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Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

Gravitational slingshots are now a common part of space missions where the trajectory of a spacecraft is altered using the gravity of another body. These often bring fabulous opportunities for an extra bit of bonus science such as that demonstrated by ESA’s Hera mission on its way to asteroid Dimorphos. It’s following up on the DART 2022 impact but to get there, it’s used the gravity of Mars. It came within 5,000 km of the red planet and on its way, was able to take a look at Mars’ smaller moon Deimos from its far side.

Supernova explosions are powerful enough to cause mass extinctions if they're close enough. But can we tie supernovae to any of Earth's five mass extinctions? New research shows supernovae could be responsible for the Late Devonian and Late Ordovician mass extinctions.

It’s not so surprising that Auckland University harbors a Māori activist like Eru Kapa-Kingi; what is surprising is that Auckland University has publicized his words and activities, amd they seem proud of them!  For Kapa-Kingi’s goal is apparently to decolonize not just Auckland University (once the best university in New Zealand, now a hotpot of identity politics), but all universities in the country. And he sees academia more as a place to enact activism than to seek the truth.

For Kapa-Kingi already knows the truth, and it’s that universities must be decolonized (I take that to mean that all “Western” influences must be expunged), and they should be run on the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a pact that has nothing to do with academia.  If you read its three provisions, you’ll see this, but the Treaty (“Te Tiriti”) is now being interpreted by the indigenous people as meaning “Māori should get at least half of everything.” (They constitute 17.8% of New Zealanders.)  This drive for inequity is eventually going to wreck New Zealand academics, driving away those who want to study something other than the Treaty of Waitangi—and to keep away academics who ponder studying in New Zealand.

I used to think there was hope for academics (and politics) in this beautiful country, but the fact that the University of Auckland is publicizing Kapa-Kingi in a long puff piece made me realize that universities are committing academic suicide through identity politics. Yes, the whole country has been ideologically captured by the activist tendency to play on the guilt complexes of those descended from Asians and Europeans.

Click below to read the article from the Auckland Uni news site, and if the article disappears you can find it archived here.

Note that the university doesn’t bother to translate most of the Māori language into English. This is its way of virtue signaling, though most Māori (about 79%) do not have a conversational knowledge of their own language. It’s okay to use the language in articles, but the University of Auckland really should translate the Māori terms.

The article’s introduction to Kapa-Kingi:

As the early morning sun cast long shadows over the Far North town of Te Kao, hundreds prepared to embark on a hīkoi that would stretch over nine days, culminating at the steps of Parliament.

Their mission was clear: to challenge the Treaty Principles Bill and uphold the mana of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Leading them was Eru Kapa-Kingi, an emerging leader in te ao Māori. At age 28, the law academic and activist ultimately mobilised one of the largest public demonstrations in New Zealand’s recent history. But for Eru, of Ngāpuhi and Te Aupōuri descent, this was more than political activism – it was an act of whakapapa, a reclamation of identity and duty.

“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity,” he says.

“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.

“Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga [the 1835 declaration of independence], and the kōrero that surrounds them, I’m drawn to it on more than an academic level.”

That journey began in the lecture halls of Victoria University where Eru graduated with a conjoint law and arts (te reo Māori) degree with honours, and later continued at Waipapa Taumata Rau. In 2023 he joined Auckland Law School as a professional teaching fellow, where he designs and teaches compulsory courses on te ao Māori me ōna tikanga (the Māori world and its cultural practices).

Yes, the law school at Auckland has compulsory courses on the Māori world and its culture. Compulsory! Do their laws differ from those of New Zealand? I doubt it. There may be cultural adjudications within the various tribes, but if you want a law degree from Auckland, do you really need to learn about Māori culture? Maybe optional courses, but perhaps in sociology or anthropology rather than the law school. But as we’ve seen, throughout New Zealand each major is developing compulsory courses in indigenous culture. It doesn’t matter if you’re a physics or math major, you’ve going to have to take one of these.

At any rate, I’ll give some quotes from the article uttered by Kapa-Kingi, a well-known activist. The quotes are in italics. I’ll also link to the Māori Dictionary since no translations are given:

“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity. . . . “

“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. [JAC: Tribes from the North Island] I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.” [JAC: “The Māori world”

During a meeting in Parliament, Kapa-Kingi showed people opposed to a pure Treaty-led government that they were not welcome. (He did an intimidating haka performance):

During the Waitangi Day pōwhiri for Parliamentarians, Eru took a stand. As politicians made their entrance, he led a separate haka. He says it was a direct challenge, that sent an unambiguous message: ‘You are not welcome here’. The act was not symbolic; it was a deliberate response to the voices of the hapū within his iwi, Ngāpuhi, who he says made it clear that certain politicians should not attend, following a year of what they felt were attacks on Māori rights and sovereignty.

The “attack on Māori rights and sovereignty” appears to involve favoring the Treaty Principles Bill, a doomed bill that intended to codify what the Treaty of Waitangi really means today. People don’t want the bill because the “progressives” want to interpret the Treaty in ways that consistently favor the indigenous people. (New Zealand has no constitution.) Even the Prime Minister, who at one point pushed the bill, has realized its antiwoke implications and now says it has no chance of passing.

Finally, the dangers to New Zealand academia, my primary concern:

For Eru, academia is not just a career path but an opportunity for transformation. He sees universities as central to the colonial project in Aotearoa and believes they have a responsibility to undo its damage.

“We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting.”

“That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project,” he says.

“And it’s not just an academic topic but a lived reality. It should be a daily practice that all people in Aotearoa contribute to.”

And there you have it. Everybody must decolonize!

As the anonymous correspondent who sent me this article said, “This is not what we thought we were agreeing to when we supported affirmative action to increase the proportion of Māori academics, but it’s what we got. This guy is basically using his university position to further the political interests of Te Pāti Māori.” [JAC: the Māori Party].  “It’s not hard to see why people like this oppose institutional neutrality.”

Institutional neutrality, of course, would prevent universities from making pronouncements favoring indigenous people over everyone else, and also confecting mandatory courses that have the same effect. The progressives don’t want that!

The wind on Saturn's largest moon is strong enough to blow around rocks of up to half a metre in diameter, which could put NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission at risk

Here are some photos from a new contributor, Loretta Michaels. Her IDs and identifications (the binomials are from me) are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These were taken in Oct/Nov 2024 on the Upper Amazon in Peru, as part of a boat trip around the region. If you wanted to add this to my description, I use a Sony DSC-RX10 M4 (a fantastic camera that for some reason Sony has discontinued, much to the disappointment of fans.)

Tropical Kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus):

Plum-Throated Cotinga (Cotinga maynana):

Large-billed tern (Phaetusa simplex):

Black Collared Hawk (Busarellus nigricollis):

Squirrel monkey (Saimiri sp.):

Another Black Collared Hawk:

Harpy Eagle (I think; Harpia harpyja):

Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax):

Great Black Hawk (Buteogallus urubitinga):

Yellow-rumped cacique (Cacicus cela):

 Oriole Blackbird (Gymnomystax mexicanus):

Roadside Hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

A pause from my quantum series to announce a new interview on YouTube, this one on the Blackbird Physics channel, hosted by UMichigan graduate student and experimental particle physicist Ibrahim Chahrour. Unlike my recent interview with Alan Alda, which is for a general audience, this one is geared toward physics undergraduate students and graduate students. A lot of the topics are related to my book, but at a somewhat more advanced level. If you’ve had a first-year university physics class, or have done a lot of reading about the subject, give it a shot! Ibrahim asked great questions, and you may find many of the answers intriguing.

Here’s the list of the topics we covered, with timestamps.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:40 Why did you write “Waves in an Impossible Sea”?
• 03:50 What is mass?
• 09:03 What is Relativistic Mass? Is it a useful concept?
• 17:50 Why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is necessary
• 23:50 Electromagnetic Field, Photons, and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
• 36:17 Particles are ripples in their Fields
• 38:47 Fields with zero-mass particles vs. ones whose particles have mass?
• 46:49 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
• 52:08 What was the motivation/history behind the Higgs field?
• 1:02:05 How the Higgs field works
• 1:05:33 The Higgs field’s “Vacuum Expectation Value”
• 1:12:02 The hierarchy problem
• 1:24:18 The current goals of the Large Hadron Collider

A private moon mission planned for 2027 will be the first step towards commercial lunar mining of rare and expensive helium-3

A recent BBC article reminded me of one of my enduring technology disappointments over the last 40 years – the failure of the educational system to reasonably (let alone fully) leverage multimedia and computer technology to enhance learning. The article is about a symposium in the UK about using AI in the classroom. I am confident there are many ways in which AI can enhance learning efficacy in the classroom, just as I am confident that we collectively will fail to utilize AI anywhere nears its potential. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to shake four decades of consistent disappointment.

What am I referring to? Partly it stems from the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s I had lots of expectations about what future technology would bring. These expectations were born of voraciously reading books, magazines, and articles and watching documentaries about potential future technology, but also from my own user experience. For example, starting in high school I became exposed to computer programs (at first just DOS-based text programs) designed to teach some specific body of knowledge. One program that sticks out walked the user through the nomenclature of chemical reactions. It was a very simple program, but it “gamified” the learning process in a very effective way. By providing immediate feedback, and progressing at the individual pace of the user, the learning curve was extremely steep.

This, I thought to myself, was the future of education. I even wrote my own program in basic designed to teach math skills to elementary schoolers, and tested it on my friend’s kids with good results. It followed the same pattern as the nomenclature program: question-response-feedback. I feel confident that my high school self would be absolutely shocked to learn how little this type of computer-based learning has been incorporated into standard education by 2025.

When my daughters were preschoolers I found every computer game I could that taught colors, letters, numbers, categories, etc., again with good effect. But once they got to school age, the resources were scarce and almost nothing was routinely incorporated into their education. The school’s idea of computer-based learning was taking notes on a laptop. I’m serious. Multimedia was also a joke. The divide between what was possible and what was reality just continued to widen. One of the best aspects of social media, in my opinion, is tutorial videos. You can often find much better learning on YouTube than in a classroom.

I know there are lots of resources out there, and I welcome people to leave examples in the comments, but in my experience none of this is routine, and there is precious little that has been specifically developed to teach the standard curriculum to students in school. I essentially just witnessed my two daughters go through the entire American educational system (my younger daughter is a senior at college). I also experienced it myself in the decades prior to that, and now I experience it as a medical school educator. At no level would I say that we are anywhere close to leveraging the full potential of computers and multi-media learning.  And now it is great that there is a discussion about AI, but why should I feel it will be any different?

To be clear, there have been significant changes, especially at the graduate school level. At Yale over the last 20 years we have transitioned away from giving lectures about topics to giving students access to videos and podcasts, and then following up with workshops. There are also some specific software applications and even simulators that are effective. However, medical school is a trade school designed to teach specific skills. My experience there does not translate to K-12 or even undergraduate education. And even in medical school I feel we are only scratching the surface of the true potential.

What is that potential? Let’s do some thought experiments about what is possible.

First, I think giving live lectures is simply obsolete. People only have about a 20 minute attention span, and the attention of any class is going to vary widely. Also, lecturers have a massive difference in their general lecturing skills and their mastery of any specific topic. Imagine if the entire K-12 core curriculum were accompanied by series of lectures by the best lecturers with high level mastery of the subject material. You can also add production value, like animations and demonstrations. Why have a million teachers replicate that lecture – just give students access to the very best. They can watch it at their own pace, rewind parts they want to hear again, pause when their attention wanes or they need a break. Use class time for discussion and questions.

By the way – this exists – it’s called The Great Courses by the Teaching Company (disclosure – I produced three courses with the Teaching Company). This is geared more toward adult learning with courses generally at a college level. But they show that a single company can mass produce such video lectures, with reasonably high production value.

Some content may work better as audio-only (a Podcast, essentially), which people can listen to when in the car or on the bus, while working out, or engaged in other cognitively-light activity.

Then there are specific skills, like math, reading, many aspects of science, etc. These topics might work best as a video/audio lecture series combined with software designed to gamify the skill and teach it to children at their own pace. Video games are fun and addictive, and they have perfected the technology of progressing the difficulty of the skill of the game at the pace of the user.

What might a typical school day look like with these resources? I imagine that students’ “homework” would consist of watching one or more videos and/or listening to podcasts, followed by a short assessment – a few questions focusing on knowledge they should have gained from watching the video. In addition, students may need to get to a certain level in a learning video game teaching some skill. Perhaps each week they need to progress to the next level. They can do this anytime over the course of a week.

During class time (this will vary by grade level and course) the teachers review the material the students should have already watched. They can review the questions in the assessment, or help students struggling to get to the next level in their training program. All of the assessments and games are online, so the teacher can have access to how every student is doing. Classroom time is also used for physical hands-on projects. There might also be computer time for students to use to get caught up on their computer-based work, with extended hours for students who may lack resources at home.

This kind of approach also helps when we need to close school for whatever reason (snow day, disease outbreak, facility problem, security issue), or when an individual needs to stay home because they are sick. Rather than trying to hold Zoom class (which is massively suboptimal, especially for younger students), students can take the day to consume multi-media lessons and play learning games, while logging proof-of-work for the teachers to review. Students can perhaps schedule individual Zoom time with teachers to go over questions and see if they need help with anything.

The current dominant model of lecture-textbook-homework is simply clunky and obsolete. A fully realized and integrated computer-based multi-media learning experience would be vastly superior. The popularity of YouTube tutorials, podcasts, and video games is evidence of how effective these modalities can be. We also might as well prepare students for a lifetime of learning using these resources. We don’t even really need AI, but targeted use of AI can make the whole experience even better. The same goes for virtual reality – there may be some specific applications where VR has an advantage. And this is just me riffing from my own experience.

The potential here is huge, worth the investment of billions of dollars, and creating a market competition for companies to produce the best products. The education community needs to embrace this enthusiastically, with full knowledge that this will mean reimagining what teachers do day-to-day and that they may need to increase their own skills. The payoff for society, if history is any judge, would be worth the investment.

The post Using AI for Teaching first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Scientists have long sought the particle that carries the force of gravity, but a new theoretical model tosses out that idea entirely – and shows how it could be tested in experiments

The Big Wheel, discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang - surprisingly early for a spiral galaxy of a similar size to our Milky Way

Surveys that ask thousands of people how they spend their time have revealed some surprising activities that seem to make any given day a good one

Even as quacks and antivaxxers take over our federal government's health apparatus, let's not forget why we need stronger, not laxer, regulation of "unconventional" medical practices.

The post Quackery (still) kills: A five-year-old boy dies in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

When Beetlejuice goes off, it's going to be the show of a lifetime. But it’s not going to hurt us.

Despite their overall similarities, asteroids are usually pretty distinct from one another. Vesta has a very different spectroscopic profile than Psyche, for example. So it might come as no surprise that another of the main asteroids - Pallas - is in a class all its own except for the 300 or so members of its "family" with similar orbital profiles and spectroscopic lines. A new paper from researchers who were then Visiting Astronomers at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Haiwi'i took a look at members of that family in the infrared for the first time and compared them to a particular Near-Earth object that might have a similar make-up.

I’ve dissected many crazy papers over the years—just to show what passes for “scholarship” in some of the humanities. Yes, of course there’s good scholarship there, too, but I have a feeling that in STEM you won’t find anything as inconclusive or incoherently written as this paper (h/t: Luana for finding it). And nearly all science papers at least reveal a tentative fact or two about nature. In contrast, many “studies” papers like this one seem like wheel spinning, and are baffling. They seem to be vehicles not for finding knowledge, but getting tenure and promotions. If there is a contribution to human knowledge from this effort, I can’t find it. This one was published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

You can read the paper by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.

I scanned it once and then read it more carefully a second time, and I swear I still can’t figure out what it’s trying to say. Some AI analysis given below didn’t help much.. Not only is the paper’s thesis obscure, but it is written so poorly, and with the use of so many jargon words (“attending to,” “becomings,” “intersectional ecoqueer feminist perspective,” “disrupt normative ideas,” etc), that it would kill George Orwell if he wasn’t already dead.

The paper notes that Dr. Diamond-Lenow “(she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Oneonta,” but on the list of faculty in that department I cannot find her.

Knock yourself out (and you will):

Below is the abstract, and I hope you can get something out of it. All I can remember is that lesbians seem to have a special relationship with dogs (and machines like iPhones), and this tells us something about the “the rich complexity of dyke culture and its processes of continually processing and becoming.” (“Becoming” is a favorite word in the paper, and “dyke” is a word used by Diamond-Lenow). And the author decries the misuse of dogs as tools of racism, white supremacy, and militarism.

Abstract:

This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.

Some dog-dissing from the paper, giving a flavor of its content:

As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).

Historically, dogs have been tools of settler colonialism and enslavement mediating racialized naturecultures (Johnson, Citation 2009, Boisseron, Citation 2018). They are also instrumentalized for racialized securitization in policing, border patrol, and carceral systems—they are in this sense, part of the violent cyborg offspring Haraway discusses. Police have long used dogs to intimidate and attack marginalized communities, as seen in numerous documented incidents: during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; against anti-police violence protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (Wall, Citation 2016); against Indigenous activists opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 (Democracy Now!, Citation 2016); during Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and elsewhere (The Marshall Project, Citation 2020); and most recently, in 2024, against student protests over the genocide in Gaza on college and university campuses (Most, Citation 2024).

Look! Dogs are also vehicles for racial criminalization!

. . . . As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).

And military dogs are tools of sexualized colonization and dehumanization!:

In the military, dogs are used as cyborg weapons, used to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), patrol bases, police detainees, and target enemies. They played key roles in U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 (Bumiller, Citation2011) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 (Rogers, Citation2019). Dogs were also involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004 (Schmitt, Citation2006). These deployments reflect a logic of heteronormative nationalism and sexualized colonization, dehumanizing Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern men within necropolitical formations of war (Diamond-Lenow, Citation2020).

There are lots of neologisms like “natureculture”. But here is the paper’s conclusion:

The article thus contributes a queer trans feminist perspective on human-dog becomings to queer ecological critique, highlighting the significance of lesbian queer feminism in analyzing more-than-human relationalities, particularly with dogs.

For some reason the last three words make me laugh out loud.

At any rate, Luana found a site where you can enter the URL of an article like this one, and it will give you both an AI summary and a podcast. I haven’t tried it, but you can if you wish. At any rate, when she put in the URL of this paper, here’s what AI spit out. I must say that it merely reiterates the paper’s language in a way that a cheating student might copy, but doesn’t shed much further  light on this black hole of scholarship:

1. What is the central focus of this article?

This article centers on the interconnectedness of queer (specifically lesbian, non-binary, and trans) identities, human-animal (primarily canine) relationships, and technology (drawing on cyborg theory) within contexts of both affection and oppression. It aims to analyze how these entanglements contribute to the formation of queer worlds and how they are shaped by and respond to societal structures of power, particularly white supremacy and militarization.

2. How does the article connect queer ecofeminism with cyborg and companion species theories?

The article brings queer and lesbian ecofeminist perspectives into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg (as a hybrid of machine and organism challenging traditional boundaries) and companion species (highlighting the co-evolution and interdependence of humans and domesticated animals). By doing so, it seeks to understand how the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs, in their technologically mediated and ecologically situated contexts, challenge and redefine categories of nature, culture, human, and animal.

3. What are the two main case studies used in the article’s analysis?

The article examines two primary case studies: firstly, the ways in which dogs, including robotic dogs, are utilized and instrumentalized by the state for purposes of racialized and imperial violence. Secondly, it analyzes the everyday intimacies and relational experiences between queer (lesbian, non-binary, and trans) individuals and their dogs, focusing on how these relationships contribute to the articulation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship.

4. How does the article critique the state’s use of dogs and robot dogs?

The article offers a queer lesbian feminist critique of the state’s deployment of dogs and robot dogs, particularly in the context of racialized and imperial violence. It argues that this instrumentalization of canines as tools of militarization and control is intertwined with white supremacist ideologies and inflicts violence not only on targeted human populations but also through and toward the dogs themselves. The critique aims to expose the underlying power structures and ethical implications of such practices.

5. In what ways do dogs contribute to the lives and identities of queer individuals, according to the article?

The article suggests that dogs play a significant role in the lives of lesbian, non-binary, and trans individuals, contributing to the formation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship structures. Through intimate relationships with dogs, queer individuals can articulate and experience their identities in ways that challenge normative understandings of these categories. These interspecies bonds help in the creation of queer social worlds and facilitate unique forms of becoming.

6. What does the article mean by “queer canine becomings”?

“Queer canine becomings” refers to the ongoing and mutual shaping of identities and ways of being that occur within the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs. It emphasizes that these relationships are not static but rather involve processes of co-creation and transformation. The “queer” aspect highlights how these becomings often challenge and expand conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and species boundaries.

7. How do love and violence intertwine in the queer dog relationalities discussed in the article?

The article posits that queer-dog relationships exist within “ecologies of love and violence.” This means that these intimate bonds are not immune to broader societal forces of oppression and violence. The article explores how the potential for both deep affection and the awareness of systemic violence against both queer individuals and animals shape these interspecies connections, offering insights into the complexities of queer feminist worldbuilding in a non-ideal world.

8. What is the significance of lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics in understanding these interspecies entanglements?

Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics, as proposed in the article, provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the potentials and challenges inherent in the entanglements of queer identities, dogs, and technology. This perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of how power operates within these relationships, how boundaries are blurred and renegotiated, and how new forms of resistance and world-making can emerge from these complex interspecies intimacies in the face of both love and violence.

This may be the wackiest paper I’ve ever covered here, though it has had some tough competition.

UPDATE: The right-wing College Fix also found this paper, and proffers its own summary:

Basically, the professor’s argument seems to boil down to this: Dogs provide a positive relational experience for many LGBTQ people. However, the government also uses dogs and robo-dogs, or cyborgs, to commit unjust violence against marginalized people. Therefore, the relationships between dogs and humans are complex.

LOL! But although that seems satirical, it also seems accurate.

The process of evolution is often described by the phrase “survival of the fittest,” coined by Charles Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer.1 The phrase reflects a popular sentiment that nature is best described as, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s colorful and oft-quoted expression, “red in tooth and claw.”2 But Spencer’s phrase is misleading, inasmuch as he was applying it according to his own idiosyncratic views, while failing to properly reflect Darwin’s attitude toward the theory he developed. It directs our attention to organisms and species on the cusp of survival. But, as I shall argue here, they are the least fit and therefore least relevant in evolution’s ability to make progress toward an aggregate system of life that is increasingly abundant, diverse, and collectively capable. Life’s progress comes primarily from “proliferation of the fittest.” It might seem insignificant to focus on life’s ability to proliferate, far beyond its ability to just survive, but the payoff is enormous. This opens up the possibility for an even bigger idea: Evolution seeks sets of patterns (such as genes) that cooperate toward their mutual proliferation. And nature selects some patterns over others by simply proliferating them more rapidly. Culling of the unfit may be part of the evolutionary process for early planetary life, but it is not required for evolutionary progress after life has achieved a critical threshold of intelligence. This article describes a cooperation-based interpretation of evolution that extends the Gaia hypothesis proposed decades ago by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

♦ ♦ ♦

It is the nature of life to proliferate—to become more diverse and abundant in whatever environment it exists. Wherever in the universe planetary life is established, as it continues it will likely discover millions of ways to adapt and flourish. After a few billion years, any such accommodating planet will likely be covered with life, spectacularly diverse and wildly prolific—call it constructive proliferation. 

Why, then, do we tend to model evolution in terms of its destructive elements—competition and culling of the unfit? Why do we dwell on life’s failures—species extinctions and organisms that die before they procreate? They play almost no role at all in evolution’s ability to make progress in life—toward ever greater abundance, diversity, and capability. The traditional manner of thinking about evolution in terms of competition and elimination misses this important element of the process, namely constructive proliferation. 

Modern thinking on evolution has been heavily influenced by the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, himself reflecting the work of Robert Trivers, William D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and others pursuing a “selfish gene” model of the evolutionary process.3 Dawkins revealed valuable insights into evolution by showing us how to look at life’s development from a gene’s eye view. As such, he focuses more on the destructive than constructive elements of evolution. For example, Dawkins describes evolution metaphorically in terms of a “Darwinian chisel” sculpting the characteristics of a species: “The gene pool of a species is the ever-changing marble upon which the chisels, the fine, sharp, exquisitely delicate, deeply probing chisels of natural selection, go to work.”4He uses the chisel metaphor to show how a subtractive process, such as chipping away at a big block of marble, can eventually reveal a beautiful statue. By analogy, we are supposed to believe that evolution’s subtractive process of culling the unfit can eventually reveal a beautifully adapted, incredibly capable apex predator, such as a lion. 

It is the nature of life to proliferate—to become more diverse and abundant in whatever environment it exists. 

The phrase “survival of the fittest” does indeed reflect this subtractive process, but as I shall argue, it leaves us with a dilemma—before a lion can survive, it must exist. “Survival of the fittest” does not explain how a new species is created, a point made by the evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner in his aptly titled book Arrival of the Fittest.5 Before a lion can survive, it must first arrive. So, by what mechanism is new and better life created in the first place? 

Along with the negative aspect of evolution that culls unfit life, there must also be a positive aspect to account for the initial creation and ongoing proliferation of new and successful life. It must be more than just the effect of a random mutation or genetic recombination, because neither can account for how a slightly different set of gene patterns might be better. And since the overall system of life is so prolific (over time), we may reasonably conclude that the positive aspect of the evolutionary process must be greater in magnitude than the negative aspect, perhaps far greater. So, let us try to tease apart the positive and negative facets of evolution. In other words, rather than focusing on evolution’s failures, let us turn our attention to its creative successes. To do so, we must consider evolution in terms of nature’s most basic elements. And when we do, we find cooperation everywhere. 

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Life is all about patterns of matter and energy that are able to self-organize and replicate. There is no such thing as natural benefit to life other than the greater proliferation of its underlying patterns. Everything of interest or benefit to life comes down to pattern proliferation, which—for biological life on Earth—involves gene-like patterns (in DNA or RNA) acting collectively toward their mutual replication. Inside a typical cell, molecules collectively catalyze themselves into ever greater abundance by combining nutrients that have permeated through the cell wall. This cooperative process continues until the critical molecules have become sufficiently abundant to generate two cells, allowing the cell to divide. Cell division is the very basis for life, and the central mechanism by which life is able to proliferate. This is made possible by cooperation among the cell’s metabolic molecules. At higher levels, cells cooperate to produce organs, and organs cooperate to produce highly capable organisms. Higher still, organisms cooperate in collectivities like beehives, ant colonies, and human societies. 

Cooperation among certain things at one level can produce something very different at a higher level. And the very different something that emerges from cooperation can sometimes yield new value—call it pattern synergy—recognizing that when certain things are carefully arranged into a particular pattern, they can collectively produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts—often referred to as emergence. The gears and springs of a mechanical clock, for example, take on much more value when they are precisely arranged into a device that keeps accurate track of time. And, just as the design of a better clock requires enhanced cooperation among its gears and springs, the evolutionary design of better life also requires enhanced cooperation among its various components—molecules, cells, organs, and limbs. 

The concept of pattern synergy was recognized at the molecular level (and above) by the famed designer and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller in his 1975 book Synergetics, in which he defined synergy as “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”6Fuller’s work focused primarily on the geometric designs that naturally emerge from certain combinations of atoms and molecules. But the concept of pattern synergy can apply at many higher levels as well. At each level, emerging synergies become the building blocks for the next higher level. 

Life is all about patterns of matter and energy that are able to self-organize and replicate. 

Another contributor to the concept of pattern synergy is biologist Peter Corning, starting with his 1983 book The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution.7 In his 2003 book Nature’s Magic, he notes: “The thesis, in brief, is that synergy—a vaguely familiar term to many of us—is actually one of the great governing principles of the natural world. … It is synergy that has been responsible for the evolution of cooperation in nature and humankind …”8

Then there is Robert Wright’s runaway 2000 bestseller, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which focused on a critical distinction made by game theorists in their modeling of relationships as either zero-sum or nonzero-sum. Zero-sum games involve competitive relationships in which the positive gain of the winner equals the negative loss of the loser, summing to zero. Nonzero-sum games, on the other hand, involve relationships in which the interests of the game’s participants overlap. Two players of a game can both win, yielding a positive (nonzero) benefit to both. In real life, people find many ways of cooperating synergistically toward their mutual benefit, and Wright devotes his entire book to the proposition that life’s most successful relationships among organisms—both within and between species—are based on these kinds of nonzero win-win scenarios: “My hope is to illuminate a kind of force—the nonzero-sum dynamic—that has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far.”9

As an example of Wright’s way of thinking, consider how patterns from very different domains can cooperate toward their mutual proliferation. Cooperation among humans accelerated greatly about 10,000 years ago when our ancestors began working together in fields to cultivate farm crops, such as wheat. Those agricultural activity patterns persisted and proliferated because they allowed the genes of humans and the genes of wheat to mutually proliferate. And just a century ago, the patterns of materials and activities underlying tractor production began cooperating with the patterns of genes in humans as well as the patterns of genes in all species of agricultural production toward a veritable “orgy” of mutual proliferation. The human population has doubled twice since then, from 2 billion to 8 billion. And patterns of production in agriculture and industrial manufacturing have also proliferated roughly in tandem with humans. Our modern economy is highly positive-sum, thanks to the many synergies that result during production. 

Life’s progress comes primarily from “proliferation of the fittest” … far beyond its ability to just survive. 

In most nonzero-sum game-theoretic paradigms, the players have the option of cooperating (as if synergistically) toward their mutual benefit. However, they also have the option of betraying (or defecting), which may earn an even higher short-term payoff than cooperating. This tradeoff between the short-term temptation of betrayal versus the long-term benefits of ongoing cooperation was recognized by Robert Axelrod as a fundamental characteristic of life’s many relationships. In The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), Axelrod ran through computer simulations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and discovered a successful strategy for encouraging ongoing cooperation based on reciprocity--known as tit-for-tat. “So while it pays to be nice, it also pays to be retaliatory. Tit-for-tat combines these desirable properties. It is nice, forgiving, and retaliatory.”10

Unfortunately, any system of cooperative life will naturally breed cheaters and defectors. Let’s just call them all parasites. Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson has described parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one.”11 Here, we recognize them as species that routinely act to divert life’s critical resources away from their best synergistic uses—away from the hosts that earn them to the parasites that simply steal them. Wilson goes on to say: “Tolerable parasites are those that have evolved to ensure their own survival and reproduction but at the same time with minimum pain and cost to the host.” While parasites can be wildly prolific in the short term, the burdens they place on their hosts ultimately limit their ability to proliferate over the long run. Since parasite species depend on their host species for future infestations, the relationship between them is ultimately competitive and dysergistic. There are a couple of ways that nature can eliminate parasitism: Mutations to the host species can sometimes discover an immunity to the parasite. Even better, mutations to the parasite species can sometimes discover a way for it to become mutualistic with the host. Parasites are actually prime candidates for discovering new forms of mutually beneficial cooperation. After all, the flow of benefit from the host to the parasite is halfway to the kind of relationship evolution prefers. To become fully mutualistic, all that is needed is for the parasite to reciprocate some sort of commensurate benefit to the host. 

Consider how E. coli bacteria in the guts of most animals evolved to provide a valuable digestive service in exchange for a steady supply of food on which the bacteria can feed. The initial infestation of bacteria into the guts of animals, long ago, might have started out as purely parasitic. But, if so, mutations to E. coli bacteria at some point found a way to cooperate by reciprocating benefit to their hosts. No matter how cooperative relationships come to exist, they are always preferable to—more prolific than—competitive relationships. In Richard Dawkins’ words: “Parasites become gentler to their hosts, more symbiotic.”12

Nature’s forces cause synergies to emerge from certain cooperative arrangements of things and activities. And it happens at all levels, from the atomic to the galactic. At every level, a new type of synergy emerges from cooperation among patterns of things and activities at lower levels. Evolution’s ability to discover new and better forms of pattern synergy at ever higher levels of cooperation is the natural source of all creativity. 

By shifting the emphasis to evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we reveal a clear directionality … always toward ever greater degrees of synergistic cooperation. 

Nowhere is pattern synergy more obvious or valuable than in the arrangement of the human brain, where 85 billion neurons cooperate to produce a vivid conscious awareness and ability to reason. In fact, each organ of a human body consists of many cells that all cooperate to produce a specific biological function. And at an even higher level, the complementary functions of human organs and limbs cooperate to produce a body capable of performing ballet. Cooperation is everywhere in life, within organisms and among them. 

Photo by NOAA / Unsplash

Many different types of species routinely cooperate toward their mutual proliferation by exchanging various services and molecular resources. We have already considered the mutually beneficial relationship between animals and the E. coli bacteria in their guts. As another example, bees provide a pollination service to flowering plants in exchange for nutritious nectar. In Entangled Life (2020), Merlin Sheldrake describes how certain fungi attached to plant roots can isolate and donate critical environmental nutrients to the plants in exchange for carbohydrates: “Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi … which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the ‘wood wide web’.”13 These are just a few of the most obvious cases in which vastly different species find ways of cooperating toward their mutual proliferation. There are many other forms of cooperation among species that are far less obvious. When they are all tallied up, it becomes apparent that each species depends on many others for its existence, and the entire system of life develops almost as if it were a single self-regulating organism. 

Cooperation toward mutual proliferation appears to be what nature seeks. 

At ever higher levels, cooperation toward mutual proliferation appears to be what nature seeks. The occasional discovery of a better form of cooperation is what accounts for all types of evolving progress. (The term better here means more mutually prolific.) From nature’s perspective, the only way to define cooperation is in terms of patterns acting collectively toward their mutual replication and ongoing proliferation. Cooperation is the basis for everything of benefit or value to life. In this sense, evolution’s “purpose” is to discover ever better forms of cooperation among replicating patterns of things and activities, causing their ever-increasing mutual proliferation. 

Nutrient exchanges and communication between a mycorrhizal fungus and plants. (Source: Adapted by Charlotte Roy, Salsero35, Nefronus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

So, life is about much more than just survival. Evolution seeks patterns that cooperate toward mutual proliferation. And the better they cooperate, the more they proliferate. From this perspective, natural selection works through the differential proliferation of patterns (such as genes)—some proliferating more rapidly than others (of which some will experience negative proliferation). Over time, any life-accommodating world may naturally become covered with species that best embody and embrace cooperation, making them most prolific. Importantly, in this interpretation of evolution, neither competition nor culling of the unfit is required for evolutionary progress. 

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Pioneers in this view of life are the chemist James Lovelock and the biologist Lynn Margulis, both of whom saw cooperation everywhere in the aggregate system of life. Margulis, for example, developed a cooperation-based theory of the origin of the eukaryotic cell—the complex cellular structure out of which all plants and animals are made—from simpler prokaryotic cells. Margulis theorized that the more complex eukaryotes resulted from the symbiotic union of different types of prokaryotes. Perhaps the very first eukaryotic cell resulted from a parasitic infestation by one type of prokaryote into another type. If so, the parasitic prokaryote then discovered a way to provide benefit to its host, and the parasitism gave way to mutualism. The patterns in those combined prokaryotes stumbled into a way of cooperating toward their mutual proliferation by together creating a better type of cell, a process Margulis called endosymbiosis.14

Most biologists were initially skeptical, but the tenacious Margulis heroically persisted in developing and presenting evidence to support her theory, and in the fullness of time her peers were forced by the weight of the evidence to finally accept it. An early adopter of Margulis’ theory was James Lovelock, who showed how different species naturally coevolve in ways that allow them to cooperatively regulate critical aspects of their common environment. Lovelock named his theory Gaia, after the primal Mother Earth goddess from Greek mythology.15

Nowhere is pattern synergy more obvious or valuable than in the arrangement of the human brain. 

To the extent any two species in a system of aggregate life successfully cooperate toward their mutual proliferation, they together may become increasingly abundant. Plants that participate in cooperative relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, for example, will tend to proliferate more rapidly than plants that don’t. So, it is not just a coincidence that our world has become covered by such cooperative plants. By comparison, noncooperative species become relatively diluted and decreasingly relevant to the overall system. The species that are best able to cooperate toward their mutual proliferation increasingly influence the entire system of life. In various ways, they collectively produce a stable environment that is conducive to their mutual ongoing proliferation. Thus, a subsystem of cooperation may naturally rise like a Phoenix out of the ashes of primitive and chaotic life. Species cultivated by farmers (corn, wheat, pigs, chickens) have certainly risen in abundance relative to other species due to their cooperation with humans, arguably the most poignant example of which is the domestication of wild wolves into modern dogs. 

The entire web of life becomes more robust as semiredundant cooperative mechanisms emerge in the set of all interspecies relationships. For example, in addition to bees, there are many other species of insects and small birds that redundantly pollinate flowering plants. So, if a few bee species were to go extinct, other pollinating species would likely pick up the slack. Likewise, there are many species of plants that redundantly produce the oxygen required by animals, and many species of animals that redundantly produce the carbon dioxide required by plants. 

Through all the redundancies across the many various mechanisms of cooperation, the whole system of aggregate life develops an evolutionary toughness, becoming increasingly stable, robust, and resilient to exogenous shocks. Accordingly, Margulis titled an essay on the subject “Gaia Is a Tough Bitch.” It describes how our planet’s temperature and atmosphere “are produced and maintained by the sum of life.”16 In her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet, Margulis says that plants and animals cooperate to hold the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere steady, at a level that “hovers between a global fire hazard and the risk of widespread death by asphyxiation.”17

According to Lovelock’s hypothesis, many different species cooperate to produce a very stable system of aggregate life able to regulate its own critical parameters—a capability known as homeostasis. And the interdependencies among species cause the entire system to increasingly act like a robust superorganism at a higher level. This view of earthly life as a superorganism was characterized by Richard Dawkins thusly: “Lovelock rightly regards homeostatic self-regulation as one of the characteristic activities of living organisms, and this leads him to the daring hypothesis that the whole Earth is equivalent to a single living organism. … Lovelock clearly takes his Earth and organism comparison seriously enough to devote a whole book to it. He really means it.”18

The discovery of new gene patterns that are better able to cooperate … is the constructive mechanism through which evolution develops new and better biological life. 

Dawkins’ writings have often carried the assumption that evolution happens in a parallel fashion among multiple competing organisms from which the unfit are fatally culled. With regard to the evolution of Gaia, for example, he wrote: “there would have to have been a set of rival Gaias, presumably on different planets. … The Universe would have to be full of dead planets whose homeostatic regulation systems had failed, with, dotted around, a handful of successful, well-regulated planets of which Earth is one.” 

As evolution is described here, however, it does not require competition among multiple species, along with extinction by some. The discovery of new gene patterns that are better able to cooperate toward their mutual proliferation is the constructive mechanism through which evolution develops new and better biological life. Neither competition nor culling of the unfit is necessarily required. 

To his already enormous credit, however, Dawkins also wrote: “I do not deny that somebody may, one day, produce a workable model of the evolution of Gaia … although I personally doubt it. But if Lovelock has such a model in mind he does not mention it.”19 Well, allow me to suggest a workable model of an evolving Gaia. 

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Natural selection chooses some patterns of life over others primarily on the basis of their respective abilities to proliferate. This allows us to conceive of evolution operating on a sole entity, such as a single system of aggregate life composed of many interdependent species. It is a serial style of evolution based on ever better forms of cooperation among its various species. The beneficial changes resulting from this style of evolution simply unfold sequentially through time, as new and better forms of cooperation are discovered. And the net effect is ever greater proliferation of aggregate life. It appears to be a much more accurate description of how evolution really works than the widely accepted parallel style that relies on competition. 

This serial style of evolution applies to Lovelock’s model of Gaia in which evolving patterns build themselves up through ever better relationships of cooperation. From among those patterns, the fittest—which tend to be the most cooperative in this model—are naturally selected by way of their greater proliferation, without any need for competition or culling of the unfit. 

Consider the 2016 book by Russian complexity scientist Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth.20 The central idea is that physical competition and mortal conflict were necessary for eliminating entire groups of noncooperators, leaving just the groups of cooperators to survive. But when we model natural selection in terms of differential proliferation, we may conclude that no war was ever required. While many wars certainly did happen over the past 10,000 years, general cooperation was likely destined to emerge and flourish even if they hadn’t happened. 

Cooperation naturally emerges because it creates mutually beneficial synergies. And those synergies yield evolutionary advantage to the cooperators, enabling their greater proliferation. Two cooperative families, for example, might take turns caring for each other’s children, realizing synergistic efficiencies that would enable both families to diligently raise more children than would have otherwise been possible. We should therefore expect groups full of cooperators to proliferate their populations more rapidly than groups full of competitors. And any planetary system of sufficiently intelligent life will, over time, become increasingly dominated by the faster-growing groups of cooperators, without anyone ever having to die prematurely. 

Life is about much more than just survival. Evolution seeks patterns that cooperate toward mutual proliferation. And the better they cooperate, the more they proliferate. 

This cooperation-based interpretation of evolution gives us new insight into a decades-old debate among evolutionists over the concept of group selection. The debate focuses on whether natural selection needs to operate at the group level to explain how group-benefiting behaviors can naturally emerge. To fully expose the dilemma, Richard Dawkins imagines two very different groups—one composed of cooperative altruists and the other composed of individuals who are purely selfish. Dawkins suggests that the group of altruists, “whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first.” But, there’s a catch: “Even in the group of altruists, there will be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the ‘altruistic group’ will be overrun by the selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group.”21

Dawkins has expressed his belief that natural selection operating at the level of genes is sufficient to account for the emergence of group-benefiting behaviors. And arguments presented here support that belief. When natural selection is defined as proliferation of the fittest (rather than elimination of the unfit), there is then no difference between selection at the genetic level and selection at the group level. Groups are selected to the extent genes within them proliferate. 

Groups are naturally selected by their differential ability to grow their populations. And cooperative groups will always tend to proliferate more rapidly than uncooperative groups. Mutually beneficial cooperation simply bubbles forth from within such a group. No individual needs to die, and no group needs to be eliminated, for group selection to occur. In fact, no competition at all between groups is ever required for evolutionary progress, other than to see which can sustainably grow its population the fastest. 

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The evolutionary value of cooperation over competition was recognized more than a century ago by the Russian intelligentsia. But the concept remained largely ignored by evolutionary thinkers in the West until nobleman Peter Kropotkin was exiled to English territory for political reasons. There, he wrote a series of articles (in English) discussing Darwin’s central theme of “struggle for existence,” later collected into a book titled Mutual Aid.22 About a century later, evolutionary theorist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould penned one of his monthly columns titled “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot.” “Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence,” Gould opined. “Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances.”23 Gould then presented a fascinating account of how and why Russians were more predisposed than Westerners to appreciate the evolutionary value of cooperation among animals and among humans. 

Just a subtle twist in how we think of natural selection opens a new interpretation of evolution that emphasizes cooperation. We have simply elevated our focus, away from nature’s less favored species that are concerned with mere survival, upward to nature’s more preferred species capable of rapid proliferation. By shifting the emphasis to evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we reveal a clear directionality in how all kinds of progressive systems naturally develop—always toward ever greater degrees of synergistic cooperation among replicating patterns. That natural directionality determines how nature defines goodness and betterment, providing a bedrock foundation for a new system of naturalized philosophy. It also suggests a purpose to life—to advance evolution in the direction it was always destined to go—toward ever greater cooperation, mutualism, and symbiosis.

The Jewish holiday of Purim was on the 13th and 14th of March, and on the 14th a breeding pair of mallards appeared at Botany Pond, and they’re still there. The main heroes of the Purim legend were Queen Esther and Mordecai, the advisor to the King (both Jewish), both of whom saved the Jews of Persia from total annihilation. The names of our ducks were thus obvious: the hen is Esther and the drake is Mordecai.

Aren’t they beautiful? (Click photos to enlarge them.)

Esther swimming:

The pair in the open pond (see below):

In the channel; ducks on the rocks, with Esther preening herself:

Mordecai on the rocks. It looks as if he got pecked on the breast, perhaps in a fight for Esther:

More Esther. Notice that her bill is not heavily decorated with black, as was the case with our favorite ducks in previous years:

Ducks are at their cutest when they tilt their heads, which, given the placement of their eyes, they must do to look upwards (hawks, other potential predators, etc.):

Swimming and drinking in the channel:

This is the new remodeled pond, very different from the previous version. Sections of the pond have been blocked off with netting to protect the plants, but we are trying to get the netting reduced as right now the ducks don’t have full access to the pond, and ducklings can’t fly over nets.  I am worried that, if they fix the nets as they’ve promised, the men running around in the water will permanently drive away Esther and Mordecai.  We want them to nest. Another anxious duck season begins. . . .

Oh, and we’ve asked for the duckcam to be turned back on. Stay tuned.

And a bonus gray squirrel, named Shmeul, in a nearby trash can. He is just finishing noshing on a piece of pizza someone discarded.

Send in your photos, please!

It’s Sunday, so John Avise is back with a selection of North American butterfly photos. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge your photos by clicking on them.

This week continues my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Polydamus Swallowtail (Battus polydamas), upperwing:

Polydamus Swallowtail, underwing:

Propertius Duskywing (Erynnis propertius):

Purplish Copper (Lycaena helloides), female upperwing:

Purplish Copper, female underwing:

Queen (Danaus gilippus), male upperwing:

Queen, male underwing:

Queen, female upperwing;

Queen, female underwing;

Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis), upperwing:

Question Mark, underwing;

Question Mark, another specimen underwing:

Question Mark, another specimen upperwing:

Earlier this week, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) announced the science objectives for the fourth cycle of the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) General Observations program - aka. Cycle 4 GO. In keeping with Webb's major science objectives, many of these programs will focus on the study of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.