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Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.

Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously.  And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand.  Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:

Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.

But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.

I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.

a.) There is something rather than nothing.

b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation. 

I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)

c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die. 

In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God  Daseler adds further evidence:

Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.

I should add that Murray also accepts “near-death experiences” (“NDE”s) as evidence for God, as do recent books like Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Both of these books have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and some Googling will turn up ample critiques.

d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray

This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer.  But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.

e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.

Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior.  Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt).  Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:

• There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
• Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
• There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
• When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
• The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
• By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
• There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
• Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.

And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?

Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.

Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:

Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”

The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”

In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:

I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it?  Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.

If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better.  But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

 “. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.

The most robust evidence to date shows that people with a type of lung cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy before 3pm

Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health

Over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, they dragged out a groggy groundhog (Marmota monax), Punxsutawney Phil, from his wooden-box den, and determined whether he could see his shadow.

He did, and that means that we have six more weeks of winter weather to come.  Is that any surprise?

Below is a short video in which Phil is forced to look at a piece of paper. Who knows if he actually saw his shadown, but the top-hatted flacks, members of the so-called “Inner Circle” who interpret Phil’s predictions, did.

But looking at Phil’s history, the rodent is not accurate at predicting the long-term weather:

The Inner Circle claims a 100% accuracy rate, and an approximately 80% accuracy rate in recorded predictions. If a prediction is wrong, they claim that the person in charge of translating the message must have made a mistake in their interpretation. Empirical estimates place the groundhog’s accuracy between 35% and 41%.

So it goes.  It’s a groundhog, for crying out loud, not a weatherman. And the Inner Circle is a religion. . . .

 

My long-stated position (although certainly modifiable in the face of any new evidence, technological advance, or good arguments) is that the optimal pathway to most rapidly decarbonize our electrical infrastructure is to pursue all low-carbon options. I have not heard anything to dissuade me so far from this position. A couple of SGU listeners, however, pointed me to this video making the case for a renewable + battery energy infrastructure.

The channel, Technology Connections, does a good job at putting all the relevant data into context, and I like the big-picture approach that the host, Alec Watson, takes. I largely agree with the points he makes. Also, at no point does he say we should not also build nuclear, geothermal, or more hydroelectric. He does, perhaps, imply that we don’t need nuclear at several points, but he did not address it directly.

So what are the big-picture points I agree with? He correctly points out that fossil fuels are disposable – they are fuel that you burn. They do not, in themselves, create any energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, a solar panel or wind turbine, once you have invested in building them, can produce energy essentially for free for 20 years. He argues that we should be investing in infrastructure, not just pulling fuel out of the ground that we will burn and it’s gone. I get this point, however, what about hydrogen? It is not certain, but let’s hypothetically say we find large reserves of underground hydrogen that we can tap into. I would not be against extracting this resource and burning it for energy, since it is clean (produces only water, and does not release carbon). Although, we might find better uses for such hydrogen other than burning it, such as feedstock for certain hard-to-decarbonize industries.

But his point remains valid – we should be looking for ways to develop our technology to be reusable, circular, and sustainable, rather than extractive. Extracting and burning a resource is one way and limited. At most this should be a stepping stone to more sustainable technology, and I think we can reasonably argue that fossil fuels was that stepping stone and it is beyond time to move beyond fossil fuel to better technology.

Also, building wind or solar plus batteries is the cheapest new energy to add to the grid. He feels the economics will simply win out. I agree – with caveats. At times I get the feeling he is arguing for what will happen in the long run, but he also says “we are here now”. We are sort-of here now, but not fully, which I will get to below. Solar panels are relatively cheap and efficient. Wind turbines are getting more efficient and cost-effective as well, although are more sensitive to market fluctuations and any delays. And he correctly points out that these technologies are still rapidly improving, while there is not much room for improvement with burning fossil fuel.

He also nicely addresses some of the common misunderstandings about renewable energy (a lot of “whatabout” questions). What about the land-use issue with solar panels? He points out that if we just converted the land currently used to grow corn for ethanol (which is a massively inefficient use of land and way to create fuel), and instead put solar panels on that same land, we could generate more than enough energy to run the entire country and charge all our EVs. Solar panels simply create much more energy per acre than corn for ethanol. That’s a solid point.

Whatabout all the lithium and rare-earths we need to build all those panels and batteries? His answer is – well, yes, we do need to extract all those minerals to build all the panels and batteries we need. However, he argues, once we do that, the panels and batteries can theoretically be infinitely recycled. Those atoms don’t go away. This is one of his “eventually” arguments, in my opinion. Yes, one day we might theoretically have an energy infrastructure built entirely on recycled material that has already been extracted. I agree, and I agree that we should be building toward that day (rather than just burning fuel).  But we are nowhere near that day.

Further, technological advancements, like sodium ion batteries and newer lithium chemistry, removes many of the conflict elements and rare elements. Also true. Sodium batteries are actually already in production.

Does any of this change my position? No. I have already endorsed many of these arguments in favor of renewables. I also think we should be building and researching to develop an all-renewable future based on an entirely circular technology cycle. If we are playing the “eventually” game, however, I also think we need to add fusion to the mix, once we tackle that herculean technology challenge. This is especially true if we want to venture out into our solar system.

What he does not explicitly address, however, is the optimal path to that future. A path, I believe, that should take into consideration the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere between now and our zero-carbon future. My position has always been, not that renewables are not great and should be a big part (if not totality) of our energy future – but that we are still in a stepping-stone era of history.

The way I see it, we need to be transitioning from the fossil fuel stepping stone to the nuclear-geothermal-hydroelectric stepping stone before we get to entirely renewable. What does this mean?

It means we should be shutting down coal-fired plants as fast as we possible can. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy and is increasingly becoming one of the most expensive (even without counting the cost of carbon, which I think we should). It also costs the most lives, all along the chain. To do this (again, as quickly as possible) means not only building lots of solar and wind, but also nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric. The latter two, however, are location limited. Sure, we are developing technology to expand geothermal, but there is an inherent limit – if it costs more energy to pump the fluid down to the hot layers than we get out of the exchange, the process simply does not work. It’s unclear how much of a role geothermal can play. And hydroelectric requires the proper water features, and it harmful to local environments.

We can, however, build nuclear almost anywhere. We can swap them in, one-for-one, for retiring coal plants. We can have them on ships, and can place them relatively close to where the energy is used. We have plenty of fissile material, and the newer designs are safer, more efficient, and more dispatchable. The big downside to nuclear is that it is expensive – but it’s way less expensive than global warming.

Nuclear can potentially give us the 30-50 years it will take to advance our technology and build all that renewable infrastructure. And yes – we do need this time. Simply building all those panels and batteries will take time. Updating and expanding the grid will take time. All these projects need minerals, and it will take time to develop the mines necessary (yes – decades).

The question is – while we take the next 30-50 years go transition to renewables, do we want to be burning fossil fuels or uranium? That is really the big question.

I also think that Alec does not pay enough attention to the energy storage issue. Building enough battery storage for an all-renewable energy infrastructure is no small task. Again, it will take decades. Perhaps more importantly – as he correctly says, batteries get you through the night. However, they do not get you through the winter. An all-renewable future requires long-term energy storage as well. Batteries will not work for this. As far as I know, the only really viable solution right now is pumped hydro. But this too will take decades to develop, and it remains to be seen how much pumped hydro we can develop without too much harm to the environment.

The bottom line is this. If we are talking about the future of our energy and also transportation sectors, then I completely agree – we should be aiming for an all-electric, all renewable future based upon an entirely circular economy rather than a linear extraction-burn economy. But we also need to consider how much carbon will be emitted between here and there, and if we want to minimize that carbon, we also should be building out our nuclear infrastructure, maintaining our hydroelectric inventory, and continuing to develop geothermal. These energy sources also have the advantage of providing baseload and even dispatchable energy, which significantly reduces the need for energy storage and will buy us time there as well.

The post A Fully Renewable Grid? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

MACE is a next-generation experiment designed to catch muonium transforming into its antimatter twin, a process that would rewrite the rules of particle physics. The last search for this effect ended more than two decades ago, and MACE plans to leap far beyond it using cutting-edge beams, targets, and detectors. A discovery would point to entirely new forces or particles operating at extreme energy scales.

We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought

To eliminate bedtime struggles, a growing number of parents have turned to melatonin gummies, but these hormone supplements are largely unregulated. Columnist Alice Klein digs into the evidence on the risks of regularly using melatonin as a sleep aid for children

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 team has entered a carefully controlled two-week quarantine as the countdown begins for their journey to the International Space Station. The four astronauts—representing NASA, the European Space Agency, and Roscosmos—are isolating at Johnson Space Center before heading to Florida for final launch preparations. The mission could lift off as early as February 11, with multiple backup launch windows lined up.

Hidden lava tunnels on the Moon and Mars could one day shelter human explorers, offering natural protection from radiation and space debris. A European research team has unveiled a bold new mission concept that uses three different robots working together to explore these extreme underground environments autonomously. Recently tested in the volcanic caves of Lanzarote, the system maps cave entrances, deploys sensors, lowers a scout rover, and creates detailed 3D maps of the interior.

Gene-editing citrus fruits to make them less bitter could not only encourage more people to eat them, it might also help save the industry from a devastating plague  

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has recently said that he wants to transform the NIH into the "research arm of MAHA" and a "central driver of the MAHA agenda." Lysenkoism 2.0 continues apace at NIH.

The post Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay wants to turn NIH into the “research arm” of MAHA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

A newly detected gravitational wave, GW250114, is giving scientists their clearest look yet at a black hole collision—and a powerful way to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Its clarity allowed scientists to measure multiple “tones” from the collision, all matching Einstein’s predictions. That confirmation is exciting—but so is the possibility that future signals won’t behave so neatly. Any deviation could point to new physics beyond our current understanding of gravity.

A newly detected gravitational wave, GW250114, is giving scientists their clearest look yet at a black hole collision—and a powerful way to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Its clarity allowed scientists to measure multiple “tones” from the collision, all matching Einstein’s predictions. That confirmation is exciting—but so is the possibility that future signals won’t behave so neatly. Any deviation could point to new physics beyond our current understanding of gravity.

Although the view that sex is a spectrum, and that there are more than two biological sexes in humans and other species, is still prevalent among the woke, others are realizing that sex in humans (and nearly every other species of plant and animal) is indeed a binary, with a tiny fraction of exceptions in humans. These include individuals with “differences in sex determination” (DSD) and almost nonexistent hermaphrodites. Estimates of exceptions in our species range from 0.02% to 0.005%.

The rise of the “sex is a spectrum” notion is due solely to the rise of gender activism and to people who identify as nonbinary or transgender.  But gender is not the same thing as biological sex: the former is a subjective way of feeling, while the latter is an objective fact of biology based on a binary of gamete types.

I personally don’t care if someone identifies as a member of a nonstandard gender, but I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”

It’s a shame that many of those who claim that sex is a spectrum are biologists who recognize the sex binary and its many consequences, like sexual selection. The misguided folks include the three main scientific societies studying evolution, who issued a statement that biological sex was a spectrum, and further that this was a consensus view. (Their original statement is archived here.) The societies then took down their claim when other biologists pointed out its inanity (see here, here, and here). And it’s not only biologists who recognize the ideology behind the claim that sex is a spectrum; the public does, too.  NBC News reported this in 2023 (note the conflation of sex and gender):

A new national poll from PRRI finds Americans’ views on gender identity, pronoun use and teaching about same-sex relationships in school deeply divided by party affiliation, age and religion.

Overall, 65% of all Americans believe there are only two gender identities, while 34% disagree and say there are many gender identities.

But inside those numbers are sharp differences. Fully 90% of Republicans say there are just two genders, versus 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats who believe the same

Sadly, if you’re on the side of truth in this debate, at least as far as the number of sexes go, you’re on the side of Republicans. So it goes. Further, Americans and sports organizations themselves are increasingly adopting the views that trans-identified men (“transwomen,” as they’re sometimes called) should not compete in sports against biological women. This is from a 2025 Gallup poll.

Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and 66% of Americans say a person’s birth sex rather than gender identity should be listed on government documents such as passports or driver’s licenses.

Thus, although wokeness is like a barbed porcupine quill: easy to go inside you but hard to remove, I’m pretty confident that the claim of a biological sex spectrum will eventually decline even more. But there are still some ideologues who twist and misrepresent the facts to argue that there are more than two sexes. (The argument centers on humans, of course.)  One of these is Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, who has written several papers and a recent book arguing for the human sex spectrum. I’ve pushed back on his arguments many times (see here), and wrote a short review of his book Sex is a Spectrum, a book that should be read with a beaker of Pepto-Bismol by your side. There’s another and better critical review of Fuentes’s book by Tomas Bogardus, here,  which Bogardus has turned into his own new book, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.

This post is just to highlight another critical review of Fuentes’s book and his views on sex, one written by Alexander Riley and appearing at Compact. You can get to a paywalled version by clicking on the title below, but a reader sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote briefly from that below.

A few quotes (indented). I don’t know how readers can access the whole review without subscribing:

Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.

But the reality is that species like this one most definitely are weird, not only in the animal kingdom, but even among fish, who are among the most sexually fluid animals. Among fish, the number of species that are sexually fluid in this way is perhaps around 500 … unless you know that there are approximately 34,000 known fish species. In other words, even in the most sexually fluid animals, transition between male and female by one individual can happen in only 1.5 percent of the total species. What Fuentes describes as “not that weird” is certainly highly unusual. [JAC: note that switching from male to female or vice versa does not negate the sex binary.]

This sleight of hand is typical of Fuentes’s handling of evidence. He attacks a classic argument in evolutionary biology that differences in male and female gametes (sperm an eggs, respectively) explain many other differences between the two sexes. In short, because eggs are much costlier to make than sperm, females have evolved to invest more energy in the reproductive chances of each gamete compared to males. This bare fact of the gamete difference means, according to the Bateman-Trivers principle, males and females typically develop different mating strategies and have different physical and behavioral profiles.

The distortion below is typical of ideologues who promote Fausto-Sterling’s data even when they know it’s incorrect:

Fuentes notes that what he calls “3G human males and females,” that is, those individuals who are unambiguously male or female in their genitalia, their gonads (the gland/organ that produces either male or female gametes), and genes, do not make up 100 percent of human individuals. He goes on to suggest that at least 1 percent of humans, and perhaps more, do not fit the 3G categories. This is a claim unsupported by the facts. The citation he links to this claim is an article by biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. The claim made by Fausto-Sterling about the percentage of those who are intersex has been thoroughly debunked. She includes a number of conditions in her category of intersex (or non-3G) that are widely recognized as not legitimately so classified. One such condition (Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, or LOCAH, a hormonal disorder) makes up fully 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s “intersex” category. Individuals with LOCAH are easily classed as either male or female according to Fuentes’ 3Gs, and nearly all of them are able to participate in reproduction as normal for their sex. The percentage of those who are actually outside 3G male or female classes is likely around 0.02% percent, which means that 9,998 out of every 10,000 humans are in those two groups.

What’s below shows that trans-identified men do not become equivalent to biological women when they undergo medical transition:

Transwomen are much more likely to exhibit behaviors of sexual violence and aggression than women. A 2011 study showed clearly that even male-to-female transsexuals who had undergone full surgical transition, and who therefore had undergone hormone therapy to try to approximate female hormonal biology, still showed rates of violent crime and sexual aggression comparable to biological males. They were almost twenty times more likely to be convicted of a violent offense than the typical female subject. This is reason enough to keep individuals who have male hormonal biology out of spaces in which they interact closely with semi-clad girls and women.

And Riley’s conclusion:

The fact that Fuentes can make such ill-founded claims without fearing serious pushback is an indication of how captured academic culture is by the ideology behind this book. A healthy academic culture would not so easily acquiesce to political rhetoric masquerading as science.

Yes, anthropology has been captured—especially cultural anthropology—and, as I said, even some biologists have gone to the Dark Side. I have nothing but contempt and pity for those who know that there are two sexes but twist and mangle the facts to conform to the woke contention that the sexes can be made interchangeable. But I should add the usual caveat that, except for a few exceptions like sports and prisons, transgender people whould be given the same rights as everyone else.

Another sign of people rejecting the “sex is a spectrum” claim is that Fuentes’s book didn’t sell well. Despite coming out less than a year ago. it’s now #301,447 on Amazon’s sales list, and has only 25 customer ratings, totaling 3.8 out of 5 stars. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.

Here are two Amazon reviews by savvy readers (note: none of the reviews on Amazon are by me):

 

I never would have selected this book on my own, but fortunately a reader suggested it, and I’m very glad. The book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne III, is a history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains extending from about 1830 to the beginning of the 20th century. This is the period when all the tribes (the book calls them “Indians”, not “Native Americans”)—and there were many tribes and sub-tribes—came into conflict with Mexicans and with Americans moving West, and we know how that ends.

The history centers on the Comanches, the dominant tribe on the plains, though there was never one hierarchical tribe but a series of sub-tribes that were loosely affiliated as a “nation” and would sometimes join forces or fragment. Gwynne did a great deal of historical research using primary documents, and the result is a informative but mesmerizing tale, one that is hard to put down.

The Comanches were nomads, ranging widely over the Great Plains from Colorado to Texas.  Their “villages” were only temporary, and would be moved (by women, who did the heavy lifting) from place to place during wars or buffalo hunts.  And those were really their two primary activities: killing members of other tribes and killing buffalo, which were then so numerous then that their herds could extend to the horizon.  An important part of Comanche culture was the horse; Comanches were nearly always mounted in war or on the hunt, with horses descended from those brought to the Americas by the Spanish.  As you can see from the photo of a Comanche warrior below, the horses were small, descended from wild mustangs caught and “broken” with great skill.  Comanches also specialized in stealing horses from other tribes and from settlers and the American military. Horses were their riches.

Comanche horsemanship was superb, largely accounting for their success against other tribes and against settlers. They were able, for instance, to ride sideways on the horse’s flank, not visible to enemies on the other side, and shoot arrows (with tremendous accuracy) from below the horse’s neck. Until they managed to get firearms from the settlers and soldiers, they used arrows and lances, and that is how they brought down buffalo.  (The butchering, of course, was done by the women.)

I won’t go into detail about the lives and wars of the Comanche, except to say that the book imparts three lessons about Native Americans on the plains:

First, they did not “own” land or even occupy it. As I said, they were nomadic, and many other Native American tribes, including Apaches, Cherokees, Kickapoos, and Arapaho, roamed the same territory.  This bears on the present-day conflict about repatriating artifacts and human remains to tribes that claim them.  For artifacts or bones found on the Great Plains (and elsewhere, of course) cannot be ascribed to a given tribe without DNA analysis, which is almost never done, or if there are distinctive signs from the artifacts identifying them as belonging to a given group. Since this is rarely possible, it becomes a crapshoot about what to do about repatriating Native American artifacts, most of which now have to be returned to a tribe that claims them before scientists or anthropologists get to study them. Read the books and writings of Elizabeth Weiss to learn more about this conflict.

Second, war was a way of life for the Comanche; they were always at war with one tribe or another—even well before white settlers moved West. The view that all was peaceful among Native Americans until white settlers invaded “Indian” land and displaced the residents is grossly mistaken. Young men were trained for war beginning at five or six, and the youths were skillful with the horse and the bow.  Comanche life without war was unthinkable, and the men prided themselves, and rose in rank in their groups, largely through skill in warfare.  In the end, the Comanches were diminished not because of lack of skill in fighting, but because they were outnumbered by settlers and the Army, because the Army had superior weapons, especially cannons, and because the settlers killed off their main means of subsistence: the buffalo.  The number of Comanche is estimated to have fallen from about 40,000 in 1832 to only 1,171 in 1910.  The book describes many treaties between the Comanche and the U.S. government or its agents, but these treaties were almost always broken by one side or another—or both.

Third, their life was very hard.  They subsisted almost entirely on buffalo, had to weather the brutal cold of the Plains in tipis or on horseback, often went without food or water, and of course almost never bathed. (This was tough on the women, who became covered with blood and guts when skinning buffalo.) But they prided themselves on their toughness and bravery. (women often fought alongside the men). These features were mixed with an almost unimaginable degree of cruelty towards their enemies.  Enemies who were not killed outright were tortured, and in horrible ways: scalping, cutting, and roasting to death slowly.  These acts were considered normal and not immoral, though the white settlers (who were often tortured as captives) saw them as brutal and primitive. But the Comanche were capable of great kindness as well, especially towards other members of their tribe and occasionally towards white women and children who survived battle with the tribes and were “kidnapped’ by them, many becoming, in effect, Comanches themselves.

This brings us to the centerpiece of the story: the abduction of an American woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, in a battle in 1836. She was eight years old. Parker became integrated into the tribe, learned their language (eventually forgetting much of her English) and married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Among their three children was Quanah Parker, who showed tremendous skill, wisdom, and courage as a warrior, and rose through the ranks (despite being half white) to become a chief himself. The story of Quanah is the story of the decline and fall of the Comanches, limned with many battles and culminating in their surrender to American soldiers and sedentary occupation of land on a reservation, where of course they were unhappy. Quanah demonstrated his leadership skills even on the reservation and, through judicious rental of reservation land to settlers for grazing cattle, became wealthy and renowned among both whites and Native Americans. Here’s a photo of Quanah in his native clothing:

Daniel P. Sink of Vernon Texas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gwynne skillfully  weaves together the story of Quanah and greater historical events, so in the end you understand not just the history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but the life of Comanches and the personalities of Quanah and his mother, Cynthia Parker. Parker herself was captured by the Texas Rangers when she was 33 and lived the rest of her life with settlers, including members of her extended family. She was never happy, and tried to escape back to the Comanches several times, but never succeeded.  She had several children, including Quanah, but was separated from her sons and left with only one daughter, Topsannah (“Prairie Flower”).  Cynthia died at 40, heartbroken.  Here’s a photo of her with Topsannah. Despite arduous efforts of settlers to assimilate Cynthia back as an American, she was always a Comanche at heart. The expression on her face tells the tale.

Here’s Quanah in 1889. As you see, he adopted many of the settlers’ ways, including their clothing, But he never cut his braids:

Charles Milton Bell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve run on too long, but I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation and thank the reader who recommended it. Although it may strike you as something you might not like, do give it a try. (Click on the picture below to go to the publisher.) You may know about the sad history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but this book tells you, more than anything I’ve read, how at least some of them lived their lives as free men and women.

Today we have part 2 of Paul Handford’s hummingbird photos (part 1 is here).  Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Rufous hummer, Selasphorus rufus, was a common frequenter of our yard, boldly visiting the feeders.  It has the distinction of being the northernmost breeding species of any member of the family (61°N, in southern Alaska).  Given that they winter on the Gulf Coast and the southern Pacific slopes of Mexico, this means that, in terms of body-length, at least some Rufous hummers make the longest of all avian migrations!

The females closely resemble those of the congeneric Calliope hummer, differing in having longer tails and rufous, rather than buff flanks:

The males are mainly strongly rufous, and with a brilliant ‘metallic’ scarlet throat.  Again, this is a colour produced by interference produced by the structural characteristics of the feathers rather than by pigment.  As such, the brilliance shows when it is viewed directly;  from the side, it appears dark, even black:

Scientists warn that rapid advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness, creating serious ethical risks. New research argues that developing scientific tests for awareness could transform medicine, animal welfare, law, and AI development. But identifying consciousness in machines, brain organoids, or patients could also force society to rethink responsibility, rights, and moral boundaries. The question of what it means to be conscious has never been more urgent—or more unsettling.