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Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues.

This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. He lives in New York. His new book is On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.

Shermer and Kirsch discuss:

• Settler ideology
• Settler colonialism
• Colonialism
• Decolonization
• “The colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” —Patrick Wolfe
• Wolfe: “logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.”
• Genocide and “necropolitical transfer”
• Kirsch: “If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believe the past was better than the future.”

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

The Kiffness is the screen name of David Scott, a South African famous for his cat videos accompanied by original music.  Wikipedia says that his videos are mostly political, criticizing the government, but of course we know him as The Cat Composer. Here are his top ten “cat jams”, courtesy of reader Divy. She likes #2, but my favorite is #7. the “num num” song.

Wikipedia adds this:

In September 2024, Scott produced a video satirising a claim made by the American Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Trump-Harris presidential debate. Trump repeated unverified reports that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs kept as pets by members of the local community. The claim was subsequently denied by the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, and widely ridiculed in the media. Scott’s video, “Eating the Cats”, has since gone viral on social media.

And here’s that video, which is awesome. Its proceeds go to the SPCA in Springfield, Ohio, where the cat rumor started:

 

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Can you find 20 cats in this picture? I found nineteen. Click to enlarge:

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Finally, the NYT has a good cat story (click on screenshot below, or find it archived here), reporting that a two-year-old Siamese cat, who escaped on a family visit to Yellowstone National Park, has made its way home after an 800-mile journey:

When a cat dashed into the woods of Yellowstone National Park during a camping trip in June, his California owners, Benny and Susanne Anguiano, thought they’d never see him again.

The couple searched for five days through the woods near their campground at Fishing Bridge R.V. Park but never found their 2-year-old male Siamese cat, Rayne Beau, pronounced “rainbow.” Mrs. Anguiano said that Rayne Beau’s sister, Starr, started to meow through the screen door of the trailer. Eventually, when the couple made the tough decision to drive home to Salinas, Calif., Starr, who had never been away from her brother, meowed all the way back.

“Leaving him was unthinkable,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “I felt like I was abandoning him.”

But almost two months later, Rayne Beau was found wandering the streets of Roseville, Calif., three hours north of where the Anguianos live and more than 800 miles away from Yellowstone National Park, as first reported by the news station KSBW.

When a worker from a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals notified the couple that rescuers had identified Rayne Beau from his microchip, Mr. Anguiano said they were shocked that the cat had made it back to California.

. . . . When a cat dashed into the woods of Yellowstone National Park during a camping trip in June, his California owners, Benny and Susanne Anguiano, thought they’d never see him again.

The couple searched for five days through the woods near their campground at Fishing Bridge R.V. Park but never found their 2-year-old male Siamese cat, Rayne Beau, pronounced “rainbow.” Mrs. Anguiano said that Rayne Beau’s sister, Starr, started to meow through the screen door of the trailer. Eventually, when the couple made the tough decision to drive home to Salinas, Calif., Starr, who had never been away from her brother, meowed all the way back.

“Leaving him was unthinkable,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “I felt like I was abandoning him.”

But almost two months later, Rayne Beau was found wandering the streets of Roseville, Calif., three hours north of where the Anguianos live and more than 800 miles away from Yellowstone National Park, as first reported by the news station KSBW.

When a worker from a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals notified the couple that rescuers had identified Rayne Beau from his microchip, Mr. Anguiano said they were shocked that the cat had made it back to California.

. . . Both Mr. and Mrs. Anguiano believe at some point that their cat had hitched a ride or was picked up by a driver heading toward California for part of his journey, but they do not know for sure. The couple is hoping that someone who might recognize their cat could help explain how he made it back.

“The fact that he was in California and just three hours north of us — I think that proves more that Rayne Beau was the one trying to get towards his home,” Mrs. Anguiano said.

While not common, it’s not the first time a pet has inexplicably traveled hundreds of miles to return home. The distance from their campsite in Yellowstone National Park to Roseville, Calif., where Rayne Beau was found, is more than 800 miles, and a journey would have taken him through four states in mountainous and desertlike conditions.

When the couple reunited with him, they said that Rayne Beau had lost 40 percent of his body weight. He was restless in his carrier, but once they released him in the car he calmed down.

“He just looked at me, and then he put his head down and just fell fast asleep,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “He was so exhausted.”

Here’s an AP video of the rescued moggie:

h/t: Divy, Ginger K.

Today we have part 2 of Chris Taylor’s journey to Queensland (part 1 is here). His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In this part I will show some of the wild life around the reserve at Yourka.

Yourka is a Bush Heritage Australia reserve in the Einasleigh Uplands bioregion in Far North Queensland, not far from Cairns. Its 43,500 Ha covers the region from the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Site in the east down to the Herbert River valley in the west, and protects a range of habitats. There are a number of endangered species on the reserve, including a population of Mareeba Rock Wallaby.

We took the bus up to Atherton, where we were met by reserve staff who drove us the rest of the way to the reserve, where we arrived in the lovely tropical twilight:

There had been a quite intense and long-lasting Wet Season this year, and so the billabong on Sunday Creek, just 100m from the accommodation, had plenty of water in it.

I went for a walk around the billabong. With plenty of water, there were also plenty of birds

A Great Egret, White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae, and a Royal Spoonbill, Platalea regia, hunted in the water among the waterlilies:

Further around was a White Ibis, Threskiornis molucca, next to another Heron:

A Great Egret, Ardea alba, was feeding amongst the waterlilies in the shallows. This is quite a big bird, standing up to 1m tall:

One of the Royal Spoonbills took off and landed in a Eucalypt tree:

I tried to get a photo of the bird’s remarkable beak. The bird stirs up the bottom of the pond and then swings the broad end of the bill through the water, detecting any arthropod or fish prey which it will then capture and swallow:

A Forest Kingfisher, Todiramphus macleayii, was diving from a tree branch to take small fish from the water. This photo was taken at Innisfail, not at Yourka, but I just wanted to show the glossy blue plumage of this bird!:

There was plenty to see around the Blue Waterlilies Nymphaea gigantea:

Many dragonflies were active.  This is an unidentified species, probably a female:

This is the male of the Blue Skimmer, Orthetrum caledonicum:

Mosquito larvae die after consuming hemp leaves because they react strongly to the cannabidiol in the foliage. The discovery might lead to the development of a new pesticide to control mosquito numbers

Scientists combined innovative drone technology and boat-based surveys to map out the complex tidal flows encountered by the world's most powerful tidal turbine -- Orbital Marine Power's O2, sited in the heart of the Orkney Islands, Scotland (UK). They hope the technique could pave the way for the efficient and sustainable development and deployment of tidal energy.

Researchers have found new information about the strength of the so-called magic neutron number 50 shell closure in the silver isotope chain. The new more detailed information on the properties of the nuclei will contribute crucial information for refining our understanding of nuclear forces. The research improves state-of-the-art theoretical models and thus benefits the global description of the atomic nucleus.

Extremely thin materials consisting of just a few atomic layers promise applications for electronics and quantum technologies. Researchers have now made remarkable progress with a new experiment: The experts were able to induce an extremely fast switching process between electrically neutral and charged luminescent particles in an ultra-thin, effectively two-dimensional material. The result opens up new perspectives for research as well as for optical data processing and flexible detectors.

As power grids rely more on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, balancing energy supply and demand becomes more challenging. A new analysis shows how water systems, such as desalination plants and wastewater treatment facilities, could help enhance grid stability and create new revenue streams.

The Cosmicflows team has been studying the movements of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of attraction.

Although interactive online platforms, including esports platforms, aim to foster close connections between people, they often fall short of supporting the creation of bonds between the interaction partners. Researchers have discovered that sharing biological signals (biosignals), such as heart rate data, while playing online games can enhance the sense of cooperative play, even among complete strangers.

Asteroid Ryugu possibly did not travel as far from its place of origin to its current near-Earth orbit as previously assumed. New research suggests that Ryugu was formed near Jupiter. Earlier studies had pointed to an origin beyond the orbit of Saturn.

A crater-rich dwarf planet named Ceres located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was long thought to be composed of a materials mixture not dominated by water ice. Researchers at Purdue used data from NASA's Dawn mission to show that Ceres' crust could be over 90 percent ice.

Orbital angular momentum monopoles have been the subject of great theoretical interest as they offer major practical advantages for the emerging field of orbitronics, a potential energy-efficient alternative to traditional electronics. Now, through a combination of robust theory and experiments, their existence has been demonstrated.

Orbital angular momentum monopoles have been the subject of great theoretical interest as they offer major practical advantages for the emerging field of orbitronics, a potential energy-efficient alternative to traditional electronics. Now, through a combination of robust theory and experiments, their existence has been demonstrated.

This article just appeared in Spiked (click headline below to read), but you can see a similar piece in the Times of Israel. The upshot is that the BBC, which has long bridled at using the word “terrorists” for Hamas, is now bridling again when the Beeb itself shows a documentary about the Nova Music Festival. I haven’t seen the film yet (it’s has the great title “We Will Dance Again”), but the trailer is below.  And, of course, the Nova festival is where the butchery of October 7 began. Yes, the butchery was largely by Hamas, and Hamas are, for anyone with two neurons to rub together, TERRORISTS. But not to the Beeb, so the word “terrorist” has been expunged from the film.

It’s not clear whether that bowdlerization was at the request of the BBC, or whether the filmmakers were just cowed by the BBC’s long-standing refusal to apply the “t-word” to Hamas, but either way it’s a blot on the BBC, though the network at least partly redeems itself by showing the film. But really, a film on terrorism that won’t use the “t-word”???

I’ll give excerpts from the Spiked piece below.

An excerpt:

The BBC has reached a new low. It has tumbled further down the well of moral relativism. This week, it will broadcast a new documentary about Hamas’s massacre at the Nova music festival on 7 October last year. But according to the doc’s director, the version the Beeb is showing ‘won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. If this is true, if the BBC can’t even park its weird aversion to calling Hamas terrorists when it is airing a film about Hamas’s butchery of the young at a festival in the desert, then that shames Britain.

We Will Dance Again tells the story of what the pogromists of Hamas did when they happened upon the Nova festival in the Negev desert during their invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023. Combining harrowing testimony from survivors with graphic footage of Hamas’s barbarism, it paints a grim picture of arguably the worst event of the pogrom: 364 people were slaughtered at Nova. Yet according to the director, Yariv Mozer, one thing will be missing from the version us Brits will see: the T-word.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter on ‘what they kept’ and ‘what they cut’ from their disturbing film, Mozer says ‘the version [the BBC will] air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. Hinting at his irritation at this alleged omission, Mozer says ‘it was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities’. Then Brits can decide for themselves, he says, ‘if this is a terrorist organisation or not’. Some of us have already decided, of course. The BBC might be reluctant to call the mass murderers of Jews ‘terrorists’, but others are more than happy to do so.

It is not clear from the interview with Mozer if the BBC explicitly instructed him to take out the word terrorist, or if Mozer and his team pre-empted the Beeb’s odd concern about that word and decided to take it out themselves for an easier life. The Jerusalem Post assumes it’s the former: the BBC ‘told director’ to ‘not describe Hamas as “terrorists”’, it says. Yet even if it’s the latter, even if there are tellers of Israelis’ stories out there who get the vibe that you shouldn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’ if you want to appear on the BBC, then that’s still epically embarrassing for Britain.

If this was self-censorship, it’s understandable. After all, for the past year, ever since Hamas visited its racist terror on Israel, the BBC has been pathologically resistant to calling Hamas ‘terrorists’. Even though that’s what they are. There was a storm in the aftermath of the pogrom over the BBC’s linguistic cowardice. Just four days after the pogrom, Beeb big gun John Simpson offered a thin explanation for the corporation’s dodging of the T-word. ‘We don’t take sides’, he said. ‘We don’t use loaded words like “evil” or “cowardly”. We don’t talk about “terrorists”.’

And yet O’Neill points out how the BBC has no hesitancy about applying the term “terrorist” to “far-right terrorists”! It’s only when the terrorists kill Jews that the Beeb pulls back. (“Terrorism” is commonly used to refer to illegal and deliberate killing or intimidation of civilians in pursuit of political aims, so of course Hamas is a terrorist organization and the Nova festival is an example of terrorism.)

The Time of Israel is a little bit more forthcoming, as its article is called “BBC airs Nova massacre film after insisting references to Hamas as terrorists removed”, and also says this:

“We Will Dance Again,” a full-length documentary film about the Hamas massacre of over 360 people at the Supernova music festival during the terror group’s October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel last year, aired on Britain’s BBC2 on Thursday evening, though only after filmmakers agreed not to refer to Hamas as terrorists.

The word “insisting”, as well as the notion that there was an “agreement”, both imply that the BBC demanded that the word not be used. Well, it doesn’t matter: what matters is the BBC’s craven historical reluctance to use the word “terrorist” to refer to Hamas. Of that O’Neill says this:

One year after 364 young Jews were murdered by anti-Semitic terrorists – yes, terrorists – Britain’s public broadcaster won’t call their killers by their proper name. You couldn’t ask for better proof of how Israelophobia rots the brain and warps the soul.

Does anyone doubt that the BBC has an anti-Semitic slant?

Well, the ToI says a bit about the movie:

Mozer, Zirinsky and others have stressed that the film is apolitical. An opening title of the film notes, “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” adding: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

Nevertheless, similar efforts to tell the story of the attack on the Nova festival have been protested against, including a New York exhibit of personal artifacts from the festival that drew expressions of open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as chants endorsing the attack.

Here is the trailer (there’s also a 32-minute video that includes interviews with the director and producers).

Our immune cells change a lot as the decades progress, which could explain why we become more susceptible to certain conditions

I’m very pleased to report that “Waves in an Impossible Sea“, my book about the universe and its secret role in every aspect of daily life, has been selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of “10 Books to Read Now: Science and Technology”.

The full list and the reviews are behind a paywall, but you can see the titles of the books even before the paywall. The other nine are:

• Supremacy, by Parmy Olson
• Escape from Shadow Physics, by Adam Forrest Kay
• Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, by George Musser
• Count Down, by Sarah Scoles
• Magic Pill, by Johann Hari
• Superconvergence, by Jamie Metzl
• The Afterlife of Data, by Carl Öhman
• Read Dead’s History, by Tore C. Olsson
• Who Wrote This, by Naomi S. Baron

Ten books to keep our minds active and up-to-date! We all have some reading to do…

The Atlantic decided they needed a piece on Richard Dawkins’s “farewell tour”, but they either chose the wrong journalist or asked the author to write a semi hit-piece that made Dawkins look bad. Not completely bad, mind you, for the author does mention a few good things Dawkins has done. But, overall, the piece depicts an aging man who simply needs to fight battles, and now there are no battles to fight.  Once it was creationism, says senior editor Ross Andersen, but now it’s the lesser battle of “fighting wokeness”.

Since Andersen himself shows signs of “progressive” thought in his piece (he defends, for example, the teaching Māori legends as science in New Zealand), he may have an animus against Richard. I don’t know, but I know two things. First, Andersen shows no signs of having read Dawkins’s books or followed his career.  Second, Anderson ends his piece, which describes his opinion of Richard’s recent lecture in Washington D.C., by saying “I was bored.” His pronouncement is distinctly un-journalistic given that Andersen describes a very enthusiastic audience lining up to get books signed, and bespeaks a reviewer more concerned with his own personal reaction than with the effect of Dawkins, his writing, and his Washington discussion on the audience (and on society in general).

Click on the headline below to read it, or, if you can’t, you can find it archived here. Several readers sent me this piece—I suppose expecting to get my reaction. So here it is: the piece stinks.

The dissing starts off in a subtle way with the title (granted, Andersen may not have written it, but the Atlantic approved it). But in the second sentence, Andersen says this:

[Dawkins] has adapted his swaggering Oxbridge eloquence to a variety of media ecosystems.

Anybody who knows or has even heard Richard knows that his eloquence is not “swaggering,” but measured and reserved.  But I’ll leave that aside and pass on. Here, also, in the first paragraph, Andersen describes Dawkins’s first foray into atheism:

In 2006’s The God Delusion, another mega–best seller, Dawkins antagonized the world’s religions.

“Antagonized the world’s religions”?  Well, yes, some believers may have been offended, but what about adding that this book made an eloquent argument against religion, and, in fact (as Andersen says later!), changed people’s lives for the better. That sentence is like saying, “In Mein Kampf, Hitler antagonized the world’s Jews.”  It may be true, but both statements are certainly pejorative and woefully incomplete.

Throughout the piece, Anderson describes how energized, worshipful, and jazzed up the audience was. But of course Anderson was “bored”.  Here is part of his description:

Now, at age 83, Dawkins is saying goodbye to the lecture circuit with a five-country tour that he’s marketing as his “Final Bow.” Earlier this month, I went to see him at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Dawkins has said that when he visits the U.S., he has the most fun in the Bible Belt, but most of his farewell-tour appearances will take place in godless coastal cities. After all, Dawkins has a new book to sell—The Genetic Book of the Dead—and at the Warner, it was selling well. I saw several people holding two or three copies, and one man walking around awkwardly with nine, steadying the whole stack beneath his chin. The line to buy books snaked away from the theater entrance and ran all the way up the stairs. It was longer than the line for the bar.

As for the audience, which was surely diverse:

The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

. . . Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty [JAC: the “warm-up” act], told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition.

Indeed, Dawkins has changed many lives for the better; his books were an important impetus for people not only accepting the scientific truth of evolution, but also grasping the wonder and majesty of both natural selection and evolution—not to mention helping people throw off the constricting chains of religion. (I’m a small fish, but I myself have been told that that Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact have also changed lives.) Given the dominance of creationism in America—37% of Americans still accept Biblical creationism, 34% accept a form of God-guided evolution, while a mere 24% accept naturalistic evolution, making a total of 71% of Americans who think the supernatural played a role in evolution—accepting naturalistic evolution as true is a powerful reason to jettison your faith. And that’s what several people have told me about my first trade book.

More on audience appreciation for what Dawkins has done (attacking wokeness), a description tinged with opprobrium (my bolding):

Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations.

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

Is the discussion of wokeness (mainly how ideology affects science) a problem? And doesn’t the author realize that the interlocutor, economist Steven Levitt, confected the questions without Dawkins’s knowledge of what they’d be? If Levitt wanted to ask Dawkins about wokeness or campus ferment, is that Dawkins’s fault? Besides, the audience wanted to hear a thoughtful person’s take on wokeness, which includes science: not only the biology of sex, but the low value of indigenous “knowledge” (see below).

And that brings us to one of several major misconceptions about Dawkins. Andersen seems to think that, throughout Richard’s life, he was motivated by contentiousness: everything he did was motivated by his need to have an enemy. That enemy was, avers Andersen initially creationism, but now has morphed into wokeness (see “whack-a-mole” above):

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics. Its leaders—Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—worried that public-school students would soon be learning creationism in biology class. But there has since been a realignment in America’s culture wars. Americans still fight over the separation of church and state, but arguments about evolution have almost completely vanished from electoral politics and the broader zeitgeist. With no great crusade against creationism to occupy him, Dawkins’s most visible moments over the past 15 years have been not as a scientist but as a crusader against “wokeness”—even before that was the preferred term.

First, creationism is still with us, and in a big way. I gave the figures above, but Andersen, who’s supposed to know science, doesn’t seem to realize that far more Americans are creationists than are materialistic evolutionists, and more than 7 out of 10 of us think that God played some role in evolution. We have a long way to go.  Further, arguments about evolution aren’t gone, for the Intelligent Design miscreants are still plaguing us. As for electoral politics, evolution never played a prominent role there except once (in 2008, three of the Republican Presidential candidates in a debate raised their hands to show they didn’t accept evolution.) Evolution simply isn’t on the electoral agenda compared to the economy and, right now, immigration. And doesn’t Andersen know that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is a creationist?  Further, many of us worry, and justifiably so, that the Supreme Court, which hasn’t adjudicated the teaching of evolution since 1987, might now revisit the issue and allow creationism to be taught. Given the present composition of the court, that’s entirely possible.

I’ve known Richard for much longer than has Andersen, and I can’t agree with his conclusion that Richard needs an enemy to thrive.  Dawkins started off writing a book expounding how evolution worked (The Selfish Gene), and as far as I remember that book barely mentions creationism, if at all. It was designed not to fight creationists but to enlighten both scientists and readers about how natural selection worked. This was followed by more books explaining evolution (Climbing Mount Improbable. The Extended Phenotype—Richard’s favorite—and my favorite, the Blind Watchmaker) and of course there are several more books explaining evolution.

The fight against creationism, I think, only came later, when Richard saw to his dismay that his views weren’t immediately embraced by the American public (I had the same reaction when I wrote Wby Evolution is True). He saw, correctly, that that opposition came almost exclusively from religion. And so, only in 2009 (three decades after The Selfish Gene) did Richard write an explicitly anticreationist book: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidcence for Evolution. My own parallel is having the same realization about religious opposition to evolution, which led to my writing Faith Versus Fact after WEIT. Richard’s main motivation, as I see it, was not to fight creationism, but to share the wonder of evolution and natural selection that he himself felt. Since The Selfish Gene, he’s written 18 books, only two against religion and creationism; and his most recent books,  Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, and The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, are pure science.

As for Richard’s new “opponent”, wokeness, Andersen has to reach back into Dawkins’s Precambrian Twitter feed, basing this criticdism on just three tweets. He even mentions Elevatorgate, without noting that Richard apologized for that tweet. And as for this one, well, I see nothing wrong with it: it raises a good question for debate first broached by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the journal Hypatia:

Dawkins is raising the question for discussion, though Andersen denigrates this important issue by saying it’s a “just-asking-questions” (JAQ) tweet.  He doesn’t seem to realize that Dawkins was a professor and teacher, and this is very similar to the kind of questions an Oxford don would ask his students to write about.

At any rate, Andersen really shows his own wokeness, and, importantly, his ignorance of what’s going on in New Zealand, when he criticizes Richard’s emphasis on not teaching Māori “ways of knowing” alongside and coequal to modern science in New Zealand. This is an ongoing problem that I’ve written about many times, and one Andersen wrongly dismisses as a non-problem:

The tale of Lysenko is almost fable-like in its moral purity, and Dawkins told it well, but only as a setup for a contemporary controversy that he wished to discuss—an ongoing dispute over school curricula in New Zealand. According to one proposal, students there would learn traditional creation stories and myths alongside standard science lessons, out of deference to the Māori, whose language and culture British settlers had tried earnestly to erase. Dawkins noted that some eminent New Zealand scientists had “stuck their heads above the parapet” to object to this idea with an open letter in 2021, and were “unpleasantly punished” for doing so. He called this mob rule, and expressed concern for the young students. They could end up confused, he said, forced as they would be to reconcile lessons about the “sky father” and “earth mother” with those that concern the Big Bang and evolution.

I suspect that kids can hold those two things in mind. I suspect also that the project of science—no innocent bystander in the treatment of Indigenous people—will be best served if its most prominent voices address themselves to the Māori, and other such groups, in an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation. But even if I am wrong about all that, the specter of Lysenko would seem to have little bearing on a case in which no scientist has been officially punished. Complaints about the open letter did produce an initial investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, as a matter of process, but nothing more.

The errors in these two paragraphs are at least four:

1.) The endeavor to keep modern science free from indigenous superstition was not just in the Listener Letter, but is an ongoing battle between rationalism and superstition.

2.) The battle continues because kids CANNOT hold two different conceptions of science in their mind at once. It is confusing and simply bad pedagogy.

3.) Scientists were officially punished for denying the scientific worth of indigenous knowledge. See this report by the New Zealand Initiative. Not only were professors punished and investigated, but the ubiquity of Māori sacralization in New Zealand has chilled both university teaching and the speech of professors and students.

4.) Andersen’s ignorance is particularly strong when, Tom-Friedman-like, he proposes a melding of Māori “ways of knowing” and science in “an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation.”  That idea has led to the ludicrous notion, for example, that kauri blight (a tree disease) might be cured by rubbing the trees with whale bones and whale oil while saying Māori prayers. That is the imaginative synthesis that’s happening at this moment, and it’s in all the sciences.

The final paragraph is, frankly, offensive to journalists and readers alike:

After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.

Who cares if Andersen was bored? The crowd wasn’t bored and many paid extra for VIP tickets to get their books custom-signed and say a few words to Richard, while others formed a bigger line to get pre-signed books.  All we learn here is that the author feels superior to both Dawkins and the crowd.  I went to Dawkins’s talk here in Chicago, and I wasn’t bored, even at times when I disagreed with what Richard said.  And I’m an evolutionary biologist who’s written a lot about the fracas in New Zealand.  It appears that Mr. Andersen is not just journalistically ham-handed, but also incurious.

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