Why Evolution is True Feed

Welcome to the top o’ the week: it’s Monday, May 19, 2025, and National Devil’s Food Cake Day (remember, there’s also Angel Food Cake). The origin of the name is obscure, for this is simply a chocolate cake, usually darker than a normal one and frosted with chocolate, comme ça:

Maggio7 from Troy, MI, US, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia says this:

The name probably had several sources of inspiration, including the culinary term deviled to describe flavorful foods like deviled eggs and the contrast of this dark, dense, flavorful cake with the light and airy angel food cake. The name has inspired humorous comments; one of the first printed recipes declares it to be “Fit for Angels”, and another early recipe recommends topping it with divinity frosting.

But if you look up the culinary term deviled, you get “grilled with a piquant sauce”!

It’s also World Family Doctor Day, but not much else.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, and it’s metastasized to his bones. As they said on the news last night, “It’s not curable, but it’s treatable.”

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9” with “metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

The Gleason score is used to describe how prostate cancers look under a microscope; 9 and 10 are the most aggressive. The cancer is Stage 4, which means it has spread.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

This is very sad to hear, especially given that two of his children also died, one of brain cancer and the other in an accident that also killed Biden’s first wife. He’s also had two dangerous brain aneurysms.  The guy has been through a lot.

*Boss vs. Boss: Trump is trying to get Bruce Springsteen to shut up. It isn’t working (article archived here).

President Trump warned Bruce Springsteen to “keep his mouth shut” until he gets back to the U.S. The rock icon is showing no signs of backing down, delivering a fiery performance from a stage in this city Saturday that reflected the stark political divide in America.

Springsteen echoed earlier criticism of the Trump administration Saturday, saying a “rogue” government was rolling over U.S. lawmakers and institutions designed to keep authoritarianism in check.

“Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy,” Springsteen told the audience. To drive the point home, he dedicated one of his songs to our “Dear Leader,” an allusion to the honorific set aside for former North Korean ruler Kim Jong Il.

A similar broadside last week prompted Trump to take aim at Springsteen in a social-media post: “I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy.”

The escalating confrontation between the president and Springsteen is part of a broader clash between Trump and some pop-culture icons that goes back to the president’s first term. Trump has repeatedly assailed Taylor Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris in last year’s election but hasn’t engaged in the sort of sharp-tongued criticism delivered by Springsteen.

Trump lashed out at Swift in a separate post Friday: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’”

. . . . few artists have been as blunt as Springsteen, who for decades has cast himself as a champion of the working class and, in recent decades, has regularly campaigned with Democratic Party presidential candidates.

Still, Springsteen has generally been able to straddle the partisan divide in America. His 1984 anthem “Born in the U.S.A.” was widely embraced by Republicans including Ronald Reagan, despite its lyrics’ searing criticism of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Springsteen also counts New Jersey’s former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and longtime presidential aspirant from Springsteen’s home state, among his biggest fans.

Still, despite Springsteen’s support, the Democratic Party has seen its longtime strength among blue-collar workers eroded by the rise of Trump. The president has transcended his own gilded upbringing to become a hero to many voters across the Rust Belt states that Springsteen has made a career of singing about—including Youngstown, a working-class city in Ohio that was the eponymous subject of one of the songs Springsteen played on Saturday.

Keep on speaking your mind, Bruce!  Trump can’t do anything to you, because you have freedom of speech. It’s clear that Trump has no ability to ignore criticism, but always answers it with juvenile name-calling.

*From the NYT: “Hollywood couldn’t imagine a star like this one” (archived here). Who is the star? Why, it’s Desi Arnaz from “I Love Lucy”, a show I regularly watched as a kid.

Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once, and was nearing her wits’ end.

The movie star was Lucille Ball and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950, a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan.

Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant and self-taught showman, had an idea: The couple would undertake an old-fashioned vaudeville tour of major cities around the country. He and Ball would demonstrate the real-life chemistry that he knew would click with Americans if they only had a chance to see the act.

Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronounced the pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.

. . . Arnaz’s differences — the very elements that made network chiefs hesitant to feature him — became his greatest strengths, as his charming portrayal of the solid, bread-winning paterfamilias of an intermarried family broke new ground in television and made Ricky Ricardo a beloved figure to the 30 million people who watched his show each week. He was the one TV star who did not look or sound like any other — he was forever telling Lucy she had some “’splainin’ to do” — an immigrant who became the all-American man. The show’s sponsor had been so skeptical about Arnaz’s appeal that the contract with Desilu stipulated that Ricky could sing only if it was absolutely necessary to the plot. The audience’s near-immediate embrace of Arnaz and his music made that a moot point and the clause was eventually dropped.

The title of the inside article is “What Desi Arnaz could teach Hollywood today,” and the lesson is obvious:

He looked and sounded nothing like the preconceived notion that the entertainment business had of a successful star. So he changed the way Hollywood did business, and whom we can imagine as stars. Anyone who can’t understand that has some ’splainin’ to do.

Indeed (and remember Fred and Ethel?)!  I loved that show and knew none of the above. Here’s a short clip of scenes featuring the pair:

*On his Substack site, the well-known physician and writer Eric Topol discusses the first human to be treated for genetic disease with in vivo “CRISPR 2.0 personalized genome editing.” (h/t reader Gingerbaker).  The genetic disease was “severe carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a disease with an estimated 50% mortality in early infancy.”  After determining the infant’s defects, they developed an infusion that was targeted at the prcise base pair that was defective, and then gave it repeatedly to the one-year old. From Topol’s report:

This was unique in many respects. KJ Muldoon was born in August 2024 with lethargy, rigid muscles and other worrisome symptoms. Genome sequencing revealed this was due to a severe urea-cycle disorder that leads to accumulation of ammonia and death in about half of infants affected, and short of death, the high levels of ammonia cause lethargy, seizures, coma, and brain damage. The disease-causing gene was CPS1 (carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency), a 1 in a 1.3 million births genetic (ultra-rare) disease. KJ was hospitalized and awaited a liver transplant, listed at 5 month of age, if a donor organ became available. In the meantime, therapy consisted of a low protein diet and ammonia lowering (“nitrogen scavenger”) medications.

To get to the basis of KJ’s genomic defect and attempt a cure, the team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Penn Medicine (led by Drs. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Kiran Musunuru) sequenced KJ and his parents. The father had a truncating CSP1 variant (Q335X) and the mother a different variant, E714X). They developed an adenosine base editor (called K-abe, schematic below) to specifically correct KJ’s defective CPS1 gene. The approach taken was particularly rigorous and comprehensive. Within 6 months they tested the editor in cells with the genomic variants, in mice (bred to specifically have KJ’s CPS1 mutation), in non-human primates, and got FDA approval to give it. It was administered intravenously using delivery via mRNA + nanoparticles beginning in February 2025 and then with 2 subsequent doses. The base editor used was directed against the paternal mutation (a G→A stop variant) at the Q335X site of the CSP1 gene.

What is missing to date is a liver biopsy, due to risk to the infant, to prove the targeted CSP1 editing. There is also lacking evidence of a cure—”just” a reduced need for medications and the restrictive diet. But also encouraging is that KJ is now reaching developmental milestones and although he sustained two viral infections, both were without an ammonia crisis. Further doses of the base editor can be administered with the mRNA approach (rather than a virus vector that can induce an immune response). Regarding uncertainties, we also don’t know about the durability of the editing, any mosaicism impact (only some liver cells edited), and the potential of any off-target effects (rigorously assessed in the 6-months sprint of lab experiments but not yet in KJ).

It seemed to work, though of course fixing a genetic disease by changing some of the cells isn’t guaranteed to be a permanent fix, as there are other, unfixed cells that keep replicating. I’m not sure whether the infant will require lifelong infusions, or whether the disease has bad effects only in infancy, but it’s remarkable that you can target liver cells and change a single base pair in the DNA (out of 3 billion bases) in an attempt to cure a genetic disease. Topol adds this:

This case of KJ represents a human first—-personalized, N-of-1 genomic intervention with base editing (CRISPR 2.0), in the body (in vivo), to directly fix a pathogenic (disease-causing) gene mutation. This bespoke intervention was accomplished in a remarkably compressed timeline that included rigorous assessment in cell and animal models, along with regulatory approval to proceed. It embodies something in medicine we have not and could not have done previously. It involved a dedicated team at CHOP and Penn and collaborators spread out around the world.

There are many specific aspects of the case that deserve attention. The fact that this work culminated from many years of NIH supported research, including the current report, at a time when we’re seeing profound and indiscriminate cutting of such funds

Here’s the paper from NEJM:

There is a lot more of this to come, and it’s amazing that we’re living in an age in which gene editing (which arose as a fortuitous byproduct of pure scientific curiosity about hot-spring bacteria) can be used to ameliorate or cure genetic diseases.

*The Times of Israel reports that the body of Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar, the target of an attack about a week ago, has (according to a Saudi report) been found in a tunnel in Gaza. The third Sinwar brother, Zakaria, was killed by an airstrike on Sunday night. (Some time ago Yahyta Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was also killed by the IDF).  The IDF reported the strike, but they don’t take a kill for granted unless they’re sure, and I’m accepting this Saudi version.

A series of Israeli airstrikes last week killed Muhammad Sinwar, the de facto commander of Hamas in Gaza, according to reports on Sunday that said his body was found in a Khan Younis tunnel.

Muhammad Sinwar was the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by the IDF in southern Gaza last October.

According to a separate report, Zakaria Sinwar, another brother, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday night. [JAC: I’ve heard rumors that Zakaria was in the morgue, showed signs of life, and has been taken to the hospital. Stay tuned.]

A series of Israeli airstrikes last week killed Muhammad Sinwar, the de facto commander of Hamas in Gaza, according to reports on Sunday that said his body was found in a Khan Younis tunnel.

The strikes that reportedly killed Muhammad Sinwar on Tuesday targeted an underground command compound below the European Hospital where he was believed to have been sheltering.

The IDF later bombed the area several more times, in an apparent attempt to prevent anyone from approaching the tunnel.

According to the Saudi channel Al-Hadath, his body was recently recovered along with the remains of 10 of his aides.

The report said that there was evidence that the commander of the Rafah Brigade in Hamas’s military wing, Mohammad Shabana, was also killed in the strike.

What effect, if any, these strikes will have on Hamas remains to be seen. After all, some predicted that Hamas would give up after Yahya Sinwar was killed. It did not. But it’s clear that Israel’s big push now is designed to finish the job, and may have led to the proposal in the next item.

*In addition, Israel and the Qataris (and, “indirectly,” Hamas) are pondering one war-ending plan that would return all the hostages (dead or alive) and get Hamas to give up:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says Israel’s hostage negotiation team in Doha is exhausting “every possibility” for a deal, including a potential agreement that would see the end of fighting, in an apparent shift in approach.

The PMO says that the team is working toward the possibility of either US special envoy Steve Witkoff’s proposal for a short-term ceasefire and limited hostage exchange, or an agreement to end the war through a comprehensive release of all hostages in Gaza and the complete surrender and exile of Hamas.

“Under the prime minister’s direction, even at this hour, the negotiating team in Doha is working to exhaust every possibility for a deal — whether according to the Witkoff outline or within the framework of ending the war, which would include the release of all hostages, the exile of Hamas terrorists, and the disarmament of the Gaza Strip,” writes the PMO in a statement.

. . . . Israel has consistently said that the war will not end without the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing power. Netanyahu has previously insisted on only agreeing to a temporary ceasefire of roughly 45 days, which would begin with Hamas releasing about 10 hostages.

Will Hamas give up and go into exile? This doesn’t seem likely, as they always say they value death more than the IDF values life, and many truly believe that if they die while “resisting,” they will go to heaven and get those virgins. But surely some members of Hamas don’t want to die. See also this archived article about the IDF’s “excpanded ground operations” in the NYT.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is impatient:

Hili: I’m sitting here and waiting. A: What for? Hili: For somebody to come and fill the water bowl. In Polish: Hili: Siedzę tu i czekam. Ja: Na co? Hili: Aż ktoś przyjdzie i uzupełni wodę w tej misce. And a picture of Szaron, the Dark Tabby:

 

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

From the 2025 Darwin Awards!!/Epic Fails!!:

From Annie:

From Cats:

Masih is posting again, though they’re mostly reposts since she’s recovering from surgery. Here’s an old one but of course still relevant to the patriarchal Iranian regime:

#چهارشنبه_های_بدون_اجبار #چهارشنبه_های_سفيد
second week of #WhiteWednesdays one day, instead of feeling scared of the morality police… pic.twitter.com/8j6b6QYVlf

— My Stealthy Freedom (@mystealthyorg) May 31, 2017

Another instance of deplatforming tweeted by Nicholas Christakis at Yale. Salman Rushdie was scheduled to give the commencement speech at Claremont-McKenna College. From the link in the tweet:

The cancellation came as student and local Muslim advocacy groups called the author’s presence “disrespectful” after he said pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses were akin to supporting “a fascist terrorist group,” The Guardian reported last year.

“I’m surprised, relieved and happy,” Claremont Colleges Muslim Students Association president Kumail Afshar said about Rushdie’s decision.

Rushdie, an Indian-born British and American atheist, was forced into hiding by the outrage over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, in which he suggests Islam’s Prophet Muhammad may have entertained polytheism.

The College supported Rushdie, but I suspect he was scared of being attacked again:

When you are happy that you have cancelled the incredible Sir @SalmanRushdie from giving a talk at your college, you really have lost the plot. https://t.co/MBqFpcPVjH

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) May 17, 2025

Talking about losing the plot, look what Naomi Wolf said (“Tim Onion” is Ben Collins, owner of The Onion):

“Since I’ve rearranged my whole identity to call most people unclean and filled with vampire blood, their hugs seem less sincere. Separately, I have discovered the vampire-blooded have a new disease called Soft Hug Disease.”

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-05-17T17:56:07.455Z

From Simon:

When you post the same thing on X and Bluesky

— Oded Rechavi (@odedrechavi.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T19:52:01.542Z

From my feed; I hope this cured the mantis and it was let go. But crikey, look at that thing!

Lowering a Praying Mantis in water to entice the parasite living within to come outside. pic.twitter.com/Ld2QsdglaL

— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 17, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one that I reposted:

A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was 11, and woiuld be 94 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-19T09:39:28.249Z

From Matthew via Phil Plait; a bad joke. My own personal version, which is mine, is opening a fusion Caribbean-Jewish restaurant called “Bermuda Schwartz.”

I'm gonna open a fusion Italian-Peruvian-Jewish restaurant called Matzah Pizzu

— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T15:25:53.020Z

And a relatively newly discovered jellyfish:

The pink meanie jellyfish was only described in the year 2000 (they even got their own new family!) and we’re totally here for it. The pink meanie hunts the moon jellyfish and helps keep their blooms in check! #coralcitycamera

— Coral City Camera (@coralcitycamera.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T14:37:17.997Z

Today is Day 11 since Esther’s ducklings hit the water, and it’s time to share some photos and video of her, Mordacai (yes, he’s still here) and their brood.

But first, we were lucky enough to get a video, courtesy of an undergraduate, of the ducklings hatching underneath Esther, whose nest, you may recall, was on the ground. This video was taken on May 6, and you can see, peeping from beneath her, newly hatched ducklings. One who just hatched is still wet from the egg, while others, a bit older are dry. There were seven total, though one disappeared the first night to unknown causes.  Be sure to listen to the gasps from the students as they see the babies: “Holy cow!”  “Oh, my god!” (I’ve shown this video before, but put it up again because it’s lovely.)

They stay under mom for the first day, and hit the water the second day, which they took to. . . well, like ducks to water. (See the photo of their first moment in the water here.)

The remnants of Esther’s rather crude nest; you can see the broken eggshells. Despite being a rather incompetent nest-builder, she’s a great mom in the water.

Click on all photos to enlarge them.

It wasn’t long before Esther took them on a tour of the pond so they could learn the surroundings.  They quickly learned to use the duck ramps so they could get out of the water and dry off in the sun. In this photo she looks proud to me, but of course that’s anthropomorphizing.

This looks like the brood of five when one duckling went missing for a day but, mirabile dictu, returned the next day. I have no idea where it was.

This video shows how they swim purposefully with the mother when Esther has decided to swim to a definite place. At other times she lollygags about and the ducklings spread out over much of the pond.

The whole family on the edge of the pond (they went up via the ramp). The faithful Mordecai is standing guard to the right.

Esther and the babies. It’s warm beneath her: I’m told about 100°F.

Mom and most of the babies napping:

Mordecai napping. He is an excellent dad, driving off alien drakes who try to make time with Esther. You can see that he’s well fed by his belly hanging over the edge. We call such individuals “Dali ducks.”

Here’s a video of the ducklings (7) discovering that there are rocks they can climb on, get some sun, and dry off.

Mother and babies:

Esther in a formal pose:

Two babies:

Ducklings looking up:

. . . and one flapping its tiny wings:

Finally, a passel of ducklings (the formal name for such a group is a “flock,” a “waddling”, or a “raft”).  Needless to say, on a nice day the pond is crowded with onlookers oohing and aahing over the babies and taking pictures of them. Right now, in the absence of any turtles or fish, the ducks and ducklings are the major attraction at Botany Pond:

Here’s the comedy bit from Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time”, and it’s called “New Rule: Don’t be a hypocrite.”

A few examples:

Trump touting electric cars (Teslas) after he appropriated Elon Musk.

Republicans buying Tesla cybertrucks after most saying they’d never buy an electric truck

The American Academy of Pediatrics reversing its position on getting kids into schools after Trump agreed with them

Republicans denigrated Michelle Obama’s program, “Let’s get American healthy again”, simply because it was from Michelle Obama.

Republicans now love Russia (so Maher said) when it was previous their nightmare country.

There are lots of examples of people accepting or rejecting programs or propositions simply because of who advocated them, and that is a form of hypocrisy. Most of his examples are anti-Republican, so take that, those people who consigned Maher to hell because he had dinner with Trump and found him a gracious host. (That denigration of Maher by those who dislike Trump—and those people include Maher—is itself a form of hypocrisy. If you dislike Trump, it’s impossible to ever find him gracious.)

As he says, we should “not to automatically rush to the opposite viewpoint based solely on who said it. But until we get to where we can do that, and I just hope the Democrats come out strongly next week for a dictatorship, coal mining, and making pot illegal.”

It’s a plea for comity, but nobody seems to be in that mood these days.

If you’ve read about the various pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests across American campuses, one thing you’ll notice is a general reluctance to punish demonstrators when they violate university rules. Of course protests are usually fine if they conform to First Amendment principles (though some schools don’t hold those principles), but they’re never fine when they violate campus rules.  These latter rules are usually called “TPM rules”, meaning that universities can regulate the “time, place, and manner” of demonstrations in a way that doesn’t impede the mission of the institution: teaching, learning, and research.

So at the University of Chicago, for example, we’ve laid out the rules for protests and demonstrations at this website, which gives information about noise levels permitted, building occupancy (not permitted at all) and the like.  In 2024, I gave four examples of pro-Palestinian demonstrators violating University regulations without any punishments meted out. The only sanction levied was a tepid warning to Students for Justice in Palestine that they disrupted a Jewish gathering, a warning that they’d better not do it again or else. . . .

As I always say, rules that aren’t enforced are not rules at all. Even our encampment, which involved several hundred people—both students and outsiders—which was declared in violation of university rules, was dismantled by the university police, but none of the demonstrators faced any punishment.

Is it any wonder, then, that the anti-Israel demonstrators feel empowered to break any campus rules they want? And they did—two weeks ago when the pro-Pals, a consortium called “UCUP”, for “UChicago United for Palestine” held a week of demonstrations commemorating last year’s encampment, which, not coincidentally, also included Alumni Weekend. (One wonders what mindset thinks that these loud and obnoxious intrusions will change peoples’ opinions.)

At any rate, the Chicago Maroon, which loves nothing more than an anti-Israel demonstration, had an article about a week of protests that included several violations of University rules, all of which seem to have been unpunished. Oh, well, there’s one exception: the police confiscated one megaphone being used illegally. I suppose they arrested it for “excessive loudness.”

Click below to read the article. I’ve bolded the bits where illegal actions went unpunished. The cops and deans-on-call showed up, but the former are constrained by the administration and can’t take action without permission from above, and deans-on-call are, to me, a joke; mere observers who can’t enforce anything and barely want to report anything. In fact, some of the deans-on-call are blatantly pro-Palestinian, and so can’t be objective. Here’s a photo of the “watermelon” (Palestinian colors) fingernails of one of those deans-on-call taken by a student during the encampment last year:

I’ll give some excerpts showing how the U of C ignores violations, as well as giving the article’s introduction. Click headline below to read; unpunished violations are in bold.

Marking the one-year anniversary of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment, UChicago students and community members launched a week-long protest and installation outside Swift Hall. The students, organized as the “Popular University for Gaza,” called for solidarity with Palestine and the divestment of University funds from institutions tied to Israel.

Between Monday, April 28, and Friday, May 2, the group held teach-ins, workshops, and demonstrations—some resulting in confrontations with the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) and deans-on-call—as they sought to maintain public pressure on University leadership.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on April 28, protesters gathered on the quad outside of Swift Hall, raising a banner reading “Free Palestine, Bring the Intifada Home.” UCPD officers and deans-on-call observed from a distance as the group began a series of chants over a megaphone. Deans repeatedly informed the protesters that they were in violation of University policies regulating the use of amplified sound on campus.

Did anybody stop the violations? Are you kidding me?

Around an hour and a half into the demonstration, the UCPD officers and deans-on-call requested identification from those who had been using megaphones. The protesters initially locked arms to prevent possible arrests, with the crowd gradually dispersing as officers continued to ask for identifying information.

And again it seems as if the protestors, who are obliged to provide identification, did not do so; nor did the cops take any IDs.

Here’s a protestor waving a Houthi flag; photo by Grace Beatty.  Love that AK-47! Note the covered faces of the protestors, indicating two things: they are cowards who don’t want to be identified, and they are not enacting civil disobedience, whereby you break a law considered immoral and voluntarily take the punishment.

On Thursday they arrested. . . .a megaphone:

Two UCPD officers, along with several deans-on-call, gathered to observe the protest.

As protesters continued to chant, UCPD officers chased after demonstrators and confiscated at least one megaphone. The demonstration, which took place after 1 p.m., was again in violation of University policy regarding amplified sound. An unidentified protester flew a flag identifying with the Houthi movement in Yemen; one UCPD officer was overheard saying “As long as they’re holding [the flag], it’s free speech.”

The cop is right about free speech; our campus police are well aware of what is a violation and what is not. But they cannot move against real violations without permission of the administration.

Finally, although again this is legal, they heckled the President and Provost. Not THAT is going to change their minds!

Here’s President Alivisatos being heckled as he walks to the alumni tent. He kept his cool and did not respond. And you have to hand it to the heckler that he didn’t cover his face. (This was published on the UC United Instagram page.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by UChicago United for Palestine (@uchicagounited)

So the week was a mixture of legal and illegal activities by the protestors, but the only thing arrested was a megaphone.

Below you see a poster in the Quad. If you know what “Intifada” means, it’s a term in Arabic for “shaking off” and has come to mean “shaking off the Jews”, i.e., killing them. These are really congenial sentiments.

I’m not sure whether the students had permission to post such a banner, but even if they did the sentiments surely create a hostile climate for Jewish students:

Photo by Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon

These demonstrations used to bother me more, especially their implicit calls for genocide of Jews (the poster above and the “From the river to the sea. .  ” chants), but now that Hamas is losing, and the University of Chicago has made it clear that it will not divest from Israel, these demonstrators strike me as pathetic, cosplaying as Houthis and members of Hamas.  Surely a large moiety of them are antisemitic, and it’s okay to do that so long as you don’t create a climate inimical to the participation of Jewish students at the University.  Do we have such a climate? You’d have to ask the Jewish students, but some of them have, I’ve heard, said “yes.” I know some of them won’t wear their Stars of David necklaces in a way that make them visibly Jewish.

I wish only that my University would be serious about its demonstration rules. When students break those rules, they should be punished, bar none. If Columbia can do it, so can we.

We have three—count them, three—items today.  The first is the first known portrait of an individual cat, that is, a cat who is known to have existed as a pet and with a name:

From Strange Company,

tumblr:  Giovanni Reder, Portrait of the cat Armellino, 1750. Oil on canvas. The first known painting of an individual cat. The italian poetess Alessandra Forteguerra commissioned the artwork of her beloved tom cat. Museo di Roma.

The Mister Tristan site says this:

Very few cats can boast that they have actually had their portraits painted, that is, that they have been depicted without any allegorical, moralizing, religious, esoteric, or simply decorative intent on the part of the artist….Armellino, wearing an elegant little collar, has literally posed on a luxurious cushion; a sonnet by the abbot Bertazzi has even been dedicated to him.

Now, I can’t find a translation of that sonnet anywhere. If any reader can, or can speak Italian, please provide me with a translation. I will credit the translator and put the sonnet in this post. You can enlarge the text by clicking on it.

Reader Brooke supplied the necessary sonnet:

The translation of the sonnet in the painting can be found on this page (you have to scroll down the page quite a ways):

Sonnet to a Cat

by Abbott Bertazzi

This Cat painted here on canvas,
tasted a loving kiss from a beautiful goddess,
after having done the portrait from life,
The cat keeps himself well guarded and most jealous.
In order to keep himself fully intact,
like an Ermine who lives in fear
and to avoid being caught
flees rapidly to stay in the wood or in a more hidden place.
So you as well, oh adventurous Cat,
preserve your mouth intact and your heart pure,
and only think of the one who kissed you,
and allow only me to love you,
you who shoot a kiss,
and take back my lovely kiss to cool the passion.

The cat’s name, Armellino, apparently means ‘ermine’ in old Italian.

Another site has an excerpt about this painting from H.V. Morton’s A Traveller in Rome (1957).

In a picture gallery upstairs [in the museum of Rome] I found a portrait of a black and white cat. This lordly and imposing creature prowled the marble halls of some seventeenth century palace and is here seen enthroned upon a tasselled cushion, wearing a broad collar to which bells are attached. Pinned to a curtain behind the cat is a little poem which says that a great and beautiful lady once kissed the cat and bade him keep his heart and mouth pure, and to remember her kiss. No one knows who the lady was.

Wouldn’t “the lady” be the cat’s owner? It’s rather confusing.

There are earlier named cats, of course, including Pangur Bán (“White Pangur”), the subject of a poem written by an Irish monk in a 9th-century manuscript. It’s a wonderful poem, comparable to “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart, but, alas, there is no portrait of Pangur.

These are the two best cat poems ever.

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The Japan Rail Club site gives us a look at a wonderful Japanese cat train (I think there are several). The article and photos are from Carlissa Loh, and go to the site to see tons of photos. If you’re an ailurophile, you’ll want to take this train.

Click below to read and see photos, alo by Carlisa Loh:

Excerpts:

Would you take a 1.5-hour train in the Wakayama (和歌山) countryside just to see a cat? Many people would, and many have! In fact, it was thanks to a beloved cat, Tama, that one railway line was revitalised and saved from closure.

The railway line was Wakayama Electric Railway’s Kishigawa Line (貴志川線), and in January 2007, Tama (たま), a female calico cat, became the station master of Kishi Station (貴志駅).

Here’s Tama, the subject of a Wikipedia article in Japanese that autotranslates into English. It says, among other stuff, this:

Tama ( also known as Stationmaster Tama ; April 29 , 1999 ( Heisei 11) – June 22, 2015 (Heisei 27 )) was a cat and the honorary permanent stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Wakayama Electric Railway ‘s Kishigawa Line .

She was a female calico cat kept at the station’s convenience store and became an idol , like a maneki -neko (beckoning cat), before eventually becoming the station’s official mascot (a unique stationmaster, or cat stationmaster ) with the title of ” stationmaster ” and becoming world-famous . [ 3 ] She is now the station’s honorary permanent stationmaster.

On January 5, 2007, he was officially appointed as the stationmaster by the Wakayama Electric Railway, which caused quite a stir . [ 3 ] His main job was to “welcome customers,” and he is said to have not only attracted customers to Kishi Station, but also brought about the Heisei era cat boom, ” nekonomics ,” in Japan . [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] He was employed for life with no term limit , and his annual salary was one year’s worth of cat food .

Tama died in 2015, age 16.

But the Japan Rail Club says there’s a new stationmaster cat:

Her role of station master at Kishi Station was assumed by another beautiful calico cat, Nitama (ニタマ literarally “Tama two”), for whom curious travellers and excited fans alike travel all the way to the quiet station in Wakayama Prefecture.

Here is Nitama from CNN:

Nitama — the new stationmaster of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture — has been praised for her “hat-wearing” skills. courtesy Ryobi Group

Notes (indented) and 3 photos from Carlissa Loh:

As a tribute to Tama, Wakayama Electric Railway started operating the Tama Densha train (たま電車), an adorable train with an exterior decorated 101 drawings of Tama donning a station master’s hat in various poses. Affectionately called “Tamaden”, the train’s front even has ears and whiskers, how cute is that? As a self-professed noritetsu, I love riding special trains, and knew I had to make room in my trip to take a ride on this train and pay a visit to Nitama.

Inside the train, there were even more darling drawings and decals of Tama adorning the windows and walls, and since it was the New Year’s period when I visited, there weren’t many other passengers, so I could take photos to my heart’s content.

The Tama Densha is made up of two carriages, and each one is furnished with wooden seats of varying designs of shades of orange, black, and white, and just oozed comfort and cosiness. The train was designed by Mitooka Eiji (水戸岡 鋭治), who has designed many memorable sightseeing trains such as the luxury cruise train Seven Stars in Kyushu, many of JR Kyushu’s D&S Trains, Kyoto Tango Railway’s sightseeing trains, and more.

I’d surely ride this train if I went to Japan (one of my dream destinations)!

More photos and info at the site.

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And from Defector, Alex Sujong Laughlin interviews his cat Pong about the cat’s obnoxious behaviors. Click below to read:

Excerpts by Laughlin are indented:

Like every other member of my generation who has put off traditional markers of adulthood, like home ownership and having children, I am completely, utterly devoted to my cat, Pong. In the five years he’s lived with us, Pong has evolved from the scrawny street cat we adopted in the Union Square Petco to the ruler of our household. We often quote a decade-old Adam Serwer tweet about his own cats: Management doesn’t need a union.

We’ve invented a rich mythology for Pong’s inner life over the last five years. His hardscrabble early years taught him to flirt and charm for his meals on the streets of Harlem, where he developed his taste for French fries, noodles, and pizza. He ran with a tough crew that wasn’t afraid to get into scraps if he needed to assert dominance. He inherited his asthma and anxiety from his mother (me), and he spends his days working hard (sleeping on a chair in my office) for the money to pay our rent.

In any relationship, you fall into rhythms built around each other’s quirks and scar tissue. This is true even—or maybe especially—when the relationship is with an animal who cannot speak English. We’ve come to accept his most annoying behaviors; his loafing on our backs at 5 a.m. like a sleep paralysis demon is just a part of life with Pong, as are the lost hours of sleep and frequent yelling when he can’t find us in the house. \

I got a recommendation for a pet communicator, whose identity I’m keeping private at their request, and booked a 30-minute session with them. We met on Zoom, and when they started looking for his energy, they asked if he’s a male, six to eight years old, who’s very sure of himself. Pong was sleeping next to me in a little kitty croissant but the communicator couldn’t see him on screen. I told them they had the right guy.

What follows is an interview with Pong, through the communicator, which I’ve edited for clarity.

Just two Q&A’s via the pet communicator:

Can you tell me anything about your life before you came to live with us? 

There wasn’t a loving family, but there were two or three people who took care of me on the street. There was one man who I had a strong relationship with. There was a misunderstanding, the people tried to bring me into the house, and then took me away.

(This made me think of Alex, the doorman who apparently fed him when he was a stray, and who he was named for when he was brought to Union Square. Yes, we should’ve kept that name.)

. . .I appreciate that. OK, one last question. Sometimes you’ll crawl up onto my lap and be really sweet and snuggly, and then out of nowhere you’ll start attacking me, biting me and breaking skin. It really sucks when that happens! What’s going on? 

Sometimes I feel like I’m back on the street and it just happens. It feels right in the moment, but when you get upset I feel ashamed. I saw the tissues with the blood last week and I feel bad. It’s not your fault.

There’s a lot more Q&A at the site.

h/t: Malcolm, Ginger K.

Did you spot the spider in this morning’s post?  Here’s the original photo:

The reveal:

It’s ready for its closeup:

. . . and a running crab spider (the tentative ID) from Wikipedia:

Bruce Marlin, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Reader Enrico sent me a link to this video called “Blind Spot“, a 2024 movie that’s 95 minutes long. The topic is antisemitism on American college campuses.

The YouTube notes:

“Blind Spot” is the only current film focused exclusively on campus antisemitism. Featuring never-before-seen interviews with students before and after October 7th, along with testimony before Congress and insights from officials, journalists, and university staff, it reveals how antisemitism on campus didn’t appear overnight—and what can be done about it. Described as “like nothing I’ve ever seen” and “a fire alarm ringing,” the film highlights the resilience of Jewish students and the urgent need for change.

It begins with the infamous conflict between Rep. Elise Stefanik and the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. The Presidents’ answers about the rules were correct, but the Presidents of Penn and Harvard later resigned, largely because of the hypocrisy of their answers: free speech is indeed within the colleges’ ambit, but they enforced it erratically and hypocritically.

The rest of the video consists of short interviews and statements and scenes of anti-Israel demonstrations from many schools, including the University of Chicago. As we already know, anti-Semitism is pervasive at many of these schools. What impresses me is the resilience and determination of the Jewish students. Compared to the angry, shouty, ace-covered advocates of Palestine, they seem eminently rational. I found it both depressing and heartening.

This film was made last year, but I can’t say things have gotten palpably better in the last year.  As Hamas continues to lose in Gaza, the intensity of Jew hatred has only grown.

BTW, my Belgian colleague Maarten Boudry, a philosopher with whom I’ve published (and an atheist), just published an article in Quillette detailing his impressions of his first trip to Israel.

We have only one set of Readers’ Wildlife left, so I’m putting in a “Spot the. .  .” feature from Neil Taylor of Cambridge in the UK.  But please send in your photos, folks.

Neil says this:

The first photo is a tree stump draped in spider webs in which a spider is hiding. . . .I’m not a spider expert but I think it is a running crab spider (Philodromus sp.).  Quite a beautiful little thing.

Can you spot it? I’ll post the reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time. I think this is of medium difficulty. Please do not reveal in the comments where it is; let others have the fun of finding it.

Today we have some lovely insect photos by regular Mark Sturtevant. Mark’s ID’s and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of insects taken two summers ago from area parks near where I live in eastern Michigan.

First up is a slightly embarrassing accomplishment, which is a decent picture of one of our Sulphur butterflies. Sulphurs are an exceedingly common group with several local species, but for some reason they are extremely wary around me. Anyway, this one was unwary, and I think it is the Orange Sulphur (Colias eurytheme):

Next up is our largest butterfly, the Eastern Giant Swallowtail (Heraclides cresphontes). They are often challenging since they tend to keep their “engines running” (meaning their wings are almost always in motion) when rapidly foraging from flower to flower, but this one paused very briefly:

One of my favorite insects is shown next. This is Anotia uhleri, or what I call the “Flat Derbid”, although this Derbid planthopper has no common name. They can be found in forests sitting on the undersides of leaves. The orange thingies sticking out of the head are stumpy antennae:

Here is a Leaf-footed Bug nymph (Acanthocephala terminalis):

I was finding quite a few of these Lacewing egg clusters along a forest trail. Lacewings lay eggs on the ends of long stalks for protection. Having the eggs tied together in a bundle suggests that these are one of our larger Green Lacewing species, Leucochrysa insularis. This species tends to stay in forests, sitting under leaves by day, and like the Derbid above they lay their wings flat.

An occasional visitor to the porchlight at home are Mosquitos of Unusual Size, and one is shown in the next picture. I was eventually able to identify this giant mosquito as the Gallnipper, Psorophora ciliata. This one is a female. Although she will require a blood meal to reproduce, and they are described as being rather aggressive in pursuit of humans, a relatively good thing about them is that the larvae are predatory on other mosquito larvae. I have pictures coming up later that compares one of these beasts to a regular mosquito, but for now the attached picture can give some idea:

The next three pictures show a surprise, but the story starts out unremarkably. The beetles foraging on flower pollen are Brown Blister Beetles, Zonitis vittigera. Blister Beetles are a large family, and are so-named because they are chemically protected by exuding an irritating fluid if annoyed. It is relevant to point out that they have interesting biology in that they grow up as parasites on other insects, usually on bees. The mobile first instar larvae are called triungulin larvae, and they start their journey by clambering up onto flowers and wait for a bee to visit. Once the flower is visited by their intended target, they hitch a ride to the nest where they move in and eat the bee provisions and even bee larvae:

I almost did not bother processing the 2nd picture because it had motion-blur, though the composition was nice. But do you see the tiny things on the thorax of the beetle? The 3rd picture provides a blow-up. Those little things are Blister Beetle triungulin larvae! Possibly not this species, though. So, what is going on? I have sent these pictures on to a Blister Beetle Facebook group and to iNaturalist to ask for opinions. There is no answer yet, but possibly the larvae attach to any insect visitor. Although non-bee visitors would be temporary dead-ends, one can imagine that this would at least disperse them to other flowers:

Finally, here are pictures of our most common Sand Wasp, which is the Four-banded Stink Bug Wasp (Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus). Females of these highly energetic wasps will provision a burrow with paralyzed stink bugs, and these are used to raise the next generation of wasps. In the first picture you can see the spray of sand being flung out as she excavates her burrow:

I am much relieved!

A goose-stepping duckling.  A LOT more pictures soon.

This post reports a new form of life that is clearly a member of the archaea, with characteristics of that group, but also lacking a vital feature of other archaea as well as other bacteria and all eukaryotes: metabolism: the pathways (mostly involving enzymatic proteins) that keep an organism going and reproducing by converting nutrients into energy. Its lack of genes for metabolism makes it resemble a virus, what hijacks its nutrients from the cells it infects. But viruses can’t completely self-replicate like this new critter, for viruses also partly hijack the DNA/RNA replication system of their hosts.

The new creature, whose appearance is unknown since it was identified from DNA alone, must get its metabolites through association with other species. Finally, the new creature does have something that viruses lack—a complete system for replicating its genome: ribosomes, DNA, genes for transfer RNAs, and so on. In other words, in important ways it’s different from viruses, but also different from other archaea as well as bacteria and eukaryotes (organisms with “true cells” that have their DNA in the nucleus and have membrane-covered organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts).  The DNA of this creature is in a single circular chromosome like that of bacteria and archaea. Its unique features appears to make it a member of a new domain of life.

The question is this: is this new organism even alive? Viruses are regarded by many biologists as “not alive” because they can’t grow, they have no metabolism to sustain themselves, and are completely dependent for reproduction on the replication machinery of other organisms (bacteria or eukaryotes) they parasitize.

Well, read about this new organism below, discovered by sequencing DNA inside of a singe eukaryotic cell tell me if you think it’s “alive.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s review:

There are three domains of life: the bacteria, the archaea (discovered only in 1977 by Woese and Fox), and the eukaryotes (everything else, all having membrane bound nuclei and organelles). Together, the bacteria and archaea are called “prokaryotes” (i.e., single celled microorganisms), and everything else besides viruses comprise the “eukaryotes.”

The phylogeny (family tree) of these domains is shown below.  It was realized only recently that all organisms with true cells (e.g., us) descended from archaea, as shown below. That means three things. First, we are more closely related to the archaea (which often live in weird places like hot springs or hyper-salty water) than we are to bacteria. Eukaryotes did not evolve from bacteria.

Second, eukaryotes like us could be thought of as archaea, since we are nested within that group. In the same way, we could be thought of as fish, and birds as reptiles.

Finally, archaea are considered paraphyletic: the group does not contain all the descendants of its common ancestor. The eukaryotes are not considered archaea, but ARE descendants of the common ancestor of archaea; they just branched off later into a new domain of life.

Now this family tree was constucted from DNA sequence similarity, but archaea also share certain traits with eukaryotes that bacteria don’t have, including “shared metabolic pathways, similar enzymes involved in transcription and translation, and DNA replication mechanisms.” That is what a query to Google tells me. Remember, this area is far from my own biological expertise, so if you see an error, let me know!

This tree is from Sadava et al. 2020. Life. The science of biology. 12th edition. Oxford Univ. Press)

Here is a comparison of the traits of the groups (there are overlaps),from Wikipedia.

Note that all three groups have metabolism (pathways to produce energy and grow), and cell walls, but eukaryotes have a special cell wall with two layers of lipids and a layer of protein. Viruses, not shown in this comparison, have only a protein capsule around them. (Bacteria and archaea have more complicated cell walls.)

Viruses do not metabolize and are widely regarded as “nonliving particles”.  Bacteria and most archaea have metabolism.

The paper describing the new finding is apparently not yet published, but you can find it at bioRχiv by clicking the title below or downlading the pdf here.

How did they find this thing? In a weird way. The researchers took a single individual of the dinoflagellate Citharistes regius and amplified and sequenced all the DNA it contained. Besides the DNA of the dinoflagellate, it also found DNA from three other types of organisms: cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria once called “blue-green algae”), two species of gamma proteobacteria (a well-known group) and then the weird species under consideration, which they call Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile. This apparently means it’s a candidate species that hasn’t been formally described.  We’ll call it CSM in this post. We don’t know what it looks like or what its ecology and behavior is, except we know it must be parasitic, commensal, or symbiotic with some other species. It cannot live on its own because it can’t metabolize.

Here is its genome shown in the paper. This is all we know of the organism’s biology:

(From the paper) Figure 1. The genome map of Sukunaarchaeum. From outermost to innermost circle, the positions of protein-coding genes and rRNA genes on the +/- strands, tRNA genes, GC content, and GC skew are shown. Color codes for the outermost and 2nd outermost circle: Blue, genes of unknown function; light blue, genes of known function; yellow, rRNA genes.

 

It is in the Archaea as the DNA certainly shows its affinity. But, as shown below, its lineage originated very soon after the archaea branched off from their common ancestor with bacteria.

It has a very small genome: 238,000 base pairs, though that is not the smallest genome known of any organism in the three domains of life (note I’m using “life” here, though this thing may be more virus-like and hence “not alive”).

The chomosome is circular, presumably because sequencing it, one arrives back at the beginning again.

It has 222 genes, most of which are devoted to the machinery for making copies of itself. These include transfer RNAs and ribosomal RNAs, which are not found in viruses, all of which hijack that stuff from the cells they infect.

It has NO genes for metabolism (no genes for it), so CSM must grow and divide using resources from cells that it hijacks. Other bacteria and archaea (and of course eukaryotes) have the genes for metabolic processes, making CSM more virus-like. But, as I said, it differs from viruses by having a complete set of “self-replication core machinery” and genes that are like those in archaea.

189 of its 222 genes make proteins. All but five of these are devoted to self-replication. Several are very large and strongly suggest that they constitute part of the cell wall (they call it “membrane”), though the researchers are not sure about this.

Here’s a summary of the organism. Note that its unique character, lacking metabolism, makes it distinct from other domains of archaean life.

 

And a figure from the paper  (just look at “a” on the left side) showing where it fits in the family tree of prokaryotes. It branches off from the rest of the archaea early, and then evolves very fast, as you can see by the long branch of its lineage, probably reflecting strong natural selection on the lineage.

(From paper) Figure 2. Phylogenetic placement of Sukunaarchaeum within the Archaeal domain. a, Maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree based on a concatenated alignment of 70 conserved archaeal marker proteins. The tree was inferred under the LG+C60+F+I+R10 model, based on a dataset of 150 taxa and 18,286 sites. The scale bar represents the estimated number of substitutions per site.

To summarize:

CSM is an Archaea as seen from its DNA sequence.  Of this there is no doubt.

But unlike other Archaea or even bacteria, it has NO metabolic machinery. In this way it’s similar to a virus.

But it is dissimilar to viruses because it has the complete machinery for self-replicating its genome, which viruses lack.

Ergo, it must be associated in some way with other organisms to be able to replicate.

We have no idea what it looks like, though it almost certainly is a cell rather than a virus.

Here’s how the authors highlight CSM’s uniqueness:

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum not only expands the known boundaries of archaeal diversity but also challenges fundamental concepts of cellular life. The extreme metabolic simplification raises fundamental questions about the minimal requirements for cellular life. Sukunaarchaeum, focused almost entirely on genetic self-perpetuation, represents a compelling example of how far metabolic reduction can proceed within a cellular framework. Its minimal genome, absolute host dependence necessitated by profound metaboliceduction, rapid evolution, and significant investment in large, membrane-associated proteins potentially mediating host interaction constitute a unique combination of characteristics that are collectively reminiscent of viruses. Nonetheless, Sukunaarchaeum remains fundamentally cellular – a key distinction from viruses, which typically lack their own core replication machinery genes and rely on host systems. It possesses ribosomes and the core transcriptional and translational apparatus inherited from cellular ancestors. Thus, while clearly cellular, its extreme metabolic dependence and specialization for self-replication are virus-like in nature, suggesting that Sukunaarchaeum may represent the closest cellular entity discovered to date that approaches a viral strategy of existence.

The authors found this organism by sequencing a single eukaryotic cell; CSM was likely inside this cell, like a virus in a human cell, but we don’t know if CSM damages its host(s) in any way. It is likely that many more organisms like this exist but aren’t known because people don’t do DNA sequencing of entire single-celled eukaryotes very often. Dinoflagellates are aquatic organisms, but there may be more stuff like CSM found by sequencing DNA in the soil.

I’ll add that this organism might give us an idea of how viruses originated because, if it loses some of its core replication machinery and genes for making membranes, it would become a virus. It is unlikely to be a virus that might develop into an archaean, as it already is an archaean with a membrane, but would have to evolve a tremendous amount of new metabolic machinery to be able to fuel itself, and that metabolic machinery would have to be genetically similar to the metabolic machinery of already-existing archaea.  That would be an unheard-of event of convergent evolution, thus very unlikely.  This thing, so far, is sui generis.

Finally, IS IT ALIVE? That, as you might guess, depends on your definition of “life”.

If you count the ability to self-replicate on its own, CSM is alive. In that sense viruses are not alive, and most of us think they’re not. (Bur remember that it needs to be assocated with another species to self-replicate.)

But if you count the ability to sustain itself by metabolizing and fueling its own replication, then it is NOT alive.

You pays your money, you takes your choice.

In the new Jesus and Mo post, “draw,” Mo draws a self-portrait. Apparently, though pictures of Mohammed are prohibited by nearly all Muslim sects, that prohibition doesn’t hold for Mo himself.  He seems to have a bit of a gut, doubtlessly from drinking too many pints with Jesus at the local bar.  There’s also this note:

Deadline for entry in to the annual Draw Mohammed Day Contest is May 16. Find out more here https://exmuslims.org/

But I can’t find where one enters on that site. However, I did find instructions on their Facebook page, and here they are:

 Deadline is close: Draw Muhammad Day Contest closes May 16! 

 Got blasphemy skills? Put them to paper (or pixels) for a shot at:
 $1st & 2nd place cash prizes
 EXMNA merch for runner-ups
 Bonus points for humor and satire
 AI entries welcome—just label them!

Email your entry to info@exmuslims.org with “Draw Muhammad Day Contest” in the subject line. Don’t forget to follow IG/FB [Instagram/Facebook] guidelines.

Heresy has never paid better.

Here is a sample entry from EXMNA:

Finally, the Jesus and Mo cartoon:

Today’s photos from the Pacific Northwest come from reader Jim Blilie. Jim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Spring has sprung in the Pacific Northwest after a long, cool tapering off of winter.  We have finally hit the 70°s our area (20+°C), in May.  This is a set of spring flowers (mostly).  We live in Klickitat County, Washington, at the extreme southern edge of Washington state, just east of the Cascade mountain range.  These photos, except the last two, are taken in Klickitat County.

First, two photos from a hike we take on local ranch land (the landowners are kind enough to allow public access to their land, except during calving season).  These are Grass Widows (Olsynium douglasii).

Next are two photos of some ornamental flowers that were originally planted but now run wild in our yard in the early spring.  Empress Lilies (Fritillaria imperialis), which smell almost exactly like skunk cabbage, which is probably why the deer don’t eat them.

Next are two photos from our local daily exercise walk, down the gravel road we live on.  Again, from early Spring:  Calypso Orchids (Calypso bulbosa) and Trillium (probably:  Trillium ovatum)

Next are three photos of Balsam Root (probably:  Balsamorhiza sagittata) and Lupine (probably:  Lupinus latifolius) flowers on a local hillside that we like to hike especially during the Spring and winter (it’s much too hot in the summer as it faces south). In the third photo, you can see Mount Hood (highest peak in Oregon) and Mount Jefferson (second highest in Oregon) at the top.

Next are three photos that show the prize view for hiking up this local hillside (aside from the beautiful flowers in the Spring):  On this day (5-May-2025), it was as clear as we’ve ever seen on this hike.  To get the view to the north (Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, Goat Rocks), you have to ascend 1200 feet (366m) to the top of the ridge.

Mount Adams near and large and Mount Rainier over the northern shoulder of Mount Adams.

Mount Jefferson, second highest in Oregon:

Three Sisters in central Oregon:

These are shot at the 35mm equivalent of only 200mm, so you can see how clear the day was.  We could see almost every Cascade volcano from South Sister to Mount Rainier (some were hidden from our viewpoint), a span of about 190 miles (306 km).

Finally are two photos taken yesterday (7-May) in neighboring Skamania County on a hike.  Pacific Dogwood (Cornus nuttallii), which is in full bloom in our woods now.  And finally, Oregon Anemone (Anemonoides oregana):

Insomnia has rendered me nearly insensate today, but I plan a nice science post tomorrow, assuming I’ll be able to write and think. Today we get music.

“Free Man in Paris” is a song written, sung, and performed by Joni Mitchell, describing record and film producer David Geffen kvetching about busy life in the US, where many people importuned him constantly. It’s about his celebrating his freedom from that importuning in Paris. The song first appeared on Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” album in 1974.

Geffen originally signed Joni to Asylum Records (part of Atlantic), and here’s a bit more about the song from the Wikipedia links above:

Joni Mitchell and Geffen were close friends and, in the early 1970s, made a trip to Paris with Robbie Robertson and Robertson’s wife, Dominique. As a result of that trip, Mitchell wrote “Free Man in Paris“ about Geffen.

The song is about music agent/promoter David Geffen, a close friend of Mitchell in the early 1970s, and describes Geffen during a trip the two made to Paris with Robbie Robertson and Dominique Robertson. While Geffen is never mentioned by name, Mitchell describes how he works hard creating hits and launching careers but can find some peace while vacationing in Paris. Mitchell sings “I was a free man in Paris. I felt unfettered and alive. Nobody calling me up for favors. No one’s future to decide.”

I love this song, as I love Joni—at the top of singers/songwriters/musicians of our era. Here she is playing it in 1979. The sax is great, and Joni plays electric. (The recorded version is here.)

Here’s the second of Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segments that I haven’t posted. The YouTube caption is “New Rule: Before they can take on Donald Trump, Democrats have to decide which wing of their own party is best to lead them out of the wilderness.” Well, the segment doesn’t even really tackle that question. It only says that Democrats have to be less “judgey” if they want to start winning elections.

The theme is who should be the face of the “New” Democratic party, but starts by recounting an episode of the t.v. show “Love is Blind,” which apparently is in its last season (“season 8”) and yet I’ve been completely unaware of it. The bride, Sarah, leaves her fiancée Ben at the altar because he had no strong political opinions, much less strong progressive ones.

His moral for our party: “If the standards on the Left are going to be this high, and politics is going to be this much of a cock-block, we’re never going to win elections or have any more babies. This inclination from certain liberals to always and immediately excommunicate instead of communicate is what makes them so unlikeable.”  He does dwell on the rigor women’s standards rather than men’s, but I don’t know whether they differ. (By the way, I’m a tad under 5’8″ so I guess I’m unacceptable.)  Nor do I know whether Republicans would spurn a potential paramour because they aren’t 100% down the line with Trump. All in all, this is a pretty mediocre episode of Maher, though it may appeal to those who have watched “Love is Blind.” Personally, I’d prefer more lessons for Democrats and less summary of television plots.

The guests include journalist Kara Swisher and a man I don’t recognize (readers?).

 

A short while back I added a new comment to “Da Roolz,” the list of posting guidelines that everyone should read (especially newbies). The last guideline now reads:

26.) I will tolerate no comments that are generated with AI.  Even one of them will lead to instant banning for life.

Now I will be the judge of whether a comment is likely generated by ChatGPT or the like, but this one, which someone attempted to post on the thread after “Bill Maher: New Rules #1“, is surely the product of a bot. I won’t give the hapless writer’s handle:

Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment, as discussed on Why Evolution Is True, delivers the comedian’s signature blend of sharp satire and cultural critique—this time tackling modern hypocrisy with his usual unflinching wit. The analysis highlights Maher’s ability to skewer both political extremes, though a deeper dive into his factual accuracy (or occasional oversimplifications) could add nuance. Fans will appreciate the curated highlights, while critics might crave more counterpoints. A thought-provoking read for those who miss Real Time’s mix of humor and hard truths.

Oy, my kishkes!  All I can say is that if you post something this bloody obvious—something that doesn’t add anything to the discussion—you better find another site for your Ai-generated lucubrations.  And this person must now do that.

Here’s the comedy bit from a recent edition of Bill Maher’s “Real Time” (there are two; I’ll put up the other one tomorrow). The title is “New Rule: Retake the Flag!

He first gives examples of politicians using profanity, something they never did in previous decades. That bit is pretty funny.

Maher’s guests are Democrat Donna Brazile and Republican Mike Lawler, and after his bit on profanity, Maher, citing statistics on how few Democrats say they’re proud to be American, goes on to extol the USA in an unusual burst of patriotic fervor.  He says, for example, “The U.S is leagues ahead of the rest of the world on most of the progressive issues that are important to young people,” citing statistics about gay freedom, a rise in diversity, women and black people increasingly owning businesses,  and contrasting the U.S. with third-world countries (and the Middle East).  He goes on to deplore what is especially odious: the fact that young people often appear to regard Hamas as a role model (here I agree with him 100%).  He adds, “If the thought leaders in the Democratic Party keep encouraging and not rebuking the idea that America is cringe and the people who run Gaza are great, the Democrats are doomed. . . the Democrats’ problem is the energy of the party is with the young, and the young are with the terrorists. That’s not good!”  His comment on the AOC/Bernie Sanders rally is quite apposite, but watch to see it.

He finishes by extolling all the technical advances that came from America, like smartphones and Grubhub, presumably to show the kids that they’re living an American-buttressed life.

This is a bit too jingoistic for me, though I agree with Maher’s view that young Democrats often wrongly admire terrorists, and I laughed at the profanity bit.  But other countries are at least as progressive as America in some ways, and more progressive in others. Think of Canada or Europe, especially Scandinavia. In many of those countries the penal system is more rational and humane than America’s, and there is more paternity/maternity leave, help for old people, and free medical care for all.

I will not attribute this to Maher’s demonized Dinner with Trump, but he does have a point that America is a good country to live in (or was until January), and countries ruled by terrorists are not ones we should admire.  I think he just decided to extol what is good about America. Unfortunately, we’re not unique in many of the ways he extols.

 

 

I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s engrossing essay on sex, gender, and wokeness, and something struck me—a notion that’s not original since it occurred to Rebecca Tuvel when she wrote her infamous essay for Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal, on “transracialism” Tuvel’s essay pointed out the philosophical and moral parallels between declaring you’re a member of your non-natal “race” (again, I prefer “ancestry”) and declaring that you’re of  your non-natal sex.  Yet Tuvel’s philosophical analysis of this issue, an analysis which I applauded, got her in hot water. As Wikipedia notes:

 

The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.  The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it.  The controversy exposed a rift within the journal’s editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.

In the article—”In Defense of Transracialism”, published in Hypatia‘s spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races”.  After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia‘s editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.

On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article.  When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned.  The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance.  In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.

And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.

Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.”  The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.

Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex.  After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black).  But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.

This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker.  And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.

Yes, a woman is whoever she says she is. Clearly, sex is a social construct here, and you can be whatever sex you want, regardless of your natal gamete-producing system.  Grant was widely applauded by many on the gender-extremist side, while my response was taken down by the FFRF for being hurtful and offensive (you can still read it here, here or here).

 

This fracas, which I call “The KerFFRFle,” has reminded me of the seeming hypocrisy of regarding both sex and race as social constructs, but allowing you to declare whatever sex you feel you are, but not allowing you to declare whatever race you feel you are. Transracialism would seem especially laudatory because one would think it would be a bold move to declare you’re of an oppressed minority group. (Again, I prefer “ancestry” or “population” to “race” for reasons I’ve explained many times.)

I am not taking a stand on these issues here, but merely trying, as did Richard, to understand the difference.  And so I ask readers?

Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?

 

Please send in your wildlife photos as I need MOAR! Thx!

Today we have a text-and-photo essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, emphasizing two of his favorite themes: history and pollination.   Athayde’s words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Help yourself, but don’t overdo it

Throughout the history of the Roman Empire, women had hardly any employment opportunities. Locusta was an exception. This immigrant from Gaul was celebrated for her knowledge and technical skills: Agrippina, Emperor Claudius’ wife, and Agrippina’s son, Nero the unhinged, were among her clients. Nero even hired Locusta as his advisor and as a tutor for young apprentices who could absorb her expertise in an occupation in high demand in the Empire. Locusta was a professional poisoner.

From emperors to slaves, affluent merchants to muleteers, poisoning was a convenient and effective way to dispose of a difficult spouse, secure an inheritance, settle scores with an enemy or encourage an aging relative to free up some space at home; the practice was common enough that praegustator (food taster) guilds arose among slaves and freedmen (Kaufman, 1932). Women were particularly skilled at the craft, partially as self-defence in a violent and radically male-controlled society.

Locusta testing poison on a slave, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1847–1926) © Bridgeman Art Library, Wikimedia Commons:

CHT219368 Locusta Testing Poison on a Slave, c.1870-80 (oil on canvas) by Sylvestre, Joseph-Noel (1847-1926); Private Collection;  (other info used by Agrippina to poison her husband the emperor Claudius in 54 AD; used by Nero to poison Britannicus and his mother Agrippina; adviser to Nero on poisons;); Archives Charmet; French, it is possible that some works by this artist may be protected by third party rights in some territories.possible copyright restrictions apply, consult national copyright laws

Locusta had an arsenal of poisonous plants at her disposal such as deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and hemlock (Conium maculatum) (Cilliers & Retief, 2000). But none of these handy tools were as reliable as aconite, aka monkshood or wolfsbane (Aconitum napellus), which the poet Ovid called ‘the mother-in-law’s poison’. Like all the 250 species in its genus, aconite is loaded with aconitine and related alkaloids that cause all sorts of neurological and cardiovascular disorders. Besides being a favourite of ne’er-do-wells and sorcerers for centuries, the plant has been on herbalists’ shelves as a local anaesthetic, tonic for the heart and for other pharmacological uses. These applications are benign but exceedingly risky, as 1 g of aconite biomass may despatch a patient to the underworld: this plant is about 100 times more lethal than strychnine.

A deceptively sweet-looking aconite. But the root of the plant’s name reveals its danger: akonitos (without dust), short for ‘without the dust of the arena’, implies biting the dust without a struggle © Llez, Wikimedia Commons:

Gardeners attracted to aconite’s violet-blue flowers may resent the plant’s mean streak, but for the plant, poisoned people are collateral damage. The alkaloids stuffing the plant to the gills are a defensive weapon against leaf munchers, root borers, seed predators and other enemies. Chemicals such as aconitine are known as secondary metabolites: they are energetically expensive to produce and have no role in plants’ day-to-day physiological processes such as photosynthesis, respiration or growth. Yet, they are vital for survival and reproductive success by repelling or killing herbivores that target the plant. But this form of chemical warfare has a drawback: secondary metabolites may leak into nectar and pollen, putting flower visitors at risk. In the case of aconite, nectar has low levels of alkaloids, but pollen is loaded with them. Understandably, aconite pollinators – mostly bumble bees – avoid the powdery stuff, so as not to end up dead. Such reluctance is not good for plant reproduction, but aconite has a cunning plan.

All Aconitum spp. flowers are hermaphrodite and dichogamous, that is, their male and female reproductive organs mature at different times. The male phase, i.e., the period when only the male bits are mature, occurs first and lasts for 5 to 6 days; the female phase, when the male organs wither and the female ones are receptive to pollen, lasts 1-2 days. This setting nudges visitors to explore male-phase flowers first and for longer, then hopefully transport pollen to a female-phase flower. To overcome bees’ unwillingness to play along, male-phase flowers produce more scents and over four times more nectar than the female-phase ones. This nutritional bribe persuades bumble bees to drop by for a sip of nectar, which is relatively harmless, and leave the toxic pollen alone. But even if not purposedly gathering pollen, a bee is unlikely to depart from a flower without some attached to its body. That’s all the aconite needs: the few pollen grains stuck to a bee are more than sufficient to assure pollination when the bee then takes nectar from a female-phase flower (Jacquemart et al., 2019).

Help yourself to a drink, but don’t take pollen away. Or else © Franz van Duns, Wikimedia Commons:

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate aconite’s endeavours. Like most flowering plants, it needs insects to transfer its pollen and get fertilised. To attract them, it offers rewards in the form of protein (pollen) and sugars (nectar). But the plant can’t give these goodies away willy-nilly because they are metabolically expensive. Aconite prevents the excessive harvesting of pollen by spiking it with a toxic alkaloid, but promotes the involuntary taking of some pollen grains by selectively stocking male-phase flowers with better nectar.

The aconite story is not an isolated case. Many plants regulate pollen consumption with toxins, while hermaphrodite species are often gender biased regarding nectar volume and quality (Carlson & Harms, 2006), which affect the number and duration of pollinator visits, and the number of flowers visited (Parachnowitsch et al., 2019). Natural selection doesn’t manifest itself much more gloriously than through the intricate arrangements between toxic plants and their pollinators.

The pollen stuck to this bumble bee’s corbiculae (pollen baskets) will end up as food for baby bees; from the plants’ perspective, it’s a loss of resources. Judiciously dabbing it with poison could have prevented that © Tony Wills, Wikimedia Commons:

It’s Sunday, and so we continue John Avise‘s weekly series, this one on dragonflies and damselflies of North America. John’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 4

This week I continue a series of posts on Dragonflies and Damselflies (taxonomic Order Odonata) that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m going down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Also shown is the state where I took each photo.

Mexican Amberwing, Perithemis intensa, young male (California):

Neon Skimmer, Libellula croceipennis, male (California):

Neon Skimmer, male, side view (California):

Neon Skimmer, female (California):

Red Rock Skimmer, Paltothemis lineatipes, male (California):

Red Saddlebags, Tramea onusta, male (California):

Red Saddlebags, another male (California):

Red-tailed Pennant, Brachymesia furcata, male (California):

Regal Darner, Coryphaeschna ingens (Florida):

Roseate Skimmer, female (Florida):

Roseate Skimmer, male, sideview (Florida):

Saffron-winged Meadowhawk, Sympetrum costiferum (Wisconsin):

Saffron-winged Meadowhawk, female (Wisconsin):