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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.

A US standards agency has issued new guidance saying organisations shouldn’t require users to change their passwords periodically – advice that is backed up by decades of research

Sixth-century Byzantium was a city divided by race hatred so intense that people viciously attacked each other, not only in the streets but also in churches. The inscription on an ancient tablet conveys the raw animus that spawned from color differences: “Bind them! … Destroy them! … Kill them!” The historian Procopius, who witnessed this race antagonism firsthand, called it a “disease of the soul,” and marveled at its irrational intensity:

They fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves … So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place, neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship.1

This hostility sparked multiple violent clashes and riots, culminating in the Nika Riot of 532 CE, the biggest race riot of all time: 30,000 people perished, and the greatest city of antiquity was reduced to smoldering ruins.

But the Nika Riot wasn’t the sort of race riot you might imagine. The race in question was the chariot race. The color division wasn’t between black and white but between blue and green—the colors of the two main chariot-racing teams. The teams’ supporters, who were referred to as the Blue and Green “factions,” proudly wore their team colors, not just in the hippodrome but also around town. To help distinguish themselves, many Blues also sported distinctive mullet hairstyles, like those of 1970’s rock stars. Both Blues and Greens were fiercely loyal to their factions and their colors. The chariots and drivers were a secondary concern; the historian Pliny asserted that if the drivers were to swap colors in the middle of a race, the factions would immediately switch their allegiances accordingly.

The race faction rivalry had existed for a long time before the Nika Riot, yet Procopius writes that it had only become bitter and violent in “comparatively recent times.” So, what caused this trivial division over horse-racing teams to turn so deadly? In short, it was the Byzantine version of “identity politics.”

Modern sociological research helps explain the phenomenon. Decades of studies have demonstrated the dangerous power of the human tribal instinct. Surprisingly, it doesn’t require “primordial” ethnic or tribal distinctions to engage that impulse. Minor differences are often sufficient to elicit acute ingroup-outgroup discrimination. The psychologist Henri Tajfel demonstrated this in a landmark series of studies to determine how minor those differences can be. In each successive study, Tajfel divided test subjects into groups according to increasingly trivial criteria, such as whether they preferred Klee or Kandinsky paintings or underestimated or overestimated the number of dots on a page. The results were as intriguing as they were disturbing: even the most trivial groupings induced discrimination.2, 3

However, the most significant and unexpected discovery was that simply telling subjects that they belonged to a group induced discrimination, even when the grouping was completely random. Upon learning they officially belonged to a group, the subjects reflexively adopted an us-versus-them, zero-sum game attitude toward members of other groups. Many other researchers have conducted related experiments with similar results: a government or an authority (like a researcher) designating group distinctions is, by itself, sufficient to spur contentious group rivalry. When group rewards are at stake, that rivalry is magnified and readily turns malign.

The extent to which authority-defined groups and competition for group benefits can foment nasty factionalism was demonstrated in the famous 1954 Robbers Cave experiment, in which researchers brought boys with identical socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds to a summer camp, dividing them randomly into two official groups. They initially kept the two groups separate and encouraged them to bond through various group activities. The boys, who had not known each other before, developed strong group cohesion and a sense of shared identity. The researchers then pitted the groups against each other in contests for group rewards to see if inter-group hostility would arise. The group antagonism escalated far beyond their expectations. The two groups eventually burned each other’s flags and clothing, trashed each other’s cabins, and collected rocks to hurl at each other. Camp staff had to intervene repeatedly to break up brutal fights. The mounting hostility and risk of violence induced the researchers to abort that phase of the study.4 Other researchers have replicated this experiment: one follow-up study resulted in knife fights, and a researcher was so traumatized he had to be hospitalized for a week.5, 6

How does this apply to the Blues and Greens? As in the Tajfel experiments, the Byzantine race factions had formed a group division based on a trivial distinction—the preference for a color and a horse racing team. However, for many years, the rivalry remained relatively benign. This was likely because the emperors had long played down the factional distinction and maintained a tradition of race neutrality: if they favored a faction, they avoided openly showing it. But that tradition ended a few years before the Nika Riot when emperors began openly supporting either one faction or the other. But more importantly, they extended their support outside the hippodrome with official policies that benefited members of their preferred faction. The emperors Marcian, Anastasius, and Justinian adopted official employment preferences, allocating positions to members of their favored faction and blocking the other faction from coveted jobs. To cast it in modern terms, they began a program of “race-based” affirmative action and identity politics.7, 8

In nearly all the countries where affirmative action programs have been implemented, they have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive.

Official recognition of the group distinction enhanced the us-versus-them sense of difference between the factions, and the affirmative action scheme turned this sense of difference into bitter antagonism, which eventually exploded in violence. Procopius, our primary contemporary source, placed the blame for the mounting antagonism and the riots squarely on Justinian’s program of identity politics. It had not only promoted an us-versus-them mindset in the factions, it also incited vicious enmity between them, turning a trivial color preference and sporting rivalry into a deadly “race war.”

Considering how identity politics could elicit violence from randomly assembled groups like the Blues and Greens, it is easy to imagine how disastrous identity politics can be when applied to groups that already have some long-standing, historic sense of difference. Indeed, there have been numerous instances of this in history, most ending tragically. For example, Tutsis and Hutus enjoyed centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence in Rwanda up until Belgian colonialists arrived; when the Belgians issued identity cards distinguishing the two groups and instituted affirmative action, it ossified a formerly porous group distinction and infused it with bitter rivalry, preparing the path to genocide. Likewise, when Yugoslavia instituted its “nationality key” system, with educational and employment quotas for the country’s constituent ethnic groups, it hardened group distinctions, pitting the groups against each other and setting the stage for genocide in the Balkans. And, when the Sri Lankan government opted for identity politics and affirmative action, it spawned violent conflict and genocide that destroyed a once peaceful and prosperous country. This last example—Sri Lanka—is so illustrative of the dangers of identity politics that we’ll examine it in more detail.

Sri Lanka: How Identity Politics Destroyed Paradise

She is a fabulous isle just south of India’s teeming shore, land of paradise … with a proud and democratic people … Her flag is the flag of freedom, her citizens are dedicated to the preservation of that freedom … Her school system is as progressive as it is democratic. —1954 TWA TOURIST VIDEO

Sri Lanka is an island off India’s southeast coast blessed with copious amounts of arable land and natural resources. It has an ethnically diverse population, with the two main groups being Sinhalese (75 percent) and Tamils (15 percent). Before Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948, there was a long history of harmony between these groups. That history goes back at least to the fourteenth century when the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta observed how the different groups “show respect” for each other and “harbor no suspicions.” On the eve of Sri Lanka’s independence, a British governor lauded the “large measure of fellowship and understanding” that prevailed, and a British soldiers’ guide noted that “there are no historic antagonisms to overcome.” With quiescent communal relations, abundant natural resources, and one of the highest literacy rates in the developing world, newly independent Sri Lanka was poised to flourish and prosper. Nobody doubted it would outperform countries like South Korea and Singapore, with the British governor dubbing it “the best bet in Asia.”

It turned out to be a very poor bet. A few years after Sri Lanka’s independence, violent communal conflict erupted, culminating in a protracted civil war and genocide. By the time it ended, over a million people had been displaced or killed. Sri Lanka’s per capita GDP, which was on par with South Korea’s in 1960, was only one-tenth of it by 2009. As in sixth-century Byzantium, identity politics precipitated the calamity.

Turning a Disparity into a Disaster

At the end of British colonial rule in Sri Lanka, there was significant educational and income disparity between Sinhalese and Tamils. This arose by happenstance rather than because of discriminatory policy. The island’s north, where Tamils predominate, is arid and poor in resources. Because of this, the Tamils devoted their productive energy toward developing human capital, focusing on education and cultivating professional skills. This focus was abetted by American missionaries, who set up schools in the north, providing top-notch English-language education, particularly in math and the physical sciences. As a result, Tamils accounted for an outsized proportion of the better-educated people on the island, particularly in higher-paying fields like engineering and medicine.

Because of the Tamils’ superior education, the British colonial administration hired them disproportionately compared to the Sinhalese. In 1948, for example, Tamils accounted for 40 percent of the clerical workers employed by the colonial government, greatly outstripping their 15 percent share of the overall population. This unequal outcome had nothing to do with overt discrimination against the Sinhalese; it merely reflected the different levels and types of education achieved by the different ethnic groups.

When Sri Lanka gained independence, it passed a constitution that prohibited discrimination based on ethnicity. But a few years after that, an opportunist politician, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, figured he could advance his career by cynically appealing to identity politics, stoking Sinhalese envy over the Tamils’ over-representation in higher education and government. He launched a divisive campaign to eliminate the disparity, which spurred the majority Sinhalese to elect him. After his election in 1956, Bandaranaike passed a law that changed the official language from English to Sinhala and consigned students to separate Tamil and Sinhalese education “streams” rather than having them all learn English. As one Sinhalese journalist wrote, this divided Sri Lanka, depriving it of its “link language”:

That began a great divide that has widened over the years. Children now go to segregated schools or study in separate streams in the same school. They don’t get to know other people of their own age group unless they meet them outside.

Beyond eliminating Sri Lanka’s common “link language,” this law also functioned as a de facto affirmative action program for Sinhalese. Tamils, who spoke Tamil at home and received their higher education in English, could not gain Sinhala proficiency quickly enough to meet the government’s requirement. So, many of them lost their jobs to Sinhalese. For example, the percentage of Tamils employed in government administrative services dropped dramatically: from 30 percent in 1956 to five percent in 1970; the percentage in the armed forces dropped from 40 percent to one percent.

As has happened in many other countries, Sri Lanka’s identity politics went hand-in-hand with expanded government. Sinhalese politicians made it clear: government would be the tool to redress perceived ethnic disparities. It would allocate more jobs and resources, and that allocation would be based on ethnicity. As one historian writes: “a growing perception of the state as bestowing public goods selectively began to emerge, challenging previous views and breeding mistrust between ethnic communities.” Tamils responded to this by launching a non-violent resistance campaign. With ethnic dividing lines now clearly drawn, mobs of Sinhalese staged anti-Tamil counter-demonstrations and then riots in which hundreds—mostly Tamils—were killed. The us-versus-them mentality was setting in.

Bandaranaike was eventually assassinated by radicals within his own movement. But his widow, Sirimavo, who was subsequently elected prime minister, resolved to maintain his top priorities—expansive government and identity politics. She nationalized numerous industries and launched development projects that were directed by ethnic and political considerations rather than actual need. She also removed the constitutional ban on ethnic discrimination so that she could aggressively expand affirmative action. The existing policies had already cost so many Tamils their jobs that they were now under-represented in government. However, they remained over-represented in higher education, particularly in the sciences, a disparity that Sirimavo and her political allies resolved to eliminate. In a scheme that American universities like Harvard would later emulate, the Sri Lankan universities began to reject high-scoring Tamil applicants in favor of manifestly less-qualified Sinhalese with vastly lower test scores.

Just like Justinian’s “race” preferences, the Sri Lankan affirmative action program exacerbated us-versus-them attitudes, deepening the group divide and spurring enmity between groups. As one Sri Lankan observed:

Identity was never a question for thousands of years. But now, here, for some reason, it is different … Friends that I grew up with, [messed around] with, got drunk with, now see an essential difference between us just for the fact of their ethnic identity. And there are no obvious differences at all, no matter what they say. I point to pictures in the newspapers and ask them to tell me who is Sinhalese and who is Tamil, and they simply can’t tell the difference. This identity is a fiction, I tell you, but a deadly one.9

The lessons of the various affirmative action programs in Sri Lanka were clear to everyone: individuals’ access to education and government employment would be determined by ethnic group membership rather than individual merit, and political power would determine how much each group got. If you wanted your share, you needed to mobilize as a group and acquire and maintain political power at any cost. The divisive effects of these lessons would be catastrophic.

The realization that they would forever be at the mercy of an ethnic spoils system, along with the violent attacks perpetrated against them, induced the Tamils to form resistance organizations—most notably, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE attacked both Sri Lankan government forces and individual Sinhalese, initiating a deadly spiral of attacks and reprisals by both sides committing the sort of atrocities that are tragically common in ethnic conflicts: burning people alive, torture, mass killings, and so on. Over the following decades, the conflict continued to fester, periodically escalating into outright civil war. Ultimately, over a million people would be killed or displaced.

The timeline of the Sri Lankan conflict establishes how communal violence originated from identity politics rather than the underlying income and occupational disparity between the groups. That disparity reached its apex at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, there was no communal violence at that point or during the next half-century. It was only after the introduction of affirmative action programs that ethnic violence erupted. The deadliest attacks on Tamils occurred an entire decade after those programs had enabled Sinhalese to surpass Tamils in both income and education. As Thomas Sowell observed: “It was not the disparities which led to intergroup violence but the politicizing of those disparities and the promotion of group identity politics.”10

Consequences of Identity Politics in Sri Lanka and Beyond

Sri Lanka’s experience highlights some underappreciated consequences of identity politics. Most notably, one would expect that affirmative action programs would have warmed the feelings of the Sinhalese toward the Tamils. After all, they were receiving preferences for jobs and education at the Tamils’ expense. Yet, precisely the opposite happened: as the affirmative action programs were implemented, Sinhalese animus toward the Tamils progressively worsened. This pattern has been repeated in nearly all the countries where affirmative action has been implemented: affirmative action programs have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive. That group tends to justify the indefinite continuation of these benefits by claiming that the other group continues to enjoy “privilege”—or by demonizing them and claiming that they are “systemically” advantaged. Thus, the beneficiaries of affirmative action are often the ones to initiate hostilities. In Rwanda, for example, it was Hutu affirmative action beneficiaries who perpetrated the violence, not Tutsis. The situation in Sri Lanka was analogous, with Sinhalese instigating all of the initial riots and pogroms against the Tamils.

One knock-on effect of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately benefited some of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country. The government enacted several affirmative action schemes, each increasingly contrived to benefit well-heeled Sinhalese. The last of these implemented a regional quota system that was devised so that aristocratic Sinhalese living in the Kandy region would compete for spots against poor, undereducated Tamil farm workers. As one Tamil who lost his spot in engineering wrote: “They effectively claimed that the son of a Sinhalese minister in an elite Colombo school was disadvantaged vis-à-vis a Tamil tea plucker’s son.” This follows the pattern of many other affirmative action programs around the world: the greatest beneficiaries are typically the most politically connected (and privileged) individuals within the group receiving affirmative action. They are often wealthier and more privileged than many of the individuals against whom affirmative action is directed. This has been well documented in India, which has extensive data on the subgroups that benefit from its affirmative action programs.

One unexpected consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was rampant corruption. When Sri Lanka became independent, its government was widely deemed one of the least corrupt in the developing world. However, as affirmative action programs were implemented and expanded, corruption increased in lockstep. The adoption of affirmative action set a paradigm that pervaded the government: whoever held power could steer government resources to whomever they deemed “underserved.” A baleful side effect of ethnicity-based distortion of government policy is that it undermines and erodes more general standards of government integrity and transparency, legitimating a paradigm of corruption: if it is acceptable to direct policy for the benefit of an ethnic group, is it not also acceptable to do so for the benefit of a clan or an individual? It is a small step to go from one to the other, a step that many Sri Lankan leaders and bureaucrats took. Today, Sri Lanka’s government, which once rivaled European governments in transparency, remains highly corrupt. This pattern has been repeated in other countries. For example, after the Federation of Malaysia expelled Singapore, it adopted an extensive affirmative action program, whereas Singapore prohibited ethnic preferences. Malaysia subsequently experienced proliferating corruption, whereas Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world today.

Perhaps the most profound consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately made everybody in the country worse off. After World War II, per capita income in Sri Lanka and Singapore was nearly identical. But after it abandoned its shared “link language” and adopted ethnically divisive policies, Sri Lanka was plagued by violent conflict and economic underperformance; today, one Singaporean earns more than seven Sri Lankans put together. All the group preferences devised to elevate Sinhalese brought down everyone in the country—Tamil, Sinhalese, and all the other groups alike. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s “founding father,” attributed that failure to Sri Lanka’s divisive policies, saying that if Singapore had implemented similar policies, “we would have perished politically and economically.” There are echoes of this in other countries that have implemented identity politics. When I visited Rwanda, I asked Rwandans of various backgrounds whether they thought distinguishing people by race or ethnicity ever helped anyone in their country. There was complete unanimity on this point: after they got over pondering why anyone would ask such a naïve question, they made it very clear that distinguishing people by group made everyone, whether Hutu or Tutsi, distinctly worse off. In the Balkans, I got similar answers from Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, and Kosovars.

The Perilous Path of Identity Politics

Decades of sociological research and millennia of history have demonstrated that the tribal instinct is both powerful and hardwired into human behavior. As political scientist Harold Isaacs writes:

If anything emerges plainly from our long look at the nature and functioning of basic group identity, it is the fact that the we-they syndrome is built in. It does not merely distinguish, it divides … the normal responses run from … indifference to depreciation, to contempt, to victimization, and, not at all seldom, to slaughter.11

The history of Byzantium and Sri Lanka demonstrates that this tribal instinct is extremely easy to provoke. All it takes is official recognition of group distinctions and some group preferences to balkanize people into bitterly antagonistic groups, and the consequences are potentially dire. Even if a society that is balkanized in this way avoids violent conflict, it is still likely to be plagued by all the concomitants of social fractionalization: higher corruption, lower social trust, and abysmal economic performance.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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It is therefore troubling to see the U.S. government and institutions adopt Sri Lankan-style policies that emphasize group distinctions. Echoing Sri Lanka’s separate language “streams,” many American universities now have ethnically segregated orientation and graduation ceremonies. Some offer “theme houses”—dormitories segregated by ethnicity. An Illinois public high school offers separate mathematics classes for Black and Latino students. As the U.S. continues down the perilous path of identity politics, it is unlikely to devolve into another Bosnia or Sri Lanka overnight. But the example of Sri Lanka is a dire warning: a country that was once renowned for its communal harmony quickly descended into violence and economic failure—all because it sought to redress group disparities with identity politics.

Surveys and statistics are now flashing warning signs in the United States. A Gallup poll found that while 70 percent of Black Americans believed that race relations in the United States were either good or very good in 2001, only 33 percent did in 2021.12 Other statistics have shown that hate crimes have been on the rise over that time.13 In the last year, we have also seen the spectacle of angry anti-Israel protesters hammering on the doors of a college hall, terrorizing the Jewish students locked inside, and a Stanford professor telling Jewish students to stand in the corner of a classroom. While identity politics have increasingly directed public policy and institutions, ethnic relations have deteriorated rapidly. This—and a lot of history—suggest it’s time for a different approach.

About the Author

Jens Kurt Heycke was educated in Economics and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Princeton University. He worked as an early employee or executive in several successful technology startups. Since retiring from tech, he has worked as a writer and researcher, conducting field research in more than forty countries, from Bosnia to Botswana. He is the author of Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future.

References

1. Procopius (1914). History of The Wars, Books I and II, trans. H. B. Dewing. Macmillan.
2. https://bit.ly/49BIyJN
3. https://bit.ly/3OVJ8tp
4. Sherif, M. (1961). The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. University of Oklahoma Press.
5. Diab, L. N. (1970). A study of intragroup and intergroup relations among experimentally produced small groups. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 82(1), 49–82.
6. Rabbie, J. M. (1982). The Effects of Intergroup Competition and Cooperation on Intragroup and Intergroup Relations. In Cooperation and Helping Behavior (pp. 123–149). Academic Press.
7. Malalas, J., Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M., & Scott, R. (1986). The Chronicle of John Malalas: A Translation. Australian Association for Byzantine Studies.
8. Procopius (1927). Secret History, trans. Richard Atwater. Pascal Covici, Inc.
9. McGowan, W. (1993). Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka. Pan Books.
10. Sowell, T. (2004). Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. Yale University Press.
11. Isaacs, H. (1975). Idols of the Tribe. Harper & Row.
12. https://bit.ly/3Td5l8W
13. https://bit.ly/3IgvNZ3

I’ve often stated that planets come in a wide range of sizes but rarely do I find myself stating they come in a wide range of shapes too! The discovery of WASP-107b is a case  in point since this planet is the size of Jupiter but only a tenth of its mass. But there’s more… Using the James Webb Space Telescope a team of astronomers have accurately identified that the planet has an east-west asymmetry in its atmosphere, in other words, it’s lopsided. It is tidally locked to the star and on one side, the atmosphere seems to be inflated compared to the other. 

Planets orbiting other stars are known as exoplanets. WASP-107b is one such planet in orbit about a star 200 light years away in the constellation of Virgo. The first exoplanet detection was confirmed in 1992 and since then over 5,000 alien planets have been identified. A multitude of different techniques are used to hunt them down from searching for dips in light from distant stars to analysing the spectra of a star. A wide variety of planet systems have been found from Earth-like possibly habitable planets to great big gas giants like Jupiter. With the new generation of space telescopes like the JWST it is now possible to study the atmosphere of exoplanets to learn even more about them.

Artist impression of the James Webb Space Telescope

A team of astronomers from the University of Arizona have been using the JWST with an international group of researchers to study WASP-107b. They discovered the east-west asymmetry of the planet as it passed in front of its host star just like the Moon does during a solar eclipse. 

The shape of the planet is an atmospheric phenomenon but of course when it comes to gas giants like Jupiter that’s pretty much referring to the planet itself. It’s not just a physical asymmetry though as there are temperature and cloud property differences between the eastern and western hemisphere. It’s now important to explore the asymmetry observed to learn more about the dynamics of the planet and whether it’s a unique phenomenon. 

“Icy and Rocky Worlds” is a new exoplanet infographic by Slovak artist and space enthusiast Martin Vargic. It’s available as a wall poster at his website. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic

One element of the planet which is cause for investigation and likely cause is that it’s tidally locked to the star. The force of gravity from the star and the force of gravity on the planet have acted upon each other to lock one face of the planet to the star. This means one hemisphere is constantly illuminated and warmed by the star while the other hemisphere is permanently night! Tidal locking is not unique to WASP-107b though so if this is the cause then the asymmetry should be common. 

To make their finding, the team used a technique known as transmission spectroscopy. In this technique, observations are made of the starlight as it passes through the atmosphere of the planet during transit events. As the light passes through atmospheric gasses, the presence of different gasses interacts with the light in different ways that can be seen during spectral analyses. 

What does make WASP-107b unique is low gravity and low density giving rise an atmosphere that is somewhat over-inflated compared to other alien worlds of this mass. This is the first time such an asymmetry has been seen so it will be interesting to see how unique this fascinating world really is. 

Source : Astronomers catch a glimpse of a uniquely inflated and asymmetric exoplanet

The post Astronomers Find a Strange Lopsided Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

A few kindly readers sent in some photos, so we’re good for a few days. One such reader was ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis, who sent in bird photos with a cute title (see the asterisk at bottom):

Return of the Drinking Gang*

In the warmth of mid-September, a wave of southbound songbirds stopped off at the little artificial stream in our back yard.  These migrants wore their less-than-splendid, nonbreeding plumage; some of them were probably youngsters on their first flight south.   The sound of tinkling water drew them in, and the foraging opportunities in the overhanging elderberry bush helped keep them around for a few days.  Most of them posed on either the same curved branch or the same pointed rock, glancing about for predators before dashing down to the precious water.

Nashville Warbler (Leiothlypis ruficapilla):

Wilson’s Warbler (Cardellina pusilla):

Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia):

Black-throated Gray Warbler (Setophaga nigrescens):

Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana):

Western Flycatcher (Empidonax difficilis) – this photo is from April, since the one that visited in September was too fast for me:

Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax trailii)  This photo is from the nearby creek;  I added it to illustrate why the Western Flycatcher has “difficilis” in its name (they are two of the multiple co-occurring species in the genus Empidonax):

Resident, nonmigratory songbirds were quite thirsty at this time of year as well.

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

Nuttall’s Woodpecker (Dryobates nuttalli):

Black Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans):

California Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma californica):

*The title is a repeated tribute to the Breakfast Crew series by Doug Hayes