Why Evolution is True Feed

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “cheers,” isn’t particularly religious, but surely expresses the feelings of many people. (I for one will make no resolutions!) I don’t think the “booze is always bad for you” issue is yet settled, anyway.

Ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis has return with a fresh batch of photos. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Miscellaneous birds of late 2024

The only theme of this post is “birds I saw in late 2024 and haven’t used in a WEIT post yet.”  The first ones are from Shoreline Park in Mountain View, California.  Less than a mile from the Googleplex, 5 miles from Stanford University and 10 miles from Apple’s campus, this park lies on a stretch of southern San Francisco Bay that hosts many thousands of overwintering waterfowl and shorebirds.   Every year I get to enjoy its sights the day after Thanksgiving, when my siblings and their families gather for a meal and a birdwatching stroll.

American White Pelicans, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, foraging along the shore in their majestically unhurried style:

Greater Yellowlegs, Tringa melanoleuca, staring into a very small abyss:

Snowy Egret, Egretta thula, looking like a movie star annoyed by paparazzi:

American Coot, Fulica americana, flaunting oversized webbed feet:

The next ones are from the vicinity of Davis, California.

Vermilion Flycatcher, Pyrocephalus rubinus, an immature male that excited the local birders since it’s a rare species in northern California:

Green Heron, Butorides virescens, casting a long shadow in an irrigation ditch:

Common Goldeneyes, Bucephala clangula, a group of females accompanied by one male lurking just out of sight:

Barrow’s Goldeneyes, Bucephala islandica, a more northerly species than the Common Goldeneye, distinguished by the female’s oranger beak and the male’s facial upside-down comma:

Osprey, Pandion haliaetus, watching for fish while also eyeing the humans watching it:

These two pictures are from Ashland, Oregon.

Oak Titmouse, Baeolophus inornatus, resembling Zippy the Pinhead:

Red-shouldered Hawk, Buteo lineatus, showing off a tessellated backside:

And the last is from Bodega Bay, California.

Belted Kingfisher, Megaceryle alcyon, my nearest thing to success at photographing this bold yet notoriously camera-averse bird:

UPDATE:  A UK government report from 2020 suggests that there are conflicting data on the ethnicity of the offending “grooming gangs”. Click below to see the study and I quote from page 10 of the Executive Summary (bolding is mine):

17. A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay,3 the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.4 Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.5 However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending. This is due to issues such as data quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.6 During our conversations with police forces, we have found that in the operations reflected, offender groups come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogenous. However, there are cases where offenders within groups come from different backgrounds.7

Stay tuned, and if you know of more dispositive data, place it in the comments. If this be true,  then even bringing in the element of race is misguided. But as I say below, it doesn’t matter what color or ethnicity the pedophiles were, for nearly everyone agrees that the whole issue of grooming gangs has been grossly mishandled by the UK authorities, and largely swept under the rug.

UPDATE 2: A reader calls attention to this NYT article claiming that Musk’s tactics in exposing the grooming gangs are dishonest and politically motivated.

 

The Free Press headline below may be exaggerated, but it comes close to the truth.  For it’s about the “grooming gangs” that have plagued England for several decades.  They involve groups of men—most often of Pakistani or Bangladesi ancestry—whose goal is to subjugate and rape young children of both sexes. Some children have been killed.  But because the perps are usually people of color, the government, the police, and the public have largely ignored the issue.  This is a huge scandal involving, once again, a clash of ideologies that came down the wrong way. The warring ideologies are to avoid denigrating immigrants of color versus protecting children against pedophiles.

Yes, some of these gangs have been broken up and the perps sent to prison, but only now, with the prompting of Elon Musk, is it being publicized as the heinous crime it is. (The fact that Musk is widely hated makes it hard for people to accept the situation, but his actions in this case are right.) For the grooming is still going on, and not just in the UK but in other places in Europe.  Unfortunately, calling attention to these gangs is seen not only as racist, but as anti-immigrant, both characterizations being horrible to liberals.

I’m not going to describe these crimes in detail, as they makes me sick, but you need to know about them, and the UK needs to start taking the issue VERY seriously.

First, a piece from the Free Press, which you can access by clicking on the headline.

There’s a thread of incidents tweeted by Elon Musk you can find at the link, and of course everybody is festooning them with community notes because Musk. This first one, for example, happened five years ago, and the perps are in jail. But it tells you the kind of things that can happen. Here are the first two tweets, apparently both from 2013.  But as the article above notes, this is still going on,

pic.twitter.com/mt1csIreQd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2025

A quote from the Free Press piece:

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

Although some have said that this is no longer a problem, and the perps are all in jail, that’s simply not true. The first link above goes to a UK government site about the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, and was published in May of last year:

In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims, and build up robust cases to get justice for these appalling crimes.

Established by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April 2023, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce of specialist officers has worked with all 43 police forces in England and Wales to support child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations.

Led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and supported by the National Crime Agency, the taskforce is a full time, operational police unit funded by the Home Office to improve how the police investigate grooming gangs and identify and protect children from abuse. It is staffed by experienced and qualified officers and data analysts who have long-term, practical on-the-ground experience of undertaking investigations into grooming gangs.

Finally, from Unherd, an article about how the cops are complicit in not going after grooming gangs. It’s written by a former detective :

The answer is pretty much what you would expect: going after grooming gangs that largely comprise people of color is seen as racist, and you know how the British cops are with “hate speech”:

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

It is incomprehensible to me how the police, government, and general public prefer to brush this issue under the rug: it’s pedophilia, for crying out loud, and the abuse is both horrible and pervasive. But I’ll close with the observation that again we see a clash of two opposing views: one in which people of color should be treated fairly, which is good, and the other in which children should not be sexually abused, completely incontestable.  But when people of color begin mass sexual abuse of children, and those children appear to be mostly white, you can see how it poses a conflict for the woke. Yet it should not be a conflict, for no matter what color the abusers and rapists are, they are violating the law big time and should be taken off the streets. That has happened to some extent, but not nearly to the extent that should be the case.

h/t: Luana

There are two items of interest in the Big KerFFRFle, the dispute in which the Freedom from Religion Foundation appears to be melting down over an episode in which they removed my post on gender from their website.

The first is an account of the fracas by Yontat Shimron in the Religion News Service (RNS). The piece is pretty objective but has a few glitches. Click below to read it, or find it archived here. The most interesting part is its confirmatio—heretofore only a rumor—that the FFRF has dissolved its entire Honorary Board, the board of 18 honorees from which Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, and I resigned.

I’d heard rumors that the other 15 members of the Honorary Board were also vanished, even though you can still see them at this link, (archived here) found by Googling “FFRF honorary board”. Curiously, you get two links when you Google those words, with the other one, here,  showing only one name, Jeremiah Camara.  But the reporter of the piece below verified that the entire Honorary Board is gone—defunct, sleeping with the fishes and singing with the Choir Invisible.

Click to read or, if the article disappears or changes, the version posted this morning is archived here.

The part that I found most bizarre, but conforming to rumors I’ve heard, is this (also noted in the headline):

The nation’s largest freethought organization has dissolved its honorary board after three of its prominent members resigned in an ideological battle over transgender issues.

And that’s all it said, but if a reporter noted it, she must have had information. I contacted Yonat Shimron, who verified that yes, the honorary board of the FFRF has been dissolved, that this was confirmed to her by one of the co-Presidents of the FFRF, and that it was done at the behest of the FFRF’s governing board.

The conclusion, of course, is that the FFRF does not WANT an honorary board at all. Why? The only conclusion I can reach is that other honorary-board members could, in the future, cause “trouble” in the way that the three of us did, publicly criticizing the organization for its mission creep and adherence to woke gender ideology.  Ditching the other 15 (I hope they’ve been told!) is an often-seen aspect of wokeness: any index of merit that conflicts with “progressive” ideology must be effaced. (Similarly, many American colleges have dropped requirements for applicants to submit standardized test scores, like those from the SAT and ACT.)  It seems that the FFRF doesn’t want to take a chance with people on the honorary board publicly espousing the “wrong ideology.”

A tweet from Colin Wright:

I have internal confirmation that the @FFRF has indeed dissolved their Honorary Board following the public resignations of Dawkins, Pinker, and Coyne.

When your organization has abandoned its core principled, maintaining a Board of principled intellectuals becomes a liability. https://t.co/E1P0OtIoLX

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 6, 2025

There are a couple of things I am not keen on about the piece, but in general it’s objective and accurate. I do think the sub-headline overly dramatizes my claim that transwomen are more sexually predatory than “other women” (I of course meant biological women). That was certainly not the main point of my piece, which was the definition of “woman”.   But the data certainly support that claim, which shows beyond doubt that, with respect to criminal sexual behavior, trans women are not women. Anyway, this is a quibble; authors and editors have the right to emphasize what they want.

My other beef, however, is more important, as it’s a matter of accuracy. The RNS article says this. I’ve put the contentious bits in bold:

The post, which drew intense backlash, was taken down on Dec. 28, one day after it was published, prompting Coyne, Dawkins and Pinker to resign from the foundation. That led the foundation to dissolve the 14- member honorary board.

The flap offers a peek at a roiling controversy among a select group of New Atheists who have expressed views that are anti-transgender and more generally “anti-woke.” It is a position taken by another atheist group, the Center for Inquiry. But it is also hotly contested by most in the nonbeliever community. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its “Humanist of the Year” award from Dawkins over his anti-trans comments.

In an interview with RNS, Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, took responsibility for publishing and then removing Coyne’s article.

First, I don’t know any New atheist who has expressed views that are “anti-transgender”, only discussing that the rights of transgender people might rarely conflict with the rights of other groups (viz., sports) and need to be adjudicated.  The article makes New Atheists look like people who want to erase trans folks. That ain’t true. (Yes, I suppose you can find a handful of “New Atheist” who are truly bent on curtailing all the rights of transgender people, but they are surely in the minority.)

But the bit about Dawkins is grossly distorted. Below are the purported “anti-trans” comments that Richard tweeted, comments made the AHA withdraw its award, committing a reprehensible act.  As Richard has explained, he was merely posing a question for discussion, a question first raised in 2017 by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in a published paper (“In defense of transracialism“) that concluded that there was no substantive ethical difference between asking people to accept your non-natal gender and asking them to accept your non-natal “race.”

Tuvel’s paper caused a huge controversy because some people didn’t like the race aspect, though I read Tuvel’s paper and agree with her. Still, the editor of the journal resigned, the journal (Hypatia) apologized, and many scholars called for the paper’s removal. Tuvel, a brave soul, stuck to her guns and the paper is still up. And the question is still worth debating, as Richard noted. Why is there a difference between transgenderism and transracialism?  Isn’t that something to chew on?

Richard noted that he was simply framing the question as one to ponder, as he would with questions posed to his Oxford students to discuss in their weekly essay. You can see his tweet below, and it is certainly not “anti-trans”!  The RNS really should change that, as it borders on defamation.

In another piece, secularist, humanist, and writer Ed Buckner wrote a piece on the kerFFRFle on his Substack site. You can access it by clicking below. It is generally favorable toward the views of Richard, Steve, and I, as well as toward our resignations, but makes one point that I want to emphasize:

Buckner refers to an online essay criticizing my now-defunct essay on the FFRF site (archived here), and to an essay by Aaron Rabinowitz on the Unfriendly Atheist site, to which I’ve added the link:

To turn now more specifically to Aaron Rabinowitz’s essay on Friendly Atheist (link below if you missed it), he criticized Jerry Coyne for allegedly pretending to expertise as an ethicist, for overstepping his status as a pre-eminent biologist. But I reread Coyne’s essay with care and nowhere did he state or imply that he’s an ethicist, expert or otherwise.

And Buckner has rewritten part of what I wrote to make it conform with his own ethical beliefs. In fact I agree with Buckner’s writing, which expresses my real views, views I should expanded on in the original FFRF piece:

Coyne does offer some opinions that are related to ethics, of course.

For example,

Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

My own “ethical” opinion is close to Coyne’s. I would probably—but only after I studied the matter more carefully, including discussions with rape counselors and probably even with women who’ve been victims of rape or of women-batterers, modify some of what Coyne wrote slightly to say:

Neither men or women, cis- or trans-gendered, should serve as rape counselors and as workers in battered women’s shelters, unless the counselors or others working there pass a background check; even then, no one should so serve unless the clients are aware of and accept the status of the counselors/workers.

I can imagine circumstances where there might be an advantage to victims of having a man or a trans woman on hand, but the rights, needs, and wants of the victims, even if sometimes irrational, should be paramount.

I think the second version, expressing Buckner’s views, is better than what I wrote, and it does summarize views I already held (but failed to express). While I still think that at present tranwomen should not compete against biological women in sports, and shouldn’t really be running battered women’s shelters, they should not be completely barred from that job nor from acting as rape counselors—so long as (as Buckner writes), they undergo a background check and the women residents of shelters or women being counseled for rape or sexual assault are made aware that the counselor is a trans woman (a biological man) and are okay with that. This view will, of course still be seen as “transphobic” by some extremists, but there’s a very good case for holding this view in light of the rights of biological women. This involves a conflict between two groups’ “rights”, and in the interests of fairness and the needs of biological women, I come down against sports participation of transwomen and cast a very cold eye on the other two issues.

Buckner’s conclusion (bolding is Buckner’s)

Serious freethinking, requires, in my view, expressing views and understanding and accepting that your views may not be accepted as correct by everyone. Real disagreement can occur, and this should not lead FFRF or anyone else to declare, as it did in (unwisely) removing Coyne’s reply to [Kat] Grant,

We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

That’s a terrible outcome. Of course FFRF should not publish a hateful, bigoted essay (Coyne’s wasn’t) and then remove it—it should instead post essays that disagree with other essays and promise to keep posting words from people who think freely enough to not always toe anyone’s dogmatic party line—and to say so.

I posted a comment agreeing with Buckner’s rewriting of my views on shelters and counselors, but Richard also posted an excellent related comment (click to enlarge if you’re myopic or reading on a phone):

The fallout from this affair is not quite over, but I think it does constitute a twofold lesson. First, the ideology of Leftist humanists and atheists such as Richard, Steve, and I will sometimes conflict with the ideology of other Leftist humanists and atheists, particularly when it comes to wokeness. We are not a homogenous group.

Second, it is not right for organizations that promote freethought and discussion to censor people whose ideology conflicts with their own, and by “censoring” I mean first allowing the heterodox person to publish material on the organization’s website but subsequently removing it because the publication was “a mistake” that caused “distress”. That is nonsensical behavior, and it does the FFRF no credit. (I hasten to add that I always admired, and still admire, the FFRF’s initiatives to keep religion out of government and educate people about nontheism.)

Anyway, read Buckner’s piece; there’s a lot more in it than I’ve described above.

I’ve often said that if I could have been any rock star, it would have been Stephen Stills. Well, make that any American rock star, for if I could chose one musician from around the world, it would be Paul McCartney. Both men were incredibly handsome, a prerequisite for my fantasy, but more important, both were immensely talented, able to write great songs, sing wonderfully, and play a number of instruments with dexterity. It’s just that McCartney produce a greater variety of music, and overall better music, than did Stills.

But Stills, who celebrated his 80th birthday on January 3, remains underrated. His greatest years were with Buffalo Springfield, as well as with Crosby, Nash (and somtimes Neil Young), but I will put up a few songs that he wrote and played on his own or with other groups.

First comes one of my favorite Stills songs, “4 + 20,” which did appear on a CS&N album, but is solely the work of Stills. He was indeed 24 when he wrote it, a remarkable achievement for someone that young. I loved it so much that I taught myself to play it back when I played acoustic guitar and did three-finger picking. Wikipedia says this:

Stills stated: “It’s about an 84-year-old poverty stricken man who started and finished with nothing.” However, the lyrics state that the narrator was born 24 years ago, making him about a year younger than Stills was when the song was recorded.

. . . . Stills recorded the song in one take and planned to use it on his upcoming debut solo album, but when his bandmates heard it, they implored him to use it on the Déjà Vu album. He planned to have bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash sing harmony parts, but they refused. “They told me they wouldn’t touch it,” said Stills. “So it always stood alone.” On the highly-collaborative Déjà Vu album, “4 + 20” stands out as the only song which was both written and performed solo by one member of the band, justified by Crosby who recalled “We just said, ‘It’s too damn good, we’re not touching it.”)

Here he sings and plays it on the Dick Cavett show, and you might recognize Joni Mitchell beside him as well as David Crosby sitting nearby.  The lyrics are slightly different from the recorded version (here), as Stills seems to forget the one line: “And he wasn’t into selling door to door.”

In this part of his life, Stills was also into wearing ponchos.

“Do for the others” is remarkable in that the entire song—all the vocals and instrumentation—was performed by Stills. (he also wrote it). It’s from his first solo album, the 1970 Stephen Stills. All that Wikipedia says about it is this:

“Do For the Others” was written for David Crosby about the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton.

Below we have the song “It doesn’t matter” from the 1972 Manassas album, by a group in which he shared guitar leads with former Byrd Chris Hillman.  I wanted to put up a live version of another great song from that album, “So begins the task,” but I couldn’t find a live version. You can hear the recorded version here.

The song is clearly about a lost love, and that love is apparently Judy Collins, with whom Stills had a torrid relationship. One site says this:

[Stills] wrote the song about his breakup with Judy Collins; that same lost romance was fodder for “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “You Don’t Have to Cry.” “So Begins the Task” is believed the first song Stills wrote about/for Collins.

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is one of Stills’s best songs, sung on the 1969 album “Crosby, Stills & Nash” (original recording here). But here are CS&N doing it live, and it’s a very good version, showing the harmony that made the group famous (they first sang together at a party at Joni Mitchell’s home in 1968).

Here’s a translation of the Spanish lyrics at the song’s end:

How happy it makes me to think of Cuba,
the smiles of the Caribbean Sea,
Sunny sky has no blood, and how sad that
I’m not able to go
Oh go, oh go go

What a great tribute to Judy!

Finally, Blonde in the Bleachers,” an underrated song by Joni Mitchell from her great 1972 album “For the Roses.” On this song Stills plays the bass and drums.  The two never had a romance, but did work together a few times.  My theory (which is mine) is that Mitchell wrote the song about Stills and his groupies.

The Atlantic has waded into perilous waters by publishing what turns out to be quite a good article about transgender women competing in athletics against biological women. The fact that this liberal and prestigious magazine even writes about the issue is, to me, a good sign: a sign that the issue needs discussing.  And I’m glad to see that the author, staff writer Helen Lewis, concludes with a solution that is virtually identical to mine.

To read her piece, click below, or find it archived here.

Lewis begins by citing recent controversies involving transgender women competing—and winning—against biological women. They include the now well-known story of Lia Thomas, who will swim no more against women, as well as the San Jose State women’s volleyball team, which included what seemed to be a trans woman (they won’t publicly admit it, but most team members do). This story isn’t as well known:

In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.

 

San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.

 

The problem is, as the references below show, trans women who go through male puberty retain substantial athletic advantages over biological women, even if testosterone suppressors are used to try to equalize the categories.  But the suppressors don’t do that, for somebody who goes through male puberty develops the musculature, bone density, grip strength, and other indices of athletic success that give them pronounced advantages over natal women (equestrian sports may be an exception).  And this advantage appears to last for years—perhaps forever.

Well, why not allow trans women to compete who have transitioned before puberty? The problem is that there are almost none of these, for male puberty occurs some time between ages 9 and 14, and that is simply too young for adolescent males to decide to take hormones and/or have surgery to develop something closer to a woman’s body. If future research shows that transitioning at a very young age makes females athletically equal on average to natal females, then we can reassess. But existing data show that trans women, or some with disorders of sex determination, have an innate athletic advantage over women, and thus shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports.

Republicans have made hay of this, of course, and if you polled Democrats versus Republicans over whether trans women should compete against natal women in sports, Republicans would say “no” at a higher rate. But just because this view is more pervasive in the GOP doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, Democrats themselves are starting to realize that such competition is unfair:

Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

Nevertheless, the Biden Administration’s early executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity implied that this would also hold for sports participation. Now, as Lewis notes, Biden has backed off on this construal of the order, perhaps because the wokeness of Harris and Biden (the subject of GOP attack ads) may have played a role in their November defeat.

Regardless, as I’ve learned in the past week or so, those who say that “trans women are women” will accept no exceptions to that mantra: trans women are to have every perquisite of natal women, including sports participation.  But, unlike gay rights, trans rights conflict with the rights of other groups far more often (I can’t think of any case in which gay rights conflict with other people’s rights, except for those cases of religious people asked to make cakes for gay weddings). The last sentence in Lewis’s paragraph below is telling (I’ve bolded it):

“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.

Many women and men think otherwise, as do I. But the carve-outs, as I see them, are very few. Still, if you’re a extremist gender ideologue, they are impermissible.

Democrat Seth Moulton’s breaking ranks from the Biden-ish gender ideology may have been a telling moment, as it made it acceptable for Democrats to discuss the issue in public, though many, including the FFRF, appear to still think the issue shouldn’t be discussed, much less raised. Moulton still got savaged, of course, which reflects poorly on his fellow Democrats:

After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.

Lewis is too good a writer not to give her own opinion after weighing the controversy. At the end, she suggests the “empathic compromise” given below, and I must say that I agree with almost every word of it:

In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.

Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.

My only beef with the above is that it may be dangerous to trans men or “nonbinary athletes of either sex” to compete against biological men, as the greater strength of the latter could be dangerous. This is probably why World Rugby, as well as the International Rugby League, have banned the participation of transgender women in international competitions, presumably because although they are biological men, suppressing testosterone could reduce their ability to withstand injury in this heavy-contact sport.

The athletic effects of testosterone suppression in males:

An opinion piece by Robyn Blumner in Skeptical Inquirer cites references I’ve mentioned before, showing that testosterone suppression isn’t a way to equalize the athletic performance of transgender women and natal women. As she writes:

If we eliminated sex categories for most sports, there would rarely be female winners. For natal women to be able to compete in a way that gives them a fair chance at victories, there have to be sex segregated sports.

The question then becomes whether that advantage can be mitigated through testosterone suppression. That is a matter of scientific inquiry, and the longitudinal biomedical findings to date suggest that “the effects of testosterone suppression in male adulthood have very little impact” on physiological outcomes such as muscle strength, muscle mass, or lean body mass, according to a paper titled “When Ideology Trumps Science” by six international leading researchers (Devine et al. 2022). They cite a cross-sectional study from 2022 that measured the performance of transgender women and found the “advantage may be maintained after 14 years of testosterone suppression.” (For a thorough vetting of the subject, read “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage” by researchers Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, published in the journal Sports Medicine [Hilton and Lundberg 2021].)

References:

Devine, Cathy, Emma Hilton, Leslie Howe, et al. 2022. When ideology trumps science: A response to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s Review on Transwomen Athletes in the Female Category. idrottsforum.org (November 29).

Hilton, Emma N., and Tommy R. Lundberg. 2021. Transgender women in the female category of sport: Perspectives on testosterone suppression and performance advantage. Sports Medicine 51(2): 199–214.

Today is Sunday, and so we are blessed with another batch of photos by biologist John Avise, who is sending butterflies now. John’s comments and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 5 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Clouded Skipper (Lerema accius):

Clouded Skipper underwing:

Clouded Sulphur (Colias philodice):

Clouded Sulphur underwing:

Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae):

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia), dark version:

Common Buckeye, light version:

Common Buckeye underwing:

Common Wood-Nymph (Cercyonis pegala):

Compton Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis vaualbum):

Coral Hairstreak (Satyrium titus):

Dainty Sulphur (Nathalis iole):

Welcome to Sunday, January 5, 2025, and National Whipped Cream Day, a product with many uses, including being part of a pie-in-the-face stunt. Here’s Bill Gates getting one in 1998 (it is an odious act):

It’s also National Bird Day, International Jewish Book Day, and National Keto Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I applaud Jonathan Haidt for his battle against cellphones in schools, and at The Free Press Olivia Reingold tells us “How Jonathan Haidt won the fight against smartphones in schools” (article archived here).

This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows they’re linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental illness. This January, just over two million students will return to phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.

. . . So why is this movement finally getting results now? I spoke to a dozen people—educators and activists and parents—and they all offered the same answer: Jonathan Haidt.

In March, the New York University social psychologist, who has studied the negative effects of phones on kids for years, published a book called The Anxious Generation, which immediately became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. It has remained on the list ever since, thanks to a range of influential boosters on both sides of the political aisle. It’s impossible to think of another book that’s been equally celebrated by both Democrats and Republicans: Barack Obama recently named Haidt’s book one of his favorites of the year, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the GOP governor of Arkansas, posted an Instagram video of herself with Haidt, promoting his message to her 885,000 followers. Even Bill Gates, who helped wire America by co-founding Microsoft, has listed The Anxious Generation as one of his top four reads of 2024.

Cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld, who has three children with her husband, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, was one of Haidt’s earliest and most vocal online advocates. She told me Haidt’s book “came along at just the right time”—when the negative effects of the Covid-era reliance on screen learning were being widely reported. Even The New York Times, which encouraged social restrictions during the pandemic, is now finally acknowledging that school closures damaged an entire generation.

“We have the first generation of kids who are native to phones and social media,” Seinfeld said, and “the addiction got really real” during Covid. “I can’t tell you how many moms have come up to me and said, ‘My kids hate me because I won’t let them get a phone, and I’m the only one.’ ”

Part of the book’s power is its simplicity. Haidt spells out four “foundational rules” to inspire a “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” They are: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones at school, and more unsupervised play and independence for kids. Haidt has consistently repeated these talking points at talks around the country and on his Instagram page, where he has 341,000 followers.

Even so, Haidt told me he is “astounded” by how quickly the movement has spread throughout America, even rippling across the pond to the UK. “The only other example of social change I’ve seen that has moved this quickly is the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he told me. When I asked him why it took so long, he called it a “collective action problem,” in which the general public resents the status quo, but individuals are too scared to challenge it.

The man should get a damn medal for what he did! Imagine the changes (or rather reversion to the “good old days”) that will happen when phones are widely banned from schools. People will talk to each other!

*The NYT answers the nagging question, “Could monkeys really type all of Shakespeare?” (archived here). You might already have guessed that the answer is “no” unless time is infinite. But time is not infinite.

A new paper by Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney, suggests that those efforts may have been for naught: It concludes that there is simply not enough time until the universe expires for a defined number of hypothetical primates to produce a faithful reproduction of “Curious George,” let alone “King Lear.” Don’t worry, scientists believe that we still have googol years — 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros — until the lights go out. But when the end does come, the typing monkeys will have made no more progress than their counterparts at the Paignton Zoo, according to Dr. Woodcock.

“It’s not happening,” Dr. Woodcock said in an interview. The odds of a monkey typing out the first word of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy on a 30-key keyboard was 1 in 900, he said. Not bad, one could argue — but every new letter offers 29 fresh opportunities for error. The chances of a monkey spelling out “banana” are “approximately 1 in 22 billion,” Dr. Woodcock said.

The idea for the paper came to Dr. Woodcock during a lunchtime discussion with Jay Falletta, a water-usage researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. The two were working on a project about washing machines, which strain Australia’s extremely limited water resources. They were “a little bit bored” by the task, Dr. Woodcock acknowledged. (Mr. Falletta is a co-author on the new paper.)

If resources for washing clothes are limited, why shouldn’t typing monkeys be similarly constrained? By neglecting to impose a time or monkey limit on the experiment, the infinite monkey theorem essentially contains its own cheat code. Dr. Woodcock, on the other hand, opted for a semblance of reality — or as much reality as a scenario featuring monkeys trying to write in iambic pentameter would allow — in order to say something about the interplay of order and chaos in the real world.

Even if the life span of the universe were extended billions of times, the monkeys would still not accomplish the task, the researchers concluded. Their paper calls the infinite monkey theorem “misleading” in its fundamental assumptions. It is a fitting conclusion, perhaps, for a moment when human ingenuity seems to be crashing hard against natural constraints.

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*Glory be! According to the WSJ and many other sites, the U.S. has agreed to sell a lot of weapons to Israel (archived here).

The Biden administration notified Congress of an $8 billion weapons package for Israel, including thousands of bombs, missiles and artillery shells, in one of the largest new arms sales since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

The weapons package, which congressional officials received notification of late on Friday afternoon, also includes the planned sale of thousands of bombs, air-to-air missiles and precision munitions, according to U.S. officials familiar with the sale.

The new weapons package includes some items that could draw objections from Democrats who have opposed the transfer of large bombs to Israel amid concerns over the civilian toll of the war in Gaza. The proposed sale includes a set of guidance kits designed to be fitted to large MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, as well as BLU-109 bunker buster bombs, one of the officials said. Also included are AMRAAM and Hellfire missiles and 155mm artillery rounds.

The planned weapons sale, which comes just weeks before President Biden hands over power to President-elect Donald Trump, is the largest the U.S. government has authorized for Israel since the massive $20 billion weapons package the administration approved in August. Israel was also informed of the move, said an Israeli official, who said that the country expected the weapons to begin arriving in 2025.

“We will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense,” said an administration official familiar with the deal, which still requires congressional approval to move forward. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment. The new weapons package was reported earlier by Axios.

Arms sales to Israel have been a troublesome issue for the Biden administration, which organized an airlift of bombs and other munitions to Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and militants seized some 250 hostages.

Given that Israel is at war with seven countries or territories (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and likely Syria, not to mention militia in Iraq), and that Israel has the $8 billion (its economy is doing well), this is a well-timed benefit for Israel, and Yahweh knows they need it.

*Joe Biden is trying to leave a “green” legacy, and has done something good to further it, just prohibiting oil drilling under a huge amount of federally-owned waters (archived here). But will Trump manage to overrule it? It doesn’t look like it.

President Joe Biden will move Monday to block all future oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of federal waters — equivalent to nearly a quarter of the total land area of the United States, according to two people briefed on the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet public.

The action underscores how Biden is racing to cement his legacy on climate change and conservation in his last weeks in office. President-elect Donald Trump, who has described his energy policy as “drill, baby, drill,” is likely to work with congressional Republicans to challenge the decision.

Biden will issue two memorandums that prohibit future federal oil and gas leasing across large swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the two people said. The oil and gas industry has long prized the eastern Gulf of Mexico in particular, viewing the area as a key part of its offshore production plans.

Some details of the expected decision were first reported by Bloomberg News. The total acreage and the inclusion of the Northern Bering Sea have not previously been reported.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said in an email: “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Environmentalists praised Biden’s plans, saying they would prevent future oil spills that threaten coastal communities and marine wildlife.

“No one wants an oil spill off their coast, and our hope is that this can be a bipartisan historic moment where areas are set aside for future generations,” Joseph Gordon, climate and energy campaign director for the conservation group Oceana, said in a phone interview.

Biden plans to invoke the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president broad powers to withdraw federal waters from future leasing. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that such withdrawals cannot be undone without an act of Congress.

The question is whether the new Republican Congress can undo this order.  If that takes overriding a Senate filibuster, Biden’s ruling may stand.

*Although Jimmy Carter was a “man of faith”, which I don’t consider a compliment, he was also a great human being and a superb ex-President, despite his coolness towards Israel. At the AP, Paul Newberry wrote an engaging piece about what it was like to go to Carter’s Sunday school classes, which he taught for years. I would have gone!

Before the former president entered the sanctuary, with a bomb-sniffing dog outside and Secret Service agents scattered around, a strict set of rules would be laid out by Ms. Jan — Jan Williams, a longtime church member and friend of the Carters. She would have made quite a drill sergeant.

It felt like a good-cop, bad-cop routine. Ms. Jan barking out rules you knew had come straight from Mr. Jimmy, who studied nuclear physics and approached all things with an engineer’s orderly mind.

Most important for those wanting a photo with the Carters — and nearly everyone did — you had to stay for the main 11 a.m. church service. Picture-taking began around noon.

If you left the church grounds before that, there was no coming back. If you stayed, you followed rules. No autographs. No handshakes. No attempts at conversation beyond a brief “good morning” or “thank you.”

Carter, consistently in sports jacket, slacks and bolo tie, would start his lesson by moving around the sanctuary, asking with a straight face if there were any visitors — that always got a laugh — and where they were from. In my many trips to Maranatha, I’m sure I heard all 50 states, not to mention an array of far-flung countries.

If anyone answered Washington, D.C., the answer was predictable. “I used to live there,” the one-term president would say, breaking into that toothy grin.

Carter’s Bible lessons focused on central themes: God gives life, loves unconditionally and provides the freedom to live a completely successful life. But the lesson usually began with an anecdote about what he’d been up to or his perspective on world affairs.

Carter could talk about building homes with Habitat for Humanity or bemoan U.S. conflicts since World War II. He could talk about his work with The Elders, a group of former world leaders, or a trip out West to go trout fishing with Ted Turner. He could talk about The Carter Center’s successes in eliminating the guinea worm, or his long friendships with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan.

“Willie Nelson is an old friend. He used to come visit me in the White House,” Carter related once, touching ever so gently on Nelson’s affection for weed.

“I don’t know what Willie and my children did after I went to bed. I’ve heard rumors,” the former president said, with a sly grin and a wink that suggested he believed every word.

There a fair bit more, and it’s worth reading. Carter’s official funeral begins this week as his cortege heads towards Atlanta where he’ll lie in state before heading to D.C., where he’ll also lie in state in the Capitol. His body will then be returned to Plains, Georgia, where he’ll be buried next to his beloved Rosalynn.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is angling for noms.

Hili: If I remember correctly I didn’t have my breakfast. A: Certainly you had. Hili: A modest one. In Polish: Hili: Jeśli dobrze pamiętam, to chyba nie jadłam śniadania. Ja: Owszem, jadłaś. Hili: Jakieś skromne.

*******************

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih is still on hols, but here’s the equally controversial Titania, who made a Christmas post!

Santa is a symbol of white patriarchy. He enters the home (womb) via the chimney (vaginal canal) to deposit his gifts (sperm).

Santa is a rapist.

Christmas is violence.#HappyKwanzaa pic.twitter.com/YSOMWB9iEe

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 24, 2019

From the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, who hates attention:

Trying to have a nap; I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!pic.twitter.com/Ret6KnSckB

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 31, 2019

From Malcolm; an early restored photo. It was, of course, of a CAT:

French photographer Mathieu Stern discovered an old negative film from 120 years ago and after printing it, it turned out to be a cat pic.twitter.com/6Oqe90PTuR

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) November 11, 2024

From my feed, which consists mostly of animal tweets.  A giraffe meets his offspring:

Giraffe comes to see his newborn baby pic.twitter.com/A5C7qFpvAI

— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 3, 2025

I’d gladly pay this toll:

This is the ONLY acceptable form of road tax allowed pic.twitter.com/YQrRonINvC

— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 3, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

A dutch girl killed with cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-05T12:02:43.111Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, the Amphibian Way to Wealth:

Just an incredible opportunity from 1935

— Adam Rothman (@adamrothman.bsky.social) 2025-01-02T23:47:08.714Z

 

This is true, but I’m gonna try to avoid this route:

A gentle reminder that new year resolutions don’t have to be about positive changes. You can commit to be more petty, seek revenge, and disrespect your enemies.

— Public Defendering (@foddery.bsky.social) 2025-01-01T21:53:17.325Z

 

I’ve posted several times on the claim that humans have an innate longing for God that must be filled by either religion or some simulacrum of religion. This is the famous “God-shaped hole” in our psyche claimed by believers and those whom Dan Dennett called “believers in belief.” This trope appears regularly, and the last time I discussed the “God-shaped hole” was on Christmas Eve when a Free Press article described an atheist mother lamenting the absence of religious traditions to which she could expose her children on Christmas.

With the recent kerFFRFle in which some people (including me) argue that wokeness and gender activism have taken the form of a quasi-religion—a claim that’s the subject of a whole book by John McWhorter—some people have taken to blaming atheists for creating this hole and for the need for something to replace traditional faiths. By taking away people’s religion, they say, we have made society worse as erstwhile believers start glomming onto all kinds of nonsense. (Apparently religion is a good form of nonsense.)

Well, yes, some people do need god, but that need has declined steadily in the West, and in many places the hole doesn’t seem to be filled with quasi-religions.  Northern Europe and Scandinavia, for instance, have long become largely atheistic. Exactly 0% of Icelanders under 25 believe that God created the world, and 40% of them identify as atheists.  But is Scandinavia filled with especially woke people, clinging to crystals and other forms of woo, and being the most gender-activist people in the world? Not that I know of.  So my thesis is that while some people will always need God, many do not, and their numbers will decrease over time as the world population becomes better and better off. (Religiosity is negatively correlated with well being and other indices of happiness.)

And really, isn’t it condescending to say that we atheists should not publicly criticize belief in gods because it might create even worse forms of religion?  Are we supposed to shut up about the harms and false claims of traditional faiths? That’s simply a “little people” argument, one founded on “belief in belief.”

In today’s Spectator, Richard Dawkins takes up the god-shaped hole argument, though he concentrates largely on recent accusations that he himself helped dig that hole. Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here.

Here are two people accusing Richard of wielding the Atheistic Shovel:

An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:

“New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”

And here’s Debbie Hayton on The Spectator’s website, writing (mostly reasonably) about a recent episode in which Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and I resigned from the Honorary Board of an atheist organisation that’s been taken over by the trans cult:

“An atheistic organisation worth its salt would oppose these movements in the same way that it opposes established religion, so Coyne, Pinker and Dawkins are right to walk away. But maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.”

There are other arguments, but  Dawkinss concludes that the rejection of what he calls “trans nonsense” (I’d call it “gender-activist extremism”) should be based not on the fact that it replaces the supposed benefits of religion, but on science itself:

The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.

. . . How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.

This dispels the argument that people must hold irrational beliefs—”quasi religions”—to replace real religions.  I would extend the argument a bit further, though.  While admitting that it’s hard for some folks to let go of gods, I’ll also argue that quasi-religion nonsense can be laid at the door not of atheism, but of the kind of faith that leads people to embrace important beliefs without good evidence.

We have photos from a new contributor, reader Lesli Sagan. She keeps bees and sends us photos of honeybees.  Lesli’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

All of these photos were taken in Ithaca, NY this past summer and fall, 2024. I’ve been keeping bees for decades and tend to garden for them: asters, oregano, mountain mint, coneflowers, and anything else I think they would like are my garden favorites. There’s some question in my mind whether European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are truly “wild,” given that we’ve selectively bred them. However, they are free to go anytime and often do return to the wild by absconding or swarming.

Unused bee equipment is attractive to all sorts of critters, including honey bees who may either be looking for a new home or are attracted, during lean times, to the scent of honey.

These are bees emerging through an opening in the cover of their hive.

Asters bloom until the first hard frost, and so are valuable sources of nectar and pollen for honey bees and all sorts of other insects.

This closer look of a honey bee shows her body is still fuzzy and her wings are whole. Honey bees live about a month in summer and they can be nearly bald and their wings quite ragged towards the end of the lives. This bee is probably a couple of weeks old.

While this bee is likely going for the nectar, we can still see yellow pollen on her face.

In contrast to the young bee above, this old girl has lost much of her fuzziness and her wings have been literally flown to bits. Mountain mint is a favorite of all sorts of bees.

The top bee on mountain mint is Apis mellifera, and the bee below may be as well. Not all domesticated honey bees are the familiar gold and black; darker varieties exist. None of my hives have the darker variety, so if this is Apis mellifera, she’s not from my hives.

This is an unremarkable scene at a hive entrance. Bees are coming and going, and while a few are likely guards, there are no hornets or other predators trying to break in just now.

Another fuzzy young bee, this time on oregano. She is collecting pollen, as you can see from the white pollen ball on her back leg. Pollen colors don’t always match the color of the flowers, but in this case, the petals and pollen are bright white.

This hive has windows, and here you can see the worker bees preparing cells for the honey flow.

If anyone wants to watch a complete hive inspection from this past summer, here’s a link to a GoPro video.

This is the third and last of a series of posts on the misguided concept of “agency and purpose in biology,” which one can take as the statement that “organisms have goals, and guide their own development and evolution towards those goals”.

In my first post, on December 23, I noted that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was spending millions of dollars funding grants on the science of “purpose and agency”. I pointed out one JTF  grant that just ended, which handed out $14.5 million to a consortium of investigators to study this topic.  And the JTF intends to continue funding this area:

Science of purpose. We are looking for experimental and theoretical research projects that will provide insight into the purposive, goal-directed, or agential behaviors that characterize organisms and various components of living systems. Researchers who have familiarity with our ongoing work in this area are especially encouraged to apply.

If you know the JTF, you’ll understand why they keep replenishing a trough full of grant money for such studies, for John Templeton (a mutual-fund billionaire and a believer) funded his Foundation with the intent of showing that science itself gave evidence for “spiritual reality”, aka a god or gods.  Although some of the investigators supping at the trough deny that they’re engaged in teleology, much less giving evidence for divinity, all of their work feeds into the JTF’s mission, and the authors of an article just published online at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB) agree: the idea of teleology sneaks into many of these papers.

In my second post, on December 26, I analyzed one of the JTF-funded papers often cited to support the idea of agency and purpose in organisms, a paper in BioEssays by Sonia E. Sultan et al. I found it vacuous and intellectually confusing, mistaking “purpose” and “agency” for the results of natural selection and, in the end, making the ID-friendly argument that neo-Darwinism cannot explain the origins of “novel, complex traits”. That assertion alone discredits the paper, for the one paper that actually tried, using conservative assumptions, to mathematically model the origin of a complex trait (the camera eye), did so very successfully. No problems encountered! The purpose-and-agency folks’ view is that “since we don’t fully understand how an eye/wing/brain evolved, there must have been something beyond natural selection involved.”  I suspect you know the fallacy of this argument.

Here are two concepts of agency advanced by Sultan et al and quoted in the paper below:

● “Biological agency—the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development, maintenance, and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 1);

● “Organisms themselves actively shape their own structure and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 4);

Now, a paper by James DiFrisco and Richard Gawne, published in JEB, takes apart the whole misguided notion and program of “agency and purpose” in evolution, and cites a lot of papers that tried to advance misguided ideas similar to those of Sultan et al. The title of the new paper is below, but if you click on it you will go to a truncated version of the article. However, you  can read the entire paper as a pdf file available for free here.

Here are what I take as the paper’s important points:

A.) The idea that organisms direct their own development and evolution through some nebulous, non-neo-Darwinian process is incorrect. Everything touted as “purposeful” and “the results of agency” can be explained by natural selection molding organisms’ responses to a changing environment, both within one lifetime or across generations. As DiFrisco and Gawne say, goal-directedness “is an adaptation due to natural selection.”  In my own example, cats and other mammals often grow longer fur during cold seasons because natural selection has favored genes that give organisms the capacity to put out more fur when their bodies detect cold weather. This is simple natural selection, and there is no “purpose” or “agency” involved.

B.)  Some of the papers on purpose and agency aim to “rescucitate the Aristotelian view of biological purpose and teleology as real rather than merely apparent”, so some authors really do have a teleological bent, one that you can find in some works of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.”

C.) The agency and purpose trope is, in the end, a metaphor that does no explanatory work nor promotes further research. Only the framework of neo-Darwinism can help us understand the origin of adaptations.

D.) The only “true” purpose and agency we see in biology is that which we see in the cognition of organisms capable of responding to environmental challenges by thinking rather than by a mechanical response.  But even the p&a authors are the first to aver that this is not the sense in which they use these terms. In truth, as a hard determinist I see even cognition as a mechanical process and not something different in principle from a bacterium moving towards food, but this is not so important in this debate since the “cognition” view of purpose isn’t the subject of scientific work by the Templeton-funded authors.

I’ll quote the authors’ own conception of their aims as given in the JEB paper:

Box 1: The central claims of this paper.

1. An organism’s capacity for goal-directed behavior does not itself explain any biological phenomena. Apparently goal-directed behaviors are, instead, something to be explained as an evolved characteristic of biological systems.

2. The capacity for goal-directed behavior (outside of human cognition, which can set arbitrary, novel goals) is explained by Darwinian natural selection acting in populations of individuals.

3. Notions such as self-determination, or the idea that the whole organism is a cause of its own developmental or physiological processes, are either empirically untestable, or restatements of ordinary questions about which causal mechanisms at which scales influence events.

4. Downward causation and context-dependence are “mechanistic” in the sense relevant to experimental biology. They are not mysterious processes that require adopting the teleological form of investigation provided by an agency perspective.

5. Rejection of molecular reductionism or determinism does not necessitate a commitment to the idea of biological agency. Researchers need not embrace the agency perspective in order to acknowledge the importance of multi-level complexity, emergence, and downward causation.

6. The idea that biological goal-directedness is a product of natural selection rather than the inherent agency of organisms does not require commitment to the idea that all traits are adaptations. It is compatible with genetic drift, mutation, and developmental constraints playing an important role in evolution.

7. Agency is a psychological concept with origins in heuristic ascriptions of intentionality. Accordingly, it is applicable only where psychological explanations are useful—i.e., when explaining the behavior of humans and possibly other neurologically complex organisms such as primates.

8. Agency is not an empirically meaningful property, and incorporating the agency concept into experimental practices will not contribute to progress in biology.

And a few quotes that underline their contentions (indented). First, the important of natural selection in explaining adaptations:

It is important to recognize that the attribution of non-fitness-related goals to an organism can only be empirically grounded in the psychological case, where investigators can ask another human being to report on their internal cognitive states. For systems that lack the capacity to report on such states, the attribution of goals is empirically unmoored and arbitrary (see Fig 1). Is it the goal of a given stem cell to differentiate? (Manicka and Levin 2019; Levin 2021; 2022) Or, if the stem cell fails to differentiate and dies, was that really its goal? In order for goal-attributions to explain anything, goals would need to be linked to some empirically detectable feature of the system other than the actual outcomes of its behavior. Otherwise, these explanations would be circular and uninformative. It is not clear that this can be done without reference to natural selection.

The intellectual and biological vacuity of adding “purpose” to already-existing explanations:

Even if one allows explanations based on agency, it is difficult to see how such explanations could be useful for understanding an ordinary biological process—e.g., wound healing. To explain why a wound heals following injury, the statement that it is because the system possesses agency and pursues the goal of healing wounds is not useful from a scientific point of view. This is because agency is not an experimentally meaningful property that can be subjected to tests as to whether its presence or absence influences wound-healing. The “goal” of wound-healing is not something that can be detected or measured, but would have to be inferred and attributed ex post facto based on the system’s actual behavior (see above, “Agency and goal-directedness”). This procedure cannot predict that wound-healing fails in pathological cases (e.g., tumorigenesis), nor can it explain why such malfunctions do or do not happen. In the context of modern biological research, wound-healing is understood to be explainable in terms of complex positive and negative feedback mechanisms in which a wide array of signaling molecules mediate the progression through cell- and tissue-level processes, from wound detection to hemostasis, inflammation, cell proliferation, re-epithelialization, and tissue remodeling (Singh et al 2017; Rodrigues et al 2019). These feedback mechanisms are tuned to parameter values conducive to survival and reproduction because of natural selection.

Between mechanistic explanations and adaptive ones (Tinbergen 1963; Stearns 1982), there is no obvious role for a distinct form of explanation based on agency.

How could you investigate how wounds heal by even considering the idea of “purpose and agency”?  As the authors note, there is no real “goal” here, but merely the sorting-out of genes that have different effects on wounds, with the genes that contribute to healing leaving more copies (their bearers survive and/or reproduce better).  That’s simply natural selection.  Ergo, there is no scientific benefit of JTF giving lots of dollars to study agency and purpose. They could give money for studying neo-Darwinian explanations, which we know are often the way to go, but doing so would simply justify scientific materialism, something anathema to JTF, as it leaves out god.

Finally, one more quote, as you can read the paper yourself (it’s written very clearly and should be accessible to those with a smidgen of biology knowledge):

An initial difficulty with the notion of self-determination centers on the self. It is not clear how to interpret expressions such as “the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development.” Development is the process of an organism going through the stages of its life cycle. It is not something separate from the organism. So how can an organism fail to participate in its development? If we suppose that the development of a given organism is fully determined by a set of underlying molecular factors, it is still the development of that particular organism rather than of another entity. It is also difficult to interpret the statement that “typical descriptions […] treat organisms [as] separate from and passive to the conditions under which they develop and evolve” (Nadolski and Moczek 2023, p. 3). If this refers to environmental conditions, it is an ordinary question of the relative causal importance of internal versus external factors. If it refers to internal conditions, however, the statement veers into obscurity. How can an organism be or separate from, or passive to, a process of development of itself?

This quote—and indeed, the whole paper—shows that the “purpose-and-agency” school is either engaged in a semantic rather than a biological argument, they are simply unable to grasp evolution, or they wish to make a name by couching neo-Darwinian mechanisms in “I-have-a-new-paradigm” language. .  Indeed, epigenetics (at least some forms) were not part of the modern synthesis, but neither do they play into notions of agency and purpose. Epigenetic modifications can be evolved features of organisms that are ultimately coded in the genome, or they can be environmentally-induced modifications of DNA that are rarely adaptive and, at any rate, usually disappear in two or three generations at most, making them useless to explain the evolution of adaptations.

The lesson is twofold. Beware when you see biologists banging on about agency and purpose, and think about natural selection instead. Second, the JTF is throwing away its money on misguided projects. I’d like to ask them to give money to fund real biology, as they have over a billion dollars in endowment, but funding real biology would not advance the JTF’s purpose of finding the numinous using science.

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

Jesus has been reading Gurwinder again. You should too!

Here are the first two of Gurwinder’s 15 posts on “X” giving useful ideas to get us through 2025:

1. Negative Partisanship:
Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

— Gurwinder (@G_S_Bhogal) January 1, 2025

And so on to Jesus and Mo, who once again are completely unaware of their hypocrisy:

 

Today we have a second batch of underwater photos from reader Peter Klaver (first batch here). Today we have underwater wildlife (corals). Peter’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is the second batch of photos from scuba diving around San Pedro, Belize earlier this month.

Apart from many animals, the coral reefs there also have a rich abundance of underwater vegetation.

Most of the sea floor in the reefs is covered with various kinds of soft corals.

There are also some hard corals:

. . . including brain corals:

. . .And there are various cylindrical or tubular species whose names I don’t know.

Christopher Hitchens, whom many of us admire despite occasional differences of opinion, died at only 62 on December 14, 2011.  Lawrence Krauss organized an event with four of Hitchens’s friends, all reminiscing about the Great Lion of Rhetoric. The panel was filmed in London on December 13, 2024—just 19 days ago—and I’ve put the video below.

The intro to the original audio on Krauss’s site Critical Mass:

A year ago, John Richards the head of the Atheist UK approached me about the idea of celebrating Christopher Hitchens with a Hitchmas event, near Christmas, and on or about the anniversary of Christopher’s death, on Dec 15, 2011. I realized that to do it right would require time and organization, and the proper panelists. I was thrilled that Christopher’s friends and mine, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, and Douglas Murray agreed to be part of the event, and that the HowTo Academy, which organizes wonderful events in London, several of which I had done before, agreed to coordinate the logistics with The Origins Project Foundation. A year later, the sold-out event happened, and we decided in advance to record it appropriately, with 5 cameras, and to have Gus and Luke Holwerda, who directed and filmed The Unbelievers, and with whom I began The Origins Podcast, edit the final product.

The YouTube notes:

Join us for Hitchmas, a special event celebrating the life, legacy, and ideas of the legendary Christopher Hitchens. Recorded at the Royal Geographical Society in London, this thought-provoking evening features a stellar panel of friends and intellectuals: Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, and Douglas Murray. Together, they share personal reminiscences, engage in lively discussion, and tackle modern issues with the wit and courage that Christopher Hitchens epitomized.

The evening opens with tributes from each panelist, exploring Hitchens’ enduring impact as a writer, orator, and fearless defender of reason. From heartfelt anecdotes to reflections on his literary heroes like George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse, the panel paints a vivid picture of Hitchens’ intellect, humor, and humanity. The conversation transitions into a dynamic roundtable addressing contemporary cultural and political challenges, including religion, free speech, and the rise of “woke fundamentalism.” Audience questions add another layer, sparking debates about morality, truth, and the timeless relevance of Hitchens’ insights.

This unique celebration of Hitch’s life blends humor, deep thought, and passion, culminating in a poignant reflection on friendship, courage, and the pursuit of truth. Whether you’re a longtime admirer of Christopher Hitchens or discovering his work for the first time, this event offers a powerful tribute to a remarkable man who continues to inspire millions.

Just click here to see the video, or click on the screenshot below (YouTube won’t let me directly embed the video).

Richard and Lawrence read their pieces, which are both lively, but Murray and Fry speak of Hitch extemporaneously, or at least without notes.  I won’t summarize the reminiscences as you need to hear them yourself.

The four in memoriam pieces end at 35:16 and it’s on to discussion, with Lawrence asking each person to react to a statement by Hitchens. Fry waxes eloquent on the question we all have: “What would Hitchens would say about wokeness?” Douglas Murray, a defender of Israel, is asked to respond to some quotes from Hitchens attacking Zionism.

At 1 hour 4 minutes in, the panel answers questions submitted on social media.

In the end, this is one of the few discussion videos I’d recommend watching in toto. 

I met Hitchens only once, on November 6, 2009, at a meeting in Puebla, Mexico.  My bus was heading back to Mexico City, but when I saw him grabbing a ciggie outside the venue, complete with poppy and what I”m told is a pro-Kurd lapel pin, I leapt off the bus to introduce myself.  I never do stuff like that, but this was Hitchens!  He remembered me from something I’d written, but the bus was leaving and our discourse was very brief. Here’s a photo I took from the bus:

I am doing non-website writing today, and not much is going on in the world, but I do have some heavier pieces to discuss in the next few days. But why not start off the year with a song—or two?

The Bob Marley hit “One Love” was called “One Love/People Get Ready” when issued in 1977, combining the Marley title with that of the famous Curtis Mayfield song. But there is little Mayfield in the Marley song—just enough to force Marley give it a composite title according to copyright law.  Both songs, however, are masterpieces, and both are religious.

Wikipedia gives the backstory for Marley’s double title.

The famous version of “One Love” that appears on their album Exodus was recorded in 1977 for Island Records under the title of “One Love/People Get Ready”. This version credits Curtis Mayfield (as Island Records wanted to avoid copyright problems), and it gives co-authorship credits to both Marley and Mayfield as it contains an interpolation of the Impressions‘ song “People Get Ready“, written by Mayfield. As the main artist, Marley and his group were credited as Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was not released as a single until 16 April 1984, to promote the forthcoming greatest hits album Legend. However, the single became one of his biggest hits and has been included on many of Marley and the Wailers subsequent compilation albums. The original recording of the song does not credit Mayfield’s song and is simply titled “One Love”; this is because copyright law was not enforced for Jamaican recordings at this time. The original song was published in the key of B♭ major, but it has since been transposed so it is in the key of C major.

Here is the famous version of the Marley song, recorded on June 3, 1977. It is a work of genius, marred for me only by the toy-piano-like introduction, which even sounds a bit off key. When I listen to Marley, I always remember that he died at only 36, of metastatic skin cancer that he could have prevented by having his big toe amputated. (He refused.) It’s sad but futile to think about what musical paths he would have traversed had he just allowed the doctors to sever his toe.

I forgot that Greg posted this song two years ago, so go back and see his comments  But you should definitely listen to it.

Below: The Marley lyrics.  When I read the above, I played the Mayfield song back in my mind and tried to remember which bits of Marley could have been lifted from “People Get Ready”. I remembered one line (the third bolded line below), but when I listened to “People Get Ready” after several Mayfield-less years, I discovered four bits of “One Love” that Marley took from “People Get Ready”. They are all in bold, and you can hear the Mayfield song below. They don’t constitute word-for-word plagiarism except for the third bolded line—the one I rememberd:

[Chorus]
One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel alright
Hear the children cryin’ (One love)
Hear the children cryin’ (One heart)
Sayin’, “Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright”
Sayin’, “Let’s get together and feel alright, woah-woah-woah-woah” [Verse 1]
Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (One love)
There is one question I’d really love to ask (One heart)
Is there a place for the hopeless sinners
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs? [Chorus]
One love (What about the one heart?), one heart (What about the—)
Let’s get together and feel alright (As it was in the beginning)
One love (So shall it be in the end), one heart (Alright)
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright
Let’s get together and feel alright, one more thing [Verse 2]
Let’s get together to fight this Holy Armagiddyon (One love)
So when the Man comes, there will be no, no doom (One song)
Have pity on those whose chances grows thinner
There ain’t no hiding place from the Father of Creation, singing [Chorus]
One love (What about the one heart?), one heart (What about the—)
Let’s get together and feel alright (I’m pleadin’ to mankind)
One love (Oh, Lord), one heart (Woah)
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright
Let’s get together and feel alright
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright
Let’s get together and feel alright

. . . and Mayfield’s song, (he wrote it), released in 1965—the same year Marley recorded the first version of “One Love”. It’s a beautiful song although a kind of religious hymn. From Wikipedia:

In 2021, Rolling Stone named “People Get Ready” the 122nd greatest song of all time. The song was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. “People Get Ready” was named as one of the Top 10 Best Songs of All Time by Mojo music magazine, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2015, the song was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry due to its “cultural, historic, or artistic significance”. Martin Luther King Jr. named the song the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement and often used the song to get people marching or to calm and comfort them.

It’s a new year, this is my 29,848th post since I began in 2009, and we have a new contributor to the photo series: Amy Perry from Indiana. Her photos below, though, are from California.  Amy’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.  I have added the Wikipedia links.

I took a hike in the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve Extension in the Del Mar neighborhood in San Diego. All the photos except for the three with asterisks were taken there. It is a hilly shrubland with views of the Pacific. All quotations are from the book California Plants: A Guide to Our Iconic Flora, by Matt Ritter. These plants are all in the shrublands section. I didn’t want to use descriptions from Wikipedia because readers could read them for themselves there. I wanted to provide info not easily accessible.

“The Torrey Pine (Pinus torreyana) is the rarest species of pine in North America. There are about 3,000 wild individuals growing along the coast of northern San Diego, almost entirely in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve…. This species can be distinguished from other pines by its twisted canopy of long gray green needles that are in bundles of five. The name commemorates John Torrey, a 19th century botanist and physician, and an original member of the National Academy of Sciences.”:

Torrey Pine (Pinus torreyana). Note how gangly and sprawly and chaotic-looking this tree is. Many desert plants are like that:

*Torrey Pine (Pinus torreyana) in the beach parking lot. “Trees along the immediate coast grow slowly, battered by ocean, winds and salt spray and sculpted into unusual shapes.” This tree had had part of it cut off, but the remaining part still has a very unusual shape:

The flower of the California brittlebush (Encelia californica) reminds me of black-eyed Susans in the Midwest. It is one of the very few plants still blooming in the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve Extension. It is a “non-hairy species that occurs in coastal areas,“ in contrast to plain ole brittlebush, a desert plant that has hairy leaves. The genus name “honors Christoph Entzelt, a 16th century German clergyman and natural historian.”:

California brittlebush (Encelia californica). “The desert variety can produce resin when the stems are scraped, and the dried resin can be burned for incense. In fact, the Spanish common name for this plant is incienso.” It’s unclear whether the coastal variety produces resin. If I had known about the desert variety, I would have scraped the stem of one outside the reserve to find out:

Laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) has “leaves that are folded upward along the mid vein, like a taco, with slightly wavy edges. Malosma means strong odor, for the smell of the cut leaves.” I did not tear a leaf and it’s probably a good thing since I was in a nature reserve. If I had read this botanical guide before I took my hike, I probably would have broken the law and torn the leaf, because I haven’t seen any laurel sumacs off the preserve:

Laurel sumac (Malosma laurina). The shape of the blossoms reminds me of those of the staghorn sumac in Indiana:

California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) is the most widespread species of this genus in the state according to Matt Ritter. “These evergreen leaves usually have margins rolled under, hiding a woolly underside. Eriogona means woolly knees in Greek, referring to the hairy nodes of the first species named in this genus.”:

California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum). “No part of the plant is especially edible, but the flowers are an important food source for butterflies and honeybees.”:

White sage (Salvia apiana). I hope the photo shows the softness of the leaves. “The name salvia is derived from the Latin word, Salvus, meaning safe or well, referring to the medicinal value of members of this genus:

White sage (Salvia apiana). “Most sages in California are drought-deciduous shrubs, commonly found in chaparral and coastal scrub.”:

*Ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis). “Opportunistic feeders” is what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology calls this bird in the book All about birds: California. Usually I see all manner of shorebirds at the Torrey Pines State Beach, North Beach. But one day I didn’t see any birds at all, and another day all I saw were the ubiquitous ring-billed gulls and, further inland behind some mud flats, some killdeer:

*Marbled effect of waves at Torrey Pines State Beach, North Beach, with a strand of seaweed for size comparison. Each white line is a tiny ledge about 1/8 inch high. I checked because I was curious whether the white was just a differently-colored sand or really a ledge, and the lines were indeed raised ledges.

Not long ago I mentioned that The Free Press had published a weird piece extolling religion: an atheist beefing that she really missed the goddy parts of Christmas even though she wasn’t a believer. She needed to go to church. With that, I wondered whether softness on religion was becoming part of anti-wokeness, or at least that news site.

Now, with the publication of a new longer piece, The Free Press has buttressed my speculations. For this article not only names and tells the stories of a number of notables who decided to embrace religion (largely Christianity), but also implies that there are good reasons for them to do so.  Mostly it’s the “God-shaped hole in our being”: the dubious idea that humans have an innate—and perhaps evolved—need to find a divine being to worship and give then succor.  Indeed, several people (including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose embrace of Christianity we’ve discussed before) explicitly mention that religion is what gives their life meaning.

If that is the case, good for them. But of course many of us find meaning and purpose without religion. Indeed, as I’ve argued, people often don’t go out looking for meaning and purpose to their lives, but simply enact their lives in a way that winds up giving them meaning and purpose.  Those things can be found in children, family, friends, activities (be they physical, intellectual, or humanitarian) and so on.

The biggest issue with this article, though, is that it is completely devoid of any evidence for the truth of the tenets of religion. It’s touting faith as a balm for wounded souls, and, so the narrative goes, one should accept God to get cured–regardless of whether what you believe is true. Indeed, it quotes Andrew Sullivan on the advantage of not having to have good reasons to believe:

The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?

Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”

“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”

Well, I don’t find that “genius”. If your faith depends on believing that Jesus died for our sins, was bodily resurrected, and then became the only route to Heaven, then you bloody well better have good reasons for thinking that. It was the achievement of New Atheism to show that peoples’ reasons are not good ones.  If your eternal life (and its location) depends on believing the truths espoused by your faith, it’s salubrious to have chosen the right faith. But people don’t worry about that; they usually assume the faith they were taught as children.

Click on the screenshot below to read the piece, or find it archived here.

Here are the names in each of the “I found God” anecdotes. Excerpts are indented; bolding is mine:

1.) In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.

“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.

. . . .“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.

“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”

Has to be?  Why?  And of course if you find “meaning and purpose” in things like friends, family, work, and avocation, then that is a “sense of meaning” that doesn’t need the supernatural.

2.) But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

Again, we are supposed to believe that these important intellectuals might have missed out by neglecting God.  But the effects of religious belief give no evidence for the truth of its tenets.

3.) In February 2024, podcaster Joe Rogan, in a conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, said: “We need Jesus.” Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians.

Why Jesus? Is there evidence that he was who he said he was, and that believing in Jesus is the only way to heaven? Maybe we need Muhammad or Buddha.

Anyway, many of us don’t need Jesus.

Note the swipe at Dawkins. The article makes fun of New Atheists throughout; it’s almost like that contempt was ripped from Pharyngula. There’s even a section called “The Rise and Fall of the New Atheists”.  Well, New Atheists aren’t writing their books any more, as they’ve had their say, but the decline of faith in the Western world (not just the U.S.) is sufficient evidence that the anecdotes of this article go against a trend of decreasing religiosity.

4.) In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

It’s almost as if his social-media following validates his beliefs.  And again, why Christianity? How does Brand, who I thought was smarter than this, know that Christianity is the religion with the “right” claims? Why not Islam or Judaism?

5.) In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

How certain Thiel is about the existence of God! But what is his evidence? And what is this evidence of a “plan for history” and a “plan for your life”?  Thiel is just making this stuff up, spinning his wheels.

6). Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Note that Musk said he believes in the PRINCIPLES of Christianity, not the actual factual assertions of the faith. Do those beliefs include the principle that if you don’t except Jesus as your savior, you’re going to fry eternally? What about the principle that it’s okay to have slaves, so long as you don’t whip them too hard?

As for Jordan Peterson, what he believes about Christianity is so confused and incoherent that I cannot take his “religion” seriously.

There are more like this, includiong Paul Kingsnorth and Jordan Hall, but again, they are just conversion stories, and say nothing about the truth of Christianity. And for every believer cited I could dig up someone who either gave up faith or refused to adopt it, as shown by the growth of “nones” in America.  If it’s a war of anecdotes, the nonbelievers win (see below).

But we’ve neglected the prize specimen of conversion, former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was deeply depressed, and nothing worked to help her. Until she found Christianity.

7.) In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?

Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”

In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”

The essay triggered an avalanche of conversations in the independent media universe—including a book, which she is now working on, and a debate, in June, between Hirsi Ali and Dawkins in which she argued that Christianity is a bulwark against “the cult of power, Islamism.” The debate felt like a kind of bookend to the four horsemen meeting in Hitchens’s apartment in 2007.

Well, yes, Christianity could make you resist Islam (note that religion is being divisive here), and if it cured Hirsi Ali of her depression, then I won’t fault her for accepting it, so long as she believes its tenets, which she says she does.  Here’s the debate between Dawkins and Hirsi Ali. The audience is clearly on Hirsi Ali’s side, but the existence of God can’t be decided by a vote, and of course atheists are generally seen with suspicion compared to lauded “people of faith”. I have always found it curious that it’s considered praise to say someone is a “person of faith”.  It could just as well be said that that is a “person of delusion.”

Another argument for religion adduced in the piece is that religion inspired great art, including all the religious paintings before artists discovered apples and flowers, as well as cathedrals and great music.  This is in fact true, for surely we would have no Notre Dame or Chartres without Christianity. (I’m not so sure about music and painting.) But again, Islam too has inspired fantastic architecture as in their many lovely mosques (e.g., the Taj Mahal), as well as painting, and music (well, until recently). But again, none of this attesta to the verity of the revelations given to Muhammad.

And let’s get back to Dawkins:

Dawkins underscored that he, like Sam Harris, is still very much an atheist. He did not see any contradiction in saying, as he had to Rachel Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio show, that he was “happy” with the number of Christians declining in Britain and that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”

“The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”

And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”

It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.

“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?

When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.

I can’t agree fully with Richard about Christianity having bequeathed us a world we want to live in. We can’t run the experiment, but what kind of world would we have if religion had never arisen? We wouldn’t have cathedrals, but perhaps rationality and science would have taken hold a lot earlier, and surely a lot fewer people would have died in the many religious wars. (They’re still dying in droves, by the way: Jew against Muslim, Sunni against Shia, and so on.)

All I know is that I can’t force myself to believe, to condition my life, on something like this unless I know it is true. And because I see no evidence for a God, much less for the truth of any religion, I cannot force myself to believe.  I consider myself a cultural Jew, but my life wouldn’t be that much poorer if I was purely secular.  It is very convenient that believers say they don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, for they get to believe and don’t have to explain why they believe beyond “it makes me feel good.” Like this, from Jonah Teller, a New York Catholic priest:

Father Jonah thought that a new fervor, a more authentic connection to the faith, was emerging out of the loneliness of the last few years. There was a “genuine happiness” that he could feel at Mass, “an excitement, a love.”

It wasn’t that complicated in the end. It was, he said, a kind of turning away from a radical atomization. “The world many people have grown up in is one in which you have the ability to be your own God,” said Father Jonah. “You should have it simply because you want it, whatever it may be. Or not have it, and that can include your own existence—a rejection of simply being.”

But the fact of our existence is a testament to God’s love for us, he said. “We are always wanted,” Father Jonah said. “We are always loved. This is the most important thing. God is not a mindfulness hack or a wellness exercise. It’s not—‘I found this ethical system that gets results, and therefore, I will choose it.’ It’s not a choice. It’s an encounter with an actual, personal love.”

Father Jonah’s evidence is this: we exist, therefore God, and not just God but the loving Christian god. Does God love the Covid virus and mosquitoes, too, which also exist?

I am not going to go into detail about how faith is declining throughout the West, but here are some data from the Gallup organization. Click each graph to see the report

x

 

From Pew Research:

and from Open Culture:

Look as you will, all you will find is a continuous decline in religion in America over the last 100 years.  But it’s not just America: read the Wikipedia article “Decline of Christianity in the Western World.”

This trend, of course, is downplayed in the article, with only a brief mention about the increase in “nones” under the Hirsi Ali section, but that’s about it.  Yet given this trend, in 200 years believers in America will be quite rare. Religion will never disappear, of course, but its decline has been discussed by Steve Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now. with religion adduced as an anti-Enlightenment force throughout history.

But why is the Free Press running pieces like this?  I have no idea, and can guess only that Bari Weiss, the editor, is herself religious, a believing Jew. I would love to hear her discuss the reasons for her faith, and why she rejects Christianity as a personal religion. But I haven’t seen that.

ONE MORE POINT:  To those who think that societies can’t function well without religion, I have a one-word response: Scandinavia.

Today we have some photos by UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

A windy day at the coast

Looking back for any 2024 photos not sent to WEIT yet, I came across these ones from a couple of days in mid-October.  The tides were at their monthly low, and several of us inland-dwelling Californian birders drove out to Bodega Bay hoping to see mobs of shorebirds on the exposed mudflats.  Alas, the winds were gusting at 30 mph or more, and the birds were mostly either huddled in sheltered spots or blowing wildly past us across the bay.  We even saw a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) sitting on the ground in a salt marsh, just waiting out the storm – too far away for a good photo, alas.

Last time we went to Bodega and encountered high winds, as some readers may remember, I gave up on real birds and did a photo essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and its filming locations. This time we toughed it out and tried to photograph the huddling and swirling flocks.  Here are a few scenes.

Marbled Godwits (Limosa fedoa) hunkering down at the north end of the bay:

Godwit gang:

Marbled Godwits and Willets (Tringa semipalmata; black-and-white wings) billowing by:

Western Sandpipers (Calidris mauri) mixed with a Willet or two:

Black-bellied Plovers (Pluvialis squatarola) with their distinctive black armpits:

American Coots (Fulica americana), sheltering at a marina and then deciding the humans were too close:

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) having a bad feather day:

Great Egret (Ardea alba), catching a rodent and then being pursued by another egret:

North American River Otters (Lontra canadensis), which despite their name are often seen in saltwater:

Well, that makes three of us. Steve Pinker, I, and now Richard Dawkins, have all decided independently to resign from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  The organization’s ideological capture, as instantiated in throwing in their lot with extreme gender activism and censoring any objection to their views—as well as in the increasing tendency of the FFRF to add Critical Social Justice to their mission alongside their original and admirable goal of keeping church and state separate, has motivated us in different degrees to part ways with the group. I emphasize again that the FFRF did and still does engage in important work on keeping religion from creeping into governmental activity.

Richard explains his decision in the email below, sent not long ago to the heads of the FFRF. I, for one, hope that these resignations might make the FFRF rethink its direction.

I reproduce Richard’s very civil resignation with his permission:

Dear Annie Laurie and Dan

It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Advisory Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field of Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal. Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Advisory Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.

Although I formally resign, I would like to remain on friendly terms with you, and I look forward to cooperating in the future. And to delightful musical evenings if the opportunity arises.

Yours sincerely
Richard

Like me, Steve Pinker has resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  His resignation was sent yesterday. Steve is a bigger macher than I. both intellectually and, in this case, because he was Honorary President of that Board. I put below his two emails, reproduced with permission.

The first one was sent yesterday to the co-Presidents of the FFRF as well as the editor of Freethought Today!, which originally published my piece and then removed it.

From: Pinker, Steven
Sent: Saturday, December 28, 2024 11:49 AM
Subject: resignation

Dear Annie Laurie and Dan,

With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.

My letter to you last November (reproduced below) explains why I think these are grave errors. With this action, the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics. It has turned its back on reason: if your readers “wrongfully perceive” the opposite of a clear statement that you support the expression of contesting opinions, the appropriate response is to stand by your statement, not ratify their error. It has turned the names Freethought Today and Freethought Now into sad jokes, inviting ridicule from its worse foes. And it has shown contempt for the reasoned advice of its own board members.

There are not the values of not the organization I have supported for twenty years, and I can no longer be associated with it.

Sincerely,
Steve

*************

As Steve notes above, this second letter was sent over a month ago to the same people, with copies to me and Richard Dawkins, as all of us were discussing the issue of “mission creep” with the FFRF.

From: Pinker, Steven
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2024 10:04 AM
Subject: RE: Comment for FFRF

Thanks, Annie Laurie. But I think it’s important to distinguish two things:

1. The right to bodily autonomy, an ethical issue.

2. The nature of sex in the living world, a scientific issue.

Some trans activists believe that the only way to ensure the first is to rewrite the second, imposing what we regard as fallacious and tendentious claims in defiance of our best scientific understanding. This is unfortunate for two reasons: it’s a conceptual error, confusing the moral and the empirical, and it’s counterproductive to force people to choose between trans rights and scientific reality. Those who favor scientific reality will be alienated from the cause of safeguarding trans rights.

I see FFRF as in the vanguard of separating key moral and political commitments from honest scientific inquiry (after all, a major impetus for enshrining religious doctrine such as creationism is that it is necessary for the preservation of moral values). Many people have noted that the radical factions of the trans movement have taken on some of the worst features of religion, such as the imposition of dogma and the excommunication and vilification of heretics. FFRF can be firmly on the side of trans rights without advancing tendentious (and almost certainly false) biological claims. Of course, it’s fine for views that we regard as tendentious to be expressed in FFRF forums, as long as respectful disagreements are allowed to be expressed as well.

Best,
Steve