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We went to the grocery store, and, lo and behold, I found this. Look at that apartheid settler-colonialist candy! I didn’t buy it since I adhere to the BDS (Boycott and Divestment of Sweets) policy.

Photo by Phil Ward

As I said, the more the world comes down on Israel due to anti-Semitism, hatred of the Israeli government, and general distaste for Jews, the more Zionist I get, though of course I’ll never accept the superstitions of Judaism. It’s hard to remember that there was a time—not that long ago—when Israel barely crossed my mind.

In last year’s case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled, as expected, that affirmative action (the preferential admission of students based on race or ethnicity) was illegal, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Wikipedia notes:

The majority opinion, written by Roberts, stated that the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity (tracking bare racial statistics) bore little or no relationship to the purported goals (viewpoint and intellectual diversity and developing a diverse future leadership).

Indeed, the arguments of my own graduate school in this case, angered me: not only did Harvard lie about its own admissions practices, but advanced the argument that Roberts shot down: racial diversity = intellectual and viewpoint diversity. This was the view that propelled the earlier Bakke decision: diversity was seen, sans evidence, as an innate good.  Had affirmative action been justified as a form of reparations for people who were still suffering the effects of bigotry, I would have been more in favor of Harvard’s practices. But for years the justification of affirmative action has been rife with dissimulation.

Colleges, determined to keep racial diversity high, perhaps up to the point of equity (representation of racial groups among students equal to their proportion in the population), quietly began working on ways to violate or at least obviate this ruling. Fortunately for colleges, the Supremes had left a loophole. As the Independent notes:

While the ruling says race may not be a conscious factor in admissions, it does not prevent universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected their life “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university”.

After this, you could have predicted the results: colleges and universities would immediately begin to ask students to write essays in which they were asked how they overcame obstacles. And of course every student in a minority group, knowing the scheme, would somehow find a way to argue that their race or ethnicity imposed high obstacles to achievement, but that they had somehow surmounted these obstacles. This would of course tip off admissions offices that the applicant was in a racial or ethnic minority, and give their applications a boost. (Of course in some cases an overcoming-bigotry story would be true and could indeed speak to a candidate’s value, though it would probably say little to help universities increase their ideological or viewpoint diversity.)

Moreover, opponents of affirmative action would find this form of “holistic admissions” hard to detect, and lawsuits like last year’s would be much harder to bring.

I predicted this change in applications, which did take effect, but of course it isn’t rocket science. Universities are wedded for life to increasing racial diversity; the Supreme Court said that this was largely illegal, but left a loophole; and so colleges would exploit this sole loophole in a big way. And that, according to the article from the NYT, has come to pass. Click the headline below to read, or you can find the article archived here.  The subtitle tells the tale:

This being the NYT, they begin the article by showing the advantages of this loophole, which enabled some students to “find themselves”. But the overwhelming impression you get is that both universities and students are gaming the system to get an admissions advantage.  After all, why do colleges even need to ask students how they overcame adversity?

Have a look, for example, at the essay questions the University of Chicago posed during the last application cycle (as well as some questions from previous years): there’s one mandatory question and seven optional questions from which you pick one to answer. None of them involve “overcoming obstacles,” though question #7 gives you some leeway to sneak in race and ethnicity. Here’s a typical one (questions are often suggested by students):

Essay Option 2

“Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer.
– Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21

The clear goal of these questions is to look for creativity and novel viewpoints—in other words, to seek out and harvest viewpoint diversity.

I don’t think this will be the case at Chicago next year, but we shall see. But here are some quotes from the NYT article (indented). The piece begins with the upside:

Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.

Deshayne Curley wanted to leave his Indigenous background out of his essay. But he reworked it to focus on an heirloom necklace that reminded him of his home on the Navajo Reservation.

The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.

WHAAT? The corruption of an essay on chess into one on bigotry, solely to gain a racially-based admissions advantage, is ludicrous. But you can’t blame the student—you have to blame the unnamed university. The piece continues:

All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Notice that all three students didn’t really intend to dwell on their racial identities, but were forced to because a). that’s what the unnamed college asked about, and b). they realized that mentioning their race and heritage would help them get admitted.  This is what’s known as “gaming the system.”

There’s more:

[The Supreme Court decision] led many students of color to reframe their essays around their identities, under the advice of college counselors and parents. And several found that the experience of rewriting helped them explore who they are.

Sophie Desmoulins, who is Guatemalan and lives in Sedona, Ariz., wrote her college essay with the court’s ruling in mind. Her personal statement explored, among other things, how her Indigenous features affected her self-esteem and how her experience volunteering with the Kaqchikel Maya people helped her build confidence and embrace her heritage.

For Julia Nguyen, a child of Vietnamese immigrants based in Biloxi, Miss., rewriting her essay made her more aware of how her family’s upbringing shaped her. Julia, 18, said she felt “more proud to have this personal statement because of the affirmative action case.”

In Keteyian’s case, he said he felt “a lot more passionate” about his essay after changing his approach. As a Black student interested in engineering — a field that has struggled to diversify its ranks —Keteyian concluded his personal statement with a mix of fear and hope.

“Coming to terms with the possibility I may be one of the few Black individuals at my workplace is intimidating,” he wrote, “but something to prepare for if the ruling stands, and an opportunity for me to rewrite reality.”

Now of course some of these answers may enable colleges to really increase their viewpoint diversity, ideological diversity, or even socioeconomic diversity, but one gets the impression that this is simply a way to obviate the law and the intent of the Supreme Court’s decision. And there’s another way to accomplish these aims, a way used by the University of Chicago. (I’m not bragging here; it’s just that our school is famous for its quirky and creative application questions.)

These essays on how you surmounted obstacles will spread throughout the country. I doubt, in fact, that more than a handful of colleges won’t have a question about “overcoming adversity” on their applications.  But, of course, if you have more than two neurons to rub together, you know what’s going on here: in effect, admissions offices are asking students, in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling, to “tick a box” indicating their race.  And then admissions officers can proceed with the same kind of race-based admissions they used before. In fact, some colleges explicitly admit this.

What this will produce is a spate of anodyne admissions questions and answers and, worse, a decrease in viewpoint diversity. Identity politics will become stronger than ever, and every student will absorb a narrative about how their racial identifies were crucial in getting them into college. More than ever, one’s race will become the dominant feature of one’s persona.

But there is the expected pushback, and at least the NYT mentions it. Many authorities and lawyers, as well as most Americans, don’t like it:

The court’s ruling was meant to make college admissions race-blind — answers to the race and ethnicity question on applications are now hidden from admissions committees. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans showed support for the ban on affirmative action. Some strongly believe race should not be considered during the admissions process.

“I think it’s wrong,” said Edward J. Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the case to the Supreme Court.

But the ruling also allowed admissions officers to consider race in personal essays, as long as decisions were not based on race, but on the personal qualities that grew out of an applicant’s experience with their race, like grit or courage.

Who are they fooling? If you think that mentioning that you’re black or Hispanic isn’t going to ring a bell in the admissions office, I have some land in Florida to sell you. And of course if you mention that you overcame difficulties imposed on you as an Asian or Jew, fuhgeddaboudit!

Further, even some students and parents don’t like it:

While some parents said they were glad their children got to reflect on their identities in their essays, others feared that the court ruling would make it harder for their child to find community while in college.

“Even with affirmative action in place, it’s always a struggle for people in our community to get to college and to succeed in college,” said Deshayne’s mother, Guila Curley, a college counselor on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.

Not all students appreciated the rewriting experience as much. Some found that the ruling made them feel like they were not writing for themselves, but for someone else.

Indeed! That is precisely the case. They are writing to alert admissions officers to their race, and then embroidering a story around that nucleus.

In her initial essay, Triniti Parker, a 16-year-old who aims to be the first doctor in her family, recalled her late grandmother, who was one of the first Black female bus drivers for the Chicago Transit Authority.

But after the Supreme Court’s decision, a college adviser told her to make clear references to her race, saying it should not “get lost in translation.” So Triniti adjusted a description of her and her grandmother’s physical features to allude to the color of their skin.

The new details made her pause. “It felt like I was abiding by somebody else’s rules,” she said. Triniti added, “Now it feels like people of color have to say something or if we don’t, we are going to get looked over.”

There you go. If this is not “ticking a box”, I don’t know what is. And some students are conflicted, as their guidance counselors force students to explicitly mention race against their wishes.

Some decided to leave out their race entirely. Karelys Andrade, who is Ecuadorean and lives in Brooklyn, kept her essay focused on her family facing eviction during the pandemic and being forced to live in a shelter. “That experience was a story that needed to be told,” said Karelys, 17.

In past years, some Asian American students avoided writing about their heritage, thinking affirmative action was largely unfavorable to them, said Mandi Morales, an adviser with Bottom Line, a nonprofit for first-generation college applicants catering mostly to students of color. But the end of affirmative action in colleges led some to reconsider, counselors said.

Ms. Morales cited one student who added a mention of his “conservative” Chinese family as an example. “The explicit disclosure of his ethnicity would not have made it to the final draft prior to the ruling,” she said.

Some experts argue that the court’s ruling encourages students to write on racial conflict, trauma and adversity.

Of course it does! Again, this is bloody obvious. But even some counselors who don’t push the “adversity” scenario still insist that the students mention their identities as people of color, merely noting that students should say that their race has been a salutary factor. But again, what’s emphasized is not the content of one’s character, but the color of one’s skin.

. . . Joe Latimer, the director of college counseling at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, said he believes it is not necessary for students “to sell their trauma.” Instead, he advises his students to present their identities as “strength based,” showing the positive traits they have built from their experiences as a person of color.

The NYT article begins with a positive nod towards identity applications, but ends with some people speaking truth to power:

Critics of affirmative action say they are worried about essays becoming a loophole for colleges to consider an applicant’s race. “My concern is that the system will be gamed,” said William A. Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell University who founded the nonprofit Equal Projection Project.

Since the court ruling, colleges and universities have affirmed their commitment to diversity, and some officials said their institutions will continue to foster it through outreach and tools like Landscape, a database with information about an applicant’s school and neighborhood. And officials have said race can still inform decisions, as long as they are based on the applicant’s character and its connection to the university’s mission.

But some students, including Delphi Lyra, a senior at Northfield who is half-Brazilian, have reservations about the new admissions environment.

“The idea behind the ruling is to not check a box,” said Delphi, 18, referring to the race and ethnicity question on applications. “But I think, in some ways, it has almost even created more of a need to check a box.”

Absolutely!

Again, I’m not denying that if one’s heritage does increase intellectual or ideological diversity, then that does meet the requirements of the court. But you know what will happen; I outlined it above.

It’s clear that although I favor some type of affirmative action to increase intellectual and ideological diversity, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t violate the law. After all, diversity of thoughtm does increase the proliferation of opposing viewpoints that’s essential for a good college education.  So what do we do? I have two suggestions.

1.) Eliminate all questions on college applications that require you to explain how you overcame adversity. My suggestion would be to use questions that show your creativity or ability to think outside the box—in other words, questions like the University of Chicago used in the past. This increases creativity, quirkiness, and discussion.  By concentrating on racial identities and how they held one back, the new system simply strengthens identity politics.

2.) Enforce the law.  While it will become harder for authorities to determine if colleges are ticking racial boxes, it’s not impossible. Authorities can simply determine (given that recommendation #1 is followed) whether mentioning race somewhere on your application that you’re a member of an oppressed minority correlates significantly with your chance of admission. Again, you have to be careful, but it’s not hard if you use Chicago-style questions like this—the mandatory question that all applicants had to answer last year.

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

It’s not an inventive question (you have to answer an inventive one besides this), but neither does it prompt you to concentrate on your ethnic/racial identity. Admissions officers will be tearing their hair out, for now they have to judge solely on thoughtfulness and character.

One of the epicenters of life in Davis, California is the Farmer’s Market downtown, held every Wednesday and Friday. As it was rainy and miserable, and the market is largely covered, we got ourselves there to inspect the local foodstuffs. (Only locally grown or caught items are sold.)

Fust, two photos of the venue, the second a panorama:

Click (twice in succession) to enlarge:

It wasn’t exactly the food season, but here’s what was on offer:

Two old friends (biology professors), both buying the market’s famous cumin-laced Gouda cheese. If you are a biologist from Davis, you’ll recognize them.

Squashes: I hate ’em all except for pumpkin, and then only in pumpkin pie. I do like eggplant if it’s cooked properly, and I guess that counts as a squash.

Local almonds, fresh, crunchy, and tasty:

Meyer lemons, grown widely in Davis back yards (we have a tree):

I guess berries were in season, as they had four varieties. They ain’t cheap!

They offered us a gratis strawberry to taste, and it was fantastic, juicy and sweet. They don’t put the inferior ones at the bottom of the basket, an old and nefarious supermarket ploy:

Fresh bread:

. . . and several varieties of apples. These, called “Arkansas Black,” I’d never seen before, and they were quite dark. (The only apples I really like are Granny Smiths, which are tart, the way a good apple should be. Nowadays most commercial apples have all the flavor bred out of them, so they may be crispy but all you taste is sugar:

 

Though I didn’t bring my wildlife-photo folder to California, John Avise kept his record going by seemailingnding me another batch of bird photos from South Africa. And so we shall have a wildlife post today (though I count the warthog post yesterday as wildlife).

This if the fourth in John’s series of South African birds.  His narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

South Africa Birds, Part 4 

My seminar trip to South Africa in 2007 took me to many parts of the country:  Cape Town, Durban, Grahamstown, Pretoria, Potchefstrom, Johannesberg, Kruger National Park, and elsewhere.   This week’s post is Part 4 of a mini-series on birds that I photographed during that trip.  It shows another dozen or so species from that marvelous avian-rich part of the world.

Chinspot Batis (Batis molitor), female:

Common Ostrich (Struthio camelus) male:

 Common Ostrich female:

European Stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) male:

Crested Barbet (Trachyphonus vaillantii):

Crested Francolin (Ortygornis sephaena):

Crowned Cormorant (Microcarbo coronatus):

Crowned Hornbill (Tockus alboterminatus):

Crowned lapwing (Vanellus coronatus):

Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca):

Fairy Flycatcher (Stenostira scita):

Fiscal Flycatcher (Sigelus silens), male:

Fiscal Flycatcher, female:

Fiscal Shrike (Lanius collaris), male:

Fiscal Shrike, female:

Here’s an eight-minute clip from Bill Maher in which he touts a new rule: 2024 is supposed to be “The Year of Sanity”.

Maher gives several examples of pervasive insanity, the most prominent being the likely reelection of Trump as President.  He also mentions tolerance of shoplifting, pro-Palestinian activists, admiration for the Houthis, frantic rumors that Taylor Swift is gay, claims that men can get pregnant, recent laws preventing abortion of fetuses that won’t live, and sundry other insane things.

After hearing all this, I decided that Maher is right: we need a Year of Sanity. Will we get one? I’m not holding my breath.

h/t: Mary

Last night we went to an unusual restaurant: Stand Up Kebab, located in South Davis. It’s open only on Friday and Saturday nights, and the rest of the time the owner runs a car-repair garage (attached to the restaurant) as well as a used-car lot.

It’s an unprepossessing place. You order outside and they bring you your food inside.

The long table below had three people who were either tired, drunk, or dead. They may have been workers at the garage, but they eventually returned to life and left.

But the food was good, and here’s what we ate.  Beers first, of course:Persian (Iranian) ones:

We started with an unusual Persian soup called Ash e Reshteh. I discovered the ingredients from Wikipedia:

Ash reshteh or ash-e-reshteh (Persian: آش رشته) is a type of āsh (Iranian thick soup) featuring reshteh (thin noodles) and kashk (a sour dairy product, made from cooked or dried yogurt) commonly made in Iran.

It was absolutely delicious:

This was followed by a typical Iranian meal: kebabs. We had both chicken kebabs and lamb/beef kebabs, served with sauce, pickle, and plenty of rice. I’m not sure why there was a pat of butter on my plate

Lamb and beef kebabs:

And for a postprandial treat, we repaired to a store in downtown Davis that sells boba tea and mochi donuts. We had green-tea donuts; specimen below:

These are photos taken by reader Rosemary, who lives in South Africa near Kruger National Park, and runs an organization (GMFER: Global March for Elephants and Rhinos) that protects the local wildlife by partnering with local communities to raise awareness about trafficking in animals and poaching. GMFER also works to change laws to lessen poaching of elephants and rhinos and, mainly, to end trophy hunting of “iconic” animals.  Finally, they concentrate on educating children and rangers to appreciate local wildlife and the need to protect it, and teaching them to remove snares.

Rosemary has kindly helped me make arrangements for my visit to Kruger and environs in August; these arrangements can be quite complicated.

I’ll be in South Africa (Capetown and the Kruger area) for roughly a month. When I’m not traveling or staying in wildlife camps, I will be putting up in the small town of Hoedspruit near Kruger—in the house of Rosemary’s landlady.  Since the animals roam fairly freely around that area, which is in a fenced wildlife estate, that house is visited daily by common warthogs (Phacochoerus africanus), who come by for handouts of corn.  (Sometimes leopards also appear.)

One of the hogs is a huge and magnificent male whom I’ve named Ozymandias—Ozy for short.  Here he is; isn’t he gorgeous? (Photos by Rosemary).

The “warts” are protuberances formed from cartilage, and are presumably used to protect the animal’s head. They are sexually dimorphic.  The Fresno Chaffee Zoo describes them:

Males have 3 pairs of “warts,” 1 near the eyes, 1 on the snout and 1 pair on the lower jaw. The female’s two pair of warts are smaller, with none on the snout. The eyes are set high on the head. They have a typical pig’s disc-like nose pad.

Warthogs are underrated, and don’t count as one of the “Big Five” animals that tourists come to Africa to see. But they should be, as they are amazing animals.  They have four tusks, which are simply overgrown teeth, and these are used for fighting, excavating their burrows, and digging for roots (warthogs are grazing herbivores).

The lower pair of tusks become razor sharp by rubbing against the upper pair, and, besides digging, are used for fighting, particularly between males.  I would like to pet Ozy when I meet him, but I cannot as there’s a danger of being slashed!

The hogs are poached for their tusks, which are considered analogous to elephant ivory, and are also sometimes hunted as “trophies” (I despise this practice).

Warthogs are fearless animals, and mothers will defend their babies vigorously. Below is a YouTube video showing a family being stalked by wild dogs, but the mother drives them off. Then a single warthog baby gets attacked by lions, and even gets picked up in their mouths, but then recovers, goes to ground, and, despite its tiny size, goes after the lions and drives them off!

Note the speed of the mother, and the fact that warthogs run with their tails held vertically:

And an adult escaping lions, one of their most common predators.

Warthogs can run fast: up to 30 mph (48 kph), and they forage by grazing on their knees, as is in this Wikipedia picture (they drink the same way).

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here’s Ozy again in all his glory. When he arrives for a snack, all the other warthogs, including smaller males, females, and babies, leave him alone.  With one shake of his head they know they must stay away (photo by Rosemary):

Warthogs like to bathe and wallow in mud to cool themselves. But they also have a unique symbiotic relationship with mongeese. I was stunned when I saw this video of a warthog letting mongeese crawl all over it to remove its ticks. This of course is a symbiotic relationship: the mongeese get a meal and the pig gets cleaned (it’s similar to the cleaner wrasses in the ocean):

Rosemary’s landlady has built a cement pond in her yard for the warthogs to lie in. But a big male like Ozy will drive the other hogs out of the water and mud, so they have to wait for their bath.

Ozy again, photo by Rosemary:

I have made a deal to adopt Ozy. In return for paying a monthly fee to support him as well as other animals in the area, I will ensure that Ozy will get extra food, including vegetables, and I will get photos and a monthly letter from Ozy giving me an update on his doings.

One problem with Ozy is that, according to Rosemary, he is a Republican. He likes Trump because, like Ozy, Trump is a bully. Also, Ozy is keenly aware that there are two sexes, of which he’s one stupendous example, and he doesn’t like the Biden administration’s weakness for the “sex spectrum” argument. Here he is wearing his MAGA hat. But I will help take care of him anyway:

Stay tuned for more on Ozy. He hurt his leg, presumably in a fight with another male, and it is healing, but taking a while to do so.

That this editorial appears in the premier journal Science, and is one of a growing number of pieces urging us to respect “indigenous ways of knowing”, suggests that the woke movement has sprouted a new branch. It’s one I’ve discussed many times with respect to Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) in New Zealand.

The problem with MM is that it’s not just empirical knowledge (i.e., “practical knowledge”, like when to collect eels or berries), but also includes nonscientific things like morality, religion, spirituality, guides for living, and “life forces” (an important element, mauri) that turns the whole enterprise into an exercise in vitalism. It is this infection of indigenous knowledge with supernaturalism or religion that should make us wary of saying, “Let’s merge indigenous ways of knowing with modern science!”

Now the spirit of MM has made its way across the Pacific to Canada and the U.S. as an offshoot of the “oppressor vs. oppressed” narrative. In this case, indigenous people, regarded as oppressed—and they largely were—are supposed to be given scientific credibility as a form of reparations. As Luana and I wrote in our paper, “The ideological subversion of biology,”

The promotion of these other ways of knowing comes from a desire to valorize oppressed groups by holding up much of their culture as having the same epistemic authority as science, a view that philosopher Molly McGrath called “the authority of the sacred victim.” In its secular form, this authority derives from postmodern views that science is just one of many “ways of knowing” and that the hegemony of science reflects power rather than accomplishment. This is encapsulated by the motto, espoused by some on both the Right and the Left for decades, that “science is always political.”

Like biblical creationism, much indigenous knowledge has a substantial spiritual or theological component that comes not from evidence but from authority or revelation. To add any of this knowledge to modern science, you must first separate the empirical wheat from the spiritual chaff. This is what the nondenominational Pastor Mike Aus meant when, after giving up his faith, he described “religious knowledge” this way: “There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.”

And so we have a new editorial in Science that’s an expression of this mentality. Granted, it’s not as dogmatic or misguided as articles promoting MM in New Zealand, but give North America some time. . .

Click to read:

Before we start supporting “indigenous science,” we need to know what the “science” is. If Native Americans have better ways of conserving the environment than does modern science, then yes, we should learn from them.  But do they? I can’t think of any, and in fact some of their practices, like overkilling buffalo or burning the prairie to provide grass for their horses, may well be the opposite of what conservationists recommend today. As far as knowing the temporal habits and schedules of native plants and animals, yes, we should learn from Native Americans.

But this is all practical knowledge, and to truly verify it as scientific knowledge, you need to verify assertions about what’s empirically true using the methods of modern science: experiments, hypotheses, replicability, the use of controls and so on.

In contrast to modern science, indigenous science is rarely hypothesis-driven, and so is limited to the much narrower sphere of practical knowledge: what can be detected by observation alone.  Again, that doesn’t mean that indigenous knowledge should be ignored, but perhaps we should be wary of indigenous ways of knowing.  These often involve a spiritual element that simply gets in the way of modern scientific understanding, preventing the building of telescopes, the study of ancient remains, and so on. Further, by neglecting modern scientific tools, indigenous “ways of knowing”  aren’t really ways of knowing. Does eating plant X really cure you of arthritis? How do you know that without controls? Simple attestations of the afflicted is not sufficient. If they were, then homeopathy, chiropractic, and aura therapy would also be “ways of knowing.”

This doesn’t mean that we can’t incorporate empirical observations of indigenous people into science.  But it does mean that indigenous “ways of knowing” are almost never really ways of knowing. They only become so when the tools of modern science are used to actually produce “knowledge’: understanding of something in the universe that is widely accepted after repeated and rigorous testing.

And so, like many of these articles, this one is long on equity and oppression but short on science. Where are the examples of how we can fruitfully merge indigenous “science’ with modern science? There are none:

Here, for example, we have empathic and sweet-sounding words, but a worrying lack of specificity:

Faced with the profound challenges of a rapidly changing environment, society needs other ways of knowing to illuminate a different way forward. Thanks to the leadership of Indigenous scholars and allied collaborators, Indigenous knowledge is receiving long overdue recognition for its potential to provide solutions for the mutual thriving of lands and cultures. An urgent question is how institutions can appropriately support (and not hinder) Indigenous science’s key role in creating a sustainable future.

After years of marginalization by Western science, regard for Indigenous knowledge is reaching high places. For example, in 2022, the White House called for elevating such knowledge in research, policy, and land management. This is extraordinary given the United States’ track record of attempted erasure of Indigenous thought through policies of removal and forced assimilation.

There is a global groundswell of Indigenous-led research on stewardship of lands and waters, providing opportunities for Indigenous and Western knowledges to flourish together.

Is any new “knowledge” described in the paragraphs above? I don’t see any.

The text below describes an expensive U.S. government program that is designed to support indigenous science. But what it’s really doing is supporting indigenous people. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s not pretend that this is a true melding of indigenous “science” and modern science.

A major step in this direction was announced last September by the US National Science Foundation, in its establishment of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS). Led by a team of 54 predominantly Indigenous scholars and headquartered at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, CBIKS aims to focus on complex issues at the nexus of nature and culture. The research teams, which span the globe, will address climate disruption, food insecurity, and cultural survival through learning from Indigenous community-based approaches. The goal is to identify and advance models of ethical and effective integration of Indigenous and Western sciences by creating mutually respectful and reciprocal relationships between them. CBIKS will develop generalizable approaches for a diversity of scientific communities.

Yes, one has to understand local cultures to implement these programs, and of course you have to be “respectful”, but you can bet your bippy that. the tools that will be used here will wind up being the tools of modern science.

In the end, all these programs are extensions of DEI initiatives. They are ways not to enrich modern science, but to help people regarded as oppressed. I emphasize again that this is not necessarily bad, or a simple manifestation of performative wokeness, but we have to realize that neither is this a way to enrich modern science. It is social engineering motivated by concern for the oppressed.  And it is a way for marginalized people to gain power, whether or not they can use that power effectively:

CBIKS is a prime example of a model that supports research guided by the worldview and priorities of Indigenous peoples around the world. Similar initiatives in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and elsewhere are also leading the way. For too long, Indigenous peoples have been fighting for a voice in decisions regarding their lands, waters, and lives. Indigenous-led research efforts will point to different paths forward—those in which Indigenous peoples do not merely have a seat at Western science’s table but are setting research agendas that reflect their priorities and protocols.

You get a seat at modern (I hate “Western”) science’s table by earning a seat at the table. You’re not just given one because of your ethnicity. If bigotry or oppression has held back native people from studying or practicing science, then we must correct that by giving them the same opportunities as everyone else. Nor should we exploit their lands, their knowledge, or their resources without their full participation and collaboration. But we shouldn’t pretend that we’re doing all this as a way to enrich science. These programs are, pure and simple, DEI initiatives—ways to overcome obstacles erected by bigotry and oppression. (Conceived in this way, DEI isn’t always bad!)

Finally, the article tosses more word salad that promises to create a climate “that values pluralism while protecting sovereignty of diverse knowledges. In this way, solutions can emerge from the symbiosis between Western and Indigenous knowledges that benefit everyone.”

But what are “diverse knowledges”?

And when the authors say this:

For centuries, Indigenous scientists have had to adapt to, and develop fluency in, Western modes of knowledge making. It’s now Western scientists’ turn to learn from, and respect, Indigenous science. . . . . . who were the Indigenous scientists from centuries ago?  Centuries ago? And please, if you think that “Indigenous science” can enrich modern science to everyone’s advantage, just give us a few non-trivial examples.

If you’re old enough to recognize these poems, you’re at least 60.  I remember two of them, and both have the same last line.  Your task is to supply the last line, which is the same for both quatrains.

But don’t look at any of the answers in the comments before you guess. I suspect that because we have a “golden years” demographic, the right answer will come soon.

These are from my memory, though I suppose you can find the answers somewhere on the web. No Googling!

Poem#1 (my favorite):

Cattle crossing
Please go slow
Because that old cow
Is some bull’s beau. . .

Poem #2 (this should provide a clue):

In this vale
Of toil and sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin. . .

Whenever I say that I was lucky enough to have grown up during the apogee of rock music—in the 1960s and 1970s—and that rock music sucks today, I get tremendous pushback from people who think otherwise.  Some of them maintain that high-quality rock still exists, but lives in unheard niches inhabited by obscure musicians. Other folks send me names of bands to listen to. Sometimes, they’re okay, like the Staves (now sadly diminished by the loss of one member); but often they’re not rock, and they’re NEVER as good as the best rock bands of my youth, which included Hendrix, the Beatles (the best, of course), the Doors, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Velvet Underground, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac. . . . I could go on and on. Where are their equivalents today?

The answer is that there are none. Below is what passes for rock music today: autotuned, unmemorable, and unoriginal. Yes have a listen to, Ariana Grande’s highly touted new song “yes, and?” (You could also substitute anything by Taylor Swift for this one.)

Trigger warning: really bad music. Note that this song was put up just 6 days ago and already has 20 million views! Grande and Swift are, to today’s kids, what the Beatles were to us. If you say that the rock quality of both eras is pretty much the same, and each generation just likes the music of their youth, then you don’t have ears to hear.

And now my point: to present the video below made by the great music critic and analyst Rick Beato on how rock music died.  (In other words, he agrees with what I said above.)

Here’s Beato’s YouTube intro:

In this episode, my friend Jim Barber and I unravel the tangled web of policy, corruption, and greed that led to the collapse of the music business in the late 1990s.

Beato dates the money-based destructon of rock music (and “most music”) to 1996, when, after passage of the Telecommunications Act, two organizations, Clear Channel and Cumulus, “bought up most of the radio stations”. Local ownership of radio stations died in the face of rampant capitalism that turned a panoply of local stations into just a few homogenous groups. Local D.J.s lost their power as programming devolved to just a few individuals who decreed what should be played on all the stations in their stable.

This led to a reduction of competition between musicians and to the imposition of single people’s tastes on music that was played widely. Consequently, many songs were mixed “to all sound the same” and were produced and mixed by just a handful of people. Beato claims that this homogeneity led to 2012, the year “when rock music completely died.”

It gets more complicated, with much of the machinations involving producers and managers trying to get rich at the expense of musical quality by using their own equipment instead of the studios’ or bands’ own equipment.

This is all quite arcane, but some of it makes sense to me, even early in the morning. In the end, it became too expensive for bands to make music, and rock music simply had become less popular because creativity had been stifled by economic forces.

The question, then, is whether un-stifling creativity could bring rock music back to where it was when I was growing up. Not the same styles, mind you, but a general quality that was quite high, with some groups becoming classics that would endure, becoming the staples of “oldies” stations.

My answer is “no; won’t happen.”  For to Beato and Barber’s Theory of Homogeneity I would add my own theory, which is mine, that is this. Here comes my theory.  Here it is:

All art forms, I aver, go through the same phases of gradual improvement, reaching an apogee of quality, and then experience a gradual decline into mediocrity. While this is true for music (besides rock, it’s happened to jazz, classical music), it also includes visual arts like painting.  These genres simply get exhausted after all the variations have been tried.

And now listen to Beato and Barber on “The Years the Music Died” (my title, taken of course from Don McLean).

MEMRI is the acronym for the Middle East Media Research Institute, where I spent a bit of time when I was last in Jerusalem. (They also have a headquarters in Washington, D. C.)

They translate pretty much everything that’s put online in the Arab world (ergo requiring a big stable of translators and computers), and MEMRI puts the videos online to let the let the world know what’s going on in the Middle East. They translate stuff from social media, government bulletins, sermons from mosques, schoolbooks, school plays—anything that can give insight into the Zeitgeist in the Arab world.  The Arabic, Urdi, Farsi, Turkish, Pashto, and so on are translated into Hebrew and English, and the material they translate is put up at this site. MEMRI also translates some Russian and Chinese articles into both English and Hebrew.  (Malgorzata translates many of MEMRI’s English-language articles into Polish, and of those now number 5,022!)

MEMRI’s subscribers include many governments and intelligences services in the West, as well as colleges and universities.

When I asked Yigal why mosques would even want to film sermons full of hatred and condemnation of Jews, he replied that for some reason imams and others can’t resist being on social media.

Before we get to the WSJ article on MRMRI, I’ll retell an anecdote involving its Jerusalem head and co-founder, Yigal Carmon, who previously served for two decades in the IDF, attaining the rank of Colonel, and, well, there’s more from his Wikipedia bio:

From 1977 to 1981, [Carmon] served as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Menachem Milson was appointed to serve as head of the Civil Administration, Carmon was appointed his deputy. Carmon was appointed acting head of the Civil Administration 26 September 1982 after Milson’s 22 September resignation. He served in that position until Shlomo Ilya became the Administration’s head 29 November.

In 1988, Carmon was appointed adviser on counterterrorism for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Following the fall of the Shamir government in 1992, he served for a year as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s counterterrorism adviser before resigning in 1993 due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. From 1991 to 1992 he was also a part of the Israeli delegation to peace negotiations with Syria in Washington.

He founded MEMRI in 1998, so it’s just had its 25th anniversary.

All this is to say that Yigal knows whereof he speaks, and he’s served both left-wing (Rabin) and right-wing (Shamir) Israeli governments (Carmon’s own allegiance is on the Left), knows many Arab leaders, and when he says something about the political or military climate in the Middle East, he’s worth paying attention to. (By the way, MEMRI has almost never had any mistranslations of the Arabic, despite embarrassed speakers saying that their words weren’t properly translated.)

And that brings us to my anecdote, which is mine. Here it comes:

Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter. During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter remained sanguine.  I said “How do you know this?”  Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint.  Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.

Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.

Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices.

On October 6, I informed him that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):

From: Jerry Coyne 
Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PM
To: Yigal Carmon 

Hi Yigal, I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed. Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted? best,
Jerry And Yigal answered the same day. Here is what he said: From: Yigal Carmon
To: ​Jerry Coyne​
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them. Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….

As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.

And so it happened, and Yigal’s prediction was mentioned in the new WSJ op-ed below, which gives background and details about MEMRI. But remember, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!  Click to read, though I can’t find the article archived. I’ll give a few excerpts (indented):

From the article:

Yigal Carmon is one of the few Israelis who can claim to have predicted this war. His Aug. 31 article “Signs of Possible War in September-October” cited provocations by Hezbollah, escalating violence in the West Bank and threats from Hamas as evidence of regional coordination for something big. “Israel will likely be compelled to undertake a large-scale response,” he wrote, “even at the cost of an all-out war.”

Some details were off, but Mr. Carmon says anyone paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall. “They said it all. They said everything,” Mr. Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterterrorism adviser to two prime ministers, says in a phone interview from Jerusalem. As president and a co-founder of Memri, the Middle East Media Research Institute, he had publicized Hamas’s videos advertising its drills for an invasion of Israel, as well as its claims that total war was coming.

But Hamas is always threatening war, and most of the time it comes to naught. “If they publish it many times, then you can ignore it?” he asks in response to the point. “I say just the opposite. If they publish it many times, it suggests they mean it and you cannot ignore it. You must take it seriously.”

Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.”

Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism.

. . .Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.

Memri also documents Gazans’ indoctrination from childhood into a religious ideology that puts them on a war footing. “Their textbooks are our life,” Mr. Carmon says, “but no one paid attention.” Instead, Israeli leaders were convinced that Qatari money and past beatings would deter Hamas.

It’s MEMRI, for instance, that has brought to the attention of me and many others the Jew hatred taught to Arabic schoolchildren, making us realize that in its most virulent form it’s here to stay for at least another generation.

Here’s another reason why Western governments should be reading MEMRI:

. . .Mr. Carmon directs me to a recent article in which he writes, “Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter—those clueless Americans, who don’t even know that Qatar is spitting in their face with wild anti-U.S. incitement 24/7 . . . because they only watch the deceptive Al-Jazeera TV in English.” On the Arabic-language channel, he says, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera “is the megaphone of Hamas like it was the megaphone of al Qaeda. Every speech, every statement—everything is aired several times until everybody gets it.”

The article faults the Biden administration for “pleading with Qatar” instead of threatening it: “Just one comment by the U.S. administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home.” Instead, while hostage negotiations stall, the U.S. has quietly agreed to extend its presence at the Qatari base for another decade, according to a Jan. 2 CNN report. Mr. Carmon seems mystified by U.S. weakness. “Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without power pressure on the side?”

If intelligence officials in the West aren’t reading MEMRI on a regular basis, they’re making a mistake. As you see, even the Biden administration has been gulled by the Middle East, and this happens pretty regularly. (Anthony Blinken is an especially notable victim, and he passes his gullibility on to Biden. Only someone completely oblivious to what’s happening in the Middle East would now be speaking of a “two state solution” as a way to settle this war.)

Although the WSJ article isn’t archived, perhaps a judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.

Thanks again to Yigal and his family for their hospitality when I was in Israel.

Reader Muffy sent in this photo showing the tracks of animal that she disturbed while cross-country skiing. Your job is to guess the type of animal AND the species.  Muffy will reveal it it the comments towards the end of the day, so put up your guesses now:

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “tragic,” came with the caption, “It’s okay, they had muesli for breakfast.”

I’m not sure about this one, save that the boys leave their McDonald’s cups and french-fry package on the bench after they leave. Is that the licensed immoral behavior?

Perhaps readers can explain. . .

Two readers sent me this 44-minute video posted by Tom Gross, showing Emily Hand, a 9-year-old girl kidnapped by Hamas, comforting her father Thomas, an Irishman, as he’s interviewed by Piers Morgan. (Hand’s wife died of cancer, and Thoma’s ex-wife, who served as Emily’s stepmother, was killed by Hamas.) It’s ineffably moving to see young Emily stroke her father’s face, wiping the tears from his eyes as he recounts the family’s ordeal.

You may remember Thomas Hand saying, when he thought his daughter was dead in Gaza, that her death was probably for the best, for her fate would have been worse had she been taken alive:  he imagined what Hamas would do to Emily.(A clip from that interview is at 11:42.) I’m sure he feels differently now! But he did have to explain to Emily, after she returned, that her stepmother was dead.

My friend said this:

You have to watch this—it’s insanely powerful. I’m crying.  He just lays it all out. Makes me want to move to Israel and help. . .

Towards the end, Thomas Hand gets very angry and calls Western university students “idiots”. . . and he mentions Harvard.

Here are Tom Gross’s notes:

Thomas Hand, the Irish-born father of Emily Hand who was released after 50 days in Hamas hell, gave an in-depth interview yesterday evening to Piers Morgan on Britain’s TalkTV. Emily was 8 when she was kidnapped and turned 9 in captivity.

One viewer said: “How she wiped her father’s tears, caressed and cared for him when he started to cry in the interview. Melted my heart.”

Also of note is when Thomas Hand says ignorant critics of Israel in the West “don’t know a thing” and have “no idea what they are talking about”.

Hand is no conservative: he brought up Emily on a kibbutz because he liked its socialist atmosphere. As for Emily’s kidnapping during a sleepover and the attack on the kibbutz, you’ll have to listen to the interview.

Three bits are worth noting: about 30 minutes in, Thomas explains how he told Emily that her stepmother/caretaker was dead. (See especially from 31:15 on.)

At 32:25, the discussion turns to politics, Israel’s response, and how the West has reacted. Thomas gets quite exercised, especially when he gets to the accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”

At 43:00, Piers asks Thomas to ask Emily (in Hebrew) how she felt when she saw her father again after her release.

A final word from me: of the roughly 200 people taken hostage by Hamas, from several countries, about 136 remain in Gaza. That there is no world outcry about this; that the UN hasn’t condemned Hamas for this; and that the Court of Justice in the Hague is not putting Hamas on trial for real genocide, including taking civilian hostages, firing rockets into Israel, swearing to keep attacking Israel until all the Jews are dead (as specified in its charter) and many other terroristic war crimes—all of this should bring deep shame to the West

As with many YouTube videos, this one is periodically interrupted with annoying advertisements.  Nothing is immune from being monetized these days.

Today we have photos by Friend of the Site Greg Mayer, who sent these in when the photo well was about to run dry. Greg’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. This is part 1 of 2.

Southern trees: what’s on them?

One of the things you notice in heading south are the changes in the plants and animals you see. One of the most striking things you notice is the abundance of epiphytes– plants growing on plants– which are much commoner in the southern US than in the north. Epiphytes of all sorts, and often large ones– bromeliads, vines, strangler figs, etc.– are a typical characteristic of tropical forests, but there are a fair number in subtropical Florida. The following pictures are from Jacksonville, in northern Florida.

Among the first “southern” things you notice, even while driving, is Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides, in the bromeliad family) dripping off of trees; while driving south I first noticed it in southern Georgia. Unfortunately, there were none where I walked around to take these photos! But there were other air plants– which is what Spanish moss is. Here’s one, another species of Tillandsia, in a lime tree (Citrus sp.).

Tillandsia sp., Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

Air plants have no roots, consisting instead of twisted leaves clinging to other plants and surfaces; they get water and nutrients from the air and the rain. They are not parasitical in the usual sense– they don’t “feed” upon their host– but they are what are known as “support parasites”: their host holds them up, and gets them exposed to sunlight. Some support parasites can be inimical to the host, weighing it down and intercepting sunlight and rain; a friend here in Florida told me that a lot of Spanish moss will kill a tree.

Though the lime tree had no Spanish moss, it was not doing well, and epiphytes (mostly lichens) were abundant on the moribund parts of the tree; compare the left side, with leaves, vs. the nearly barren right side.

Lime tree, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

A live oak (Quercus sp., I think) with lots of epiphytes was also not doing well. Notice the few bunches of live leaves higher in the tree; the ground below it was covered with broken-off, epiphyte-encrusted, branches. [Edit by GCM: The clumps of live leaves in the tree below are probably mistletoe, an epiphytic parasite, not leaves of the oak. Also the oak is probably not a live oak. See the comments for further details. My thanks to readers Dennis Howard Schneider,  j a higginbotham, bruce morgan, and debi!]

Live oak (Quercus sp., ?), Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

The most common epiphytes here are lichens. I won’t even venture an opinion on what species occur here, but there were differences in growth form indicating to me that several species were present. Here’s a wispy kind I found on branches.

Wispy lichen, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

Nearby on the same branches could be found a lichen with a more “structured” form, with “chimneys”.

Lichen, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

Lichens also grew on trunks; this is the same live oak as shown above.

Lichens on trunk, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

A common sight in Florida is a palm whose trunk is covered with ferns. The ferns on this one are modestly dense– I’ve seen much denser. I think the tree is one of the twelve native palms of Florida– perhaps cabbage palm. (IDs from readers on this or other plants would be appreciated!)

Epiphytic ferns on palm trunk, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

On this palm, moss is growing on the trunk, and we can see some epiphytic vines dangling.

Epiphytic moss on palm trunk, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

Finally, neither trees nor epiphytes, and, in fact, not even plants, a couple of fungi on the lawn.

Mushrooms, Jacksonville, FL, January 9, 2024.

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Ngày bướu” in Vietnamese): Wednesday, January 17, 2024. This will be a curtailed post, as PCC(E) is travelling.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 17 Wikipedia page.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is a wise cat:

Hili: I have a feeling that the world has gone crazy. A: Is it visible from your place as well? 

In Polish:

Hili: Mam wrażenie, że świat zwariował.
Ja: Z twojego miejsca też to widać?

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

From Stacy:

 

The Atlantic is actually becoming a reasonable venue instead of a woke one.  Example in point: this article by podcaster and writer Josh Barro.  We’ve probably encountered most of his indictments before, but he explains why the problems with American universities is making most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—lose respect for the institutions. Click to read, or, if the article is paywalled,  you can find an archived version here.

First, the data that constitute the problem (Barro’s words are indented):

Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.

This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).

Below are some data I found from that Gallup poll (click to enlarge if you can’t see the figures).

First, the data for all Americans, showing a drop in just the last 8 years from 57% to 36% in those who have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education:

And the data divided by demographics. Notice that confidence fell in other groups, too, especially those with no college degree, and also a greater decline among older than among younger people.

 

Why is this happening? According to Barro, and he seems on the mark to me, it’s largely because the institutions are perceived as dishonest and weaselly.  I’ll summarize his reasons, giving Barro’s quotes as either indented prose or with added quotation marks.

a.  Universities seem less interested in finding truth that in supporting an ideology, usually one aimed at social justice.  (Thinks of all the “studies” courses that exist now but didn’t in the past. Even the University of Chicago now has a Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.)

b. “Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.”  It’s clear that many universities now are trying to maintain race-based admissions though that’s been outlawed by the Supreme Court.  And there doesn’t seem to be any push to expand ideological or political diversity.

This also goes for hiring practices as well as undergraduate admissions. A quote from Barro:

Because using racial quotas in hiring is illegal, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. Instead they use ideological screens and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement reviews as a proxy for race. This approach has many drawbacks—in addition to involving a concealment of the university’s true objectives, it is of no use to Black and Hispanic candidates who are not interested in “ideologically supercharged” areas of study, and sometimes it leads to the hiring of white candidates anyway, if they know best how to include the magic trendy words in a DEI statement.

And a quote about Harvard’s litigation about race-based admissions policy, about which they simply dissimulated. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court, of course:

The dishonesty at elite universities extends beyond their research output to how they describe their admissions processes. Like many universities, Harvard has long used race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more Black and Hispanic than it would be if it did not consider race. Throughout the litigation over this practice, the university’s representatives didn’t just defend the appropriateness of race-conscious policies to promote diversity; they denied that they were discriminating at all. They played word games—similar to the “what even is plagiarism?” bit deployed by Gay’s defenders—arguing somehow that race could be used as a positive factor for admission without ever being a negative one, a mathematical impossibility when awarding a fixed number of admission slots.

c. The degrees that universities give “will not justify the time and money that students invest in them.” I’m sure this is one factor, as some schools give degrees with ridiculous names, or “studies” degrees that would make it hard to get a job. And, of course, schools are expensive, especially for “elite” colleges. This is what it’ll take you to send a student to Harvard next year. If you multiply that by four, you get nearly $320,000, not counting books and other supplies.

Even at the state school where I went, The College of William & Mary, tuition for an out-of-state student is $63,967, not that much less than Harvard’s, while in-state students pay amore reasonable amount: $39,595 When I went there it was $1200 per year, which works out, with inflation, to be the equivalent of $10,800 today—a bit more than just half in real money of the student tuition-only fee of $18,252. But the point is that except for state schools if you’re a resident, college costs more than many parents make.

Of course you shouldn’t look at college as a way to get a pecuniary return on your investment, but that’s the way things have become. It’s this “consumerist” mentality that is in fact ruining many colleges, leading to lame “pop culture” courses, grade inflation, the decline of the humanities, and the fear of professors that their students will beef because they’re not getting a monetary return. (When I taught evolution to students who were mostly pre-meds, I got complaints that evolution wouldn’t help students become better doctors. And they’re largely right, but that’s not the point of studying evolution.)

d. The “replication crisis” affecting the reliability of data has led people to think that many researchers are either sloppy or dishonest, so what you learn in college may not be trustworthy.  This is Barro’s accusation, though I don’t see it as nearly as big a contributor to the problem as the first three issues above.

e.  The waffling, euphemisms, and plagiarism evidenced in the Claudine Gray scandal. This doesn’t play into the Gallup data above, which were compiled before Gay resigned as President of Harvard, but it’s surely embedded in the minds of the public now. They also remember the waffling that she, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth showed during the House hearing. Granted, they were being bullied, but none of them made a particularly good showing, and Magill has resigned as well. This, I think, did a great deal to debase higher education in the minds of Americans. I’m not even mentioning the use of euphemisms like “duplicative language” instead of “plagiarism,” which didn’t fool anyone but made Harvard look defensive and weaselly.

f. Even science has been tarred by misguided advice by experts, especially during the pandemic. Barro:

Yet another distortion of  academic output is subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise to impose their policy preferences on the public. This phenomenon exploded as a huge problem early in the coronavirus pandemic, and it wasn’t limited to universities—some of the public-health professionals who fought to turn transmission estimates into policies that closed schools, offices, and places of worship were on faculties, some were at hospitals, some worked for the government, and some just posted a lot on Twitter. But I’ll say that several years of hearing “science says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such but rather were applications of scientific claims through a specific value framework I didn’t share—part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing—made

I’m going to add two others, which are mine. Here they are. They’re coming now. First, the deplatforming of speakers. This mainly affects conservative speakers, like federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down at Stanford Law School, an incident for which the university had to apologize. This, of course, turns off more right-wing than left-wing Americans, but the problem is that all Americans are losing confidence in colleges, and many on the Left, like me, still favor free speech for everyone.

Second, the spread of identity politics and identity issues, which “intersects” with several of the issues above. These include “studies,” DEI, and the segregation of students by race, often in “affinity houses” or in race-specific graduations. This again is guaranteed to anger a lot of people, including members of minorities who don’t favor this kind of voluntary segregation.

Finally, I want to quote one bit from Barro’s piece that’s particularly invidious:

The commentator Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the Black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation—not only failing to show that the Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.

The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of “historian finds yet another thing that is racist,” garnered credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal that published it came out with a “what is truth, anyway”–type word salad in defense of the article, including this:

We by no means hold that “fiction” is a meaningless category—dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

This ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approach leads me to suspect that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research—it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals.

Look at that word salad in the penultimate paragraph! As best I can figure, it really says that a paper which is completely bogus is okay, so long as it adheres to the narrative of white oppression and cultural appropriation. For the kind of “selective historicism” that called out Bulstrode’s paper simply “supports white domination”—even if Bulstrode was dead wrong.

Is this loss of trust good? In two ways, yes; in another way, no.  The good bits are that this lack of trust may force colleges to clean up their act. Further, people who really don’t want to go to college or need to go to college (John McWhorter says that college isn’t necessary for many people, and others may want to go to trade school), this could put them on a better career path.

But the worst part is that for those who really want a good university education, the structure has to be in place to offer one.  All of the problems above reduce the quality of education on tap, and, if you’re concerned about such things, will make America sink even lower in the worldwide competition for good colleges. Although I don’t care much whether, say, Britain offers a better college education than does the U.S. (I don’t know if this is the case), you simply want every school to be as good as it can, no matter where it is.

Barro has put his finger on a serious issue, and perhaps now that GayGate has occurred and the Supreme Court has begun dismantling DEI, the decline in respect for colleges may slow or even reverse.

 

h/t: Carl

 

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is back, taking us on a trip to Madeira. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Ilha da Madeira (Wood Island) sits some 900 km to the southwest of Portugal and 700 km west of Morocco. The island is the largest of the Madeira Archipelago, a Portuguese autonomous region. It has no beaches to speak of, but that doesn’t deter hordes of European tourists, mostly Continental Portuguese, Britons and Germans, who are lured by the island’s year-round mild climate and abundant sunshine. Inevitably, the horrors of mass-tourism are creeping in. But a judicious visitor that avoids the high season, festival days and resort hot spots near the capital Funchal, can have a memorable time – if in possession of strong legs and sturdy shoes.

Funchal is not at all a photogenic city, but it has several museums, gardens and monuments such as this homage to João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390-1471), winner of the Godzilla Prize for urban developer of the millennium. Prince Henrique the Navigator tasked Zarco with creating the right conditions for agriculture to encourage colonization in the hitherto uninhabited island. Zarco set to it, but faced a considerable obstacle hinted in the island’s name: a thick, luxurious forest blanketed it. But an easy solution was at hand – fire. Zarco set the island alight, and the inferno was reputed to have lasted seven years. The lowland native vegetation was wiped out, giving way to sugar cane © Vitor Oliveira, Wikimedia Commons:

A gondola lift from Funchal to the parish of Monte, a vertical climb of 560 m.:

In the 1850s, Monte residents were fed up with the long and boring slog to the city centre. So they came up with a speedier and more exciting alternative: to careen downhill in a carro de cesto (basket car), a wicker basket sledge mounted on wooden runners. Soon tourists wanted to hop on board, and today a carro de cesto journey is one of Madeira’s main attractions – Ernest Hemingway declared it to be one of the most exhilarating rides of his life. Gravity and greased runners propel the sledge forward at speeds nearing 30 km/h, while two sledge drivers negotiate crossings, moving cars, stray dogs, pedestrians and kerbs. Watch a safety-conscious Brit have a go at it:

Madeira is a piscivores’ paradise. Funchal’s fish market offers an enormous variety of seafood, some with odd shapes and appearances such as the peixe-espada preto, or black scabbardfish (Aphanopus carbo). Espada com banana is a local delicacy, but The World Health Organization recommends consuming the fish ‘in moderation’. Despite being an oceanic, deep-sea creature, the black scabbardfish is contaminated with cadmium, lead, mercury and other unsavoury ingredients. No corner of Earth is safe from human screw-ups:

While piscivores will be impressed in Madeira, frugivores will be dazzled. Thanks to the island’s generous climate and fertile volcanic soil, a range of aromatic, flavourful and exotic fruits are grown, such as guava, custard apple, pitanga, prickly pear, passion fruit, and physalis – without mentioning the run-of-the mill banana, papaya, mango, grape and avocado, among others:

Madeirans call their island the ‘floating garden of the Atlantic’. You can spend days hopping from one garden to another:

Cabo Girão: with a 580-m free fall, this the highest promontory in Europe (yes, Madeira is legally European, despite being much closer to Africa). The green carpet on the bottom is grapevines. A sphincter-tightening skywalk was installed at the edge of the chasm after this photo was taken. Madeira is small (57 x 22 km), but during most of its history of human occupation, the interior was uninhabited and uncultivated because of its unforgiving topography of mountainous gorges classed as Very Steep, Terrifying or Ohmygod. To this day, villages are confined to the few spots of gentler slopes:

You would expect cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles to go slow in this Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner film set. You would be wrong:

Madeira has one the most impressive irrigation systems in the world. The island is intersected by some 200 levadas, which are channels cut into stone that carry water from altitudes of up to 1,800 m in the northern and central mountains to the dry, arable land in the south. The channels, 50-60 cm deep, cover more than 3,000 km, including 40 km of tunnels. Water from the levadas is strictly controlled, distributed to villages and farmers in rations that average 15 minutes every two weeks. Each of the channels’ exits has its levadeiro, a person in charge of monitoring and managing the operation. For tourists, the paths that run along the levadas are excellent avenues for exploration, and the only way to reach some parts of the island. Some levadas are easy going, others require hunchbacked trudges in dark tunnels or pacing narrow strips between the water channel and the void. Routes, maps and possible hazards can be consulted in a variety of levadas guidebooks © Jotbe1961, Wikimedia Commons:

Levadas were built mostly by hand: men often handled their picks and shovels from wicker baskets suspended from above or tied by ropes. Here a group of workers construct a levada sometime between 1947 and 1952 © Cultura Madeir:

Cultivated terraces (poios in the local dialect) seen from the Levada do Norte, which is 50-km long with 7 km of tunnels, bringing water from an altitude of 1,000 m through mountains and valleys. The Portuguese, like the Italians, are experts is putting any scrap of land into cultivation. These terraces are very good at controlling erosion; no tractors here, though:

Curral das Freiras seen from Eira do Serrado viewpoint (1,095 m). The village was originally called Curral (pen), but was changed to Curral das Freiras (nuns’ pen) – as one version of the story goes – in 1566, when Funchal was raided by French corsairs. The good sisters from a local convent suspected that a shared religion would not be sufficient to deflate the enthusiasm of French marauders in heightened stages of concupiscence, so they skedaddled to the mountains. The humble Brides of Christ knew a thing or two about the world:

The village of Casas Próximas (“nearby houses”), which are not that near – 600 m below:

Ecological field work in Madeira is not for the easily intimidated:

Back to Funchal, just in time for Carnaval. According to a native historian, the island’s festival of debauchery inspired the Brazilian version. If so, Brazilians adapted it by tackling the Madeiran revellers’ overdressing, which must be a health and safety hazard in tropical climates:

The idea that we have libertarian free will, in the real sense of “being able to make any one of several decisions at a given time”, has made a comeback in the pages of The New York Review of Books, a magazine that never quite recovered from the death of editor Robert B. Silvers in 2017. It was once the magazine to read for thoughtful analyses of books, but it’s gone downhill.  I had a subscription on and off, but quit a while back.

But I digress. In the latest issue, the respected author and historian of science James Gleick reviews a recent book on free will, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell.  I haven’t read the book, so all I can do is reprise what Gleick says about the book, which is that Mitchell’s case for libertarian free will is convincing, and that determinism—or “naturalism” as I prefer to call it, since I take into account the inherent unpredictability of quantum mechanics—is not all there is to our actions and behaviors. Mitchell, says Gleick, maintains that natural selection has instilled humans with the ability to weigh alternatives and make decisions, not only apparent decisions but real ones, decision that involve us weighing alternatives, thinking about the future, and then making make one of several possible decisions even at the moment you decide. In other words, determinism doesn’t rule all of our behaviors and decisions. Apparently, this is libertarian free will: facing a restaurant menu, with everything else in the universe the same (a classic scenario), you could have ordered something other than what you did.

The problem is that Gleick never defines “free will” in this way; he only implies that Mitchell accepts libertarian free will, and then tries to show how evolution gives it to us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: click on the screenshot below to read:

here

Gleick argues that life without libertarian free will is pointless. I maintain that this is incorrect—that the point of our life is the gratification we get from our actions, and we don’t need libertarian free will for that. All we need is a sense of satisfaction. You don’t even really need that if you define “point” post facto as “doing what you felt you had to do.”  But, say compatibilists like Dennett—and compatibilists are all physical determinists—we need to have some conception of free will, even if what we do is determined, for society would fall apart without it. And Gleick agrees:

Legal institutions, theories of government, and economic systems are built on the assumption that humans make choices and strive to influence the choices of others. Without some kind of free will, politics has no point. Nor does sports. Or anything, really.

. . . If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.

One senses from these statements that the choices we make are not merely apparent choices, conditioned by the laws of physics, but real ones: choices that we didn’t have to make. In other words, we have libertarian, I-could-have-done-otherwise free will.

That construal of free will is buttressed by Gleick’s characterization of Mitchell’s argument as showing that we have purpose, and that purpose (again, not explicitly defined), is the proof that we have libertarian free will:

Agency distinguishes even bacteria from the otherwise lifeless universe. Living things are “imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms,” Mitchell says. He makes a powerful case that the history of life, in all its complex grandeur, cannot be appreciated until we understand the evolution of agency—and then, in creatures of sufficient complexity, the evolution of conscious free will.

And this purpose is apparently an emergent property from natural selection, not only not predictable from physics, but somehow incompatible with physical law, which, are, says Gleick, are only descriptions of the universe and not really “laws” that the substance of our bodies and brains must obey:

This is why so many modern physicists continue to embrace philosophical determinism. But their theories are deterministic because they’ve written them that way. We say that the laws govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known. In a way the mistake begins with the word “laws.” The laws aren’t instructions for nature to follow. Saying that the world is “controlled” by physics—that everything is “dictated” by mathematics—is putting the cart before the horse. Nature comes first. The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.

The incompleteness apparently creates the gap where you can find libertarian free will.

And the paragraphs below, describing the results of natural selection, seem to constitute the heart of the book’s thesis:

Biological entities develop across time, and as they do, they store and exchange information. “That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes,” Mitchell says, “one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present.” Within even a single-celled organism, proteins in the cell wall respond chemically to changing conditions outside and thus act as sensors. Inside, proteins are activated and deactivated by biochemical reactions, and the organism effectively reconfigures its own metabolic pathways in order to survive. Those pathways can act as logic gates in a computer: if the conditions are X, then do A.

“They’re not thinking about it, of course,” Mitchell says, “but that is the effect, and it’s built right into the design of the molecule.” As organisms grow more complex, so do these logical pathways. They create feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. They make molecular clocks, responding to and then mimicking the solar cycle. Increasingly, they embody knowledge of the world in which they live.

The tiniest microorganisms also developed means of propulsion by changing their shape or deploying cilia and flagella, tiny vibrating hairs. The ability to move, combined with the ability to sense surroundings, created new possibilities—seeking food, escaping danger—continually amplified by natural selection. We begin to see organisms extracting information from their environment, acting on it in the present, and reproducing it for the future. “Information thus has causal power in the system,” Mitchell says, “and gives the agent causal power in the world.”

We can begin to talk about purpose. First of all, organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says.

My response to this is basically “so what?” Natural selection is simply the differential reproduction of gene forms, which, when encased in an organism, can leave more copies when they give that organism the ability to survive and reproduce.  Organisms thus evolve to act as if they have purpose. But that “purpose” is simply anthropormorphizing the results of the mindless process of natural selection.  So, when we decide to go hunting for food, or get pleasure from being with a mate, we can say that those embody our “purpose”. But there’s nothing in all this that implies that, at a given moment, we can make any number of decisions independent of physics.

But, Gleick implies, there is a way we can do this: by leveraging the “random fluctiations” in our brains:

It’s still just chemistry and electricity, but the state of the brain at one instant does not lead inexorably to the next. Mitchell emphasizes the inherent noisiness of the system: more or less random fluctuations that occur in an assemblage of “wet, jiggly, incomprehensibly tiny components that jitter about constantly.” He believes that the noise is not just inevitable; it’s useful. It has adaptive value for organisms that live, after all, in an environment subject to change and surprise. “The challenges facing organisms vary from moment to moment,” he notes, “and the nervous system has to cope with that volatility: that is precisely what it is specialized to do.” But merely adding randomness to a deterministic machine still doesn’t produce anything we would call free will.

That’s correct, though what Mitchell or Gleick mean as “random fluctuations in the brain” is undefined. Robert Sapolsky argues, in his recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that there are no “random” fluctuations in the brain: neurons interact with each other according to the principles of physics.  To have true free libertarian will, those neurons would have to fire in different ways under exactly the same conditions in the brain. Sapolsky spends a lot of time convincingly showing that this cannot be the case. Ergo, no brain fluctuations.

But, as Gleick says above, randomness alone doesn’t give us agency. Still, under Mitchell’s model it’s essential for free will. And this is the big problem, for how does one’s “will” harness that randomness to come up with decisions that are independent of physical processes? Gleick:

Indeed, some degree of randomness is essential to Mitchell’s neural model for agency and decision-making. He lays out a two-stage model: the gathering of options—possible actions for the organism to take—followed by a process of selection. For us, organisms capable of conscious free will, the options arise as patterns of activity in the cerebral cortex, always subject to fluctuations and noise. We may experience this as “ideas just ‘occurring to you.’” Then the brain evaluates these options, with “up-voting” and “down-voting,” by means of “interlocking circuit loops among the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and midbrain.” In that way, selection employs goals and beliefs built from experience, stored in memory, and still more or less malleable.

Ergo we have to have the brain’s “randomness”, which is neither defined nor, at least according to Sapolsky, doesn’t exist. Then one harnesses that randomness to come up with your decisions:

Mitchell proposes what he calls a “more naturalized concept of the self.” We are not just our consciousness; we’re the organism, taken as a whole. We do things for reasons based on our histories, and “those reasons inhere at the level of the whole organism.” Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, our conscious self is not in control. Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes. We have so many expressions like that—get a grip; pull yourself together; focus your thoughts—metaphors for the indistinct things we see when we look inward. We don’t ask who is gathering whose wits.

Well, we can always confabulate “reasons” for what we do, but, in my view, the whole process of pondering is simply the adaptive machinery of your brain, installed by natural selection, taking in environmental information and spitting out a solution that’s usually “adaptive”.  And because different people’s brains are wired differently (there is, after all, genetic and developmental variation), people tend to have somewhat different neuronal programs, so they behave in somewhat different ways, often predictable. This is what we call our “personalities”: the programs that are identified with different bodies. “Pondering” is not something we do freely; it’s what’s instilled in our brains by natural selection to produce adaptive behavior. We ponder just as a chess-playing computer ponders: working through programs until one produces the best available solution (in the case of a computer, to make a move that best insures you’ll win; in the case of a human, to make a move that gives the most “adaptive” result).

In none of this, however, do I detect anything other than giving the name “free will” to neuronal processes that we get from natural selection, and spitting out decisions and behaviors that could not have been otherwise in a given situation. (That situation, of course, includes the environment, which influences our neurons.) In none of this do I see a way that a numinous “will” or “agency” can affect the physical workings of our neurons. And in none of this can i see a way to do something differently than what you did.

In the end, and of course I haven’t read Mitchell’s book, Gleick doesn’t make a convincing case for libertarian free will. Yes, he can make a case for “compatibilist” free will, depending on how you define that (“actions that comport with our personalities,” “decisions not made under compulsion,” etc.). But as I’ve emphaszied, all compatibilists are at bottom, determinists (again, I’d prefer “naturalists”). Remember, determinism or naturalism doesn’t mean that behaviors need be completely predictable—quantum indeterminacy may act, though we’re not sure it acts on a behavioral level—but quantum indeterminacy does not give us “agency”.  “Compatibilist” free will still maintains that, at any given moment, we cannot affect the behaviors that flow from physics, and we cannot do other that what we did. It’s just that compatibilists think of free will as something other than libertarian free will, and there are as many versions of compatibilism as there are compatibilist philosophers.

I can’t find in this review any basis for libertarian free will—not in natural selection, not in the “random” fluctuations of the brain, not in the fact that different people have different personalities and may act differently in the same general situation. You can talk all you want about randomness and purpose and “winnowing of brain fluctuations,” but until someone shows that there’s something about our “will” that can affect physical processes, I won’t buy libertarian free will. Physicist Sean Carroll doesn’t buy it, either. He’s a compatibilist, but argues this:

There are actually three points I try to hit here. The first is that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. There is an enormous amount that we don’t know about how the world works, but we actually do know the basic rules underlying atoms and their interactions — enough to rule out telekinesis, life after death, and so on. The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.

The third point — the important one, and the most subtle — is that the absence of meaning “out there in the universe” does not mean that people can’t live meaningful lives.

(See also here.)

We are physical beings made of matter. To me that blows every notion of libertarian free will out of the water. I’ll be curious to see how Mitchell obviates this conclusion.

 

h/t: Barry

Today is the Lord’s Day, but also John’s Day, for we have another dollop of themed bird photos from Dr. Avise.. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.  I’ll add here that I’m scheduled to go to South Africa in August to visit friends in Capetown and to see the animals at Kruger National Park. I have to see the big “game” before I croak!

South Africa Birds, Part 3 

This week’s post is Part 3 of a mini-series on birds I photographed in South Africa during an extended seminar trip in 2007.  It shows another dozen or so species from that avian-rich part of the world.  All of today’s birds have the word “Cape” in their common name and were photographed in the Cape Town area.

Cape Batis (Batis capensis) female:

Cape Bulbul (Pycnonotus capensis):

Cape Francolin (Pternistis capensis):

Cape Glossy Starling (Lamprotornis nitens):

Cape Grassbird (Sphenoeacus afer):

Cape Gull (Larus dominicanus) (also known as the Kelp Gull):

Cape Robin-chat (Cossypha caffra):

Cape Sparrow (Passer melanurus):

Cape Sugarbird (Promerops cafer) male:

Cape Sugarbird female:

Cape Teal (Anas capensis):

Cape Turtle Dove (Streptopelia capicola):

Cape Wagtail (Motacilla capensis):

Cape Weaver (Ploceus capensis) male: