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Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.

URL: https://whyevolutionistrue.com

Updated: 1 hour 11 min ago

Caturday felid trifecta: Thailand declares cats as its national symbol; art exhibit features medieval cats; and viral Belgian cat staffed by the Prime Minister is the continent’s equivalent of Larry; and lagniappe

Sat, 01/10/2026 - 7:45am

The meme below, from Cats Doing Cat Stuff: implies that Thaland has declared all cats as official national symbols. Well, as the articles below say, that’s not exactly true. Some cats have become national symbols, but only breeds from Thailand. Read on:

Here are two articles, the first from the Singapore-based cna news organization and the second from the Bangkok Post. Click on either to read, though the first is more informative:

From cna:

Five cat breeds native to Thailand were approved as national pet symbols by the government on Nov 18, joining the Thai elephant, fighting fish and Naga among other nationally recognised emblems.

The pure Thai breeds – Suphalak, Korat, Siamese, Konja and Khao Manee – possess distinctive physical and behavioral traits that clearly differentiate them from other breeds, according to Thailand’s National Identity Committee, which had proposed their designations as national pets.

“Their uniqueness has gained international recognition, with some foreign breeders attempting to register purebred Thai cat lines and establish global breed standards,” the Thai government’s public relations department said in a report on Nov 20.

A drawing of the five lucky breeds from cna graphics:

Readers’ wildlife photos

Sat, 01/10/2026 - 6:15am

Reader Ruth Berger sent some butterfly photos taken last year in Germany. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge Ruth’s photos by clicking on them.

Here are some butterflies I snapped on my walks on mostly sandy soil near the Main and Nidda rivers in and around Frankfurt, Germany, last year. I’ll start with a good picture (some of the others aren’t that good) of the small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, a holarctic species, on ragwort.

The next not so brilliant photo is of the orange tip (Anthocharis cardamines), whose males are so busy chasing females and each other at borders between patches of woodland and grassland in spring. Only the males of the species have the eponymic orange tip, here visiting the species’ major caterpillar feeding plant, Cardamine pratensis.

Unlike the males, orange tip females look much like any typical white butterfly (Pierinae) from above. The underside of the females has greenish markings similar, but not identical, to the species you see in the next picture, Pontia edusa, here shown feeding on a Centaurea flower:

I saw several species of red-spotted burnet moths this year, all members of the West Palaearctic Zygaena family. These are wondrous creatures, dressed in what looks like a blue black fur coat with a red-spotted cape on top. The following two pictures are of the most frequent species here, the 6-spot burnet moth, Zygaena filipendulae:

The next picture shows a moment from a scene I watched for around ten minutes: a male Queen of Spain fritillary (Issoria lathonia), the biggie on the left, chasing and harassing a small skipper (Thymelicus cf. sylvestris). Should any of the insect lovers here know what might be behind this behavior, please tell me:

The caterpillars of Issoria lathonia feed off Viola flowers. Below, you can see a female getting nectar from a European field pansy (Viola arvensis) in spring, showing its underside that has silvery-white spots with a mother-of-pearl-like appearance:

Next is one of the prettier pictures, a male common blue (Polyommatus icarus):

While the males have a beautiful upper side of shiny blue (in young animals, the color can become washed out with age), the females of the German subspecies tend to be plain brown with orange spots:

Next is a female marbled white (Melanargia galathea) , a species of the Nymphalidae family that despite its English name has nothing to do with the Pieridae family that most “whites” belong to. The females have a beige/tan hue seen from the side:

The boys are more black and white:

And this one, shown from above, is apparently a bird-attack survivor:

Categories: Science

Melanie Phillips explains, once again, why anti-Zionism is antisemitism

Fri, 01/09/2026 - 9:30am

Reader Norman sent me the first video below saying, “in one of your posts the other day you gave a link to an article about how anti-Zionism = antisemitism.” Yes, I’ve frequently said that and in fact did so in the last post. And I think the equation is clearly true. For those on the left justifying anti-Zionism, the claim that it is NOT antisemitism rests on an incorrect construal of “anti-Zionism” as “criticism of the politics of Israel/Netanyahu”. Alternatively, “anti-Zionism could mean “favoring a one-state solution, a state that includes both Palestinians and Jews—and we all know what that means for the Jews.

As the moderator defines it in the video, “anti-Zionism” is “opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel or Palestine” and that view implicitly favors the erasure or destruction of Israel, which to any reasonable person is antisemitic (where would the Jews go?). Further seeing the “anti-Zionism” trope as being politically okay ignores the fact that nearly all Muslim states in the Middle East are explicitly religiously Muslim as part of their government (viz., the formal name of Iran is “The Islamic Republic of Iran”). In contrast, while Israel was approved as a homeland for Jews after WWII, there is no requirement for residents to adhere to the tenents of Judaism, for 20% of the population are Arab Muslims and many of the resident “Jews” are, like me, atheists who are culturally Jewish. To show the difference, try being gay in Gaza or Iran as opposed to Israel.

So, below is what Norman wanted me to see: a short speech by British author and commentator Melanie Phillips. It’s part of a four-person intelligence² debate that took place six years ago. The proposition debated is is “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Phillips’s bit, agreeing with the proposition, starts 47 seconds into the video, and I’ve begun the video at that point. Her bit ends at 10:28, so the part to listen to is about ten minutes long. The rest is some person, not part of the formal debate, banging on.

As Norman says, “this is one of the most forceful and succinct statements I have heard or read.” It is indeed. And despite its title, Mehdi Hasan does not explode here. That is in the second video below, which gives the entire two-hour debate.

Here’s the whold video, including besides Mehdi Hassan (his speech starts at 35:45) and Melanie Phillips, Einat Wulf (who agrees with Phillips; her speech starts at 24:00) and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli who favors a “one-state solution” (his speech starts at 12:25). The audience, clearly on the side of Hassan and Pappé throughout, defeated the motion. They are wrong.

Categories: Science

Quinn Que: To save liberalism, “progressives” must apologize and abandon their air of moral certainty

Fri, 01/09/2026 - 7:40am

This longish diatribe against “progressives” (i.e., left-wing extremists who aren’t Communists) appeared in my weekly Substack recommendations. Intrigued by the title, I printed it out and read it (I can’t read on screens.) Que’s thesis is one you’ve often seen me advance: “progressives” have gone so far that they’ve alienated much of the Left, and must acknowledge this honestly before Democrats get a decent chance of winning substantial power.

Que’s indictment is on the mark, but his proposed solutions (see below) seem unworkable—something Que realizes. In other words, he thinks that wokeness will hang on tenaciously until its advocates apologize and work with moderates to “center-ize” the Left, but that this is highly unlikely.

Click below for a free read, but subscribe if you like the content of “Edokwin Editorial”. Que is described as “a prolific storyteller and journalist. A lover of (micro-)blogging, Que’s primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics.”

Que’s thesis starts with a laundry list of “progressive” sins, though it’s ironic to use “sins” for calling out a movement based on moral certainty (see below). I’ve bolded one sentence.

Rationalized bigotry and identitarianism. Political violence and terrorist apologia. Mass migration madness. Cancel culture. Overreaches around BLM, COVID, trans issues, and so much more. The 21st century progressive movement’s mistakes turned outright malfeasance make it one of the most totalizing failures of activism, public policy, global governance, and general wellbeing. It is a global phenomenon, with far reaching and overwhelmingly negative implications.

Keir Starmer’s approval rating sits at 18 percent. His government—barely a year old—polls at 19 percent. A far right party that didn’t exist two years ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform, has surged to 31 percent support, nearly matching Labour and the Conservatives combined. This pattern repeats across the Western world. Trump’s return in America. Wilders in the Netherlands. Le Pen’s surging support in France. Germany’s AfD. The far right isn’t ascendant despite progressive politics & policies. It’s ascendant because of progressivism.

The only hope for this movement, which has been the vanguard of leftism for most of my adult life, is to moderate and make massive mea culpas. I am not optimistic on either front however. The only thing worse than its terrible track record is the constant gaslighting about it.

Before singling out six areas in which, says Que, “progressives” have alienated the rest of America, he points out one specimen of what he calls “craven complicity”: columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. To Que, Klein epitomizes the problems afflicting “progressives” called out on their nonsense. Klein, like others of his ilk, “adjust their language just enough to avoid total campaigning disasters and PR implosions, but they never question the core conviction that animates everything they do: We are the moral vanguard, and opposition to our program stems from bigotry, ignorance, or malice.”

And that, Que argues, is the main reason why progressivism has failed, and failed largely because Americans can’t stomach it. It is “progressives'” air of moral certainty. so that they see no point engaging in introspection about their views, nor arguing about them. They are, they believe, morally right, even when they’re tactically wrong. And it is this smug air of moral rectitude that regular Americans—however dumb “progressives think they are”—can see right through, and reject. A summary:

Here’s what people like Harris, and also Andrew Sullivan, understand that most progressive critics miss: The problem isn’t just that progressives got specific policies wrong. It’s that they’ve constructed an entire worldview in which very basic things most human beings take for granted are deemed “fundamentally and morally wrong.”

That foreigners are not citizens, and citizens’ interests come first. That children are not adults capable of consenting to irreversible medical procedures. That rapid demographic transformation of neighborhoods affects quality of life. That borders serve legitimate functions. That merit matters. That parents have primary authority over their children’s education and upbringing. And that the wrongness of racism & sexism leave no space for social justice carveouts; racism against Asians, Europeans, and Jews is still racism, sexism against men (misandry) is still sexism, and so forth.

These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters. They are a political movement that has played footsie with far left extremism for ages, and which believes radical, revolutionary social change is not only permissible but necessary, even against the wishes of the voting public.

Que then singles out six areas in which “progressives” went too far (characterizations are mine, and bolding within quotes is Que’s). Que’s quotes are either indented or in quotation marks, and my comments are flush left.

a.) Cancel culture and the suppression of discourse, something that Americans see as an extreme form of “mob justice”). Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating disagreement as a moral emergency and for wielding social ostracism as a political weapon.

b.) The Covid-19 pandemic. Que thinks, and many agree, that “progressives” over-enforced things like masking and closing schools, to the detriment of American well-being. He’s not saying that precautions needn’t have be taken, but that they went too far, and were mandatory rather than voluntary. He argues that, especially in blue states, responses involved not using available evidence but “suppressing legitimate scientific debate.”

Que is right to some extent, especially in light of Fauci’s and Collin’s recently-revealed attempt to suppress investigation of the origin of the virus, but at the time it wasn’t clear what the scientific evidence was, as there was no time to accumulate it. To a large extent, health departments and the government acted on their best guess, and they sometimes got it wrong. And some were certainly wrong in suggesting (and implementing, in Vermont and New York), the idea that minorities get prioritized at the expense of other people more susceptible to infection and death. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating emergency powers as a blank check, for suppressing legitimate scientific debate, and for the generational harm inflicted on children who lost years of education and socialization to policies that didn’t work.”

c.) Hamas’s attack on Israel. I’ll quote Que here:

Nothing has more starkly revealed progressive moral bankruptcy than the response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Within hours of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping that killed over 1,200 people and harmed thousands more—segments of the progressive left were…celebrating. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted an image of a Hamas paraglider. Democratic Socialists of America rallied in support of Palestinian “resistance.” Harvard student organizations issued statements blaming Israel for its own massacre.

The reaction stunned even moderate progressives themselves. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote: “for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.” CNN’s Jake Tapper described the aftermath as “a real eye-opening period in terms of antisemitism on the left.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul spoke of a “category five hurricane of left-wing antisemitism.”

The pattern was unmistakable: progressivism’s oppressor/oppressed binary had trained a generation to see Jews—successful, often “white”-presenting—as oppressors whose suffering didn’t count. When Hamas terrorists raped and murdered Israeli women, the feminists of #TimesUp, #BelieveWomen, and the #MeToo movement stayed silent. When progressive university professors failed to condemn celebrations of the massacre, they revealed that their commitment to “social justice” was conditional on the identity of the victims.

This is absolutely true. The condemnation of Israel began before it even went into Gaza, and a lot of antisemitism that had lain latent before October 7 was quickly revealed. Jews became “Zios,” a euphemism confected by anti-Zionists, who are the same as antisemites. Many NGOs, as well as the UN, were arrantly favoring Hamas over Israel: Doctors without Borders, for example, repeatedly condemned Israel for perpetuating “genocide” without (or only rarely) condemning Hamas. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize to Jews for creating an intellectual and moral environment where celebrating the mass murder of Jewish civilians became acceptable in progressive spaces, and where opposition to that celebration gets you called a hater yourself.” Harvard has sort of done that, but “progressives” in general? Naah.

d.) Trans issues. “Progerssive” moral certainty has gone so far here that even if you think that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports and generally shouldn’t be put in women’s prisons, you are tarred as a transphobe. But most American’s aren’t afraid of or hate trans people; like me, they believe that trans people should have the same dignity and respect as anyone else, but also that “trans rights” sometimes clash with other rights (as in sport, which has men’s and women’s divisions for a reason), and those clashes must be discussed and resolved.

Que:

Few issues better demonstrate progressive detachment from reality than transgender policy—and few reveal more starkly the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive belief.

Let’s be clear about what Americans actually think. Large majorities support allowing trans adults to transition to the gender they want. Large majorities support banning discrimination against trans people. These are not controversial positions. They represent basic decency.

But Americans also believe, by even larger majorities, that: genetic human sex is real and determined by biology, not subjective feelings; children should not undergo irreversible medical transitions, especially without parental consent; male sex athletes should not compete in women’s sports; women deserve single-sex spaces for privacy and safety.

According to Ezra Klein, these majority positions are “fundamentally and morally wrong.” Not mistaken. Not worthy of debate. Fundamentally and morally wrong.

This is the progressive tell.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for sacrificing children’s health to ideological purity, for eliminating women’s spaces and sports, for calling majority opinion immoral, and for making reasonable discussion of transgender policy impossible.” I agree, but again, this ain’t gonna happen. One thing I’ve learned, from my own “cancellation” for the views expressed above, is that ideologues will never broach questioning of their views.

e. The DEI “debacle. Que has written about it here. Originally well-meaning (and still held as “morally right” by its advocates), DEI, promoted mostly by progressives and those who are relatively well off, became by 2020:

. . . . a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of administrators, consultants, and training programs. Universities created massive bureaucracies dedicated to DEI, often with more administrators than faculty in some departments. Corporations mandated unconscious bias training despite no evidence it reduced bias. Hiring and promotion decisions were made with explicit racial preferences defended as “equity.”

The contradictions were glaring. Progressives who claimed to oppose essentialism reduced people to their demographic categories. They claimed to empower minorities while treating them as fragile victims requiring constant protection. They denounced discrimination while implementing explicit racial discrimination in admissions and hiring.

Most perversely, DEI’s benefits accrued primarily to affluent, educated minorities who needed help least, while working-class minorities—and working-class people of all races—were left behind. As a Tablet Magazine analysis noted, progressivism has always been an elite movement with “class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes” at its core.

Que’s solution: “progressives must apologize for reducing equality to a spoils system, for treating minorities as political clients rather than individuals, and for poisoning the well of genuine anti-discrimination efforts.” I should add here that, lest Que be accused of racism, he is black. Finally, we have:

f. “Migration madness.” Although now Trump and his flunkies are going overboard with their seizures and deportations, I well remember when everyone, including many Democrats, were calling for migration reform to stem the tide of people entering America illegally. (This also goes for Europe, which has suffered greatly from a policy of lax enforcement, leading to the rise of the far right in European politics.) Que:

This is the tell. Progressives will finally admit, under electoral duress, that maybe they got immigration a bit wrong. But they cannot stop believing that mass immigration remains a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness.” They feel they have to adjust because Trump is dangerous and the country is full of racists, but they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for treating immigration as a morality play rather than a policy challenge requiring trade-offs, and for abandoning working-class concerns as beneath consideration while calling basic immigration enforcement “immoral.”

You’ve already seen the problem with this critique: solutions don’t seem workable. At the end of his piece, Que recommends three actions:

“Apologize, Genuinely and Specifically”
“Reform Institutions and Methods.”
“Work with Moderates to Combat Real Extremism”

For each of these Que describes what must be done specifically.

But, ridden with moral certainty, “progressives” simply won’t be able to apologize, for apologies constitute one of the hardest things for anyone to tender. I can envision #2 and #3 happening, but only if we get a centrist liberal President and Congress, and those aren’t in the offing. Even Que admits that this seems unworkable:

Will they do it? Based on the evidence at the moment, my current prediction is: “no.” The moral supremacy is too intoxicating. The institutional capture is too complete. The social rewards for performing wokeness are too powerful.

And he leaves the choice in the hands of progressives. That’s like leaving a lion the choice between eating an antelope or eating cabbage. Kudos for Que to distill the problem of “progressivism” into a bit-sized hunk, but, as John McWhorter and Sam Harris argued yesterday, wokeness (the manifestation of progressivism) seems here to stay.

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Fri, 01/09/2026 - 6:15am

Thanks to the people who sent in photos when our tank was almost empty. (I could use more, though. . . )

One of them was reader Ephraim Heller, who sends in part 11 of his installment “Brazil virtual safari.” Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them:

Here are my photos, please don’t shoot the cute duck!

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of birds in the tyrant flycatcher family as well as a few miscellaneous birds.

In Brazil, “flycatchers” and “tyrants” refer to the same family – Tyrannidae. It is the world’s largest family of birds, with more than 400 species in North and South America, including 28 species in Brazil. Tyrannidae belong to the suborder Tyranni (suboscines), a primitive passerine lineage that lacks the complex vocal learning abilities of songbirds. This places them in an entirely different major evolutionary branch from that yielding the Old World flycatchers (Muscicapidae), which are oscines (advanced songbirds).

Boat-billed Flycatcher (Megarynchus pitangua):

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana). The elaborate tail serves both aerodynamic and display functions:

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus). A real beauty:

White Monjita (Xolmis irupero):

White-headed Marsh Tyrant (Arundinicola leucocephala):

Black-tailed Tityra (Tityra cayana). Tityras were formerly in the tyrant flycatcher family, but have been split into their own family:

Now for some miscellaneous birds:

Black-capped Donacobius (Donacobius atricapilla). This pair kept up their singing as I photographed them:

Chotoy Spinetail (Schoeniophylax phryganophilus):

Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus). Argentina’s national bird, famous for constructing elaborate clay nests resembling traditional mud ovens, with complex internal chambers and entrance tunnels. This master builder creates new nests annually, with old nests often used by other bird species. The clay construction provides excellent thermal insulation and protection.

Categories: Science

2026 update: modifications of Da Roolz

Thu, 01/08/2026 - 8:30am

I haven’t had a look at Da Roolz (the commenting rules) for a while, and, having a gander, made one modification in them, as well as a change in the instructions aboout “How to send me wildlife photos“. Both of these instructional posts are on the left sidebar of the site, and look like this. You can click on them to read them.

The main change in the Roolz affects #12, which now reads like this:

Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments. I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it. Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

I’ve decided that 600 words was too long for any comments, and thus ask readers to limit them to 400 words. I’m not going to quibble if you go a few words over that, but I am asking for comments and not essays. I will enforce this limit.

I continue to urge readers not to overcomment, with the guideline being about 10% of the comments in a given post. If you’re writing more than that, please ratchet back. In the interests of, yes, comment diversity, I do not want to see a few people making most of the comments.

As for wildlife photos, they come in huge variety of formats, and it sometimes takes me a long time to get them into a properly formatted post. To make this easier, I’m asking readers to zip their photos if they can, number them, and then enclose a Word document describing the caption for each numbered photo. Be sure to give the common name plus the Latin binomial. What I’m trying to avoid is having to cut and paste words from a document into WordPress, which sometimes is wonky. And if you really want to please me, use the Times or Times New Roman typeface.

If you are a new reader and haven’t read Da Roolz, please do so before you post again. And if you want to send me photos, the link for that should give you all the information you need, including the address where you should send them.

Finally, if you have any questions, you are welcome reach PCC(E) at the email address you all know (it’s also at the “wildlife photos” link).

Thanks!

Categories: Science

Sam Harris and John McWhorter: Is wokeness dead?

Thu, 01/08/2026 - 7:15am

In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead. The short answer is “nope.” It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.

The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)

McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology. McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.

How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.

At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd. I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes. Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.

McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.

So it goes.

h/t: Bat

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Thu, 01/08/2026 - 6:15am

It’s been a while since we had some photo from evolutionary ecologist Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, but he came through yesterday with some lovely photos of DUCKS! Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. It comes in the form of a letter to me:

Dear Dr Coyne

Please step away from the duck. Don’t hurt the duck. I have a friend who is a doctor and who can help you (PhD and he studies ducks). He can help your duck syndrome (yes there is such a thing).

While you are waiting for help to arrive, here are some photos to calm your frayed nerves and stop the incessant paddling.

The photos were taken at Neary Lagoon, a city park near my home. It is the best place to see wood ducks (Aix sponsa) locally. They hang out in the wetlands in the park and often fly over to feed on settling ponds at the nearby sewage treatment facility. Delicious! The park also has lots mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).

The wood ducks are often hidden from view—they perch on branches in dense vegetation at the edge of the lagoon. But sometimes they come out and paddle around, giving nice views. Ducks pair up earlier than many other birds and many birds are in pairs but some are courting.

Darwin famously said that peacocks made him feel ill—”The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” (expressed in a letter to his friend Asa Gray). The peacock’s ornamentation is so crazy complex that Darwin found it hard to explain. Sure, sexual selection explains why animals are ornamented, but this is just crazy. I feel the same way about male wood ducks, but I feel awe instead of nausea:

This male was courting a female that was perched above him out of frame. He would do head tilts while puffing out part of his plumage:

The courting male photographed mid head tilt. Note his fanned out buffy flanks with the nice black and white edging. Clearly, fanning out a specific part of the plumage like this suggests that is an important part of the display:

A lovely female wood duck but not the object of the above male’s desire:

In fact, the above male, who was courting a female perched out of sight above him, often pecked at the female that was sitting right next to him. Perhaps she was interested in him, but the attraction was not mutual:

A male wood duck on the water:

Not far away, mallards provided great opportunities for getting flight shots. I like this one because the out-of-focus males in the background add a pleasing element:

Flight shots can be challenging but these mallards made it easy. They wanted to roost on the floating walkway in the marsh and would swim up close to the walkway and bob their head rapidly up and down a few seconds before launching into flight. Made it easy. Here is a female mallard approaching the railing:

Categories: Science

My brief interview of Matthew Cobb about his new biography of Francis Crick

Wed, 01/07/2026 - 9:00am

Matthew Cobb’s new biography of Francis Crick has been out for only a short time, but I’ve never seen a review less than enthusiastic (check out this NYT review). I finished it last week, and was also enthusiastic, finding it one of the best biographies of a scientist I’ve ever read. It concentrates on Crick’s science, but his accomplishments were inseparable from his personality, which focused not only on science but also on poetry (the book begins and ends with a poet), drugs, women, and philosophy (he was, by the way, a hardcore atheist and determinist).

But I digress. I really recommend that if you have any interest in the man and his work, which of course includes helping reveal the structure of DNA, you get this book and read it. It is a stupendous achievement, based on tons of research, sleuthing, and interviews, and only a geneticist could have written it. But it’s not dull at all: Matthew has always written lively and engaging prose. Crick is also a good complement to Matthew’s previous book, Life’s Greatest Secret, about how the genetic code was cracked.

As a complement, a biography of Jim Watson by Nathaniel Comfort is in the works, but hasn’t yet been published.

After I finished the book, I had a few questions about Crick and his work, and asked Matthew if I could pose them to him and post his answers. on this site He kindly said “yes,” and so here they are. My questions are in bold; Matthew’s answers in plain text. Enjoy:

What one question would you ask Crick if he could return from the dead? (Perhaps something that you couldn’t find out about him from your research.)

I think I would probably ask him about his view of the state of consciousness research. His key insight, with Christof Koch, was that rather than trying to explain everything about consciousness, researchers should look for the neural correlates of consciousness – neurons that fired in a correlated manner with a visual perception – and ask what (if anything) was special about how they fired, their connections, and the genes expressed within them. Since his death, we have obtained recordings from such neurons, but far from resolving the issue, consciousness studies have lost their way, with over 200 different theories currently being advanced. What did he think went wrong? Or rather, is it time to use a more reductionist approach, studying simpler neural networks, even in animals that might not be thought to be conscious?

Why did it take ten years—until the Nobel prize was awarded—for people to appreciate the significance of DNA?

Most people imagine that when the double helix was discovered it immediately made Watson and Crick globally famous and the finding was feted. That was not the case, mainly because the actual evidence that DNA was the genetic material was restricted to Avery’s 1944 work on one species of bacterium (this was contested) and a rather crappy experiment on bacteriophage viruses (this was the famous paper by Hershey and Chase from 1952; the experiment was so messy that Hershey did not believe that genes were made solely of DNA). So although the structure of DNA was immediately obvious in terms of its function – both replication and gene specificity, as it was called, could be explained by reciprocal base pairs and the sequence of bases – there was no experimental proof of this function. Indeed, the first proof that DNA is the genetic material in eukaryotes (organisms with a nucleus, including all multicellular organisms) did not appear until the mid-1970s! Instead, people viewed the idea that DNA was the genetic material as a working hypothesis, which became stronger through the 1950s as various experiments were carried out (eg., Meselson and Stahl’s experiment on replication) and theoretical developments were made (eg Crick’s ideas about the central dogma). Its notable that the Nobel Prize committee awarded the prize in 1962, just after the first words in the genetic code were cracked and the relation between DNA, RNA and protein had been experimentally demonstrated.

A lot of the latter part of the book is on Crick’s work on neuroscience (and, later, consciousness). You claim that he made enormous contributions to the field that really pushed it forward. Could you tell us a bit about what those contributions were?

Although he did not make a great breakthrough, he helped transform the way that neuroscience was done, the ideas and approaches it used. From the outset – a 1979 article in a special issue of Scientific American devoted to the brain – he focused attention on one particular aspect of brain function (he chose visual perception), the importance of theoretical approaches rooted in neuroanatomy, the need for detailed maps of brain areas and the promise of computational approaches to neural networks. All these things shaped subsequent developments – in particular the work on neural networks, which he played a fundamental part in, and which gave rise to today’s Large Language Models (he worked with both Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on this in the 1980s). And, of course, he made the scientific study of consciousness scientifically respectable, taking it out of the hands of the philosophers who had been tinkering with the problem for three thousand years and hadn’t got anywhere. Later, in a perspective article he published on the last day of the old millennium, he reviewed recent developments in molecular biology and predicted that three techniques would become useful: classifying neurons not by their morphology but by the genes that are expressed in them, using genetic markers from the human genome to study the brains of primates (the main experimental system he advocated using), and controlling the activity of neurons with light by using genetic constructs. All these three techniques – now called RNAseq, transcriptional mapping and neurogenetics – are used every day in neuroscience labs around the world. Indeed, within a few months of the article appearing, Crick received a letter from a young Austrian researcher, Gero Miesenböck, telling him that his lab was working on optogenetics and the results looked promising. During his lifetime, Crick’s decisive leadership role was well known to neuroscientists; now it has largely been forgotten, unfortunately.

Is there anything a young scientist could learn from Crick’s own methods that would be helpful, or was he a one-off whose way of working cannot be imitated?

I think the key issue is not so much Crick as the times in which he worked. As he repeatedly acknowledged, he was amazingly lucky. From 1954-1977 he worked for the Medical Research Council in the UK. He did no teaching, no grading, was not involved in doctoral supervision (I’m not even clear how many PhD students he technically supervised – 4? 3? 5? – which highlights that even if he had his name on a bit of paper, he had little to do with any of them). Apart from a couple of periods, he had no administrative duties, and only one major leadership post, at the Salk, which nearly killed him. He wrote one major grant application at the Salk (the only one he ever wrote), but basically he was funded sufficiently well to simply get on with things. And what did he do? ‘I read and think,’ he said. Try getting that past a recruitment or promotions panel today! In a way, the onus for the creation of more Cricks does not lie with young researchers, but with established scientists – they need to allow young people the time to ‘read and think’, and value failure. Most ideas will turn out to be wrong; that’s OK. Or at least, it was to Crick. Many senior researchers (and funders) don’t see things that way. However, even without such changes, young scientists can adopt some of Crick’s habits. Here’s my attempt to sum up what I think were the lessons of his life and work:

Read widely and avidly, even engaging with ideas that might seem eccentric or pointless, as ‘there might be something in it’ (one of his favourite phrases).
Talk through your ideas with your peers – try to find the weak spots in each other’s arguments.
At least in the initial stages of research, don’t get bogged down in the details that might counter your interpretation/theory – Crick and Brenner called this the ‘don’t worry’ approach. They figured that unconnected contrary data points might not undermine their ideas, and would eventually turn out to have specific, varied explanations.
Write down your ideas in the form of memos or short documents (keep them short). Writing helps you clarify your ideas and shaped your mind – do not use AI to do this! You can then share your writing with peers, which can be used as a target for discussion and debate.
Master the art of clear writing. Avoid jargon, keep your ideas straightforward. Again, the only way to develop this skill is to write – badly at first. So rewrite, edit, recast your writing – it will improve your thinking.
Above all, make sure that the science you do is *fun*. That was a word that Crick repeatedly used, and he genuinely got great pleasure from doing science and thinking about it. Seek out an area in which you can have fun and aren’t bogged down by drudgery.

Click below to get the book on Amazon:

Categories: Science

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ theism

Wed, 01/07/2026 - 7:00am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “divide”, came with a caption: “Are you sure it’s not in their cardiovascular system?” When you read the strip, you’ll understand:

What I don’t get about this strip is that even if Jesus were real, and was conversing with his believers, it would have to be in their heads. What’s the alternative: Jesus appearing before people and having a chat with them? Well, you tell me, but this is one I don’t get, though it’s clearly meant to satirize the “personal conversations” people have with Jesus.

I bet there’s a chatbot for that, though. . .

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Wed, 01/07/2026 - 6:15am

It seems that one reader or another always comes through when we run out of photos. (But after today, we’ll be in that situation again!) The helper today is Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.

There was a terrible ice storm in North-Central Oklahoma in October, 2020. It was extremely cold, raining all day, and the trees were having a hard time surviving with all the ice on them. Several trees fell in our neighborhood, and a lot of others lost big branches. The birds had a tough time. It was good to see that the tough little Yellow-rumped Warblers were quite resilient. This particular bird was actually quite active hopping around the icicles to catch insects (frozen food?). Here’s an image of it posing with a catch.

Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) with a spider catch:

The icicles on the branches and the leaves created some interesting shapes with “frozen hearts” and “ice covered pecans” abound! Everything was quite photogenic, but it was hard for the birds.

A Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger) navigating the icy terrain:

I found several hungry Yellow-rumped Warblers jumping around among the icicles.

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos):

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) in the rain:

Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina):

As this was not enough, a huge snowstorm rolled in 3 months later which nearly killed off all our local bluebirds. I have not seen a storm like that one in Oklahoma, but that’s for another day.

Categories: Science

There is no evidence for extraterrestrial visitation of Earth, no pickled bodies of extraterrestrials, and no UFOs held by American companies

Mon, 01/05/2026 - 7:30am

A person I know has, for the past year or more, been trying to convince me that Earth has been visited by UFOs, and that, indeed, some of those spacecraft have been captured along with the bodies of the piloting extraterrestrials. Her claim is that the bodies and the spaceships (presumably crashed) have been given to private companies by the government, and the craft are being reverse-engineered to suss out the technology behind the “UFOs”. Further, the bodies of the pilots (bipedal like us, I’m told) are being examined to see what kind of life they represent. As to why this is all being kept secret, I’m informed that there are important security considerations. But I’m not told which considerations are important enough to keep this huge story secret.

I have read a lot of the information sent to me supposedly supporting this claim, and ultimately it all comes down to the assertions of one David Grusch, who relies on documents he can’t show people and hearsay that he can’t reveal given by others who supposedly have seen the extraterrestrials and their craft. It’s instructive to look up Grusch on Wikipedia, where you read stuff like this:

David Grusch is a former United States Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official who has claimed that the U.S. federal government, in collaboration with private aerospace companies, has highly secretive special access programs involved in the recovery and reverse engineering of “non-human” spacecraft and their dead pilots, and that people have been threatened and killed in order to conceal these programs. Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini’s government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have both denied Grusch’s claims, stating there are no such programs and that extraterrestrial life has yet to be discovered. No evidence supporting Grusch’s UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

Grusch also appears in an infamous 2½-hour hearing by the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on “Unidentified and Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs”. I’ve put it below. The hearing starts at 18:00, several True Believers gives testimony, and Grusch first appears at 46:45 and also later (I have not listened to the whole thing today). Note that AOC is on the subcommittee.

More from Wikipedia, including about this hearing:

On June 5, 2023, independent journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal provided a story detailing Grusch’s claims of a UFO coverup by the government to The Debrief, a website that describes itself as “self-funded” and specializing in “frontier science”. The New York Times and Politico declined to publish the story, while The Washington Post was taking more time to conduct fact-checking than Kean and Blumenthal felt could be afforded because, according to Kean, “people on the internet were spreading stories, Dave was getting harassing phone calls, and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out”.According to Kean, she vetted Grusch by interviewing Karl Nell, a retired Army colonel who was also on the UFO task force, and “Jonathan Grey” (a pseudonym) whom Kean described as “a current U.S. intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC)”. Kean wrote that Nell called Grusch “beyond reproach” and that both Nell and “Grey” supported Grusch’s claim about a secret UFO retrieval and reverse engineering program.

Grusch claims that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and possesses multiple spacecraft of what he calls “non-human” origin as well as corpses of deceased pilots. He also claims there is “substantive evidence that white-collar crime” took place to conceal UFO programs and that he had interviewed officials who said that people had been killed to conceal the programs.

Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on “football-field” sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was “malevolent activity” by UFOs.

During a July 26, 2023, Congressional hearing, Grusch said that he “was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access”and that he believed that the U.S. government was in possession of UAP based on his interviews with 40 witnesses over four years. He claimed in response to Congressional questions that the U.S. has retrieved what he terms “non-human ‘biologics'” from the crafts and that this “was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the [UAP] program I talked to, that are currently still on the program”. When Representative Tim Burchett asked him if he had “personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal” the government’s possession of “extraterrestrial technology”, Grusch said yes, but that he was not able to provide details except within a SCIF (Sensitive compartmented information facility).

So it’s not just the government that knows this stuff, but private companies, who apparently retain for study the craft and jars of pickled aliens, or “biologics.” (It may be relevant that Grusch has a history of mental disorders, for which he’s been committed twice to institutions.) At any rate, you can see above that not just Grusch, but also two other people who have had respectable military or government jobs, testify to the credibility of extraterrestrial craft.

The hearing itself, with all three witnesses swearing to tell the truth, has been presented to me as giving credibility of the witnesses’ stories. To me all that means is that three people believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, and yet fail to present convincing evidence. I have no objections to a hearing, because if there were credible evidence of this stuff, the government would like to know about it. So would the rest of us, especially biologists and physicists.

Both the government and other experts who aren’t True Believers have heard the verbal evidence, but for some reason material evidence never surfaces. I’ll revert to Wikipedia for the last time:

Grusch’s assertions are primarily based on alleged documents and his claimed conversations, rather than testable evidence. Claims that the government is engaged in a conspiratorial effort to conceal evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth are broadly considered untrue by the majority of the scientific community, because such claims oppose the best currently available expert information.

Joshua Semeter of NASA’s UAP independent study team and professor of electrical and computer engineering with Boston University’s College of Engineering concludes that “without data or material evidence, we are at an impasse on evaluating these claims” and that, “in the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing”. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, published a critique of the Grusch claims on June 22 with Big Think. Frank writes that he does “not find these claims exciting at all” because they are all “just hearsay” where “a guy says he knows a guy who knows another guy who heard from a guy that the government has alien spaceships”. [JAC: that’s an apt critique of the claims.] Frank also said of the Grusch account that “it’s an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, none of which we’re getting”, adding “show me the spaceship”.

Where is the damn spaceship? Where are the bodies of the extraterrestrial pilots?

You can go down the rabbit hole of these claims for days, but all I’ll say is I will remain skeptical until genuine evidence comes to light—and by that I mean production of the “biologics” and their craft. The failure of proponents to provide such evidence, which is always “kept elsewhere” and is “a secret matter of national security importance”, make me think that what we have here is true conspiracy theory. Again, reporters and skeptics should look at this evidence, but they’ve always come up with bupkes.

When I asked my friend why the greatest news story in the history of humanity has not been broken by mainstream news, I get answers involving extreme secrecy. But give me a break: there existed pickled aliens and spacecraft remains, and none of it has been verified by mainstream news outlets, not in decades? Smells like Pizzagate to me!

Finally, when I’m told that the very testimony of people with decent credentials proves that they’re correct, I respond with this: “Well, there are lots of people with decent credentials who said they have had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.” Plenty of Americans believe in the literal truth of the divine-Jesus story and have had Jesus Encounter Experiences, despite the lack of evidence—even historical, extra-Biblical evidence for a divine, crucified-and-resurrected Son of God. These people far outnumber True Believers in UFOs. Should we then take their testimony about Jesus seriously?

I haven’t followed this controversy closely, and perhaps readers, or people like Michael Shermer, have something to say about it. But until I see those pickled aliens, I think it’s more parsimonious to think that their existence is about as likely as that of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot.

I believe they’re supposed to look something like the picture below. If so, it would be a remarkable example of convergent evolution following two independent origins of life on two different planets.

Peacefyre, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Mon, 01/05/2026 - 6:15am

Ec0logist Susan Harrison from UC Davis answered my plea for photos, and her submission today, which is the last in the tank, happens to be her 100th contribution to this site. Kudos to Dr. Harrison, though she still has a ways to go to match the site record of John Avise.

At any rate, please follow Susan and send in your good wildlife photos. Her text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Black Rails on a King Tide

“…The size of a sparrow and nearly impossible to see without tremendous effort… Beware confusion… Typically rare even in proper habitat. Incredibly difficult to locate even when vocalizing within mere feet of an observer; stealthily dashes around at the base of dense grass like a ninja.” — eBird

“One of the most elusive birds in an elusive family… infamously difficult to see…. In some places, bird clubs organize field trips that search specifically for them… during particularly high tides when water levels force these small birds to the edges of marshes.” — All About Birds

“Epic flooding from king tides leaves Marin County roads under water, businesses damaged” — ABC7 News, Jan. 2, 2026

The new year began for me with the self-imposed challenge of seeing a Black Rail, Laterallus jamaicensis. Like many other birders, I’d only ever heard one, and even that had not been easy (it entailed kayaking to a delta island where one had been heard by a boat-borne birder). Two factors were in my favor in early 2026: the near-record high tides of Jan. 2, and the company of conservation biologist Steve Beissinger, who knows all about Black Rails in California.

We spent the morning in China Camp State Park in Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, where shallow marshes of pickleweed (Salicornia pacifica) line the western edge of the Bay. While Steve hadn’t studied Black Rails here, it’s a well-known place to seek them.

Over the course of 90 minutes, we watched as meandering streams and ponds swelled, water puddled on the road and then cascaded over it, and entire marshes disappeared as the shore migrated inland. Joggers, cyclists, and drivers paused in confusion along the inundated pavement. We later learned this was the region’s highest tide since 1998.

Flooded main road of China Camp State Park:

After some exploring, Steve paused where a low, shrub-lined embankment beside the road offered rails a covered exit ramp from the water:

While we watched the waters rise, Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula) and Great Egrets (Ardea alba) avidly hunted for flood-displaced prey. We hoped NOT to see a Black Rail in the beak of an egret!

Egrets, mainly Snowy:

Raptors including White-Tailed Kites (Elanus leucurus) took advantage of the hunting opportunity as well (although this particular rat-murderer was seen on my drive home).

White-tailed Kite:

Finally, we saw a rail fly in and dive under the Coyote Bushes (Baccharus pilularis) just in front of us. It turned out to be a Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola), robin-sized and with a longer and more colorful beak than a Black Rail.

Virginia Rail:

But with further searching under these bushes, we found two tiny, dainty Black Rails, as well as a second Virginia Rail! All four were foraging within the dense tangle of branches, undisturbed by their human admirers a few feet away. We were very fortunate indeed to get these closeup views.

Black Rails:

One Sora (Porzana carolina), a larger and more swimming-prone rail, circled nearby.

Sora:

Steve and the magic Coyote Bushes:

Categories: Science

Neanderthals are Homo sapiens

Sun, 01/04/2026 - 10:15am

UPDATE: I can still see the viewable-by-all post of David Hillis; perhaps you have to be on Facebook yourself to read it. Here is the full text:

“Joao Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon, noted, with a trace of sarcasm, that the push to classify Neanderthals as a separate species frequently arises from a reluctance, especially among geneticists, to fully accept them as a geographically distinct, but interbreeding, branch of humanity.” Exactly. Neanderthals were a geographically distinct population of Homo sapiens, rather than a distinct species. The two populations interbred extensively, and many modern people (including me) have both as ancestors. If pure Neanderthals were around today, no one would call them a different species, which would be considered highly insulting and racist. Why does the fact that we interbred them to extinction (actually intergradation) change that? Given that much of modern humanity carries Neanderthal genes in their genomes, it is time to stop making this misleading distinction. Neanderthals are Homo sapiens, too. ***********************************************

For a long time I’ve maintained that Neanderthals, which most anthropologists seem to think are a species different from Homo sapiens, in fact constituted a population that was H. sapiens. That, at least, is a reasonable conclusion if you use the Biological Species Concept, which defines populations as members of the same species if, when they meet under natural conditions in nature, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. And we know that’s true of Neanderthals and “modern” H. sapiens, because we carry some Neanderthal genes (I have some), and that means the two groups hybridized and that the hybrids backcrossed to our ancestors—and were fertile.

The bogus “species” is known to some as Homo neanderthalensis, which I reject. I have no objections, however, to Neanderthals being called a “subspecies,” or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as a subspecies is just a genetically differentiated population that lacks reproductive barriers from other populations.

The four or five “species” of giraffes that have recently been “recognized” are in fact just like Neanderthals and modern humans: bogus entities said to be “real species”; but in the case of the giraffes they don’t meet in nature so we can’t test their ability to interbreed in the wild. But they can do in zoos (and produce fertile offspring). There is likely only one species of giraffe. You cannot rationally separate species that live in different places by their DNA divergence alone. Those who love to divide up species for any reason whatsoever are known as “splitters.”

I’m glad to see that David Hillis, a widely-respected evolutionary systematist at UT Austin, agrees with me. Here’s his post on Facebook about the topic, prompted by an article in the NYT.

Categories: Science

Law professor argues that universities can’t be institutionally neutral

Sun, 01/04/2026 - 8:15am

As we all know by now, American universities are starting to follow the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which declares that our school is to be “institutionally neutral.” This means that no moiety of the University—no department, no center, and no official unit—can make an official ideological, moral, or political pronouncement unless it has to do with the mission of our University. (In reality, such statements, as I note below, are really the purview of only the University President, not subunits.)

But what is our mission? It’s pretty much outlined in the page on the foundational principles of the University of Chicago. In short, it combines the usual goals of a university—the promotion, promulgation, and preservation of knowledge, as well as teaching it—with a fierce dedication to preserving free expression.

And it’s the latter, free expression, that institutional neutrality is meant to preserve. If there were some departmental or university presidential statement, for instance, endorsing Governor Pritzker as a better Presidential candidate than J. D. Vance (I’m looking ahead), that would chill the speech of those favoring Vance. Because the statement is official, it could inhibit the speech of pro-Vance untenured faculty (or even tenured ones) as well as students, who would fear punishment or other sanctions for bucking what’s is an official stand. The Kalven Report, of course, emphasizes that any member of the University community can speak privately on any issue (we have First-Amendment-ish free speech). And we’re encouraged to speak our minds as individuals. But in fact, the only person who can decide what the University can say publicly about such issues is the University President. (This has been violated in the past, but we try to police it. Because of some violations, President Bob Zimmer issued a clarification of Kalven in 2020, affirming that it applied to all official units of the University.)

One example of a political issue on which the University of Chicago spoke publicly was to favor DACA, as the University believed that its mission would be enhanced by allowing all students to compete for admission (or, if admitted, remain here) regardless of their immigration status. (The “Dreamers” came to America as children and grew up here.) And we have a policy that we do not reveal anything about the immigration status of students, for losing them would make our student body depauperate of diversity. (Yes, “diversity” is a principle of the U of C, too: see our Foundational Principles of Diversity and their codification here), but we are seeking viewpoint and experiential diversity, not ethnic diversity.

The University of Chicago was the first school to officially codify institutional neutrality, but now, according to FIRE, 41 universities have adopted neutrality. That’s still pathetically few: only 1% of the 4,000-odd degree-granting institutions in America. In contrast, 115 have adopted the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. But the list of Kalven-adopting schools is growing fast, for we’ve seen what happens when universities take gratuitous political stands.

However, Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis, disagrees, claiming that it’s impossible for universities to be neutral. In his misguided and poorly-written piece at the Wall Street Journal‘s “Education News section”, Soucek says that “the neutrality so many are touting and pledging is an illusion.” That’s wrong, which becomes clear when you read his argument. Further, he says that “by one estimate, over 150 universities” have adopted the principles of the Kalven report. He gives no link, and I don’t believe it, because FIRE is punctilious in keeping the list linked above and, as I said, it lists but 41 schools.

I argue that, with the exception of schools like Brigham Young and Catholic University, in which promulgating faith is part of their mission, and schools like West Point and Annapolis, which produce future military officers, all universities should adopt institutional neutrality, for neutrality promotes free speech and free speech promotes learning, teaching, and academic freedom. (I may have missed a few exceptions, but I can’t think of any.)

Click the headline below to read:

So why is it impossible for universities to be truly neutral? Why is neutrality “largely an illusion”? It may be hard to maintain, and be violated in some schools, but the reason Soucek gives for the “illusory” nature of neutrality (which should apply to many companies, too!) are unconvincing. I’ll summarize his two main reasons in bold, but indented statements are from the article.

1). Universities sometimes have buildings named after people, expressing admiration for them. And sometimes those names are taken down. Both acts are, says Soucek, political.

More common are the choices around the names that universities give to their schools, buildings, scholarships and chairs. Schools express something with each of these choices.

At UC Davis, I am lucky to work at King Hall, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., but some neighboring law schools haven’t been so fortunate. UC Berkeley no longer refers to its law school as Boalt Hall, having discovered how grossly anti-Chinese its namesake was. And the first law school in California, once known as UC Hastings, is now UC Law SF—less catchy but no longer associated with the massacre of Native Americans. Renaming efforts may strike some as hopelessly woke, but choosing to keep a name for the sake of tradition, or branding, is no less value laden.

Even the University of Chicago has dealt with this. A few years ago, the university renamed what was formerly its Oriental Institute, partly to avoid the “pejorative connotations” of the word “oriental.” Chicago also quietly gave its Robert A. Millikan chair a new title after other schools had removed Millikan’s name because of his ties to eugenics. In each of these decisions, Chicago, like other universities, did exactly what its former provost, Geoffrey Stone, said universities shouldn’t do: “make a statement about what is morally, politically and socially ‘right’”—and wrong.

Well, sometimes buildings are named after donors, and it may be in the donation papers that the donors’ names must stay on the building. Renaming the “Oriental Institute,” is not chilling speech, but expressing the faculty’s feeling that the word “Oriental” had bad connotations (thanks, Edward Said). And renaming a chaired professorship in the rush to purge people who had views we considered reprehensible may be something to argue about, but one thing it does not do is chill speech. There was no official statement about the badness of eugenics (actually, some eugenics is still practiced today, but not in the way it was once conceived). This was simply a renaming. Further, will not see any official statement of our University about eugenics or about prenatal screening for genetic diseases, or aborting genetically defective fetuses. In fact, you will find no official statement in our University about abortion at all. (I was told that OB-GYN had a big argument about this when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, and the upshot was that this medical department could not make any official statement about Dobbs.) That was the right decision. I myself opposed Dobbs, but I would not want universities saying so officially.

This stuff about renaming, while you might be able to squeeze a drop of juice out of it, misses the main point, which is not about names but official statements. The latter chill speech; the former almost never do.

2). Universities have different missions, and so even if they adopt neutrality, they will make different exceptions to neutrality.

Soucek shows that he misunderstands Kalven when he says stuff like this:

The University of Chicago itself has spoken out on any number of politically fraught issues in recent years, from abortion to DACA to Trump’s Muslim ban, which Chicago filed a legal brief to oppose. Some see this as hypocrisy. I see these choices as evidence of what Chicago considers integral to its mission. In its brief, Chicago claimed it “has a global mission,” which is what justified its stance on immigration law. Not every university shares that global mission; some exist to serve their states, their local community or people who share their faith. We’re not all Chicago, and that is OK. We can be pluralists about universities’ distinctive missions.

First, the University of Chicago has not spoken out officially on abortion. If it has, let Soucek give a reference.There are no official statements I know of. As far as DACA and banning Muslims, those are both conceived of as limiting the pool of students we could have, and that violates the University’s mission. This is well known, and doesn’t violate Kalven. Ergo, “having a global mission” was not the justification for our stands on immigration. Those came from seeing our mission to allow qualified faculty and students to form a diverse community regardless of immigration status.

Second, I am baffled by Soucek’s statements that “some universities exist to serve their states and their local community” (serving faith is okay for religious schools and allows Kalven violations, but faith-based universities are inimical to free thought and as an atheist I don’t approve of them). Even a community college or a state school should maintain institutional neutrality as a way to promote free speech. “Serving your community” can be one mission of a school, but it’s not one that should allow a school to make official pronouncements on morality, ideology, or politics.

Soucek goes on to explain that he taught a “great books” curriculum at three different schools (Chicago, Columbia, and Boston College, with the latter a Jesuit school, but one that encourages free expression). Again, with the exception of religious and military schools, most universities should share a similar mission, one that I outlined above. And insofar as they do that, they should have institutional neutrality. Because Columbia and Chicago taught great books courses for different missions (they used to, but no longer!) does not mean they should differ in what political/moral/ideological statements they make officially. It is the commonality of missions that lead to a commonality of reasons for neutrality.

In fact, Soucek himself seems to realize that secular schools shouldn’t make Kalven-violating statements, and in a weird paragraph, he endorses neutrality (bolding is mine).

The real question universities need to be asking, then, isn’t whether some statement, policy or investment strategy counts as “political,” especially in a world where nearly every aspect of higher education has become politicized. Instead, I would replace all of the recent committee reports and neutrality pledges with something like this: “The university or its departments should make official statements only when doing so advances their mission.”

The last paragraph is in fact what institutional neutrality is for.

One more confusing paragraph. What is the sweating professor trying to say here?

Some issues, for some schools, so thoroughly implicate their mission that they need to be addressed no matter how controversial. Catholic University and the University of California were both right to talk about Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, though in opposite ways, and for different reasons.

Maybe Catholic University was okay to talk about Dobbs, as its stated mission is cultivation of Christianity (read Catholicism) for CU says this in its “aims and goals” statement:

As a Catholic university, it desires to cultivate and impart an understanding of the Christian faith within the context of all forms of human inquiry and values. It seeks to ensure, in an institutional manner, the proper intellectual and academic witness to Christian inspiration in individuals and in the community, and to provide a place for continuing reflection, in the light of Christian faith, upon the growing treasure of human knowledge.

But no, it was not okay for the University of California to talk about Dobbs. I don’t know what they said, but if they officially attacked the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, which is what Dobbs did, they would chill speech of those who are opposed to abortion, and members of the University community should have the right to say that without fear of retribution. Again, Soucek seems to misunderstand why Kalven is there, and gives no reason why the University of California should be okay with violating it.

Soucek also seems to think that maintaining silence in the face of a controversy means that you are taking sides–and defining your “mission”. He’s wrong. Have a gander at this:

More recently, when the Trump administration has denied the existence of transgender people and demanded that universities do so as well, so-called neutrality pledges give them nowhere to hide. If universities must speak out about threats to their mission but can’t speak otherwise, every choice about when to speak ends up defining what their mission is. Staying quiet when trans students, faculty and staff are under attack isn’t silence in that case. It is a loud expression that trans rights, and trans people, aren’t relevant to that school’s mission. There is nothing neutral about that.

In the end, Kalven’s loophole ensures that universities will always be saying something—about their mission, if nothing else—even when they maintain the institutional silence the Kalven Report has become so famous for recommending.

The University is not “hiding” about various transgender controversies. Au contraire, it is encouraging discussion about them by refusing to take any official position, which would squelch debate. A school not saying anything about Trump’s views on trans people does not mean that the University endorses those views. Rather, each person is free to say what they want without fear of retribution from the school. I, for example, think that Trump is wrong to ban transgender people from the military. Others may feel differently, and that difference leads to the kind of debate that college is about. Soucek’s big error is to think that by NOT issuing statements, the University is making statements, That’s the old ‘silence = violence” trope and again shows the authors’s ignorance of Kalven, an ignorance surprising coming from a professor of constitutional law. Soucek seems a bit short on logic.

As one of my colleagues said:

[Soucek] complains that if the university does not speak up against Trump’s statements about trans people, then trans people are not part of the university’s mission. Well, that seems reasonable to me. I don’t see that any particular group or identity is the “university’s mission”, no matter how topical. Individual faculty, students, and staff who research, treat, and advocate for trans people have that mission. But that’s not the university’s mission.

Is that so hard to understand?

Just when I finished this post, Luana sent me this tweet, saying “I hope he means it.” So do I.

NEW: Harvard President Alan Garber said the University “went wrong” by allowing faculty activism in the classroom, arguing professors’ political views have chilled free speech and debate on campus.@EliseSpenner and @HugoChiassonn report.https://t.co/CsyA2gfQNK

— The Harvard Crimson (@thecrimson) January 3, 2026

Categories: Science

The NYRB takes down Ross Douthat’s new book on why we should believe in God

Fri, 01/02/2026 - 7:30am

I haven’t read the New York Review of Books in years, even before the editor who made it so good, Bob Silvers, died in 2017. And lot of the great authors who published there, like Fred Crews or Dick Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) have passed on, and the magazine haven’t seemed able to replace them (I don’t know why; perhaps they don’t exist). But reader Barry called my attention to two articles in the new issue, one of which is pretty good, and I’ll discuss today, while the other, dire and über-woke, I’ll discuss tomorrow—even though I’m sick to death of its subject.

But today we have Robert P. Baird, a novelist who apparently knows a lot more about science (and religion) than Ross Doubthat, reviewing Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and pretty much taking it apart. Hell, it’s not just taken apart, but destroyed, though politely. I’ve discussed this book several times on this site, and Douthat has published excerpts and touted it widely, so its contents are no secret. It makes, as I take it, four major claims, several of which are criticized in extenso by Baird:

1.) Science has failed to explain major things about the Universe, including consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics. This means that there is A Big Explanation Beyond Science, and that explanation is God

2.) Therefore you should believe in God (such belief also brings comfort, says Douthat, but he advocates belief for the next reason, not because it brings comfort).

3.) The religious tenets of faith are true. (He’s never given any evidence for this.) That, and the inadequacy of science and its materialistic viewpoint, is the major reason for belief.

4.) But since different religions make different truth claims, which one should you believe? Douthat zeroes in on Christianity (see below), in particular his own Catholic faith. His reasons are laughable.

All of this is the usual nonsense, and makes one wonder why Douthat is taken seriously as a thinker, since none of these tenets are new, and all have been refuted. Further, why on Earth does the NYT employ him as its house conservative columnist? Is he the best such columnist they can find? The paper already has Bret Stephens, so why do they need Douthat? For balance? That’s like trying to balance a lead sinker with a feather.

At any rate, it’s salubrious, at least, to have a comprehensive takedown of this ludicrous book in one place, since the NYT hasn’t given the book a formal review. Indeed, they’ve allowed Douthat to blather on about his book several times in its pages (e.g., here, here, and here), which almost amounts to journalistic nepotism.

At any rate, you can see Baird’s review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived here.

Baird’s quotes are indented, while mine are flush left. (You can see another good takedown of Douthat’s book by Ron Lindsay at Free Inquiry.) The first quote below gives Baird’s accurate take of the materialist view of the Universe, including biology, a view that Douthat opposes because it leaves no space for God.

There’s a view of the human situation that goes something like this: 14 billion years ago, give or take, the universe exploded into being. The Big Bang didn’t create everything, but it did provide everything necessary to create everything else: a collection of immutable physical laws, a hot soup of subatomic particles, an unthinkably vast quantity of energy. After 10 billion or so years of expansion and cooling, the universe contained some trillion trillion stars, and at least as many planets. Around that time, on one of those planets orbiting one of those stars, a random series of chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules. Chemistry made way for biology as four billion years of further chance developments generated a bewildering diversity of living organisms. Eventually one of those organisms, a bipedal primate with small teeth and a prominent chin, developed the capacity for complex language and abstract thought. This species called itself Homo sapiens, the wise man, but this was only puffery, the illusory boast of an apex predator at the extremely temporary peak of its powers.

and Baird’s assessment:

Believe, the recent book by Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion columnist at The New York Times,presents itself as a work of apologetics—a case, as the subtitle has it, for “why everyone should be religious.” Though late chapters do make a positive case for religious belief, and the final chapter offers a half-hearted pitch for Douthat’s own strain of conservative Catholicism, I don’t think it misrepresents the book to say that it is mostly interested in disqualifying the comprehensive skepticism I outlined above.

Baird goes on to discuss Douthat’s tenure with the NYT and why they continue to employ him, supposing that he’s a “serious and reasonable conservative.” The first adjective is correct, the second wrong. And Baird adds that Douthat, while pretending to oppose some tenets of the Republican Party, appears, says Baird, to blame them on the Left:

Douthat’s punditry has long struck me as glib and sententious, and it particularly rankles when you notice how many of his arguments borrow the look-what-you-made-me-do rhetoric of domestic abusers and playground bullies. Whether his subject is immigration, or abortion, or gay marriage, or trans rights, or free speech, or the broad rollback of civil rights taking place under the cover of the “anti-DEI” backlash, Douthat likes nothing more than telling his liberal readers that conservative extremism is in fact all their fault.

But the ridiculous train of argument for God, and then Christianity is in fact all Douthat’s fault. On to his major points:

Douthat’s presumed motives:

But the deeper I read into Believe, the more I began to see why the idea of mere religion appeals to Douthat. He is a pundit, not a theologian, and he admits early on that he has no interest in debating the kinds of questions that have traditionally animated Christian apologetics—about Christology, say, or apostolic succession. (You will find Tyler Cowen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the Claremont Review of Books cited in his notes but only passing mentions in the text of Augustine, Aquinas, and Kierkegaard.) What Douthat does want to do is argue with atheism, especially with the lingering legacy of New Atheism, the Anglo-American media phenomenon from the early Aughts that sought to disqualify religious belief tout court.

This is where mere religion comes in. Though it makes little sense as a rigorous conceptual category, it does work reasonably well as a catchall for everything the New Atheists despised. By stripping away the thorny and often mutually contradictory truth claims of this or that faith tradition, Douthat is able to focus his rhetorical energies in a way that suits his polemical style. It allows him to argue, in other words, by means of a familiar double negative: not the case for religion so much as the case against the case against any kind of faith.

Douthat’s stupid argument for God from ignorance: Granted, the second paragraph above isn’t written well, with the double negative confusing the reader, but it’s okay. While Baird himself seems to be uncomfortable with atheism, and wishes that Douthat had indeed made his case (I guess Baird harbors that God-shaped lacuna), he can’t resist showing the flaws in Douthat’s Big Argument from Ignorance, and to the problems with using that tired old Bucephalus to tout religion:

Part of the trouble is Douthat’s tendentious misunderstandings of basic science. He appears to think, for instance, that when physicists talk about the observer effect in quantum physics, they mean that human consciousness is “the only thing that transforms quantum contingency into definite reality, wave into particle, probability into certainty.” But this is not what most physicists mean at all. As Werner Heisenberg noted, “The introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature.” A quantum observation is a type of physical interaction; it has nothing to do, contra Douthat, with any “mysterious but essential role” for specifically human observation.

Another part of the trouble is Douthat’s dependence on the argumentum ad ignorantiam, a fallacy so common in apologetic literature that it has its own Wikipedia page. Arguments of this type, known derisively as “the God of the gaps,” look for holes in our scientific understanding of the world and claim those as proof, or at least a heavy suggestion, against the secular hypothesis. Douthat wants us to see mysticism, near-death experiences, our own consciousness, and even the physical constants that make life possible in the universe as evidence that a superreal Something Else must be going on.

. . . At one point Douthat suggests that the physical laws that govern the universe ought to be seen as evidence of a divine mind. He compares the universe to a house and scientific laws to “finely wrought schematics” that imply a Great Architect in the sky. But here the double-negative reasoning that Douthat loves so much shows its limits. The fact that science can’t explain where physical laws come from is an epistemological nullity; it can’t be tweaked to reveal some esoteric alternative. Maybe physical laws do come from God or the gods. Or maybe they’re the local manifestation of the multiverse. Or maybe they simply are, for reasons we’ll never grasp. The possibilities are endless, and nothing allows us to prove which option is superior.

Douthat’s argument for God also uses evolution, and again Baird shows his ability to tackle those claims. Douthat appears to be in the 34% of Americans who think that humans evolved, but their evolution was guided by God:

A related innumeracy shows itself when Douthat turns to evolution. He seems to accept a version of the Darwinian theory, even as he wants to argue that the emergence of the human species is too complex, too mind-bogglingly unlikely, to have occurred without divine guidance. It’s true that if you tallied the likelihood of all the billions of events that led up to the evolution of human beings on Earth, you would end up with a probability that, on any human scale, looked indistinguishable from impossibility. But the long process that led to our species did not take place on a human scale. It happened over billions of years, in a universe with something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets—a universe old enough and big enough, in other words, to offer statistical room for a lot of approximately impossible events to take place.

Does this mean that science can rule out the possibility that evolution was directed by a divine intelligence? Of course not. But it does give the lie to Douthat’s desperate claim that “the universe isn’t really hiding the ball from us when it comes to cosmic order and human exceptionalism.” Reason can tolerate the belief that God had a hand in evolution, but only at the price of admitting that He took pains to conceal public evidence of His interventions.

The Argument from Ignorance seems to be making a comeback these days; you see it everywhere. And it always involves the same stuff: science hasn’t explained the laws of physics, “fine-tuning”, human consciousness, why math is so effective in helping understand the Universe (presumably God created math, too), and so on. One would think that a refutation like Baird’s would prevent future misunderstandings, but each generation (particularly the younger ones who don’t read) have to be presented with the rebuttals anew. Fighting religious arguments against science is a battle that won’t end until religion ends, and that’s never.

Douthat’s stupid argument for why Christianity is the best and truest religion. This argument and others like it. fascinate me, for every religion has its own set of truth claims,—and many are incompatible. Since those claims can’t be adjudicated because there’s no relevant evidence, you have to more or less make up reasons why your religion happens to be the best and “truest” one. Here’s how Douthat does it:

Perhaps the most serious weakness of Believe is its poor handling of religious pluralism, which is in many ways a far more difficult challenge to belief than scientific skepticism. Douthat clearly wants mere religion to help him dodge the problem as long as possible; arguing for a general acceptance of religion—which is to say, a general rejection of secularism—allows him to hold off questions about specific religions until well after the midpoint of the book. But eventually he turns to the hard question left open by his title: Believe in what?

To answer this, Douthat downplays all the fantastically complicated disagreements that have marked religious history for centuries. Instead he narrates a tidy tale of convergence toward a handful of broadly similar, and mostly monotheistic, major faiths. With the unearned confidence of a Whig historian, he allows himself grand and absurd pronouncements like “The more popular, enduring, and successful world religions are more likely than others to be true” and “If God cares about anything, He cares about sex.” Claims like these are so theologically preposterous, especially coming from a practicing Catholic, that it’s hard to know quite what to make of them. If nothing else, though, they reinforce my sense that the existence of Believe is its own best counterproof: in a world where religious truths were as obvious and reasonable as Douthat wants them to be, there would be no need for him to write it.

The book’s strangest feature is its enervating conception of belief. Douthat claims that he doesn’t look to Christianity primarily for comfort, and yet he writes about religion as though its major purpose were to banish any thought of our insignificance. He wants religion to assure him not only that “our conscious existence has some cosmic importance, some great consequence,” but that the universe was designed with one end in mind: “Toward making us possible, the readers that the book of nature was awaiting all along.”

There is more, but the review, sadly, ends rather lamely. But never mind: Baird has focused on, and dismantled, the key points of Douthat’s argument. The two I find most important are the claims that, first, science hasn’t explained everything, and therefore there is a God whom we should worship, and second, that the “right” God just happens to be the Christian God. It’s time to put this nonsense to bed, but it refuses to get under the covers. So I’m glad that people like Baird keep fighting the good fight: the fight against believing stuff not because it’s supported by evidence,but because it makes you feel good.

The NYT really shouldn’t keep Douthat on, or use its pages to tout his ludicrous ideas, but they want a couple of house conservatives (Stephens is far, far better), and, as I’ve pointed out before, the paper, like the Free Press, is curiously soft on religion. Why that’s so is beyond me.

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Fri, 01/02/2026 - 6:15am

UC Davis Math professor (emerita) Abby Thompson sends some (mostly) intertidal photos, but from Hawaii rather than California. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

We got to spend ten days before Koynezaa in Kauai, thereby missing some torrential northern California rains. So here’s a little Hawaiian wildlife:

A not-great iphone photo: This drama played out on our hotel walkway. We came across a father explaining to his son that this was a momma snail taking care of her baby, a charming but inaccurate description. In fact the “baby” is the voracious and carnivorous Rosy Wolfsnail (Euglandina rosea) which was introduced to combat the “momma” African Giant Snail (Lissachatina fulica), also an introduced species. The result has been the extinction (by the wolfsnail) of some 8 species of endemic Hawaiian snails. The Giant Snails (well, perhaps not this one in particular) are thriving. The road to hell, etc.:

Cellana sandwicensis (yellow-foot ‘Ophi):

Arakawania granulata (Granulated drupe; [a gastropod]):

Actinopyga varians (Pacific white-spotted sea cucumber) Not the most attractive creature- and there are a lot of them. They’re about 8” long and seem to just lie about.:

Colobocentrotus atratus (Shingle urchin). These very cool urchins make it look like a fleet of miniature spaceships have landed on the rocks:

Exaiptasia diaphana (pale anemone):

Gyractis sesere (colonial anemone):

Monetaria caputophidii (Hawaiin snakehead cowrie). Not sure where the snakehead part comes in:

Sunset behind the palm trees (iphone photo):

Most photos were with an Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode.

Categories: Science

Readers’ wildlife photos

Thu, 01/01/2026 - 6:15am

We start the new year with clouds, which, though some say they’re loaded with bacteria (and created by the bacteria as a means of dispersal), we’ll consider nonliving atmospheric phenomena. This montage could be called, “I’ve looked at clouds that way,” and comes from reader David Jorling in Oregon. David’s captions are indented, and the photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

First of all here is an overly simple chart that I used to identify the clouds: UCAR/L.S. Gardiner

As to these three photos, the first was taken at Mary S Young State Park while I was walking my dog. These are “cirrus” clouds which, as I understand it, means there are strong winds in the upper atmosphere:

As to the following two pictures, which were taken from my yard amongs the Douglas Fir Trees. My best guess (and perhaps one of your readers has more expertise is that these are a mixture of cirrostratus and cirrocumulus clouds. perhaps in a state of transition:

More pictures taken from my yard. Again my best guess as is cirrrostratus clouds:

Perhaps these are in transition from cirrostratus to cirrus:

My suspicious is that these are Cirrostratus transitioning to cirrus:

This one was taken at sunset near Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood. They may have appeared lower perhaps because I was at about 6000 feet elevation instead of about 300 feet where I live. So my suspicion is that these are either cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds:

This is a picture from my yard toward some neighboring Douglas Firs and assorted evergreens. I suspect these are cirrocumulus clouds:

This is a picture I took from my car during a nationally forecast “Atmospheric River”. (In Oregon we call it “Rain”.) The picture was taken westbound on the Ross Island Bridge. The building above the Stratocumulus cloud (in Oregon we call it a “Fog Bank”) is one of the buildings of the Oregon Health Sciences University, which is the main medical school in Oregon:

Categories: Science

An MCAT prep question

Wed, 12/31/2025 - 7:50am

One of my colleagues’ students is going to take the MCAT, the test required to get into med school. (As far as I know, it’s still required.) The student found this question in a practice exam they were taking on a laptop.

I’ll print out what’s above:

Which of the following statements is NOT an accurate description of gender?

A. Gender is a biological distinction.
B. Gender ideals and expectations vary by culture.
C. Some societies recognize more than two genders.
D. Gender is a performative aspect of individual identity.

I know the right answer, but perhaps you can vote to see which one was deemed correct by those who made the test. It’s unclear to me why this is on a test designed to assess students’ ability to succeed in medical school. Well, you get a chance to answer it below, as here’s a poll. Pick one,and remember, you’re looking for an INACCURATE description of gender.

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

Categories: Science

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ conversion to woo

Wed, 12/31/2025 - 7:15am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “abandon,” came with this note:

Ending the year on a hopelessly optimistic note. Happy New Year to all youl ovely patrons! Here’s the article upon which today’s strip is based.

After many tries, I managed to call up that archived article, but here’s the same one I found in the Times from December 2 that you can probably access for free (click on screenshot). They’re the same.

And an excerpt:

Paganism is the most popular spiritual destination for British Christians who convert to another faith, outstripping Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, a study has found.

Religious faith is “fragmenting” in the UK as more than one in ten people who abandon Christianity in Britain take up paganism, wicca or another form of “spiritualism”, according to the report.

While Christianity is still gaining new adherents, these arrivals are outnumbered by people quitting the faith, figures showed. This is leading Christianity to dwindle in Britain overall, casting doubt on recent reports suggesting that a revival may be under way.

So much for a slowdown in the waning of Christianity! Here the barmaid explains the decline to the pair, BUT note that many of these apostates still accept some form of woo.

Categories: Science

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Readers’ wildlife photos

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Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ conversion to woo

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