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Today we have bird photos from reader Rodney Graetz of Canberra, Australia, who has contributed several times before. Rodney’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

A Backyard Year

Because we live in a leafy suburb in an intentionally leafy city, our very ordinary backyard occasionally hosts interesting native wildlife.  In January, the first appearance of this juvenile (yellow/buff chest feathers) and very ragged and grubby Kookaburra (Dacelo sp.) Why so?  Kookaburras, along with 50+ parrot species, nest only in tree hollows.  Consequently, the competition for nesting sites is incessant and fierce.  For Kookaburras, the competition within a nest is also fierce, sometimes lethally so.  Driven by food and space conditions, aggressive nestlings are known to kill one another (Siblicide): usually the last born or smallest is killed first.  So, this grubby (sex unknown) bird may well have had a tough upbringing, including a killing:

The same bird in late September, now well-groomed and obviously in good condition.  It returns irregularly and we hear it more often than we see it.

This pair of Magpie Larks (Grallina cyanoleuca) appeared last year and have remained ever since.  The male is standing, and the post-bath female is squatting (deformed foot).  It is a widespread species that we include here as part of a larger story later.

Now (November), both birds have begun harvesting mud and grass for nest building, ferrying high up into the street tree, beak full by beak full.

This is the nest that they made last year in October.  It is a substantial, thick-walled cup nest, built, beak full by beak full.  It failed during a heavy rainstorm.  The current nest under construction is nearby:

Though slight birds, both male and female birds will display and fight over territory, here the birdbath.  We include this (Trap) photograph because it revealed the mesmerising underwing feather patterning of the Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), none of which is visible when the wings are folded:

In early September, this young Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus) arrived, a first.  Note the sharply hooked beak.  Its bathing technique is to get completely sodden, as here, then spend 10 minutes or so, meticulously grooming.  Its song is delightful.  Lately, we hear the bird more than we see it.

I add this borrowed photo to illustrate how they earned their common name Butcherbirds.  Like in a butcher shop – remember them? – surplus prey is hung or wedged, as here, or spiked on a thorn.  I’ve yet to personally see this in the wild.

A likely male (black eye) Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) contemplating a drink, a lengthy process similar to a winetaster at work.  A very common bird everywhere in Canberra, visually and noisily.  I include the photo to illustrate how large this parrot is (750+ gm, 1.8 lb) and to note that it will readily bathe in aviary captivity but rarely in the wild.  Most likely because a wet bird this size would require considerable effort to get airborne from the ground.  They do ‘sponge bath’.  During rain, they select a tree canopy with dense pendulous leaves, as Eucalypts mostly are, and fly into them, hanging upside down and flapping their wings to get them wet, particularly the wing underside – wing pits?  Their raised crest signals are similar to human eyebrows in showing surprise, fright and rage.

In early November, a first, both of sighting and visit, a female Pacific Koel (Eudynamys orientalis), a migratory Cuckoo species.  Two interesting aspects: the first being the probable migration distance travelled from northern tropical Australia, or even Indonesia, to Canberra in southern Australia.  The second is that, like all the Cuckoo family, they are brood parasites.

The female Koel has turned to call loudly after a departing (all black) male Koel, thus displaying her intricate feather patterning.  The behaviour of the two birds suggested there was a mating event.  If so, she and all other gravid female Koels in Canberra, will stay feeding and begin searching for susceptible birds’ nests in which to deposit their egg(s).

National bird experts list the local bird species vulnerable to Koel Brood Parasitism, among them being the Magpie Lark.  Copied from a national bird book, this painting illustrates the closeness in egg appearance between that of a Koel and a Magpie Lark, a pair of which birds are busy making a mud cup nest in our street tree.  We live in interesting times:

Dark matter made out of axions may have the power to make space-time ring like a bell, but only if it is able to steal energy from black holes, according to new research. 

An intriguing possibility for a candidate for the mysterious dark matter is that it might be an axion. Originally predicted to exist decades ago to explain some strange properties of the strong nuclear force, axions have yet to be detected in the laboratory or in any experiments. However, this elusiveness would make them a perfect candidate for dark matter, since by definition dark matter hardly if ever interacts with normal matter.

If the dark matter is an axion, or of a kind of particle related to the axion, then it would have very strange properties. It would be the lightest particle ever known, in some models no bigger than a billionth the mass of the electron. The incredible lightweight nature of this particle means that it would behave in very strange ways in the cosmos. It would be so light that its quantum wave nature would manifest on very large scales, meaning that it would tend to act more like a wave than a particle.

One of the ways this wave nature would manifest would be around rotating black holes. Through a process known as super-radiance, this kind of dark matter could steal angular momentum from the black hole. This would prevent the dark matter from falling through the event horizon, and instead it would pile up around the black hole like an invisible shroud.

But once no more new energy could be extracted from the black hole, the dark matter would evaporate away. In the process, according to new research, the dark matter would ring space-time like a bell, sending out an enormous amount of gravitational waves.

These gravitational waves would have a distinct signature from the ones known through black hole mergers. And even though they would be far weaker, they would be in the frequency ranges of detectability for existing and planned gravitational wave observatories.

The researchers proposed that we comb through existing data to hunt for any potential signatures of this kind of dark matter collecting around black holes. And if we don’t find what we looking for, we could still fine-tune upcoming experiments to hunt for this surprising signal.

The post Axion Dark Matter May Make Spacetime Ring appeared first on Universe Today.

Interview with Kevin Folta; News Items: Sense of Self in Robots, New Energy Secretary, Finding Planet Nine, Stress and Paranormal Belief; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Dumb Idioms; Science or Fiction

If you associate yourself with Sensible Medicine, you are anti-vaccine no matter how you describe yourself.

The post Any Doctor Who Enabled RFK Jr. In Any Way Is Anti-Vaccine No Matter How They Describe Themselves first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Most of the time the Sun is pretty well-mannered, but occasionally it’s downright unruly. It sometimes throws extremely energetic tantrums. During these events, a solar flare or a shock wave from a coronal mass ejection (CME) accelerates protons to extremely high velocities. These are called Solar Particle Events or Solar Proton Events (SPEs).

However, the exact timing of these events can be difficult to ascertain. New research has determined the date of one of the most powerful SPEs to strike Earth during the Holocene.

No one alive today has witnessed the Sun’s extreme power. But ancient people did. In the last 14,500 years, there have been several solar storms and SPEs powerful enough to damage living things and create aurorae at middle latitudes, even at the equator. Understanding the timing of these ancient events is a key part of understanding the Sun.

Powerful outbursts from the Sun are becoming a more significant threat as we expand our presence in space. They can damage satellites and pose a radiation threat to astronauts. Even the Earth’s surface isn’t safe from the most powerful SPEs which can knock out technological infrastructure like power grids and communications networks.

“If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Irina Panyushkina, University of Arizona

The Sun’s most powerful outbursts seem to occur during solar maximum, the period of greatest activity during the Sun’s 11-year cycle. But there’s some uncertainty, and since SPEs can be so damaging, there’s a need to understand them better, beginning with their timing.

Only six SPEs have left their mark on Earth in about the last 14,500 years. Historical accounts can open a window into the timing of ancient SPEs, but they’re plagued by inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Fortunately, these natural events leave a trace in the natural world.

These solar outbursts create what are called Miyaki Events after the Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake. Miyake discovered that they create a sharp rise in cosmogenic isotopes due to increased cosmic rays striking Earth’s upper atmosphere. The events create carbon-14 (14C), a radioactive isotope that is present in tree rings. The events also create other isotopes like Beryllium-10 (10Be)and Chlorine-36 (36Cl) that are present in ice cores.

In new research published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers pinpointed the timing of the last SPE to strike Earth. It’s titled “The timing of the ca-660 BCE Miyake solar-proton event constrained to between 664 and 663 BCE.” The lead author is Irina Panyushkina from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research.

There have been several Miyake events depending on how they’re defined.

“Thanks to radiocarbon in tree-rings, we now know that six Miyake events happened over the last 14,500 years,” Panyushkina said. “If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Carbon-14 continuously forms in Earth’s atmosphere because of cosmic radiation. In the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to form CO2. “After a few months, carbon-14 will have traveled from the stratosphere to the lower atmosphere, where it is taken up by trees and becomes part of the wood as they grow,” said lead author Panyushkina.

During a Miyake event, the amount of carbon-14 spikes, and that spike is reflected in tree rings. There have been several of these events, depending on how they’re defined, and several more awaiting more rigorous confirmation. There rate of occurrence is poorly understood, but the data we have shows that they occur every 400 to 2400 years. One of them occurred around 660 BCE, and that event is the subject of much research.

“The precise positioning of a SPE in real time is extremely important for the parameterization of solar activity and forecasts,” the authors write in their research. “Notably, one of the recently confirmed SPE events does not have an exact calendar date. Multiple radionuclide evidence of an extreme SPE (or ME) event ca. 2610 BP (before 1950) more commonly referenced as ca. 660 BCE, was confirmed with high-resolution 10BE records of three ice cores from Greenland in 2019.”

The circa 660 Miyake event is different from the others. “However, the ca. 660 BCE ME has an unusual structure that is different from the short-term rapid increases in radionuclide production observed at 774–775 CE and 993–994 CE. One proposed explanation is the possible occurrence of consecutive SEPs over up to three years,” the authors explain in their research. If Miyake events can occur in such rapid succession, we need to know about it, for obvious reasons.

In this new research, the team analyzed tree rings for 14C content to generate an accurate date for the ca-660 BCE Miyake event. They focused on larch trees in arctic-alpine biomes, one in the Altai mountains and the other in the Yamal Peninsula. In these regions, larch trees are more sensitive to atmospheric changes and have clearer 14C spikes.

This figure from the research explains some of the research into the ca. 660 BCE Miyake event. a) shows variations of Carbon-14 concentrations measured in tree rings, and b) shows the locations of the samples. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

Panyushkina and her co-researchers examined tree rings from ancient samples, including trees buried in mud and sediment and timbers excavated during archaeological digs and measured the Carbon-14 content. Next, they correlated their findings with other research into Beryllium-10 found in ice sheets and glaciers. Beryllium-10 is also created during Miyake events. It isn’t absorbed by trees, but is deposited in ice.

“If ice cores from both the North Pole and South Pole show a spike in the isotope beryllium-10 for a particular year corresponding to increased radiocarbon in tree-rings, we know there was a solar storm,” Panyushkina said.

This sounds like a nice tidy way to determine the dates of Miyake events, but it’s not so easy. Researchers have struggled to find a pattern. Tree rings are clearly marked by growing seasons, but ice cores are not. There’s also a lag time between the creation of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere and its presence in trees, and in ice. Different trees also absorb the carbon at different times and rates, and they also store and recycle the carbon, which can influence how they serve as recorders of atmospheric CO2. These and other challenges mean that conclusions don’t jump out of the data.

But this research still has value, even if it isn’t the silver bullet when it comes to predicting these powerful solar events. The issue with the 660 BCE event is its complexity. It seems to have several spikes and declines in a short period, suggesting more complex solar behaviour than a simple single-spike storm.

“Our new 14C data defined the two-pulse duration, considerable magnitude, and the precise date of what was previously described as the event ‘around 660 BCE’,” the authors write. “We showed that the double pulse of cosmic radiation during 664—663 BCE produced a nontypical pattern of ME cosmogenic isotope production recorded at multiple locations in northern Eurasia.”

This figure from the study illustrates some of the complexity that makes pinning down the exact date of the circa 660 BCE Miyake event difficult. Different types of trees in different locations have different spikes in Carbon-14. PDF stands for probability distribution function. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

“The impact appears as a 2–3 year rise of Carbon-14 concentrations tailed by a 2–3-year peak (or plateau) before the signal decays,” the authors write. The Carbon-14 production in 664 BCE was 3.5 and 4.8 times greater than the 11-yr average.

What does it all mean?

There’s a lot of complexity. Different trees absorb carbon differently, the stratosphere and troposphere mix differently at different times, and growing seasons can vary significantly. “Finally, the double pulse of the 664–663 BCE ME onset and the prolonged waning of the 14C spike signal implies possible uncertainties complicating the use of this spike signal for single-year dating of archeological timbers and occurrences,” the researchers explain in their conclusion.

However, one thing is clear in all of the data. The Sun has blasted Earth with extreme SPEs in the past that are much more powerful than anything in modern time. “Extreme proton events that are hundreds or thousands of times stronger than those of modern instrumental observations may recur on the timescale of hundreds of years,” the authors write in their conclusion.

Ultimately, the tree rings can shed light on how powerful these solar storms are, but they’re not exact when it comes to dating them.

“Tree-rings give us an idea of the magnitude of these massive storms, but we can’t detect any type of pattern, so it is unlikely we’ll ever be able to predict when such an event is going to happen,” Panyushkina said. “Still, we believe our paper will transform how we search and understand the carbon-14 spike signal of extreme solar proton events in tree rings.”

The post Earth’s Old Trees Keep A Record of Powerful Solar Storms appeared first on Universe Today.

Engineers have found a way to simultaneously mitigate three types of defects in parts produced using a prominent additive manufacturing technique called laser powder bed fusion.

As part of an effort to overcome the long-term energy-storage challenge, engineers have invented a water-soluble chemical additive that improves the performance of a type of electrochemical storage called a bromide aqueous flow battery.

New research has uncovered what may be the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water activity on Mars, revealing the planet may have been habitable at some point in its past.

I decided to go on both Bluesky and Twitter, and leave Twitter only if it goes belly up. In the meantime, I’m at my usual Twitter site ( https://x.com/Evolutionistrue?lang=en), but now have this one, too:

https://bsky.app/profile/evolutionistrue.bsky.social

And my first tweet was my latest post giving two videos of Molly Tuttle. Notice that Hili is still my avatar. If you don’t like Bluesky, just keep following me (if you do) on Twitter.

Two songs from the immensely talented bluegrass picker and singer Molly Tuttle. whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/11/22/t…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-11-22T19:19:01.851Z

Some time ago I watched a video of Molly Tuttle, who plays a wicked bluegrass guitar and banjo, and has a great country voice. I immediately recognized her immense talent (along with that of her friend Billy Strings, with whom she plays here). And tbat talent has now been recognized multiple times. As Wikipedia notes:

In 2017, Tuttle was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award. In 2018 she won the award again, along with being named the Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2023, Tuttle won the Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree and also received a nomination for the all-genre Best New Artist award at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. Also in 2023, Tuttle and Golden Highway won International Bluegrass Music Awards for album Crooked Tree and the title track in the categories of Album of the Year and Song of the Year, respectively, while Tuttle won Female Vocalist of the Year.

But, as they say, without further ado I’ll let you hear two of her songs (along with her able bandmates), both recorded some time ago. Her musicianship is even better now than in these videos, but I think they’ll suffice.

The first is the old John Hartford song made famous by Glenn Campbell in 1968:

And of course this one’s by Neil Young, and appeared on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu.

Earthen channels that span more than 640 kilometres show that pre-Mayan Mesoamericans built large-scale fish-trapping facilities earlier than previously thought

A rock that formed around 4.5 billion years ago on Mars before being blasted into space by a meteor strike and making its way to Earth contains telltale evidence that it was formed in the presence of hot water

Researchers developed an efficient approach for training more reliable reinforcement learning models, focusing on complex tasks that involve variability. This could enable the leverage of reinforcement learning across a wide range of applications.

A novel hydrogen sensor offers a promising solution for real-time hydrogen leak detection, addressing safety concerns in industrial applications. This sensor, made with nano-patterned cupric-oxide (CuO) nanowires (NWs) with voids, can detect hydrogen at extremely low concentrations with high response, recovery speed, and precision, significantly improving previous CuO-based sensors. It has the potential to enable safer and more reliable use of hydrogen in clean energy applications.

A research team has developed a new class of oral peptide therapeutic leads for treating chronic abdominal pain. This groundbreaking innovation offers a safe, non-opioid-based solution for conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), which affect millions of people worldwide.

Earth and Mars are the only two rocky planets in the solar system to have moons. Based on lunar rock samples and computer simulations, we are fairly certain that our Moon is the result of an early collision between Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia. Since we don’t have rock samples from either Martian moon, the origins of Deimos and Phobos are less clear. There are two popular models, but new computer simulations point to a compromise solution.

Observations of Deimos and Phobos show that they resemble small asteroids. This is consistent with the idea that the Martian moons were asteroids captured by Mars in its early history. The problem with this idea is that Mars is a small planet with less gravitational pull than Earth or Venus, which have no captured moons. It would be difficult for Mars to capture even one small asteroid, much less two. And captured moons would tend to have more elliptical orbits, not the circular ones of Deimos and Phobos.

An alternative model argues that the Martian moons are the result of an early collision similar to that of Earth and Theia. In this model, an asteroid or comet with about 3% of the mass of Mars impacted the planet. It would not be large enough to have fragmented Mars, but it would have created a large debris ring out of which the two moons could have formed. This would explain the more circular orbits, but the difficulty is that debris rings would tend to form close to the planet. While Phobos, the larger Martian moon, orbits close to Mars, Deimos does not.

This new model proposes an interesting middle way. Rather than an impact or direct capture, the authors propose a near miss by a large asteroid. If an asteroid passed close enough to Mars, the tidal forces of the planet would rip the asteroid apart to create a string of fragments. Many of those fragments would be captured in elliptical orbits around Mars. As computer simulations show, the orbits would shift over time due to the small gravitational tugs of the Sun and other solar system bodies, eventually causing some of the fragments to collide. This would produce a debris ring similar to that of an impact event, but with a greater distance range, better able to account for both Phobos and Deimos.

While this new model appears to be better than the capture and impact models, the only way to resolve this mystery will be to study samples from the Martian moons themselves. Fortunately, in 2026 the Mars Moons eXploration mission (MMX) will launch. It will explore both moons and gather samples from Phobos. So we should finally understand the origin of these enigmatic companions of the Red Planet.

Reference: Kegerreis, Jacob A., et al. “Origin of Mars’s moons by disruptive partial capture of an asteroid.“ Icarus 425 (2025): 116337.

The post New Supercomputer Simulation Explains How Mars Got Its Moons appeared first on Universe Today.

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Clune (a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University) reprises the familiar idea that the “wokeness” of academia—the explicit aim of turning higher education towards reforming society in a “progressive” way—has largely destroyed academia and reduced its standing in the eyes of the public.  It has done this, he says, by alienating the public via professors making pronouncements outside their area of expertise, something that simply turns off the average Joe or Jill.

The blame for this, says Clune, rests to some degree on academics themselves, but is largely the responsibility of administrators who feel compelled to comment on every issue of the day in the name of their university, creating an “these are our values” atmosphere that chills speech. In other words, they abjure institutional neutrality.

But you can read it yourself by clicking on the screenshots below. I’ll give a couple excerpts to whet your appetite.

The problem: (note the link to articles on the decline in public opinion of higher education, the big price we pay for politicizing academia):

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

Here are the results of several Gallup polls on Americans’ confidence in higher education over only the last eight years. There’s been a big change:

Why faculty have no more credibility than anyone else when it comes to pronouncing on politics:

Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.

The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.

The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.

. . . . Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.

Who’s to blame? Faculty and, mostly, administrators who refuse to accept ideological neutrality of their universities.

It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.

The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.

What do we do?  The answer is clearly that professors should “stick to their last” and administrators should stop making pronouncements on social issues that have nothing to do with the mission of their university.  For it is our concentration on teaching and learning that really commands the respect of the public. When the public loses respect for universities, they stop wanting to attend them, which is a loss for both them and America, and it also turns them into people who, by disliking self-professed “elites,” become populists who vote for authoritarians like Trump (this last bit is my take, not Clune’s).  Here’s a last quote from his article:

If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.

First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.

Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.

I think the second point has been underemphasized. In fact, I haven’t seen it made in arguments about how to fix academics. But a good liberal education turns you on to thinking about what you believe, and above all constantly questioning your beliefs and seeking out further knowledge to buttress or refute them. It is the love of learning, combined with tutelage in how to assess what you learn, that will in the end restore the stature of academia—if it can be restored at all.

When deciding whether to let people await trial at home or in jail, US judges can use a risk score algorithm. But it often makes harsher recommendations than humans do

Reader Chris, knowing of my disdain for podcasts (and perhaps for Jordan Peterson as well), asked me to listen to at least 15 minutes of this long (1½-hour) discussion between Richard Dawkins and Peterson.  All it did was confirm my disdain for Peterson, who seems remarkably self-absorbed and domineering (he doesn’t even let the moderator, Alex O’Connor, get a word in edgewise). And it made me admire Richard even more for his patience in dealing with cranks.

I started listening at 17:23, and that’s where I started the video below. Or you can click on this time marker: (17:23) with the discussion of whether the biblical texts were divinely inspired or did they evolve over time in a secular way?

What bothers me about Peterson is not only his logorrhea, but his unwillingness to answer questions straight, producing a word salad that barely makes sense.

During the 15 minutes I listened (from 17:23 to about 33:00), Dawkins and Peterson discuss whether the Bible was divinely inspired, whether it contains any “truth” at all, and whether the concept of “sacrifice,” which Peterson says is the dominant motif of the Bible (it supposedly progresses from a primitive notion of sacrifice in the Old Testament to Jesus’s marvelous sacrifice made to redeem humanity) come from divine inspiration.

A good example of Peterson’s word salad in this clip is his assertion that truth is unified, and the world of value and world of fact must “coincide in some manner we don’t yet understand.” He gives us a Hobson’s choice: “You either believe that the world of truth is unified or it’s not; either there’s contradiction between value and fact” or there is not.  Peterson adds that he belives that “different sets of values can be brought into unity.”  This to me seems deeply misguided. Values are not the same thing as facts, nor can all different sets of values, which at bottom reflect preferences, can be harmonized.

Peterson repeatedly claims to be asking questions of Richard, but he never really finishes his questions because Peterson is so obsessed with talking nonstop. He is in love with his own thoughts and his own voice.

However, Richard manages to get in one question for Peterson: “Did Jesus die for our sins?”  That is a yes-or-no question, but Peterson waffles, saying that there are “Elements of the [Biblical] text he doesn’t understand:, but the more Peterson studies the bible, the more he understands.  Peterson analogizes the Bible to quantum mechanics, saying that the more you study this mysterious subject, the more you understand.  Richard responds by shutting Peterson down, saying that Biblical texts do not work in the same way as does quantum mechanics, in that quantum mechanics works—it generates predictions that lead to further truths about the world. The Bible, avers Richard, don’t have any credentials because it makes no predictions.

In an attempt to corral Dawkins into Christianity, Peterson says that Dawkins’s claim that he was a “cultural Christian” proves that Dawkins “found something derived from Christianity that he had an affinity with”. “What did Christianity get right,” asks Peterson, “that enabled [Dawkins] to make a statement like that?”  Dawkins responds nothing: his view that he is a “cultural Christian” simply means that he was brought up in Christian culture and knows the Biblical texts. Dawkins adds that doesn’t value Christianity at all.

They then arrive at one moment of agreement: some religions lead to better behavior of their adherents than do others. Both men seem to agree that Islam leads to a worse society than does Christianity. But then Peterson implies that morality is identical with religion, and that you adhere to better religions to get societies with better morality.  I would point out that Steve Pinker, in his big books, explains how religion is really an impediment to the improvement of society, and that you don’t in fact need religion to derive morality. We all know this is true from the morality discussed by secular philosophers like Plato, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Rawls, and Singer. Peterson seems to be a Confused Christian.

Finally, before I gave up in disgust, I watched Richard ask Peterson whether he believed that Jesus was born of a virgin (32:10). Once again Peterson waffles, saying that he isn’t really qualified to comment on elements like this in Bible, but he sees enormous mystical and metaphorical value in the story: “Any culture that doesn’t hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.”  My response is “WTF”? What does he mean by “sacred”? And which societies have died for lack of this sacralization?

What we see here is Peterson arguing that Biblical/spiritual “truth” is no different from scientific truth; in other words, all “ways of knowing” come up with truths of equal status.

One other thing I learned from this video, besides the relief I need no longer pay attention to Peterson, is Richard’s enormous patience in dealing with semi-loons like his opponent.  I wondered why Richard even engaged Peterson, but reader Chris responded this way: “I like Sam Harris’s explanation of old: he and Richard know they can’t change the views of their opponent, but they can influence some of the audience watching it.”

It seems to me, though, that Richard is being a huge masochist by engaging in this effort. Fans of Peterson love his word salad and will not stop worshiping him, and those who are neutral should, if they have any neurons, realize from Peterson’s words alone he is in some way unhinged.

Here: click the video to start where I started, and then listen to about minute 34. And have some antacid at hand!

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