Why Evolution is True Feed

This is the result of a dispute I’ve explained before (see here). Because the FFRF has caved into to gender extremism, an area having nothing to do with its mission, and because, when they let me post an article on their website about this, they changed their mind and simply removed my post, I have decided I can no longer remain a member of their board of honorary directors.  So be it. Everything is explained in this email I sent FFRF co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker about an hour ago, to wit:

Dear Annie Laurie and Dan,

As you probably expected, I am going resign my position on the honorary board of the FFRF.  I do this with great sadness, for you know that I have been a big supporter of your organization for years, and was honored to receive not only your Emperor Has No Clothes Award, but also that position on your honorary board.

But because you took down my article that critiqued Kat Grant’s piece, which amounts to quashing discussion of a perfectly discuss-able issue, and in fact had previously agreed that I could publish that piece—not a small amount of work—and then put it up after a bit of editing, well, that is a censorious behavior I cannot abide. I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that “distressing” and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.

As I said, I think these folks should have moral and legal rights identical to those of other groups, except in the rare cases in which LGBTQIA+ rights conflict with the rights of other groups, in which case some kind of adjudication is necessary. But your announcement about the “mistake” of publishing my piece also implies that what I wrote was transphobic.

Further, when I emailed Annie Laurie asking why my piece had disappeared (before the “official announcement” of revocation was issued), I didn’t even get the civility of a response. Is that the way you treat a member of the honorary board?

I always wanted to be on the board so I could help steer the FFRF: I didn’t think of it as a job without any remit. The only actions I’ve taken have been to write to both of you—sometimes in conjunction with Steve, Dan (Dennett), or Richard—warning of the dangers of mission creep, of violating your stated goals to adhere to “progressive” political or ideological positions. Mission creep was surely instantiated in your decision to cancel my piece when its discussion of biology and its relationship to sex in humans violated “progressive” gender ideology. This was in fact the third time that I and others have tried to warn the FFRF about the dangers of expanding its mission into political territory. But it is now clear that this is exactly what you intend to do. Our efforts have been fruitless, and if there are bad consequences I don’t want to be connected with them.

I will add one more thing. The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (“a woman is whoever she says she is”), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.

I will continue to struggle for the separation of church and state, and wish you well in that endeavor, which I know you will continue. But I cannot be part of an organization whose mission creep has led it to actually remove my words from the internet—words that I cannot see as harmful to any rational person.  I am not out to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, and I hope you know that. But you have implied otherwise, and that is both shameful for you and hurtful for me.

Cordially
Jerry

Today is the last Sunday of the year, which means that we have John Avise‘s last post of the year (he will of course continue in 2025).  Right now he’s showing photos of American lepidopterans. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 4 

First, I’d like to wish all WEIT readers a Happy New Year and a wonderful 2025.  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.

California Sister (Adelpha californica):

California Sister, underwing:

California Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis californica):

Callippe Fritillary (Speyeria callippe):

Callippe Fritillary underwing:

Carolina Satyr (Hermeuptychia sosybius):

Carolina Satyr underwing:

Cassius Blue (Leptotes cassius), underwing:

Ceraunus Blue (Hemiargus ceraunus), male, topwing:

Ceraunus Blue, underwing:

Checkered White (Pontia protodice), male:

Checkered White, female:

Checkered White, female underwing:

Good morning on Sunday, December 29, 2024, the penultimate day of Coynezaa, which ends tomorrow with a milestone birthday for PCC(E).  Today we will have a brief Hili post, but there will be readers’ wildlife, a regular post (this one on the osculation of faith), and an announcement.  All is well, and tomorrow or Tuesday we’ll be back in business.

It’s also National Pepper Pot Day, celebrating a soup said to be created on this day in 1777 when George Washington sent his cook out to forage for something that could warm and nourish his freezing soldiers overwintering at Valley Forge. This soup was the result, though Wikipedia has a different origin tale.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

There is only one item of news for us today:  there has been another plane crash, this time in South Korea, and the death toll is high. On the news this morning they attributed it to a bird strike. Two people survived, both members of the crew:

A passenger plane crashed while landing at an airport in southwestern South Korea on Sunday, killing most of the 181 people on board in the worst aviation disaster involving a South Korean airline in almost three decades, officials said.

The Boeing 737-800 plane, operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air, had taken off from Bangkok and was landing at Muan International Airport when it crashed at around 9 a.m. local time. Footage of the accident shows a white-and-orange plane speeding down a runway on its belly until it overshoots the runway, hitting a barrier and exploding into an orange fireball.

Officials were investigating what caused the tragedy, including why the plane’s landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned, whether birds had struck the jet, or if bad weather had been a factor.

The airport in Muan had warned the plane’s pilots about a potential bird strike as they were landing, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The plane issued a mayday alert shortly afterward, then crash-landed, he added, saying later that the plane’s black boxes — which should help determine the cause of the crash — have been recovered.

Jeju Air flight 7C2216 had 175 passengers and six crew members on board. Hundreds of people — grandparents, parents and children — packed the Muan airport waiting anxiously for news about their loved ones.

As of Sunday evening, the government said, 177 people had been confirmed dead, including 22 Korean nationals identified by their fingerprints. The names of the dead were posted on lists in the airport as relatives crowded around.

More than 1,500 people were deployed to help search the wreckage; at least two crew members were rescued from the aircraft’s tail section.

Lee Jeong-hyeon, an official in charge of search and rescue operations at the scene, said the plane had broken into so many pieces that only its tail was identifiable.

“We could not recognize the rest of the fuselage,” he said.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are almost in hibernation:

A: Lately you are in bed day and night. Hili: We are waiting for spring.

In Polish: Ja: Ostatnio w dzień i w nocy jesteście na łóżku. Hili: Czekamy na wiosnę.

When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! I’m not going into a long exegesis here, as I’ll have more to say about this affair elsewhere.  But here are the relevant links:

“What is a woman?“: The original FFRF post on Freethought Today! by Kat Grant, an intern with the FFRF.

“Biology is not bigotry“: My response to Grant’s piece on Freethought Today!. The link is an archived one because the original post is gone. You can also find it archived here. Also, because a reader suggested that archived pieces could be removed, I’ve added a transcript of my final published piece below the fold of this article. 

When some readers pointed out yesterday that “Biology is not bigotry” was no longer online, I had no idea what happened, and assumed they had relocated the post. I was unable to believe that they would actually remove my post, especially because FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor had given me permission to write it and approved the final published version.

I emailed Annie Laurie inquiring what had happened to my piece. I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally. They still have not done so, and now they shouldn’t bother. Instead, they sent out the following notice to all FFRF members (it’s also archived here):

 

Note first that when they refer to my piece, they mention neither who wrote the piece or what it was about. If I’m to be cancelled for what I wrote, dammit, I want my NAME and TOPIC mentioned!

Several things are clear, including a point I’ve made before: the FFRF has a remarkable ability to place any kind of antiwoke ideology under the rubric of “Christian nationalism.” That’s why I wrote in my now-expunged piece, “As a liberal atheist, I am about as far from Christian nationalism as one can get!”  And of course I support LGBTQIA+ rights, save in those few cases where those rights conflict with the rights of other groups, as in sports participation. I doubt that even the FFRF would think that women should be boxing, professionally or in the Olympics, against men or biological men who identify as women.  So in terms of “LGBTQIA-plus rights,” I’m pretty much on the same plane as the FFRF, even though they imply I’m not.

But it’s the last six paragraphs of the FFRF’s post where they explain why they took down my piece.  It is because it caused “distress” and “did not reflect [the FFRF’s] values or principles.”  I’m not sure what values or principles my piece failed to reflect. Does the FFRF think that sex is really a spectrum, that there are more than two sexes in humans, or that the most useful definition of biological sex doesn’t involve gamete size? I don’t know, nor do they say.

As for my words causing “distress,” well, I’m sorry if people feel distress when I explicate the biological definition of sex or estimate how few people fail to adhere to the sex binary.  But this is all material not for censorship but for back-and-forth discussion, especially on a site called “Freethought Now!” (Should it be called “Freeethought Not!” instead?)

And that is what disappoints me most: not just the “mission creep” instantiated by the FFRF’s incursion into partisan politics or dubious ideology, but the fact that they will not allow free and civil discussion about an article that they published, an article that concludes by saying, “A woman is whoever she says she is.”  If that is not a statement ripe for discussion, then what is? It is only fear that would make an organization take down a rational discussion of such a contentious statement. I don’t know what the FFRF is afraid of, but I am just a biologist defending my turf, and am not by any means bent on hurting LGBTAIA+ people.

I’m distressed that it’s come to this, as I’ve always been a big supporter of the FFRF and its historical mission, which is, I suppose, why they made me an honorary director and gave me the Emperor Has No Clothes Award. And I will always support their activities that genuinely try to keep church and state separate. But when they start censoring my words because, though biologically justifiable, they are ideologically unpalatable, that is just too much. All I can say now is that this is not the end of this kerfuffle, and that I stand by what I wrote before.

How sad it is that one of the nation’s premier organizations promoting “freethought” won’t permit that kind of thought on their website, but instead quashes what they see as “wrongthink.”

 

Click “continue reading” to see a transcript my original published piece.

•  Freedom From Religion Foundation
• December 26, 2024

 

Disclaimer: FFRF Honorary Board Member Jerry A. Coyne requested that this column be written as a guest blog. The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Biology is not bigotry
By Jerry A. Coyne

In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?”, author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.” This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people — or men who identify as women (“transwomen”) — feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality. Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization — and thus a concept — based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms.  We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal.

Besides its universality, the gametic concept has utility, for it is the distinction between gamete types that explains evolutionary phenomena like sexual selection. Differential investment in reproduction accounts for the many differences, both physical and behavioral, between males and females. No other concept of sex has such universality and utility. Attempts to define sex by combining various traits associated with gamete type, like chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, body hair and so on, lead to messy and confusing multivariate models that lack both the universality and explanatory power of the gametic concept.

Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary. Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly — without the normal number of ten fingers.  Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)

In biology, then, a woman can be simply defined in four words: “An adult human female.”

Dismissal of trait-based concepts of sex leads to serious errors and misconceptions. I mention only a few. The biological concept of a woman does not, as Grant argues, depend on whether she can actually produce eggs. Nobody is claiming that postmenopausal females, or those who are sterile or had hysterectomies, are not “women,” for they were born with the reproductive apparatus that evolved to produce eggs. As for chromosomes, having two X chromosomes gives you a very high probability of being a woman, but a rearrangement of genetic information can decouple chromosome constitution from the gametic apparatus.

But the biggest error Grant makes is the repeated conflation of sex, a biological feature, with gender, the sex role one assumes in society. To all intents and purposes, sex is binary, but gender is more spectrum-like, though it still has two camel’s-hump modes around “male” and “female.” While most people enact gender roles associated with their biological sex (those camel humps), an appreciable number of people mix both roles or even reject male and female roles altogether. Grant says that “I play with gender expression” in “ways that vary throughout the day.” Fine, but this does not mean that Grant changes sex from hour to hour.

Under the biological concept of sex, then, it is impossible for humans to change sex — to be truly “transsexual” — for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is “transgender,” or, for transwomen, “men who identify as women.”

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Biological sex affects who and what we are. Let’s look at the contentious area of sports participation.  Here’s a summary of the current regulatory situation (from a link that Grant gives):

“For the Paris 2024 Olympics, the new guidelines require transgender women to have completed their transition before the age of 12 to be eligible to compete in the women’s category. This rule is intended to prevent any perceived unfair advantages that might arise from undergoing male puberty.”

“In addition, at least 10 Olympic sports have restricted the participation of transgender athletes. These include sports like athletics, cycling, swimming, rugby, rowing, and boxing.”

Completing transition before 12 is virtually unknown (26 American states ban childhood transition), and the International Olympic Committee has now asked each sport to devise its own rules. Further, the presence of “regulation” does not make the problem go away, for many regulations are insufficient to protect female athletes from male athletic advantage. According to a United Nations report on violence against women, “By 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals [to transgender women] in 29 different sports.”

I close with two points. The first is to insist that it is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. 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.

Finally, speaking as a member of the FFRF’s honorary board, I worry that the organization’s incursion into gender activism takes it far outside its historically twofold mission: educating the public about nontheism and keeping religion out of government and social policies. Tendentious arguments about the definition of sex are not part of either mission. Although some aspects of gender activism have assumed the worst aspects of religion (dogma, heresy, excommunication, etc.), sex and gender have little to do with theism or the First Amendment. I sincerely hope that the FFRF does not insist on adopting a “progressive” political stance, rationalizing it as part of its battle against “Christian Nationalism.” As a liberal atheist, I am about as far from Christian nationalism as one can get!

Issues of sex and gender cannot and should not be forced into that Procrustean bed. Mission creep has begun to erode other once-respected organizations like the ACLU and SPLC, and I would be distressed if this happened to the FFRF.

Jerry A. Coyne is emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

Note: The Hili Dialogues will be truncated over the next few days as I figure out how to respond to the FFRF’s removal of my piece on biological sex.  Bear with me; I do my best. I’m also not sure about readers’ wildlife and the Caturday felids.

Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 28, 2024, the fourth day of Coynezaa, which ends on the 30th, as well as National Chocolate Candy Day, which reminds me of this famous clip from “I Love Lucy”:

It’s also Call A Friend Day, National Card Playing Day, and Pledge of Allegiance Day, the latter celebrating our National Fealty to God (it was on this day in 1942 that Congress recognized the words of the pledge, but the “One Nation, Under God” bit was added only in 1954 in reaction to of Godless Communism.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, call this week, “TGIF: Welcome to America, Greenland.” And as the items are short, I’ll steal one more as lagniappe:

→ Sinwar shirts: Until people noticed and got annoyed, Walmart was selling shirts online celebrating Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar with the not-at-all alarming URL: walmart.com/ip/Yahya-Sinwar-We-Will-Win-Or-Die-Shirt. Free shipping!

→ UN’s gonna UN: It was a busy year for the United Nations. It condemned Israel 17 times and condemned the rest of the world a combined six times, according to UN Watch. Afghanistan barred women from speaking, and the UN General Assembly couldn’t muster even one of their little fake resolution batons. Meanwhile, UNRWA, a Hamas front that calls itself part of the UN but is based in Gaza, is reportedly selling some of that desperately needed aid. The UN closes out the year stronger than ever.

→ Oh no, not flames! One Canadian headline writer was so determined to avoid saying that an arsonist firebombed a synagogue that they instead wrote this:

Flames. After what they did to that woman on the subway, they’ve had quite a villainous week! And a “place of worship.” If your media company just uses words to accurately describe what is happening, you’re considered a wild, rebellious group of thought criminals.

→ Gaetz situation unfortunate all around: The House Ethics Committee finally released its report on Matt Gaetz this week, giving America a Christmas gift that nobody asked for but everyone expected. The committee found evidence that Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex and drugs, but also for companionship and tenderness. They allege it happened on at least 20 different occasions, one of which involved a 17-year-old girl, violating Florida state laws. This really caught me off guard. Paying minors for sex is illegal in Florida? Gaetz’s die-hard fans (who are these people?) defended him, arguing that two key witnesses against Gaetz have serious credibility issues, which, frankly, no surprises there, since they are 17? There’s nothing I didn’t lie about at that age. My question: Who do you think witnessed Gaetz at his Diddy freak-off–like parties? Honest church ladies? Think again. Gaetz, for his part, released a statement: “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank, and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

He’s just an average frat boy, you see. Boys will be johns. And he’s repented, changed his ways. Nothing else to it. Embarrassing? Yes. Criminal? Probably. I’ll let the dust settle on this one, but for now, my main takeaway is that congresspeople have enough money to spend tens of thousands of dollars on women and drugs and still have the gall to demand a raise. Washington at work, people.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are going to the salon:

A: What are you doing here? Hili: We are waiting for fur care. In Polish: Ja: Co tu robicie? Hili: Czekamy na pielęgnację futer.

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

From reader Reese Vaughn, who reports, “Woodford got a catnip ball for Christmas.”  That cat is baked!

From Now That’s Wild:

. . . and from Cat Memes:

Here physicist Brian Greene argues with Sam Harris about approaches to dispelling false beliefs, aka religion. Greene argues that simply acquainting people with science will make them less religious (or at least he implies it), and avers that some New Atheists have been ineffective because they call religious people “stupid”. (That’s not so true!). Harris, however, says that the “carrot” attitude of Greene (and Greene really doesn’t use a carrot because he doesn’t criticize religous belief at all) may not be as effective as Harris’s “stick”, which is simply rational argument about what is true and open criticism of the harms of religion. As Sam says, it’s false to assert that you can’t reason people out of religion because he’s seen it happen. So have I.

Sam notes what seems to be the case: Greene just doesn’t want to be the “go-to guy for why you can’t have your cake and eat it too in the matter of science and religion.”  On the other hand, Sam notes that in some ways religion is bad for science. For example, some religious beliefs are inimical to understanding science, including accepting global warming. And of course creationism is still with us in the form of ID.  Sam then asks whether Greene shouldn’t be pushing harder against such inimical religious beliefs. Greene responds that in physics he doesn’t encounter that kind of religious mishigass, which is found more in biology. It’s more than that, though, because I believe that in the past Greene, as one of the organizers of the World Science Festival, has participated in osculating the rump of faith. As I wrote in 2020:

On the other hand [Greene] takes lots of money from the John Templeton Foundation to run the World Science Festival, and there’s always some Templeton-sponsored events that reconcile religion and science or enable “spirituality”.  In fact, Dan Dennett withdrew from a Festival panel when he learned it was backed by Templeton (see the first link in this sentence). And Greene has always been reluctant to say anything bad about religion, despite the fact that he seems to be an atheist. Although he’s said that “there’s much in New Atheism that resonates with me“, he’s admitted that his strategy is less confrontational and less antagonistic than scientists like Dawkins. In fact, as we see below, it no longer seems the least confrontational and antagonistic, but rather worshipful.

There’s more, but I think that one element in Greene’s reticence is knowing that if one criticizes religion, one loses popularity. The fastest way to erode one’s acclaim as a science writer or popularizer is to criticize religion, even if you do it separately from talking about science. Neil deGrasse Tyson has also learned that lesson.

 

On December 23m I called attention to the huge amount of money that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was throwing at biology projects giving evidence of “purpose and agency” in organisms. For example, one grant given to a group of investigators, titled “Agency, directionality, and foundations for a science of purpose,” handed out more than $14.6 million! And one of the few areas in biology they’re funding again next year is, yes, projects on the “science of purpose”, to wit:

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.

Now you can easily see how this fits into the JTF’s original aim, which was to find evidence for divinity and spirituality in science. And indeed, I’m sure that’s why they’re funding this area.  But I’ve already argued that the only kind of “purpose” found in organismal behavior is that involved in conscious cogitation, which is present in only a few organisms.  Yes, some behaviors look “purposeful,” as when a bacterium moves toward or away from light, but that’s a purely mechanical response—not the kind that, say, humans have when they decide, “I’m going out for pizza.” And of course there is no goal-directedness or purpose in evolution, which simply sorts out genetic variation based on whether genes leave more or fewer copies of themselves, often leaving more when they adapt their carrier better to the environment.

However, the biologists who get funded for work on “agency” and “purpose” will be the first to tell you that they are not really imputing to organisms the kind of mental “purpose” that some organisms have, nor are they looking for anything numinous or supernatural. Rather, they seem to be whipping up a bunch of word salad that makes it seem that they are overthrowing the neo-Darwinian view that adaptations arise from genetic variants sorted out by their relative contribution to the genes of descendants.  Such researchers pretend that they are making profound new statements about biology and evolution, but when you look at the papers carefully, as I did with one of the influential papers (below) that Templeton funded in its “purpose and agency” program, you find nothing new. In this case, a whole paper touting “purpose” is merely re-describing something known for a long time: organisms can evolve “norms”of reaction”. These are simply the plastic developmental programs that organisms evolve to respond to environmental changes, so that behavior, physiology, and appearance can change when conditions change. That superficially may look like “agency”, but there’s no “will” involved, and nothing beyond genes responding to environments.

The evolution of norms of reaction is not hard to understand. Take one familiar plastic response: mammals like cats that grow longer fur in the winter.  This is due simply to natural selection acting on the DNA to respond to cold temperature by growing thicker fur. And, of course, as we know from all the varieties of dogs and cats with more or less fur, artificial selection can do that, too. We needn’t think about “purpose” or “agency” when we see this, nor need we say, “one purpose of this trait is to keep the cat warm” or “the cat has agency to grow longer fur to keep in warm in winter.”  That kind of talk about “purpose” is only confusing, hiding what really happened during evolution: natural selection for flexible forms of development.

And there are gazillions of traits that you could say look as if organisms have such agency or purpose, but they are all the result of natural selection. If a goat loses its front legs in an accident, it may well eventually walk on its hind legs. To do that, a number of their bones, tendons, and muscles have to be reconfigured to allow adaptive locomotion. But this, too, is a result of evolved plasticity: in the past, injuries may have been common, and those individuals with genes that allowed their development to compensate for those injuries, thus allowing the sufferer to survive and reproduce, outcompeted individuals lacking genes giving their bodies the ability to cope with injuries.

This is nothing new in evolution; people have talked about plasticity and “norms of reaction” (how organisms change to cope with changes in the environment”) for ages, and there are even experiments showing that such coping is due to natural selection.  But authors like those of the paper below, funded by the JTF, gussy up an old concept by calling it “biological agency”, enabling them to get a ton of cash from the JTF.

I see the effort as intellectually confusing and, indeed, hubristic, because surely the authors know what they’re doing. In the next and final installment of this “agency” mishigass, I’ll highlight a paper that calls this kind of effort to task, showing that it really doesn’t show anything new. Yes, I get excited when new concepts and findings appear in biology and especially evolution, but this ain’t one of them.

Click on the headline below to read the paper, which is free (there’s a pdf here):

The Sultan et al. paper is poorly written, full of big words that are supposed to constitute their idea of agency. But let’s see first how they define agency. Excerpts from the paper are indented.

What is agency? Sultan et al. assure us that it isn’t anything supernatural, but what it really is comes down to “self-regulation” that, in the end, simply amounts to the norms of reaction of an organism.

Living systems have evolved to be robust, responsive, flexible, self-synthesizing and self-regulating. This dynamic flexibility is manifest across diverse levels of biological organization, from cells, to tissues, to entire organisms, to reproductive lineages, to social colonies, and throughout a variety of organismal activities—from molecular signaling pathways to morphogenetic, metabolic, immune, endocrine, and behavioral systems. We use the term biological agency to refer to this suite of robust processes that is constitutive of living systems (See Box 1). Biological agency, in this sense, is the capacity of a system to participate in its own persistence, maintenance, and function by regulating its own structures and activities in response to the conditions it encounters.[69] Attributing agency to a biological system is based on natural, empirically determined processes and connotes neither consciousness nor deliberate intention.

or

Agency is a dynamical property of a system.[162] It consists in the system’s capacity to transduce, configure, and respond to the conditions it encounters. Crucially, agential systems are capable of maintaining functional stability in response to conditions that would otherwise compromise their viability.

Try as I might, I cannot see a distinction between this farrago of fancy words and good old “norms of reaction”.  “Self regulation” is simply the end result of natural selection acting on organisms so that when the environment changes, they respond through their evolved developmental systems in an adaptive way. Note that the authors explicitly rule out “purpose” of “deliberate intention” in the “consciousness” sense here.  Ergo, “maintaining functional stability in response to conditions that would otherwise compromise their viability” is just like a cat growing longer fur in the winter, but it sure is a fancy way of saying it.

Here some examples the authors adduce for “agency”:

Polypterus fish reared in a terrestrialized environment in which fish are forced to walk on their pectoral fins rather than swim, adjust—within a lifetime—not just their behavior, gait and posture but also their skeletal features, in ways that parallel the fossil record of tetrapods’ ascendance onto land.[136] Tadpoles exemplifying the ancestral detrivorous life style and associated gut morphology will adjust the latter if forced to consume a carnivorous diet, in ways that partly parallel evolved changes in specialized carnivorous lineages.[137] Examples such as these suggest that interactions between developmental systems and environmental circumstance may bias the production of phenotypic variation in the face of novel or stressful environments toward functional, integrated, and possibly adaptive variants.

No, the phenotypic direction isn’t “biased” by anything but natural selection. Polypterus fish live in shallow water and have lungs, and it’s possible that their ancestors evolved to walk on their fins to get around in that shallow water or even to leave the water for brief periods of time if their ponds are drying up and they need to get to another pool of water.  Or, it’s even possible that this norm of reaction isn’t evolved at all, but simply the result of an organism struggling to move when that’s the only alternative it has. Here’s what it looks like:

Try that with a goldfish! Why do Polypterus show “agency” in this way but not goldfish? Probably because of the evolutionary background of this species, which is sometimes regarded as an example of the kind of fish that evolved into terrestrial teterapods. But what “agency” are they showing? Likewise, it’s easy to see how tadpoles could occasionally encounter a situation in which there is more “meat” (other organisms or their remains) to eat than there is non-animal detritus. In that case, tadpoles able to evolve a way to change their digestion in such a circumstance would leave more offspring than those that couldn’t. Of course for this system to work, the environment would occasionally have to change in a way that would give organisms like this an advantage (it doesn’t have ot change every generation).  If organisms evolved a developmental system to adapt to environmental changes that couldn’t conceivably have occurred, then we’d have something to talk about! But I know of no such cases.

To justify their “new” approach, the authors give examples of three phenomena that, they say, can’t be explained by conventional neo-Darwinism:

1). Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), in which genes for traits are identified by looking at which genetic variation in an entire genome is correlated with variation in a trait, often reveal “too few genes”.  For example:

In the case of body weight, for example—a biomedically critical trait in the context of obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes—115 genetic loci that showed significant statistical association with body mass index (BMI) collectively explained less than 3% of the variation among adults,[8] and a meta-analysis based on an enormous sample of 700,000 individuals (conferring great statistical power) still explained only 6% of BMI variation[9] despite using a high-dimensional correlation matrix that is known to inflate these estimates.[10] While such extremely large studies may incrementally add to the variance explained by identifying additional loci of small effect through sheer statistical force, over 90% of (a) phenotypic variation for BMI and (b) risk of type 2 diabetes remains unaccounted for,[11, 12] pointing to a more fundamental issue.

And yet heritability studies, involving simple correlation of BMI between relatives is measured, show that between 40% and 70% of the variation of that trait among individuals is due to variation in genes. We can find only 6% of those genes, so where are the rest?  One explanation is that there are many genes affecting BMI whose effects are too small to be measured by GWAS, which requires pretty big effects to find a genetic region affecting a trait. Further, GWAS analyses rely entirely on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA sequence), and are unable to detect duplications and deletions, which we know make a contribution to human trait variation (see references here, here, and here). Finally, GWAS is unable, except in vary large samples, to detect rare genes, and yet given the size of the genome, everyone has quite a few “rare” genes.  When you use large samples, as they have done for human height, the missing heritability diminishes to almost zero: the genetic variation detected by GWAS gives predictions that are almost the same as that based on standard heritability studies.

The authors add this:

Biomedical researchers concerned about the limits of the GWAS approach are therefore increasingly calling for conceptually broader studies directly addressing processing pathways that modulate gene function and hence phenotypic outcomes in individuals via complex gene-environment interactions,[18] environmentally-mediated epigenetic modifications,[19, 20] and physiological and developmental feedback systems such as microbiome composition, which changes dynamically in response to the individual’s diet, behavior, and social environment.[21]

Yes, perhaps there are some differences in microbiomes that are responsible here, but there are many traits where there are “missing genes” that cannot be imputed to microbiome inheritance. As for epigenetic modifications and the like beyond bacteria in the gut, those would also show up in GWAS studies, and so can’t constitute “missing genes” (an epigenetic modification occurs at a given site in the DNA, involves a modified base, and is supposedly inherited over at least one generation).

But much of the above is simply gobbledygook: how can “dynamic changes in response to diet, behavior, and social environment” account for missing genetic variation that shows up in heritability studies but not GWAS studies? This could occur only in species in which cultural, nongenetic factors are inherited, like the tendency to eat fatty foods. But these factors are usually ruled out in most heritability (e,g., in flies) and those studies still show a substantial genetic contribution to variation in a phenotype. What the authors consider “agency” here is not clear, but they are doing a service by highlighting a problem that has yet to be solved: “dark heritability.” We don’t know the answer yet, but we have some clues, and time will tell.

2). The authors drag in epigenetics to explain the missing heritability. This second problem is really the same as the first: we have a mismatch between results revealed by GWAS analysis and simple studies of heritability via correlation between relatives.  But this doesn’t solve the problem: it compounds it for two reasons. First, epigenetic modifications of DNA will show up in GWAS and heritability studies, and so don’t constitute “dark genetic variation”. Further, non-coding RNAs, which the authors further use to explain missing variation, are also inherited.  Finally, and most important, epigenetic modifications of DNA resulting solely from the environment (and not coded for themselves in the genome) almost never persist for more than two or three generations, and thus can’t explain a persistent appearance of “adaptive change” over evolution. Nor are epigenetic modifications usually adaptive, and they can be maladaptive (as in the “Dutch famine trauma”), because they are not evolved but simply the effect of the environment on a genome not adapted to changes in that environment.

Here is one example the authors use to show agency via purported epigenetic change:

An experimental example using isogenic plants points to part of what may be missing. In one series of experiments with the common herb Polygonum, parent plants of the same genetic line were either drought-stressed or given ample water. When their offspring were grown in identical, dry, conditions, they developed differently: the offspring of drought-stressed parents produced significantly larger and more rapidly-extending root systems than those of the moist-grown parents, an inherited phenotypic effect that resulted not from a genetic difference but in response to parental conditions.

“Isogenic” means that all the plants were genetically identical. And yes, it’s hard to imagine that offspring have a way of genetically “knowing” whether their parents experienced drought, though there could be cytoplasmic effects.  So this looks like agency, and may be due to adaptive epigenetic modification.  But this is the exception, rather than the rule.

3.) This is the kicker: neo-Darwinism cannot, say the authors, explain the origins of “novel, complex traits”. Here we have one of the assertions of intelligent design, but although there’s no designer, the authors’ claim about the impotence of neo-Darwinism in producing complex adaptations is simply wrong (they are implying, I think, that organisms are somehow using their AGENCY to develop those complex traits. Here’s the assertion:

The origin of novel complex traits constitutes a central yet largely unresolved challenge in evolutionary biology.[61] Ever since the founding of evolutionary biology one of the discipline’s core motivations has been to understand such elaborate innovations as the vertebrate eye, the insect wing, or the mammalian placenta, traits whose origins transformed the diversity of life on earth. Yet conventional approaches to understanding evolutionary change have provided few opportunities to make significant headway.[62] Of the four evolutionary processes conventionally recognized—natural selection, genetic drift, migration, and mutation, the first three can only sort among existing variants and their distribution within and among populations, but by themselves cannot bring about novel features.[63] This privilege is instead restricted to mutation, yet all attempts to explain the evolution of novel complex traits solely via the coincident origin, spread, and fixation of one beneficial mutation at a time have failed.

Sorry, but this resembles what comes out of the south end of a cow looking north. There is no conceptual reason that sorting out existing and new genetic variants via conventional natural selection is impotent to produce complex traits. The problem is that we simply weren’t there when many complex traits evolved, and so don’t know the genes involved, the selection pressures involved, or even the developmental pathways involved in producing the traits.

I know of only one attempt to get at this problem, and that involved the evolution of the camera eye. This was the work of Nilsson and Pelger summarized in a delightful summary by Richard Dawkins called “The eye in a twinkling“.  Using conservative (“pessimistic”) assumptions about mutation rates, heritabilities, and the number of developmental steps required to transform a light-sensitive spot into a complex “camera eye” with a lens, retina, and cornea (viz., what we and some cephalopoods have), Nilsson and Pelger found out that the evolution of this assuredly complex trait took around 400,000 generations. As Dawkins noted:

Assuming typical generation times of one year for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure. It is a geological blink.

And so it might be with other traits, like wings or placentas. The problem is making an appropriate model, and that is hard or impossible without knowing how the trait evolved (we have some idea with the eye, as Dawkins notes, hearkening back to Darwin, who first raised the “eye problem”.) But without such models, it’s almost deceitful to say that we need a new paradigm to explain the evolution of complex traits. (In fact, we can see the evolution of complex traits—like whales evolving from land ungulates in a mere 10,000 years. And that is surely due to selection, though we can’t say with assuredness that conventional neo-Darwinism was involved. But our ignorance does not justify us trying to depose a well-established paradigm, and one that works very quickly in the case of artificial selection (genetic analysis of adaptations invariably shows that changes in the DNA are involved).  Are dog breeds all due to epigenetic modifications of DNA or “agency” in the ancestral wolf? I don’t think so!)

I’ve already gone on too long, but if this paper is typical of the kind of research the JTF is funding as evidence for agency and purpose, it’s throwing its money down the toilet,.

Oh, and one last beef. When I saw this claim in the Sultan et al. paper, I was astonished:

In Maize, for instance, the “profound” architectural and reproductive changes that distinguish cultivated Maize from its wild progenitor, Teosinte, resulted not from novel mutants but from the response of a complex epistatic network to the atmospheric CO2 and crowded planting conditions encountered during the species’ early cultivation.[155]

What? This change, from the grass teosinte on the left to modern corn on the right (hybrid is in the middle) has nothing to do with novel mutations?

John Doebley, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

I looked up reference 155 and found this:

For example, genetic research shows that once-emphasized conventional assumptions about morphological change—e.g., that the change was driven mainly by human selection for rare mutants of a few single genes that were deleterious in wild plants and favorable in field environments or by selection for new, advantageous mutations that appeared postcultivation—have, for some major traits, been supplanted by different and/or more complex processes. These processes include (i) regulatory changes that targeted diverse developmental pathways and led to changes in gene expression (e.g., how, when, and to what degree existing genes are expressed through changes in the amount of mRNA during transcription); (ii) extensive rewiring of transcriptomic and coexpression networks; (iii) in an increasing number of wild progenitors, the presence and availability to the first cultivators of preexisting, nondeleterious genetic components for major domestication traits (known as “cryptic genetic variation”) that induce trait variation only under specific environmental or genetic conditions; and (iv) deviations from simple Mendelian expectations.

Every change mentioned involves mutations, whether they be structural, regulatory, or “cryptic” (genes showing their effects only under limited conditions). There is nothing new here, merely an explication of how artificial selection on teosinte involved a variety genetic changes.  There is NO AGENCY in teosinte, not even construed as broadly as Sultan et al. do.

In the end, the paper seems to be much ado about nothing, which, in the last chapter (maybe tomorrow) another author will analyze critically, showing that there’s no “there” there.

I know many people won’t be interested in this analysis, but I wanted to get it on the record because so many people are hearing that not only is neo-Darwinism a pretty useless paradigm for understanding adaptation, but now are hearing as well that some nebulous “purpose” and “agency” are involved. As usual, Templeton’s money has only muddied the water.

 

h/t: Luana for her explanations of GWAS.

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has returned with one of his patented text-and-photo stories of biology.  Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.

Gone with the wind

As the sun rose on the morning of 28 October 2013, a painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) came out of nighttime torpor, spread its wings to warm up and start a busy day. Were the butterfly to be conscious and self-aware, it would know right away it had gone through a rough patch. Its wings were worn out and ragged in places. If the butterfly looked around, it would see it had company: other painted ladies, all equally battered, mingled nearby. They were on a beach fringed by unfamiliar vegetation and, curiouser and curiouser, the sea seemed to be on the wrong side. It didn’t look at all like West Africa, from where they took off 5 to 8 days before. The perceptive butterfly would be right: they had ended up in French Guiana, over 4,200 km away from home across the Atlantic Ocean.

The painted lady is one of the most cosmopolitan of all butterflies, absent only from Antarctica and South America © Muséum de Toulouse, Wikimedia Commons:

Painted ladies are committed frequent flyers, constantly on the move to keep up with seasonal food plants. Every spring they set out from tropical Africa to Europe across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, only to go back in the autumn. The 15,000-km round trip of successive generations between Africa and Europe is the longest migratory flight recorded for butterflies. But crossing the Atlantic Ocean, as registered by Suchan et al. (2024), is a much tougher challenge altogether: no stopovers for feeding, no respite from the weather. How did the painted ladies make it through the gruelling journey alive?

Routes of painted lady spring migration from North Africa to Europe © Sémhur, Wikimedia Commons:

A fellow traveller, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), may offer some clues. Every year, monarchs depart from their breeding grounds in southern Canada and northern USA in September and October, arriving at their overwintering sites in Central Mexico in November. Migrating monarchs cruise at energy-saving speeds of about 9 km/h, slower than a person jogging (although there’s a quite a large variation in butterflies’ speed estimates), so they have to slog away to manage distances of over 4,000 km.

Monarch butterfly southbound migration patterns © U.S. Forest Service:

For some insects such as dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata), flight is bimotoric, that is, controlled by forewings and hindwings. Others such as grasshoppers, crickets and related species (Orthoptera) have posteromotoric flight (driven by hindwings). Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) are anteromotoric fliers: their flight is controlled primarily by the forewings (Dudley, 2002). But hindwings don’t have a secondary role in butterflies’ locomotion: they are exceptionally well-developed and are coupled with the forewings to flap in synchrony, so that butterflies in general have the largest wing area relative to body mass of all flying insects and perhaps all flying animals, a feature of great help for migrating species.

An efficient flying machine: a female monarch © Kenneth Dwain Harrelson, Wikimedia Commons:

Still, flapping their wings alone would not do: fat reserves would soon be depleted. So, monarchs use skills familiar to aircraft pilots; they glide, taking advantage of air currents and thermals. By holding their wings motionless, their fore- and hindwings overlapping to form a single aerodynamic surface, monarchs gain altitude by soaring in rising air currents, just like birds do. This technique is the most energy-efficient travelling method regarding distances travelled. With good weather and tail winds, monarchs can soar to at least 300 m above the ground and glide for very long distances (Gibo & Pallett, 1979).

Monarchs, birds and glider pilots fly towards a cliff or building to be carried over the top of the obstacle by the deflected air and rise to a higher altitude © Aerospaceweb.org:

Suchan et al. (2024) estimated that painted ladies’ travel would be limited to about 780 km without refuelling. Even if they could feed and despite favourable winds, they wouldn’t go beyond 1,900 km by flapping their wings. Painted ladies must have glided along the northeasterly trade winds, the prevailing winds from West Africa to northwestern South America – the same winds that helped the Portuguese and Spanish to colonize the New World. Based on what has been observed for monarchs, painted ladies must have glided about 85% of the time taken for their trans-continental flight. This dispersal ability could explain the sudden appearance of gaggles of them in places as diverse as the French Riviera, Gaza, Madagascar, the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, and in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle (Shields, 1992):

A model of wind trajectories 48 h before painted ladies were observed in French Guiana © Suchan et al., 2024:

Big and conspicuous wings allow butterflies to travel far, but they also attract hostile characters such as hungry birds. To reduce their chances of ending their lives as juicy morsels, butterflies must take evasive actions. Their well-developed hind wings allow them to make abrupt turns with just a couple of wing flaps, giving them outstanding manoeuvrability. Most butterflies fly erratically, often zig-zagging with no discernible patterns. If you ever tried to catch a butterfly in the air, you know how expertly they evade pursuers. Irregular, chaotic flight patterns can frustrate and discourage the most relentless predator, who quite likely would give up the chase by pragmatically convincing itself in a sour-grapes fashion that the intended prey is ‘mostly wrapper and little candy’ (Jantzen & Eisner, 2008).

A gentleman failing to impress the ladies with his hunting skills. Catching butterflies in Venetian canal, 1854 © Antonio Rotta, Wikimedia Commons:

Butterflies elicit feelings of vulnerability and tenderness, but aesthetics are not good ecological yardsticks. These insects are well-adapted to the vagaries of life, including inclement weather, food deprivation and threat of predation. Some species are perfectly capable of travelling – voluntarily or not – distances that would defeat tougher-looking creatures. These feats of endurance must be relevant for the dispersal and colonisation of hitchhiking propagules such as spores and pollen, but such effects are yet to be extensively investigated. Meanwhile, we may carry on appreciating butterflies’ beauty, knowing that their perceived fragility is deceiving.

Butterflies are not the delicate creatures of our imagination © Samuel Hubbard Scudder, 1881, Wikimedia Commons:

It is Thursday, December 26, 2024, Boxing Day, the second day of Chanukah, and, most important, the second Day of Coynezaa.

The Hili dialogue will be very short today because I prepare most of them the day before, and yesterday was Christmas, when I took a well-deserved break.  We will have a science post and a readers’ wildlife post, but the full Monty won’t be on tap until tomorrow.  So first, here’s Hili (and Szaron). Hili is chewing out the sub-editors

Hili: What do our readers like best? A: I don’t know, I never thought about it. Hili: That’s what I suspected. In Polish: Hili: Co nasi czytelnicy lubią najbardziej? Ja: Nie wiem, nigdy się nad tym nie zastanawiałem. Hili: Tak podejrzewałam.

And Szaron on his blanket and the poinsettia. No worries: none of the cats gnaw on the plant, whose sap is poisonous.

*One NYT article that readers can quarrel about. It’s by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Penn’s Wharton School, and is called “No, you don’t get an A for effort.” (See it archived here.) It’s an argument that today’s students, who beef about their grades not reflecting their effort, are misguided. While effort may count some, achievement, or merit, is more important—at least for course grades. Excerpts:

After 20 years of teaching, I thought I’d heard every argument in the book from students who wanted a better grade. But recently, at the end of a weeklong course with a light workload, multiple students had a new complaint: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.”

High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient — an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge. In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.

This isn’t Gen Z’s fault. It’s the result of a misunderstanding about one of the most popular educational theories.

More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. Praising kids for their abilities undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks. They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set — they thought success depended on innate talent, and they didn’t have the right stuff. To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable. And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.

The idea of lauding persistence quickly made its way into viral articles, best-selling books and popular TED talks. It resonated with the Protestant work ethic and reinforced the American dream that with hard work, anyone could achieve success.

Psychologists have long found that rewarding effort cultivates a strong work ethic and reinforces learning. That’s especially important in a world that often favors naturals over strivers — and for students who weren’t born into comfort or don’t have a record of achievement. (And it’s far preferable to the other corrective: participation trophy culture, which celebrates kids for just showing up.)

The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person). And that does students a disservice.

. . . . This is what worries me most about valuing perseverance above all else: It can motivate people to stick with bad strategies instead of developing better ones. With students, a textbook example is pulling all-nighters rather than spacing out their studying over a few days. If they don’t get an A, they often protest.

. . . Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message. There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.

. . . Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message. There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.

Is Grant a hardass, too tough on his students? Should effort (which can be gauged to some extent) count for anything when assessing grades? After all, when someone like me used to look at grades on a transcript, say for potential graduate students, I assumed they reflected mastery of the material.

And on meme from Cat Memes:

. . . and my daily post from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Killed with cyanide gas upon arrival at Auschwitz, this French Jewish girl was only eight.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-26T11:37:01.149Z

Here, via Barry, is a 15½-minute video compendium of my beloved Philomena Cunk (aka Diane Morgan) celebrating today’s holiday.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “ploy2”, the boys give the barmaid a new toy, but then Mo breaks it. Oy! I think one recurring theme of this strip is “The boys exemplify that which they decry.”

This strip was in fact first published in 2008—16 years ago. Happy birthday to Jesus!

In place of the readers’ wildlife photos, we’re having a series of readers’ domestic wildlife, aka kitties. Yesterday I asked readers to send in one picture of their cat having a Christmas theme. I will post more if they arrive today, but here’s what we have.  Readers’ descriptions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Send ’em in until noon Chicago time!

From Bob Randall:

Fred would rather attack the low hanging ornaments on our regular tree. This small tree only has one wooden ornament, and he didn’t bother with it.  When the presents were finally opened this morning, he was all into the wrapping paper and opened boxes.  Fred just showed up one afternoon, and despite our attempts to find his former owner, he adopted us. Fred was named to go along with his best friend and sometime nemesis, Barney, as in the Flintstones. From Publilius: Here’s my twelve-year-old cat Violet. A co-worker’s daughter brought her home as a kitten.  year later, the daughter moved to California, leaving the cat behind. No one else in the family wanted a cat, so I offered to adopt her. She’s been a great cat.

From Robert Wooley, of Asheville, NC:

This is Lucy (now 13 years old), on 2/24/19, in her Santa hat and scarf. This is a historically rare photo, because they were only on her for about 5 seconds before she ripped them off, and she has never allowed me to tarnish her dignity with them again. Lucy is the best cat I’ve ever had: soft, cuddly, playful, easy to take care of, non-destructive, clean, funny.

From Ursula: “Edith guarding the stocking”:

From George Scott in Colorado:

A few years ago we had two sweet (usually) black cats, Christopher and Samantha. They passed away at the ages of 18 and 19, We miss having them around, but don’t miss some of the duties of being cat staff, so we replaced them with these two black plastic cats. Not as cuddly, but far easier to take care of.

From Reese Vaughan:

It’s Woodford Reserve again; his litter was named for liquor.  He lives in Texas.  Every year he takes a great interest in the Christmas tree. Here, he appears to be sniffing the lights, but the granddaughter says he bit them.

From JC McLoughlin:

Inkling oozes around the table leg in silent preparation for an assault on Ghrelin. NOT a pretty sight.

From Darrel E.:

This is one of our three, Princess Leia, making herself at home in the Christmas village under our tree. She is about 5 years old now.

We found Leia at our local humane society when she was about 3 months old. She was a feral that they had trapped with two other litter mates. They were not having any luck trying to habituate her to humans and were beginning to think they may not be able to adopt her out. We took her and had her out of her shell in a week, though she still has her quirks. She is the sweetest soul I have ever encountered.

From Shoshana:

I’m attaching picture of my Christmas cats. Yoda and Mendel are half brothers (same father) born six months apart. Both have mutations in KRT71, the same gene that causes curls in poodles and near hairlessness in the Canadian Sphynx. (Though visible in their truncated whiskers and wavy fur, I confirmed through Basepaws that they have the rexoid mutations. Other than that, they are moggies with a little bit of a lot of breeds—everything from Maine Coon and Norwegian Forest Cat to British and American Shorthair and Bengal, etc.)

From Bruce Cochrane:

Here are two of ours – Mothra and Rommel. Both are purebred Burmese, bred. By the late Delores Kennedy of Louisville. Rommel is 10, at more than lives up to his name. Mothra is 4 and did a lot to get us through COVID.

PS – we are up to N=8.

From Kevin Henderson of Los Alamos, New Mexico:

Jules (2) Lyra (15, black), and Opera (9, named after the Santa Fe Opera).  The lamb behind Lyra is g-2.  A physicist will get that reference.

From Brooke O’Neill in Atlanta

This is a picture of Peppermint – sadly now departed – on the Christmas day when she was gifted to my then- 7 yo daughter as a wee kitten. My daughter very aptly named her Peppermint since it was Christmas day and since the kitten had red (orange, really) and white stripes.

One of the first things my daughter did was tuck the kitten into the pink hat (don’t worry – the kitty was very cozy and content).

From Elizabeth Leahey-Martinez:

This is our rescue cat Lilah on her favorite blanket in front of what she considers her Christmas tree. Our vet believes Lilah is part Egyptian Mau, which is quite an interesting breed to read up on, as they have a unique skin fold under their belly that allows them to be more agile and jump very high, along with some other unique characteristics. Her mother was found pregnant wandering the streets of Fullerton, California. My vet and two sisters who run a rescue took her mother in and we adopted her about 5 years ago.

From Steven Eakman:

Here is our elder statesman, Nigel, addressing the assembly from his Pillow of Purrfect Pronouncements.

From Naama Pat-El:

Attached are pics of Mulan (fluffy grey and white) and Maryam with the tree. Our two other cats are less interested…

From Susan Harrison:

Here are Natasha (foreground), Boris, and their stuffed sibling — a.k.a.  Spirit Cat — enjoying the holidays.

From Dennis Howard Schneider:

Here is Bootz, a Hili lookalike. She was left on my porch 13 years ago around Christmas. She is one tough cookie:

From Linda Taylor (no cat name given), titled “Waiting for guests for Christmas Eve Dinner”:

From Steven Psycho:

Bif was found living in a tree at about 1 yr old. She just celebrated her 1 yr anniversary when she was found with her paws frozen to the driveway.

My daughter and her husband poured warm water on her feet to free her.  They brought Bif inside ” just until she recovers”. Bif has been a housecat ever since.

From Natalie in Berlin:

Stupsi is a 3 year old cat of Polish descent that welcomed me and my family into the new house we moved to this summer. She is a scepticat as you can see here – albeit a total sweetheart with the children whom she teaches good manners for long lasting happy relationships with their new cat master.

I asked her if she would put on a Santa hat to send as a Christmas greetings to your readers. Her answer I interpreted as “You must be joking.” The Christmas candle was more successful. The newly planted Christmas tree is pleasantly accepted as an opportunity for hide and seek games, pretending she is not there, and then jumping out from behind it to the surprised delighted giggles of our daughter Murielle (4). Really for atheists there is no better companion than a sweet Stupsi like her.

From reader Divy in Florida we have a Christmas-y Jango:

From Laurie:

Here is your niece, Miss Octavia Sadle, listening to her favourite xmas music!!!

Screenshot

And your namesake niece, Miss Alcestis Jerry, in her mummy’s lap!

From Sue Smalldon:

In the spirit of Christmas, spreading love and understanding, I wanted to share a heartwarming moment that happened this morning – Christmas morning. For the first time ever, my dog ‘Homer’ let one of my cats ‘Fearless Pussycat’ clean his ears! To understand this milestone, I should add that Homer doesn’t even let me clean his ears, so it was an absolutely thrilling WOW moment. Homer and Fearless Pussycat have always had a unique relationship. Fearless Pussycat, true to her name, is always bold and adventurous, while Homer is more reserved and protective. This special interaction between them was wonderful. Oh btw it reached 39.4 degrees Celsius today so that’s about 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Hence the fan  in the photo, although I’ve ended with both fans and the air conditioner on.

 

From Katey Keffalinos, we have a Christmas mouse:

Not a moggy, but a mousey! You were so good to post Cricket as a (rein)deer mouse a few years ago, so I was hoping you might share him as Santa (Crick Kringle, if you will). Cricket died shortly into the new year, and I miss the sweet little guy. He lived a long time for a deer mouse; 4 years, 7 months, and became very bonded with me, as he was not releasable due to neurological impairment. He was a champion nest builder, intrepid sofa climber (with my assistance and spotting), world class snuggler and brave cooperative patient at the vet for his regular nail trims, as well as tolerating silly hats and holiday photo shoots. He was very special. 

From Kevin Elsken of Springdale, Arizona.

I could not quite get the cats in a true Christmas pose, and actually we decided not to put up a tree with two 8 month old very active kittens running around! I include a photo of the kids: JB (flabby tabby), Misty (grey) and Sam (tuxedo). They are doing their best Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Other Cats imitation…

 

From Terence McLean in Edmonton, Alberta:

Here is Ruby in the tree again this year. She gets the zoomies and ends up in the tree for a break. Have a fantastic 2025.

Also from Stephen P., “Some cat figures and pics which are ubiquitous in Chiang Mai, Thailand.”  They must love their cats there

I’m sort of late this year, but if you can send me a photo of your cat in a Christmas theme, and also a few words about the cat (including its name), I’ll try to put these up tomorrow.

I just realized that Chanukah and Christmas and Coynezaa all begin on the same day this year. The latter two are by definition, but the coincidence of Chanukah and Christmas occurs only rarely.

If you don’t know where to send them, look at the left hand sidebar and click on “How to send me wildlife photos.”

NOTE:  I can use only one photo per contributor, so please send just one.

It’s not surprising to me that a mainstream liberal newspaper, the New York Times, would publish an op-ed on Christmas Eve that assumes the reality of Jesus as the son of God. There are of course endless lessons one can draw from this myth, and the NYT has always been soft on religion. Remember the op-ed column by Anglican minister Tish Harrison Warren, in which we were subject to a weekly dose of anodyne pap? (The paper apparently ditched her after a while.)

But today we get an essay from Peter Wehner that, to me, seems arrantly stupid in its very thesis. For that thesis is that IF you believe in Jesus’s genealogy, and IF you think that one’s genealogy beyond one’s parents could be a source of shame, THEN you could draw lessons from the story of Jesus as told in the Bible.  Every one of these links is weak, and yet the paper published the essay anyway. I’ll give a few quotes below (click below to read the article, or find it archived here, but don’t bother):

Wehner was impressed by a semon her heard at a Baptist Church, and simply draws on its content to show that Jesus was amazing in overcoming his lineage:

One of the forgotten facts of the story of Jesus’ life is that he came from a profoundly dysfunctional family.

I was reminded of this while listening to a sermon this month at Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. Chris Davis, the pastor of the church, took as his text the first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, known as the genealogy of Jesus. Those verses, a long list of names that ties one generation to another, are often skipped over in favor of the story of Jesus’ birth. To the degree that they have any meaning at all, it’s usually because for Christians it establishes Jesus as the heir to the promises God made to Abraham and David.

But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: “one generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.” There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters.

Now I’ve forgotten my New Testament (yes, I read it), but I’m not sure how broken Jesus’s fictional ancestry was. But let’s assume it was pretty screwed up. From that Wehner ()and Davis) draw the following conclusions, all based on assuming the truth of the New Testament). I’ve indented the quotes; bolding is mine:

1.) The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, “then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events.

The next lesson is pretty much the same:

2.) A Jesus who showed up from nowhere, fully grown and without ancestry, might have too. The actual Jesus, though, shows us something different. We are not our bloodlines or our family histories.

And the lesson in wokeness:

3.) But Jesus’ awareness of broken lives wasn’t restricted to his family tree; it defined his ministry. He identified with the least and the lowliest, not just those in his lineage but those in his life.

4.) The genealogy of Jesus is also a story of radical inclusion. Several of the women listed in the first chapter of Matthew are Gentiles [non Jews]. This incorporation has significance, according to Craig Barnes, a former president of Princeton Theological Seminary.

And that’s about it. Is there anything new here except to draw lessons from a work of fiction? Those lessons, in fact, are purely made up, and the last two are simply wrong. Yes, you could couch Jesus as a Social Justice Warrior, who included everyone in his great love, except for the fact that he stated that he himself was the only way to get to heaven. Remember John 14:6 in the King James Bible?

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

That alone should dispel the idea that Jesus’s teachings were inclusive, for what about all those nonbelievers outside of the Middle East who had no opportunity to accept Jesus. Further, Christian theology tells us that these were tainted by Original Sin, and, as unrepentant sinners, were doomed to fry for eternity in Hell.

Yes, what we have here is a believer cherry-picking Scripture to tell us something that everybody knows (if some of your ancestors—but not your parents!—were dysfunctional, you can overcome that); as well as telling us something that isn’t true (Jesus’s love extended to everyone), But yes, it’s the Christmas season, and it’s grinch-y to even say that Jesus might not really have been the wonder-working Son of God.

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

Well, of course the MSM has always been soft on religion, adhering, even if atheistic, to “belief in belief”. What bothers me is that one aspect of my own ideology, which is opposition to the performative and ineffectual forms of wokeness, is also getting soft on religion. I’m not referring to right-wing media like Fox News, which of course won’t go after religion, but to the liberal form of anti-wokeness. Like this article that just appeared in the Free Press (click to read). In some ways this one is worse than above, for it demonstrates the regret of a mother (the author) for not having imbued her children with more of the Jesus-y aspects of Christianity. And that despite the fact that author Larissa Phillips (founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project) and her husband are atheists. (This article isn’t fully archived.)

The thesis here is that yes, Christmas is a great time to get together with family, celebrate in traditional ways by opening presents, having a big feed, and socializing with others.  But this still leaves a God-shaped hole in one’s persona.  Now a mother with kids in her twenties, Phillips regrets not having injected more traditional religion into her kids’ upbringing. And remember, she and her partner are atheists. What gives?

Of all the treasures that came out of the cardboard box of Christmas decorations every December of my childhood, the nativity set was the best. Joseph, Mary, the kings, the shepherds: Our tiny figures were made of clay with a white glaze that looked like icing. I treated them like delicate, special dolls, rearranging them and moving them around the living room, from the coffee table to the stereo console, to the mantle. I might add a blanket for the baby, sometimes a scarf for Mary, cut from scraps of velvet or felt.

These are experiences that my own children, who are now 21 and 25, never had. Their father and I are atheists who, without debate, raised them entirely without religion. At Christmas, we still did the tree and the lights and the presents—all the secular parts of the holiday—and my kids knew the Christmas story, the way they knew about Greek myths. But there were no religious symbols in our home, and no going to church. In recent years, I’ve begun to regret this.

Apparently problems arise if you bring up your kids without Jesus. One of those problems is the Santa myth:

But right away, there were problems with secular Christmas, and they got worse every year.

Santa Claus, for example. If you’ve decided to raise your children without God because you are into truth and reason and rationality, are you going to tell them that Santa Claus is real? And refuse to budge even when your kids become stout little rationalists demanding answers? I thought it was bizarre to lie to your children, but by the time they started asking difficult questions, we were committed to Christmas. We went half in on the Santa delusion, referring to Santa with a wink.

Yes, but kids stop believing in Santa after a while, and you don’t see Santa-believers doing bad stuff to others. This isn’t always the case with Christians.  And then there is the Present Problem:

The problem with presents was worse and ever-worsening. I love presents. I love buying gifts and wrapping them and hiding them in secret places. I love the sight of a Christmas tree surrounded by presents. I love Christmas morning, sitting around in pajamas opening all the gifts. And when the kids were still little it was simple: Fill a stocking with a few chocolates and trinkets and wrap up some presents. Preschoolers are easy to impress. They like boxes more than anything else. (“Mom!” my 4-year-old daughter stage-whispered to me one Christmas morning, having peeked under the tree. “He brought clementines!”) But older kids always want more. By middle school my daughter had graduated to texting me an extensive shopping list with links. She once told me that her friends’ parents spend $1000 on each child. It made me wonder whether I should give up on presents completely.

Seriously? I know families whose present-giving is minimal, and I doubt that Amish or Orthodox Jewish families engage in this sort of wholesale gift-giving.

But the biggest problem is that God-shaped hole:

Maybe we didn’t have to reject every aspect of the religious traditions.

I’m sure my kids would have had complaints about church on Christmas Eve. I’m sure I would have too. I can imagine sitting in a pew silently grumbling about the minister’s call for obedience. My husband might have sighed pointedly when the man behind us sang too loudly. It wouldn’t have been perfect. But lately I can’t get those services at my grandmother’s church out of my mind. Even as a teenager it was impossible not to be moved by the sight of the familiar building at night, dressed up in garlands and ribbons, the stained glass windows in dark shadows, the altar flickering with candlelight, everyone in velvet dresses or ties or even suits. I remember the voices of the choir vibrating in my chest and the feeling of something very big and old and special.

My generation had the best of both worlds. We played in the crumbling remains of Christian traditions without realizing how much structure and beauty they gave us. I’m still an atheist, but I’ve come to believe that taking religion out of my children’s Christmas was a mistake. They never really witnessed the celebration of a miracle that goes back two thousand years. They didn’t have a nativity set, even though I loved mine, because when you scrub God from your holiday celebration, it’s strange to give your kids a tiny baby Jesus to play with. Isn’t it?

I’m not sure anymore. I couldn’t pass on to my kids a faith in God, but I could have shared the traditions that have always shaped and enchanted childhoods in this part of the world. The remnants were still there, and they were good. To today’s young atheist families building their annual rituals, I offer this advice: It’s okay if you don’t believe in God. Go to the Christmas Eve service anyway. Learn the carols, even the religious ones. Get the nativity set.

Yes, you have to let your kids see that celebration of a delusion.  But what Phillips is mourning here is not really the lack of traditional religious beliefs. She’s mourning what Richard Dawkins likes about Church: the ceremony, the incense, and the singing. What she’s talking about is not a god-shaped hole but a hymn-shaped hole.  The problem with this article is just that: it confects a problem that really doesn’t exist. Does atheist Phillips want her children simply to know more about religion? If so, give them a Bible? Or, if she wants her kids to hear hymns and sniff incense, well, that’s simply ceremony.  Yes, I went to midnight mass at Notre Dame when I lived in Paris, and it was quite the spectacle, with the swinging censers, the music, and the beautiful cathedral. But not for a minute did I believe what they were celebrating, and I could get the same feeling by going to a concert of Tagore songs.

Of course Bari Weiss, the founder of the Free Press, seems to be religiously Jewish; as far as I can see, there are aspects of Judaism that she believes in. But she’s not explicit about it, and so I can’t be sure that she’s not a secular Jew like me.  I’d like to ask her exactly what supernatural stuff she believes in, and what about this article merited its publication.

UPDATE: This just came up: an interview of Tom Holland by Bari Weiss:

An excerpt. Bolding is mine:

Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and resurrection, or you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity is among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.

Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—which amounted to half the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world, with more than 2 billion adherents.

How did the radical message of Christianity catch on? How did it change the world? And how does it shape all our lives today?

These questions motivate the latest episode of Honestly. My guest is the incredible historian Tom Holland, one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. His podcast, The Rest Is History, is among the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history’s most interesting characters and sagas. I can’t recommend it more highly.

I also recommend Tom’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In it, he argues that Christianity is the reason we have America, that it was the inspiration behind our revolution. He also argues that Christianity is the backbone of both “wokeness,” as an ideology, and liberalism, which so often sees itself as secular.

Oy vey! Something is going on at the Free Press. I guess it’s the claim that Christianity is the backbone not just of wokeness, but of liberalism.

As I noted yesterday, Biden has commuted the sentences of all but three federal prisoners on death row; they’ll now be serving life behind bars without parole instead. I insisted that this was an excellent decision, as I have never seen the sense of the government killing a prisoner.  Here are the pros and cons of capital punishment as I see them.

Pro:  People feel that somebody who does a bad crime deserves to be killed for it. The idea is that because the criminal made the victims suffer, he, too, should suffer as retribution for what was inflicted on his victims. It’s retribution, Jake!

Cons:  Because of litigation fees and the length of time before execution, as well as execution costs, it actually costs more to execute a prisoner than to keep him in prison until he dies.

If exculpating evidence surfaces, you can retry or free a living prisoner, but not one who’s been executed.

Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.

Capital punishment is purely retributive and, in the end, seems selfish as it satisfies the wishes of people to see other people dead.

The state should not be in the business of killing people. That is reserved for one’s opponents in wartime.

Prisoners sentenced to death have no opportunity to be rehabilitated. And surely some of them could be released eventually and become productive citizens, and enjoy the rest of their lives in freedom.

To a determinist, prisoners who commit capital crimes had no choice in the matter, and you don’t execute people for “making the wrong choice” if they didn’t have one.

Anyone who wants retribution should be able to find it in the idea that someone will spend the rest of his life in prison, which is a harsh punishment in itself.

Note that the cons heavily outweigh the pros. And that is surely why the U.S, is the only Western country to have the death penalty (Japan also has it, though it’s not really “Western”).

My question: is there ANY benefit to society in having the death penalty? It seems to hang around because it to afford a ghoulish kind of closure to those who feel strongly about what should happen to someone who commits a horrible crime. One of the most barbaric things I have seen is the crowd of people massed outside a prison on the eve of an execution, baying for blood.

I didn’t think Mossad admitted its involvement in “Beepergate“: the dissemination among Hezbollah of pagers and walkie-talkies that exploded on a signal last September.  It was key in demoralizing Hezbollah as well as eroding its power, and was cleverly targeted to avoid collateral damage. Apparently now we know that Mossad did this, since two ex-Mossad agents admitted it, and their story was shown on “60 Minutes” this week. It’s also recounted in the Times of Israel.

Here’s the 60 Minutes episode. What’s new: the walkie-talkies were disseminated ten years ago, but weren’t triggered until a few months ago. Since walkie-talkies are used only in battle, Mossad began to weaponize pagers as well. A series of shell companies in Taiwan and Hungary were set up to sell the devices to Hezbollah (they had exploding batteries) while completely masking Israel’s involvement.Multiple tests were done by Mossad to ensure that only the carrier of the pager (a Hezbollah fighter) would be injured. A big internet campaign was mounted to tout the advantages of the exploding beepers, which were larger and thus more cumbersome than conventional beepers.

To get the pagers only into the hands of Hezbollah, Mossad hired the woman who usually sold pagers to the terrorists. In toto, 30 Lebanese died and 3,000 were injured, almost all of them fighters. Yes, a few civilians were hurt, including children. But the vast majority of those injured were terrorists. All in all, the targeted episode was quite successful. It didn’t single-handedly bring about the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, but Hezbollah and its controlling state, Iran, have been set back on their heels.

The Toi article pretty much replicates what’s in the video, but I’ll emphasize one bit:

the psychological effect the attack had on Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a “tipping point of the war,” Gabriel said.

He asserted that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker. Asked how he knows that, Gabriel said, “It’s a strong rumor.”

Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.

People watch the speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as they sit in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel said. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”

In the days after the attack, Israel’s air force hit targets across Lebanon, killing thousands. Nasrallah was assassinated when Israel dropped bombs on his bunker.

By November, the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a byproduct of the deadly attack by Hamas-led terrorists in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, ended with a ceasefire.

Even given all the precautions, Leslie Stahl has the moxie to ask one of the ex Mossad agents whether this episode might make Israel worry about its “moral reputation.” Some question!

It’s been called to my attention that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) is up to mischief again. I haven’t written about it for a long time, largely because I thought it had reformed. It had largely stopped giving the $1+ million Templeton Prize to theologians and clerics, and awarding it to scientists instead—albeit scientists friendly to religion.  Further, the science that JTF was funding didn’t seem that bad or that connected to religion.

On the other hand, you’ll never see an explicitly atheist scientist get a Templeton Prize. That’s because of the history of the Foundation: John Templeton intended the billions he earned from his mutual fund to to show that science gave evidence for God. Ergo, for most of the JTF’s lifetime, the science it funded had a numinous or supernatural aspects to it. As Wikipedia notes:

The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton. Templeton became wealthy as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science.

Well, the bad old days seem to be back again.  If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll see the areas that the JTF is funding in life sciences, which appear to be areas that involve infusions into biology and evolution of goal-directedness and purpose. If those things do exist in evolution, it would constitute (or so JTF thinks) evidence for God.

The JTF, as the site above stipulates, is accepting proposals in three areas of biology, so if you want a pile of dosh and are willing to sell your soul, go ahead and send in proposals on these things:

This year we would like to receive project ideas in the following topic areas:

1.) 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.

2.) Epigenetic inheritance. We are interested in funding projects that elucidate fundamental genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate inter- and trans-generational transmittance of biological information and health outcomes. We are particularly interested in how early life choices and environmental exposures causally impact development and the early onset of disease, and diagnostic platforms that may predict generational disease susceptibility.

3.) Other areas of interest. We also remain open to innovative ideas in other areas of basic research in the biological sciences, such as also origins of life, complexity, emergence, evolution, human development, plant resilience, and ecological health and interventions.

This is the first of two posts on the area “the science of purpose”, an area that is, frankly, nuts.  Evolution does not produce adaptations that are purposive and goal-directed, save for the production in some organisms of mentation and consciousness that can, psychologically, enact deliberately purposive behavior. But that’s limited only to a few groups of organisms  And, as you’ll see, that’s not all the JTF or the biologists it funds are talking about. What they’re referring to is the recent drive to impute a kind of teleology to nature, as if the evolution of organisms was somehow driven externally to achieve adaptive ends, and driven not by natural selection but. . . . well, by various poorly explained mechanisms. A group of biologists dedicated to non-Darwinian adaptation, and a group that contains many of the people who purport to have deposed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, can be seen at the site “The Third Way” (Its list of members, by invitation only, can be seen here). Not all of the researchers there have bought into the teleological aspects of evolutionary biology, but some have, and as a whole they haven’t contributed much to the advances of evolutionary biology.  Here’s what the Third Way is said to represent:

The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. [JAC: My response to the preceding sentence is “No it doesn’t!”] Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. Many scientists today see the need for a deeper and more complete exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary process.

By funding these alternatives, Templeton hopes that people will, by thinking that modern evolutionary theory, or “neo-Darwinism” has been rejected, be more likely to see the hand of god in science. And although the Third Way also rejects “arbitrary supernatural forces”, many take the third way to be actions of the numinous (Intelligent Design advocates love it.)

In fact, a lot of the speculation of “Third Way” theories borders on the teleological, though religion doesn’t play an explicit role. Or, rather, the “religion” involved is to depose a neo-Darwinism seen as dogmatic and constricting. To see how close some of the “Third Way” biology comes to invoking teleology, see this short take by Larry Moran on the ideas of a Third Way member, James Shapiro (Moran had a longer review of Shapiro’s ideas in a book review, but it’s no longer online.) One excerpt from the shorter Moran:

James Shapiro is one of those scientist who think that evolutionary theory is due for a “paradigm shift.” His schtick is that mutations often involve genome rearrangements and that reorganization of the genome may be a sort of “natural genetic engineering” that cells use to direct evolution. It’s hard to figure out what Shapiro actually means and even harder to figure out his motives. I posted an earlier comment from him that suggests he is looking for a middle ground between science and Intelligent Design Creationism. Here’s part of that earlier post: The Mind of James Shapiro.

“Natural genetic engineering” is in fact teleological.

Why Templeton loves the “science of purpose,” and throws a ton of money at research in this area, is because it supposedly shows that there is more to the origin of adaptations than mutation and natural selection, and a lot more more to evolutionary change than just change in genes or regulatory sequences of DNA (ergo the emphasis on “epigenetic inheritance” above).  And that feeds into the JTF’s original aim of showing that science points to God, renamed by them as “agency” or “purpose” in the new proposals.

In fact, meet the old proposals: same as the new proposals. Below is a grant given to a group of scientists for three years by the JTF, ending in August of this year. Click to read, though I give a summary below. Note that the grant awarded amounted to $14.5 million, a huge amount of money.  JTF is rich because John Templeton was a very wealthy manager of a mutual fund, and his eponymous Foundation has plenty of money (an endowment of over $3.3 billion in 2015) to fund his desire to find purpose and God in nature. Sadly, there are too many scientists eager to glom onto this money. After all, NSF and NIH grants are hard to get these days, and so what’s the issue if, by getting JTF money, you become just another prize stallion in the Templeton stable?

Here is that grant (click to go to it):

Here’s what, according to the JTF, the $14.6 million went for. Bolding is mine:

Although biologists often use descriptive language that imputes purposiveness to living systems, many have argued that these conceptions are at best heuristic, and at worst egregious errors. However, there is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests. This project addresses the demand through a novel, interdisciplinary, large-scale program that combines philosophers, theoreticians, and experimentalists to: (i) articulate more precise concepts related to function and purpose, (ii) develop innovative formal models of agency, (iii) operationalize notions of goal-directedness for accurate measurement, and (iv) trial and implement methods and platforms to detect and manipulate directionality in living systems. Seven clusters composed of multiple distinct research groups under the leadership of a coordinator will undertake collaborative activities that include within-team investigative tasks (e.g., conceptual analysis, formal modeling, and experimental inquiry), within-cluster workshops and briefings, and across-project conferences with strategic writing enterprises and outside commentators. These collaborative activities leverage the fact that each cluster is organized around key concepts (e.g., function and goal-directedness), modeling practices, and distinctive phenomena at diverse temporal and spatial scales—behavior, development, ecology, genomics, and macroevolution—and will result in conceptual, theoretical, and empirical outputs comprising foundations for a multidisciplinary science of purpose. These foundations will foster new lines of scientific research based on an increased array of conceptual possibilities, distinctive formal modeling strategies, and next-generation experimental platforms for the discovery, observation, and manipulation of purposive phenomena.

Note that, contra the Templetonian mishgass, there is no “purpose” or “goal” of evolution, whether it be by natural selection or other mechanisms like meiotic drive or genetic drift. If natural selection operates (and that’s the only process we know that can create adaptations), then there is no ultimate goal because natural selection has no foresight. Rather, mutations that leave more copies of themselves—often by improving the ability of their carriers to thrive in their environments—outcompete other gene forms that aren’t so prolific. Evolution by natural selection is a step-by-step process that has no ultimate goal, even if a well-adapted organism, like a woodpecker, looks as if was designed. That’s why evolution can go backwards, as it did several times when land animals, which evolved from fish, returned to the seas as whales and seals.

It was in fact Darwin’s great achievement to explain the illusion of design by a Creator as the results of a materialistic step-by-step process that had no ultimate goal. Given the way selection works, how could there be a “goal”? How could there be a “purpose”?

But, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades: purpose and goals are back again. Templeton has funded their study, and apparently intends to continue to funding their study.

In the next post, which will be either today or tomorrow depending on how much other work I get done, I’ll call your attention to a new paper that highlights why injecting “purpose” and “goal directedness” into evolution is intellectually vacuous and empirically unproductive.  Although I’m not surprised that Templeton is pushing this area, I am surprised at the number of scientists who are willing to jump on the purpose bus. I can explain this only by observing that one of the best ways you can get noticed in science is to depose an existing paradigm.

Here’s the header of the JTF’s homepage. Are those praying hands I see? And is that the robe of a Buddhist monk?

I’ve mentioned before Robert Sapolsky’s recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, a 528-page behemoth that at times is a bit of a slog and at other times an inspiration. (See here, here, here, and here for previous posts about it.) I found his argument against libertarian free will convincing, but of course I already believed that there is no good argument for libertarian (“you-could-have-done-otherwise”) free will (LFW), so I was on his side from the outset. I’m a hard determinist, and that’s based on seeing that the laws of physics obtain everywhere. But people are still maintaining not just that we can confect some form of free will despite the truth of determinism (these people are called “compatibilists”), but that we have real libertarian free will. They are wrong.

The video below, arguing for LFW, came in an email from Quillette touting their most popular articles of 2024.  But this was a short (4.5-minute) video, not an article, and I don’t think the video was one of the top items. Perhaps the note referred to a Quillette article by Stuart Doyle (below) on which the video is based, but that article was published in 2023.

At any rate, listen to the video first, and then, if you want to see what I consider an unconvincing argument against free will (though it does make some fair criticisms of Determined), click on the headline below to read Doyle’s argument that we have “not disproven free will.”

The narrator of the video isn’t named, but she pretty much parrots what’s in Doyle’s essay, emphasizing an argument for free will that Doyle considers dispositive, but to me seems irrelevant.

You may notice some problems with the “rebuttal” described in the video. For example, it seems irrelevant to argue that “just because a neuron doesn’t have free will doesn’t mean that the bearer of a collection of neurons (a person) doesn’t have free will.”  This is an argument that the emergent property of LFW can still appear even if neurons themselves behave according to physical law (a large argument in Sapolsky’s book).  Also, if quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable (and we don’t know this for sure), that itself, says the narrator, poses a problem for free will, because it means that, at any given moment, a quantum event may change your behavior.

There are two problems with the quantum-indeterminacy argument. First, nobody ever maintained that quantum events like the movement of an electron can result from one’s volition (“will”), so unpredictability at a given moment does not prove volition. Further, we don’t even know (and many of us doubt) that a quantum event can change human behavior or decisions on a macro level. Some people have calculated that it can’t.  So the whole issue of quantum unpredictability is irrelevant to the main problem: whether, at a given moment, you can, through your own agency, have behaved or decided differently.

This brings up the problem of predictability. The narrator’s (and Doyle’s) argument is that if you cannot predict someone’s behavior or decision—even with perfect knowledge of everything—then we have free will. As I just said, quantum physics may cause such fundamental unpredictability, but doesn’t support the notion that we have LFW  Yet the video and Doyle suggest there is another form of fundamental unpredictability that can cause a lack of predictability despite perfect physical knowledge: computational undecidability. Both the narrator and Doyle accuse Sapolsky of complete ignorance of this concept, which, they say, constitutes “a major flaw in Sapolsky’s argument.”  The narrator says that if human behavior is fundamentally unpredictable, then it supports the idea that free will exists. The premise of this criticism is, of course, is that if you can’t predict human behavior and decisions, even with perfect physical knowledge, then you can’t say that we lack free will. But these arguments using predictability are flimsy arguments against determinism, and, in fact, we’ll never have the perfect knowledge we need to predict behavior.

The problem is that quantum mechanics can in principle wreck perfect predictability of behavior, but that possibility doesn’t support free will. So does “computational undecidability”, another thing that impedes prediction, leave room for free will? I don’t think so (see below).

 

The essay by Stuart Doyle on which this video is based can be accessed by clicking the link below, or you can find it (archived here). Doyle is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Kansas.

Let me start by saying that Doyle’s essay, while it makes its points clearly and strongly, seems almost mean, as if Doyle takes great joy in telling us how stupid Sapolsky is.  And this is coming from someone (me) who’s been accused of the same thing. (I plead not guilty, at least for my published work.). But for a scholar publishing a rebuttal on a major site, it seems to me uncharitable to say stuff like this:

Sapolsky’s conclusions about morality and politics stand on nothing beyond his personal tastes. His book was marketed with such authoritative headlines as “Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will.” In contrast to the hype, Determined is ultimately a collection of partial arguments, conjoined incoherently. And Robert Sapolsky is to blame.

Sapolsky is to blame? Well, yes, of course he is, he’s the author, but the concept of blaming someone for writing a book they don’t like, and and accusing them of incoherence (I disagree) is not civil discourse. But let’s move on.

The observation that every object in the universe obeys physical law does directly imply that there is no amorphous “will” that can affect the laws of physics, something that physicist Sean Carroll (a compatibilist) has emphasized. To me, this puts the onus on those who accept LFW to tell us what aspect of human volition is independent of the laws of physics.What form of nonphysical magic can change the output of our neurons? So far, nobody has done this.  Thus, to a large extent, I think, one can tentatively accept determinism simply from knowing that every physical object obeys well-known laws and, as Carroll has written, “The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.”  Carroll:

All we need to account for everything we see in our everyday lives are a handful of particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons — interacting via a few forces — the nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism — subject to the basic rules of quantum mechanics and general relativity. You can substitute up and down quarks for protons and neutrons if you like, but most of us don’t notice the substructure of nucleons on a daily basis. That’s a remarkably short list of ingredients, to account for all the marvelous diversity of things we see in the world.

So yes, Carroll is a determinist in a way that refutes libertarian free will, but in the link saying he’s a compatibilist, you’ll see that he says that we have a sort of free will instantiated in the emergent properties of humans acting as agents and expressing preferences. (Of course our tastes and preferences are also formed in our brain by the laws of physics.) Well, there is no real emergence that defies the laws of physics: emergence may not be predictable from lower-level phenomena, but it is consistent and derives from  lower-level phenomena. Saying, as Doyle does, that “The ‘mechanism’ that produces deliberative choices is the whole person” is to say nothing that refutes determinism.

As I reread Doyle’s paper, I realized that although he does point out some contradictions in Sapolsky’s arguments, Doyle does nothing to dispel determinism.  What appears to be the central contention of his essay is that there is another way that physical objects can behave unpredictably beyond quantum mechanics, and that way is computational decidability. But that supports LFW no more than does any unpredictability of quantum mechanics.

Here’s what Doyle says:

So what could give us the ability to surprise Laplace’s demon? Computational undecidability. This is a term describing a system that cannot be predicted, given complete knowledge of its present state. This fundamental unpredictability shows up in algorithmic computation, formal mathematical systems, and dynamical systems. Though an unpredictable dynamical system may evoke the concept of chaos, undecidability is a different sort of unpredictability. As described by one of the greatest living information theorists, C.H. Bennett:

For a dynamical system to be chaotic means that it exponentially amplifies ignorance of its initial condition; for it to be undecidable means that essential aspects of its long-term behavior—such as whether a trajectory ever enters a certain region—though determined, are unpredictable even from total knowledge of the initial condition.

If a system exhibits undecidability, then it is unpredictable even to Laplace’s demon, while a system that is merely chaotic is perfectly predictable to the demon. Chaos is only unpredictable because the initial conditions are not perfectly known. So it would be fair to dismiss that kind of unpredictability as mere ignorance—an epistemological issue, not an ontological reality. But the delineation between the epistemic and the ontic falls apart when we talk about what Laplace’s demon can’t know. An issue is “merely” epistemological when there is a fact of the matter, but the fact is unknowable. There actually is no fact about how an undecidable system will behave until it behaves. For a fact to exist, it must be in reference to some aspect of reality. But nothing about present reality could ground a fact about the future behavior of an undecidable system. In contrast, the exact actual state of present reality grounds facts about the future of chaotic systems. We just can’t know the exact actual state of present reality, thus unpredictability is “merely” epistemological in the case of chaos, but not in the case of undecidability.

Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves, with no fact of the matter of what we’ll choose before we choose it. But Sapolsky seems unaware of undecidability as a concept. He mislabels cellular automata as chaotic, rather than recognizing the truth that they exhibit undecidability. This is a major factual error on Sapololsky’s part.

First of all, from what I’ve read of computational undecidability, it is a phenomenon not of physical objects, but of  philosophy combined with mathematical concepts and models. As Wikipedia says (and yes, I’ve read more than that article):

There are two distinct senses of the word “undecidable” in contemporary use. The first of these is the sense used in relation to Gödel’s theorems, that of a statement being neither provable nor refutable in a specified deductive system. The second sense is used in relation to computability theory and applies not to statements but to decision problems, which are countably infinite sets of questions each requiring a yes or no answer. Such a problem is said to be undecidable if there is no computable function that correctly answers every question in the problem set. The connection between these two is that if a decision problem is undecidable (in the recursion theoretical sense) then there is no consistent, effective formal system which proves for every question A in the problem either “the answer to A is yes” or “the answer to A is no”.

Two points here. First, Doyle gives not one example of a biological system in which “computational undecidability” would obtain.  If there was one, why didn’t he mention it? It seems to me solely a mathematical/logical concept, and my (admittedly cursory) readings have turned up nothing in biology or physics that seems “computationally undecidable”, much less in a way that would give us free will.

Second, even if there is a fundamental and non-quantum form of unpredictability in physics and biology, that doesn’t open up the possibility of free will. That would depend on whether our “will” could, in some non-physical way, affect the behavior of molecules. If it cannot happen with quantum mechanics, then how can it happen with computational undecidability? Unless Doyle tells us how this mathematical/logical idea can somehow affect our behavior according to our “will”, he has no argument against determinism and thus has no argument for free will.

Now it’s true that belief in “physical determinism—folding into that term quantum and other unpredictable effects not affected by our volition)—is largely a conclusion from observing nature. But just because we cannot absolutely prove determinism of behavior from science, we can still increase determinism’s priors by various experiments. These include recent studies showing that you can predict, using brain scanning, binary decisions that people make before they are conscious of having made them. For example, if people are given a choice of adding or subtracting two numbers, scanning their brains shows that you can, with substantial probability (60-70%), predict whether they’ll add or subtract up to ten seconds before they are conscious of having made a choice. And this is from crude methods of measuring brain activity (e.g., fMRI). Perhaps by measuring individual neurons or groups of neurons we could predict even better. But the experiments so far imply that decisions are made before people are conscious of them, and that raises the Bayesian priors that people’s behaviors are determined by physics, not by their “will”.

And there are various other experiments showing that you can both increase or decrease people’s sense of volition.  Electrical stimulation of the brain can make people think that they made a decision when in fact it’s purely the result of stimulating certain neurons. This causes people to make up stories of why they did things like raise their hand when a part of their brain is stimulated (“I decided to wave at that nurse”). But that sense of volition is bogus. This kind of post facto confabulation, which occurs very soon after you decide something or do something, is what makes us think what we have LFW. Further, there may be evolutionary reasons why we think we have libertarian free will, but I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that I think that our feeling of having LFW is merely a very powerful illusion—an illusion that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection.

On the other hand, you can make people think that they didn’t have volition when in fact they did. A Ouija board is one example: people unconsciously move the “cursor” around to make words when they think that it’s moving independently of their will.  There are other experiments like these, all showing that you can either strengthen or weaken people’s sense of volition and will using various psychological tricks.  And they all go to refute the idea of libertarian free will

So yes, I think Sapolsky is right. His determinism agrees with nearly all the scientists (including compatibilists) who think that the notion of libertarian free will is bogus. To think otherwise is to believe that there is some kind of non-physical mental magic that can change the laws of physics.

One final point. Arguments about free will are not just philosophical wheel-spinning, for they play directly into an important part of society: reward and punishment—especially punishment. If the legal system truly embraced determinism of behavior, we could still have punishment, but it would be very different. We would punish to keep bad people off the streets, to give people a chance for rehabilitation (if they can be rehabilitated), and to deter others.  But what we would not have is retributive punishment: punishment for having made the wrong choice.

Legal systems are grounded on the notion that we are morally responsible, but under determinism we’re not. Yes, we can be responsible for an act, but “moral” responsibility is intimately connected with libertarian free will; it’s the idea that we have the ability, at any given time, to act either morally or immorally (or make any any other alternative decision, even if it doesn’t involve morality). Yes, I know there are some who think that the justice system already implicitly accepts determinism, but they are wrong. For if it did, we wouldn’t have any form of retributive punishment, including capital punishment.

As for rewarding good behavior, well, yes, you couldn’t have done otherwise than, say, saved a drowning person. But rewarding people who do good is a spur for other people to do good.  Even if the rewarded people don’t “deserve” plaudits in the sense that their accomplishments didn’t come from LFW, handing out rewards for things that society approves of is simply a good thing to do—for society.

Oh, a p.s.  Because people feel so strongly that they do have libertarian free will, I have faced more opposition when touting determinism than when touting the truth of evolution. As I always say, “It’s much harder to convince a free-willer of the truth of determinism than to convince a creationist of the truth of evolution.”  People feel so strongly that they have LFW that I have suffered two unpleasant consequences for touting determinism. I’ve told these stories before, but a big jazz musician nearly attacked me for implying that his solos were not truly extemporaneous, and that he could not have played a different solo, and on another occasion an old friend kicked me out of his house because he couldn’t abide the notion of determinism. No creationist has ever treated me in those ways!

This being Sunday, John Avise is here with some pictures, and remember that he’s moved on to butterflies. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

First, I’d like to wish all WEIT readers a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Coynezaa, or whatever else you may be celebrating during this special season.  This week continues the 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.

Bramble Green Hairstreak (Callophrys dumetorum):

Brazilian Skipper (Calpodes ethlius), underwing:

Brown Elfin, Callophrys augustinus:

Cabbage White (Pieris rapae), male:

Cabbage White, female:

Cabbage White, underwing:

California Dogface (Zerene eurydice), male underwing:

JAC: This butterfly was on a stamp:

Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Designed by Stanley Galli., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

California Dogface female underwing:

California Dogface, male upperwing:

California Dogface, female upperwing:

California Dogface, larvae on False Indigo Bush (Amorpha fruticosa):

California Hairstreak (Satyrium californica):

California Ringlet (Coenonympha california), dark morph:

California Ringlet, light morph:

California Ringlet, mating pair:

I think in the last year a trope has originated in which orange cats are said to be mischievous and weird.  I’m not sure about that, but several studies (two below) report a paper that has apparently found the gene that, when mutated, causes a cat to be orange. From the first source (click on headlines to read):

Orange cats have earned an online reputation for being chaotic, energetic rascals. But among scientists, they’ve long been known for something else: the enduring mystery of their distinctive coats.

Now, two independent studies by American and Japanese scientists have probed the genetic origins of these cats’ color—and, working separately, the teams reached the same conclusion. They suggest that orange cats have their bright, warm pelts as a result of genetic variations on their X chromosomes. The papers, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, were recently posted to the preprint server bioRxiv.

Scientists Greg Barsh from Stanford University and Hiroyuki Sasaki from Japan’s Kyushu University and their teams studied feline genomes to pinpoint which protein encoded by a cat’s genes brought out the orange hue. What they found was astonishing: a tiny deletion on the cat’s DNA influenced its entire color scheme.

“Our work provides an explanation for why orange cats are a genetic unicorn of sorts,” Kelly McGowan, a Stanford University geneticist who participated in the American study, says to Tom Howarth at Newsweek. The orange cat is a “fascinating exception” to the way orange-like color variants occur in many other domestic species, such as dogs, sheep, horses or rabbits, she adds.

In most other mammals, mutations in a protein called Mc1r lead to red hair color. But this has failed to explain orange color patterns in cats. “It’s been a genetic mystery, a conundrum,” Barsh tells Science’s Sara Reardon.

Instead, the new studies point to a gene called Arhgap36, a protein on the X chromosome. It had never been in the lineup of potential candidates for the “orange gene,” so to speak, because it controls aspects of embryonic development. As a result, scientists thought major mutations to Arhgap36 would likely kill the animal, Barsh said.

Nevertheless, Barsh’s team found that Arhgap36 in orange cats produced almost 13 times more RNA—molecules that help translate DNA into proteins the body can use—compared to the same gene in other types of cats. When they took a closer look, they saw that an increased amount of Arhgap36 in melanocytes, or skin cells that produce hair color, led to production of a light red pigment, making a cat’s fur appear orange.

From The Smithsonian Magazine (click to read):

The article below from phys.org implies (it’s never stated explicitly in the non-scientific literature) that the gene which, when mutated, causes orange-colored fur, also causes black or other coloration when it occurs in other forms. Since the genes for coloration are on the X chromosome, and males are XY (the Y carries no color genes), males can be black or orange, but never both because they have only one X chromosome=. Females, with two Xs, can show both colors, and that’s why calico and tortoiseshell cats, with black and orange, as well as white, are nearly always females, as you see below. (Rare XXY torties occur, and they’re male but show the black-and-orange pattern.

The reason why you have different-colored patches of fur in torties and calicos is because “dosage compensation” in females in effected by having one X chromosome turned off in each cell, and adjacent cells inherit that condition. Thus one gets patches of orange and black (or white) corresponding to parts of the fetal kitten in which the different X chromosomes are activated and inactivated.

Here’s a calico cat (female):

Ellisn95, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As Wikipedia notes, “A calico cat is not to be confused with a tortoiseshell, who has a black undercoat and a mostly mottled coat of black/red or blue/cream with relatively few to no white markings. ”  Here’s a tortie:

Lucashawranke, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Iceland harbors the saga of the Yule Cat (Jólaköttur ), whose myth originated around 1862, It is a fearsome felid. As Wikipedia notes:

The Yule cat (Icelandic: Jólakötturinn, IPA: [ˈjouːlaˌkʰœhtʏrɪn], also called Jólaköttur and Christmas cat) is a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic Christmas folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Christmas season and eat people who do not receive new clothing before Christmas Eve. In other versions of the story, the cat just eats the food of people without new clothes. Jólakötturinn is closely associated with other figures from Icelandic folklore, considered the pet of the ogress Grýla and her sons, the Yule Lads.

ZME Science says the story actually originated in the Dark Ages but wasn’t written down until the mid-1800s. Here’s how the myth goes:

In Medieval Iceland, employers rewarded their employees and members of their households with new clothes and sheepskin shoes. The gifts were made as a reward for a year of hard work and as a motivator to finish the work before Christmas — particularly processing the autumn wool. Here’s the thing, though: if you didn’t have new clothes for Christmas, the dreaded Yule Cat would come out and eat you — and this was no ordinary cat.

It towers above the tallest buildings, prancing around Iceland looking for people without new clothes. It especially looks for children and inspects them to see if they have new garments. If they were too lazy to earn them, the unfortunate children might just end up on the menu of the Yule Cat.

Over time, the legend evolved. You don’t need to buy new clothes every year, one way to avoid the Yule Cat’s claws is by being generous: Gifting clothes to the less fortunate also keeps the cat at bay.

Here’s a cartoon of a girl with new clothes who gets saved from the  Jólaköttur, while her brother, bereft of new garb, seems to have been badly scratched (though not eaten):

And below is a video of Björk singing a song about the Jólaköttur.  The Icelandic lyrics are at the YouTube site, and here’s their Google translation (Listen for the word “Jólakötturrinn” in the first line.)

You know the Christmas cat
that cat was a giant
People didn’t know where he came from
or where he went

He opened his eyes
both glowing
It wasn’t for the fainthearted
to look at them

The combs were sharp as thorns
up from his back
and the claws on his hairy paws
were ugly to see

That’s why the women competed
with combs and looms and spinning wheels
and knitted colorful scarves
or little socks

Because the cat wasn’t allowed to come
and tease the children a little
They had to make clothes
from the adults

And when the lights were turned on on Christmas Eve
and the cat peeked in
the children stood there, red and excited
with their parcels

He waved the stele strongly
he jumped and he scratched and blew
and was sometimes up in the valley
or out on the headland

He hovered, hungry and fierce
in the bitterly cold Christmas snow
and made the hearts tremble
on every farm

If there was a pitiful sleigh outside
the misfortune was immediately certain
Everyone knew that he hunted men
but did not want mice

He laid down on the poor people
who did not get any new sleighs
for Christmas – and struggled and lived
in the poorest conditions

From that he took the food
at once
all of their Christmas food
and ate it most of the time almost by himself
if he could

That was why the women competed
with combs and looms and spinning wheels
and knitted colorful scarves
or little socks

Some of them got aprons
and some had received shoes
or something that was considered necessary
but that was enough

Because the cat could not eat anyone
who received some clothing
Then she hissed rather badly
and ran away

Whether she still exists, I do not know
but her path would be sad
if everyone next
had some bread

You may now have in mind
to help, if there is a need
maybe some children
who do not get anything

Perhaps, the search for those who suffer
from the lack of light in the world around
gives you a good day
and a merry Christmas

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The description of this video, which appears to have gone viral, is this:

This hilarious video shows the moment a hungry moggy would not let anything get in the way of his dinner. Plume the cat bursts through a wall of snow after his owner put a dish of his favourite grub out and calls the famishing feline.

The cat, who is a sprightly 14-year-old, was caught on camera by his owner Ann Got after she noticed he tried to make a hole in previous snowdrifts. As the footage rolls, a chilly Plume can be seen outside before Ann, 25, opens the back door to reveal a pile of snow up against. Then as Ann shouts she has food seconds later Plume bashes his way through the snow drift.

Ann said: “This happened after a huge snowstorm in Gaspe, in Quebec, Canada, on February 16. “Plume had made this entrance before then I was thinking he can make it again and then after some more snow he did it again. “I have been surprised but the funny reaction, but we have had some people say he was thrown through, which he was definitely not. “He’s just a very straightforward cat.” Video licensing : agencemediafailsworld@gmail.com

 

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Lagniappe from Cat Memes: From Iceland, a depiction in lights of the Jólaköttur:

h/t: Russell