Why Evolution is True Feed

The University of Chicago doesn’t like to publicize protests about the Middle East war, as they make the school look bad. And the University is even more secretive about punishing protestors—like these—who violate the University “Protest and Demonstration Policy” by shouting down speakers (also see the President’s statement here). I have been unable to find out, in several cases, whether local punishments have been applied to disruptive students.  This is kept a secret for reasons best known to the University.

These violations of University policy, involving disruptions of other people’s speech, are not protected by the University’s free expression policy, which hews very close to the First Amendment of the Constitution. But despite their illegality, they continue. And they invariably involve pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some of whom have vowed not to respect the protest and demonstration policy.

So far the University has either failed to punish violators, or has given them only a slap on the wrist, like writing an essay on “my demonstration experience.” It’s not rocket science to figure out that if demonstrators violate University regulations but aren’t punished seriously, and there’s no record of a violation on their transcript, then the illegal protests will continue.  A regulation that’s not enforced is a regulation without teeth.

Below is are two short videos from Instagram showing a protest at the Medical School that occurred last month.  The speaker (or “attempted speaker”) is Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld, the new President of the prestigious American Medical Association (AMA).  He is accomplished, Jewish, and gay.

The last two traits caused the protest that occurred when he was invited to speak to his alma mater, for he got his MD here. Despite his being a liberal and an honored physician, and despite his attempt to present a “Grand Rounds” talk on LGBTQ+ equity in medicine to the the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society, the students still harassed him.

You can see the “issues” by listening to the angry and loud protests below (note that the cowardly speakers donned masks to hide their identities).  Ehrenfeld is accused of Israeli “pinkwashing” (the crazy claim that Israel only pretends to support LGBTQ+ rights to distract people from the country’s supposed crimes); accused of the AMA not having formally called for a ceasefire in Israel; and accused of being complicit in the deaths of Palestinian civilians because of Israel’s supposed war crimes.

As the Instagram post says below, “Security escorted protestors out of the lecture hall.” That’s a step in the right direction, since the University has failed to do even that during other protests.  But are these protestors medical or other students at the University? If so, then they must be punished. If they’re not from the University community, then they’re likely guilty of trespassing and can be banned from campus. Whatever the University does about this, it must involve more than simply removing disruptive protestors from the venue, as that’s not really a deterrent, much less a punishment.

These protests invariably involve only pro-Palestinian students, simply because the pro-Israeli ones aren’t into this kind of disruption. And this has led pro-Palestinian demonstrators to ask why  they’re being singled out by the University.  But that’s a dumb question with an easy answer: “Because they’re the only group that holds these types of angry and disruptive protests with respect to the war.”

I wonder whether after Israel is victorious, as I think it will be, these protests will continue.  I think they will, because the anger will only be intensified.

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Here’s another post sponsored by the Students for Justice in Palestine, a registered student organization. Some of the video overlaps with that above, but they also have the temerity to tell Ehrenfeld what his ethical responsibility is:

On 2/20, Healthcare workers and medical students led disruptions and a banner drop during American Medical Association President Jesse Ehrenfeld’s talk at UChicago Medicine. AMA stop the hypocrisy, you have an ethical obligation to stand against genocide. You have an ethical obligation to stand with life, in solidarity with Palestine. Ehrenfeld, history is watching! Med Students say: Ceasefire Now!
Repost from @hcw4palichi

The students apparently disagree with the restriction that there is a time and place for free expression—times and places where it doesn’t disrupt University activity.  This video also shows security asking students to leave, but they persist in a “silent protest,” holding up a banner in the classroom. I am not sure if that’s a violation of University regulations, but it should be, because it is disruptive, particularly when there are many signs held by many students. I would say, “no signs in the lecture hall.”

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Today is Sunday, and so we have bird photos from biologist John Avise, this time from Northern Ireland. John’s narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note the five DUCKS at the beginning.

Birds in Northern Ireland  

In 2008, I visited Northern Ireland and Ireland to give invited seminars at major Universities in both countries.  My hosts knew of my great interest in birds, and so they very graciously took me on an extended tour of nature reserves and natural habitats across the entire island.  This week’s post shows some of the birds I photographed in the Northern Ireland portion of that journey.  The weather was mostly cloudy and rainy; ergo the darkness of some of the pictures.  Many of these birds will be familiar to European readers of WEIT.

Dabchick (also known as “little grebe”; Tachybaptus ruficollis):

Ferruginous Duck (Aythya nyroca), drake:

Common Pochard (Aythya ferina), drake:

Tufted Duck (Aythya fuligula), drake:

Gadwall (Mareca strepera), drake:

Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) adult in basic (non-breeding) plumage:

European Herring Gull (Larus argentatus):

Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) flight silhouette:

Common Linnet (Linaria cannabina):

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) head portrait:

European Robin (Erithacus rubecula):

Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), dorsal view:

Northern Fulmar, ventral view:

 Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus):

Sandwich Tern (Thalasseus sandvicensis):

Western Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula:

Bill Maher’s 8½-minute monologue, largely about the advanced age of Joe Biden, aired on Real Time last night. His point: don’t let the opposition define you, and be who you really are. In Biden’s case, that’s being old, and Biden should, says Maher, “own it.”

I’m not sure that would really work, though. Americans watch Biden, and they’re scared by what they see. But there’s also a nice skit of Maher playing an aged Biden (with a walker) giving the State of the Union address.

Watch before they take it down. The ten-minute “overtime” segment, with a strange mixture of  guests—Dr. Phil, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Tim Ryan—is here.

It’s taken me a while to fathom how anti-Israeli (or even antisemitic) the New York Times is, but the article below exemplifies this bias, which constantly leaks into the paper’s news reporting and non-op-ed stories.  In fact, I find that the Times of Israel gives more accurate information about the war than does the NYT.  If you read the NYT article below article and can’t see how it’s slanted to make Israel look bad, then I think you’re missing something.

The story in the article is one I reported on December 1 and on December 7 of last year—about the shooting of three Palestinian (or Palestinian-American) friends, all attending American colleges, as they took an evening stroll in Vermont. As I said at the time (the Wikipedia account is here):

You have surely heard that three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were shot on November 25 in Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens; the other a legal resident.  The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill. From the NYT:

They were shot and wounded on Saturday by a white man with a handgun while they were walking near the University of Vermont, the police said. Two of the victims were wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs, a traditional headdress.

The young men told family members they were speaking a hybrid of English and Arabic before the man shot at them four times without saying anything before the attack, according to a family spokeswoman.

Two of the victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. The third sustained much more serious injuries.

The one with serious injuries was shot in the spine, and may never walk again. This is a terrible attack, and, while we can be grateful that nobody was killed, losing your ability to walk is horrible. The shooter has been charged with second-degree murder, and, if he’s guilty, which seems likely, will be spending a long time in either prison or a mental hospital.

Tahseen was shot in the leg and recovered, but Hiasham is still in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. This story attracted a good deal of attention at the time because of the possibility that it could have been a hate crime: the young men were speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs (scarves that symbolize Palestinian solidarity). Plus the victims are considered “people of color,” which always gets progressives furiously speculating, and then—as in this case—asserting that it must have been a hate crime. Someone, it was said, was trying to kill Palestinians because they were Palestinians.

Now there’s no doubt that someone committed a horrible crime. Although nobody was killed, Hisham will probably never walk again, and since he’s only 20, I see that as a terrible fate. (The article below notes that he seems to be accepting it pretty well.)

But was it really a hate crime? Even on December 7 the police, searching furiously, couldn’t find any evidence that the perpetrator, one Jason Eaton, was motivated by hatred of Palestinians. Instead, he appeared to be mentally ill, and what meager evidence there is suggests that he might be pro-Palestinian! Even so, the students, the family, and some of the media were asserting or implying that Eaton was “Islamophobic.”  As Wikipedia reports, Eaton has been “charged with three counts of attempted murder in the second degree” and investigations into it being a hate crime are continuing.  The trial has yet to begin, and if there’s no evidence of a hate crime, then they can’t tack that on as another charge.

As the NYT story begrudgingly notes below, there’s still no evidence of anti-Palestinian bigotry in the shooting, even after four months.  If you read about this shooting, you slowly realize that the media and many Palestinians actually want it to be a hate crime, for that would fit a narrative of minority students being victimized.

I would think that Palestinians would want it NOT to be a hate crime, because that would mean that there’s less hatred that turns into violence.  But the narrative overtakes the facts.

The NYT has found a new way to use this four-month-old shooting to demonize Israel, and that’s why the article below is so long. It ties together the shooting and the victims’ lives since November, but also works into the article repeated demonizations of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians, leaving out some salient facts. In other words, it’s coopting the shooting, which is bad enough on its own, to push an anti-Israel narrative. The author, Rozina Ali, is clearly anti-Israel, as you can see clearly from her “X” feed. No agenda here!

Click below to read the piece from the NYT Magazine, or you can find the article archived here.

I’ll just give some quotes from the long piece, quotes critical of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians (there’s nothing positive about Israel, of course). Some of her quotes (the three boys met and became friends in Ramallah, on the West Bank) are below, indented:

The friends largely avoided run-ins with Israeli forces or the settlers surrounding Ramallah. Still, they were growing up in the shadow of the second intifada. Security was tight. Long gun barrels followed them at military checkpoints, prickling them with fear. As a child, Hisham heard about a friend of his cousin’s who was killed by Israeli soldiers. A friend’s father was arrested and disappeared into the prison system for a year and a half. No one knew precisely why. Once, when Hisham was hiking, a group of soldiers demanded to see his identity card. They let him go, but he was rattled.

The occupation affected Tahseen intimately: He couldn’t visit his relatives in Gaza, including his grandmother, because Israel restricted movement between the two strips of Palestinian territory. One of his earliest memories was of being rushed away by his dad from a tear-gas canister that landed near him. When he was 11, soldiers barged into the living room of his house without warning, pointed their guns at the family and shouted out a name — Tahseen’s neighbor. They had the wrong house. Years later, it happened again.

. . . Kinnan and Hisham appeared to be more troubled. Early one afternoon in May 2021, when Hisham was 18, he ventured to El Bireh, an adjoining city where people were protesting. Demonstrations had erupted across the West Bank in response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and efforts to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The teachers at Ramallah Friends regularly discussed the occupation — a subject that could hardly be avoided even in a class on poetry. Still, they discouraged students from attending demonstrations, where they could be killed. A classmate who attended one had been shot in the leg. But Hisham was tired of feeling humiliated and oppressed. I don’t accept this, he thought. I’m not going to take this lying down.

The NYT doesn’t note that the “response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza” was, as you can see from the links, a military response to Hamas rockets fired at Israel from Gaza! The paper implies, as it often does, that an Israeli defensive response to an attack from Palestine is really an attack mounted by Israel.

Next we hear about Israel “pounding” Gaza after the barbaric attacks on October 7. Note the choice of words:

Then, last October, as he started his second year, Hamas gunmen breached a fence and attacked towns across southern Israel, killing civilians and capturing hostages. And then Israel began pounding Gaza.

. . . The friends missed home. Not just Ramallah, which was rapidly changing under Israel’s latest incursion, but a particular time, the one they couldn’t return to. They missed the life before they came to the United States to study, before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. . .

Hamas “attacks” while Israel “pounds” and bombards “relentlessly”.  The whole narrative implies that, in general, nothing that Palestinians do is bad and everything Israel does is bad.

More:

Still, deadly violence in the United States seemed rare compared with that in the West Bank, where Israeli forces were detaining Palestinians en masse. Even before the Oct. 7 attacks, 2023 was a particularly deadly year; now deaths shot up. By the end of the year, Israeli forces and settlers would kill 507 civilians there, including 124 children — the highest death toll since the United Nations began recording such statistics in 2005. The friends were planning to meet in Burlington, Vt., and stay with Hisham’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. Some of the parents encouraged them to stay in the United States for the winter holidays, too. They thought their children would be safer there.

There is no mention about why Paletinians were detained and some killed by the IDF.  I doubt it was because the IDF just likes to kill Palestinians.

There is plenty of discussion of hate crimes against Muslims, and no discussion about the fact that religious hate crimes against Jews are not only more frequent in number than “Islamophobic” hate crimes, but farmore frequent on a per capita basis. From the Dept. of Justice data in 2022:

• Religion-Based Crimes: There were 2,042 reported incidents based on religion. More than half of these (1,122) were driven by anti-Jewish bias. Incidents involving anti-Muslim (158) and anti-Sikh (181) sentiments remained at similar levels compared to 2021.

The Times of Israel, using FBI data from 2022, gives slightly different numbers but they’re roughly similar:

There were 1,305 offenses committed against Jews in 2022, the FBI reported in its tally Monday of national crime statistics, far outnumbering the second-largest category, anti-Muslim crimes, of which there were 205.

Taking the Justice Department statistics, and assuming the observation that there are 7.6 million Jews in America and 3.45 million Muslims, this works out to a per capita yearly ratio of hate crimes against Jews to that of Muslims being 3.2 to 1 (I hope I did my math right). That is, the chance of a Jew being the victim of a religiously-based hate crime is roughly 3.2 times the chance of a Muslim being a victim. But of course the antisemitic crimes are rarely discussed, because although Jews are the victims, they are—being “white adjacent”—not seen as victims.

But I digress.  The final bit of the long story is the evidence that the shooter was Islamophobic. Here’s what the paper says about that:

Within hours, the police came to talk to [the three shot students]. Hate crimes, which are predicated on the state of mind of the aggressor, are challenging to prove in court. This case was even more tricky: The shooter said nothing out loud before, during or after the shooting, and the man the police had charged in the attack, Jason Eaton, was a somewhat complicated character. He had returned to Vermont the previous summer, after some years in upstate New York. Things had taken a bad turn — a series of troubled relationships and jobs that didn’t work out. He spent Thanksgiving with his mother, who later told a reporter that he had had mental-health struggles but was “totally normal” that day. Eaton appeared to have engaged in political discussion online. According to a local Vermont paper, he had left comments on X about an op-ed piece about Gaza — “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” — and described himself as a “radical citizen pa-trolling demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” Per a police affidavit, Eaton had a pistol, a rifle and two shotguns in his apartment, along with ammunition consistent with casings found at the crime scene. (Eaton has pleaded not guilty to three charges of attempted second-degree murder.)

The link to the story at a Vermont site, however, makes Eaton seem even more pro-Palestinian:

While Seven Days has not been able to view all of Eaton’s social media posts, what was provided to the paper suggests he had some sympathy for the Palestinian side of the conflict.

“What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” he wrote in a November 16 post responding to a VTDigger.org commentary by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) that called for a cease-fire. “Brittan [sic] wouldn’t let ships with food sent by other countries into Ireland during the famine. My people starved.”

In an October 17 post on X responding to a different article, Eaton wrote that “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”

There is no suggestion that he hated Palestine or Palestinians; in fact, it’s quite the contrary. But that doesn’t stop the boys or their families—or prominent voices in the Palestinian community—from asserting it was a hate crime. For some reason, and in the absence of evidnece, they just know that Eaton was motivated to shoot Palestinians.  And so The Narrative must be obeyed.

In the end, what we see in this article is not evidence for a hate crime, but strong evidence that the NYT wants to make the shooting into a “hate story”, with the anti-Israeli author using her venue to gin up hatred against Israel.  As I said the other day, this is the way the mainstream liberal media operates in America today: the narrative is more important than the truth.

And did it strike the author (or the editors) that all the anti-Israel stuff in this post has absolutely nothing to do with the shooting of these students?

______________

By the way, here’s something that looks at first like an antisemitic hate crime: a man of Arab descent killing a Jewish dentist. However, one local source reports that the killer “identified as 29-year-old Mohammed Abdulkareem, was believed to be a ‘disgruntled former customer’ of the dental office, authorities said”. I don’t know any more details, though, as I can’t find a mention of it in the MSM.  (It would be there if it was a Jew killing a Muslim!)  But sometimes a killing is just a killing, and has nothing to do with religion or politics.

San Diego shocking murder – Mohammed Abdulkareem, 29, was arrested after shooting & killing Jewish dentist, Dr. Benjamin Harouni, at his SmilePlus Dentistry practice in the El Cajon suburb. 

Demand El Cajon Police investigate if antisemitism was a factor in this shocking crime -… pic.twitter.com/chBqrrRVH1

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 1, 2024

Today we have an all-audio and all-video trifecta.

First, here’s an eight-minute video about why cats run away from home. If you let your cat go outdoors, watch this, and, more important, get your cat chippsed AND a collar with a phone number on it. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve known who have lost an indoor cat that accidentally went outdoors; and there was no collar with an ID tag and no chips.  In my view, all cats should be chipped.

 

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In this Purrli® program (click on screenshot), you can adjust six parameters of a cat’s purr to find out what kind of purr you like best. (“Meow-y” means that there’s an occasional meow, which I like. Below the screenshot I’ve given that I consider my favorite purr for a cat lying on my chest or lap.

 

My favorite settings. There are around two meows per minute, but I’d silence them if I were working at the same time:

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One of the great internet video sequences is to introduce the candy Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. It creates a huge fountain of the soft drink reasons given here.  An excerpt:

All the sites recommend a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke (not regular Coke) and a limited number of Mentos.

The carbonated drinks’ fizz comes from carbon dioxide added to the bottles at high pressure. 2-liter Diet Coke contains around 12-15 grams of dissolved carbon dioxide. The gas tries to escape and form bubbles around any irregular surface, called a nucleation site. Mentos also have nucleation sites because they are not as smooth as they appear. When added to Coke, the dissolved gas pushes the liquid out of the container at a super-fast speed in the form of bubbles. The candies simply catalyze the release of gas from the Coke bottle. Therefore, the chemical reaction between Coke and Mentos, in reality, is a physical reaction.

No matter how messy or sticky the experiment is, there are only two ingredients required to make this geyser. One bottle of 2-liter fizzy drink, preferably Diet Coke, and Mentos are needed in an adequate quantity to give a spectacular reaction. For a 2-liter bottle of Coke, at least five Mentos are good enough. Moreover, all Mentos must be added to the drink simultaneously, giving each of them equal time to create an effect. As Mentos candies are dropped into the Coke bottle, there is an explosion seconds later, and a “Mentos Coke Fountain” goes high up in the sky.

. . . The highest recorded explosion has been of Mentos and Diet Coke when the fountain touched up to 10 meters. Most people believe that the more Mentos are added to Coke, the bigger and higher the eruption will be. However, the number of Mentos that will make a difference is limited. Through various investigations, it has been deduced that seven Mentos are the max.

Well, try it (I wouldn’t waste two liters of Diet Coke when you can watch it on YouTube). But can you watch cats reacting to it? Here’s a 3-minute video of cats watching this chemical reaction set up to follow a domino-falling sequence. I wonder how many times they had to set this up to get it right, for it requires the cats to help.

There’s a related video, sans Mentos and Cokc, below. Actually, I like the second one better because there’s a treat at the end.

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Lagniappe: A short video of a cat encountering a giant tarantula (nobody gets hurt):

h/t: Barry

Today we have two smallish sets of photos. Click photos to enlarge, and the photographers’ captions are indented. And remember to send your wildlife photos, as the tank is dangerously low.

First, a few photos of Colorado from Douglas Swartzenruber.

This is just a collection of pics from being out and about in Colorado.  I did not think that any captions were necessary – some folks may recognize a locale or two, but it’s not really important.

A deer and a beer:

Given the last two pictures, I’ll have to relate a joke (slightly NSFW):

Q: Why are beer nuts like deer nuts?
A:  They’re both under a buck.

The last time I told this to someone, they pointed out that beer nuts are probably more than a dollar now. And indeed they are!  There goes the joke. . . .

Here are a couple of photos by Muffy Mead demonstrating the macro capabilities of phone cameras:

You were asking this morning for more wildlife photos and I can’t say mine are all that great, but I thought your readers might be interested in the fact that you can now buy a macro lens for your phone camera very inexpensively, and it’s a lot of fun to take closeup pictures of insects and other stuff! So attached are a few photos I took (dragonfly, butterfly, dragonfly wing, wasp nest) including one of the lens I have, but there are several others to choose from on Amazon.

Click to go to the Amazon site (the price has gone up):

We missed a full year of Botany Pond last year, and that meant a dearth of ducks, although we managed to bring up a brood of ten trapped on the roof of a dormitory two blocks north. That was a considerable accomplishment given the difficulty of the task, which involved schlepping water and food over to the dorm three times a week for eight weeks. We also had a somewhat depressing experience with Amy the Library Duck, who couldn’t find her way to the lake several blocks west, and so we had to purloin her offspring and put them into rehab. That was also the case for another lost brood a few weeks earlier.

We had hoped that Botany Pond would be filled with water by June of this year, but even that doesn’t seem to be in the offing, and we may not even get to see the migrating ducks stop by here on their way south.  Below is the announcement from the Chicago Maroon about various delays in reopening the Pond, which is now surrounded by an ugly metal and nylon-mesh fence.

Although the article below starts this way:

According to a University spokesperson, the refilling of Botany Pond along with its bridge repairs are set to be completed this spring, with planting and landscaping occurring over the summer. The re-introduction of the pond’s wildlife will be a gradual process that will begin upon the pond’s refilling, with a focus on re-building the pond’s ecosystem from the ground up in order to ensure its self-sufficiency. According to a University spokesperson, the refilling of Botany Pond along with its bridge repairs are set to be completed this spring, with planting and landscaping occurring over the summer. The re-introduction of the pond’s wildlife will be a gradual process that will begin upon the pond’s refilling, with a focus on re-building the pond’s ecosystem from the ground up in order to ensure its self-sufficiency. It is unclear when Botany Pond will be open to the public again.

Well, they are not going to complete the bridge repairs this spring, nor will the pond be refilled, nor will the bridge be completed. Forget about the planting and landscaping.  Everything is on hold because the University is hurting for money.

Pessimist that I am, I don’t think the pond will be refilled any earlier than the Spring of 2025, which means that we’ll have lost two full wildlife seasons.   This is sad not only because the turtles, fish, and ducks won’t be here to enjoy, but the entire pond, a jewel of the University, will be fenced off and unavailable to the community. People from all around, whether or not they had anything to do with the U of C, would stop by and get respite from their quotidian woes by communing with the pond, its plants and trees and of course its avian wildlife. You can read about the delays below, but I won’t reproduce them as it just makes me sad. Click to read the rest:

Instead of bemoaning the problem, I’ll put up a few photos to bring back memories of brighter days.

Feeding the ducks with the Lab School students, 2017:

Honey and her brood of 17 from 2020. Half of the brood was kidnapped form Dorothy, but Dorothy went on to re-nest and produced her own brood of seven:

Honey as a soccer ball:

Me feeding Honey, 2021:

Honey’s very young babies:

. . . and her teenage brood. Ever watchful, she was the Queen of Duck Mothers:

Roof ducks, last year, with mother Maria. We brought every one up to fledging!

The pond in November, 2022. Work has been very slow, and back then it apparently wasn’t due to lack of money:

Turtles in 2018 (red-eared sliders). They are off somewhere being taken care of, but I wonder if we’ll ever see them again:

The pond in 2018:

Unknown drake and his mate:

Frisky the wood duck sitting on his cypress knob (sadly, they cut down the trees):

Frisky nuzzling his girlfriend Ruth, who flew off on her own:

Is it any wonder I’m depressed?

h/t Charles

One of the most striking differences between monkeys and other primates on the one hand and apes on the other is that—with a few exceptions—other primates have tails but apes don’t.

A new paper in Nature, which is really cool, investigates the genetic basis for the loss of tails in apes. (The phylogeny below shows that the primate ancestor had a tail, and it was lost in apes.)

Why did apes lose their tails? We don’t know for sure, but it may be connected with the facts that apes are mostly ground-dwellers and a tail would be an impediment for living on the ground and moving via knuckle-walking or bipedal walking. (The gibbon, considered an ape that branched off early from the common ancestor with monkeys, is an exception, as it’s mostly arboreal. Gibbons move by swinging from branch to branch but they have no tails However, this form of locomotion, called brachiation, really doesn’t require a tail for grasping or balance.) I suspect that because apes who move in these ways don’t need tails makes it disadvantageous to have a tail: it’s metabolic energy wasted on an appendage that you don’t need, and one that could get injured. Thus natural selection likely favored the loss of a tail.

Regardless, the new Nature paper, which you can access below (pdf here, reference at bottom), involves a complex genetic analysis that pinpoints one gene, called Tbxt, as a key factor in tail loss.  By genetically engineering the tail-loss form of the gene from apes and putting it into mice, they found that the mice engineered to have the ape form of the gene either had very short tails or no tails at all. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Click to read:

First, here’s a phylogeny of the primates from the paper. Apes diverged from monkeys (or rather “other monkeys”, since apes can be considered a subgroup of monkeys) about 25 million years ago. The tailless apes are shown in blue, with the common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes shown about 25 million years ago.

How can you find the genes that are involved in tail loss in apes? The best way to do it, which the authors used, is to first look for mutations in primates that cause loss or shortening of the tails, and then see whether the forms of those genes differ between apes and monkeys.  Xia et al. looked at 31 such genes but didn’t find any genes whose forms were concordant with tail loss.

They then went on to mice, looking another 109 genes associated with tail loss or reduction in the rodents.  Here they found one gene, Tbxt, that had an unusual form in all apes that was lacking in other primates.  Tbxt, by the way, is a transcription factor: a gene that produces a protein that itself controls the action of other genes, regulating how and whether they are transcribed, that is, how these other genes make messenger RNA from the DNA. (Messenger RNA, as you know, is then “translated” into proteins.)

And this transcription factor had an unusual feature in apes but not in other primates: it contained a small sequence called Alu, about 300 base pairs long, that was inserted into the DNA of the Tbxt gene, but in a noncoding region (“intron”) separating the coding regions of Tbxt that make the transcription-factor protein. (Genes are often in coding segments, or exons, separated by introns, and the exons are spliced together into one string before the mRNA goes off to make protein.)

Only primates have Alu elements; they formed by a genetic “accident” about 55 million years ago and spread within genomes. We humans have about one million Alu elements in our genomes, and sometimes they move around, which gives them the name “jumping genes.”  They are often involved in gene regulation, but can also cause mutations when they move, since they seem to move randomly.

Here’s a diagram of a monkey Tbxt gene on the left and the human version on the right. Note that in both groups the gene has coding regions, which are spliced together when mRNA is made to produce the full transcript.  But note that in humans there is an Alu element, “AluY” stuck into the gene between Exon 6 and Exon 7. I’ve put a red circle around it. This inserted bit of DNA appears to be the key to the loss of tails. (Note the nearby Alu element AluSx1 in both groups.)

(From paper) Schematic of the proposed mechanism of tail-loss evolution in hominoids. Primate images in a and c were created using BioRender (https://biorender.com).

Here’s why the authors singled out the Tbxt gene as a likely candidate for tail loss? This is from the paper:

Examining non-coding hominoid-specific variants among the genes related to tail development, we recognized an Alu element in the sixth intron of the hominoid TBXT gene (Fig. 1b). This element had the following notable combination of features: (1) a hominoid-specific phylogenetic distribution; (2) presence in a gene known for its involvement in tail formation; and (3) proximity and orientation relative to a neighbouring Alu element. First, this particular hominoid-specific Alu element is from the AluY subfamily, a relatively ‘young’ but not human-specific subfamily shared among the genomes of hominoids and Old World monkeys. Moreover, the inferred insertion time—given the phylogenetic distribution (Fig. 1a)—coincides with the evolutionary period when early hominoids lost their tails. Second, TBXT encodes a highly conserved transcription factor crucial for mesoderm and definitive endoderm formation during embryonic development. Heterozygous mutations in the coding regions of TBXT orthologues in tailed animals such as mouse, Manx cat, dog and zebrafish lead to the absence or reduced forms of the tail, and homozygous mutants are typically non-viable.

In other words it matches the distribution of tails or their absence, mutations in the gene affect tail lengths in mice, the insertion is about the same age as the common ancestor of apes and other primates (25 myr), its function at least suggests the potential to affect tail length, and, finally, mutations of the gene in other animals result in taillessness, including producing MANX CATS. Here’s a tailless Manx male.

Karen Weaver, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

But the real key to how this form of the gene causes tail loss rests in another speculation: there is another Alu element (“AluSx1” in both figures) which is inserted backwards in the same gene, lying between coding regions (exon) 5 and 6. The new AluY element is of a similar sequence to the old one, but in reverse orientation. So, when the Tbxt gene is getting ready to form mRNA, the two Alu elements pair up, which makes a loop of DNA between them that is simply spliced out of the mRNA sequence.

Here’s a diagram of that happening. Note the loop formed at top right by the pairing of the two Alu elements (red and dark gray), a loop that includes a functional part of the gene (exon 6 in royal blue). When the transcript of this gene is made, the code from exon 6 is simply cut out of the mRNA. This produces an incomplete protein product that could conceivably affect the development of the tail.

But does it work that way?

The authors did two tests to show that, in fact, removal of exon 6 in mice does shorten their tails, and in some cases can remove them completely.

The first experiment simply involved inserting a copy of Tbxt missing exon 6 into mice (they did this without the complicated loop-removal mechanism posited above).  Sure enough, mice with one copy of this exon-missing gene showed various alterations of the tail, including no tails, short tails, and kinked tails.

This shows that creating the putative product of the ape loop-formation process, a Tbxt gene missing exon 6, can reduce the tail of mice.

But then the authors went further, because they wanted to know whether putting both the Alu elements AluSx1 and AluY into mice in the same positions they have in primates could produce reduced tails in mice via loop formation.  They did this using a combination of CRISPR genetic engineering and crossing, for mice having two copies of the Tbxt gene that forms loops and excise exon 6 turn out to be lethal.  Viable mice have only one copy of the loop-forming gene.

And when they engineered mice having one copy of the normal Tbxt gene and one engineered copy with the two Alu elements whose pairing eliminated exon 6 (they showed this by sequencing), lo and behold, THEY GOT TAILLESS MICE!  Here’s a photo of the various mice they produced. The two mice on the right have a single copy of the engineered gene with reversed Alu elements that produces a transcript missing exon 6. They are Manx mice! They have no tails! They are bereft of caudal appendages!

f, (from paper) Representative tail phenotypes across mouse lines, including wild type, TbxtinsASAY/insASAY, TbxtinsRCS2/insRCS2 and TbxtinsRCS2/Δexon6. Each included both male (M) and female (F) mice.

This complicated but clever combination of investigation and genetic engineering suggests pretty strongly that tail loss in apes involved the fixation of a mutant Tbxt gene that reduced tails via snipping out of an exon.  This is not a certainty, of course, but the data are supportive in many ways.

So is this likely one mutation that caused apes, over evolutionary time, to lose their tails (we have only a small tail (“coccyx”), consisting of 3-5 fused caudal vertebrae, as shown below in red in the second picture (both are from Wikipedia)

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.DrJanaOfficial

 

Our tail, in red:

The author and licenser of the contents is “BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan.”

Now if this gene was indeed involved in the evolutionary loss of tails in apes, it would constitute a form of “macromutation”: a character change of large effect due to a single mutation. But surely more genes were involved as well. For one thing, even a single copy of this gene causes neural-tube defects, so any advantage of a smaller tail would have to outweigh the disadvantage of the possibly producing a defective embryo or adult. Also, even if this gene is responsible for the missing or tiny tails of apes, there are likely other genes that evolved to further reduce the tail and to mitigate any neural-tube problems that would arise. (Evolution by selection is always a balance between advantageous and deleterious effects: it was advantageous for us to become bipedal, but that came with the bad side effects of bad backs and hernias).

I really like this paper and have no substantial criticisms. The authors did everything they could to test their hypothesis, which stood up well under phylogenetic, temporal, and genetic analysis.  We can’t of course be absolutely sure that the insertion of the AluY element helped the tailed ancestor of apes lose their tails, but I’d put my money on it.

What’s further appealing about this paper is that the genetic underpinning of the tail loss was completely unpredictable: the function of a gene was changed (and its phenotype as well) simply by the insertion of a “jumping gene” into a noncoding part of a functional gene.  That formed a loop that caused a cut in the gene that, ultimately, affected tail formation. Apes with smaller tails presumably had a reproductive advantage over their bigger-tailed confrères, but the genetics of it is complex, weird, and wonderful.

h/t: Matthew

Reference: Xia, B., Zhang, W., Zhao, G. et al. On the genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes. Nature 626, 1042–1048

Well, we’re in serious trouble photo-wise, and I have about five days’ worth of photos left, including Robert Lang’s final three installments of his trip to Antarctica. If you want this feature to continue, please send in your photos.

Today ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis returns with photos of Costa Rican birds. Her captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Costa Rica:  Mostly Big Colorful Birds  

On a recent trip to the Sylvan field station in lovely and unspoiled southwestern Costa Rica, featured in  my last RWP post, I also passed through the small coastal towns of Golfito and Puerto Jimenez and visited the fabled Corcovado National Park.  Today’s post shows more birds seen on these travels — the first three of which have in common that they are large and colorful and nest in tree holes.

Scarlet Macaws (Ara macao) greeted us with noisy screams in Puerto Jimenez.  A half-dozen of them were moving through the Almendra del Mar (Sea Almond, Terminalia catappa) trees and devouring the large oily seeds.   My impression was that these were bickering couples, but I’m no macaw psychologist.  What’s clear is that Costa Rica has done a magnificent job of protecting these once-endangered birds from the illegal pet trade.   We saw many Scarlet Macaws in Golfito as well, zipping in and out of nests in hollow dead palm trees.  We never saw any macaws deep in the forest.

Red-lored Amazons, or Red-lored Parrots (Amazona autumnalis), almost as large as crows, were another common sight and sound in the towns, and also in farmlands and flying high above the forests.   Like the macaws, they have suffered from the pet trade but are doing well here at present.

Yellow-throated Toucans (Ramphastos ambiguus) were frequently seen in both town and forest settings.   What I believe these photos show is a female toucan feeding her young, calling to her mate who calls back, obtaining food from her mate, and returning to their nest.

The rest of these birds are either big, OR colorful, OR treehole-nesting….

Crested Guan (Penelope purpurascens):

Baird’s Trogon (Trogon bairdii), a rare species:

Northern Black-throated Trogon (Trogon tenellus):

Golden-hooded Tanager (Stilpnia larvata):

Golden-naped Woodpeckers (Melanerpes chrysauchen):

The Quote of the Week comes from the Tablet article below, which is worth reading in its entirety (and is free). It’s about how DEI is ruining universities.

But one quote particularly struck me because of its truth and concision, and it’s this one:

As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.

Click headline below to read the whole piece:

h/t: Anna

It’s not widely known that Israeli hospitals will treat any Palestinian who’s sick or injured, given that a few conditions are met. First, the patient must not be a terrorist, though children of terrorists will be and have been treated so long as they’re accompanied by a relative (mother or grandparent) who is not suspected of terrorism.

Further, the patient must have a condition that is not treatable in a Palestinian hospital.  Finally, the patient must have permission from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to go to an Israeli hospital (the PA is supposed to cover the expenses but often doesn’t), and, if the patient is from Gaza, permission from the Gazan authorities.  Since the PA sometimes doesn’t pay up, often the treatment winds up being free, which means it’s paid for by Israel.

This has been going on forever, and yet it’s rarely publicized.  If Israel is an “apartheid state”—even with respect to Palestinians—this treatment wouldn’t be dispensed. It is, pure and simple, a case of humanitarianism and altruism.  And remember, this is not a one-off: it happens all the time.  It involves the Israelis helping people regarded as their antagonists, but they do it anyway, for they value life.  Remember that when you hear that the IDF is deliberately killing civilians for the sake of taking life.

How many people are treated in this way? The American Journal of Public Health answers this in a 2018 article:

Undoubtedly, the short- and long-term suffering of an ill Palestinian delayed at a checkpoint is always unfortunate, and occasionally even tragic. [JAC: delays for sick people passing through checkpoints into Israel sometimes occur to allow ambulances and the like to be checked for terrorists, bombs, or weapons, which have been found in ambulances and other vehicles.] However, despite ongoing terror threats, and even during unrest and wars, many Palestinians do pass daily into Israel for medical care. Israeli hospitals have long provided Palestinians with extensive medical services. For example, during the research period (in 2005 alone), approximately 123,000 Palestinians were treated at just one institution, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, which included 15000 admissions as well as 32,000 visits to the emergency department.

In general, special entry permits are issued in humanitarian cases for ill people, their chaperones, and for Palestinian medical teams. For example, more recently, in 2016, 93,890 such authorizations were issued for patients (plus 100,722 for accompanying family) to be treated at hospitals throughout Israel. At the two West Jerusalem Hadassah hospitals alone, 15,743 patients, comprising more than one third of the total, came through checkpoints and were cared for there. Another 16% (6,577 patients) crossed into Israel and were treated in hospitals in East Jerusalem.

During the same year, 9,832 Palestinian children with birth defects and chronic diseases were treated in Israeli hospitals. During the first half of 2017, 46,132 such permits have been issued and a further 2,163 authorized Palestinian medical personnel to work or be trained in Israel or East Jerusalem (written personal communication, October 4, 2017, Ido D. Dechtman and Yuval Ran, Medical Corps, Tel Aviv, Israel Defense Forces). Another noteworthy example of Israeli compassion for the suffering of her Arab neighbors is the treatment of more than 4,000 victims of the Syrian Civil War in civilian hospitals at Israeli government expense.

Do people realize this? If they do, do they even care, or do they manage to write it off as some kind of “sickwashing”?  I find it a heartening example of humans at their finest.

So here’s the story of one Gazan child whose life was saved by a complex procedure in an Israeli hospital. This is a report from the Elder of Ziyon site.

Click to read; I’ve reproduced the whole short post below:

There’s an intro from the EoZ, and then the details from the Sheba Medical Center (further indented). Bolding comes from the EoZ’s post:

I received this from Sheba Medical Center:

Among Sheba’s values are “peace through health” – treating all patients from the region and Middle East and seeing healthcare as a path to peaceful coexistence.

At the outbreak of the war there were sixty-one Palestinian patients being treated at Sheba and housed on the campus with sixty-eight family members.

Sheba has continued to receive Palestinian patients from the West Bank throughout the war, as well as providing food, shelter and any needed treatments to the forty families from Gaza that were being treated at Sheba and cannot return at this point.

One story in particular is stunning.

W—–, who has asked that her identity and photo be obscured, came to Sheba from Gaza, with a toddler son S—- who has a serious and fatal immune system deficiency disorder. What was needed was a stem cell transplant, but he had no bone marrow match with his younger brother or other family members.

Sheba staff told W—- and her husband that if she had another baby, there was a possibility that child could be a match and a donor. They decided to try. She became pregnant and a test revealed that the fetus would indeed be a match for her sick son. So, Sheba put them up on the campus and treated her for the duration of her pregnancy and delivery.

The baby boy, G——, was born on Oct. 17.

While Sheba was receiving a flood of those injured and traumatized by the war, and with 200 doctors and nurses mobilized into the army, they proceeded with taking extraordinary steps to save the life of one Palestinian child.

The newborn’s cord blood was sufficient for the needed stem cell transplant. The procedure has been performed and the now-four-year-old son is expected to regain full health and live a normal life. When it is possible to do so, his family will return to Gaza with him and his new baby brother.

Hamas fired machine guns into cribs and then raped the mothers of the babies before murdering them, and Sheba is going to great lengths to save the life of a single toddler from Gaza.

You unfortunately will not read this story anywhere else. But our values will continue to define us, and we will continue to hold them high.

They are right – this story will not be published in the media. Stories of Israeli Jews being a light unto nations are not very popular right now for those who want to push the opposite message.

There is nothing inconsistent between this story from Sheba and what the IDF is doing in Gaza.  In both cases they are doing everything they can to save lives – both Israeli and Arab.

I wanted to reproduce this in the hopes of showing the humanitarian of Israelis, which in cases like this I consider both tear-inducing and reassuring. But it also shows what humans of any nationality are capable of if they can set aside fear and hatred of The Other.

This event was more or less inevitable given that organizations can allow people to change their genders (a social construct) but won’t allow them to change their race (another social construct).  That is, many people and groups approve of “transgenderism” but strongly oppose “transracialism”.

It’s a mystery to me why, if you feel you’re of a different sex or gender than your natal sex, it’s okay—and often approved by authorities—to be identified by your assumed gender. But if you truly feel that you were born as a member of the “wrong” race, as was, famously, Rachel Dolezal in Spokane, Washington, then you are not allowed to identify as a member of  your chosen race. When Dolezal was outed as white by her family, she was demonized, universally excoriated, and then fired from her job as chapter president of the local NAACP.

Defending the idea that you could be sincerely “transracial,” philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel compared transracialism with both transsexualism and transgenderism in an article in the journal Hypatia, and ignited a huge academic firestorm. As I wrote at the time:

. . . . more than 400 academics have signed an open letter to the editor of Hypatia calling for the article to be retracted. “Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege,” the letter says.

The journal’s Facebook apology responded to those concerns by saying that it would be looking closely at its editorial processes to make sure they are more inclusive of transfeminists and feminists of color, whom the journal said had been particularly harmed by the article. The journal also apologized for its initial response to the backlash, saying that an earlier Facebook post had “also caused harm, primarily by characterizing the outrage that met the article’s publication as mere ‘dialogue’ that the article was ‘sparking.’ We want to state clearly that we regret that the post was made.”

But Tuvel’s article wasn’t pulled, and it’s still up (see first link above).  I defended her because I think Tuvel’s argument for tranracialism, assuming someone’s desire to change races is sincere, showed clear and strong philosophical parallels with transgenderism. But for some reason I still can’t fathom, even progressive whites oppose transracialism, including the kind like Dolezal’s in which one identifies as the member of a group said to be oppressed. The differential response must have something to do, I think, with an assumed “sacredness” of racial minority status.

Well, according to the New York Post, a Chicago cop named Muhammad Yusuf, who initially gave his race as “Caucasian,” but could easily be considered a person of color, has decided to change his racial designation so he can take advantages of perks given to PoCs.  It’s not a ruse, for he really is a minority-group member, and after joining the force he realized that he might have been promoted faster had he provided a more accurate racial designation. Click on the screenshot below to see the archived Post article:

The cops, by the way, refused to change his racial designation even though Yusuf gave them the results of a 23andMe test showing his genome had a non-Caucasian origin. So Yusuf is suing them.

Excerpts:

A Chicago police officer is suing the city to change his race on his official records after the department said it would allow officers to freely change their gender to match their identity.

Mohammad Yusuf, 43, said in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed last week that he is looking to change from “Caucasian” as he “currently identifies as Egyptian and African American.” However, the Chicago Police Department is not allowing him to change his race.

The lawsuit comes as the department allows an officer’s “gender identity [to be] corrected to match their lived experience,” Yusuf’s lawsuit alleges.

And, the decision is impacting Yusuf’s professional advancement, he claims.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Chicago Police Department for a statement, and it said: “We do not comment on pending litigation.”

According to the lawsuit, Yusuf alleges that he has been repeatedly overlooked for promotions due to his “Caucasian” race. These promotions, he claims, have been given to other minority applicants with only very few going to Caucasian applicants.

The 20-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department points in his lawsuit to CPD’s promotion system that “particularly” benefits “minority candidates,” even if they did not score well on promotional exams.

Yusuf specifically claims he “scored in the first promotional tier” on the sergeant’s exam in 2019. But, he was not promoted then and has still not received such a promotion.

Since that time, he alleges in the lawsuit to have seen “over 75 Merit Promotions to sergeant,” with “less than five” going to candidates who identify as Caucasian.

“Despite Yusuf’s exemplary qualifications and the purported race-neutral policy of the Merit System, Yusuf has been repeatedly bypassed for promotion in favor of less qualified candidates, based on their race, specifically African American officers, some of whom had disciplinary issues and were not suitable for the responsibilities of a sergeant,” Yusuf said in his complaint.

Yusuf said he first joined the force in 2004 and, at the time, the department only offered three race selections: Caucasian, Black and Hispanic. He chose “Caucasian” and it was put on his official record, he said.

Now, the department offers “over nine” different racial designations for incoming officers. But, it is stopping him from changing his race to more accurately reflect his identity due to a “blanket prohibition” against changing an officer’s race, the legal filing said.

. . . . After repeated rejections, Yusuf claims he was told he would first have to produce a DNA test before his race could be changed on his record. He then provided the results of a “23 and Me” genetic test, which showed his heritage and race, but the department ultimately said it was “not possible” to change his official record, he claims.

So Yusef is suing Chicago for a Title V civil rights violation.  He has a good case, for if the Police Department allows a gender (or sex) transition, it should allow a race transition, so long as it’s sincere. And although Yusef is doing this for reasons of ambition, he nevertheless has a good claims, for he’s not really Caucasian.  Further, gender is said to be a social construct, and so is race, so what’s the difference? (Race isn’t really a pure social construct, for even the wonky “traditional” races like black, white, and East Asian have diagnostic genetic/biological differences if you do a multivariant DNA test.)

At any rate, Yusef seems to have a valid claim and I’m curious about whether the Police Department, which surely does practice a form of affirmative action for promotion, will fold.

And speaking as an observer of human nature, I still don’t understand why transracialism, particularly like the case above—but also in the case of Rachel Dolezal—is considered a no-no by both members of minorities and white “progressives.”

Below: Rachel Dolezal (photo taken from Wikipedia), speaking at a civil rights rally before being outed:

Aaron Robert Kathman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

 

h/t: Jez

Please send in your wildlife photos, as we are in serious danger of running out. I am not kidding! Help me out, please.

Today’s batch of photos comprise the photos taken by Robert Lang on his recent trip to Antarctica: this is part 4 of 7.  Robert’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them,

Antarctica Part 4: Flying Birds

Penguins are the avian stars of Antarctica, but there are plenty of other birds to see—and the others do a bit of flying to get around.

The Antarctic Shag (Leucocarbo bransfieldensis) is a species of cormorant, but with its black-and-white coloring, can be mistaken for a penguin, at least from a distance; once it takes wing, of course, any illusion is broken:

Another black-and-white bird is the Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata), but it’s never going to be taken for a penguin:

The Kelp Gull (Larus dominicanus) is also a visitor to the islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula:

A gull-like bird is the Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus). As the name suggests, they’re quite large, and have a distinct tubular nasal passage, called a naricorn, on the upper bill, that makes them easy to distinguish from other large birds of similar shape:

And flying:

The bad boy of the avian Antarctic is the Skua (Stercorarius sp.). There are two Antarctic species, the South Polar Skua (Stercorarius maccormicki) and the Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus). I don’t know which one this (these) are; precise IDs from readers would be welcomed. Here’s one on a rare patch of color:

Skuas will prey on penguin chicks, and we saw one take one. It hovered over a colony, dove in, took off from a cacophony of squawking penguins with a hatchling in its mouth, and flew a few tens of yards away. It then dispatched the chick with a few pecking blows and swallowed it whole. Sad to see, but it’s the circle of life in the Antarctic:

Another bird that hangs around penguin rookeries is the Snowy Sheathbill (Chionis albus). It will eat almost anything it finds, and often finds worthwhile fare in penguin guano, a habit that has given it the nickname of “sh*t chicken” (at least, according to our leader):

Another distinctive bird is the Cape Petrel (Daption capense): two shown here from the underside:

They are most distinctive when seen from above, as here. Because of their black-and-white speckled pattern, our leader called them “QR code birds.” It’s a little amusing to think that each one might have its own website. Alas, my iPhone refused to lock onto any of them, so I just had to be satisfied with photographs:

Next: Seal Team Six.

Here’s a longish discussion from Persuasion between Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers. Mounk is a political scientist and author whom you’ll encounter frequently in the liberal media, while Summer was, of course. . . . . well, let’s let Wikipedia summarize it:

[Summers is] an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School.  In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.

In my estimation, Summers was a very good President, though he did attract controversy. The most infamous incident during his tenure at Harvard was his claim, during a closed conference on diversity in science and engineering, that underrepresentation of women in STEM was due to a difference between men and women in the variance in ability in these fields. Although the means (average abilities) were about the same, the variance in ability means that there are more men than women at both tails of the distribution: the “low ability” tail and the “high ability” tail. Since academics and other scientists are drawn from the upper tail, Summers posited that this difference in variation (but not in means) explained the difference in sex representation in STEM.  (I would also suggest that there may be a sex difference in preferences.)

The evidence is, in fact, in favor of this theory for at least a partial cause of sex inequities, so Summers may have been right. But his mere suggestion that the inequities in sex representation may not have been due to bias was enough to ignite a conflagration among the Harvard faculty, and ultimately resulted in Summers being forced to resign. And this simply for noting that while on average men and women have about the same average ability in STEM, it is the difference in the variance of that distribution—a sex difference in variance seen in several other traits—that led to the outrage.  In my view, firing Summers for this was a mistake, and was a loss for Harvard.

At any rate, in this interview Summers talks about the problems with Harvard, with elite universities in general, and then goes on to discuss AI, finishing with a brief suggestion about how Biden could be reelected. I am not a big maven or student of AI, though I will of course use it when it’s useful, but I’ll skip that part and just quote the discussion about universities. Bits from the discussion are indented, and any comments of mine are flush left. As always, Summers doesn’t pull any punches.

The ruination of universities by “identity essentialism”.

Yascha Mounk: The last few months have been rather eventful at Harvard University. Tell us your view of what has happened and why it matters.

Larry Summers: It’s been a very difficult time. I think what universities do is as important as the work of any other institution in our society, in terms of training young people and preparing them for careers of leadership, and in terms of developing new ideas that set the tone for the cultural, the political, the policy debates that go forward.

Paul Samuelson famously said that if he would be allowed to write the economics textbooks, he didn’t care who would get to perform as the finance ministers going forward. So I think what happens in universities is immensely important. And I think there is a widespread sense—and it is, I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.

This, of course, refers to the eternal struggle among academics involving identity (or “diversity”) versus merit.

It goes on:

Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about the nature of the conflict here. What is the conception of the university that has historically guided it, and how is it that those values have changed over the last ten years?

Summers: I think the values that animated me to spend my life in universities were values of excellence in thought, in pursuit of truth. We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth. And a world that is better understood is a world that is made better. And I think, increasingly, all you have to do is read the rhetoric of commencement speeches. It’s no longer what we talk about. We talk about how we should have analysis, we should have discussion, but the result of that is that we will each have more respect for each other’s point of view, as if all points of view are equally good and there’s a kind of arbitrariness to a conception of truth. That’s a kind of return to pre-Enlightenment values and I think very much a step backward. I thought of the goal of the way universities manage themselves as being the creation of an ever larger circle of opportunity in support of as much merit and as much excellence as possible.

I spoke in my inaugural address about how, a century before, Harvard had been a place where New England gentlemen taught other New England gentlemen. And today it was so much better because it reached to every corner of the nation, every subgroup within the population, every part of the world. It did that as a vehicle for providing opportunity and excellence for those who could make the greatest contribution. But again, we’ve moved away from that to an idea of identity essentialism, the supposition that somehow the conditions of your birth determine your views on intellectual questions, whether it’s interpretations of quantum theory or Shakespeare. And so that, instead, our purpose is not to bring together the greatest minds, but is back to some idea around multiplicity of perspective with perspective being identified with identity. We used to venerate and celebrate excellence. Now, at Harvard, and Harvard is not atypical of leading universities, 70 to 75% of the grades are in A-range. Why should the institutions that are most celebrating of excellence have only one grade for everyone in the top half of the class, but nine different grades that are applied to students in the lower half of the class? That is a step away from celebrating and venerating excellence.

Summers expatiates on the debacle of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testifying before a House committee, and notes, as I’ve emphasized, that what brought the Presidents down was not the hectoring of Elis Stefaniks or outrage about people being allowed to call for mass killing of Jews, but the arrant hypocrisy of these schools in their attitudes toward free speech (see below).  In the end, it looked as if demonizing Jews was the only form of free speech acceptable at Harvard, while other and more trivial issues were censored and censured.  Summers notes this below, and the commitment of elite schools to Social Justice and identity politics, led him to say that “. . . the fact that the ways in which great universities have acted have so enabled the Elise Stefaniks, the Bill Ackmans, and the Christopher Rufos, speaks to the danger with which they have been governed.”

Summers on free speech and Harvard’s double standard:

Summers: I think you and I are very much in agreement. I don’t think any reasonable person can fail to recognize a massive double standard between the response to other forms of prejudice and the response to anti-Semitism. And yes, you could have debates about when anti-Zionism or the demonization of Israel is and is not anti-Semitism. But on any reasonable conception of what’s going on, there has been a double standard. And I think those of us who are concerned about the double standard come to a view about how we want it remedied. And I think for the most part, the right way of remedying it is with a de-emphasis rather than a re-emphasis on identity.

Everyone needs to be enabled to feel safe. That doesn’t mean that they have a right to avoid being triggered by speech they don’t like, or to be spared exposure to ideas they find noxious. That doesn’t mean they have a right to bean-counting exercises where the share of members of their group is evaluated against a share of its population. It does mean that they’re entitled to the maintenance of an open and tolerant community where no one is allowed to shut down any set of ideas, that they have the right to be protected from discrimination, and that they have the right for there not to be indoctrination. I think in many ways what would be most problematic would be an indoctrination arms race in which a larger and larger fraction of an education is consumed by a recitation of the grievances of various groups.

In the second paragraph he’s touting equality over equity: equality of opportunity over “bean-counting exercises” (it’s this kind of metaphor that I would have avoided, as it equates university policy to “bean counting”, a phrase with bad optics (or “bad auditory”). But having equity as a goal, especially while maintaining that it’s perfectly consistent with keeping merit high, is a flawed exercise.

The stuff on AI will interest many readers, but I’ll let those folks read it themselves, and just finish with Summers’ response when asked what Biden and the Democrats could do to ensure that Trump doesn’t win in November.  His answer is somewhat lame, but of course he admits he’s not a political pundit but an economist:

I tend to find political experts’ opinions on economic questions to not be very sound and thoughtful. And I’m not sure why I should suppose that my opinions on political questions will be particularly sound and thoughtful. So I answer the question with humility. But my instinct is that political parties prevail and incumbent presidents prevail by returning to a broad American center. And I am hopeful that Joe Biden, whose roots are with an American middle class, will find a broad expressive American voice in the months ahead that will place less emphasis on responding to each particular identity element in the Democratic bouillabaisse and instead speak to the hopes, the obligations, the expectations of all Americans in a universalist kind of language. I think that he has styled himself over many years as “middle class Joe,” and that’s something that goes deep within him.

My hope and my best guess is that we will see that come out and that as it comes out and as the clamor of the various activist groups within the party comes to seem less dominant, he will emerge as a unifier and as a successful candidate. But again, I answer economics questions with confidence and political questions with trepidation.

I agree that Biden has become much more woke than I envisioned when he took office, and he’s been leaning more towards “progressive” Democrats than I hope.  Further, his wokeness will, I suspect, hurt him in the election, and I now think he’s got a better than even chance of losing. Given that many Americans (about 75%, I think) worry that he’s not physically or mentally fit to be President, while the same figure for Trump is about 46%, it seems that all Biden can do is get younger.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “scare,” once again shows Mo unable to think clearly about his Islamism. (While banning speech is not a good deterrent, a good deterrent is banning anti-Islamic crimes like attacking Muslims. I’m still conflicted about whether I think that there should be extra punishment for “hate crimes.)

Today we have some photos of American otters taken by Ephraim Heller, whose Instagram page, with more wildlife photos, is here.  His captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These photos were taken in Grand Teton National Park over three days in February. This North American River Otter (Lontra canadensis) consistently came back to the same fishing spot.

The first time I saw the otter, I watched him catch and eat two large Utah sucker fish (Catostomus ardens). As he was eating, this Common Raven (Corvus corax) approached and nipped at the otter’s tail. I presume the raven was hoping that the otter would become so irritated that he would give up the fish:

While river otters primarily eat fish, they will happily eat a bird when the opportunity arises. I have watched them hunt ducks and even pelicans. Hence this raven was quite bold to be pecking at the otter’s tail. After several minutes of this the otter had had enough. He threw the remains of his sucker fish back into the ice hole and turn to face his attacker. The raven immediately backed off and flew away:

After eating a large Utah sucker fish, the river otter dove back into his ice hole and emerged with another, which he also quickly consumed. He must burn a lot of calories!:

The river otter extolling the virtues of Utah sucker fish to a Black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia):

Going for a stroll on the frozen Snake River:

After eating two fish, it’s time to clean up by rolling in the snow, shaking it off, and grooming:

During the winter in Grand Teton National Park, the fish lower their activity and metabolism and reside under the ice at the river bottoms. You would think that this would make them easy prey. However, on this day I watched the otter make six unsuccessful dives before emerging from his hole with another Utah sucker. Interestingly, I only saw the otter catch sucker fish — never one of the trout that are common in the Snake River:

An unhappy, flailing fish:

The otter ate this entire fish in about ten minutes, starting with his head and ending with his tail:

A smiling otter:

Otter, deceased Utah sucker, and black-billed magpies hoping to share the leftovers:

UPDATE:  Notice that one of the debate participants, David Lillis, has left a comment below.

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The NewsHub article below, reproduced on MSN, contains a short (10-minute debate) about whether and how Mātauranga Māori (Māori “ways of knowing) should be taught in public schools. The participants are Sir Ian Taylor (a half-Māori businessman and a proponent of teaching MM as science), and David Lillis. a statistician and physicist who’s been an opponent of teaching MM as equivalent to science, though he thinks it has a place in classes like sociology or history. I’ve written frequently about this debate, and you can see my many post here.

I’m in general on Lillis’s side, as Taylor seems to think that MM, which is really a mélange of practical (observational) knowledge, myth, morality, tradition, and superstition, is in effect “science”, with all the other supernatural or moral bits really being science in disguise.  You’ll see how he uses slippery language when implying that early Polynesians, who found their way across the Pacific via trial and error (eventually using guidelines), were really quite accomplished physicists. (How many voyagers died when they didn’t reach land?) Taylor:

“It was that indigenous knowledge that brought our Polynesian voyages, starting 3500 years out of Asia across the greatest expanse of open water on the planet. Now you do not cross the greatest stead of ocean water on the planet without science, technology, engineering and math.”

No, Sir Ian, you’re wrong.  The Polynesians were not scientists, engineers, or mathematicians: they were observant people and built good boats. But how much purchase do you get in math or physics class by pointing this out? True, it was a great accomplishment, but it wasn’t achieved via the toolkit we call “modern science.”  Taylor sees MM as “indigenous knowledge,” which isn’t exactly like modern science, but fits in alongside it. And a lot of MM isn’t knowledge at all.

Lillis advocates a modern “first rate” curriculum for NZ, and that includes a bit of MM; but notes that MM shouldn’t “saturate the curriculum,” which many Kiwis really think should happen.  He says that MM can be part of classes in “languages social studies, and history”, but not science.  The biased moderator (or maybe she’s just ignorant) interrupts Lillis twice, asking why indigenous knowledge isn’t science, and Lillis points out that indigenous knowledge is largely “observation, careful observation, and trial and error, and passing down of knowledge by word of mouth, which is necessarily limited, but I hear that there are scientific elements in traditional knowledge, including Mātauranga Māori.”

Again, Sir Ian claims that MM is science, although he denied that earlier. His goal of teaching MM as science is to excite (mostly Māori) students about STEM. He then lapses into what I see as virtue-flaunting gibberish.

Sir Ian avers that what he learned about science in school was “really boring.” But seems to me that the best way to overcome that is to teach modern science, including perhaps a bit of traditional knowledge, but also jazz up the science teaching in general.  The fact is, however, that some people will never be turned on by science, so you the goal of inspiring everyone is largely futile.

Finally, Lillis notes that mythology and religion should not be taught as science. He uses the example of the Māori myth of “snaring the sun,” which would confuse students if taught as science. But Sir Ian, slippery as ever, manages to claim that “snaring the sun” is really part of physics and that Māori mythology can be turned into the “Big Bang” found by modern physics. But why not just teach the Big Bang and the evidence for it rather than extract it from Māori myth?

Click either the headline below or the screenshot to go to the short debate. The moderator clearly seems to be on the side of Taylor, as she more or less must be in woke New Zealand.

Or click here to watch:

Here’s a transcript of part of the debate that shows how Taylor a rhetorical alchemist, miraculously transmutes MM into modern science:

Advocate for mātauranga Māori, Sir Ian Taylor joined AM on Tuesday morning and told the show he believes there are certainly lessons that can be learned.

“It was that indigenous knowledge that brought our Polynesian voyages, starting 3500 years out of Asia across the greatest expanse of open water on the planet. Now you do not cross the greatest stead of ocean water on the planet without science, technology, engineering and math,” Sir Ian told AM co-host Melissa Chan-Green.

Sir Ian said mātauranga falls into the category of science and pointed to a couple of examples. [JAC: I find these funny although bogus.]

“One of the examples we give is the apple always fell from the tree, that’s mātauranga, that’s indigenous knowledge. It became gravity when it landed on Isaac Newton’s head,” he said.

“The other example I’d give for the way kids are learning physics and maths from these stories, [is] the waka holder of the Tahitian sailors who went out and met Captain Cook as he arrived, kept going back because they thought his boat was broken because it was so slow.

“Well, actually it was Archimedes principle. The boat was slow because it had a big area in the water. It’s the displacement of water.”

We have a new and more moderate government in NZ now, in contrast to the Leftist one—mainly under Ardern and Hipkens—that inserted MM into all the schools. It remains to be seen whether the new Luxon government can stop the colonization of science by MM, and restore New Zealand’s slipping reputation for quality education.

h/t: Michael

The latest issue of Science contains three ideological articles on how teaching of science must be reformed to be more inclusive and antiracist. Most of the authors of all three pieces are affiliated with departments or institutes of science education, and this may explain the mission-oriented tone of the pieces. I’ll discuss one of them today and another one soon.

This article argues that genetics education remains systemically racist, and must be attacked, dismantled, and made explicitly antiracist.  In fact, the article could have been written by an Ibram Kendi—if he knew anything about genetics.  As usual with such pieces, the problems it raises occurred largely in the past and are not currently “systemic” in genetics education. The article gives no evidence that today’s genetics classes are rife with racism, white supremacy, advocacy of eugenics, and other bad behaviors that create divisions between people. On the other hand, the article nevertheless wants to emphasize divisions between people—most notably “races:—as they see these divisions, conceived as “socially constructed”, as groups having differential power that must be recognized and effaced.

Besides being divisive, my main objection to the piece is that it assumes genetics is taught today as it was seventy years ago, which it isn’t, and, most of all, it tries to turn a science class into a class in ideology: a course in “dismantling” modern genetics to eliminate its white supremacy and then re-infusing it with “antiracist” values.  Having taught genetics and sat in on other genetics classes, the authors are dealing with a non-problem, and their solutions will only make genetics education worse: turning out a generation of ideologues who know less about genetics than the previous generation.

Click on the title to read, and you can find the pdf here. Excerpts from the piece are indented

First, the problem, stated in postmodern terms. Note the jargon:

The methods of conducting genetics research and its outcomes are steeped in, and influenced by, power and privilege dynamics in broader society. The kinds of questions asked, biological differences sought, and how populations are defined and examined are all informed by the respective dominant culture (often Eurocentric, white, economically privileged, masculine, and heteronormative) and its predominant ways of knowing and being (3). Findings from human genetics and genomics research subsequently play into existing sociopolitical dynamics by providing support for claims about putative differences between groups and the prevalence of particular traits in particular groups (3). Historically, such research has been used in support of eugenic movements to legitimize forced sterilization and genocides.  [JAC: this happened in the past and is not happening now.[ Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such research is merely a discredited past relic, a stain on the otherwise objective and rational track record of genetic research. Rather, it was mainstream work conducted by prominent researchers and supported by major professional societies. The reality is that some modern human genetics is still informed by the same racist logic (4). [JAC: no examples given.]

I’m not sure what the “racist logic” is here. If you look up reference (4), you don’t find evidence of “racist logic” in modern science, but a description of its use in older teachings and then a discussion about how one should conceive “ancestry”.  In fact, that reference gives evidence that there are average genetic differences between “races” even though populations vary continuously with geography and there are no diagnostic and fixed differences between named “races” (I prefer to use the term “geographic population”, a claim that Duncan et al, deny.  Luana Maroja and I, in our recent paper on ideology and science, show that even in America, typological “races” of “white, East Asian, Hispanic, and black” (“Hispanics” aren’t normally considered a race, but in America are distinct because they’re largely from Mexico), are not sociopolitical constructs lacking biological meaning, but do differ on average in traits and constellations of genes. From knowing only an American’s genes, you can guess their self-reported ancestry with over 99% accuracy.

What these differences mean for traits, behaviors, and medical outcomes is only beginning to be explored, but they reflect the geographic distribution of ancestors, for geographic isolation leads to genetic diffrences via natural selection and genetic drift. This is why genetic ancestry companies can give you a pretty accurate view of your genetic ancestry (I, for example, am nearly 100% Askhkenazi Jew). This wouldn’t work if geographic populations were genetically identical.

The purpose of the paper, then, is to expose and then dismantle the systematic racism of modern genetics education.  You must be “antiracist” rather than “race-neutral”— something that Kendi emphasizes in his book on antiracism—and must at every turn deny that human races or populations differ biologically, for that leads inevitably to ranking and racism. In other words, it’s bad for society to even study genetic differences between populations:

Genetic distinctions between human populations are not natural; they are the consequences of categorizations developed by geneticists for the purposes of their research and the questions they pursue.

. . . The search for genetic differences among populations, even when not done using explicit racial categories, can still yield findings that are problematic in that they can make social hierarchies appear “natural”. , ,  [JAC: they then cite the caste divisions in India, and I know little about that. But the point—that differences equal ranking and racism—is the same.]

. . . . Our contention here is that successful genetic education has to be antiracist, it cannot be race-neutral. Therefore, a core learning objective for human genetics education should be understanding that neither the environment nor scientists’ definitions of genetic populations are neutral but rather that they are shaped by the historical, social, and political contexts in which they exist.

Actually, one can parse out genetic groupings using statistics alone, free from “historical, social, and political contexts.”  Now what you call these groupings—races, ethnic groups, or populations—is arbitrary.

Further, the goal of genetics education must be dismantling this racism, not so much teaching how genetics works:

First, if one wishes to dismantle racism (and other systems of oppression) in science and society, then one needs to understand the ways in which such oppression is woven into the fabric of genetics research and disrupt and counteract these practices early and often through education.

But, as I said, the evidence for the ongoing racism of genetics is nil, and, in fact, the authors have to resort to making doubtful statements like this:

In this sense, the Human Genome Project was developed in, and sustained by, a sociopolitical context that upheld (and still upholds) value-laden group differences.

So the “sociopolitical context” was supposedly based on showing group differences that could be the basis of bigotry (not the case), but this “fact” is even used to tar the Human Genome Project, which was supposedly not only developed in the context of bigotry, but sustains that bigotry! To wit:

To dismantle racism, you must first recognize that racial differences are purely a social construct, but at the same time must recognize them, probably because these socially-constructed differences are correlated with well-being. (I of course don’t deny that racism has lowered the well-being of minorities, but also recognize that even to practice racism, one has to somehow recognize different populations, and that’s partly genetic, even if the genetic differences we see were only used as platforms for historical racism and bigotry.

And so we must avoid color-blindness because recognizing color (which of course is largely genetic) is said to be the key to eliminating disparities between races. (The authors barely mention hardly anything about socioeconomic differences within populations; their entire focus is on race.):

The understanding that race is not genetic (or biological) does not automatically translate into an understanding that race is a social construct, or that it can, and does, shape our biology. Moreover, knowing that race is a social construct does not automatically explain racial disparities in health or any other arena because it ignores the systemic nature of racism and the resulting inequities. Solely countering beliefs in race-based genetic differences and focusing on the similarities between racial groups obscures the real and devastating differences in the well-being of minoritized racial groups. This can lead to racial “color blindness” of a genetic flavor that sees everyone as the same and turns a blind eye to the impact of racism on people’s biology. Finally the authors give three recommendations of how to teach genetics in both secondary (middle and high school) and postsecondary (college) genetics classes.

 

1.) Emphasize the sociopolitical context of the environment

2.) Entangle environment and biology.

3.) Scrutinize the sociopolitical categorization of human populations.

Point 1 is made to emphasize the debilitating effect of racist environments on minorities, point 2 is to show how the environment, which imposes differences on people via racism, has biological effects on people, and point 3  is to show how the definition and use of races has served the political ends of gaining power over others. The authors recommend some textbooks that will help create “brave and safe spaces” for students:

 There are powerful exemplars of curricula at the high school level that engage students with ambitious science, its sociopolitical dimensions, and a focus on social justice (13, 14). There is a growing number of excellent books (15) and online resources for anti-racist genetics and biology education—for example, the LabXchange’s “Racism as a Public Health Crisis” curriculum, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s materials on “Race, Racism, and Genetics.” These resources include supports for teachers in creating brave and safe spaces for discussions about race and genetics. Funding and committed support of national and professional science and science education organizations will also be instrumental for these efforts.

Of course using these books turns a genetics course into a course in antiracist ideology, so that there is less time for students to learn “race-neutral” genetics. But the authors don’t really care how much genetics students learn; they are far more concerned with propagandizing a generation of students to create the kind of social change they see as salubrious:

In the short term, we see scientists’ role in the education of future scientists and teachers as one powerful lever for change. Undergraduate coursework in biology and genetics, often taught by faculty in those departments, is a space where we can begin “sowing the seeds” of sociopolitical awareness in genetics.

Now I think it’s great to work to rid the world of what racism that still exists, though I don’t see much of it in genetics courses.  And I see nothing wrong, when you teach human genetics, with revealing the flaws in the old diagnostic “big-genetic-difference” view of human races, and emphasizing instead that they are populations that now intergrade, so the delineation of specific races becomes arbitrary. But one has to also tell the truth: races are populations that evolved in ancient geographical isolation, and there are real biological differences between them.  And, of course, one should at least insert the caveat that the differences that do exist do not efface the moral dictum that members of different groups have equal rights and deserve equal treatment.

The worst part of this paper—and the two papers that accompany it (one here, the other here)—is that it’s part of a nationwide drive to turn education into propaganda, and of to change the purpose of all education from teaching students the truth to teaching students the temporary and political “personal truths” of their woke overseers.

Please send in your wildlife photos if you got ’em. Save Robert Lang’s Antarctic photos, I have little backup, and that would be disastrous. Thanks!

Today regular Mark Sturtevant gives us a passel of insect photos. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This post starts the pictures taken last season, but I am terribly behind in my post-processing so these were only recently made ready to share. It was another great year, and praise to the gods of light that my energy for going out as often as possible shows no sign of abating.

The pictures were taken either in or around my house, or from parks in eastern Michigan. I use an extremely worn out Canon t5i body (a consumer-grade crop sensor camera. Nothing fancy). Lenses include the Canon 100mm f/2.8L macro lens + a Raynox 250 diopter lens for extra power, and at times I use the Venus/Laowa 2.5-5x super macro lens, which is fully manual. My external flash is the Kuangren dual head flash with home-made diffusers. Readers can see all that on my odds-and-ends Flickr page if they like.

From an outing to an area park, here is an unknown caterpillar on Ash. I don’t yet have an ID:

Here is a small Dung Beetle with an interesting color. I suspect the genus Onthophagus:

A Soldier Beetle Podabrus flavicollis:

Next up are Scorpionflies (Panorpa sp), weird insects commonly seen on low foliage in forests. They are generally scavengers on dead insects. The scorpion-like tail is only seen in males, and it is simply their enormous genitalia. I stuck with this one for a long time, and he became quite used to me so I could get closer and closer:

As shown in the next picture, female Scorpionflies lack the impressive tail equipment:

A Cobweb Spider (Steatoda sp.) is shown in the next picture. This could be one of about two species in my area, but they are tricky to tell apart. I had inquired about its ID in a spider-centric Facebook group, and the resident experts weren’t sure of the ID either:

This set closes with an adorable Dimorphic Jumping Spider (Maevia inclemens). There were lots of these around the house last summer. This cute little male was fun to photograph in a staged session on the dining room table, and these are two closely cropped pictures of the little guy. Their common name reflects the fact that males come in two color forms. Some males are like this one, while others are pale all over but with orange markings. Those males therefore look more like females. I always have a soft heart for Dimorphic Jumper males since they are always moving around, bobbing their cute little pedipalps, and hoping with all their hearts that a female will signal back:

Thank you for looking!

I’m adding here, with permission, some short videos sent by Tom Gross in his latest newsletter. His descriptions (bolding is his) are indented.

At the very moment Brits lit up Big Ben in de facto support of Hamas, brave crowds in Gaza risked their lives to denounce Hamas:

American Ivy League students praise Houthis while Houthis crucify and stone gays to death:

NYPD finally make arrests as Columbia University students intimidate Jews, call for end of Israel:

Red Crescent helps Hamas terrorists escape, while Red Cross fails to visit even one Israeli hostage or provide medicines:

UNICEF – open to helping all children except Israeli ones:

Freed female teenage hostage speaks of Hamas sex crimes against Israeli girls still in captivity:

IDF releases newly captured Hamas footage of the red-haired Bibas kids, the world’s youngest hostages:

Working-class Latinos in LA who actually have jobs to get to, clear the freeway of middle-class Palestine supporters blocking their road to work:

Pro-Hamas mob chase & threaten to behead Iranian who expresses sympathy with Israeli victims:

The BBC called these pro-Palestine demonstrators in London yesterday “peaceful”:

And one I found: the brave and vociferous Noa Tishby on the sexual violence of Hamas (WARNING: Some disgusting crimes described):