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The latest 8-9 minute comedy/news bit hasn’t yet been posted on YouTube, but there is a two-minute chuckle on new posters reflecting America’s new set of allies. It’s called “Rosie the Pivoter,” and here it is:

One of the most odious forms of censorship in modern science. or in any discipline that produces empirical results, is to simply ignore the results of or even refuse to publish a study simply because it gives results you—or a journal or a newspaper—don’t like because they go against current ideology.

We’ve seen this before when Johanna Olson-Kennedy’s multi-year, federally funded study on the effects of puberty blockers was held back by the authors from publication because it didn’t give the results that the authors wanted. Instead of blockers increasing the mental well-being of children in a two-year study, there were no palpable improvements (I don’t know if there was a control group as the study hasn’t been published). As the New York Times reported:

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

How duplicitous and craven can you get? And given that it was taxpayer money that funded this study, don’t we (or the NIH) have the right to demand that it be published? Of course Olson-Kennedy had an excuse: she said that no improvements were seen because the kids were “in really good shape when they came in.” But earlier she had reported that one-quarter of the same group was depressed or suicidal when the study began! Something is fishy, and I think it’s the odor of mendacity. Publish the study and let us see for ourselves!

Now we have another case, with two media organizations—this time including the NYT—ignoring a study on the inimical (yes, inimical) effects of DEI training on intergroup harmony. Both articles are from late last year.

The first article below, from Lee Jussim’s “Unsafe Science” Substack site (click headline), is really a repost of something written by Colin Wright for his own Substack site. Lee planned to write something on this study but, as he says below, he deferred to Colin (second headline, click to read):

From Lee:

This post was written by Colin Wright and originally appeared at his Substack site, Reality’s Last Stand. It is on our research on the negative consequences of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pedagogy and rhetoric based on ideas promoted by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo (whose work was quoted exactly in our experimental manipulations). I was planning to do a post on this, but his was so good, I had little to add. Lee

. . . and an excerpt from Colin’s original.  As you can see from what’s below, the study was shelved by two organizations, certainly because it didn’t show that DEI training increased “inclusion”.

From Colin’s piece (bolding about the craven behavior is mine):

In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.

The implications of these findings cannot be downplayed. DEI programs have become a fixture in workplaces, schools, and universities across the United States, with a 2023 Pew Research Center report indicating that more than half of U.S. workers have attended some form of DEI training. Institutions collectively spend approximately $8 billion annually on these initiatives, yet the NCRI study underscores how little scrutiny they receive. While proponents of DEI argue that these programs are essential to achieving equity and dismantling systemic oppression, the NCRI’s data suggests that such efforts may actually be deepening divisions and cultivating hostility.

This context makes the suppression of the study even more alarming. The New York Times, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives. The editorial decisions were ostensibly justified as routine discretion, yet they align conspicuously with the ideological leanings of those involved. Are these major outlets succumbing to pressures to protect certain narratives at the expense of truth?

You can see the study below (click to read it); I’ve quoted the first page with a précis of the methods and results.  Note that this study did have a random control—the usual method where one group reads material designed to produce the desired results (in this case by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo) while the control group reads “neutral” material.  Any sources of the funding are not given the relatively short (23-page) report, so I don’t know if it was done using taxpayer money. The text has plenty of bar graphs that tell the tale (I won’t include them here).

They don’t pull any punches with the title.

Here’s the summary; bolding in the last paragraph is mine. The total sample was 423 undergraduates

Given both the lack of rigorous research on diversity initiatives and the documented potential of DEI efforts backfiring, a better assessment of the efficacy and effects of contemporary diversity training is warranted.

This study focused on diversity training interventions that emphasize awareness of and opposition to “systemic oppression,” a trend fueled by the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and popularized by texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s, How to Be an Antiracist. 10 While not representative of all DEI pedagogy, “anti-racism” and “anti-oppression” pedagogy and intervention materials have seen widespread adoption across sectors like higher education and healthcare. Yet this pedagogy lacks rigorous evaluation of effectiveness, particularly with respect to reducing bias and improving interpersonal/inter-group dynamics.

The prominent “anti-oppressive pedagogy” in DEI programming can carry perceived rhetorical threats for those whose politics or other beliefs run counter to the fundamental premises of the critical paradigm from which the pedagogy derives. Programming may reflexively cast members of so-called “dominant” groups or those who disagree with “anti-oppressive,” “anti-racist,” or modern-day “anti-fascist” framings as oppressive, racist, or fascist.

The studies reported herein assess a crucial question: Do ideas and rhetoric foundational to many DEI trainings foster pluralistic inclusiveness, or do they exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts? Do they increase empathy and understanding or increase hostility towards members of groups labeled as oppressors?

Across three groupings—race, religion, and caste—NCRI collected anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings. The religion-focused interventions drew on content from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), commonly used in sensitivity training on Islamophobia. For race, materials featured excerpts from DEI scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Caste interventions featured anti-oppression narratives from Equality Labs, one of the most prolific training providers for caste discrimination in North America.

Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material. Their responses to this material was assessed through various questions assessing intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, and through scenario-based questions (details on all demographic data, survey questions, essay conditions, responses and analyses can be found in a supplementary document to this report).

Across all groupings, instead of reducing bias, they engendered a hostile attribution bias (Epps & Kendall, 1995), amplifying perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present 11 , and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice. These results highlight the complex and often counterproductive impacts of pedagogical elements and themes prevalent in mainstream DEI training.

One addition from the study:

It is beyond the scope of this research to evaluate DEI training writ large and our work therefore, should not be taken as evaluating the efficacy of an entire industry.

Yes, that caveat almost a given. But this isn’t the first study to show that DEI training doesn’t do what it purports to do.  But this one is a fairly comprehensive study, and any discussion of the efficacy of DEI training should take its results into account. Pity that the NYT or Bloomberg ignored it.

Meet Aaryan Shukla, a 14-year-old boy from India, and one of those kids who has this mysterious ability to do mathematics in his head–very rapidly. Here he tries to set a number of Guinness records in one day. He set six!

The records (he tried for ten): all involve the speed with wich Aaryan got a successful answer.

Adding  100 4-digit numbers
Adding 200 4-digit numbers
Adding 50 5-digit numbers
Dividing a 20-digit number by a 10-digit number
Multiplying two five digit numbers (a set of 10)
Mutiplying two eight-digit numbers (a set of 10)

Of course you could produce an infinite number of categories to test, but it’s clear this young man has amazing abilities. Does anyone know how he does it? I have no idea! And I wonder if this skill could help him get a job, or whether his abilities translate into other abilities that could secure lucrative employment.

ADDENDUM:  See added comments and clarifications under “addendum” at bottom.

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I’ve written many times about the battle of the indigenous people in New Zealand (the Māori) to get their “way of knowing”—which includes a lot of superstition and unreliable word-of-mouth “knowledge,” as well as legends and morality—adopted as official policy or as a “way of knowing” that is equivalent to science.  This push demands an extreme and unjustifiable form of affirmative action, supported, say the activists, by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi made between the locals and European “colonists.” (In the Māori language it’s called “Te Tiriti”.)

The culture war—and there really is one—is fomented not by the “colonists” (descendants of Europeans) as the WaPo implies,  but by the Māori themselves, who argue that the Treaty essentially entitles them to half of everything in the country. This is not even equity, for Māori comprise about 18% of the population.  But the issue is with the Treaty, which, say indigenous people, is in effect the official Constitution of New Zealand. It isn’t, because it really specifies only three things (from Wikipedia):

• Article one of the Māori text grants governance rights to the Crown while the English text cedes “all rights and powers of sovereignty” to the Crown.
• Article two of the Māori text establishes that Māori will retain full chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures while the English text establishes the continued ownership of the Māori over their lands and establishes the exclusive right of pre-emption of the Crown.
• Article three gives Māori people full rights and protections as British subjects.

Note that this says nothing about more modern problems, like who gets hired for jobs or accepted in college, what projects get funded, or what gets taught in classes. Yet that’s the way the Māori have interpreted it.

To create a more modern law, a libertarian “colonist” in parliament, David Seymour, introduced a “Treaty Principles Bill” that, he says, will remedy the Māori interpretation of Te Tiriti by banning discrimination but also providing equal opportunities for everyone. Seymour is the leader of the ACT New Zealand party, which Wikipedia describes, confusingly, as “a right-wing, classical liberal, right-libertarian, and conservative political party in New Zealand”. (I believe it would be seen as “centrist” in the U.S.)

My non-Māori friends in NZ, while opposing the extreme privileges given to indigenous people, nevertheless say that the Treaty Principles Bill is confusing, but still think that the 1840 Treaty is outdated and needs some legislative tweaking, especially to eliminate the whole passel of special privileges the courts and government have conferred on the Māori.  And even the Prime Minister of the country, Christopher Luxon, elected partly to eliminate wokeness, has says the bill is dead. The Luxon government has failed to stop the Woke Train set in motion by the Ardern government.

Needless to say, the Māori hate the new bill and want to keep adhering to the Treaty of Waitangi.

Here’s the reaction (described in the WaPo article below), of the youngest member of New Zealand’s Parliament, Hana-Rawhitie Maipiu-Ckarke, only 22. Below you can see her tearing up the new bill and performing a haka (a traditional war dance to intimidate the enemy) in Parliament. She is joined by other like-minded lawmakers,  but the video went viral and inspired thousands of people to write in or give oral testimony opposing the Treaty Principles Bill. Note, however, that given the atmosphere of intimidation in NZ, public support of the bill would seriously endanger people’s jobs or well being.

Read the WaPo article by clicking below (it’s also archived here):

The article is sympathetic to the Māori, who were indeed once treated very badly by Europeans. But it distorts not only the advantages that the law has now given them over Europeans, and the dangers of opposing their increasing drive for not only equity, but more than equity. This demand for Even More Than Equity is what has ignited the culture war, most prominently in the schools, and, on this site, in the science classroom. (Remember the money allocated to rub whale oil on kauri trees and play whale songs to them, all catering to a Māori legend that the whale and trees were brothers, creating the notion that whale oil and songs could kill the microorganism blight that’s killing the trees? (It won’t, and the money came from taxpayers.)

The WaPo distorts the treaty grossly, saying stuff like this:

The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between the British crown and more than 500 Maori chiefs, resulted in New Zealand’s Indigenous population being violently dispossessed of their lands, leading to disadvantage and disempowerment that continue today.

As you can see from Article 2 of Te Tiriti above, this is either a lie or a distortion that could have been easily corrected had the author looked at the treaty. The Māori retained their lands.

In the end, this is a fight about extreme affirmative action, and I can’t help but sympathize a bit with Seymour, who, noting the great legal advantages Māori have over all other New Zealanders (there are also about 18% Asians in the country),

. . . has insisted his Treaty Principles Bill merely “gives every New Zealander the same rights and dignity” and would ensure “the Treaty can no longer be used to justify separate public services, race-based health waitlists, and creeping co-governance.”

This equal rights and opportunities notion is anathema to indigenous people.  And so the Treaty Principles Bill is, in effect, dead, an ex-bill, singing with the Choir Invisible.  Even Luxon admits this. There is no sign that equal opportunities rather than group preferences will come to pass in New Zealand.

The article goes on to valorize the indigenous people, implying that even now they are experiencing a form of Jim-Crow-like segregation and bias similar to that of the American South in the late 18th and early 19th century. That is simply not true.

But I’ll hand my commentary over to a Kiwi friend who know about America, and tried to explain everything to me when I asked the anonymous friend “what the hell is going on over there?”

His/her answer is below the line, with the words indented, and quotes doubly indented. The last full paragraph sums up the situation, but if you read what’s below, you’ll get a good understanding of what is going on in New Zealand.  As I said, WaPo and Wikipedia quotes are doubly indented, but I’ve also put them in quotes.

========================

Here are a few comments that may be helpful – I find that Americans can be flummoxed by NZ treaty discussions.  *Every* *single* *element* of the discussion seems be in active dispute, with high emotions and no obvious way of resolving the issue.

Here are a few tips for American brains trying to understand the NZ Treaty debates: NZ’s political system is UK-derived, so there is no single written constitution. There are a variety of documents and laws that make up “the constitution”. Wikipedia seems to have it:

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“The constitution of New Zealand is the sum of laws and principles that determine the political governance of New Zealand. Unlike many other nations, New Zealand has no single constitutional document.[1][2] It is an uncodified constitution, sometimes referred to as an “unwritten constitution”, although the New Zealand constitution is in fact an amalgamation of written and unwritten sources.[3][4] The Constitution Act 1986 has a central role,[5] alongside a collection of other statutes, orders in Council, letters patent, decisions of the courts, principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,[1][6] and unwritten traditions and conventions. There is no technical difference between ordinary statutes and law considered “constitutional law”; no law is accorded higher status.[7][8] In most cases the New Zealand Parliament can perform “constitutional reform” simply by passing acts of Parliament, and thus has the power to change or abolish elements of the constitution. There are some exceptions to this though – the Electoral Act 1993 requires certain provisions can only be amended following a referendum.[9]”

================

So, this passage in the WashPo article is confused in several ways:

=============

“The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between the British crown and more than 500 Maori chiefs, resulted in New Zealand’s Indigenous population being violently dispossessed of their lands, leading to disadvantage and disempowerment that continue today. Maori experience worse health, greater poverty and higher incarceration rates than the non-Maori population.

But the treaty has become New Zealand’s de facto constitution. In recent decades, Parliament and the courts have come to see it as promising Maori, who make up almost 20 percent of the population, significant decision-making powers and special protections.”

=============

It would be accurate to say this: “But the treaty has become *part of* New Zealand’s de facto constitution”, but no one would say it’s the whole constitution. Very obviously, it says nothing about elections, parliaments, etc etc.  But it’s not “the constitution”.  The actual Constitution Acts started some years after the Treaty:

===============

“The New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 (15 & 16 Vict. c. 72) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that granted self-government to the Colony of New Zealand. It was the second such Act, the previous 1846 Act not having been fully implemented.[1] The purpose of the Act was to have constitutional independence from Britain.[2] The definition of franchise or the ability to vote excluded all women, most Māori, all non-British people and those with convictions for serious offences.[3]

The Act remained in force as part of New Zealand’s constitution until it was rendered redundant by the Constitution Act 1986.”

===============

It’s also weird to say, “The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between the British crown and more than 500 Maori chiefs, resulted in New Zealand’s Indigenous population being violently dispossessed of their lands, leading to disadvantage and disempowerment that continue today.”  The 1840 Treaty explicitly said that (a) Maori should have the rights and privileges of British subjects, and (b) only the Crown could buy land from them. These were some of the provisions to protect Maori.  So, the sentence should have said “(some) of NZ’s indigenous population were violently dispossessed of their lands, despite the Treaty”.  Without the Treaty, the previous situation would have applied, which was random whalers and pirates and settlers making and breaking land deals outside of any governmental regulation.

Regarding the modern debate & the WashPo article:

– I think it would be true to say that David Seymour & supporters are motivated by (a) the idea that the meaning of the Treaty/”treaty priniciples” have become pretty much an exercise in free association, used to justify whatever the left wants at the moment; (b) in particular, two that were highly controversial were the last government’s attempt to split up important things by race — e.g., the national health service, the attempted “Three Waters” reform of water districts etc.; (c) Seymour’s also got an eye for building his own brand/notoriety and that of his ACT Party.  ACT is often called “far right” but as far as I can tell they are socially liberal libertarians.

ACT is also starting to pay attention to the education and university mess. The dominant National Party seems to mostly avoid these topics, although there have been some improvements, and the National-ACT-NZFirst coalition plans to introduce academic freedom legislation sometime soon.

– As for the response, the National Party views ACT’s treaty principles bill as a headache; but they were forced into it to put the coalition together.  They presumably will vote it down.  However, it’s created a massive opportunity for both ACT and Te Pati Maori (the Maori Party – by no means do all Maori vote for this party) to rile up their base and get attention. Te Pati Maori is beset by other scandals, though, and even the haka-in-parliament stunt had mixed reactions locally and abroad (I recall seeing it mocked on the Jimmy Kimmel show) – if I had to bet, I’d say the coalition will win the next election, but who knows?

– While politically, ACT’s treaty principles bill might work for them, I don’t see it as the best approach myself. I think what we desperately need in New Zealand is some textual originalism, interpreting the treaty on its own terms in the context of its time, and not trying to turn it into either:

(a) a mandate for anti-democratic moves like making every institution, governmental or not, having a 50-50 power share between Maori and non-Maori representatives (the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union (TEU) rammed this through in early 2023 in the waning months of the Labour government. Very few people spoke out about it (many left long before this, the majority of faculty are not in the TEU), some left the TEU afterwards, for spending $850/year to make a mockery of democratic values is not everyone’s cup of tea.)  or

(b) trying to turn the Treaty into a full mandate for the modern system, which is what Seymour is trying to do, also seems non-textual.  One thing the National Party gets right is their basic claim that democracy is self-justifying, and that sovereignty resides with the people in a democratic system; and it’s been that way for 100+ years.  The Treaty wasn’t a full constitution, and we shouldn’t try to pretend it was; and we don’t need it to be.

I think everyone on both sides should study the example of the Australian referendum on an “Indigenous Voice” for the Australian Parliament in late 2023. This initially had some support of both left and right, but when the actual proposal came out, everything fell apart, and it was voted down strongly—and probably fatally wounded the current Labour government. Part of the problem was that the proposal was supposed to be a major Constitutional change, but no exact statutory language was being voted on, and what was proposed was quite vague, with uncertain implications on how it would function and how much power it would have.

It is possible that New Zealand’s recent experience with “mission creep” and “language creep” was influential for some — e.g., many have the perception that in NZ, the modern Treaty discussion started with recognising its historical importance and creating the Waitangi Tribunal to address specific historical grievances between an iwi (tribe) and the Crown (the government), but in recent years many have tried to take it all the way to the requirement of mandatory co-governance of all government and nongovernment institutions and activities, including secondary schools, universities and including all subjects — with any opposition to any of this declared to be far-rightist racism. What activists mean by co-governance varies, but it’s pretty clear that what the activists really want is institutional power assigned by race, often 50/50 Maori vs. non-Maori, and they don’t merely mean “everyone gets to participate in governance, because this is a democracy and we can all vote and run for office, regardless of race”, which of course New Zealand has had for a long time.)

[News story from Australia: Why the Voice failed, October 16, Australian Broadcasting Corporation]

ADDENDUM FROM CORRESPONDENT:

If I could make a few clarifications on the material before the anonymous post:

1. I would be careful about referring to “the Māori”, especially about “their” political views. Like everyone else, there is considerable political (and religious etc) diversity among Māori. While you can say they are broadly supportive of the Treaty of Waitangi (there is a annual national holiday about it, after all), for any specific debate about what it means for particular questions like co-governance, science education, etc, there would be lots of diversity. Te Pati Māori (the Māori Party) currently represents the Maori activist position, but it doesn’t get a majority of even Maori votes, and there are ongoing scandals about misuse of census data to bring TPM voters to the polls during the last election, so it may be yet another episode where TPM gets a few seats one election, and loses them the next.

(Notably there is diversity between iwi/tribes as well as between individuals. After awhile in NZ you detect that some iwi had good relationships with the Crown at various historical points, others had wars with each other and with the Crown, some have longstanding grievances, others don’t, or did but have had their grievances resolved with Treaty Resolution agreements put together by the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal, endorsed by an iwi, and approved by Parliament.)

2. One way of showing the political diversity among Maori is to note that the current Centre-Right government is made of 3 parties: the National Party (headed by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon), the ACT Party (headed by David Seymour), and New Zealand First Party (headed by Winston Peters). Both David Seymour and Winston Peters are…Maori! Winston Peters, I believe, even once headed Te Pati Maori back in the 1970s and won a number of seats that way for some years.

3. The phrases about “changing the Treaty” are incorrect. There is no attempt to literally re-write the Treaty, and no mechanism for doing so. The Treaty is a historical document. It is rather like the US Declaration of Independence, or the Magna Carta. These documents provide inspiration and context, but they are not themselves law, except insofar as codified by laws passed by the legislature.

This is confusing because Americans think of “treaties” as detailed legal agreements with other countries, which are passed by 2/3 of the Senate and then become binding statutory domestic law. This sort of framework did not exist in New Zealand in 1840. It is nevertheless important of course, and the things specifically agreed in 1840 would probably be considered binding by modern courts, e.g. if, in modern times, the government tried to confiscate Maori land, a court would presumably rule it illegal and cite the Treaty (that this was often not the case for much of New Zealand’s history is a legitimate grievance, which the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal is supposed to help eventually resolve). However, detailed modern policy proposals, like splitting the National Health Service along racial lines (or even trying to effect some similar carving-up of intellectual space, e.g. in science education) goes far beyond anything one could call a legal mandate of the Treaty.

So the debate is really about the interpretation of the Treaty, in which language (English or te rep Maori) and what that says about what government laws and policies should be. The 2017-2023 Labour government accepted and pushed hard a postmodern, activist interpretation of all of these questions. Despite this, in 2023, Labour lost a number of crucial seats to Te Pati Maori anyway, and are in the minority. The new government is doing some retrenchment.

It’s Sunday, ergo we have a new selection of North American butterfly photos from John Avise. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. It’s his 250th contribution!

Butterflies in North America, Part 13 

This week is a landmark of sorts: It marks the 250th Sunday that PCC(E) has posted my photos (of birds and butterflies) on WEIT!  Today we continue my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m still drawing from my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Pacific Orangetip (Anthocharis sara) male upperwing:

Pacific Orangetip, male underwing:

Pacific Orangetip, female:

Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), upperwing:

Painted Lady, underwing:

Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon), upperwing:

Pale Swallowtail, underwing:

Pearl Crescent (Phyciodes tharos),upperwing:

Pearl Crescent, underwing:

Phaon Crescent (Phyciodes phaon), upperwing:

Phaon Crescent, underwing:

Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor), upperwing:

Pipevine Swallowtail, chrysalis:

For some reason Bill Maher’s latest comedy/news video, “New Rules: Guilt by Civilization”, is age-restricted (it must be the photo of Bianca Censori in her see-through outfit) , but you can see it by clicking either here or on the “Watch on YouTube” line below.

The beginning is great, as Maher claims that the Democrats won’t win elections unless they stop doing land acknowledgments, which. as he shows, was made by , by Julianne Hough in a cringeworthy announcement that kicked off the Oscars this year (I had no idea!) He says, and I agree, “Either give the land back, or shut the fuck up.” He adds, with tongue in cheek, “If you want to thank a tribe for Hollywood, start with the Jews.”

Maher then moves on to New Zealand’s wokeness, noting the recent recognition of a mountain sacred to the Māori as a person having all the rights of a human.  He takes down “the authority of the sacred victim” by simply asking, “Can we please get over this idea that ancient people weren’t just as full of shit—in fact, more full of shit—than humans today? It’s so simplistic—this idea of ‘guilt by civilization’—that the ancient and indigenous and not us was always better than us. It wasn’t.” He highlights some of the problems with ancient Māori civilization in a way that’s not going to go down well in New Zealand.

Maher points out all the advantages of modern, “civilized” life, like anesthetics, refrigeration, medicine, etc. and disses the “but-they-lived-in-harmony-with nature” trope.  He admits that what the European invaders did to the Indians was “not good”, but also “not unusual” since Native American tribes were not only constantly warring with each other, but often enslaving each other.

His final touting of fairly steady progress since ancient times—progress both technological and moral—could have been taken from the pages of Steve Pinker’s books The Better Angels of our Nature or Enlightenment Now.  Those books have received a lot of criticism, but it’s hard to deny the data they adduce. And if you want to reject their thesis of centuries long improvement in moral and bodily well-being—the same as Maher’s thesis here—ask yourself this: “Would you rather have lived your life in the 14th century–or now?” If you answer “now,” then you’d probably have already been dead years ago.

Here’s a question that cat owners probably ask themselves. Certainly some cats go nuts when they see themselves in the mirror, but they could be thinking it’s just another cat and not their own reflection?  Here, according to petMD, is how SCIENCE addresses the question. click to read:

The test scientists use for self-recognition is the famous “mirror test“, which has been criticized because it depends on a critical use of animal vision, and not all species are very visual. They have, for example, used odor in animals like dogs (e.g., do they recognize their own odor?) From the article:

Understanding that you are the person staring back at you in the mirror may seem obvious, but it’s a feat of mental gymnastics that you probably didn’t develop until you were 18 to 24 months old. Scientists have used the mirror-self recognition test (also called the MSR or mark test) to assess self-awareness in humans and animals for decades.

How the test is run varies slightly from study to study, but MSR tests work by exposing animals to mirrors. Once the animal is used to the mirrors’ presence, the researcher places a marker, like a sticker or a patch of dye, on a part of the animal’s body they can’t readily see (their face or neck, for example).

If the animal investigates the visible mark on their body while looking at themselves in the mirror, they are said to pass the MSR test. In other words, they saw something unusual on their body when they looked in the mirror and reacted in a way that showed understanding that their reflection was their own image.

Some animals, such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and magpies, have passed the MSR test, but many others haven’t. While there haven’t been any rigorous mark tests involving cats, one recent study made use of YouTube videos and concluded that cats can’t recognize themselves in the mirror.

But what about moggies?

Understanding that you are the person staring back at you in the mirror may seem obvious, but it’s a feat of mental gymnastics that you probably didn’t develop until you were 18 to 24 months old. Scientists have used the mirror-self recognition test (also called the MSR or mark test) to assess self-awareness in humans and animals for decades.

How the test is run varies slightly from study to study, but MSR tests work by exposing animals to mirrors. Once the animal is used to the mirrors’ presence, the researcher places a marker, like a sticker or a patch of dye, on a part of the animal’s body they can’t readily see (their face or neck, for example).

If the animal investigates the visible mark on their body while looking at themselves in the mirror, they are said to pass the MSR test. In other words, they saw something unusual on their body when they looked in the mirror and reacted in a way that showed understanding that their reflection was their own image.

Some animals, such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and magpies, have passed the MSR test, but many others haven’t. While there haven’t been any rigorous mark tests involving cats, one recent study made use of YouTube videos and concluded that cats can’t recognize themselves in the mirror.

If you look at the paper, the answer is clearly “we have no idea,” for they don’t even used the “mark test” on cats. Clearly there is an important question here begging for an answer, and that answer is not that hard to get, even if the test produces false negatives (e.g. when animal does recognize itself but the mark test fails). Cats are visual animals, though, so someone should slap some red sticky dots on cats’ heads and see what happens. The article even tells you how to do it at home!

The best thing about the MSR test is you can easily try it at home with your own cat. Here’s how:

• Place a large mirror on the floor where your cat likes to spend a lot of time.

• Let your cat get used to the mirror for at least a few days.

• Cut out two small squares of clear tape. Leave one clear and color the other so it will clearly stand out when placed on your cat’s fur.

• When you’re ready to perform the test, place the colored piece of tape on the bottom of your cat’s neck and the clear one nearby.

• Put your cat in front of the mirror and watch how they react.

• Cats who look at themselves in the mirror and quickly try to remove the colored piece of tape might be demonstrating self-awareness!

I’m not sure what the clear tape is for, though.

There are videos of cats seeing themselves in the mirror, but they say little about self-recognition:

When you watch videos of cats seeing themselves in the mirror, it’s obvious they know that something important is going on. The cats’ body language falls into two categories:

• Aggressive: The arched back, erect hair, and puffy tail flicking back and forth are all signs of agitation and aggression in cats. Often, cats show signs of aggression because they are scared and feel like they need to defend themselves.

• Curious: Some cats don’t appear agitated but are simply curious. Their eyes are open wide, and their ears are pricked forward.

You can see both aggression and curiosity in the linked video, which I’ve put below:

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From that ever-informative magazine Newsweek, we learn that people are starting to dunk their faces into bowls of ice water or ice cubes, convinced that this will improve their skin. (I have no idea if there’s any data to support this, though the magazine found one doctor who said, “By constricting blood vessels, cold exposure reduces inflammation and redness, alleviating puffiness and restoring a refreshed look. Cold exposure is particularly helpful for those who have irritable skin through the constriction of blood vessels, alleviating swelling and flushes.”)

At any rate, a helpful cat helped its staff get through this painful procedure. Click on headline to read.

An excerpt:

For many, achieving flawless skin doesn’t happen overnight and often requires effort—whether through skincare products, facials, or even dunking your face in a bowl of ice-cold water, as this woman demonstrates.

Ice-cold therapy for facial skin can reduce puffiness and inflammation, and tighten pores; however, putting your face in the freezing water is the hard part. So, it’s no wonder Makayla Raezz (@makayla.raezz) is reluctant during her TikTok video, which has an astounding 17.7 million views.

Fortunately, she has a supportive kitten called Calypso who seems determined to help Raezz reap the benefits. She stands on her hind legs, places her front paws on her owner’s head, and simply pushes her face into the water.

The feline is referred to as her owner’s “personal cheerleader,” but not all TikTok users agree. Many were left wondering if the cat’s actions were playful or something more sinister. The debate in the comments continues to grow, with some users calling it “supportive” while others remain suspicious of the cat’s motives.

So far, the video has 2.8 million likes and over 7,000 comments, with many viewers assuming the worst.

“I think your cat want[s] you dead,” said one user, while others have written in the first person what they believe the cat would say if she could talk.

“Shhh shhh don’t fight it,” said one comment with over half a million likes, and another wrote: “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

“Shhhhh just go into the light, girl!” said a third commenter and a fourth wrote: “Nah she was tryna take you out right there sis,” gathering over 20,000 likes.

Nonetheless, whatever the cat’s intentions were, her owner seemed happy that she helped her brace the cold. She even smirks at her kitten’s efforts, amused by the unexpected push. After all, it is beneficial.

Here’s the video under debate:

@makayla.raezz

#iceyface

♬ original sound – ;༊

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The movie “Flow,” an animated film featuring a cat and some other creatures, like a capybara and a lemur, encountering a worldwide flood apocalypse, is superb, and I’ve been touting it for a while. Well, it just won the Oscar for the Best Animated Feature Film, and you should see it. Below is a video of the award, and notice the black cat to the left during the award and in the picture below. Note also that one awardee says that “we’re all in the same boat,” indicating one theme of the movie, which features no words or humans—only animal noises. The movie was made by a group that included Latvians, French, and Belgians.

Oh, here’s the trailer again:

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Lagniappe: A statue memorializing a famous cat lady who lived on the Canary Islands of Spain:

h/t: Ginger K.

Today we have some front- and backyard photos of flowers taken by Rik Gern of Austin Texas. Rik’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are two more examples of plants from the front and back yard. They are both species of  ground cover, and are common in Central Texas.

I sent you some pictures of Lawnflower, aka Straggler Daisy (Calyptocarpus vialis)  a few years ago, but a new camera inspired new pictures. Lawnflower has antibacterial properties, grows just about anywhere, is comfortable underfoot, and mows easily. What’s not to like?

The next small plant is Common Chickweed (Stellaria media).The flower is so small that it’s easy to miss. Unlike Lawnflower, Common Chickweed is an introduced species. It is allegedly edible and has been used to treat conditions such as itchy skin.

Neither species is unusual, exotic, or eye catching, but both are examples of the common beauty that surrounds us if we open our eyes to it.

You wouldn’t think that this difference would need to be discussed once again, but yes it does, because distinguishing between the two is one of the missions of new University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, founded with a $100 million (!) gift of an anonymous donor.  This forum hit the ground running, with a number of special events and discussions on free expression, usually related to how it works and should work on college campuses. Its first director, Tom Ginsburg, who teaches International Law and Political Science here, has buttressed his mission by publishing several articles in the most widely-read forum for higher academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Ginsburg’s piece below, which you can access by clicking on the link, explains why scholarship and not political advocacy is what we want in University classrooms. Moreover, departments and units of the University should not be engaged in making “official” political pronouncements that chill speech (that is a violation of our Kalven Report, now endorsed by 30 universities besides ours.

I’ll give a few quotes below, which echo in more eloquent language positions I’ve held and advanced on this website. I’ve put the quotes under my own bold headings, but words from Ginsburg’s essay are indented:

Why you can’t just teach anything in the classroom (i.e., no complete “free speech” in class):

Academic freedom is centrally dependent on claims of professional expertise. Within a field, academics have freedom of teaching and research. (In the United States, at least, academics are also allowed broad extramural speech.) But academics can be punished for failure to observe disciplinary standards.\

In my own case, I cannot go into my constitutional-law course and instead teach the laws of physics or advertise the latest brand of detergent; the reason this is true is that no legal academic would in good faith recognize those speech acts as within the domain of constitutional law. While I cannot be fired for the way I teach constitutional law, I can be punished for failing to do the job for which I was hired.

This is why you can’t teach creationism (judged by the courts as “not science”) in a science class, even of the Discovery Institute would have it otherwise.  The line between teaching and advocacy, however, can be thin—especially so when you’re teaching politics. It’s all too easy when teaching about the history of the Middle East, for example, to distort what happened to favor the message you want to impart (and of course history has divergent interpretations).

Why “studies’ courses are particularly susceptible to advocacy. (Ginsburg largely exempts black studies, which seems to have reached academic maturity). Not many science courses in college include ideological advocacy; this is found more often in secondary schools.

American society, however, began to doubt such claims of neutrality with the crisis of the 1960s. Many of the academic disciplines created in that period were born under a political star and rejected claims of technocratic neutrality in favor of promoting perspectives that had theretofore been excluded. It is hardly surprising they saw their mission as integrating scholarship with a particular set of definitions of social change.

Unfortunately, these fields also became active agents of social construction and political mobilization, sometimes on an ethnic basis. Scholarly associations of these new interdisciplinary fields do not hide these goals. The Chicana- and Chicano-studies association begins its mission statement by saying it will “advance the interest and needs of the Chicana and Chicano community.” The Association for Asian American Studies mission statement includes as an objective “advocating and representing the interests and welfare of Asian American studies and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

Presumably scholars in these fields are evaluated not only by their scholarship but by their advocacy of particular interest groups. We can understand why histories of exclusion encouraged scholars to blur the lines between scholarship and advocacy, but doing so draws on the social capital of the scholarly enterprise for unabashedly political purposes. (Interestingly, Black studies may have done a better job of transforming into a stable scholarly interdiscipline.)

Among older disciplines, anthropology has led the way in insisting that cultural advocacy must be at the heart of scholarship. In a 1999 statement on human rights, the American Anthropological Association pronounced that it had “an ethical duty to protest” when any culture or society denies the right of people and peoples to the “full realization of their humanity.” But in 2020, it refined this commitment to include a cultural relativism, stating that “no one jurisdiction ought to impose its own interpretation of how to recognize and protect these rights on any other jurisdiction.” Reflecting on its own tainted history, the AAA leadership went on to demand “forms of research and engagement that contribute to decolonization and help redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”

When one’s scholarship is designed to include advocacy — what Tarunabh Khaitan has called “scholactivism” — risks are obvious. Advocates may reject or downplay inconvenient results, distorting academic debates. More deeply, they violate the “role morality” — the notion that some roles entail specific ethical commitments — of scholarship, which is the very basis for the social tolerance of academic freedom in the first place. While of course there is always a deep politics of scholarship, for example in the selection of topics for inquiry or methods for approaching them, these biases ought to be examined and minimized in genuine inquiry, not celebrated. This requires a humility about the limits of one’s own perspective.

Academic boycotts. The American Association of University Professors recently removed its opposition to boycotts, clearly so that scholars could boycott Israel. That was a cowardly and heinous move, which impedes academic freedom. Ginsburg says this:

The horrors of the Gaza war have provided a litmus test for whether disciplines are committed to genuine inquiry or instead to “scholactivism.” Several associations have debated or passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire. With the tacit support of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), several scholarly associations have signed on to a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These include the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

While the promoters of the boycott emphasize that it is not to be directed at individual scholars, it has in fact led to hundreds if not thousands of individual-level cancellations of scholarly engagements and collaborations. Such a collective boycott arguably undermines the academic freedom of scholars at both targeted and targeting institutions, who should be free to collaborate with whom they choose. Advocates of academic freedom should oppose this kind of boycott vigorously.

Institutional neutrality. The last part of the essay promotes the kind of institutional neutrality first adopted by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report in 1967, and now held by about 30 schools. It is an essential part of Chicago’s promotion of free speech, because if a department or center

. . .We should, for example, call into question the general practice of scholarly associations making pronouncements by majority rule. The internal progress of science depends on tolerating dissidents and does not proceed by majority rule. Why should things be different when the discipline is speaking as a whole? A small step of self-correction would be to use collective statements only in extreme circumstances, perhaps only with super-majoritarian rather than majoritarian mechanisms.

. . . . In a prescient observation in 2001, Clark Kerr noted that there was a conflict between the traditional view of the university that flowed from the enlightenment, embodied in a vision of seeking truth and objectivity, and a postmodern vision in which all discourse is political, with university resources to be deployed in ways that were liberatory and not repressive. He thought the conflict might further deepen, and noted that “any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large.”

As we stand at a moment of deep alienation, stepping back from the further politicization of scholarship is an existential step.

This essay originally appeared in Inquisitive.

The postmodern view is wrong, and it’s clearly opposed by Ginsburg. The Chicago Forum is clearly defending the Chicago Principles of Free Speech, but is also a forum for discussing and tweaking those principles. When, for example, do demonstrations on campus abrogate freedom of speech? When does teaching lapse into advocacy? We have continuing discussions about issues like this, and the Forum is also supports a unit on freedom of expression given to first-year students before they start classes.  Actually, our faculty need it as much as do the students!

On March 2, 125 scientists and people affiliated with biology (from 18 countries) signed a letter to the presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) See my post about this here.

Our letter and signatures, resulting largely from the effort of Luana Maroja of Williams College, was written to object to the three societies’ previously published claim that biological sex in all species (not just humans) was some sort of multidimensional social construct that was, above all, NOT binary. Here’s one paragraph from their letter, dated February 5, 2025 and addressed to President Trump and “Members of the U.S. Congress.”

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

I can’t resist pointing out that the “lived identity” part has nothing to do with biological sex, but shows more than anything the ideological purposes of this letter.

Although these views were presented as a “scientific consensus”, the societies did not poll their members. Rather, I gather that they consulted their executive boards and decided that this was a good way to signal their virtue—even if involved distorting biology.  Their “multidimensional, multivariate” concept of sex, which incorporates information from a number of disparate traits, is in sharp contrast with what most biologists see as the definition of sex: a binary trait in all animals and plants that is based solely on whether they have the reproductive apparatus to produce large versus small gametes.  As Richard Dawkins has explained, the latter gamete-based “Universal Biological Definition” (UBD) of sex has the advantage that, yes, it’s universal (every plant and animal species has only two types of gametes), and it’s also explanatory, essential for understanding stuff like natural selection and sexual dimorphism. The multidimensional definition is neither universal nor explanatory.

The Tri-Societies “definition”—which isn’t really a definition—gives us no way to answer the two questions, “Well, how do you tell what sex a person/animal/plant really is?” and “How many sexes are there, then?” It’s a useless construct foisted on the public to show solidarity with those people who don’t identify with one of the two biological sexes. (I repeat again that it’s a description of nature, not a a prescription about how people should be treated.) But we felt that such a letter needed to be sent to show that by no means do all biologists agree on a multivariate definite of sex.

Our first letter (identical, but with only 23 signatures) was never answered, but this time we asked for a response and got one, signed by all three Presidents.  I can’t reprint it because we didn’t ask for permission, but some of its gist is in the response below from Luana. I will say that they admitted that they think they’re in close agreement with us (I am not so sure!), that their letter wasn’t properly phrased, that some of our differences come from different semantic interpretations of words like “binary” and “continuum”(nope), and that they didn’t send the letter anyway because a federal judge changed the Executive Order on sex (this didn’t affect our criticisms). At any rate, the tri-Societies letter is on hold because the organizations are now concerned with more serious threats from the Trump Administration, like science funding.

While I can’t reveal all the points they made, I can say that I see this largely as a victory for reason, as although the letter is still up at the link (they really should remove it and inform the members of the Societies), it wasn’t ever sent and they admit that it has several deficiencies. However, since they do admit those deficiencies, they really should take the letter down because it misrepresents biological reality as well the views of many–perhaps most–evolutionists. (You can also find the letter archived here).

At any rate, the Societies’ letter was sent to all 125 signers, some of whom read this website and are able to comment on the response. In the meantime, yesterday Luana sent the letter below to the Societies (quoted with permission).  Given that the Societies admit the letter was misleading and yet it’s still on the internet representing what is said to be a “scientific consensus” and not even giving a definition of biological sex, the proper thing to do would involve either taking it down or writing something newer based on a poll of the Societies’ members.

Luana’s letter:

Dear Dan, Jessica and Carol,

Thank you for your response.  We are pleased to hear that the letter has not yet been sent . Is the letter going to be removed from the website and members notified of the change and any future changes?

I am unclear what you mean by “Subsequently a federal judge decided against the Executive Order we were commenting on, and the wording of that EO then changed, rendering our original letter moot.”  I am not aware of such change – the EO is still in place (here). What are you referring to?

Furthermore, subsequent to the Executive Order 14168, the HHS has released a guidance (here) to the U.S. government, external partners, and the public to expand on the sex-based definitions. The HHS guidance changed the definition related to “producing gametes” (at conception) to sex “characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing” eggs (ova) or sperm.

We hope we can indeed find common ground,

Best,
Luana

I end by saying that scientific societies need not be “institutionally neutral” when they are dealing with issues that affect the mission of the societies, as the definition of sex surely does. But what’s not okay is for the societies to distort “scientific consensus” in the interest of ideology. I have no idea if the Presidents of these societies really believe what they said (as Dawkins has pointed out, all three Presidents use a binary notion of sex in their own biological work), but something is deeply wrong when you use one notion of sex in your own science and yet deny that notion when you’re telling politicians what scientists “really believe.”

Please send in your wildlife photos!

Today we have part 9 of Robert Lang‘s collection of photos that he took while visiting Brazil’s region last year. Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photo by clicking on them.

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

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

Potoo (Nyctibius sp.). Our guide spotted this one at night atop a roadside post, and while the lighting made it far beyond the abilities of my big-lens Canon, my iPhone 14 managed to get a decent picture—as one of several tries, mostly unsuccessful, but this one came out:

Purplish jay (Cyanocorax cyanomelas):

Red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata):

Red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata):

Greater rhea (Rhea americana):

Rhea chicks:

Ringed kingfisher (Megaceryle torquata):

Roadside hawk (Rupornis magnirostris). Saw a lot of these, some of them even along the side of the road:

Roseate spoonbill (Platalea ajaja) among the caimans:

Caatinga cacholote (Pseudoseisura cristata). Formerly called the rufous cacholote (which was what our guide identified it as):

More birds to come.

It’s not only unconscionable for “progressive” Democrats to cheer on trans-identified males (“transwomen”) who compete in women’s sports, but that behavior certainly hurt the Democrats, especially because most Americans, including Democrats, think that this kind of participation should be forbidden:

A recent New York Times/Ipsos survey found the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don’t think transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in women’s sports.

“Thinking about transgender female athletes — meaning athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female — do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports?” the survey asked.

Of the 2,128 people who participated, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports.

Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democrat, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete with women.

Among 1,022 Republicans, that number was 94%.

You can find the poll results here.

While at first it seems empathic to allow trans-identified males to compete against women, it’s really unfair to women, and to most of us the total fairness is increased by forbidding that competition. (I still think trans-identified males who want to do sports should compete somewhere, either in an “other” league, or perhaps in men’s sports.)  People recognize this, and Democrats who favor this cross-sex competition simply look clueless. (I am exempting any sports in which men and women perform about equally, though I’m not sure which ones.)

As the reader who sent me this new article from the NYT said, “Perhaps the fever has finally broken.” I think it has, for California governor Gavin Newsom, a diehard and largely “progressive” Democrat, is now going along with most Americans. Click below to read the article, or find it archived here.

An excerpt:

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, embarking on a personal post-mortem of the failures of his Democratic Party, suggested this week that the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”

The comments by Mr. Newsom, who has backed L.G.B.T.Q. causes for decades and was one of the first American elected officials to officiate same-sex weddings, represented a remarkable break from other top Democrats on the issue, and signaled a newly defensive position on transgender rights among many in his party.

Just as surprising as Mr. Newsom’s remarks was the person to whom he made them: Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old right-wing influencer best known for starting Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump organization that is active on college campuses.

Mr. Newsom invited Mr. Kirk, who has a long history of inflammatory and conspiratorial remarks, onto the debut episode of his new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” for an 81-minute discussion because, the governor said, “people need to understand your success, your influence, what you’ve been up to.” Mr. Newsom spent much of the conversation reflecting on the myriad ways that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign failed to reach key voters during the 2024 election, losing ground with young people, men and Hispanic voters.

Mr. Newsom is widely seen as having presidential ambitions in 2028 — something he joked about on the podcast — and until recent months, he had often sought to project an image as one of the leaders of the Democratic Party’s opposition to President Trump. In December, he cursed Mr. Trump’s name in an interview with The New York Times, but shortly after the president’s inauguration, Mr. Newsom traveled to Washington for a meeting with Mr. Trump to discuss funding for wildfire relief.

I hope, but not sure I exspect, other Democrats to follow his lead. Certainly lost causes like AOC will now follow.

And yes, this is not a huge issue compared to, say, Ukraine, but one’s stand on it is indicative of both one’s moral compass and of one’s sympathy to real feminism.  I’ll surely be called a transphobe for applauding Newsom, but so be it. I don’t of course think that most legal and moral rights of trans people should be abrogated, but there are a few cases where they do conflict with rights of other groups (jails, changing rooms, etc.), and one should adjudicate these things sensibly.  What one shouldn’t do is hurl slurs at people like Newsom who have a rational approach to the issue.

THIS ARTICLE IS DEDICATED TO MY COLLEAGUE MATTHEW COBB, WHO IS BEING DRIVEN CRAZY BY UNHINGED PIECES ON “DE-EXTINCTING” THE WOOLY MAMMOTH

The push to re-create the extinct Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) may be the biggest waste of money in decades, and for several reasons. First, the people behind this are misleading the public by making us think that they’re going to give us a real woolly mammoth instead of a hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant Asiatic elephant, which is what they’re really trying to make. It doesn’t help that credulous and ignorant journalists can’t even see through this.

Second, the endeavor to even make a hairy elephant (they propose to put manufactured mammoth genes with sequences derived from frozen mammoths, into a fertilized elephant egg, and then implant it into an
Asiatic elephant), faces so many obstacles that it seems nearly impossible. And even if it were possible, you’d need to make at least two faux mammoths so they could create a lineage. And where would they live, since real woolly mammoths were denizens of the chilly tundras of northern Asia? (That’s why they had hair.) What would they eat? Asiatic elephants don’t eat the kind of stuff on the tundra, and aren’t equipped to process it, but they’re not going to change behavior and physiology genes.

As I reported yesterday, this ridiculous project is making the news again because, yes, scientists have created a “woolly mouse” by injecting nine genes known to influence hair color and texture IN MICE into mouse stem cells and implanting the lot in mice. They got fuzzier mice, but apparently not the ones shown below, which are in the press release. What they really got are mice less hairier than those shown in the press (see below).

Of course, you can also breed mice that look like this, but we can’t breed Asiatic elephants, though that would be more likely to produce a faux mammoth, because their generation time is too long.  And, as I said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make transgenic mice than transgenic elephants.  As one wag tweeted about this ludicrous experiment on mice, which is supposed to be a precursor to the Mammoth Project:

GIVE THEM TRUNKS YOU COWARDSwww.theguardian.com/science/2025…

— Marc Dionne (@marcsdionne.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T18:05:25.420Z

. . . AND BIG TUSKS, TOO!

Both Matthew and I have criticized this project for its pretended aims as well as its impossibility (see my posts here, as especially this one), and Matthew is getting depressed at how many journalists have been taken in by the project, now in the hands of Colossal Biosciences (a “de-extinction” company), but most famously promoted by Harvard’s George Church, the founder of Colossal (curiously, Elon Musk had a hand in convincing Church to take this on). In fact, Matthew devotes a big section of his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, to debunking the Mammoth Project.

Now Scientific American, which I hoped would recover from its years of benighted wokeness, has taken up the story. (Click below to read, or find it archived here.)

How did the magazine do? (The author is journalist Adam Popescu and the editor is Andrea Thompson, “covering the environment, energy and earth sciences”.) Well, on first reading I’d give it a C. It does point out some problems to worry about after we produce a woolly mammoth, but is quite thin about whether they can get one in the first place.  For example, it doesn’t even note that an Asian elephant with a few genes that make it hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant is nothing like a Woolly Mammoth, separated by about 6.5 million years of evolution. (That’s about the time separating us from chimps and bonobos.) It is a hairy elephant with no behaviors that would help it survive on the tundra.  And they don’t even mention the problems of implanted a genetically altered elephant embryo back into a female Asiatic elephant. Here’s what I wrote in one post (the quote within is from the NYT):

Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system?

But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), Church had this bright idea:

Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates.

Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy,” he said. “But everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

The idea has a few precedents. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have developed a sealed bag that can support a fetal lamb for four weeks, for example. But Colossal will need to build an artificial uterus big enough to house a fetus for around two years, reaching a weight of 200 pounds.

An artificial mammoth uterus? Seriously? If you think that’s gonna work, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Of course, if you’re going to breed these things, you’d have to make two of them of opposite sexes. Could they even do that?

That, in fact, is another huge problem beyond problem beyond the pretense that they are going to put a lot of mammoth-derived or mammoth-mimicking genes in an elephant and call it a Woolly Mammoth. An artificial womb for a baby elephant would be the size of a Volkswagen!  Scientific American doesn’t mention that problem, either.

Finally, the Colossal researchers apparently also inserted a gene thought to affect mouse lipid metabolism into the mouse (Nature, in the article below, doesn’t mention it), but the Sci. Am. article says in the second paragraph that the Woolly Mice have “cold adapted traits such as the way in which it sotres and burns fat”.  That is a lie. They don’t know whether the gene does that in the mice, and later on Sci. Am. gives the real story:

The team also targeted lipid metabolism, “which is the process by which the body breaks down, synthesizes and stores fats,” Shapiro says. The paper notes that “future experiments will examine the effect of high fat diets and temperature preferences” on the mice to inform further work toward the goal of developing cold-adapted elephant-mammoth hybrids.

So no, the mice are not cold adapted. (See below, too.)

The problems that Sci Am does mention involve mostly things about about the environment and conservation, perhaps prompted by the editor. And they are real problems, but won’t even need to be considered until we get one of these mammoths (the NBC Evening News on Tuesday said that Colossal envisions the Mammoth Release in 2028, which is pure bunk). Below are problems Sci. Am. lists, but they’re all problems that would arise if they created the faux mammoth and then put it into the wild. These are quotes:

But many experts in genetic engineering and conservation are skeptical. Rewilding is risky; species such as wolves and elephants have come into conflict with humans, and others have fallen victim to predators and poachers. No one knows what would happen if a mammoth—or, more technically, an elephant-mammoth hybrid—was released: What would it eat? How would we protect it? Could it reproduce?

. . . . As for saving the climate, “we’re looking at a warming world, and [Colossal’s researchers] want to bring back creatures that are adapted to the cold?” says Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at National Museums Scotland, who studies ancient mice-sized mammals. “I study animals from the past, and they should stay in the past. Lack of habitat, human conflict, agriculture, climate change—the idea that they can fix that with gene editing is missing the big picture.”

. . . “In certain ancient species’ DNA, you don’t know what the function of this DNA is, so there are more than ethical problems; there are biological hazards from moving and editing the DNA,” says Yale University geneticist Jiangbing. Zhou “I’m not sure about the potential risks of this type of work, as the function of ancient DNA in live mice may be difficult to predict.”

. . . What happens with the mice or—if the company ever realizes its ultimate ambition—the woolly mammoths is another ethical quandary. “I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, but if we’re going to interfere with nature, there has to be good reason,” Panciroli says. Additionally, reintroduced animals (including elephants) are routinely targeted by poachers, points out Andrea Crosta, founder of a wildlife-crime-fighting nongovernment organization called Earth League International.

. . .“It’s arrogance,” says Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who spent decades fighting whaling and the ivory trade. “I’m not against technology. I’m not saying nature’s perfect. But this is such a waste of money when conservation is dying for lack of funds. To make some strange animal we can gawk at—we should be past that.”

Trailblazing biologist George Schaller agrees. “We need to protect what we have,” he says.

I think I’ll downgrade the grade I give to Sci. Am. to a D, for they completely omit the problems of making anything that resembles a Woolly Mammoth, and then point out problems that would arise if we could and then unleashed them on the tundra. They should have mentioned, as Nature implies below, that the whole project is simply bonkers and will not succeed. (If they do, I’ll eat my hat.) And Sci Am show pictures of hairy mice which are NOT the mice created by Colossal (see below).  Showing those photos borders on duplicity!

Nature, as you can tell by the headline below, does a much better job of pointing out the problems, though it doesn’t mention the Uterus Difficulty or the Behavior and Foraging Difficulty. I give the article an A-, though, because it does say that Colossal isn’t going to produce a woolly mammoth. Click to read:

They point out the main problem in the third through fifth paragraphs:

Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.

But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.

“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”

And note that Colossal created some of their fuzzy mice by inserting into the mice genome not genes derived from mammoth sequences, but mouse mutations already known to make mice hairier. It’s a scam!

Shapiro [from Colossal] defends the decision to include mouse-specific mutations in Colossal’s woolly mice, in part because of the genetic chasm that separates mice and mammoths. “We have to choose modifications that are going to be compatible with healthy animals,” Shapiro says. “We’re not shoving mammoth genes into mice because there’s 200 million years of evolutionary distance between them.”

It’s not clear how many genetic changes would be needed to imbue elephants with mammoth traits. Lamm says Colossal’s goal isn’t to create an exact replica of mammoths, but a creature that can fill the ecological niches that mammoths occupied. “It’s really about rebuilding extinct species for today and looking for lost biodiversity and lost genes that drive those phenotypes.”

Making eight changes to an organism’s genome, as the Colossal team did, is now fairly standard in genetic engineering, Riesenberg says.

Riesenberg and his colleagues are developing methods to introduce dozens, or even hundreds, of Neanderthal-specific changes into human stem cells — to identify the biology that makes humans unique (“One cannot and should not recreate the Neanderthal,” he stresses). Altering an animal’s genome on this scale is one of the great frontiers in genome editing, Riesenberg adds. Even the capacity to make this many changes “would not bring you close to making a mammoth”.

Clearly Nature isn’t enthusiastic about this project, and they shouldn’t be. Even the woolly mice they show are not from their study (see below), but that took another scientist to point that out.

As Dr. Victoria Herridge points out below, they didn’t get the hairy mice shown in the journalism (and press-release) photos by combining the genes they said they inserted into the mouse. Instead, they appear to have inserted other genes already known to cause hairiness in mice, for because people have been breeding hairy “fancy mice” for years. The “mammothiest mouse” produced by Colossal is not the one shown in the pictures.

And so we have the BlueSky threads below from Dr. Victoria Herridge at the University of Sheffield, a paleontologist who studies real mammoths.  She simply takes the Colossal report apart, noting that the hairy mouse pictures used in Sci Am. do not show show the result of combined gene insertions used by the researchers, but some other mutations. Further, she notes that there’s no known effect of the “fat metabolism” genes on fat metabolism of the transgenic mice.  As Matthew adds, “note that the key experiment changing fat metabolism genes HAD NO EFFECT though they said little about that in the paper and the journalists all skipped over it…”

Here’s the hairiest mice that the Colossal people really produced by multiple insertions. They aren’t the ones in the picture above; they’re much more clean-cut! Note her comment on the inefficacy of the fat-metabolism gene.

 

Here Tori shows that Colossal should have used other mouse mutants to confect the mammoth story. Look at the double mutant Fgfr1/2!!!!

Finally, she tried to track down where the mice in all the magazines and the press release came from (the original BioRχiv paper is here).   These mice are in the supplementary materials in the article’s preprint, but involve fewer mutations than the ones touted as “mammothyt mice”:

I asked Matthew if he had ever seen any article in the popular press (beyond what’s in his book) that provided an accurate critical analysis of the Mammoth Project. He said, “no”.  As the warden said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Science journalism is, by and large, abysmal, though of course there are exceptions.

Finally, some humor from Dr. Cobb, who’s been beleaguered by science journalists about this for years, and always tells them that the project is dumb:

He’s dreaming of eating those damned woolly mice.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T20:25:24.966Z

We are running out of photos from different readers, but fortunately we have several remaining installments from Robert Lang‘s trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, one of which I’ll present today. But please send in your photos!

Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

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

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

Laughing falcon (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Lesser yellow-headed vulture (Cathartes burrovianus). One of the several vultures we saw (which included the spectacular king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), but alas, that one only at a great distance.):

Monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus):

Monk parakeets live in communal nests that they keep adding to, eventually resulting in gigantic snarls of branches with openings all over that are a constant hum of activity. Here’s a close-up of one, showing some of the individual nest openings within the apartment block:

Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata):

Nanday parakeet (Aratinga nenday):

And a pair of Nanday parakeets:

Orange-backed troupial (Icterus croconotus):

Peach-fronted parakeets (Eupsittula aurea). These tiny, wide-eyed birds look like play toys:

Plumbeous ibis (Theristicus caerulescens):

More birds to come.

Matthew Cobb and I have repeatedly criticized the efforts of geneticist George Church and his colleagues to “bring back the extinct woolly mammoth,” because in fact all they intend to do is insert a few genes for stuff like hair into the elephant genome, creating a hairy elephant rather than resurrecting an extinct species (see our posts here and especially the one here).  The NBC Evening News, after showing these fluffy rodents, even said that the mammoths could appear as early as 2028!

And problems are greater than just the duplicity involved in saying that a few inserted genes can re-create an extinct species: they also involve how to put those genes into an Asian elephant egg, and create a womb that will nurture the modified egg and keep the fetus alive. Not to mention that if you want to keep this bogus “species” going, you have to produce at least one male and one female.

The Guardian has given new life to this fiction by saying that the creation of “woolly mice” who carry inserted genes giving them longer and newly-colored hair is the first step to creating the woolly mammoth. The article even even has the temerity to describe the woolly mice as a “new species”, which under any reasonable species definition is sheer nonsense.  It’s a long way from putting extra hair on a mouse to putting extra hair on an elephant, even if that extra hair somehow supports the crazy idea that “we’ve re-created the mammoth!”

Read this mishigas by clicking on the headline:

An excerpt. The bolding is mine:

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.

The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.

However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

The team also disrupted a gene associated with the way fats are metabolised in mice and was also found in mammoths, which they suggest could play a role in cold adaptation.

Note that they don’t know if the gene is associated with cold tolerance, and they changed only nine genes involved with hair. There are probably thousands of genes that differentiate the Asiatic elephant from the extinct mammoth.

As you see above, yes, they got furry mice, which of course are NOT a new species as they can interbreed with house mice.

Why don’t these people have the simple realization that:

a.) You don’t recreate an ancient species by making a modern one that somewhat resembles the extinct one but doesn’t near have the genetic differences that separate them. (What about behavior, for crying out loud?)

b.) You can’t genetically manipulate elephants the way you genetically manipulate mice.

c.) You have to create a lineage of breeding hairy elephants so the “revived species” will perpetuate itself.

But there’s at least one sane person who’s quoted:

Dr Tori Herridge of the University of Sheffield, said: “Engineering a mammoth-like elephant presents a far greater challenge: the actual number of genes likely to be involved is far higher, the genes are less well understood – and still need to be identified – and the surrogate will be an animal that is not normally experimented upon.”

And while some said the goal of reviving the mammoth had drawn closer, others were more sceptical. “Mammoth de-extinction doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon,” said Herridge.

I suspect Church will be dead before they even get close to their mammoth goal.  If I were in charge, I’d simply give up this tedious and worthless project.

Here’s a reconstruction of the real ancient wooly mammoth from Wikipedia.  How are they gonna make those long, curved tusks?

Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve written sentences like this many times: “While biological sex is a binary, gender in humans forms more of a spectrum.” But I was never really sure what “gender” meant. I know that it’s generally synonymous with “sex”, but that is clearly not what I meant when I spoke as I did above. What did I mean?  Some time ago, I read philosopher Alex Byrne’s book Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions, which parses the term at hand. Alex concluded that “gender” is a confusing term that shouldn’t be used. In fact, when I read his book I agreed with him. But somehow I continued to use the word “gender”, perhaps to show that I don’t impugn, erase, or dismiss people who don’t adhere strictly to the behaviors and appearances associated with the two types of people in the sex binary.

So I called Alex yesterday to get some more clarity on the term, and now I think I see what the problem is. He sent me an article from Fairer Disputations that gives about as succinct an account of the problems as I’ve seen. Click below to read it:

Gender is of course used as an indicator of what type of noun you’re using (“le/la” in French, “der, das, and die” in German), and it’s also been used for decades as a synonym for sex. But that’s not what people mean today when they refer to “gender”, as I did in my first sentence above. Sometimes it’s used only with respect to human sex: “a woman” is a gender in humans, as is “a man.”  But that makes it synonymous with sex save that the two terms refer to adult versions of biological sex. A “woman”, for instance is an adult human female. You can then use “girl” and “boy” for the juvenile versions.

What do activists or “progressives” mean? It’s not clear! In the end, Alex’s article makes a persuasive case that instead of using “gender—which can mean other things like where one sits on the internal “sex feeling” spectrum, or the degree of masculinity or femininity expressed in a performed sex role—and so on, one should simply use simple English to express your meaning. For example, when I was younger people used the word “tomboy” to refer to a girl who showed masculine behaviors or appearances. Isn’t it simpler to just explain what you mean by “tomboy”, then, instead of classifying it as a gender, saying Ia girl who shows many masculine traits/behaviors.  If we are referring to people who feel they are of both sexes, you can say the person is “androgynous”.  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how Alex starts his piece:

It is sometimes said that “gender” had an exclusively grammatical sense before the 1950s, as in “The gender of ‘chaise’ in French is feminine.” Henry Fowler, the English philologist and author of the quirky 1926 style guide A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, sternly pronounced that the word “is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”

But the (non-jocular) use of “gender” to mean sex—male and female—goes back centuries, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording an example from 1474 (“His heyres [heirs] of the masculine gender…”). These days there is an embarrassment of riches: “gender” is used to mean social roles and norms attaching to the two sexes, or masculinity and femininity, or an internal sense of being male/female/neither, and more. Many words have multiple meanings, which usually doesn’t produce incomprehension, but “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding. As Abigail Favale puts it in a recent essay, it’s “a word with no stable definition that is nonetheless endlessly deployed, shifting meanings to suit a particular agenda.” This “linguistic bedlam” prompts her to ask whether we should “abandon the word” or “attempt to redeem” it.

Here’s the crux of the problem: the two most common uses of “gender” by gender activists or confused people like me:

Other proposals for what the word should mean face a similar question. For instance, the UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller defined “gender” his 1968 book Sex and Gender as masculinity and femininity (more exactly, albeit rather obscurely, as “the amount of masculinity and femininity found in a person”). Masculinity and femininity are interesting subjects, but there is no obvious reason why we need a special word to talk about them. The words “masculinity” and “femininity” will do quite nicely.

To take another example, “gender” is sometimes understood to refer to sex-typed social roles, “the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture,” which we do not want to ignore. But again, alternative terminology is ready to hand: “sex roles” is a decent compact label, and “gender roles” is even better, with “gender” understood to mean sex. Abbreviating “sex roles” or “gender roles” with the single word “gender” only makes the intended meaning less clear. [Note that here Alex does countenance the use of “gender”, though I’d use “sex roles” as you don’t then have to define what a “gender role” is.]

As to women, men, girls, and boys, there is no need to introduce any new vocabulary, because we already have the appropriate words. If we want to talk about women, men, girls and boys collectively, we can use “people” or “humans.” If we want to talk about women and girls, a single word will do the trick, namely “female.” That is because “female” has a restricted sense in which it applies to “a person of the sex that can bear offspring,” to quote the OED. (That is actually the first entry for the noun “female” in that dictionary; the broader sense in which the word applies to Lola is the second entry.)

More importantly, we must contend with the sense of “gender” on which it is a synonym of “sex.” As the moon pulls the sea to the shore, “the latter-day upheaval in sexual mores” pulls “gender” towards sex, male and female. Resistance is as useless as King Canute’s attempt to stop the incoming tide. Favale’s proposal inevitably introduces an unwelcome ambiguity where there was none before. In one sense, Taylor Swift’s gender is female. In Favale’s sense, Swift’s gender is either woman (the four-gender version), or else woman-or-girl (the two-gender version).

Byrne thus recommends that we deep-six the use of the word except insofar as it’s synonymous with sex, but it’s too late for that. As Alex says, “the high priests of genderology will not see the light.”

The pushback to Trump’s new EO (and the HHS definition of sex) specifying that biological sex be put on all government documents comes in two forms. One could specify the present and confusing notion of gender, but there are hundreds of specified “genders” and it’s impractical to do that, as well as confusing for anyone using the documents. The other suggestion is to put your “felt” sex on the documents rather than your biological sex.  That’s entirely possible given that in many states you can go back and change your “sex” on your birth certificate to correspond with what sex you feel yourself to be Thus a trans-identified male could change the birth “sex” to “woman”.

To me that seems a bit of a lie, because, to me (and of course this will get me in trouble), a transwoman is not the same thing as a biological woman, and ditto for a transman and a biological man. It’s also damaging for women in sports, as the NCAA now says that what it says on your birth certificate tells you whether you can compete in men’s or in women’s sports.  In other non-official documents, of course, anything goes. But the government, and the states, should not be participating in what is effectively lying when they countenance using “felt sex” to fill in the blank for “sex.” For none of this is intended to damage or “erase” people, though of course some may have hurt feelings.  But of course women who are beaten in athletics by a biological male also have hurt feelings.

Finally, those benighted people who advance a multifactorial, multidimensional definition of “sex” (hormones, chromosomes, genitals, etc.), under which they don’t ever specify a way to determines one’s biological sex, must surely agree that there are more than two specification for “felt sex”!  What do you do then?

Readers can (and will) dissent of course, but that’s what the comments are for. Oh, and I just realized that I’ve violated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which says, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “limp2,” is actually a “resurrection from 2009.” It appears to show Mo in a burqa, and mocks the tendency of pious religionists to ape the behavior of their leader.

Today we have tidepool photos by Intellectual Hero Abby Thompson, a mathematician from UC Davis. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

More tidepool pictures from Dillon Beach, CA,  plus a vegetable.  As usual I got help with some of the IDs from people on inaturalist.   First the vegetable:

This is Romanesco from our local farmers’ market, carefully selected as the most beautiful in the pile. It’s a fractal-ly vegetable; the large spiraling pattern repeats in the smaller spirals which repeat in the even smaller spirals which…..   In a mathematical fractal this goes on ad infinitum, in a vegetable, not so much.  I posted a similar picture outside my office door about 20 years ago and a computer scientist stopped by to ask me how I’d generated the image.   He was disappointed it was an actual photograph of an actual vegetable.

   On to the tidepools:

Hermissenda crassicornis (nudibranch) doing this interesting thing- using the surface tension of the water to “walk” upside down on the surface of the pool.   For some reason they often do this as the tide is beginning to come back in:

An infant Kelp Crab (Pugettia sp.), through a microscope:

Dendronotus venustus (nudibranch). A fractal-ly nudibranch.:

Aeolidia loui (nudibranch) with its eggs, above the water line:

Aeolidia loui:

A baby Ochre Star (Pisaster ochraceus). This was about an inch across.    The adults are the large (usually 6 inches or more), very common orange or purple stars.   For some reason I see the adults (always) and the small babies (sometimes) and not anything in between:

Cuthonella cocoachroma (nudibranch). This picture doesn’t do it justice.     They are quite small (about ½” long), and findable only because the white tips of the cerata (those things on its back) sparkle like gems when they catch the light:

Eudendrium californicum,  a colonial hydroid.    Each “flower” is an animal, and the orange blobs are part of the reproductive structure.:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

In this latest nine-minute comedy/news bit from Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” a show that included Rahm Emanuel and Fareed Zakaria, Maher suggests who the Dems should run for President and Vice-President in 2028.

Ths clip, called “New Rule: The next Democratic Star” proffers a solution to the waning popularity of the Democratic Party and the increasing desire of its members to move to the center. Maher suggests John Fetterman as a potential Prez, because he comes off as someone who understands the average American.  He also notes that Fetterman shares some of the features that helped Trump win, the most important being “authenticity, balls, and charisma.”

Yes, Fetterman had a stroke and suffers from depression, but Trump is unhealthy and suffers from narcissism. Fetterman, however, has sensible and potentially winnable political views; as Maher says, “Fetterman says the four words that strike fear into the heart of every Republican who wants to hang onto power: ‘I am not woke’.”

Maher also suggests Mayor Pete as a possible VP candidate, and I’m for that, too. (He notes that a disabled President combined with a gay VP surely checks as many intersectionality boxes as one person of color.) If not Mayor Pete, than Gretchen Whitmer.

This is a very good one; watch it!

Barnard College was founded in 1889 as a woman’s school because only men were allowed in the nearby Columbia University. Now the two institutions are affiliated and share considerable resources, including classes and dining halls. Barnard students also get their diplomas from Columbia University.

As you may know, three Barnard students were expelled this month for sit-ins in University buildings, and the expulsions are, so far, still in force. Because of that, a passel of pro-Palestinian protestors of unknown origin held their own illegal sit-in in Barnard’s Milbank Hall, a sit-in that included vandalism.  And students also marched on Columbia University, injuring one worker and also committing vandalism. In neither of these last two cases were any protestors punished.

Over the last two years, Columbia has been an epicenter of pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic activity, so much so that the HHS has decided to review Columbia’s federal funding in light of their accused violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting “discriminationon the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.” (There’s a whole Wikipedia article on “Antisemitism at Columbia University,” a practice that goes back nearly 100 years but of course has ramped up since the Gaza War. Before she resigned as President of Columbia, Minouche Shafik created a Task Force on Antisemitism, but, given their laxity towards protestors who violated Columbia’s rules, I’m not expecting much from it.  All I can say is that if I were a Jewish parent or student, even a secular one, I wouldn’t ever send my kids to either Barnard or Columbia, not only because of their pervasive antisemitism but also because loud and illegal demonstrations are constantly interrupting academic activities.

Columbia is also uber-woke, which is another reason to avoid it, since it practices indoctrination of students. To see how it works, let’s just look at one ideologically-based department, Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies. Click on icon below to see some stuff about it:

 

Here are two of the three pictures on the front page. I don’t think this department is going to abide by institutional neutrality! (There is of course no pro-Israel photo.)

As the reader who sent this to me said:

I guess the “Inclusive” part of DEI at the school does not include Jews or white males.  But yeah — AAUP opposes institutional neutrality, arguing that it violates the academic freedom of departments to express their communal voice.

And on that front page, check out the articles.

Spotlight on Faculty Research:

Neferti Tadiar, “Why the Question of Palestine is a Feminist Concern”: “During our weeklong investigative trip, we were witness to multiple and varied testimonies to and clear evidence of the daily acts of violence, harassment and humiliation that Palestinians are subjected to, both massive and intimate.” Read the full article here.

See also: Neferti Tadiar, “Powers of Defending Freedom”

I’d suggest checking out Tadiar’s article for a real word salad that ignores the fact that Palestine, like many Arab countries, is explicitly anti-feminist. Dr. Tadiar, who is head of this department, includes this as the closing of her essay:

Ultimately, however, what makes the question of Palestine a feminist concern does not rest on any one of these analytical perspectives or points of critique. It rests rather on the connections that the oppression and struggle of Palestinians enables us to draw across those differences on which the oppression depends and that the question as it is now posed presumes. It is a feminist concern because it calls us to forge new relations beyond the province of interests and inherited forms of social belonging to which we might have become tethered and, for those of us not already called, to feel the suffering and aspirations of Palestinians as also our own. The strangulation of Palestinian life is, after all, not the accomplishment of one aberrant state, inasmuch as the latter is supported by a global economy and geopolitical order, which condemns certain social groups and strata to the status of absolutely redundant, surplus populations – an order of insatiable accumulation and destruction that affects all planetary life. The question of Palestine is thus an urgent question of a just and equitable future that is both specific to this context and to this people, and a general and paradigmatic global concern. To take a stand in solidarity with and to be involved in the struggle of Palestinians to resist and transform the conditions of their own dispossession and disposability – to join in their aspiration for collective freedom and self-determination – is also to participate in the remaking of global life, which cannot but be a paramount feminist act.

Also, have a look at the course offerings, which are heavily larded with Social Justice, though I do note one course on “Contemporary American Women’s Jewish Literature.” The rest of the courses comprise a farrago of courses with explicitly political aims, concentrating on victims.

But I wonder what kind of job a graduate in this department is suited for. I can think of only two: to become an academic in a similar department elsewhere, or go to work for a DEI organization.