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For reasons I don’t really understand, Steve Pinker gets piled on when he claims, correctly, that humanity has made both material and moral progress in the last eight centuries or so.  But there seems to be a group of miscreants who think that they’d be better off in the 13th century and were devout Christians, obeying religious dicta. This is not only wrong but stupid. If they returned to the times they tout, they’d most likely be living in filth, ridden with maladies, not be able to read or write, and, finally, would die at about 30 from a tooth abscess.

But they were religious! The absence of faith is the latest argument for the failure of modernity.  Material progress and improvements in health, so it’s said, have left humanity only with that damn “god-shaped hole”. Despite our higher well being, it’s said, we are still bereft, yearning for a god.  Although you can have your modernity and gods too, somehow these advocates of material regression think that the benefits of modernity have in fact produced that god-shaped hole by distorting our values, and we need to get back to Christianity (they never mention the other religions).

One of the biggest advocates of the god-shaped-hole (henceforth GSH) hypothesis is Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who penned a dreadful article in the Free Press along the lines above, called “How the West lost its soul“. Kingsnorth argued that only religion (preferably Christianity, though he mentions others) can save us from the malaise caused by the lack of religion. The Enlightenment, he says, has failed, and so, lacking a morality that cannot exist without religion, we tack our way through life without spiritual mooring.

This is nonsense, as I argued here on October 13 (see also here).  And now Steve Pinker and Marian L. Tupy (the latter described as “the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity“) have taken Kingsnorth’s thesis apart, showing both the benefits of progress that came from the Enlightenment as well as the failure of religion to forge a workable morality. The resurgence of “Christian nationalism” in America, they argue, has only brought back the old morality that impeded progress.

You can read their piece by clicking below (if you subscribe, for it isn’t archived):

First, though, look how the Free Press‘s author Freya Sanders introduces the piece by Pinker and Tupy (henceforth P&T). The bolding is mine:

We write about this a lot here at The Free Press—about how phones have robbed kids of their childhoods and how young people think corporate jobs are pointless. Paul Kingsnorth argued earlier this year that when people in the West stopped going to church, “the vacuum was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.” TikTok is warping our moral codes, and porn has ruined our sex lives. People are depressed, nihilistic, and increasingly illiterate.

What’s the answer? God, according to a lot of people. There has been a boom in religiosity across the West. We’ve published a lot about that, too—about how Americans are flocking to podcasts and apps that teach them about scripture; how young people are getting baptized in record numbers, or traveling to France to go on a pilgrimage; and how female Catholics are bringing back chapel veils because they want to connect to a “lost type of Catholicism.”

But in certain corners of the intellectual right, the idea that life was better in the good old days has intensified into a longing for—of all social orders—medieval Christendom. There are calls to replace American democracy with a monarchy. To make our laws and lawmakers more Christian. When Tucker Carlson says feudalism sounds good, you know things have gone too far!

So we’re glad to present the opposing view today, in the form of an essay by Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy—who believe that we are alive at the best possible time to be human: right now. And we don’t need the Bible to have a moral code, because we have a secular one that is the reason for all human flourishing: the set of ideas we refer to as Enlightenment ideals. They are the ideas America is built on. And they are written into the Constitution, right next to God.

America has always been a negotiation between reason and faith. Right now, the negotiation is fierce. We’re proud to publish arguments on both sides of it—including this thought-provoking essay. Don’t miss it.

This is disingenuous. Note that Sander says, “we’ve published a lot” about the “boom in religiosity” and the need for God.  Indeed they have, but the P&T piece is really the only humanistic attack on religion that I’ve seen on the site. The fact is that the Free Press is always banging on about religion and its virtues (Bari Weiss is, a Jew who, I think, believes in a higher power), and I think they published this just to show that the venue does indeed publish a variety of opinions, thus being “objective”.  (It also has some well known and eloquent authors) But so far it’s been about ten pro-religion articles to this single dissent, so I call that ratio slanted journalism.

But onward and upward, for this piece is a good palliative for all the Free Press‘s god-touting. P&T begin by describing how conservatism has brought us back longing for the good old days when Christianity ruled the West. They explicitly single out Kingsnorth’s article, for these two men have written a long rebuttal. In the introduction, they obliquely criticize the Free Press, too:

Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

And The Free Press recently showcased a full-strength expression of pre-Enlightenment nostalgia in an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called “How the West Lost Its Soul” (an excerpt of his book Against the Machine).

According to Kingsnorth, Western civilization has lost the sacred story that sustained it for 1,500 years: Christianity. The story begins with the Garden of Eden, where humanity chose knowledge over communion with God, which led to exile and suffering, though with a path to salvation through belief in a grisly human sacrifice and a miraculous resurrection. For centuries, “the mythic vision of medieval Christendom” offered people meaning and morality, writes Kingsnorth. But starting with the Enlightenment, and accelerating in the 1960s, it gave way to a “partial, empty, and over-rational humanism,” leaving societies spiritually adrift. With sustaining myths gone and no shared higher purpose, Westerners now live amid “ruins.”

The Free Press introduction captures the contrast starkly: “Conventional wisdom insists that technology has made life better,” whereas the abandonment of the religious story has left us with “a complete lack of meaning.”

I don’t want to reproduce huge portions of the article here, and since it’s not archived, you won’t be able to read it if you don’t subscribe (I suggest you do, if only for Nellie Bowle’s weekly “TGIF” column. Or perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy. But I am excerpting more than normal for those who can’t access the piece.

Here are the areas that P&T consider, with excerpts (indented) and perhaps a few words (mine flush left) on each.

Well being and morality. In a section called “knowledge is more meaningful than ignorance and superstition,” P&T argue that religion did not improve people’s well being in the old days, but simply justified bad stuff. They argue that humanism provides a better grounding for morality than does religion, and who would argue otherwise? After all, even religious people pick and choose their Biblical morality, implicitly assuming that things are good because God approves only of what is good, implying that the “good” pre-dates the pronouncements of God. Quotes (all indented):

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.

, , ,the popular canard among theoconservatives is that religion is the only conceivable source of morality, and so a secular society must be mired in selfishness, relativism, and nihilism. Kingsnorth, for example, favorably cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment left us with a morality that, “loosed from theology,” consists of “nothing more than [an] individual’s personal judgment.”

The dismissal is breathtaking.

The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society

Barbarism and immorality.  P&T show that “premodern Christianism was not moral, but barbaric.” Again, what rational person could doubt that?

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best. The God of the Old Testament prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, disobedience, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. Indeed, he commanded the Israelites to commit all of these against their enemies.

Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.

The point about the delay in adopting “Christian humane advances” is a good one. If Christianity causes moral improvement, why did it take millennia for this to get going?

“Health and prosperity are more meaningful than starvation and squalor”.  Steve has argued this clearly in two books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), and surely Tupy—whose work I don’t know—has made similar claims.  I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.

Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.

Christianity comes with antisemitism.  P&T argue that the hegemony of Christianity both in older times and now is inevitably accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, for if you embrace “Christian values”, you perforce see Jews, who supposedly killed Christ and cannot get to heaven by accepting Jesus, as being “anti-moral.” This, too, appears to be the sentiments of modern Christian nationalists, but is dispelled by secular humanism:

[Yoram] Hazony said: “All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended?—all of those questions are on the table.” It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.

America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.

In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then.  But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one.  Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters.  But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god.

In their last section, called “Modernity is not a ruin”, P&T reprise their argument, and I’ll give a longer bit:

the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.

It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”

When we ask people about their lives today, their own judgments belie any narrative of decadence and decay. Global surveys find that it’s the richest and freest countries, not the backward theocracies, in which people express the greatest satisfaction with their lives. Pathologies like homicide, incarceration, child mortality, educational mediocrity, and premature death are more common in the more religious countries and American states than the more secular ones.

People also express their conception of a better life by voting with their feet. In 2020, of the 281 million who moved to another country, 232 million of them sought a better life in high-income, increasingly secular countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Today’s reactionaries can’t have it both ways, asserting that the affluent secular West is a decadent ruin while fending off the millions of people from poorer and more religious countries who risk their lives to get in.

And if people voted with their hands and had a time machine, they’d surely set it for now instead of 1350.

This is the last batch I have, so we’ll have a photo hiatus over Thanksgiving unless somebody sends in some pics.

Today’s photos come from reader Uwe Mueller, who sends us bird photos from Germany. Uwe’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first five pictures were taken in the Bergisches Land, Germany.

A Great tit (Parus major) taking a steep turn directly in front of the camera. It took a lot of attempts to get this kind of shot from this little bird in flight:

This bird was really a hard one to identify. It could either be a Marsh tit (Poecile palustris) or a Willow tit (Poecile montanus). Both birds are very similar and only distinguishable by some minor differences in a few features. After a lot of investigation I tend to think that this is a Marsh tit. But I could still be wrong:

Grey wagtails (Motacilla cinerea) are to be found mostly at small creeks or shallow ponds where they meticulously search the water and the banks for food like worms and insects. They are quite skittish birds and don’t like the human presence. To get a close shot like this you have to stay low-key in nature and have a long lens:

A Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), one of the most widespread warblers in Germany. I had some difficulty with its identification because the blackcap of the bird in the picture is more like a mid-brown cap:

A European green woodpecker (Picus viridis), another bird that you often hear but rarely see:

A Great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) is feeding one of its chicks with fresh fish. This picture was taken at the river Ruhr:

A flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) flying over the Ruhr. In the upper right corner of the picture you can see a Greylag goose (Anser anser) and two hybrids also flying in this flock. My guess is that the hybrids are the offspring of the Greylag goose. Canada geese and Greylag geese are known to mate with each other and produce offspring:

A European herring gull (Larus argentatus) flying very low over the Baltic Sea near the town of Kiel, Germany:

A male Red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator) with its distinct red eyes, also near Kiel:

Another picture from Kiel, a Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) sitting in a surge of waves:

This funny little fella is a Sanderling (Calidris alba). They are constantly rushing over the beach with little mincing steps that are so quick that you hardly see their feet while running. Due to this behaviour they are called “Keen Tid“ in Northern German dialect which translates to “Don’t have time“. Every now and then they stop and stick their beak into the sand, searching for worms and small crabs, like in this picture that I took on the East Frisian island of Juist:

Yesterday I started a response to this article, which seems to me fits cleanly into a science-denial format. The author is making a lawyers case against the notion of climate change, using classic denialist strategies. Yesterday I focused on his denial that scientists can ever form a meaningful consensus about the evidence, conflating it with the straw man that a consensus somehow is mere opinion, rather than being based on the totality of the evidence. Today I am going to focus on the notion of “post-normal” science. Macrae gives this summary of what post-normal science is:

“The conclusions of post-normal science aren’t ultimately based, then, on empirical data, with theories that can be rigorously tested and falsified, but on “quality as assessed by internal and extended peer communities,” i.e., “consensus,” i.e., informed guesses.”

This is another straw man. He is creating a false dichotomy here, based on his misunderstanding of science (he is a journalist, not a scientist). Yesterday I gave this summary of how science works:

“Science is not a simple matter of proof. There are many different kinds of evidence – observational, experimental, theoretical, and modeling (computer modeling, animal models, etc.). Scientific evidence can use deduction, induction, can start with observation or start with a hypothesis, can use theoretical constructs, can make observations about the past and make predictions about the future. All of these various activities are part of the regular operation of science. No one type of evidence is supreme or perfect – they all represent different tradeoffs. Scientific conclusions are always a matter of inference – scientists make the best inference they can to the most probable explanation given all of the available evidence. This always involves judgement, and some opinion. How are different kinds of evidence weighted when they appear to conflict?”

He seems to believe that the only “real” science is one based on pure evidence, requiring no opinion or judgement – but this does not exist. There is no proof in science, only inference based on the evidence, which is always partial and imperfect. But this is the strategy of science denial – create an artificially narrow definition of science (which may sound reasonable to a non-scientist) then try to exclude the science you want to deny from “real” science. So, evolution deniers claim that no exploration of the past can be “real” science because you cannot do repeated experiments on the past. No one was there to observe it. Now Macrae is saying we cannot do science about the future, because you can’t experiment on the future, only make “guesses”.

Macrae is also repeating another common evolution-denial tactic of saying that climate change cannot be falsified. He has to go there because his notion that you cannot do science about the future is obviously false when you consider that science often functions by predicting what will happen in the future, and that such prediction can potentially be falsified. He claims climate models are not real science (they are one piece of doing climate science) because even if they are wrong, climate scientists don’t change them. But in order to make this point, he has to misrepresent how well the climate models over the past 50 years have matched actual warming.

To do this he again employs a common denial tactic – reference outliers that agree with your position. There are three prominent climate change denying scientists that always seem to be quoted – Lindzen, Spencer, and Christy. A thorough exploration of their claims is beyond this post, but suffice to say, they are a minority opinion, far from the  mainstream of their field. Every field has such outliers. Again – this is why we look to see if there is a consensus in a discipline, to see where the weight of opinion is. Otherwise you can play – choose your own expert – to find whatever opinion suits you. In this case, Macrae cites Christy to claim that climate models have over-called warming. He states this as a fact, without disclosing that Christy’s analyses are controversial at best, and clearly in the minority.

Here is a good review of climate models by an academic source. They conclude:

“Climate models published since 1973 have generally been quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes reasonably close to what has actually occurred, especially when discrepancies between predicted and actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are taken into account.”

You have likely seen these projections, with a line surrounding by a zone of uncertainty, projecting temperature into the future. Actual warming has been within this zone (within 2 standard deviations from the average predicted warming). What they mean by taking discrepancies into account – if you ran a model in 1980 and plugged in a predicted amount of CO2 release, but the actual CO2 releases was more or less, the model will be off not because it doesn’t work, but because the wrong amount of CO2 was entered. We can then run the model again with the correct CO2 and see how its predicts warming. But even without this, the models have done generally very well. They are not perfect, but accurate, and are being tweaked all the time to get more sophisticated and more accurate.

Much of what Macrae says after this is based on the false premise that climate models don’t work but scientists ignored this – hence climate science is not falsifiable. But this is nonsense – most analyses find that the climate models work just fine.

Macrae also, even within his false premise, is committing another denialist trope – saying that because the models were allegedly off (they weren’t) they are therefore wrong. Evolution deniers do this a lot as well – because scientists were wrong about the branching pattern of evolutionary relationship among certain species, perhaps evolution did not happen at all. Even though the cherry-picked outlier he chose shows the models were off, they still predicted warming and the globe is warming. They were correct about the direction and persistence of warming, just off in terms of magnitude (again, according to Christy, but not the majority of climate scientists).

Taken together these strategies that Macrae is using are common among many campaigns to deny accepted science (accepted because the totality of evidence favors those conclusions). But of course, he denies the denial, even while blatantly engaging in it.

 

The post Is Climate Science “Post Normal” Science – Part II first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Understanding how exactly lunar dust sticks to surfaces is going to be important once we start having a long-term sustainable presence on the Moon. Dust on the Moon is notoriously sticky and damaging to equipment, as well as being hazardous to astronaut’s health. While there has been plenty of studies into lunar dust and its implications, we still lack a model that can effectively describe the precise physical mechanisms the dust uses to adhere to surfaces. A paper released last year from Yue Feng of the Beijing Institute of Technology and their colleagues showcases a model that could be used to understand how lunar dust sticks to spacecraft - and what we can do about it.

See some of the winning entries for this year's Oceania Photo Contest, including Miesa Grobbelaar's shot of a whale, which took the top prize

Moss spores spent nine months strapped to the outside of the International Space Station, exposed to vacuum, cosmic radiation, temperature swings from minus 196°C to 55°C, and unfiltered solar ultraviolet light. Over 80 percent survived the ordeal and returned to Earth still capable of growing into new moss plants. This remarkable resilience, demonstrated by one of Earth's earliest land plants, suggests that life's fundamental mechanisms may be far more robust in the face of space conditions than previously imagined.

The world's gravitational wave detectors just wrapped up their longest and most productive observation campaign, capturing 250 new collisions over two years of continuous listening. These ripples in spacetime, created by black holes and neutron stars spiralling into each other across the universe, have given scientists their first direct evidence for Stephen Hawking's 1971 theory about black hole surface areas, revealed second generation black holes born from previous mergers, and detected the most massive black hole collision ever observed. The haul represents over two thirds of all gravitational waves ever detected.

The cultivation of wheat, barley and maize, which are easily stored and taxed, seems to have led to the emergence of large societies, rather than agriculture generally

Our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83, which could influence our capacity to learn and our risk of certain conditions

A roundup of evidence supporting the use of radiocarbon dating to assess the age of organic matter from 500 to 55,000 years old.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Astronomers have just catalogued the 40,000th near Earth asteroid, a milestone that marks humanity's transformation from passive targets to active defenders of our planet. These space rocks, ranging from house sized boulders to some the size of mountains, follow orbits that bring them uncomfortably close to Earth. Each discovery adds another piece to our planetary defence puzzle, though current surveys have found only about 30 percent of the mid sized asteroids that could still cause regional devastation if they struck our world.

Using a precisely aligned pair of laser beams, scientists can now hold a single aerosol particle in place and monitor how it charges up. The particle’s glow signals each step in its changing electrical state, revealing how electrons are kicked away and how the particle sometimes releases sudden bursts of charge. These behaviors mirror what may be happening inside storm clouds. The technique could help explain how lightning gets its initial spark.

Moss spores survived an extended stay on the outside of the ISS and remained capable of germinating once back on Earth. Their resilience to vacuum, extreme temperatures, and UV radiation surprised the researchers who expected them to perish. The spores' natural protective coat likely played a key role in shielding them. The study hints at the potential for simple plants to support agriculture beyond our planet.

Europe is investing in a coordinated effort to develop high-power optical vortex technologies and train new specialists in the field. The HiPOVor network unites academia and industry to advance applications ranging from material processing to environmentally friendly photonic systems.

Trigger warning: blood!

Yesterday I posted this photo of an injury I sustained, and asked readers to guess what caused it:

Given what readers know of me, the most common answers were “bit by a duck” and “bit by a squiirrel.”  It turns out that the latter answer (first suggested by Robert Wooley) is correct.  Ducks can’t really bite, at least not hard enough to break the skin, and when I’ve fed them out of my hand, they simply hoover up duck pellets from my open palm. No duck has ever caused me pain (I’m ignoring swimmer’s itch from parasites in the pond as well as the injury I sustained as I ran to rescue a baby duck being attacked by a mallard hen, slicing open my ear as it was caught on a thorny tree).

The most accurate answer came from Johan Kleynhaus:

Our host posted photos some time ago of him feeding the squirrels. My best guess is an over-excited squirrel, at the prospect of scoring a fat nut, who jumped up and the boss’s thumb got in the way.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades, that’s the answer.

I have been feeding squirrels in two places: around Botany Pond and in the Regenstein Library courtyard across the street, for winter is coming on and the fluffy rodents need to lay in their food.

Now the squirrels around Botany Pond know me, and run to me when I whistle. Several of them will even crawl up my leg to retrieve a nut from my hand, and, since they know me, they are not aggressive.  But the squirrels at Regenstein are not yet used to me. I’m training them by throwing them nuts and making my characteristic whistle, just as I did at Botany Pond.  They now know to come to my whistle, but they’re still wary of me.

One of the great pleasures of feeding squirrels is seeing them encounter big nuts for the first time, and not knowing what to do with them. (They learn quickly.) I’ve been giving them hazelnuts in the shell, as well as pecans in the shell. They particularly love pecans, and can handle them well as one end is pointed, making it easy to grab with their mouths, after which they run off and bury the nuts. (They store most of what I give them for the winter, which raises the question of whether they remember where their nuts are buried.)

The local store ran out of pecans, but I found that good walnuts in the shell are available at a reasonable price ($4/pound) on Amazon, and I bought several pounds. I put about five nuts in my pocket as I walk home each day, dispensing them to whoever comes to my whistle. Yesterday, though, the rodents were ravenous, and I ran out of walnuts before I got to the library.  But I was still approached by a hungry squirrel who ran up to me.  I had a few hazelnuts left: small ones. It’s not wise to give a small hazelnut to a squirrel who doesn’t trust you, as they’re inclined to simply go for your hand to get the nut, and that means the possibility of being bitten. Which I was.  The little fellow didn’t intend to hurt me, but simply wanted that nut come hell or high water. And, grabbing it, it bit me by accident.

Squirrel bites are nasty, for their sharp incisors go through flesh like butter, leaving a deep slice like a knife. And that’s what happened yesterday. I will no longer feed hazelnuts to unfamiliar squirrels. But the wound isn’t dangerous, for squirrels almost never carry rabies, and this one acted normally. I went home, cleaned off the cut, soaked it in very hot water for a while, and then doused it with isopropyl alcohol. Here’s what it looks like today. There is no pain. (Sorry for the blurry photo; I don’t know how to take closeups with my iPhone). Note that the slice is small, but produced a lot of blood because it was deep. (I also have superglue on my thumb, as I got it on my hands while trying to glue together a plastic key fob. I am a schlemiel.)

This wasn’t the first time I got chomped by a squirrel. I was badly bitten during my first job at the University of Maryland. As I walked home one day, I saw a student playing with a baby squirrel in a tree outside my building. It was small and adorable, and the student held it and petted it. I couldn’t resist. “Can I hold it, too?”, I asked foolishly.  “Yes, of course,” she said.  “Will it bite me?” I asked. “No, she said,” “it doesn’t bite.”  I picked up the squirrel, whereupon it put its front legs around my thumb (the same one!) and chomped deeply into the pad of flesh and fat at the base of my thumb. It wouldn’t let go, and I shook my hand to dislodge the attacking rodent. “Don’t hurt it!” she cried, oblivious to my own pain. It was one of the most painful injuries I ever sustained.

And the cut was deep. It immediately began spewing blood—a lot more than in the first photo above.  And within a few minutes the base of my thumb swelled up to the size of a ping-pong ball.  I thought I’d better go to the doctor, but it was hard to locate one, as it was Sunday. I finally managed to find one after a few hours, and the doctor took a look and pronounced it “a nasty bite.” He told me that I wouldn’t get rabies, but since the bite occurred a few hours before, he thought they may have to open up my hand and do something to prevent infection (an operation?). At any rate, the doctor didn’t do that, but used some device to open up the cut, and then made me sit in his office for half an hour soaking my hand in the disinfectant betadyne.

Yes, I am foolish, but I’m not going to stop feeding squirrels. I will just be more careful, and will feed unfamiliar squirrel just by dropping the nut in front of them.

That is my story. I have another tale about being bitten through my nostril by an albino baby skunk, but that’s for another day. . .

Quantum theory fails to explain how the reality we experience emerges from the world of particles. A new take on quantum cause and effect could bridge the gap

I don’t know how many times Agustín Fuentes, an anthropology professor at Princeton, will keep repeating the same arguments about why biological sex isn’t binary (see these posts on my site). It never seems to end. You’d think he’d stop banging the drum now that he’s written a whole book on the issue called Sex is a Spectrum, but he keeps on making the same old arguments that have been refuted many times (see this review by Tomas Bogardus, for example).  Why does someone make such weak arguments, and continue to do so without ever addressing the many criticisms he’s encountered?

I strongly suspect it’s because Fuentes is an ideologue: he believes that if people see biological sex as spectrum rather than a binary, opprobrium against trans people will lessen or vanish. But trans people should be treated with respect no matter whether or not sex is binary, for “is” does not equal “ought”—a lesson Fuentes should have learned. Further, nearly all trans people implicitly accept a sex binary: after all, they transition from having a male role or appearance to having a female role and appearance, or vice versa. But I’ve written about that before.  Nor does the binary nature of sex have anything to say about how we should regard people of nonstandard gender.Making that argument is another violation of Hume’s Law.

Now Fuentes has been joined by Nathan Lents, a professor at John Jay College. Lents has done good work refuting Intelligent Design, and I’m sad that this essay, published in ProSocial World, an endeavor of biologist David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, is not of Lent’s usual quality. In fact, it’s a terrible article, replete with mistaken arguments and bad logic.

Now it’s possible that these authors really believe that biological sex is a spectrum and are not just trying to buttress a “progressive” gender ideology, but I would find that behavior obtuse. Read Dawkins (link below) or Bogardus to see why.

I am so tired of this misrepresentation and confusion that it deeply nauseates me to have to discuss them again, but I’ll try to do so briefly, using quotes from the article by Fuentes and Lents. Click on the headline below to read (it’s also archived here).

Fuentes and Lents (henceforth F&L) first admit the binary of gametes, a binary used to define the sexes by most biologists who aren’t ideologues:

The major clades of eukaryotes – plants, animals, fungi, and the many kingdoms of protists – have evolved both unique and shared aspects in their sexual reproductive mechanisms, but one such aspect – the differentiation of gametes into two major forms – is a common theme. Anisogamy, the property of having two types of gametes – one very large and relatively immotile and one very small and highly mobile – is a key feature of sexual reproduction in all animals, all land plants, and many protist kingdoms.

F&L’s beef is not that there is a gametic binary (see Richard Dawkin’s great Substack essay for why defining—actually, recognizing—the sexes this way is essential and useful), but rather that organisms recognized as “male” (small mobile gametes) and “female” (large immobile gametes) show variation in other traits related to sex.  On average, human males differ in body size from females, but there is variation within each sex. And so it goes for body hair, gene expression, behavior, penis size, and so on.  But of course these traits, while correlated and connected with sex, are not part of the definition of sex, which involves the gamete binary.

Some quotes from F&L:

In our view, this binary classification of sex in animals is insufficient for capturing the full breadth of biological sexual diversity.

Some of the inadequacies of the binary sex classification for individuals are uncontroversial, as it has long been known that a large number of species – around 20% of non-arthropod invertebrates – include individuals that are simultaneously hermaphroditic. Many others, including around 2% of vertebrates, are sequential hermaphrodites. Animal bodies exist in a variety of sexed forms, with some even reconfiguring their biology relating to sex, including for the production of gametes, within their individual life history, sometimes multiple times. The presence of simultaneous and sequential hermaphrodites vexes the binary classification for sexed bodies and demonstrates that sex is neither immutable nor neatly reducible to gamete production.

Furthermore, sexual dimorphisms, sexual bimodalities, and a spectrum of sex-influenced gene expression are observed throughout animal bodies and across animal species. Some of this variation is patterned in close association with gamete production, but much is not so simply described. Across bodies, behaviors, and physiologies, there is substantive inherent variety and diversity, creating a sexual continuum of genetic, developmental, and behavioral biology within and across species. Individual animals can vary widely in the development, patterning, and expression of sexual biology in a variety of ways, from body sizes and compositions, to color patterns and genital anatomy, to courtship behaviors and parental investment, to name some of the most commonly diverse components of sex. These biological variations rarely collapse into two discrete sex-based categories defined by gamete production. Moreover, much of the biological variations in bodies, even those closely associated with reproduction, are also engaged in a diversity of other bodily functions and processes with myriad phylogenetic, ecological, and behavioral constraints and affordances, which are also not ubiquitously or consistently associated with the type of gametes a body produces.

But nobody contests this form of variation; but to pretend that hermaphrodites refute the sex binary is disingenuous. Yes, some individuals can make both types of gametes, and some, like the infamous clownfish, can actually change their sex, but the gametic binary remains. (I don’t much care if you call hermaphrodites a “third sex”, but they still bear only two types of gametes—the only types that exist.) Human hermaphrodites, like other individuals called “intersex,” are vanishingly rare, and none have been able to produce viable gametes of both types. But F&L’s arguments are not about hermaphrodites or “intersex” individuals with differences in sex development. Instead, their arguments are about variation among individuals, most of them of regular sex.

They also extend their argument among species. In various species of animals, for instance, biological sex can be determined by genes, chromosomes, rearing temperature, social milieu, haploidy versus diploidy, and so on, but there are only two types of gametes and reproductive systems, no matter how sex is determined.  That in itself should tell you something important about the binary.  Nevertheless, F&L persist with their “variation means there’s no binary” argument:

Dramatic sexual diversity and variation is not limited to adulthood. There is also substantive diversity in mechanisms of sex development across various animal taxa. There are chromosomal systems, other genetic systems, as well as systems based on season, temperature, age, social status, and population density, most of which have convergently evolved in multiple disparate lineages, emphasizing the relative genetic, cellular, and developmental flexibility and adaptability of these sex systems.

But, to paraphrase Ronald Fisher, the sexes are always two. Why is that?  F&L are using a familiar but misguided tactic trying to refute the sex binary. I call this “The Argument from Complexity” and it can be stated this way:

There is variation among individuals in traits related to and correlated with gamete type, and that variation is often not binary but bimodal or even forming a spectrum. Further, the determination of these traits, like body size or behavior, depends on a complex interaction between genes, development, and the environment.  Therefore biological sex itself is not a simple binary, but a spectrum.

You can recognize the fallacy in this; I believe Emma Hilton calls it a “bait and switch”. Yes, determination of ovaries and testes itself is complex, with many genes (as well as the internal environment) involved. And individuals vary in gene expression, body size, ornamentation, and other traits connected with sex. But there are still only two types of gametes and two sexes. Male and female peacocks look very different, but nobody says that refutes the sex binary. (In fact, the sex binary explains this difference.) And individuals of the two sexes must mate with each other to produce offspring—save for parthenogenetic or self-fertilizing species, which still participate in the gamete binary. Regardless of the complexity of development in humans, you get an offspring only when a male having sperm mates with a female having eggs.  If the male is very short, or has a tiny penis, that makes no difference!

Here’s F&L’s version of The Argument from Complexity:

Importantly, the recognition that sex can be a complex mixture of anatomy, physiology, and behavior does not serve to deny or minimize the existence and impacts of sex differences. In fact, it affirms them and emphasizes their importance. While the matter of which gamete an animal body makes – its gametic sex – is clearly important, it is not the only variable by which animal morphologies or behaviors can be, or are, sexed. If these other variables were neatly binary, immutable, and non-overlapping, it would not be necessary to distinguish between gametic sex and biological sex. But, since nearly all other sex traits are either continuous or bimodal, are not always immutable nor perfectly correlated, a simple and categorical definition of sex that is based purely on gamete production is both unwarranted and potentially misleading.

. . . Animal morphology and physiology are the product of complex interactions of biological, developmental, and environmental systems, and the human environment is a particularly complex assemblage of biotic and abiotic factors: what we refer to as human culture.  Human phenotypic expression is always mutually shaped by cultural milieu.  It is well-established that adult height and weight, childhood development trajectories, taste bud reactivity, muscle development and coordination, patterns of sexual arousal, resistance (or lack thereof) to disease-causing bacteria, and nearly every other aspect of human bodies emerge from mutual and interactive development of physiology, morphology, cultural context, and lived experiences.

All that is sand thrown into the eyes of the public; it has nothing to do with the binary nature of biological sex.

Finally, N&L even make the bonkers argument that the athletic advantage of males or females may not be a result of their evolved differences (based on gene expression), but could be a result of social conditioning. This is an argument made by those “progressive” individuals who think that we should not be dividing sports into male versus female leagues. (The Olympic Committee has just decided otherwise.):

Furthermore, it is not currently known which, or how much, of all of this patterned variation is shaped by differences in how boys and girls, and men and women, use their bodies on a daily basis. While human anatomical development is a fairly canalized pathway producing a relatively consistent phenotypic range, the developmental process itself both affects and is substantively affected by how that anatomy is physically and socially engaged, especially during childhood and adolescence. Indeed, there is emerging evidence that persistent culturally mandated gender differences in play behaviors and sports participation, which are quite substantial in many cultures, have clear and strong effects on the developmental dynamics of skeletal and muscle formation.

Similarly, gendered differences in the social environment likely contribute to differences in sexed bodies in ways that are probably impossible to untangle. For example, it is well established that hormone levels and ratios are affected by the social environment, and these same hormones directly impact both the development of many tissues and sex-related and non-sex-related behaviors (muscle hypertrophy, hair distribution, metabolism, mental alertness, and libido, to name a few). Such complexities are not limited to humans by any stretch, as Patricia Brennan explains in another essay in this series, in Ruddy Ducks, social interactions directly impact the seasonal growth and development of the penis, emphasizing the dynamically responsive nature of sexual anatomy, even in adult animals.

It’s not clear to me what the penis of ruddy ducks has to do with human behavior and sports participation. Sadly, F&L don’t discuss the evidence that even injecting biological males with hormones and giving them puberty blockers, an important change of internal environment, nevertheless still gives these trans-identified males an athletic advantage over biological women.

I hope that I don’t have to make these points again, but I suspect I will.  The ideological termites have dined well, and have even managed to convince biologists and science popularizers like Steve Novella and Bill Nye that sex is a spectrum.  Have a look below at Bill Nye using the Argument from Variation to claim that sex is a spectrum. (I have never liked his arguments, and this bit shows he’s drunk the Kool-Aid.)  Nye also notes that sex is “assigned at birth”.  What is extra confusing is that he conflates sex with both “sexuality” and gender.

This is the last collection of photos I have, so the feature won’t be available until I get new pictures. Just sayin’. . . .

But today we have a photo-and-text essay from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The unfairly despised

The renowned entomologist, evolutionary biologist, naturalist, conservationist and target of woke troopers Edward O. Wilson popularised the concept of biophilia (love of life), the intuitive affiliation humans have with nature that is expressed by our attraction to animals, plants, landscapes and other natural things. For Wilson, biophilia is an evolutionary trait ingrained in the human personality. While his hypothesis has been supported by anecdotal and quantitative evidence, not all forms of life are equally cherished. Snakes and spiders, for example, evoke fear and revulsion in many people, responses that are also embedded in our brains and shaped by ancestral fears of animals that could harm us.

Little Miss Muffet being scared by a spider, by William Wallace Denslow © Wikimedia Commons:

Among the many types of animal phobias (the irrational, exaggerated and uncontrollable aversion to certain creatures), entomophobia is one of the most common across countries and cultures. Many theories have been proposed to explain the negative emotions triggered by insects (Lockwood, 2013), but anthropologist Hugh Raffles was spot on in describing entomological scenarios that can trigger primordial horrors: “there is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude; there is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places; there is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling; there is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings; there is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth.” (Raffles, 2010).

The fear of being stung, bitten, or swarmed by flying living things help explain why, in a 2021 survey, Britons placed spiders and wasps at the top of the list of unpopular invertebrates. The survey also revealed an interesting aspect of human perceptions and attitudes: largely harmless animals are more disliked than mosquitoes, the world’s most lethal to humans.

Results of a YouGov 2021 survey © Statista:

Cockroaches came third on the British dislike scorecard, surely only because they are not that common in the country. In warmer places, where people are likely to have had close encounters with cockroaches, these insects shoot up to the top of the list, and by a considerable margin. A shiny, greasy appearance, probing antennae, erratic skittering and a sewage aroma are off-putting enough, but their flying and occasional accidental entanglement in one’s hair can send the toughest character shrieking away. On top of that, domestic cockroaches are associated with filth, which triggers an uncontrollable feeling of disgust. For psychologist Mark Schaller, this reaction reflects our Behavioural Immune System, a set of innate responses shaped by evolution to identify signs of contamination by pathogens and avoid disease. If something looks like it could make us sick, we flee from it.

A sight to make many people cringe: an Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis) sharing our table © H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons:

The upshot of all this bad PR is that many people loathe cockroaches. Fervently. And yet, there’s more to cockroaches than abjectness and pestilence.

There are some 4,500 described species of cockroaches, of which 25 are synanthropes (organisms adapted to live near humans) and considered pests. The remainder are found in a variety of natural ecosystems, predominantly in tropical and sub-tropical regions. They live among leaf litter, rotting wood, underneath tree bark and among vegetation, feeding on almost anything of nutritional value. Together with termites, which belong to the same order Blattodea, cockroaches are highly beneficial by accelerating the breakdown of organic matter and the release of nutrients into the environment.

Florida woods cockroaches (Eurycotis floridana) munching away on rotten wood © Happy1892, Wikimedia Commons:

And another ecological role of cockroaches is slowly becoming better known: pollination.

Some plants and cockroaches share the same type of habitat: shaded, humid spots under the cover of thick vegetation. These places are not the best for recruiting the usual pollinators such as bees, hover flies and moths. But a cockroach may be the ticket for efficient transport of pollen from one plant to another. And that’s an opportunity not missed by Balanophora tobiracola, a parasitic flowering plant from Yakushima Island, Japan. Margattea satsumana cockroaches are seen scurrying all over B. tobiracola plants, suggesting they may do more than feed on pollen and nectar. Indeed, exclusion experiments – where plants accessible to visitors are compared to those with no access – revealed that cockroach visitation enhanced pollination, while the contribution of moths, flies and beetles was negligible (Suetsugu, 2025).

A M. satsumana cockroach visiting a B. tobiracola plant © Suetsugu & Yamashita, 2022:

Cockroach pollination on a Japanese island is not an isolated case. In French Guiana, the cockroach Amazonina platystylata is the main pollinator of Clusia aff. sellowiana (a potentially new species related to Clusia sellowiana). The cockroaches have no specialised pollen-collecting structures, but their bodies are coarse enough to retain pollen grains and transport them from flower to flower (Vlasáková et al., 2008).

An A. platystylata cockroach and a Clusia flower © Cockroach Species File and Scott Zona (Wikimedia Commons), respectively:

Cockroaches are known to pollinate some ten other plant species, so they are not exactly major players in plant reproduction. But part of the reason for these meagre figures is lack of information. Shy, nocturnal insects living deep down in thick forests are not observed very often, much less researched. Cockroach pollination also illustrates plants’ capability to adjust and make the best of challenging settings; when run-of-the-mill pollinators are not around, a busy, inquisitive cockroach would do just fine.

Not all cockroaches are unappealing to us, like the Mardi Gras cockroach, aka Mitchell’s diurnal cockroach (Polyzosteria mitchelli), from Australia © Evelyn Virens, iNaturalist:

This article is from a year ago, but it was just sent to me as it is making the rounds in climate change denying circles. It is by Paul Macrae, who is an ex-journalist who now seems to be primarily engaged in climate change denial. The article (a chapter from his book on the subject) is full of the standard climate denial tropes – for the sake of space, I would like to focus on three specific points. The first is the claim that climate science is “settled”, the second is the notion of “post-normal science”, and the third is a factual claim about the accuracy of prior climate models.

Of course, if there is a consensus among climate scientists that global warming (I will get into more details on what this means) is “settled”, that makes it difficult, especially for  a non-scientists, to question the conclusion. So order number one – deny that there is a consensus, deny that consensus is even a thing in science, and deny that science can ever be settled.  I don’t suspect that I will ever be able to slay this dragon, it is simply too useful rhetorically, but for those who are open to argument, here is my analysis.

First – consensus is absolutely a thing in the regular operations of science. A consensus can be built in a number of ways, but often panels of recognized world experts are assembled to review all existing scientific data and make a consensus statement about what the data shows. This is often done when there is a policy or practice question. For example, in medicine, practitioners need to know how to practice, and these consensus statements are used as practice guidelines. They also set the standard of care, so as a practitioner you should definitely be aware of them and not violate them unless you have a good reason. Obviously, the question of global warming is a serious policy question, and so providing scientific guidance to policy makers is the point, such as with the IPCC. Consensus is also used to set research and funding priorities, to establish terminology, and resolve controversies. But to be clear – these mechanisms of consensus do not determine what the science says. That is determined by the actual science. The point is to provide clarity regarding complex scientific evidence, especially when a practice or policy is at issue.

The reason we need such expert review is because scientific evidence, as regular readers here know, is complicated. Science is not a simple matter of proof. There are many different kinds of evidence – observational, experimental, theoretical, and modeling (computer modeling, animal models, etc.). Scientific evidence can use deduction, induction, can start with observation or start with a hypothesis, can use theoretical constructs, can make observations about the past and make predictions about the future. All of these various activities are part of the regular operation of science. No one type of evidence is supreme or perfect – they all represent different tradeoffs. Scientific conclusions are always a matter of inference – scientists make the best inference they can to the most probable explanation given all of the available evidence. This always involves judgement, and some opinion. How are different kinds of evidence weighted when they appear to conflict?

So it is a meaningful question to ask – to different scientists looking at the same question from different perspectives come to roughly the same conclusion? For example, do those doing ice-core analysis large agree with those looking at tree rings? We have data from different kinds of temperature measurement, from physicists looking at the activity and influence of the sun, and the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. We may even have data from planetary astronomers. Then we have various computer models, which take input from many sources of information. No one source of information is definitive. So scientists triangulate from different perspectives and see if they align on the same answer. The only way to know is to see if there is a consensus among the various scientists, each with different pieces to this enormous puzzle.

But of course, in order to be precise, you have to break down the question of global warming into it’s specific pieces – does CO2 drive warming, are there other sources of climate forcing, what is the climate sensitivity to CO2, is the planet actually warming and how much, and what will be the consequences of different levels of warming? We can’t just say – climate change or global warming, we have to address each component separately.

Is science ever “settled”. Macrae conflates this notion with “certain” (there are such straw men throughout his article). Science is never 100% certain, and it is never done. But there is a place for the notion that some claims in science are so well-established that they are functionally settled, meaning we no longer have to specifically establish them over and over again. We can take them as a given and move on to more detail and other sub-questions. For example, it is settled that the Earth is roughly a sphere, while planetary scientists continue to revise greater and greater detail. It is established that life on Earth is the result of organic evolution from a common ancestor, that the brain is the organ of the mind, that DNA is the molecule of inheritance, that plate tectonics is real, and that multiple sclerosis is an auto-immune inflammatory disease. Research in all these areas is ongoing, but there is very strong agreement (a consensus) that these basic fundamental questions are settled.

They could still, theoretically, be overturned, but the probability is so close to zero we can treat it functionally as zero. It is simple not a serious scientific possibility that the Earth is flat, that life was created 10,000 years ago, that consciousness lives in the heart, that proteins carry inheritance, that the Earth is completely static, or that MS is caused by an imbalance of the humors. Would Macrae agree that any of these questions are scientifically “settled”? Should we give serious consideration to flat-Earthers?

With regard to climate change, it is well-established (use whatever phrase you like) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the planet is warming. It is also well-established that industrial release of previously sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere and therefore the carbon cycle is forcing the climate to become warmer on average. There is a range of possible climate sensitivity, which is open to revision, but that range has statistical confidence intervals and the range is narrowing as our confidence increases through further research. Exactly how much warming will occur is open to further study and revision, but again there is a range with confidence intervals. What will the consequences be? This is difficult to predict, but there are some very reasonable statements that we can make, informed by climate models and what has already happened over the last 30 years. But there is a lot of uncertainty – and of course, that uncertainty cuts both ways. It could be better than the average prediction, or it could be worse.

What is not reasonable is to assume everything will be fine. This is like facing the possibility of cancer, with the same degree of uncertainty. Just hoping that it’s all fine and doing nothing is likely not a rational course of action. This doesn’t mean you have to opt for the most radical surgery either. There is often a range of options, which can be determined by the level of evidence and the resulting risks vs benefit. Doing nothing about climate change until we have a high degree of certainty is also not a rational course, because climate change gets harder and harder to deal with the longer it goes and the worse it gets. Solutions also take decades to unfold.

Typically, those in the denier camp use the most unreasonable or extreme version of climate mitigation strategies as if they are the only option. This is like alternative medicine proponents characterizing all cancer treatment as “cut, burn, and poison.” Macrae similarly writes:

“And shouldn’t we be especially wary when this science, with its attack on fossil fuels, threatens the very foundations of Western-style civilization?”

Now who’s the alarmist? Sure, there are extremists on the fringe of every movement. In terms of actual proposed policy, however, and the center of gravity of climate discussion, we are mostly talking about investing in R&D, investing in infrastructure, and jiggering the markets away from fossil fuels and towards green energy. There is no serious policy discussion about banning fossil fuels and collapsing western civilization. There is nothing like that in the Paris Accords, or in any UN recommendation. Whatever you think about the effectiveness of Biden’s policies, they were entirely carrots for industry to increase investment in green energy. About the most radical actual policy proposal is a carbon tax, which most economists agree would likely be effective. This would hardly collapse civilization.

These are all inevitable technologies because they are superior to burning fossil fuels on many levels – cleaner air, reduced health care costs, more energy independence. We just want to make them happen faster.

Tomorrow I will write part II, covering post-normal science and the accuracy of climate models.

The post Is Climate Science “Post Normal” Science? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Using in-situ propellant has been a central pillar of the plan to explore much of the solar system. The logic is simple - the less mass (especially in the form of propellant) we have to take out of Earth’s gravity well, the less expensive, and therefore more plausible, the missions requiring that propellant will be. However, a new paper from Donald Rapp, the a former Division Chief Technologist at NASA’s JPL and a Co-Investigator of the successful MOXIE project on Mars, argues that, despite the allure of creating our own fuel on the Moon, it might not be worth it to develop the systems to do so. Mars, on the other hand, is a different story.