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There’s simply no news today, I’m exhausted from lack of sleep, and as I looked at the latest draft posts I have (there are over 2,600 drafts, most of which will never see the light of day), I was not inspired to write anything, though there are two science posts that I’ll be working on. We’ll see if anybody reads them.

Ergo, enjoy Bill Maher’s comedy-and-politics bit from his latest episode of Real Time. In this 8.75-minute segment,  Maher decries Terminally Online Disease (TOD), one of whose symptoms is the fervent need to express an opinion on everything. (The video begins by excusing cat haters, who include Oscar-winning actress Jessie Buckley—not a propitious start.) Maher then goes on to criticize people who spend all their time doomscrolling through social-media sites on “devices”, mistaking what they read for a national or international consensus and apparently anxious to get outraged.  The scrollers are contrasted with regular people who have “shit to do.”

All told, it’s a pretty curmudgeonly bit and not as funny as his usual shticks.  But it’s all I got.

The guests were Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Paul Begala, CNN contributor and Democratic strategist, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). 

Today we have some travel and wildlife photos from reader Jan Malik.  Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (Don’t miss the Taiwan barbet!)

Here are a few pictures I took during my short stay in Taipei, Taiwan (Republic of China) in 2016. Business trips usually allow very little time for sightseeing — the familiar, morbid cycle of airport → hotel → conference room → hotel → airport — but on this occasion I had a few free hours in the afternoon. Naturally, I decided to explore the nearby Taipei Botanical Garden with a birding lens that mysteriously strayed into my suitcase:

On my way to the Botanical Garden, I visited the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park and Hall, the latter built in the late 1970s after the President’s death. I include it here for documentary reasons — who knows how long it is going to survive, given the volatile political situation.

Inside stands a larger‑than‑life sculpture of the Generalissimo. Taiwan’s history is typical of right‑wing dictatorships which, like South Korea, Spain, or Portugal, began as oppressive authoritarian regimes and then evolved into genuine democracies. Conversely, left‑wing dictatorships typically resist fundamental change and persist until their eventual collapse:

Onward to wildlife. The entrance to the Mausoleum was guarded by a lion (Panthera leo var. lapideus):

Already in the Botanical Garden, I encountered a cat, doing what cats do best – contemplating:

In one of the alleys I came upon a sizable crowd — people were observing local celebrities, a pair of nesting Oriental magpie‑robins (Copsychus saularis). The birds seemed completely unfazed by the attention, the male singing and standing guard at the nest;

These birds are bold and well adapted to human habitats. The female does most of the feeding; here she brings an unidentified moth to her chicks in a rotted‑out branch stump:

At a nearby pond I spotted a duck. It was likely a domestic bird, possibly with a dash of wild Mallard  (Anas platyrhynchos) ancestry:

The pond was full of lotus plants, which provided excellent habitat for the Common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). Like all rails, these birds have relatively small wings and strong feet, well suited to foraging on land as well as in water. They swim well despite lacking webbing between their toes. These traits help explain why, when rails successfully colonize remote predator‑free islands, they often evolve reduced flight or complete flightlessness;

Moving further along the park alleys, I spotted a Taiwan barbet (Psilopogon nuchalis) looking out of its nest cavity. As an endemic species, it was a special find for me. Barbets vary widely in sexual dimorphism — in the Taiwan barbet the sexes are practically indistinguishable, in others (like the Coppersmith barbet) the differences are subtle, and in still others (such as the Red‑and‑yellow barbet) they are striking. I wonder why, in this species, bright coloration in females is not maladaptive. Perhaps the fact that they are obligate cavity nesters shields incubating females from predators. The same logic applies to woodpeckers, whose sexes are also similar aside from modest red patches in males:

Shortly after the barbet, I hit another jackpot in my endemics count — the Taiwan blue magpie (Urocissa caerulea). Like other corvids, it is social and omnivorous, and like Taiwanese barbets, it is sexually monomorphic. Corvids also evolved cooperative breeding: fledglings often remain with their parents and help raise the next brood. This likely evolved through kin selection. Why does it work so well in corvids and not in most other birds? Perhaps in environments with limited resources, young birds have better reproductive success by helping relatives than by attempting to breed independently?:

Having spent some time observing the magpie, I moved on — my remaining time before the flight was getting short. Soon I saw another first for me, though a common sight in Southeast Asia: the light‑vented bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis). An omnivorous bird, here it was about to snatch a ripe fig:

Moving on, I photographed a dragonfly, which I believe is a male Crimson Marsh Glider (Trithemis aurora). These insects are sexually dimorphic, with olive‑colored females. This male appears to be orienting its abdomen toward the sun to reduce the surface area exposed to solar radiation and prevent overheating — a behavior known as “obelisking”:

Near the Botanical Garden exit I saw the last animal in this series, the Eurasian tree sparrow (Passer montanus). They always bring a smile to my face. Unlike many other sparrows, the sexes are alike. In 1958 they were targeted during China’s “Four Pests” campaign, a fine example of how ideology can override basic biological understanding:

While driving toward the airport that evening, I saw a Buddhist temple by the roadside, adorned with a symbol that, in European cultural circles, evokes entirely non‑religious sentiments. It was adopted in the 1920s by the National‑Socialist German Workers’ Party, but in Asia it is an ancient religious emblem. It is not identical to the Hakenkreuz — it “rotates” counterclockwise — and its meaning here is entirely benign:

 

Today we again have three items plus lagniappe, and I will keep on with Caturday posts for at least a month.

First, we have a four-minute video of Marvin the Cat getting a “rave bath”, whatever that is.  The YouTube notes give a link and a caption:

So I asked Grok what a “rave bath for a cat” is. The AI answer:

A “rave bath” is a fun, creative bath-time setup for a cat (specifically one that actually enjoys water—rare for most cats!) where the owner turns the bathtub into a glowing “party” atmosphere.

It comes from a popular 2024 viral video by The Dodo featuring a cat named Marvin, who is obsessed with baths. His owner came up with the idea to make bath time even more exciting:

• They turn down the lights in the bathroom to make it dark.
• They add glow sticks (the kind you crack and shake) floating in the water for Marvin to swat, chase, and play with.
• Sometimes they include a light layer of pet-safe bubble bath or bath bombs for extra splashing fun.

The result looks like a mini rave or underwater wonderland with colorful glowing lights reflecting in the tub. Marvin goes wild splashing around and clearly loves it.

The term “rave bath” stuck because of how the owner describes it in the video: “We came up with the cutest thing ever. It’s a rave bath… It’s like a Wonderland.” The video has millions of views across YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, and people now sometimes use the phrase for any glow-stick-enhanced bath for water-loving pets.It’s basically the opposite of a normal stressful cat bath—pure pampering and play for cats like Marvin who beg for water time instead of running away from it. If your cat hates baths, this probably won’t convert them, but it’s adorable to watch! You can find the original video by searching “Woman Throws A ‘Rave Bath’ For Her Cat Who Loves Bath Time | The Dodo.” [JAC: note the disco music during the rave bath.]

This is a woman who loves her cats!

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You should all know by now that Turkey is probably the most cat-loving country in the world. I’ve seen it for myself on several visits: one of the notable aspects is the groups of cats that congregate in outdoor restaurants, with the customers occasionally feeding them. Here’s a photo I took in March, 2008 in Istanbul:

From the Facebook site Fact Fuel: we learn that some Turks erect minature ladders to keep cats dry (and note the cat houses):

Winter in parts of Turkey can blanket cities in heavy snow, leaving stray cats searching for warmth along icy streets. In response, some apartment residents have installed small, cat-sized ladders leading from the ground up to their balconies. These narrow wooden or metal pathways are carefully secured against building walls, giving outdoor cats a safe route upward instead of forcing them to remain exposed to freezing temperatures below.

Once on the balcony, many residents place insulated boxes, blankets, or small shelters where the cats can curl up and rest. The ladders act as bridges between street life and temporary refuge, especially during storms. For animals accustomed to navigating rooftops and alleyways, the climb becomes a familiar path to safety.

The gesture reflects a cultural affection for street cats that runs deep in many Turkish communities. Rather than ignoring their presence, neighbors adapt their living spaces to include them. In the quiet snowfall of winter nights, these modest ladders stand as vertical lifelines — proving that compassion can be built step by step, right alongside everyday homes.

The ladders:

And if you click on the screenshot below you’ll go to an Instagram video:

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And we return to the perennial problem described in this NYT column, which refers to a paper in the Anatomical Record by a team of Japanese authors (second secreenshot). You can access both sites by clicking on the titles (the NYT goes to an archived link).  The key is the way a cat’s spine is configured.

From the NYT article:

In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair.

Greg Gbur, a physicist and cat-falling expert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was not involved with the paper, said the study was the first he knew of that explored “what the structure of the cat’s spine tells us about how a cat turns over while falling.” He added that the research uncovered many remarkable details about how cats maneuver while falling.

People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study.

“Physicists have tried to model the behavior in relatively simple equations,” said Ruslan Belyaev, a zoologist at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow who was not involved in the study. But, he added, “the real cat” is anything but simple.

Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models.

The first, “legs in, legs out,” suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall.

The second model, “tuck and turn,” suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements.

In the new study, Dr. Higurashi and his colleagues scrutinized different segments of cat spines using donated cadavers. They also conducted dropping experiments on a pair of live cats, from about three feet up.

But wait! There’s more:

The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match.

They measured the spinal flexion in cat cadavers whose spines had been removed, and they twisted the removed spines until they “failed”. Here’s a figure from the paper:

(from the paper): (a) Schematic diagram of the testing apparatus used to twist a spinal region until failure. The rotary table was operated manually to rotate the caudal end of the spinal region counterclockwise relative to the immobilized cranial end at a quasi-static loading rate. Torque was measured using the transducer between the table and specimen. The rotation of both the table and specimen was filmed using a digital camcorder. (b) Torque-angular displacement curves obtained for Cat A, illustrating the mechanical properties measured in this study. Torque was recorded at every 5° of angular displacement. The neutral zone (NZ) was defined as the part of the curve with minimal resistance to vertebral rotation. The lumbar spine had no NZ. Stiffness was measured as the ratio of the change in torque to the change in angular displacement in the linear part of the curve. Max, maximum torque; ROM, range of motion.

“The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck,” Dr. Higurashi said.

Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the “legs in, legs out” model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says.

The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

Here’s a figure from the paper showing the cats being dropped (onto soft pillows, mind you). Note that in (b) the anterior part of the cat rotates faster than the rear part,  This cat looks scared, with its tongue sticking out. The caption tells you what’s going on.

From the paper: (a) A representative frame sequence illustrating sequential rotation of the anterior and posterior trunk without counterrotation during air-righting. In this sequence, a cat rotates to the right. (1) The dorsal sides of both the anterior and posterior trunk are initially oriented downwards. (2) Upon release, the anterior trunk becomes oriented laterally, while the posterior trunk remains oriented downwards. (3) The anterior trunk is oriented upwards, indicating that its rotation has been completed, whereas the posterior trunk is oriented laterally. (4) The anterior and posterior trunk are both oriented upwards, indicating the completion of posterior trunk rotation. (b) Bar charts with individual data points showing the time required to complete anterior and posterior trunk rotation during air-righting for each of the two cats (Cats H and I). Error bars represent ±1 SD from the mean. The start of free fall was defined as time zero. Significant differences were assessed using paired Student’s t-tests. **p < 0.01.

If you want to see the paper, click below:

Here’s an enlightening video of how cats spin their bodies (front first) to land on their feet. It’s clearly instinctive, i.e., reflecting a behavioral-genetic program molded by natural selection:

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Lagniappe: Larry the 10 Downing Street cat has put out a video about what’s going on in his block. Most important, the Brits have decided to replace historical figures on their banknotes (they once included Darwin), with wildlife. Larry makes a strong case that he’s both wildlife and a historic figure!

 

Extra lagniappe: A CBS news report on the rescue of Biscuit, a stranded moggy:

And a third lagniappe item. This photo and caption arrived just half an hour ago from Robert Lang. His caption:

Yesterday I and some friends did a hike to a little-visited waterfall in the San Gabriels. At the trailhead, which is shared with some other popular trails, we met this person who was bringing his moggie along for their hike:’

h/t: Carl, Robert

James Blilie is back with some black-and-white photos from his perambulations and climbs.  Jim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. And Jim tells us he’s recovering well from a knee replacement.

Here is another set for your consideration:  Black and white landscape images from those I posted on that previously mentioned FB page for B&W images.

First up are two shots from our attempt to climb Mount McKinley (as it was named at the time) in May 1987.  We did not summit (“worst May weather since 1960-something”):

Rocky outcrop in the Kahiltna Glacier, scanned Tri-X Pan

Camp on the Kahiltna Glacier with the summit in the background, scanned Tri-X Pan:

Our local mountain, Mount Adams, but from the other side, the north side, 1987.  I climbed it three times, always from the north.  The “standard” route is on the south side.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Skiers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, 1988, scanned Kodachrome 64:

Dinner preparation, Nepal, 1991, scanned Tri-X Pan:

The Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, DC, January 1992, scanned Tri-X Pan

Letchworth State Park, New York, November 1992, scanned Tri-X Pan:

Elephants, Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 1991, scanned Kodachrome 64:

Bonneville Salt Flats, Nevada, June 2013:

Mount Hood, taken from our driveway, December 2023:

Kalaloch Beach, Olympic Peninsula, June 2025:

Equipment:

Current:

Olympus OM-D E-M5, micro-4/3 camera (crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35MM, f/2.8 ASPH.  (24mm-70mm equivalent, my walk-around lens)
LUMIX 35-100mm  f/2.8 G Vario  (70-200mm equivalent)
LUMIX G Vario 7-14mm  f/4.0 ASPH  (14-28mm equivalent)
Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm, F4.0-6.3 II ASPH., Power O.I.S. (200mm-800mm equivalent)

The scanned images:

Pentax camera bodies:  LX, K-1000, ME-Super, MX
Various Pentax M-series and A-Series lenses:
20mm f/4
20mm f/2.8
50mm f/2.0
200mm f/4
Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8

Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).

Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.

But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.

Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage.  But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.

Some excerpts:

last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:

Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.

Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:

1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.

2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?

Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection.  None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Amen!

My friend the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry is writing about what he calls, correctly, “the most dangerous idea in academia”—an idea that can get you banned or even fired if you even suggest it. It is, of course, the notion that different “races” differ on average in IQ or intelligence. It’s such a hot potato that many people think that research looking for any differences should be banned or strongly discouraged. (This, of course, is because any potential outcome save exact equality among groups is said to inevitably cause racism and bigotry.)

I’ll leave aside here the idea of what “races” are, for Luana and I explained our take in our Skeptical Inquirer paper “The Ideological Subversion of Biology.”  We can use instead either the notion of “self-defined races” (the boxes one ticks on a form) or, as Luana and I wrote, human populations:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

We discuss some differences between populations and self-diagnosed “races” that are known. There are also known differences in IQ, but the taboo question is whether any of those difference reside in the genes. On this subject I, like Maarten, am agnostic, as I simply don’t know the literature well enough (and am not sufficiently interested in it) to form an opinion.

Click on the screenshot below to read Maarten’s take:

Maarten was impelled to write the piece because one of his colleagues at Ghent University, Nathan Cofnas, is in big trouble because he’s promoted the most inflammatory version of The Forbidden Question: that a substantial portion of the differences in IQ between American blacks and whites (a phenotypic difference of about 15 points) is genetic:

My guest Han van der Maas, a renowned intelligence researcher at the University of Amsterdam, explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between ethnic groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson’s paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: future evidence might yet reveal such differences, and we should not try to cancel researchers who claim such differences are real.

Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department (and hundreds more in a letter to the rector) clearly think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire Nathan Cofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups such as whites and blacks in the US—differences that are themselves well documented—have largely genetic causes, rather than environmental ones like socio-economic disadvantage or discrimination. He makes the same claim about the higher scores of East Asians and Jews (which exceed those of white Europeans, by the way). They dismiss all of this as “pseudoscience and racism.”

The question is whether Cofnas should be fired for his claim, and whether the research supposedly supporting it should be banned.  I would argue that the answer to both questions is “no”, but researchers have to be very careful and sensitive in pursuing it.  Maarten quotes the paper by Luana and me about this (his words indented, ours doubly indented):

Now, I perfectly understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims, and I agree that such hypotheses should be treated with utmost caution. As my friend Jerry Coyne wrote with Luana Maroja in their influential article The Ideological Subversion of Biology:

In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry.

Still, this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. If you are not prepared to extend academic freedom to ideas you fiercely disagree with, you do not really believe in academic freedom.

In light of calls for Cofnas’s firing, a number of people have signed an open letter defending Cofnas’s right to study this topic (or any reasonable topic); the letter is at the link below:

My colleagues Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan wrote an open letter defending the academic freedom of Nathan Cofnas. I have signed it as well, together with luminaries such as Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal , Susan Blackmore, Scott Aaronson, and Bryan Caplan. Here it is in full:

And the letter, which is short:

A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas’s Right to Academic Freedom of Expression

Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.

We oppose this attack on academic freedom. While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment. Of course, other academics should be free to criticise or repudiate those claims.

The statements mentioned above do not even attempt to engage with Cofnas’s empirical claims. Disagreements, whether about empirical claims, ethical principles, or the interpretation of the ethical code of a university, should be settled through free inquiry and open, civil discussion.

We commend Petra De Sutter, Rector of Ghent University, for her statement to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, that “As a university, we have a responsibility to create space for debate, but also to ensure an environment where people feel heard and respected.”

We agree that creating space for debate is an essential element of a university, and that space for debate should not be closed unless this is a last resort to prevent a clear threat of lasting substantial harm.

Note that the letter takes no position on the data itself; it’s a letter about whether Cofnas should be granted academic freedom to do his work.  As Maarten himself says, “As most of the signatories, I do not endorse Nathan Cofnas’s claims and remain agnostic on the issue.”  Luana and I, along with 145 other academics, signed this letter, with some signers named above.

It’s a sign of the ideologically-infused and chilling atmosphere in biology that one has to think for even a second before agreeing with the letter.  Now you might think that finding genetically-based IQ differences betwen populations might cause “a clear threat of lasting substantial harm,” but for reasons outlined in our paper, Luana and I don’t agree.  There are potential upsides in such data, just as there are potential upsides in looking at interpopulation data on medical conditions (the goal is to help individuals, not to demonize one group or another). After all, we don’t even know how the data will come out.

And it’s not at all clear whether finding out that an interpopulation difference has genetic causes will lead to increased bigotry. Since genetic contributions to being gay have been found, prejudice against gays has decreased, not increased. If you reject free will and accept determinism due to genes, physics, and one’s environment, one might see genetically-based differences as “forgiving,” for you cannot be blamed for the genes you get from your parents and that reflect long evolutionary histories.

Maarten goes on to show the difference in long-distance running abilities between Ethiopians and Kenyans on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (these are population differences rather than differences between the classically-defined “races”.  Though I don’t know whether there have been tests to show that these differences are genetic (potential studies could include adoption at birth, rearing in different environments, and so on), I would be willing to bet that they are. But, as Maarten says, “measuring intelligence is far more complicated than crossing a finish line.”

Boudry adds that Cofnas has sometimes been brusque in his public pronouncements about his work, but this is not uncommon among academics:

Finally, what about Nathan Cofnas’s vigorous activism alongside his academic work? It is true that Cofnas is far less measured in his Substack posts than in his academic publications on IQ. For instance, his flippant way of expressing a statistical point about the racial IQ gap in academic achievement (similar to the point above about long-distance running) seems almost deliberately incendiary:

Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. […] In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.

Cofnas is also very combative in his attacks on “woke ideology”, and he genuinely believes only a “hereditarian revolution” can truly dismantle it—otherwise, we’ll be stuck fighting symptoms rather than root causes:

Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back.

I’m not convinced, but it’s a clever argument, and I’d encourage you to check it out with an open mind.

Finally, Maarten points out one harmful side effect of demonizing people for the kind of work they do in academia:

Calling for the dismissal of anyone who even touches the third rail of ethnic differences in IQ is also strategically unwise. Such attempts often fuel the phenomenon of “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people naturally become suspicious: What are they trying to hide? The result is a further erosion of trust in academia.

And that is not just a made-up reason. When the public perceives scientists to be espousing a political or ideological cause in their research, their view of science is eroded. Have a look at this paper showing that when the journal Nature, in a first, endorsed a political candidate (Joe Biden) for U.S. President in 2020, it reduced the public trust not just in the journal, but in scientists themselves.

Do weigh in below, and because the issue is a sensitive one, you might want to answer this poll.

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

The Jesus and Mo artist has recycled an old strip for Lent, which goes from Feb. 18 through April 2. The caption is this:

Friday Flashback – because we’re in the middle of Lent. You didn’t forget, did you? Heathens!

Mo shows here that he has at least a tad of a sense of humor.

Banksy is a pseudonym for a street artist who became a famous and high-priced “establishment’ artist, all the while remaining completely unknown—until now. (Actually, the Daily Mail had correctly guessed his identity in 2008).  Banksy started drawing graffiti in Bristol, England, and then began using stencils, which were quicker to put up—making him less likely to get caught.  But he did get caught in 2000 for vandalizing a billboard in New York, and for that he had to disclose his real name. A spiffy piece of detective work published in Reuters two days ago, shows that the Mail was correct, and that Banksy is in fact a 50-53-year old white man named Robin Gunningham. He remains a multimillionaire.

His most famous work can be seen here: “Girl with Balloon,” showing a girl trying to catch the string of a heart-shaped balloon. It’s been sold in several versions, including one on paper that was deliberately shredded by a machine inside its frame while it was being auctioned off at Sotheby’s.  Here’s the event, and the video—showing the preparation—was clearly made by Banksy. It was another of his pranks, but one that was viewed (and priced as) Banksy art itself.

And the explanation (note what the shredded artwork went for!):

On 5 October 2018, a 2006 framed copy of the artwork was auctioned at Sotheby’s selling for £1,042,000 – a record high for the artist. Moments after the closing bid, the artwork began to self-destruct by means of a hidden mechanical paper shredder that Banksy had built into the frame bottom. Only the lower half shredded. Banksy released an image of the shredding on Instagram with the words “Going, going gone..”. Sotheby’s said, “We have not experienced this situation in the past where a painting spontaneously shredded”,  leading some market watchers to speculate the remains of the painting will be worth even more. Banksy released a video of the shredding and how the shredder was installed into the frame in case the picture ever went up for auction.

The woman who won the bidding at the auction decided to go through with the purchase. The partially shredded work has been given a new title, Love Is in the Bin, and was authenticated by Banksy’s authentication body Pest Control. Sotheby’s released a statement that called it “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.” Love Is in the Bin was itself sold at Sotheby’s for £18 million in October 2021.

Note that the price shot up after the drawing was shredded! It is considered an “art intervention“!

Bansky is both political (and pro-Palestinian) as well as mischievous. And filthy rich. If you’re into art, or want to see how the mystery of his identity was solved for good, click on the Reuter’s screenshot below or see the article archived for free here. There’s also a short take at Entertainment Weekly.

It’s a long but fascinating investigation, and if you’ve been following Banksy over the years, you’ll want to read it. But I’ve taken excerpts from condensed summary from EW:

One of the art world’s biggest modern mysteries may have just been solved.

A new report claims to have once-and-for-all unmasked the elusive graffiti artist Banksy, who has been operating under complete anonymity since the early 1990s.

The investigation, published Friday by Reuters, combs through and eventually sets aside some of the buzzier theories as to the “Girl with Balloon” artist’s true identity. Is he the Massive Attack frontman Robert Del Naja? Or the street artist Thierry Guetta, also known as Mr. Brainwash, who was the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which Banksy directed and — completely disguised, of course — also featured in?

After nearly three decades of speculation, journalists Simon Gardner, James Pearson, and Blake Morrison claim “beyond dispute” that Banksy is a man named Robin Gunningham.

. . . The final identification started with a clue from Banksy Captured, a 2019 memoir from Steve Lazarides, who managed the artist from the late 1990s through 2008. The year that book was published, Lazarides posted a photo from 2000 of an “aborted Banksy work” to his Instagram — a defaced Marc Jacobs billboard in New York City that was left incomplete after authorities allegedly arrested the artist.

. . .Police documents and a court file relating to the arrest that Reuters unearthed repeatedly make reference to Gunningham — who signed his own name at the bottom of a written confession.

Though police sought to charge Gunningham with a felony, he was released and the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor after posting $1,500 bail, temporarily turning over his passport, and completing five days of community service.

. . .This isn’t the first time Gunningham has been suspected as the real hand behind the mysterious graffiti artist. The Daily Mail pointed the finger at Gunningham in 2008, the same year he legally changed his name to David Jones. But suspicions persisted around figures like Del Naja, Guetta, and British politician Billy Gannon.

Banksy started out as a guerrilla artist whose quickly rendered, stencil-like illustrations with an often highly political charge garnered him instant notoriety. He has made work in innocuous corners of major metropolitan cities like London and New York City, but has also become known for provocative illustrations left in conflict zones like Ukraine and the Palestinian West Bank.

And, from the Reuters exposé, here’s how he was caught and identified:

In September 2000, Banksy was shifting from painting freehand to using stencils, a method suited for repetition and speed. But when he climbed up on [Gallerist Ivy] Brown’s roof to have at the billboard, he painted freehand.

The half-finished image resembled a billboard Banksy saw in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” In his 2023 “Cut & Run” exhibition in Glasgow, the artist said the movie scene inspired him to get into graffiti. In “Jaws,” someone doctored a tourism billboard depicting a woman on an inflatable raft in the sea. The vandal added a shark fin and gave the woman bulging eyes and a speech bubble: “HELP!!! SHARK.”  [JAC: The Reuters site has a photo of the doctored billboard.]

In a painting spree, Lazarides wrote, Banksy “doctored the Marc Jacobs Men billboard so that the model had goofy teeth” and drew a “giant speech bubble” that was strangely empty.

That’s because New York police caught Banksy before he could finish.

. . . . . at 4:20 a.m. on September 18, 2000, authorities found a man defacing a billboard on the roof of 675 Hudson Street. Because damages exceeded $1,500, police sought to charge him with a felony. Among the documents is the man’s handwritten confession.

Within hours of his arrest, documents show, the man was assigned a public defender. That afternoon, he was released after agreeing to temporarily turn over his passport.

The court file shows he would later post $1,500 bail in exchange for his passport. The felony charges were reduced to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. He paid a fine and fees totaling $310, and by early 2001, he completed his sentence of five days of community service, the records show. On the bail form, he gave his address as 160 E. 25th Street in New York, the location of one of Manhattan’s most eccentric hotels.

. . . When Banksy was busted in 2000, he wasn’t on the New York Police Department’s radar, said Steve Mona, the now-retired lieutenant who ran the 75-member vandal squad back then. The police had no idea they had nabbed “Banksy” because the artist had only recently begun employing the style and pseudonym that would make him famous.

Given Banksy’s celebrity, the name of the culprit now takes on significance. It wasn’t Del Naja who defaced the billboard atop 675 Hudson Street. The man who confessed was Robin Gunningham.

In addition to his signature, Gunningham is repeatedly named in court and police documents related to the arrest.

The Reuters piece photos of his signed confession, with “Robin Gunningham” appearing at the bottom, barely legible. The rest of the excerpts are from Reuters:

The Mail on Sunday had been right in 2008 in making the case that Gunningham was Banksy. In hindsight, Gunningham’s effort to hide his identity began falling apart with his September 2000 arrest in New York. Records of the bust existed and they contained his real name. The books by former manager Lazarides wouldn’t be published until 2019. But the photos and the details Lazarides included about the arrest enabled us to pinpoint where Banksy was apprehended and the ad he defaced.

There’s one more bit of evidence that is telling.  In 2022, Bansky did seven famous murals in Ukraine (you can see them here) but there was no record that a “Robin Gunningham” ever entered Ukraine (remember, he had a passport).  Reuters reveals that Bansky had since adopted the name of “David Jones.”  This was verified by several documents, but Reuters isn’t making them public  out of the desire to preserve some of Gunningham’s information, including his address. (The documents are, however, apparently available publicly.)

At any rate, Bansky did enter Ukraine at the same time as his painting partner, Robert Del Naja, and the crucial evidence was found:

On October 28, 2022, the day Duley and Del Naja entered Ukraine, a “David Jones” also crossed the border at the same location, according to a source familiar with immigration procedures. The source also told us the date of birth listed on Jones’ passport. It was the same as Robin Gunningham’s birthday.

According to the source, records also indicate Jones left Ukraine on November 2, 2022, the same day Del Naja departed.

I don’t know what will happen now: will Gunningham still use the name “Bansky,” turn out art under his birth name, Robin Gunningham, or use his changed name, David Jones? My guess is that whatever name he uses, he’ll still make art, and perhaps mysteriously, but now that he’s known, perhaps the work won’t be worth as much as it was when Banksy was a ghost.

Here’s an Instagram Post purporting to show two photos of Gunningham. You can see more at this Google Search page.

We had an unexpected snowstorm last night, dropping less than an inch but still covering the ground, as it’s below freezing. Fortunately the weather has warmed up today.

Armon and Vashti were starving this morning because of the cold, and were waiting for me at the “feeding spot” at the north end of Botany Pond.  They had a huge breakfast, and gave me the gift of their tracks in the snow. This is the only way I know they walk around on the ground when I’m not there.

I can’t get enough of Duck Tracks in the Snow.  In fact, that would be a good title for a song. . .

Since I was in an upsetting kerfuffle with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF, and I call the squabble “The KerFFRFle”), over which I resigned from its Honorary Board along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, I haven’t paid much attention to the organization. I do get their alerts, for they’re still doing good work in upholding the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, reinforcing the wall between church and state. Their condemnations, like the one I highlight here, don’t usually accomplish much, but their lawsuits or amicus briefs have been effective, and the FFRF does raise awareness about Constitutional violations.  Yes, they are overly woke, which is why I resigned (see the first link), but that doesn’t mean that their overall effect is bad. It isn’t!

I noticed the other day that they’ve gone after New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who I see as both an antisemite and an Islamist. And by “Islamist” I mean a Muslim who is active in trying to make countries adopt Islam as part of their system of governance.  In this case, Mamdani is mixing Islamic religious celebrations with city business: a violation of the First Amendment. I have little doubt that he would like the U.S. to become the Islamic Republic of America.

Click the screenshot below to read:

An excerpt:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is again warning New York City’s mayor that the Constitution prohibits government officials from using the machinery of public office.

FFRF has sent its second letter in a couple of months to Mayor Zohran Mamdani after receiving a complaint from a New York City employee regarding a recent religious event organized through official city channels. The national state/church watchdog previously contacted Mamdani in February after he posted on the official New York City Mayor’s X account about participating in a suhoor meal and praying with Department of Sanitation workers during Ramadan. [JAC: he appears to have deleted the tweet, and if that’s the FFRF’s doing, good for them],

Despite that warning, FFRF has now learned that the mayor’s office held a “City Workers Iftar” on March 12 to “celebrate workers who keep New York City running while fasting.” The event notice was emailed to city employees by Interim Commissioner Melissa Hester and it noted that the event included a call to prayer.

A city employee who contacted FFRF observed that it is “completely inappropriate for a government agency to have a religious celebration.” The employee expressed concern that events like this may create the perception that the mayor’s office favors one religion and that employees attending city-sponsored events may be expected to participate in religious activities.

“While you are entitled to observe your faith in your personal capacity, the Constitution prohibits government officials from organizing, promoting or participating in religious exercises in their official roles,” FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line writes to Mamdani. “Hosting a religious observance for city employees of one religion and facilitating a call to prayer through official government communications and personnel crosses the line between private religious expression and government-sponsored religious worship.”

FFRF emphasizes that city employees work under the authority of elected leadership, creating a dynamic where even “voluntary” religious events can carry implicit pressure. “Public employees should not be placed in a position where they may feel compelled to attend a religious event or appear supportive of a particular faith tradition to maintain favor with their employer,” the letter states.

I oppose Mamdani not only because of his Islamism and apparent antisemitism, but because he’s a faux Democrat, promising much but likely to deliver little. (See his latest gaffe on St. Patrick’s day!) And I worry that because the Democrats are so befuddled and besotted by “oppressor/victim” ideology (Mamdani, being a Muslim, is seen as “oppressed”), he will have a future in politics beyond being mayor. He could become a Congressman, though fortunately not President, as he wasn’t born in the U.S.

Anyway, be aware of what’s going on in NYC, and kudos to the FFRF.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “Minor 2” came with a note that it’s “a resurrection today, from the more innocent time of 2007.”

This is a good strip because it makes the point that the claims of many “standard” religions, when laid out in black and shown to someone who hasn’t been religious, seem just as silly as the claims of Scientology, which do involve Xenu, space travel, volcanoes, and hydrogen bombs. (They don’t tell that to novice Scientologists.) For example, Wikpedia lays out the beliefs of Scientology in its “Xenu” article:

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

These events are known within Scientology as “Incident II”, and the traumatic memories associated with them as “The Wall of Fire” or “R6 implant“. The narrative of Xenu is part of Scientologist teachings about extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in earthly events, collectively described as “space opera” by L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III (OT III) in 1967, warning that the “R6 implant” (past trauma) was “calculated to kill (by pneumonia, etc.) anyone who attempts to solve it”.

The Church of Scientology normally only reveals the Xenu story to members who have completed a lengthy sequence of courses costing large amounts of money.  The church avoids mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story’s confidentiality, including legal action on the grounds of copyright and trade secrecy. Officials of the Church of Scientology widely deny or try to hide the Xenu story. Despite this, much material on Xenu has leaked to the public via court documents and copies of Hubbard’s notes that have been distributed through the Internet.

Scientology has done a lot to try to prevent its dictates from being known, but it’s too late. And those dictates are not that much sillier than the Christian myth of a scared Jesus who was God/Son of God, came to Earth, was killed, came back to life, and ascended to Heaven, with belief in this being helping you to have a pleasant eternal life rather than burning in hell.  Every faith I know of, down to those of Cargo Cults, is based on irrational beliefs or unproven claims about the supernatural (some forms of Buddhism may be exceptions so long as they don’t belief in karma or successive rebirths).

But I digress. Here’s the cartoon:

Today I’m putting up an animal cam in lieu of Readers’ Wildlife Photos because I need to conserve the latter: I have only about two batches left. If you have some, send them in!

But this is one of the best animal cams I have seen, for it shows in real time a very rare animal: a brooding female kākāpō and her chick (Strigops habroptilus). This is the world’s only flightless parrot, and is found in New Zealand, where it evolved in the absence of mammalian predators. Now it’s highly endangered, with only a few hundred individuals left, but an intensive conservation effort by New Zealand is bringing them back. This effort includes putting all kākāpōs onto islands where potential predators birds have been removed. As Wikipedia notes,

The kākāpō is critically endangered; the total known population of living individuals is 236 (as of 2026). Known individuals are named, tagged and confined to four small New Zealand islands, all of which are clear of predators; however, in 2023, a reintroduction to mainland New Zealand (Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari) was accomplished.  Introduced mammalian predators, such as cats, rats, ferrets, and stoats almost wiped out the kākāpō. All conservation efforts were unsuccessful until the Kākāpō Recovery Programme began in 1995.

Newsweek, via reader Ginger K, offers us a link to a live kakapo cam. This is the only such bird ever to be livestreamed with a cam, and here’s some information about the video below from Newsweek. I find the feed mesmerizing, and watched the female sleep for a while last night (it was day in New Zealand), sitting on her fluffy white chick and occasionally grooming herself and the chick.

Newsweek:

A quiet underground nest on a remote island off New Zealand’s coast is captivating viewers around the globe as the world’s largest parrot species is livestreamed.

The YouTube livestream, Kākāpō Cam, offers a continuous view inside the nest of Rakiura, a 24-year-old female kākāpō—one of just 236 left worldwide. Rakiura has been living beneath a rātā tree on Codfish Island, also known as Whenua Hou, off the country’s southern coast, where she hatched two chicks this breeding season.

Since January, the footage has offered unpolished, intimate glimpses of the nocturnal, flightless parrot. Rakiura shuffles in the nest, preens her green feathers, settles her body protectively over her chick, and occasionally leaves under the cover of darkness to forage before returning to feed. At times, the screen shows little movement at all—just the soft rise and fall of a bird resting, giving viewers a rare, real‑time look at a species most will never see in person.

“This is the only camera in a kākāpō nest this season, and the only nest we’ve ever streamed live,” Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for Kākāpō at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), told Newsweek. “Kākāpō Cam provides insights that help guide us to support their recovery, while also giving people around the world a chance to connect with this incredible species.”

. . .While most female kākāpō choose new nesting spots each breeding cycle, Vercoe said Rakiura has returned to the same site every season—allowing conservationists to reinforce the nest and carefully plan a reliable camera setup months in advance through the DOC’s Kākāpō Recovery team.

Hands‑on fieldwork began in October 2025 and will continue for most of the year, involving around 30 DOC staff, specialist support teams and 105 volunteers, each donating two weeks of their time.

The team also added drainage and a small access hatch to protect eggs and chicks without disturbing her natural behavior.

The camera was first trialed during the 2022 breeding season, but this year’s stream went live in time to capture egg‑laying and hatching for the first time.

Rakiura successfully hatched two genetically important chicks on February 24 and March 2, though the older one was later transferred to a foster mother so she could focus on raising the remaining chick, Nora‑A2‑2026, now the star of the livestream. The team will check on the chick every three days until it is one month old.

Okay, enough information. Watch below live NOW. If mother Rakiura is out, you’ll still see the chick. When I put this up at 8:15 a.m. Chicago time, it will be 2:15 a.m. in New Zealand, and it looks like mom is still sleeping.  Watch from time to time so you can see the chick. She’s very solicitous of it and grooms it often.

Lagniappe: a tweet on this season, a great one for baby parrots, from New Zealand Conservation

And one of the best animal videos ever: a male kākāpō, Sirocco, shagging biologist Mark Carwardine while Stephen Fry looks on and narrates. This was from the BBC show “Last Chance to See,” about endangered species:

When I went to New Zealand a while back, I really wanted to see these birds, but you really can’t: you need a good reason to get to the islands where kākāpō are kept. To do that, you have to be somehow involved in their conservation. You can volunteer to live on the island for several months and help monitor the birds, but that’s a big commitment just to see them. However, if you want to help save them, you can donate here.

I am sure you can guess what this photo shows:

Yep, my babies are trotting around in the snow. Fortunately, they have a kind patron who feeds them twice a day.  Armon and Vashti are still here, and what reason would they have to go, given that they are fed two big square meals a day: nutritious duck pellets for main and tasty freeze-dried mealworms for dessert?

They are looking good, and Vashti seems positively plump.

Over at the Heterodox Stem site, Iván Marinovic, a professor at Stanford, has hit on a way to measure wokeness in college curricula. He uses key words to distinguish “ideological and activist” courses from those that hew to the “Western intellectual tradition” (note the caveats in his piece), and shows that, using this measure, the curriculum of the University of Chicago over the 13 years from 2012 to2025 has more than doubled the percentage of courses whose description include woke words, while the percentage of courses described with “Western canon” words has remained relatively constant. Marinovic calls this process “curriculum degradation,” and notes this:

The University of Chicago occupies a unique position in American higher education. Its undergraduate Core Curriculum, built on the Hutchins-era Great Books model, has historically been the strongest institutional commitment to the Western canon at any major research university. If curriculum degradation is occurring even at Chicago, it is likely occurring everywhere.

Click the title below to see the article:

Here’s Marinovic’s methods

We classify every course in a university catalog using two keyword lists: a progressive list and a Western canon list, as described below. We assign a course to a category if its title or description contains at least one keyword from the category’s keyword list.

We matched via word-boundary regular expressions on the combined title and description text (case-insensitive). Word-boundary matching ensures that partial matches are avoided (e.g., the term “race” does not match “interface” or “brace”). Each course’s title and description are concatenated into a single text field; if any keyword from a given list appears within that text, the course is flagged for that category.

The progressive keyword list comprises approximately 55 terms and phrases signaling engagement with progressive social frameworks, diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives, or critical identity scholarship. These terms are organized into eleven thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 1.

Here’s Table 1:  Progressive-signal keyword list by thematic category.

And the Western canon method:

The Western canon keyword list comprises approximately 45 terms and phrases signaling engagement with the traditional Western intellectual and literary canon, spanning classical antiquity through the Enlightenment. These terms are organized into six thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 2.

This is  Table 2: Western-canon keyword list by thematic category.

The example school chosen (Marinovic suggests that this be done for other schools as a preliminary indicator of what’s going on in them):

We extract course data from thirteen annual catalogs (2012–2013 through 2024–2025). After deduplicating crosslisted courses, which appear under multiple department codes, we obtain 21,381 unique courses across 114 departments. Departments are mapped to broad areas: Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM, Professional, and Other.

Figure 1 presents the central finding. The progressive signal rose from 12.7% of the catalog in 2012–2013 to 28.3% in 2024–2025—more than doubling over thirteen years. The canon signal dropped from 13.2% to 11.9%. The progressive-to-canon ratio consequently rose from 1.0× (parity) to 2.4×.

Now you can say that this is obvious because “wokeness” or “progressivism” is a fairly recent phenomenon, and has invaded academia since most professors are liberals or Democrats. And that invasion is expected to be reflected in course content.  But this index is a way of measuring the extent of that invasion (or “degradation” as the author calls is), and seeing which universities and which feels have been the most “degraded.”

Marinovic also divided up the proportion of “progressive” versus “canon” courses in each of four area: the humanities, the social sciences, STEM (science, technology, enginnering and mathematics), and professional areas, presumably courses in medicine, business, and the laws. The conclusion, presumably for the final period, is shown in Table 3 below:

Table 3 shows that the progressive signal is highest in the Social Sciences (27.4%) and Humanities (24.6%). The progressive signal is naturally lower in STEM (7.6%) but still unexpectedly high given the technical nature of STEM content.

Indeed, I have personal experience with the increasing “progressivization” of the biological sciences:

Marinovic proposes that we might make Curriculum Content Indices for many schools, saying it takes only a few hours to do this if course information is publicly available.  How would we use thse?

Such an index would allow prospective students to assess how much of a university’s catalog engages the Western intellectual tradition versus ideological content; donors to direct funding toward institutions that maintain intellectual breadth, and policymakers to monitor trends and evaluate the effects of reform efforts.

Finally, Marinovic gives an important caveat about the data and how it should be used:

A word of caution is in order. Keyword-based textual analysis of course descriptions is a blunt instrument. A course flagged by our progressive keyword list may turn out, on closer inspection, to be a rigorous scholarly treatment of the topic; conversely, a course that escapes detection may nonetheless promote an activist agenda in practice. The signals we measure should therefore be understood as a noisy first approximation—useful for identifying broad trends and prompting further inquiry, but never a substitute for substantive evaluation of what is actually taught. Policymakers, in particular, should resist the temptation to use simple keyword counts as the basis for funding decisions or regulatory action. Our goal is to promote transparency and informed conversation, not to supply a scorecard that short-circuits careful judgment.

As far as I know, the University of Chicago is the only school to be vetted this way, but many universities have their course catalogue—though not necessarily the course descriptions—online and could be crunched in this way.  I’d love, for example, to see similar data from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Columbia University, Barnard College, and, of course, Reed College, Swarthmore, Harvard, and Smith. And how could we forget Oberlin?

Christopher Beha‘s new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, appears to have gotten a lot of attention (including a guest essay in the NYT and a long essay in the New Yorker)—more attention than it deserves, I think—for several reasons. First, there’s a resurgence of books dissing “new atheism”, mainly because it doesn’t give us meaning, doesn’t fill the “God-shaped” hole that supposedly afflicts all of us. Second, the book makes the familiar argument that science itself (connected with atheism, it’s argued) is impotent at explaining consciousness, and the religious public loves to hear that science is stymied by such a problem (in the case of consciousness, it isn’t; the problem is just hard).  Finally, Beha has name recognition because he was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine for four years.

I haven’t read the whole book, but I’ve read both of his articles above as well as other reviews, and I’m not impressed, as there’s really nothing new here. Still, I suppose that just as the arguments of atheism must be made repeatedly to enlighten each new generation, so the arguments against atheism must also be made again and again by believers. (I wonder, though, why, if New Atheism was such a dud, as many say, there are so many books going after it.)

Click below to read an archived version.

I’ve written on this website two critiques of excerpts and arguments from Beha’s book  (here and here), and I just saw another negative review by Ronald Lindsay in Free Inquiry. Lindsay pretty much sums up the problems with the book in these paragraphs:

Building on his skepticism about science, Beha further argues that science cannot explain consciousness, which, for him, is a limitation that “proved fatal.” He states that science deals with material things, and because consciousness “is not material … not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge,” then “[b]y the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist.”

Wow, that’s several misstatements in the space of a few sentences. To begin, consciousness is not a “thing.” It’s a processing of information based on inputs from indisputably material things. And there are few, if any, scientists who claim consciousness is not real. Finally, there is overwhelming evidence that the processing of information that is consciousness is dependent on the existence of and proper functioning of our material brains, which science does study with increasing understanding. No, we do not yet have a complete explanation of how consciousness arises, but that is no justification for inferring there is some immaterial, spiritual reality beyond the reach of science.

Frankly, these arguments are so poor they seem like makeweights for Beha’s real beef with atheism: it doesn’t direct him how to live. Beha’s disenchantment with atheism began when he realized atheism didn’t answer the question “How should I be?” Atheism did not tell him “what is good.” As Beha states, most atheists hold that people decide for themselves how to live.

Here is the crux of the quarrel that many theists have with atheism. They believe atheism leaves them rudderless, thrown back on their own resources in forging a life with meaning and value. By contrast, they believe that God provides them with an objective grounding, with clear direction. They no longer have to decide for themselves.

No, atheism doesn’t tell us how to live. It’s simply a claim that there is no convincing evidence for divine beings, ergo we shouldn’t accept them, much less make them the centerpiece of our lives.  If as a you want to find a way to live, you must go beyond that.  Some people like Beha find it easy to slip into an existing religion, which comes ready-made with meaning.  (But how do you know you’ve chosen the right or “true” religion?)  Others do the harder work of thinking for themselves, with many atheists accepting secular humanism as a guideline, but interpeting it in their own way.  Beha is apparently afflicted with doubt (he used to be an atheist), but has settled on Catholicism.

Parrales and the Atlantic are surprisingly appreciative of Beha’s glomming onto his youthful Catholicism. The last paragraph of the review is this:

Is it possible to understand Christianity as a bulwark against social change and still hold on to faith sincerely? I think so—Ali and Vance have elsewhere also reflected more personally on their conversions, for example. But describing one’s religion primarily as a tool to harken back to the past, or as a way to defeat your enemies, risks overlooking the humanizing power of belief. This is what makes Beha’s book so worthwhile, for showing how religion at its best offers more than a theory of cultural renewal. As his there-and-back-again story conveys, faith can foster humility, of the mind and of the heart, and a desire to see others with the love that they believe God sees in people.

Yes, religion gives us ready-made morality, comforting fictions, and, of course, a community of fellow believers. That’s about all the “meaning” it offers. As for its “humanizing” power, how does believing in fiction “humanize” you? Sure, you can cite the Golden Rule, but secularists have made the same argument. And there’s nothing in humanism that promotes misogyny, hatred of non-humanists, or the like—the ubiquitous downsides of religion.  Was Parrales thinking of all religions when he wrote that, including Islam, Hinduism, fundamentalist Christianity, and so on? Are those “humanizing” faiths?

But Parrales emphasizes in his piece that Beha’s falling in love with a woman (curiously, an atheist who remains a nonbeliever!) is what brought him back to Jesus.  We hear the usual arguments that stuff like “love” cannot be explained or understood by scientists, something that’s completely irrelevant to the evidence for gods. Perrales:

For Beha, though, falling in love was more than merely analogous to having faith; it was a catalyst. More than a decade after first reading Russell, he began seeing someone. It went poorly at first—he acted “wooden and self-conscious” and rambled about his literary ambitions while she nodded politely. (“She was not the kind of person who judged other people on what they did for a living,” Beha writes.) But once he changed course and tried to make her laugh instead, she taught him two things: that he could, and that he was “still capable” of both being happy and making another person so. Within a year, they were engaged.

That wasn’t the only change. He quit drinking. His depression receded. The thought of having kids, something he had previously written off as a futile act, now appealed to him. As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.”

The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin. Romantic idealism—Beha’s term for the belief of atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche that each individual must fashion meaning in a meaningless universe—could not contend with the fact that Beha hadn’t brought about his newfound sense of meaning on his own. It was external, at the mercy of someone else.

To Beha’s surprise, the Catholic faith that he thought he had left behind provided the meaning he was seeking. Inspired by medieval-Christian mysticism—a tradition that emphasizes contemplation and a “willingness to live with perplexity”—and the New Testament’s claim that God is not just loving but love itself, he started attending Mass once again.

Surprise! Beha found that Catholicism was a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece left. How convenient!  Contemplation, of course, is not the purview of just Catholicism (many humanists meditate), and of course a scientific frame of mind (or rationality itself) mandates being a diehard skeptic. There are no bigger skeptics and doubters than scientists, for it’s a professional virtue.

There’s more, but I’ll add just one more bit. Perrales describes others, notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali and J. D. Vance, of also finding solace in religion, not because of its truth claims but because it’s a remedy for a “lack of meaning”

Take the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In 2023, after many years as a committed atheist, she described her conversion to Christianity as being motivated by a desire to “fight off” the “formidable forces” of authoritarianism, Islam, and “woke ideology.” She made no mention of Christ, or of love. At a 2021 conference, J. D. Vance described his conversion to Catholicism by saying, “I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” The British rapper Zuby posted on X a few years ago that “the West is absolutely screwed if it loses Christianity.” (The post received nearly 2 million views and earned a reply from Elon Musk, who said, “I think you’re probably right.”)

Parrales hasn’t done his homework, for, as I recall, Hirsi Ali did admit she accepted the tenets of Christianity. At first I couldn’t find the proof, but Grok gave me the evidence:

In a live debate with Richard Dawkins at the Dissident Dialogues Festival in New York on June 3, 2024 (hosted by UnHerd), Hirsi Ali explicitly addressed her acceptance of key tenets. When Dawkins pressed her on whether she believes in the virgin birth and Resurrection, she responded affirmatively to the latter, stating, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.”

She framed this as a deliberate choice rooted in her personal spiritual experience, including answered prayers during a time of crisis, which led her to embrace the “story of Jesus Christ” as a symbol of redemption and rebirth.

Here’s the video, so check for yourself, (start 7 minutes in). Hirsi Ali is reluctant to admit her specific beliefs, perhaps because it’s embarrassing.  I don’t get the “I choose to believe” claim. Because you “choose” to believe what you find consoling doesn’t make it true! As I recall, the audience in this debate was firmly on Ayaan’s side, but I haven’t listened to this debate for several years.

At any rate, I was sad to see The Atlantic boosting faith, and boosting it as a medicine that can give meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives.

Mark Sturtevant has returned with some excellent arthropod photos. Mark’s caption and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note that his stacking method is time-consuming; the third picture, he says, took “weeks,” and he’s still not finished.

Here is another set of local insect pictures, all manual focus stacks from either a staged setting from where I live in eastern Michigan, or at a local park.

The first was a visitor at the porch light. This beetle is a female stag beetle (Dorcus parallelus), and I was surprised about the ID because it was barely an inch long. Males of this species have mandibles only slightly larger than those in females:

The next picture is a Longhorn Beetle, Astyleiopus variegatus:

Next is a scene of symbiotic interactions between aphids and ants, where the aphids bribe the ants into protecting them by producing sugary secretions. The ants appear to be New York Carpenter Ants (Camponotus novaeboracensis), and I don’t know why they are called that since the species has a very wide range in the U.S. They are here tending aphids of an unknown species on a thistle plant. This picture is in a way impossible since an extreme macro picture like this cannot have much depth of focus, and it is also impossible to extend focus by conventional focus stacking since ants never sit still. So I’ve been spending weeks extending the depth of this picture from bits and pieces of several pictures. I am still not done doing this, but Mark needs a break so out it goes, into the public:

Dragonflies are next. These too are quick manual focus stacks but with a telephoto lens. Probably my favorite field for photographing dragons is a two hour drive away, but it is worth it because there is a field that is swarming with many species, including species that I don’t see elsewhere.

The first of these is a Common Green Darner Anax junius, which is a common species but what was exciting for me was that this is a male. Females land. Females are so easy to photograph that I usually don’t even bother. But males? No. Males fly pretty much all day, and I seldom get a chance with them:

But the best reason to visit the “dragonfly field” are its Clubtail dragonflies (Family Gomphidae). The main flight season for Clubtails is June, so that is when I make a point to visit the dragonfly field where there are ten documented species from this family. I have photographed all but two from there. Clubtail dragonflies tend to be marked in yellow and black, and they have a thickened end on their abdomen. But not all species have this color scheme, and some are more ‘club-tailed’ than others. A couple things to like about them as a group are the many species, and their reliability for perching on or near the ground. This is in stark contrast to certain other dragonflies (i.e., male Green Darners!)

The first of these are some of the ‘big-club’ Clubtails, and we start with a Midland Clubtail (Gomphurus fraternus):

The next is the impressively clubbed Cobra Clubtail (Gomphurus vastus):

And here is another one, the Skillet Clubtail (Gomphurus ventricosus), which is perched on Poison Ivy. Just to make things interesting, much of the ground cover in the dragonfly field is Poison Ivy. You should not even touch this stuff:

Do you see the differences in the above three species? Me neither! But upon close comparison, there are small differences in their markings that can be discerned. Most of the time when I am out there, I don’t know what big club species I am photographing.

Not all Gomphids are like the above. Here is a Lancet Clubtail (Phanogomphus exilis), which is probably the most common Gomphid in this park:

And here is an example of a very different dragonfly in the clubtail family, the Rusty Snaketail (Ophiogomphus rupinsulensis). There is another species of snaketail in the field, but it is rare and I have yet to see it. Just another reason to make the drive every June:

Now all of the above species of dragonflies are under 2” in length, so considerably shorter than your little finger. But dragonfly field hosts the largest Clubtail in the U.S. called the Dragonhunter (Hagenius brevistylus), which is about 3.5” long — the length of your index finger.

Does that still seem small? I promise if you see one you will stop and stare. Everyone does, because in the field they look big. The Dragonhunter is not even the largest of our dragonflies but they are probably the heaviest. Dragonhunters get their common name from their habit of eating other dragonflies. Admittedly, most dragonflies do that, but Dragonhunters seem to have a reputation for it. Even though I have seen many dozens by now, they always get my undivided attention when one goes cruising by:

Here’s an issue to ponder of a cold Saturday in March.  Many people with some intellectual clout (i.e., they’re not stupid) claim to be religious, and yet when you press them to find out exactly what they believe, they clam up or equivocate.  Some Christian academics I know, for instance, will mumble and change the subject if you ask them about the nature of the God they accept, or whether Jesus revived the dead, and then was crucified and resurrected.  To me this means either that they do not believe the tenets of their religion, or that they do but are embarrassed to admit it.

And yet, as I wrote in Faith versus Fact, I am hardly aware of any religions that do not make factual claims. Here, for example is one version of the Nicene Creed from the United States conference of Catholic bishops.  I’ve have bolded every factual claim:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

It’s almost all in bold. As Wikipedia notes: “On Sundays and solemnities, one of these two creeds is recited in the Roman Rite Mass after the homily. In the Byzantine Rite, the Nicene Creed is sung or recited at the Divine Liturgy, immediately preceding the Anaphora (eucharistic prayer) is also recited daily at compline.”

Likewise, Muslims accept the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad by an angel, Mormons believe that the angel Moroni hid the golden plates on which the book of Mormon was inscribed, and then revealed them to Joseph Smith. Hindus, in contrast, believe in many gods manifesting parts of one reality. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but do embrace things like rebirth and karma.

The point is clear, every religion depends on a set of core beliefs, and if you reject them you’re not very credible as embracing that religion. You can hardly call yourself a Christian, for example, if you don’t believe in the existence of Jesus as a divine being, and in his crucifixion, resurrection, and a form of God made human. (Remember, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”)

But now all sorts of people are publishing bestselling books about how they made their way back to religion after a period of nonbelief, why atheism is wrong because it can’t explain a fine-tuned universe, consciousness, and so on.  And yet these same people are willing to change their entire lives based on nonexistent evidence. Others say they don’t need no stinking evidence; they believe because it makes sense or resonates with them (this is why Ross Douthat is a Christian rather than a Muslim).

So here’s the question to ponder and discuss:

Can you really call yourself adherent to a given religion if you don’t accept the fundamental tenets of that religion?

Granted “fundamental tenets” is a slippery term, and people’s religious mileage varies, but when someone publicly professes that they are religious, it seems fair to ask them, “So tell me: which claims of your religion do you accept, and which do you reject?” For some reason, though, people treat religion as off limits in that way: they don’t have to answer you.

We have three items today, all with videos. First is a video compilation of 18 celebrities who are cat lovers. You’ll have heard of some of these ailurophiles, like Taylor Swift and Rickey Gervais (owner of Pickle), while others, like Martha Stewart, Roberty Downey, Jr. and Nicole Kidman, were surprises.  Sit back and enjoy the videos, which show both entitled moggies and their famous staff:

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This article about a bra-swiping cat comes from IHeartCats, and there’s a video below.

An excerpt. The cat is named Anna:

At first, no one realized a pattern was forming. Small things began to appear around the house without explanation. A plastic bag left neatly in the hallway. A random object resting near the couch. Anna would sit nearby, calm and observant, as if waiting for someone to notice. Over time, her behavior evolved into something far more specific and unforgettable.

Anna developed a habit of bringing bras from all over the house and placing them in the most unexpected locations. The middle of the living room. Right outside a bedroom door. Sometimes beside someone who was still fast asleep. Each item was carefully carried, never dragged or abandoned. To Anna, these were not stolen objects. They were gifts.

Her timing is part of the charm. Anna does not limit her deliveries to convenient hours. She prefers moments when the house is quiet and still. Early mornings. Late nights. That is when she seems most focused, padding softly across the floor with her prize, completely committed to the task at hand.

She also appears to enjoy keeping everyone guessing. The bras are rarely the same. They do not belong to Sarah most of the time, which only adds to the confusion and laughter. Anna seems delighted by the reaction she gets, even if she pretends not to notice. Her bright eyes and relaxed posture suggest she feels proud of her work.

One night, Sarah woke suddenly in the darkness and found Anna in the middle of a delivery. The house was silent. The moment felt surreal. Anna had brought not one, but two bras. She placed them carefully, then paused as if to admire her effort. Neither item belonged to Sarah. That detail somehow made the experience even more amusing.

Anna was adopted from a shelter in 2016, and from the very beginning, she stood out. Sarah had never encountered a cat quite like her. Anna was expressive, curious, and full of tiny habits that made her feel almost human in her determination. Every quirk seemed to reveal a little more of her personality.

It is hard not to wonder what goes through Anna’s mind during these deliveries. Perhaps she feels a sense of purpose. Perhaps she believes she is contributing to the household in her own meaningful way. Her body language suggests confidence and satisfaction, as if she knows she is doing something important.

Over time, Anna’s strange routine has become a source of comfort and joy. Her gifts are a reminder of how deeply animals connect with their humans, even when their methods are unconventional. What began as a mystery has turned into a beloved part of daily life.

Appaently Anna is an outdoor cat, as some of the bras she delivers to her staff don’t belong to the female member. Also, the fact that Anna’s a girl cat keeps her from being labeled a pervert.

Here’s a two-minute video of Anna delivering bras to her staff. They are apparently “presents.”  They could prevent this by simply keeping the bras out of reach of the cat.  As for why Anna prefers bras above other objects, that will remain a mystery. Perhaps science can tackle the question.

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Speaking of weird cats, here’s Nugget, who is no longer with us, but while alive required emotional support potatoes.  He seems to like yams as well. Nugget’s story goes up to 1:13, and then unfortunately segues into the story of a nosey dg named Nola, who likes to climb trees and then, at 2:24, to another dg named Mojo who required emotional support tennis balls. The videos are from Jenn, a well-known figure on Facebook, also known as “The Good News Girl,” who is famous for “posting something positive every day.”

 

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Lagniappe: We have a 3-minute video showing the doings of Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street.  Larry is a senior cat, 19 years old, and he’s been in his job since 2011, so this is his fifteenth anniversary at the Prime Minister’s residence. Here Larry addresses the recent arrest of Peter Mandelson, former UK ambassador to the US, now accused of micsonduct in office. It also shows all the attention Larry gets from those lucky enough to enter Downing Street.

As you’ll see, Larry has a dry sense of humor.

h/t: Ginger K

At the end of last year I wrote an article in Quillette called “Can art convey truth?” (archived here). I contended that while the object of science is to find the truth about the universe (including humans, of course), the goal of much of the humanities—the arts—is not to find truth; humanities have other aims. As I said,

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Because of this, we can’t say that the purpose of universities is to “find and promulgate truth” so long as universities teach the visual, literature, music, cinema, and so on. That doesn’t diminish the value of universities, but slightly changes what we see as their mission.

I was prompted to write this because at a Heterodox Academy meeting in Brooklyn last year, I was roundly criticized by scholars like John McWhorter and Louis Menand, who maintained that there was indeed agreed-upon “truths” to be found in art (McWhorter later recanted a bit). I think they were wrong, perhaps wedded to the idea that admitting that art isn’t “truthy” would be an admission that it’s inferior to science. (It isn’t; they are simply different.) And reader of this site will know of my respect and admiration for art.

Now an artist has weighed in on this argument, (also in Quillette) and she’s on my side. The artist is Megan Gafford, who is quite accomplished, and I like her work (see examples here).  I will first show her view that, in general agrees with mine, and then discuss a few reactions I have to her contentions. I am not saying where she’s wrong, but merely commenting on her commentary.

You can read Ms. Gafford’s article by clicking on the title screenshot below, or, if you can’t see the original, find it archived here. Her piece also contains one of her lovely drawings.

Here’s her opening, which I was pleased to read (I took a lot of flak for saying that art does not uncover “truths”):

In a recent Quillette piece Jerry Coyne argues that “unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth.” When he made a similar assertion last June at a Heterodox Academy conference, it “resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane,” he writes. Wary that people might perceive him as “just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school,” Coyne writes about art from a defensive crouch—but because I’m an artist, and well within my lane, I have no such qualms. Coyne is correct when he writes:

The real value of art … is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Would-be defenders of art make a serious category error when they insinuate that beauty is inferior to truth—as if beauty were an insufficient goal. But it is impossible to champion art effectively unless you believe that beauty is its own justification. Coyne offers examples of poems and paintings that he admires for their beauty. But he does not go far enough. Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

One comment I have on her piece is that she never really defines “beauty”.  It can of course be construed in several ways, including the most common interpretation: something that pleases the aesthetic senses (especially sight). This would include music you find appealing, paintings by Johannes Vermeer, literature that is appealing to the ear (for me that would be Yeats or Joyce’s “The Dead”), and so on.

But one could argue that much great art is not “beautiful” in that sense, for many works of art are upsetting and distressing, or conveys emotions that are not pretty.  I’ve thought of a few, including Dante’s Inferno, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1984, art depicting war (“Guernica,” Goya’s paintings), or upsetting art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Munch’s “The Scream”. I’m a fan of Jackson Pollock, but it’s unclear whether the artist intended his “drip paintings” to be beautiful, and certainly many people don’t find them so.  By concentrating on “beauty” as the goal of art, Gafford herself doesn’t go far enough—unless “beauty” and “what I consider great” are taken as synonymous. That makes the argument tautological, though.

I will now give a few quotes from Gafford along with my response:

Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

I’ll use my favourite novel as an example. John Steinbeck recasts the Cain and Abel story in his 1952 saga East of Eden, and his wisest character ponders different English translations of that Bible story with mutually incompatible interpretations. He wants to understand the precise meaning of what God told Cain after he slew Abel, so he consults the original Hebrew to sort out what it really means:

I won’t reproduce Gafford’s argument, here, but her example from Steinbeck doesn’t seem to me to convey “beauty” unless it’s seen as s proper (and therefore more meaningful) translation of the Hebrew for the Cain and Abel story, which itself was a model for East of Eden.

Another:

Physicists have long tried to figure out whether we’re living in a deterministic universe, a question with obvious implications for free will. But for now, we don’t know—and maybe we cannot know. Reality can be inscrutable. It is the task of scientists to answer questions like “do we live in a deterministic universe?” And it is the task of artists to summon beauty that helps us bear the uncertainty. These roles are equally important. They are not interchangeable.

I won’t argue about free will here (except to say that I don’t think we have it in the libertarian sense, and there’s strong evidence for that contention), but rather would note that art has a wider purpose than “summoning beauty to help us bear the uncertainty” (of life and thought, I presume). Again, great art may not alleviate our distress, but exacerbate it. There is a lot of great art and literature that is simply disturbing. Do you think the painting below is beautiful?  It’s  “Head VI”by Francis Bacon (from Wikipedia), one of the versions of Bacon’s famous “Screaming Pope” series. Those paintings are not beautiful in any conventional sense, but they’re mesmerizing and, I’d say, great art. This resembles Munch’s “The Scream”, and I doubt that Bacon meant it to convey beauty. Rather than soothe our anxiety, it heightens it:

Fair usage, Wikimedia.

Gafford also notes that writers and artists talk about revealing “truth”, for example:

Artists often treasure the truth, as when Paul Cézanne wrote to a younger painter, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you.” By this he meant an authentic impression of nature grounded in immediate perception, rather than any inherited formulae or conventions. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway claims in his memoir A Moveable Feast that “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Clearly Cézanne and Hemingway are talking about subjective rather then objective truth: they are talking about expressing their own views or feelings clearly.

Finally, Gafford talks about how scientists themselves speak of the beauty of their fields, for example a “beautiful experiment” (the Meselson and Stahl experiment comes to mind) or a “beautiful equation”:

Just as artists treasure the truth, scientists frequently extoll beauty. Ulkar Aghayeva argues that “every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is.” She details different reasons why scientists have called experiments beautiful. The aesthetic sensibilities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists were “centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty,” she writes, while contemporary theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek regards a beautiful experiment as one where “you get out more than you put in” because “beautiful experiments exhibit a strong information asymmetry between the input from the experimenter and the output of the system under study.”

I’m not sure how much of a role aesthetics plays here, compared to cleverness and simplicity that yield decisive results (Meselson and Stahl experiment) or E = mc², which is “beautiful” in its simplicity and its economy. But there are lots of important equations that are not nearly as simple or economical.

Finally, while of course appreciating science, Gafford seems to see art as a way to give us a respite from science, which is conceived of as wearing and tedious. Gafford first quotes the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen:

“The tightly structured and highly collective nature of scientific work seems to arise from our desire to actually get things right. We use experts and inferential reasoning in science in order to cope with the vast, sprawling nature of the world. Our separate minds just aren’t large enough to do it on our own. So scientists create a vast store of publicly accessible data, and then use this collective database to make accurate predictions. This methodology requires a radical degree of trust. Scientific conclusions are based on long chains of reasoning, which cross different specialties. Engineers rely on chemists, who in turn rely upon statisticians and molecular physicists, and on and on. And much of this involves trusting others beyond one’s ability to verify. A typical doctor cannot vet, for themselves, all the chemistry, statistics, and biological research on which they rely. The social practice of science is oriented towards epistemic efficiency, which drives us towards epistemic dependence. Scientific conclusions are network conclusions. …

Our artistic and aesthetic practices offer us a respite from that vast, draining endeavor. We have shaped a domain where we can each engage with the world with our own minds—or in nicely human-sized groups. We have shaped a domain where we can return to looking at particular things directly, instead of seeking general principles. This form of aesthetic life functions as a relief from the harsh demands of our collective effort to understand the world. Our aesthetic life is a constructed shelter from science.”

. . . and adds this in her own words:

And so, no matter how well beauty and truth complement each other, we should not conflate the value of art with that of science, lest we weaken both. Can scientists reach their full potential without art as a shelter from the psychic cost of surrendering autonomy? Can artists summon beauty into the world if they do not value it as an end unto itself?

I agree with her conclusion about conflation, but disagree with her claim that doing science incurs a “psychic cost of surrendering autonomy”, meaning that we have to dissolve our egos into the collective enterprise of science to do it properly.  But I’ve never felt that to produce a psychic cost: I find it joyful to do my science  in a community, for that is where you get many of your ideas. Only a few scientists, like Einstein, do their work in isolation, and presumably like it that way.

This is just a commentary on a commentary, and, as I said, not a critique of Gafford, but a scientist’s expansion on her ideas—part of a continuing dialogue on science and art.

 

The Jesus and Mo artist has resurrected a strip called Fluid, called “a Friday Flashback from almost exactly 8 years ago.” It’s a classic, with Mo donning a niqab as an expression of his feminine side. Unfortunately, that side applies only to his garments, not to his temperament.