Why Evolution is True Feed

I hope I won’t sound callous or unfeeling if I argue that the food shortage in Gaza has been exaggerated by the UN and the world media.  I would argue that, from what I know, there is enough food in Gaza for everyone. The problem is that it’s not being properly distributed, as people are taking the humanitarian free food and selling it in the open market or the black market. And Hamas, of course, is purloining much of it for its own needs.  I am not arguing that people aren’t going hungry in Gaza. Old people, people without means to buy food from the market, and those who just can’t fight the scrum around the food trucks—these people are hungry and need help.

Now I’m not sure what kind of help they need given the three videos below from Tom Gross’s newsletter, but one thing that would help is to eliminate Hamas. Terrorists are stealing food meant as humanitarian relief, they are attacking and shooting food-truck drivers (see below), and they are hijacking entire trucks.  Further, UNRWA should not be in charge of distributing food, as they’re in league with Hamas. I’m glad that Israel seems to be doing quite a bit to help, especially in moving in food from the north and getting IDF soldiers to deliver it. This is going above their pay grade.

Here are three of Tom Gross’s videos and one additional one I found.  The titles in bold are from Gross:

Palestinian food market in Gaza that the western media won’t show you. Rafah. March 6, 2024

 

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Egyptians furious and scared as Hamas murder and injure humanitarian aid drivers

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And at the end of this one we have a staged example of a “victim”, presumably of hunger or the IDF, who miraculously revives when the camera turns off.

What is in those free Gaza food packages airdropped by the US? (Please watch this video to the end to see the hospital recovery)

Finally, from MEMRI, we have an article and a video about a Palestinian man disdaining airdropped food and throwing it in the bin.  Click on either the screenshot or headline to see the video. Here’s the transcript:

In a video posted on March 4, 2024 on Fouad – Palestine Gaza @Fouad_Diab80 on X (formerly Twitter) “Ibrahim from Gaza” complains about an  American aid packet and throws it in the trash. The man says that the packet contains “things you cannot even call food and they stink”, adding that he does not want aid airlifted from Jordan, and that he will not accept aid from a country that is “an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide.” He continued to say that he wants aid from Arab countries, Brazil and South Africa.

Ibrahim:“This is the American aid that we are receiving by air. Let me show you what it is. Things that you cannot even call food and they stink. Here it is. Take a look. I don’t want aid that comes by air from Jordan. Am I supposed to accept aid from a country that is an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide? I don’t understand. I don’t get it, okay?

If he’s starving (he doesn’t look like it), why does he throw food away, or at least give it to people who are starving? Has he no heart?  This doesn’t fit the narrative.

The solution to everything the world is asking for in Gaza seems to be eliminating Hamas and creating a governance for the area that isn’t full of terrorists. Yet the whole world, now including the U.S., seems bent on keeping Israel from eliminating Hamas. And the world also wants terrorists (aka the Palestinian Authority) to govern Gaza when the war is over.

I was sent this article from The Economist (as usual, authors’ names aren’t given), and I’m not sure whether that site leans right or left.  Nor do I really care, except that people might tend to dismiss its argument and its data on political grounds. And, as usual, that would be a mistake.

The thesis here—and I’ll show data—is that American universities are going downhill in many ways: bigger bureaucracy, less respect from the public, grade inflation, lazier students, declining in world rankings, and so on. Some of these contentions are new to me, but the article does paint a picture of a system going downhill. I’ll show the data and the Economist‘s indictment below.

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

Excerpts from the piece are indented.  First, their thesis:

But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

This is accurate: other surveys show that public trust in American institutions of higher education is waning. And this despite the article’s claim that elite universities, at least, are getting richer and richer, both because tuition has risen so rapidly and because universities are now managing their endowments in a riskier manner. That new style of management has paid off since the stock market and real estate have boomed in recent years,

What this has done is created a two-tier system of universities: the “elite” ones, where everyone aspires to go, and the rest of the pack, which hasn’t changed that much:

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

Despite this, the reputation of elite universities has dropped, especially compared to Chinese ones, whose scholars are producing relatively highly-cited scientific papers. Two figures from the paper. These changes in research reputation are small, but they are all negative for the elite U.S. universities:

Same for highly-cited scientific papers; the Chinese are booming here while American papers are falling:

Now I don’t really care that much about whether other countries are doing okay or booming in scientific papers compared to the U.S., as science is a worldwide endeavor and, as I’ve said about this trend, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But I care more about the reputation of elite universities, largely because I went to one for my Ph.D. and worked at one for 3 decades. I would care if the top American colleges stopped providing quality education, though maybe that’s just snobbery on my part. And of course the reduction in highly-cited papers is a side effect of a relative degeneration of quality education in the U.S.

But perhaps that’s just compared to China, and we’re doing as well as ever. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Here are some of the factors that the article points out are dragging down our top universities.

Bloated bureacracy.  If you work at one of these schools, you’ll have noticed this:

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

The next item explains much of the bloat:

The expansion of DEI initiatives. This is another thing you’ll have noticed if you work at an elite school.  But it’s happening pretty much everywhere. As you probably know, Florida just passed a law, largely in response to the Supreme Court’s banning race-based admission, getting rid of the DEI programs in state universities. In some places, like Michigan, the bloat—and salaries devoted to DEI—is stunning. DEI officials in Michigan colleges can earn more than $200,000 per year. From the article:

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

Changing admission policies favoring equity over merit.  This itself may be changing, as in the last several weeks schools like Dartmouth and Brown have reinstated the use of standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for application. (In many places they became optional or were, as in California, not wanted at all.)  Reducing the importance of standardized tests was originally done to boost equity of minority groups, but that wasn’t often admitted by colleges; “holistic” admissions were simply said to be better judges of future success, and schools boasted that there was no tradeoff between merit and equity.. But this is not the case—SAT scores remain the best predictor of academic success as well as admission to good graduate schools. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing back towards merit again, though I still favor a form of affirmative action: preferential admission of minorities when they are just as qualified as nonminority applicants. From the article:

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

Lowering of standards.  The article implies that students are getting lazier with time.  Over the three decades I taught here, I can’t really vouch for that, at least in undergraduate evolution class.  Because of my lack of experience in more than one class, I’ll just reproduce what the article says, though of course grade inflation everywhere is real and has been amply documented. Nowadays everyone gets As, which of course reduces the value of even calculating grade-point averages. (Putting the median grade in a course on students’ transcripts would help with this.)

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

Boards of governance (trustees, etc.) have become too weak to enforce a climate of excellence. I know nothing personally about the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, but at least at Harvard the Board of Overseers’ spinelessness was a major factor in prolonging the kerfuffle about ex-President Claudine Gay. The Overseers first denied charges of plagiarism, threatened the New York Post for trying to publish those allegations, continued to deny them, and then, after the outcry—largely prompted by Bill Ackman—grew too loud, finally asked Gay to resign. Further, the Harvard Overseeers, who are nearly wholly responsible for putting in place policies like freedom of expression and institutional neutrality, have done almost nothing on this account. In the Boston Globe, Steve Pinker called for Harvard to reform itself in five areas, and there’s now a group of professors at Harvard to apply pressure on the administration to behave properly. Fingers crossed.

From the article:

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

There’s a lack of political balance on faculties. Everyone knows that university faculties are almost completely on the Left side of the political spectrum. Look at this plot:

And it’s even more skewed at elite universities:

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

One possible reason is that the definition of “liberal” has changed: that American politics in general have become more right wing, so that more centrist professors will now identify themselves as being far left or liberal. But I don’t think that’s true. Further, the article claims that conservatives have been forced out of academia or aren’t even being hired in the first place.  I don’t know the reason, but it is true that at least in elite universities, there is groupthink that demonizes conservatives. (Remember how Judge Duncan was treated at Stanford Law School?)

But I still think schools would benefit from increasing the diversity of political opinions, because sometimes conservatives have some good arguments, and at any rate without opposition from the other side, liberals have no way to test or hone their ideas. I would personally would benefit from more conservatives in my school, even though I identify as a classical liberal.

Given these problems, the solution is clear; do the opposite of what’s causing them. Pare down DEI, get better boards of trustees, put more emphasis on merit in admissions, require students to do more, somehow curb grade inflation (that seems nearly impossible to me!), hire more conservatives, and inculcate students with more information about free speech (we’re doing that here; see below). The return to an emphasis on merit seems to me the most important, but of course “progressives” define merit in ways that differ from how the term was used historically.

Here are a few suggestions in two paragraphs, with both Lukianoff and Ginsburg (head of the University of Chicago’s Forum to promulgate free expression) being liberals.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

h/t: Jean

Today we have a parliament of owl photos from reader Steve Adams. Steve’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them,

Here is a series of Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) that I have photographed over the past few months. I am fortunate that there is an area nearby that has extensive open fields and protected grasslands where the owls seem to have a preference for hunting. It is also an excellent habitat for Northern Harriers, which can often be seen hunting the same fields. These photos come from several outings I made from November through February.

In this first series, the late afternoon Sun cast beautiful light on this Shortie as it came in for a landing on a fence post.

This next set shows owls that overflew or nearly overflew me. I must admit that I almost missed these shots since I was so surprised by how close they came.

This last set shows those wonderful, piercing eyes that make them so good at hunting.

JAC: Here’s a range map of the species from Cornell’s Birds of the World:

 

Within about a month of each other, two articles came out discussing how America’s most prominent liberal newspapers—the New York Times and the Washington Post—have both abjured proper standards of journalism when covering the Israel/Hamas war. (Further, the other day the Torygraph wrote about how the BBC does the same thing.) And, of course since all three criticized venues are on the Left, their biases run in the same direction: towards Hamas or Palestine and against Israel.

The first headline below is from conservative National Review, and you can read it by clicking on the headline below or reading it archived here.   The second headline is from Quillette, and you should be able to access it directly by clicking on the second headline.

The articles differ slightly, with criticism of the Post dealing with its direct biases in reporting, while that of the NYT, written by a historian, showing its abysmal understanding of Middle East history, which, coincidentally, makes Israel look bad. (It’s clearly not a coincidence, as the distortions always fit the liberal narrative.). I’ll just give one or two examples of bias from each article because you can read them yourself.

This, from the WaPo, is a bad one, verging on blood libel against Israel. But there are lots of other examples that I’ll pass over:

Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis [denying Hamas’s use of hospitals as headquarters], a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza.

The IDF initially brought the bodies back to Israel to determine whether they were in fact Israeli hostages. The IDF then returned those bodies it had identified as Hamas fighters.

In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn antisemitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies. The Post quoted the ministry as saying, “After examining the bodies, it is clear that features of those killed had changed greatly in a clear indication that the Israeli occupation had stolen vital organs from them.”

“The media office denounces in the strongest terms the Israeli occupation army’s disdain for the dignity of the bodies of our 80 martyrs that Israel had stolen during its genocidal war because it delivered them mutilated,” Hamas said.

“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. “The IDF referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond.”

Virtually all other reputable news outlets — Reuters, Barrons, the French wire service AFP, and the Times of Israel — decided not to lend any credibility to the preposterous allegation. But not the Post. The outlet stood alone in airing Hamas’s antisemitic conspiracy. Outlets across the broader Middle East such as the Yemen Press Agency, Al Jazeera, Iran Press, and Al Mayadeen English were not so circumspect, joining the Post in advancing Hamas’s claims.

“It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said. “For years, there has been, primarily in academia and Palestinian propaganda outfits, this claim that the Israelis are harvesting organs.”

“It evokes the worst of the blood libel; ‘taking the blood from little children’ kind of stuff which is still recycled to this day,” Rubinstein continued. “The fact that the Post would publish this, and that somehow it got by the editors, is frankly a damning indictment of the operation over there now.”

The “blood libel” claim Rubinstein refers to is a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that holds that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in religious ceremonies. The ancient smear has in recent years morphed into the claim that Israel routinely harvests the organs of oppressed peoples: When Israel established a hospital in Haiti in the wake of that country’s 2010 earthquake, allegations that the IDF service members staffing the hospital had illegally procured patients’ organs to sell for a profit went viral.

Reached for comment, a Post spokesperson did not explain why the outlet chose to include Hamas’s blatant antisemitic conspiracy mongering in its coverage while most other reputable international outlets disregarded the remarks.

Yes, the Post had no comment, but it would probably say they were just “raising the possibility” that Jews stole the organs of dead Hamas fighters. The whole accusation is palpably ridiculous, even more so given that the bodies that supposedly provided organs had been dead for days.  You don’t “raise the possibilities” when they’re as stupid as this—not unless you want to sow doubt in the minds of Israel-haters. So it goes.

The Quillette article below is by the distinguished and reliable Israeli historian Benny Morris.

Morris analyzes a discussion in the NYT Sunday Magazine by six people (you can read it for yourself, archived here), and calls out most of the participants for arrant historical ignorance. His intro:

As we saw from the savage Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7 October, the Palestinians have certainly been active protagonists in their more-than-century-long battle against Zionism and Israel. But the New York Times would have it otherwise. Indeed, the underlying narrative in their magazine piece of 6 February 2024, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948,” is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab–Israeli war and its origins.

The Times article consists of a lengthy “discussion” between Arab and Jewish scholars (three ostensibly from each side) and comments and clarifications (and mis-clarifications) by Emily Bazelon, the NYT staff writer who moderated the dialogue and put the piece together. Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab–Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance: The Road Not Taken (1991), on the clandestine post-1948 Arab–Israeli peace talks, and The War for Lebanon (1984), on the Israel–PLO war of the early 1980s. During the discussion, the three Arab panellists—Nadim Bawalsa, an associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies; Leena Dallasheh, who is writing a book on Nazareth in the 1940s and ’50s; and Salim Tamari, a sociologist from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank—almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.

Bazelon, the moderator and staff writer for the NYT Magazine, seems to make repeated mistakes, and I’ll give one example below. First, though, a trope Bazelon uses several times:

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the “Palestinians rebelled” against the British and “violence first broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.” (Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out,” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad).

The “violence broke out” phrase would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. The article is replete with mistakes, but here are two more excerpts:

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Bazelon asks: why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947? This is the crux of the issue since their rejection of partition then is arguably the reason why the Palestinians do not have a state to this day. The panellists offer a variety of misleading answers. Abigail Jacobson, a historian at Tel Aviv University and one of the three Jewish participants, argues that the Palestinians could not accept a resolution that earmarked 55 percent of Palestine for the Jews, who only comprised a third of the country’s population, while the Arabs—two-thirds of the population—were only awarded 45 percent of the land. “If you were a Palestinian,” she asks her readers, “would you accept this offer?” But Jacobson forgets that most of the land assigned to the Jewish state was barren wasteland in the Negev Desert. She also elides the basic truth, which is that the the real reason the Palestinian leadership opposed the resolution was that they opposed the grant of any part of Palestine—no matter how small a percentage of the land—to Jewish sovereignty. In their view, all of Palestine, every inch, belonged solely to the Palestinian Arabs. Jacobson argues that “the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority within an Arab state.” That is correct. But the point is that they were only willing to accept them as such.

The “real reason” still holds: the Palestinians don’t want two states because they want Israel gone, and they might tolerate Jews in a majority-Palestinian state, but that’s unlikely since there are few Jews remaining in any Arab state. Jews in a Palestinian-majority state would most likely be doomed.

And once again Bazelon flaunts her ignorance:

Finally, the article’s meagre treatment of the 1948 War is itself fraught with errors. Take Bazelon’s introductory paragraph describing the war’s second half. Her first sentence is correct: “On May 14, Israel declared itself a state.” But then she adds, “The next day, the British began leaving, and Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the new state, later joined by Jordan.” This sentence contains no less than three basic errors. Firstly, the British had already begun their staggered withdrawal from Palestine in December 1947, and had lowered the Union Jack on 14 (not 15) May, though some small British units remained in the north of the country until the end of June 1948. Secondly, Lebanon never attacked Israel. And thirdly, Jordan participated in the pan-Arab invasion of 15 May, rather than joining “later.”

Three errors in one sentence, and Bazelon was wrong, as you can check.  Now this description of history isn’t all that consequential, but it shows a lack of fact-checking and of knowledge, as does the entire article. There’s a longer passage about something more important—the participation of Palestinians in the Second World War—but I’ll leave that for you to read.

I no longer get war news—or at least believe war news—from the NYT or the Post, but go first to the Times of Israel. Yes, it’s an Israeli paper, but I find it to be more accurate, and less likely to jump the gun, than American liberal media. And access is free.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “fired,” came with a caption: “Then we’ll troll you on social media until you delete your account.” The boys have a song for us today, which they don’t realize is really about them. (The theme of the strip is the Divine Duo’s inability to see their own flaws.)

This article in the “Reality’s Last Stand” Substack shows you how well oiled “affirmative therapy” is for gender transitions, at least at Kaiser Permanente, a medical organization. The take-home lesson is that there appear to be almost no points at which objective therapy operates to explore your feelings. Instead “rah rah” therapy is the rule, and the patient’s wishes override everything else. Further, it’s easy to get approved for dangerous surgery—”bottom surgery” for women is dire, ineffective except in creating a faux penis, and liable to serious complications—without full explanations of the consequences.

The story is this: Beth Bourne, a 53-year-old divorced mother from Davis California, had a daughter who came out as trans at about fourteen years old. Bourne was amazed at how few checks and balances there were with people uncritically accepting her daughter’s feelings.  Bourne’s concerns about gender activism eventually led to her estrangement from her daughter, but that gave her license to go ahead with her own actions, actions designed to show how easy it was to go the full route from woman through hormones to surgery to become a trans man.  Bourne didn’t take the hormones or have the surgery, but, as a test, she pretended to feel like a man to see how often people gave her empathic and objective care rather than “fully affirmative” care.

The answer was that virtually all the care was affirmative.  No objective therapy was offered, hormones were proffered easily and gladly, and there were no problems getting top and bottom surgery scheduled quickly, without what Bourne saw as necessary warnings of the dangers of both hormones and cutting. Yet even during the process Bourne raised red flags about her mental condition that should have served as warnings for doctors and therapists.

Bourne kept her ruse going for 231 days before stopping the pretense.

Click to read:

Some quotes:

Throughout the whole 231-day process of my feigned gender transition, the Kaiser gender specialists were eager to serve me and give me what I wanted, which would all be covered by insurance as “medically necessary.” My emails were returned quickly, my appointments scheduled efficiently, and I never fell through the cracks. I was helped along every step of the way.

Despite gender activists and clinicians constantly claiming that obtaining hormones and surgeries is a long and complex process with plenty of safety checks in place, I was in full control at every checkpoint. I was able to self-diagnose, determine how strong a dose of testosterone I received and which surgeries I wanted to pursue, no matter how extreme and no matter how many glaring red flags I purposefully dropped. The medical workers I met repeatedly reminded me that they were not there to act as “gatekeepers.”

I was able to instantly change my medical records to reflect my new gender identity and pronouns. Despite never being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I was able to obtain a prescription for testosterone and approval for a “gender-affirming” double mastectomy from my doctor. It took only three more months (90 days) to be approved for surgery to remove my uterus and have a fake penis constructed from the skin of my thigh or forearm. Therapy was never recommended.

But of course Bourne was a middle-aged woman, not a child or adolescent. Shouldn’t she be able to get what she wants? She addresses this objection:

Critics might dismiss my story as insignificant on the grounds that I am a 53-year-old woman with ample life experience who should be free to alter her body. However, this argument for adult bodily autonomy is a standard we apply to purely cosmetic procedures like breast implants, liposuction, and facelifts, not “medically necessary” and “lifesaving” treatments covered by health insurance. Or interventions that compromise health and introduce illness into an otherwise healthy body. And especially not for children.

My story, which I outline in much more detail below, should convince any half-rational person that gender medicine is not operating like any other field of medicine. Based on a radical concept of “gender identity,” this medical anomaly preys upon the body-image insecurities common among pubescent minors to bill health insurance companies for permanent cosmetic procedures that often leave their patients with permanently altered bodies, damaged endocrine systems, sexual dysfunction, and infertility.

She then goes into the story, beginning with her change in pronouns and “self-described” sex. She then went through the process of scheduling top surgery (breast removal), all without any therapy and with just a few questions about suicidal thoughts and the like. Only thereafter did she have two one-hour Zoom “mental health” appointments, during which she dropped several “red flags” that would contraindicate her going further with gender transition, including mentioning that she had PTSD, eating disorders, and a family history of body dysmorphia. Then they got to the “fun stuff”: the top surgery and hormones, which were more or less self-prescribed (Bourne’s bolding):

[The Zoom therapist] told me that we had to get through a few more questions related to my medical history before “we can move on to the fun stuff, which is testosterone and top surgery.”

The “fun stuff” consisted of a discussion about the physical and mood changes I could expect, and her asking me about the dose of testosterone I wanted to take and the kind of “top surgery” technique I’d prefer to achieve my “chest goals.” She told me that all or most of my consultations for surgeries and hormones would be virtual

A 15-minute Zoom call with a primary care doctor led to a visit for a body chemistry workup and then an instant prescription for testosterone in the amount Bourne wanted to take. Bourne then said she wanted to have a phalloplasty (“bottom surgery,” or construction of a faux penis) along with a hysterectomy during the same operation where they would remove her breasts.  No problem: the referral for this was easily obtained after only a sixteen-minute Zoom consultation, and at that point Bourne stopped the ruse.  She concludes this (bolding is mine):

In fewer than 300 days, based on a set of superficial and shifting thoughts about my gender and my “embodiment goals” triggered by the mere mention of “gender” in a form letter from my primary care physician, and driven by what could only be described as minor discomforts, Kaiser Permanente’s esteemed “multi-disciplinary team” of “gender specialists” was willing, with enthusiasm—while ignoring mental health concerns, history of sexual trauma, and rapidly escalating surgical requests—to prescribe life-altering medications and perform surgeries to remove my breasts, uterus, and vagina, close my vaginal opening, and attempt a complex surgery with high failure and complication rates to create a functionless representation of a penis that destroys the integrity of my arm or thigh in the process.

This describes the supposedly meticulous, lengthy, and safety-focused process that a Kaiser patient must undergo to embark on a journey to medically alter their body. No clinician questioned my motivations. No one showed concern that I might be addressing a mental health issue through radical and irreversible interventions that wouldn’t address my amorphous problems. There were no discussions about how these treatments would impact my long-term health, romantic relationships, family, or sex life. I charted the course. The clinicians followed my lead without question. The guiding issue was what I wanted to look like.

No other medical field operates with this level of carelessness and disregard for patient health and welfare. No other medical field addresses issues of self-perception with surgery and labels it “medically necessary.” No other medical field is this disconnected from the reality of the patients it serves.

Even though she’s an adult making a decision that should be reserved for adults, the lack of checks and balances for her transition, despite Bourne’s deliberately raising warning flags, is disturbing. You can judge whether there’s something to worry about here. I think there is.

Two other points. First, this seems somewhat unethical in that medical insurance must have been needed to pay for part of Bourne’s hormones and consultations (she covered the co-pay). Thus someone paid for most of her ruse.  To me this is problematic, but in the end was worth it to get the full story of how easy it is to transition without the proper advice.  To get an okay for bottom surgery after only 16 minutes of consultation, without an attendant and extensive series of warnings and lists of possible consequences, and without being given a period to think about it, seems like malpractice.

Finally, the main issue for transitioning involves not adults—who are generally happy with their outcomes—but children or adolescents who may not have the maturity to make such a dramatic, body-changing decision, or who may be going through a period of stress and depression that could resolve in other ways besides surgery. (These young people often eventually come out as gay.)  There is no account similar to Bourne’s of a young person trying to see how easy it was to medically transition while faking the whole thing. What we do have are accounts by young people who have transitioned and then regretted it, or have recounted how easy it was to get affirmative therapy. That, in fact, is why the Tavistock Clinic in London was closed, why many European countries won’t allow giving hormones to young people except in clinical trials, and why several young people who transitioned are suing clinics and doctors. (It’s that in her account Bourne gives the names of many doctors who “helped” her.)

I think that in the future people will look back at this spate of gender transitioning and be shocked at how little controls were exercised during the process. Of course adults should be able to transition if they want, but, particularly with young people, the kind of therapy they should be given is in fact almost never given.

Yesterday I was walking through campus and noted that all the lamposts in the main quad are bedecked, illegally, with pro-Palestinian stickers. (It’s legal for student organizations to put up stickers, but only inatdesignated sites and so long as the organization is identified. Neither is the case here.

A few examples (there must have been about two dozen, all violating posting and demonstration regulations):

And pro-Palestinian students (considered, I think, “progressive” Leftists) are seen here in an illegal blocking of Levi Hall (the administration building) last November 3.  As far as I can find out, though this was against University rules, no punishments were levied against the participants. (I asked the admin but didn’t get an answer.)

Another illegal protest was a group of pro-Palestinian students holding a sit-in in the admissions office. In this case they were arrested, but the charges were dropped. The punishment by the University appeared to have been to write an essay about “my demonstration experience”, in which the students simply reasserted that they were right, claimed that they were being silenced by the University, and protested being punished at all.

But of course things can get even more aggressive and violent, like many of the demonstrations in London, the illegal blocking of highways and roads, and vandalism and graffiti (e.g. Jewish stars or swastikas posted in Jewish homes). You don’t see this kind of aggressive demonstration enacted by pro-Israel students or people out in the world, but those people are not seen as progressives, but as “white colonialists.”

I could go on. While most Black Lives Matter protests were generally peaceful, 7% involved violence.  Leftists opposed to Republicans felt free to confront GOP politicians and their families in restaurants, or make a fracas outside their homes.  I see that as a form of unproductive protest. Yet all of these people would be considered residing on the Left. (In this post I’m not considering violence from those on the Right, as during the January 6 insurrection.)

My assertion is that the farther on the Left you reside (i.e., the more “progressive” of a Leftist you are), the angrier you are in your public political acts and the more likely you are to either be in-your-face aggressive or to break the law. And while breaking the law for a cause is civil disobedience, it is done in a more violent manner than it was a few decades below. Further, “progressive” protestors, instead of willingly accepting punishment, assert that they should not be punished at all. (For examples on our campus, see here and here.) If that’s your view, you’re not doing civil disobedience.

I too was involved in activism during my college years, and I know how righteous you feel when you’re fighting for a cause you see as just. It not only adds a panache of virtue to your college experience, but also gives you automatic membership in a group of like-minded people.

In my case there were two causes worthy of demonstration: the Vietnam war and civil rights.  And in my memory—and I believe in general—both of these causes explicitly avowed nonviolence. Martin Luther King followed the nonviolent principles of Gandhi (granted, there were some civil rights groups, like the Black Panthers, who didn’t eschew violence), and the hallmark of the civil rights demonstrations—the things that made them effective—was their nonviolent character.  When civil rights protesters in Birmingham were attacked by police dogs and blasted with water hoses, and when white people dumped ketchup and milkshakes on civil rights demonstrators sitting peacefully at lunch counters in Greensboro, the immorality of segregation became palpably clear.

Nonviolence was, I think, the key to success—both in ending the Vietnam War and getting the Civil Rights Acts passed.  In my view, violent or angry demonstrations, like stopping traffic or yelling slogans in people’s faces with megaphones, are not devised to produce political success, but to flaunt virtue.  They are, I believe, counterproductive compared to what nonviolent or more peaceful demonstrations could do. They are counterproductive because they anger and inconvenience onlookers, and are designed to do that. You don’t get sympathy for Palestine by blocking traffic on Lake Shore Drive while shouting “From the river to the sea. . .  ”

Regardless, here is the question I’m asking, and to which I don’t have a satisfactory answer:

Why are “progressive” leftists so much angrier and violent in their protests than are more centrist leftists, as well as than were leftists of seventy years ago? What accounts for this anger?  

One explanation is that modern progressives feel that they’re on the side of history, more morally correct than their opponents. But that doesn’t wash because it was also the case for Leftist protestors of the Sixties.  I surely felt that I was more virtuous than those espousing segregation or touting the rectitude of fighting in Vietnam.

What baffles me is the much higher degree of anger from “progressive” Leftists than from more centrist ones, as well the willingness to display it in protests. I ask readers to weigh in. Perhaps you feel my data are wrong: that “progressive” protestors are not publicly angrier than liberal ones. If so, say that as well.

Twitter is good for some stuff, and the best are 1.) cat and duck pictures and 2.) finding out about new science papers, often before they’re published.  Remember the conflict last year about the frequency of women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies (see my posts here). The original paper in PLoS One by Anderson et al. claimed that not only did women engage in hunting in these societies more often than we thought (79% of a sample of such societies showed women participated in hunting), but they also hunted big game more often than we thought. The paper was meant to dispel “The myth of man the hunter” (part of its title) and was clearly meant to promulgate some kind of sex equity in hunting, though a separation of gender roles doesn’t demean women.

The paper was criticized a lot for using biased data (see the set of links above), and the bias, it seemed, either intentionally or fortuitously dispelled what was seen as a misogynistic view: men hunted and women stayed home to grow food, mend things, and take care of the children. It was certainly treated in the popular literature as a blow to both misogyny and the view that sexes had “roles” consistent across societies.

Then I saw this tweet by Alexander, who does cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and it pointed to a not-yet-published paper on BiorΧiv whose claims, when you read it blow Anderson et al. out of the water.  Now remember, it isn’t yet peer-reviewed, but its accusations—there are 15 authors—are devastating. If it’s true, Anderson et al. are guilty of incredibly sloppy scholarship.  And also perhaps ideologically-biased scholarship, since every error or miscoding they used biased the results in favor or women hunting more frequently or taking larger game.

First, the tweet.

Click below to see the pdf of the paper:

Venkataraman et al. find that the paper commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper: leaving out important papers, including irrelevant papers, using duplicate papers, mis-coding their societies, getting the wrong values for “big” versus “small” game, and many others.

Rather than go through the mistakes, I’m just going to show you the last three paragraphs of Venkataraman et al., which summarize the errors they found in Anderson et al.  Read it. If they’re even close to being right, PLoS ONE should retract the Anderson et al. paper.

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis. Specifically, Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from DPLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our re-coding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) societies in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our re-coding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., [10]), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups. Anthropologists have long recognized that the nature of cooperation in foragers is complex and multi-faceted, and women’s and men’s subsistence activities play important and often complementary roles. Moreover, women’s hunting has been studied for decades, and anthropologists have a good understanding of when and why it occurs. Yet, to focus on hunting at the expense of other critical activities – from gathering and food processing, to water and firewood collection, to the manufacture of clothing, shelters, and tools, to pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, childcare, and healthcare, to education, marriages, rituals, politics, and conflict resolution – is to downplay the complexity, and thereby the importance of women’s roles in the foraging lifeway. To build a more complete picture of the lives of foragers in the present and the past, it serves no one to misrepresent reality. In correcting the misapprehension that women do not hunt, we should not replace one myth with another

The truth is the truth, and, as Venkataraman et al. note repeatedly, the truth does not work to the detriment of women in these societies, who, with a frequent division of labor, work at least as hard as do the men.

h/t: cesar

There are many things to criticize about this new paper in Science (one of three “woke” papers in the issue), but to me the worst is its denial of the sex binary.  For that binary, whose existence the authors even admit, is considered by them to exemplify “essentialism”—the object of the paper’s attack. By including more about variation in traits, including the sex of individuals, say the authors, there can be “a broad decrease in gender essentialist beliefs among US adolescents.” And they demonstrate this push for essentialism and neglect of trait variation by surveying genetics chapters of six high-school biology texts.

This, in other words, is an ideologically motivated paper, and it shows. And the object of its publication is a familiar one: to buttress people who see themselves as “variant” in terms of gender “nonbinary”.  But of course the “essentialist” sex binary is simply a fact of nature, and should not lead to demonization of those who feel they’re of their non-natal sex. Nature gives us no lessons about how to treat people outside the “norm.” Yes, binary people don’t feel that they’re either male or female, and that’s okay and should be respected, but you can’t say that the biological sexes in plants and animals form a spectrum. Yet that’s just what the authors say.

Now there may be something worthwhile in this paper insofar as it points out how textbooks have neglectedf genetic and environmental variation that causes differences between groups.  But whether one has to go into a long disquisition on variation in high school biology is debatable (see below for one of the confusing changes they suggest). Further, the examples of  “essentialism” they show aren’t very convincing. Finally, most of the paper is simply confusing as well as tendentious.

Click on the title below to see the short paper (four pages, the pdf is here):

I read the paper three times, and my marking-up of my copy below shows how many comments I had. I won’t bore you with most of them, though!

The authors go after what they see as three misguided views promulgated in the textbooks they surveyed:

Three basic assumptions undergird the essentialist view of sex and gender (1): (i) there is little to no variation in traits or behaviors within a sex or gender group; (ii) differences between sexes or genders are discrete—the groups do not overlap substantially in traits; and (iii) internal factors such as genes are the best explanation for all forms of variation within and between sex or gender groups. Scientific research on sex and gender is inconsistent with these assumptions (3, 4), yet they are commonly held. For example, substantial portions of US adults (≈40 to 70%) attribute gender differences in traits and behaviors to genetic causes (5).

References 3 and 4 recur throughout the paper as “evidence”. I’ve glanced at one of them, and didn’t see it saying what the authors claimed, but readers should check for themselves.  At any rate, certainly biologists recognize that these tropes are wrong. There is ample variation among individuals within a sex or gender group (the authors conflate sex and gender, and eventually combine them as “sex/gender”, which is a mistake); for nearly all traits there is substantial variation among individuals of a sex (I’ll leave gender aside for now); and, finally, saying that “internal factors such as genes are touted as “the best explanation for all forms of variation within sex or gender groups” is, to a biologist, nonsensical.  We don’t use terms like “best explanation”. If we want to look at variation within a group, we can measure the proportion of variation among individuals by a figure called the heritability, which runs from 0 (no variation in traits due to variation among individuals in their genes [religion is a likely example] to 1 (all variation among individuals is due to variation in their genes).  To say genetic or environmental variation is a “best” explanation is ridiculous because it depends on the trait, the environment, and the population.

What is  the definition of sex?  The authors first more or less admit that it’s indeed a binary based on gametes, but then say how “complex” it is, which of course sex determination, particularly with respect to secondary sexual traits is.  The first conflation is how many sexes there are, which has a simple answer, with how sex produces an individuals’s appearance and other traits, which has a complicated answer. They then conflate sex with gender, using the term “sex/gender”.  Bolding in the excerpt below is mine, and note how they confuse the definition of sex with the determination of sex through development. The former is a simple binary, while the latter is indeed complex.

Sexual reproduction generates new allelic combinations within a species (3). Sex determination is the process by which an organism develops a particular sex—the ability to produce a particular type of gamete, along with any associated phenotypic traits. This process is tremendously variable across species. In some species (such as cichlid fish), an individual’s sex can be determined by the temperature of their physical surroundings and can reverse. Some species have more than two sexes (for example, some fungi have thousands); others have more than two sex chromosomes (for example, the platypus has 10) or sex chromosomes other than X and Y (for example, birds have Z and W sex chromosomes).

But just because how gametes are produced within a species, or sex-associated traits are determined, are complex, doesn’t mean that sex isn’t a binary. It’s also a binary in animals where sex determination is produced by temperature (turtles), haploidy vs. diploidy (bees), or social environment (some fish).   They tack on “associated phenotypic traits” as part of the sex definition, which is wrong.

The conflation of the sex binary with the variation in sex-associated traits leads them to somehow implicitly dismiss the binary:

 As a result of this complexity, human sex variation is not strictly dichotomous at the biological level; rather, it is best described as a somewhat continuous, bimodal distribution (3). This biological variation intersects with the cultural practices of medical clinicians to influence sex assignment (3), often in ways that reduce the underlying biological complexity to a simpler binary: females and males. However, many intersex humans exist who blur the hard lines between males and females (3).

The proportion of individuals who are either male or female, based having the developmental equipment for making big or small gametes, is not “somewhat continuous”. It is nearly completely binary, with only 0.018% of individuals (as the authors admit, about 1 in 5600—they say 2 in 10,000—being of indeterminate sex, including intersexes). That means that 99.982% of individuals lie in the two peaks, or rather two straight lines shooting upwards.  This is not at all “somewhat continuous” it is all but binary with a teeny blip in the center. Call that “very very very very strongly bimodal” if you wish, but the proportion of indeterminate individuals is miniscule, and these individuals are not a third sex, but represent developmental anomalies. Essentialism is in effect the case here: there are only two sexes and a very few individuals of indeterminate sex.

Another mistake they make is to claim that although gender (what sex role you think you enact) is socially constructed, that means that gender has nothing to do with biology:

Altogether, nearly all trait variation that exists within and between human sexes is not what essentialism predicts, and neither is the causal source of this variation (that is, there are no genetic “essences”).

The same arguments apply to gender, perhaps even more forcefully, because gender is a socially constructed lay interpretation of the biological phenomenon of sex (3, 4). Individuals who identify as women or girls are often expected to adopt a set of socially and culturally prescribed activities, abilities, and interests that distinguish them from individuals who identify as men or boys (3, 4). Thus, differences in complex traits (such as activities, abilities, and interests) between individuals who identify as different genders have no biological basis and are instead explained by sociocultural factors (4).

But the vast majority of individuals have a “gender” that corresponds with their biological sex, with individuals showing typical sex-associated traits such as differences in aggression, risk-taking, interest in people vs. things, and so on. As Luana and I showed in our Skeptical Inquirer paper, many of these traits have an evolved genetic/biological basis. If that’s the case, then a hefty proportion of “gender roles” also have a biological component (see #2 in our paper). To say that there is no biology in gender roles is simply ludicrous.

On to the textbooks.

Variation within sex/gender groups. Using rather fuzzy and subjective criteria, the authors argue that sex and gender are presented in textbooks as essentialist, even though the sexes themselves, as a binary, are essentialist.  Gender is of course variable, but they don’t show examples of “essentialism” in gender in this paper. Here’s their analysis:

Twelve percent of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as uniform [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.08, 0.17)] (see SM for analytic strategy). In addition, 10% of paragraphs described individuals of a single sex/gender group as differing by type [β = 0.10, 95% CI (0.05, 0.16)]. By contrast, descriptions of continuous variation within a sex/gender group occurred in only 3% of paragraphs [β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05)].

Note that “sex” has now become “sex/gender”. If you mix them together, then there’s a danger of textbooks conflating the sex binary with the variability of gender identification, and you wind up with a nonsensical analysis.

Variation between sex/gender groups.  Here, coding the textbook paragraphs, the authors found no tendency for textbooks show discrete differences between sex/gender groups (note again how they confuse the results by mixing “sex” and “gender”) as opposed to showing overlaps and variation.  In other words, their hypothesis of essentialism was falsified!

Sixteen percent of paragraphs described categorical differences between sex/gender groups [β = 0.16, 95% CI (0.10, 0.22)]. By contrast, only 11% of paragraphs described similarities or overlaps across sex/gender groups [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.06, 0.16)]. The difference between these code proportions was not statistically significant [β = 0.05, 95% CI (-0.01, 0.11)].

But they decide the difference is significant anyway—because there is overlap between the groups, ergo no essentialism:

Yet because sex/gender groups overlap considerably on most complex traits (3, 4), even this seemingly balanced presentation of similarities and categorical differences is more consistent with essentialism than with the scientific consensus on sex and gender.

They try to save their hypothesis even though the statistics don’t support it.

Internal versus external explanations.  What the authors are looking for here are whether textbooks describe variation within and between “sex/gender” groups as having an internal explanation (genetic) or external explanations (presumably environmental and social factors). Here they find mostly internalist explanations—that is, their hypothesis of textbooks being “essentialist” is confirmed:

Internal explanations were given in 12% of paragraphs [β = 0.12, 95% CI (0.06, 0.20)]. External explanations were given in only 1% of paragraphs [β = 0.01, 95% CI (0.003, 0.02)]. This difference was statistically significant [β = 0.11, 95% CI (0.05, 0.19)].

To see how they coded textbook passages as essentialist (or internalist), and how the authors recommend that textbooks be rewritten, here’s their table (click to enlarge):

It’s true that tongue-rolling is no longer seen as a dominant, single-gene allele, so correcting that is okay. Note, though the authors’ admission (yellow) that intersex individuals are rare, so that one really falls more into “discreteness” rather than “continuity”.

The second paragraph from the textbook (lower left) is much better than the authors’ revision (lower right), particularly for recessive traits, because the “suggested” version is simply confusing. They throw in “variation” simply because, as any geneticist knows, the severity of a genetic disease varies among people. Yet they see the revised version as infinitely superior to the textbook version because their revision less uniform and more continuous. I find it overly complicated and confusing.

The lesson the authors draw from looking at single chapters of six high-school biology textbooks, then, is that essentialism is the norm, and that’s bad. But I suspect, given how they treated “variation between sex/gender groups”, and their conflation of sex and gender, that there’s some cherry-picking going on. At any rate, having taught genetics, though not in high school, I think this paper is making a great deal out of relatively little. It is paragraphs like these that make me think the motive is ideological, and thus the textbooks must be altered to conform with the authors’ preferred ideology:

One limitation of our study is that we did not search for sex and gender terms outside of genetics chapters. We may have thus underidentified messages that are inconsistent with essentialism about sex and gender. However, qualitative studies that have analyzed the nongenetics chapters of biology textbooks by using the lenses of feminist and queer theory—which were developed to uncover and counter gender essentialism—do not support this optimistic view (15).

Readers who are interested in this claim can read reference 15 here.

The authors continuously argue that textbooks are “inconsistent with scientific reality”, as if the sex binary were not “scientific reality” (notice that they concentrate on sex and gender, which itself is telling). Their object is clearly to show that everything forms a spectrum, and so any variation in gender (I won’t admit that there’s variation in sex, except for the 0.018% of indeterminate individuals) is fine. And it is fine, but not because biology is always a spectrum.

Here’s another paragraph

When describing sex/gender groups as uniform, or as composed of different types, biology textbooks are expressing essentialist views that are inconsistent with scientific reality: It is continuous variation that is the norm within sex and gender groups. When describing between-group variation, biology textbooks discuss differences and similarities at similar rates. In actuality, sex and gender groups overlap substantially on most complex traits (3, 4). Rather than reflecting this reality, textbooks paint a picture that is consistent with the essentialist notion that sex and gender groups are discrete.

Note that again they get themselves into the weeds by conflating sex (which is discrete) with gender (which isn’t). They themselves promulgate confusion in this paper which, in the end, seems to me to make no progress in achieving social justice. Yes, the authors correct a few biological errors in textbooks, like the genetics of tongue rolling, but it takes a while for high-school texts to catch up to recent research.

I received a link to this paper from several colleagues I respect, all of them more or less outraged by the sloppy methodology, tendentious analysis, and ideological overtones.

I’ll quote one colleague’s view:

This paper on sex and gender in biology textbooks was recommended to me yesterday, and I was baffled by it.  First, I was baffled that a paper with such a short and simple statistical analysis would be published in a journal like Science. Second, I was baffled that the paper promotes a blank-slateist view os sex differences which considers differences between men and women to be the product of “social construction” (note how they support their claims about gender by repeatedly citing the same two papers). Finally, I think the alleged examples of “essentialism” that they cite from biology textbooks are no such thing, and in fact I could not detect mistakes in the paragraphs that they showed. The worst part is that they claim that their misguided views are the “consensus” in biology, while only citing a few papers that support their views. I think this paper is a perfect example of how ideology is perverting science and science education, because it uses gender theory in place of mainstream biology.

But of course colleagues who liked the paper (I know of none) wouldn’t be likely to send me the link and beef about thje paper!

I should add that there’s one more paper in this series of three, but I won’t bother you with it. The title and link are below, click if you can bear reading more of this stuff. The ideological leaning of the triumvirate is clear:

Giving a lecture at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York City is a high honor, and Bari Weiss, former NYT writer and now editor of The Free Press, was chosen for it, giving a lecture in a decades-long series on the state of world Jewry. You can either read or hear  the talk below (click headline or video).  I read it, for I have little patience for long videos. However, since the whole talk is given in transcript, the only thing I missed was the visuals. See below for my take on what she said.

Here is Weiss’s message as I understood it, with the main points put in bold. All the text below is mine except for quotes from the transcript, which are indented.

1.)  Jews are endangered because of loss of freedom.

This loss of freedom involves, among other things, the denigration of Jews by DEI (which paints us as white oppressors and engages in racial equity that in effect discriminates against Jews. It was even instantiated in this lecture! The bit below is from Bari’s introduction and isn’t in the talk.

But for a sense of the state of Jewish life in America these days, you need only to have walked by the building that night. You would’ve found that police had cordoned off the entire block—and for good reason. Anti-Israel protesters, many wearing masks, gathered to intimidate those who came to the lecture. On the way in, you would’ve been screamed at—told you were a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” among other choice phrases. You might have even glimpsed Jerry Seinfeld being heckled and called “Nazi scum” on his way out of the talk. (Classy.)

I am beyond grateful to the NYPD, and the entire staff of the 92nd Street Y, for making sure that everyone who attended the talk was able to do so safely. But everyone must ask themselves: Do we want to live in a country in which simply giving a speech about a Jewish subject requires serious police protection? What does that reality say about the state of our country and our freedoms?

From the text:

Because freedom isn’t only under siege in Russia and Iran and Hong Kong. It is also under siege here at home.

By leftists who glorify terrorists. . . and by rightists who glorify tyrants. By technology companies that revise history and tell us it’s justice. By demagogues who point to the grocery stores and the subway system in Putin’s Russia and insist that they are symbols of human flourishing. And by an elite culture that has so lost all sense of right and wrong, good and bad, or has so cunningly transformed those categories, that it can call a massacre “resistance.” A genocidal chant, a call for “freedom.” And a just war of self-defense “genocide.”

. . .There are now whole realms of American life where you cannot be free as a Jew.

Ask the terrified Jewish schoolteacher in Queens who hid in a locked room in her school as a mob of hundreds of “radicalized” kids rampaged through the halls—for almost two hours—after they discovered she had attended a pro-Israel rally.

Ask Matisyahu, who announced that two of his concerts were canceled by venues after anti-Israel activists planned protests. Or the actor Brett Gelman, whose book signings faced the same fate.

Ask Princeton University student journalist Alexandra Orbuch. When pro-Palestinian students didn’t like the questions Orbuch asked, they got the school to issue a no-contact order against her, which effectively prevented her from reporting on them.

Go apply for a job as a curator at MOMA and mention that you’re a Zionist or have the word Israel on your résumé. See what happens.

2.) Jews are the “canary in the coal mine”: in periods of despotism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia, we are among the first to lose our freedom but not the last.

Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews are safest. And when such virtues are regarded as threats, Jews will be regarded as the same.

In other words: when people turn against freedom, they turn against us.

Some of the indignities suffered by Jews are mentioned above. Here are other signs of the dissolution of freedom in America (I am giving her take, not necessarily mine).

And it’s time to go to war for our values. 

When Apple’s diversity chief—a black woman—was forced to step down for saying that being a minority or a woman are not the only criteria for diversity, did you take her side?

When Asian Americans were discriminated against, did you see their cause as being essential to our own?

When American doctors were censored for questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, were you as outraged about this as you were about people who refused to wear masks in March 2020?

When, just across town, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, did you protest?

We glance at these things, feel a twinge of discomfort, and then decide to move on—giving ourselves one excuse after another. But these are the moments for action, because they are wrong. They are bad for America, and because they are bad for America, they are bad for Jews.

I thought for sure that although we saw yesterday that Jews are by far the religious minority that suffers the most per capita from victimization by hate crimes, black people would surely have a higher rate. But the FBI statistics for 2022 (below) seem to show that Jews suffer more from hate crimes per capita than any other group.  Using the data below on number of victims, combined with the number of blacks (about 50 million) and Jews in America (about 7.6 million), it seems that an individual Jew in America is 2.7 times as likely to be the victim of a hate crime than is a black person. I’m not sure what that means except that Jews are under siege.

3.) Jews have fallen for the false god of materialism.  Weiss notes this by recounting the Biblical story of Aaron and the golden calf—a false idol that Jews worshiped when Moses was slow in coming down the mountain with the tablets.  Weiss says that our false idols are STUFF instead of ideas:

We modern Israelites have also been worshipping false gods.

Our American idols are prestige, power, social acceptance, popularity, elite opinion, and the Ivy League—but I repeat myself. Our idols are the coveted board seat. The best tables. Relationships with the pretty people.

We put truth on the altar, as if it were a tithable commodity, to remain insiders, to have bragging rights.

We have been willing to sacrifice what is most precious to us—including our own children—for the sake of it.

Why are we doing this?

We are doing it because we are a tiny minority, and because we feel vulnerable and scared and alone. And because fitting in feels safer than standing apart.

. . . We are doing it because we also live in a culture of idolatry, only this time the materials are pixels and diplomas, adherence to a particular ideology and an emergent social credit system based on likes and retweets.

. . . What is being asked of us is to give up what feels central to our lives—but isn’t. To stop caring so much where your kid goes to college; to give up that museum board seat; to stop funding schools that treat Israel as a pariah and thus Jews who support it as the same; to detach from the friend or institution that has made clear that, to them, you are a second-class citizen.

Now throughout the talk there are scattered references to God (including the notion that are rights are given by God), which suggests that Weiss is indeed religious and believes, at least, in a higher power.  I of course am not down with that because we don’t need God to give us rights, and, if you espouse a rational approach to life (as Weiss emphasizes), then you shouldn’t believe in gods. But I’m not sure that her mention of “idolatry” above really means “we should be worshiping God, not things.” It could well mean (and I think it does mean) that our “idols” should be freedom and truth:

4.) The solution to the “othering” of Jews is to embrace our state of being “the other”, to strive for freedom for ourselves, and to seek the truth.  Below is our task; I love the quote from Dara Horn, who wrote the absorbing book People Love Dead Jews:

So what do we do?

The charge is as simple as it is spiritually difficult. We fulfill our duty and our responsibility to be free.

As my friend, the brilliant Dara Horn, has written: “Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”

. . . .To be free is to tell the truth even in a world awash with lies. 

And what is truth? It is the state of the world determined by observation and confirmed by unanimity:

The sky is blue. Robin DiAngelo might say it’s pink. Candace Owens might say it’s green. But it’s not. It is blue. That is as true as asserting that there are good governments and evil ones. There are societies organized to generate progress and well-being and those organized around terror and debasement. There are better cultures for women and minorities and there are worse ones. There are historical truths, even if they’re inconvenient for people to know about, even if the activists running places like Google are frantically working to disappear the old facts.

Here’s Solzhenitsyn again: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” To be a free person is to refuse to tell lies, to refuse to stand by as they are told. To be a free person is to live in truth.

Some of the best bits of Weiss’s talk are the quotes she uses.  And she ends with one more:

One time a few years ago, before the pandemic and the wars and so much else that would reshape our world, these themes were already on my mind. And so when, on a trip to Israel, I met my hero and now my friend, Natan Sharansky, I really only had one question for him. I asked him if it was possible to teach courage. He paused and said this: “No. You can’t teach it. You can only show people how good it feels to be free.”

And that’s what I want to end on. Fighting the lies against us, fighting the lies against history, living in truth—it feels good. It’s relaxing to tell the truth. You’ll laugh more. Not that I’m here selling a new cure for depression, but I promise this is a start.

What a blessing to be free to choose. I know what my choice will be. I am determined to be free.

********

Several readers sent me a link to this talk extolling it as a masterpiece. I can’t go along with that take, but I can say that it’s a very good and inspiring talk. Yes, its lessons seem a bit trite or anodyne, and they really apply not just to Jews, but to everyone.  Still, it’s good to hear a Jewish woman stand up and assert that the Jews aren’t “white adjacent” oppressors who have to live with that label, that we must fight against those who would put us in that box, and that we should work constantly to dispel the lies and false rumors spread about Israel in an attempt to erase that state from the map.

The University of Chicago doesn’t like to publicize protests about the Middle East war, as they make the school look bad. And the University is even more secretive about punishing protestors—like these—who violate the University “Protest and Demonstration Policy” by shouting down speakers (also see the President’s statement here). I have been unable to find out, in several cases, whether local punishments have been applied to disruptive students.  This is kept a secret for reasons best known to the University.

These violations of University policy, involving disruptions of other people’s speech, are not protected by the University’s free expression policy, which hews very close to the First Amendment of the Constitution. But despite their illegality, they continue. And they invariably involve pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some of whom have vowed not to respect the protest and demonstration policy.

So far the University has either failed to punish violators, or has given them only a slap on the wrist, like writing an essay on “my demonstration experience.” It’s not rocket science to figure out that if demonstrators violate University regulations but aren’t punished seriously, and there’s no record of a violation on their transcript, then the illegal protests will continue.  A regulation that’s not enforced is a regulation without teeth.

Below is are two short videos from Instagram showing a protest at the Medical School that occurred last month.  The speaker (or “attempted speaker”) is Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld, the new President of the prestigious American Medical Association (AMA).  He is accomplished, Jewish, and gay.

The last two traits caused the protest that occurred when he was invited to speak to his alma mater, for he got his MD here. Despite his being a liberal and an honored physician, and despite his attempt to present a “Grand Rounds” talk on LGBTQ+ equity in medicine to the the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society, the students still harassed him.

You can see the “issues” by listening to the angry and loud protests below (note that the cowardly speakers donned masks to hide their identities).  Ehrenfeld is accused of Israeli “pinkwashing” (the crazy claim that Israel only pretends to support LGBTQ+ rights to distract people from the country’s supposed crimes); accused of the AMA not having formally called for a ceasefire in Israel; and accused of being complicit in the deaths of Palestinian civilians because of Israel’s supposed war crimes.

As the Instagram post says below, “Security escorted protestors out of the lecture hall.” That’s a step in the right direction, since the University has failed to do even that during other protests.  But are these protestors medical or other students at the University? If so, then they must be punished. If they’re not from the University community, then they’re likely guilty of trespassing and can be banned from campus. Whatever the University does about this, it must involve more than simply removing disruptive protestors from the venue, as that’s not really a deterrent, much less a punishment.

These protests invariably involve only pro-Palestinian students, simply because the pro-Israeli ones aren’t into this kind of disruption. And this has led pro-Palestinian demonstrators to ask why  they’re being singled out by the University.  But that’s a dumb question with an easy answer: “Because they’re the only group that holds these types of angry and disruptive protests with respect to the war.”

I wonder whether after Israel is victorious, as I think it will be, these protests will continue.  I think they will, because the anger will only be intensified.

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Here’s another post sponsored by the Students for Justice in Palestine, a registered student organization. Some of the video overlaps with that above, but they also have the temerity to tell Ehrenfeld what his ethical responsibility is:

On 2/20, Healthcare workers and medical students led disruptions and a banner drop during American Medical Association President Jesse Ehrenfeld’s talk at UChicago Medicine. AMA stop the hypocrisy, you have an ethical obligation to stand against genocide. You have an ethical obligation to stand with life, in solidarity with Palestine. Ehrenfeld, history is watching! Med Students say: Ceasefire Now!
Repost from @hcw4palichi

The students apparently disagree with the restriction that there is a time and place for free expression—times and places where it doesn’t disrupt University activity.  This video also shows security asking students to leave, but they persist in a “silent protest,” holding up a banner in the classroom. I am not sure if that’s a violation of University regulations, but it should be, because it is disruptive, particularly when there are many signs held by many students. I would say, “no signs in the lecture hall.”

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Today is Sunday, and so we have bird photos from biologist John Avise, this time from Northern Ireland. John’s narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note the five DUCKS at the beginning.

Birds in Northern Ireland  

In 2008, I visited Northern Ireland and Ireland to give invited seminars at major Universities in both countries.  My hosts knew of my great interest in birds, and so they very graciously took me on an extended tour of nature reserves and natural habitats across the entire island.  This week’s post shows some of the birds I photographed in the Northern Ireland portion of that journey.  The weather was mostly cloudy and rainy; ergo the darkness of some of the pictures.  Many of these birds will be familiar to European readers of WEIT.

Dabchick (also known as “little grebe”; Tachybaptus ruficollis):

Ferruginous Duck (Aythya nyroca), drake:

Common Pochard (Aythya ferina), drake:

Tufted Duck (Aythya fuligula), drake:

Gadwall (Mareca strepera), drake:

Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) adult in basic (non-breeding) plumage:

European Herring Gull (Larus argentatus):

Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) flight silhouette:

Common Linnet (Linaria cannabina):

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) head portrait:

European Robin (Erithacus rubecula):

Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), dorsal view:

Northern Fulmar, ventral view:

 Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus):

Sandwich Tern (Thalasseus sandvicensis):

Western Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula:

Bill Maher’s 8½-minute monologue, largely about the advanced age of Joe Biden, aired on Real Time last night. His point: don’t let the opposition define you, and be who you really are. In Biden’s case, that’s being old, and Biden should, says Maher, “own it.”

I’m not sure that would really work, though. Americans watch Biden, and they’re scared by what they see. But there’s also a nice skit of Maher playing an aged Biden (with a walker) giving the State of the Union address.

Watch before they take it down. The ten-minute “overtime” segment, with a strange mixture of  guests—Dr. Phil, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Tim Ryan—is here.

It’s taken me a while to fathom how anti-Israeli (or even antisemitic) the New York Times is, but the article below exemplifies this bias, which constantly leaks into the paper’s news reporting and non-op-ed stories.  In fact, I find that the Times of Israel gives more accurate information about the war than does the NYT.  If you read the NYT article below article and can’t see how it’s slanted to make Israel look bad, then I think you’re missing something.

The story in the article is one I reported on December 1 and on December 7 of last year—about the shooting of three Palestinian (or Palestinian-American) friends, all attending American colleges, as they took an evening stroll in Vermont. As I said at the time (the Wikipedia account is here):

You have surely heard that three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were shot on November 25 in Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens; the other a legal resident.  The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill. From the NYT:

They were shot and wounded on Saturday by a white man with a handgun while they were walking near the University of Vermont, the police said. Two of the victims were wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs, a traditional headdress.

The young men told family members they were speaking a hybrid of English and Arabic before the man shot at them four times without saying anything before the attack, according to a family spokeswoman.

Two of the victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. The third sustained much more serious injuries.

The one with serious injuries was shot in the spine, and may never walk again. This is a terrible attack, and, while we can be grateful that nobody was killed, losing your ability to walk is horrible. The shooter has been charged with second-degree murder, and, if he’s guilty, which seems likely, will be spending a long time in either prison or a mental hospital.

Tahseen was shot in the leg and recovered, but Hiasham is still in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. This story attracted a good deal of attention at the time because of the possibility that it could have been a hate crime: the young men were speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs (scarves that symbolize Palestinian solidarity). Plus the victims are considered “people of color,” which always gets progressives furiously speculating, and then—as in this case—asserting that it must have been a hate crime. Someone, it was said, was trying to kill Palestinians because they were Palestinians.

Now there’s no doubt that someone committed a horrible crime. Although nobody was killed, Hisham will probably never walk again, and since he’s only 20, I see that as a terrible fate. (The article below notes that he seems to be accepting it pretty well.)

But was it really a hate crime? Even on December 7 the police, searching furiously, couldn’t find any evidence that the perpetrator, one Jason Eaton, was motivated by hatred of Palestinians. Instead, he appeared to be mentally ill, and what meager evidence there is suggests that he might be pro-Palestinian! Even so, the students, the family, and some of the media were asserting or implying that Eaton was “Islamophobic.”  As Wikipedia reports, Eaton has been “charged with three counts of attempted murder in the second degree” and investigations into it being a hate crime are continuing.  The trial has yet to begin, and if there’s no evidence of a hate crime, then they can’t tack that on as another charge.

As the NYT story begrudgingly notes below, there’s still no evidence of anti-Palestinian bigotry in the shooting, even after four months.  If you read about this shooting, you slowly realize that the media and many Palestinians actually want it to be a hate crime, for that would fit a narrative of minority students being victimized.

I would think that Palestinians would want it NOT to be a hate crime, because that would mean that there’s less hatred that turns into violence.  But the narrative overtakes the facts.

The NYT has found a new way to use this four-month-old shooting to demonize Israel, and that’s why the article below is so long. It ties together the shooting and the victims’ lives since November, but also works into the article repeated demonizations of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians, leaving out some salient facts. In other words, it’s coopting the shooting, which is bad enough on its own, to push an anti-Israel narrative. The author, Rozina Ali, is clearly anti-Israel, as you can see clearly from her “X” feed. No agenda here!

Click below to read the piece from the NYT Magazine, or you can find the article archived here.

I’ll just give some quotes from the long piece, quotes critical of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians (there’s nothing positive about Israel, of course). Some of her quotes (the three boys met and became friends in Ramallah, on the West Bank) are below, indented:

The friends largely avoided run-ins with Israeli forces or the settlers surrounding Ramallah. Still, they were growing up in the shadow of the second intifada. Security was tight. Long gun barrels followed them at military checkpoints, prickling them with fear. As a child, Hisham heard about a friend of his cousin’s who was killed by Israeli soldiers. A friend’s father was arrested and disappeared into the prison system for a year and a half. No one knew precisely why. Once, when Hisham was hiking, a group of soldiers demanded to see his identity card. They let him go, but he was rattled.

The occupation affected Tahseen intimately: He couldn’t visit his relatives in Gaza, including his grandmother, because Israel restricted movement between the two strips of Palestinian territory. One of his earliest memories was of being rushed away by his dad from a tear-gas canister that landed near him. When he was 11, soldiers barged into the living room of his house without warning, pointed their guns at the family and shouted out a name — Tahseen’s neighbor. They had the wrong house. Years later, it happened again.

. . . Kinnan and Hisham appeared to be more troubled. Early one afternoon in May 2021, when Hisham was 18, he ventured to El Bireh, an adjoining city where people were protesting. Demonstrations had erupted across the West Bank in response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and efforts to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The teachers at Ramallah Friends regularly discussed the occupation — a subject that could hardly be avoided even in a class on poetry. Still, they discouraged students from attending demonstrations, where they could be killed. A classmate who attended one had been shot in the leg. But Hisham was tired of feeling humiliated and oppressed. I don’t accept this, he thought. I’m not going to take this lying down.

The NYT doesn’t note that the “response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza” was, as you can see from the links, a military response to Hamas rockets fired at Israel from Gaza! The paper implies, as it often does, that an Israeli defensive response to an attack from Palestine is really an attack mounted by Israel.

Next we hear about Israel “pounding” Gaza after the barbaric attacks on October 7. Note the choice of words:

Then, last October, as he started his second year, Hamas gunmen breached a fence and attacked towns across southern Israel, killing civilians and capturing hostages. And then Israel began pounding Gaza.

. . . The friends missed home. Not just Ramallah, which was rapidly changing under Israel’s latest incursion, but a particular time, the one they couldn’t return to. They missed the life before they came to the United States to study, before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. . .

Hamas “attacks” while Israel “pounds” and bombards “relentlessly”.  The whole narrative implies that, in general, nothing that Palestinians do is bad and everything Israel does is bad.

More:

Still, deadly violence in the United States seemed rare compared with that in the West Bank, where Israeli forces were detaining Palestinians en masse. Even before the Oct. 7 attacks, 2023 was a particularly deadly year; now deaths shot up. By the end of the year, Israeli forces and settlers would kill 507 civilians there, including 124 children — the highest death toll since the United Nations began recording such statistics in 2005. The friends were planning to meet in Burlington, Vt., and stay with Hisham’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. Some of the parents encouraged them to stay in the United States for the winter holidays, too. They thought their children would be safer there.

There is no mention about why Paletinians were detained and some killed by the IDF.  I doubt it was because the IDF just likes to kill Palestinians.

There is plenty of discussion of hate crimes against Muslims, and no discussion about the fact that religious hate crimes against Jews are not only more frequent in number than “Islamophobic” hate crimes, but farmore frequent on a per capita basis. From the Dept. of Justice data in 2022:

• Religion-Based Crimes: There were 2,042 reported incidents based on religion. More than half of these (1,122) were driven by anti-Jewish bias. Incidents involving anti-Muslim (158) and anti-Sikh (181) sentiments remained at similar levels compared to 2021.

The Times of Israel, using FBI data from 2022, gives slightly different numbers but they’re roughly similar:

There were 1,305 offenses committed against Jews in 2022, the FBI reported in its tally Monday of national crime statistics, far outnumbering the second-largest category, anti-Muslim crimes, of which there were 205.

Taking the Justice Department statistics, and assuming the observation that there are 7.6 million Jews in America and 3.45 million Muslims, this works out to a per capita yearly ratio of hate crimes against Jews to that of Muslims being 3.2 to 1 (I hope I did my math right). That is, the chance of a Jew being the victim of a religiously-based hate crime is roughly 3.2 times the chance of a Muslim being a victim. But of course the antisemitic crimes are rarely discussed, because although Jews are the victims, they are—being “white adjacent”—not seen as victims.

But I digress.  The final bit of the long story is the evidence that the shooter was Islamophobic. Here’s what the paper says about that:

Within hours, the police came to talk to [the three shot students]. Hate crimes, which are predicated on the state of mind of the aggressor, are challenging to prove in court. This case was even more tricky: The shooter said nothing out loud before, during or after the shooting, and the man the police had charged in the attack, Jason Eaton, was a somewhat complicated character. He had returned to Vermont the previous summer, after some years in upstate New York. Things had taken a bad turn — a series of troubled relationships and jobs that didn’t work out. He spent Thanksgiving with his mother, who later told a reporter that he had had mental-health struggles but was “totally normal” that day. Eaton appeared to have engaged in political discussion online. According to a local Vermont paper, he had left comments on X about an op-ed piece about Gaza — “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” — and described himself as a “radical citizen pa-trolling demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” Per a police affidavit, Eaton had a pistol, a rifle and two shotguns in his apartment, along with ammunition consistent with casings found at the crime scene. (Eaton has pleaded not guilty to three charges of attempted second-degree murder.)

The link to the story at a Vermont site, however, makes Eaton seem even more pro-Palestinian:

While Seven Days has not been able to view all of Eaton’s social media posts, what was provided to the paper suggests he had some sympathy for the Palestinian side of the conflict.

“What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” he wrote in a November 16 post responding to a VTDigger.org commentary by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) that called for a cease-fire. “Brittan [sic] wouldn’t let ships with food sent by other countries into Ireland during the famine. My people starved.”

In an October 17 post on X responding to a different article, Eaton wrote that “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”

There is no suggestion that he hated Palestine or Palestinians; in fact, it’s quite the contrary. But that doesn’t stop the boys or their families—or prominent voices in the Palestinian community—from asserting it was a hate crime. For some reason, and in the absence of evidnece, they just know that Eaton was motivated to shoot Palestinians.  And so The Narrative must be obeyed.

In the end, what we see in this article is not evidence for a hate crime, but strong evidence that the NYT wants to make the shooting into a “hate story”, with the anti-Israeli author using her venue to gin up hatred against Israel.  As I said the other day, this is the way the mainstream liberal media operates in America today: the narrative is more important than the truth.

And did it strike the author (or the editors) that all the anti-Israel stuff in this post has absolutely nothing to do with the shooting of these students?

______________

By the way, here’s something that looks at first like an antisemitic hate crime: a man of Arab descent killing a Jewish dentist. However, one local source reports that the killer “identified as 29-year-old Mohammed Abdulkareem, was believed to be a ‘disgruntled former customer’ of the dental office, authorities said”. I don’t know any more details, though, as I can’t find a mention of it in the MSM.  (It would be there if it was a Jew killing a Muslim!)  But sometimes a killing is just a killing, and has nothing to do with religion or politics.

San Diego shocking murder – Mohammed Abdulkareem, 29, was arrested after shooting & killing Jewish dentist, Dr. Benjamin Harouni, at his SmilePlus Dentistry practice in the El Cajon suburb. 

Demand El Cajon Police investigate if antisemitism was a factor in this shocking crime -… pic.twitter.com/chBqrrRVH1

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 1, 2024

Today we have an all-audio and all-video trifecta.

First, here’s an eight-minute video about why cats run away from home. If you let your cat go outdoors, watch this, and, more important, get your cat chippsed AND a collar with a phone number on it. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve known who have lost an indoor cat that accidentally went outdoors; and there was no collar with an ID tag and no chips.  In my view, all cats should be chipped.

 

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

In this Purrli® program (click on screenshot), you can adjust six parameters of a cat’s purr to find out what kind of purr you like best. (“Meow-y” means that there’s an occasional meow, which I like. Below the screenshot I’ve given that I consider my favorite purr for a cat lying on my chest or lap.

 

My favorite settings. There are around two meows per minute, but I’d silence them if I were working at the same time:

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

One of the great internet video sequences is to introduce the candy Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. It creates a huge fountain of the soft drink reasons given here.  An excerpt:

All the sites recommend a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke (not regular Coke) and a limited number of Mentos.

The carbonated drinks’ fizz comes from carbon dioxide added to the bottles at high pressure. 2-liter Diet Coke contains around 12-15 grams of dissolved carbon dioxide. The gas tries to escape and form bubbles around any irregular surface, called a nucleation site. Mentos also have nucleation sites because they are not as smooth as they appear. When added to Coke, the dissolved gas pushes the liquid out of the container at a super-fast speed in the form of bubbles. The candies simply catalyze the release of gas from the Coke bottle. Therefore, the chemical reaction between Coke and Mentos, in reality, is a physical reaction.

No matter how messy or sticky the experiment is, there are only two ingredients required to make this geyser. One bottle of 2-liter fizzy drink, preferably Diet Coke, and Mentos are needed in an adequate quantity to give a spectacular reaction. For a 2-liter bottle of Coke, at least five Mentos are good enough. Moreover, all Mentos must be added to the drink simultaneously, giving each of them equal time to create an effect. As Mentos candies are dropped into the Coke bottle, there is an explosion seconds later, and a “Mentos Coke Fountain” goes high up in the sky.

. . . The highest recorded explosion has been of Mentos and Diet Coke when the fountain touched up to 10 meters. Most people believe that the more Mentos are added to Coke, the bigger and higher the eruption will be. However, the number of Mentos that will make a difference is limited. Through various investigations, it has been deduced that seven Mentos are the max.

Well, try it (I wouldn’t waste two liters of Diet Coke when you can watch it on YouTube). But can you watch cats reacting to it? Here’s a 3-minute video of cats watching this chemical reaction set up to follow a domino-falling sequence. I wonder how many times they had to set this up to get it right, for it requires the cats to help.

There’s a related video, sans Mentos and Cokc, below. Actually, I like the second one better because there’s a treat at the end.

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Lagniappe: A short video of a cat encountering a giant tarantula (nobody gets hurt):

h/t: Barry

Today we have two smallish sets of photos. Click photos to enlarge, and the photographers’ captions are indented. And remember to send your wildlife photos, as the tank is dangerously low.

First, a few photos of Colorado from Douglas Swartzenruber.

This is just a collection of pics from being out and about in Colorado.  I did not think that any captions were necessary – some folks may recognize a locale or two, but it’s not really important.

A deer and a beer:

Given the last two pictures, I’ll have to relate a joke (slightly NSFW):

Q: Why are beer nuts like deer nuts?
A:  They’re both under a buck.

The last time I told this to someone, they pointed out that beer nuts are probably more than a dollar now. And indeed they are!  There goes the joke. . . .

Here are a couple of photos by Muffy Mead demonstrating the macro capabilities of phone cameras:

You were asking this morning for more wildlife photos and I can’t say mine are all that great, but I thought your readers might be interested in the fact that you can now buy a macro lens for your phone camera very inexpensively, and it’s a lot of fun to take closeup pictures of insects and other stuff! So attached are a few photos I took (dragonfly, butterfly, dragonfly wing, wasp nest) including one of the lens I have, but there are several others to choose from on Amazon.

Click to go to the Amazon site (the price has gone up):

We missed a full year of Botany Pond last year, and that meant a dearth of ducks, although we managed to bring up a brood of ten trapped on the roof of a dormitory two blocks north. That was a considerable accomplishment given the difficulty of the task, which involved schlepping water and food over to the dorm three times a week for eight weeks. We also had a somewhat depressing experience with Amy the Library Duck, who couldn’t find her way to the lake several blocks west, and so we had to purloin her offspring and put them into rehab. That was also the case for another lost brood a few weeks earlier.

We had hoped that Botany Pond would be filled with water by June of this year, but even that doesn’t seem to be in the offing, and we may not even get to see the migrating ducks stop by here on their way south.  Below is the announcement from the Chicago Maroon about various delays in reopening the Pond, which is now surrounded by an ugly metal and nylon-mesh fence.

Although the article below starts this way:

According to a University spokesperson, the refilling of Botany Pond along with its bridge repairs are set to be completed this spring, with planting and landscaping occurring over the summer. The re-introduction of the pond’s wildlife will be a gradual process that will begin upon the pond’s refilling, with a focus on re-building the pond’s ecosystem from the ground up in order to ensure its self-sufficiency. According to a University spokesperson, the refilling of Botany Pond along with its bridge repairs are set to be completed this spring, with planting and landscaping occurring over the summer. The re-introduction of the pond’s wildlife will be a gradual process that will begin upon the pond’s refilling, with a focus on re-building the pond’s ecosystem from the ground up in order to ensure its self-sufficiency. It is unclear when Botany Pond will be open to the public again.

Well, they are not going to complete the bridge repairs this spring, nor will the pond be refilled, nor will the bridge be completed. Forget about the planting and landscaping.  Everything is on hold because the University is hurting for money.

Pessimist that I am, I don’t think the pond will be refilled any earlier than the Spring of 2025, which means that we’ll have lost two full wildlife seasons.   This is sad not only because the turtles, fish, and ducks won’t be here to enjoy, but the entire pond, a jewel of the University, will be fenced off and unavailable to the community. People from all around, whether or not they had anything to do with the U of C, would stop by and get respite from their quotidian woes by communing with the pond, its plants and trees and of course its avian wildlife. You can read about the delays below, but I won’t reproduce them as it just makes me sad. Click to read the rest:

Instead of bemoaning the problem, I’ll put up a few photos to bring back memories of brighter days.

Feeding the ducks with the Lab School students, 2017:

Honey and her brood of 17 from 2020. Half of the brood was kidnapped form Dorothy, but Dorothy went on to re-nest and produced her own brood of seven:

Honey as a soccer ball:

Me feeding Honey, 2021:

Honey’s very young babies:

. . . and her teenage brood. Ever watchful, she was the Queen of Duck Mothers:

Roof ducks, last year, with mother Maria. We brought every one up to fledging!

The pond in November, 2022. Work has been very slow, and back then it apparently wasn’t due to lack of money:

Turtles in 2018 (red-eared sliders). They are off somewhere being taken care of, but I wonder if we’ll ever see them again:

The pond in 2018:

Unknown drake and his mate:

Frisky the wood duck sitting on his cypress knob (sadly, they cut down the trees):

Frisky nuzzling his girlfriend Ruth, who flew off on her own:

Is it any wonder I’m depressed?

h/t Charles

One of the most striking differences between monkeys and other primates on the one hand and apes on the other is that—with a few exceptions—other primates have tails but apes don’t.

A new paper in Nature, which is really cool, investigates the genetic basis for the loss of tails in apes. (The phylogeny below shows that the primate ancestor had a tail, and it was lost in apes.)

Why did apes lose their tails? We don’t know for sure, but it may be connected with the facts that apes are mostly ground-dwellers and a tail would be an impediment for living on the ground and moving via knuckle-walking or bipedal walking. (The gibbon, considered an ape that branched off early from the common ancestor with monkeys, is an exception, as it’s mostly arboreal. Gibbons move by swinging from branch to branch but they have no tails However, this form of locomotion, called brachiation, really doesn’t require a tail for grasping or balance.) I suspect that because apes who move in these ways don’t need tails makes it disadvantageous to have a tail: it’s metabolic energy wasted on an appendage that you don’t need, and one that could get injured. Thus natural selection likely favored the loss of a tail.

Regardless, the new Nature paper, which you can access below (pdf here, reference at bottom), involves a complex genetic analysis that pinpoints one gene, called Tbxt, as a key factor in tail loss.  By genetically engineering the tail-loss form of the gene from apes and putting it into mice, they found that the mice engineered to have the ape form of the gene either had very short tails or no tails at all. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Click to read:

First, here’s a phylogeny of the primates from the paper. Apes diverged from monkeys (or rather “other monkeys”, since apes can be considered a subgroup of monkeys) about 25 million years ago. The tailless apes are shown in blue, with the common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes shown about 25 million years ago.

How can you find the genes that are involved in tail loss in apes? The best way to do it, which the authors used, is to first look for mutations in primates that cause loss or shortening of the tails, and then see whether the forms of those genes differ between apes and monkeys.  Xia et al. looked at 31 such genes but didn’t find any genes whose forms were concordant with tail loss.

They then went on to mice, looking another 109 genes associated with tail loss or reduction in the rodents.  Here they found one gene, Tbxt, that had an unusual form in all apes that was lacking in other primates.  Tbxt, by the way, is a transcription factor: a gene that produces a protein that itself controls the action of other genes, regulating how and whether they are transcribed, that is, how these other genes make messenger RNA from the DNA. (Messenger RNA, as you know, is then “translated” into proteins.)

And this transcription factor had an unusual feature in apes but not in other primates: it contained a small sequence called Alu, about 300 base pairs long, that was inserted into the DNA of the Tbxt gene, but in a noncoding region (“intron”) separating the coding regions of Tbxt that make the transcription-factor protein. (Genes are often in coding segments, or exons, separated by introns, and the exons are spliced together into one string before the mRNA goes off to make protein.)

Only primates have Alu elements; they formed by a genetic “accident” about 55 million years ago and spread within genomes. We humans have about one million Alu elements in our genomes, and sometimes they move around, which gives them the name “jumping genes.”  They are often involved in gene regulation, but can also cause mutations when they move, since they seem to move randomly.

Here’s a diagram of a monkey Tbxt gene on the left and the human version on the right. Note that in both groups the gene has coding regions, which are spliced together when mRNA is made to produce the full transcript.  But note that in humans there is an Alu element, “AluY” stuck into the gene between Exon 6 and Exon 7. I’ve put a red circle around it. This inserted bit of DNA appears to be the key to the loss of tails. (Note the nearby Alu element AluSx1 in both groups.)

(From paper) Schematic of the proposed mechanism of tail-loss evolution in hominoids. Primate images in a and c were created using BioRender (https://biorender.com).

Here’s why the authors singled out the Tbxt gene as a likely candidate for tail loss? This is from the paper:

Examining non-coding hominoid-specific variants among the genes related to tail development, we recognized an Alu element in the sixth intron of the hominoid TBXT gene (Fig. 1b). This element had the following notable combination of features: (1) a hominoid-specific phylogenetic distribution; (2) presence in a gene known for its involvement in tail formation; and (3) proximity and orientation relative to a neighbouring Alu element. First, this particular hominoid-specific Alu element is from the AluY subfamily, a relatively ‘young’ but not human-specific subfamily shared among the genomes of hominoids and Old World monkeys. Moreover, the inferred insertion time—given the phylogenetic distribution (Fig. 1a)—coincides with the evolutionary period when early hominoids lost their tails. Second, TBXT encodes a highly conserved transcription factor crucial for mesoderm and definitive endoderm formation during embryonic development. Heterozygous mutations in the coding regions of TBXT orthologues in tailed animals such as mouse, Manx cat, dog and zebrafish lead to the absence or reduced forms of the tail, and homozygous mutants are typically non-viable.

In other words it matches the distribution of tails or their absence, mutations in the gene affect tail lengths in mice, the insertion is about the same age as the common ancestor of apes and other primates (25 myr), its function at least suggests the potential to affect tail length, and, finally, mutations of the gene in other animals result in taillessness, including producing MANX CATS. Here’s a tailless Manx male.

Karen Weaver, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

But the real key to how this form of the gene causes tail loss rests in another speculation: there is another Alu element (“AluSx1” in both figures) which is inserted backwards in the same gene, lying between coding regions (exon) 5 and 6. The new AluY element is of a similar sequence to the old one, but in reverse orientation. So, when the Tbxt gene is getting ready to form mRNA, the two Alu elements pair up, which makes a loop of DNA between them that is simply spliced out of the mRNA sequence.

Here’s a diagram of that happening. Note the loop formed at top right by the pairing of the two Alu elements (red and dark gray), a loop that includes a functional part of the gene (exon 6 in royal blue). When the transcript of this gene is made, the code from exon 6 is simply cut out of the mRNA. This produces an incomplete protein product that could conceivably affect the development of the tail.

But does it work that way?

The authors did two tests to show that, in fact, removal of exon 6 in mice does shorten their tails, and in some cases can remove them completely.

The first experiment simply involved inserting a copy of Tbxt missing exon 6 into mice (they did this without the complicated loop-removal mechanism posited above).  Sure enough, mice with one copy of this exon-missing gene showed various alterations of the tail, including no tails, short tails, and kinked tails.

This shows that creating the putative product of the ape loop-formation process, a Tbxt gene missing exon 6, can reduce the tail of mice.

But then the authors went further, because they wanted to know whether putting both the Alu elements AluSx1 and AluY into mice in the same positions they have in primates could produce reduced tails in mice via loop formation.  They did this using a combination of CRISPR genetic engineering and crossing, for mice having two copies of the Tbxt gene that forms loops and excise exon 6 turn out to be lethal.  Viable mice have only one copy of the loop-forming gene.

And when they engineered mice having one copy of the normal Tbxt gene and one engineered copy with the two Alu elements whose pairing eliminated exon 6 (they showed this by sequencing), lo and behold, THEY GOT TAILLESS MICE!  Here’s a photo of the various mice they produced. The two mice on the right have a single copy of the engineered gene with reversed Alu elements that produces a transcript missing exon 6. They are Manx mice! They have no tails! They are bereft of caudal appendages!

f, (from paper) Representative tail phenotypes across mouse lines, including wild type, TbxtinsASAY/insASAY, TbxtinsRCS2/insRCS2 and TbxtinsRCS2/Δexon6. Each included both male (M) and female (F) mice.

This complicated but clever combination of investigation and genetic engineering suggests pretty strongly that tail loss in apes involved the fixation of a mutant Tbxt gene that reduced tails via snipping out of an exon.  This is not a certainty, of course, but the data are supportive in many ways.

So is this likely one mutation that caused apes, over evolutionary time, to lose their tails (we have only a small tail (“coccyx”), consisting of 3-5 fused caudal vertebrae, as shown below in red in the second picture (both are from Wikipedia)

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.DrJanaOfficial

 

Our tail, in red:

The author and licenser of the contents is “BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan.”

Now if this gene was indeed involved in the evolutionary loss of tails in apes, it would constitute a form of “macromutation”: a character change of large effect due to a single mutation. But surely more genes were involved as well. For one thing, even a single copy of this gene causes neural-tube defects, so any advantage of a smaller tail would have to outweigh the disadvantage of the possibly producing a defective embryo or adult. Also, even if this gene is responsible for the missing or tiny tails of apes, there are likely other genes that evolved to further reduce the tail and to mitigate any neural-tube problems that would arise. (Evolution by selection is always a balance between advantageous and deleterious effects: it was advantageous for us to become bipedal, but that came with the bad side effects of bad backs and hernias).

I really like this paper and have no substantial criticisms. The authors did everything they could to test their hypothesis, which stood up well under phylogenetic, temporal, and genetic analysis.  We can’t of course be absolutely sure that the insertion of the AluY element helped the tailed ancestor of apes lose their tails, but I’d put my money on it.

What’s further appealing about this paper is that the genetic underpinning of the tail loss was completely unpredictable: the function of a gene was changed (and its phenotype as well) simply by the insertion of a “jumping gene” into a noncoding part of a functional gene.  That formed a loop that caused a cut in the gene that, ultimately, affected tail formation. Apes with smaller tails presumably had a reproductive advantage over their bigger-tailed confrères, but the genetics of it is complex, weird, and wonderful.

h/t: Matthew

Reference: Xia, B., Zhang, W., Zhao, G. et al. On the genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes. Nature 626, 1042–1048

Well, we’re in serious trouble photo-wise, and I have about five days’ worth of photos left, including Robert Lang’s final three installments of his trip to Antarctica. If you want this feature to continue, please send in your photos.

Today ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis returns with photos of Costa Rican birds. Her captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Costa Rica:  Mostly Big Colorful Birds  

On a recent trip to the Sylvan field station in lovely and unspoiled southwestern Costa Rica, featured in  my last RWP post, I also passed through the small coastal towns of Golfito and Puerto Jimenez and visited the fabled Corcovado National Park.  Today’s post shows more birds seen on these travels — the first three of which have in common that they are large and colorful and nest in tree holes.

Scarlet Macaws (Ara macao) greeted us with noisy screams in Puerto Jimenez.  A half-dozen of them were moving through the Almendra del Mar (Sea Almond, Terminalia catappa) trees and devouring the large oily seeds.   My impression was that these were bickering couples, but I’m no macaw psychologist.  What’s clear is that Costa Rica has done a magnificent job of protecting these once-endangered birds from the illegal pet trade.   We saw many Scarlet Macaws in Golfito as well, zipping in and out of nests in hollow dead palm trees.  We never saw any macaws deep in the forest.

Red-lored Amazons, or Red-lored Parrots (Amazona autumnalis), almost as large as crows, were another common sight and sound in the towns, and also in farmlands and flying high above the forests.   Like the macaws, they have suffered from the pet trade but are doing well here at present.

Yellow-throated Toucans (Ramphastos ambiguus) were frequently seen in both town and forest settings.   What I believe these photos show is a female toucan feeding her young, calling to her mate who calls back, obtaining food from her mate, and returning to their nest.

The rest of these birds are either big, OR colorful, OR treehole-nesting….

Crested Guan (Penelope purpurascens):

Baird’s Trogon (Trogon bairdii), a rare species:

Northern Black-throated Trogon (Trogon tenellus):

Golden-hooded Tanager (Stilpnia larvata):

Golden-naped Woodpeckers (Melanerpes chrysauchen):

The Quote of the Week comes from the Tablet article below, which is worth reading in its entirety (and is free). It’s about how DEI is ruining universities.

But one quote particularly struck me because of its truth and concision, and it’s this one:

As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.

Click headline below to read the whole piece:

h/t: Anna