heritability of zero (they have no genetic variation among them), so there is less phenotypic variation among the individuals.  As for the Fruend paper, it shows plasticity of brain development, because of course learning is a form of adaptive plasticity that can change the brain. But that by no means says that genes aren’t an important source of variation.

I could go on and on about how Richardson claims that genes aren’t important, all the while showing that they are. Here’s a good example:

First, laboratory experiments have shown how living forms probably flourished as “molecular soups” long before genes existed. They self-organized, synthesized polymers (like RNA and DNA), adapted, and reproduced through interactions among hundreds of components. That means they followed “instructions” arising from relations between components, according to current conditions, with no overall controller: compositional information, as the geneticist Doron Lancet calls it.

In this perspective, the genes evolved later, as products of prior systems, not as the original designers and controllers of them. More likely as templates for components as and when needed: a kind of facility for “just in time” supply of parts needed on a recurring basis.

So what? There were primitive replicators first, which might as well be called genes, but the modern system of sophisticated gene action, often involving introns, splicing, transcription factors, and so on, is what we know about now, and what Richardson says about early organisms is irrelevant.  But wait! There’s more!

Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Where does Richardson think that those enzymes and proteins come from, which are often used to manufacture vitamins and amino acids? Where do the cell signalling factors come from? They all come from genes! The “dynamical systems” that he touts so highly come largely from genes, and without genes we would have no organisms and no evolution. Yes, environmental factors are important in controlling the timing and action of genes, but often those “environmental factors”, like signals in different organs that lead to differential development, are themselves derived from genes. And the sequestration and use of externally derived chemicals, like some amino acids and vitamins, are also controlled by genes.

I can barely go on, and if I continue this would last forever. Just one or two more pieces of stupidity:

Accordingly, even single cells change their metabolic pathways, and the way they use their genes to suit those patterns. That is, they “learn,” and create instructions on the hoof. Genes are used as templates for making vital resources, of course. But directions and outcomes of the system are not controlled by genes. Like colonies of ants or bees, there are deeper dynamical laws at work in the development of forms and variations.

Some have likened the process to an orchestra without a conductor. Physiologist Denis Noble has described it as Dancing to the Tune of Life (the title of his recent book). It is most stunningly displayed in early development. Within hours, the fertilized egg becomes a ball of identical cells—all with the same genome, of course. But the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

My answer is “yes it could have, and it is”. Those “chemical systems” that cause an organism to develop come from genes, which have changed over evolutionary time in a way that leads to adaptations, including proper development. By and large, genes control development, particularly early development.  Organisms with pretty much the same genes (members of the same species, for example) always turn out pretty much alike, with similar behaviors and appearances. Further, the more closely related species are, the more similar they tend to be. This reflects genetic similiarity, not some nebulous similarity in “dynamical systems,” whatever those are.

One more:

But it’s not so simple. Consider Mendel’s sweet peas. Some flowers were either purple or white, and patterns of inheritance seemed to reflect variation in a single “hereditary unit,” as mentioned above. It is not dependent on a single gene, however. The statistical relation obscures several streams of chemical synthesis of the dye (anthocyanin), controlled and regulated by the cell as a whole, including the products of many genes. A tiny alteration in one component (a “transcription factor”) disrupts this orchestration. In its absence the flower is white.

This is a good illustration of what Noble calls “passive causation.” A similar perspective applies to many “genetic diseases,” as well as what runs in families. But more evolved functions—and associated diseases—depend upon the vast regulatory networks mentioned above, and thousands of genes. Far from acting as single-minded executives, genes are typically flanked, on the DNA sequence, by a dozen or more “regulatory” sequences used by wider cell signals and their dynamics to control genetic transcription.

“Statistical relation”? What is described in peas is a direct causal relation: a mutation, acting through pathways, is responsible for changing flower color. If you flip a light switch, the light goes on. If you have the right mutation, the flower is white. What’s the big deal? Further, “transcription factors” are coded in the DNA; they are proteins that regulate the transcripotion of other genes: how those genes make messenger RNA.

And the ultimate dissing of genes:

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Finally, because GWAS studies aren’t yet developed to the point where they always can pick out important genes (remember, variation in most traits is due to variation in many genes, with the variants having small effects, and GWAS misses rare genes), Richardson says this:

The startling implication is that the gene as popularly conceived—a blueprint on a strand of DNA, determining development and its variations—does not really exist.

Well, as Dawkins has pointed out, genes are more like “recipes” than blueprints, but this isn’t what Richardson is saying here. What he is saying is that genes play at best only a small role in development.  He is both wrong and muddled.

It is this kind of popular science that I most despise, because it dissimulates, misleads, and even fibs about the state of modern science. By misleading the public about genetics, it affects not only their understanding of science, but, when shown up to be nonsense, as I and other have done, erodes public trust in science.

If you want to read this piece, be my guest, but if you know anything about genetics, keep a big glass of Pepto-Bismol at hand.

 

h/t: the always helpful Luana

The Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine has now done 13 podcasts on the history of DNA, beginning with the discovery of nucleic acids through the observation that DNA was the hereditary material (Avery et al.) and (so far) up to the structure of the double helix.  As far I know, our own Dr. Cobb, very eloquent behind the microphone, has been on four of these broadcasts:  #3, 4, 7 and the newest one #13, about Watson, Crick, and the double helix.

You can access the whole lot by clicking on this screenshot, or get to the individual podcasts by clicking on the screenshot below.

This podcast series illuminates the history of seminal discoveries and research through which we learned about the molecule that has been dubbed as the “secret of life” itself: DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.

This series progresses from the first discovery of the substance in 1869 to the late 1950s, when scientists figured out the structure of this molecule and its implications for the way in which it carries out its biological functions. Each episode features scholars and experts from different fields, including the history of science, other humanities and social sciences—such as philosophy, anthropology, sociology of science and STS—the specific areas of science pertinent to the paper being discussed, and science communication.

Click on the “Resources” tab for information for researchers as well as further readings.

Jump to:
Episode 1 on Friedrich Miescher and the discovery of nuclein
Episode 2 on Albrecht Kossel and the discovery of the building blocks of nuclein
Episode 3 on Walter Sutton and the relation between chromosomes and heredity
Episode 4 on Fred Griffith and the discovery of bacterial transformation
Episode 5 on Phoebus Levene, DNA chemistry and the tetranucleotide hypothesis
Episode 6 on William Astbury, Florence Bell and the first X-ray pictures of DNA
Episode 7 on Oswald Avery, Colin McLeod, and Maclyn McCarty and the chemical basis of bacterial transformation
Episode 8 on Maclyn McCarty, Oswald Avery and the enzymatic evidence for DNA as the transforming substance
Episode 9 on Erwin Chargaff and the evidence for non-uniformity of nucleotide base composition in DNA
Episode 10 on Harriet Ephrussi-Taylor, Rollin Hotchkiss and the demonstration of bacterial transformation as a general phenomenon
Episode 11 on Alfred Hershey, Martha Chase, and the conclusive evidence for the function of DNA as the material of heredity.
Episode 12 on Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, their collaborators, and the data that supported the double helix model for DNA structure.
Episode 13 on James Watson, Francis Crick, and the DNA Double Helix.

You can hear the latest episode, 62 minutes long, by clicking at the screenshot below, is described comme ça:

Rounding out the story begun in the previous installment, episode 13 of the DNA Papers centers on the publications in which the double helical structure for DNA was proposed, detailed, and its various implications speculated upon. It features four papers, all by Watson and Crick from Cambridge. Together these papers not only proposed that DNA’s three dimensional structure was a double-stranded helix, but also described the antiparallel and complementary nature of its two component strands and the specific pairing of  the component nucleotide bases, namely,  the purines, A and G, with the  pyrimidines T and C respectively. The papers also discussed the implications of these features for the fundamental functions of DNA. . . .

And the participants are:

Soraya de Chadarevian, University of California, Los Angeles
Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester
Nathaniel Comfort, Johns Hopkins University
Georgina Ferry

Today we have photos and videos of Hawaii sent in by Rosemary Alles, with photography credits to both her and Hale Anderson. The text is by Rosemary and is indented; you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Background

Sri Lanka lies in the shadow of her giant neighbor India; a teardrop on the vast slate of the Indian Ocean. My family emigrated from our island nation many moons ago, leaving a jeweled landscape ravaged by corruption, ethnic violence, and terrorism.

My first home in the West was in Canada and then on the Big Island of Hawaii. These days, I travel between South Africa and Hawaii centering my work around the protection of iconic mega-fauna.

Hawaii, like Sri Lanka, is home to a myriad endemic species; many are critically endangered, endangered or threatened. Frequently referred to as the “Endangered Species Capital of the World”, my island state is also home to Hawaii Volcano’s National Park. 344,812 acres of rainforest, desert and windswept magnificence that boasts at least one success story; the nearly flightless Nene Goose. (Branta sandvicensis). This once endangered bird has made a comeback thanks to ongoing funding and restoration efforts.

From Jerry: Here are two photos I took on the Big Island of a nene crossing sign and the goose itself: July 1, 2019.

Last month, my sister and I were on the Big Island of Hawaii memorializing my mother’s passing. While there, Kīlauea erupted, throwing molten rock 35-50 feet in the air. A shield volcano, Kīlauea is the youngest and most active volcano on the Islands. I’ve been close to many lava flows during my years Hawaii, and this time, we were -once again- fortunate to see Kīlauea erupt on September 15th, just hours before it stopped. A video is here.

Before we left, my sister to her home in Toronto, and I to South Africa, we sat by the ocean where the water meets the sand. That evening, as the sea swallowed the sun in a crepuscular ritual, the sky turned red, a fiery blood-orange I had never seen before, not in all my years on the islands.

Mālama ‘Āina. Take care of the land, take care of the sea.

Images of the fiery sunset have not been adjusted at all, other than for cropping.

These are the images of the fiery sunset:

A brief explanation of the phenomena (the vivid nature of the sunset and the detail in the clouds) is explained as follows (by an astronomer-friend in France). Please refer to the two drawings obviously not drawn to scale.

Low hanging clouds are illuminated by the sun from below. The sun has set for the observer (me) but not from the perspective of the clouds. The grazing light enhances the contrast. Essentially the light from the sun is reflecting at a low angle on the clouds causing grazing.

The tree in the foreground of the eruption-image is an Ohi’a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha). As of this writing, the species, endemic to Hawaii, is suffering from ROD (Rapid Ohia Death) from invasive fungi. Ohi’a is one of the first species to appear on “new” lava – once it has cooled.

Videos and text here: “Kīlauea was erupting at the summit most recently from September 10-16, 2023. Several roughly east-west oriented vents on the western side of the downdropped block within Kīlauea’s summit caldera generated lava flows onto Halema‘uma‘u crater floor, within Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. ”

“Halemaʻumaʻu is home to Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, according to the traditions of Hawaiian religion. Halemaʻumaʻu means ‘house of the ʻāmaʻu fern’.”

Kilauea after the eruption stopped:

Three videos of the 2023 Kilauea eruption:

A  Wild Hawaiian Orchid.

” Their technical names are Anoetochilus sandvicensis (the jewel orchid); Liparis hawaiensis (the twayblade orchid); and Platanthera holochila. These native orchids grow in the very highest places within the island’s forests and bog.” 

Orchids for my mother on the blue slate of the Pacific.

The Golden Pools of Keawaiki:

From this site:

“The Golden Pools of Keawaiki on the Kohala coast are landlocked freshwater ponds (anchialine pools) connected to the ocean. Lava fields surround them, and the only greenery is saplings growing at these oases. The Golden Pools of Keawaiki got their name from the gold-colored algae growing on the underwater rocks.”

Mauna Kea, the White Mountain, so named for the snow along its flanks during the colder months of the year. Mauna Kea is ~13,800 feet high.

Quote: “If we measure the entire mountain from top to its base, which is referred to as the ‘dry prominence’, Mauna Kea is 500 metres (1640 feet) taller than Everest.”

The observatory-domes of several world class telescopes are located atop the mountain; the W.M Keck Telescope, the Gemini, the Subaru, the CFHT (Canada France Hawaii Telescope), and the NASA infrared Telescope Facility are among the ~13 scopes on the White Mountain. I worked for both the CFHT and Keck Telescopes prior to switching career paths. The Thirty Meter Telescope (the TMT) was slated for completion prior to 2019, but was successfully halted after several years of protest by native Hawaiian groups. Hawaiian mythology considers the mountain “sacred”. In a tragedy for science, the compromise, if one is reached, may prove fatal for the future of astronomy on Mauna Kea, the world’s best site for ground-based astronomy.

Quote: “The height of the mountain, lack of light pollution, dry atmosphere, and minimal air disturbances make Maunakea the foremost place in the world for astronomy research.”

Quote: “Crucially, the MKSOA includes representatives from both astronomical observatories and Native Hawaiian communities. Its members say it marks a new approach, one that for the first time gives Native Hawaiians a voting role in overseeing the mountaintop. And although board members don’t want to get ahead of the process, an emerging compromise could see the embattled TMT built atop the peak in exchange for the decommissioning of several telescopes.”

Ironically, Hawaii’s coastline is also “sacred’ to Hawaiians, however, no clarion call has been issued to decommission the multiple hotels along the coastline. Connect the dots. Commerce and skill sets.

Mauna Loa, the Long Mountain, slightly less in height than Mauna Kea. Hawaii Volcano’s National Park lies to the south of Mauna Loa.

If you watch or read the news, you can hardly avoid the newest hype about the “de-extinction” of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)—hype that implies that scientists, using genetic engineering, are on the verge of bringing back that extinct pachyderm. (The species, which coexisted with humans, went extinct about 4,000 years ago, when the Egyptians were still thriving.)

Yes, in a Jurassic-Parkish gambit, scientists are proposing to bring the mammoths back: to “de-extinct” them. A company called Colossal Biosciences, with George Church as its founder, proposes to give us woolly mammoths again, and may even allow us to fill the tundra-steppes of Eurasia with a species that no longer lives there.

It’s not true. They are not producing real woolly mammoths, and the program will not succeed even if they produce the faux mammoths they’re trying to make.

In my previous post on this, called “a mammoth debacle,” I pointed out a number of problems with this effort, not the least the misrepresentation by the media (encouraged, I think, by the scientists) that they really were going to bring back the species that had gone extinct. This is not true—not even close.

What they are going to do is put a handful of mammoth genes (we have the mammoth DNA sequence since we have individuals dug out of the permafrost) into an elephant genome, producing, so the company hopes, a large, hairy elephant with tusks. In other words, the animal they propose to produce is simply an elephant with a few mammoth genes that makes it look superficially like a mammoth. One problem is that we don’t know exactly which genes produce these traits in the mammoth; all we have are DNA sequences. We can investigate what the genes do, but putting them in an elephant genome via CRISPR and hoping that the result will look like a mammoth, is an expensive process, and likely to fail. And you don’t get many chances to fail, because each time you do this you need a female elephant in heat that you can impregnate with a genetically modified elephant egg.

But wait! The problems are much greater than this! Here’s what I wrote last time:

Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system?

But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), Church had this bright idea:

Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates.

Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy,” he said. “But everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

An artificial mammoth uterus? Seriously? If you think that’s gonna work, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Of course, if you’re going to breed these things, you’d have to make two of them of opposite sexes. Could they even do that?

I haven’t even mentioned the ecological problems. Mammoths no doubt had cold-tolerance genes and behavioral genes for existing on the northern tundra-steppes and tending baby mammoths. How are they going to find those genes?

Now the Washington Post tells us (and everybody else) that Colossal Biosciences is “close” to producing this mammoth, which is really a big hairy elephant. But they don’t say that in the headlines. But at least the Post mentions some of the problems with this doomed effort, quoting scientists who are dubious about the venture. And, luckily, those scientists include our own Matthew Cobb.

But the bottom line is: NO, they are not going to bring back the woolly mammoth, nor will they bring the species back as a going concern.

Click below to read, or find the article archived here.

Quotes from the paper are indented. The big news is that the company is now able to get elephant stem cells that they can genetically engineer, making them a bit mammothier. These genetically engineered cells are then to be injected into a female elephant when she is in estrus. The news, as Matthew told me (he’s quoted in the piece), is that “they are able to fiddle around with elephant stem cells for the first time.”  But again, this that just allows production of a big hairy elephant with tusks.

But I digress. From the piece:

A company aiming to bring extinct animals back from the dead said it has taken an elephant-sized step toward genetically resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a wild if contentious goal to repopulate the Arctic tundra with a missing titan

Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company based in Dallas, announced Wednesday that it has produced a line of Asian elephant stem cells that can be coaxed to transform into other types of cells needed to reconstruct the extinct giant — or at a least a mammoth-like elephant designed to thrive in the cold.

“It’s probably the most significant thing so far in the project,” said George Church, a Harvard geneticist and Colossal co-founder. “There are many steps in the future.”

For proponents, bringing back vanished animals is a chance to correct humanity’s role in the ongoing extinction crisis. Breakthroughs in their field, they say, may yield benefits for animals still with us, including endangered elephants.

Yet the technical challenges of birthing into the world a living, breathing mammoth remain, well, colossal. And the project raises hairy ethical questions: Who decides what comes back? Where will the reborn species go? Could the money be better spent elsewhere? And how hard will “de-extinction,” as the revival efforts are known, be on the animals themselves?

And the BIG NEWS:

Scientists have produced such stem cells in the lab for other animals, including humans, mice, pigs and even rhinos. But for years, getting the right elephant stem cells to test all those cold-climate characteristics proved elusive, in part because elephant cells’ ability to avoid cancer made reprogramming them difficult.

Colossal said they have produced the stem cells they need by suppressing the anti-cancer genes and bathing the cells in the right chemical cocktail. Colossal published a preprint Wednesday that is not yet peer-reviewed. The company said it is working to place the study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

I’m curious how they’re going to test whether a given gene, beyond producing hair, increases cold-tolerance.

Further, Matthew and I are both concerned with the ethical questions, especially bringing into being a mammothy elephant not designed to survive on the tundra, and then putting it in that habitat. It has no mate, it doesn’t have the genes for surviving on the tundra, and it will likely die.  If scientists ever screw up by “playing God,” well, this may be one example.

Here’s Matthew and another biologist expressing doubt about the whole mishigass:

Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, said all those “ifs” may be insurmountable. There is no guarantee that the modified chromosomes can be introduced to an elephant cell, or if that an embryo will take hold in an elephant womb.

And perhaps more profoundly, there is the question of how a mammoth, if born, will learn to behave like a mammoth. “Most of the mammals and birds that are being talked about have complex social and cultural interactions that have been lost,” Cobb said. “They are not simply their genes.”

Modern elephants, for instance, are highly social beings, passing down knowledge about the location of watering holes and other survival skills from one generation to the next. Their ancient cousins may be similar. “They’ve got no elders to raise them, to teach them,” Browning said. “They’re got no way of learning how to be mammoths.”

And any living surrogate elephant meant to gestate and give birth to a new mammoth will go through some degree of hardship. “How many dead elephants are we willing to have to get one woolly one?” said Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist specializing in ancient elephants at the University of Sheffield in England.

Finally, there’s the artificial uterus problem. Last night the NBC News said a woolly mammoth could be only five years away. Don’t you believe it! Here’s Church touting not only bringing back the mammoth, but trumpeting (pardon the pun) the idea that this complicated technology could help save modern species of elephants (there are three: two species of African elephant and the Asian elephant):

Colossal said its long-term goal is to use artificial wombs to gestate the animals, itself a tall technological task. The company notes that its research into elephant cells can help with current conservation efforts, such as potential treatments for a form of herpes that kills young elephants. Indeed, the company hopes to make money by licensing or selling some of the technologies it creates along the way.

“It’s not so much bringing back the mammoth, it’s saving an endangered species,” Church said. “It’s working out technology that’s useful for conservation and climate change.”

But Cobb said the biggest threats facing elephants are hunting, habitat destruction and other conflicts with humans, adding: “How will a greater understanding of cell biology help?”

Ceiling Cat bless Dr. Cobb for fighting the hype that creeps into science reporting!

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

A satirical article that appeared in Clickhole (h/t: RM). Click to read:

We’ve talked before about “positionality statements” (see here and here; also Sally Satel’s article here). These are statements, usually put at the end of an academic paper, in which the authors give all kinds of information about their upbringing, ethnicity, race, sexual identity, sexual inclination, upbringing, and so on. It’s the kind of information that the Woke use when making a statement, putting it in the blank space here:  “As a _____________, I feel that. . . . ”

Here’s a typical statement, one that I’ve posted before:

I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was “different.” Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production that resisted the nuances of the diverse individuals and groups I sought to better understand. . . . I seek to place myself in relationships and contexts to learn and engage in a co-conspiring, co-liberatory inquiry stance.

These are cringe-worthy of course, but their proponents say they’re useful.  I say they’re not, as did Sally Satel. In this matter Dorian Abbot, my heterodox colleague at the University of Chicago, also agrees. You can see his short HeterodoxSTEM article (it’s worth subscribing if you’re in STEM) by clicking the headline below.

 

The reason usually asserted for people making statements like this is that, by giving the authors’ backgrounds and beliefs, it enables the reader to better judge the paper scientifically, possibly being aware of biases that might affect a paper’s results or conclusions. But the authors should have been aware of this themselves and expunged any bias in their data collection or analysis, or at least gotten another pair of eyes to look over the paper before submitting it. And, of course, looking at the science in a paper, and seeing if it’s solid, is the job of the reviewers who decide whether it’s meritorious enough to be worth publishing. If authors can’t vet their own papers for accuracy before they submit them, they shouldn’t be doing science. As Sally Satel said:

Rather than confess the blind spots and biases they think they have, scientists should make their data transparent; pre-register research hypotheses; engage in rigorous, blind peer review; and publish detailed letters to the editor. It is the research that should come under scrutiny, not the researcher.

It seems likely to me that these statements have other purposes beyond vetting a paper. They are often used to flaunt virtue or even confess the author’s whiteness or other failings; in other words, they consitute = contrition, braggadocio, or both. The statements’ purpose is as much (or more) ideological than it is scientific. It also verges on solipsism.

As Dorian notes, the NSF prohibits such statements in proposals for getting grants:

the NSF has banned any personal information on official biosketches, for good reason (bolding is mine):

Individuals are reminded not to submit any personal information in the biographical sketch. This includes items such as: home address; home telephone, fax, or cell phone numbers; home e-mail address; driver’s license number; marital status; personal hobbies; and the like. Such personal information is not appropriate for the biographical sketch and is not relevant to the merits of the proposal.

So the NSF, for good reasons (irrelevance to the merit of a paper), prohibits these statements, but authors merrily include them when allowed, and one journal (according to Satel, it’s the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering) even requires them!

Dorian gives an over-the-top example of such a statement that he found here. It’s in the Journal of Paleobiology, part of a three-authored article on the underrepresentation of women in that field:

Nan Crystal Arens (she/her) is a White, cisgender, heteroromantic woman and professor in the Department of Geoscience at Hobart & William Smith Colleges (HWS). She was a first-generation college student with a learning disability that significantly slows her parsing and processing written language. HWS is a predominantly White, private undergraduate institution where faculty are encouraged to engage actively in scholarship, although both time and resources for this component of faculty work are extremely limited. HWS faculty in the natural sciences boast a strong tradition of including undergraduate students in their research, as reflected here. Arens’s advocacy for greater inclusion of historically marginalized people in STEMM arises both from her experience as a woman in geology and paleontology and as the mother of two cisgender women who are just beginning to confront the inequities of the world.

“Levi Holguin (he/they) is a person assigned female at birth, neurodivergent, queer, first-generation college student, and part of an immigrant family. They come from a low-income background and are a devotee of folk Catholicism. Many of his identity markers challenge normative standards in the several communities of which he is a part. This draws them into conversations regarding gender and intersectionality. He was motivated in this work by the desire to make change that will open opportunities for marginalized people.

“Natalie Sandoval (she/her) is an undergraduate Latina attending a predominantly White, private institution as a first-generation student. She is cisgender and queer, does not live with a disability, and from a low-income immigrant family. Growing up in an immigrant Latino family, she is no stranger to forced gender roles and machismo, which draws her to gender studies and equity issues. She has done previous research on gender representation in STEMM careers and feelings of belonging on campus. Her previous research also includes family planning and contraceptive use. She is a community advocate through the National Diversity Coalition and seeks opportunities to improve gender equity, accessibility, and human rights through community advocacy and policy change.”

Heteroromantic? Queer? Not disabiled?  What are the sweating author trying to convey with that information? I can’t see anything in these statements that would make me evaluate the paper differently from how I’d do it if I lacked this information. (Do note the virtue-flaunting!).

I don’t have much to add to what I’ve said before—save that this is just one more attempt of the Ideological Camel to insinuate its carcass into the Tent of Science.  In effect, it devalues what science is presented by implying that it might be biased (and offers no help in fixing any such bias!).  Dorian has a few words at the end that echo my own sentiments:

Positionality statements are a flagrant violation of one of the key Mertonian Norms of science, universalism, which states that “scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.” They are not just political grandstanding, which is bad enough, but actually act to undermine the ideal of the disinterested collection of evidence and development of explanatory theories by the scientific method, and therefore decrease confidence in scientific results. In science, it doesn’t matter if your father was a prince or pauper, what you look like, where you came from, or what naughty stuff you do with whom. Science is science, data are data, and bullshit is bullshit. In order to preserve the integrity of the scientific process, journals should ban positionality statements, and we, as reviewers, should automatically reject any paper that includes them.

Amen!

Today’s instructive photo-and-text contribution comes from reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior and deals with a topic we’ve discuss a lot: biological sex and its consequences. In this case, we learn about how organisms adaptively adjust the sex ratio of their offspring when conditions change.

Athayde’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Sometimes snips, snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, other times sugar and spice

As the story goes, during a tour of a government farm, American First Lady Grace Coolidge was being shown around by a farmer when she saw a cockerel and a hen romantically engaged. She asked her guide how often the cockerel would mate, to which he responded: ‘dozens of times a day.’ Good-humouredly, Mrs Coolidge retorted: ‘tell that to the President’. The farmer dutifully did so, and President Calvin Coolidge asked: ‘same hen every time?’, to which the farmer replied: ‘No, Mr President, a different hen every time.’ And the president: ‘tell that to Mrs Coolidge.’

Psychology Professor Frank A. Beach (1911-1988) saw this improbable anecdote as an ideal model to name a widespread phenomenon among animals: the Coolidge Effect, which is the enhanced sexual interest of males whenever a new female is accessible, regardless of the availability of previous sexual partners – a behaviour rarely reported for females. This shocking manifestation of male chauvinism has been offered a biological explanation.

The term ‘gonochorism’ makes us scramble for the dictionary, even though one of the first things we learned from our Birds and Bees lessons – or used to learn before ideological gangrene poisoned Facts and Reality – is that our species is gonochoric (or dioecious), that is, it has two sexes: the male sex produces or is geared up to produce gametes (reproductive cells) called sperm, while the female sex is equipped to produce gametes known as ova or egg cells. The lesson’s climax was the revelation that some types of frolicking could result in the fusion of these two types of gametes to produce babies.

Male and female Mandarin ducks (Aix galericulata), a gonochoric and sexually dimorphic (sexes have different morphological characteristics) species © Francis C. Franklin, Wikimedia Commons

Later in life, when we took biology courses, we were told that many plants and some animals are hermaphrodites (they produce male and female gametes), while other organisms don’t need sex to reproduce. But the overwhelmingly majority of animals, and all mammals and birds, are sexually binary: they either produce male gametes or female gametes – leaving aside the rare cases of individuals that don’t fit in either category. And, from humans to asparagus, that is, for virtually all multicellular organisms, the female gametes are larger – often much larger – than the male gametes; that’s to say they are anisogamous: the two types differ in size and shape. And anisogamy has much to do with the Coolidge Effect.

Because sperm are relatively small, energetically cheap gametes, males can afford to churn out and distribute lots of them. By mating with as many females as possible, males increase their chances of passing on their genes. If a male gamete ends up in an unsuitable female, it’s not a big deal: there are plenty more fish in the sea. It doesn’t work like that for females. They put a lot of energy into their eggs, which are gigantic when compared to sperm. So, a female can only make a few of them in her lifetime. Adding gestation and time spent nurturing their young, females have a much lower reproductive capacity. As they invest a great deal more in producing an embryo than males, they need to choose their mates well to maximize their chances of success; if their Romeos are weak and unfit, females may have wasted all their reproductive potential. For females, it’s a matter of quality, not quantity.

Together at last. A human male sex cell (spermatozoon) penetrating a human ovum. The spermatozoon is ~100,000 times smaller than the ovum. Image in the public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

These biological particularities are strong incentives to polygyny, the mating system where a male has multiple sexual partners while the female mates with one or a few males. Polygyny is the most common mating strategy for vertebrates; about 90% of mammal species are polygynous. These males are, like the Coolidges’ rooster, always ready for a new romantic adventure.

Angus John Bateman (1919–1996), a botanist who worked with fruit flies, found one important consequence of the Coolidge Effect. For most polygynous species, a small number of males monopolize the females and prevent other males from mating. That is, some males are highly successful in reproducing, while many more have no success at all. Things are more predicable for females: most of them will mate – the few successful males will make sure of that. The upshot is that males’ reproductive success is more variable than females’.

The winner takes it all: while one red deer stag (Cervus elaphus) keeps harems of up to 20 hinds, other males go with no dates © Keven Law, Wikimedia Commons.

Enter evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and computer scientist Dan Willard (1948-2023) to thicken the plot by proposing that differences in reproductive success can bias the production of male and female offspring. Trivers and Willard argued, reasonably, that sons and daughters of females in good condition (that is, well-fed, healthy, and not pressured by competitors) would also be in good condition, whereas sons and daughters of females in poor condition (malnourished or debilitated by parasites or competitors) would also be in bad condition. But, when the reproductive success of one sex – males, in the case of polygynous species – is more variable than the other, diverging strategies emerge. In an evolutionary sense, it pays for strong, healthy females to have many sons, who mate frequently and produce lots of grandchildren for their mother. Daughters on the other hand are a less promising investment because, despite being strong like mum, they are restricted by low reproductive rates. But if the mother is in poor condition, having daughters would be a better deal because despite being feeble like mum, those who survive to adulthood are likely to produce some offspring. Feeble sons on the other hand may never breed, as they would be no match for males in good condition (Trivers & Willard, 1973). In other words, when things get bad, it’s better to have more daughters than sons. This risk-spreading strategy is a form of biological bet-hedging to maximize fitness and applies beyond mammal polygyny. If females’ reproductive success is more variable, we should expect more sons than daughters when the going gets rough.

Representation of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis for polygynous species. Low-quality females are more successful than low-quality males, but high-quality males and more successful than high-quality females © Shyu & Caswell, 2015.

The Trivers–Willard hypothesis provides an explanation for a common occurrence among animals: sex ratios going astray. In theory, a species should produce about the same number of sons and daughters (1:1 ratio) to maintain long term stability. This is known as the Fisher’s principle – although it would be fairer to call it the ‘Cobb’s principle’ after the solicitor and amateur biologist John Cobb (1866-1920), who first proposed it (Gardner, 2023) (Cobb’s work is virtually unknown today, and academics from the Church of Woke would have conniptions at citing his paper, published in The Eugenics Review).

The Trivers–Willard hypothesis has had an enormous influence in evolutionary biology. Its predictions have been supported by studies with a range of species, although its universality has been debated and questioned. Nonetheless, the hypothesis has encouraged much theoretical and empirical research about sex allocation. This body of work has revealed that variation of reproductive success between sexes is not the only driver of sex ratio skewness. Food, mothers’ age, litter size, population density, the weather, or some other environmental or physiological factor may induce females to adjust the sex ratio of their offspring to maximise fitness.

UK’s age-sex pyramid illustrating the population’s distribution by age groups and sex. The male to female ratio is 1.05 at birth, shifting to 0.73 for those aged 65 and over © Kaj Tallungs, Wikipedia.

It turns out that food availability is an important inducer of sex ratio fine-tuning for one group of animals of enormous ecological end economic importance: cavity-nesting solitary bees. Most of the 20,000 or so known species of bee build their nests in the ground, but about 30% of them took another path regarding housing. They occupy or expand naturally occurring cavities such as crevices under or between stones, cracks in a wall, holes in dead wood, hollow stems and tree bark, transforming them into cosy, safe environments in which to raise their young.

Like all solitary bees, cavity-nesting species are on the wing for a small portion of their lives, sometimes weeks. After mating, each female spends her short adult life tirelessly victualing her nest with pollen and nectar to provide for her brood. It’s a race against time and over hurdles such as bad weather, competitors, flower scarcity, pests and parasites. Reproductive success depends on the amount of food available for the young, and here their sex can be the decisive factor. Female bees – like most insects – are in general bigger than males, so they need more food. As these big eaters could be a survival risk, some tinkering may be in order.

A red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) man-made nest with brood cells well-stocked with pollen.

A red mason bee couple. The female is 20-25% bigger than the male © Aka, Wikimedia Commons.

The orchard mason bee or blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria), a cavity-nesting species from North America, is a valued pollinator of several fruit trees. During the early nesting season, when pollen and nectar are most abundant and mum is in top shape, her offspring comprise mostly females. As the season progresses, flowers become scarce, so she has to work harder to provision her nest. Now the sex ratio tilts towards the smaller males, who have better chances of survival because they need less food (Torchio & Tepedino, 1980).

The scenario is similar for the related red mason bee (Osma bicornis), a Eurasian species, but here parasites play a part. As the nesting season advances, females become less efficient and take more time to gather food, creating opportunities for nest-invading parasites. Females deal with the problem by reducing the amount of food stored, with a corresponding shift in the sex ratio towards the less demanding sons (Seidelmann, 2006). In the case of the Australian endemic banksia bee (Hylaeus alcyoneus), the growing food scarcity causes the reduction of the brood’s body mass and a shift in their sex ratios. But contrary to the prevailing pattern found in bees, male banksia bees are significantly larger than females. So unsurprisingly, the energetically cheaper daughters became more abundant late in the season (Paini & Bailey, 2002). Other cavity-nesting bees have also shown declines in foraging efficiency as the season progresses, and these changes have been linked to reduced size of their offspring and shifts in their sex ratios.

Seasonal variation in sex ratio of emerging banksia bee adults (sex ratio = number of males/total number of emerging adults) © Paini & Bailey, 2002.

A male banksia bee. They become progressively scarce in coastal areas of southern Australia as the season advances © The Packer Lab, Wikimedia Commons.

The facultative, condition-dependent shift of sex ratios is a remarkable survival tool. The power to quickly tilt the offspring’s sexual balance could make the difference for a species’ success. In the non-nonsense, unforgiving great outdoors, where long-term existence hangs on the ability to adapt to changes, boys and girls are not always equally valued: these are the times when a Sophie’s choice of sorts is necessary.

JAC note:  Just to put an evolutionary-genetic gloss on this, the changes of sex ratio with environmental or other conditions are the result of evolution. That is, those individuals having genes enabling them to adjust the sex ratio in adaptive ways leave more copies of their genes than individuals who can’t adjust their offspring’s sex ratio. Or, to be even more accurate, genes that affect sex ratio in adaptive ways leave more copies of themselves than genes which can’t do that.

Here’s the latest comedy interlude from HBO’s “Real Time” show with Bill Maher. It’s a ten-minute critique of our obsession with identity, including race.  As he says, “We need to stop talking about the things that make Americans different from each other and start honoring the things that make us the same.”

Another quote: “Today’s Democrats should move away from identity politics. It’s not working.” Clearly Maher is not only addressing Democrats, but trying to get them to adopt a strategy that wins elections. 

Those who object to colorblindness, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, won’t like this.

And I love the bit at 5:19.

h/t: Mary

In November I reported on an Unherd article by the estimable Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a piece called “Why I am Now a Christian,” that announced her “conversion” from atheism to Christianity. This took many people aback, as it seemed so counterintuitive.  Ali, as an opponent of Islamism, seemed like the least likely person to turn Christian. Her explanation was that Christianity and its values were the only way to stave off the tide of encroaching terror, corruption, Islamism, and despotism. As she said:

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I disagreed, as I think secular humanism can fight off those “formidable forces, too”, and the world is turning less religious as it is.

Richard is going to interview Ayaan soon on his Substack site, but he has just written about Hirsi Ali’s religiosity, concluding that she’s not really a Christian.

Click below to read:

Richard makes a distinction between three types of Christians, which also holds, I think, for Jews, and perhaps for other faiths as well.

I want to make a three-way distinction. You can be a Cultural Christian, a Political Christian,  a Believing Christian, or any combination of the three. People may disagree about which of these constitutes being “A Christian”. For me it has to be Believing Chistian.

I am a Cultural Christian, specifically a Cultural Anglican. I was educated in Christian schools. The history of my people is heavily influenced by Christian tradition. I like singing Christmas Carols, and am deeply moved by the sacred music of Bach and Handel. My head is full of Biblical phrases and quotations. And hymn tunes, which I regularly play by ear on my electronic clarinet.

I think Ayaan Hirsi-Ali (who is one of my favourite people in the world) is a Political Christian. She was brought up in the culture of Islam and is well aware of the horrors that that religion is still visiting on Muslims around the world, especially women. She sees Christianity as a relatively benign competitor, worth supporting as a bulwark against Islam. Just as most of us support a political party without agreeing with all its policies, because we prefer it to the alternative, a Political Christian may support Christianity without being a Believing Christian, because it’s better than the main alternative. Ayaan is a Cultural Muslim, and it is this that has driven her to be a Political Christian.

Believing Christians believe that there is a supernatural creator at the base of the universe called God. They believe a First Century Jew called Jesus is the son of God. They believe Jesus’s mother was a virgin when she gave birth to him. They believe that Jesus came alive again three days after he died. They believe that we ourselves have an immortal soul which survives our bodily death. They believe that God listens to our prayers.  I strongly suspect hat Ayaan doesn’t believe any of these things. She is not a Believing Christian.

Richard made a similar pronouncement in an earlier “open letter” to Hirsi Ali.

Well, we don’t know if Hirsi Ali’s really a believing Christian, as she doesn’t explicitly describe her beliefs in the UnHerd piece (true Christian ones are instantiated in the Nicene Creed). But we’ll know when she and Richard have their talk.  Apparently, she at least has what Dennett called “belief in belief”: a feeling that belief is good for society even if its tenets aren’t really true. Cultural Christianity (or Judaism, for that matter), doesn’t come with “belief in that belief”), as cultural forms of religion are merely forms of belonging to a community and don’t make assertions that others have to believe.

As I said I think Dawkins’s tripartite classification holds for Judaism as well.  I am a cultural (secular) Jew, but I don’t think we need to embrace the tenets of Judaism to make society better or more resistant to corruption. We simply need secular humanism.  And, of course, I don’t worship or adhere to what’s in the Old Testament, which I think was a purely human document reporting on a fictional world. (There is, of course, some historical truths in the Bible, but that’s about it.)

After considering whether he is a cultural Christian (Anglican) or political Christian, Dawkins decides he’s a Political Christian because he despises the actions and of believers like pious Muslims, and so concludes this:

If I were American I would vote Democrat because, in spite of their idiotic stance on the male/female distinction, they are hugely preferable to the Republican alternative. Similarly, if I were forced to vote for either Christianity or Islam as alternative influences on the world, I would unhesitatingly vote Christian. If that make me a Political Christian, so be it. I am perhaps as much of a Political Christian as Ayaan is. But does that make either of us a Christian?

And so he tells Hirsi Ali that they don’t really differ in substance.

The only disagreement is a semantic one. I am a Cultural Christian but not a Believing Christian, which, in my language means I am not a Christian. You, Ayaan, are a Political Christian, which in your language, but not mine, makes you a Christian. But we are neither of us Believing Christian. And this, in my language but not yours, makes neither of us Christians. So, dear Ayaan, let’s not agree to differ. Let’s agree that we don’t really differ.

Stay tuned for the discussion!

Why are men better than women at chess?

This is the question that Carole Hooven, author of the excellent book Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, takes up in a new article in Quillette. What I like about the article is that it appears to consider every available hypothesis, and uses a scientific approach to finding evidence that either supports or weakens many of them. She tentatively settles on one that may be evolutionary in its origin, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Click below to read:

I believe Hooven got interested in the question when FIDE, the international chess federation, recently decided that transwomen would not be permitted to compete in their official chess events that were limited to natal women. Since transwomen are natal men, this implies that there is some advantage in being a natal man when it comes to winning at chess. Of course this move by FIDE could be considered transphobic, as it already has been, but in fact the evidence is that, regardless of cause, men are much better than women at chess.

How do we know this? Because, although some chess tournaments are limited to people of one sex, there are also mixed-sex tournaments in which women play against men. And those show a result similar to that in tennis: rankings based on those tournaments show that the top women chess player would probably rank below the top 200 or 300 men.

But why is this? After all, in tennis and other sports, men outdo women because there is an inherent athletic advantage associated with the male body: more muscles, higher bone density, greater grip strength, and so on. These advantages become prominent at puberty because they’re associated with the higher testosterone of males. (This does not mean, of course, that no woman can ever beat a man in mixed-sex sports; it is a difference, and a big one, in averge performance.) Likewise, transwomen, biological men who assume the identity of a woman, also retain these athletic advantages over natal women, especially when they transition after puberty. That’s why several sports associations have banned transwomen from women’s athletics.

But chess?  None of the athletic advantages I mentioned should obtain for chess, which involves only moving light pieces of wood or plastic around a board. So why are men so much better at playing chess?

Hooven lists a number of hypotheses, which I’ve divided into the following categories in bold (my words). Carole’s text is indented.

a.) More males take up chess in the first place. If this is the case, then regardless of average performance, the top players will be weighted with more men, simply because even if the average performance is the same, a bigger curve for men (frequency versus score) means that the upper tails of high performance will contain more men.  This will be the case regardless of the variation in performance itself, and simply reflects the fact that at every performance level, there will be more men than women.

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but one Hooven thinks is weak because of Scrabble and bridge, which more women than men take up but ultimately the championships are heavily dominated by men:

In a game of Scrabble, as most readers will know, two competing players earn points for creating words using one or more of the seven lettered tiles in their inventory, which they place on a grid-spaced board. Like chess, Scrabble uses a version of the Elo rating system. But unlike in the chess world, women dominate the recreational ranks of Scrabble, accounting for about 85 percent of all recreational players. Even at the competitive level, women generally outnumber men (which isn’t that surprising given that Scrabble is all about words, and verbal ability is one area in which women tend to outperform men). So if the participation-rate hypothesis were correct in this context, then women should be dominating the elite Scrabble ranks.

But they’re not. Instead, men dominate Scrabble’s upper tiers, as they do in chess. And the same goes for Bridge, another game that’s dominated at the recreational level by women.

Scrabble tournaments usually feature separate divisions, which are classified according to Elo ratings. Players with the highest ratings compete in the first division, in which there are few women. As the skill level goes down, the proportion of women increases, until you get to the lowest level, where women vastly outnumber men. No woman has ever won a national or World Scrabble Championship. (However, just last year, Ruth Li from Toronto did win the North American Championship in the High School division, becoming the first female to ever win any such regional championship.)

Of course, Scrabble and chess are different games that require different skills, and lessons from the former may not cleanly translate to the latter. But even if one confines one’s focus to chess, the participation-rate thesis doesn’t present a convincing explanation for the observed sex differences in performance.

In addition, over the last few years women’s participation in chess has increased substantially, but the average gap between men and women hasn’t narrowed much, though it has a bit in some places. Overall, though, this hypothesis seems weak.

Second, over the last 50 years or so, female participation in chess has increased measurably around the world—a fact that should, according to the participation-rate hypothesis, lead to a narrowing of the sex gap at the highest levels of play. And in a few cases, that has happened. In France, for example, the female participation rate increased from 6 percent to 15 percent from 1985 to 2015, and the sex gap in ratings also significantly narrowed. But overall, the evidence is mixed. In the mid-1940s, the Elo difference between the world’s highest-rated male and female chess players hovered around 150 points. Eighty years later, that figure hasn’t really changed. (Note that such comparisons are based in part on retrospectively calculated Elo ratings, as FIDE didn’t start using them until the late 1960s.)

b.) Sexism: women are driven out of chess or don’t take it up because of misogyny in the game. Sexism can manifest itself in many ways: simple harassment of women (which is reported), not taking women seriously, which can lead to a lack of self-confidence, lowered expectations, and a higher dropout rate.  This should be mitigated to some degree by the existence of all-women’s leagues and tournaments.  But Hooven doesn’t think that this is an important hypothesis because reduced sexism over time hasn’t narrowed the performance gap:

Such reports [of sexism] should, of course, be taken seriously. But I’m far from convinced that sexism and harassment are the main reasons why men outperform women at chess. We’ve already come a long way in battling sexism during my lifetime. And yet, even as women have made great strides in such areas as medicine, law, engineering, and academia, the sex gap in chess has barely budged since second-wave feminism took off in the 1960s. This all suggests there’s something else going on.

c.)  Men and women have the same average performance, but men have greater variance, manifested as relatively more players in both the highest and lowest tails of the performance distribution. Hooven calls this the “greater male variability”, or GMV, hypothesis. The variability can involve many traits possibly involved in chess success: spatial ability, drive to win, willingness to practice, and so on. The key here is that there need be no average difference between men and women, but still the greater variation of men ensures that in the upper tails, where the champions reside, will be mostly populated by men. (The hypothesis can still hold even if there are some differences in means.) GMV may be the case for intelligence, as the average performance of men and women on IQ-related tests are about the same, but men are more variable. But again, this doesn’t seem to be telling for chess, though it could be important in STEM fields:

The GMV hypothesis is the explanation often given for sex differences in STEM fields, particularly the “hard” sciences such as physics. The idea is that even if there’s no male-female difference in average math or physics ability, there would still be more men at the very high (and low) end of the ability spectrum. These are the extreme outliers who are most likely to earn prestigious faculty positions, file many patent applications, and win career achievement awards. And there is, in fact, strong evidence supporting the hypothesis; many traits do tend to be more variable in men than in women.

But if the greater male variability hypothesis explained the male advantage in chess, then we should observe that Elo ratings [these are measures of chess proficiency involving games won as well as the quality of the opponent] for males would be more variable than those for females. That is, we would expect more male grandmasters not because males are better at chess, but simply because there would be fewer females at both the high and low end of performance.

But in most populations of chess players, that statistical pattern isn’t reflected in the distributions of Elo ratings. Those for males are not more variable than for females. In many cases, in fact, the variability among female ratings is actually higher.

d.) Males are innately better in traits that lead to success in chess.  These involve average differences in traits and not just variances, and could include spatial ability, degree of aggression, drive to win, other aspects of cognitive ability, dedication to the sport so that one practices a lot more, and so on. Note that “innately” implies the differences don’t result from socialization or sexism, but are the same kind of differences that gives men advantages in “regular” sports. Of course these innate differences could interact with other factors, as the phenotype here (chess performance) always involves an interaction between genes and one’s environment.

Ultimately, Hooven considers this the best explanation because there is independent evidence that men excel in the kind of motivation, competitiveness, and “obsessive passion” that leads to monomaniacal focus not just on winning, but on practicing:

 A more promising explanation for male dominance in elite chess involves motivation. A large body of research strongly suggests that the sexes differ in their preferences for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply more competitive—that is, they have a stronger motivation not just to compete, but to win, in formal physical and non-physical competitions of all kinds.

Men are more likely to choose games that involve direct, one-on-one competition, in which the result is a clear winner and loser—such as chess. Women are less competitive even when interacting anonymously—for example, in online arenas such as massive multiplayer role-playing games. This applies even when players interact using avatars of the sex opposite to their own; situations in which social expectations and stereotypes should have a reduced influence on in-game behavior. Women’s performance and enjoyment tends to suffer when the competition intensifies; that is, when the stakes are highest or time pressure is applied. For example, the average male-female sex difference in “blitz” chess games, which allocate ten minutes or less for each player to make all of their moves, is greater than that observed in standard chess, in which each player has at least an hour and a half. Moreover, relative to men, in experimental and real-life conditions, women tend to opt out of tournament conditions.

So it’s not surprising that females, being less focused (on average, as usual) on crushing an opponent in some future tournament, might be less motivated to go in for the kind of hardcore practice that’s necessary to develop elite skills (“deliberate practice,” as it’s called, as distinct from simply practising by playing).

. . . . If your instinct tells you that males will be disproportionately drawn toward this kind of intense practice style than females, you’re correct. Studies show that boys and men are more likely to exhibit a “rigid persistence in an activity,” by which “the passion controls the individual” (“obsessive passion” in the literature). In anecdotal terms, we are talking here about the man who drops everything to become, say, a 16-hour-per-day videogamer, or a day-trader, or chess addict. Yes, some women take on these kinds of fixations. But men do it more often, and with greater intensity.

It’s long been known that measures of risk-taking, competitiveness, persistence, and aggression are higher in men than women, so this may be a key factor in the explanation.  But are these differences due to evolution or socialization? After all, men are expected to be aggressive and behaviorally conform to a “male stereotype”.  On the other hand, that stereotype itself could reflect behavior instilled by natural selection more in one sex than another, so it’s seen as the norm.

Hooven comes down on the evolution side, and I pretty much agree with her given these arguments as well as others (e.g., socialization should differ among human societies but the average behaviors don’t; our closest primate relatives, who aren’t socialized, show similar difference in aggression and competition, there are biological reasons to expect higher competition in males, and these traits begin to manifest themselves at a young age, presumably before much socialization can take place).  Luana Maroja and I discuss similar sex differences in behavior (and their possible evolutionary roots) in our Skeptical Inquirer paper on ideology and biology.

Hooven:

That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)

If this is the case, what about FIDE’s decision to ban transwomen from their women’s chess tournaments? (Some countries, including England, Germany, France, and the United States, don’t uphold this ban in their national tournaments.)  In the end, since Hooven concludes that biological factors play a key role in men’s dominance in chess, for the time being FIDE’s ban makes sense:

Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.

Of course the data we really need are the chess performance of transwomen playing against biological women, and as far as I know we don’t have that kind of data.

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A coda:  Perhaps the thinnest book I own is called “Jewish Sports Heroes”, given to me by a Jewish relative. It’s thin because Jews are not usually among the best baseball, soccer, football, or basketball champions we can think of (Sandy Koufax is a notable exception). I’m not going to hypothesize about this religious lacuna, but what amuses me is that the last chapter in the book, and the longest one, is on chess, as Jews have always excelled in chess. If the writers wanted to produce a book of reasonable length then, they simply had to add chess as a “sport” coequal with sports like football and basketball.

Today’s contribution is, of course, a Sunday selection of birds from John Avise. John’s IDs and notes are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Australian Birds, Part 3 

This week’s post continues a 5-part mini-series on birds that I photographed on a short business trip to Queensland, Australia in 2006.  It shows just a few of the many avian species that inhabit the Land Down Under.

Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis):

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa):

Grey-headed Robin (Heteromyias cinereifrons):

Helmeted Friarbird (Philemon buceroides):

Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae):

Lewin’s Honeyeater (Meliphaga lewinii):

Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)

Arafura Shrike-thrush (Colluricincla megarhyncha):

Macleay’s Honeyeater (Xanthotis macleayanus):

Magpie Goose (Anseranas semipalmata):

Magpie Goose flying:

Comedian Andrew Doyle is of course the creator of Titania McGrath, an über-woke and privileged cis white female who expounds Social Justice on Twitter. She’s spoofing it, of course, but has fooled many people into thinking she’s serious. And, as a full time faux wokester, Titania has made many satirical posts that later came true. Here Doyle gives some of them.

It goes to show that in Woke World, the line between satire and reality is paper-thin:

I’ve described in these pages what I consider to be the finest prose written in English; it includes the beginning of The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott; the ending of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (but there’s also great stuff in Tender is the Night); much of Thomas Wolfe (especially “The Child by Tiger“, an excerpt from one of his novels); and James Joyce’s long story The Dead, which, especially in its ending, stands above them all.

But there’s one more, and I’ll put down a specimen here. I know I’ve put up a video of this scene from Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) before, but I just reread much of the book and marveled at how wonderful it is—and sad, too.  It is of course an autobiography of Blixen’s stint in Kenya, where she owned a coffee farm, and includes a hedged description of her life with her lover Denys Finch Hatton, a guide and big-game hunter who died in a plane crash while she still lived in Kenya.

She and Denys had picked out their graves, up in the Ngong Hills with a fantastic view of the plains as well as Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilamanjaro.  But she had to leave Africa when she lost her farm, and so buried Finch Hatton up in the hills before she left.  This description of what happened to his grave always brings me to tears, no matter how often I read it. I just realized I put this up in a longer extract seven years ago, and you might want to read that part, too.

After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”

It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.

The last paragraph is one of the best I know in English, and the whole scenario is ineffably moving. It’s even more amazing when you realize that Blixen’s native language wasn’t English but Danish, and she wrote the book in English. (In this way she’s like Joseph Conrad.)

I know I’ve forgotten some of my favorite prose, but I’ll note more here if I remember. In the meantime, weigh in with your favorites below. Remember, this is not a selection of “best books” or “best stories” but simply “the best prose written in English”.

The lion clip is no longer on the Internet, but below a clip from the movie showing Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) giving a few words at Finch Hatton’s burial (he was played by Robert Redford).  Just these few moments show what a great actor Meryl Streep is.

The film was shot on location in Kenya, and I do recommend it, even if the critics give it only a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It did win the Best Picture Oscar.

The NYT’s “Trilobites” column analyzes what a cat’s meow really means. Click on the headline below, or read the article archived here.

The article describes a study in which people tried to interpret the meaning of a cat’s meow by watching videos of said moggy. Some excerpts:

It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent).

The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets.

The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both.

. . .Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16.

That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do.

. . . And the fact that we’re not very good at picking up on signs of animal discontentment should not come as a surprise, Dr. Udell suggested. “We’re more likely to perceive our animals as experiencing positive emotions because we want them to,” she said. “When we see the animals, it makes us feel good, and our positive emotional state in response to the animals gives us these rose-colored glasses.”

Even some of the most common cues may be misunderstood.

Purring, for example, is not always a sign of comfort. “Purring can be exhibited in uncomfortable or stressful conditions,” Dr. de Mouzon said. “When a cat is stressed, or even hurt, they will sometimes purr.”

Such instances are a form of “self-soothing,” said Kristyn Vitale, an assistant professor of animal health and behavior at Unity Environmental University in Maine, who was not involved in the new study.

. . .As an example, Dr. de Mouzon pointed to a cat’s habit of suddenly biting. “Over time, with cats communicating and humans not understanding, the cat will just bite,” she said, “because they have learned over time that this is the only way to make something stop.”

Animal rescue shelters use such findings to educate prospective owners. Dr. Udell and Dr. Vitale are assessing whether cats can be suitable as therapy animals, or in aiding children with developmental differences.

I wonder if humans could develop a form of “purr therapy” in which we could do something similar to purring as “self-soothing”.  As you know, self care is a big deal these days, often involving expensive items like hot-rocks-on-the-back therapy and expensive oils.  If we could do something like purring it would be a lot cheaper!

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From Country Life we have a big list of great quotations about cats. I’ll give just a few; click on the headline to see ’em all:

Ernest Hemingway:

“One cat just leads to another.”
Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”

Mark Twain

“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.”

Jane Pauley

“Never trust a man who hate cats.”

Albert Schweitzer

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”

Lilian Jackson Brown

“Dogs have their day but cats have 365.”
Source: Three Complete Novels by Lilian Jackson Braun: The Cat Who Saw Red / The Cat Who Played Brahms / The Cat Who Played Post Office

P. C. Cast

“I’ve found that the way a person feels about cats—and the way they feel about him or her in return—is usually an excellent gauge by which to measure a person’s character.”
Source:Marked

Charles Dickens

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”

Eckhart Tolle

“I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.”
Source: The Power of Now

Beverley Nichols

“Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.”
Source: Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ X. Y. Z.

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This NYT piece (click on headline or find it archived here) made big news, and is still doing so: I saw it on the NBC Evening News two nights ago. It’s one of the cleverest ideas I’ve heard of!

An excerpt (warning: lots of puns):

Finally, there is something cats can do for humans.

The Worcester Public Library in Worcester, Mass., announced that through the end of March, people who have lost or damaged a book or other borrowed items can bring a photograph, drawing, or magazine clipping of a cat, and get their library cards reactivated.

The library calls the program March Meowness, a way for the system of seven branches to forgive (or is that fur-give?) members of the community who misplaced a book or damaged a borrowed item, and then never went back to avoid paying for it.

In just a few days, the program has already generated hundreds of returns, multiple postings of random cat photographs on the library’s Facebook page, and photographs and drawings pinned on a growing “cat wall” in the main building.

The local NPR affiliate, WBUR, described it as a “never be-fur tried initiative,” and urged patrons to hurry and “act meow.” So far the response, WBUR said, has Jason Homer, the executive director of the library, “feline good.”

. . . If you don’t have a cat? No problem. One cat-less 7-year-old boy, who never returned a “Captain Underpants” book, had his library card reactivated after the staff gave him paper and crayons to sketch one.

. . .The library had previously tried to boost attendance and fee-forgiveness programs with canned food drives. But the cats found their way into the spotlight, as they do. The Meowness program took shape after several months of brainstorming by a library task force that met to come up with a creative way to get people back through the doors.

“It spiraled in a good way from there,” Mr. Homer said. “We were just trying to figure out the lowest barrier possible.”

. . .Mr. Homer said that using cats as the vehicle to forgive patrons for losing or damaging books or other borrowed items could help to soften the stereotype of the stern librarian.

“We don’t really have the high buns and ‘shush’ people anymore,” he said. “We are still book lovers, cardigan lovers and cat lovers.”

This would not, of course, have worked nearly as well as d*gs, for cats rule the Internet.

On the news report I heard that the library had received over 10,000 cat photos, many sent in by distant folks who wanted to help a local waive their fees or get back their library card.  In response, the library has now waived fees for everyone! That’s what a cat lover would do.

And here’s a video:

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Lagniappe: A version of the well known song “The Cat Came Back“, sung by Garrison Keillor and Frederica Von Stade. This song was written in 1893 by Harry S. Miller, and has been recorded many times.

The original sheet music:

In public domain.

h/t: Merilee