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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:

Perhaps I’m into sappy music today, but let’s end the day, as we started it, with romantic music, and one of my favorite pop songs. This one is “I’ll never love this way again,“, and no, even though it’s sung by Dionne Warwick, it wasn’t written by Burt Bachrach but by Richard Kerr and Will Jennings. And it was produced by Barry Manilow, whom you can see below.

This live version below has both Warwick on vocals and Manilow on the keyboard (and some vocal harmony).  It counts as one of my “lost love” songs (I have a list) because she realizes that her great romance is doomed to disappear (“before the good is gone”, “I won’t turn my head in sorrow if you should go away”).

Warwick was a great vocalist, and had a lot of good songs, but now she’s forgotten. Would anybody now in college have even heard her name?

Here’s what the Guardian considers her best song, though I don’t agree, though it’s very good. It was written by Burt Bachrach and Hal David, and performed here by Warwick the year after it was written (1964, when Warwick was 24).

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Simon and Schuster description here

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller’s Doctored shows that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Piller begins with a whistleblower—Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag—whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize–rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller’s revelations of Schrag’s findings stunned the field and the public.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, this “seminal account of deceit that will long be remembered” (Katherine Eban, author of Bottle of Lies and Vanity Fair special correspondent) exposes a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer’s research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field’s institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. It is a shocking tale with huge ramifications not only for Alzheimer’s disease, but for scientific research, funding, and oversight at large.

 

As I reported recently, 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. 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! The bolding below is mine:

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. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

A number of biologists I talked to had strong objections to both this wonky declaration, which of course is based not on biology but on ideology (see my posts here and here), as well as to its implication that biologists, including members of the three societies, generally agreed with it. But the societies did not poll their members before issuing a general statement in their name!

The statement is in fact is a prime but embarrassing example of societies being ideologically captured to the extent that they misrepresent science to cater to “progressive” liberalism. The object of course is not foxes, horses, or oak trees, but humans; this is meant to reassure people who feel that they are “nonbinary” in gender that nature is just like them. (For an excellent analysis of the issue, and a defense of the binary nature of sex, see Richard Dawkins’s article here.)

Luana Maroja of Williams College, my frequent partner in crime, was even more concerned, and so she penned a letter which she sent last night to the Presidents of the three societies.  With a little help from me, she managed to get 23 biologists to sign the letter (as expected, many demurred and wouldn’t sign). I reproduce Luana’s letter below with permission; Except for Luana and me, I have left off the signers’ names because I didn’t ask them if they wanted to go public about such a touchy subject.

To wit:

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,

Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
Luana S. Maroja, Professor of Biology, Williams College

THE NAMES OF 21 OTHER SIGNERS ARE REDACTED

I doubt the Societies will pay this letter any attention, as they seem to be doubling down on the sex-is-a-spectrum-in-all-species view. This is performative flaunting of virtue that will accomplish nothing.  But we and the other signers want the public to know that this view of biological sex is not held by all biologists, and hardly represents a scientific consensus. (If there is a consensus, it is most likely the gametic definition described by Dawkins.) If you want to write your own letter rather than sign a group effort, the email addressed of two Presidents are given in their letter, and it’s easy to google that of the ASN President. And if you did sign the letter and want that to be public, simply say it in the comments below.

As a former President of the SSE, I am ashamed of what that society has done, and they should be ashamed of themselves for truckling to the latest ideology. They can of course issue statements bearing on issues of evolution, but this one simply distorts the facts. And, as I reported yesterday, the SSE has seen fit to make more general declarations about politics.

I see in the NYT that there’s a new “authorized biography” of the Bangles, recounting their rise and fall. An excerpt:

The first time Susanna Hoffs and the Peterson sisters sang together and their voices blended, the frisson was unmistakable. “We knew we had something,” Hoffs said. “We created a band in that moment.”

Hoffs, 66, beamed at the memory, sitting in her kitchen on a late January afternoon. Dressed in a sweater and slacks, the diminutive [she’s 5″2′] singer and guitarist sipped coffee, an old Margaret Keane painting hanging above her. Her airy home in Brentwood is just a few blocks from where the Bangles were born, on a cool evening in early 1981 in her parents’ garage.

“It’s an overused word, but we were organic,” the guitarist Vicki Peterson, 67, said. “We formed ourselves, played the music we loved, we really were a garage band.” But a garage band “that somehow became pop stars,” the drummer Debbi Peterson, 63, noted. Both sisters were interviewed in video conversations.

The Bangles broke big, scoring five Top 5 hits and storming MTV with inescapable songs like “Manic Monday” and “Eternal Flame.” They were one of the era’s rare all-girl groups — and became one of the most successful female bands of all time — a crew of puckish 20-somethings showcasing their collective songwriting and vocal chops.

But one of the defining bands of the 1980s also ended in spectacular fashion. Less than a decade after its birth, the group imploded in its manager’s Hollywood mansion, the sisterhood of its members lost amid a farrago of fame and mental fatigue.

That story plays out vividly in “Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of the Bangles” by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, out on Feb. 18. Bickerdike — the author of books about Nico and Britney Spears — fashioned a history of a bygone era in the music business, one in which the outsize influence of major labels, domineering producers and Machiavellian managers could routinely make or break a band.

. . . The notion of the Bangles as a band of equals quickly went out the window. “Susanna [Hoffs] was pushed forward as the sex symbol,” Bickerdike said. “But Sue is really smart and goofy, she’s actually kind of a dork, you know? So I think that was an uncomfortable role for her.”

And this is a crime:

While the Go-Go’s were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, the Bangles have yet to be nominated.

Here’s Susannah singing my favorite Bangles song, “Eternal Flame,” for which she wrote the lyrics, in 2021—when she was sixty (she turned 66 on January 17). She remains beautiful and alluring, and her voice is still lovely. She’s also Jewish, and I’d marry her in a second—if she wasn’t already married.

Here’s a good live version (1996) with just Hoffs and a guitarist. A live version with all the Bangles is here and you can hear the original recording here.  The song topped the charts in both the U.S. and U.K.

My once-favorite society continues to take ideological positions rather than scientific ones, and it continues its habit of wokeness with this latest announcement.

Even after getting some pushback from members about its misguided announcement about the “spectrum of sex”, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) persists in taking political positions (in some cases having little or nothing to do with evolution per se), implicitly violating institutional neutrality and chilling the speech of SSE members.  The SSE Council sent out this memo two days ago. (It doesn’t seem to be on their website.)  While their concern for science funding does indeed fall within the ambit of the SSE, they are now changing the mission of the Society (as they did with the last announcement) from promoting the study of evolution to also enacting social justice.  And as time passes, and as I hear about the annual meetings and read their statements, they’re getting more “progressive” all the time. The letter below spends quite a bit of time advocating for “equity” (they don’t seem to know what the word means) and DEI. The bolding is theirs announcement.

February 10, 2025

Dear SSE members,

The Society for the Study of Evolution leadership has been following recent developments at the US federal level, as they affect teaching, the conduct of scientific research in evolution, and the people who do both. We are deeply concerned about misrepresentation of science, deletion of public data and reports from governmental websites, and illegal attacks on science funding and DEI mandates. We stand committed to supporting our community and our mission: to promote evolutionary biology research, education, application, outreach, and community building in an equitable and globally inclusive manner.

The daily attacks from the administration on science and its infrastructure are of great concern. Scientific research and education require funding. Halts or suspension of already awarded funding or non-negotiated changes to associated indirect costs are untenable. Such interruptions create unnecessary problems for investigators, post-docs, students and universities alike, and can derail ongoing experiments. The deletion of public data and reports from governmental websites amounts to book burning and cannot be tolerated. Likewise, the forced archiving of proposal calls that support development of a diverse pool of scientists has serious consequences.

Taken as a whole, this attack on the scientific enterprise threatens the production of knowledge by US scientists, with fall-out [sic] that will affect the health and well-being of our society. Basic research provides the foundational knowledge on which applied research is built, which in turn is translated into advances in human welfare. The US has historically been a leader in this area, benefiting from diversity in the workforce and from public funding. This leadership role is now significantly threatened.

What has the SSE done so far?

In response to the January 25, 2025 Executive Order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, SSE and our sister societies, The American Society of Naturalists and the Society of Systematic Biologists, are sending a letter to the White House and all members of Congress clarifying the scientific consensus regarding the definition of sex. We will continue to watch events as they unfold and will respond accordingly. We welcome opinions and ideas from the membership on how we can best support you during this time.

What can you do?

Make your voice heard. If you are a US citizen, contact your congressional representatives, both in the House and Senate. Calling is more effective than writing an email or a letter, but anything is good. Personal stories of the impact on you and your science are most effective. Engage with groups that advocate for public policy. The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) offers communications and advocacy training and opportunities to meet with lawmakers through the AIBS Congressional Visits Day event on April 28-30. Funding support is available from SSE for this, with an application deadline of February 17. Larger societies (e.g., AAAS, Ecological Society of America) also sponsor advocacy training.

Communicate with the public. Send an op-ed to your local newspaper, telling the story of the impact on you and your science. One resource for drafting a compelling op-ed is at https://www.theopedproject.org/askajournalist. Story-telling resources are also useful, and a multitude can be found through an online search (e.g., here and here). Continue posting on social media, vetting for accuracy.

Use your local resources and expand your network. Work with your institution to support spending of current grant funding. Think about your network. Who do you know who knows someone who could be helpful?

Tell us how this has affected you. We would like to know how you have personally been affected by the attacks on science and scientists and solutions that you or your academic unit have developed in response. Send your personal experiences and any ideas for further action by SSE to president@evolutionsociety.org or submit them to SSE Council through this form.

In sum, the SSE leadership reaffirms our commitment to the SSE mission: we will work tirelessly on behalf of the membership to promote and defend evolutionary biology, and to support all the diverse people that form the bedrock of this field. Although there are many moving parts, daily stressors, and huge unknowns that members of SSE are currently grappling with, we note that the attacks on historically excluded members of society are reprehensible. We encourage our membership to be unwavering in your support of the most vulnerable within the community. Attacks on science and science funding are likewise untenable. We emphasize that defending evolutionary biology and promoting inclusive science is the ethical and moral way forward.

Sincerely,

SSE Council

Scientific societies of course should advocate for positions that further the mission of the society, which, as I recall when I was President, was to further knowledge, research, teaching, and publishing in evolution. Now, however, they have clearly changed their mission in the direction of social justice:

In sum, the SSE leadership reaffirms our commitment to the SSE mission: we will work tirelessly on behalf of the membership to promote and defend evolutionary biology, and to support all the diverse people that form the bedrock of this field.

Now the membership of any society is diverse in the sense that it contains people with different backgrounds and views, but it’s also clear that by “diversity” the SSE means ethnic or racial diversity. Does anybody think it means anything else? And so the SSE is now promoting equity as well as evolution.  They imply, without proof, that a diverse group of people will produce better evolutionary biology. That is likely true for “diversity of interests” but is it true for diversity of ethnicity? Who knows?

Of course the SSE should not show any bias towards any group, and a statement to that effect would suffice on its website. Further, since evolutionary biology is not limited to the U.S., the SSE should sometimes hold meetings with the societies of other countries, which they have done, and offer meeting grants to students from outside the U.S.. But other countries have their own evolution societies, too.

As far as “equity” is concerned, it usually means ethnic representation in the society in proportions to the existing groups in society, not “equal opportunity”. But opportunity and representation are conflated in the sentence below:

We stand committed to supporting our community and our mission: to promote evolutionary biology research, education, application, outreach, and community building in an equitable and globally inclusive manner.

At the end, they urge the members to take political action, mostly to oppose executive orders of Trump that, the Council believes, hurt the SSE.  They don’t seem to realize that most members just want to concentrate on doing their research.

The point of all this, though, is just to give my view that my once-beloved SSE has, like many other societies, has become political, and has changed its mission to emphasize social justice as well as science. I highly doubt that this announcement will have any beneficial results for the SSE or society as a whole; it is an exercise in flaunting the society’s virtue. If there is a lesson here, it’s that while the SSE may make political statements that further its scientific mission, it should stay out of ideology and politics that are irrelevant or tangential to evolution.

I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps.  Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here.  And of course I try to refute his arguments.

First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.

I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument.  It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.

Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):

1.) The three big ones.  He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.

The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.

As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced  consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious.  Douthat:

[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?

Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”.  I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.

But wait! There’s more!

2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.  To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all. 

Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)

But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.

As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage.  Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive.  This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning.  And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.

Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:

3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:

Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?

This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals).  Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities.  Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution.  Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.

And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.

And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God.  But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God.  But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed  evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.

Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.

Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.

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

Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:

Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.

For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.

There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here.  The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.

h/t: Paulo

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “crimes,” came with a link: “Disestablish the Church of England“. And this time it’s Jesus rather than Mo who shows the characteristic hypocrisy or doublethink of the Divine Duo.  Also, note the decline in respect for religion!

In lieu of readers’ wildlife today, I’ll show some drawings and photos in honor of Darwin’s Birthday.  (Note to those malcontents who think that evolution is a religion that worships Darwin as a God: no, we do not think Darwin is infallible. He made a lot of errors, and his neglect of genetics and of how species really arise are big lacunae. Nevertheless, he’ll gone down in history as perhaps the most influential biologist ever.)

This comes from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.

Here is my own Jewish Darwin Fish, just photographed:

More from Athayde. A mockery of the Christian Fish (there are many):

A big Darwin Award for this:

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on this day in 1809 and attended Shrewsbury School as a boarder beginning at age 8. He went to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1825, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood and preferred collecting beetles. He dropped out and attended Cambridge University until 1831, when he started on the epic five-year voyage of the Beagle.  Here is his statue is in front of Shrewsbury School:

Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Darwin was pretty well off, and became more so when he married Emma Wedgwood, heiress of the Wedgwood pottery company. He married Emma in 1839 and in 1842 they moved to Down House in Kent (visit it; it’s not far from London!).  The couple had ten children, seven of whom survived. Darwin lived at Down House the rest of his life (he died in 1882), and it was there that he wrote On the Origin of Species and all his subsequent books. Here’s his study in Down House, which is pretty much as it was when he worked there.  I understand that he wrote in the chair, using a board placed over the arms. There’s also a basin behind a screen where Darwin would go to vomit, for he was often ill with a disease that we still don’t understand.

It’s me at Down House: August 19, 2008. You can see that Darwin had a nice mansion:

My friend Andrew Berry, who went to Shrewsbury School, and Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (two volumes). It is magnificent and written beautifully: a must-read. Janet showed us around Down House, which was a rare opportunity! I understand she’s revising it into one volume, perhaps because people lack attention spans these days, but I’d read the two-volume bio.

A cat I photographed at Down House. Darwin didn’t have much truck with cats and preferred d*gs. However, there are cats there now:

Here’s a tweet that points to many caricatures of Darwin and Darwinism, carefully collected and curated by John van Wyhe on his fantastic Darwin Online website. There are caricatures of Darwin, caricatures of evolution, and drawings from the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”. I’ll give a few of each, with permission from van Wyhe.

For #DarwinDay, John van Wyhe shares this new collection of Darwin/evolution caricatures on the Darwin Online website: darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures….Image: "This way to daylight my sons," Darwin says to Huxley and Tyndall (holding the banner of Science) in an 1873 caricature#histsci #HPS

— Michael D. Barton (@darwinsbulldog.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T03:25:05.199Z

Caricatures of Darwin. All captions are from the website:

c.1828 Two humorous ink sketches of Darwin riding giant beetles by fellow Cambridge undergraduate Albert Way, with captions “Darwin & his hobby.” and “Go it Charlie!”. The joke in this instance being Darwin’s obsession with collecting beetles as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. See Diana Donald’s entry on this here. See some of Darwin’s beetle captures here. (Yale University Library & Falvey Library, Villanova University) 1871 “MR. BERGH TO THE RESCUE.” At the door of the “SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. PRES. BERGH”. Harper’s Weekly (19 August): 776.

A postmortem portrait:

1882 “THE LATE CHARLES DARWIN.” The Wasp (San Francisco) 8, no. 300 (28 April): front cover.

Caricatures of Darwinism:

1872 “London: a Pilgrimage” by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré. The gaping human visitors seen from inside the Monkey House, in the Zoological Gardens, London, appear rather monkey-like themselves. This was only a year after Darwin’s Descent of man was published.

1909 “How true! How True! | DARWIN [on cover of a magazine] | IN THE GOLDEN CHAIN OF FRIENDSHIP | REGARD ME AS A ‘MISSING’LINK!” By H. H. Tammen. “994”. USA postcard, stamped 1912.And two from the Scopes Trial:

1925 “Tennessee’s St. Patrick”. Los Angeles Times (27 March). Bryan wields a club “Evolution must not be taught in the schools of Tennessee” against scurrying apes and monkeys.

And from Chicago (a Darwinian town) showing how banning the teaching of evolution just creates interest in it:

1925 “HOW THEY ARE TEACHING EVOLUTION IN TENNESSEE”. Chicago Tribune (27 May).

Here we have two notables on opposite sides of the religion-versus-faith issue, or at least clashing about how to deal with the oft-claimed incompatibility between science and religion. In one corner is Sam Harris, who, as you know, is a hard-core critic of faith, and not shy about saying that. His book The End of Faith could be counted as the beginning of New Atheism. In the other corner is Brian Greene, who doesn’t like to criticize religion because, he says, confrontation turns people off (he refused to autograph my Faith vs. Fact book that I was auctioning off for charity).  And Greene doesn’t mind taking Templeton money to fund his World Science Festival.

This 9-minute discussion, from 2018, is part of a 2+-hour discussion you can find here.

Greene argues there’s a big reason to avoid being as hard-core as Harris. He claims that being vociferous (apparently like Harris or Dawkins) undercuts the stated goal of atheists to spread rationality. For Greene sees New Atheists as elitists who tell people that they are “stupid”—a contention that we often hear but I don’t think carries much truth. (Try finding such a statement in Faith vs. Fact!) Rather, Greene believes that people’s deconversion is best accomplished indirectly: by getting people to appreciate the natural wonders of the universe and showing your passion for them. This, he thinks, “will drive things in a good direction.” (I believe he means letting go of religion, though Greene isn’t explicit.) I can’t quite see how that would work.

Sam responds that people’s minds can change; believers can become nonbelievers. That is true, and I’ve seen it and, indeed, have even been instrumental in changing some minds that way. (No, I don’t call people “stupid.”)  Greene responds that he’s changed minds, too, but yet he fails to show that the “soft” approach is more efficacious. How many I-got-people-to-give-up-religion anecdotes does he have? As Sam says, “You’re talking about the carrot and I’m talking about the stick. And the stick works.”  This exchange, by the way, is hilarious.

Sam responds that there are some religious views that in fact facilitate the ruination of nature (global warming, for example, can be justified as a necessary precursor of The End Times).  Greene responds that he’s rarely confronted with such people.

My methods are clearly the same as Sam’s, though I wouldn’t for a minute tell Greene that he has to go after religion big-time. That’s just not his way. However—and I don’t have evidence for this—I do think that the direct approach to criticizing faith, one that avoids ad hominem attacks—is more efficacious. I don’t think telling people that science and faith are perfectly compatible, for instance, can account for the rise of the “nones” in recent years. It appears that many people have become “nones” because they realized that religion is irrational and in conflict with science. As a paper published in 2023 noted:

. . . . the authors queried self-identified religious nones about their reasons for leaving their religion. In response, each participant wrote a short personal essay, which was coded by the research team. Four primary themes emerged. About half of the sample (51.8%) reported leaving for intellectual reasons or because they outgrew their faith. Roughly a fifth of the sample (21.9%) reported religious trauma, such as the hypocrisy of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Others (14.9%) reported leaving religion because of personal adversity, such as an inability to make sense of the tragic death of a child, or social reasons (11.4%), including a religious community’s being unwelcoming.

In other words, by far the most common reason for leaving faith is because people perceive that it has no intellectual underpinnings. They don’t leave it because appreciating a passion for the university changes them “in a good way”. (Note that New Atheists also emphasize at least two of the other three reasons people give up their faith.)

As you know the University of Chicago was the first higher-ed school in America to adopt a position of institutional neutrality. This was done in 1967, with the principle embodied in our Kalven Report.  Kalven prohibits the University or its units, including departments and centers, from taking official stands on political, moral, and ideological issues—save in those cases where the issue is one that could affect the mission of our University.  According to FIRE, which approves of this position of institutional neutrality, some 29 other colleges or boards of education have joined Chicago in adopting one.

Deviations from the position of neutrality are rare, but this morning we learned that our President, Paul Alivisatos, has declared official University opposition to the Trump’s administration of slashing “indirect costs” on NIH grants. “Indirect costs” are the payments the University gets on top of an award when a researcher or entity gets a grant. They are supposed to be used to support the research through university costs and infrastructure, paying, for example, for building maintenance, administrative costs, electricity, water, and other costs not directly involved in doing research.  Each university negotiates its indirect costs directly with the NIH, and they typically range between 25% to 70% of the money awarded the researcher.

So, for example, if I asked for $2 million in research for monies for a three-year NIH grant, having calculated the costs of doing the research and paying grad students and postdocs, I would ask for that amount of money. Our overhead rate is 64%, so if I got the grant, the university would receive an extra $1,280,000 in overhead, so the whole award would cost the NIH over $3 million.

Now not all the overhead is used to support the specific research grant funded, as there’s no way to exactly calculate infrastructure costs.  Universities therefore often put the overhead money into a big pot used to support the university as a whole, and often it’s not clear where that overhead money goes, nor is it clear that all of it supports research.   But it is clear that overhead is crucial for keeping universities running and that a lot of it does cover the costs doing research (animal facilities, safety assurance, OSHA compliance, and so on). The Chicago Maroon reports that the cuts will cost our University $52 million in yearly revenue.

It was a big deal, then, when the Trump administration decided to cap the indirect cost rate on NIH grants at 15%, which would result in a severe loss of money to research-oriented universities—amounting in toto to billions of dollars.  The NIH verified this in their own announcement.  To President Alivisatos, this slashing represents an impediment to the mission of the University of Chicago, and so we broke neutrality, as delineated below his announcement below. I’ve put a screenshot of the announcement, but have put the words in larger type below it:

I’ve put the parts in bold where the University has taken an official stand:

Dear Colleagues,

In recent weeks, a large number of executive orders and federal policy changes have been issued. Following an election, policy changes are an expected part of our democracy. Yet today, some of these, if implemented, would have far-ranging adverse impacts on institutions of higher education and academic medical centers, including ours. These matters stand to affect our institution substantially, and I have a duty to act in support of our core interests.

Yesterday, I authorized that we join over a dozen plaintiff universities and associations in a suit to challenge the sudden reduction in NIH indirect costs that was announced Friday evening. The precipitous timing of this move would immediately damage the ability of our faculty, students, and staff (and those of other academic institutions and medical centers across the nation) to engage in health-related fundamental research and to discover life-saving therapies. For many, indirect costs may conjure images of administrative waste, but the truth is: this is a mechanism through which federal grants support essentials like state-of-the-art lab facilities and cybersecurity to protect data privacy.

I–and the leadership from across the University–are monitoring the policy developments closely. We look at each issue carefully and with an open mind. In this rapidly evolving landscape, where appropriate, the University is acting on our community’s behalf on a wide range of issues in defense of our operations and mission.

This is a period of contestation and change, and in such a moment it is important to keep our focus on what we treasure in UChicago. Ours is an extraordinary community where we advance our mission to create new knowledge, where we offer students a deep and meaningful education, where we forge new understanding, and where our medical enterprise offers new therapies and care for patients. This is a place where we are committed to open debate, to rigor and to excellence, and where we recognize that diversity of viewpoint and experience enriches our ability to seek truths. Realizing these values is a constant and good struggle, and academic freedom and freedom of inquiry and expression are the fundamental principles that make them possible. The work of the members of this community is important. For these reasons, since the University’s founding, this community has been committed to upholding those ideals–and will remain steadfast to honoring them.

Many of you have questions; local leadership across the schools, units, and divisions will have the most up-to-date information. We are collaborating with other institutions and utilizing the tools available to us to counter actions that would adversely affect our ability to fulfill our calling.

Sincerely,
Paul

——-

Paul Alivisatos

President

Harvard had similar objections:

Every scientific and medical breakthrough, whether in basic or applied research, depends on the people who conduct the research, as well as the materials and laboratory equipment they use. These components of research, readily attributable to a specific project, are funded as direct costs, but they do not encompass all essential aspects of research. The work also requires laboratory facilities, heat and electricity, and people to administer the research and ensure that it is conducted securely and in accordance with federal regulations. The expenditures for these critical parts of the research enterprise are called indirect costs. They are substantial, and they are unavoidable, not least because it can be very expensive to build, maintain, and equip space to conduct research at the frontiers of knowledge.

Implementing a 15 percent cap on indirect support, as the NIH has announced it intends to do, would slash funding and cut research activity at Harvard and nearly every research university in our nation. The discovery of new treatments would slow, opportunities to train the next generation of scientific leaders would shrink, and our nation’s science and engineering prowess would be severely compromised. At a time of rapid strides in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, brain science, biological imaging, and regenerative biology, and when other nations are expanding their investment in science, America should not drop knowingly and willingly from her lead position on the endless frontier.

Since this just happened, I’ll leave the lawsuiting to the University, though I note that a federal judge has put these cuts on temporary hold as the attorneys general of 22 states, including Illinois, have filed a lawsuit claiming that the cut would irreparably damage research.  In the meantime, those of us in the free-speech community here are pondering whether and how the cuts really do endanger the stated mission of our university. It would seem obvious that it does, since part of our mission is to generate knowledge through research, but there are two caveats. Does the mission per se include medical research designed to save lives—that is, to create medical innovations? Is that part of our our mission statement? And does the mission of the university include protecting its operational budget, assuring a comfortable financial bottom line? If so, how much overhead do we require?

Clearly our university and others construe this as part of our mission, and I’m not going to object. But clearly we need to think harder about what the mission of a university like ours really is.

The last time the University of Chicago broke institutional neutrality was in 2017, when the U of C declared opposition to Trump’s cancellation of the DACA (“Dreamers”) act because having Dreamers here as part of the university was considered helping fulfill our mission, and deporting them would thus impede our mission.  As the Chicago Maroon noted at the time:

The University declined to support the DREAM Act in 2010, citing the 1967 Kalven Report which recommended that the University generally avoid taking political stances, and University spokesperson Jeremy Manier maintained this position in an e-mail to The Maroon Tuesday.

“The DREAM Act encompasses issues that do not directly affect the University,” he said in the e-mail. “However, in general the University strongly supports efforts to address this issue through legislation that protects the ability of DACA-eligible students to live in the United States and pursue their education and careers here.”

That breaks institutional neutrality. Such declarations are rare here, and thus today’s announcement is a big deal for the University of Chicago.

Today we have another photo-plus-text contribution from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior; the subject is mangoes, my favorite fruit (and flies, my favorite group of insects). Athayde’s text is indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

The king and its flies

Germany has its Pumpkin Festival, Canada celebrates a Cranberry Festival, Spaniards go wild hurling over-ripe tomatoes at each other at the Tomato Festival, while Italians savour their winemaking heritage during the Marino Grape Festival. But among the many fruit- and produce-themed events around the world, few have the cultural magnitude of The International Mango Festival, held annually in Delhi.

Delhi’s mango festival: activities include mango eating competitions, mango quizzes and slogan-writing, mango carving, mango tasting and varieties contests, dances, plays and crafts © India’s Ministry of Tourism.

Mango (Mangifera indica) has been a cultural and religious symbol in India for millennia: grown for over 4,000 years, its earliest references date back to around 2,000 BC from ancient texts and scriptures. The fruit is associated with fertility, prosperity and devotion in Hindu and Buddhist mythologies and traditions. Mangoes symbolise the arrival of summer, appearing in folk songs, literature and art, and are used in religious ceremonies and offerings to the gods. When summer comes, Indians give mangoes to family, friends, customers and employees. The fruit’s flavours, juiciness and texture make it an effective tool for diplomatic relations: mangoes have been routinely offered to foreign dignitaries and were sent as gifts for the coronation of George VI.

The mango is more than an Indian icon: it is one of the most important fruits in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. Mangoes are a main source of vitamin A in Africa and Asia, and the tree’s bark and leaves have been used in folk remedies for centuries. The fruit is mainly eaten in natura, green or ripe, but is also liberally used in chutneys, pickles, curries, preserves, juices, ice-creams and a variety of dishes throughout Asia and Central and South America. Mangoes are grown commercially in more than 100 countries, and 65 of them produce over 1,000 million tonnes each a year. And there’s no problem selling all those fruits: mangoes are rapidly gaining in popularity in temperate countries, so demand is increasing. The cultural, nutritional and economic importance of the mango more than justify its title of ‘the king of fruits’.

The king of fruits. Mangoes sold in Britain don’t do justice to the fruit’s flavours © Obsidian Soul, Wikimedia Commons:

Mango trees produce panicles (branched inflorescences) bearing tiny flowers – and lots of them. A mature tree may have 200 to 3,000 panicles, each with 500 to 10,000 flowers. This abundance may suggest ample opportunities for pollination, but that’s not so. Depending on growing conditions and crop variety, 30 to 80% of flowers are staminate, that is, they lack functional pistils. These flowers are functionally male, therefore incapable of being fertilized. The remaining fertile flowers are vulnerable to a range of environmental stresses such as excessive rain and extremes of temperature that prevent fertilisation. To make things worse, each flower produces little nectar, relatively few pollen grains (200-300), and its stigma (the part that receives the pollen) is too small to be of great efficiency. As a result, up to 60% of the flowers receive no pollen, and a panicle may produce up to three fruits at most.

A mango panicle © Delince, Wikimedia Commons:

A single mango flower is not particularly rewarding, but massive numbers of them entice lots of non-specialised visitors. A range of flies, bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, beetles, ants, bugs and bats drop by for a small sip of nectar from each flower. By hopping from flower to flower, visitors greatly increase the chances of cross pollination – although the wind also plays a part.

Among all the flower visitors, one group makes up some of most efficient pollinators of mango varieties grown around the world: flies, especially blowflies, carrion flies, bluebottles (family Calliphoridae), flesh flies (family Sarcophagidae), hover flies (family Syrphidae), and the house fly (Musca domestica). Except for hover flies, they are not seen in a good light by the public. That’s understandable, since most of what we know about them relates to their roles as agricultural pests and vectors of human and animal diseases. But that’s a narrow take on their comings and goings. These flies, often categorised as “filth flies”, are enormously important as decomposers and recyclers, and are vital for food chains: numerous birds, bats and fish depend on them. Another role is becoming increasingly understood: their contribution to myiophily (or myophily), that is, pollination by flies (Orford et al., 2015).

The unappealingly named oriental latrine fly (Chrysomya megacephala) is an important mango pollinator © portioid, iNaturalist:

Blowflies, flesh flies and the like are relatively large and their bodies are covered with ‘hairs’ (setae), which are important pollen-carrying structures. These flies are abundant and persistent flower visitors throughout the blooming season, all desirable qualities for efficient pollination. Besides mango, blow flies, flesh flies and the house fly are known or suspected to pollinate avocado, blueberry, Brussels sprout, carrot, leek, macadamia, onion and strawberry (Cook et al., 2020). The common greenbottle (Lucilia sericata) and the bluebottle (Calliphora vomitoria) are reared commercially for the pollination of seed crops and vegetable crops, respectively (L. sericata is also reared for medical uses: because their maggots preferentially eat dead tissue, they have been used for the treatment of diabetic ulcers, bedsores and other chronic wounds).

A fly with pollen attached to its back © ninfaj, Maryland Agronomy News:

Mango farmers in Northern Australia hold blow flies in such esteem that some growers have installed ‘stink stations’ in their orchards, a practice also used by avocado farmers in Peru. Each station consists of a plastic container filled with fish or chicken carcasses, a concoction guaranteed to attract flies. It’s not clear whether these contraptions improve yields (Finch et al., 2023), but at any rate, farmers see foul-smelling orchards as a small price to pay for the possibility of bumper crops of juicy, fragrant and profitable mangoes.

‘Stink stations’ used by mango growers in the Northern Territory, Australia © Finch et al., 2023:

The mango is a case study of the ‘other’ pollinators, that is, those outside the better known and celebrated club of bees, hover flies and moths. We may be unenthusiastic about flies that are the happiest on carrion and dung, but that’s a reflection of our aesthetic prejudices. Farmers around the world who deal with the mango’s finicky floral biology are very grateful for those unloved insects that help them produce better and more of the king of fruits.

The Guimaras Mango Festival in the Philippines wouldn’t be so lavish without the contribution of some flies of ill repute © Ranieljosecastaneda, Wikimedia Commons:

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday February 11, 2025, and National Peppermint Patty Day.  I can’t show a picture (copyright issues!) but here’s some information from Wikipedia, where you can find a drawing from the Peanuts strip:

Peppermint Patty is a fictional character featured in Charles M. Schulz‘s comic strip Peanuts. Her full name, very rarely used in the strip, is Patricia Reichardt. She is one of a small group in the strip who live across town from Charlie Brown and his school friends (although in The Peanuts Movie, Snoopy in Space, and The Snoopy Show she, Marcie, and Franklin live in the same neighborhood and attend the same school). She has freckles and “mousy-blah” hair, and generally displays the characteristics of a tomboy.

Charles M. Schulz modeled Peppermint Patty after a favorite cousin, Patricia Swanson, who served as a regular inspiration for Peanuts. Schulz had also named his earlier character Patty after Swanson, and he coined his well-known phrase “Happiness is a Warm Puppy” during a conversation with her in 1959. Swanson’s roommate Elise Gallaway served as the model for Peppermint Patty’s best friend Marcie. In later years, especially after lesbian groups began identifying with Peppermint Patty, Schulz downplayed the fact that the character was based on Swanson to protect her privacy.

In one interview, Schulz stated that he coined Peppermint Patty’s name after noticing a dish of peppermint patties in his house and deciding the name was so good that he should use it before another artist thought of the same joke. He created the character design to fit the name. Peppermint Patty debuted in the strip of August 22, 1966.  In 1972, Schulz introduced the character’s last name, Reichardt, which he borrowed from the last name of his secretary, Sue Reichardt, whose favorite character was Peppermint Patty.

It’s also Get out Your Guitar Day (I have a Martin that I no longer play), International Day of Woman and Girls in Science,  and National Latte Day. Here’s mine from yesterday (Puerto Rican coffee courtesy of Divy):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump is about to intensify his trade war by levying tariffs on steel and aluminum from every country, including Canada and Mexico (article archived here):

President Trump is poised to move forward with sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum on Monday, re-upping a policy from his first term that pleased domestic metal makers, but hurt other American industries and ignited trade wars with allies on multiple fronts.

The 25 percent tariffs that the president said he would impose on foreign steel and aluminum will be welcomed by domestic steelmakers, who argue they are struggling to compete against cheap foreign metals. As they did during Mr. Trump’s first term, U.S. metal makers have been lobbying the administration for protection, and Trump officials agree that a strong domestic metal sector is essential for U.S. national security.

But the tariffs will invite plenty of controversy. They are likely to rankle America’s allies, like Canada and Mexico, who supply the bulk of U.S. metal imports. And they could incite retaliation on U.S. exports, as well as pushback from American industries that use metals to make cars, food packaging and other products. Those sectors will face significantly higher prices after the tariffs go into effect.

That’s what happened in Mr. Trump’s first term, when he slapped 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum. While he and President Biden eventually ended up rolling back those tariffs on most major metal suppliers, they were often replaced with other trade barriers, like quotas. Studies have shown that while the measures helped U.S. metal makers, they ended up hurting the broader economy, because they raised prices for so many other industries.

And of course that’s what’s expected. Tariffs are no good for anybody, and ultimately the consumer pays the price. Further, among his other unconstitutional acts, the NYT reports that Trump is contemplating running for a third term!:

Just eight days after he won a second term, Mr. Trump — whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified — mused about whether he could have a third presidential term, which is barred by the Constitution.

Since then, he has floated the idea frequently. In public, he couches the notion of staying in office beyond two terms as a humorous aside. In private, Mr. Trump has told advisers that it is just one of his myriad diversions to grab attention and aggravate Democrats, according to people familiar with his comments. And he has made clear that he is happy to be past a grueling campaign in which he faced two assassination attempts and followed an aggressive schedule in the final weeks.

The third-term gambit could also serve another purpose, political observers noted: keeping congressional Republicans in line as Mr. Trump pushes a maximalist version of executive authority with the clock ticking on his time in office.

The man is insane! (But we knew that already.) This, like the prohibition of birthrights, is destined to sink like a lead balloon. The Supreme Court wouldn’t allow anything like this, for it’s a clear violation of the Consitution.

*The WSJ reports that, in violation of international law, Ukrainian prisoners of war are now subject to unlimited violence  and torture in Russian prisons, with no restrictions on what can be done to them.

In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg’s prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: “Be cruel, don’t pity them.”

. . . Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners’ genitals until batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.

Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal how Russia planned and executed what United Nations investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has helped the Russian prison officials defect.

. . . . Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2½ years, the 25-year-old was moved from prison to prison in Russia before being released in October of last year.

He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia’s Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked. They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard.

When it was over, he was told to yell “glory to Russia, glory to the special forces” and then ordered to walk to the front of the room—still naked—to sing the Russian and Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn’t know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.

The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities, according to the former guards and human-rights advocates: making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will to resist after they suffered extreme brutality.

The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used so often, especially in showers, that officers complained about them running out of battery life too fast.

One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia, said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons and the officers tested other materials, including insulated hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.

The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot. At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.

Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.

Well, this is close to how the Nazis treated Soviet prisoners of war, though it’s not quite as bad (the Germans often shot them or starved them to death). But it’s a war crime, and I doubt that Ukraine is doing anything like this.  Remember when Trump said he’d stop the war in Ukraine on “day 1” of his administration?

*Two piece of news from the Hamas/Israel war.  First, Hamas has suspended both the release of hostages and the cease-fire, blaming Israel for violating their agreement:

Hamas announced on its Telegram account on Monday that it is canceling the release of hostages on February 15 until further notice due to an Israeli violation.

Egyptian mediators fear that the statements will lead to a breakdown of negotiations. At the same time, Hamas told US mediators that the ceasefire was no longer in place due to Trump’s comments about displacing Palestinians.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said, following the announcement, that it has reached out to all countries mediating the agreement, demanding “swift assistance in finding an immediate and effective solution to restore the implementation of the deal.”

“We call on the Israeli government to refrain from actions that endanger the execution of the signed agreement and to ensure its continuation, securing the return of our 76 brothers and sisters,” the statement continued.

“The hostages are out of time, and they all must be rescued from this nightmare urgently,” the forum added.

They said they have officially contacted the government and the intelligence coordination unit to “clarify the situation and provide updates to all concerned families who fear for their loved ones’ fates.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is consulting with top security officials in light of Hamas’s announcement and intends to move the security cabinet meeting on Tuesday to the early morning hours.

One Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post that, in his view, Hamas did not attempt to sabotage the deal in its latest statement.

What is going on here? Hamas is complaining that Israel is not delivering enough goods to Gaza and not allowing Gazans to return to their homes in northern Gaza.  Neither claim is true: Gazas who go north and find their homes in ruins are simply heading south again.  Malgorzata suspects that this is a tactic that Hamas is using to try to wheedle more out of Israel than was agreed.  We will know on Saturday, if more hostages are not handed back to Israel, if Hamas is really  breaking the agreement. If so, then all hell may break loose.

*Also, the Palestinian Authority has stopped its “pay for slay” program (see Wikipedia article on the Palestinian “Martyr’s Fund”) which gives Palestinian prisoners in Israel (or Palestinians killed or injured while enacting terrorism money based on how many Jews they have killed or tried to kill (not a lot of people know about this).

Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas issued an order to cancel laws and regulations related to paying financial allocations to the families of Palestinians linked with terrorist activity, known as “pay for slay,” on Monday, according to Palestinian Authority state media WAFA.

Additionally, the computerized cash assistance program, along with its database and financial allocations, will be transferred from the Ministry of Social Development to the Palestinian National Institution for Economic Empowerment, WAFA stated.

The amendments will allow all families previously benefiting from the former laws, regulations, and legislations to be subject to the same eligibility criteria as other families enrolled in social protection and welfare programs, according to WAFA.

The Palestinian Institution for Economic Empowerment will now assume full authority over all social protection and welfare programs in Palestine. It will be responsible for providing assistance to all Palestinian families in need, without discrimination, WAFA added.

Why are they eliminating this odious fund? Because Trump cut of all money to the Palestinian Authority, and Israel is withholding the pay-for-slay money from the prisoners. And, on top of that, there’s this:

This comes amid news that, on February, US courts will impose heavy fines – of about $200-300 million – on the Palestinian Authority – following lawsuits filed by families of terror victims. The PA is reportedly worried that this will lead to a financial crisis.

The Palestinian Authority arranged payment for families of dead Hamas terrorists amounting to a combined total of around $2.8 million, following the October 7 attacks, according to a report by the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a nongovernmental organization and media watchdog group.

With U.S. aid cut off, and fines in the offing, Abbas is in danger of losing his Presidency for life (that would be a good thing.) To try to avoid bankrupting the West Bank, Abbas seems to have decided that he can sacrifice the pay-for-slay program.

*From The Free Press‘s daily newsletter (yesterday) about the Super Bowl. You’ll want to click on some of the links, but I’ve also put two of the videos below (one is in a tweet).

The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.

This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.

Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?

Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)

Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.

The Nike ad (note the FP’s comment) is among the tweets below, along with a counter-ad by women objecting to trans-identified males competing in women’s sports.  Here’s the Bud Light commercial:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are in the kitchen, closely watching Andrzej:

Szaron: What is he doing? Hili: I don’t know, but it’s not what we are waiting for. In Polish: Szaron: Co on robi? Hili: Nie wiem, ale nie to, na co czekamy.

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

From Things With Faces. This spud is saying, “Don’t chop me up!”:

From Cat Memes:

From @secretsoftheoccult:

Masih posted this 2½-minute video Twitter post about Iranian women defying the hijab ban. Do watch it. I can’t embed it, but if you click on the screenshot you’ll go there.

I saw this ad, which apparently was meant to counter the Nike ad below. This is a good ad; I guess it was the Nike ad that “sucked”:

It sure seems like @Nike thought they needed a women’s ad.

I wonder why?

The ad sucked. You can’t win. So win. WTF does that even mean?

Dear Nike – your ad was no good. You’ve lost your mojo. Hypocrisy does that. No longer authentic. pic.twitter.com/iFUGa3u7gN

— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) February 10, 2025

Here’s the ad (featuring famous women athletes urging other women to accomplish what they’re told they can’t):

From Luana. I can’t believe that encamping students (actually in buildings) at Bowdoin actually got punished!

Haha, Bowdoin is suspending the students occupying a campus building and telling on them.

They’ve received an “immediate temporary suspension…pending a College disciplinary process” and are kicked off campus.

They’re also told, “Your family will receive a copy of this letter.” pic.twitter.com/9jbChzo3P2

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 10, 2025

From Brian, showing the speed of light going around different planets. Jupiter is BIG!

Visualization of the speed of light on the surface of different planets. pic.twitter.com/LGOI1F3iNv

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) February 10, 2025

From Malcolm; revenge cat:

The middle one planning revenge pic.twitter.com/ZNTCDBCLoN

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) January 23, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Gassed upon arrival at the camp, this Italian Jewish girl was five.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T11:07:42.250Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first on reports a finding that flies PLAY! I must read the paper!

Our story about flies on carousels is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! After formally engaging the fantastic @clarahowcroft.bsky.social and integrating helpful reviewer feedback, we present a more concise story with detailed behavioural quantification and cooler videos! doi.org/10.1016/j.cu…

— Wolf Huetteroth (@wolfhuette.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T16:03:38.157Z

A lovely duck photo taken by one of Matthew’s friends:

Teal on the River Otter estuary this morning

— Andrew Luck-Baker (@andrewl-b.bsky.social) 2025-02-09T16:04:52.872Z

Well, I’ll treat you to one more item about indigenous knowledge in New Zealand, this time when it clashes with modern science! It turns out that the Māori are beefing about there being too many satellites in the sky, and beefing for two reasons. First, this raises the possibility that the night sky might be changed, making it lighter, and that might make celestial navigation more difficult. Not that the Māori rely on that any more (actually, their Polynesian and SE Asian ancestors developed it), but their historical practice from hundreds of years ago might be made more difficult.

Second, the satellites are somehow said to interfere with a Māori ritual in which the steam from cooked food is allowed to float up toward the stars. (The ritual arose to give thanks for a good harvest.)  It is not clear to me how satellites would interfere with that, so you’ll have to ask the Māori.

Click below to read the excerpt from Stuff, a New Zealand news site:

Here’s the beefing about the ceremony (I’ve added translations):

A Māori scientist has warned our skies could become clogged with up to 100,000 satellites in the next five years – threatening thousands of years of Māori knowledge in the process.

The pollution could get so bad that stars seen by Māori ancestors would no longer be visible to the naked eye.

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have already interfered with a tuku wairua [food/steam] ceremony during Matariki, when whānau [members of a family group] who have died are released to the stars; while satellite proliferation threatens traditional waka hourua navigation [celestial navigation using double-hulled canoes].

Scientist, and Indigenous astronomy expert Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting is part of Sustainable Space – a group seeking to save Earth’s lower orbit, under 2000km, from uncontrolled development.

Moko-Painting often shows up in similar items, for he’s quite a vociferous activist.

Moko-Painting said about 15,000 satellites have been sent into space since the 1950s – about 7000 of those are still functional, and about 10,000 are still in space.

“Between 2022 when these estimates were made, and 2030, it’s estimated that we’ll have between 60,000 to 100,000 satellites in orbit.”

He said the about-3000 Starlink satellites in orbit were “already causing issues”.

. . . He got involved in the issue after the first Matariki public holiday in 2022, when he joined his wife’s whānau at Waahi Pā in Huntly for the hautapu (feeding the stars with an offering of kai [food].

“And just as we were doing our tuku wairua, just as we were sending on those who had passed on from that year, we had 21 Starlink satellites cutting through, right past the path of Matariki [the Pleiades star cluster.”

Apparently people thought that this was the stars’ response to the ceremony, and was propitious, but Moko-Painting—who admits that Starlink is important in communicating with rural communities—still has a beef:

“And those who knew would just say ‘no, that’s actually this man who loves the technology for launching satellites but makes them far too bright’ … and he does them in this line in an eye-catching kind of way, and that’s completely unregulated.”

I doubt that people will stop launching satellites because it somehow interferes with this ceremony. But wait! There’s more! As I said, there’s a possibility that too many satellites may interfere with celestial navigation, which only a few Māori still practice. But this is only a hypothesis, and hasn’t been shown, mainly because only a few stalwarts still use celestial navigation, and only as a way to keep alive that ancestral skill:

Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a waka hourua, double-hulled waka used for voyaging, the night sky is 10% brighter than it used to be, Moko-Painting said. “So one could argue that 10% of what our tūpuna could see with their eyes while navigating is no longer visible to us.”

Master navigator Jack Thatcher has travelled tens of thousands of kilometres on waka hourua, as a guiding light that keeps his crews alive.

The Pacific covers a third of the planet. Thatcher’s journeys – using only stars, ocean swells and birds as guides – include a 3200km trip from Aotearoa to Rarotonga, which is only 67km wide.

. . . Having 100,000 satellites in orbit might be good for “pinpoint accuracy” all around the world, but those who rely on the stars for guidance won’t know which is a satellite and which isn’t.

“They’ll obliterate most of the patterns that we all depend on to help us find our way.”

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He said the satellites were already being discussed in the voyaging community. Light pollution wasn’t the only problem – “eventually they’ll be rubbish”, Thatcher said.

“We’re entering that zone of global extinction, because we’ve polluted our planet, now we want to pollute our heavens.”

While the technology might be used instead to navigate the oceans, “that’s not the point”, he said.

“Indigenous knowledge is something that is a self-determination thing.”

It’s not clear to me, though, that if the night sky is 10% brighter than before, this would somehow efface or even impede celestial navigation. They give no evidence, but some want to kvetch about it anyway, because it apparently erases the achievements of the Māori’s ancestors (not the Māori themselves):

Māori know who they are because of their ancestors’ achievements. “And now you’re going to take that all away from us.”

The first waka [canoe] in this country used navigation knowledge that ancestors accrued over millennia, Thatcher said – travelling from Southeast Asia to Aotearoa almost 6000 years later.

Essentially, he said, if you can no longer navigate the oceans through the stars “it becomes book knowledge only”.

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“Indigenous identity helps people to be who they are and enables them to be proud of who they are, because of their ancestral knowledge that they still hold on to.”

The whole idea of keeping indigenous knowledge alive was that “we’re not dependent on any technology”.

So Moko-Painting has joined a group of scientists calling for holding back on launching satellites.  The article ends abruptly:

SpaceX, which operates Starlink, did not reply to queries at time of publication.

The problem with all this is that these two problems haven’t been demonstrated. The navigation impediment is a theoretical possibility and won’t be known until people like Thatcher try it.  Since they can still do it successfully, even with all those satellites up there, I think this is not a serious concern. As for the satellites interfering with the smoke rising to the stars, that is pure superstition and doesn’t command concern from any rational person.

I wish I had a happier post for number 30,000, but you’re stuck with this one. However, it’s in line with the kind of stuff I’ve been writing about for a while, so it’s appropriate.

Today we must deal with a letter from the Presidents of three organismal evolution and ecology societies (The Society for the Study of Evolution, American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists), a Diktat declaring that biological sex is not binary, exactly as they did in 2018 (same societies, almost the same statement).  Both letters were also responses to statements by the U.S. government headed by Trump, taking issue with the government’s position that sex is binary. HHS incorrectly used genitalia as an earlier criterion for what was binary, but Trump’s new Executive Order uses an accurate definition of sex, one based on whether an individual’s reproductive apparatus is set up to produce large immobile or small mobile gametes. (I guess I should make the requisite disclaimer that while I agree with much but not all of Trump’s statement, that doesn’t mean I endorse Trump!)

My critique of the 2018 statement is posted at this site. I took the position that scientific societies shouldn’t take ideological stands unless they are attacking an ideology that damages the mission of the society itself, and are making a statement that corrects an incorrect but widespread view.  Well, this again applies here: these three societies are attacking a biological fact: the binary definition of biological sex, something well within the ambit of biology societies. The problem is that, as in 2018, the three societies are using misleading and false arguments to show that biological sex is a spectrum.  Further, as in 2018, the motivation for this statement does not appear to be a scientifically-based attempt to correct government misinformation, but rather seems to be ideological.  In fact, biologists have recognized sex as binary (with a few very rare exceptions) since the late nineteenth century, and have based the binary conclusion on the fact that all animals and plants produce two types of gametes, with no intermediates (see below for references).

The desperate attempt in this letter, and the one in 2018, to show that sex is a spectrum intends, I think, to buttress those people who either feel they don’t belong in one of the two sexes, are transsexual (a behavior that assumes two sexes) or feel that they are somewhere in between—or even members of neither sex. But the attempt is misguided, for, as I’ve said repeatedly, morality, as The Naturalistic Fallacy and The Appeal to Nature Fallacy argue, should not be strongly based on biological reality. Observing nature does not tell us what is right or wrong, or specify how we should behave towards others.

However, the 2018 and present letters, instantiate a third falacy—what Luana Maroja and I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy” described in our Skeptical Inquirer paper (bolding is mine below):

Both fallacies lead to the same errors. First, if we condition our politics and ethics on what we know about nature, then our politics and ethics become malleable to changes in what we discover about nature later. For example, the observation that female bonobos rub each other’s genitals as a bonding behavior has been used to justify why human homosexuality is neither offensive nor immoral. Bonobo behavior is, after all, “natural.” (Similar same-sex behaviors have been reported in many species and have been used to the same end.) But what if no such behavior had been seen in any nonhuman species? Or what if the bonobo observation was shown to be wrong? Would this make homosexual behavior immoral or even criminal? Of course not, because enlightened views of homosexuality rest not on parallels with nature but on ethics, which tells us that there’s nothing immoral about consensual sex between adults.

Second, we must realize that many behaviors that are “natural” because they’re found in other species would be considered repugnant or immoral in our own. These include infanticide, robbery, and extra-pair copulation. As one of us wrote, “If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers.” But we don’t really derive our morality or ideology from nature. Instead, we pick and choose those behaviors in other species that happen to resemble a morality we already have. (People do exactly the same thing—ignoring the bad behaviors and lauding the good ones—when they pretend to derive morality from religious texts such as the Bible.)

All the biological misconceptions we’ve discussed involve forcing preconceived beliefs onto nature. This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.” It demands that you must see the natural world through lenses prescribed by your ideology. If you are a gender activist, you must see more than two biological sexes. If you’re a strict egalitarian, all groups must be behaviorally identical and their ways of knowing equally valid. And if you’re an anti-hereditarian—a blank slater who sees genetic differences as promoting eugenics and racism—then you must find that genes can have only trivial and inconsequential effects on the behavior of groups and individuals. This kind of bias violates the most important rule of science, famously expressed by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Thus the latest letter, like the earlier one, is apparently written to try to convince people that in reality sex is not binary in nature, thereby buttressing gender-activist ideology.  It is not meant to clarify mistaken biological views. In fact, the letters muddy the waters by presenting a misguided view of sex and giving it the imprimatur of biological societies. As we’ve learned so often recently, though, what scientific societies and journals say often flouts the truth, intended to be ideological rather than scientific.

The problem, then, is not that the societies are making a political statement about biology. The problem is twofold. First, the societies’ attempt to buttress their biological argument is wrong, involving a lot of misleading assertions—all in three short paragraphs.

Second, the Presidents of the Society say they are speaking not only for the 3500 scientists who belong to their organizations, but also for the majority of biologists, saying that their conception of sex represents a scientific “consensus”.   It does not, nor do they know this. They did not poll their members before issuing their statement, and they buttress their argument by citing just two papers, one a very short Scientific American op-ed showing that the development of biological sex is complex and can be derailed by a number of mutations, the other a Nature paper by a freelance science journalist who uses a similar argument: the process of sex determination is “complex.” Indeed it is, but development is always complex, and yet, remarkably, evolution has channeled it into two pathways with similar destinations in all animals and vascular plants, producing, by a variety of developmental processes, two types of individuals in these species, one producing sperm and the other eggs. And that journalist, as you see below, doesn’t support the statement at all! Did they even bother to check that? (h/t: a reader below):

No, not at all. Two sexes, with a continuum of variation in anatomy/physiology.

— Claire Ainsworth (@ClaireAinsworth) July 21, 2017

The best refutation of the letter below is actually Richard Dawkins’s Substack piece on the binary nature of sex (excerpted from a forthcoming essay), “Is the male female divide a social construct or a scientific reality?” I recommend that you read it after you read the letter below. But I’ll give one quote from the piece first, showing Dawkins presenting the “Universal Biological Definition” (UBD) of sex:

It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy [the condition in which all individuals have gametes of the same size], leading to extreme anisogamy [the condition in which individuals have gametes of different sizes, meaning two], is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

On to the letter, and I’ll try to be brief since Richard’s piece shows the fallacies inherent in their defense of a “spectrum” of biological sexes. The letter is indented, and you can see the original by clicking the title below:

Policy: Letter to the US President and Congress on the Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender

Contributed by kjm34 on Feb 06, 2025 – 11:35 PM

President Donald J Trump
Washington, DC

Members of the US Congress
Washington, DC

February 5, 2025

RE: Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender

Dear President Trump and Members of the US Congress,

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”. That Order states first, that “there are two sexes…[which] are not changeable”. The Order goes on to state that sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce. These statements are contradicted by extensive scientific evidence.

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. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

We note that you state that “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in the government itself”. We agree with this statement. However, the claim that the definition of sex and the exclusion of gender identity is based on the best available science is false. Our three scientific societies represent over 3500 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. More information explaining why sex lies along a continuum can be found here, under the Education and Outreach tab. If you wish to speak to one of our scientists, please contact any of the societies listed below.

Carol Boggs, PhD
President
Society for the Study of Evolution
president@evolutionsociety.org

Daniel Bolnick, PhD
President
American Society of Naturalists

Jessica Ware, PhD
President
Society of Systematic Biologists
president@systematicbiologists.org

Oh dear; what a thicket of misguided argumentation we must make our way through here! Let’s take it paragraph by paragraph.

The first paragraph simply denies that there are two sexes, with sex is defined by gamete size. These contentions, they say are contradicted by “extensive scientific evidence”.  But they cite only two papers supporting that, throwing out a number of traits connected with sex but not part of the UBD, a definition that goes at least as far back back as Robert Payne Bigelow in 1894. For a list of gamete-based definitions from different eras, see this paper by Carlos Y. Fuentes (pdf here); the article is in Spanish but should self-translate into English.  To check a more recent book, I just pulled the second edition of Doug Futuyma’s textbook Evolution on my shelf, whose various editions I taught from at Chicago. Sure enough, on p. 389 I find this:

Most sexually reproducing species have distinct male or female sexes, which are defined by a difference in the size of their gametes (ANISOGAMY). In ISOGAMOUS organisms, such as Chlamydomonas and many other algae, the uniting cells are the same size; such species have mating types but not distinct sexes.

I’ve pointed out before that the sex binary applies to all animals (including of course us) and all vascular plants, but not to protists, algae, and some fungi.  But the UBD of course centers on humans, not algae or fungi, for humans are the object of the letter below. (They do note that the trait diversity that produces a sex spectrum applies to all biological species!)

The second paragraph can be addressed by Dawkins’s excerpt above: it mentions a lot of traits associated with biological sex that show variation, but these are not part of the UBD itself.  Let me repeat his words again:

All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

And of course we do see variation in sex organs, chromosomes, behavior, and so on, as well as “the lived experience of people”, which has nothing to do with any biological definition of sex. (What is the “lived experience” of sea urchins, foxes, or gingko trees, that would affect the binary nature of sex in those species?) In humans, the frequency of exceptions to the sex binary lies between 1/5600 individuals and 1/20,000 individuals. As I’ve said, that’s as close to a binary as you can get.

The authors also say this:

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. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.

I have no idea what a “biological construct” is! What is the consensus about the meaning of that term?

The argument proceeds to cite a number of factors associated with sex in some but not all species, but, as Dawkins notes, these traits do not partake in the UBD noted by biologists well before we learned about chromosomes or hormones.

The authors fail to address this important question: if sex is defined by where an organism is positioned along dozens of variable axes, like hormone titer, lived experience, external genitalia, sex chromosomes (many species don’t have these), and other secondary sex traits (there’s a reason they’re called “secondary”!), then how do we determine what sex an individual is? It would have to be some kind of combinatorial, multifactoral analysis that takes all these factors into account. And of course it would result in the delineation of a gazillion sexes within many species—perhaps an infinite number in humans! Is that what the authors really believe.  If they say they are “male,” for example, how do they know that?

And yet I’m sure that all of the authors of this letter, if they work on animals or plants, would use the terms “male” and “female” without defining them.  For example, ASN President Daniel Bolnick, who works on stickleback fish, also sells them from his lab’s “stickleback stock center”. Below are the going prices. Note that they sell ony two sexes of stickleback: male and female. Why aren’t there more? Aren’t there sticklebacks with a lived experience that aren’t either male or female? How does Bolnick define these sexes and why aren’t there more of them?

I see this is running long, so I’ll make just two more points.

First, the spectrum of sex and the denial of the UBD is said not just to apply to humans, but to all species!  From paragraph two of the letter (my bolding):

Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

What?  All biological species have the kind of diversity that effaces the sex binary, so they must not participate in the UBD, either?  Did the authors realize what they were saying? Is sex a spectrum in elephants, possums, aardvarks, cougars, and so on?

Finally, note that the paper repeatedly emphasizes the authority of their societies, as if they were speaking for all their members. But their members were not polled on this (I’ve asked some), and so the statements must have come from the Presidents themselves or more likely the small board of officers of the societies.  It is a Diktat from on high, and the implied unanimity is false. Some members I’ve talked to in the last few days absolutely disagree with the statement and are even offended that they are implicitly characterized as agreeing that sex is non-binary.  Nor do several people I’ve talked to observed a “scientific consensus” that sex is somehow defined by combining a number of traits in a multifactoral way.

The statement below should and will offend the many members of these societies who do see sex as binary:

However, the claim that the definition of sex and the exclusion of gender identity is based on the best available science is false. Our three scientific societies represent over 3500 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. More information explaining why sex lies along a continuum can be found here, under the Education and Outreach tab. If you wish to speak to one of our scientists, please contact any of the societies listed below.

Well, I could produce a long list of members of these three societies who do not endorse the letter above. (I was once President of the SSE and don’t endorse it, and I have considerable expertise examining the variability of sex expression in fruit flies. In the comments section below you’ll find another former SSE President who disagrees with their new letter as well.)

In the end, what we see here is three prominent organismal-biology societies having been ideologically captured to the point where they will twist and misrepresent scientific fact to buttress an ideologically-based view that sex is a spectrum.  These societies and their Presidents should be ashamed of themselves.  Scientific truth is not determined by pronouncements of the presidents of scientific societies, however notable these presidents may be.  The UBD is one of the great (and few) generalizations in evolutionary biology, a definition that’s been immensely fruitful in understanding things like sexual selection. It’s a great pity that these societies are trying to scupper the UBD simply to buttress an evanescent form of gender ideology.

It’s Sunday, and that means John Avise Photograph Day. John continues today with his series on North American butterflies. His IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. This is post 29,999

Butterflies in North America, Part 9 

This week continues my multi-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.  With this post, we’ve reached the halfway point of my photographic tour through this continent’s many Lepidopterans.

Juba Skipper (Hesperia juba), topwing:

Juba Skipper, underwing:

Julia Heliconian (Dryas iulia), upperwing:

Leonard’s Skipper (Hesperia leonardus), male:

Leonard’s Skipper, female:

Little Glassywing (Vernia verna), underwing:

Little Wood Satyr (Megisto cymela), underwing:

Long Dash Skippper (Limochores mystic):

Long-tailed Skipper (Urbanus proteus), topwing:

Long-tailed Skipper, underwing:

Lorquin’s Admiral (Limenitis lorquini), topwing:

Lorquin’s Admiral, underwing:

The first of our three items today (plus there’s lagniappe at the bottom) are the three best cat commercials ever made.  I chose the first two, but reader Divy insisted that I add the third,

This one was originally broadcast on the Superbowl, and in my view has never been bettered for a cat commercial. Repeated watching enables you to pick up things you missed the first time.  It even has its own Wikipedia entry, “Cat herders“, which says, among other stuff, this:

Cat Herders is a commercial made by Fallon for Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Alluding to the management-speak idiom “It’s like herding cats” that refers to the impossibility of controlling the uncontrollable, it posits an analogy between herding cats and the solution of seemingly impossible problems by EDS.

. . . Authentic cowboys were required, and a casting call was put out across Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California. Some of the cast had never acted previously but others were SAG-accredited.

Actor Tony Becker points out that many of the actors were “real-life cowboys”, and gives a comprehensive cast list [the list is on the page]

Real cowboys!

Here’s a well-known Cravendale Milk ad for cats with thumbs. Very clever!

And here’s one of the “got milk?” series that is Divy’s favorite. Cats don’t have no truck with fake milk!

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

This is from Fox News, but there’s no politics in it—just humanity. Click to read about a lovely man who rescued a kitten from a bunch of horrible people who glued it to a road! How much more disgusting can people get?

An excerpt (the story is from October of 1918):

A tiny kitten may have shaved off one of his nine lives after being discovered glued to a busy road in Oregon on Friday.

Chuck Hawley was driving to work on Silverton Road Northeast just outside of Salem around 7 a.m. when he noticed there was something in the road in a busy lane of traffic.

“When I went to pick her up, her feet were stuck to the road, and I’m like, ‘uh oh.’ So I start to pull her feet up, and it was like a rubber cement, so she was glued to the road.” Hawley told FOX12. “It was all under her neck and then she had a little bit down her side, but it was mostly her tail and her feet.”

The 5-week-old kitten, frightened and cold, had her feet soaked in glue that was “sort of rubbed into the pads of her feet,” according to Hawley.

“Sticky” the kitten was found with her feet stuck to a busy road on Friday. (FOX12)

“I think the way she was sitting someone actually went out and put her there,” he told FOX12. “Because there were no glue footprints around, it was just a glob of glue under her, so it looked like someone just took her and put her in the road.”

Hawley took the kitten, now named Sticky, to an animal clinic where staff members had to use mineral oil to get the glue off her tiny paws. Puncture wounds were also found on the kitten’s neck, but it’s yet to be determined what caused them.

On Monday, Hawley said he spoke with deputies from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, who came to his home to take pictures of Sticky’s neck injuries as they investigate how she ended up glued to the road.

And so Sticky was saved!

The little kitten is expected to make a full recovery — and wound up getting a new home out of the ordeal after Hawley adopted her.

“The funny thing is we were just talking about getting a cat a couple of nights ago,” he said. “Seems like there’s easier ways for the cat to find us, but if that’s how we’re doing it, okay, I guess that’s how we’ll do it.”

Here’s a 2-minute4 video:

Stuff like this both restores my faith in humanity but also makes me realize how horrible some people are. Torturing a poor animal that never did anything to you! Isn’t that the way that some serial killers start?

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From Bored Panda we have some vintage cat photos. The site has twenty, but I’ll show half a dozen.  Click on the headline below to see them.

First, BP‘s intro:

Cats have a way of capturing our attention and our hearts, and it’s not just a modern thing. Long before the internet, people were photographing their furry companions, preserving those moments for generations to enjoy. Thanks to Paula Leite Moreira, a Brazilian journalist and the creator of the Instagram account “All Vintage Cats,” these charming snapshots from the past are now reaching a whole new audience.

Paula’s collection is like a time machine for cat lovers. From historical archives to forgotten magazines, she’s unearthed photos that show cats in all their timeless glory—lounging, playing, or even posing with famous faces. If you’re someone who appreciates old photographs or just loves cats, this project is a quiet little gold mine you won’t want to miss. Scroll down to take a look at some of the gems she’s shared.

Milk right from the source!  A note from the article:

Bored Panda reached out to Paula Leite Moreira once more to learn more about her insights on the evolving portrayal of cats in photography across different eras and cultures.

When asked if she noticed any patterns or trends in how cats were photographed across different decades or countries, the journalist mentioned that in the early days of photography, around the mid-19th century in Europe, photos often depicted kittens mimicking human poses, sometimes even dressed in tiny outfits. “These images were frequently made for postcards. But aside from that period, it’s remarkable how photos from decades ago are similar to those we see today. Owners also enjoyed capturing casual moments with their cats at home, with their families, in an unpretentious way.”

From the article:

We were curious about the most surprising or unusual place where Paula came across a vintage photo of a cat. “Definitely a photo of a kitten ‘hidden’ in the so-called ‘longest beard in the world’ of a Frenchman named Louis Coulo,” the journalist responded.

It is a great photo, and here it is:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by All Vintage Cats (@allvintagecats)

 

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Lagniappe: From Newsweek, a cat with salacious markings (below).  I don’t think the black bit looks like a middle finger, though:

Picking a name for a pet is no easy task, which is why one owner took to Reddit and asked for name suggestions, but the answers they received were unexpected.

Reddit user u/martindukz posted to the subreddit channel r/funny a picture of the unnamed brown, white and black calico cat sitting on a footrest. Within four days, the post received over 27,000 upvotes and almost 10,000 comments.

People were basing their suggestions on a specific physical characteristic. The shape of the black fur marking on her lower back immediately gave people ideas; however, the suggestions weren’t what the owner expected. People flooded the comment section with not-safe-for-work name options.

The owner commented on the post, saying the cat’s name is Chili, but based on the marking, they are open to renaming her; hence, the post to Reddit.

Newsweek reached out to u/martindukz via Reddit for additional comment.

“I may be a little dark, but I see a middle finger in that black splotch. I won’t make any name suggestions,” commented one Reddit user.

Others suggested subtle names after humans such as Richard or the author Charles Dickens. A more subtle name idea was Clickbait “because that mark looks like a computer mouse.”

Not everyone had their heads in the gutter. Someone asked: “Am I the only one that thinks it’s a lighthouse?”

h/t: Dan, Divy

Today we have photos of amphibians and other items from Matt Moran, an ecologist at Monteverde in Costa Rica as well as Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology and Health Sciences at Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas.  Matt’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

These are photos from the Children’s Eternal Rainforest in Costa Rica (25,000 hectares), where I work as a field biologist. I am engaged in several projects, but my major one is a study on the status of amphibians in the park. Amphibians around the world have been declining and this area of Costa Rica is one of first places it was documented. While many theories have been developed as to why amphibians are declining, the one with the most support that explains the sometimes sudden collapse of amphibian populations (especially frogs) is the arrival of a pathogenic fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), commonly called chytrid. This fungus infects the skin of frogs and often causes high levels of mortality. It has been implicated in the extinction of dozens of species of frogs around the world.

In the Monteverde area where I work, the population collapses occurred in the late 1980s. Initially, 25 of the known 50 species from the area were missing, but over time, most reappeared, apparently surviving in small numbers and then recolonizing larger areas. It appears that this was a major selection event, so that individuals with natural resistance to the fungus survived to reproduce, while most died. It is estimated that in many species, over 99% of individuals died. About 5 species originally found in the area appear to be totally extinct. Others still missing from here exist elsewhere, although often at critically low levels. Many, however, have recovered and probably exist at levels similar to pre-fungus invasion times.

I am attempting to determine the frog community structure 35 years post-chytrid invasion. These data will be valuable in two ways: 1) to determine how the community structure has changed over the last 35 years, and 2) to determine how future community structure is different from today so that we will have long-term population trends (using now as a baseline).

This is an amazing place to work. I retired from academia several years ago and this has become my new passion. It is one of the most biodiverse protected areas on the planet and every minute I spend in the forest is enchanting beyond description.

Emerald Glass Frog (Espadarana prosoplebon). This is the most common glass frog (Family Centrolenidae) found in this area. As their name suggests, they have transparent skin on the ventral side and their internal organs are easily visible. Interestingly, this species, like most glass frogs, does not appear to have declined because of chytrid fungus invasion. Like all glass frogs, this one breeds in streams:

Reticulated Glass Frog (Hyalinobatrachium valerioi). A fairly common species in mid-elevation areas of rainforest. It is easily identified by the large yellow spots on the dorsal side:

Clay-colored Rain Frog (Pristimantis cerasinus). A small frog found perched on leaves in the rainforest. It is identified by its eye color, often called “sunset” eyes, with the contrasting yellow (dorsal) and brown (ventral) parts of the iris. It has direct development where eggs are laid on the forest floor and the tadpole develops inside the egg directly into a miniature version of the adult. This species declined with the arrival of chytrid fungus but now appears to be relatively common again:

Sunset over the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, Costa Rica:

Evergreen toad (Incilius coniferus). A common toad found in mid- and low-elevation rainforest. This species is one of the few true toads (Family: Bufonidae) that can readily climb vegetation, although they are also often found inside the burrows of other animals. They are highly toxic and probably have few predators:

Puma (Puma concolor) track. These big cats are common in rainforests through Costa Rica. We also have jaguars (Panthera onca), but jaguar tracks are the size of your hand, including the fingers!!, while puma tracks are the size of the palm of your hand. Because it had rained very hard the night before, I knew this track was less than 8 hours old!:

Atlantic Forest Toad (Incilius melanochlorus). Another common toad. This one declined dramatically with the arrival of chytrid fungus but now appears to have fully recovered:

A giant Ceiba tree (Ceiba pentandra). This is one of largest trees in Central America, reaching heights of over 70 meters. Because they often grown above the canopy (emergent tree), they are the favorite nesting sites of many raptors (e.g., Harpy Eagle, Harpia harpyja) where the elevated platform provides a good viewing point and relative safety from nest predators. This tree may be over 300 years old:

When I first saw this snake, I thought it was the highly venomous Fer-de-lance (Terciopelo in Costa Rican Spanish, Bothrops asper). However, this is the False Fer-de-lance (Xenodon rabdocephalus), a harmless mimic. I have often wondered if it is true case of mimicry trying to make potential predators think it is the deadly pit-viper or if its patten is actually an example of convergent evolution for camouflage. It might function in both ways in that it does provide great camouflage, but if spotted, it also has the pattern of something very dangerous!?:

JAC: I added a photo of a real fer-de-lance from Wikipedia:

thibaudaronson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons