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Some time ago I watched a video of Molly Tuttle, who plays a wicked bluegrass guitar and banjo, and has a great country voice. I immediately recognized her immense talent (along with that of her friend Billy Strings, with whom she plays here). And tbat talent has now been recognized multiple times. As Wikipedia notes:

In 2017, Tuttle was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award. In 2018 she won the award again, along with being named the Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2023, Tuttle won the Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree and also received a nomination for the all-genre Best New Artist award at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. Also in 2023, Tuttle and Golden Highway won International Bluegrass Music Awards for album Crooked Tree and the title track in the categories of Album of the Year and Song of the Year, respectively, while Tuttle won Female Vocalist of the Year.

But, as they say, without further ado I’ll let you hear two of her songs (along with her able bandmates), both recorded some time ago. Her musicianship is even better now than in these videos, but I think they’ll suffice.

The first is the old John Hartford song made famous by Glenn Campbell in 1968:

And of course this one’s by Neil Young, and appeared on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu.

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Clune (a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University) reprises the familiar idea that the “wokeness” of academia—the explicit aim of turning higher education towards reforming society in a “progressive” way—has largely destroyed academia and reduced its standing in the eyes of the public.  It has done this, he says, by alienating the public via professors making pronouncements outside their area of expertise, something that simply turns off the average Joe or Jill.

The blame for this, says Clune, rests to some degree on academics themselves, but is largely the responsibility of administrators who feel compelled to comment on every issue of the day in the name of their university, creating an “these are our values” atmosphere that chills speech. In other words, they abjure institutional neutrality.

But you can read it yourself by clicking on the screenshots below. I’ll give a couple excerpts to whet your appetite.

The problem: (note the link to articles on the decline in public opinion of higher education, the big price we pay for politicizing academia):

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

Here are the results of several Gallup polls on Americans’ confidence in higher education over only the last eight years. There’s been a big change:

Why faculty have no more credibility than anyone else when it comes to pronouncing on politics:

Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.

The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.

The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.

. . . . Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.

Who’s to blame? Faculty and, mostly, administrators who refuse to accept ideological neutrality of their universities.

It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.

The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.

What do we do?  The answer is clearly that professors should “stick to their last” and administrators should stop making pronouncements on social issues that have nothing to do with the mission of their university.  For it is our concentration on teaching and learning that really commands the respect of the public. When the public loses respect for universities, they stop wanting to attend them, which is a loss for both them and America, and it also turns them into people who, by disliking self-professed “elites,” become populists who vote for authoritarians like Trump (this last bit is my take, not Clune’s).  Here’s a last quote from his article:

If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.

First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.

Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.

I think the second point has been underemphasized. In fact, I haven’t seen it made in arguments about how to fix academics. But a good liberal education turns you on to thinking about what you believe, and above all constantly questioning your beliefs and seeking out further knowledge to buttress or refute them. It is the love of learning, combined with tutelage in how to assess what you learn, that will in the end restore the stature of academia—if it can be restored at all.

Reader Chris, knowing of my disdain for podcasts (and perhaps for Jordan Peterson as well), asked me to listen to at least 15 minutes of this long (1½-hour) discussion between Richard Dawkins and Peterson.  All it did was confirm my disdain for Peterson, who seems remarkably self-absorbed and domineering (he doesn’t even let the moderator, Alex O’Connor, get a word in edgewise). And it made me admire Richard even more for his patience in dealing with cranks.

I started listening at 17:23, and that’s where I started the video below. Or you can click on this time marker: (17:23) with the discussion of whether the biblical texts were divinely inspired or did they evolve over time in a secular way?

What bothers me about Peterson is not only his logorrhea, but his unwillingness to answer questions straight, producing a word salad that barely makes sense.

During the 15 minutes I listened (from 17:23 to about 33:00), Dawkins and Peterson discuss whether the Bible was divinely inspired, whether it contains any “truth” at all, and whether the concept of “sacrifice,” which Peterson says is the dominant motif of the Bible (it supposedly progresses from a primitive notion of sacrifice in the Old Testament to Jesus’s marvelous sacrifice made to redeem humanity) come from divine inspiration.

A good example of Peterson’s word salad in this clip is his assertion that truth is unified, and the world of value and world of fact must “coincide in some manner we don’t yet understand.” He gives us a Hobson’s choice: “You either believe that the world of truth is unified or it’s not; either there’s contradiction between value and fact” or there is not.  Peterson adds that he belives that “different sets of values can be brought into unity.”  This to me seems deeply misguided. Values are not the same thing as facts, nor can all different sets of values, which at bottom reflect preferences, can be harmonized.

Peterson repeatedly claims to be asking questions of Richard, but he never really finishes his questions because Peterson is so obsessed with talking nonstop. He is in love with his own thoughts and his own voice.

However, Richard manages to get in one question for Peterson: “Did Jesus die for our sins?”  That is a yes-or-no question, but Peterson waffles, saying that there are “Elements of the [Biblical] text he doesn’t understand:, but the more Peterson studies the bible, the more he understands.  Peterson analogizes the Bible to quantum mechanics, saying that the more you study this mysterious subject, the more you understand.  Richard responds by shutting Peterson down, saying that Biblical texts do not work in the same way as does quantum mechanics, in that quantum mechanics works—it generates predictions that lead to further truths about the world. The Bible, avers Richard, don’t have any credentials because it makes no predictions.

In an attempt to corral Dawkins into Christianity, Peterson says that Dawkins’s claim that he was a “cultural Christian” proves that Dawkins “found something derived from Christianity that he had an affinity with”. “What did Christianity get right,” asks Peterson, “that enabled [Dawkins] to make a statement like that?”  Dawkins responds nothing: his view that he is a “cultural Christian” simply means that he was brought up in Christian culture and knows the Biblical texts. Dawkins adds that doesn’t value Christianity at all.

They then arrive at one moment of agreement: some religions lead to better behavior of their adherents than do others. Both men seem to agree that Islam leads to a worse society than does Christianity. But then Peterson implies that morality is identical with religion, and that you adhere to better religions to get societies with better morality.  I would point out that Steve Pinker, in his big books, explains how religion is really an impediment to the improvement of society, and that you don’t in fact need religion to derive morality. We all know this is true from the morality discussed by secular philosophers like Plato, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Rawls, and Singer. Peterson seems to be a Confused Christian.

Finally, before I gave up in disgust, I watched Richard ask Peterson whether he believed that Jesus was born of a virgin (32:10). Once again Peterson waffles, saying that he isn’t really qualified to comment on elements like this in Bible, but he sees enormous mystical and metaphorical value in the story: “Any culture that doesn’t hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.”  My response is “WTF”? What does he mean by “sacred”? And which societies have died for lack of this sacralization?

What we see here is Peterson arguing that Biblical/spiritual “truth” is no different from scientific truth; in other words, all “ways of knowing” come up with truths of equal status.

One other thing I learned from this video, besides the relief I need no longer pay attention to Peterson, is Richard’s enormous patience in dealing with semi-loons like his opponent.  I wondered why Richard even engaged Peterson, but reader Chris responded this way: “I like Sam Harris’s explanation of old: he and Richard know they can’t change the views of their opponent, but they can influence some of the audience watching it.”

It seems to me, though, that Richard is being a huge masochist by engaging in this effort. Fans of Peterson love his word salad and will not stop worshiping him, and those who are neutral should, if they have any neurons, realize from Peterson’s words alone he is in some way unhinged.

Here: click the video to start where I started, and then listen to about minute 34. And have some antacid at hand!

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is here to present the first part of a three-part text-and-photo series on Brazil. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Back in the day. Way, way back

The Brazilian north-eastern hinterland is not a hospitable place for an outsider. Except for a short and intense rainy season, this is a dry, dusty and sizzling territory: a land of the cactus, thorny scrub and stunted trees. The native Tupi speakers called this semiarid region caa (forest, vegetation) tinga (white), and the term was adopted by the Portuguese settlers as caatinga. But the apparent harshness of the landscape misrepresents its ecological importance. The caatinga is a biota found nowhere else in the world, harbouring more than 2,000 species of vascular plants and vertebrates, with endemism in these groups ranging from 7 to 60%. And like every other Brazilian ecoregion, the caatinga has been severely degraded and fragmented. But its plants and animals have one place of refuge: the Serra da Capivara National Park in the state of Piauí. The park is a haven to numerous birds and endangered mammals such as the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus), jaguar (Panthera onca) and other cats, and the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus).

The 129,140-ha park contains a massif of sandstone sediments formed some 430 million years ago when the whole area was submerged under a sea. The massif, smoothed by water and wind, was once the seabed, and pebble conglomerates on top indicate an overlying beach.

A view of Serra da Capivara National Park, a geologist’s delight:

The park is surrounded by a 10-kilometer buffer zone that is also protected. In this private property contiguous with the park, the rocky walls echo the racket of howler monkeys (Alouatta spp.):

At the base of the sandstone massif, there are hundreds of hidden shelters and overhangs, where ancient peoples expressed themselves through rock art. Thousands of prehistoric paintings sprawl on rock walls and ceilings depicting armadillos, rheas, jaguars, lizards, capybaras (the only capybaras in the Capybara National Park are painted on walls), as well as human figures hunting, playing, dancing, having sex, and being nasty to each other. The images were mostly painted with red ochre (haematite) and other clays; some were made with burned bone charcoal. Because there are no organic components in the pigments used in the paintings, it is not possible to date them precisely. The lower estimates are around 5,000 years.

A rhea painted under this shelter:

Among animals and people, a woman gives birth (highlighted by the arrow):

“The kiss”, one of the most famous paintings in the collection. But in truth we have no idea whether the image indeed depicts two people kissing:

A poor soul saying goodbye to this world in the maw of a jaguar or puma – identified by its paws:

The creation of the park and its protection came about thanks to the efforts of archaeologist Niède Guidon, who also managed to kick off a major kerfuffle in the archaeological world. Based on her excavations carried out between 1978 and 1987, Guidon concluded that the Capivara paintings could be over 12,000 years old. And more: she found evidence of hearth fires and stone tools in layers ranging from 5,000 to 60,000 years, the oldest dates for human habitation in the Americas (Guidon & Delibrias, 1986). Guidon’s conclusions started an ongoing debate because they challenged the established Clovis First theory, which argues that people colonised North America via the Bering Straits ~13,000 years ago, then moved down into Central and South America in the following millennia. Her critics, mostly American archaeologists, claimed the tools she found were made by monkeys or are natural objects altered by weather, and that her carbon hearth samples were the result of natural fires. Guidon, who’s backed by French archaeologists, retorted that ‘Americans should excavate more and write less’. Ouch.

Because of its biodiversity, outstanding geology, pre-historical paintings and more than 1,300 archaeological sites, the park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991:

Guidon may have been vindicated because subsequent excavations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and USA have also raised doubts about the Clovis First theory. It seems possible now that humans came to the Americas in a series of colonising waves through the Bering Straits starting way before 13,000 years (Waters & Stafford, 2007). But Guidon’s conjecture that Homo sapiens first arrived in South America crossing the Atlantic from Africa, perhaps as far back as 100,000 BC, has received scant support. For one thing, genetic analyses contradict her.

A soup kitchen queue? A religious ceremony? A conga line?:

During the short and unpredictable rainy season, a roaring waterfall runs through this natural gutter:

Hell to the left:

Hell doesn’t look too bad:

A view of the caatinga, with the Museu do Homem Americano (Museum of the American Man) in the distance. All ‘dead’ vegetation will burst into green life at the first downpour:

It’s already the end of the “work” week: Friday, November 22, 2024, and in a week I’ll be in Poland! It’s National Cranberry Relish Day, and I suppose one spoonful per year, ingested at Thanksgiving dinner, won’t hurt you, but the stuff is pretty dire.  Jellied cranberries are better. Here’s how they are grown, which requires lots of water:

It was on this day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I remember the moment exactly: it was announced over our junior high-school public address system.  It was one of those incidents that never lets you forget how you learned about it. 

It’s also National Kimchi Day in South Korea, which must be a big celebration, and Humane Society Anniversary Day in the U.S.,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I reported yesterday (or rather, stole from other people’s reports) about Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Attorney General. Here’s some more information from the NYT:

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “pretty obvious” that Gaetz didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.

. . .Matt Gaetz told people close to him that he concluded after conversations with senators and their staffs that there were at least four Republican senators who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Curtis of Utah.

Gaetz told confidants he did not want to get in a protracted confirmation battle and delay Trump from getting his attorney general in place immediately at the start of his administration.

. . . . Gaetz’s withdrawal creates a vacuum at the apex of the Justice Department but not necessarily instability, even if his replacement is not confirmed quickly. Trump has already tapped two of his personal lawyers — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — to top operational posts; both are well-regarded department veterans whose appointments were welcomed by some career department staff.

Here are the candidates who remain, and it’s a pretty sad lot (from the NYT).  Noem, Rubio, Kennedy, and Hegseth. .  oh my!

*Speaking of Hegseth, the WSJ has an article titled, “Trump team blindsided by latest details of sexual-assault allegations against Hegseth.”

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room.

The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021. The transition team wasn’t told that a copy of the police report had been released to Hegseth previously, the people familiar with the discussions said.

“This is another instance of people being blindsided, so I think there’s rising frustration there,” said a person familiar with the transition. While the president-elect is still behind Hegseth for now, “if this continues to be a drumbeat and the press coverage continues to be bad, particularly on TV, then I think there is a real chance that he loses Trump’s confidence.”

Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday after meetings with senators that “the matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared.” Through his lawyer, he has acknowledged the sexual encounter but said it was consensual, while the woman who made the allegation hasn’t spoken publicly.

Officially, Trump’s transition team is standing by Hegseth. “This report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated, and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement.

The “blindsiding” is either because Hegseth hid stuff from the Trump team or they simply didn’t ask for a full account of every allegation against him. Hegseth admits he paid off one woman, but did so only to protect his career from a damaging lawsuit.  Now his career is endangered without a lawsuit. From NPR:

After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced “an immediate horror storm” had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.

My judgment: like Gaetz, he will have to withdraw.

*The Senate voted on a Bernie-Sanders-led measure to block the sale of weapons to Israel, but the vote failed.

The Senate on Wednesday voted down a measure, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a handful of Democrats, that sought to block the sale of some $20 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Israel, in a last-ditch effort to limit the carnage, suffering and destruction caused by its 13-month war in Gaza.

The measure failed, with none of the three resolutions it comprised garnering more than 19 supporting votes. But the effort — the first time Congress has voted on whether to block an arms sale to America’s closest Middle East ally — also served as a bellwether of the dissatisfaction within President Joe Biden’s own party about his handling of the Middle East crisis.

Wednesday’s vote, spurred by Sanders’s filing of rarely invoked joint resolutions of disapproval, follows the Biden administration’s determination a week ago that it would not take punitive action against Israel for failing to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza. The administration in October warned Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.

Biden’s decision not to act — after international aid groups and the United Nations said the crisis in northern Gaza had reached catastrophic levels over the past month — infuriated liberals, who have called on him repeatedly to hold Israel accountable for a war that has killed roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population, according to local health authorities. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes, charges he strenuously denies.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, was slow in the first few months of the war to join other liberals’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, even after thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed under Israeli bombardment. That reticence drew a backlash from his progressive supporters. He has since been among the most vocal critics of the administration’s approach to Netanyahu.

As far as I can learn, the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is manufactured. While some people may not get enough to eat on some days, nobody is starving to death, though Hamas and the UN pretends that there are.  And remember that 100 food trucks going into Gaza the other day were hijacked, and it’s probable that the hijackers were from Hamas (who else would have that power?). Finally, there are 14 field hospitals in Gaza as well as some of the larger hospitals are still working.

Here is the list of Senators who voted against Israeli aid include Elizabeth Warren (expected) but also Dick Durbin, my own Senator. I have written him asking for an explanation.

*The International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for war crimes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

The court also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed by an IDF strike in Gaza in July. Khan had sought arrest warrants for Deif and slain Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar for the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

Since neither Israel nor the US have accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, it doesn’t really affect our relationships, but both men are subject to arrest if they set foot in 120 other countries, though other countries often don’t bother to carry out what the ICC wants.  Countries who said they would arrest either man include Italy, France, Canada (of course), Jordan, and the UK. The US has rejected the warrants, and Argentina, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

The United States rejected a decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief, a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.

“The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the spokesperson said, adding the US is discussing next steps with its partners.

I don’t know if this case will be argued out before the ICC, or whether Israel will send lawyers to defend Netanyahu and Gallant.  Better call Natasha Hausdorff! Here she is on the allegations, speaking yesterday for ten minutes on Radio Times about the charges:

*The Washington Post’s op-ed columnis Jennifer Rubin says that conventional news in papers, social media, and on television is dying, but one venue is burgeoning, and should be a model of how the news is conveyed: ProPublica, a nonprofit funded by philanthropists and foundations. It was the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, and has won several more, as well as other awards.

The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade. Cable TV networks are shedding audience share at an alarming rate. Increasingly, they seemed to have forgotten who their audience even is. The hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago was the sort of move, judging from the backlash, that is likely to increase its progressive audience’s flight from MSNBC. CNN, in its effort to be all things to all people, is also hemorrhaging viewers. Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years. (The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate unleashed an exodus of hundreds of thousands of readers who had expected a clarion voice in defense of democracy.)

It is not merely this shrinkage in conventional news consumption that should be alarming. The preponderance of voters who get no news whatsoever suggests the very notion of an “informed electorate” might become a thing of the past.

However, there is a part of the news ecosystem that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds: nonprofit news, especially the juggernaut ProPublica, which has been responsible for buckets of scoops that for-profit media have missed.

ProPublica has reported on everything from the actual tax rates paid by billionaires to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial scandals to the story of a Georgia woman whose death resulted from the state’s abortion law. It has run stories on everything from how “Opponents of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging and Misinformation” to how “Tribal College Campuses Are Falling Apart. The U.S. Hasn’t Fulfilled Its Promise to Fund the Schools.” One of its most recent investigations revealed, “Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.” (You come away wondering what else you are missing relying on for-profit media.)

I recently spoke with Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor. He described the extraordinary expansion of an experiment that began in 2008 with a $10 million budget. Since then, its national coverage and staff (now about 150) have boomed, its budget has increased to $50 million, and it has created hubs across the country to fill the gap in regional and state news. It went from 36,000 donors in 2022 to 55,000 today.

Starting with a single hub in Illinois, it has added others in the South, Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Texas (in collaboration with the Texas Tribune) and New York. It has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards in the short time it has operated

Moreover, ProPublica has pioneered an inventive partnership with local papers all over the country. ProPublica provides an enterprising investigative reporter with salary for a year plus the infrastructure necessary to report the story, including editors, research assistance and lawyers.

I have never read this site before, but will start doing so. One problem is that we need more than one nonprofit news site if there’s to be competition, yet grant and foundation dollars are limited, so this can’t completely replace the for-profit news. Further, I don’t know if the site has any biases at all; readers who look at it should weigh in below. Finally, it is an investigative reporting site, and so if you want breaking news you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks the fallen leaves are rubbish (Malgorzata says that, in Poland, Trump is held responsible for everything bad that America does):

Hili: Autumn has made a terrible mess. Andrzej: It’s all Trump’s fault. Hili: You have been listening to the BBC again. In Polish: Hili: Jesień strasznie naśmieciła. Ja: Wszystko przez Trumpa. Hili: Znowu słuchałeś BBC.

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

From Jesus of the Day. Ah, the good old days! I never had this female-attracting collar. What an outfit!

From Things with Faces: a weirdly-marked tuxedo cat:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy, a lovely doormat:

Masih didn’t tweet anything new today, but here’s something from J. K. Rowling, who’s decided to publicize those people who threaten her online:

In which both the upside and the downside of the new block function are summed up perfectly. pic.twitter.com/fiVwd2fAgq

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 21, 2024

One I retweeted, and I may have posted it before:

I love this, especially “Fraaaaaaance!” https://t.co/r5TvbHWu88

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 21, 2024

x

I’ll be at this meeting along with Luana on a panel on censorship in science, but there are a gazillion other to see, as Lukianoff notes:

Looking forward to @USCDornsife‘s Censorship in the Sciences conf in Jan where I’ll be presenting alongside @jon_rauch @Musa_alGharbi @LKrauss1 @PsychRabble @ImHardcory @JMchangama & many more!https://t.co/e09oCbmh3k

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) November 20, 2024

I am pretty sure this is for real, but it’s horrible.  It’s religion, Jake!

Sorry, but if your religion allows old men to marry young girls like this, maybe it’s time to have a conversation with yourself and realize your religion is not a religion of peace.

It’s pure evil! pic.twitter.com/P6hGOy3uXR

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) November 20, 2024

One from my feed that I retweeted with a comment:

This is a fantastic commercial. If you don’t tear up, you’re made of stone. https://t.co/XXzcJEBFLw

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 21, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Apparently too old to live, this Dutch man was gassed at 63 upon arrival at Auschwitz. https://t.co/kbla6SITWW

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 22, 2024

Two posts from Professor Cobb. I want this brick badly!

Dramatic paws.Norwich.#WallsOnWednesday

— Duncan Mackay (@theduncanmackay.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T09:29:35.883Z

Living groups of animals originated quickly:

Our latest, by Emily Carlisle, Zongjun Yin, Davide Pisani and myself: Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…

— Philip Donoghue (@phil-donoghue.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T17:53:30.375Z

I was working on a post in a desultory manner but decided to wait until tomorrow. Plus it’s snowing fairly heavily in Chicago so everything is a big mess of sloppy ice water.

BUT: this is excellent news if you have any neurons (click to read):

The NYT:

Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s contentious choice for attorney general who had faced a torrent of scrutiny, said on Thursday that he was withdrawing from consideration for the role.

“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.”

Mr. Gaetz, who visited with Republican senators on Wednesday to help make a case for his selection, said in the post that the meetings were “excellent,” and that “momentum was strong.” But he added that “Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1,” referring to the Justice Department.

He added, “I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

Mr. Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct until he resigned from the House on Nov. 13, after Mr. Trump announced his intention to nominate him.

Mr. Trump, in a social media post, said he appreciated Mr. Gaetz’s attempts to win over senators and be confirmed as attorney general, adding that he thought Mr. Gaetz “was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration.”

House Republicans voted yesterday to block the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz, but the momentum for withdrawal was strong. I am glad because I always thought that Gaetz had the greatest potential to harm America among all the cabinet members, followed by Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense), and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (proposed Secretary of Health and human services.

One down, two to go.

Regular contributor Mark Sturtevant has once again sent us a batch of lovely insect photos, including some arachnids and one mammal). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The first part of this set are photographs from the gardens around my house, and then we move out to area parks. I live in eastern Michigan.

The lovely beetle shown in the first picture is a Lily Leaf Beetle (Lilioceris lilii). These become common on the lilies that the wife likes to grow, and they are a minor pest on them as they riddle the plants with holes. I had never seen the larvae, but while preparing this post I had learned that they hide under the leaves and I simply never looked there. The larvae are disgusting, as they cover themselves with their droppings as a deterrent. I should definitely photograph some next season!:

Next up is another example of Say’s Mantidfly (Dicromantispa sayi). In my last post I had shown a female, and this is a smaller male. This species of Mantidfly grows up by living and feeding inside the egg sacs of spiders, and there are always jumping spiders on our shed and that is where I find Mantidflies:

Back in the garden there is always drama of one kind or another. I was very elated one day to find a Cuckoo wasp foraging at the daisies, as shown in the next picture. I won’t be able to identify the species without careful inspection, but these beautiful wasps are usually challenging to photograph since they are normally very alert and active. I simply got lucky here. Cuckoo wasps are so-named because they are kleptoparasites in the nests of wasps or bees. Besides feeding on the provisions meant for the larvae of their hosts, they also eat the host eggs or larvae as well:

Predators commonly stay among the daisies in the garden, including the crab spiders shown in the next two pictures. I believe these are Misumenoides formosipes, based on the ridge that I could see just underneath the frontal eyes. The second picture shows one that has taken a Green Bottle Fly, Lucilia sericata:

Next are pictures taken from local parks. Here is one of our larger species of skipper butterfly, the Indigo Duskywing, Erynnis baptisiae. One can generally recognize skippers since they are usually moth-like butterflies, and they have distinctly hooked-shaped clubs on their antennae. In my younger years it was believed that skippers were a separate group from butterflies, but now they are found to be within the latter. And while we are at it, butterflies are now understood to be descended from moths, but let’s move on:

The remaining pictures were all taken on one day at a flower-filled and very productive meadow near where I work. There are more pictures from that park from this day, but those will have to wait for later.

First up is this extremely metallic Dogbane Beetle (Chrysochus auratus). These are vegetarian on a narrow range of host plants, including Dogbane, which makes the insects toxic:

The beetle shown in the next picture had me stumped for a while, but the distinctly “flabellate” antennae and an old field guide helped me to narrow it down. This is a kind of Wedge-shaped beetle, Macrosiagon limbata, and that surprised me since it does not resemble the one species that I know from this obscure family. This one is a male, identified by its antennae. Females will lay eggs on flowers, and the active larvae that hatch will clamber onto a passing bee to be taken back to the nest. There they will consume the larvae in the nest:

Many Bergamot flowers were in the field, and they were well tended by many of these clear-winged sphinx moths (Hemaris sp), and you can see tthat it is a bumble bee mimic:

The final insect-related pictures show why I spend much time carefully looking under leaves. I will likely never learn the species names of these insects, however. The white mass on the right is a bundle of cocoons from the Braconidae family of wasps, which are small wasps that are parasitoids inside the bodies of caterpillars. The term “parasitoid” is preferred here, rather than parasite, since the insects live inside the bodies of their hosts – parasite-like – but they quite deliberately and slowly kill their host, while parasites aren’t supposed to do that on purpose. The eviscerated caterpillar has fallen away, unfortunately, but while it was there it would be laying across the cocoons, still barely alive for a time, and actively “protecting” the cocoons in a strange example of how a hosts’ behavior is changed by parasitoid wasps. I have seen this many times, and you can see it as well in this very entertaining Ze Frank video that Jerry posted recently.

But that isn’t all. What are those black thingies to the left? Well, those are the pupae of a kind of hyperparasitic wasp – very small wasps that are parasitoids of the parasitoids. I had seen these mini-tombstones of pupae many times on plants, but this is the first time that I had enough context to understand the bigger picture about them. If you look carefully you will see an adult wasp among the pupae – a detail that I did not see at the time. Based on some findings in BugGuide, I suggest that this second group is from the Eulophidae family, as shown in the linked picture:

Next is a close-up of the Eulophid pupae. This required the Raynox 250 diopter lens to boost the power of the macro lens. The yellow stuff next to the pupae is called meconium, and they are the gut contents of the hyperparasitoid larvae. When a larva pupates, it will first purge its gut contents:

When I excitedly showed this amazing story to the wife, she was quite horrified.

After a pleasant and very productive afternoon spent in the flower-filled meadow, I noticed that I was being watched by a curious onlooker:

Yesterday I mentioned this interview in the new Sapir quarterly magazine edited by Bret Stephens, who in this article interviews Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Diermeier was our provost from 2016 to 2020, but left to take the top job at Vanderbilt.  I, among many, miss him, for at Vandy he’s turned the school into a model of academic freedom and free speech, but hasn’t neglected the enforcement of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech.

The discussion below shows how deeply Diermeier has pondered all the issues around freedom of expression and the purpose of a university. Combined with Stephens’s probing questions, it’s an excellent conversation.

Here are three excerpts from a longish discussion, which is worth reading in toto. First, the politicization of universities versus social inequality:

Bret Stephens: Until recently, surveys showed that Americans had high confidence in higher education. It was seen as an essential ticket to success in American life. In the past decade or so, that confidence has plummeted. The last survey I saw, from Gallup, showed a sharp decline, and that came out before October 7 and the protests that followed. What happened in the past 10 years to cause that decline?

Daniel Diermeier: We’ve seen the same data, and I’ve been very concerned about the drop in approval and trust in higher education. The decline has been larger among people on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it’s across the board, from the Left and the Right. My sense is that it comes from two concerns. From the progressive side, the concern is that highly selective universities are perpetuating inequality. And the concern from the Right is that we’re woke factories.

Stephens: Both of them can be true.

Diermeier: One hundred percent. My own sense is that the concerns about the propagation of inequality are, on closer inspection, much overblown. I think the concerns on the politicization of higher education and the ideological drift are much more valid.

The question of the politicization of higher education has come into stark relief after what we’ve seen last year: the conflict in the Middle East and the drama on campus. These developments have elevated into the public consciousness concerns that have been present for years. They now are front and center, much more serious, and they require a course correction by many universities.

The University of Chicago’s “foundational principles“:

Stephens: A historian might say, “Go back to the University of Chicago or Yale in the 1950s and you’ll find conservative critics railing against higher education as hotbeds of radicalism.” Now we look back on that and sort of chuckle. Is the criticism more valid today? If so, why?

Diermeier: Yes, I think the criticism is more valid today. If you look back, there were three pillars of how a university thought about its role in society. If you look at the University of Chicago, one pillar was this commitment to free speech that goes back to the founding and then through a whole variety of presidents, reaffirmed, most recently, by the 2015 report, often referred to as the Chicago Principles. Universities need to be places for open debate.

Pillar two is what we call institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not get involved, will not take positions, on controversial political and social issues that bear no direct relevance to the university’s mission. The University of Chicago’s formulation of this policy was the Kalven Report from 1967, which so eloquently articulates that when the university formulates a party line on any issue, it creates a chilling effect for faculty and students to engage in debate and discourse.

And the third pillar, less appreciated but important, is a commitment to reason, to respect, to using arguments and evidence. Discourse and debate at the university shouldn’t be about shouting. That’s a more cultural aspect. All three have eroded, and they have eroded over the past 10 years in significant fashion. Now we see the consequences of that.

I’m not sure how institutional neutrality has eroded, since it was really only embraced by the University of Chicago until very recently. Now, as FIRE reports, 25 colleges and universities have adopted the position. It seems to me that institutional neutrality has expanded, not “eroded.”

Finally, the ambit of institutional neutrality,  how it differs from propagandizing classrooms, and why the question of “affirmative action for conservative faculty” is not a major issue:

Stephens: Let me ask you about the role of university leaders. One thing you sometimes hear from presidents is I have no power. The faculty rule the institution. There’s a limit to what I can do in terms of what happens on my own campus. Tell us about governance structures. How can university leadership effectively use its position within those structures to set a tone, create a culture, have a set of rules and expectations for how the student and faculty behave? If you were speaking to first-time university presidents from across the country, what would you advise them?

Diermeier:

. . . . Institutional neutrality does not constrain faculty or students. It does constrain administrators. So the second concern that you pointed out, which I’m going to call the politicization of the classroom, is a separate one. That, to me, is a question of professionalism. If you’re using your classroom for indoctrination or propaganda, you’re fundamentally not doing your job. You’re not creating an effective learning environment for your students. So I think these are two separate issues that should not be commingled, because the point of institutional neutrality is to create freedom for faculty and students. If that freedom and responsibility are abused, that’s a different conversation.

. . . .If [faculty are] using their classroom for political propaganda, it’s a different conversation. The right way to think about hiring and promotions is that they should be based on expertise and merit. I’ve cited a couple of these University of Chicago reports before, but there’s one called the Shils Report that makes that very clear: We do not want to have political litmus tests for whom we hire and promote.

That said, there is an important role for the university, including its curriculum, in a society that investigates and reflects on itself, its values, its history. A lot of that is in humanities, the social sciences, divinity schools, law schools, and so forth. There are multiple perspectives, and to have them in the classroom is vitally important. If you have a class on ethics, you want the students to deal with virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequential ethics. You want these perspectives well represented, so that they are challenged, and then students can make up their own mind about what they think. If that does not happen because of the ideological capture of a department or program, we’ve got a problem.

I’m very doubtful that the solution is affirmative action for conservatives. I’m also not convinced that these movements to create new centers are the solution, either. I think the challenge goes a little deeper than where people are on political orientation — it has to do with how fields of study are structured and how certain fields have evolved. But we cannot have an ideological monoculture in these types of classes. It’s a disservice to our students.

And, if you don’t want to read, here’s a 45-minute conversation between Diermeir and Dan Senor (Senor’s “Call Me Back” show) that covers much of the same ground as the Sapir article. Senor notes how happy Vandy’s students are compared to students at other places, and Diermeier tries to explain it (note: it has something to do with football, too). Diermeier does credit a lot of Vanderbilt’s academic policies to what he absorbed at the University of Chicago.

Note at about 30 minutes in, Diermeier describes the sit-in in the administration building which led to disciplining the pro-Palestinian protestors. The University of Chicago doesn’t go nearly this far in disciplining protestors that do exactly the same thing. At Vandy, there was suspensions, probation, and even arrests for assault. Diermeier also explains why he would not accede to the demonstrators’ demands for divestment of the university’s endowment from Israel, and explains why he considers encampments a violation of the school’s policy. At the end, he muses about what to do free speech crosses the borderline into illegal harassment or threats.

In my view, Diermeier is the best university President in America, for his policies are the best and are based on considerable thought (and of course, his experience at The University of Chicago).

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bias,” came with a list of previous strips on the topic (below the cartoon). As usual in this strip, they decry the very behaviors they’re exhibiting. 

The note:

It IS weird that they write so may songs about cognitive biases, isn’t it?

deal
outrage
harbour
gaslight
hymn
fallacy
unwary
blackmail
affect
written
told
spiral
fired

Last spring, during all the protests, sit-ins, and encampments at my University—nearly all of them by students favoring Palestine vis-á-vis the war—the protestors decided to bring their beefs into my department. In fact, some of the protestors, given their actions, were probably members of our department (Ecology and Evolution) or undergraduate students , as putting up posters and flyers put requires a university ID card to get into the building, some of the actions were surely done in the evening, when you have to request special access to the building and have a good reason for it, and, tellingly, one of the flyers used the motif of Honey the Duck—my duck.   I am showing here just a small selection of flyers and posters that went up last spring.

It hardly requires mention that this kind of ideological propaganda, spread through the department on bulletin boards, white boards, and walls, created a chilling climate. By being posted in “official” places, it gave the imprimatur of the department to an ideological position. Such material is also banned by the University from being affixed to official boards—like the seminar-announcement board below.

But below is one of the anti-Israel posters that appeared in the spring. This one was affixed to the board above, which is supposed to be reserved for seminar announcements and other official department business. At least the poster itself says who created and disseminated it: Students for Justice in Palestine (who else?).  But this kind of political propaganda is not supposed to be put on official department boards.

Our department chair, recognizing the inappropriateness of these postings, sent out an email banning them, and he and the staff removed them. Since the beginning of this academic year the protests (save one poster) have not appeared in our department.

Here’s a whiteboard inside one of the buildings used by our department. This kind of drawing is not, I think, against University regulations, but it’s surely inappropriate. Note that it’s a Palestinian flag. Had I drawn an Israeli flag on the board, it would have lasted about an hour! (I do not, of course, parade my political views on department sites.)

The one below was almost certainly made by a member of our department or an undergraduate (I consider grad students as “department members”), and was affixed illegally because all posters must be on bulletin boards and must show the name of the group posting them. Again, Palestinian flags are used in a display of departmental affinity.

Below is the poster that I consider the most odious one. It was placed on several bulletin boards, including the official seminar board shown in the first photo. Not only is it illegally posted, but, to my shock, it used my own special duck, Honey, as an advertisement for “freeing Palestine.”

Now clearly this is aimed at me.  To their credit, the office staff, recognizing this, had removed similar posters from the department, hoping I wouldn’t see them. But I did.

My reaction was one of anger, for I loved that duck, and to use her to promote the “freeing of Palestine” (whatever that means) is a direct attack on me for being pro-Israeli. It was, I thought, like using pictures of someone’s pets to promote terrorism.

I suppose the person who put this up, whoever he or she is, calculated that this would intimidate or provoke me.  It did not. It only made me more resolute in my desire to support others who favored Israel (particularly the Jewish students), and I did so until the end of the school year.

But it did have an effect that was probably unintended, and which I suppose the posters are happy about.  It made me wonder who would do such a thing, especially in a department, where we’re all supposed to be colleagues. Now I’m sure that none of my faculty colleagues would do this, but my guess is that the perp was a graduate student or undergraduate. That is only a guess, of course. But the result is that this poster, combined with the propaganda above, has made me feel alienated from the department, something that I haven’t felt since 1986 when I began my job here, for this has always been a collegial department.  Now, when I am in a departmental group like a party or coffee hour, I wonder if someone there could have produced these hateful displays, and so I’ve largely stopped going to these groups.

As I said, this kind of mishigass has largely stopped. And the perpetrators are of course unknown, since they do this work when nobody is around. I’m sure they realize, since they clearly know my proclivities, that I think their moral compass is skewed 180°.  But they’ll never give up their anonymity, for they are cowards, like their confrères who wear masks during public demonstrations.

Reader David Hughes sent some photos of Zambezi and the fabled Victoria Falls, which have always been on my bucket list. David’s comments are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

In October this year I took part in a group tour to southern Africa, starting off in Zambia and then going overland through the national parks and wildlife reserves of northern Botswana. Our starting point was a couple of days based at a comfortable lodge on the northern (Zambian) shore of the Zambezi River, about 45 km upstream from the Victoria Falls. Our first taste of the African wild came with a couple of leisurely boat cruises along the Zambezi.

This photo shows a riverside landscape along the Zambian shore. The antelope grazing near the water are impala (Aepyceros melampus), the most common medium-sized herbivore across all the areas we visited:

As you might expect, there is an abundant and diverse community of fish-eating birds along the river. The group shown here includes black-headed heron (Ardea melanocephala), great egret (Ardea alba), African sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) and white-breasted cormorant (Phalacocorax lucidus):

One of the benefits of exploring the river on a slow, quiet boat is that you can get much closer to birds and animals than you could on foot, or in a noisy motor vehicle. This is the African wattled lapwing (Vanellus senegallus):

Just to remind us that we were indeed in Africa, a basking Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus):

The habitual companion of the crocodile throughout the inland waters of Africa, a trio of dozing hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius):

A river cruise is also a great way to see many of the land mammals as they come down to drink. This female greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros) is accompanied by a pair of oxpeckers, I think the yellow-billed oxpecker, Buphagus africanus:

A Nile monitor lizard (Varanus niloticus). This one was about a metre and a half long:

The river cruise also gave us our first view of African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana). The elephants here, with access to permanent water, have a much easier life than their cousins living in the drier areas we were shortly to visit:

After cruising the Zambezi, the next day was spent visiting the spectacular Victoria Falls (Mosi-oa-Tunya in the local vernacular). The Falls consist of a long, winding gorge with water cascades at particular points. These pictures were taken from the Zimbabwean side of the gorge, which is generally considered to give the better views. To get there from Zambia involves buying a temporary visa to cross the international border, then an additional fee to get into the park area (all payable in hard currency, of course), but it’s well worth it:

Another view of one of the cascades. October is late in the dry season, and the water volume is relatively low. During the wet season there’s much more water going over the edge but this throws up so much spray that it can be difficult to see the Falls in their true magnificence:

A final view of the Falls. Near the centre, some people are just visible at the top of the cliffs, giving a sense of scale:

There’s a pleasant walking trail which follows the line of the gorge, and some wildlife to be seen. This young male Cape bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus – although the taxonomy of these antelopes is disputed) was obviously used to people and quite happy to pose for photos next to the trail:

A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Stephens defines true liberalism this way:

By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.

And how it’s disappeared from universities:

Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.

A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.

He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.  The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:

In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.

But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.

But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.

I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.

At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.

You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.

I’ve written a fair number of posts about science writer John Horgan over the years, and also pointed out posts in which others took Horgan to task for his miguided views or even lack of understanding of the science he wrote about.

Horgan became well known for his 1996 book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Its thesis is summarized by Wikipedia:

Horgan’s 1996 book The End of Science begins where “The Death of Proof” leaves off: in it, Horgan argues that pure science, defined as “the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it,” may be coming to an end. Horgan claims that science will not achieve insights into nature as profound as evolution by natural selection, the double helix, the Big Bang, relativity theory or quantum mechanics. In the future, he suggests, scientists will refine, extend and apply this pre-existing knowledge but will not achieve any more great “revolutions or revelations.”

This thesis of course has not been supported. To name two new mysteries in physics that arose after Horgan (writing largely about physics) claimed that the field was moribund, we have new evidence for both dark energy and gravitational waves. The book hasn’t worn well, and his subsequent work never came close to the popularity of his 1996 book. As he writes about himself (yes, in the third person) on his own website:

Although none of Horgan’s subsequent books has matched the commercial success of The End of Science, he loves them all. They include, in chronological order, The Undiscovered Mind; Rational Mysticism; The End of War; Mind-Body Problems; Pay Attention, a lightly fictionalized memoir; and My Quantum Experiment, which like Mind-Body Problems is online and free.

Apparently Horgan supports himself with a sinecure as a teacher and Director of the Center for Science Writings (CSW) at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Given that he has gone after me several times over the years, and in an unprovoked way (reader Lou Jost once called him a “contrarian” in a comment).  And his rancor continues in the latest post on his own website (below), in which, defending departed Scientific American editor Laura Helmuth, he can’t resist insulting a number of us:

Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.

Seriously, Horgan, “social injustice warrrions?” and “woke bros”? And what’s with the nicknames and “wannabes”? No, I don’t want to be Richard Dawkins: I’ve never aspired to that level of renown nor do I have the talent to achieve it.  Horgan simply can’t resist mocking everyone who has “bashed” Scientific American, apparently unable to distinguish between criticism and “bashing.”  Yet despite his historical nastiness to others, Horgan characterizes himself on his webpage as a “nice guy”

John Horgan is a science journalist who has knocked many scientists over the course of his career and yet stubbornly thinks of himself as a nice guy

And, in the piece below, also praises Helmuth for her niceness:

She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.

I am perfectly prepared to believe that Helmuth is a kind and considerate person, and have never said otherwise. It’s a pity that Horgan himself has failed to achieve this “heroic feat.”

At any rate, Horgan wrote for Scientific American between 1986 and 1997. As he says in his third-person bio, “Horgan was a full-time staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, when the magazine fired him due to a dispute over his first book, The End of Science.” But he later wrote several other pieces for the magazine: “From 2010-2022 he churned out hundreds of opinion pieces for the magazine’s online edition.” Several of these were under the editorship of Helmuth, who headed the magazine from 2020 until about a week ago.

As you know, Helmuth resigned from Scientific American after posting several expletive-filled tweets on election night, something that I showed and discussed here. Although she later apologized, she announced her resignation five days ago.  It’s not clear, however, whether she voluntarily resigned or was given the choice of resigning or being fired. The president of the magazine says the former, but it seems ambiguous; as the Washington Post notes:

Kimberly Lau, president of the magazine, said in a statement that it was Helmuth’s decision to leave, and the magazine is already seeking a new editor.

and adds:

A screenshot of her posts circulated on X, and one account called “The Rabbit Hole” asked its followers on Nov. 12 if Helmuth was “someone who is entirely dedicated to uncompromising scientific integrity?” or “a political activist who has taken over a scientific institution?”

Elon Musk, owner of X and close ally of president-elect Donald Trump, reacted to the post four minutes later with “the latter” — which spawned thousands of comments, replies and likes.

Lau, the president of Scientific American, did not respond to questions about whether Helmuth’s resignation was related to the backlash from Musk and others.

I won’t speculate about what happened, but as readers know I’ve criticized the magazine many times for its wokeness, its misguided views, its pervasive ideology, and its downright errors many times (see here for a collection of criticisms, including the magazine’s infamous indictment of both E. O. Wilson and Gregor Mendel [!] as racists).

Michael Shermer, a Sci. Am. columnist, who was given a pink slip because he contradicted the magazine’s “progressive” views, has also summarized the increasing wokeness of the magazine, as has James B. Meigs. (See also my critique of articles from just the single year of 2021.)

In the end, I think Helmuth’s desire to make Scientific American a magazine infused with and supporting progressive leftism not only severely degraded the quality of a once-excellent venue for popular science—perhaps at one time our best popular-science magazine—but also ultimately led to her leaving the room.

But John Horgan now defends both the magazine and Helmuth in his latest blog post (click below), implicitly assuming that Helmuth was fired—and fired largely because people like me criticized the magazine:

The intro:

Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.

On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him.

Although Helmuth apologized for her remarks, Elon Musk (perhaps miffed that Scientific American recently knocked him) and others called for her head. Yesterday Helmuth announced she was stepping down.

Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.

Note the implicit assumption that Helmuth was fired (“loses her job”). Well, I didn’t cheer her cancellation (yes, some people cheered her departure), and I doubt that she’s been canceled. She’s been gone only a week, and I doubt that she’s been blackballed in science journalism. At any rate, Scientific American does have a long way to go if it’s ever to repair the reputation it once had, a reputation that was eroded with Helmuth at the helm.

Horgan lays out his rationale for the piece:

I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.

Indeed! Would that Horgan himself was kind and considerate! But in fact I’d settle for “not obnoxious,” but for Horgan that’s not in the cards.

He proceeds to defend the magazine’s politicization:

I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.

Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”

What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.

I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.

First, Horgan here conflates the practice of science itself with the presentation of science in magazines like Scientific American.  Yes, the actual doing of science should, as far as possible, be politically neutral, and so should articles published in scientific journals. (Sadly, the latter hope is now repeatedly violated.) The ideological erosion of biology, as Luana and I called our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, has led to the loss of trust in biology and in journals themselves; and the same is happening in all STEMM fields. You wouldn’t think that math could go woke, for instance, but it has, and medical education has long been colonized by ideology, to the point where it endangers the health of Americans.

No, I see no problem in principle with scientific journals pointing out scientific problems with social issues. Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, for example, was criticized by three authors (including Hans Bethe) in a 1984 issue of Scientific American. And scientific data on covid, published in journals, was critical in assessing how to best attack the pandemic. To the extent that public policy depends on scientific fact, and to the degree that those facts inform policy, it’s perfectly fine for scientific journals and magazines to correct the facts and show how such corrections might change policy.

But Scientific American went much further than that, taking on social-justice issues that were purely performative and had no possible salubrious effect on society, or even dealt with matters of fact. To see some of this mishigass, I call your attention to the collection of 2021 posts I made about ludicrous or mistaken articles in the journal—and this is but a small selection.

1.) Bizarre acronym pecksniffery in Scientific American.Title: “Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, diversity, equity, and Inclusion.”

2.) More bias in Scientific American, this time in a “news” article. Title: “New math research group reflects a schism in the field.”

3.) Scientific American again posting non-scientific political editorials.Title: “The anti-critical race theory movement will profoundly effect public education.“

4.) Scientific American (and math) go full woke.  Title: “Modern mathematics confronts its white, patriarchal past.”

5.) Scientific American: Denying evolution is white supremacy. Title: “Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy.”

6.) Scientific American publishes misleading and distorted op-ed lauding Palestine and demonizing Israel, accompanied by a pro-Palestinian petition. Title: “Health care workers call for support of Palestinians.” (The title is still up but see #7 below)

7.) Scientific American withdraws anti-Semitic op-ed. Title of original article is above, but now a withdrawal appears (they vanished the text): “Editor’s Note: This article fell outside the scope of Scientific American and has been removed.”   Now, apparently, nothing falls outside the scope of the magazine!

8.) Scientific American: Religious or “spiritual” treatment of mental illness produces better outcomes. Title: “Psychiatry needs to get right with God.”

9.)  Scientific American: Transgender girls belong on girl’s sports teams. Title:  “Trans girls belong on girls’ sports teams.”

10.) Former Scientific American editor, writing in the magazine, suggests that science may find evidence for God using telescopes and other instruments. Title: “Can science rule out God?“

And of course the magazine was full of op-eds that pushed a progressive Leftist viewpoint. When I emailed Helmuth offering to write my own op-ed about the malign effects of ideology on science, she turned me down flat.  There was no balance in the magazine—not even in the op-eds.

The rest of Horgan’s short rant goes after Trump and his appointees, for he seems to connect Helmuth’s resignation with Trump’s victory. Yes, in one sense they were connected, because Helmuth scuppered herself by being unable to control her tweets on election night, calling Trump supporters “fucking fascists.” But to imply that the critics of the journal were “right-wing”or “social injustice warriors” is just wrong.  People like me, Pinker, Dawkins, and Shermer are classical liberals, and criticized the magazine because it was becoming a vehicle for ideology rather than science.

We have two batches left (including today’s), so please send in your wildlife photos.

Today’s photos of archnids come from Dean Graetz of Australia, whose IDs and notes are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Backyard Spiders

Here in Canberra, we grow Australian native desert flowers in our backyard for their colour and insect attraction.  As a consequence, we also attract an array of spiders interested in trapping any visiting insects.  We find all spiders naturally interesting.  They have a 200-million-year fossil record and are a very successful lifeform with about 36,000 species, of which about 2,900 are found in Australia.  We wish to share them with you, such as this specimen.  Undoubtedly a female, she is intriguingly patterned and laying out a very sparse web.

A much larger example of these Flower or Crab spiders with legs folded ready to seize any visiting insect.  Her back pattern is very similar to that of the spider in the first image.  The ragged covering of hairs or spines make is difficult to immediately separate the spider body from the flower.

Leaf-curling Spiders  (Phonognatha graeffei) select a suitable leaf from the ground and, using silk, curl it to form a protective cylinder, silked shut at the top and open at the bottom.  They then live in this protective cylinder with only their legs showing, feeling for the vibrations of a captured insect.  As much as we try, we have never seen this construction happening live.

A distinct species of Flower-type spider, away from our backyard, industriously repairing her web after trapping and ingesting the innards of a wasp-type insect.  Its desiccated remains will be eventually cut loose and discarded.

A demanding situation to interpret.  Barely visible at the bottom of the cluster is a bee abdomen.  Swarming all over it are very young spiders that are suspiciously similar to the presiding web-owning female.  We did not witness the bee capture or the arrival of the young spiders.  So, which event came first?  Intriguing!

Another puzzling situation.  An unusually large amount of silk was used to wrap the butterfly, whose abdomen shape suggests its contents have not yet been liquified and extracted.  The view is of the spider’s underside where a curious spherical body is visible.  A parasitic tick?

An unknown species resting at the centre of her unfinished web.  The visible haloes of dots surrounding her are the small sticky deposits she has symmetrically spaced to eventually hold the long cross-lengths of silk, the last task of web construction.  Fascinating and thought-provoking.

The next two photos are borrowed and are not of our backyard, though we do occasionally find this famous spider here.  It is a large female Redback spider, guarding her near-perfect spherical egg sacs.  This species (Latrodectus hasselti) is well known in Australian popular culture.  It is seriously venomous, agonisingly painful, but apparently not lethal since the development of an antivenom.  It is well-known because, in rural settings, people have had their buttocks bitten while using an outdoor toilet (aka Outhouse) and they have never forgotten the occasion.

As well as regarded as serious threats to people, Redbacks are widely recognised as tough and effective predators.  Their silk is outstandingly strong, here trapping a struggling lizard, and their silk plus venom has been photographed killing small snakes.  Being tough and very effective are characteristics Australians respect. Consequently, many sporting teams use the name Redback because of their uniform colour and to imply their toughness and effectiveness.

So it is no surprise that when an Australian boot company wants to promote its tough and effective work boots, it uses the brand name Redback.  These boots are really ‘bloody good’ boots.  I have two pairs.

I’ve always been a big fan of James Carville, the political strategist who turned 80 last month. I love his Louisiana accent, his curmudgeonly behavior and pull-no-punches discourse, and his inevitable appearance on television wearing a Louisana State University shirt, the place he went to college (he was also in the Marines).

You may remember Carville in the 1993 movie “The War Room” as a main strategist, along with George Stephanopoulos, of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. That film was great, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (it didn’t win). Here’s Carville giving his minions a peptalk the day before Clinton’s election. He tears up a little as he gives his message:

But we forget that Carville was also the advisor to several losing Presidential campaigns of Democrats, including John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020.

Carville wasn’t involved directly in Kamala Harris’s campaign, though he contributed to the effort, but right up to the end he thought that Harris would win, and said so loudly and confidently. Here he makes his prediction only five days before the election. (I still love his straightforward style of speaking.) Carville disappears in the middle of the video, but returns at about 5:50 to reaffirm his optimism, promising that the women of America will take Harris over the top.

Yes, Carville’s confident predictions were wrong.

Below you see his postmortem with Amanpour on CNN after the election, acting somewhat sheepish (“winning is everything,” he says) and branding the Democrats as “losers” and now an “opposition party”. His analysis: Harris didn’t sufficiently distinguish herself from Biden, a failure that proved “decisive.” He also blames the lack of an open primary process and the failure of Harris to layout new policies. Finally, he says at the end that the Democrats have been tarred for a long time by the party’s wokeness, and though Harris pivoted a bit towards the center, her party was still tarred with the “stench” of wokeness. As he says, “It’s gonna take more than one cycle to get this stench off of the Democratic Party, and it’s a STENCH of the highest order, let me tell you.”  (He throws in that the Party could have given a much stronger economic message.)

But he knew this stuff already when he appeared in the video above!  He was simply wrong, and this somewhat detracts from his ability to read politics. Yes, a lot of people were wrong, as the election was close, but somehow I’ve always put my faith in Carville.

But, at eighty, Carville still vows to fight on as a member of the disloyal opposition. He’s already thinking about the 2026 midterms, and about what the Democratic Party has to do to win some Senate and House seats. Ceiling Cat bless this Bayou Curmudgeon!

Nature Scientific Reports has an open-access article reporting a rare find: a mummy of a kitten (“juvenile”) of a sabre-toothed cat, found frozen in the Russian Republic of Sakha, in Siberia. You can read the report by clicking below, or download the pdf here.

Mummies are rare because an animal has to die and then be permanently frozen in ice, and then later discovered. This is, as far as I know, the first mummy of a sabre-toothed cat, though skeletal remains are known. (These skeletal remains were used to identify the species of cat; see below)  It appears to be a young kitten, judging from comparison with a living relative, a three-week-old African lion (Panthera leo). The mummy’s remains were carbon dated to 31,808 ± 367 years ago, so it could have been contemporaneous with humans, who were probably in Siberia about that time.

Here’s a description of the specimen and then some photos:

The Badyarikha mummy (specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1) contains the head and the anterior part of the body preserved approximately to the caudal edge of the chest (Fig. 1). There are also incomplete pelvic bones articulated with the femur and shin bones. They were found encased in a piece of ice along with the front part of the cub corpse. The specimen is stored at DMF AS RS in Yakutsk.

Figure and caption from the paper (click figures to enlarge them):

The frozen mummy of Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene: (A) external appearance; (B) skeleton, CT-scan, dorsal view.

And here’s a comparison of the heads of the specimen (top) with a preserved three-week old lion cub. The face of the sabre-tooth is flatter than that of the lion, but this is probably due to deformation of the specimen (see skulls below). But the mummified cats’ external ears (auricles) are not as prominent as those of the lion. (Smaller ears are a characteristic adaptation to cold climate, as protruding ears are a source of heat loss.) The mummy’s fur color was dark brown, with the paws and chin being lighter brown:

‘The authors make a big deal about the thickness of the neck, which shows that this was a muscular cat (compare with the lion cub below):

(From the paper): External appearance of three-week-old heads of large felid cubs, right lateral view: (A) Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene; (B) Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-210286; Recent.

From the paper:

The mummy neck is longer and more than twice as thick as that of P. leo, ZMMU S-210286 (80.0 vs. 74.0, 52.0 vs. 32.0, respectively). The difference in thickness is explained by the large volume of muscles, which is visually observed at the site of separation of the skin from the mummified flesh.

Based on comparison of the skull with known fossil skeletons, they identified this cub tentatively as a juvenile Homotherium latidens.

Here’s an 8-minute movie about the genus Homotherium, showing a reconstruction of the animal and a lot of useful information:

And a photo of skulls of the sabre-tooth cub specimen (top row) and a 3-week old lion cub (bottom row).   The enlarged arches, where chewing muscles are attached, suggest that the species was adapted to inflict a strong bite (perhaps to use its serrated incisor teeth), though I’m not a paleontologist and am just guessing.

(from paper): Skulls of three-week-old large felid cubs, left lateral view (A, C) and dorsal view (B, D): A, B, Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, 3D computer models (image is reconstructed based on the undeformed right half of the skull, mirrored); Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene; C, D, Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-3034, photographs; Recent.

The authors say this:

One of the striking features of the morphology of Homotherium, both in adults and in the studied cub, is the presence of an enlarged premaxillary bone, containing a lateromedially expanded row of large cone-shaped incisors that form a convex arch. Among all the unerupted teeth of the Homotherium cub mummy, only the upper and lower deciduous incisors protrude with their tops from the alveoli.

Here’s where the premaxillary bone is: the orange one in front. You can see that this bone is larger in the mummy than in the lion cub.

 

Finally, the configuration of the paws, which are far more rounded in the mummy than in a lion cub, support the suggestions from the cub’s ears that this was a cat adapted to the cold. Forepaw photos, with A-C being the mummy and D being a lion cub. Rounded paws, also seen in lynxes and other cold-weather cats, are better for walking on snow, as they act as “snowshoes” that give a greater area of contact with the snow:

(from Fig. 7 of paper): Forepaws of three-week-old large felid cubs: A, B, С, Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, right forepaw; Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene: A thumb claw; B second digit claw; С plantar view; (D) Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-210286, right forepaw, plantar view; Recent. Designations: 1, first digital pad; 2, carpal pad (absent in H. latidens).

And the authors’ interpretation:

The front paw of the juvenile Homotherium latidens has a rounded shape. Its width is almost equal to its length, in contrast to lion cubs with their elongated and relatively narrow front paw (Fig. 7). The wide paw, the subsquare shape of its pads, and the absence of a carpal pad are adaptations to walking in snow and low temperatures. The small, low auricles and absence of the carpal pad in Badyarikha Homotherium contrast with the taller auricles and normally developed pads in the lion cub. All these features can be interpreted as adaptations to living in cold climate.

The carpal pad (“2” in the lion photo) is apparently missing in the sabre-tooth, and this is said to be an adaptation to walking in snow, though I’m not sure why.  But all the data indicate that this species of cat was muscular (the forepaws also suggest more muscles than the lion) and, as suggested from its Siberian habitat, adapted to a cold climate. You can learn more about the lifestyle of this genus of cat from the movie above.

h/t: Erik

We have a new contributor, Amy Perry of Indiana, who sends us a panoply of photos from her area. Amy’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

All of these were taken at Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis. This a state-protected area that has the strictest protection of any type of land designation in that it needs to fill a pressing public need that cannot otherwise be filled plus the signature of the governor, if any of it is developed or taken. The land has been state-protected for 41 years and is an oasis of peace in the midst of suburban and light industrial development. The nature preserve is surrounded a conservation easement; the entire area is 120 acres and incudes three ecosystems: a swamp, prairie, and forest.

Some of these were taken by the former chief naturalist of Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, Indiana. Some were taken by me, with my iPhone 11.

Most of these photos are spring ephemerals, or short-lived plants. They bloom before the trees leaf out and they are gone by the end of May or so.

The spicebush (Lindera benzoin) photo was taken in the fall; the leaves turn yellow in the fall. If you crush a leaf you can smell a lemony-spicey aroma–very attractive. The spicebush swallowtail butterfly needs that plant.

I included the drip torch photo because it illustrates a conservation technique used to manage prairies. It was taken during a controlled burn of a prairie. Controlled burns are performed to mimic what used to occur naturally (and the native Americans would burn prairies also). As you probably know, fire destroys shrubs and saplings, leaving the prairie plants free to grow by themselves unshaded.

Dutchmen’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) leaves look very similar to squirrel corn (Dicentra canadensis). But Dutchmen’s breeches flowers have two spreading spurs while squirrel corn’s blooms are rounded and connected (Michael Homoya, Wildflowers and Ferns of Indiana Forests.)

Rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) stems and leaves are rough to the touch, like rosin. Rosinweed blooms in the summer.

Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) trees are so named for obvious reasons.

Easatern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) has a foul odor. It looks like giant garlic cloves. It needs constantly moist soil. It flowers in January and February, generating so much heat that sometimes it melts the surrounding snow. The leaves can be reddish mottled or other colors. I love the giant leaves.

The thin pink stripes of spring beauties (Claytonia virginica) guide insects to the pollen at the center. I have seen spring beauties growing in lawns of houses built 40 years ago, remnants of the forest that was there before the home.

Trout lilies (Erythronium americanum):

Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica):

This article from Harvard Magazine documents the occurrence of “silent study-ins” in the University’s main library: Widener. While protests on the wide Widener steps have always been countenanced, these demonstrations are new because they take place inside—in the reading rooms.

They of course involve pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protestors, who can’t seem to refrain from disrupting anything, whether it be traffic, classes, putting up graffiti, or, in this case, studying in the library. These sit-ins have been conducted by both students and faculty (faculty are often more anti-Israel than students). Click to read.

Some excerpts:

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech.

On January 19, 2024, just after Alan M. Garber assumed the interim presidency, he and the deans released a statement clarifying University policy regarding “the guarantees and limitations” of campus protest and dissent. That January policy states that “demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in classrooms…libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion.” But it did not define what constitutes a protest.

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A day before the event, a Harvard administrator warned students that such an action would violate Harvard policies, The Crimson reported. During the protest, library staff informed the students that they could not protest in the library and recorded their Harvard ID numbers. (Students are allowed to protest outside of the library—the Widener steps are a popular location. This semester, both students and faculty held pro-Palestine protests there and were not punished by the University.)

The students were punished, but lightly. Then the faculty got in on it (they were given the same punishment), and the idea spread:

In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.” During the students’ two-week Widener suspensions, they could pick up library materials from other locations, but not enter Widener itself.

The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

. . . . Following those initial confrontations, library actions become more numerous on campus. In the month following the October 16 faculty study-in, there have been two such events at the Law Library, one at the Graduate School of Design, another at the Divinity School (a “pray-in”), and two more in Widener (one faculty-led and another student-led). A November 8 Widener faculty study-in pushed the University’s punishment calculus to its logical extreme, with professors displaying blank papers.

Some pushback from a librarian:

 The administrative response to the library protests has, if anything, prompted more faculty members to express concerns. Since the fall wave of demonstrations began, the library has twice articulated why the study-ins merit punishment. On October 24, University librarian Martha Whitehead published an essay titled “Libraries are places for inquiry and learning” in which she argued that the study-ins—which she firmly classified as protests—disrupt academic life:

While a reading room is intended for study, it is not intended to be used as a venue for a group action, quiet or otherwise, to capture people’s attention. In the study-ins in our spaces, we heard from students who saw them publicized and chose not to come to the library. During the events, large numbers of people filed in at once, and several moved around the room taking photos or filming. Seeking attention is in itself disruptive.

What we have here is a conflict between free speech and disruption of University regulations, which prohibit demonstrations in libraries. Granted, these are silent demonstrations, so I had to think it over. In the end, having studied at Widener Libary, which has a huge and beautiful reading room, I decided I agree with Ms. Whitehead.  I thought, “What if I were trying to study in Widener and a bunch of people came in with posters affixed to their computers, sometimes walking about, and all of them expressing an opinion on ideology or politics. I concluded that such demonstrations, no matter what ideology they favored, are disruptive of study, which of course is one of the functions of the University. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my work if I were surrounded by protestors.

By all means these demonstrators are free to gather and hold up signs on the Widener steps (shown below), but to have silent demonstrations like this in libraries, symposia, or classrooms, is disruptive to the mission of a university, and should be banned. Harvard has already banned them, but perhaps you disagree. Give your opinion in the comments, please:

A photo of the Widener showing its famous steps. This is from about 1920. They look pretty much the same today, but there are no cars or buggies in front.

Abdalian, Leon H., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a short video of the spaces inside Widener, including the reader rooms. Isn’t it lovely? They show the steps in an outside view at the end.

The good news is that the Washington Post, defying the inevitable cries that the paper is “transphobic”, is calling for a “respectful debate on trans women in sports”.  This is, of course, because of the increasing number of biological men who identify as women (I prefer that jawbreaker to “trans women” because the latter plays into the misleading mantra that “trans women are women”), and because men who have gone through male puberty before transitioning have an inherent physical advantage over biological women.  Even the UN now agrees on that, and gives data below on how many women have lost sports medals to transitioned biological men.  I will, however, use “trans women” as shorthand in this article.

Just to see a major op-ed (by the editorial board!) defy the gender activists, who have censored all debate on this important ethical issue, makes me pleased. Read the article by clicking on the headline below or find it archived here.

You’ll note that the tone of the article is carefully monitored to ensure that a) the paper calls for “respectful” debate, when in fact what we need is just debate, and I haven’t seen any people discussing the issue being disrespectful to trans women; and b) although the op-ed doesn’t take sides, it cites accumulating data documenting the athletic advantage of trans women over biological women. There are enough data now, as we see below, to call for reform of sports regulations, so the debate is provisionally settled at present, though of course it’s about facts and those facts—and the resultant prescriptions—may change.  For example, I don’t think there are any data showing that trans women outperform natal women in equestrian sports, though I can’t be sure: if men outperform women in horse sports, that means that even there different rules must be made. One thing is for sure: if there is a sport in which natal men do not outperform natal women, then by all mean let trans women compete with natal women. In such sports everybody can compete against everyone else.

But I digress: here are some excerpts from the op-ed. I have put other references below. Note the paper cited in the second paragraph; you may want to have a look. Also see the papers I cite below.

Trans people deserve to be treated with dignity, and the law should protect them from discrimination in areas such as employment and housing. But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.

In athletic competition, male puberty confers significant advantages. While those biological differences vary by skill and sport, a 2023 paper by medical researchers in the United States and Italy noted that “it is well established that the best males always outperform the best females when the sport relies on muscle power, muscle endurance, or aerobic power.” The hormone therapy that many trans women take reduces some of those advantages over time, but research into how much those advantages can be mitigated, and over what time frame, is still ongoing. Other advantages, such as height, are fixed by the end of puberty. This poses obvious fairness and safety questions.

Note that the question is not just one of fairness—of transitioned biological men having unfair advantages competing against cis women—but of safety. A strong, muscular transitioned man could well injure a woman rugby player. This is why the English Rugby Football Union banned trans women from competing in women’s rugby.  More from the WaPo article:

The public needs more and better research to make those decisions. But unless the data show that transitioning can fully erase the effects of male puberty, the country will also need a frank and open debate about the trade-offs between inclusion on the one hand and safety and fairness on the other.

And yet too often, efforts have been made to avoid or prevent discussion of those trade-offs by labeling debate inherently transphobic. This is not how a healthy democracy makes decisions.

Note too that gender activists ignore the palpable safety risk and of course the unfairness to biological women, saying that “trans women are women”, which means that trans women should have every right and privilege enjoyed by biological women.  Well, I’d agree with that if by “right” one means “moral and legal right”, but I’ve always thought that there are some exceptions to the “rights” of trans women. Sport participation against biological women is one, of course. But trans women shouldn’t be allowed willy-nilly to be rape counselors advising unwilling women, monitors of shelters for battered or abused women, or inmates in jails holding biological women. Beyond that, I can’t think of many exceptions.

More from the article; notice that the public clearly recognizes the unfairness of having trans women in women’s sports:

A 2023 Gallup poll showed that almost 70 percent of Americans think sports participation should follow birth sex, not gender identity. Pressuring Democratic politicians to side with the minority, without giving sufficient space to the other side’s argument, is a recipe for irresolution and resentment.

The Democratic bit comes from the recent demonizing of Representative Seth Moulton (D, MA) for saying this: ““Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

For that Moulton was called a transphobe by Democrats, who should be more thoughtful, and Moulton’s campaign manager resigned. This is simple wokeness: performative virtue-signaling that defies the known facts.  Of course the paper isn’t going to say that, but ends its piece this way:

We cannot predict whose argument will prevail. We can only say that no one — and certainly no political party — is entitled to win this debate by default.

Well, I would have put it more strongly, but I’ll take it.

A recent UN report (!) on violence against women and girls (pdf here) documents the possibility of violence and actually gives numbers for the medals lost by biological women to trans women.

Here are some data; the bolding is mine:

Policies implemented by international federations and national governing bodies, along with national legislation in some countries, allow males who identify as women to compete in female sports categories.28 In other cases, this practice is not explicitly prohibited and is thus tolerated in practice. The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports. 

Note that one of the arguments for allowing trans women to compete against biological women is that there are so few of the former that it doesn’t matter. But even one medal taken away from a biological women is unfair, and I don’t see why there should be a threshold below which mixed competition is okay. Further, 890 medals in 29 sports is not a small figure!

Below the report notes that suppression of testosterone in trans women will not equalize the athletic potential of trans women and biological women. Testosterone levels used to be the criterion for Olympic participation of trans women or women with disorders of sex development, but the Olympics recently punted, saying that each sport must set its own criteria (again, my bolding):

Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty, thereby resulting in the loss of fair opportunity. Some sports federations mandate testosterone suppression for athletes in order to qualify for female categories in elite sports. However, pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.This approach may not only harm the health of the athlete concerned, but it also fails to achieve its stated objective. Therefore, the testosterone levels deemed acceptable by any sporting body are, at best, not evidence-based, arbitraryand asymmetrically favour males.

Here are three recommendations from from the UN report (again, bolding is mine). These are conclusions, so are based on data. While more data are needed, what we have now is sufficient to actually make policy instead of simply calling for “more debate.”  Of course more data will always be useful, but we have sufficient data to make provisional policy.

(b) Ensure that female categories in organized sport are exclusively accessible to persons whose biological sex is female. In cases where the sex of an athlete is unknown or uncertain, a dignified, swift, non-invasive and accurate sex screening method (such as a cheek swab) or, where necessary for exceptional reasons, genetic testing should be applied to confirm the athlete’s sex. In non-professional sports spaces, the original birth certificates for verification may be appropriate. In some exceptional circumstances, such tests may need to be followed up by more complex tests;

(c) Refrain from subjecting anyone to invasive sex screening or forcing a person to lower testosterone levels to compete in any category;

(d) Ensure the inclusive participation of all persons wishing to play sports, through the creation of open categories for those persons who do not wish

(d) Ensure the inclusive participation of all persons wishing to play sports, through the creation of open categories for those persons who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex, or convert the male category into an open category. . . 

The last recommendation is one I agree with and have made before.  I have written many times on this issue (see here and especially the papers I cite here).

Finally, here is a new editorial in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. There are many authors, including developmental biologist and geneticist Emma Hilton, a colleague of Matthew’s at the University of Manchester. It’s a short piece (less than two pages); click to read.

Here’s a summary of their recommendations:

During press conferences at the 2024 Olympic Games, theInternational Olympic Committee (IOC) invited solutions to address eligibility for women’s sport. We take this opportunity to propose our solution, which includes: (a) recognizing that female sport that excludes all male advantage is necessary for female inclusion; (b) recognizing that exclusion from female sport should be based on the presence of any male development, rather than current testosterone levels, (c) not privileging legal“passport” sex or gender identity for inclusion into female sport; and (d) accepting that sport must have means of testing eligibility to fulfill the category purpose.

They recommend as an initial test a simple cheek swab that can determine the sex-chromosome constitution of women. If that shows deviations from the regular XX genotype, they then recommend “comprehensive follow-up in the rare cases that require extra consideration, with emphasis on the duty of care to every athlete. . . “.

I’m glad that the Washington Post brought this into the open, and with the approbation of its entire editorial board.  Nobody involved in the discussions above is a “transphobe” who wants to deny men who identify as women legal or moral rights. But it’s time we admit openly that those rights are not unlimited—that the mantra “trans women are women” is not only biologically inaccurate, but also that the inaccuracy places a few limits on the rights of trans women.

It’s Sunday, and that means we have a batch of biologist John Avise‘s bird photos. Today’s group features headshots of birds in zoos. John’s text and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Zoo Headshots 

I love visiting well-designed zoos, especially those with large open aviaries and other open-like enclosures.  The San Diego Zoo is exemplary in these regards.  This week’s post shows head portraits of several avian species from around the world that I’ve managed to photograph in zoo aviaries.  In such large enclosures, taking good photos remains challenging because the birds have plenty of space to freely move and fly around in their simulated natural habitats.

Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola peruvianus) male (native to South America):

Black Crowned Crane (Balearica pavonina) (native to Africa):

American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) (native to the West Indies and northern South America):

Chilean Flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis) (native to southern South America):

Lesser Flamingo (Phoeniconaias minor) (native to sub-Saharan Africa and India):

Chestnut-breasted Malkoha (Phaenicophaeus curvirostris) (native to Southeast Asia):

Red-and-Green Macaw (Ara chloropterus) (native to South America):

Hyacinth Macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) (native to South America):

Saddle-billed Stork (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis) (native to Africa):

Shoebill (Balaeniceps rex) (native to Africa):

Southern Bald Ibis (Geronticus calvus) (native to southern Africa):

White-faced Whistling Duck (Dendrocygna viduata) (Native to Africa):