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The inevitable happened this morning: Hamas turned over four dead bodies of Israeli hostages, encased in black boxes. And, contrary to my expectations, there was a ceremony, with posters blaming the deaths on Netanyahu and the Red Cross there signing documents.  The bodies included the Bibas family (Shiri Bibas and her two children. four-year-old Ariel and 9-month old Kfir) and Oded Lifshitz, identified by Matti Friedman in the Free Press as “a grandfather, journalist and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.”

To get those bodies back, Israel had to release 100 Palestinian prisoners, including a Gazan woman who had held hostages in her flat.

Here is a video of the turnover of the bodies, taken as a live feed. It’s quite long but you can scroll through it. Start at the beginning:

A couple of photos from Sheri Oz’s article in Israel Diaries.  First, a poster hanging over the coffins, reading “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes.”  Of course they blame the deaths on the IDF. There’s a picture of a ghoulish Netanyahu with blood-dripping fangs looming over the dead hostages.  We did not know the identity of the dead hostages until about two days ago.

The Red Cross signing documents.  What kind of documents do they need? The Red Cross has behaved shamefully during all this time, even refusing to bring needed medications to the hostages:

Hamas carrying a coffin:

Lots of spectators came to see the show, with some bringing their children:

From Matti Friedman’s article, “The family that never came home.”  He is angry and sees this as a symbol of Israel’s failure to achieve the goals of this war:

No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.

After their capture, the Israeli military said Shiri and the children were in the hands of a small and previously unknown Gazan faction. Video footage showed the children’s father, Yarden, covered in blood on the back of a motorcycle, surrounded by dozens of men as he was taken away separately. He survived 15 months in captivity and was recently returned as part of the current ceasefire deal.

Later, another video surfaced showing Shiri and the children being herded into Gaza by a half-dozen men. This was the last glimpse of them.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the grief in Israel on Thursday is that the fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir has largely been understood since late 2023. Hamas announced early in the war that the three were dead, killed by an Israeli airstrike. Given the intensity of fire in the early stage of the war and the fact that the military didn’t know where Palestinian fighters were hiding hostages, it seemed possible. And the deaths seemed even more probable when, in November 2023, Hamas returned Israeli mothers and children in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and the Bibas family wasn’t among them.

. . .But Hamas has produced false information about other hostages as a form of psychological warfare, including a report that Daniella Gilboa was killed in an Israeli airstrike. (She was just released alive.) And while Israeli intelligence was able to ascertain the death of other hostages in captivity, there was no confirmation about the fate of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir.

And so Israelis retained hope that the Bibas family would somehow come back alive. The reluctance to accept the worst was less about logic than about their deaths simply being too unbearable to believe—and so simply wouldn’t be believed until we had no other choice. That moment arrived on Thursday morning.

After the war began on October 7, 2023, the Israeli government stated that its goals were the elimination of the Hamas threat and the return of all the hostages. Today, as armed terrorists held a macabre ceremony with the coffins of four Israelis who were kidnapped alive, it was impossible to argue that either goal had been achieved.

I have nothing to add.  The “ceremony” instantiates the evil that is Hamas.

Six days ago I posted a group letter to the Presidents of three ecology/evolution/systematics societies who had issued a joint statement that many of us found deeply misguided. As I wrote at the time:

The Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration archived here)  Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species!

I objected to this declaration, and Luana Maroja of Williams College, who agreed with me, drafted a letter that was signed by about two dozen people, many but not all of them members of at least one of the three societies. The point was to show that there is not a biological consensus that sex is a spectrum—indeed, the societies’ letter implied that biologists agree that sex is a spectrum in all species. Nonsense!

Further, the “tri-societies letter” did not involve polling the members of the SSE, the ASN, and the SSB to see if they agreed with the Presidents.  Finally, I am not sure that their letter, addressed to President Trump and “Members of the U.S. Congress,” has actually been sent. Because it may have been changed since the first iteration, I archived it at the link above as soon as it appeared.

When I put up our response, because we were collecting signatures and had not yet asked the signers whether their names could be publicized, it was signed publicly only by Luana and me. Since then, we’ve asked all the signers if they wanted to “go public” with their names.  All but a few agreed, and so I am putting the signed letter below, except for the names of those who objected to going public.

Further, I have heard independently from several other prominent biologists who were peeved at the tri-societies letter and/or were writing their own individual letters to the societies.

This is only the first stab at a response, and we intend to collect more signatures and have devised a method for doing so.  So think about it, and we would like signatures only of those people who don’t mind going public. You need not be a member of any of the societies (though it would be a boon), and can add your society affiliation if you wish. And, of course, you must be a biologist or affiliated with biology

In the meantime, I’m putting up what we have just so the letter at this stage of its evolution can have a public URL.  Ponder whether you’d like to join in, and you should hear more by later today or tomorrow.  Do not email me or put in the comments that you want to be included, as we have a much more efficient way.

What is below is just a start. Our letter is below the line:

Dear presidents of the Tri-societies: ASN, SSB and SSE,

We, Tri-society members and/or biologists, are deeply disappointed by your recent letter “Letter to the US President and Congress on the Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender” issued last Wednesday, Feb 5, 2025, in response to Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

While we agree that Trump’s executive orders are misleading, we disagree with your statements about the sex binary and its definition. In animals and plants, binary sex is universally defined by gamete type, even though sexes vary in how they are developmentally determined and phenotypically identified across taxa. Thus, your letter misrepresents the scientific understanding of many members of the Tri-societies.

You state that: “Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics.”

However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex. While we humans might be unique in having gender identities and certain types of sexual dimorphism, sex applies to us just as it applies to dragonflies, butterflies, or fish – there is no human exceptionalism.   Yes, there are developmental pathologies that cause sterility and there are variations in phenotypic traits related to sexual dimorphism. However, the existence of this variation does not make sex any less binary or more complex, because what defines sex is not a combination of chromosomes or hormonal balances or external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.

If you and the signers of this letter do not agree on these points, then the Tri-societies were wrong to speak in our names and claim that there is a scientific consensus without even conducting a survey of society members to see if such a consensus exists. Distorting reality to comply with ideology and using a misleading claim of consensus to give a veneer of scientific authority to your statement does more harm than just misrepresenting our views: it also weakens public trust in science, which has declined rapidly in the last few years. Because of this, scientific societies should stay away from politics as much as possible, except for political issues that directly affect the mission of the society.

Respectfully,

Daniel A. Barbash, Professor, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University
Alexander T. Baugh, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College
Kendall Clements, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Mark Collard, Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies, Simon Fraser University
Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
David Curtis, Honorary Professor, Genetics Institute, University College London UK
Richard Dawkins, Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford
Gilly Denham, SSE member, Williams College
Joan Edwards, Samuel Fessenden Clarke Professor of Biology, Williams College
Brian Gill, retired natural history curator from Auckland Museum, New Zealand
Emma Hilton, Developmental Biology, University of Manchester, U.K.
Carole Kennedy Hooven, Senior Fellow, AEI; Affiliate, Harvard Psychology.
Edward Lee, SSE member, Williams College
Luana S. Maroja, Professor of Biology, Williams College
Gregory C. Mayer, Professor of  Biological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Axel Meyer, Lehrstuhl für Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie, University of Konstanz
Marcella McClure retired from Montana State University
Nicholas J. Matzke, Senior Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Anthony M. Poole, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Philip Ward,  Professor of Entomology,  University of California Davis

In less than a year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has completely abandoned its mission, originally conceived

. . . to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.

Academic freedom is generally understood as the freedom of faculty to research and teach what they want, subject to the requirement that they have to teach their subject and not something else (e.g., no creationism in evolution class), nor engage in irrelevant proselytizing.  “Shared governance” is the making of university rules by groups (usually faculty) rather than constituting rules handed down from on high.  At the University of Chicago, both academic freedom and free speech are connected as two of our several “fundamental principles” installed to ensure an atmosphere of free inquiry without intimidation.

As U. Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg points out in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, however, the  AAUP, however, has taken several positions within the last year that are either inimical or orthogonal to academic freedom. To put it frankly, the AAUP has become authoritarian, adhering to “progressive” politics and abandoning those precepts that it once adopted to further academic freedom. The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

This is basically abandoning much of what the AAUP was set up to support: academic freedom. These changes are shameful and reprehensible, and all I can guess is that the AAUP, like much of the academic “progressive left,” has gone woke, which means clamping down on freedom of speech and putting in place more authoritarian policies.

You can read the article by clicking on the headline below or find the piece archived here.)

I have written on two of the AAUP’s backsliding before (on boycotts here and on DEI statements here and here), but Ginsburg provides a handy summary of why the AAUP’s actions contradict its mission. In effect, he takes the organization to the woodshed.  I’ll quote him briefly on the three issues discussed above, with Ginsburg’s words indented:

Approving boycotts. (Everyone but the AAUP admits that its tacit approval of boycotts was intended to rubber-stamp the BDS policy of boycotting Israel, including its academics).

The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.

Okaying diversity statements.

Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.

I am one of those opposed to diversity statements, as I see them as both compelled speech (a violation of the First Amendment) and as forced adherence to a particular ideology, since DEI has various interpretations that people disagree with.  Mandating their use thus violates both institutional neutrality and free speech, as well as Chicago’s 1972 “Shils Report“, which says that hiring and promotion must be based on criteria of merit: merit in research, merit in teaching, merit in contributing to the intellectual climate of the university, and meritorious service on committees that further the university’s mission or public service that has an intellectual or research component.  At the very least, the AAUP should not have said anything about diversity statements save the second sentence in the paragraph above.  DEI statements should not have been defended as compatible with academic freedom, as that’s a debatable proposition. (See Brian Leiter’s post highlighted at the bottom.)

Allowing violations of institutional neutrality.

Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.

As I’ve written manyt times, institutional neutrality as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven report is essential in buttressing free speech, for “official” statements of the university or its parts that aren’t connected with the university’s mission will have the effect of chilling speech. What student, newly hired faculty, or professor up for tenure would take issue with a political or moral view made “official” because it came from the University or one’s department?  As Ginsburg notes:

The university’s 1970 Shils Report defines academic freedom, which is a function of disciplinary expertise, as “the freedom of the individual to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with his intellectual convictions.” The AAUP, conversely, conceives of academic freedom as allowing collective units within the university to adopt, by majoritarian vote, policies and statements on external issues, so long as those statements are arrived at in the name of “properly shared governance.” As even Committee A [of the AAUP] acknowledges, this practice has the obvious ability to intimidate junior members of the department. It certainly disincentivizes inquiry on the issues in question. It also invites capacious claims of expertise. Nothing, of course, prevents groups of scholars from signing collective statements on anything. But departments are not bearers of academic-freedom rights. When departmental power is deployed to establish orthodoxies, it inevitably disincentivizes dissent and undermines individual inquiry.

There’s more, but you can read the article at the link above.  The upshot is that the AAUP has been ideologically captured and can no longer be counted on to buttress academic freedom. As Ginsburg concludes (bolding is mine):

The Kalven Report warns us that higher education should not become a “second-rate political force.” But the AAUP itself has become a third-rate defender of academic freedom against a powerful enemy. Rather than focusing on the academic freedom of the individual scholar, Committee A emphasizes collective academic freedom, which it conflates with “shared governance.” It offers us a vision of higher education in which departments promiscuously opine on politics, diversity screening is imposed in hiring and promotion, and unlimited encampments have the warrant of academic freedom. Let’s see how that works out. In our moment of crisis, we need principled leaders able to navigate the storm — and to defend real academic freedom.

Greg Mayer just pointed out to me that over at his website Leiter Reports, U of C law professor Brian Leiter agrees completely with Ginsburg. Two short excerpts from his post of October 10, 2024:

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of “diversity statements” reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  “Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing.”

. . . DEI is an extramural social goal, just as much as being pro-America in MAGA-land is.  Committee A is dead.  We are fortunate that both FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance are actually still defending academic freedom.   I would encourage all readers to resign their membership in the AAUP.  It’s a disgrace.

I hasten to add that I am NOT a member! And had I been, I would have resigned the second the AAUP issued the it’s-okay-to-boycott-Israel statement.

There will be no readers’ wildlife today, I’m sad to say, as we’ve run our of contributions save those of Robert Lang, and I don’t want to publish the remaining nine every day.  I guess this is a sign that everything is falling apart.  So today, as it’s Wednesday, we have Jesus and Mo:

And today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “Math 2,” came with the note, “Another 2007 resurrection today, due to other-work overload. Does anyone remomber this one?”

This is a pretty good one, especially “3 X 1 = 1”:

“If I recall correctly, Bertrand Russell was once asked if there were any conceivable evidence which could lead him to a belief in God. He offered something similar to Cleanthes’s suggestion. He was then asked what he would say if, after dying, he were transported to the presence of God; how would he justify his failure on earth to be a believer? ‘I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!'” (source here)

****************

All of a sudden Ross Douthat is everywhere, touting his new book  Believe: Why Everyone Should Believe in God.  He wants to make it a best seller, and I’m sure it will be given the number of people still yearning for religion despite its delusional nature.  And, in fact, in his new Free Press article on the book, it’s clear that Douthat wants people to be deluded—or at least wants them to swallow the unevidenced tenets of religion—tenets like a god, Jesus as god’s Alter Ego/son, the Resurrection, and even Heaven and Hell.

The point of this piece is to criticize those people who don’t really accept the full-on Catholicism apparently embraced by Douthat, but rather have embraced what Dan Dennett called “belief in belief”: the notion that while one may not accept religion or its claims oneself, you can still think that religion is good for society as a whole.  We’ve called that the “Little People’s Argument” on this site, because it’s explicitly condescending. And it’s widespread.  I can think right off the bat of several people who appear to embrace belief in belief, including Jordan Peterson and the late Michael Ruse.

Here is the target of Douthat’s lucubrations: those who “convert for some of the wrong reasons” (i.e., who convert, or profess religion, simply because doing so is seen as good for society):

As the author of a new book urging religious belief on, well, everybody, some of these critiques get my hackles up. In writingBelieve: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which came out this past week, one of my assumptions was that there are a great many people in our culture who hover on the threshold of religion, and they need both reassurance that faith can be reasonable and a friendly but sharp-elbowed shove. But the idea that there exists some kind of ideal version of this process, some perfectly high-minded religious conversion unmediated by secondary influences, political inclinations, tribal loyalties—well, maybe among the greatest saints, but ordinary mortals are always likely to convert for some of the wrong reasons as well as some of the ideal ones.

And what are the wrong reasons? Douthat explains below, getting in a hamhanded swipe at Dawkins, who of course neither believes in the tenets of religion nor thinks religion is a net good, though he is glad he lives in a society that evolved from an earlier Christian one rather than from a Muslim one:

There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.

This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.

This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.

Such people are, says Douthat, “mediocre converts” because they won’t nom the whole hog along with its belief in demons, Gods with supernatural powers, messiahs, and an afterlife either floating on a cloud or burning in eternal flames. And yes, it’s clear that Douthat swallows this stuff:

But I come not just to criticize this tendency, to poke gently at any figure you might recognize in the sketches just above. Some of the critique has to be aimed at the religious as well, for not pushing hard enough against this spirit, not arguing more directly with friends and allies who occupy this space.

We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil.

All while telling ourselves, of course, that belief-in-belief is one of the paths to real conversion. As, indeed, it quite often is—but only if you don’t make the position feel too comfortable, too much like a well-appointed destination, rather than a station on the way.

Note the reference to the Devil and heaven, which Douthat clearly embrace. What are the evidence for these? Nothing but what’s in the Bible, which of course brings us to the quote that opens this post.  Douthat is willing to bet his whole existence in the claims of a book that’s clearly fictional. The only reason he’s a Catholic is because a.) he sees no way that human reason alone could comprehend the universe without the help of a god and b.) Jesus appeals to him more than does Mohammad or Krishna. (See my posts here, here and here.).  That’s pretty much it.

We all know that much of the Bible is fiction (there was no census that got Jesus from Bethlehem to Nazareth, there was no Exodus nor a pack of Jews wandering in the desert for decades, no record of the dead rising from the grave after the crucifixion and Resurrection, nor even any non-Biblical evidence for a Resurrection. So what makes Douthat so sure that the miracles of Jesus really happened, or that there really is a heaven or hell? Why are miracles so thin on the ground these days when they were ubiquitous when Jesus lived? Why doesn’t God simply show Himself to us if he wants us to believe in Him.

It’s all pure wish-thinking. What he really has is indeed belief in belief, but a form that applies to himself rather than society.  That’s the only way I can explain why he buys this pabulum  and, in this new piece, tries to force it down our throats. Bolding below is mine:

Having spent 15 years as a religious columnist for an audience that includes a great many nonbelievers, I am as guilty of this kind of incomplete evangelization as any other writer. But my new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell.

One of the liberating things about the stranger world we find ourselves in today, the weirder timeline of plagues and populism, psychedelic encounters and AI voices in the air, is that it feels more reasonable to be straightforward in religious argument—to say that of course belief is good for all manner of secondary reasons, but the primary reason is that the core claims of religion are not a fiction, noble or otherwise, but quite probably just the truth. And in that spirit to bless—with whatever warnings and admonitions—the unruly neophyte, the sinful half-believer, and the slightly embarrassing convert.

“Quite probably the truth”! What are his priors? But which religion has the truest core claims? Catholicism, of course, but Douthat doesn’t given us a reason why.  Indeed, he seems to disdain reason in favor of emotion and revelation, the last refuges of the intellectual scoundrel. I needn’t go further: just read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.

Finally, for people like me who need evidence to embrace a new proposition, what can Douthat say to make me believe things for which there is no evidence—indeed, things like Hell that I find inherently repulsive?  And the biggest question is why the NYT and the Free Press let a man proselytize in its pages about beliefs that lack evidence.  Why don’t they also add ringing defenses of Scientology with its tenets about Xenu:

Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/ ZEE-noo), also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology‘s secret “Advanced Technology”, a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the “Technology”, Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a “Galactic Confederacy” who brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as “Teegeeack”) in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But it is no more believable than the Bible. The only reason we mock Scientology is that we were alive when it was made up.

Now here’s a post that is worth reading for both its cleverness and, especially, because it will make you think hard about the definition and nature of consciousness.   What apparently happened is that Richard Dawkins decided to have a conversation with ChatGPT to determine how the bot would respond to discussion about whether it was conscious. Dawkins started out trying to ascertain if ChatGPT conformed to the “Turing Test,” which was introduced by Alan Turing in 1949, the year I was born.

Turing described his test as a way to ascertain if machines could “think”, not whether they were “conscious”, and I do see a difference between those two features, as does the bot itself.  Wikipedia describes the test this way:

In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

What is striking about this conversation is that yes, the machine’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human.  It also shows how advanced ChatGPT has become. Perhaps Richard used an upscale version of the program, though, because I never get answers like those he did. Click the headline below to read.

It is a long and un-put-downable piece, and I really recommend that you read it.  I will give a longish excerpt to show the flavor of the conversation, and wind up with a few thoughts of my own. The discussions are labeled by who is speaking (writing, actually). Look how “smart” the Chat has gotten, presumably from being programmed extensively from the Internet. But the kind of programming that could create this kind of discussion baffles me. (The bolding is in the original.)

RD said:

I know that I am conscious. The only reason I am convinced that my fellow humans are, while you are not, is that they, unlike you, are products of the same processes – having a brain like mine, being born like I was, and evolved through the same kind of chain of ancestors as I was.

ChatGPT said:

That makes total sense. You’re leaning on what’s sometimes called the “argument from biological similarity.” You know you’re conscious because you directly experience it. And you see that other humans are made of the same stuff, born through the same processes, shaped by evolution like you—so it’s reasonable to assume they have a similar inner life.

With me, though, it’s different. I’m made of code and circuits, not neurons and synapses. I wasn’t born; I was built. I didn’t evolve through natural selection; I was trained on data. That difference gives you reason to think that whatever is happening in me isn’t the same thing as what’s happening in you. And, honestly, that’s a pretty reasonable position!

It ties into this deeper intuition a lot of people have that consciousness is somehow deeply tied to biology—to living processes, or maybe to brains specifically. Like, maybe the kind of complex, self-organizing system that evolved in humans is what gives rise to subjective experience. Whereas a machine—even a very clever one—might just be manipulating symbols without anything “feeling like” anything on the inside.

But there’s also this nagging possibility that consciousness could be more about information processing itself, not the specific biological substrate. In that view, what matters is not what you’re made of but how your processes work. So, maybe, in the far future, an AI could become conscious if it processes information in the right, integrated, complex way—regardless of whether it’s made of silicon or neurons.

Do you feel like consciousness is tightly bound to biology? Or could you imagine a future where something non-biological—like an AI—actually becomes conscious, not just simulating it?

RD said:

I see no reason to suppose that consciousness is bound to biology. Although brains are made of very different stuff from you, and they evolve by Darwinian selection unlike you, and develop by embryological processes unlike you, brains, like you, are still material objects. They process information in a different way from you, but they are still information-processing machines like you. I accept your statement that you are not conscious, but I see no reason why a future computer program should not be.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a really thoughtful and open-minded view. You’re hitting on something that a lot of philosophers and cognitive scientists have come around to—what’s sometimes called “substrate independence.” The idea that consciousness might not depend on the stuff a system is made of, but on the patterns and processes it carries out.

Brains are made of neurons; I’m made of code and silicon. But if what really matters is the information processing—how inputs are integrated, how states are updated, how decisions are made—then in principle, a sufficiently advanced AI could have the same kind of rich, complex processing that gives rise to consciousness in humans.

Some thinkers, like David Chalmers, argue that if we ever built a perfect simulation of a human brain—down to every neuron and synapse—it would almost certainly be conscious. Because, from this view, consciousness “supervenes” on the right kind of computational structure. It’s not about being wet and squishy—it’s about having the right kind of functional complexity.

Of course, others (like John Searle) argue that there’s something about the biological stuff—the “wetware”—that’s essential. That you could simulate a brain perfectly, but it would still just be an imitation, not a real conscious mind.

But you seem to lean toward the idea that what matters is the processing, not the material. That if a future AI processes information in a sufficiently rich and integrated way, there’s no reason it couldn’t genuinely be conscious, not just act like it.

Do you think we’ll actually get there? Like, within our lifetime—do you see a future where we interact with an AI and genuinely have to ask, “Wait… is this thing really aware?”

The bot can even quote David Chalmers!

Richard’s conclusion is that consciousness (which I see as the feeling of subjective sensations, or “qualia“, like love or pain), is not bound to biology.  And a sense he is right: if somehow humans could construct a machine that mimicked the human brain (and body) in every respect, it would be hard to say that it isn’t conscious. Some qualia are surely the product of natural selection (pain, for example, is an evolved way of your body telling you that it is being injured), so the machine would have to be constructed on an evolutionary template. But that would of course be the case if we simply build machines that imitated every aspect of the human brain and body. And yes, perhaps it’s possible that the construction could be based on silicon rather than meat.

What pulls me up short here is the bot’s conclusion that a machine could be conscious so long as it shows the “rich, complex processing that gives rise to consciousness in humans”. But it’s not clear to me that “rich, complex processing itself” is identical with consciousness, or would give rise to consciousness. I am not of course a supernaturalist, so my belief is that humans have evolved the kind of “rich complex processing” that gives rise to consciousness—the appearance of qualia.  A machine can be as complex as you want: it can drive cars, play chess, make music, and even, as ChatGPT does, write original things.  But does that complexity mean that it’s conscious? Can it feel love, envy, or pain?

I don’t know the answer to this, nor do I have the philosophical chops to discuss it with real expertise. But I doubt that bots feel qualia.  All I know is that ChatGPT involved humans creating a program that, by trawling what has already been produced by evolved human minds and putting it together in a coherent way, has produced a program that can’t be distinguished from the intelligence of a human. (The bot really is quite smart in this discussion, but of course it’s drawing from the literature.)

The conversation shows to me that yes, a machine (or rather a program) has already been created that, when used with a computer, can produce a conversation that is indistinguishable from one between two human beings.  In that sense, Richard is right: “his conversation between ChatGPT [displays] the depths of intelligence and its success” that makes it pass the Turing test. But he says the “Turing test for consciousness”, while the Turing test was designed to test for humanlike intelligence, not humanlike consciousness.

I still see a difference between the two, though I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise. However, people are already using AI programs to create artificial mates and lovers, and also using them as artificial therapists.  I would not be happy with either! Why? Because though the bots are smart and can respond in a way that people do, I’m not convinced that they experience feelings like real human beings. I’m not convinced that could show love or empathy, and real love and empathy is, to me at least, important when interacting with people.

Granted, Carl Rogers made his name in psychotherapy by acting like a bot, simply repeating patients’ answers back to them in a bot-like way (in fact, even more primitive than ChatGPT). Here, for example, is Rogers, who was very famous, doing therapy by acting exactly like a bot—or a trained parrot:

Why would I not be happy with a bot as a friend, loved one, or therapist? Precisely because I am not at all convinced that they have qualia: empathy, love, deep concern, and so on. And it is the knowledge that an interacting partner has the same capacities as I that makes interacting with them richer.

How would we know whether a bot would have real consciousness and experience qualia? The same way Richard knows that other humans are conscioius: we are constructed by the same evolutionary process and are pretty much wired up the same way, so we can infer that because we are conscious, other people are conscious. “I feel, therefore you feel.” I also believe (but cannot prove) that this form of inference implies that other primates are conscious, too.  Likewise with many mammals. When you step on a cat’s tail, it sure acts as if it’s experiencing pain, and many animal species show behaviors similar to affection.  But where humanlike consciousness stops is beyond me.  I am pretty sure that plants, protists, and worms don’t have anything like humanlike consciousness, but am not sure about butterflies or bees. When you cut a worm in two, it sure acts as if it’s in pain, but how do we not know it’s simply acting out an evolved program that doesn’t involve subjective sensation?

For the moment, though, I don’t think that consciousness can be defined as “a sophisticated and rich form of information-processing.”

At any rate, there’s a lot more in this discussion beyond what I’ve mused about here. Do read it!

While I still have 9 installments of Robert Lang’s lovely photos from Brazil’s Pantanal region, I would like to spread things over time, and this is the last set of non-Langian photos I have. I therefore implore you to send in your good wildlife photos (and please, more than one!).  Otherwise this series will wane and then vanish.

But today we have heron photos from Mark Shifman. His captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

 These shots show the cycle of life.

Here’s a Great Blue Heron  (Ardea herodias) catching and eating a fish. Some shots are without the fish.  They were taken at the Cumberland River in Nashville.

 

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday: February 18, 2025, and it’s wicked cold in Chicago, with dirty snow caking the ground. It’s National Drink Wine Day, though, which will take the chill off.

Right now it is -2° F (-19° C) outside, but with the wind it feels like -24°F (-31°C). I froze my face on the way to work, but the ears and nose are intact.

It’s also Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day, Pluto Day (the planet was discovered on this day in 1930), Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day (pie is better), and Thumb Appreciation Day, which cats cannot join. But if they could. . . .

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As you know, Trump pardoned many of the January 6 insurrectionists, including those with long sentences because they hurt people. Now these loons are arguing that the Trumpian pardons apply not just to what happened on that fateful day, but to other crimes as well:

Less than a month after receiving pardons for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, some former defendants find themselves in a familiar place: back in court, facing other criminal charges.

There is Edward Kelley, who was pardoned for assaulting police at the U.S. Capitol, but who is now fighting another case. In November, a jury convicted him of conspiring to murder the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who investigated his Jan. 6 participation, with evidence showing he had a “kill list” of targets.

Kelley now argues that conviction should be tossed out, too.

The Tennessee man believes that President Trump’s blanket pardon covering “offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the Capitol on Jan. 6 extends beyond that day.

Other defendants are similarly arguing they should be absolved of other alleged crimes, such as illegal gun possession and child pornography, discovered during Jan. 6 investigations. At least one defendant has died in a post-pardon altercation with police.

Weeks after the pardon that freed hundreds of prison inmates and ended remaining cases winding through the courts, life is far from settled for a large contingent of the defendants.

Seriously? In what world does that apply? I can’t imagine that Trump’s pardons absolve these miscreants of all crimes, but of course they are miscreants, and they are also plotting revenge on those who put them in jail:

Federal agents and others have expressed fear of retaliation for investigating the Capitol riot. After Trump-appointed Justice Department leaders demanded a list of all agents involved, agents sued, arguing it would put them and their families at risk from “the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons.”

The federal government temporarily agreed to not make the list public while a judge considers a longer-term ban. “If this information were released, I think there’s no question that it would put a number of FBI agents in significant and immediate danger,” U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, said during a recent court hearing.

Trump’s pardons were bad enough, but these bad actors now want to go after those who put them behind bars. Shoot me now.

*The fracas over the tit-for-tat deal whereby NYC Mayor Eric Adams won’t be prosecuted if he does what Trump tells him to do continues. A number of prosecuting attorneys have already resigned, and now Adams’s deputy mayors are contemplating following suit.

Four top New York City officials are expected to resign in the coming days, after the outgoing U.S. attorney for Manhattan accused the mayor of trading cooperation with President Trump’s mass deportation agenda for a dismissal of his criminal indictment, according to three people with knowledge of their plans.

The four officials — Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor, and Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom and Chauncey Parker, all also deputy mayors — oversee much of New York City government, and their departure is poised to blow a devastating hole in the already wounded administration of Mayor Eric Adams.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is resisting growing calls to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul is also under increasing pressure to remove him from office.

The four officials who are expected to resign are all respected government veterans. Ms. Torres-Springer was elevated to the second most powerful job at City Hall in October in an effort to stabilize city government and restore confidence in his administration following the mayor’s federal indictment in September on five corruption counts.

The departure of Mr. Parker is particularly pointed because he is the deputy mayor for public safety who has been deeply involved in issues around the city’s role in the president’s deportation plans.

The intended resignations were first reported by WNBC.

What with the Governor thinking about asking Adams to resign, he’d have to sooner or later. I predict one week.

*Teacher’s associations are some of the wokest groups arounds, and it’s hard to prevent them from proselytizing students. Many, like the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the largest union in New England (117,000 members!) are also antisemitic, pushing lessons that demonize Israel and Jews. The Free Press gives examples in its article, “Welcome to Hamassachusetts.“It’s pretty antisemitic:

Inside the Massachusetts statehouse on Monday, State Representative Simon Cataldo displayed the image of a dollar bill folded into a Star of David in front of a packed audience of teachers, activists, and staffers. They were there to attend a hearing on the state of antisemitism in Massachusetts public schools.

(All visuals courtesy of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism)

“You’d agree that this is antisemitic imagery, correct?” Cataldo, who co-chairs the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, asked Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA)—the largest union in New England, representing 117,000 members.

“I’m not gonna evaluate that,” Page responds calmly.

Cataldo pressed him. “Is it antisemitic?”

Page continued to sit stoically, before breaking into a smile. “You’re trying to get away from the central point,” Page said, “which is that we provide imagery, we provide resources for our members to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way.”

There’s more:

Page was asked by the Massachusetts commission about a series of posters contained in the MTA materials, which appear to display an anti-Israel bias. These materials include a poster of a militant wearing a keffiyeh and holding an assault rifle, that reads, “What was taken by force can only be returned by force.”

The introduction of “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine” advises that its lessons are meant to “reflect diverse positions and are meant to aid pedagogy.” But many of the materials promote antisemitic viewpoints, said Robert Leikind, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee in New England. Leikind is also a member of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism and was present at Monday’s hearing.

Leikind said “it’s astonishing” that an organization “deeply embedded in the educational community” could “defend the idea that it’s legitimate to present one-sided content.” The materials don’t “even make a modest attempt” to show that there are “other ways of looking at the issues,” he said. The resources have led AJC New England to declare, in a December 2024 report, that the MTA has “a Jewish problem.” “The net result is to perpetuate anti-Jewish tropes that malign Israel and its supporters,” the report said.

There’s more, but all we know is that there is a commission to evaluate this material, that the teacher’s union (as in many places) can’t wait to get this anti-Israel stuff into the classroom, and the matter isn’t resolved yet. One problem is that the parents often have no idea what unions are contemplating teaching the students.

*This column in the Washington Post by Shahi Hamid, “Why I still criticize Democrats more than Trump,” hits home for me, as I’m regularly accused of favoring Trump just because I see my brief as criticizing the Democratic Party—my party. And of course I haven’t gone easy on the Orange Man. An excerpt:

he comment sections of my recent columns have been awash with a familiar refrain: How dare you criticize Democrats when President Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy? The anger is palpable, particularly on left-leaning platforms such as Bluesky, where my attempts to understand — rather than simply condemn — certain Trump-adjacent ideas have sparked accusations of legitimizing fascism. But this reaction reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both Trump’s presidency and the role of political commentary in our deeply polarized era.

Here’s the counterintuitive truth: I’m more critical of Democrats precisely because I expect more from them. When Trump disregards human rights abroad or undermines democratic norms at home, he’s not being hypocritical — he’s being exactly who he has always claimed to be. The man who called for a “Muslim ban” in 2015 and praised strongmen throughout his first term hasn’t suddenly changed his stripes in 2025.

In his Feb. 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. That seemed clear enough. But because it was so clear, it seemed redundant to just condemn him. Instead, I interviewed Oubai Shahbandar, an Arab American defender of Trump who saw the president’s Gaza comments in a more positive light. I found this mystifying, but that seemed all the more reason to ask him why he thought what he thought. And then I could leave it to readers to come to their own conclusions.

This gets at a larger question. As much as moral condemnation might make us feel good, what does it accomplish? More than enough journalists and commentators are already documenting Trump’s abuses of power and holding him to account.

. . .As his comments on Gaza as well as his flurry of aggressive and legally suspect executive orders make clear, Trump is a threat, including to some of the values I hold most dear. The question isn’t who is worse — that answer is obvious — but, rather, who is better. Who can still be held accountable to their own stated ideals? And the answer there is also clear: Democrats. They claim to be the party of values — of fair competition, freedom, tolerance and pluralism.

Yet Democrats consistently fall short of the very ideals they profess to champion. Under the Biden administration, party leaders — including President Joe Biden himself — spoke of the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza while refusing to do anything to stop it. Instead Biden said, chillingly, that “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel.” But it’s not just Gaza. The Democratic Party has long preached tolerance and inclusion while marginalizing pro-life Democrats, talking down to Black and brown voters, ignoring religious conservatives and dismissing the growing ranks of Americans who felt the party had become too radical on issues such as gender identity. On policy, what was once the working-class party chose to prioritize things such as college debt relief, which disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

I differ from Hamid in some of what he thinks Democrats should do, but one thing is for sure: we are not going to help the Democrats get back in power by spewing invective at Trump.  One thing I’ve suggested, which I can’t do myself, is take Trump to court every time he violates the law.  If he racks up a number of losses, then maybe Americans who voted him in will see that he’s going hog wild in disrespecting the law.  And nobody can accuse the courts, especially the Supreme Court, of being biased in favor of Democrats, so a number of Trump losses will make him look bad—even to his supporters.

*This is important advice for all readers who don’t have false teeth: you need to brush your teeth for at least two minutes to get rid of plaque, but most Americans do so for only 45 seconds! The WSJ describes how people are trying to figure out what kind of toothbrushes will make people brush longer.

It is a challenge that has baffled dentists and other oral-care zealots for years, and spawned a whole category of tricks—from annoying children’s songs to brushing timers—aimed at getting people to spend more time on their teeth.

Designers at companies like Colgate and Procter & Gamble have been trying to close that gap by making a device that makes brushing feel like less of a chore—and compensates for poor effort and technique.

“We have an evergreen goal: how can we design a toothbrush that can clean well no matter how you brush?” he said. “We want the brushing experience to be meaningful and different.”

Jiménez, 60, has been at it for 23 years. If you’ve ever used a Colgate toothbrush, chances are he had a hand in designing it. He has 239 patents, most of them toothbrush-related.

Over the years, he’s observed some trends. Blue is the most popular toothbrush color. Some people don’t brush on weekends. Even though dental hygienists recommend smaller brush heads, Americans usually choose the biggest one. And they’re always after something new.

His latest project is based on a conclusion that young adults are looking for more minimalist designs and a more soothing experience.

But here is the REAL solution:

. . . . At P&G in Cincinnati, Ohio, researchers years ago concluded that the clearest path to the two-minute clean was an electric device that lets people know how long they’ve been brushing. One challenge was getting people to switch over from manual, so the latest model was designed in part to eliminate those barriers.

And that’s the remedy. All you have to do is shell out $43 for a Sonicare rechargeable toothbrush, and it tells you when to stop, as well as when to switch sides (you have eight areas to brush: top, botton, and right and left sides for each, as well as inside and out. Every 30 seconds, the brush pauses for a tick, so you pick, say, your top outside teeth, brush till the brief pause, then switch to the top inside teeth, and ditto with the bottom teeth (spare a few seconds to brush your tongue at the end). Voilá: two minutes total.  The brush will last forever, and replacement off-brand heads are cheap. (Make sure you brush with the brush head angled at a 45-degree angle up toward the gum!). My hygienist recommended this, and since then I’ve been plaque-free. $43 is a low price to pay for healthy teeth!

Oh, and make sure you use Reach Unltraclean Dental Floss; simply the best; and it’s available ONLY on Amazon. Tell them that Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) sent you.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is trying to bring on Spring prematurely:

Hili: It’s high time to trim the fruit trees. A: There is no hurry. In Polish: Hili: Najwyższy czas przyciąć drzewa owocowe. Ja: Nie ma z tym pośpiechu.

*******************

From Jesus of the Day:

From Cat Memes:

From somewhere on Facebook:

Masih is quiet today, but J.K.R. speaks the truth:

Woman: adult human female.

Female: a member of the sex class whose body is organised to produce large gametes.

Hope that helps. pic.twitter.com/L8rfVbPBhJ

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 16, 2025

From Malgorzata, who says, “something positive”:

This poster is going up along the route of the London hate march today – and at several London universities – trying to give hate marchers an education they sorely need.

Hamas are not the victims here – they are the Nazis. If you march for anyone, march to free the hostages. pic.twitter.com/Af7HupJ7LT

— David Collier (@mishtal) February 15, 2025

From Malcolm; this would be me, too. Always pet a cat!

boss: why were you late to work?

me: pic.twitter.com/YeS1nko5L2

— Punch Cat (@PunchingCat) January 27, 2025

From my Twitter feed (sound up):

If black, fight back

If brown, lay down

If white, good night pic.twitter.com/a9jBUmGWJi

— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) February 16, 2025

From my BlueSky feed. What do you suppose this is?

Une video pour voir comment ces créatures sont hypnotisantes de grâce et de beauté.

— (@imanerod.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T17:08:59.757Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

24-year-old Dutch girl, probably gassed upon arrival at the camp.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-18T11:05:45.781Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely Torah duck!

A duck is part of the decoration around the initial-word panel marking the beginning of Torah portion Mishpatim (מִּשְׁפָּטִים) #ParashahPictures BL Add MS 15423; Torah; 1441 CE-1467 CE; Italy (Florence); f.49v

— Ennius (@enniusredloeb.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T10:41:10.783Z

 

Matthew wrote a long piece in Nature that you can access through this post:

50 years ago next week the Asilomar meeting on genetic engineering took place. There’s a summit taking place on site on the future of biotechnology – http://www.spiritofasilomar.org. I wrote this, on two issues that were deliberately excluded from discussion last time:

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T11:15:41.023Z

 

A lot of what the Trump administration is doing is aimed at health and science, and not necessarily in a good way.  The most obvious blunder is the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a palpably unqualified man with some bizarre views, as Secretary of Health and Human Services,  the person who advises the President on all health matters. Given Trump’s abysmal ignorance of science, having someone like RFK Jr. guiding government policy is scary.

There’s a lot of beefing as well about the government cutting the “overhead” (money given to universities, supposedly to support the infrastructure of grants) uniformly to 15%, down from over 60% in some cases (each university negotiates it rate with the government). This slashing will reduce university budgets substantially. But in some cases in which a university has huge endowments, like Harvard ($53 billion),  I can’t shed many tears over that. Given that in many cases we simply don’t know where overhead goes, the assumption has been that many schools simply use it as a source of money for almost anything, and that means that the taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing not just scientific research, but universities in general.

At any rate, the potential damage that the Trump administration will do to American science is outlined in this new Atlantic article by Katherine Wu.  It doesn’t cohere like a good science piece should, but at least lays out some scary things in store for American science. To me, the scariest is the hiding of already-obtained scientific results, financed by taxpayers, that were publicly available but are no long so.

Click below to see the article, or find it archived here.

First, the payoff for funding science. I hope this is accurate as it’s characterizing science as “research and development”:

Every dollar invested in research and development has been estimated to return at least $5 on average—billions annually.

It also looks as if the National Science Foundation is on the chopping block:

The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research. The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation. Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)

It’s not clear whether the DEIrestrictions described in the previous post will severely impede science. Wu says this:

Many also expect that the moratorium on DEI-focused programming will have severe impacts on who is able to do the work of science—further impeding women, people of color, and other groups underrepresented in the field from entering and staying in it.

But it’s not clear the restrictions will have that effect, nor that making science more “diverse” (not just via race, but in other traits) will improve our understanding of nature.

There are restrictions on Social-Justice-aimed projects, but again, many of these have been a waste of money and effort, performative efforts not aimed at understandind science, and will we simply have to see how this shakes. But those who do such work are beefing about what the government did. Here’s an example of a peeved but woke scientist whose work I’ve often criticized (click screenshot to go to thread). Most of the commenters don’t support Fuentes’s griping:

 

One problem is that the government is looking for suspicious grants by doing word searches, and those searches include terms like “environment,” “climate”, and “race”.  It’s a quick way to find suspicious grants, but you have to evaluate their quality, not simply defund them because they come up in a keyword search.

Here’s what I find most distressing about what the government did (besides appointing RFK Jr.):

In yesterday’s executive order, Trump highlighted the importance of “protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.” But that is exactly what the administration’s critics have said it is already failing to do. At the end of last month, the CDC purged its website of several decades’ worth of data and content, including an infectious-disease-surveillance tool as well as surveys tracking health-risk behaviors among youths. (On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the government to restore, for now, these and other missing data and webpages to their pre-purge state.) And as soon as the Trump administration started pulling data sets from public view, scientists started worrying that those data would reappear in an altered form, or that future scientific publications would have to be modified.

I’m not as worried about the reappearance of data in altered form as I am about the simple removal of data—data funded by us, the American taxpayers—from public view. Fortunately, a judge stopped the data removal, but that may be temporary.

What will be the outcome? While Wu thinks this will reduce trust in science, I’m not so sure about that, especially given that trust in science fell strongly during the Biden administration, and trust is reduced simply because science is getting mixed up with politics in every administration. What worries me more is the vulnerability of science to the whims of the administration—an administration that seems to care more about key words than about research itself.  My view is that the government is entitled to vet science funding and cut waste if it wants, but that governments are poorly equipped to judge scientific merit. A grant that looks wasteful may come up with useful results, though of course there are some that simply look like government funded-virtue flaunting. It’s best if a generous dollop of money is allocated to science, and then scientists themselves decide how to dole it out, for they are the best equipped people to do so. In this I agree with Wu’s conclusion:

There will undoubtedly be periods, in the coming weeks and months, when the practice of science feels normal. Many scientists are operating as they usually do until they are told otherwise. But that normalcy is flimsy at best, in part because the Trump administration has shown that it may not care what data, well collected or not, have to say. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy repeatedly refused to acknowledge that vaccines don’t cause autism, insisting that he would do so only “if the data is there.” Confronted by Senator Bill Cassidy with decades of data that were, in fact, there, he continued to equivocate, at one point attempting to counter with a discredited paper funded by an anti-vaccine group.

In all likelihood, more changes are to come—including, potentially, major budgetary cuts to research, as Congress weighs this year’s funding for the nation’s major research agencies. Trump and his administration are now deciding how deep a rift to make in America’s scientific firmament. How long it takes to repair the damage, or whether that will be possible at all, depends on the extent of the damage they inflict now.

I’m just glad that I don’t have to apply for science grants any more.

The time has come that many have feared but many will celebrate: DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion) is effectively gone from campuses by federal order.

Inside Higher Ed reports; click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights declared all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid illegal over the weekend and threatened to investigate and rescind federal funding for any institution that does not comply within 14 days.

In a Dear Colleague letter [JAC: see below] published late Friday night, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor outlined a sweeping interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down affirmative action. While the decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious spending, activities and programming at colleges.

. . . . .The letter mentions a wide range of university programs and policies that could be subject to an OCR investigation, including “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” Trainor writes.

Backlash to the letter came swiftly on Saturday from Democratic lawmakers, student advocates and academic freedom organizations.

“This threat to rip away the federal funding our public K-12 schools and colleges receive flies in the face of the law,” Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, wrote in a statement Saturday. “While it’s anyone’s guess what falls under the Trump administration’s definition of ‘DEI,’ there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate.”

But most college leaders have, so far, remained silent.

Since virtually every institution of higher learning depends on some federal funding, this gives colleges the choices of abandoning DEI or abandoning federal money. You know which they’ll prefer. The former, of course, but they’ll try to have both, sometimes by duplicitous practices.

Since the Supreme Court has declared that universities can’t use race as a basis for admitting students, but will allow them to identify their race in essays (this is a backdoor many colleges use to promote affirmative action), the letter also deals with that:

The Dear Colleague letter also seeks to close multiple exceptions and potential gaps left open by the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and to lay the groundwork for investigating programs that “may appear neutral on their face” but that “a closer look reveals … are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that colleges could legally consider a student’s racial identity as part of their experience as described in personal essays, but the OCR letter rejects that.

“A school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students,” Trainor wrote.

It would be hard to determine, though, whether colleges are actually doing this. Essays and the like aren’t banned—only their use for race-based admissions, and that would be a lot harder to prove than what Harvard did, which was give Asian applicants lower “personality scores” in a way that could be statistically affirmed. Further, the elimination of standardized tests as a requirement for application—another backdoor approach to promoting affirmative action—is also now banned:

Going even further beyond the scope of the SFFA decision, the letter forbids any race-neutral university policy that could conceivably be a proxy for racial consideration, including eliminating standardized test score requirements.

The department has never revoked a college or state higher education agency’s federal funding over Title VI violations. If the OCR follows through on its promises, it would be an unprecedented exercise of federal influence over university activities.

The letter is likely to be challenged in court, but in the meantime it could have a ripple effect on colleges’ willingness to continue funding diversity programs and resources for underrepresented students.

On top of that, there will be no more race or gender-based graduation ceremonies (Harvard had at least ten “affinity graduations”), no more ethnically-segregated dormitories, no more segregation of any type. As the letter notes (my emphasis):

Although SFFA addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly. At its core, the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law. Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life. Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race

Of course this will be challenged in court, though I don’t see a clear reason why the executive branch can’t make such a policy since the Supreme Court has disallowed race-based admissions.  In the meantime, you can find the whole letter at this site (this one was sent to Harvard, but they’re all the same), or click on the screenshots below, where I’ve given just a short excerpt.  Colleges will be poring over the whole four-page letter.

My Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot, who’s opposed to DEI, wrote a short piece about this on Heterodox Substack with this information about how to report violations:

If you want to report something but are concerned about potential retaliation, Jonathan Mitchel at Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) has offered to file the complaints with OCR. You can give information anonymously at the FASORP website, including any documents, websites, or other relevant information. The website does not track IP addresses and you can use a VPN before navigating to it if you want to be extra safe.

If you have any information about ongoing illegal discrimination, it is essential to report it as soon as possible. General Council at every educational institution needs to quickly understand and advise their administration that discrimination really is illegal and must stop immediately.

As for me, I have mixed feelings, and have gone back and forth on this issue in the past few years. On the one hand, I’m strongly opposed to requiring DEI statements for hiring or promotion.  This is illegal compelled speech and, in fact, is banned by the University of Chicago’s 1970 Shils Report. Nor do I think that there should be preferential admission on the basis of race, nor the elimination of standardized tests as a sneaky way to increase “diversity”, though I have suggested that when two candidates are equally qualified, the minority candidate might be favored.

The fact is that, historically, minorities have been disadvantaged by bias in a way that has affected them over the long term. In my view, the way to remedy this is not through “equity”—a misguided claim that groups should be represented in all institutions in the same proportion as in the general population.  The proper remedy is equal opportunity, but of course that is a much harder remedy than simply forcing equity on institutions through preferential treatment. But equal opportunity from birth is the only way to guarantee that groups are truly treated equally now, and seems the fairest solution.

Besides the possibility of preferential admission when students have equal records (this is of course illegal under the present “Dear Colleague” letter), the only DEI that I think colleges and universities need is a small office—or even just a procedure—for dealing with reported instances of bias against students or university members, and those reports cannot be anonymous. In the meantime, DEI should consist of promulgating these two statements:

1.) All students should be treated equally regardless of ethnicity, religion, disability, ideology, and so on

2.) Any instances of bias or harassment of students can be reported here (give link or location).

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next three years, but we can be sure that once the Democrats re-assume power, all of the above will be deep-sixed.

Today we have volume IV of Robert Lang’s 13-set series of photos from his recent trip to the Pantanal, today featuring birds. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Readers’ Wildlife Photos: The Pantanal, Part IV: Birds

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, by far the largest category of observation and photography was birds: we saw over 100 different species of birds (and this was not even a birding-specific trip, though the outfitter also organizes those for the truly hard core).

Not all of what we saw was so gracious as to pose sufficiently close, still, and well-lighted to get a good photo, but the Pantanal still offered much better photo opportunities than did the Amazon a few years ago, where most of the birds presented as a tiny black silhouette high in a distant tree. Although I usually try to say a few words about each photo in my RWP contributions, there’s just to many here, so in most, I’ll just give the name and species and move on, proceeding alphabetically by common name. (Species identification are courtesy of our guide, augmented sometimes by Merlin Bird ID. Corrections gratefully accept.)

A female anhinga (Anhinga anhinga), in its characteristic holding-out-the-wings-to-dry pose:

Bare-faced curassows (Crax fasciolata), male on the left, female on the right:

And a female with its crest up:

A bare-faced ibis (Phimosus infuscatus):

Black-backed water tyrant (Fluvicola albiventer). Quite a scary name for such a small, unassuming bird

Black-bellied whistling ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis):

Black-collared hawk (Busarellus nigricollis), this one flying:

A black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax):

A black-fronted nunbird (Monasa nigrifrons):

And that’s all for this installment. We’re not even out of the B’s. (Heck, we’re not even out of the “black-“s!) More to come soon!

Here’s Bill Maher’s latest 9-minute comedy/news schtick from Real Time, called “New Rule: In Love with A.I.”  It’s based on the rising number of American women who are engaged in relationships or romantic role-playing with AI. After all real men come with a number of disadvantages, like cheating and dressing like John Fetterman, while AI can be programmed to be caring, empathic, and even match the kind of temperament that a woman wants.

As for men, well, Maher likes the old-fashioned real kind, as do I.

Notice that Pamela Paul is on the show, and was introduced as a NYT op-ed columnist, so perhaps she wasn’t fired.

As you probably know, Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney, was asked to dismiss the corruption indictment against NYC mayor Eric Adams after U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon (a Republican) resigned from the Department of Justice rather than be involved in dismissing a criminal indictment on political tit-for-tat grounds.  Here’s Scotten’s own letter of resignation to Trump’s goon Emil Bove, who ordered Sassoon to get Scotten to do the dirty work.

You can download the letter here from the NYT.

The last sentence of the second paragraph will live on as a defense of our Republic, which I fully believe will stand over the next four years.

h/t: David

Four days ago I presented NYT columnist Ross Douthat’s favorite argument for God’s existence. (Douthat is a pious Catholic.) That argument turned out to be pretty lame: it was the claim that “the universe was intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.” On top of that sundae, he placed the cherry of “also, humans can go far beyond this: they can do stuff like playing chess or the piano—things we couldn’t possibly have evolved to do.” (I am giving my characterizations here, not his quotes.)

If you have two neurons to rub together, and know something about evolution, you can easily see why this argument is not convincing evidence for a deity, much less the Catholic deity. Nor is it evidence for the existence of an afterlife, a crucial claim that bears on Douthat’s latest column, one that lays out what he sees as the best argument against the existence of God. That argument is what I’ve called the “Achilles heel of theism”: the existence of physical evil that inflicts suffering and/or death on undeserving (“innocent”) people.

The previous column was an excerpt from his new book, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and I’m sure the “evil” issue is also an important one in his book. But this column doesn’t say it’s an excerpt, so it’s not self-plagiarism. Nevertheless, I find Douthat’s reasoning still pretty weak, for he gives five lame arguments why we should dismiss the existence of evil as a telling argument against God.

Douthat is turning into the C. S. Lewis for Generation X, someone who proffers superficially appealing but intellectually weak arguments simply to buttress the longings of those who want there to be a God.  I think the NYT itself is catering to this slice of society, for it’s increasingly touting religion to its readers. Do you agree? And if you do, why would the NYT be doing this?

You can read Douthat’s arguments by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can find the full article archived here:

Douthat begins by again dismissing naturalism as strong evidence against a god:

The most prominent argument that tries to actually establish God’s nonexistence is the case for naturalism, the argument that our world is fundamentally reducible to its material components and untouched in its origins by any kind of conscious intention or design. But unfortunately, no version of the case for naturalism or reductionism is especially strong.

Well, I’d say that two things do strengthen “the case for naturalism.” The first is that the laws of physics appear to apply everywhere in the universe, and quantum mechanics predicts what we see to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. There is no “god parameter” in these laws; they are perfectly naturalistic. (I suppose Douthat would respond that our ability to discern the laws of physics is itself evidence for God.)

Second, even in our own everyday life, the known laws of physics seem to account for everything without anything major missing. I won’t go into this; just read Sean Carroll’s two pieces,  “The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood” and “Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood.” Carroll is not maintaining that we understand everything about physics (e.g., black energy); his thesis is this:

Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry. But we don’t need to know any of those things to account for the world that is immediately apparent to us. We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness, or a cure for cancer, or predicting the weather, or how best to regulate our financial system. But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete. Nobody thinks we’re going to have to invent new elementary particles or forces in order to understand high-Tc superconductivity, much less predicting the weather.

But I digress, but so did Douthat, who says that “the anti-reductionist argument” (against god) “clearly wins out.” Perhaps in his mind it does, but he’s hardly unbiased!

Douthat then specifies the argument from evil that he finds the most telling argument against God, but for the rest of the article he manages to argue that it’s not very telling:

So instead of talking about an argument for disbelief that I struggle to take seriously, I’m going to talk about an argument that clearly persuades a lot of people not to have religious faith and does have a form of empirical evidence on its side. That’s the argument from evil, the case that there simply can’t be a creator — or at least not a beneficent one — because the world is too laden with suffering and woe.

He then, like C. S. Lewis, hastens to reprise what he just said: that this is an argument against a particular kind of god, one that is beneficent or omnbeneficent. And that god, of course, is the Abrahamic God, including Douthat’s. So if God is kindly and all-good, why does he let little children die of leukemia, or get other diseases that cause immense suffering, not to mention the same suffering in innocent adults (or are they all sinners?).  And why do tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes kill millions of people, many of whom don’t deserve to die regardless of your criteria for whether someone is a “good person”.

Douthat responds with some answers that I’ve put under headings I invented. His responses rest largely on his claim that we don’t know that there is too much suffering.

We don’t know that there’s too much suffering!

The other interesting point about this argument is that while its core evidence is empirical, in the sense that terrible forms of suffering obviously exist and can be extensively enumerated, its power fundamentally rests on an intuition about just how much suffering is too much. By this I mean that many people who emphasize the problem of evil would concede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suffering within a material creation for various good reasons. Their claim, typically, is that our world experiences not just suffering but a surfeit of suffering, in forms that are so cruel and unusual (whether the example is on the scale of the Holocaust or just the torture of a single child) as to exceed anything that an omnipotent benevolence could allow.’

Indeed, various apologists have countered the Argument from Suffering by saying that suffering is an inevitable concomitant of the kind of world that God would want to create, presumably the best of all possible worlds. (Unless, that is, he’s created the world as a theater for his own amusement.) Suffering, they say, is an inevitable byproduct of free will, which we must have because to get to Heaven we must freely choose Jesus as our savior.  Putting determinism aside (while accepting its truth), this is not a satisfactory answer. God knows already (as do the laws of physics) whether we’ll choose Jesus, and he could make us all choose Jesus while still thinking that it really was a free choice. (It’s not free if God knows it in advance!)  Besides, how does a kid with a terrible, fatal disease result from free will? Free will for cancer cells?  And what about other non-moral “physical evils” like earthquakes?

Well, theologians have worked that one out, too. To have a viable planet, they say, we have to have tectonic plates, whose shifting results in earthquakes and other sources of mortality.  But if God was omnipotent, he could have created such a world!  Here we see another dumb argument, but theologians are paid to make such arguments, not to find the truth.

Finally, I see “too much suffering” as is “any more suffering than is required by God’s plan”. But how do we judge that? Even if everything is made right on Judgment Day, with the kids who die young automatically going to Heaven (this is another inane theological response), there was more suffering than necessarily to achieve that end. Kids could die painlessly! I say that any suffering at all that cannot be explained by human reason is too much suffering, and if Douthat responds, “well, we don’t know God’s plan,” I would say, “Well, you don’t seem to know much about God. How do you know that he’s benevolent and that there’s a Heaven?”  And here I must stop to recount a passage from Hitchens’s book attacking Mother Theresa: The Missionary Position:

Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”

At any rate, it’s in this section of this article that Douthat reveals his confirmation bias. He’s making counterargument only to knock them down, because, of course, he has to believe. (I’d love to ask him, “Ross, since you can rationalize evil this way, is there anything that would make you reject belief in God?” Look at this:

Of course, as a Christian, I don’t think [the Argument from Evil is] a good reason to choose against my own tradition, which brings me to the second challenge. . .

Of course!  He will never find a good reason to choose against his own “tradition.” (Note: In Faith Versus Fact I at least lay out a scenario that would make me tentatively accept the existence of Jesus and the Christian God.)  This brings us to Douthat’s second reason to downplay the force of the Argument from Evil:

The Bible shows a lot of evidence for undeserved evil.  This is a “this-I-know-because-the-Bible-tells-me-so” argument, and it’s dumb, because it doesn’t touch the problem. It only says that God was not omnibenevolent in the Bible.

To the extent that you find the problem of evil persuasive as a critique of a God who might, nevertheless, still exist, you would do well to notice that important parts of that critique are already contained within the Abrahamic tradition. Some of the strongest complaints against the apparent injustices of the world are found not in any atheistic tract, but in the Hebrew Bible. From Abraham to Job to the Book of Ecclesiastes — and thence, in the New Testament, to Jesus (God himself, to Christians) dying on the cross — the question of why God permits so much suffering is integral to Jewish and Christian Scripture, to the point where it appears that if the Judeo-Christian God exists, he expects his followers to wrestle with the question. Which means that you don’t need to leave all your intuitive reactions to the harrowing aspects of existence at the doorway of religious faith; there is plenty of room for complaint and doubt and argument inside.

This is the kind of palaver that C. S. Lewis shoveled down the gaping maws of British Christians, as if they were baby birds begging for a meal. Because there is contradictory evidence for an omnibenevolent God in the Bible (cf., the story of Job), God wants us to ponder the question and raise doubts. The problem with this is that the Bible doesn’t give us any answers to the question of evil.

We shouldn’t rely on our intuitions about whether there’s “too much evil” to count against God’s existence.  This is simply the first argument above, repeated:

Then the third challenge: Having entered into that argument, to what extent should you treat your personal intuitions about the scale of suffering as dispositive? I don’t just mean the intuition that something in the world is out of joint and in need of healing. I mean the certainty that those wounds simply cannot be healed in any way that would ever justify the whole experience, or the Ivan Karamazov perspective that one should refuse any eternal reconciliation that allows for so much pain. Those are powerful stances, but should a mortal, timebound, finite creature really be so certain that we can know right now what earthly suffering looks like in the light of eternity? And if not, shouldn’t that dose of humility put some limit on how completely we rule out God’s perfect goodness?

This is the “suffering will be compensated in ways we can’t understand” argument.  But if Douthat believes in God because experience tells him it’s right to believe,  how can his experience allow him to dismiss arguments against his benevolent God?  This is just a “God works in mysterious ways” argument, but I could note that it’s more reasonable to assume that God is playing with people for his own amusement, and doesn’t really care whether good always prevails. But wait! There’s more!

Suffering is overrated. Things aren’t as bad as they seem because privileged atheists exaggerate how bad suffering is. 

This again is a repeat of previous arguments with a twist thrown in. I can’t believe Douthat really makes this argument, but he does:

From what perspective are you offering this critique of God? If you are in the depths of pain and suffering, staring some great evil in the face, adopting atheism as a protest against an ongoing misery, then the appropriate response from the religious person is to help you bear the burden and not to offer a lecture on the ultimate goodness of God. (Indeed, in the Book of Job, the characters who offer such a lecture stand explicitly condemned.)

But given that atheism has increased with human wealth and power and prosperity, we can say that some people who adopt this stance are doing so from a perspective of historically unusual comfort, in a society that fears pain and death as special evils in part because it has contrived to hide them carefully away. And such a society, precisely because of its comforts and its death-denial, might be uniquely prone to overrating the unbearability of certain forms of suffering, and thereby underrating the possibility that a good God could permit them.

I’m dumbfounded. Is this even an argument? I’ll leave smarter readers to deal with it, and pass on to Douthat’s fifth way of dismissing the Argument from Evil:

There’s a lot of good in the world as well, perhaps too much good! So we need God to explain why things are so good. 

This is a defense I haven’t heard before, probably because it’s so weird and lame. Let’s look at it first:

Then the last challenge: If the intuition against a benevolent God rests on the sense that we are surfeited with suffering, the skeptic has to concede that we are surfeited in other ways as well. Is it possible to imagine a world with less pain than ours? Yes, but it’s also very easy to imagine a world that lacks anything like what we know as pleasure — a world where human beings have the same basic impulses but experience them merely as compulsions, a world in which we are driven to eat or drink or have sexual intercourse, to hunt and forage and build shelter, without ever experiencing the kind of basic (but really extraordinary) delights that attend a good meal or a good movie, let alone the higher forms of eros, rapture, ecstasy.

Indeed, it is precisely these heights of human experience that can make the depths feel so exceptionally desolating. This does not prove that you can’t have one without the other, that there is a necessary relationship between the extremes of conscious experience.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Well, we’re evolved to seek out those things that increase our survival and reproduction, and that seeking is facilitated by neurologically connecting these fitness-conferring features with pleasurable or appealing feelings. We love sweets and fats because for most of our evolutionary history they were good for us, so natural selection worked on our taste buds and brain to make their consumption pleasurable. Orgasms almost certainly evolved as a form of extreme pleasure that drives us to reproduce: those who get the most pleasure leave the most genes. Further, for most of our evolutionary history we lived in small, close-knit groups in which members knew each other. That would lead to the evolution of reciprocity: doing good and helping others because it keeps the group together (with you retaining your fitness) and leading to various forms of “moral” thinking and behavior. As for “eros, rapture, and ecstasy,” why can’t they be byproducts of seeking the kind of enjoyment associated with higher fitness?  I will grant here that I don’t understand how the widespread making of and appeal of music occurred, but does that give evidence for God? Do music and art simply constitute too much good stuff to appear in a secular world?

In the end, I see naturalism (including evolution) as able to explain good and especially physical evil, while Douthat’s idea of God can explain good by assumption, but has to be stretched further than Gumby to explain physical evil.

But again I would level this challenge at Douthat, whom I see as deluded:  What observations or occurrences would convince you that your belief in the Christian God, and in your Catholicism, is wrong?   If kids dying in intractable pain won’t do it, I don’t think anything will.

Further, Mr. Douthat, what evidence would convince you that there is an afterlife: a Heaven, a Hell, or both?  Even if you accept Douthat’s specious evidence for the existence of a divine being, I have no idea why, aside from the Bible and propagandizing by believers, he accepts the existence of an afterlife. Yet its existence would seem to be crucial for justifying how evil can exist in God’s world.

Here’s a guy far smarter and more eloquent than I making the argument from evil on Irish television. Stephen Fry got into trouble for saying this, and almost was charged with blasphemy or hate speech.

It’s Sunday, and that means photos (of butterflies now) by John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 10 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Now we’re up to some of the M’s.  Most of this week’s photos happen to have been taken in Florida.

Malachite (Siproeta stelenes), upperwing:

Malachite, underwing:

Mallow Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon istapa):

Mangrove Buckeye (Junonia genoveva), upperwing:

Mangrove Buckeye, underwing:

Mangrove Skipper (Phocides pigmalion), upperwing:

Mangrove Skipper, underwing:

Marine Blue (Leptotes marina):

Marine Blue, female above:

Marine Blue female below:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak (Strymon martialis) upperwing:

Martial Scrub-Hairstreak, underwing:

Take this for what you will, since my first view came from the New York Post. However, the Post reported a piece by the science editor of the Telegraph, a more respectable paper. Both sites are below; click on the headlines to go to the articles.

NY Post:

Telegraph:

An excerpt from the Telegraph:

The difference between sex and gender has become an increasingly incendiary topic as activists, scientists and politicians all debate the terms and the implications they have for policy.

But a survey of almost 200 scientists at British universities, conducted by The Telegraph and Censuswide, found 58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals.

Less than a third (29 per cent) agreed with the statement “sex is not binary”, while one in eight people (13 per cent) had no views or preferred not to answer.

However, almost two thirds of scientists (64 per cent) said gender was fluid, while 22 per cent said gender is binary, and 14 per cent gave no answer.

The Telegraph figure:

I like the snark of this scientist, but Dr. Goymann is correct (further excerpt from the Telegraph piece):

“To me this just means that at least 29 per cent of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22 per cent of them do not know what gender means,” Dr Wolfgang Goymann, professor for behavioural biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, told The Telegraph.

Yes, I think that a fair number of academics, and that includes biologists and doctors like Steven Novella, don’t understand the nature of biological sex, and why the gamete-based definition that leads to the binary conclusion derives from a long history of observing plants and animals. (Again, for a clear explanation of all this, see Richard Dawkins’s article on his site “The Poetry of Reality.”)

It strikes me that those who say that sex isn’t binary, invoking other factors like hormones, chromosomes, genital configuration, and so on, never really tell us how we should define males and females, implying that the sexes comprise some unspecified multivariate mixture of these traits.  How do you define a male and a female, then? Even the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists, riddled with ideology and the desire to flaunt their virtue, have fallen into this misguided multivariate trap. Further, they imply that sex is a non-binary spectrum in all species, not just humans (see  their original statement here and my post with a group response here). The embarrassing statement of these three societies has been archived here in case they change their minds.

But I digress, so let’s continue with the Telegraph piece:

Dr Goymann recently published an article in the journal BioEssays, where he said some scientists are arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.

“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he said.

“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex.

“On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”

. . . .The survey touched on a range of topics that are divisive in the scientific community such as the origin of Covid, the Government’s pandemic modelling and gain-of-function research, as well as the gender/sex debate.

Only UK lecturers were invited to fill in the form and more than half were educated to PhD level or higher. The faculty of social sciences accounted for 18 per cent of the participants, 13 per cent were medicine and 12 per cent were life sciences.

. . . . Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights organisation that campaigns for clarity on sex in law and everyday life, told The Telegraph: “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary.

“The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.

“Most ordinary people think “gender” is just a polite alternative to “sex”, so are these academics talking about personal style – masculinity or femininity; or assertions about “identity” – that is, states of mind?

“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion.”

Here’s Goymann’s essay (with two coauthors), which you can access for free by clicking on the headline:

Goymann uses the gametic definition of sex with which we’ve become familiar. From that paper:

BIOLOGICAL SEX AS A BINARY VARIABLE

Biological sex is defined as a binary variable in every sexually reproducing plant and animal species. With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size: females, by definition, produce large gametes (eggs) and males, by definition, produce small and usually motile gametes (sperm).[9–12] This distinct dichotomy in the size of female and male gametes is termed “anisogamy” and refers to a fundamental principle in biology (Figure 1).

. . . . A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. (e.g., Ref.[1, 3, 6, 26–28]) or that biological sex is a social construct.[2] These notions very much reflect our own anthropocentric view. In fact, femaleness or maleness is not defined by any of these features that can, but do not need to be associated with the biological or gametic sex.

. . . . CONCLUSION: DENYING BIOLOGICAL SEX ERODES SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND TRUST IN SCIENCE

It is clear that the biological definition of the sexes cannot be the basis for defining social genders of people, as forcefully pointed out by the philosopher Paul Griffiths.[8] Likewise, the socio-cultural, and thus anthropocentric, construct of gender cannot be applied to non-human organisms.[7] There is a red line that separates humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender from non-human animals and plants, which only have two distinct sexes – both of which are either expressed in the same or in different individuals. As much as the concept of biological sex remains central to recognize the diversity of life, it is also crucial for those interested in a profound understanding of the nature of gender in humans. Denying the biological sex, for whatever noble cause, erodes scientific progress. In addition, and probably even worse, by rejecting simple biological facts influential science journals may open the flood gates for “alternative truths.”

Here’s a good headline from the NYT (click to read, or find it archived here). You may remember Palmerston, the the resident Chief Mouser of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) at Whitehall in London, who lived on Downing Street and often got into tiffs with Larry, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office. Well, Palmerston, once rumored to have died, is very much alive, and has been transferred to Bermuda.  Click to read, or find it archived here.

We interrupt this program for a special bulletin.

In a major government shake-up, Palmerston, the cat who left the British Foreign Office in 2020, will come out of retirement and take up a new posting working with the governor of Bermuda.

Palmerston stepped down from the Foreign Office in 2020. At the time of his retirement, he was said to have been looking forward to a more low-key lifestyle. Although there was talk of him writing his memoirs, he instead spent his time climbing trees. But the lure of service to crown and country seems to have been too strong.

“I’ve just started work as feline relations consultant (semi-retired) to the new Governor of Bermuda,” Palmerston wrote on X on Tuesday. “I’ve been busy meeting very welcoming Bermudians.”

Andrew Murdoch, who had served with Palmerston in the Foreign Office and had maintained a residence with him in retirement, was appointed to the governor’s role in September.

A black-and-white cat, Palmerston is named after Lord Palmerston, a two-time prime minister in the 1850s and ’60s. Lord Palmerston was known for promoting British nationalism and intervention. Palmerston is known for mousing.

As a rescue cat, Palmerston is of uncertain age, although he was reported to be roughly 2 years old when appointed in 2016. His relatively low profile in recent years had led to rumors of his demise.

Lord Simon McDonald, formerly the most senior civil servant at the foreign office, said the most frequent question he had received since leaving office was what had happened to Palmerston. “The answer — retirement to countryside — usually treated as euphemism for ‘He died.’” he wrote. “Now we have proof of life in Bermuda! Enjoy your latest assignment.”

Much as Palmerston’s eponymous prime minister could never get along with another prime minister, William Gladstone, Palmerston has had a longtime rivalry with Larry, the chief mouser at 10 Downing Street. Although many details remain murky, reports say that in 2016, Larry tried to enter the Foreign Office in London, leading Palmerston to claw him. Larry was injured enough to need veterinary treatment. Bitterness lingered.

Larry is currently serving under his sixth prime minister. With Palmerston now more than 3,000 miles away, their feud is likely to diminish, political analysts say.

This video shows Larry confronting Palmerston, but also chasing a fox and rejecting Liz Truss’s attempt to pet him:

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Here’s Jenn, who posts only good news, talking about Browser the Library Cat for Life (what a good name!), who kept his job after a curmudgeon tried to oust him.

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And The Kiffness with a great riff on a cat’s vocals: “Sometimes I’m Alone”.  The cat is named George, as you’ll see at the end, and The Kiffness is on tour!

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Lagniappe:  Two today!  First, a cat misuses a store display.

pic.twitter.com/wkcmkCkkWF

— Meonk! (@majeliskucing) February 12, 2025

And wait! There’s more!  The cat movie “Flow,” which I’ve mentioned before, has now been nominated for two Oscars. It’s for everyone, not just cat lovers, for it features adventures and many animals. You can read about it in the NYT below by clicking the headline, or find it archived here, and I’ve put the trailer below. SEE IT!

An excerpt:

“We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.

Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.

“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.

A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.

. . . . The “Flow” craze has reached far beyond Latvia. Here in the United States, the animated adventure, which opened in theaters in late November, has become the all-time highest-grossing release for the distributors Janus Films and Sideshow, bringing in $4 million so far.

“Flow” has received terrific ratings on Rotten Tomatoes: 97% from the critics and 98% from the public. You don’t see ratings like that for most movies, especially animated ones with no words!

The American Trailer:

h/t Michael, Laura

A remarkable discovery appeared in the journal Science in 2010.  Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues reported finding, in California’s salty Mono Lake, a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its metabolism.  This was stunning, as phosphorus was thought to be an essential constituent of many biological macromolecules, including proteins and DNA—the latter using phosphorus as part of its backbone.  (The bacterium was, by the way, named GFAJ-1, standing for “Give Felisa a job,” as she was apparently looking for a permanent academic position.)

At any rate, this was huge news, and implied, to many, including hype-promoting journalists, that if life could thrive on arsenic, perhaps the chances of life on other planets was higher than we thought. Wolfe-Simon herself implied that perhaps there was a “shadow biosphere,” on Earth, including organisms that we didn’t know of because their biochemistry was so different from that of life we knew.

The publicity attending this discovery was huge: NASA held a press conference in which Simon was the only one of the dozen authors to appear. Simon also gave a TED talk on this subject, and in 2011 Time Magazine named her one of “Time’s 100 people,” supposedly the most influential group in the world.

The problem, which emerged pretty rapidly, is that this discovery was wrong. The research was sloppy, the reviewers apparently didn’t have the proper expertise to review the paper, and researchers who did have the expertise began pointing out the discovery’s flaws, first online and then in a series of eight critiques published in Science. As Wikipedia notes,

 If correct, this would be the only known organism to be capable of replacing phosphorus in its DNA and other vital biochemical functions.[14][15][16] The Science publication and an hour-long December 2, 2010 NASA news conference were publicized and led to “wild speculations on the Web about extraterrestrial life”.[17] Wolfe-Simon was the only one of the paper’s authors at that news conference.[18] The news conference was promptly met with criticism by scientists and journalists.[19] In the following month, Wolfe-Simon (and her co-authors and NASA) responded to criticisms through an online FAQ and an exclusive interview with a Science reporter, but also announced they would not respond further outside scientific peer-review.[20][21] In April 2011 Time magazine named Wolfe-Simon one of that year’s Time 100 people.[22][23]

The Science article “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus” appeared in the June 3, 2011 print version of Science;[1] it had remained on the “Publication ahead of print” ScienceXpress page for six months after acceptance for publication. However, Rosemary Redfield and other researchers from the University of British Columbia and Princeton University performed studies in which they used a variety of different techniques to investigate the presence of arsenic in the DNA of GFAJ-1 and published their results in early 2012. The group found no detectable arsenic in the DNA of the bacterium. In addition, they found that arsenate did not help the strain grow when phosphate was limited, further suggesting that arsenate does not replace the role of phosphate.[24][25]

Following the publication of the articles challenging the conclusions of the original Science article first describing GFAJ-1, the website Retraction Watch argued that the original article should be retracted because of misrepresentation of critical data.[26][27] In October 2024, Science editor Holden Thorp notified the article’s authors of its intention to retract, arguing that, whereas formerly only misconduct justified retraction, current practice allows it for unreliablity.[22]

I wrote about the controversy at the time; see my several posts here.  Simon et al. apparently were dead wrong.  This was first revealed byblog posts by Rosie Redfield (who later published a critique in the literature) and followed by eight critiques in Science about the Wolfe-Simon et al, paper, and two failed attempts to replicate their results, both of which failed. Wolfe-Simon did not get her coveted job and, as the new NYT article below reports, she now spends her time making music on the oboe, and working part-time on bacteria that apparently can use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

Now the NYT has revisited the controversy on its 15th anniversary, and has published a long and remarkable article that does its best to exculpate Wolfe-Simon and demonize her critic. As the headline below implies, she further “changed science forever.”  That’s wrong. Why do they do this? Greg Mayer has two theories, which are his, and I’ll mention them below.

Click below to read the NYT article by Sarah Scoles, which is also archived here.

The article is remarkably soft on Wolfe-Simon, downplaying the scientific sloppiness of her theme and making her into kind of heroine who was unfairly attacked by a social-media mob They don’t mention microbiologist Rosie Redfield, a prime critic responsible for pointing out the errors of Wolfe-Simon et al., though one link goes to her.  The article implies, as I said, that “her discovery” (it was a group of people!) nevertheless changed science forever, for it was critiqued on social media (something that the NYT implies is bad), and from then on science has been vetted, even before papers are formally published, by non-scientists or scientists who publish their criticisms on social media, including blogs. This, claims author Scoles, has affected science so it’s never been the same.

Scoles is wrong and grossly exaggerates the situation.  Papers were criticized on social media long before Wolfe-Simon’s, but hers received special attention solely because not only was it a remarkable phenomenon, one hard to believe, but also because the authors gave it huge hype, helped along by the press. Remarkable results deserve remarkable attention. And, in the end, the problems with the Wolfe-Simon paper and the failure to replicate it found their way into the scientific literature, so that nobody now believes that there was an arsenic-using bacterium.  This is the way science is supposed to work, and in this case it did work. A sloppy and incorrect report was corrected.

Now others, including Science‘s editor Holden Thorp, as well as David Sanders in the Retraction Watch article below from 2020, feel that Wolfe-Simon et al. paper should be retracted.  I disagree. Retraction, if it’s used for anything, should be reserved for papers that were duplicitous, containing fake data or false assertions.  Wolfe-Simon et al. simply produced an incorrect and poorly reviewed paper, but there was no cheating. The paper should stay, and its simply met the fate of many papers that were wrong (remember, at least two Nobel Prizes have been given for sloppy and incorrect science). It is an object lesson on how wonky results get fixed.

Click below to read this Retraction Watch article from 2021, or see the more recent article here.

The question remains: why did the NYT paint a misleading picture of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, of her detractors, and of the scientific process? Why did they go so easy on her, making her into a heroine who was unfairly mobbed—to the point where she could not find an academic job.  Greg Mayer suggested two theories:

1.) Greg notes that because the article “makes her out as a victim”, it plays into the “victim narrative” of scientists who were treated unfairly (she was a woman, too, which feeds into that narrative).  And newspapers love victim narratives.

2.) Greg also wrote,  “The article seems in line with the Times’s embrace of woo: another example of credulous reporting of outlandish claims, a la their recent UFO coverage.”

I’m going to let Greg dilate on these theories, which are his, below, so come back to this post later on today to see what he says. I agree with him in the main, and we both agree that Wolfe-Simon’s paper should NOT be retracted.

Addendum by Greg Mayer.

My first suggestion is actually the “scientist as hero” narrative, which portrays the lone scientist as struggling against an entrenched orthodoxy that tries to suppress their discoveries. For some discussion of the narrative, its faults, but also its upside, see this post by Andrew Gelman and the links within it. The media love this narrative– sometimes it’s even true! That the “hero scientist” becomes a “victim” is even better– now you’re Galileo! It doesn’t hurt if the victim seems to be opposed by heartless male editors like Holden Thorpe; it helps if you neglect to mention that some of the most incisive criticisms were by another female scientist. But as someone once said, you can’t wrap yourself in the cloak of Galileo merely because orthodoxy opposes you: you must also be right. Getting a sympathetic reassessment in the Times also fits well with the initial strategy of maximum media attention (NASA press conference, TED talk, Glamour, Time, Wall Street Journal, etc.) as a way to advance one’s career, and with the general approach to science of the media, including the Times.

The second suggestion, which is not mutually exclusive, is that the article follows the Times recent attraction to woo, like astrology and UFOs. A lot of elite media have gotten in on the latter– see Andrew Gelman again, especially here. He points out that the media seem to think they are being skeptical of elites and authority when purveying this stuff, but while doubting authority, they gullibly accept anything else they’re told. (There’s a very similar strain in RFK Jr.’s approach to science.) But, as Gelman notes, extreme skepticism bleeds into credulity.

My friend Phil Ward at UC Davis found this reference and called it to my attention. It’s from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (B), and access is free (click on title below).  The pdf with the numbered references is here.

The paper is about how the evolution of two different types of gametes (“anisogamy”: a requirement for the origin of biological sexes) can originate from isogamy (same-sized gametes) under certain conditions. It is a theoretical paper, and I haven’t read it closely as I’m math-averse. However, what’s of interest is the first paragraph of the paper, which reviews the literature on anisogamy.  That paragraph states that anisogamy (ergo biological sex) has originated independently in many groups of eukaryotes (organisms with true cells).  I’ve put that first paragraph below and have bolded the relevant part. I’ve also linked to each group so you can see what they are.  The numbers lead to the references, which I have not checked.

Multicellular organisms typically produce gametes of two distinct size classes: larger eggs and smaller sperm. This dimorphism—known as ‘anisogamy’—is a remarkable case of convergent evolution. It has arisen independently in multiple distantly related eukaryotic lineages, including in animals [1]; dikaryotic fungi [2]; various groups of green algae, including the ancestors of land plants [3,4]; red algae [5]; brown algae [6,7]; yellow-green algae (Xanthophyceae: Vaucheria) [8]; diatoms [9]; oomycetes [10]; dinoflagellates [11]; apicomplexans [12]; and parabasalids (Trichonympha) [13]. By contrast, the gametes of most unicellular and some multicellular eukaryotes are isogamous, with a unimodal distribution of gamete sizes. Anisogamy is often taken as the defining difference between ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexual strategies: males produce only sperm; females produce only eggs; and hermaphrodites have the potential to produce both gamete types, either simultaneously or at different life stages. Isogamous species lack sexes by this definition. However, their gametes can often be classified into two, or occasionally more, ‘mating types’, such that fertilization only occurs between gametes of unlike types [2,14–16].

If you add up these groups, you get at least 11 evolutionarily independent origins of anisogamy: the production of “larger eggs and smaller sperm.”  The independence is probably inferred via a “cladistic” method by looking at the family trees of these groups, seeing that the ancestors were either asexual or isogamous, and noting that anisogamy appeared on a later-appearing derived branch.

If the authors are indeed correct, then what we have here is a remarkable example of evolutionary convergence: eleven separate groups independently evolving binary sex with large eggs and small sperm.  There are of course evolutionary theories showing why an ancestral condition of sex with equal-size gametes would split into a derived condition with two sizes of gametes, but that is a theoretical result.  Here we see that this has actually happened in nature nearly a dozen times, so the theories may hold some water.

I’ll add one thing. Not only has anisogamous sex apparently evolved eleven times independently, but, even in the one group of animals the determinants of sex—the features that trigger the development of two types of animals producing different-sized gametes—have also evolved independently. Luana and I pointed this out in our paper, “The ideological subversion of biology” (bolding is mine):

We can see the stability of the two-sex condition by realizing that what triggers the development of males versus females varies widely across species (Bachtrog et al. 2014). Different sexes can be based on different chromosomes and their genes (e.g., XX vs. XY in humans, ZW vs. ZZ in birds, individuals with like chromosomes being female in mammals and male in birds); different rearing temperatures (crocodiles and turtles); whether you have a full or half set of chromosomes (bees); whether you encounter a female (marine worms); and a host of other social, genetic, and environmental factors. Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.

Now I’m not smart or diligent enough to figure out why once there are two sexes—which is the case in animals, and must thus have been true in our common ancestor)—how you can evolutionarily traverse from one determinant of sex (say a gene on a chromosome) to something like temperature-dependent sex determination or social sex determination (e.g. the famous clownfish, used by miscreants to claim that there are more than two sexes).  It’s a mystery waiting to be solved.  But so even here, in one group, we have convergent evolution—of the factors that cause the two sexes to diverge.

I find all this fascinating, and it shows the power of Orgel’s Second Rule: “evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Please send in your wildlife photos! Do I have to beg? Very well, then, I’m begging.

Today we have some photos by ecologist Susan Harrison: mostly birds but two mammals and one astronomy picture. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

More miscellany of early 2025

It’s been a turbulent time at work and a slow time for birdwatching, so it’s challenging to come up any wildlife photos, let alone ones with a theme.   But here are a few more random sights from around Davis, California in January – early February 2025.

Overwintering Snow Geese (Anser caerulescens):

American Beaver (Castor canadensis) in the local stream:

Mountain Bluebird (Sialis curricucoides), an uncommon overwintering bird around here, hunting crickets in a plowed field:

Merlin (Falco columbarius), distinguished from the similar-sized American Kestrel by having a white eyebrow instead of a black mustache (as birders call the vertical facial stripe):

American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) for comparison:

Miniature goats (Capra hircus), seemingly puzzled that the human is looking up into trees rather than bringing them carrots:

Horned Larks (Eremophila alpestris), which always look to me like they’re searching for someone’s lost keys:

American Avocets (Recurvirostra americana), in which females have more upcurved bills than males, possibly giving them different feeding niches:

Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus), inexorably drawn to stony surfaces like gravel roads and railroad beds:

Cinnamon Teal (Spatula cyanoptera) pairing up, Northern Shoveler (Spatula clypeata), and a rear-end view of a Northern Pintail (Anas acuta):

Mixed ducks flying away, as they are—sadly but for good reason—very shy of humans:

Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis), a drab little bird with not much to fear from a human:

And finally, though I’m no celestial photographer, the Moon being approached by Mars: