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In my view, “Blackbird,” a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney and released on the Beatles’ “White Album” in November, 1968, is one of his finest works.  Here we see him rehearsing it in the the EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on the very day it was recorded: June 11, 1968. (The released version is here.)

A few notes on the song from Wikipedia:

McCartney explained on Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road that the guitar accompaniment for “Blackbird” was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well-known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As teenagers, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a “show off” piece. The Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney said that he adapted a segment of the Bourrée (reharmonised into the original’s relative major key of G) as the opening of “Blackbird”, and carried the musical idea throughout the song. The first three notes of the song, which then transitioned into the opening guitar riff, were inspired from Bach.

The first night his future wife Linda Eastman stayed at his home, McCartney played “Blackbird” for the fans camped outside his house.

. . . Since composing “Blackbird” in 1968, McCartney has given various statements regarding both his inspiration for the song and its meaning.  He has said that he was inspired by hearing the call of a blackbird one morning when the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, and also writing it in Scotland as a response to the Little Rock Nine incident and the overall civil rights movement, wanting to write a song dedicated to people who had been affected by discrimination.

You can listen to Bach’s Bourré here, but for the life of me I can’t hear the germ of “Blackbird” in it.

The sound is off at the beginning but starts 16 seconds in. There are a few other breaks in the sound.

It’s clear that the song was tweaked right up to the end, including the tempo, the pause, and the raising of the voice on the word “life” halfway into the song.

The guy speaking to John and Paul is of course George Martin, who contributed so much to the greatness of the group’s songs.  Notice that Paul breaks into other songs from time to time, including Helter Skelter and Mother Nature’s Son, both also on the White Album. At about 6:15, Lennon tunes his guitar to McCartney’s, as if wanting to accompany him on Blackbird. But no accompaniment was needed.

Check out Macca’s shoes! The woman sitting in the corner and then next to McCartney is identified by a commenter:

Francie Schwartz is the lady appearing in the video alongside Paul. She was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend during the summer of 1968, which coincides exactly with the White Album recording sessions. She wrote about her time at Abbey Road in her memoir Body Count (1972), giving a firsthand account of those legendary sessions. You can read about Schwartz here.

This is McCartney at the apogee of his powers. The song is a work of genius.  In all my life I will never figure out where the ability to produce songs like this comes from. All I can guess is that there’s a kind of neuronal wiring in such people that can turn thoughts into wonderful music.

Larry the Cat recently turne 19 (and celebrated his 15th year at 10 Downing Street), but the Senior Cat is still going strong. For example, he recently caught his third mouse, though that was nominally his job as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.  All Brits love him now (save for the miscreants), and he’s still getting into trouble, as this recent YouTube video shows:

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Quite a few readers called my attention to this Canadian cat, named Louis Vuitton (!), who lives in a town that straddles the border with the U.S. Despite new restrictions on immigration, Louis, as the CBC article below shows, repeatedly enters the U.S. illegally and then slips back to Canada. Click on the headline to read:

An excerpt:

On Zero Avenue in South Surrey, B.C. lives a cat without a care in the world, and a supercilious name to match.

Louis Vuitton has become a local legend for doing with ease what most humans wouldn’t dare.

Each day, he leaps back and forth across a narrow ditch that sits smack dab on the Canada-U.S. border.

“He hasn’t always been such a rebel, but he is extremely friendly,” Deb Tate, Louis’ owner, told As It Happens host Nil Koksal.

He just loves people, says Tate, and he doesn’t care what side of the border they’re on.

“He will walk up, greet people, get his pats and belly rubs and then continue on when he’s done.”

On one side of the ditch is a row of charming homes, including his own, on Canadian soil. On the other are the green fields of Peace Arch Historical State Park in the United States.

There aren’t any fences, just a street in between and a shallow divide. According to Tate, there are plenty of cameras and hawk-eyed border guards patrolling nearby, ready to pounce on illegal crossers.

But none of that seems to concern Louis, who trapezes across whenever he wants, with the air of someone who knows the rules, and chooses to ignore them.

Louis, who turns six on Canada Day,has been lapping up all the attention from locals since he caught the eye of Instagram user @pnwdaily360, who posted a now viral video about “the border-hopping kitty.”

There’s a cat that doesn’t really give a f–k about borders,” says the user in the video. “And he comes over and hunts in the ditch. There he is. What’s up buddy?”

The video has since garnered over 220,000 likes and three million views on Instagram.

Tate says Louis even has a habit of smuggling things across the border, dropping it ever so thoughtfully on her doorstep.

“He’s been known to bring home a treat or two from his adventures,” said Tate. “We’ve received everything from snakes and mice and squirrels, much to my chagrin.”

As for his name, Tate says it wasn’t given to him because he has a penchant for luxury goods at duty-free prices.

“He’s a rescue kitty, and we decided that coming from humble beginnings, he deserved a designer name,” said Tate. “We just named him Louis and … he has just grown in to fill the personality, and more.”

Click the video below to see a two-minute video of Louis in action.  I wonder if ICE will go after him. After all, he not only enters the U.S. illegally, but commits crimes (murder!) in our country, bringing mice, snakes, and even squirrels back to Canada.

 

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Finally, from 1000 Libraries Magazine we hear about a cat who got an honorary doctorate from a university in Vermont, so he is now known as “Dr. Max Dow.”  Click the screenshot below to get the details:

An excerpt:

That’s Dr. Max Dow, to you. Max Dow, a once feral kitten, has been granted an honorary PhD from Vermont State University Castleton. After making a name for himself around campus for the last five years, Max has become a staple on the grounds and a famously friendly mascot for the school. He is beloved by students and faculty alike — so much so, the university bestowed an honorary doctorate of ‘litter-ature’ to him at this year’s commencement ceremonies.

Much like many other great scholars, Max’s life started with humble beginnings. He was living on the streets of a neighboring city in Vermont as a feral kitten before being adopted by his loving family and owner, Ashley Dow. Dow and her family live in a neighborhood shared with Vermont State University Castleton, and about a year after moving into their new home, Max began to explore the campus for the first time.

In an interview with USA Today, Ashley Dow shares the first memories of Max making his way to campus. She and her family were worried when he hadn’t returned home. They went searching for Max and quickly found that he was exploring the university and was familiarizing himself with curious students and staff.

Max is well taken care of by students, much to the relief of his owner. Students have been responsible for looking out for Max’s well-being and regularly check in with his owners about his health and safety. Many residents on campus have Dow’s number and will send her update texts when Max is seen or is being cared for by a student or faculty member. After a run with some not-so-friendly stray cats in the neighborhood, Max was injured.

In response, Dow asked the school’s faculty and students to be vigilant about returning Max home by 5:00 PM so his family could keep an eye on him during the night. She shared that everyone has complied with her request on numerous occasions and goes out of their way to make sure he is looked out for when he’s around campus.

. . . Max has benefited from the many perks of being a ‘student’ on campus. According to Vermont State University, Max can be seen hitching rides across school grounds in students’ backpacks and has even been the artistic muse and subject of many photography major projects.

. . . After five years of dedication to Vermont State University and its students, the school decided it was time for Max to earn his degree. During the Spring 2024 commencement, Max was celebrated and met with applause when he earned his doctorate in “Litter-ature” alongside over 1,000 other students.

. . . Vermont State University shared their feelings about Max in one quote saying, “We are incredibly proud of Max and deeply grateful for the role he plays within the culture of our University and for his part in elevating VTSU’s reputation for academic excellence and outstanding commitment to animal welfare.”

Here’s Max’x doctoral diploma from the site:

. . . and a short video about Max—I mean Doctor Max.

I hope he’s chipped.

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Lagniappe: From Stacy, a post from the FB Group the National Carousel Association:

Extra lagniappe from Cats Doing Cat Stuff. Safe treats for your moggy:

Today’s we have photos from Ephraim Heller of hummingbirds from Trinidad and Tobago.  Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

On my February visit to Trinidad and Tobago I managed to photograph 13 of the 18 hummingbirds that are sometimes present on the islands. Previous posts were devoted to my new favorite bird, the tufted coquette (here) and to photos of six other species (here). This post covers the remaining six species. The species that I did not photograph either do not visit feeders or are only present seasonally in the country.

Black-throated mango (Anthracothorax nigricollis). Some individuals have been documented to migrate over 1,000 miles:

Blue-chinned sapphire (Chlorestes notata):

Brown violetear (Colibri delphinae). An aggressive species that zealously defends its nectar sources:

The copper-rumped hummingbird (Saucerottia tobaci) is the most common hummingbird on both islands. An individual amused me over several days as it vigorously defended three feeders from all species, regardless of the fact that food was plentiful:

When light hits the male ruby-topaz hummingbird (Chrysolampis mosquitus) just right it lights up like a neon sign. As in many other hummingbird species, the male’s crown and throat produce color not through pigment but through the physical structure of the feathers: stacked layers of melanin granules in the barbules:

White-chested emerald (Chrysuronia brevirostris). Males and females look alike:

Artemis II returns today, if everything works okay. As I’ve said, there are some concerns about the heat shield, but not serious concerns. The space.com article below (click on it to read) gives the details as well as several links. I’ve put its video link (the best one, I think) below. Be sure to watch it live starting about 7:40 this evening, Eastern time, as several events will occur at or during re-entry.

Jim Batterson sent this link and added a few words:

In particular item #14 talks about their egress and being carried to the Navy recovery ship by helicopter.  After the crew are safe on board the ship, I think that the capsule is simply retrieved into the ship’s onboard “well”.  The astronauts are then helicoptered to firmer terra firma.

A short excerpt:

The Artemis 2 Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10, at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 April 11 GMT) with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California. Returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist). You can watch the landing live on Space.com, beginning at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT). You can also follow the mission live online on our Artemis 2 mission updates page.

After an epic trip to the moon and back, it’s landing day for the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon.

But returning from deep space is no easy feat, especially for the Artemis 2 astronauts, who are the first crew to fly on NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The most harrowing part of the journey lies ahead: a fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth’s atmosphere at about 24,000 mph (38,600 kph) that will subject them to temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) with only their heat shield for protection and parachutes to slow down.

“Every system we’ve demonstrated over the past nine days — life support, navigation, propulsion, communications — all of it depends on the final minutes of flight,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters Thursday (April 9). “We have high confidence in the system, in the heat shield, and the parachutes and the recovery system that we’ve put together.”

Watch it all below:

For the first time ever, I visited Whole Foods in Hyde Park, as I was craving matzos for Passover and it was the only place that carried them. (Trader Joe’s, for instance, was sold out and wasn’t getting any until 2027.)  Since Passover ended yesterday, nearly every place was sold out for the holidays.

Over my entire life, I’ve avoided Whole Foods for two reasons: it’s very expensive and also carries homeopathic remedies, which I despise as they’re totally ineffectual.

But the craving for matzos (I eat them spread with good sweet butter) drove me on.  My haul is below, acquired on the advice of a friend. The matzos are not kosher for Passover, but of course I don’t care about that. And I was told that Kerrygold butter from Ireland is about the best you can buy, so I got two sticks of that to smear on the matzos.  Finally, there’s a small jar of tart cherry jam made by Dalmatia and imported from Croatia, also recommended by my food-savvy friend.

Yes, the place is expensive, and walking there and back took 1.5 hours given the fact that no employee seemed to know where anything was. The jam, for instance, is not with the other jellies and jams, but for some reason was put at the cheese counter. Nobody knew where the matzos were, so I had to ask about five people. (I should add that Whole Foods employees at the Hyde Park store are not very friendly, especially when compared with workers at Trader Joe’s, who are always helpful and amiable.) Fortunately, the Irish butter was in the dairy section where it should be.

This is all the makings of a fine snack!

Whoops! I forgot to add that gas prices in Chicago seem to be about a dollar higher than the average across the rest of America. Here’s a photo from my trip to Whole Foods:

My insomnia continues, and has apparently worsened for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it’s anxiety about the war, but it’s definitely anxiety about something. Perhaps subliminal anxiety—after all, we can’t control what our brain does.  Last night I woke up at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. When this happens nearly every night, I try to suppress the worries that arise almost—like everyone, I have a panoply of items on the worry list. But anxiety seeps in and keeps me awake. AT 4 a.m., I hauled my sorry tuchus out of bed, did my ablutions, and came to work. That is the usual situation.

If I were to guess at the items that make me most anxious (besides the worry about getting back to sleep, which is counterproductive), there are these:

The Middle East.  Because I post daily about the war in Iran and other Middle Eastern matters, I seem to have gotten caught up in the roller coaster that is this region of the world, a roller coaster exacerbated by Trump’s waffling, which may be a deliberate strategy.  Regardless, like the mess that is American politics now, I realize that there’s little I can do to affect matters. And given that, I should simply observe the situation, express my opinion when I can, but not get so engaged that I’m destabilized by the ups and downs of both the war and politics.  But in this I’ve failed.

The ducks at Botany Pond.  I should just do what I can to take care of them, including feeding the ducklings when they come, but caring for them has almost become an obsession.  “No ducklings left behind” is my motto.  There’s nothing I can do to stave off most predators or prevent errant mallards from entering the pond and harassing Vashti, but somehow it’s a constant anxiety until the ducklings grow up and fly away.

Death.  I guess a lot of readers don’t worry about their mortality, but when you get into your seventies it’s almost inevitable. I’ve already lost several friends and classmates, and of course, as the syllogism goes, all men are mortal.

In response, some people have said that because they don’t worry about the time before they were born, which they equate with the time after they die, it’s futile to be afraid of death. In response to that I quote Christopher Hitchens, who knew he was dying of cancer but never openly admitted it:

“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise.”

I once asked readers if they wanted to be immortal (with the stipulation that you don’t fall apart completely), and most said “no”—they will have seen enough of life when the Reaper comes. But I like the party too much!

It was a rough morning on Botany Pond. Two undocumented drakes invaded this morning, and I must have spent 45 minutes chasing them around with my squirt gun. They would leave (along with Armon, who always returns), but then come back again. When they are around they will harass Vashti, even driving her off the nest, and that’s not good.

Finally Armon and Vashti were left alone, but I don’t want the undocumented ducks coming back.  Also, when chasing the errant drakes away, I accidentally spooked the wood duck pair, who have taken off.  I was sad because I love them so much, and I hope they return. (They’re clearly not yet nesting.) Armon goes after invaders, but not with great vigor: he’s a bit of a wuss.

But now all is quiet, and we had an epochal event a few minutes ago: four of the five red-eared slider turtles we put into the pond last fall (retrieved before Botany Pond was renovated) showed up, and all were competing for space and sun on a small rock.  There are other rocks they could use, but they like the one below.  I suspect the fifth turtle wandered away from the Pond at some point. This is the first time I’ve been able to see more than three turtles.

I’m exhausted: duck tending is no picnic!

As always, an Aussie who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link, and noted that New Zealand isn’t the only country in the Antipodes that tries to make science (again “Western science”) coequal with indigenous knowledge.  Clicking on the screenshot below will take you to the strategy developed by the Aussie government: the “Australian Marine Science Strategy 2026-2036”

It begins on p. 2 with a land acknowledgement:

. . continues with a mission statement on page 4:

The National Marine Science Strategy 2026–36 sets out the research and development needed to realise the socioeconomic opportunities and benefits that come from enabling a thriving ocean economy while effectively minimising, mitigating and adapting to the critical challenges facing Australia’s ocean and coasts over the coming decade. It recognises that responding to challenges such as climate change and extreme events, biodiversity collapse and competing ocean uses will not only help ensure a healthy ocean, conservation and national resilience, but also unlock new opportunities for sustainable industries and innovation that deliver long-term environmental and economic prosperity for Australia.

. . . and then sets out seven “national ambitions” for improving our knowledge of marine science, all of which (save one) involve conservation, mitigating climate change, and fostering marine “industries.” The exception is the very first ambition:

Embed First Nations knowledge, innovation and leadership in marine science to ensure sustainable and equitable marine policy and management.

Finally, after going through the ambitions, continuously paying homage to the “knowledge systems” of the First Nations people (i.e., the Aboriginal Australians and Melanesian Torres Strait islanders), the report gives its recommendations. Here’s the very first recommendation (p. 33):

Now there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that the two groups that constitute the First Nations People get equal opportunity to do science and contribute to science. And insofar that the indigenous people have produced knowledge that can be verified by modern science, by all means give them credit and fold that knowledge into modern science. But, as usual, they do more than that. First the program argues, again with a dearth of examples, that “We also have much to learn from the integration and application of Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems.” (p. 28). How do they know that? Where are the improvements in marine biology that have already come from “indigenous knowledge systems”?

This is not science or technology, but a drive for scientific equity: making indigenous knowledge coequal with modern science. And that is not even politics, but the sacralization of the oppressed. As we’ve seen so many times before from Canada and New Zealand, it is virtue signaling on a national scale.

Most readers here (and I) are keen on getting a Democrat elected as President in 2028, and it would be nice as well if the Democrats took over both houses of Congress this fall.  And, indeed, with Trump’s ratings in the dumpster, that may well happen.  But Ruy Texiera is worried that that is not enough: he thinks the Democrats feel that they don’t have to do more than sit back and let Trump self-destruct.  His thesis in this Substack article (the last one in the five years the site has been going), is that the Democrats are jaded and have failed to learn the lessons of the last few years—lessons about what the public wants. This obtuseness, he says, will eventually come back to haunt them, and may even affect Democratic chances for victory in the next few years.

I recommend that you read this article: the message may sound old, but Teixeira expresses it in detail and writes extremely clearly.  The sub-message for Democrats is this: “Don’t let the ‘progressives’ take over the party!”

If you don’t know Teixeira. here’s from his Wikipedia bio (he seems to be pretty much of a centrist):

Ruy Teixeira born December 15, 1951) is an American political scientist and commentator. He is a senior fellow at the centre-right think tank American Enterprise Institute and co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter The Liberal Patriot, along with John Halpin.

He is known for his work on political demography, particularly for the book The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), which he co-wrote with John Judis. In it, they argue that the US Democratic Party is demographically destined to become a majority party in the early 21st century, a thesis that he later disavowed, citing the rise of the progressive movement in the United States.

. . . Since 2020, Teixeira has written critically about a leftward shift within the Democratic Party.  He has argued that the progressive movement in the United States is over and finished after the 2024 United States elections, positing that Democrats still do not realise it as of 2025.

Click the screenshot to read for free (it’s the lack of money that has apparently killed the site, but it’s too late to subscribe):

Last year he wrote a related piece about Democratic obtuseness, “Is our Democrats learning?“, which gets its ungrammatical title from a G. W. Bush query, “Is our children learning?”.

On to the present piece; my comments are flush left; Teixeira’s quotes are indented.

The problem 

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

. . . Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

Teixiera then singles out five areas in which, he argues—convincingly—that Democrats haven’t learned. Immigration and trans rights are the most thorough areas he analyzes (though economics will be more decisive), but of course I can’t quote the whole piece. A bit of each:

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

This is remarkable. Perhaps nothing would surprise a Democratic time traveler from the 20th century as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the Democrats’ 21st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, Democrats have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc. . . .

. . . . In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has been met with little resistance in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, Democrats’ identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?

Of course trans people deserve those “basic civil rights,” but the clash among the Left is about the “ideological agenda of trans activists.”  I am not aware of any Democratic politican being asked outright by the press, “Do you think that trans women are actually women, and should, for example, be able to compete in women’s sports or be confined in women’s jails?” The press is not doing its job here; after all, part of its duty is to make Americans aware of where their politicians stand. But the mainstream media, being pretty “progressive” itself, is loath to even pose these questions.

Here’s another example of where the press has failed to do its job:

The immigration problem. The immigration issue has been a total disaster for the Democrats. They encouraged mass immigration through lax border and interior enforcement and porous asylum systems that effectively legalized illegal immigration and made a mockery of controlled, legal immigration. Over time, the intense unpopularity of these policies has contributed hugely to tanking Democrats’ working-class support. But to this day where are the Democratic politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?

There follows a list of ten reasonable propositions about immigration that no Democrat will touch.  Teixeira rightly sees the Democrats as effectly espousing an “open border” policy, with the possible exception of immigrants who have committed crimes in their home country or have done so after illegal entry into America.

But so far what has happened? Clearly Democrats are much happier denouncing ICE (including calling for its abolition) and Trump than they are grappling with the immigration issue and making clear, unambiguous commitments to radical reform. Noah Smith rightly sums up the situation:

I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.

This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.

I have seen no equivalent expression of principle [JAC: remember, he’s talking about the Democrats] during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.

Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?

Why can’t a reporter ask Elizabeth Warren or AOC this question: “Do you favor unrestricted immigration into America, and, if not, who would you exempt?”

And a big problem that’s only going to get worse:

The economic program (or lack thereof) problem. Democrats seem to think that the well-documented discontent with the Trump administration’s economic management now makes the economy “their” issue. In a thermostatic, opposition party sense that may be true, but it remains the case that Democrats do not have an advantage over Republicans on handling the economy.

This makes sense since voters viewed the previous Democratic administration quite negatively on economic management. They may not like what Trump has done, but they have not forgotten what Democrats did.

And let’s face it: the current Democratic economic program is quite thin; voters can reasonably question whether Democratic plans for the economy would be much of an improvement over what the previous Democratic administration delivered. Take energy.

. . . Rounding out the hit parade of Democratic economic policy ideas is that old favorite, “tax the rich.” There are now several versions in circulation whose policy defects we will pass over in charitable silence. But if this is what now passes for an innovative Democratic economic policy idea, they are perhaps in more trouble than I thought.

Feel free to agree or disagree below, but I recommend reading the whole article. I’m not only worried about the Democratic prospects in the next two years, but also about whether if Democrats do get in, it will be “progressive” Democrats or disguised progressives like Kamala Harris.

Here are Teixeira’s last words ever on this website:

Looking over this list of problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

I’m not as pessimistic as Teixeira, but it’s time for liberals to speak out against illiberalism in their party, and demand that their candidates listen to their constituents.

This video showed up as a “suggestion” when I was watching YouTube (no, I’m not a Nazi), and I was curious to see what the last German propaganda newsreel of WWII showed. Among other things, which are explained in the 12½-minute clip, is the last video taken of Hitler, showing his left hand shaking violently (5:34), a symptom medical historians have attributed to Parkinson’s disease. (This bit wasn’t shown in the final video.) Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945—just five weeks after this newsreel appeared in German cinemas.

The footnotes show the direct translation, but there’s English narration of what’s going on in the video beginning 48 seconds in.

There’s a Wikipedia article on the newsreel series called, Die Deutsche Wochenschau, and here are two paragraphs from it:

Die Deutsche Wochenschau (German for ‘The German Weekly Review’, lit. ‘The German Weekly Look‘ or ‘The German Weekly Show‘) is the title of the unified newsreel series released in the cinemas of Nazi Germany from June 1940 until the end of World War II, with the final edition issued on 22 March 1945. The co-ordinated newsreel production was set up as a vital instrument for the mass distribution of Nazi propaganda at war. Today the preserved Wochenschau short films make up a significant part of the audiovisual records of the Nazi era.

. . . Among the many notable scenes preserved by the newsreel are the Nazi point of view during the Battle of Normandy, the footage of Hitler and Mussolini right after the 20 July plot, and the last footage (No. 755) of Hitler awarding the Iron Cross to Hitler Youth volunteers in the garden of the Reich Chancellery shortly before the Battle of Berlin. Its last documentary, Traitors before the People’s Court, depicted the trial of the accused in the 20 July plot, and was never shown.

It’s fascinating to see how, with the Russians closing in on Berlin, the German people were not told of it but instead were misled to think that they might successfully resist the enemy.

Please allow me to show you pictures of my children, which this year comprise a pair of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and a pair of wood ducks (Aix sponsa). The latter don’t seem to be breeding here as they’re on the pond most of the day, and because female wood ducks nest in tree holes, and we ain’t got any.

The female mallard, named Vashti, is nesting nearby, but I’m keeping her nest location as secret as I can as I don’t want people disturbing her while she’s incubating her clutch of seven eggs. I expect a hatch about April 19 or so.  The male mallard, named Armon, patiently awaits Vashti, who comes down to the pond once a day to have a big feed and a bath and preening session. Those sessions last about 15 minutes, but Armon, a lovesick drake, patiently patrols the pond for about 23 hours and 45 minutes per day.

The wood ducks are absent in the mornings but then are at the pond most of the rest of the day, which tells me that the wood duck hen is not sitting on eggs.

But have a look at these gorgeous wood ducks: feathered jewels. I’ve added a few photos of our resident turtles, red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans). Of the five we put in last fall, I’ve seen two or three. The other turtles must have either died during hibernation or simply walked away from the pond.

Below: the wood duck pair, whom I haven’t named as no names suggested have seemed appropriate. This is an example of extreme sexual dimorphism, as you can clearly see. Why females chose males with those patterns, colors, and a crest is something we don’t understand. But it’s clearly another example of sexual selection in birds, something that ultimately devolves to the difference between the sexes in gamete size and investment. (Yes, there are two sexes in all of these animals.)

Do click on the photos to enlarge them.

The male.  I can’t get enough of seeing him and marveling at his beauty. The only other wild duck to rival this phenotypic glory is that of the male mandarin duck (Aix galericulata), a species found in East Asia. Wood ducks, however, are natives here.

He has satanic red eyes, but really is very gentle (also quick and much smaller than a mallard):

Here’s a video of the male and female wood duck having their lunch at Botany Pond:

Wood ducks seem quite romantic to me. They are always very close to each other and sometimes the male nuzzles the female.

I need names! The hen:

They are quite plump, as I ensure that they never go hungry.

Armon doesn’t really like the wood ducks, but somehow knows to chase them halfheartedly, as you see him chasing the male wood duck here.  When an undocumented drake flew into the pond last Saturday, and began chasing Vashti off her nest (he was clearly eager to copulate), Armon went after him big time.  With the help of Armon, a lot of running and yelling, and my trusty Super Soaker, I finally managed to expel the intruder. Here Armon goes after the male wood duck, who is much faster and more agile.

This is my favorite picture of the pair. They both have their heads cocked, probably looking at something above like a hawk.  Ducks have eyes on the sides of their heads, and so must cock them if they want to see above. It’s very cute when they do that, and rare to see a pair do it simultaneously:

The hen has iridescent feathers, too, but they’re less conspicuous and usually covered by the wings. They are probably byproducts of the colors that are exaggerated in males. You can see some of them below:

Have another picture of my boy:

The male woodie standing on one leg, doing his flamingo impression. (Ducks do this to conserve heat, and this was a chilly day.)

As I said, Vashti is incubating her eggs, but she comes down to the pond for about 15 minutes per day for a nosh and a bath. Here’s part of her preening session, which is quite vigorous. Shortly thereafter she flew off to her nest. Note that Armon stays nearby, as he gets only a few minutes per day with his mate and lady love.

And we mustn’t forget the turtles! On warm days they come out of the water to soak up sun on the rocks, extending their limbs to get as much heat as possible. We call this “turtle yoga.”

The long claws tell us that the one below is a male (they use the claws in courtship):

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “create”, came with this caption:

In which the boys return to the devilishly tricky P of E.

I assume the artist means “problem of evil”, which of course clever theologians have found a way to rationalize (there’s nothing these people can’t explain).  But Mo is unable to come up with his own theodicy.

Paul McCartney was—and I use the past tense—one of the two greatest songwriters of the era that comprised the apogee of pop music. (The other was John Lennon; I’m excluding Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as were folkier).  Sadly, he’s still making music, and, save for George Harrison, each of the Beatles immediately lost their touch after they went solo.

Here’s a McCartney song touted in the NYT as the “What’s New” in music we should pay attention to. It’s from a new album he’s releasing in May. Their blurb:

Paul McCartney, ‘Days We Left Behind”

“The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” to be released May 29, will be Paul McCartney’s first solo album since 2020; it’s named after a Liverpool street in the neighborhood where he grew up. In “Days We Left Behind,” a cozy ballad carried by acoustic guitar and piano, he sings about places and memories as both fragile and lasting; he mentions Forthlin Road, the street where he lived and wrote early songs with John Lennon. “Nothing stays the same,” he muses, but he also insists, “No one can erase the days we left behind.” His voice is shakier than it once was, only making things more poignant.

Listen for yourself. Yes, his voice is shaky, a mere shadow of his voice from the Sixties. Worse, the song is lame in both melody and lyrics, though the melody is worse than the lyrics, which are at least tolerable (I give them below).

I realize that Macca was made to create music, and probably can’t stop doing it.  And this song is still better than a lot of the dreck that passes for pop/rock music these days, but compared to the earlier McCartney, well, it’s sad.  If you leave the video on, you’ll see a horrific AI-generated video in which all four Beatles are stuck in.

Lyrics:

Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to last

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behind

See the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for more

And nothing stays the same
No one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behind

We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken

Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
And no one can erase
The days we left behind

In the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they’d stay
With me for evermore

’Cause nothing stays the same
And no one needs to cry
And no one is to blame
For the days we left behind
The days we left behind

I would have missed this video had reader Doug not called my attention to it. It’s a very good half-hour discussion by evolutionary biologist Zach B. Hancock, a professor at Augusta University, in which he recommends the the top ten most influential books in evolutionary biology. Since Hancock is a population geneticist, the books deal largely with evolutionary genetics, but not all of them.

I slipped in at #10 with my book on Speciation with Allen Orr, but I won’t be too humble to claim our book wasn’t influential, for, as Hancock notes, it’s the only comprehensive book on the origin of species around. (Darwin’s big 1859 book was about the origin of adaptations, and had little that was useful about the origin of species.) Hancock regrets that Allen and I aren’t going to do a second edition, but Allen refuses to, and I don’t have the spoons (I do have 200 pages of notes on relevant papers that appeared after our book came out, but that will go nowhere.)

The rest of the list is stellar, and shows a keen judgement about the field. I’m not sure I would have put Lack’s book on the Galápagos finches in there, as it’s pretty much out of date. It should be replaced by a very important book by Ernst Mayr, his Systematics and the Origin of Species or the updated version in 1963,  Animal Species and Evolution. It was Mayr who codified the Biological Species Concept and paved the way for experimental and observational studies of speciation, and hence my book with Orr. 

I’d expect every graduate student in evolutionary genetics to have read  most of these books by the time they get their Ph.D. In fact, when I was on prelim hearings, judging whether students could be admitted to candidacy after a year or two, I and my colleague Doug Schemske made a habit of asking students to name the major accomplishments of several of the authors listed below. My impression is that the history of the field is not given so much weight now, so I wonder if students could still explain the major accomplishments of say, Theodosius Dobzhansky or Ronald Fisher. The books are of more than historical interest, for they raise questions that are still relevant. (I spent a lot of my career trying to understand the phenomenon of “Haldane’s Rule,” explained by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922. The paper was completely neglected until I read it in the early eighties and started a cottage industry of explanations [my own was largely wrong]).

Hancock’s explication of each book is excellent.  If you’re an academic teaching evolutionary biology, you might see how many of these books your students have read.

One commenter on YouTube gave the list and the time points in the video where each is discussed (the links go to those time point).

2:26 #10 Speciation – Jerry Coyne & Allen Orr
4:50 #9 Darwin’s Finches – David Lack
6:59#8 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – Julian Huxley
9:15 #7 The Origins Of Genome Architecture – Michael Lynch
11:23 #6 Chance & Necessity – Jacques Monod
13:26 #5 The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
16:54 #4 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution – Motoo Kimura
19:34 #3 Genetics and the Origin of Species – Theodosius Dobzhansky
22:20 #2 The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection – Ronald Fisher
26:35 #1 On The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin

Reader Simon called my attention to a new obituary in the Times of London of Robert Trivers, a giant in evolutionary biology (and a notorious eccentric) who died on March 12.  Because his death wasn’t announced immediately after he expired, this was bit late, but better late than never—especially given Trivers’s importance in the field. It’s a good obituary but the gold standard was Steve Pinker’s “in memoriam” article about Trivers published in Quillette on March 25.

Click the screenshot below to read, and if that doesn’t work,the article is archived here.

An excerpt:

In a burst of creativity in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers published a series of scientific papers that earned him a claim to being among the most important evolutionary theorists since Darwin. He was the first to fully appreciate how a gene-centric view of natural selection could explain some of the most puzzling and fundamental patterns in social life: the function of altruism, why males and females differ so much, the underpinnings of sibling rivalry and the delicate dynamic of conflict and co-operation that exists between parent and child.

Brilliantly original, Trivers was also an academic misfit: a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking individualist with a notable tendency to get into violent scrapes and an ungovernable character that eventually strained his relationship with the academy to breaking point.

Why do we ever behave altruistically? That is, why would an organism ever promote the reproductive success of another at some cost to its own? Since the work of the great evolutionist WD Hamilton, it had been appreciated that “kin selection” could explain why close relatives help one another out: doing so promotes an organism’s “inclusive fitness”, a measure accounting not only for an organism’s own genes but for copies of the same genes likely to be present in relatives. But why help non-kin? To Trivers, it was an obvious fact of life that we sometimes give priority to friends, and even strangers, over direct relatives.

Persuaded of the misguidedness of “group selectionist” theories that were fashionable at the time — according to which organisms sometimes sacrifice themselves for the “good of the species” — Trivers gave the central explanatory role to the gene. In his landmark 1971 paper, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, Trivers argued that altruism depended on the possibility of reciprocity. As long as helping a non-relative is not too costly, and there is sufficient probability that the favour would one day be returned, genes coding for altruistic dispositions spread.

. . . Frustrated by the Harvard biology faculty’s delay in granting his tenure application in the late 1970s, he abruptly left with his young family to take up a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a decision he came to regard as a “once in a lifetime” mistake. There, he befriended Huey Newton, co-founder of the paramilitary Black Panther political party, who was a doctoral student at the university. They co-authored a paper on self-deception, and Trivers made Newton his daughter’s godfather. He joined the Panthers for a period and later confessed to doing “an illegal thing or two”, before Newton removed him from the group for his own safety.

In fact, what I recall in 1977 is that Harvard’s biology department recommended tenure for Trivers, but that recommendation was overturned by President Derek Bok.  I was there at the time and can vouch for that. Others say that Trivers asked for early tenure and was denied that, and then decided to leave Harvard. I also heard, and I can’t vouch for this, that Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) and Dick Levins, both Marxists who despised sociobiology, went to President Bok to lobby him to deny Trivers tenure.  What we do know is that Trivers then moved to Santa Cruz, and later to Rutgers, where his academic turmoil continued:

. . . In 2015 he was suspended by Rutgers University for refusing to teach a course on human aggression, a field he claimed he was not expert in (despite its being a personal forte of his). He quit university life for good shortly after. Later, he was among the set of high-profile intellectuals pilloried for maintaining financial and social links to Jeffrey Epstein, even after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Far from apologetic, Trivers, who accepted funding from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability, vouched for his integrity; in Trivers’s view, Epstein’s imprisonment was punishment enough and his crimes less “heinous” than they were made out to be.

It is testament to the depth and generality of Trivers’s discoveries that they could be applied so readily, as he unsparingly conceded, to his own case. As he understood, natural selection has built us, and it is to natural selection we must return “to understand the many roots of our suffering”.

Compared to Pinker’s piece, the Times obituary is light on Trivers’s scientific accomplishments, but all in all it’s pretty good.

Below is a NYT obituary, also delayed, that appeared on March 27 (click to read or find it archived here):

An excerpt (David Haig, who’s quoted, has written his own remembrance of Trivers, as the two were good friends; but I don’t think it’s yet been published):

“Robert Trivers was unlike any other academic I have known,” David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, wrote in a remembrance of Professor Trivers for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “In another life, he might have been a hoodlum.”

Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)

In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.

“I was an intellectual opportunist,” he wrote in “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” (2002). “The inability of biologists to think clearly on matters of social behavior and evolution for over a hundred years had left a series of important problems untackled.”

The paper does a decent job in outlining Trivers’s contributions, the most important of which was his evolutionary explanation of “reciprocal altruism”, but again, see Pinker for a fuller explication.  A bit more about the situation at Harvard:

During this creative burst, Professor Trivers struggled with mental health issues and was hospitalized at least once for bipolar disorder. He applied for early tenure at Harvard, but the decision was postponed because of concerns about his mental health.

“He could be a brilliant and wonderful colleague,” Professor Haig said. “In a different mood, he could be unnecessarily hostile to those around him.”

That’s enough for now, save one I just found in Skeptic, a remembrance by Trivers’s only graduate student ever, Robert Lynch. Click below to read:

It ends this way:

One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.”  That seems just about right to me.

His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him.

I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.

Once again we have an article about how science could be improved if only it incorporated indigenous “ways of knowing”—the “braiding of knowledge” referred to in the Guardian article below (click to read).  I often see another metaphor used to express the same thing: “two-eyed seeing”, with one eye seeing the way indigenous people do, and the other way modern science does. (I won’t use the term “Western science,” often used to denigrate it.) The implication is that modern science is half blind without indigenous knowledge.

And once again we see five things. The first is that indigenous knowledge is local knowledge, usually about how to grow food or harvest other things that enhance the lives of locals.

Second, indigenous “ways of knowing” are not science in the modern sense—the sense that involves hypothesis testing, doubt, controlled experiments, blind testing statistics, data analysis, and mathematics.  Indigenous “science” does not avail itself of these essential items in the toolkit of science.  Rather, it usually involves using trial and error (mainly about food), and if something works, it becomes “knowledge”. Such knowledge—like how to build the “clam gardens” copiously mentioned in the article below—may be true and may indeed be “knowledge” conceived of as “justified true belief”, but justification usually doesn’t involve replication.

Third, the “braiding” is asymmetrical: modern science can contribute much more to indigeous practices than the other way around. How to build clam gardens or harvest sweetgrass is, after all, not something that’s widely applicable, while principles of genetics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and so on, are universal, and science can do a lot to help indigenous people with issues like medicine, probably the most important area of asymmetry.  We do not often adopt indigenous medical practices, but the other way around is pervasive, because modern medicine, based largely on science, works..

Fourth, examples of indigenous knowledge that are given in the article are few. These article are usually a lot more about people touting “other ways of knowing”, and calling attention to the past oppression of indigenous people, than they are about the expansion of human knowledge.

Finally, the article completely neglects examples of the damage done to the environment by indigeous people, and these examples are not rare. They cannot be mentioned because what indigenous people do must be uniformly regarded as good. But they are not, as the date below the fold show.

Click below to read; the author is Leila Nargi.

Examples of indigenous knowledge. I would be remiss if I neglected the “ways of knowing” that the article says should be braided with modern science. There are not many, but this list is pretty exhaustive from the article. Excerpts from it are indented, and my comments are flush left.

Clam gardens:

Beginning at least 4,000 years ago, Native communities built clam gardens into the intertidal zone from Washington state through coastal British Columbia, and into south-east Alaska. They are a unique form of mariculture that provide harvestable habitat for an array of tasty ocean creatures like butter clams – collected “in great numbers, then smoked and dried and stored and traded”, Hatch said. But they also yielded red rock crab, basket cockles, sea cucumbers, limpets, sea snails and seaweeds in a veritable smorgasbord for humans and marine mammals, such as otters.

These gardens change where sediment moves and may protect against increasing shoreline erosion; studies also show that clam productivity and populations are higher inside gardens than outside them.

Yes, this is an advance in growing clams, and may have other salubrious environmental effects, though they aren’t documented. At any rate, stemming erosion would be limited because clam gardens are restricted in size.

Sweetgrass harvesting:

Still, the necessity of “proving” the validity of longstanding Indigenous practices can frustrate. Suzanne Greenlaw, a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, is an ecologist at the Schoodic Institute, a non-profit of the National Park Service (NPS) that supports Wabanaki-led research. She participated in a 2016 study to understand how sweet grass, which grows in salt marshes, rebounds after harvesting. The study was part of a Wabanaki bid to re-establish the right to gather sweet grass from NPS land. Though the Wabanaki have made baskets from sweet grass for centuries, they have been cut off from ancestral marshes in Maine’s Acadia national park for at least 100 years.

Non-Indigenous researchers planned to conduct an environmental assessment to gauge how well plants regrew after picking, choosing sweet grass plots that had no connection to those once used by the community. This led to a comparison study in which Wabanaki practitioners demonstrated their superior understanding of how and where to harvest for the greatest ecological benefit. (They may reclaim harvest rights later this year.)

Notice that modern science will be used to verify whether the way sweetgrass is harvested affects future harvests.  But that is not indigenous knowledge; rather, it’s an in-progress attempt to verify that knowledge, with the goal of helping indigenous people who have lost their right to harvest regain their rights.

Other stuff:

More Indigenous people – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a notable example – are entering academia and changing it from the inside, while some tribal nations have hired their own scientists. Non-Native institutions are seeking to undo their erasure of Indigenous cultures; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has started to include labeling that highlights Lenape names and uses for food plants like persimmons. International environmental organizations also increasingly recognize the importance of including Indigenous voices in discussions around the climate crisis. Since 2022, there’s even been federal funding to study ways to combine Indigenous and western sciences, so each part remains distinct while being strengthened by the other.

Note that labeling plants with indigenous names is an exercise in linguistics and anthropology, not a “way of knowing”. And while indigenous people should not be excluded from discussions about practices that may affect their lives, that too is not “knowledge’ but inclusion.

More:

In fact, there are many proven correlations between Indigenous-managed food systems and ecological health. Researchers at Simon Fraser University have found that when Indigenous groups in British Columbia tended forest gardens, they not only produced an impressive biodiversity of food plants – from crabapple and hazelnut and wild plum to wild rice and cranberries – they also improved forest health.

Whyte, the University of Michigan professor, works with the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan – one of many Native nations that used prescribed burns to boost populations of sharp-tailed grouse, snowshoe hare and deer, all of which declined after the federal government’s 1911 burning ban. Collaborating with US Forest Service researchers, they conducted more than 20 ecology surveys and other projects that proved their case for fire, in the interest of establishing a co-management plan that would allow them to reintroduce this tool.

The first part is absolutely expected: if you deliberately plant diverse plants to get fruits and nuts, and compare the biodiversity with that of native forests, yes, you’ll get a more diverse “ecosystem”. If you see that as a “healihier” ecosystem because it has more ethnobotanical assets, yes, that is also true.  But surely the author doesn’t mean to imply that all North American forest should be turned into “forest gardens” for growing food.

As for controlled burning, yes, that can be useful in replacing natural burns that are no longer permitted, but in the past burns set by indigenous people could become uncontrolled.  This was particularly dire in New Zealand, where 40% of native forest (30-35% of the total land area) was burned by Māori people within 200 years of their arrival on the two main islands in the 13th century. (There were of course no non-Polynesian “colonists” then.) See below the fold for more data.

All in all, it’s not an impressive record, and hardly one that enriches modern science. Indeed, modern science is making a large contribution to indigenous people than the other way around. Despite that,

Indigenous knowledge is sacralized and, the article implies, should be considered coequal with modern science.  Some quotes:

Rather than dismissing Indigenous knowledge, more western scientists are discovering its viability for themselves and adjusting their research goals to embrace it.

That represents a “massive shift”, according to Kyle Whyte, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Historically, western scientists have considered themselves rigorous and empirical, while they have classified traditional Native thought as mythic, religious or plain made-up, he said.

It’s not false to say that a great deal of “traditional Native thought”, construed as “ways of knowing”, is indeed mythic, religious, or plain made-up.  But some of it is not, and insofar as this knowledge can be verified by modern science, that part is indeed “knowledge”.

Western science favors distinct disciplines – ecology, biology, geology and Supernant’s specialty, archaeology. But Indigenous knowledge considers “the earth and the water and the air and the plants and the animals as deeply interdependent and interconnected; to understand one is to understand all. And that has a lot to teach western science,” Supernant said of the importance of braiding these systems.

Notice the inaccurate term “Western science”.  And insofar as a system is dependent on other things, modern science has to deal with it. But, as my advisor Dick Lewontin said in an essay called “A reasonable skepticism“:

But this holistic world view is untenable. It is simply another form of mysticism and does not make it possible to manipulate the world for our own benefit. An obscurantist holism has been tried and it has failed. The world is not one huge organism that regulates itself to some good end as the believers in the Gaia hypothesis believe. While in some theoretical sense “the trembling of a flower is felt on the farthest star,” in practice my gardening has no effect on the orbit of Neptune because the force of gravitation is extremely weak and falls off very rapidly with distance. So there is clearly truth in the belief that the world can be broken up into independent parts. But that is not a universal direction for the study of all nature. A lot of nature, as we shall see, cannot be broken up into independent parts to be studied in isolation, and it is pure ideology to suppose that it can.

It is common to say that indigenous knowledge is superior to modern science because the former is more “holistic”.  Lewontin shows the fallacy of that claim.

Here’s another common claim you encounter in this kind of literature:

As opportunities for western and Indigenous collaborations multiply, it’s critical that Indigenous people maintain control over any knowledge gleaned and how it’s used, especially in light of western scientists’ historic penchant for extracting information that suited their own purposes and dismissing the rest. “Western science can help, as long as Native people are still decision makers. . . ” [quote from Suzanne Greenlaw, a Native American ecologist]

If this means anything beyond the way that published data is treated in modern science, then it is an unwarranted privilege. When science is published it becomes the property of humanity, and by and large those who produced the knowledge have no control about how it’s used—nor should they. If other people want to use what you’ve published for their own purposes, well, that’s the way science works. Indigenous people should have no more control over any knowledge they make public than should anybody else.

Below we see the implication that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science (the quote is from Kisha Supernant “Métis and Papaschase and the director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology”):

What constitutes progress when it comes to braiding western and Indigenous science depends on whom you ask. “If the burden of proof remains on Indigenous communities to demonstrate, using western scientific methods, that their knowledge … is valid, I think we’re not at the place we need to be,” Supernant said. “It is difficult to braid two things together when they’re not given equal weight in the braid.”

Well, I’d say that given the toolkit that’s constitutes modern science and is used to establish “knowledge,” then yes, indigenous people should have to demonstrate that their knowledge really is knowledge in the modern sense before it’s used.  When the Māori want to play whale songs to infected kauri trees because whales and kauri trees were once seen as brothers, then they should have to demonstrate the phylogenetic affinity of trees and cetaceans as well as the efficacy of whale songs. (This is a real case based on mytic lore.)

Finally, the bit below strikes me as rather patronizing, treating Indigenous people like children. (“Whyte” is a “professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”)

Whyte is encouraged that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which seeks to provide scientific evidence to inform government decision-making, included a chapter on Indigenous knowledge in its latest global assessment. But he sees plenty of opportunity for improvements to braiding. For starters, “Indigenous people need to be involved at the earliest stages of research,” he said. And that means western scientists “need to get into the habit of approaching potential [Indigenous] partners and saying ‘I’m interested in water. Are you interested in water?’ before any research questions have been created. Let’s just get excited together about the topic, and plan from the beginning.”

If they plan experiments on indigenous land, or experiments that affect indigenous people, then yes, there should be consultation.  But “getting excited together” before any research questions have been formulated is not the way that science works, nor should it.  Science is not an endeavor that involves research equity, and creating such equity must be an extracurricular activity. The job of science is to understand the Universe, not to create social justice or spread an ideology.

h/t Ron, Ginger K

Click “continue reading” to see what we know about the damage indigenous North Americans did to the environment. It gives the answer to a question I asked Grok.

The question I asked: What damage did indigenous North American people do to the environment? And Grok’s complete answer, with sources (the ones I got had links).

Indigenous North American peoples (pre-Columbian ancestors and later Native American groups) altered their environments in significant ways, as all human societies do when they hunt, farm, burn landscapes, or build settlements. This often caused localized environmental damage, including species declines or extinctions, soil degradation, erosion, and major shifts in vegetation. The notion of a “pristine wilderness” untouched by humans before Europeans is a myth; archaeological, paleoecological, and historical evidence shows active modification and overexploitation in many regions.

Impacts varied by group, region, time, and technology (e.g., hunter-gatherers vs. agricultural societies), and were generally smaller-scale and more reversible than industrial-era damage due to lower populations and simpler tools. Many practices were adaptive for the peoples involved (e.g., increasing game or crops), but they still produced clear negative effects on ecosystems, biodiversity, and long-term habitability in specific areas. Here are the main documented examples:

1. Contribution to Pleistocene Megafauna Extinctions (~13,000–11,000 years ago)The arrival of humans in North America coincided with the extinction of ~38 genera of large mammals (megafauna), including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, horses, and saber-toothed cats. The “overkill hypothesis” (proposed by Paul Martin) argues that efficient human hunters rapidly drove these naïve animals to extinction through direct predation, especially as human populations grew and spread.

• Supporting evidence includes kill sites with Clovis points and megafauna bones, plus computer models showing hunting pressure could cause rapid collapse. Humans hunted/scavenged these species continent-wide, including in eastern North America. sapiens.org
• Counterarguments note climate change (end of the Ice Age) played a major role, with many species already declining; extinctions weren’t instantaneous “blitzkrieg.” Some studies suggest 75–90% of northeastern megafauna vanished before or without heavy human involvement. science.org

Consensus: Humans were a key driver (especially in the Americas, where losses were ~72% of large mammal genera), amplifying climate stress via overhunting and habitat disruption. This was the earliest major human-caused environmental shift on the continent.

ourworldindata.org

2. Agricultural Overexploitation and Landscape Degradation (Southwest and Other Farming Regions)Sedentary farming societies like the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi/Hohokam, ~AD 1–1500) in the arid Southwest cleared woodlands, built irrigation systems, and intensified agriculture, leading to deforestation, soil erosion, salinization, and arroyo (gully) formation. These contributed to regional collapses and site abandonments.

• Chaco Canyon (Ancestral Puebloans): Massive wood harvesting for construction and fuel stripped local woodlands (piñon-juniper, ponderosa pine). This caused destabilization, soil erosion, reduced water retention, and increased environmental unpredictability during droughts. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Hohokam (Arizona’s Salt and Gila River valleys): Long-term irrigation raised groundwater salinity, rendering fields infertile and contributing to agricultural failure and societal decline by the 15th century. acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
• Similar issues elsewhere: Prehistoric farming caused accelerated soil erosion in some areas, outpacing natural rates. sciencedirect.com

These were human-induced changes that made recovery difficult without relocation—classic cases of local environmental collapse from overexploitation.

3. Widespread Controlled Burning and Vegetation Shifts

Indigenous groups across North America (and especially the Great Plains, California, and eastern woodlands) used frequent, low-intensity fires to manage landscapes: clear underbrush for travel/hunting, promote grasses and fire-tolerant plants (oaks, hickories), drive game, and enhance berry/root crops. This profoundly altered ecosystems from what they would have been under purely natural (lightning) regimes.

• Forests were converted to grasslands, savannas, or open woodlands with grassy openings. Fire-tolerant species increased near settlements (e.g., oaks rose dramatically in southern New England forests). psu.edu
• This created the “park-like” landscapes Europeans later described—not untouched wilderness. Post-contact fire suppression (after indigenous populations crashed) led to fuel buildup and today’s severe wildfires. en.wikipedia.org

While often sustainable and biodiversity-enhancing in a mosaic sense, it represented deliberate, large-scale human modification that reduced closed-canopy forests and favored human-preferred species over others.

4. Hunting and Local Overexploitation

Beyond megafauna, there is evidence of wasteful or unsustainable hunting:

• Buffalo jumps and communal hunts sometimes killed far more animals than needed (pre- and post-horse), leaving carcasses unused. thetedkarchive.com
• In some areas, deer, beaver, and other game were depleted locally through intensive harvesting (pre-contact for subsistence; later amplified by European trade).
• Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian (1999) documents cases where indigenous groups did not always act as perfect conservationists—e.g., selective use of animals or failure to limit impacts despite knowledge of ecology. thetedkarchive.com

Pre-contact populations peaked around AD 1150 before some regional declines (from drought, warfare, disease), showing societies weren’t always in perfect equilibrium.

dri.edu

Context and ScaleThese impacts were real but not uniform or continent-wide “destruction.” Many groups were mobile or low-density, allowing recovery over time. Practices often reflected deep ecological knowledge (e.g., fire as “medicine” for resilience). European contact later caused massive indirect changes via depopulation (~90% decline in some areas from disease), followed by reforestation—but the question focuses on indigenous actions.

theguardian.com

Scholarly views (e.g., Krech, paleoecological studies) reject romanticized “harmony with nature” as ahistorical. Indigenous peoples were sophisticated actors who shaped, exploited, and sometimes damaged environments for survival and advantage—just as humans everywhere have. Modern conservation draws useful lessons from their fire management, but facts show they were not uniquely non-impactful.

Today the Artemis 2 capsule with its four astronauts does its transit around the Moon, going further into space than any human have gone into space. They’ll also see parts of the Moon’s backside that have never been seen by the living human eye, though the backside has been amply photographed.

Shortly after midnight this morning, the capsule entered the Moon’s “sphere of influence,” meaning the part of space where the gravity of the Moon exceeds the gravity of Earth.  The schedule is below, and I’ve put a video of the live proceedings below.

From the Space.com site:

The Artemis 2 astronauts have arrived in the moon’s sphere of influence, and are now preparing for a very full day of lunar observations.

They crossed the celestial threshold early Monday morning (April 6), becoming the first people to do so since the crew of Apollo 17, in 1972.

The pull of the moon’s gravity on the Artemis 2 Orion capsule officially became stronger than Earth’s influence on the spcecraft at 12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), as Orion flew 39,000 miles (62,764 kilometers) above the moon and 232,000 miles (373,368 km) from Earth.

Today, they will break the distance record set by Apollo 13, which flew 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth. Artemis 2 reach that, and then some, but between breaking the record and setting their own, they will have hours of lunar observations to conduct as Orion makes its closest approach to the moon.

Here’s a full breakdown of what to expect today (all times in EDT):

There will be about a 40-minute communications blackout (starting at about 6:47 pm) when they go around the Moon. Here’s today’s schedule:

1 p.m.: NASA lunar flyby coverage begins.
1:56 p.m.: Apollo 13 distance record broken
2:10 p.m.: Crew remarks about record
2:15 p.m.: Crew configures Orion for flyby
2:45 p.m.: Lunar observation period begins
6:47 p.m.: Loss of communications (estimated 40-min.)
7:02 p.m.: Closest approach to the moon
7:05 p.m.: Maximum distance from Earth
8:35 p.m.: Orion enters solar eclipse period
9:20 p.m.: Lunar observation period ends
9:32 p.m.: Solar eclipse period concludes

Watching a bit this morning, I see there is a possible cabin leak, which is worrying, but it may have been a false alarm.

If the video is not working, you can see it on the Space.com site: You can also scroll back and see what was going on previously.

h/t: Bat

Today’s photo come from reader Jan Malik, who took them in New Jersay. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

As an appendix to the earlier Tree Swallow pictures, here are a few more from the New Jersey Botanical Garden. A walk in that park on the first day of spring is a ritual of mine—to ensure all observable phenomena related to spring are happening again and that the thermal death of the Universe is postponed for yet another year.

Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) pausing mid-search for food. This is a female; in this species, the red plumage is restricted to the nape and the area above the bill, whereas males sport a continuous red cap:

Spring Snowflake (Leucojum vernum, possibly var. carpathicum), a Eurasian transplant. It looks succulent, but this perennial defends itself against mammalian browsing by producing bitter, poisonous alkaloids:

Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) hiding in bearberry brambles. Against this notorious garden destroyer, only the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch offers a true degree of protection:

Forsythia (Genus Forsythia) in bloom—the unmistakable sign that spring has arrived:

White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis). Like the woodpecker, it is a connoisseur of arthropods hiding in bark. however, by being equally adept at feeding head-down or head-up, it finds insects that a woodpecker might miss:

Common Water Strider (likely Aquarius remigis) emerged from its winter hiding. These are predators and scavengers of insects trapped on the surface of slow-flowing streams. As a “true bug,” it has evolved to exploit surface tension. However, surface tension alone doesn’t keep it dry; the secret lies in the dense, hydrophobic hairs on its tarsi. These trap air to act as tiny “dinghies,” preventing the legs from being wetted by capillary action:

Crocus flower (likely a Woodland Crocus, Crocus tommasinianus). The flowers emerge before the leaves, which then die back in late spring after accumulating enough biomass for the year. This adaptation to montane meadows and early forests allows them to bloom early, while withdrawing underground provides a defense against browsing:

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) picking bittersweet fruit (likely the introduced Oriental Bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus). The fruit is indeed slightly sweet—a fact I confirmed before spitting it out, as they are reportedly toxic to humans. As they say: don’t try this at home; try it in nature instead:

After the meal, the mockingbird sits quietly in a nearby bush. They mimic other birds’ calls, possibly to fool rivals into thinking a territory is already occupied. It doesn’t work on me, though—I can always tell the original bird from the imitation:

Snowdrop (Genus Galanthus), another Eurasian immigrant. Most of the plants in these pictures were introduced from Eurasia to the Americas; however, with the exception of the Bittersweet, they are generally not considered invasive:

A Jumping Spider. I can’t vouch for the exact ID, but it resembles Phidippus princeps. While not my best shot, it’s worth noting that, like all others in this series, it was taken with a single lens (Canon RF 100-500mm)—a blessing for a lazy photographer.

An Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), looking lean after winter and digging for roots and grubs in the lawn. This species is an unwelcome sight in Europe, where its introduction is displacing the native Red Squirrel. But can we really blame them? They are simply good at being squirrels. It is entirely a human fault that geographical barriers are collapsing. In this “Homogecene” era of a connected world, the total number of species will inevitably decline:

I guess the Torygraph is considered “mainstream media” in the UK, and, like American MSM, seems to be touting religion in a way we didn’t see a few years ago. In this short article, which I found through the disparaging tweet below (an accurate, tweet, it seems), Baron David Frost, a conservative political bigwig in the UK, tells us why we should be going to church this Easter.  He seems to love “full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which apparently means the whole Catholic hog, from snout to tail. No “skim Christianity” for him!

Go below to read the article.

Hello, I am mental.

— Richard Smyth (@rsmythfreelance.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T07:46:00.501Z

Click the screenshot below to go to an archived version of the Torygraph piece, which describes Lord Frost (is that the same thing as a Baron?) this way:

Lord Frost led the negotiations that finally took Britain out of the EU in 2020.  A Cabinet minister in the Boris Johnson government, he resigned in protest at the handling of Covid lockdowns, and has since been a persistent advocate of a more fully conservative approach to policy on the Right. He is a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.

Wikipedia adds this:

David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost (born 21 February 1965) is a British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.

Frost spent his early professional career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming Ambassador to Denmark, EU Director at the FCO, and Director for Europe and International Trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was a special adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government.

And yes, I have to say, although it’s Easter, the guy is mental, for he thinks that anybody who has had an elevating aesthetic or emotional experience is providing evidence not just for God, but for the God of Rome.

I’ll put a few topics under bold headings (mine). The indented parts are from the article by Baron Frost.

The evidence for a revival of Christianity is weak. First, Frost makes this admission:

The Quiet Revival – the view that people are coming back to church and the long years of decline might be over – has been much discussed in ecclesiastical circles this last year. A YouGov poll in a Bible Society report seemed to vindicate it by asserting the number of 18 to 24-year-olds attending church monthly had jumped from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024.

It’s fair to say that these figures were a bit controversial right from the start. And the doubts were justified last week, when YouGov, in its latest polling flop, had to admit it had made an error and had not applied proper quality control to its sample.

So are we back to square one? Is the whole thing just confirmation bias and wishful thinking?

So he gives the “evidence” for the revival, which he has to find in places other than the polls. One is in hearsay, another his own behavior:

I don’t think so. Something is definitely happening, if not exactly what the Bible Society described. There is too much other evidence. Numbers coming into the Catholic Church each Easter, here and across the West, are increasing (I was one in 2025). Footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back. Sales of printed Bibles have doubled. There is even a mini boom in the Greek Orthodox Church going on.

Summing it up, the Rev Daniel French, chaplain at Greenwich University and Irreverend podcaster, said: “I see considerable curiosity about faith, particularly from young adults, often men. The old assumptions that religious conversations are taboo have evaporated. My week is filled with impromptu chats about God in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.”

Why is the West becoming more Christian? It isn’t, but this is what the sweating Baron says: it’s the Internet and the stagnation of society, Jake!

Why might this be? It’s speculative, but my experience suggests several different reasons. One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”

There is also the collapse of the narrative of inevitable progress, the belief that young people will always be economically better off than their parents, the growing dysfunction in society starting with the pandemic, all may be generating a tendency to look beyond economics for life satisfaction.

Of course we know that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and well-being, a correlation that holds across both nations and U.S. states. The worse off you are, the more religious you are. Further, there’s a positive correlation between income inequality (measured by the “Gini index”) and religiosity: the higher the inequality, the more religious people are. That the former produces the latter, so it’s not a spurious correlation, is supported by the fact that religiosity rises a year after inequality rises.  Likewise with falls of inequality and falls of religiosity. That’s not proof, but is support for the connection made famous by Karl Marx, a quotation that is often truncated to distort its meaning:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

What Marx was saying was not that religion was good for people because it soothed them, but that it was bad for people because it was what people did when they could not find relief from their suffering and oppression through means that could actually improve their situation. They thus have to turn to the opium of belief.

The Baron sees evidence for God every time people have an aesthetic or spiritual experience.  Not just evidence for God, apparently, but evidence for Catholicism!:

Reflect on the experiences in your life where you feel, for a moment, you might have had an experience of something beyond this world, a moment in the English countryside, a phrase of music that tugs at the heartstrings, and ask yourself why you feel that, if material reality is really all there is. Consider too that most people in history, and indeed most people in the world today, have not had that belief, and maybe aren’t all wrong. Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.

But of course people throughout the world have this kind of experience, people including atheists like Richard Dawkins and me. And not for a minute do we think that emotionality is evidence for gods. Is it evidence for Allah, and also for Xenu and Vishnu?

The evidence that these emotions and epiphanies are the product of material reality can be seen, for one thing, because you can have them simply by taking drugs. I remember once when I was in college, doing a science fellowship during the summer, I took LSD and walked through the quad (the “Sunken Garden”) at William and Mary.  There were high-school brass bands having some kind of competition, and, in my psychedelic daze, their ragged, dissonant music seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Was that evidence for God? Had I not been tripping, I would have run away in horror.

The Baron admits that Christianity is meaningless unles you believe its foundational truths. You don’t often see this kind of admission since “sophisticated” believers don’t like to admit it, nor will they say explicitly what they believe:

After all, the important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is not properly consider it. And in Western society that is all too easy.

I’ve considered the “evidence”, which of course is almost entirely what’s in the Bible.  And I don’t buy it, as I suspect most of the readers here don’t.  And what about the gazillion other faiths of the world. Why does Frost reject Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults but accept the “truth” of Christianity? (Like Christians, adherents to cargo cults keep waiting for a savior who never comes.) I’d like the Baron to tell me how he knows not just the Resurrection and Jesus’s “miracles” were true, but why the writing of the Quran is a bogus story. And why, among Christian religions, are the dictates of Catholicm true? (The Baron touts the revival of religion as involving mainly Catholicism and “Protestant evangelicals.)  Gimme that full-fat religion!

The Baron tells us why we should go to Church.

In an essay entitled Man or Rabbit?, CS Lewis gently mocked those who didn’t reject Christianity but tried to ignore it, not from disbelief, but from a suspicion that it might be true after all and that acknowledging it would be inconvenient – rather like someone who doesn’t open their bank statements for fear of what might be in them. Don’t be like that person. Face the issue head on. At least give Christianity a fair hearing. Show up to church this Easter. You never know what might happen.

I ignore Christianity because it’s a full-fat superstition supported by no evidence. I’m amused that he quotes C. S. Lewis, who I admit I find hilariously stupid about religion even though his Mere Christianity is probably the most influential work of popular theology ever. I’ve read it, of course, and I always have to laugh when I read “Lewis’s trilemma“—an argument for the divinity of Jesus and truth of his message. Lewis actually stole this argument from others, as several people had made it before him. Here’s Lewis’s version:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Of course there are alternatives to “liar, lunatic, or Lord”; I’m sure you can think of at least one: people made up what Jesus said in the Bible. You can read alternative criticisms here.

But the real question is whether Frost himself is a liar, lunatic, or Lord. And we already know the answer: he’s a Lord.

I guess I’m just splenetic on this day when people go to Church to worship something for which there’s no evidence. And, contra Frost, I won’t be showing up to church this Easter. Instead, I’m writing this post.

The Cambrian Period, beginning at 538.8 Ma (million years ago) and lasting about 52 million years, is famous for marking the transition from simple and largely unicellular animals to, beginning at the period’s inception, representatives of modern groups.  This apparently rapid onset of modern forms of multicellular animals constitutes the famous “Cambrian Explosion.”

The Cambrian was preceded by the 96-million-year-long Ediacaran period, extending from 635 million years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian. The Ediacaran fauna, consisting of some multicellular animals of unknown affinity and things looking like members of some modern groups like cnidarians (represented today by jellyfish, corals and anemone). But most of the Ediacaran groups appeared to have died out at the end of the Ediacaran, and for unknown reasons.

The boundary between the Ediacran and the Cambrian thus marks a major transition in animal life.   Many of the “modern” groups that first arose during the Cambrian don’t have apparent ancestors in the Ediacaran, and so those modern groups were thought to have evolved almost instantaneously (in geological time!). But surely modern groups had ancestors during the Ediacaran: unless you’re a Biblical fundamentalist, you realize that ancestors of modern groups had to have existed well before the Cambrian explosion.

Now a paper in Science, based on a fossil group called the Jiangchuan Biota that spans the period from 559-534 million years ago, shows that representatives of “modern” groups seen in the Cambrian explosion were indeed present in the late Ediacaran, pushing back the time of origin of modern phyla 4-5 million years.  This conclusion was possible because of the remarkable preservation of the animals (and some algae), all present as carbonaceous films on rocks—the same kind of films (presumably due to rapid burial) that enabled us to see the remarkable Burgess Shale fauna of the middle Cambrian. The new find was in the province of Yunnan in Southwestern China.

You can see the paper by clicking the screenshot below, reading the pdf here, or reading the shorter blurb at an Oxford University sit. at the bottom. All photos below are taken from the paper.

I won’t go into all the terminology involved in identifying the groups but will show a few fossils from the paper strongly suggesting that some “modern” groups arose in the late Ediacaran.

First, an anomalous animal that appears to be some kind of worm, but one with a “holdfast” disc on its butt. We don’t know what this one is, but it has oral projections or tentacles. The disc is very clear:

Another wormlike animal (note that these are small: a few millimeters) having a clear oral region. Again, we’re not sure what this is, but the preservation as a carbon film is remarkable:

A deuterostome (animals where the first opening in the embryo becomes the anus rather than the mouth), a group thought to have appeared in the Cambrian but here seen in the Ediacaran: this one resembles  Herpetogaster, known from the early Cambrian which, according to Wikipedia, “possessed a pair of branching tentacles and a tough but flexible body that curved helically to the right like a ram’s horn and was divided into at least 13 segments”. This one, like Herpetogaster, has tentacles (at leat four) and a stalk.  It’s interpreted as a relative of acorn worms, relatives of modern echinoderms which are hemichordates, the closest living group to modern chordates (animals with notochords and a dorsal nerve chord, which include all vertebrates).

The one below,described in the paper as “Margaretia-like animal now known as a dwelling tube for an enteropneust hemichordate worm”. It’s also described as having “regular, oval-shaped holes running along its length”. Again, we see what is likely an early hemichordate, showing that the relatives of modern chordates seem to have been present several million years before the Cambrian explosion began.

The one below is identified as a ctenophore, or comb jelly, a phylum of early animals previously known only from the mid-Cambrian. “OS” stands for “oral skirt”, described as “a specialized, often scalloped, muscular, or rigid structure surrounding the mouth, primarily found in Cambrian-era fossil comb jellies such as Ctenorhabdotus and Thalassostaphylos. Unlike modern ctenophores, these ancient species used the skirt for feeding, potentially to engulf large prey.”

Finally, this animal is thought to be an early cnidarian with tentacles and a holdfast (HF). Although one form identified as a cnidarian had already been recognized from the Ediacaran, here we have another that’s different, showing a radiation of cnidarians before the Cambrian.

These fossil data support already-existing molecular data suggesting that animal groups had already evolved and diversified before the Cambrian, though until now no fossils, or only a few suggestive fossils, were known.

The authors’ summary below, though written in scient-ese, basically says that a major radiation of animal phyla had already begun before the Ediacran/Cambrian boundary, but we did not know about it because the conditions for forming this kind of trace fossil, requiring rapid burial in marine sediment (and subsequent finding by investigators!) were infrequent:

The new Jiangchuan animal fossils, dominated by bilaterians of apparently diverse affinities, with rarer fossils more typical of late Ediacaran deposits, could be described as a “Cambrian-type” assemblage from the late Ediacaran. A dominantly bilaterian assemblage from the late Ediacaran may not have been discovered until now as a result of the paucity of carbonaceous compressions from this time, hinting at a broader taphonomic bias (51).

If you want a short, readable summary of the importance of this fine, click below to read a shorter summary from Oxford University.