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Mark Sturtevant has returned with some excellent arthropod photos. Mark’s caption and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note that his stacking method is time-consuming; the third picture, he says, took “weeks,” and he’s still not finished.

Here is another set of local insect pictures, all manual focus stacks from either a staged setting from where I live in eastern Michigan, or at a local park.

The first was a visitor at the porch light. This beetle is a female stag beetle (Dorcus parallelus), and I was surprised about the ID because it was barely an inch long. Males of this species have mandibles only slightly larger than those in females:

The next picture is a Longhorn Beetle, Astyleiopus variegatus:

Next is a scene of symbiotic interactions between aphids and ants, where the aphids bribe the ants into protecting them by producing sugary secretions. The ants appear to be New York Carpenter Ants (Camponotus novaeboracensis), and I don’t know why they are called that since the species has a very wide range in the U.S. They are here tending aphids of an unknown species on a thistle plant. This picture is in a way impossible since an extreme macro picture like this cannot have much depth of focus, and it is also impossible to extend focus by conventional focus stacking since ants never sit still. So I’ve been spending weeks extending the depth of this picture from bits and pieces of several pictures. I am still not done doing this, but Mark needs a break so out it goes, into the public:

Dragonflies are next. These too are quick manual focus stacks but with a telephoto lens. Probably my favorite field for photographing dragons is a two hour drive away, but it is worth it because there is a field that is swarming with many species, including species that I don’t see elsewhere.

The first of these is a Common Green Darner Anax junius, which is a common species but what was exciting for me was that this is a male. Females land. Females are so easy to photograph that I usually don’t even bother. But males? No. Males fly pretty much all day, and I seldom get a chance with them:

But the best reason to visit the “dragonfly field” are its Clubtail dragonflies (Family Gomphidae). The main flight season for Clubtails is June, so that is when I make a point to visit the dragonfly field where there are ten documented species from this family. I have photographed all but two from there. Clubtail dragonflies tend to be marked in yellow and black, and they have a thickened end on their abdomen. But not all species have this color scheme, and some are more ‘club-tailed’ than others. A couple things to like about them as a group are the many species, and their reliability for perching on or near the ground. This is in stark contrast to certain other dragonflies (i.e., male Green Darners!)

The first of these are some of the ‘big-club’ Clubtails, and we start with a Midland Clubtail (Gomphurus fraternus):

The next is the impressively clubbed Cobra Clubtail (Gomphurus vastus):

And here is another one, the Skillet Clubtail (Gomphurus ventricosus), which is perched on Poison Ivy. Just to make things interesting, much of the ground cover in the dragonfly field is Poison Ivy. You should not even touch this stuff:

Do you see the differences in the above three species? Me neither! But upon close comparison, there are small differences in their markings that can be discerned. Most of the time when I am out there, I don’t know what big club species I am photographing.

Not all Gomphids are like the above. Here is a Lancet Clubtail (Phanogomphus exilis), which is probably the most common Gomphid in this park:

And here is an example of a very different dragonfly in the clubtail family, the Rusty Snaketail (Ophiogomphus rupinsulensis). There is another species of snaketail in the field, but it is rare and I have yet to see it. Just another reason to make the drive every June:

Now all of the above species of dragonflies are under 2” in length, so considerably shorter than your little finger. But dragonfly field hosts the largest Clubtail in the U.S. called the Dragonhunter (Hagenius brevistylus), which is about 3.5” long — the length of your index finger.

Does that still seem small? I promise if you see one you will stop and stare. Everyone does, because in the field they look big. The Dragonhunter is not even the largest of our dragonflies but they are probably the heaviest. Dragonhunters get their common name from their habit of eating other dragonflies. Admittedly, most dragonflies do that, but Dragonhunters seem to have a reputation for it. Even though I have seen many dozens by now, they always get my undivided attention when one goes cruising by:

Astronomers have discovered the brightest fast radio burst ever detected and traced it to a nearby galaxy using a new network of CHIME Outrigger telescopes. The flash, nicknamed RBFLOAT, lasted only a fraction of a second but briefly outshone every other radio source in its galaxy. Follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a faint infrared signal at the same location. The burst’s unusual behavior—showing no signs of repeating—may challenge current ideas about what causes these mysterious cosmic flashes.

New research suggests Mars may have remained habitable much longer than scientists once thought. Ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater appear to have been soaked by underground water billions of years ago, leaving behind minerals that can preserve signs of life. Even after surface water disappeared, subsurface flows may have created protected environments for microbes. These hidden habitats could be key targets in the ongoing search for past life on Mars.

On 2 July 2025, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst lasting over seven hours, nearly twice the duration of anything previously recorded. Not only was it the longest ever seen, it repeated, firing off multiple distinct bursts across an entire day. GRB 250702B, as it became known, doesn't fit any known category of astronomical explosion. But a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers the explanation that a star torn apart by an intermediate mass black hole may well be the culprit! On 2 July 2025, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst lasting over seven hours, nearly twice the duration of anything previously recorded. Not only was it the longest ever seen, it repeated, firing off multiple distinct bursts across an entire day. GRB 250702B, as it became known, doesn't fit any known category of astronomical explosion. But a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers the explanation that a star torn apart by an intermediate mass black hole may well be the culprit!

Mars didn’t always look like the barren world we see today. Over billions of years, the Sun’s solar wind stripped away much of its atmosphere, helping transform it from a warmer, wetter planet into a frozen desert. NASA’s twin-spacecraft ESCAPADE mission aims to watch this process in action by measuring how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ fragile magnetic environment. The findings could reveal how Mars lost its habitability—and help prepare humans for future missions there.

NASA’s Curiosity rover is investigating strange spiderweb-like ridges on Mars that may reveal a hidden chapter of the planet’s watery history. These “boxwork” formations likely formed when groundwater flowed through cracks in the rock, leaving minerals that hardened into ridges while surrounding material eroded away. New chemical analyses of drilled rock samples show minerals linked to water activity.

The spacecraft changed the binary system’s orbit, confirming that a kinetic impactor can be an effective planetary defense technique for deflecting a near-Earth object.

Every time you flip a light switch, or check the time, or feel the sodium ions wiggling in your brain — don’t think about that one too much—you’re assuming something fundamental. You’re assuming the universe is a finished product. A completed work. You think the Big Bang happened, the forces of nature settled into their seats, and we’ve been cruising on a smooth, predictable ride ever since.

Here’s an issue to ponder of a cold Saturday in March.  Many people with some intellectual clout (i.e., they’re not stupid) claim to be religious, and yet when you press them to find out exactly what they believe, they clam up or equivocate.  Some Christian academics I know, for instance, will mumble and change the subject if you ask them about the nature of the God they accept, or whether Jesus revived the dead, and then was crucified and resurrected.  To me this means either that they do not believe the tenets of their religion, or that they do but are embarrassed to admit it.

And yet, as I wrote in Faith versus Fact, I am hardly aware of any religions that do not make factual claims. Here, for example is one version of the Nicene Creed from the United States conference of Catholic bishops.  I’ve have bolded every factual claim:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

It’s almost all in bold. As Wikipedia notes: “On Sundays and solemnities, one of these two creeds is recited in the Roman Rite Mass after the homily. In the Byzantine Rite, the Nicene Creed is sung or recited at the Divine Liturgy, immediately preceding the Anaphora (eucharistic prayer) is also recited daily at compline.”

Likewise, Muslims accept the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad by an angel, Mormons believe that the angel Moroni hid the golden plates on which the book of Mormon was inscribed, and then revealed them to Joseph Smith. Hindus, in contrast, believe in many gods manifesting parts of one reality. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but do embrace things like rebirth and karma.

The point is clear, every religion depends on a set of core beliefs, and if you reject them you’re not very credible as embracing that religion. You can hardly call yourself a Christian, for example, if you don’t believe in the existence of Jesus as a divine being, and in his crucifixion, resurrection, and a form of God made human. (Remember, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”)

But now all sorts of people are publishing bestselling books about how they made their way back to religion after a period of nonbelief, why atheism is wrong because it can’t explain a fine-tuned universe, consciousness, and so on.  And yet these same people are willing to change their entire lives based on nonexistent evidence. Others say they don’t need no stinking evidence; they believe because it makes sense or resonates with them (this is why Ross Douthat is a Christian rather than a Muslim).

So here’s the question to ponder and discuss:

Can you really call yourself adherent to a given religion if you don’t accept the fundamental tenets of that religion?

Granted “fundamental tenets” is a slippery term, and people’s religious mileage varies, but when someone publicly professes that they are religious, it seems fair to ask them, “So tell me: which claims of your religion do you accept, and which do you reject?” For some reason, though, people treat religion as off limits in that way: they don’t have to answer you.

Every planet with a magnetic field has a radiation belt, a region of space where charged particles get trapped and flung around at extraordinary speeds. Earth has two of them, and they've been puzzling scientists for decades. Now, a physicist at the University of Helsinki has built a model that defines a universal upper limit to just how energetic those belts can ever get. The answer applies not just to Earth, but to every planet in the Solar System, every gas giant, and even the strange objects sitting halfway between planets and stars.

We have three items today, all with videos. First is a video compilation of 18 celebrities who are cat lovers. You’ll have heard of some of these ailurophiles, like Taylor Swift and Rickey Gervais (owner of Pickle), while others, like Martha Stewart, Roberty Downey, Jr. and Nicole Kidman, were surprises.  Sit back and enjoy the videos, which show both entitled moggies and their famous staff:

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This article about a bra-swiping cat comes from IHeartCats, and there’s a video below.

An excerpt. The cat is named Anna:

At first, no one realized a pattern was forming. Small things began to appear around the house without explanation. A plastic bag left neatly in the hallway. A random object resting near the couch. Anna would sit nearby, calm and observant, as if waiting for someone to notice. Over time, her behavior evolved into something far more specific and unforgettable.

Anna developed a habit of bringing bras from all over the house and placing them in the most unexpected locations. The middle of the living room. Right outside a bedroom door. Sometimes beside someone who was still fast asleep. Each item was carefully carried, never dragged or abandoned. To Anna, these were not stolen objects. They were gifts.

Her timing is part of the charm. Anna does not limit her deliveries to convenient hours. She prefers moments when the house is quiet and still. Early mornings. Late nights. That is when she seems most focused, padding softly across the floor with her prize, completely committed to the task at hand.

She also appears to enjoy keeping everyone guessing. The bras are rarely the same. They do not belong to Sarah most of the time, which only adds to the confusion and laughter. Anna seems delighted by the reaction she gets, even if she pretends not to notice. Her bright eyes and relaxed posture suggest she feels proud of her work.

One night, Sarah woke suddenly in the darkness and found Anna in the middle of a delivery. The house was silent. The moment felt surreal. Anna had brought not one, but two bras. She placed them carefully, then paused as if to admire her effort. Neither item belonged to Sarah. That detail somehow made the experience even more amusing.

Anna was adopted from a shelter in 2016, and from the very beginning, she stood out. Sarah had never encountered a cat quite like her. Anna was expressive, curious, and full of tiny habits that made her feel almost human in her determination. Every quirk seemed to reveal a little more of her personality.

It is hard not to wonder what goes through Anna’s mind during these deliveries. Perhaps she feels a sense of purpose. Perhaps she believes she is contributing to the household in her own meaningful way. Her body language suggests confidence and satisfaction, as if she knows she is doing something important.

Over time, Anna’s strange routine has become a source of comfort and joy. Her gifts are a reminder of how deeply animals connect with their humans, even when their methods are unconventional. What began as a mystery has turned into a beloved part of daily life.

Appaently Anna is an outdoor cat, as some of the bras she delivers to her staff don’t belong to the female member. Also, the fact that Anna’s a girl cat keeps her from being labeled a pervert.

Here’s a two-minute video of Anna delivering bras to her staff. They are apparently “presents.”  They could prevent this by simply keeping the bras out of reach of the cat.  As for why Anna prefers bras above other objects, that will remain a mystery. Perhaps science can tackle the question.

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Speaking of weird cats, here’s Nugget, who is no longer with us, but while alive required emotional support potatoes.  He seems to like yams as well. Nugget’s story goes up to 1:13, and then unfortunately segues into the story of a nosey dg named Nola, who likes to climb trees and then, at 2:24, to another dg named Mojo who required emotional support tennis balls. The videos are from Jenn, a well-known figure on Facebook, also known as “The Good News Girl,” who is famous for “posting something positive every day.”

 

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Lagniappe: We have a 3-minute video showing the doings of Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street.  Larry is a senior cat, 19 years old, and he’s been in his job since 2011, so this is his fifteenth anniversary at the Prime Minister’s residence. Here Larry addresses the recent arrest of Peter Mandelson, former UK ambassador to the US, now accused of micsonduct in office. It also shows all the attention Larry gets from those lucky enough to enter Downing Street.

As you’ll see, Larry has a dry sense of humor.

h/t: Ginger K

Cambridge scientists have discovered a light-powered chemical reaction that lets researchers modify complex drug molecules at the final stages of development. Unlike traditional methods that rely on toxic chemicals and harsh conditions, the new approach uses an LED lamp to create essential carbon–carbon bonds under mild conditions. This could make drug discovery faster and more environmentally friendly. The breakthrough was uncovered unexpectedly during a failed laboratory experiment.

In a randomised trial, men who experience premature ejaculation benefitted from using an app to learn techniques for extending intercourse

Scientists are exploring a surprisingly simple way to clean up diesel engines: adding tiny droplets of water to the fuel. During combustion, the water rapidly vaporizes, triggering micro-explosions that improve fuel mixing and lower combustion temperatures. Studies show this technique can slash nitrogen oxide and soot emissions by more than 60% while sometimes even improving engine efficiency. Because it works in existing engines without redesign, it could provide a quick path to cleaner diesel use.

Scientists have uncovered evidence that our Sun may have traveled across the Milky Way as part of a massive migration of Sun-like stars billions of years ago. The journey may have carried the solar system away from the galaxy’s crowded center into a calmer region where life could eventually emerge.

Stars peek through the dusty, winding arms of NGC 5134, a spiral galaxy located 65 million light-years away, in this Feb. 20, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument collects the mid-infrared light emitted by the warm dust speckled through the galaxy’s clouds, tracing the clumps and strands of dusty gas. The telescope’s Near Infrared Camera records shorter-wavelength near-infrared light, mostly from the stars and star clusters that dot the galaxy’s spiral arms. The image helps researchers understand star formation in spiral galaxies. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

So that's all nice. But why now? That's the question everyone asks. We went decades — centuries, millennia really — without seeing a single rock that didn't have a "Made in the Solar System" sticker on it. Then, in the span of less than ten years, we get the Big Three: 'Oumuamua, Borisov, and now 3I/ATLAS.

I went to a chiropractor in the 1980s for a stiff neck that had not improved after a month. A coworker praised him with the evangelical certainty usually reserved for miracle diets, used car salesmen, and people who have just read one book on nutrition. I was skeptical but adventurous, which is how most regrettable life decisions begin.

The adjustment worked. My neck improved. Worse still, my chronic asthma improved as well.

At the time, I was deeply unhappy in my first professional job after earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in applied behavioral science at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. I worked for a personnel-testing firm that marketed itself as scientific while relying on psychological instruments invented—without irony—in-house. Their psychometric rigor consisted largely of confidence, clipboards, and an aggressive font choice.

Compared with the pseudoscientific theater I was being paid to defend, chiropractic felt almost wholesome.

These tests produced false positives and false negatives with impressive symmetry, giving employers either a false sense of security or a convenient scapegoat. Qualified people quietly lost livelihoods. Chiropractic, by contrast, seemed refreshingly concrete. Hands. Spines. Patients who said they felt better. I imagined self-employment, ethical work, relief of pain, and perhaps even improved health. Compared with the pseudoscientific theater I was being paid to defend, chiropractic felt almost wholesome. In retrospect, this should have been a warning sign.

Why Chiropractic Made Sense at First

I had been trained in program evaluation, a discipline shaped by people obsessed with how to infer causality in the messy real world where randomization is often impossible and people insist on behaving like people. This was the era of stress research—Hans Selye, Thomas Holmes, and Richard Rahe—demonstrating that belief, expectation, and circumstance could predict outcomes as dramatic as Navy pilots crashing jets on aircraft carriers.

Chiropractic appeared to offer a humane alternative: a hands-on profession marginalized by a medical establishment overly confident in pharmaceuticals and procedures. Like many, I believed useful treatments had been discarded not because they failed, but because they threatened professional turf. I believed science had limits, and that those limits had been selectively enforced, preferably against someone else.

So I decided to become one myself, and in 1987 I graduated from the San Jose campus of Palmer College of Chiropractic and joined the ranks of doctors of chiropractic—eager, idealistic, and spectacularly unaware of the epistemic ecosystem I had entered.

Inside the Bubble

The dominant narrative was simple: conventional medicine had unfairly dismissed us. Scientific objections were cherry-picked. Our methods worked; medicine simply refused to look properly, or long enough, or with an open heart and an open mind liberated from all that oppressive critical thinking.

On weekends, I studied at Stanford’s Green Medical Library and noticed something curious: the library did not carry chiropractic’s premier scientific journal. I proposed that Palmer purchase a subscription for Stanford. We did. Stanford thanked us politely, in the tone such institutions reserve for unsolicited fruit baskets.

Subtle vital forces, innate intelligence, and spinal “subluxations” hover just beneath the surface of even the most modern curricula, like software that never quite finishes installing.

Old-guard chiropractors complained that we risked spilling our secrets to scientific medicine. The truth is, chiropractic education exists in a parallel universe. Its founding figure, D.D. Palmer, died in 1910, but his metaphysical afterlife remains active. Subtle vital forces, innate intelligence, and spinal “subluxations” hover just beneath the surface of even the most modern curricula, like software that never quite finishes installing.

The 1990s brought chiropractic its brief flirtation with legitimacy. The NIH’s Office of Alternative Medicine was established, fueled in part by philanthropic enthusiasm from abroad.

I interviewed for a position at an English health estate owned by Sir Maurice Laing, who had both an interest in alternative medicine and the resources to indulge it. I declined the offer, tethered as I was to America, but not before inserting myself into meetings with leaders of British complementary medicine. 

To the British Committee on Complementary medicine, I proposed a heresy: stop arguing about putative mechanisms; first determine what works, for whom, and under what conditions. Program evaluation before explanation. My suggestion was politely ignored. Before assuming his kingship, King Charles quietly stepped away from his advocacy of complementary medicine. One suspects reality intervened, possibly with charts.

The Cracks Appear

After years of practice and research involvement, my discomfort grew. Chiropractic diagnostics increasingly failed a basic test: face validity. 

My practice partner believed she could diagnose disease by testing the strength of specific muscles, a method known as applied kinesiology (AK). Patients loved it. The ritual was impressive. They asked why I did not perform AK, as though I were withholding a party trick. I asked her once how often her diagnoses were correct. “About half the time,” she said, without irony.

This is precisely the accuracy one would expect from a fair coin flip, except coins do not bill insurance companies or require continuing education credits. These tests were never compared to gold standards, so strictly speaking they were never correct or incorrect at all. They simply were.

What finally broke me was not only the epistemology—it was the economics. Chiropractic education devotes astonishing energy to practice management. Seminars, workshops, and consultants descend with the same message delivered in different fonts: sell care plans, sell frequency, sell fear. Some that you pay for one-to-one counsel offer referrals when referring to other chiropractors. My millionaire business coach promised me $1000 per referral that signed up—but always called a few weeks later with a sad reason not to pay. 

The mantra was explicit: ABC—Always Be Closing. The bottom line of all the chiropractic continuing education and coaching programs was to lie about how chiropractic is crucial for overall health, and the bottom-bottom line was that advising chiropractors is much more profitable than being one.

Patients were no longer people with problems to be evaluated; they were “cases” to be converted. Thirty-six-visit plans were praised. Lifetime care was normalized. Preventive adjustments were marketed with the confidence of seatbelts and vaccines—minus the evidence, testing, and regulatory oversight.

Certainty, I learned, is a remarkably precious commodity in chiropractic world.

Those who questioned this model were told they lacked confidence, commitment, and the proper chiropractic spirit. Skepticism itself became a personal failure. Success was measured not in clinical outcomes, but in collections. The resemblance to the psychometric firm I had fled years earlier was no longer subtle. With a quiet corruption of Avedis Donabedian’s classic framework—structure, process, and outcome—chiropractic leaders instead sold belief, structure, and certainty. And certainty, I learned, is a remarkably precious commodity in chiropractic world.

Indeed, one of the central problems with chiropractic is its frank comfort with ignoring evidence in favor of belief systems that “just make sense.” Plausibility substitutes for proof. Confidence substitutes for outcomes.

In practice, chiropractic operates at two largely disconnected levels of knowledge. At the top sit researchers, faculty, and administrators—those who define the profession’s identity—yet who typically know very little about the day-to-day realities of practice. At the bottom are practicing chiropractors, submerged in diagnosis codes, billing rules, collections, hiring and firing staff, training front-desk help, negotiating with insurers, and keeping the lights on.

The irony in all that is that the most influential voices shaping chiropractic practice are almost entirely those who do not practice. These are the “paycheck chiropractors,” whose authority is inversely related to their proximity to the trenches. They do not argue with insurers. They do not explain denied claims. They do not rehire front-desk staff every six months. Yet this has never impaired their confidence in advising clinicians how to act, what to treat, and what to expect from every imaginable or unimaginable combination of symptoms.

Practicing chiropractors, for their part, are remarkably comfortable with this arrangement. When things wobble or fail, blame flows inward. The practitioner assumes personal deficiency: insufficient belief, insufficient technique, insufficient commitment. It functions like a built-in self-protection virus for the profession—very convenient for avoiding collective accountability.

This arrangement is also useful when graduates eventually notice three inconvenient facts:

1. There are few jobs.
2. There is no meaningful referral network within medicine.
3. Fifty years of accumulating studies have failed to make a compelling case for chiropractic’s widespread clinical utility.

Chiropractic does not compete well with medicine—or even with itself. When studied carefully, its apparent effectiveness dissolves into non-specific factors: expectation, attention, ritual, and natural history. When chiropractic researchers properly control for placebo and natural recovery, the specific effect of spinal manipulation reliably shrinks or disappears altogether. Paradoxically, better science makes chiropractic look worse.

Structurally, the profession is a two-tiered, one-directional system that rarely improves, because the real problems are invisible at the top and permanently personalized at the bottom. Some leaders continue selling early-20th-century dogma, steering chiropractic safely away from medicine by avoiding diagnosis and disease altogether.

When a profession cannot hear its own failures, cannot correct its own assumptions, and cannot tolerate honest uncertainty, leaving stops feeling like betrayal and starts feeling like hygiene.

At some point, the pattern became impossible to ignore. When a profession cannot hear its own failures, cannot correct its own assumptions, and cannot tolerate honest uncertainty, leaving stops feeling like betrayal and starts feeling like hygiene. That was when I knew I was done.

Many of my former classmates reached the same conclusion, some more quickly than I did. Privately, several admitted that much of what we had been taught was baloney. They were not amused. A $200,000–$400,000 investment over four years had produced clinicians who knew just enough medicine to realize how little they could safely treat. The coping mechanism was predictable: at least we help 50 percent of patients—better than nothing.

Some eventually realized that 50 percent accuracy in a two-outcome probability space is not success at all.

At the end of last year I wrote an article in Quillette called “Can art convey truth?” (archived here). I contended that while the object of science is to find the truth about the universe (including humans, of course), the goal of much of the humanities—the arts—is not to find truth; humanities have other aims. As I said,

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Because of this, we can’t say that the purpose of universities is to “find and promulgate truth” so long as universities teach the visual, literature, music, cinema, and so on. That doesn’t diminish the value of universities, but slightly changes what we see as their mission.

I was prompted to write this because at a Heterodox Academy meeting in Brooklyn last year, I was roundly criticized by scholars like John McWhorter and Louis Menand, who maintained that there was indeed agreed-upon “truths” to be found in art (McWhorter later recanted a bit). I think they were wrong, perhaps wedded to the idea that admitting that art isn’t “truthy” would be an admission that it’s inferior to science. (It isn’t; they are simply different.) And reader of this site will know of my respect and admiration for art.

Now an artist has weighed in on this argument, (also in Quillette) and she’s on my side. The artist is Megan Gafford, who is quite accomplished, and I like her work (see examples here).  I will first show her view that, in general agrees with mine, and then discuss a few reactions I have to her contentions. I am not saying where she’s wrong, but merely commenting on her commentary.

You can read Ms. Gafford’s article by clicking on the title screenshot below, or, if you can’t see the original, find it archived here. Her piece also contains one of her lovely drawings.

Here’s her opening, which I was pleased to read (I took a lot of flak for saying that art does not uncover “truths”):

In a recent Quillette piece Jerry Coyne argues that “unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth.” When he made a similar assertion last June at a Heterodox Academy conference, it “resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane,” he writes. Wary that people might perceive him as “just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school,” Coyne writes about art from a defensive crouch—but because I’m an artist, and well within my lane, I have no such qualms. Coyne is correct when he writes:

The real value of art … is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Would-be defenders of art make a serious category error when they insinuate that beauty is inferior to truth—as if beauty were an insufficient goal. But it is impossible to champion art effectively unless you believe that beauty is its own justification. Coyne offers examples of poems and paintings that he admires for their beauty. But he does not go far enough. Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

One comment I have on her piece is that she never really defines “beauty”.  It can of course be construed in several ways, including the most common interpretation: something that pleases the aesthetic senses (especially sight). This would include music you find appealing, paintings by Johannes Vermeer, literature that is appealing to the ear (for me that would be Yeats or Joyce’s “The Dead”), and so on.

But one could argue that much great art is not “beautiful” in that sense, for many works of art are upsetting and distressing, or conveys emotions that are not pretty.  I’ve thought of a few, including Dante’s Inferno, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1984, art depicting war (“Guernica,” Goya’s paintings), or upsetting art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Munch’s “The Scream”. I’m a fan of Jackson Pollock, but it’s unclear whether the artist intended his “drip paintings” to be beautiful, and certainly many people don’t find them so.  By concentrating on “beauty” as the goal of art, Gafford herself doesn’t go far enough—unless “beauty” and “what I consider great” are taken as synonymous. That makes the argument tautological, though.

I will now give a few quotes from Gafford along with my response:

Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

I’ll use my favourite novel as an example. John Steinbeck recasts the Cain and Abel story in his 1952 saga East of Eden, and his wisest character ponders different English translations of that Bible story with mutually incompatible interpretations. He wants to understand the precise meaning of what God told Cain after he slew Abel, so he consults the original Hebrew to sort out what it really means:

I won’t reproduce Gafford’s argument, here, but her example from Steinbeck doesn’t seem to me to convey “beauty” unless it’s seen as s proper (and therefore more meaningful) translation of the Hebrew for the Cain and Abel story, which itself was a model for East of Eden.

Another:

Physicists have long tried to figure out whether we’re living in a deterministic universe, a question with obvious implications for free will. But for now, we don’t know—and maybe we cannot know. Reality can be inscrutable. It is the task of scientists to answer questions like “do we live in a deterministic universe?” And it is the task of artists to summon beauty that helps us bear the uncertainty. These roles are equally important. They are not interchangeable.

I won’t argue about free will here (except to say that I don’t think we have it in the libertarian sense, and there’s strong evidence for that contention), but rather would note that art has a wider purpose than “summoning beauty to help us bear the uncertainty” (of life and thought, I presume). Again, great art may not alleviate our distress, but exacerbate it. There is a lot of great art and literature that is simply disturbing. Do you think the painting below is beautiful?  It’s  “Head VI”by Francis Bacon (from Wikipedia), one of the versions of Bacon’s famous “Screaming Pope” series. Those paintings are not beautiful in any conventional sense, but they’re mesmerizing and, I’d say, great art. This resembles Munch’s “The Scream”, and I doubt that Bacon meant it to convey beauty. Rather than soothe our anxiety, it heightens it:

Fair usage, Wikimedia.

Gafford also notes that writers and artists talk about revealing “truth”, for example:

Artists often treasure the truth, as when Paul Cézanne wrote to a younger painter, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you.” By this he meant an authentic impression of nature grounded in immediate perception, rather than any inherited formulae or conventions. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway claims in his memoir A Moveable Feast that “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Clearly Cézanne and Hemingway are talking about subjective rather then objective truth: they are talking about expressing their own views or feelings clearly.

Finally, Gafford talks about how scientists themselves speak of the beauty of their fields, for example a “beautiful experiment” (the Meselson and Stahl experiment comes to mind) or a “beautiful equation”:

Just as artists treasure the truth, scientists frequently extoll beauty. Ulkar Aghayeva argues that “every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is.” She details different reasons why scientists have called experiments beautiful. The aesthetic sensibilities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists were “centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty,” she writes, while contemporary theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek regards a beautiful experiment as one where “you get out more than you put in” because “beautiful experiments exhibit a strong information asymmetry between the input from the experimenter and the output of the system under study.”

I’m not sure how much of a role aesthetics plays here, compared to cleverness and simplicity that yield decisive results (Meselson and Stahl experiment) or E = mc², which is “beautiful” in its simplicity and its economy. But there are lots of important equations that are not nearly as simple or economical.

Finally, while of course appreciating science, Gafford seems to see art as a way to give us a respite from science, which is conceived of as wearing and tedious. Gafford first quotes the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen:

“The tightly structured and highly collective nature of scientific work seems to arise from our desire to actually get things right. We use experts and inferential reasoning in science in order to cope with the vast, sprawling nature of the world. Our separate minds just aren’t large enough to do it on our own. So scientists create a vast store of publicly accessible data, and then use this collective database to make accurate predictions. This methodology requires a radical degree of trust. Scientific conclusions are based on long chains of reasoning, which cross different specialties. Engineers rely on chemists, who in turn rely upon statisticians and molecular physicists, and on and on. And much of this involves trusting others beyond one’s ability to verify. A typical doctor cannot vet, for themselves, all the chemistry, statistics, and biological research on which they rely. The social practice of science is oriented towards epistemic efficiency, which drives us towards epistemic dependence. Scientific conclusions are network conclusions. …

Our artistic and aesthetic practices offer us a respite from that vast, draining endeavor. We have shaped a domain where we can each engage with the world with our own minds—or in nicely human-sized groups. We have shaped a domain where we can return to looking at particular things directly, instead of seeking general principles. This form of aesthetic life functions as a relief from the harsh demands of our collective effort to understand the world. Our aesthetic life is a constructed shelter from science.”

. . . and adds this in her own words:

And so, no matter how well beauty and truth complement each other, we should not conflate the value of art with that of science, lest we weaken both. Can scientists reach their full potential without art as a shelter from the psychic cost of surrendering autonomy? Can artists summon beauty into the world if they do not value it as an end unto itself?

I agree with her conclusion about conflation, but disagree with her claim that doing science incurs a “psychic cost of surrendering autonomy”, meaning that we have to dissolve our egos into the collective enterprise of science to do it properly.  But I’ve never felt that to produce a psychic cost: I find it joyful to do my science  in a community, for that is where you get many of your ideas. Only a few scientists, like Einstein, do their work in isolation, and presumably like it that way.

This is just a commentary on a commentary, and, as I said, not a critique of Gafford, but a scientist’s expansion on her ideas—part of a continuing dialogue on science and art.

 

Simulations of Australopithecus hominins’ anatomy suggest that when they gave birth, they may have exerted tremendous pressure on their pelvic floors, putting them at risk of tearing