Why Evolution is True Feed

Despite the calls of both Presidential candidates to “unite America”, the calls of many to “reach across the aisle” and confect bipartisan legislation, and the advice of some that it’s time to discuss America’s differences instead of hating one’s opponents, we are now hearing calls from Democrats and liberals to boot those who voted for Trump out of our lives.

I disagree. I know some of those people, and although I don’t like the way they voted, I don’t think that’s sufficient to avoid them forever, or to give them sharp lectures that they are fascists and tried to ruin America and our livelihood. There are, as I’ve pointed out in the nooz over the last few days, a diversity of reasons why people voted for Trump: wokeism of the Left, their own economic problems due to inflation, immigration, and so on—reasons that can be debated but not dismissed.

Sadly, we have some on the Left becoming haters like this. One such person is discussed in a column on by Jonathan Turley written on his website.  Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, an attorney, a legal scholar. and, I believe, a libertarian.  As noted below, Turley wrote a recent column in The Hill about the “liberal rage” that is spreading now that Democrats have started to internalize the election debacle. In that piece Turley made a reasonable point:

It is important to note at the outset that there is no reason Democratic activists should abandon their values just because they lost this election. Our system is strengthened by passionate and active advocacy.

Rather, it is the collective fury and delirium of the post-election protests that was so disconcerting. Pundits lashed out at the majority of voters, insisting that the election established that half of the nation is composed of racists, misogynists or domination addicts who long to submit to tyranny.

No, not everyone who voted for Trump is a fascist racist, or misogynist. (For crying out loud, a huge number of women voted against Harris.( In fact, more than half of all Americans voted for the Orange Man, since Harris apparently lost the popular vote. I am embarrassed before the world that we chose Trump to hold the most important job in the country, but there it is.

Ergo the rage. In his new column, Turley note a particularly striking and offensive (to me) example of that rage: a resident in psychiatry at Yale. Turley’s words:

With women pledging to break up with their boyfriends and divorce their husbands over the Trump victory, Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun is advising that it may also be necessary for your mental health to cut off your family and friends who supported Trump. In that way, you can avoid being “triggered” by opposing political views — much like Yale itself.

As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.

Dr. Calhoun went on MSNBC’s Joy Reid to offer the curious take on good mental health. Reid has spent the week condemning the majority of voters (particularly minority voters) in the nation as racists and misogynists for the Trump victory.

Reid joined a rising tide of rage, which I discussed in my column this weekend. Dr. Calhoun added her voice to the madness.

“So, if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you… it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why…

…You know, to say, ‘I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me.’ I think you should very much be entitled to do so, and I think it may be essential for your mental health.”

There is another possibility. You can try to resolve those feelings with people who you previously liked or loved. It may actually help to discuss these issues outside of the echo chamber of your political associations.

If you want to hear Calhoun, who is African-American, actually say what she said above, click on the screenshot below, which will take you to the Fox News column showing a video of Calhoun speaking to Joy Reid on MSNBC. Yes, the words she said are indeed the ones above:

Turley adds this and touts his book, which I haven’t read:

Across the country, women have been cutting their hair and joining the Korean 4B movement—bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex). One is quoted as saying, “I fear The Handmaid’s Tale will become our reality.”

It is a curious response since figures like Reid blame white women for the loss. Trump won white women voters by eight points at 53 percent. Harris actually fell slightly in the support of women overall. Conversely, roughly 43 percent of men voted for Harris. Yet I watched one deranged voter say that she is thinking of buying a “Glock” and shooting the first man who comes near her. If so, she would have an over 4 out of 10 likelihood of shooting a fellow Harris supporter.

None of this is good for our nation’s mental health and suggesting that people retreat further into their silos does not make for particularly healthy advice.

As discussed in my book, The Indispensable Right, we have become a nation of rage addicts. Taking another hit of rage will do little to break that addiction.

Now I didn’t vote for Trump, of course, but I am not prepared to either lecture people who did, telling them that they were attacking my livelihood, or telling them that I don’t want to associate with them. I suppose it’s okay to say that “I want to take some time for myself right now,” without giving the reason, and then trying to have a discussion later.

Of course people can sever any relationship they want over the election, but that sort of attitude doesn’t seem to me conducive to mental health—even though Calhoun is a shrink—and it’s certainly not good for the Democrats. After all, a common element in post-election analyses is the idea that the elitism of Democrats, combined with their characterizing their enemies as yokels or fascists, are factors that turned off centrists and leftish Republicans.

There will be some lively discussion around the Thanksgiving and Christmas groaning boards, but Calhoun’s table will be emptier than usual.

h/t: Bill

Well, we have one more batch of photos after this, and then the feature goes belly-up.  If you don’t want that to happen, please send in your good wildlife photos.

Today being Sunday, we have a visit by John Avise, who sent photos of some birds near his home. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click the photos to enlarge them.

A Morning at the Beach 

A few days ago, I went to Crystal Cove State Park, which is only a 15-minute drive from my house here in Southern California.  I timed my visit so as to capture the long morning light at low tide.  Here are some of the birds that I photographed on that short but special visit.  All of these species are regulars along our beaches, especially during the autumn and winter months.

Willet (Tringa semipalmata) posing:

Willet standing on one leg

Willet showing the white stripe along its wing (normally visible only during flight):

Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) posing:

Whimbrel with small crab:

Another Whimbrel pose. showing its head stripes:

Sanderling (Calidris alba) posing:

Sanderling stretching:

Western Gull (Larus occidentalis) posing:

Black phoebe (Sayornis nigricans) (yes, they inhabit beachfronts as well as many other habitats in S. Cal.):

Black Turnstone (Arenaria melanocephala) posing:

Black Turnstone in flight:

To end, the week, we have some stunning videos from BBC Earth and other places, depicting the migratory behavior of the red crabs of Christmas Island, a small Australian territory (135 km², pop. 1692 ) near Indonesia: encircled below. Their vernacular name is The Christmas Island red crab, the Latin binomial is Gecarcoidea natalis, and they are  endemic to that island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean.

TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The life cycle of this crustacean is described here, but the videos are more impressive. Here are the basic facts:

The migration starts with the first rainfall of the wet season. This is usually in October or November, but can sometimes be as late as December or January.

Red crabs all over the island leave their homes at the same time and start marching towards the ocean to mate and spawn. Male crabs lead the migration and are joined by females along the way.

The exact timing and speed of the migration is determined by the phase of the moon. Red crabs always spawn before dawn on a receding high-tide during the last quarter of the moon. Incredibly, they know exactly when to leave their burrows to make this lunar date.

However, because crabs wait until the first rainfall to start their trek, they sometimes have to hurry. If the rains arrive close to the optimal spawning date, they will move rapidly. But if the rain comes early they may take their time, stopping to eat and drink on their way to the coast.

If it begins raining too late to make the spawning date, some crabs will stay in their burrows and migrate the following month instead.

And from BBC Earth, narrated by Attenborough. Note that the crabs breathe through gills, which must be kept moist. They live on land, but in moist habitats, but a remnant of their evolutionary origin is their need to go back to the ocean to spawn. Note that they walk sideways.

Note that they mate during the migration, too, so it’s not just females who are drawn to the sea at this time. A similar video, but also showing one of their predators and some of the other dangers they face.

I especially like this video because it shows how the island’s human inhabitants care for and protect the crabs:

After Trump won the election, Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, went ballistic on BlueSky (Twitter for progressives). She issued the three posts below, decrying her generation for being “fucking fascists” and telling some of her high-school classmates to “fuck them to the moon and back” (note to editor: “moon” is usually capitalized).

I have to say that this sounds a bit like Helmuth was a bit tipsy, but I won’t blame alcohol for this. After all, if you’re drunk, you’d better stay away from social media! I wrote about these “tweets”, and about Scientific American‘s “progressive” editorial slant, in a piece I posted yesterday. (This is part of a long series of posts I’ve done about her and the magazine.)

At any rate, after what must have been a bunch of pushback, and perhaps realizing that her job was in jeopardy, Helmuth issued an abject response yesterday, to wit:

After making a series of fiercely ideological and political statements on social media in the wake of Trump’s win and being pilloried for doing so, @SciAm editor in chief Laura Helmuth is now back pedaling. She claims she is committed to editorial objectivity. pic.twitter.com/qwTsaiyKLE

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) November 7, 2024

Well, I’m trying to be more charitable these days, striving to put myself in my opponents’ shoes and imputing to them the best motives I can think of, but I couldn’t do it this time.  And that’s because Helmuth has left a paper trail during her editorship—a paper trail of progressive leftism and wokeness that has demonized many people (including Mendel!) as racists and bigots. Thus I’m not convinced by her assertion that she “respects and values people across the political spectrum.”  No, she seems to despise people on the right, and that’s what came out in her first set of tweets above.

Further, what is the “mistake” here? She’s is the editor of a major magazine, for crying out loud, and should know how to control herself. “Shock and confusion” doesn’t, at least to me, excuse her behavior. “Shock,” perhaps, but what is she “confused” about?

Her statement that her unhinged tweets “do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues,” really means, of course, “Please don’t fire me! I’ll be a good girl from now on,”  I doubt, however, that her bosses at Springer really care about her eroding reputation. They probably care more about the bottom line, and I have no idea how the magazine is doing.

The sentence that irked me the most is “I am committed to civil communication and editorial objectivity.” Indeed! The whole magazine has violated both tenets for years. It gave Michael Shermer a pink slip for simply questioning accepted (woke) wisdom in his column, and couldn’t wait to accuse E. O. Wilson of racism, nearly before his body had gone cold. The many biased and slanted columns do not bespeak Helmuth’s commitment to objectivity, and here’s one example that I mentioned yesterday.

After the magazine published its hit piece on E. O. Wilson, accusing him (as well as Mendel and others) of racism, thirty evolutionary biologists and I cobbled together a letter to Scientific American, rebutting the hit piece’s claims and defending Wilson and his legacy (you can see the letter here).  Helmuth rejected the letter. She also rejected my personal appeal to “consider an op-ed about how extreme Leftist progressivism is besmirching science itself by distorting the truth? (Example: arguments that sex is not bimodal in humans, but forms a continuum.) I could make a number of arguments like that about biology that, contra McLemore, have truth behind them.” That letter didn’t fly, but Luana Maroja and I turned the idea into a paper for Skeptical Inquirer. 

So much for Helmuth’s editorial objectivity! 

Unfortunately, the readers are almost unanimously unimpressed by the apology. Go see for yourself, but I’ll put up a few screenshots of responses:

We are in dire need of photos, dear readers. If you have good wildlife snaps, please send them in. Thanks! Today we have a contribution on falconry (or rather, “hawkery”) from ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis. Her notes and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Hunting with the Sky Wolves  

One sunny October morning, I accompanied two expert falconers and their Harris’s Hawks (Parabuteo unicinctus) on a jackrabbit (Lepus californicus) hunt.   I’d met Don and Pete when they displayed their hawks at at a native seed farm open house last spring.  As leaders of the California Hawking Club they work to educate the public about falconry. It’s a demanding and highly regulated sport, practiced by only about 4,000 licensed falconers in the US.  Here is poignant advice from the CHC’s website: “Will you, can you, commit part of your waking hours to a creature who at the very best of times will merely tolerate your presence, is as affectionate as a stone, and at the worst of times will cause you heartache and puncture wounds?”

Harris’s Hawks are favored for falconry because they are unusually social raptors. Uniquely, they hunt in groups and have thus been nicknamed “wolves of the sky.” Our expedition involved a trio of different-aged siblings, although Harris’s Hawks need not be kin to hunt together.

Released from their travel crates, Jenny, Zeva, and Shooter quickly flew to a power line and began scouting the fields:

Jenny wears orange jesses (leg straps).  Note that she also sports a GPS transmitter, as do the other hawks, enabling the falconers to follow them on foot guided by a smartphone app.   Unlike true falcons, Harris’s Hawks do not typically fly many miles in the course of a hunt.

Jenny:

Cooperative hunting by the ‘wolves of the sky’ is thrilling to watch.  The hawk who first spots the prey chirps to alert the other hawks and initiates the chase. (If the falconers happen to see the animal first, they helpfully call ‘hoo-hoo-hoo’ to the hawks.) The other hawks then see the speeding prey and fly ahead, coordinating their paths to intercept it.  Female Harris’s Hawks are larger than males and will often make the killing pounce.

The first rabbit was killed so quickly that we didn’t see it happen.  Don and Pete bagged the rabbit so the hunt could continue.  Note the hawks resting in the shade at lower left:

The falconers then raised a T-perch and two hawks hopped aboard, allowing them to sit and look for prey as the group moved around.  As we traversed orchards and fields, the hawks frequently came and went from the perch, as well as pausing in trees:

A second rabbit soon rocketed out of the orchard, which was a fatal decision on its part.  Moving far faster than me or my camera, the hawk trio took it to the ground a few hundred yards away:

After handing the hawks meat treats from a bag, Don took the rabbit to the car to serve up lunch:

Spritzing their meal with water helps the hawks stay hydrated:

The hawk on the left, Abby, is a young trainee on a lightweight tether called a creance.   She didn’t get to hunt this time, but did get to join in the feast:

Their hunt and meal finished, the hawks permitted themselves to be returned to their travel crates:

The rewards of being a falconer, again from the CHC website:

“Are you ready to be one of that elite band of hunters in the most awesome sport on the face of the earth? Are you ready to have people see you with awe, amazement and sometimes anger? Are you ready to be the absolute center of attention whenever you carry your hawk on your fist? Are you ready for that incredible rush when that wild creature first returns to you, on its own and able to fly free but decides to come to you instead?”

Some falconers and their birds are not sport hunters but pest-control professionals, whose job is to keep away nuisance birds such as starlings. The most famous of these is Rufus the Hawk, who for 16 years has kept pigeons off the Wimbledon tennis courts.

Rufus the Hawk (from The Telegraph; photo credit: Getty):

If you have good wildlife photos, please send them in, as we always need more.  Today we have a word-and-picture post on butterflies contributed by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Fluttering souls

We may be unsympathetic to celebrities who moan about the encumbrances of being gorgeous, but not the Greek princess Psyche. Her striking beauty sent the goddess of love Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) into a not so loving fit of jealousy. She devised a cunning plan; to dispatch her son Eros (Cupid) on a mission to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest, wickedest man he could find. But Aphrodite should have taken a hint from her son’s name: Eros spoiled mum’s revenge by falling in love with Psyche. That didn’t work too well for the princess; she became separated from Eros and fell into the clutches of a resentful Aphrodite, who imposed upon her a series of terrible tasks. After many twists and turns worthy of a Mexican telenovela – you can read it all in Metamorphoses – the lovers were reunited. Zeus, Heaven’s Big Cheese, took pity on Psyche. He made her immortal and gave her in marriage to Eros. A happy ending.

Psyche’s tribulations and eventual redemption spoke of mortals’ aspirations, so in her newly acquired divine status, the princess became the goddess of the human soul. For the ancient Greeks, a dying person would breathe out his or her soul, which would fly to the underworld in the form of flickering shadows or spirits. In his History of Animals, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote that a butterfly’s cocoon was like a tomb, and the adult insect emerging from it was like the soul fluttering away from a human body after death. It’s no surprise then that the Greek word ψυχή (Psykhe) was used for ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’. The representation of the soul as a butterfly was an appropriate symbol of the fragility and shortness of life, and that connection explains why goddess Psyche was often represented as a butterfly or as a maiden with butterfly wings.

Psyche, by Pietro Tenerani (1789-1869) © Paolobon140, Wikimedia Commons:

Butterflies have much more to do with humans than merely representing the wanderings of our soul. Their colours and wing patterns, their gentleness and fragility and amazing life cycles have long enthralled naturalists, artists and writers. More books have been written about butterflies than any other insect. Butterflies don’t share the PR problem facing wasps, spiders and other invertebrates that are commonly lumped together as creepy crawlies. Most people like butterflies. Sometimes the attraction is excessive: over-collecting by amateurs, naturalists, and biologists menaces many butterfly species.

The butterfly hunter, by Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885) © Museum Wiesbaden, Wikimedia Commons:

Butterflies are among our commonest and certainly most flamboyant garden visitors. We see them gracefully hopping from flower to flower, probing them with their conspicuous proboscis (tubular, flexible and elongated mouthparts specialised for sucking) for a sip of nectar. So, reasonably, we may assume these plant-insect associations are evidence for psychophily (pollination by butterflies). But that would be a too-hasty conclusion.

Psykhe brought us words such as psychology, psychedelic, psychopath, psycho, psychosomatic, psychomotor and psychophily – the latter illustrated by this pollen-carrying skipper butterfly © Raju Kasambe, Wikimedia Commons:

 

It has long been known that flower visitation does not necessarily result in pollination. That will happen only when pollen grains from the stamen (the male part of the plant) are transferred to the stigma (the female part). But many factors interfere with this process: the visitor may only collect nectar, bypassing the all-important pollen. If pollen is collected, it may be dropped before reaching a receptive stigma, eaten, or taken away to feed the visitors’ brood. Pollen grains passively attached to the visitors’ body may be too few, or located on the wrong part of the body so that it does not contact a stigma. For a variety of reasons, most flower visitations have no bearing of plant fertilisation.

Butterflies are largely nectar drinkers, tapping flowers’ abundant reserves of sugars and amino acids. Some species get their nutrition from ripe or rotten fruit, tree sap, wet soil, animal carcasses and even tears. But with the exception of pollen-munching Heliconius spp. (Young & Montgomery, 2020), butterflies stick to a liquid diet. They rely on their proboscis, an intricate feeding apparatus that works as a drinking straw ranging in length from around 6 mm to a record 52.7 mm for the immaculate ruby-eye skipper (Damas immaculata) (Bauder et al., 2014).

The coiled proboscis of a butterfly © Atudu, Wikimedia Commons:

Pollen is inconsequential to most butterflies. They don’t collect it willingly and their bodies are not adapted to unintentionally transport significant amounts of pollen grains like bees and flies. And that is a problem for plants: they invest a lot of energy producing nectar to attract pollinators. If a visitor goes away with a bellyful of nectar but no pollen, the plant has been a victim of nectar theft (when visitors take nectar without pollinating the flower). Butterflies as a group may have evolved to be nectar thieves, which from the plants’ point of view is nothing short of parasitism (Wiklund et al., 1979). This form of larceny is not restricted to butterflies: bees, flies, birds and most other visitors will steal nectar if given the opportunity (Irwin et al., 2010). But most of the 20,400 or so described species of butterflies don’t compensate their thievery by pollinating their victims.

Butterfly visitors are detrimental or indifferent for a wide range of flowering plants. But, as invariably is the case in biology, things are not simple or straightforward. Butterflies are abundant flower visitors and some species are long distance flyers, therefore with great potential for pollen dispersal. Some plants have not let these traits go to waste: they adopted psychophily as their main or sometimes only means of sexual reproduction. A few plants do that by producing reproductive structures that facilitate pollen transfer by butterfly wings. Others, like the Carthusian pink (Dianthus carthusianorum), hide their nectar at the bottom of narrow, tubular flowers that exclude most visitors, but not butterflies with long proboscises. While moths can take nectar while hovering over a flower, butterflies need to land to feed. The Carthusian pink obliges them with flowers shaped with a flat rim, which is a convenient landing platform for butterflies. This European plant is found in dry, grassy habitats of altitudes of up to 2,500 m, and it depends entirely on butterflies for pollination (Bloch et al., 2006).

Carthusian pink:

In some cases, butterflies intending to commit thievery have the table turned around on them, so that the would-be cheaters become the cheated.

Crucifix orchids (Epidendrum spp.) comprise over 1,400 species distributed from the southeastern United States to northern Argentina. This group of plants is highly diverse morphologically and ecologically, but most investigated species share one feature: a dry cuniculus. This structure is concealed in the column (the fused reproductive parts characteristic of orchids) and normally functions as a nectar reservoir. The majority of crucifix orchids have no nectar to bargain, but that doesn’t deter a range of butterflies. Probably attracted by the orchid’s scents, they probe the flower’s column and cuniculus in search of a non-existent reward. Ending up empty-handed is not the butterflies’ sole unpleasant surprise: the floral tube is narrow and bent, so that a visitor has to struggle to retract its proboscis. This temporary detainment – which could last for over one hour – increases the chances of a butterfly leaving the flower with pollinia (a blob of pollen) attached to its proboscis. This stratagem works very well for the orchids, so that butterflies and some day-flying moths are their only or main pollinators.

(A) Epidendrum densiflorum inflorescence; (B) Dissected flower and detail of column; (C) Flower in longitudinal section, showing the empty cuniculus © Silveira et al., 2023.

Butterflies do not belong to pollinators’ Premier League, but the Carthusian pink, crucifix orchids and several other plants demonstrate that psychophily is not that rare. Butterflies fly over large distances, are attracted to a variety of plants and make repeated visits to flowers. These features must compensate for some of their shortcomings, and we surely have much more to discover about their role in plant reproduction.

Themisto amberwing (Methona themisto), an orchid pollinator © Evaldo Resende, Wikimedia Commons:

Matthew sent in this latest “True Facts” video from Ze Frank; it’s about some of the most amazing and nefarious insects around: parasitoid wasps. (There’s an ad in the middle.)

There are a lot of questions and “I don’t know” answers here. The gall wasps are especially fascinating from an evolutionary viewpoint, as they somehow modify a plant’s gene expression to make the plant grow a gall that can house the wasp.

We don’t know how they do this, but even the gall wasps inside their houses can themselves be parasitized by other species of gall wasps (Again, we don’t know how these “hyperparasitoids” detect and find a larval host inside a gall). Finally, we don’t understand how natural selection has modified a parasitoid wasp so that it injects stuff into its host that modifies the host’s behavior, making iot a “zombie host.”

The photography is amazing; it seems to get better with every one of ZeFrank’s videos.

Do watch this; you’ll learn some natural history and, I hope, be amazed at the achievements of natural selection.

The latest Jesus and Mo cartoon, called “racism”, came with the sentence, “Happy Islamophobia Awareness Month!:

Ahmadiyya Muslims, by the way, have teachings distinct from those of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, including the resurrection of Jesus and the denial of “abrogation”: the view that the later-written verses of teh Qur’an supersede the earlier ones.

 

Like many Americans (and readers) this morning, I woke up, fumbled for my computer, and read the results in a state of shock.  The Republicans had won everything: the Presidency, the Senate, and, most likely, the House (see NYT results below).  As one of my friends wrote me, in the first email of the day, “I did not see this coming.”  Neither did I. Click the headline below to see the NYT story (archived here for free)

A pessimistic take from the NYT:

Donald J. Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time on Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.

Mr. Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.

His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Mr. Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.

In a deeply divided nation, voters embraced Mr. Trump’s pledge to seal the southern border by almost any means, to revive the economy with 19th-century-style tariffs that would restore American manufacturing and to lead a retreat from international entanglements and global conflict.

Now, Mr. Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose re-election to the White House and later mount a successful run. At the age of 78, Mr. Trump has become the oldest man ever elected president, breaking a record held by President Biden, whose mental competence Mr. Trump has savaged.

His win ushers in an era of uncertainty for the nation.

To roughly half the country, Mr. Trump’s rise portends a dark turn for American democracy, whose future will now depend on a man who has openly talked about undermining the rule of law. Mr. Trump helped inspire an assault on the Capitol in 2021, has threatened to imprison political adversaries and was denounced as a fascist by former aides. But for his supporters, Mr. Trump’s provocations became selling points rather than pitfalls.

As of early Wednesday, the results showed Mr. Trump improving on his 2020 showing in counties all across America with only limited exceptions. Mr. Trump had secured the necessary swing states — including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — to guarantee him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

Republicans also picked up at least two Senate seats, in Ohio and West Virginia, to give the party a majority in the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call.

Here are the results by state, with a few still undecided (the last update was at 5:45 a.m. Eastern time). As everyone expected, Illinois, as well as most of New England, went blue, while all the swing states with called elections (notably Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia) went for Trump. But he already has 277 Electoral-College votes, 7 more than he needs to win. Harris has not yet conceded nor made any announcement, though I heard on the news that she will speak this morning. Click on the map to see the state-by-state results:

Yes, America elected a man who, I think, is unstable and afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder. He is the first felon elected as President of the United States.  Who knows what will happen?  I was never a big fan of Kamala Harris, but I see Trump as unpredictable enough to plunge us into war.  For the next four years we will face the Republicans enacting their agenda, making their laws and verifying them via a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

I am not a political pundit, so all I can do is give my own personal reactions. Until recently, I thought that this election was Trump’s to lose, even though I knew it would be a squeaker. But Trump’s behavior over the last few weeks—the dark language, the execrable performance during the one debate, his laughter at the idea that reporters might be shot, the vows to overturn America starting on Day 1—all of this made me think that there is no way Americans could elect such a man.

They did.

On the other hand, I sometimes thought that this election was Harris’s to lose.  What the American people wanted, I thought, was not only somebody likable (I don’t see Harris that way, but as someone who panders and dissimulates), and, most important, we—and by that I mean centrists, Democrats, and Republicans who don’t like Trump—wanted Harris to espouse a policy. But instead of hearing that, we heard a woman unable to answer questions, who pandered to the electorate using identity politics (which she’d seemingly foresworn), who seemed to be hiding the fact that she was really on the Progressive Left, and, in general, did not seem able to convince the public that she could handle the most important job in the world. She did not earn her nomination, but inherited it, and subsequently did nothing to show that she deserved it.

Still, all along I felt that she was a far better candidate than was Trump.  She lost, I think, because she was not sufficiently centrist, and because she didn’t show, as Presidents must, that she had the ability to think on her feet.  If there is a lesson for Democrats here, it is to recalibrate their message and move towards the center, and listen to the American people when they speak about things like immigration and the economy (no, tariffs—also Trump’s solution—are not the way to solve that)

Did wokeness cost Harris the election? Who knows, and I’m not prepared to assert it. (Note that the NYT above considers this a blow against “the elite.”) But I think the era of identity politics (an integral part of wokeism) has come to an end. Harris largely avoided them, but she still lost, for she did not lay out a program that would appeal to all Americans, which was what she promised to do. Perhaps, given the divisions in America, such a program is impossible.

The Free Press ponders why Harris lost:

Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake—all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, he has faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney general is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties.

And yet here he is: America’s 47th president.

. . . . Trump’s mastery of political imagery [they describe four “iconic photographs,” including his punching-the-air photo after a bullet nicked his ear] stands in sharp contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris, who kept making gaffes when she needed to demonstrate basic competence. One such howler came at a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, eight days before Election Day. As the crowd chanted “Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la!” the vice president implored her fans: “Now I want each of you to shout your own name. Do that.” The cheers stopped. Then Harris offered an awkward laugh and, like a comic having to explain a joke that didn’t land, she said, “’cause it’s about all of us.”

In one stumble, you have a synopsis of what went wrong for the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024. Here was a friendly audience, raring to go, in a must-win state, brought to stunned silence because the candidate apparently hadn’t thought through a throwaway line at a rally. In the home stretch of the election, Harris couldn’t close the deal even as the media graded her on a curve.

In some ways, the Democratic Party should have seen all of this coming. In the perilous four weeks between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket, a number of Democratic insiders publicly proposed an abbreviated primary campaign to avoid anointing the vice president. Harris was seen by many Democrats as a liability. At the beginning of the summer she had a 37.9 approval rating, along with a reputation for being terrible to her staff and pathetic when it came to thinking on her feet.

A key part of her strategy was a disciplined avoidance of the media. Harris didn’t do her first solo television interview as her party’s nominee until five weeks after her selection on September 13. And until October, she largely avoided saying what she would do if she won the White House.

That turned out to be a good strategy. Because once Harris started to open her mouth, she reverted to form. Consider her October 8 appearance on The View, when she was asked the most obvious question of a vice president serving in an unpopular administration: What would you have done differently than President Biden? Her response: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

Is there any good news? Only that we won’t have a January 6 situation again! But joking aside, and despite all the anguish of my friends and most Democrats, I am strangely hopeful—hopeful that yes, the Republic can and will withstand four years of Trump and Republican rule. Somehow my faith in America has immunized me against the results of this election.

Beyond that, I can make no predictions save that Trump will not be elected again.

Here are the results of our poll from two days ago, and some readers have already sent anguished comments and emails. Harris was favored by more than six to one, and she was predicted to win by 62% of those who voted:

Finally, I listened to most of this two-hour podcast yesterday, created by The Free Press and moderated by Bari Weiss. It shows Sam Harris making the case for electing Kamala Harris, and Ben Shapiro making the case for Trump.  This is about the best discussion I’ve heard, and I was convinced by Harris, especially his arguments against Trump. But Shapiro was no slouch, even though his case against Harris was better than his case for Trump.

Again, all I can think is this: “Our Republic will stand.” Ceiling Cat bless us all.

You are welcome to comment below. I’ll put up the Hili dialogue in an hour or so.

If you don’t want to be glued to the tube, I’ve learned from Luana of a good site to see the election returns in real time—that is, if you’re a fanatic about these things. It’s called 270towin, and shows a map giving votes in the states as they come in, and, at the same time, the latest Electoral College vote. For example, here’s what I see right now, a dead heat.

The color palette to the right tells you which states are considered safe, up for grabs, or (in tan) tossups when you click on them in real time.

When the count reaches 270, we have a winner. You can toggle back and forth between “live results” and “forecast”.

Feel free to blow off steam or elation below. It’s going to be a long night, and I have a feeling that the election won’t be settled when I wake up tomorrow.

Just yesterday I wrote about the drive in New Zealand to integrate indigenous medicine (Rongoā Māori, or RM) with modern (often called “Western”) medicine.  The problem is that RM not only uses  spiritual treatments (prayer, singing, dunking the sufferer in water) but also herbal remedies, and neither of these have been tested for efficacy using randomized, controlled, double-blind testing. This is the gold standard used in modern medicine to test the efficacy of drugs and (sometimes) surgery. Without such tests, we simply can’t say that a medical intervention actually works.

But the drive to sacralize indigenous “ways of knowing” is strong, and has spread from New Zealand across the Pacific, where it is growing in both Canada and the United States.  Although it’s one thing—and still a bad thing—to prevent scientists from examining bones and artifacts found on land claimed to be “owned” by indigenous people, it’s a different thing entirely to start treating people with indigenous medicine. Although everyone can decide whether or not they want to be treated with scientifically tried-and-true procedures versus quackery like homeopathy, or even seek religious “cures,” children can’t make such decisions. They are subject to the whims and faiths of their parents, and in Faith Versus Fact I document some horrible deaths of children  propagandized into religious healing by their parents.  (Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, are forbidden to receive blood transfusions because of a wonky interpretation of the Bible.) At least when you take your kids for their vaccinations, you can be almost certain that they’ll acquire immunity to infection.

As I said, this kind of harmful sacralization of medical “ways of knowing” is on our doorstep, and below is an op-ed from the WSJ (by the editorial board) reporting that the Biden Administration has approved funding for “traditional health care practices of Indigenous people.”  And it doesn’t seem to matter exactly what those healthcare practices are! It can be herbs, prayer, touch, chanting, and so on. The government will pay for it!

Click below to read the short piece, which I’ve reproduced almost in its entirety, or find it archived here.

The “housing” bit is tangential, reporting that “the Administration is letting states use federal Medicaid dollars to pay for low-income housing, mini-refrigerators and food. A Biden executive order last month gave states a green light to use Medicaid to pay for ‘gun violence prevention’ counseling.”  I don’t have such strong feelings about that, though it does seem a tad outisde the ambit of what Medicaid is for.

But main part of the article, given below, is about government funding for what seems like quackery.  And if you want to argue that this op-ed is “fake news” because it comes from the op-ed section of the paper (yes, that section leans right), you can find the same information in an NPR article from October 19 of this year.

A long excerpt (bolding is mine):

The Biden Administration is trying to woo Native Americans whose votes could be pivotal in Western states. One pre-election gambit is to let Medicaid pay for Native American “traditional medicine.”

The Health and Human Services Department last month approved requests by Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to use federal Medicaid funds to cover “traditional health care practices” of indigenous people. “We are extending access to culturally appropriate, quality health care in Tribal communities,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

HHS says the Medicaid approvals are “the latest action demonstrating the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to support and invest in Indigenous communities across the country.” In short, this looks like another income redistribution scheme.

HHS doesn’t plan to restrict the types of traditional medicine that Medicaid will cover, nor the types of “healers.” Each tribal “facility can tailor provider qualifications for their traditional health care practitioners,” HHS says.

An American Medical Association brief on the state Medicaid proposals says “traditional healers are often identified in their Tribal community by their innate gift of healing” and “typically work informally.” Their “healing services” could include sweat lodges, prayers, purification rituals, songs, dance, herbal remedies and shamanism.

One healer who advocated for Medicaid coverage told the Salt Lake Tribune in February that he sometimes prescribes a “special ceremony against the negative energy of diabetes.” Herbs, he said, are also a favorite remedy for chronic illnesses including cancer plus a “special expression of prayer to the deities that made those herbs.”

Herbal remedies may have their uses, but Medicaid is supposed to cover evidence-based treatments. HHS says “demonstration projects” can determine if traditional medicine improves health outcomes. But lack of access to modern medical care—not lack of traditional remedies—is why Native Americans suffer more disease and worse health outcomes.

The last paragraph is correct in both assertions: Medicaid isn’t supposed to pay for quackery (seriously: “sweat lodges, songs, dance and shamanism”?) and Native Americans do lack sufficient access to modern health care.  The first bit is documented here:

Alternative treatments that haven’t been proven in scientific studies usually aren’t covered by Medicaid. Some procedures, such as chiropractic treatments and acupuncture, are sometimes covered. These treatments are more likely to be covered if they are recommended or prescribed by a doctor. Other alternative treatments that are occasionally covered include massage, pain treatments, and nutrition therapy. Some treatments, such as herbal and homeopathic therapies, are usually not approved for Medicaid payment.

Well, I’m not so sure that many chiropractic therapies, or any form of acupuncture, has been “proven in scientific studies”. But your tax dollars are paying for it! Now get ready for your tax dollars to pay for sweat lodges, songs, dances, and ceremonies. And you don’t even have to live in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to be dunned for quackery. The fund for Medicaid comes from all of us.

 

h/t: Frau Katze

Reader Thomas Webber is a new contributor, but his photos of flowers are lovely. Tom’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  The images have been stacked, but I removed that information from the captions.  On to Tom:

The University of Florida owns and manages a large pine forest near Gainesville for teaching and research. Much of it is a commercial-type pine plantation, with smallish trees all the same age growing in close-packed straight rows.

Another part is managed to restore something like the native pre-settlement forest; in this section the trees are relatively old and widely spaced, and the canopy is fairly open, allowing plenty of light to reach the understory. This forest type has evolved under the influence of fire, and the wildfires have now been replaced by managed burns. The understory is host to an impressive variety of shrubs, grasses, and forbs, many of which are adept at exploiting burned- or other periodically disturbed patches of the landscape. Here is a just a small sample of the wildflowers I’ve encountered there in late summer and early fall this year.

I think I’ve identified all of them correctly to genus, and most to species, but I have put the qualifier “cf.” before some of the species epithets I’m not so sure of. I invite corrections.

Prairie clover, Dalea cf. pinnata. 1 cm.:

Spurred butterfly pea, Centrosema virginianum. 3.5 cm across the long side:

Hempvine, Mikania cf. scandens. 2.5 cm. This one has not fully opened:

Blackroot, Pterocaulon pycnostachyum. 7 cm long. I was surprised to find these at this time of year; they are usually spring flowers, but a few emerged in one plot after the mid-summer burn:

Silkgrass, Pityopsis cf. graminifolia. 1.5 cm.:

Pineweed, Hypericum gentianoides. 3 mm. The flowers are tiny but the plants can be conspicuous; this year they covered a dirt road in one of the less-traveled parts of the forest:

Button eryngo, Eryngium yuccifolium. 1.5 cm.:

Azure sage, Salvia azurea. 1 cm across the lower lobe:

I especially like the next ones because they are uncommon, furtive, and take some finding.

Sensitive partridge pea, Chamaecrista nictitans. 7 mm across the lower lobe:

Ticktrefoil, Desmodium cf. paniculatum. 7 mm across the upper lobe:

Florida sensitive-briar, Mimosa quadrivalvis. 1 cm.:

Rustweed, Polypremum procumbens. 4 mm.:

Mouse melon, Melothria pendula. 3 mm.:

Axil-flower, Mecardonia acuminata. 5 mm.:

Rongoā Māori is the “indigenous way of healing”: a combination of herbal and spiritual medicine used by the Māori of New Zealand.  As The Encyclopedia of New Zealand notes, there were both supernatural and human illnesses, with the former treated through spiritual means (e.g., prayers, dunking in water, and other treatments described below), and the latter through herbal remedies. Here, for example, are the supernatural maladies and remedies:

Mate atua – supernatural illnesses

Mate atua were supernatural afflictions, sometimes caused by malevolent spirits when a person had broken a tapu (religious restriction). Dealing with mate atua required a tohunga (priest). His first job was to determine the hara (transgression) committed, and to identify the spirit. The tohunga took a thorough case history of all the patient’s actions before they got ill, sometimes including the patient’s and family’s dreams.

A tohunga’s job

Tohunga were experts in various fields, including the arts, agriculture, fishing, warfare and healing. They were also seen as the earthly medium of the gods, and were intensively trained in whare wānanga (houses of higher learning). Tohunga held a position of authority and respect, but also had the huge responsibility of keeping their people healthy.

Finding the cause was the first stage of treatment, followed by exorcism of the spirit that had possessed the patient. The next stage was a whakahoro (purificatory rite) to remove the effects of the tapu. This usually involved dipping the patient in a stream while the tohunga performed a karakia (prayer) or incantation.

Mariunga

The Ngāti Porou leader Tuta Nihoniho described the mariunga – a wand of wood such as karamū, māpou or maire, which was touched to the body of an invalid and received their essence. It was then taken to a tohunga, who could tell whether the patient would recover.

Takutaku rite

Another rite, the takutaku, involved touching the patient with a karamū leaf, which was then floated downstream. The malevolent spirit would be carried to sea and then to Te Waha o te Parata (a huge whirlpool, caused by a great monster), and finally to the underworld. Freed of the spirit, the patient was then sprinkled with, or immersed in, water.

The site also lists a number of herbal plants used for “human” illnesses, although, as far as I know, none of them have been tested by the gold standard of modern medicine: controlled, randomized, and double-blind testing. I have no doubt that some of these plants do work, but in the absence of testing we won’t really know which ones, and how efficacious they are.

As Wikipedia notes, these forms refer. .

. . . . to the traditional Māori medicinal practices in New Zealand. Rongoā was one of the Māori cultural practices targeted by the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, until lifted by the Maori Welfare Act 1962. In the later part of the 20th century there was renewed interest in Rongoā as part of a broader Māori renaissance.

Rongoā can involve spiritual, herbal and physical components. Herbal aspects used plants such as harakeke, kawakawa, rātā, koromiko, kōwhai, kūmarahou, mānuka, tētēaweka and rimu.

The practice of Rongoā is only regulated by the Therapeutics Products Bill in the case of commercial or wholesale production so that “Māori will continue using and making rongoā just as they have for generations.”

The Tohunga Suppression Act outlawed traditional medicine in favor of “Western” medicine, but, as the note above shows, the ban lasted just 55 years, and Rongoā Māori is now again legal, though its practitioners often realize that they need to send patients to modern doctors if a traditional cure doesn’t look propitious.

However, there seems to be a move afoot to make Rongoā Māori coequal to modern medicine, if not in curative properties at least in “deep mutual respect.” But, those two items are not independent, for how can a modern physician respect medicines that haven’t been properly tested, much less have any respect for supernatural cures?

What is bad about the attempt to get “deep respect” for indigenous medicine that hasn’t been properly vetted, is that with medicine, unlike with incorporating other indigenous ways of knowing into teaching (e.g., Māātauranga Māori), human lives and health are at stake, so I do have issues with the article below in the ANZ Journal of Surgery (click to read for free).

This study is really an anecdotal one, and with a very small and geographically limited sample, too. The authors recruited four colorectal “Western” surgeons (WS) from the Christchurch region of New Zealand, all of whom had expressed interest in Rongoā Māori (RM). Likewise, the authors recruited seven Rongoā Māori practitioners, four of whom volunteered to be part of the study. Therefore we have a total of eight subjects, all of whom were asked their views about the medicine practiced by the other group. The interviews took place once, and were 30-60 minutes long.  The actual study thus lasted a maximum of eight hours.

The upshot:

Western surgeons’ perspectives on RM

The results are no surprise: the doctors didn’t know much about RM. But they were “open to collaboration”, though it wasn’t clear what kind of collaboration. (I can understand that a Māori patient might want a Māori RM practitioner around, at least for solace and cultural comfort.)  And of course the doctors thought that, in general, there needs to be better communication between practitioners of modern and of indigenous medicine. Finally, the surgeons cited “systemic barriers, such as bureaucratic hurdles and the absence of clear referral pathways” as impediments to collaboration or “integration”.

Rongoa practitioners’ perspectifes on modern medicine

The indigenous doctors “often feel overlooked within the healthcare system.  And this leads to the article’s theme: that modern medicine must be infused in some way with indigenous medicine: a “genuine collaboration”. For instance we read this:

Rongoā practitioners often feel overlooked within the healthcare system. This highlights the need for initiatives that aim to raise the profile of Rongoā Māori within New Zealand’s healthcare system (Table 1). One practitioner mentioned ‘collaboration is minimal, at this stage like the non-Māori community certainly don’t even know that Rongoā exists or anything about it and so that’s not being referred’.

. . . Formulating a genuinely collaborative approach requires recognition of Rongoā Māori as a an option in the patient care journey. ‘Building relationships is key… maybe starting with shared learning experiences,’ one practitioner suggested, proposing foundational steps towards effective collaboration.

. . . . This perspective challenges the healthcare sector to move beyond tokenistic inclusion, advocating for a genuine integration of Rongoā Māori that honours its potential to contribute to improved health outcomes, particularly for Māori patients.

. . . Understanding Rongoā Māori in its full depth requires acknowledging and valuing its comprehensive approach to health, which integrates the spiritual, mental, and physical dimensions of well-being.

The problem here is that we do not know the potential of RM to contributed to improved health outcomes–not without scientific testing of RM remedies, especially the “spiritual” ones. The article refers repeatedly to “mutual respect” of the two types of medicine, as well as the advantage of RM in being “holistic” (presumably meaning it uses spiritual cures as well as medical ones).

The conclusion, which was inevitable, is that modern medicine should collaborate with RM in curing patients. I quote from the paper (bolding is mine):

As identified in the interviews, it is imperative that a curriculum for healthcare professionals encompasses not only the theoretical concepts but also the practical applications of Rongoā Māori. This requires a willingness to move beyond a cursory acknowledgement of Indigenous practices within the medical education system to embedding it as a vital component of healthcare training. It was proposed that an effective educational initiative could take the form of an immersive wānanga on a marae, where tauira (students) and tākuta (doctors) would have the opportunity to learn directly from Rongoā practitioners in a setting that honours the roots of the mātauranga.28–30 In addition to this, incorporating placement based learning would further enable Western practitioners to observe the holistic model of care first hand. This aligns with the insights from the interviews where it was emphasized that Rongoā Māori is dynamic in its practice and does not follow a prescribed regimen.17 By having the opportunity to experience this personalized approach, healthcare professionals can better appreciate the value of nurturing this collaborative relationship.

. . .Recognizing the immense benefits that a holistic model of healthcare offers, there is an unequivocal need to navigate and dismantle the systemic barriers that Rongoā practitioners are faced with. This necessitates a concerted push to ensuring Indigenous healing practices are formally recognized within healthcare frameworks to facilitate a collaborative coexistence with Western medical practices. Moreover, establishing structural support to facilitate funding and infrastructure is an essential component to enhancing the capacity of the current healthcare system to address a diverse range of health needs and allowing this to thrive. It is paramount that this collaboration is guided by Rangatira and Tohunga in this field to ensure the delivery of health services is culturally congruent and responsive. The move towards an inclusive healthcare system that respects the diversity of cultures aligns with Te Tiriti o Waitangi’s principles, honouring Māori sovereignty and self-determination over their health.

“Te Teriti,” of course, is the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which made England the sovereign government of New Zealand, conferred on the Māori British citizenship with all the attending rights, and allowed Māori to keep their lands and possessions. But there is nothing about health in that treaty at all, though of course anybody can “self determine” whether they get care, and whether they get RM care, modern medicine, or both. But the Treaty of Waitangi has assumed an almost sacred position in New Zealand culture, now viewed as mandating that all aspects of Māori culture and “ways of knowing” must be considered coequal in the country. Right now there’s a big battle about how far Māori “ways of knowing” are taught as coequal to science in schools, and the indigenous people seem to be winning that fight. This article is just a salvo in the battle for medicinal hegemony.

But before they win the Battle of Medicine, any RM-based cures, whether they be based on plants or supernaturalism, must be tested—and tested according to the best procedures of modern medicine, usually double-blind, randomized, and controlled trials. Without those trials, you simply can’t be sure that a treatment works. Saying “our tradition shows that it works” is not sufficient, nor is the claim “well, it worked for me!”  We all know the power of confirmation bias and of the placebo effect, and the kind of testing described above is designed to eliminate these effects. (As Richard Feynman famously said, “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”)

So no: there cannot be deep mutual respect between indigenous medicine and modern (aka “Western”) medicine until indigenous treatments are tested according to the standards of Western medicine. It will not work the other way around.

I am heartened that some RM practitioners recognize when herbs and superstition won’t work, and summarily hand their patients over to modern doctors.  But I don’t think RM should be integrated with modern medicine, or treated with great respect.  Until it’s proven efficacious, the null hypothesis should be that the untested treatments of RM comprise quackery

The campaigning for President reaches a fever pitch today, and then tomorrow people head for the polls to cast their vote (many of us, including me, have voted by mail already).  This is of course an unscientific poll of readers, so let’s call it the Nate Goldenberg poll.  There are two of them, and of course votes are anonymous.  First, tell us your own choice:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

and then tell us who, in your view, will win:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I’ve left the second poll unexpired because we have no idea how long the vote-counting will go on!

Of course you are encouraged to leave comments pertaining to both questions.

My friend Andrew Berry, who teaches and advises biology students at Harvard, has long had the bug that infected me when I was younger: the desire to trek in Nepal, where the mountains are impossibly high. This summer he took a long guided trek into little-visited parts of Nepal (guides are required for these places), producing a great 37-minute video (bottom) accompanied by music and sound. (For further mountain adventures, see Andrew’s one-hour video of his 2023 trek to Dolpo and the fabled Kingdom of Mustang, featured in these pages.)  The notes below are his:

Limi Valley Trek, June ’24

Like Jerry, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years in Nepal, most often on a trail, trekking. It’s hard to beat a high altitude encounter with the mightiest mountains on earth.  I’m on an academic schedule, which means that I have plenty of opportunity to go travel over the summer, but unfortunately trekking, Nepal, and the summer don’t really go that well together.  The most pressing of my university responsibilities cease around the beginning of June.  The monsoon typically arrives in Nepal in the middle of that same month, veiling the mountains in banks of cloud, soaking the trekker (and everyone else), and delighting/stimulating/exciting the voracious leeches that inhabit the montane forests.  In short, monsoon trekking is pretty dismal.

There are however some regions of Nepal that are less affected by the monsoon than others.  Specifically, the further west and north you go, the less the impact.  It is, after all, the Bay of Bengal branch of the monsoon that inundates Nepal, so it is coming from the east.  Heading north is to take advantage of the rain shadow imposed by the main cordillera of the Himalaya.  Some regions of Nepal are north of the range — they’re politically Nepal but geographically, culturally, and linguistically Tibetan.  In summer ’23 I went to Dolpa and Mustang, this summer to Simikot, the main town in the NW corner of Nepal.  This kind of trekking is a far remove from the kind of ‘teahouse’ trekking that Jerry and I are accustomed to: you walk from village to village and stay in local accommodations, meaning that you can get away with carrying little more than a sleeping bag.  To visit the more remote areas, you’re required to have expensive permits and to be accompanied by officially recognized guides.  In addition, because these routes take you beyond inhabited areas, it’s necessary to camp and to be self-sufficient in food and other supplies.  The result of these joint requirements is a logistically complex undertaking — thank goodness for the excellent outfitter I work with in Kathmandu, Raj Dhamala of Himalayan Trekkers.

I’ve always wanted to go to Simikot.  After spending six months in Nepal before going to university, I had a map of the country on the wall of my room for all three years of college.  As I stared at it, Simikot came, for me, to symbolize the remote, inaccessible Nepal that had been out of bounds for me the year before (for financial and permitting reasons).  It’s taken a few years actually to convert that fixation into an actual visit (42, if you insist on asking!), but I’m happy to report that Simikot didn’t disappoint.  The town is clustered around a Twin Otter landing strip, a slice of the horizontal — well, a slice of gentle slope — in a world of plunging verticals.  The mighty Karnali river crashes through its gorge far, far below.  Plenty of trekker-tourists come through (for many, it’s a jumping off point for a visit to Buddhism’s holy mountain, Kailash, in Tibet), but Simikot remains primarily an administrative and trading center.  Google Translate’s influence has not apparently extended to Simikot (or at least it hadn’t when this sign was painted)

 

Our route started — initially in a Jeep — and finished in Simikot.  Two weeks.  Its main focus was the Limi Valley, which runs W-E just south of, and parallel to, the Chinese/Tibetan border.  An upside of the timing is that this is the time of year that livestock — cattle, sheep, goats, yak — are moved up to high altitude summer pastures, meaning that we frequently encountered people and their animals undertaking the same seasonal migrations that their ancestors (both human and animal) have done for aeons.  It truly is a privilege to spend time in such spectacular country, and to meet so many people living lives so far removed from ours.  With Raj in Kathmandu, I had discussed the possibility of tacking on a (minor) peak ascent on to the trek, but I ended up wimping out.  Just a hike for me: 5000m (16,400′) over passes is plenty high enough for me.  I think Ang Dawa, one of three wonderful Sherpa guides with me, was a little disappointed by this lack of serious climbing (he’s summited Everest five times, so he’s entitled to his disappointment)

Here’s a video montage from the trip.  I like to take panoramic photos in country like this, and I think a slow pan across images like these is the best way to appreciate the scenery.  Also, I can’t resist shooting plenty of video too.  So much to see!

Be sure to enlarge the video:

Here’s this week’s comedy/news bit on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show.  His topic is voters who can’t seem to agree on a Presidential candidate, and how they should be voting for Kamala Harris.  Maher avers that if Harris loses, it will because of “progressophobia,” which he calls “Steven Pinker’s term for the liberal fear that of ever admitting when things are actually good.”

Maher’s point is that salaries and the economy are “great”, as he says, and that the perception that they’re not is not a reason to vote for Trump.  The predicted recession didn’t happen (note the very salacious==and somewhat tasteless–joke about Trump’s sexual proficiency, followed by a not-bad imitation of Trump himself. I love the “in this reality, if you can’t get bacon, you’ll die” statement, mocking one recent assertion of Trump.  One statement I don’t get, though, is this one: ” I don’t know if Kamala worked at McDonald’s, but she’s not Flo from Progressive.”  Help me out here.

It’s basically an endorsement of Harris, saying that although she’s not perfect, and is mostly campaigning by dissing Trump rather than advancing her own plans, Maher finishes by saying, “‘I’m not Trump’ is still a really great reason.”

I’m actually surprised that the article below was published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), one of the more high-quality science journals, just a tad below Science and Nature in prestige. It has had a reputation for being “progressive” (e.g., woke), one that I discussed last year when Steve Pinker had an email exchange with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Marcia McNutt.

After McNutt, along with the Presidents of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Engineering, issued a pro-affirmative-action and pro-DEI statement on June 30, 2023, Pinker wrote McNutt pointing out that such statements are incompatible with the NAS’s mission. His email (reproduced at the link above) contained this bit:

I would like to express my disquiet at the recent NAS Statement on Affirmative Action. The desirability of racial preferences in university admissions is not a scientific issue but a political and moral one. It involves tradeoffs such as maintaining the proportion of African Americans in elite universities at the expense of fairness to qualified applicants who are rejected because of their race, including other racial minorities such as Asian Americans. Moreover it is a highly politicized policy, almost exclusively associated with the left, and one that majorities of Americans of all races oppose.

It’s not clear to me how endorsing one side of a politically polarizing, nonscientific issue is compatible with the Academy’s stated mission “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

The problem is worse than being incompatible with the Academy’s mission; it could substantially harm the Academy’s goal of promoting politicians’ and the public’s acceptance of science. Extensive research has shown that rejection of the scientific consensus on evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and other scientific topics is uncorrelated with scientific literacy but predictable from political orientation: the farther to the right, the greater the rejection of evolution and climate change.

McNutt wrote back, but declined to have her answer reproduced on this site. Nevertheless, from Pinker’s response to her response, you can gather that she defended the stand of the original three-President statement, apparently written to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision that college admissions could not be based on race.

Steve said this, among other things (again, see the whole of his email at the site):

Even more concerning, the statement could have been lifted out of the pages of any recent left-wing opinion magazine, since it reiterates the current conviction that racial inequities are primarily due to “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education” and to “individual bias and discrimination.” Entirely unmentioned are other potential causes of racial discrepancies, including poverty, school quality, family structure, and cultural norms. It is surprising to see a scientific organization attribute a complex sociological outcome to a single cause.

Finally, the statement, and your letter, equate diversity of ideas with diversity of race. The advantages of intellectual diversity are obvious (though I have not seen any statements from the Academy addressing the shrinking political diversity among science faculty, nor the increasing campaigns that punish or cancel scientists who express politically unpopular views). The assumption that racial diversity is the same as intellectual diversity was exactly what the Supreme Court decision singled out and struck down, since it carries with it the racist assumptions that black students think alike, and that their role in universities is to present their race-specific views to their classmates.

Dr. McNutt replied, but again did not give permission for her letter to be reproduced.

I have to give McNutt credit, then, for allowing the two-page piece letter to be published, as it contains a pretty explicit criticism of McNutt, especially of a later piece by McNutt and Crow, “Enhancing trust in science and democracy in an age of information,” published in Issues in Science and Technology. McNutt and Crow bemoan the detachment of science from society and society’s ethical values and make this statement, which is debatable:

Therefore, we believe the scientific community must more fully embrace its vital role in producing and disseminating knowledge in democratic societies. In Science in a Democratic Society, philosopher Philip Kitcher reminds us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” To produce outcomes that advance the public good, scientists must also assess the moral bases of their pursuits. Although the United States has implemented the democratically driven, publicly engaged, scientific culture that Vannevar Bush outlined in Science, the Endless Frontier in 1945, Kitcher’s moral message remains relevant to both conducting science and communicating the results to the public, which pays for much of the enterprise of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It’s on scientists to articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce in ways that can be understood by citizens and decisionmakers.

While the good part of McNutt and Crow’s message is their call for scientists to explain the scientific results of their work to the public, it’s a different matter to ask scientists to “produce outcomes that advance the public good.” That can be an explicit aim of science, as in producing golden rice or Covid vaccines, but many scientists doing “pure” science are motivated by simple curiosity. That curiosity, too, can have salubrious social outcomes, but most of the time it just enriches our knowledge of the universe.

Further, it seems excessive to asks scientists to also “articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce.”  Are scientists experts in morality? And what are “public values”—the latest ideology of the times? One might think from this piece, and the correspondence above, that McNutt does favor the politicization of science, but along the lines of “progressive” politics.

Thus I was pleased to see this letter, by evolutionary molecular biologist Ford Doolittle, appear as an opinion piece in the latest PNAS.  Here he takes issue not only with the politicization of science, but explicitly with McNutt and Crow’s article. You can read the letter by clicking on the screenshot below, or read the pdf here:

But Doolittle begins with a thesis that I find dubious: that “group selection”—the differential reproduction of genetically different human groups—has led to our drive to understand nature—indeed, to selection on many species to “understand” their environment. But, says Doolittle, group selection has not led to the drive to integrate science and social values. (Other species don’t really have “social values” anyway). Bolding is mine:

Most humanists and scientists now agree that science is special in its relationship to the real world, more special than are other human activities—religion and politics, for instance. But philosophers of science keep arguing about why that should be. There is, I believe, a good evolutionary explanation of why—one that incorporates what is often called group selection (1). But group selection will only move humans closer to the truth if researchers and others take care to ensure that social values don’t distract or mislead.

So, my plea is that scientists and others ensure that science remains independent from social values. Social values are constraints—limitations on the evolutionary process. I worry that mixing science and social values hampers scientific progress.

and this from Doolittle’s piece:

My evolutionary argument starts with the contention that there is a selective advantage at all levels to having a better map of reality. Having a better understanding of the world promotes fitness. Living things at all levels (genes, cells, multicellular organisms, species, multispecies communities, tribes, nations of humans, and even broader cultural frameworks) that have such a better map of the world leave more progeny or last longer than living things that don’t, all else being equal. This has been true from the beginning of life.

. . . And, of course, human groups—tribes, nations, and broader cultural collectives—that have better knowledge of the natural and cultural world have a better chance, all else being equal, than those that have less adequate knowledge.

This is a bit mixed up, for evolutionary group selection is a genetic phenomenon, not a cultural one, and in this case would argue that some groups of humans genetically endowed with better knowledge of the environment would survive and reproduce better than less-informed groups. And, over time, this would spread the genes for acquiring more and more accurate knowledge about the universe.

The problem, as always with group selection, is that, because it depends on the differential survival and reproduction of groups, it is much slower than selection acting on individuals harboring genes producing an ambition to know. Those genes would spread within groups and there is no bar to having individuals with such genes. (I think Doolittle’s misconception here is that only groups can differ in their urge to understand.) Group selection is usually invoked to explain the evolution of traits that are advantageous to groups but not individuals, like pure altruism towards nonrelatives. But over time, group selection has fallen out of favor; see this eloquent critique by Pinker on Edge: “The false allure of group selection“).

Doolittle notes that occasionally Darwin was a group selectionist, but in fact A. R. Wallace, in his first exposition of natural selection, published simultaneously with Darwin’s, was even more of one!

But I digress; natural selection acting on genes (Dawkins’s “replicators”) and the bodies bearing them (the “vehicles”) is sufficient to produce the drive to know.  Still, in the end it hardly matters. Humans are curious creatures, and there’s doubtlessly a big effect of evolution on that trait.

And it doesn’t even matter whether our drive to know is evolutionary rather than purely social if one argues, as Doolittle does, is that mixing science and politics is bad for science. Here’s Doolittle’s peroration about why mixing science and ideology is bad:

But outside certain limits, society is not ethically uniform, and important values are not shared. We are so politically polarized now that there is an ever-present danger of “weaponizing” the pursuit of knowledge, and thus of the results of earnest inquiry being dismissed by those whose social values disagree with those of scientists. We embrace political polarization to the detriment of both scientists and the scientific enterprise.

Science is based on the assumption that our collective understanding of the world, though always imperfect, generally improves over time and that there is no trade-off between what we think we should do and the scientific truth. As the 18th-century philosopher David Hume noted, you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” The consilience of scientists’ personal social values (which surely have changed over time) and modern, fundable science is precisely why I see current trends in politicization as dangerous to the scientific enterprise—a worry underscored when these trends are viewed through an evolutionary perspective going from genes to individual cells to tribes to broader cultural frameworks.

We scientists should be even more careful not to allow what we think is “right” (what we ought to do) to influence what we think is “true” of the world. What we think is right changes with time and context, but what we think is true should be our eternal goal.

Doolittle notes that “it is inevitable that science which does not agree with some aspect of society’s current value system has little chance of getting funded,” but that isn’t 100% true. Sure, if you want to show that there is “structural racism” in an academic field, then your grant may well get funded, but it could also get funded if you’re studying the systematics of ants, or string theory, or the migration distance of Drosophila. Those kinds of studies get funded based on merit, not on “society’s current value system”—unless, that is, you define “value system” tautologically as “what people want to fund”.

In the middle of the article, though, he’s careful not to go too hard after McNutt. But, again to her credit, she let this be published:

As an ethical constraint, the sentiments of Marcia McNutt, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, and her coauthor Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, might serve as a contemporary example (10). They write that science must “produce outcomes that advance the public good,” citing the Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher to remind us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” Science, in other words, should be constrained by human social values. Perhaps they meant by this that science functions best (that is, provides better understandings of the world) in democratic societies, rather than arguing that democracy is best for our species. The former is an epistemic value, but the latter is a social value and thus an unnecessary constraint.

 

McNutt and Crow’s social values are mine, too, and those of many scientists, I hasten to add. . . .

As I said, if you want to stretch “ethical values” to become “the idea of what sorts of questions need answering,” then of course the science that people do, and especially the science that gets funded, will generally comport with social values. But McNutt, Crow and Doolittle are talking, I think, about prioritizing science that matches our current ideology (i.e., justifying DEI initiatives, documenting inequities, or trying to show that indigenous “ways of knowing” are coequal to modern science). Alternatively, McNutt and Crow might urge us not to do forms of science carrying any possibility that they could have bad social consequences (the classic example is studying group differences in IQ).

But it would have behooved Doolittle to give more examples of the kind of science that people are objecting to now. I’ve written a lot about the ways that ideology is intruding in science in detrimental ways: two examples are my paper with Luana Maroja on ‘The ideological subversion of biology” and also the Abbott et al. paper “In defense of merit in science.”

I see this has been a rather rambling post, involving group selection, the debasing of science by politics, and debates in the scientific literature.  So be it, and again I’m pleased that NAS President McNutt has allowed an op-ed to be posted in “her” journal that explicitly takes her to task. That is in the finest tradition of allowing open discourse in the literature.

h/t: Anna, Luana

I have about three wildlife-photo submissions in reserve, so we’re going to run out soon. If you have some good photos (not blurry or small!), please send them to me. Thanks!

Today is Sunday, and we’re resuming John Avise‘s series on the birds of Hawaii; this is the last installment. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Birds in Hawaii, Part 4 

This week we conclude our 4-part photographic journey into native and introduced bird species that you might encounter on a natural-history tour of the Hawaiian Islands.

Red-vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus cafer) (native to the Indian subcontinent):

Red-whiskered Bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus) (native to Asia):

Salmon-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua moluccensis) (native to Indonesia):

Spotted Dove (Spilopelia chinensis) (native to the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia):

Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Ardenna pacifica) (widespread in tropical Pacific and Indian oceans):

Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) (native to North America):

White Tern (Gygis alba) (widespread in the world’s tropical oceans):

White Tern flying:

 White-rumped Shama (Copsychus malabaricus), male in bird-bander’s hand (native to India and southeast Asia):

White-rumped Shama female:

Yellow-fronted Canary (Serinus mozambicus) (native to Africa):

Zebra Dove (Geopelia striata) (native to southeast Asia):

Here’s the beginning of Wikipedia’s entry for Kathleen Hagerty, the Provost of Northwestern University here in Evanston, Illinois. It’s a screenshot, and I’ve marked it:

I don’t find any discussion about “antisemite” in the “history” section of the entry, so this description must have been in the original post created in August, 2020.

Now why would this description of Hagerty be added to her entry?  One thing I recall is that Northwestern was one of the few universities to actually bargain and strike a deal with the pro-Palestinian protestors at her school.  I find this from The Minnesota Lawyer (bolding is mine):

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a federal Title VI complaint against Northwestern University on behalf of the Young America’s Foundation, which has an active chapter on the university’s campus.

The complaint documents the university’s plan to offer nearly $1.9 million in scholarship funds, faculty positions, and student-organization space to Palestinian students and staff. As a recipient of federal funds, Northwestern University is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “on the grounds of race, color, or national origin,” WILL said.

Northwestern University officials have struck a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment on campus. In exchange for removal of the encampment, Northwestern agreed to provide a facility for Muslim student activities and fundraise for scholarships going to Palestinian undergraduates.

According to WILL attorney Skylar Croy, that deal violates federal law.

“You just can’t go get scholarships based on ethnicity because they rioted it and demanded it,” Croy said.

According to WILL, on April 29, 2024, University officials entered into an agreement with anti-Israel demonstrators occupying a space on campus called Deering Meadow. The officials involved in the agreement are University President Michael Schill, Provost Kathleen Hagerty, and Vice President Susan Davis.

Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, the University promised to provide the “full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers.”

The agreement provides “funding two faculty per year for two years,” with the provision that these faculty will be “Palestinian faculty.”

Additionally, Northwestern University agreed to “provide immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students.” MENA is an acronym for “Middle Eastern and North African” individuals.

According to WILL, as a recipient of federal funds, the University is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.” By providing nearly $1.9 million in scholarships, two faculty positions, and “immediate temporary space” based on an individual’s status as Palestinian or MENA, the University is intentionally discriminating against non-Palestinian or non-MENA individuals on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.

WILL noted, as the United States Supreme Court recently held in a case applying Title VI, race and national origin may never operate as a “negative” or a “stereotype.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 218 (2023). Discrimination in favor of Palestinians or MENA individuals is, in turn, discrimination against individuals not within those categories and is therefore illegal under federal law.

Did some pro-Israel editor stick “antisemite” in there somehow to reflect this bargain? If so, it’s not in the history of the entry. I don’t find the word in the entry for Northwestern President Michael Shill, and VP Susan Davis doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry.

But I expect that, now that I’ve called attention to it, this noun will be gone by the end of the day. Still, this deal is almost certainly illegal, but that doesn’t warrant such pejorative.

h/t: Peggy