Why Evolution is True Feed

Matthew sent me this qui, involving ten pairs of photos in Brittanica Education. The object is to see whether you can tell which is generated by AI and which is real.  Click on the headline below to go to the quiz, which is fun to take. After you click on which photo you think is real, the explanation of why you should have known pops up.

Here is one pair of photos, but take the quiz yourself, which is quick.  Matthew says “I got 10/10”, but poor PCC(E) got only 9/10. Some are more obvious than others.

Have a look and then go to the quiz. Give us your score and then beef if you wish. This is the last one:

Today’s photos are by reader Ephraim Heller, and come from Tanzania (see his earlier photos from that location here). Ephriam’s links and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Brief introduction: These photos were taken on safari in Tanzania in April 2025. Most are from the Serengeti National Park with a few from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

Today’s photos focus on antelope (hartebeest and wildebeest) and zebra.

Zebras scratching and socializing:

Zebra suckling her youngster:

Zebra baby, fur still wet from birth and wobbling on its legs:

Hartebeest mom watching over sleeping baby. According to the African Wildlife Foundation: “The hartebeest is a large, fawn-colored antelope. Their most distinctive characteristics are a steeply sloping back, long legs, and elongated snout. Despite their ungainly appearance, they are as elegant, if not more than, other antelopes. They are one of the most recent and highly evolved ungulates and are far from clumsy. In fact, they are one of the fastest antelopes and most enduring runners — capable of reaching speeds of up to 70 km/h. These qualities gave rise to their name, which means ‘tough ox.’ Their sedentary lifestyle seems to inhibit the mixing of populations and gene flow, and as a result, there are several subspecies of hartebeest.”

Wildebeest beginning their annual migration. This line of animals was miles long and they didn’t stop running during the hour that I observed them:

Dawn wildebeests:

For our final video of the day, we have a two-minute clip of a very gutsy man rescuing a big male kangaroo who was caught in a metal cable. All’s well that ends well.

Kangaroos are reputed to be dangerous, for they can kick you hard. But I found only two reported human deaths due to kangaroos. The animal most likely to kill you in Australia, according to Wikipedia’s “animal attacks in Australia” article, is snakes, with between 3 and 10 deaths per year.

More video today!  This one, of course, was suggested to me by YouTube, since I watch a lot of food videos as well as history videos. And it’s exactly the kind of video that I would have to click on, as it lists the favorite foods of every American President.

Here are the Presidents who, in my view, had the best taste (you’ll have to watch to see their favorites):

Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Lyndon Johnson***
Jimmy Carter

LBJ gets the kudos for liking the best dish, and, looking over the list, I see that it’s weighted with Presidents who liked Southern food. No surprise, as it’s America’s best regional cuisine.  They do mention a McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish as Trump’s favorite, but I thought he liked Big Macs better. Either way, he doesn’t make the list.

A friend who is laid up with covid, and watching New Atheist videos (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc.) for the first time, sent me a new (six-day-old) [rp=atheist video made by someone I didn’t know. That would be Darante’ LaMar Martin, a former pastor who deconverted. In this 17.3-minute video, he makes two assertions: that there is no tangible evidence supporting the miracles of the Bible and thus the foundational claims of Christianity; and the spread of Christianity was based on “imperial enforcement” by king rather than on its truth. (Later adherents would have no way on checking the truth, anyway, and we know that the sole evidence underlying the world’s most popular religion, with 2.6 billion adherents, is solely the Bible. There is no extra-Biblical evidence for a person, much less his acts, on whom the New Testament is based.

You probably have heard some of the arguments against Jesus’s miracles before (e.g., the lack of contemporaneous evidence for a Jesus Man, as well as the absence of evidence that, upon the Crucifixion, the sky darkened and dead saints emerged from their graves. But the stuff about the subsequent spread of the faith, like the story of Constantine’s conversion (or rather, cooption), was new to me. (I can’t vouch for this other stuff; perhaps readers can judge it.)

It’s not clear whether Darante‘ believes that there was a Jesus figure on whom the faith was based. He implies that there was a “spiritual figure”  named Christus, a man who didn’t have a lot of followers but was executed by the Romans because he posed a “fringe threat.”  As he says, “The Romans didn’t kill a king; they killed a failed prophet.”

About the spread of Christianity he adds this: “The story of Christianity’s rise is not a story of truth triumphing over doubt. It’s a story of power rewriting the rules of belief. Christianity didn’t spread because Jesus walked out of a tomb. It spread because Christianity coopted its rivals, aligned with empire, absorbed its enemies, and forged its own legitimacy with law, violence, and theological branding.”

You know of prominent Christians who expound their beliefs in the mainstream media.  Some, like Andrew Sullivan, irk me because while I admire their political views, I see their religious belief as a form of irrationality or even hypocrisy: they accept things without the evidence they’d demand for political assertions.  Others include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’m not too hard on because she found religion to be the only palliative for her severe, suicidal depression.

The most irksome is Ross Douthat, whose new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is flogging it everywhere (the NYT gives him a big platform), and making no bones about believing in not only Jesus and the Crucifixion, but also the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels.  While Sullivan and more liberal believers are clearly reluctant to describe the contents of their beliefs, Douthat has purchased the whole hog and proffers slices of ham to everyone.

Martin’s YouTube page, with more atheist videos, is here. (try “The ten top lies I told as a pastor.“) He has a charismatic style of speaking, and I can imagine that he was a good preacher before he saw the light.

 

We have 2-3 more groups of photos, so please send in any good ones you have.

Today’s photos are of plants, and were taken by Aussie Julia Monaghan. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Australian Native Plants (mostly)

These photos were taken in my and my neighbour’s garden, in the Lake Macquarie area of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest coastal salt water lakes. As Australia often has a very hot, dry climate (thought we do have flooding at the moment), plants have many different adaptations to cope with the generally harsh climate, often growing in poor soils with full sun and low water supply. I took my photos using my Samsung phone.

Hairpin Banksia flower (Banksia spinulosa). A species of small woody shrub in the Proteaceae family, native to eastern Australia. The spikes are gold or sometimes yellowish. Specimens of Banksia were first collected by naturalists Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, on the Endeavour during Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific Ocean:

Hairpin Banksia bush (Banksia spinulosa). Banksia are adapted to fire, which plays an important role in seed release and germination. The plant’s reproductive structures, the woody follicles, store its seeds and only release them when exposed to the heat of a bushfire:

Hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa) post pollination. As the flowers die they will develop into woody, fruiting cones:

Grevillea Mason’s Hybrid (Grevillea banksii × Grevillea bipinnatifidajubata) are a small spreading shrub that attract and feed native birds throughout sping and summer. A cultivar from a genus of over 350 flowering plants in the family Proteaceae, they are also known as  spider flowers.  This Grevillea is also named the Ned Kelly after one of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers:

Grevillea ‘Peaches and Cream’ (Grevillea bankssi × Grevillea bipinnatifida). Another Grevillea cultivar, their nectar is a reliable food source from winter to spring that feeds honeyeaters such as lorikeets and parrots. Grevilleas are generally very heat and drought tolerant:

Stiff Bottlebrush (Calistemon rigidus) attracts a variety of birds, from nectar-feeding species such as honeyeaters, to seed-eating birds such as cockatoos. Its dense foliage acts as a habitat for many different birds, as it provides thick cover and many nesting opportunities:

Purple Morning Glory (Ipomoea indica) is a climbing vine that grows quickly and smothers other plants. Considered a reportable weed, it was introduced from  Mexico or Central America as a garden plant but has become established in different ecosystems:

Coastal or Cairo Morning Glory (Ipomoea cairica) is another climbing vine introduced from Africa or Asia, that grows rapidly, smothering other plants. It has also been classified as an environmental weed:

Kangaroo Paw Bush – Pink (Anigozanthus) are a smaller cultivar of the Kangaroo Paw. They are very tolerant of drought and coastal conditions once they are established. They come in a variety of vibrant colours, including brilliant red, bright pink and bright yellows:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Pink ( Anigozanthus). Their tufted flowers covered with velvety hairs resemble the paw of a kangaroo, hence their name:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Yellow (Anigozanthus):

Grasstree (Xanthorrhoea australis). These are ancient trees consisting of a thick trunk made up of a dense layer of old leaves forming a protective layer around a softer core, with a tuft of newer leaves forming a crown at the top of the tree. These trees are extremely slow growing and may take many years to flower. While bushfires may burn the leaves and blacken the trunk, the plant’s living core is protected as it sits underground. In this species, fire stimulates flowering:

It’s time for another duck report, though I’ve been very tardy. The ducklings have grown a lot since the photos I show here, but the penultimate photo tells you what they looked like yesterday.

First, here’s lazy Mordecai, who is loath to fly. When he encounters stairs (this is before the ducklings hatched), he hops up them rather than flies:

The brood in the pond. They were still small when these pictures were taken, at about a week old (they’re now 19 days old).

Here’s Esther and her brood when they were two days old. Note that there are seven ducklings. We lost one to unknown causes :-(, but the rest are alive and healthy.

Mom and brood sunning on a stone:

Nap time!

One week old:

The babies love to climb on stones, and fortunately the pond is furnished with lots of them. They do this to dry off and also to warm up. Esther, always attentive, is right beside them. She’s turned out to be a great mother despite her hamhanded building of a nest on the ground.

Mordecai, whom I haven’t seen in 3.5 days, would stand guard while Esther was with the brood. They were small enough at a week old that she could sit on them all, but now they’re too big (see below):

A goose-stepping one-week-old duckling:

They like to swim in the discarded plastic pots previously (and unsuccessfully) used to grow plants. The pots have been left in the pond.

The Lab School teachers (a K-12 University of Chicago-affiliated school) know that the ducklings are here, and I’ve been asked to show them the ducks and answer their questions twice. I did it first with the kindergarten students, and below I’m talking to the 3rd through 5th graders while feeding the ducks. It’s a great joy to do this and field diverse questions of the students. (A frequent one: “Do the ducklings have names?”  Answer: “No, because we can’t tell them apart.”)

Another adorable week-old duckling:

. . . and here’s a photo I took yesterday. Look how they’ve grown! These are 19-day-old ducklings, so this represents about two weeks of growth from the photos above. Don’t worry; I have more photos and videos documenting their growth. These have full crops as they’ve just been fed.

And Mordecai, ever watchful (and plump). He seems to have disappeared, and I hope he returns. But his job as father is largely done. He did try to drive away invading drakes, but now Esther will have to do that herself. (I was told that last night she drove away three drakes!)

I’ve posted her often about the follies of “de-extincting” animals like the dire wolf, dodo, and woolly mammoth, culminating in a Boston Globe op-ed on May 1.  I’ve been quite critical of de-extinction claims, particularly those of Colossal Biosciences, which claims to have de-extincted the dire wolf, is on track to de-extinct woolly mammoths by 2028, and says it’s working on bringing back the dodo and the thylacine. My Globe op-ed explains four major problems with Colossal’s program. The first was this:

First, and most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.

In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”

I am of course not the first scientist to point this out. Several, including Tori Herridge and Adam Rutherford, have written severely critical takes on Colossal’s claims.  But the mainstream media, by and large, ate up those claims.  Science journals and popular-science magazines like Science and New Scientist, however, did publish trenchant criticisms.

I believe Colossal was stung by these criticisms, which I’m sure they didn’t anticipate—though they should have. The company pushed back, but eventually, in an article in New Scientist (see below and my post), quoted Colossal’s chief scientific officer, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro, as finally admitting that they really didn’t produce dire wolves, but grey wolves with a handful of edited genes that supposedly made the tweaked canids look more like ancient dire wolves.

Click below to see  Colossal’s partial retraction, which is also archived here:

Here’s how Beth Shapiro walked back the dire wolf de-extinction claim:

Well, yes, they had said they were dire wolves.  As the NYT reported on May 11:

The resulting animals [the gene-edited solves] were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”

Here’s Shapiro saying the same thing in a Bluesky post:

A statement from our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Beth Shapiro, on the dire wolf project pic.twitter.com/upl3WPSeUw

— Colossal Biosciences® (@colossal) April 10, 2025

Oy!  Everybody can disagree and everyone can be right!  All must have prizes!  She says that Colossal chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves. That’s a highly watered-down version of the morphological species concept, one of the alternative species concepts that Allen Orr and I criticized in our book Speciation (see chapter 1 and Appendix). But the most trenchant and humorous criticism of using this concept to rescue Colossal’s claim also came from the NYT piece:

A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”

LOL.

In fact, we have no idea whether the three animals produced by Colossal even look a lot like the extinct dire wolf. For one thing, Colossal used mutations known in wolves and dogs (not taken from the dire wolf genome) to make the three living individuals white.  We don’t know if dire wolves were white, and some think they were reddish-brown, which seems more appropriate given that they didn’t live in the Arctic. (They lived in woodlands in the tropics and temperate zone.) And, as I’ve emphasized at great length, they can’t give the de-extincted animals the brains of the original species, for we don’t know which genes control the brain differences, much less what the brain differences were. Absent that ability, no de-extincted animal can behave like its model—something crucial if you want, as Colossal claims, to restore these animals to their “original” habitat.

But where we were as of yesterday was that Colossal, via Beth Shapiro, had finally admitted that they had not produced dire wolves but genetically tweaked gray wolves (of the 20 tweaks, five came from mutations in dogs and gray wolves, not from the dire wolf genome).

Now, however, they’ve walked it back again!  The tweet below shows a statement sent to New Scientist by a spokesperson at Colossal. Jacob Aron is the magazine’s news editor and he, like all of us, is now deeply confused. Colossal says that yes, they DID make dire wolves:

Colossal has sent us a statement, which we've added to the story. I don't feel the situation is any clearer…

— Jacob Aron (@jjaron.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T11:14:21.057Z

The New Scientist article now has this “correction:

Yep, let me put that in big letters: “WITH THOSE EDITS, WE HAVE BROUGHT BACK THE DIRE WOLF”.  And even using the concept of “functional de-extinction” is bogus, for they know nothing about the function (behavior, etc.) of the dire wolf.  All we know is that we have three white-colored gray wolves that may have bigger heads than did gray wolves when the trio grows up.  But 20 genetic tweaks is a teeny, tiny fraction of the thousands of differences between the extinct and the de-extincted creature, including the missing differences in brain structure.

The impression I get is that Colossal is now in PR chaos, stung by criticisms made by scientists and quoted in the press. They are desperate to say that they really have de-exincted animals despite the fact that all they have are three white canids, each with 15 DNA letters changed from gray wolf code to code taken from the dire wolf. Really, by any stretch of the imagination these are not members of a resurrected species. And the more Colossal opens its yap, now contradicting itself twice, the less respect I have for it.

After Shapiro admitted that Colossal hadn’t resurrected dire wolves, one of my colleagues posted this on Facebook:

I’m OK with this…I like it when scientists admit that they were wrong, or over-stated something. Although the initial press release was misleading at best, I’m glad that they clarify that these were not really Dire Wolves.

Sadly, they now say that they really are dire wolves. I’ve informed said colleague about the update, and we’ll see what he/she says.

h/t: Matthew

Hey, folks, this is the penultimate batch of photos I have. Please send me more!

As it’s Sunday, we have photos from John Avise, continuing his series on dragonflies and damselflies of North America. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 6

This week I continue my series of posts on Dragonflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’ve gone down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name, and also show the state where I took each photo.  Next week, PCC(E) willing,  we’ll probably start a short series on Dragonflies’ close cousins, the Damselflies (also in the taxonomic Order Odonata).

Wandering Glider, Pantala flavescens, male (California):

White-faced Meadowhawk, Sympetrum obtrusum. male (Wisconsin):

White-faced Meadowhawk, another male (Michigan):

White-faced Meadowhawk, female (Wisconsin):

Widow Skimmer, Libellula luctuosa, male (Wisconsin):

Widow Skimmer, female (Wisconsin):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, Sympetrum vicinum, male  (Michigan):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, female (Michigan):

Yellow-legged Meadowhawk, mating pair, (Michigan):

As you know, Colossal Biosciences, a company heavily funded by donors who include Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods, claims that it “de-extincted” the defunct dire wolf, and says it will have woolly mammoths on the ground within three years.  This claims are grossly misleading, as I pointed out in a recent Boston Globe op-ed. 

The press and much of the public, of course, reacted with joy at the notion that we could bring back charismatic extinct species, although here and there scientists like me would show why these claims are overblown, largely because the “de-extincted” species would represent only modern species that had had just a tiny handful of genetic edits making them resemble the extinct one.  Important adaptations in the extinct species, most notably those involving physiology and behavior (the latter would require edits to genes in the brain that we don’t know), would not appear in the de-extincted species.  As I wrote in my piece:

. . . . . most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.

In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”

Now, according to a New Scientist article below (click headline to read archived version, or find it here), the chief scientific officer of Colossal has finally admitted, after claiming otherwise, that they really haven’t produced dire wolves. As we critics maintained, they’ve produced grey wolves with a few traits that might have been present in dire wolves. But even their admission of having distorted what they did is disingenuous, as they claim they never said what they in fact did say.

I’ve put an excerpt (indented) below:

Excerpt:

The dire wolf is “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”, Colossal Biosciences claimed on 7 April. And many people seemed to believe it. New Scientist was one of the few media outlets to reject the claim, pointing out that the animals created by Colossal are just grey wolves with a few gene edits.

Now, in a subsequent interview, Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro appears to agree. “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned,” she tells New Scientist. “And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”

I haven’t seen the interview, but. . . .

Richard Grenyer at the University of Oxford says this is a major departure from what Colossal has said previously. “I read that as a clear statement of her view of what they did and didn’t do – and that what they didn’t do was bring back a dire wolf from extinction.”

“I think there is a serious inconsistency between the contents of the statement and the actions and publicity material – including the standard content of the website, not just [the] press briefing around the dire wolf – of the company,” he says.

For instance, the Colossal press release announcing the birth of the gene-edited wolves refers to them as “dire wolves” throughout. Shapiro defended this claim in an interview with New Scientist on 7 April.

“We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal,” she said at the time.

I know of no biologist who adheres to the morphological species concept, and even if they do, they wouldn’t say “if they look like species X (with “like” being totally ambiguous), then they are members of species X. A superficial resemblance is not enough, and even then we don’t know what the real, extinct dire wolf looked like.

See my analogy with the Ferrari above, or, in a funny analogy in a NYT critique of Colossal, there’s this:

Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”

If you’ve followed Colossal’s statements, or gone to the de-extinction part of its website, the company is still claiming that it’s more or less bringing back species, though as I recall from earlier versions, they’ve walked back some of their claims. Now, for instance, they single out just six physical or physiological traits in the woolly mammoth that they’re trying to tweak, and they are still claiming that their efforts will make serious inroads on the problem of species extinction.

Here’s a kicker. Colossal engineered white coats into the three faux “dire wolves,” apparently because the animals (made famous by the t.v. series “Game of Thrones) were white on television. But. . .

It is actually unclear whether the gene-edited wolves look like dire wolves. For instance, there is some evidence dire wolves had reddish rather than white coats, according to Claudio Sillero at the University of Oxford.

And here’s one more claim that isn’t all what it seems to be:

Yet even when Sillero and other experts put out a statement saying the gene-edited grey wolves aren’t dire wolves, the company stuck to its guns. “[W]e stand by our decision to refer to Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi colloquially as dire wolves,” Colossal said in a statement on X. [JAC: Don’t bother looking up the tweet, as it’s no longer about dire wolves.]

But in her more recent interview with New Scientist, Shapiro claims Colossal made it clear from the start that the animals are just gene-edited grey wolves.

“We didn’t ever hide that that’s what it was. People were mad because we were calling them dire wolves,” she says. “Then they say to us, but they’re just grey wolves with 20 edits. But the point is we said that from the beginning. They’re grey wolves with 20 edits.”

Well, this is partly true. There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.

On Colossal’s website, you can still see them claiming that they de-extincted the dire wolf:

Note Colossal’s claim that they “successfully restored a once-eradicated species”.  Now that is simply wrong. They used 15 edits taken from the dire wolf genome to produce a gray wolf that has only a tiny, tiny portion of dire wolf genome. Were I in Colossal, I’d simply drop the word “de-extinction.” But of course you don’t attract donor or make money by saying that you’re “tweaking an existing species to look like an extinct one.”

Trump continues to go after Harvard, ostensibly because of its pervasive antisemitism (granted, President Alan Garber says that the climate is still antisemitic and he himself has been a victim). However, Trump is punishing the wrong people for Harvard’s presumed crimes, and those include researchers whose grants have been cut or rescinded.

Now he’s taken an even more egregious step: threatening to ban the school’s ability to accept international students unless it coughs up a pile of information about all of Harvard’s foreign students.  Click the headline from April 17 below to read, or find the article archived here:

An excerpt:

The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision — which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body — after a back-and-forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move intensifies the administration’s attempt to upend the culture of higher education by directly subverting the ability of one of the nation’s premier universities to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world. That capability, across all of academia, has long been one of the greatest sources of academic, economic and scientific strength in America.

It is also likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the Trump administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” a letter to the university from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security said the action applied to current and future students.

“Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the department said in a news release after Ms. Noem posted the administration’s letter on social media later on Thursday.

Not only that, but current foreign students have to find another place to study, pronto. Do you think that’s easy? And of course Trump has a way to enforce this plan: all he has to do is revoke the visas of foreign students.

Granted, a lot of dosh is involved, as foreign students tend to pay full fare:

The administration’s decision is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the 2025-26 school year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students. (Harvard notes it is need-blind for all students, regardless of nationality.)

You can read the letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem here, which lays out what Harvard has to cough up to prevent loss of its foreign students. It was apparently sent to the school

I don’t think Harvard responded by the April 30 deadline, and they have responded this way:

Harvard relayed those concerns to the administration on April 30. On the same day, the university’s executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, issued a public letter that vowed the school would provide the administration only with information “required by law” and urged students to “stay as focused as possible on your academic pursuits.”

The administration responded the following week, notifying Harvard that the school’s response did not satisfy Ms. Noem’s request, the people said. In the same message, the administration appeared to narrow its request by asking for information on international students who met any one of four criteria.

Noem then disqualified Harvard from the student visa program. I have just learned that Harvard has filed a lawsuit over this latest action and has filed a restraining order against the government (you can read the new suit here). I haven’t read it yet,  and though I’m not a lawyer, I think the university has a good case. Harvard is being singled out among all American universities in this way (some are even more antisemitic than Harvard) and the government’s dismissing of foreign applicants has never been done before. I’m not sure whether selective enforcement is grounds to sue, but you can be sure that Harvard will mount a case.

One quarter of Harvard’s students are foreign, and they are essential to Harvard being Harvard. Further, it’s inimical to scholarship to prevent students who want to study at Harvard from coming here, denying the world the ability to send people to an American university renowned for producing brilliant foreign scholars.

This morning, Steve Pinker published a long op-ed in the NYT on the “Harvard derangement syndrome” of the administration. Click on the headline below to read it, or find it archived here:

An excerpt (Steve first mentions all the pieces he’s written criticizing Harvard):

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just forbade Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.

Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.

He admits that Harvard still has problems:

Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.

. . .The most painful indictment of Harvard is its alleged antisemitism — not the old-money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III, but a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry. A recent, long-awaited report detailed many troubling incidents. Jewish students have felt intimidated by anti-Israel protests that have disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life, often met with a confused response by the university. Members of the teaching staff have gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming. Many Jewish students, particularly Israelis, reported being ostracized or demonized by their peers.

As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!

I’m glad there’s some Yiddish in there.  He notes that withholding grant money hurts Jews than other groups, and is hypocritical given Trump’s past statements:

Just as clear is what won’twork: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.

The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Indeed. It’s natural that a populist and delusional President will go after America’s most elite university.

. . . . Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.

Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

Pinker feels that Harvard is capable of reforming itself, and in fact is now doing so. But even if some of the reforms coincide with those demanded by the Trump administration, it’s simply bad for the government to mold universities to its liking. Withholding grants and revoking the visas of foreign students will not cure Harvard of antisemitism.

Trump is violating the third of Haidt and Lukianoff’s “great untruths” which, ironically, are supposed to motivate young people, not universities:

“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

Read the whole op-ed, written with Pinker’s typical panache; he concludes that, for Harvard, the “appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.” Sadly, Trump has already wielded the knife.

h/t Greg Mayer

Reader Ephraim Heller sends some lovely photos from his safari in Tanaznia in April 2025. Emphraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Today’s photos focus on lions (Panthera leo). [JAC: I especially love this one]:

This is the last (I hope) of three posts on a topic I’m reading about: academic freedom (I have to be on a panel about the topic in June). Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. I won’t reprise what I said in those posts except to summarize their main points:

Post 1: The “clash of ideas” touted by Mill and others as the primary virtue of free speech, assuming that this clash will produce the truth, is in fact ineffective at furnishing us with the truth, for truth is ascertained not by a collision of ideas given equal weight, but from empirical investigation (“science construed broadly”). Nevertheless, free speech is a sine qua non for democracy, whose working reflects popular opinion, and popular opinion is the foundational turtle of democracy.

Post 2: Academic freedom, the right of scholars to study, research, and teach what they want without interference, is essential for finding the truth about anything (“truth” is what exists in the universe). This does involve the clash of ideas mentioned above, but not all ideas are regarded as equal under academic freedom: some have more credibility than others, viz., evolution vs. creationism. Further, unlike the egalitarianism of the public square, academic freedom assumes a meritocracy and also involves scholarly behavior that would seem to (but doesn’t) violate the First Amendment, like compelled speech (a professor, for example, must teach her topic and not some other topic).  Finally, scholarly standards differ from discipline to discipline, and so the notion of “what academic freedom entails” will also differ:  “success” in doing literary criticism, for example, is very different from “success” in molecular biology.  I maintain further, that the notion of “truth” isn’t relevant to much of humanities, for example literary criticism, music, art, or ethics. There is no empirical truth to be found there, but nevertheless the clash of ideas is still essential to dispel error. (“You can’t prove that Spinoza said that.”)

The more I read, the more disagreement I find about what academic freedom really means and how it relates to free speech. Is it covered by the First Amendment? (some say “yes”)—or is it something different? Is academic freedom something possessed by professors, universities, students, or all of the above?  I would answer to the first part “no,” since “freedom of thought” isn’t covered by the First Amendment. But I read last night that the Supreme Court has deemed academic freedom not only a First-Amendment right, but one that applies to all universities, be they public or private. (The First Amendment applies only to public universities, since they’re an arm of the government, though many universities voluntarily adhere to its standards).

As I said, every private school, including Hamline University where a professor was fired for showing an image of Mohammed, has academic freedom for its faculty; the fired Hamline professor was defended by many (including the AAUP) for having her academic freedom violated, and she settled with Hamline. (The President of the College subsequently resigned.

I emphasize that when I say that many areas of the humanities  are incapable of finding truth, that is not to denigrate them or deem them inferior to science (see a list of their areas here). For humanities have their own ambit. Philosophy keeps us thinking straight and prevents us from falling into error, literature puts us into the shoes and minds of other people, and music and art give us beauty. Life without humanities would be dull indeed, and I’ve always said that in general scientists know more about and appreciate the humanities more than humanities people know about and appreciate science.

This leaves one question: what about institutional neutrality—the principle that universities should not make ideological or political pronouncements unless they bear directly on the mission of the university? (This was of course first embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Principle.)  The purpose of this principle is to avoid the chilling of speech that would occur if a university establishes an “official” position that students and faculty would be loath to violate. (Everyone, of course, is free to voice their personal opinion according to the First Amendment: you just can’t do it in the name of the University. And our late President Bob Zimmer said that he was reluctant to give his own personal opinion because it could be taken to represent the University of Chicago’s position.).

By impeding the chilling of speech, Kalven also impedes the chilling of research and teaching. If, for example, a college held the position that sex was not binary, and that there was a spectrum of sex in humans, researchers would be reluctant to either publish, work on, or make that claim. (The President of Spectrum U. would be Agustín Fuentes.)

Thus institutional neutrality is the rope that ties together free speech and academic freedom.  Any university worth its salt—one that wants to foster discourse and consider all ideas on their merits, however offensive—should adhere to the three prongs of Kalven, academic freedom, and free speech. It’s a pity that so few Universities follow all three (only 30 American universities have adopted institutional neutrality; and that’s out of 2,637 four-year colleges!).

And so endeth this homily.

Ecologist Susan Harrison always manages to come through when I’m low on photos, as I am now. Today she sends us a batch of birds from Ohio. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Magee Marsh, Ohio and its many warblers (and others)

The Great Lakes are a significant obstacle for songbirds struggling north from the tropics to breed in the vast, insect-rich expanses of high latitude North America.  Abundant warblers and other small migrants congregate in mid-May in the boggy forests along the lakes’ southern shores.  There, many species tank up on bugs and await favorable winds for the long water crossing, while others settle and breed.

In turn, birdwatchers also convene for this annual avian spectacle. Mid-May at Magee Marsh, on Lake Erie east of Toledo, has become known as “The Biggest Week in American Birding”.   A friendly and festive atmosphere prevails as throngs of birders move along boardwalks peering into dense foliage and high treetops.   This year, I was fortunate to combine a work trip with seeing peak migration at Magee Marsh.

Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citraea) nesting pair:

Magnolia Warbler (Setophaga magnolia):

Blackburnian Warbler (Setophaga fusca):

Bay-breasted Warbler (Setophaga castanea):

Chestnut-sided Warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica):

American Redstart (Setophaga ruticilla):

Black-throated Green Warbler (Setophaga virens):

Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens):

Cape May Warbler (Setophaga tigrina):

Black-and-white Warbler (Mniotilta varia):

Warbling Vireo (Vireo gilvus):

Philadelphia Vireo (Vireo philadelphicus):

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus):

I’m making this into a separate post because it pains me so much: it was the first thing I read online when I woke up this morning.  Surely as a result of worldwide Jew hatred, instigated by the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli protestors in America (indeed, throughout the world), a pair of young aides at the Israeli embassy in Washington were shot to death by, yes, a “Free, free Palestine” protestor. The murder took place right outside the Capital Jewish Museum, also in Washington. From the NYT (article archived here):

Two young Israeli Embassy aides were shot and killed outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington on Wednesday night by a man who shouted pro-Palestinian slogans after he was detained, according to law enforcement officials.

The close-range shooting occurred shortly after 9 p.m. on a street outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The area is the heart of official Washington, packed with federal buildings, embassies and museums. The Capitol, the F.B.I.’s Washington field office and the headquarters of the Justice Department are all near the museum.

The suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, was detained shortly after the shooting and there was no ongoing threat to public safety, law enforcement officials said.

Pamela A. Smith, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, told reporters at a news conference that Mr. Rodriguez exclaimed, “Free, free Palestine,” after he was in custody. He also informed the police where he had discarded the weapon used in the shooting, Chief Smith said.

Israel’s foreign ministry identified the victims as Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Mr. Lischinsky was a research assistant in the political department at the embassy and Ms. Milgrim organized trips to Israel, according to the ministry.

Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador, said at the news conference that the two people killed were a couple about to be engaged. “The young man purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem,” he said.

But being the NYT, the paper couldn’t resist putting in this paragraph:

After the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli military began a campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave. It set off a wave of pro-Palestinian protests, including at Israeli embassies and at American college and university campuses. The Israeli Embassy in Washington has been a particular focus for protesters.

Did the NYT forget that the protests against Israel and for Palestine began immediately after the October 7 attacks, and Israel did not launch its invasion into Gaza until a week later, and a full-scale invasion nearly three weeks later? But that’s irrelevant; what’s clear is that Israel was never going to get the world’s sympathy, if it attacked Hamas—except perhaps for a day or two.

A bit about the couple from the WSJ:

Nissim Otmazgin, a dean at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who taught Lischinsky, said he was gentle, hardworking and an idealist who was interested in building bridges between Israel and other countries. He spoke English, Hebrew, German and Japanese.

“He knew he wanted to be a diplomat. It was his dream,” he said. “A dream that shattered.”

Milgrim, who was American, worked at the Israeli Embassy’s department of public diplomacy and said on her LinkedIn profile that she was passionate about Israeli-Palestinian peace-building. She had worked as a Jewish educator.

“Her energy, thoughtfulness, and unwavering belief in dialogue, peace, and equality inspired everyone who had the privilege to work alongside her,” said a statement by Tech2Peace, an organization that Milgrim had worked at that brings together Palestinians and Israelis through tech.

There is no justification for murdering these young people. You can say that they worked for Israel, but they were not combatants.  I talked to Malgorzata this morning, and she thinks this murder is a harbinger of violence to come; that it somehow will justify copycat murders of Jews in other places. That is what “globalizing the intifada” really means.

I hope Malgorzata is wrong, but I wouldn’t place money on it. One thing for sure is that this killing will do nothing to “free Palestine”. What Gaza needs to be freed from is Hamas.

Here’s an uncredited picture of the murdered pair from Tom Gross’s newsletter. What makes this even sadder is that in a week Yaron would have proposed to Sarah in Jerusalem, and now they will never be a married couple.

The crime is being investigated as a hate crime, supported by the new finding that someone with the same name as the suspect left a long (900-word) anti)-Israel manifesto online. I can’t find the manifesto online, but here’s part of a summary:

The approximately 900-word statement — written in the clear language of an English major, dated May 20 and published online around the same time the shooting occurred — mentions the high death toll in Gaza and notes the ineffectiveness of nonviolent protests against Israel, including the self-immolation of US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell. It also expresses dissatisfaction with American support for Israel.

In my first post of this series of two I maintained that First-Amendment-style freedom of speech, or something close to it, is necessary for the functioning of a democracy. But free speech is also touted not just as a prerequisite for having democracy, but a necessity for producing the “clash of ideas” that will give rise to the truth.  My contention in the first post is that while free speech is politically vital, it cannot by itself lead to finding the truth. For that you need what I call “expanded academic freedom”:  the right of individuals (usually academics or scholars) to think, write, and speak whatever they want. For this second endeavor is, unlike free speech, the one that allows people to look at the universe and see what is empirically true. (As I said earlier, the “truth” in my view, and that of the OED, is “something that conforms to fact or reality”, and knowledge, defined as “justified true belief”, is simply widely accepted truth.)

These are the two linchpins for finding and disseminating truth. Academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate reality and find out what is (provisionally) true, while freedom of speech guarantees the right to promulgate what you’ve found out. They work together to find the truth and (also important) make it publicly visible and publicly acknowledged: that is, they work together to produce knowledge.

I have construed academic freedom broadly and not limited it to academics. However, even on campus, academic freedom, just like freedom of speech, has its limits.  It is not true that I can teach creationism in an evolution class, or rail about Trump in a class about British history.  Academic freedom allows you to stay within the parameters of accepted knowledge and discourse within a field and, if you’re broaching new and heterodox ideas, they must be relevant to the class topic. If you violate this repeatedly, you’re likely to lose your academic job, and can have tenure revoked.

Similarly, academics are free to research anything they want, but that is no guarantee that their research will meet the standards of their field. If I was hired as a geneticist but spend my time studying the behavior of crickets, and not doing a good job of it, then yes, I could be disciplined or let go. You are free to do what you want within the parameters of your job, but that doesn’t guarantee career success.

(I won’t go into the the issue here of whether there is free speech in the classroom, though there clearly isn’t: again, professors can say what they want in class, but will be deep-sixed if it’s not relevant to the subject being taught. And classes also have is compelled speech: students are compelled to answer questions verbally or on exams, and are not free to give any answer they want.)

The separation of free speech and academic freedom is not a clean one. For example, a professor might say something in a didactic capacity that some students might consider harassment, like the professor at Hamline College who got into trouble for showing a picture of Muahmmad as a person, which offended some students. (The prof, who left, was ultimately vindicated.) However, there is a difference between freedom of speech adjudicated by the government, and freedom of thought, research, and teaching that is regulated by a professor’s field of work or department.

While freedom of speech assures professors at public universities of the right to promulgate their ideas, it is academic freedom, not freedom of speech, that allows them the latitude to study what they want and teach not only the gist of a subject, but promote a students’ ability to think.  It is academic freedom—the freedom of inquiry—that has:

• Made the American university system a huge draw for students and researchers throughout the world (the US has 80% of the world’s top 50 universities).
•  Led to 71% of all Nobel Prizes awarded having gone to Americans (29% of immigrants to America).  55% of the total are in science.
• Prompted many revolutionary discoveries, including polio and other vaccines, gene editing technology, MRI, lasers, and GPS. (note that academic freedom obtains in many other countries, where it’s also promoted discoveries, including the structure of DNA and, in part CRISPR editing).
• Led to the preeminence of American industry in creating scientific innovations, including microchip technology, vaccines for mumps, rubella, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis A, and various drugs.

While industry doesn’t have “academic freedom” in the sense that universities do, remember that most of the researchers in industry who create these innovations were trained in universities and absorbed their research ethos. But of course companies don’t have freedom of speech in the way that universities do; for example, they have the right to keep the technique behind their discoveries confidential for a time without publishing all the details.

You’ll notice that I have stayed away from humanities fields like literature, art, music, philosophy and law.  Why? Because, in my view, while these fields may produce interpretations or analyses of things like novels and paintings, they do not yield empirical truths. Literature, music, and painting, for example, are not “ways of knowing” but “ways of feeling or thinking”. (I discuss this in Chapter 4 of Faith Versus Fact).

This of course does not mean that such fields are without worth or merit; every reader here knows of my admiration for much of the humanities, particularly literature, art, and philosophy. It is simply that it’s not clear what we mean in such fields by the “pursuit of truth”.  What, for example is the “truth” in a Jackson Pollack painting or in Joyce’s Ulysses?  What is the (empirical) truth in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice? The latter gives us a provocative way to look at and construct morality, but of course there are a gazillion other suggestions about how to do that. Which one is the “true” path to morality?

Granted, fields like sociology and economics do traffic in truth, but truth that can be ascertained only by using the scientific method construed broadly, which I see as confluent with academic freedom.  It is the toolkit of science, which developed under academic freedom, that allows us to reach real truths, and that toolkit includes implements like falsifiability, quantitative methods, pervasive doubt and criticality (a feature of academic freedom itself), replication and quality control, parsimony, collectivity, double-blind testing, and peer review. These are laid out in Chapter 2 of Faith Versus Fact.  And in that book I also define “science construed broadly” as any endeavor that uses some of these tools to ascertain what’s true. So, for example, plumbers, car mechanics, and others who solve empirical problems using a version of the scientific method can be considered practicing “science construed broadly”. Steve Gould realized this in his essay Genesis vs. Geology, recounting his testimony in the creationism trial of McLean v. Arkansas:

As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?

I see I’ve digressed a bit, so let me summarize. What is this sweating professor trying to say? (And remember, this is simply a first draft of some nascent ideas.) My claim is that freedom of speech does not by itself lead to truth via the much-vaunted “clash of ideas”.  That clash is necessary to find the truth, but not sufficient. Atop it one must place academic freedom: the freedom of scholars to teach, think, and research what they want.

I also claim that much of the humanities, whatever they claims, is not capable of finding truth, since it doesn’t turn on empirical facts but on critical analyses, competing theories, and competing interpretations. That doesn’t make humanities lesser than science—unless scholars in fields like art, music, and literature claim that they are practicing “another way of knowing.” Some disciplines, notably philosophy are good at of pointing out errors of thinking and guiding rational thinking, but again (in my view) do not and cannot find truths about the universe in which we dwell.

Finally, academic freedom is separate but still intertwined with freedom of speech, but they differ in important ways. The practice of academic freedom does not assume that all ideas are equal or all people are equal in merit: academia is hierarchical and meritocratic, while the First Amendment assumes that all views when expressed are equal and nobody gets an extra say because of their merit. Freedom of speech promotes the emergence of competing truths, while academic freedom emphasizes the ascertainment of the “truest” of these competitors.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “conduit,” came with the caption, “To be fair, he did make that clear.” And once again we see two of the prime features of Mo’s character: hypocrisy and cluelessness.

In case you’ve forgotten your religious history, yes, the Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad, but through a primary conduit: an angel. As Wikipedia notes:

Muslims believe the Quran was orally revealed by God to the final Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel incrementally over a period of some 23 years, beginning on the Laylat al-Qadr, when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632, the year of his death. Muslims regard the Quran as Muhammad’s most important miracle, a proof of his prophethood, and the culmination of a series of divine messages starting with those revealed to the first Islamic prophet Adam, including the holy books of the Torah, Psalms, and Gospel in Islam.

And heeeere’s the Divine Duo:

We’re running low on this feature, so please send in some good photos. I won’t beg again for a while.

Today we have photos from Africa by Loretta Michaels.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Brief Introduction: I used to do a lot of business in Africa and so I almost always tried to tack on a weekend safari of some sort while there.  Most of these times I had only my iphone to take pictures, unlike the bigger safari vacations my husband & I take with all our camera gear.

While in Dar es Salaam on business, I spent a weekend on Chumbe Island, just off the coast of Zanzibar.  One of the more bizarre sightings was a Coconut Crab (Birgus latro), the largest land crab in the world, which is able  to climb coconut palms and easily crack coconuts with its claws.  These crabs also eat fleshy fruit and even prey on smaller crabs. This species of crabs has evolved to live on land from the sea, returning to water only to lay their eggs. On land, they live in underground holes made with fibers from coconut husks, and are generally only spotted at night. An adult crab can reach one meter in length. It has a curled-under abdomen that makes it look like a lobster. Coconut crabs supposedly have very tasty meat, so, unfortunately, they are hunted:

Three nicely aligned bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) I saw during a trip to Zambia:

A nice female African lion (Panthera leo), spotted during a night drive in Zambia:

A Komodo Dragon (Varanus komodoensis) spotted during a drive:

Two white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) in Nairobi National Park, a 45 square mile wildlife sanctuary established in 1946 just outside Nairobi:

Lunchtime at the Lilayi Elephant Nursery just outside Lusaka, Zambia.  The baby elephants are just adorable to watch, especially as they come running in from the fields when they see it’s feeding time:

A Golden Monkey (Cercopithecus mitis kandti) spotted in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda:

A mother and baby mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, just outside Kigali. It is one of two subspecies of the Eastern Gorilla.  The other population lives in the Congo. The park is one of the 3 homes of the endangered mountain gorillas within the Virunga Mountains:

Dominant male gorilla in Volcanoes National Park:

Variable Sunbird (Cinnyris venustus) in Rwanda. The sunbirds are a group of small Old World passerine birds which feed largely on nectar, although they will also take insects, especially when feeding young. Flight is fast and direct on their short wings. Most species can take nectar by hovering like a hummingbird, but usually perch to feed most of the time:

I’m participating in the Heterodox Academy meeting in NYC on June 23-25, and its theme is “Truth, Power, and Responsibility.” The program for the entire meeting is here.

I’m on a rather daunting plenary panel on the 25th (below).  The description:

The Duties and Responsibilities of Scholars | Wednesday, June 25 at 12:30-1:50pm What does it mean to be a scholar today—and who gets to decide? In an era marked by rising polarization, increasing public scrutiny of higher education, and shifting institutional expectations, the role of the scholar is more contested than ever. This plenary session brings together leading thinkers from across the academic spectrum to examine whether there are universal norms of scholarship that transcend disciplines, and what obligations scholars have not just to their fields, but to academia at large. This panel, featuring Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago), Jennifer Frey (University of Tulsa), Louis Menand (Harvard University), and John McWhorter (Columbia University), and moderated by Colleen Eren (William Paterson University), will explore where today’s academics derive their sense of duty, how those understandings are evolving, and what responsibilities come with the title of professor.

I suppose I could just let the bigwigs do all the talking, but I do want to make a contribution.  To do that, I’ve been reading quite a bit about academic freedom and free speech. I’ve discovered that they are two separate things, and that, if achieving truth is one’s aim, academic freedom is at least as important as free speech. In These are nascent ideas, so feel free to comment on them below.

First, let’s look briefly at free speech, which most scholars define this way:

Freedom of speech (according to America’s First Amendment): the prohibition of the government to suppress speech in public square. (There are of course exceptions, like harassment, false advertising, defamation, or creating imminent and predictable violence.)

There are three parts of the courts’ interpretation of First Amendment free speech:

a. There can be no content discrimination [A content-based law discriminates against speech based on the substance of what is communicated].

b. There are no true or false opinions for the purpose of the First Amendment. That is, everybody is entitled to their own opinion in all matters, both political and epistemic. This means that the ideas are given equal political consideration, but this doesn’t mean that all opinions are equally valid.

c.  The state cannot compel you to speak. (This is outlined in Robert Posts’s engaging speech).

There are two reasons for a rational democracy to adopt freedom of speech.  First, because a democracy is really government based on public opinion, as it’s ultimately based on votes. And, as we have learned, voters can sometimes have false or even harmful ideas. Second—and this is the philosophical underpinning of all freedom of speech laws—the freedom is supposed to create a “marketplace of ideas”, whose clash through public discussion and expression is supposed to be an essential route to finding TRUTH.  But does it? My view is no: the truth is ultimately determined through academic freedom, which I construe broadly to encompass quasi-scientific investigation using evidence, but investigation not necessarily done by academics.  I’ll discuss this in part 2 of the post, which I may or may not put up today.

The “marketplace of ideas” trope is based largely on the pronouncements of two men: John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ll give some of their quotes below about the value of the marketplace of ideas:

John Stuart Mill from on “On Liberty”

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

. . . . There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

The beliefs  which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

I have long touted Mill’s tract as of supreme importance in justifying freedom of speech in a democracy. And I still think that, but I no longer agree that the clash of ideas among the public promotes or guarantees emergence of the truth. Something more is needed, and that something, as we’ll see, is evidence.  Note that evidence is not mentioned by Mill.

From Oliver Wendell Holmes as quoted in the Annenberg Classroom:

In his dissent from the majority opinion in Abrams v. United States (upholding the Espionage Act convictions of a group of antiwar activists), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes coins his famous “marketplace of ideas” phrase to explain the value of freedom of speech.

The full quote:

“[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

And from an article in Wikipedia: [In] the dissenting opinion by Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in United States v. Schwimmer. Holmes wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.’

Note that he doesn’t mention freedom of speech, but freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is not protected under the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But does the clash of ideas in the public square produce truth (defined roughly as “something that conforms to fact or reality”) or knowledge (defined as “justified true belief”)? Again, the clash of ideas is necessary in a democracy so that the public can consider all sides of an issue before making decisions on who runs the government. We can argue later about whether certain non-elected parts of the government, like the Supreme Court, operate according to the First Amendment. They certainly don’t, as there is compelled speech—lawyers forced to answer questions—and not all ideas are considered equal.

Well, surely the clash of ideas is necessary to produce truth, but it’s not sufficient.  Let’s take some examples.

One that immediately comes to mind is the clash between creationism and evolution. Everyone is entitled, via free speech, to espouse publicly one or another view in the public square (but not in the classroom).  This is the vaunted clash of ideas.  But did this clash produce truth per se? No, what eventually allowed evolution to overcome creationism is evidence,  and that evidence doesn’t come from opinions, but from epistemic considerations.  What empirical evidence do we have on the side of evolution (ahem, Why Evolution is True), and what evidence on the side of a supernatural hand in creationism? The evidence comes from scholars (or nonscholars employing scientific methods) gathering evidence under the principle of academic freedom: studying, thinking, and publishing what they want, using norms of scholarship and without outside interference.  The finding of “truth” depends not only on a clash of ideas, but on the adducing of evidence by the opposing sides, along with the presumption that the public is rational and thoughtful enough to evaluate that evidence. (It apparently isn’t as judging by the most recent Gallup poll, which shows that 71% of Americans think that God had some had in evolution.)

Second, consider whether everyone is entitled to free government-provided health care, as in the UK and many other countries. Here we have an ongoing clash of ideas, which so far has resulted in an answer of “no” in America, though that could change.  Which “truth” has resulted from this clash? Does the UK have the truth, or the US? The “truth” is that perhaps one of these is better for society than the other, but the clash of ideas itself won’t settle the issue, and even so there would be unresolvable disagreement about what “better” means. What we need is what we don’t have: a comparative experiment (or data) showing the effects of each choice in each society, AND a public that has a widely shared idea of what a “better society” means.

The second question in fact involves not just facts but values: what kind of society do we want?  And while those values might be informed by a clash of ideas, they are based largely on unchangeable personal preferences. Often the clash of ideas rests heavily on morality, and, as I believe, there is no absolute morality and no “moral truth” (let’s put Biblical morality to the side here, since it’s not even clear that there is such a thing). Rather, morality is based on personal preferences, and in many cases (viz., the trolley problem), there is no truth: one simply adheres to one preference over another.

Here’s a third example: should society allow abortion? If some people have views on abortion that hinge on empirical facts, like whether a fetus has a heartbeat, can feel pain, or be viable if removed from the mother, then yes, those views can be informed by empirical investigation, also called “science”.

But there are many who favor an absolute prohibition of abortion because they consider it murder, murder of a potentially viable human being.  Such people feel they are right, but morally right. Other people, like me, favor almost unrestricted abortion up to birth, simply because I believe that a society in which women have that choice is a better society than one in which abortion is forbidden or given time limits.  But is the “truth” here? There is no truth: there is only people deciding what is morally permissible.  Yes, we have a clash of ideas, and yes, it’s resolved in various ways in various states, but the resolution is a political one: a consensus of opinion and not a determination of “truth.”  Again, I don’t see how that clash itself leads to the “truth”. It can lead to a political decision, but since this is largely an issue of preference, there is no truth to be had, no “conforming to what is reality.”

I maintain that most of the clashes of ideas we see in society deal with political or moral issues, hinging on preferences that cannot be adjudicated by argument alone. Some can be adjudicated by empirical investigation, but that is a minority.

In the end, while I believe that a clash of ideas is essential in a democracy simply to have a working democracy, the clash alone does not guarantee homing in on truths about the universe, and in many cases it can’t.  In the cases where it can, the clash involves differing opinions about empirical issues. And it is the resolution of those issues by empirical data that will guide us toward the truth. Absent empirical evidence, which can result only from academic freedom (construed widely as the freedom to think, teach, and research), a mere clash of ideas cannot guide us to the truth.

Today we have a lighthearted change of pace: reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is writing not about pollination, but about aging.  His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In banana years, we are bread

I think it’s safe to assume that a good many WEIT readers, like me, have already accrued many miles on their personal odometers. Or, as Brazilians say it, dobraram o Cabo da Boa Esperança (have rounded the Cape of Good Hope): our odyssey  is almost completed, the distance to the end is much shorter than to the starting point. We can fall into anguish about it, despair, deny, ignore, fight back to slow the rate of decrepitude, or be philosophical regarding the inevitable outcome. Because, as Maurice Chevalier quipped, old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.

Here are some thoughts about ageing and some assorted images lifted from Private Eye magazine (hopelessly lefty but unbeatable with their cartoons), or sent by fellow old codgers.

Some quotes:

There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. David Eagleman

Death does not make us equal. There are skulls with all their teeth. Mário Quintana

At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas. Often credited to Claude Pepper

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down. George Burns

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. Franklin P. Adams

Tom Smith is dead, and here he lies, / Nobody laughs and nobody cries; / Where his soul’s gone, or how it fares, / Nobody knows, and nobody cares. Grave epitaph, Newbury, England, 1742

You start off irresistible. And, then you become resistible. And then you become transparent – not exactly invisible but as if you are seen through old plastic. Then you actually do become invisible. And then — and this is the most amazing transformation — you become repulsive. But that’s not the end of the story. After repulsive then you become cute – and that’s where I am. Leonard Cohen

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. John Mortimer

There is still no cure for the common birthday. John Glenn

She said she was approaching forty, and I couldn’t help wondering from what direction. Bob Hope

Happiness is good health and bad memory. Ingrid Bergman

Older people shouldn’t eat health food: they need all the preservatives they can get. Robert Orben

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing. Quentin Crisp

About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age. Gloria Pitzer

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. Terry Pratchett

In the long run, we’re all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Anon

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted. Bertrand Russell 

The fluffy newborn chick of hope tumbles from the eggshell of life and splashes into the hot frying pan of doom. Humprey Lyttleton

A doctor is seeing an old millionaire who had started using a revolutionary hearing aid:

– So, Mr Humphrey, are you enjoying the new device?

– Very much so.

– Did your family like it?

– I don’t know, I haven’t told anyone yet. But I’ve already changed my will three times.

And for the final image: my wife suggested that I should hang a sign like this by my desk. I declined because it is not truthful: I am not on a diet.