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Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “targets,” came with the caption, “He’s fluent in French, you know.”  The story is that, by a big margin (210-81), the French Senate voted to ban “‘ ‘the wearing of any sign or outfit ostensibly showing a political or religious affiliation’ in competitions at regional and national levels as organised by French sports federations.”  This seems explicitly aimed at Muslim women, and Amnesty International says the ban—which needs to be affirmed by the National Assembly to become law—would “violate human rights.”

Jesus may have a point that this is illiberal, but also realizes that it is misogynistic.  Mo has a good comeback (well, at least a riposte.)

The Naturalistic Fallacy, which most of you surely know, it the erroneous equation of what does exist with what should exist.  Discussed extensively by Hume, it is the false equation of “is” with “ought”. In biology, it takes the form of observing some behavior in animals that is similar to a behavior in humans, and then justifying or saying the human behavior “natural”  or “good” because we see it in other species.

But this is a bad argument, for it cuts both ways. After all, animals show a lot of behavior that would be considered reprehensible or even immoral in humans.  In fact, Joan Roughgarden wrote a book, Evolution’s Rainbow, which describes sex and gender diversity in nature as an explicit way of justifying similar behaviors in humans as good—because they are natural. I reviewed the book for TLS and wrote this bit (review no longer online but I can send a copy).

Coyne, J. A.  2004.  Charm schools. (Review of Evolution’s Rainbow, by Joan Roughgarden). Times Literary Supplement, London. July 30, 2004 (No. 5287), p. 5.

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers. And given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body, nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behaviour are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?

The step from “natural” to “ethical” is even riskier. As the philosopher G. E. Moore argued, identifying what is good or right by using any natural property is committing the “naturalistic fallacy”: there is no valid way to deduce “ought” from “is”. If no animals showed homosexual behaviour, would discrimination against gay humans be more justified? Certainly not. Roughgarden’s philosophical strategy is as problematic as her biological one.

Now a 2022 paper in Nature Communications had the potential to demonstrate the same fallacy, but fortunately the authors went to great lengths to avoid that  The same, however, is not true of a new take on this paper in a new article in ZME Science, which gave a précis of the paper and stepped on the Fallacy’s tail.

First the Nature paper itself, which you can access by clicking on the article below, or by reading the pdf here.

It’s a good paper on the evolution and phylogeny of “same-sex sexual behavior” in mammals, which they define as “transient courtship or mating interactions between members of the same sex“.  

Note that it’s “transient,” which explicitly excludes homosexuality, most notably in humans, which is a persistent sexual attraction to members of one’s own biological sex.  This form of transient sexual interaction is surprisingly common—a conservative estimate is 4% of all animal species, and, as the authors say, [includes] “all main groups from invertebrates such as insects, spiders, echinoderms, and nematodes, to vertebrates such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”

Now there are two ways to explain a behavior that seems on its face maladaptive. Why would you engage in sexual behavior that doesn’t involve passing on your genes? One hypothesis is that it’s just a nonadaptive byproduct of other behaviors: a general drive to mate when the appropriate mates aren’t available, or simply mistaken identity.  But the authors investigate two hypotheses that it is adaptive, and give some tentative evidence for that.

First, the results:

• The authors did a comprehensive survey of same-sex behavior (defined above) in 2546 species of mammals, and superimposed species with and without such behavior on their phylogenetic tree. The object was to see how many times the behavior evolved independently, and whether it was present in the common ancestor of a group (and thus could be passed along to its descendants). Here’s one of those phylogenies with the caption. (You needn’t worry about the details or summary, as I’ll give it below).

(from paper) Phylogenetic distribution of the presence of same-sex sexual behaviour in males and females in the subset III (see methods). The state of the mammalian ancestral nodes was assessed using maximum likelihood estimation (black: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by females; yellow: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by males; purple: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by both sexes). The silhouettes of representative mammals (downloaded from http://www.phylopic.org) illustrate the main mammalian clades. They have a Public Domain license without copyright (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

A summary:

•  The behavior was reported in 261 mammalian species
• Same-sex sexual behavior appears to be equally common in males and females, and the behavior in both sexes tends to be correlated across groups. That is, male and female same-sex behavior is more likely to both appear in the same species than if it either were distributed randomly among groups.
• It was not possible tell, using phylogenetic analysis, whether same-sex behavior was likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all mammals, but was NOT likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all placental mammals.
• The behavior seems to have evolved independently in many lineages, so same-sex sexual behavior seems to be a case of “convergent evolution.”
• The behavior is correlated with whether or not a species is social. If it is social, there’s a significantly higher probability of same-sex sexual behavior. (Remember that this is a correlation and doesn’t imply that sociality prompts the evolution of such behavior. The behavior could simply result from iondividuals in social species being closer to other individuals than those in non-social species.)
• The common ancestor of all primates does seem to have possessed same-sex sexual behavior.

The association of same-sex sexual behavior with sociality leads the authors to conclude that the behavior evolved by natural selection as a way to enforce inter-individual harmony required by sociality. They mention two such advantages:

1.) Same-sex sexual behavior is a way of creating and maintaining social bonds between individuals in a group; it’s a bonding mechanism.
2.) The behavior could also help prevent or resolve conflicts between members of a group, allowing a hierarchy to develop without injury of death to group members.

The authors mention that these effects have been demonstrated in some species like bottlenose dolphins and American bison, but I’m not familiar with this work, and such conclusions seem to me to be extraordinarily difficult to arrive at. However, I’ll take the authors’ word for it.

The authors are, to be sure, careful in their conclusions. First, they note that nonadaptive hypotheses, like “mistaken identity” could also contribute to the behavior.

Second, and the big one, they note that the behavior they studied is not the same as homosexual behavior like we find in humans.  They do add, however, that it humans do show same-sex sexual behavior in humans (I presume they’re referring to “bisexual” people who have sex with both males and females). From the paper:

However, same-sex sexual behaviour is operationally defined here as any temporary sexual contact between members of the same sex2. This behaviour should be distinguished from homosexuality as a more permanent same sex preference, as found in humans. For this reason, our findings cannot be used to infer the evolution of sexual orientation, identity, and preference or the prevalence of homosexuality as categories of sexual beings Nevertheless, even taking into account this cautionary note, by using phylogenetic inference, our study may provide a potential explanation on the evolutionary history of the occurrence of same-sex sexual behaviour in humans.

They may be right, but I think they should have added that even if same-sex sexual behavior was rare or nonexistent in mammals, its existence in humans is not made “ethical” or “natural” in our species. That would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy, and I emphasize that they do not commit it.  I’d would also emphasize, as I did above, that any sexual behavior between consenting human adults is not for us to judge, regardless of whether or not other species show it, and that such behaviors are fine so long as they’re legal. We don’t need to justify same-sex sexual behavior in humans by seeing it elsewhere in nature. But perhaps this stuff doesn’t belong in a scientific paper. But I want to emphasize it here, as I did in my review of Roughgarden’s book.

As I said, the authors don’t commit the naturalistic fallacy, but the new ZME Science paper below comes close to it. Click headline to read:

Up until the end, this article is okay, but then it can’t resist diving into our own species (bolding is mine).

However, the researchers distinguish between SSSB and sexual orientation. While SSSB involves occasional same-sex interactions, sexual orientation encompasses consistent patterns of attraction and identity, particularly prominent in humans.

While SSSB in animals supports the naturalness of such behaviors, human experiences of sexuality include layers of identity, culture, and personal meaning that go beyond biological explanations. Homosexuality in humans often involves stable sexual orientations and relationships, distinct from the transient or context-dependent SSSB observed in some animal species.

Ultimately, the widespread occurrence of SSSB in mammals, especially primates, strongly suggests that such behaviors are natural and adaptive. Normalizing same-sex behavior as a part of this spectrum aligns with both biological evidence and a broader understanding of human social and emotional complexity.

The last paragraph explicitly says that the results show that homosexuality (one of “such behaviors”) is “natural and adaptive”, as are all “same-sex behaviors” in humans.  The Nature paper says nothing of the sort.  The authors of the Nature paper explicitly exclude homosexuality as not a behavior they studied, but ZME Science lumps it in with other same-sex sexual behaviors, dwspite homosexuality being very different from SSSB.

Again, you do NOT need to justify same-sex sexual behavior, whether it be transient or permanent, by finding examples in the natural world. If we didn’t find any other species with homosexual behavior, would that make it wrong or bad in humans? Of course not! “Is” does not equal “ought,” and I’ll add the corollary that “not is” does not equal “not ought”. The Nature paper is valuable it looking at the evolution of a behavior and testing hypotheses about its adaptiveness, but of course adaptiveness or evolution has nothing to do with the ethics of behaviors between consenting human adults.

Reader Debra Coplan made a trip to Baja, and today sends us photos. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I had the opportunity to visit the Baja Peninsula this past weekend, and would like to share some of the wonderful vegetation I saw from the that area. We went as far south as the Sonora Desert region to Catavina, east of the Pacific Ocean. Catavina is about 300 miles south of the border.

We had to drive from the north which had Mediterranean desert foliage to the Sonora Desert which had little rain. The Mediterranean desert gets hurricanes which dump water to an area in that more northern part of the desert.

The Mediterranean desert is north of Sonora desert, but they abut next to each other. Sometimes we saw Mediterranean desert on one side of the road and Sonora-type vegetation on the other . A clearer transition between the 2 areas became evident as we went south into drier region: one side being lush with taller plants and the other side dry with low plants.

I am not a biologist, so hopefully I’ve identified the plants correctly.

Boojum Tree – Cirio Idria columnaris

This is an plant endemic to this Catavina area of the desert. It is the signature plant of the region, and can get to 70 feet tall. The flame of leaves on the top are golden like a flame at the top of a candle. See top photo.

The second Boojum had a stalk that was in an area of more water so it looks more lush.  The name Boojum is in reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Hunting of the Snark”. It is looks a bit like an upside down carrot with a whitish stalk.

On the road on the way out of Catavina we were stopped by the military police checking to make sure we did not steal a Boojum tree to transplant up north. Cardon.  Pachycereus pringleiL

This particular cardon had a genetic mutation so instead of growing up, it grew sideways. The man is about 6’ tall.  I was fascinated by the one limb that wasn’t affected by the mutation.

California penstemon; Penstemon californicus:

I am including this penstemon flower because it was my favorite story. I loved how it gets pollinated. Unfortunately, the plant was down below a steep creek so I did not get a photo.

Various species of bees in the region are guided into the flower by the purple lines pointing the way to the back of the flower. It reminds me of an airplane coming in for a landing.

As the bees go in, the pollen rubs from the antlers (male part) off onto the bee.  You can see the long anthers but unfortunately there was no pollen in this one. The bees then fly off to another penstemon where the pollen interacts with the stigma (female part) deeper in the flower to pollinate.

Nightshade Mariola, Solanum hindsianum

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of a flower on this plant either,  but was amazed by the pollination story.  This plant had very tiny opening at the end of the yellow anthers. It’s very hard for bees to get into the tiny opening to get the pollen so they use buzz pollination.  The bees grab hold of the yellow anthers and vibrate their bodies, which forces the pollen out and onto their bodies, where it gets distributed.

Hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus:

 

In Catavina, inland from the Pacific Ocean, we visited a cave of the Cochimis, the indigenous inhabitants of this area.

 

A steep 10-minute hike up huge boulders of the Sonora desert reveals a cave with some paintings that were about 4,000 years old.   I have no idea what dyes they used, but heard they were not from plants of this area.

There is the head of a hummingbird in the painting below:

On February 6 of this year, the Presidents of three evolution/ecology societies (the Society for the Study of Evolution [SSE], the American Society of Naturalists [ASN], and the Society of Systematic Biologists [SSB]) put a letter on the SSE website. It was a reaction to a Trump executive order about the definition of sex, and the “tri-societies” statement asserted that sex is not binary (in ANY species), but was a multidimensional multifactoral “biological construct”.  I archived the letter here because I had a feeling that it would cause trouble.

It did. But first, read it below.  It was written, of course, as a kind of virtue-flaunting exercise to placate those who don’t feel that they are either “male” or “female” (“nonbinary” people). But in so doing, the three Societies promulgated a gross distortion of what many (I won’t say “most”, since I don’t know) biologists conceive of as the definition of sex, which is based on gamete size and is close to being binary as it comes. I’ve bolded bits of it below, bits that conflate sex and gender, throw in “lived experience” to add to the confusion, and claim that the nonbimodality of sex “is a hallmark of biological species,” implying that in all animals and plants the definition of sex is far more than bimodal.

Note that the members of these three societies were not polled about the so-called “scientific consensus” they assert; this is a diktat from the Presidents. Voilà: the original “tri-societies” letter:

President Donald J Trump
Washington, DC Members of the US Congress Washington, DC February 5, 2025

RE: Scientific Understanding of Sex and GenderDear President Trump and Members of the US Congress,

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”. That Order states first, that “there are two sexes…[which] are not changeable”. The Order goes on to state that sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce. These statements are contradicted by extensive scientific evidence.

Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

We note that you state that “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in the government itself”. We agree with this statement. However, the claim that the definition of sex and the exclusion of gender identity is based on the best available science is false. Our three scientific societies represent over 3500 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. More information explaining why sex lies along a continuum can be found here. If you wish to speak to one of our scientists, please contact any of the societies listed below.

Carol Boggs, PhD
President
Society for the Study of Evolution
president@evolutionsociety.org

Daniel Bolnick, PhD
President
American Society of Naturalists

Jessica Ware, PhD
President
Society of Systematic Biologists
president@systematicbiologists.org

You can see all my posts about the resulting kerfuffle here.  In short, intiially about twenty of us wrote to the three societies objecting to the letter’s scientific contentions. Eventually 125 people connected with evolution appended their names to the letter and were willing to make their objections public (see here). Richard Dawkins also got into the fray, and both he and I discovered independently that the three Presidents who signed the letter actually act as if sex were binary in their own published research. Further, two former Presidents of the SSE also publicly disagreed with the characterization of biological sex given above.

Finally, our letter signed by 125 people asked for an answer, and although we got one from the societies, we were also told we couldn’t make it public. So be it, but I did characterize the answer here, and the societies largely conceded our points. As I wrote:

. . . . this time we asked for a response and got one, signed by all three Presidents.  I can’t reprint it because we didn’t ask for permission [we later did but were refused], but some of its gist is in the response below from Luana [Maroja]. I will say that they admitted that they think they’re in close agreement with us (I am not so sure!), that their letter wasn’t properly phrased, that some of our differences come from different semantic interpretations of words like “binary” and “continuum”(nope), and that they didn’t send the letter anyway because a federal judge changed the Executive Order on sex (this didn’t affect our criticisms). At any rate, the tri-societies letter is on hold because the organizations are now concerned with more serious threats from the Trump Administration, like science funding.

It’s still on hold, but now they’ve taken it down (see below).

I closed my post this way:

I end by saying that scientific societies need not be “institutionally neutral” when they are dealing with issues that affect the mission of the societies, as the definition of sex surely does. But what’s not okay is for the societies to distort “scientific consensus” in the interest of ideology. I have no idea if the Presidents of these societies really believe what they said (as Dawkins has pointed out, all three Presidents use a binary notion of sex in their own biological work), but something is deeply wrong when you use one notion of sex in your own science and yet deny that notion when you’re telling politicians what scientists “really believe.”

It’s just wrong when three evolution societies give the public a distorted view of how biologists define “sex”, and even more wrong when they do so because they are motivated not by the search for truth but to cater to a certain ideology.

As this sad drama draws to an end, I was just informed that, after several months, the three societies have taken down their misguided diktat.  Go to this SSE website and you’ll see this note:

As they say, “a revised version is in progress and will be posted shortly.”  I look forward to the revised definition of sex!  I also note that, as far as I know, no members of the three Societies have been informed that the letter was removed (they were told that the letter was posted, but only several weeks after it went up).

I’m posting this simply as a public service, to inform members of the Societies, and others following kerfuffles about the definition of sex, that the letter was finally taken down and will be replaced. The silver lining is that although I found the original letter embarrassing to science–and just another reason for people not to trust science–the Societies are rethinking what they say about sex.  However, I doubt that the replacement letter is going to emphasize the bimodality of sex as it is defined by many biologists.  After all, the Societies have to be ideologically correct, don’t they?

h/t: Luana Maroja (who did nearly all the heavy lifting of writing responses, gathering signatures, and so on.

Yep, it’s time for this feature again. (I have been lax in accumulating words and phrases). Note that I am not trying to change the English language here—only saying what irritates me, and why. Here are four examples, some of which I may have kvetched about before:

Advancement.  NO! NO! NO!  “Advances” has always been sufficient before, so why this gussying-up of a good word? I think the “-ment” suffix is intended to make the speaker sound more erudite, though perhaps people aren’t aware that “advances” is a perfectly good word.

Dudebro.  This word simply means “males I don’t like”, either referring to all males or a specified group. Either way, it is offensive and wouldn’t be tolerated if there was a similar word for women (there probably are, but I’m not going to suggest any.)

“It is what it is.”  This seems to me, on the surface, a redundancy. Things are what they are. Yes, of course! I suppose it could be construed as meaning, “These things can’t be changed,” but why not use that phrase instead of one that’s either ambiguous or redundant.  It also implies that what is cannot be changed, which stifles progress.

“That is so niche.”  This clearly means “this is too specific” in some sense. But “niche” is a noun, not an adjective.  I’m sure it’s too late to stop this one, just as it’s impossible to stop “genius” being used as an adjective instead of a noun, as in “here are ten genius hacks for your closet”.

Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel.  (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)

The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April),  Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article).  As Wikipedia says:

The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CAIR-Chicago (@cairchicago)

Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)

To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”.  I don’t think he put it on, though!

I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:

Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.

As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):

. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”

and

The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.

The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.

Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

and

Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.

Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.

Yes, the news is thin today, and I will let other people rail about Trump, as I’ve done my share in the last week or so. Instead, how about a happier topic: books?  I have just finished two books and, as I’ve said, I’m reading another.  I am glad to say I can recommend them all for your consdieration.

The first one was Walter Isaacson’s 2004 biography of Benjamin Franklin, which you can find on Amazon, with the long (586 pp.) paperback now only $6.66 (Satan’s number). Click cover to go to the site:

I don’t know how Isaacson manages to pump out these long biographies, which are packed with research and scholarship (though written very well), so quickly. But he does. I’ve read two of his before: his biographies of Steve Jobs (2011) and of Leonardo da Vinci (2018).  Both were good, but the biography of Leonardo I think is a world-class piece of writing. If you must read one of these, start with that. Isaacson clearly has a penchant for very smart men, preferably polymaths like Franklin and Leonardo. But I note that he’s also written a biography of Albert Einstein (2008); I haven’t read that one because I’ve read about three other biographies of the man.

You can get all four as a set of “The Genius Biographies” for $51, and that’s over 2000 pages of enjoyment and education.

Like Leonardo, Franklin was also a polymath: he “discovered” and worked out the properties of electricity, helped write both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, invented bifocals, set up the American postal system, and founded the University of Pennsylvania. As a superb diplomat, he helped bring an end to the Revolutionary War on favorable term for America, and also served as what then constituted the governorship of Pennsylvania. Moving back and forth between the U.S. and France, as well as throughout America, his travels equipped him well to contribute to founding documents that all our colonies were able to sign.

Further, Franklin was a humble man, dressed in ordinary garb, not foisting himself on others, largely free from arrogance, and trying to live by his famous 13 “necessary virtues” he compiled when  young.  He largely succeeded in living up to those standards, though he was a bit wobbly on “temperance”, winding up with gout as well as kidney stones. Yet despite his ill health in later life, he was the prime mover in the Treaty of Paris (1783), requiring delicate skills at negotiating simultaneously with France, the nascent U.S., and Britain. The only palpable flaw that I could detect in him was his gross neglect of his wife, whom he left for 14 of the last 17 years of his life, and was not there when she died. Franklin himself had a long life, expiring at 84.

I’d recommend this highly, especially if you know little of Franklin. You’ll be impressed at his scientific skills: though he wasn’t a theoretician, he was great at thinking up hypothesis and good at testing them. Its length makes it a good book to take on a trip, but if you haven’t read his biography of Leonardo, start with that one.

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I’ve read quite a few books on the Holocaust, but this one, byJózsef Debreczeni, may be the best, outstripping even the famous books of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel (Night and If This Is a Man) . Up until recently, however, it was obscure, and, though written in 1950, it was available only in Hungarian, and wasn’t translated into other languages, including English, until 2023. I believe a reader suggested it in an earlier “books” post on this site. Click below to find it at Amazon:

What makes this book different from those of Wiesel and Levi is, curiously, its lack of analysis and of philosophizing.  Night is also semi-fictional, so you can’t tell which episodes were made up, though it’s largely true.  In contrast, Cold Crematorium merely describes what happened to Debreczeni in the Lager: what life was like as inmate in three different concentration camps, including Auschwitz.  He was in the camps for only about a year, but that was nearly enough to do him in. From Wikipedia:

The winter of 1944–1945 was harsh, with heavy snows and extreme temperatures. [Dobreczeni] contracted diarrhea, and by January 20 he weighed 35 kg (77 lb). Thanks to a friend who brought him extra food, he survived. He subsequently contracted typhus but survived with the help of a camp doctor. Soviet forces liberated the camp in May 1945, and he recovered at a Soviet hospital.

I cannot begin to describe how grim the life in the camps was, especially at Auschwitz, but he doesn’t spare the reader the gory details. One of them: everyone constantly had diarrhea because of the diet of soup made with polluted water and almost no contents, and because the “toilet man” with the bucket didn’t come around fast enough, everything was covered with shit, which eventually piled up on the floor above the ankles. The intricate way prisoners developed a black market in food and tobacco to survive is amazing.

I like this book because, more than the other books, it’s just a graphic and un-fictional presentation of day-to-day life in a concentration camp. This shows you how horrible the Holocaust really was, and how inhumane were the people who engineered and implemented it.  It doesn’t discuss whether all of us have the potential to become Nazis, and doesn’t go into depth about how the Holocaust affected the author after he was liberated. The book simply ends with the liberation.  One trigger warning: it is very graphic and disturbing, but also the only book I know that makes you see what it was like to be an inmate.

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

Finally, I am 110 pages into the book below, which I mentioned a few days ago (click cover to go to Amazon site).  I recommend it, at least what I’ve read of it so far. It’s an analysis of cancel culture by two employees of FIRE (Schlott is also a journalist). As I said the other day,

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.) What doesn’t kill you make you weaker

2.) Always trust your feelings

3.) Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

It’s a lot like Lukianoff’s talk that I heard in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, recounting horrific tales of cancellation coming from both the Right and the Left. Right now I’m reading about those instances, and haven’t yet encountered the authors’ solutions, which come at the end of the book. We all recognize divisive nature of politics (and life!) in America, as well as the fact that for many, the validity of social/political arguments now seems to rest largely on whether the person who makes them is on your side (“good”) or not (“bad”).  I’ll give an overall assessment when I’m done.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you’re reading or what you’ve read lately, preferably dwelling on books you’d recommend. I’ve found many good books by following readers’ suggestions, and so I hope to make this a regular feature. Put your readings in the comments!

It’s Sunday, which is John Avise photo day. John’s new series takes us through the dragonflies and damselflies of North America. His notes and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 2 

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.

Brown Spiketail, Cordulegaster bilineata, female (Georgia):

Brown Spiketail, female sideview (Georgia):

Calico Pennant, Celithemis elisa, mature male (Michigan):

Calico Pennant, young male (Michigan):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, Sympetrum illotum, adult male (British Columbia, Canada):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, mating pair (British Columbia, Canada):

Carolina Saddlebags, Tramea carolina (Florida):

Common Green Darner, Anax junius, male (California):

Common Green Darner, flying (California):

Common Green Darner, pair mating (California):

Common Whitetail, Plathemis lydia, female (Georgia):

Dragonhunter, Hagenius brevistylus (Wisconsin):

I want to remind readers again to avoid over-commenting on threads for reasons I’ve discussed before.  The Roolz on this issue (see here) are often blatantly ignored. Now I don’t enforce them strictly, but I see some folkz commenting over and over again on the same thread, and often making the same point.

If you haven’t yet read the posting guidelines, please do so here or on the left sidebar.  (“Da Roolz”).  At issue:

Thank you.

A lot of people came down on Bill Maher for his report about dining with Trump at the White House and, although Maher took Trump to task several times during that visit for the administration’s policies, he had the temerity to confess being surprised that Trump actually was gracious to him in person and even laughed.  For saying that Maher was demonized widely. Larry David joined in the pile-on in a satire in the NYT called “My dinner with Adolf“, a satirical parallel about dining with Hitler and finding him gracious.

Well, I wasn’t so amused by that parallel, for although I think Trump is a narcissistic loon who is on track to wreck the country, he is not equivalent to Hitler, and I detest the “Hitler parallel” that is so widespread these days.  The trope, of course, is that if you dislike someone and his actions, then every single thing that person does must be bad and he’s pretty much like Hitler.

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.  What doesn’t kill you make you weaker
2.  Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people

We see #3 on both sides in American politics, including in the criticism of Maher, and all I can say is that by and large I embrace the arguments of Democrats, but I try hard not to see Republicans as evil, much less as a pack of Hitlers. Yes, of course there are some bad Republicans, but they’re not all Hitler equivalents.

Indeed, some of the NYT readers pushed back on David in a new collection of responses.

I had no doubt that after the dinner Maher would go back to dissing Trump on his show. And sure enough, he did in his latest “Real Time” comedy/opinion bit, called “New Rule: Flirting with Fascism”. Watch the 7.5-minute video below. As you see, Maher more or less calls Trump a liar, a violator of the Constitution, a flirter with authoritarianism and dictatorship, and an instigator of the January 6 insurrection. Not to mention the title of the bit. . .

Maher tells Democrats that they have to evolve a new strategy to win back seats and perhaps the White House, but he still favors trying to talk to the other side. He even mentions the crap he took for dining with Trump. Here’s the last bit that starts at 6:11:

“I’ve taken some shit from the looney Left for just reporting honestly how the President reacted in private when I criticized him to his face.   What I should have said is that he eats with his hands and that he showed me his collection of human ears pressed between the pages of Mein Kampf. . . . But I didn’t do that. I was honest about it, and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, ‘Now okay: you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls. . . . It’s not how I meant it to come out. . . . What I mean is ‘It’s your turn. You know things aren’t going well and the first hundred days has been, yes, a shitshow. Show me that you can be honest about that. Show me that you’re not just a MAGA cultist’.”

I would say that’s a pretty hard-headed criticism of Trump, and you won’t find harder criticism even in the NYT.  So let’s not have any demonization of Maher or flippant comparisons with Hitler here. If you want to emit the Hitler tropes, I’d advise you to abstain and reserve them for other websites I can point you to. In fact, I may make that the latest one of the Roolz.

This is one of the most amazing performances of someone under fire I’ve ever seen, and even though the video was long for me (45 minutes), I watched the whole thing, mesmerized as well as stunned by how well the “victim” answered questions coolly and eloquently.

In one corner: Natasha Hausdorff, British barrister (lawyer) with an expertise in international law. She’s also Jewish and the legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel. Her credentials are impeccable:

A graduate of Oxford University and Tel Aviv University, Hausdorff practised with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and clerked for the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. She was a former fellow at Columbia Law School in the National Security Law Program. She is also the legal director of the NGO UKLFI Charitable Trust.

In all the other corners (it’s a hendecagon, with 11 corners) are the hostile opponents: the members of the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Dame Emily Thornberry.  This interview grilling was part of the Committee “conducting an inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asking ‘how the UK and its allies can help to achieve a ceasefire and lasting end to the war in Gaza and Lebanon’.”

Remember that the UK government, though nominally supporting Israel, refused to sell arms to the Jewish state. But here, its members are basically asking Hausdorff to defend every action of Israel. And she basically does.  The hostility of the committee towards Israel seems ubiquitous (Hausdorff was one of several experts, including Palestinians, but I was unable to find any YouTube videos of Palestinians testifying at this hearing.)  What is amazing about Hausdorff is that she not only doesn’t lose her cool despite the clearly anti-Israel inquisitors, but always has the facts at her fingertips. And when she doesn’t know something, she says so.

I highly recommend that you watch this video, if for no other reason that to see a stupendous performance. But you will also hear how someone who’s pro-Israel deals with canards and misconceptions about the war. Or listen to just fifteen minutes.

After watching this, Malgorzata (who called it to my attention) said, “Natasha Hausdorff is a force of nature and a world class treasure.” I agree; Hausdorff is one of my rare heroes.

The article below from MedpageToday (click headline below to read, or find it archived here) reports that the government has begun policing at least three scientific journals, asking them if they enforce viewpoint diversity and how their vet their manuscripts, especially those with “competing viewpoints.” In other words, the Trump administration is now doing to scientific journals (well, at least a few) what it’s doing to American colleges and universities. The only difference is that the letter to the journals doesn’t have an explicit threat, though there’s an implicit one since the letter is from a U.S. Attorney and requests a response.

An excerpt from MedpageToday:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.

Martin’s letter asks five questions, including how the journal assesses its “responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation,” and how it “clearly articulate[s] to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others.”

It also asks whether the journal accepts manuscripts from “competing viewpoints” as well as how it assesses the role of “funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles.”

Finally, it asks how the journal handles allegations that authors “may have misled their readers.”

“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”

Martin requested a response by May 2.

The letter to CHEST was dated April 14 and was originally posted on Xopens in a new tab or window by Eric Reinhart, MD, of Chicago.

These of course are not only unethical but probably illegal attempts at censorship—trying to chill science, and for reasons I can’t quite discern.

The article has a few responses, including one from FIRE:

Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.”

“It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect,” Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. “Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”

JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, noted that in a First Amendment case such as this, the law is clear: “A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal.”

“When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn’t doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath,” Morris said in an email to MedPage Today. “He’s abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech.”

CHEST is, according to Wikipedia, “a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians.”  It’s not a predatory journal, as far as I can see, but a reputable one of value to the relevant group of doctors. You can see the contents of the latest issue of the journal here; there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. And here’s the letter to Chest from (gulp) the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Sounds official and scary, no? (Click to enlarge or go to the link just given.)

 

 

The best response to such a stupid letter is no response: were I the editor, I wouldn’t respond, and then if the government pulls out the heavy artillery, sue them. As the reader who sent me this link noted, “This request is simple to address.  If the DOJ were shown the rigor and vigor with which  scientific viewpoints are attacked and defended during the review process, they would be disabused quickly of any suspicion that competing, non-frivolous  viewpoints are underrepresented in the journals.”

But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science. I hope this doesn’t go to every journal, because you’d see an outcry bigger than the one accompanying the administration’s threat to universities.  In the case of journals, which I don’t believe get federal funding, it’s a case of attempted censorship, pure and simple, and although the government may have some rationale for trying to control the behavior of universities, there is none for censorship of scientific publications. The only censors of such publications are scientists or the journals themselves.

 

h/t: Edwin

Today Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has another text-and-photo biology lesson for us. Athayde’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The article is about the Asian giant hornet, a creature I also wrote about in Why Evolution Is True as the opening to Chapter 5 on natural selection.

Athayde:

An undesirable pilgrim   

It’s Saturday morning in an English town, and Mr and Mrs Smith set out for their favourite weekend activity – visiting the local garden centre. Wandering among rows of potted plants, clothing, shoes, tools, ceramic gnomes, barbecue gear, deck furniture and myriad other items made in China, all undoubtedly uniquely crafted, Mr and Mrs Smith spot that week’s acquisition: a gorgeous plant imported from the continent at the discounted price of £4.99. The couple drive home pleased with their purchase, which will be a nice addition to their new conservatory. Mr and Mrs Smith would be less pleased, dismayed in fact, if they knew the vase holding their plant hid a menacing stowaway: a dormant Asian hornet queen (Vespa velutina).

Mr and Mrs Smith’s tale is fiction, but something along those lines happened in France in 2004: one or more Asian hornet queens sneaked into the country hidden in pottery imported from China. When the hornet’s presence was formally recognised in the following year, it was too late. The invader had already spread out, and soon made its way into other countries in continental Europe.

Plant nurseries and garden centres are potential ports of entry for invasive species © Arpingstone, Wikimedia Commons:

Queens of hornets and related species have special skills to spend the winter safely. They build a cell in the soil, rotten wood, stumps or logs lying on the ground, also in manmade structures that offer comfy spots such as holes in ceramic pots, cracks in wooden boxes, and gaps in farming equipment. The queen will form a tunnel a few centimetres long leading to the cell and plug it with earth, scrap wood or some other material. This enclosed chamber, known as a hibernaculum (plural hibernacula), from the Latin for ‘wintering residence’, will shelter the queen from the elements, predators and pathogens. The queen also prepares herself for the long fasting spell ahead. She will put a lot of weight by tucking glycogen, lipids and proteins into her trophocytes, cells that function as a storage organ. Fats make up about 10% of a worker’s dry weight, shooting up to 40% for a queen about to go into hibernation. Despite all these measures, most queens don’t survive the harshness of winter. Those few that do, secure and well-nourished, can stay dormant for a long time – 6 to 8 months, depending on the species (Matsuura & Yamane, 1984). Eventually they come out of their slumber, fly away to build their nests, and produce a first batch of workers. From then on, colonies grow rapidly.

A German wasp queen (Vespula germanica) tucked in inside a hibernaculum built in a fallen tree © MaxNikon, Wikimedia Commons:

Queens’ ability to hibernate for long periods hidden in goods transported around the world gives the Asian hornet excellent opportunities to colonise new territories. On top of that, members of the genus Vespa have tremendous dispersal capability. Adult Asian hornets can spread at a rate of 75 to 100 km/year, and gynes (females that will mate and become queens) can fly 18 km/day. Also, hornets have high reproductive rates and adapt easily to novel conditions. They are not fussy about nesting materials and location, and the ability to thermoregulate their nests increases their chances of survival.

An Asian hornet nest. The combs that house the brood are enveloped by an external wall that keeps the nest at around 30°C, even when ambient temperatures are 20° lower © Mossot, Wikimedia Commons:

Like all related species, adult Asian hornets feed on nectar but hunt prey for their young. They have a catholic diet, going after the most abundant and vulnerable insects but not letting fortuitous opportunities such as bird and mammal carcasses go to waste. One nest can consume an average of 11.3 kg of insect biomass in one season (Rome et al., 2021), and if solitary bees, bumble bees and flies are there for the taking, pollination services may be affected. But to the consternation of beekeepers, European honey bees (Apis mellifera) make up a significant portion of the Asian hornet’s menu.

An Asian hornet taking a sip of nectar © CABI Compendium:

The ability to hover allows the Asian hornet to patrol a beehive entrance, waiting for the opportunity to pounce on a bee leaving or coming home. The hornet may even invade the hive if the entrance is unguarded (Diéguez-Antón et al., 2024). Hornets may not have to kill bees to harm a colony. Their hovering in front of a beehive may cause ‘foraging paralysis’, which is the cessation or reduction of workers’ activity (Monceau et al., 2018). By killing bees or preventing them from foraging, Asian hornets weaken the hive. Queens lay fewer eggs, bee population is reduced, and susceptibility to diseases increases. With time, the colony may collapse.

Asian hornets invading a beehive © Diéguez-Antón et al., 2024:

In some places in France and other European countries, densities have reached 5 to 6 nests/km2, and up to 12 nests/km2 in urban environments. The consequences of Asian hornet arrival are not completely understood but are not likely to be trivial. In France, up to 29% of bee colonies could be lost, with a cost of up to €30.8 million to the country’s economy (Requier et al., 2023).

Asian hornet dorsal and ventral views © Didier Descouens, Muséum de Toulouse, Wikimedia Commons:

Across the English Channel, beekeepers watch these developments with justifiable apprehension. The Asian hornet, like all other Vespa species, has a remarkable invasive potential. A British incursion could be less severe than in continental Europe because of harsher weather, but nobody wants to take chances with such a highly adaptable species. Based on the French experience, the Asian hornet would stay put if it ever gets a firm foothold in the country. There have been close calls since 2016, when Asian hornets were discovered for the first time in Britain. Their nest was found and destroyed. Subsequently, there have been other 144 confirmed sightings, with 110 nests eliminated. Thanks to scientists, technicians, members of the public and a network of dedicated beekeepers monitoring Asian hornet sightings, Britain is holding the fort. But, by tweaking a well-known quote, we can say that ‘eternal vigilance is the price for keeping Britain free of the Asian hornet’.

While British beekeepers worry, their counterparts across the Atlantic may sympathise without burdening themselves with someone else’s problem. But complacency would be a mistake. In 2019, the Asian giant hornet (V. mandarinia), an even bigger headache than V. velutina, sneaked into British Columbia and Washington State. For whatever reason, this introduction seems to have fizzled out naturally. But it could happen again. And in 2023, some Asian hornets were spotted mingling about in Savannah, Georgia. One nest was found and destroyed, but others may have escaped detection: time will tell. The take-home message is that it doesn’t pay to underestimate hardy, efficient and adaptable marvels of natural selection like Vespa wasps.

Surveillance is the best defence because eradication is much more likely to succeed in the early stages of an invasion. With alien hornets, you can’t drop your guard © The War Illustrated Album de Luxe, 1916. Wikimedia Commons:

JAC: In WEIT I discuss an adaptive strategy that honeybees have evolved in Asia, but haven’t yet in other places in the world. When the first “scout” hornet invades a nest, it’s immediately surrounded by a ball of honeybees that vibrate their wings and abdoments, cooking the hornet to death by raising the temperature.  The temperature is enough to kill hornets but not bees, and the scout is unable to report back to the other wasps that it found a nest.

The NYT’s associate editor Lauren Jackson is doing a year-long series on “belief” for the paper. In her latest piece (click below to read, or find it archived here), she pulls out all the stops, averring the several points that we’ve seen appearing over and over again in the MSM. To wit:

1.) America needs religion to hang together as a society. Religious people by almost any measure are happier, less lonely, more educated, and more well off than nonbelievers. That, she implies, is a reason to believe, even though she herself is a nonbeliever. (I guess she has “belief in belief”.)

2.) But religion is waning in America (this is based on a Pew survey that shows that the “Christian share of the U.S. population stabilizes.” But look at the data below she adduces! It’s pretty pathetic, showing a decline over two years as the percentage of “Americans who identify as Christian”, a figure that has been fairly constant since 2019 at about 63%. This is after nearly 20 years of a steady decline. The percentage of “nones” (people not affiliated with a particular denomination) has also dropped by 2-3% in one year (2022-2023) and all this has heartened believers (or “believers in belief”) to cheer for the perceived resurgence of religion in America.

3.) Jackson, an ex-Mormon and now nonbeliever, nevertheless applauds this trend as well, for, after she left the Latter-day Saints, she never found the happiness and connection she achieved as a Mormon. Her laments about this loss verge on a Big Whine, for one wants to keep asking her “Well, why don’t you go back to religion?” Jackson’s answer is unsatisfactory.

4.) And we get the usual palaver that most of us harbor a God-shaped “hole in our hearts”: a desperate need for religion that can’t be filled by any other activity or form of sociality.

I’ve argued against many of these claims before, and this post is a précis of Jackson’s long argument. But below I’ll show you how Richard Dawkins has answered her—far better than I.  What is worth pondering is why the media is making such a big brouhaha about religion’s resurgence now (see articles by Dreher, Douthat, and Hirsi Ali), and why they insist that only belief in God can quell our angst.  I attribute this largely to two things: the pandemic and Trump, both of which have made people unhappy and insecure. And when that happens people turn to faith.

But I digress: here’s the article. I’ll give some indented quotes:

Here’s her reason for giving up Mormonism. It seems to have little to do with the religions’s ludicrous truth claims, but with her desire to conform to her peers.  But she couldn’t, as Barry Manilow sang, “get the feeling again,” no matter what she did:

I never really wanted to leave my faith. I wasn’t interested in exile — familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.

My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the last 30 years. I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. Around 40 million Americans have left churches over the last few decades, and about 30 percent of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

That’s what I did, too. I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

And her proclamation that religion is back!:

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. [JAC: Generational?] People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

Well, if she admits that religion will probably continue to wane, then what is she celebrating? The “limits”—-the pathetic “limits” you see in the graph above?

She goes on at length about studies showing the palpable advantage of religion in promoting happiness and well-being, and I’m not familiar with much of that work. Even so, if we don’t believe in God for various reasons (mine is “no evidence”) are we supposed to force ourselves to believe because if we pretend to, we might actually lapse back into belief? And there are all those friendly people you can meet in church.

Yes, Ms. Jackson longs and pines for her God, but she just can’t get that feeling again. Here’s the biggest whine, which makes me want to shake her and say, “Go back to church, for crying out loud!”: Bolding is mine:

But many of these “nones” have had a dawning recognition that they had thrown “the baby out with the baptismal water,” as my colleague Michelle Cottle said.

“I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now,” Ms. Mahoney told me.

Like Ms. Mahoney and many other “nones,” I too feel stuck. I miss what I had. In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary — when the baby arrives, the moving truck comes or grief overwhelms. I lost answers about planets, galaxies, eternity. I still find it odd to move through the world, going to the gym and sending Slack messages, with these questions threatening to overtake me. Shouldn’t I be dumbstruck, constantly? Shouldn’t we all?

. . . In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

Well, as I’ve discussed sporadically, and readers mostly agree, our lives do NOT have a purpose imposed by the outside, including by belief in God. The idea of your “life’s purpose” is confected: it is a made-up construct incorporating the things you’ve done that you find satisfying, meaningful, or enjoyable.  And this brings up the question of evidence for God, something that’s pretty much neglected by Jackson.

Bolding is mine below.  I don’t see why she can’t go back—perhaps not to Mormonism, but there are plenty of more humanistic faiths, including deism and pantheism. There’s even Unitarian Universalism, a non-goddy faith that’s currently riven by social-justice issues. But what about Quakerism?

And if her beliefs have changed, perhaps, just perhaps, she sees that it’s really impossible for her to regain faith because she realized that there’s simply no evidence for a god.  So we have the equivalent of a child who can’t take her teddy bear to school and yet desperately longs for it because it gives her such comfort.  Again, bolding is mine.

But I don’t feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. Most importantly, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

Part of my response is in 1 Corintians 13:11, and I’ll substitute “woman” for “man”:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a woman, I put away childish things.

Time to ditch the teddy bear.

This is where Richard Dawkins enters.  Ms. Jackson, wracked with doubt, had read Richard’s books, which had some influence on her. So she called him up and asked him about the need for faith:

A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America’s secularization had stagnated.

He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. “It seems to me, should be reasonably easy to sort out,” he said. For ethics, he encouraged people to take civics classes and host a weekly discussion club. For community? “Play golf.”

He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith: “It should be quite easy to show documentary films: David Attenborough films, Carl Sagan films, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide.”

But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren’t enough.

Well, there was nothing else for me to do than forward the article to Richard, since he was quoted.  It turns out he hadn’t seen it.  But, in about a day, he knocked out a short but trenchant response to Jackson’s agonized lucubrations. His piece is a masterpiece of defending humanism. I am not going to quote it except for the very last bit, for you can read it on his Substack by clicking on the link below (it’s also archived here).

The ending:

Who needs New Age spirituality (“sound baths”, “energy healing”, “astrology”),who needs to thumb-suck under a mental comfort blanket, who needs gods, when reality is there for the taking?

I’d say, “Touché.”

A new “installation” appeared in the Quad yesterday next to the tent that appeared the other day; both were designed by the Students for Justice in Palestine and were erected with permission of the University.  That makes a total of three “hatey” installations on the quad, and it makes the area look like a mess. Prospective students and parents are now visiting the campus, and I wonder what they think of it, especially if they’re Jewish.

This one below may have had a tent nearby, as it looks as if something collapsed, or there is some canvas at the bottom. At any rate, this shows four of our Trustees, all accused of “financing genocide.”   I disagree:it is Hamas that is committing genocide, not Israel.

The tent is nearby, showing our President, Paul Alivisatos (with a dollar sign for the “s”), looking satanic and bearing the blood-dripping label, “genocide normalizer”.  At the top we read “Israel Bombs” along with an Israeli and American flag.  At the bottom we see the useless cry to “divest,” for the University has already said it won’t.  SJP is fighting a battle they’ve already lost, but they can’t help acting out. This is the equivalent of a tantrum by a petulant child.

The tent. You can enter it to “find out more,” but a herd of elephants couldn’t push me inside that den of admiration for terrorism and antisemitism:

The official University permission, required for any such installation:

Somebody seems to have complained, because at the bottom of the “permission” sign, highlighted in yellow, is a note that the OEOP is investigating this installation for whether it violates university policy. Until that determination is made, the installation will stay up, though it has to come down this Saturday. That’s in two days, so the “investigation” is more or less a sham.  But if the Trump administration sees this, what with its use of antisemitism as an excuse to control universities and remove federal funding, who knows what will happen? I wonder if the University thinks of that.  Still, giving permission for these “art installations” is making a statement in favor of free speech, and for that I admire them.

Below is the old sign before the updated replacement above. At the bottom it reads:

Installation Description

A 15 X 15 foot tent with a presentation inside about on going [sic]genocide in Palestine and the University’s ties to Israel. Art will be displayed.

They don’t say what’s on the outside, which I showed the other day: hateful caricatures of administrators and trustees embellished with symbols of red hands, a widely-understood symbol of killing Jews. Some art!

I wonder if there’s any number of installations that reaches a threshold of constituting harassment of Jews. For the meantime, I construe this as free speech, but, as I said, even our free-speech advocates are debating whether the Quad should be free of banners and signs and used as a place for discussion and speech, since some construe a plethora of signage as actually chilling speech. For the time being, I am on the pro-sign side, but there should be a limit on the number and size of signs allowed on the central part of our campus.

And the hatred evinced by these signs makes me detest the ideology behind them, for the ideologues have already lost–both on campus and in Gaza.  And remember, after the extremists take care of the Jews, their next aim is to destroy Western civilization and its Enlightenment values.

Reader Mark Joseph recently sent in some bird photos from his friend Cliff’s April 2024 trip to Belize; part one was posted here, and this is part two.  I am not sure who wrote the captions, but they’re indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Hooded oriole (Icterus cucullatus) – male:

Hooded warbler (Setophaga citrina) – male:

Least sandpiper (Calidris minutilla):

OK, this one is a bit of a story. Cliff called it a house wren, which is what I would have called it too, but when I went to look up the binomial to use in this post, I found out that the “house wren” has recently been split into *8* different species! So, this is now a Northern House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). Besides this common North American bird, the “Northern” group now has five area-specific Caribbean island species. There is also now a “Southern” group, the Southern House Wren and one erstwhile subspecies, Cobb’s Wren:

Limpkin (Aramus guarauna):

Prothonotary warbler (Protonotaria citrea):

Roadside hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

Rose-throated becard (Pachyramphus aglaiae) – female, if I’m not mistaken:

Russet-naped wood rail (Aramides albiventris):

Rufous-tailed hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl):

Vermilion flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus) – male:

White-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) – non-breeding plumage:

 

While looking through Cliff’s pictures of his trip to Belize, I see that he also did a nice series of six pictures of the Northern Jacana – Jacana spinosa (aka the Jesus bird, as it can walk on water); the comments with these pictures are Cliff’s:

Northern Jacana are very attractive birds that live pretty much on floating vegetation in freshwater marshes, ponds, etc:

They are very colorful in flight, squawking the entire time aloft.

These birds are interesting in that the female mates with several males, then the male raises the young (newborn Jacana can walk, swim, and feed themselves from birth):

 

Even the young birds have the famed Jacana ridiculously long toes for walking on floating vegetation:

 

This is one of my favorite images from the entire trip (so far)…

I have long wished for my first trade book, Why Evolution is True, to be published in Arabic. That’s because many who adhere to Islam take the Qur’an literally (it’s almost a requirement) and the Qur’an is explicitly creationist, saying that Allah created the Universe in six days and that humans were created from a glob of mud.  I am unsure how often evolution is taught is universities or secondary schools in Islamic countries, but I at least wanted the evidence for evolution that I adduce in WEIT to be available to Arab-speakers.

The book was translated into Arabic by the Egyptian Translation Service, but their copyright has apparently run out, and at any rate, someone told me that the translation was now available free on the internet.

So, if you are in an Arab-speaking country, you can find the contents of WEIT here or by clicking on the title page below. You can also find the pdf here.

I was amused to see that when I translated the cover into English, it reads this way:

So be it, I am Dr. Quinn. Spread the word about this so that others can read the book, a book up to now available only in one small bookstore in Cairo, and only in a few copies (I have only one).  Certainly the original book in Arabic, as Rodney Dangerfield might say, “got no respect.”

I am late to the party, so you probably already know about this, but Harvard has refused to truckle to the demands of the Trump administration and has filed a lawsuit (Harvard v. HHS; see below). Briefly, those demands to Harvard were: “shape up or we’ll withhold federal grant money.” You can see the administration’s letter here and can read my summary of what the administration wanted let it withhold $2 billion in grant money:

This is a Big Demand and covers multiple areas, which I’ll just summarize with bullet points. Quotes are from [the administration’s] letter:

• Harvard has to fix its leadership, reducing the power held by students, untenured faculty, and by “administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.”
• All hiring from now on must be based on merit and there will be no hiring based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
• By August of this year, Harvard must have solely merit-based admissions, again without admissions based on ‘race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.” The “proxies” presumably mean the way universities now get around bans on race-based and similar admissions by asking admission questions like, “describe how you overcame hardships in your life.”
• Reform international admissions, by not admitting students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
• Harvard is to commission an external body to audit the university for viewpoint diversity. Though they’re not clear what “viewpoint diversity” means, it’s obvious that they want more conservative points of view and fewer professors pushing pro-Palestinian points of view
• Reforming programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”, including information about individual faculty who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or who incited violence
• Discontinue DEI programs, offices, committees, and the like
• Students are to be disciplined for violating University speech regulations, and student groups that promote violence, illegal harassment, or act as fronts for banned groups
• Harvard is to establish a whistleblowing procedure so that noncompliance with the Diktat above can be safely reported.

President Alan Garber responded by giving the administration the middle finger in a short response.

Yesterday I got an email from Harvard (it’s below but the link works, too) with an announcement by Garber that Harvard is suing the federal government:

 

It’s a good letter, but note in the third paragraph that the emphasis on why this bullying is bad centers on its medical effects: it will impede research on human diseases, and thus could hurt or kill humans as the withdrawal of funds brings a halt to research (it already has stopped some research).  Well, there’s far more than that at stake, yet the health aspects are what take center stage.

But Presidcent Garber’s announcement does emphasize the government’s attack on Harvard’s values, which include academic freedom in the classroom. Garber is also clearly upset (I am reading between the lines) at the administration’s demand that the university produce more “viewpoint diversity” (see paragraph 5). Further, it’s demeaning to Harvard for the government to demand that an independent body certify the rise viewpoint diversity and to report back to the administration at intervals.

Now certainly many of the changes the administration demands are salubrious (I for one agree that DEI has to be dismantled, which comports with Harvard’s own internal committee of reformist professors, as well as the stipulation merit be the sole criterion for hiring and admissions (my own university has a similar hiring procedure in its Shils Report).  As I’ve said, and others may disagree, I do think that minority status can be taken into account when two candidates are equally qualified, so that is a diluted form of affirmative action. And of course there should be no climate of antisemitism or hatred of any other group on campus, as specified by Title VI.  I do note, though, that Garber says this:

We will also soon release the reports of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias. I established these groups last year as part of our efforts to address intolerance in our community. The reports are hard-hitting and painful. They also include recommendations with concrete plans for implementation, which we welcome and embrace. No one in our community should experience bias, intolerance, or bigotry. We believe adoption of the recommendations and other measures will go far toward eradicating those evils on our campus.

Yet according to the Free Press (article archived here), the report on antisemitism hasn’t been published on time, and I have no information about the Islamophobia report. From the FP:

The demand is only the latest controversy for Harvard’s antisemitism task force, a committee that has been plagued by problems throughout its short existence.

Foremost among them: its failure to deliver a report. The task force had originally said they would publish their findings in the “early fall” of 2024, yet the report has still not been released. The report is meant to detail all occurrences of antisemitism at the university.

The committee has been mired in controversy from the moment it was announced in January 2024.

First, Derek J. Penslar’s appointment as co-chair of the task force was met with harsh criticism from the Harvard community over Penslar’s public comments about Israel and antisemitism on campus. Larry Summers, Harvard’s 27th president, wrote that “Penslar has publicly minimized Harvard’s antisemitism problem, rejected the definition used by the U.S. government in recent years of antisemitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state, and more.” Summers added that “none of this in my view is problematic for a professor at Harvard or even for a member of the task force, but for the co-chair of an antisemitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”

Then, less than a month after Harvard’s antisemitism task force was announced, its co-chair, ​​Raffaella Sadun, resigned, claiming she wanted to “refocus her efforts on her research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities.”

A source close to Sadun told The Free Press that the real reason for her resignation was that “she found it impossible to make any progress” or to get the committee “to take the problem of antisemitism as seriously as she thought it ought to be taken.”

. . . .  [Claudine Gay] ended up forming an Antisemitism Advisory Group and asking Wolpe to join. Summers cautioned Wolpe not to take the position for fear he was “being used,” but Wolpe accepted anyway. Two months later, in December 2023, Wolpe resigned from the advisory group, stating that “both events on campus and [Claudine Gay’s] painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”

Rabbi Wolpe notes that there is indeed endemic antisemitism at Harvard, though former President Larry Summers says that the big drop in Jewish student enrollment at Harvard (now less than 5% compared with 25% in the 1970s) reflects not antisemitism but “an arithmetic consequence of efforts and developments leading to more African American, Hispanic, Asian, and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”  Not being at Harvard, I have no opinion on this but will be interested to see the reports of the task forces when they come out.  I do not know, however, of much “Islamophobia” at Harvard save the outing of students who said that October 7’s attack was Israel’s fault.

All that said, it’s reprehensible when the government forces Universities to make changes to comport with their political views by threatening to withhold grant money and impede research. This would give any administration the right to mold universities to its liking simply by withholding federal funds, which come in many forms. But punishing grantholders for the sins of their university seems somehow wrong. Yes, the government does already demand enforcement of some provisions and has made implicit threats (recall the “Dear Colleague” letter of Obama), but what the administration is doing to Harvard is qualitatively different, and far more threatening to the working of American universities.

Greg Mayer has read the lawsuit complaint (below) and gave me permission to add his comments:

As Garber wrote, the complaint is worth reading. It strikes back on two fronts: First Amendment and due process. The latter, I think, is critical, as the wholesale illegality — not unconstitutionality, just facial illegality—of the Trump administration actions is blatant, and I can’t imagine even the most conservative court overlooking it.

To use a criminal justice analogy, constitutional arguments over whether particular forms of capital punishment are permissible might go either way; but you certainly can’t execute someone who hasn’t been convicted of any crime!

I’m not saying that Harvard’s First Amendment argument isn’t strong, just that the due process argument is so compelling that it should put a halt to the rescission of grants without any need to decide constitutional issues until much later. (Courts love deciding on single issues, putting off more difficult questions till another day.)

The change in overhead rates is a different situation– that’s more of a contractual dispute than just plain breaking the law.

The complaint (click on screenshot below to go to it; it’s also here.) The lawsuit is 51 pages long.

There’s also a NYT news article about the lawsuit (archived here). Their short summary of the points at issue:

The 51-page lawsuit accused the Trump administration of flouting the First Amendment by trying to restrict what Harvard’s faculty could teach students. “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that the First Amendment is designed to safeguard,” the complaint argues, quoting from a 1969 Supreme Court opinion upholding the First Amendment rights of high school students.

The complaint also argues that the government “cannot identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, science, technological and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives.”

I have a feeling the administration is going to lose this one big time. And, as I’ve said, if Trump is to be taken down for his unwarranted executive hubris, it will not be through the rage of Democrats or through demonstrations, but through the courts. We Democrats won’t get everything we want, but I think that the blatantly illegal excesses of the administration will be curbed.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “apostates,” shows Mo instantiating the hatred inherent in some Islamists. The accompanying caption: “It’s complicated.”

From Wikipedia’s article “Apostasy in Islam“, showing that it is indeed complicated (but not for Mo):

Apostasy in Islam (Arabic: ردة, romanized: ridda or ارتداد, irtidād) is commonly defined as the abandonment of Islam by a Muslim, in thought, word, or through deed. It includes not only explicit renunciations of the Islamic faith by converting to another religion or abandoning religion, but also blasphemy or heresy by those who consider themselves Muslims, through any action or utterance which implies unbelief, including those who deny a “fundamental tenet or creed” of Islam.  An apostate from Islam is known as a murtadd (مرتدّ).

While Islamic jurisprudence calls for the death penalty of those who refuse to repent of apostasy from Islam, what statements or acts qualify as apostasy and whether and how they should be punished, are disputed among Islamic scholars, with liberal Islam rejecting physical punishment for apostasy. The penalty of killing of apostates is in conflict with international human rights norms which provide for the freedom of religions, as demonstrated in human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights provide for the freedom of religion.

While walking home yesterday afternoon, I came across this protest sign just off the Quad. Like yesterday’s “installation,” this one was also approved by the University for public display, but I didn’t get a look at who put it up, though there’s a reference to the Instagram site “@ek_taskforce” (environmental justice task force) at the bottom. I’ll check later on.

At any rate, its theme is clear, giving all the reasons why the University of Chicago hates “you”, meaning the campus community.  They including “arresting students” (those students who either attacked cops or violated campus regulations and trespassed; the latter were all let off), “investing in death” (i.e., Israel), evicting local residents, helping destroy the planet, and even “losing millions of dollars on cryptocurrency” (that’s one I haven’t heard.) You can read most of the reasons given, or expletives, but clicking on the photo to enlarge it. It may have been erected to criticize the university on Earth Day.

The hatred of the University here is palpable, including the straightforward “Fuck UChicago” and assertions that “The board of trustees are criminals” and the University “hates people of color.” While I remain a free-speecher, some of my free-speech colleagues think that no “installations” of any kind should be put in the Quad, as they’re said to impede free speech by being corrosive of intellectual discussion and inimical to civil and rational engagement. (As a private university, we aren’t obligated to adhere to the First Amendment on our campus.)  I go back and forth on this, but it’s clear that our Administration favors complete First-Amendmen-legal expressions in the “public square.”

At any rate, what struck me was that those who put up  this “installation” was backwards. The University of Chicago does not hate its community. Rather, the people who put up this sign (and the tent I showed yesterday) hate the University because it doesn’t behave the way they want. And that has led me to think that those people not only favor the destruction of Israel, but also the destruction of Western civilization and Enlightenment values as a whole. Sometimes they say this explicitly, and it’s a recurring theme in Douglas Murray’s speeches and books.  Until recently I hadn’t thought much about that, but now I think it’s worth considering. I surely do not want to live in a world run according to the values of those who erect these installations.