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Fossil evidence shows that humans have been practising cannibalism for a million years. Now, archaeologists are discovering that some of the time they did it to honour their dead

Fossil evidence shows that humans have a very long history of eating each other. Now, archaeologists are discovering that the practice of cannibalism could be surprisingly compassionate

The death of George Floyd, and his presumed murder by Derek Chauvin with the complicity of several Minneapolis policemen, was an iconic moment in today’s race relations, the most important event leading to the “racial reckoning” of the last few years.  In late December of last year, I posted a movie, “The Fall of Minneapolis” (watch it here), and, after watching it and the included bodycam videos from cops that weren’t allowed into Chauvin’s trial, concluded that there was substantial doubt that Floyd had been murdered murdered, or that Chauvin had intended to do him in.

On December 28, after watching the film, I wrote this:

A few weeks ago I discussed the movie “The fall of Minneapolis”, which you can watch free here. The movie maintains that George Floyd was not murdered by racist cops, but died after he was arrested due to a combination of stress, use of dangerous drugs, and heart and lung problems. Here’s how I summarized the movie at the time:

1. Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
2. The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
3. The [police] bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
4. The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
5. The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
6. The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.

Earlier I put up a discussion between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, both of whom had watched the film and were not only impressed with it but agreed with my take that the “Chauvin murdered Floyd” scenario was likely a distortion. (See also this post by Loury.) It was after this discussion that the movie went public and I watched it.

Now, in the video below, Loury backtracks in his opinion, and several readers have called this backtracking to my attention (including some uncivil ones who basically accused me of being credulous and daring me to post what’s below). But of course if I put out my opinion, and it’s shown to be subsantially weaker than I thought, of course I’m going to post the countervailing arguments.

First, excerpts from Loury’s new Substack post, “We were too quick to praise ‘The Fall of Minneapolis“.  It’s accompanied by a short video (below) which will later be posted in full. When that happens, and the critic, Radley Balko, publishes all of his three-part critique, I’ll weigh in myself. For the time being, let’s withhold any judgment that Floyd was or wasn’t murdered by Derek Chauvin with complicity of other cops. Let’s wait for the evidence. But do watch the film; the links is above.

From Loury:

John and I helped bring a lot of attention to the The Fall of Minneapolis, a documentary by Liz Collin and JC Chaix which argues that Derek Chauvin is not responsible for the death of George Floyd and that Chauvin’s trial was tainted by perjury and manipulation of evidence. We discussed the film on one episode and brought the filmmakers on for a second episode. John and I both came away convinced that Derek Chauvin hadn’t gotten a fair trial and that he may well be innocent. But a couple weeks ago, the journalist Radley Balko published part one of what he says will be a three-part series debunking The Fall of Minneapolis. It was an unsettling read, one that I found so convincing that it’s led me to question my own earlier support of the film.

It was not wrong to call attention to the documentary, nor was it wrong to talk to the filmmakers. But I do wish I had not been so eager to accept their conclusions. I’ve spent years decrying the outsized reaction to the death of George Floyd, the riots and the antiractist mania that followed, and the superficial moralism of progressives who claim to find white supremacy at the root of even the most minuscule social infractions. When I saw a documentary that claimed to locate real, empirical corruption at the heart of the George Floyd case itself, I was primed to believe it.

I’ve had to take stock of my reasons for going all-in on The Fall of Minneapolis without subjecting it to scrutiny befitting the magnitude of its claims. Certainly I was ready to accept those claims, but at some level, did I want to accept them as well? I cannot be certain that my desire to strengthen my argument against George Floyd’s canonization did not neutralize the skepticism that should kick in whenever a shocking claim is made, no matter its ideological implications. The documentary’s counter-narrative fit neatly with my own, which should have moved me to seek further verification rather than accepting it at face value.

As you’ll see in this week’s clip, John doesn’t think we erred all that egregiously. But I do. I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true. I think I’ve succeeded in that where Balko’s critique is concerned, but only to the end of correcting an earlier failure. I sometimes describe myself as “heterodox.” That means looking on all orthodoxies with a critical eye, including the personal orthodoxies we develop over time. Without self-reflection and introspection, heterodoxy risks becoming orthodoxy by another name, a shallow rebrand that betrays its own purpose. As John is fond of saying, that won’t do. I may have fallen short this time. But, as I’m fond of saying, God’s not finished with me yet.

And a bit from the first installment of Balko’s debunking of the film. I’ll read all three parts and weigh in then. But again, realize that the film might have been edited to buttress an ideologue position: Floyd wasn’t murdered. Here’s Balko’s main conclusion in part one:

The documentary makes a lot of outlandish claims, but I want to focus mostly on the two that I’ve seen most often. These are also the two claims that [Coleman] Hughes spends most of his piece promoting.

The first claim is that when Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s back and neck for nine minutes, it could not have been criminal assault because the Minneapolis Police Department has trained its officers — including Chauvin — to use that very technique.

The second claim is that Floyd’s official autopsy found that he died of a heart attack brought on by cardiovascular disease and drug use. Therefore, Chauvin could not have been responsible for Floyd’s death.

Both of these claims are false. The first claim is not only incorrect, the documentary engages in deceptive editing and convenient omissions to push it. In other words, the documentary is lying. The second claim is also incorrect, but the explanation is a bit more complicated.

The new (and truncated) 14-minute discussion between Loury and McWhorter is below.  Both agree that the filmmakers were “dishonest in their depiction” of how Chauvin restrained Floyd. McWhorter asseverates that he and Loury were nevertheless within their rights to call attention to the original documentary, for to ignore it simply because the filmmakers were conservatives would be a mistake. The question was whether these filmmaker/conservatives were not honest actors. McWhorter, while not as convinced as is Loury that the documentary was dishonest and misleading, welcomes the controversy and, like me, will wait until the to-and-fro is over before issuing a conclusion. (Loury seems more worried about being thought of as “too credulous” and for having confirmation bias because he was too woke to be objective.)  I suspect that the two filmmakers will themselves issue a critique of Balko’s critique.

To be fair, Balko is expert in investigating police issues, so I don’t feel as guilty as does Loury for taking the film’s assertions at face value.  But this is how the truth comes out: evidence is presented on both sides, even if one or both sides are ideologically motivated, and then one can try to adjudicate the evidence without being tained by one’s own ideology.

My stand is closer to McWhorter’s. I assumed the filmmakers were working in good faith, and I didn’t have the expertise to judge all the claims. If those claims are shown to be bogus, I’ll retract at least some of my conclusions I gave above. For now, it’s appropriate to withhold judgment on the conclusion that Chauvin, in doing a “neck restraint” of Floyd, was acting according to Minneapolis police instructions, in which case Floyd was the victim of either homicide or murder. I still think people need to watch the film to see what the officers were dealing with: an uncooperative, doped-up individual who resisted following police orders and was taken to the ground because of that. But what follows after Floyd was on the ground is the major issue.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “cynical”, has a sociological bent, coming with the link below:

Professor Al to you, sonny. Comic inspired by the 1st 9 minutes of this video.

“Cynicism is basically an evolutionary heuristic to save people from having to think.”  I believe the paper is this one from 2018, which you can download for free.

Microbes that rapidly convert CO2 to rock could lock away the greenhouse gas in deep underground storage sites, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs

Today we have part 2 of Robert Lang’s seven-part series of his trip to Antarctica in a small boat (part 1 is here). And today the PENGUINS make their appearance, including two videos. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can click the photos to enlarge them.

Antarctica Part 2: Gentoo Penguins

We saw three types of penguins along the Antarctic Peninsula: Adélies (Pygoscelis adeliae), Chinstraps (Pygoscelis antarcticus), and Gentoos (Pygoscelis papua). The most common were Gentoos, which will be the topic of this collection.

All three are so-called “brush-tailed” penguins, with short, stiff tails that they use like the third leg of a stool when standing and use like a rudder when swimming. Gentoos are distinguished by their orange bill and white patches just above the eyes:

Their colonies are cacophonous, as pairs call with a gurgling “haw-hee-haw” call that, when massed, sounds like a herd of donkeys:

They also have long orange toes, that look to me like a bundle of black-tipped carrots.

Although we often saw them nesting near the shore, we also saw rookeries hundreds of feet up the cliffs. Hard to imagine having to climb up and down every time they go out for food or return to the nest:

To get to and from their rookeries, they follow well-trammeled pathways across snow and rocks. In the snowfields, their paths get beaten down into troughs, which are colored by their guano, pink from the diet of krill:

While their waddles on land are almost comical, once in the water, they are graceful and agile. Here’s a group of them “porpoising,” leaping out of the water as they travel:

And to get a sense of their speed under (and over) water, here’s a short video of a group feeding near our two zodiacs:

They are devoted parents. The parents alternate tending the egg(s) and feeding. Here’s one sitting on its egg while it tends the pebbles that make up the nest. If you turn up the sound, you can hear their calls:

Here’s a gentoo feeding its chick:

And one feeding two chicks:

A close-up of a chick. Note the fringed tongue:

Gentoos come ashore to molt and molt all at once. Not many people know (*) that when a gentoo molts its head like this, it takes about 3 weeks to grow a new one:

(*) “Not many people know” because of course that’s not true. (They do molt their feathers over the course of a few weeks.) They also have very flexible necks, as that photo shows.

One of the islands we visited, Deception Island, is an active volcano and had steam vents along the shore. They made for some eerie photos and videos: “Gentoos in the Mist,” as we visited these gentle not-quite-giants:

Next: More penguins: Adélies and Chinstraps!

During courtship rituals, female scorpions appear to willingly let males sting them, which may be a way for them to evaluate prospective mates

The Mayo Clinic is a prestigious medical institution with a deserved international reputation. It also promotes rank pseudoscience. It does this, apparently, for all the reasons we have explored here at SBM over the years. I have seen first hand how one or a few true believers can promote so-called alternative medicine at their institutions, meeting little resistance from colleagues and administrators […]

The post Mayo Clinic Promotes Reiki first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas frequently toy with their peers by poking, tickling or stealing from them, perhaps showing behaviours that were prerequisites for human joking

Lucy Aharish is the first Arab Muslim television presenter on mainstream Israeli t.v.  Here’s a video, highly touted on the Free Press site, in which Bari Weiss interviews Aharish for an hour: “This Muslim Israeli woman is the hope of the Middle East“.

I’m not sure what the title means by “hope of the Middle East,” unless it buttresses Aharish’s claim that Muslims who commit or even approve of terrorism are not “real Muslims”, and thus there is hope for peace and comity between Israelis and “real” Muslims in Palestine.

A bit about Aharish from Wikipedia:

As of 2018, Aharish serves as a news anchor for Reshet 13. She was previously a morning anchor on a current-affairs show for its predecessor Channel 2, a presenter of the Evening Edition for i24NEWS, a news presenter and reporter for Channel 10, a co-host for Radio 99, a late-night co-host for Channel 1, as well as a co-host for Kan 11.

The interview has its ups and downs, but I think it’s worth watching for two reasons. First, it shows how even Israeli Arabs are subject to racism (Aharish tells several stories, including her failure to get paid for a speaking engagement simply because of her religion and ethnicity).  But she also claims that Israel is not an “apartheid” state, citing those Israeli Arab Muslims who have risen to high places (both of her sisters have good jobs, and of course Israeli Arabs do occupy high places, including the Knesset and the Supreme Court). So apparently Aharish believes that although there’s residual racism in Israel, it doesn’t affect Israeli Muslims’ opportunities or life prospects. (I’m not quite sure how, if there’s racism, it can NOT play out in differential treatment!) But it’s certainly true that Israel is a ton less racist than Palestine or other Arab countries—places where Jews often can’t even live, much less rise to decent positions.

At many points Aharish is moved to tears, especially when saying things like, “Hamas murdered in the sense of compassion in me, the humanity in me.” She argues that after the October 7 attacks she had lost empathy for the Palestinians, but now is realizing that  “Israel cannot afford to lose its humanity” and emphasizes the need to make the next generation of inhabitants of Gaza and West Bank become neighbors to the extent that they could forge a peace with Israel.

As I said, I find the most dubious claim to be Aharish’s insistence that terrorists, as well as those Arab Muslims in Palestine and other Arab countries who sympathize with terrorists, are not genuine Muslims. She argues that this extremism “is not Islam.  This is not being a Muslim. This is being a monster.” But the polls taken in Palestine and other Arab countries show the contrary: a huge proportion of inhabitants, if not most of them, approved of the October 7 massacre and don’t want Israel to exist. And, of course, Sam Harris has argued that this form of extremism is really inherent in Islam. All you have to do is to read the Qur’an to see its emphasis on killing apostates, infidels and Jews. To be sure, the Bible is pretty genocidal, too, but the difference is that Christianity has now largely been stripped of its homicidal dicta while Islam has not.

It is, I think, a debatable matter of whether most Muslims fall into Aharish’s definition of “extremists.” Sometimes it sounds as if she’s making a virtue of necessity.

But, as I said, this is worth listening to. For a shorter take on her views, also showing her emotionality (a good thing, one rarely seen in an anchorperson), see this CNN video.

Here’s the intro to the interview at the Free Press.

Lucy Aharish is one of the most prominent television broadcasters in Israel. But that’s not the thing that makes her exceptional. The thing that makes Lucy stand out is that she is the first Arab Muslim news presenter on mainstream, Hebrew-language Israeli television.

Born and raised in a small Jewish town in Israel’s Negev desert as one of the only Arab Muslim families there, Lucy often says that she sees herself as sitting on a fence. By that she doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to take a side—as you’ll see, she is a woman of strong convictions, bravery, and moral backbone. What she means is that she has a unique lens through which to view the divisions in Israeli society, the complexity of the country’s national identity, and the Middle East more generally.

That complexity was on display in 2018 when Lucy’s marriage to a Jewish Israeli actor (Tsahi Halevi of Fauda fame) sparked a nasty backlash from the country’s religious far-right.

Lucy has long been a vocal critic of those peripheral far-right voices—the ones who are inclined to oppose her marriage. She’s also long been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But she is equally critical of her fellow Arab Israelis, particularly of Arab violence and of the Arab leadership that she says condones it.

An Arab. A proud Israeli. A Muslim married to a Jew. In short, Lucy Aharish is an iconoclast.

I sat down with Lucy recently in Tel Aviv. We talked about the October 7 massacre and its impact on the country and her family—her husband put on his uniform and headed to the south within hours of Hamas’s invasion of the country. Left alone with her son, she contemplated “hiding him in the washing machine,” should terrorists arrive at her doorstep.

And the video:

Millions of U.S. households would benefit from heat pumps, but the cost of installing the technology needs to come down to make their use a more attractive proposition.

Researchers are further improving CRISPR's versatility to engineer new grasses and yeasts for biochemical production.

Researchers have used equipment originally intended for astronomy observation to capture transformations in the nuclear structure of atomic nuclei, reports a new study.

Since the turn of the century, six new chemical elements have been discovered and subsequently added to the periodic table of elements, the very icon of chemistry. These new elements have high atomic numbers up to 118 and are significantly heavier than uranium, the element with the highest atomic number (92) found in larger quantities on Earth. This raises questions such as how many more of these superheavy species are waiting to be discovered, where -- if at all -- is a fundamental limit in the creation of these elements, and what are the characteristics of the so-called island of enhanced stability. In a recent review, experts in theoretical and experimental chemistry and physics of the heaviest elements and their nuclei summarize the major challenges and offer a fresh view on new superheavy elements and the limit of the periodic table.

A new study by researchers has revealed a sustainable method of efficiently converting waste heat into electricity using Irish wood products, while minimizing costs and environmental impact.

The properties of supramolecular polymers are dictated by the self-assembled state of the molecules. However, not much is known about the impact of morphologies on the properties of nano- and mesoscopic-scale polymeric assemblies. Recently, a research team demonstrated how terminus-free toroids and random coils derived from the same luminescent molecule show different photophysical properties. The team also presented a novel method for purifying the toroidal structure.

The properties of supramolecular polymers are dictated by the self-assembled state of the molecules. However, not much is known about the impact of morphologies on the properties of nano- and mesoscopic-scale polymeric assemblies. Recently, a research team demonstrated how terminus-free toroids and random coils derived from the same luminescent molecule show different photophysical properties. The team also presented a novel method for purifying the toroidal structure.

Chiral skyrmions are a special type of spin textures in magnetic materials with asymmetric exchange interactions. They can be treated as quasi-particles and carry integer topological charges. Scientists have recently studied the random walk-behaviors of chiral skyrmions by simulating their dynamics within a ferromagnetic layer surrounded by chiral flower-like obstacles. The simulations reveal that the system behaves like a topological sorting device, indicating its use in information processing and computing devices.

Chiral skyrmions are a special type of spin textures in magnetic materials with asymmetric exchange interactions. They can be treated as quasi-particles and carry integer topological charges. Scientists have recently studied the random walk-behaviors of chiral skyrmions by simulating their dynamics within a ferromagnetic layer surrounded by chiral flower-like obstacles. The simulations reveal that the system behaves like a topological sorting device, indicating its use in information processing and computing devices.

A new study examines the circumstances behind who is found at fault when cars hit pedestrians in an urban area. Results showed that the environment where the crash took place -- especially the types of roads and the amount of access to marked crosswalks -- played a key role in whether the pedestrian or the driver was blamed for the collision.