Why Evolution is True Feed

It’s another slow day as the year creeps snailwise to its end, and I’m feeling dolorous and had another bad bout of insomnia last night. The good news is that there’s nothing intellectual afoot that I feel compelled to write about.  The other good news is that you get to take a QUIZ, one pointed out in the NYT but located another site that’s free.  Here’s what the NYT says (archived here):

Now, from IDR Labs, comes the social media-friendly Food Social Class Test, a casual online survey based on a data-driven academic report published in 2020 by Silvia Bellezza and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania. That work was broadly derived from research into the connections between social class and the things we choose to put in our mouths — a link explored in the early 1980s by the French academic and intellectual Pierre Bourdieu.

Mr. Bourdieu’s work sharply skewered myths of social mobility in a postindustrial society. He found, unsurprisingly, that in many ways those at the top of the capitalist food chain go to considerable lengths to safeguard and maintain social privilege and generational wealth.

Which brings us to the twice-baked potato topped with melted Cheddar and bacon bits: Reader, I took the test.

In it, each of the 35 menu options is offered as a silhouetted photo with a bar beneath it for rating a selection. Users are encouraged to rate such things as a Cheddar-topped baked potato by indicating the degree to which they “agree” or “disagree” with it. Though there are plenty of things with which this reporter quibbles on a daily basis, seldom has a baked potato provoked him to argument.

. . .Simply select menu items with caloric values in the low triple digits and you are quickly aligned with high-class culinary ways. If it is true that you can never be too rich or too thin, as the Duchess of Windsor is believed to have remarked, it goes without saying that you cannot achieve the latter benchmark by scarfing down Sloppy Joes. We live, after all, in an Ozempic era.

So never mind the fried fish sticks, the potato chips, the defrosted pizza, the chicken nuggets, or the hot dog with all the trimmings. Forget the Mac ’n Cheese or even the Truffle Mac ’n Cheese, presumably featured on the survey as a snob trap. Adding two small discs of fragrant fungus to a dish that is otherwise a gloppy, glutinous cholesterol nightmare does not significantly elevate it on the class scale.

That seems rather snobbish to me; I just like food that tastes good, and that’s how I rated them.

Here’s the site and the first example. Click on the “Food Test” icon below to take the quiz (and you know you will!):

One example: here’s the first of 35 items I chose. You have five choices for each item: really bad, bad, so-so (leave it in the middle), tasty, and REALLY tasty. Just move the cursor to one of the four spaces or leave it in the middle:

And here’s my result: I have “upper middle class” food choices. I don’t know what to think about that (I added the arrow).

In truth, I liked nearly everything, but somethings more than others (I wasn’t keen on the truffle mac ‘n’ cheese, which is like putting a pig in a fur coat, or on the tuna tartare tacos, a bad concept). Take it yourself and let us know how you did in the comments below. I wonder if anybody will come out “lower class”.  I urge readers to take the test because I want to know how people do!

Did you find the cat amongst the owls in today’s Hili Dialogue? If not, I’ve circled it below.

There’s not much news today, it’s cold and gray, and my building is empty, as all the sane people appear to have already buggered off for the holidays. Feel free to talk or rant about what you want below. For example, here’s one thought I had: “Increasing decrepitude with age is nature’s way of preparing you for death. In other words, by the time one gets really old and hobbled with many ailments and pains, it becomes easier to die.”

It’s time to tell each other what we’re reading and what we think of the books. The object, of course, is to give all of us hints about what we might want to read.

I’ve just finished two books, both of them good  (of course both were recommended by a friend who knows good writing), and I recommend both, but especially this first one, which is superb. Click on the cover to go to the Amazon site:

There’s a Wikipedia article about this 1999 novel here, but don’t read it if you don’t want to see the whole plot. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s about a Japanese-Korean man, Franklin Hata, who has moved to a small suburban town in New York, running a pharmacy-supplies store. He’s done well and has, in fact, become his town’s model citizen, eventually giving up his store and living a happy and prosperous retirement, having adopted, as a single man, a Korean girl named Sunny.

The one unhappy aspect of his life is that he can’t seem to form stable love relationships, not with Sunny nor with any of the several women he fancies. The reason involves a series of flashbacks to when Hata was serving in the Japanese Army in World War II (there are flashbacks involving nearly every relationship in the book), and a relationship he developed at that time, which haunts his whole existence. I will say no more, except that the prose is beautiful (a sine qua non for novels I like). HIGHLY recommended, and it should have won more awards than it did. I don’t think it was made into a movie, but it really should have been.

Here’s the book I just finished (click to go to Amazon site):

That one, from 2005, also has a Wikipedia page. Nathan Glass, stricken with cancer, moves to Brooklyn to live out his days in a pleasant urban environment (he’s the opposite of Franklin Hata, who hated cities). He meets his nephew, and then ensues series of random and unpredictable episodes involving an antique bookstore, long-lost relatives, and fractious relationships with other people.  It’s a good read, and a short one, so it’s a good book to take along on a trip or the beach (if you happen to live in a warm place). I would recommend it, but not nearly as highly as I would A Gesture Life.

I’m not going to read the other three essays in the Ta-Nehisi Coates book The Message, for his Israel-essay debacle put me off him for a while. Instead, I have two books in line. I started the first one, below, last night. It’s from 2001 and I have found but not read its Wikipedia page. (Click to go to the Amazon site.)

After that one, I’ll attack this monster, which I’ve requested on interlibrary loan (I have no more room to put any books I buy, so I get them all from the University Library). Click to go to the Amazon page. At 864 pages, this one is a monster, but, unlike the kids, I like long books. It was published in 2004, is highly regarded, and has its own Wikipedia page that I refuse to read.

It seems that I’m on a fiction kick lately, which isn’t usual for me, but the books that my literary advisor recommends, which have all been good, are guaranteed not to contain a clunker. As for nonfiction, I’m still waiting for Robert Caro to produce his fifth volume of the LBJ biography that I love so much (I think it’s the best biography ever written, at least that I’ve read), but Caro is now 89 and it’s a race against time.  The previous bio that I thought was the best, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, was abruptly truncated after volume 1 because Manchester died. I’d still recommend reading the first volume, even though it ends right as Winnie becomes Prime Minister and things would be getting even more interesting.

Your turn. Which books have you read lately, and which do you recommend (or not recommend)?

UPDATE: The site to which I refer below disappeared for a while this morning, and then reappeared.  So the post right below still links to the right places:

Simon Fraser University in British Columbia recently adopted a policy of institutional neutrality.  But its latest endeavor shows that it’s still in the thrall of wokeness, for it’s launched a policy of “decolonizing and indigenizing” STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).  Nothing good can come of their effort, for, as you see, it can mean only the adoption of indigenous “ways of knowing” in the sciences.  There are several pages on the site, which was sent to me by a member of the Simon Fraser community. Click on the screenshot below to go to the “welcome” page and its links.  The small print in the headline says this:

Welcome to the Decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM (DISTEM) Website, dedicated to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM at Simon Fraser University (SFU)!

This website, originally designed to support STEM faculty, is a valuable tool for anyone committed to the decolonization of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to decolonize and indigenize our teaching. Click the link to go to the web site. Most of the pages are just a bit of text and links to other sites or to the home pages of the authors.

The endeavor seems serious, for this is part of the rationale:

To understand the importance of such systems in the decolonization of library classification, it is essential to explore Ashley’s work with the Indigenous Curriculum Resource Centre (ICRC) and her adaptation of the Brian Deer Classification System (BDCS). Most importantly, classification and categorization systems need to shift away from Western-European knowledge systems to prioritizing Indigenous ways of knowing and being, which are community focused. For example, a shift in language from “Indigenous Peoples – History and Culture” to “Indigenous Peoples – Communities,” moves the narrative away from historicizing Indigenous peoples toward their power, knowledge, and contemporary contributions. Not only does this shift place Indigenous Peoples and communities at the centre, but all other surrounding categories move outward to reflect their relationality to these communities and Indigenous knowledge. Such shifts in thinking and doing are crucial for STEM faculty and students to learn and apply. We strongly encourage you to follow the links provided above to gain a deeper understanding of these vital concepts and how we can all further decolonize our minds.

Note that the program is not designed to bring more indigenous people into science—though that may be one of its aims—but to CENTER the contributions “Indigenous Peoples and Communities” in teaching the content of science, at the same time “moving all other surrounding categories outward.”

Some of the aims from the Project History:

One of the major concerns faculty shared was that they lack the time and resources necessary to learn about and then implement these processes, both personally and professionally. This issue was exasperated because information and resources related to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, as well as teaching and learning, are dispersed and disconnected both online and off, which can be overwhelming for faculty, particularly those just beginning their decolonizing journeys. Thus, the DISTEM Website originally aimed to meet faculty needs by creating a central online living archive of relevant and varied resources focused on decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, both generally and regarding teaching and learning, in postsecondary institutions.

As I always say, if there is indigenous knowledge that is part of STEM, then by all means incorporate it into STEM, for I seriously doubt that there is enough empirical knowledge in American northwest tribes to constitute a substantial moiety of modern science. Like the indigenous “knowledge” of New Zealand, it will consist largely of trial-and-error methods that the locals developed for subsistence: how, when, and where to catch fish, collect berries, build canoes, and the like.  Indigenous knowledge is not a toolkit like modern science—a toolkit for finding answers that incorporates hypothesis-testing, experiments, statistics, blind testing, pervasive doubt, and so out. Rather, indigenous knowledge is a set of facts acquired independently of that tookit. But yes, there may be some indigenous knowledge there, but seriously, why would Simon Fraser make a whole program out of centering science on it.

You know why: they are displaying their virtue by sacralizing the practices of the indigenous people.  But those people descended from other people who crossed over the Bering Strait about 15,000 years ago, and those people had their own knowledge. It’s bizarre to center the “knowledge” of tribes who flourished before modern science began, but again, that’s what you have to do if you want to show your virtue. And it’s too bad for science—and for Simon Fraser.

If you have any interest in scrolling around these pages, the person who sent this to me says this: The “Prototype” page is the resource. The coloured circles and the orbiting dots are links – click one to make the dots stand still and get a pop-up with some text and a link to a resource. They are amazingly bad. I picked one from “Animals” and one from “Creation Stories”, and got links to old essays by the queer theorist Kim Tallbear. Not a scientist, and not writing about or engaging with science. The “Creation Stories” link is full of old tropes about the racism of human population genetics research. Ho hum. Here’s what the prototype page looks like (click to go to it). The rings are labeled, from the outside in, “Indigenous Influence/Contributions to Non-Indigenous Society,” “Elders,” “Family Life and Parenting,” “Sexuality and Relationships,” “Gender Roles and Gender Identity,” “Children and Youth,” “Social Structures—Kinship, Clans, Families,” “Indigenous Identity”, and, in the center, “Roles and Relationships.” You know already that this is a sociological resource having almost nothing to do with STEM.

If you click on the green dot in the “Gender Roles and Gender Identity” site, for instance, you get one reference and its summary:

Two Spirit Garrett, M. T., & Barret, B. (2003). Two Spirit: Counseling Native American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual People. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 31(2), 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2003.tb00538.x

The cultural world of the Two Spirit, the traditional role of Native individuals believed to possess both male and female spirit, is explored in both “old ways” and current-day experiences. Cultural beliefs and meanings around sexual identity are discussed from a Native perspective with recommendations for counseling Two Spirit clients.  (A Spanish translation follows.)

This has nothing to do with STEM.

In one respect this seems harmless, because there’s no way in tarnation for this stuff to really make its way into STEM. But in other ways it’s not harmless, as it warps scholarship, pretends that sociology or ideology is hard science, and makes a mockery of true STEM.

Poor Simon Fraser. In the end they are not decolonizing of indigenizing science, but sacralizing Native Americans.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rooted,” is a good one, and comes with this note:

#ffffff to be precise. [JAC: this refers to the color white]

A reminder of the UK parliament’s proposed definition of Islamophobia:

Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

Jesus is right on the money, but Mo is wrong in saying Jesus is an “old white guy” (he was supposedly around 33 when he was crucified.

Today we have some underwater photos from reader Peter Klaver. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

My friends and I did 5 days of scuba diving from San Pedro in Belize. The coral reefs there are beautiful and are home to many animals.

The large animals we saw most often were nurse sharks (Ginglymostoma cirratum):

They are quite tame and if we spotted them lying on the sea floor, we could move in quite close to them:

The other type of sharks we saw were reef sharks:

There were lobsters:

And turtles. I’m not 100% sure, but I thin this is a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas):

There were rays of wildly varying size. This was a larger one:

And there were these almost entirely white fish whose name I don’t know:

I wanted to like this paper because its thesis—that the prevalence and dogmatism of religion impedes scientific progress—is one on which I’ve written a book. This paper purports to demonstrate such an incompatibility between science and religion using data, but the data are correlative without any indication of causation, and the data have some problems.  To be sure, the data are provocative, and author Matías Cabello may be on to something, but right now the paper is at SSRN (Social Science Research Network) and doesn’t appear to have been published or peer-reviewed. You can see it by clicking the title below or download paper here. If you’re interested, read it and form your own opinion.

For a long time historians of science, the most prominent of which was the late Ronald Numbers, maintained that the “conflict hypothesis”—that religion and science were in historical conflict—was dead wrong. I never found their arguments convincing, one reason being that they would weasel and wiggle around clear cases of conflict, like that of Galileo versus the Catholic Church. Sure, there were other things beyond a Bible/science conflict involved in that dispute, but you’d have to be blind not to see that the heliocentric solar system, and Galileo’s writings promoting it, deeply irked the Catholic Church. One philosopher who also sided with these “no-conflict” folks was the late Michael Ruse, who, though an atheist, devoted a lot of time and writings to showing the science and religion are compatible. I found him tendentious and unedifying. Finally, Francis Collins, former head of the NIH and of the Human Genome Project, has come out with a new book, The Road to Wisdom, which goes to great lengths to show that one can be a scientist and a believer, too (he’s an Evangelical Christian).

My book Faith Versus Fact makes a case that in fact the two areas are incompatible, since they both involve empirical assertions about the universe, but only science has a way to test and verify them. (Read the book.) And in the beginning I dispel the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion, supporting the “conflict” hypothesis. But I won’t go on, as you can read it for yourself.

At any rate, Cabello’s manuscript uses historical and present-day data to make two points:

a.) The conflict between religion and science can be seen because science began to grow up until 1520, but then stagnated between 1520 and 1720.  This 200-year period, says Cabello, coincided with a growing religious dogmatism, imposed largely by the Catholic Church. At the same time, science itself stagnated. After 1720, when the Counter-Reformation ended and Catholic dogma waned, science began to grow rapidly again. This correlation, says Cabello, is some evidence that religious (mainly Catholic) dogma was repressing the growth of science.

b.) Analysing Wikidata on nearly 125,000 scientists, Cabello found (and equations are involved) that scientists who were less religious over the entire period (yes, he controls for some extraneous variables)—scientists including deists, pantheists, agnostics, and atheists— tended to be more accomplished than scientists who were clearly religious. (Quakers, who are in the middle, tended to be more scientifically accomplished than religious people but not as much as freethinkers.)

Now readers who scrutinize the paper will probably find a lot to beef about, and since I read it only twice, and not very carefully, I’m not going to come out in strong support of its results. But I do want to call attention to it because it’s one of the few papers to support the “conflict” hypothesis with data.

a.) The temporal correlations.

Here are some plots showing the change in religiosity over time and the change in science activity over time. The first plot gauges religiosity by looking at the frequency of “God-referring words”—”God”, “Jesus,” and “Christ”—in Google books published in five different European languages.

You can see that religion increased around 1520, and stayed fairly constant (in terms of word density) until about 1720, when it began a more rapid decline that seems to have asymptoted at a low level around 1900.

(From paper): (a) shows that God-referring words (God, Jesus, and Christ, in vernacular and Latin) appear with greater frequency in the period 1520–1720 than before and after, suggesting a rise-and-fall pattern of religiosity Source: Own work based on Google’s ngram service (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Here is the corresponding temporal change in science activity, using as a proxy the density of words in books associated with science or protoscience (see caption for words counted). The stagnation between 1520 and 1720 is clearer here, followed by a rise in science word density up to the present time. One sees an inverse correlation between the lines in (a) and (b), a mirroring that Caballo considers evidence for his thesis.

(from paper) (b) shows that the post-1720 decline of God-referring words coincides with the increased use of words that were strongly associated with (proto)science already in the 1500s (medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, philosophy, hypothesis, logic, and experiment, in vernacular and Latin). Source: Own work based on Google’s ngramservice (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Further evidence is adduced in the following two graphs of the “pace of science,” based on word counts of scientists and discoverers per capita during different periods (top graph) compared to per capita words in Wikipedia about scientists and discoverers. Both graphs show the same stagnation during the 200 years after 1520, with, in this case, an increase before 1520 and again after 1720. The notes on the graphs are indented below both:

Notes: (a) shows that the per capita number of famous scientists and discoverers aged 20 to40 stagnated between 1520 and 1720, while it had been growing before and grew thereafter; (b) shows that the impact of these scientists, proxied by the number of words written in their biographies, declined during that same period, while it had been growing before and thereafter. Overall, these figures suggest that Europe’s scientific output per capita stagnated during the age of religious fever that spans roughly between 1520 and 1720. Source: Wikipedia’s scientists and discoverers are from Laouenan et al. (2022). Population data is from the Maddison Project Database 2020 (Bolt and Van Zanden, 2020), Prados de la Escosura, ÅLAlvarez-Nogal, and Santiago-Caballero (2021), Malanima (2011).

Finally, here’s a graph of the degree of “secularization” of science, taken as “the percentage of all scientists who were clergy.  This is not so convincing to me because before the 18th century only clergy had the luxury of doing science, as it was an avocation. And the proportion of clergy doing science isn’t, to me, a strong index of how much science itself was impeded by the beliefs of clergymen. After 1720, one could begin to make a living doing science, and thus didn’t need a clergyman’s stipend to do science. Nevertheless, one can’t dismiss these data completely.

From paper: Notes: The figure depicts the share of famous scientists and proto-scientists who were part of the clergy according to Wikidata’s person description or occupation. It shows that the share remained stable at around 20% during the religious revival of 1520–1700, while it had been declining before and continued to decline thereafter, with 1720 marking the sharp beginning of a quick secularization of science.

And one thing is for sure: scientists began losing their religion after the turn of the 18th century, to the point now that, in America and Britain, scientists are far less religious than the average person. The proportion of believers in America’s National Academy of Sciences, for instance, is about 8%—just about exactly the proportion of atheists among the general population! As I point out in my book, as one rises higher in science, going from employment at a university to employment in an elite university to membership in the National Academy, the proportion of believers drop steadily, something that’s also true in the UK. This could mean that the more atheistic you are, the higher you’re likely to rise in science, OR that the better scientist you become, the more you lose your faith. OR, it could reflect both factors.

b. The religiosity versus the achievements of scientists.

Finally, the author did a multivariate calculation on the “fame” of scientists related to their religiosity, dividing scientists into three classes: least dogmatic (atheists, deists, agnostics, and pantheists), “moderately dogmatic” (Unitarians and Quakers), and “strictly dogmatic” (Puritans and Jesuits, religious groups who did the most science). He found that accomplishment, as reflected in words in Wikipedia, was highly, significantly, and positively associated with membership in the “least dogmatic” group, and not nearly as correlated with membership in the other two groups (Quakers born after the 17th century are an exception; they are scientifically accomplished.) Cabello thinks that freedom from religious belief “opened up a whole path of ideas disconnected from the prevailing thought system”, allowing scientists to become more accomplished.

Again, one could pick nits with these data, and I’m not going to answer potential criticisms, as the author deals with some of them. I’ll just give his conclusion:

This article presents quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival and zeal associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.

There are two further points. First, as the author notes, we don’t know why lack of religiosity is correlated with  greater scientific accomplishment, something that I discuss above. He says this:

All these results are silent about the direction of causality. Did high-impact thinking lead to abandon dogmas? Or did less dogmatic minds produce high-impact science? Or both? The correlation can be interpreted either way. Charles Darwin, for example, became agnostic late in life, what suggests that science may have eroded his beliefs. Newton, by contrast, was young (“very early in life”) when he “abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity” (Keynes, 2010); this suggests that his unorthodox beliefs may have opened the way for his science. Such bidirectional causality is consistent with the aggregate and regional trends and propositions discussed in previous sections.

Finally, Caballo ponders why opposition to the “conflict hypothesis” (which, by the way, is embraced by a majority of Americans) is so strong among academics.  His theory is that academics see a lot of religious scientists, and from that conclude that there can be no conflict. To that I’d respond, “those people demonstrate compartmentalization, not compatibility.”

Instead, I’d say that people like Numbers and Ruse adopt the “no conflict” hypothesis because it is more or less a “woke” point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin, too.  You don’t get popular by touting a conflict, as I’ve learned, but people love to hear that you can be religious and also embrace modern science. Even if those people are atheists, they can be “atheist butters” or promoters of the “little people” hypothesis that society needs religion to act as a social glue. If you tell people that it’s a form of cognitive dissonance to be both religious and a supporter of science, one might think that the glue would dissolve. (It won’t.) And, of course, “sophisticated” believers don’t like to hear that their faith is at odds with science.

But it is.

h/t: Bruce

Send in your photos, folks!

Today we have some arthropod photos from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose IDs and captions are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Hello again from Eastern Michigan. Here are various insects and spiders that I had photographed in my area from two summers ago. My last post left us at a very productive park near where I work, and this post starts with some things that I’d found during that same outing.

We start with a boldly marked Stink Bug called the Anchor Stink Bug (Stiretrus anchorago).

The field in this park always has numerous Chinese Mantids (Tenodera sinensis). This being early August, they had not yet reached adult-hood so here is a nymph. By early fall I can expect to see many huge adults in the field. It seems guaranteed. I suspect that some years ago, someone had set out many of their oothecae (egg pods), and this thriving population remains the result.

Overlooking the field was a hardwood forest, and I was quite pleased that many interesting kinds of critters were in it. Among these were weird planthoppers from the family Derbidae, which are one of the many good things found under tree leaves. These lack common names, so I gave them my own. First, here is what I call the Flat Derbid (Anotia uhleri) because when fully at rest they spread their wings out flat, making them resemble a small translucent moth. This one was slightly disturbed by my attentions so it had gone into a more alert posture. Although Derbids can jump and fly like other planthoppers, they are rather placid in nature so they are easy to photograph when handled with care. The prominent thingies on the head are its antennae:

The next one is what I call the Red Derbid (Apache degeeri). This is my favorite Derbid, and I found several of these that day. Its antennae are long and squiggly, making it look like it has some kind of weird face. There is a third species that I call the White Derbid. It is nearly the twin of the Red Derbid, but it’s mostly white. These are found under tree leaves that are farther to the south:

The woods were full of orb webs, and most of those belonged to an odd but quite common spider called the Spined Micrathena (Micrathena gracilis). These pea-sized spiders are pretty helpless when displaced outside of their web, but they are quite skillful when in their web and of course they swiftly build their large orb webs at night when they are basically blind:

Among these spiny weirdos I was amazed to find a striking color variant, as shown in the next picture. I had to take this one home for staged pictures! That is one spider that belongs on a heavy metal music album cover!:

The remaining pictures came from other area parks. As I am still feeling spidery after that last one, here is our largest spider, the Fishing Spider (Dolomedes scriptus). The linked picture gives you an idea of their size. Fishing Spiders hunt near and on water, and this one was found along a river bank. This lady had carried her egg sac to the top of a plant, and she is guarding her recently hatched spiderlings in a web nursery. You can see the mass of babies in the background. Fishing Spiders can be irritable at this time, but she was not at all aggressive so I had no trouble taking a wide-angle macro picture. Although the composition does not suggest it, the lens had to pretty much touch the spider since the working distance for wide-angle macro is extremely short:

I have some odds-and-ends remaining, but I will finish with an interesting one.

Next up is an Ailanthus Webworm Moth (Atteva aurea). These small moths have expanded their range northward since they have accepted the invasive Ailanthus or Tree of Heaven as a host plant. If one plays with the lighting, as I have done here, one can get a bit of iridescent blue out of the black markings on the wings:

Next up is a Scaly Bee Fly (Lepidophora lepidocera). Adult Bee Flies feed on nectar, and the larvae are either parasitic or predatory on other insects, depending on the species:

Here are some of our local wasps. First is our native Northern Paper Wasp, Polistes fuscatus, followed by an Eastern Yellowjacket, Vespula maculifrons. These are of course social wasps:

Next up is a White-banded Potter Wasp, Ancistrocerus albophaleratus. Potter wasps are solitary, and they build a mud-pot nest which they will provision with paralyzed arthropods like caterpillars or spiders, depending on the species:

The above wasps all belong to the family Vespidae, which can be immediately recognized because their front wings are folded lengthwise into a V in cross-section (V is for Vespidae).

The next insect looks like a lovely green-eyed bee, but I soon realized it lacked certain bee characters and so it had to be a wasp. It took a while, but I finally identified it as belonging to the family Crabronidae, and the genus Tachytes – that is all I know. These solitary wasps raise their young in burrows, provisioning them with paralyzed grasshoppers or katydids:

The last insect is rather comical and I don’t understand what it wants. This is a Pixie Robber Fly (Beameromyia sp.). Robber Flies are of course predatory. I occasionally see this species drawn to the porch light at night, as this one was, and for some reason they really want to stand on their head. I managed to coax this one onto a stick for pictures, and while I would tip and turn the stick to get it into frame, it would immediately adjust its stance so that it remained as you see it here. I have no idea why:

This WaPo article below (click headline to read, or find the piece archived here), discusses the new case about gender transitioning being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. It’s judging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that, according to the paper, “bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.” (23 other states have similar laws). I’m not sure how a ban on blockers can discriminate on the basis of sex if the hormones are banned in both males and females, but I’ll leave that up to the lawyers.

What’s important here is that the dispute about the blockers is now being discussed openly, in an Editorial Board op-ed in the Washington Post, while previously such discussion was taboo. Even questioning the use of such “affirmative treatments” was seen as “transphobic,” though there wasn’t good clinical evidence that they had good outcomes. They could even have been harmful, and in light of a lack of efficacy, they’re now banned in the UK and regarded as experimental treatments in much of Europe.

What we need, as the paper says, are “gold standard” studies: large controlled studies (double blind ones would be impractical given that the drugs have easily discernible effects) over a fairly long period of time.

Read below, and I’ll give some quotes (indented):

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.

Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.

“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

An early Dutch study of blockers showed “promising results”, but the sample was too small to give definitive results, and wasn’t replicable:

Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.

Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments.

And here is the unconscionable censorship on the part of both the American government and the WPATH organization that I haven’t yet written about:

Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.

Weaponized?  WEAPONIZED? The study is done, but the results aren’t ideologically pleasing to gender activists, and so the study languishes, unpublished. That is unethical, for whether or not one uses blockers can have permanent effects on the well being and future fertility of adolescents.

And so we have one more example of science being suppressed because it didn’t give the results activists wanted. But this story isn’t over. As the Post recommends, Congress should fund larger and wlll-conducted trials of blockers with followups on adults who have gone on to estrogen or testosterone therapy. Given the increasing number of people who want to transition, such studies are imperative. But now we lack evidence, and without that the use of blockers should, I think, be stopped. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

Over at the Heterodox STEM site, Anna Krylov (a Professor of Chemistry at USC) just posted a recent 40-minute lecture she gave about the ongoing erosion of the concept of merit in science (the alternative to merit, of course, is “equity”).  Because the original video was poor, Anna went ahead and re-recorded the lecture slide for slide and word for word. You can see the new version of the lecture at the video below, and read transcript by clicking on the headline just below.

The video:

Her lecture begins by citing a paper that many of us collaborated on, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” finally published in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas. Let me just put down a short excerpt about the paper from Anna’s talk, referring to its rejection from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science:

Ben Gibran writes: “It’s crazy enough that an article entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science” needs publishing; it’s mind-blowing that it’s published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What next, “In Defense of Not Drinking Battery Fluid”?

But PNAS editors had a different opinion.

Here is the feedback we received following our initial inquiry. The board was concerned with the word MERIT in the title of the paper. They wrote: “The problem is that the concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as implemented…” They finish with an advice: “If the authors could use a different term, I would encourage that.”

We considered to change the title to this: “In Defense of M**** in Science,” but ultimately we were not able to address all editorial concerns. So this is how we ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

And, in a bit of self-aggrandizement, but one that’s relevant, Anna and I wrote an editorial about this mishigass in the Wall Street Journal (click to read, or, if you don’t subscribe, find the article archived here):

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata

Several people sent batches of photographs in, and many thanks to them. We have enough for about a week.

Today’s Sunday, which means that we have photos from biologist John Avise, who has moved from birds to lepidopterans. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Butterflies in North America, Part 2 

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

Atala (Eumaeus atala), underwing:

Atlantis Fritillary (Speyeria atlantis):

Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton):

Baltimore Checkerspot, underwing:

Barred Sulphur (Phoebis philea) underwing:

Behr’s Metalmark (Apodemia virgulti), topwing:

Behr’s Metalmark underwing:

Bernadino (square-spotted) Blue (Euphilotes allyni), male topwing:

Bernardino Blue, female:

Bernardino Blue, underwing:

Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), male:

Black Swallowtail, underwing:

Reader Debra says “Farbsy is a comedian on Instagram who pretends to run a customer service line for cats.” That is, the animals call in to beef.

Click the picture or here to see the video on Instagram, and sound up:

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There’s a new cat movie called “Flow”, made in Latvia, which gets an unheard-of rating for both critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes:

And the NYT review, archived here, is also excellent, especially if you’re an ailurophile:

“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.

Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.

“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.

It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

The trailer:

The film also has a Wikipedia entry (it also summarizes the plot, which you may want to avoid before you see it), and it details the movie’s encomiums:

Flow (Latvian: Straume) is a 2024 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Gints Zilbalodis and written by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. The film is notable for containing no dialogue.

Upon premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film received critical acclaim and won numerous film and animation awards, including the Best Animated Film awards at the European Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Board of Review Awards.  The film was selected as the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

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And here’s a five-minute video compilation of cats in the snow:

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h/t: Laura, Jez

The bit in quotes in the title may be a bit mean, but it’s the title an anonymous reader gave in an email linking to several articles from a New Zealand site (here, here, and here). The articles describe a new set of standards for registered nurses in the country, standards that I read in the official government document (see below).

Why this seems “asylum-ish” is because the standards are almost entirely directed to prioritizing and catering to the indigenous Māori population of the country, even though they are in a minority of the population (16.5%) compared to Europeans (70%) but also very close in numbers to Asians (15.3%, with most of the remainder being Pacific Islanders).  The standards direct New Zealand nurses to become “culturally competent”, which is okay if it means being sensitive to differences in psychology of different groups, but is not okay if it means medically treating those groups in different ways, or having to become politicized by absorbing the Treaty of Waitangi or learning about intersectionality.  And that is in fact the case with the new standards, which also prompt NZ nurses to engage in untested herbal and spiritual healing, including prayers.  The whole thing is bonkers, but it takes effect in January.

As one of the articles says, “critics argue that these changes prioritise ideology over practical skills.” And I suspect you’ll agree after you read the relatively short set of official standards given below. Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles in the news:

The updated Standards of Competence require nurses to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau (Māori cultural safety) by addressing power imbalances in healthcare settings and working collaboratively with Māori to support equitable health outcomes.

The standards place a strong emphasis on cultural competency, including the need for nurses to establish therapeutic relationships with individuals, whānau [Māori extended families], and communities. They must also recognise the importance of whanaungatanga (building relationships) and manaakitanga (hospitality and respect) in fostering collective wellbeing.

One of the more significant additions involves requiring nurses to “describe the impact of colonisation and social determinants on health and wellbeing.” Additionally, nurses must advocate for individuals and whānau by incorporating cultural, spiritual, physical, and mental health into whakapapa-centred care (care focused on family and ancestral connections).

The new Standards of Competence have faced sharp criticism from some nurses, who argue the requirements impose ideological perspectives and unnecessarily complicate training processes.

However, none were willing to speak on the record for fear that voicing their concerns could jeopardise their employment.

The standards are unbelievable, so extreme in their catering to indigenous peoples that they seem racist against everyone else. But don’t take my word for it: simply click on the document below and look it over. It’s no wonder that many nurses are flummoxed by the new directive, which, as usual, is heavily larded with indigenous jargon that many (including Māori) don’t understand.  The language is simple virtue flaunting.

The very start of the standards promotes the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”)—an agreement between some (not all) Māori tribes and the British governance that established three principles. First, Māori would become British citizens with all the rights attending thereto. Second, the governance of New Zealand would remain in the hands of Britain and British settlers (“the Crown’). Finally, the Māori would be able to keep their lands and possessions and retain “chieftainship” of their lands.

Even though this agreement was never signed by all indigenous tribes on the island, it has assumed almost a sacred status in New Zealand, with a newer interpretation that goes something like this: “The Māori get at least half of everything afforded by the government, and their ‘ways of knowing’ would be considered coequal to modern knowledge (including in science and medicine). Further, Māori, as ‘sacred victims’, would get priority in educational opportunities and, in this case, medical treatment.”

If you read The treaty of Waitangi, you’ll see it says nothing of the sort. It simply establishes rights of governance and possession in a deal between Europeans and Māori. But the Māori have used it to inflict considerable guilt on the non-Māori population, to the extent that you simply cannot question the interpretation of the treaty above, or of the increasing forms of “affirmative action” for Māori, because people who raise those questions, like the baffled nurses above, risk losing their jobs. This is the reason that virtually every academic and citizen who writes to me from New Zealand about the fulminating and debilitating wokeness of the country asks me to keep their names confidential.   The fear of questioning what’s happening in that country is almost worse than the burgeoning affirmative action towards a small moiety of the population. Granted, the Māori have been discriminated against and had it bad for a while, but those days are really over now, and it’s time to treat everyone according to the same rules. And of course nurses know that they have to have different bedside manners towards different patients. But that doesn’t mean that they must treat some of them with chants and prayers.

Well, on to the rules. And they begin, in the very first directive, by emphasizing the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi!. I’ll post screenshots as well as text, and will highlight some bits in red. Here’s the first page of “standards of competence”. Te Tiriti doesn’t take long to appear!

“Pou” are “standards”. Here are the first two. Note that the introduction to the document doesn’t say explicitly that these standards are culture-directed and a subset of other standards of nursing skill. No, these are just “the standards.”

Pou one: Māori health. Reflecting a commitment to Māori health, registered nurses must support, respect and protect Māori rights while advocating for equitable and positive health outcomes. Nurses are also required to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau by addressing power imbalances and working collaboratively with Māori.

Pou two: Cultural safety Cultural safety in nursing practice ensures registered nurses provide culturally safe care to all people. This requires nurses to understand their own cultural identity and its impact on professional practice, including the potential for a power imbalance between the nurse and the recipient of care.

The two pou expanded, which are directives about how registered nurses are supposed to behave.

Under standard (pou) #4, called “Pūkengatanga [expertise] and evidence-informed nursing practice”, we see this.

What is Rongoā? Ask the Museum of New Zealand, which describes it as “Māori medicine”, characterizing it like this:

In traditional Māori medicine, ailments are treated in a holistic manner with:

• spiritual healing
• the power of karakia [prayers of incantations]
• the mana [supernatural essence] of the tohunga (expert)
• by the use of herbs.

In other words, nurses are supposed to allow patients to choose their own therapy, even if it includes untested herbal remedies, spiritual healing, supernatural power, and prayers. Is it any wonder that nurses are both confused and opposed to this?

It goes on and on in this vein, consistently outlining standards of care that favor Māori, and then ending with a glossary heavily laden with woke and postmodern terms, Again, these are being given to registered nurses (no, not shamans) to tell them how they must behave. A few items from the glossary, which have no clear connection with nursing:

 

Again, as far as I can determine, these are not just standards for nurses to become culturally sensitive, but appear to be general standards for nurses that want to be qualified as nurses. And the standards have become so ideological and political that—and I don’t say this lightly—they seem pretty racist, favoring one group over another and telling nurses to afford indigenous people care and treatment that others don’t get. Is there to be no cultural sensitivity towards Asians, who have their own form of indigenous herbal medicine?

Here are some sentiments expressed by Jenny Marcroft, the Health Spokesperson for the New Zealand First political party.

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It goes without saying that it nurses must do all this stuff to practice their skills, many might be compelled to leave New Zealand and practice overseas, something that the country can’t afford to happen. And so, because opponents of this stuff are silenced, the country, immersed in wokeness, continues to go downhill.

Well, folks, this is the penultimate batch of photos I have, so if you don’t contribute, the feature will die. Don’t make me beg.

Today, though, we have a contribution from reader Lukas Konecny, who has provided some introductory notes (indented). You can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Some of these nature shots are quite old and I have never had a good camera, but I tried to pick some good ones (some of the grasshopper photos may need zooming in and cropping but when I tried to do that, my software always distorted the photos). The cicada is from Greece (it sits on a wire rope), the rest are from Slovakia, the mushroom was in a forest and the dragonfly in my university dormitory in Bratislava while others (owls, hummingbird hawkmoth, cat, grasshopper) are all from a garden.  The autumn owl (in a cherry tree) is from the same year (2015) as the spring owlet (in an apricot tree) so it might be the same bird. The grasshopper and the cat are from this summer – the cat watched me while I was releasing the grasshopper that had made its way to my room during the night and to my relief didn’t immediately attack it but let it fly away in peace. Maybe nature finding its way into human spaces is the common theme (except for the mushroom, that’s just autumnal feeling).

Amanita muscaria:

Cat:

Cicada:

Dragonfly:

Grasshopper photos:

Macroglossumm a hummingbird hawkmoth:

Owl, autum:

Owlet, spring:

Every once in a while Sam Harris, who must be overwhelmed with his writing on Substack, his podcast, and his complex meditation site, gets back to what brought him public notice: criticism of religion. And even if you know his views from The End of Faith or Letter to a Christian Nation, you’ll benefit if you’re able to read the two pieces below. (These two Substack essays have titles clearly drawn from the latter book.)

Apparently some high-handed Christian, just called “X,” wrote to Sam chewing him out for dissing Christianity, saying that atheism didn’t disprove God’s existence, claiming that Sam didn’t understand modern religion or sophisticated theology, asserting that religion makes people behave better, and arguing that Sam’s criticism of religion—Christianity in particularly—showed that he was intolerant.

Well, this is all meat for Sam’s grinder, and the poor “X” got it ten ways from Sunday, in two posts on Sam’s site. You won’t be able to access them all unless you’re a member of his Substack, but I’ve linked to them anyway and will give some of the delicious quotes I found. And, in case you haven’t read Sam’s first two books and can read these essays, they’re a decent substitute. (But you should read the books.) Click on the headlines to go to the site.

 

First, a response to X’s claim that Sam was arguing against religious extremists, not moderates (this in fact was taken up in The End of Faith). I’ve indented Sam’s comments.

So let me address my longstanding frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded. It is true that their “sophisticated” theology has generally taught me to appreciate the candor of religious fanatics. Whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, moderates like yourself claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken extremists to be the sole representatives of these great faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason and contemporary ethics, and that our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” Needless to say, such casuistry generally comes moistened by great sighs of condescension.

. . . . The problem, as I see it, is that religious moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting this is that they just have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody is ever motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis of religion. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certainty in most respects—often blinds a person to the reality of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now especially unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between their faith and extremism. But there isn’t. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is not a moderate. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac from the 14th century—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, and to hunt witches (good luck). Of course, you can cherry-pick scripture and find inspiration to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are fit only to be crushed in God’s loving machinery of justice.

Part 2 of the evisceration of X:

Here, Sam argues why religion is not a net good.

-To be clear, I do not “disdain” religious moderates. I do, however, disdain bad ideas and bad arguments—which, I’m afraid, religious moderates tend to produce in great quantities. I’d like to point out that you didn’t rebut any of the substantial challenges I made in my last volley. Rather, you went on to make other points, most of which I find irrelevant to the case I made against religious faith. For instance, you remind me that many people find religion—both its doctrines and its institutions—important sources of comfort and inspiration. You also insist that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. But you could gather such facts until the end of time, and they wouldn’t begin to suggest that the God of Abraham actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that he came to Earth in the person of Jesus Christ to redeem our sins.

I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who imagine themselves to be dependent upon their church for a sense of purpose and community, and who do good things wherever their missionary work takes them. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr.—that a very randy and unscrupulous dowser—by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? And what of the Scientologist next door, who appears to be living his best possible life? Does his success in Hollywood increase your admiration for that patent charlatan, L. Ron Hubbard?

Something that often gets neglected in these discussions is that if one religion is absolutely true, all the others are wrong. And Sam, like the other New Atheists, is absolutely concerned with religious truth, for at bottom most religious behavior is based on the conviction that the tenets of one’s faith are true. If you believe that Christ wasn’t resurrected, you can hardly call yourself a Christian. One important reason for seeing if a religion is “true” is given below: you need good reasons for behaving as you do. But first this:

If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong:

• Jesus Christ was the Messiah—so the Jews are wrong.
• Jesus was divine and resurrected—so the Muslims are wrong (“Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.” Qur’an, 4:157).
• There is only one God—so the Hindus are wrong.

But, of course, the Christians have no better reason to think they’re right than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.

And here’s my favorite bit, which tells you why the truth of one’s religion is crucial:

As I have argued elsewhere, the alleged usefulness of religion—the fact that people find it consoling or that it sometimes gets them to do good things—is not an argument for its truth.

And, of course, the utility of religious faith can also be disputed. Wherever religion makes people feel better, or gets them to do good things, it does so for bad reasons—when good reasons are available. Which strikes you as more moral, helping people out of a sincere concern for their suffering, or helping them because you believe God wants you to do it? Personally, I’d prefer that my children acquire the former attitude.

And religion often inspires people to do bad things that they would not otherwise do. For instance, at this very moment in Syria and Iraq, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims can be found drilling holes into each other’s skulls with power tools. What are the chances they would be doing this without the “benefit” of their incompatible religious beliefs and identities?

As the late Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

On to “sophisticated philosophy” and exegesis:

The Bible, as you suggest, “defies easy synthesis” and “can be hard to understand.” But it is worse than that. No, I haven’t argued that the book “is principally about owning slaves”—just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong, which is a terrible flaw in a book that is widely imagined to be perfect.

The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor, the meek, and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument—and they knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest repository of wisdom we have.

Below is the only part of the essays that confuses me. Sam thinks we have no free will (he has a book called Free Will that’s well worth reading). If that’s the case, how can he say this?

It is true that many atheists are convinced that they know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith or Waking Up know that I am not convinced of this. While I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the brain, I do not think that the reducibility of consciousness to unconscious information processing has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t justify crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world.

It sounds to me that he is separating mind and matter, not a stand that comports with determinism.  It’s always seemed to me palpably unscientific to say, knowing that the brain is made of matter and that our thoughts and behaviors stem almost entirely from the brain, that consciousness (a brain product) must also come from matter and its physical behavior. In fact, this is the point that Sam seems to make repeatedly on his meditation website. But maybe I’m not understanding something,

In the end, Sam gives “X” a final drubbing after “X” calls Sam intolerant for criticizing Christianity.   Sam’s superb writing and thinking make it sting all the harder:

What if I told you that I am confident that I have an even number of cells in my body? Would it be intolerant of you to doubt me? What are the chances that I am in a position to have counted my cells and counted them correctly? Note that, unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections, my claim has a 50% chance of being true—and yet it is clearly ridiculous.

Forgive me for stating the obvious: No Christian has ever been in a position to be confident (much less certain) that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he will one day return to Earth wielding magic powers. Observing this fact is not a form of intolerance.

You seem to have taken special offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be honest on every other topic, in this instance, she doesn’t want to distinguish what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) from (1) what she wants to be true or (2) what will keep her children from being too sad in Granny’s absence. So Mommy is lying—either to herself or to her kids—and we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than learn how to grieve, we learn to lie to ourselves, or to those we love.

You can complain about the intolerance of atheists all you want, but that won’t make unjustified claims to knowledge appear more reasonable; it won’t differentiate your religious beliefs from the beliefs of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won’t constitute an adequate response to anything I have written here, or am likely to write in the future.

Harris is a gifted man, and I’m baffled at the number of people who seem to intensely dislike him.

Wildlife photos return today, but I have precious few batches in the tank. If you got ’em, please send ’em, lest this feature disappear.

Today UC Davis mathematician Abby Thompson, who survived cancelation, is back with pictures of California tide pools. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

November-December tidepools (Northern California).  The weather at the coast over the Thanksgiving weekend was spectacular- sunny, warm, with no wind; perfect for poking around in the tide pools.    As usual I got help with some of the IDs from people on inaturalist.

Mussel-covered rock (probably Mytilus californianus); I liked the pattern made on the sand as the tide retreated:

Calliostoma ligatum (blue-ringed top snail):

Eupentacta quinquesemita (stiff-footed sea cucumber) Probably; it’s a little hard to tell with sea cucumbers. This one was a couple of inches long.

Hemigrapsus nudus (Purple shore crab). This is one of the most common crabs on this stretch of shore.   This one was small (maybe 2” across the back) but testy, apparently ready to take me on:

Dendronotus subramosus (nudibranch). Nudibranchs are often scarce at this time of year, but the calm sea seems to have brought them out:

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch) Posing for the camera:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone). I’ve posted a few pictures of this species.   The color varies so much that they all look quite different.   I’ve never seen one that’s blue before; it was striking next to the brilliant orange sponge:

Hermissenda opalescens: (nudibranch):

Cervus canadensis nannodes (Tule elk) from tiny creatures to large (although this species is small for elk). This picture is from Point Reyes National Seashore, where there’s a reserve.    A short, highly recommended hike takes you to where the elk can be found wandering about:

Tomales Point at sunset, as the tide was beginning to turn:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.    The last two pictures were taken with my iphone.

Will Indigenous knowledge, as instantiated in Native North American tribal “ways of knowing”, help ameliorate climate change?  One would think “not much” because anthropogenic climate change, now a virtual certainty, is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and it’s hard to imagine that Native Americans either generate much of those gases or have any knowledge to slow their accumulation, which derives mostly from industrial countries.

But the Biden administration thinks otherwise, perhaps for two reasons: the “progressive” sacralization of indigenous people and their knowledge, and, second, the assumption that Native American knowledge, which derived largely from finding empirical ways of making a living (when to grow food, how to hunt, etc.), made them “stewards of the environment.”  The latter isn’t really the case, as Native Americans engaged in several practices, among them overhunting of bison and overburning of the prairie and woodlands (the latter also was done to facilitate hunting). At any rate, a reader sent me a link to the right-wing Free Beacon site below that reports a last-minute Biden Administration initiative to meld modern science with Native American ways of knowing to attack the problem of climate change. Below that is the press release from the Administration that gives details and links to the official government memorandum of collaborating with indigenous people.

Here’s an excerpt from The Free Beacon which is explicitly hostile to wokeism, but is otherwise pretty accurate:

The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of “Indigenous Knowledge” on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience.

The agency, according to a press release, signed a formal memorandum of understanding with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to “advance Indigenous Knowledge” and “achieve strong climate resilience for our tribal nations.” The agreement will impact at least 35 accredited universities and “empower our tribal colleges and universities to be leaders in the ongoing response to climate change.”

“Indigenous Knowledge” is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works. While scientists have referred to its ideas as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, those criticisms have not stopped the Biden administration from ordering the federal government to consider “Indigenous Knowledge” when implementing rules and regulations.

President Joe Biden issued a memo in November 2022 that directed more than two dozen federal agencies to apply “Indigenous Knowledge” to “decision making, research, and policies.” The memo called on agencies to speak with “spiritual leaders” and reject “methodological dogma.”

NOAA’s language in its announcement echoes Biden’s guidance. The agency contrasts “Indigenous Knowledge” with “western science,” although it declined to define either term.

Now I’m wholly in favor of trying to incorporate Native Americans into modern science and higher education. After all, they were largely given a raw deal by the government, still suffer more than many others from poverty and ill health, and deserve the same chance that other Americans get. Ergo, incorporating modern science into universities largely serving Native Americans, as well as casting a wider net to bring Native American science, is something to be admired. The problem with the Free Beacon piece is that not all “indigenous knowledge” is “pseudoscience”. For there are empirical facts that indigenous people discovered—in fact, that they needed to discover—for Native Americans to make a living before the U.S. was colonized by Europeans. Saying that “it’s all pseudoscience” is simply a slur.

Likewise for this sentence: “‘Indigenous Knowledge’ is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works.”  This is wrong on several counts, including the characterizing of indigenous knowledge as “discredited.” While much of it is, both in North America and New Zealand, not all of it is! Further who claims that indigenous people have an innate knowledge of how the universe works? Nobody has that—it has to be discovered by observation! The implication that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow in their bearers’ DNA is misleading.

Neverthless, we have to be very careful of both diluting science with wokeness to expiate our guilt, and of using spiritual, religious, and moral teachings as part of indigenous knowledge, for those teachings have nothing to do with modern science, whose job is to understand the universe.

Perhaps you’ll get a better idea of this “two-eyed” seeing that melds of modern and indigenous knowledge from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s press release on the agreement. Click below to read:

But although this release affirms the admirable desire to give opportunities to Native Americans, several aspects are worrisome—especially the claim that we can help solve global warming in a big way by incorporating indigenous knowledge.  I’ll give a few quotes.

First, a good aim:

NOAA and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) signed a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) to advance Indigenous Knowledge, science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, and workforce training opportunities for tribal communities with the goal of building climate resilience.

But this is worrisome:

“NOAA is excited to team up with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to accelerate information-sharing aimed at building climate resilience, adaptation and co-production of knowledge in communities across the United States and tribal nations,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “Indigenous Knowledge has made it possible for Indigenous Nations to persist and thrive for millennia. These knowledge systems are needed more than ever to inform NOAA and our nation’s approach to environmental stewardship.”

Are they needed more than ever? I doubt it. Modern science has long ago eclipsed indigenous knowledge as a way of understanding the universe. And, of course, “indigenous knowledge” often incorporates nonscientific forms of spirituality and superstition.

Can we have some examples, and not just trivial ones, about how indigenous knowledge has aided conservation of the North American environment? I’m sure there will be something, but I doubt that we’ll find any equitable “coproduction of knowledge” except for that of people engaged not in indigenous ways of knowing but in modern science. And the worries are exacerbated when considering how the NOAA plans to deal with our most serious environmental crisis: climate change. Here are some of the program’s goals:

• Identifying western science and Indigenous Knowledge priorities for the AIHEC, an organization that provides leadership and influences policy for 35 accredited U.S. tribal colleges and universities.
• Creating opportunities for NOAA to learn from faculty and students from tribal colleges and universities through coordinated partnerships that promote co-learning and co-development of knowledge, include community-driven research to advance NOAA’s mission to build a Climate-Ready Nation, as well as shared AIHEC-NOAA objectives.

I think we have to face the fact that if climate change is to be stopped or reversed, the main impetus for that will come from modern science (as well as political agreements to curb greenhouse gas emissions), and not from indigenous knowledge. “Environmental stewardship” that helped native Americans hunt and cultivate food will, I suspect, play almost no role in this endeavor. How could it?

So far the U.S. isn’t nearly as bad off in sacralizing indigenous knowledge as is New Zealand, where the battle continues to rage about whether Māori knowledge is comparable to modern scientific knowledge (it isn’t). But these American initiatives are the canary in the coal mine. I wish that somebody in charge would make rational decisions about exactly what indigenous knowledge could contribute not only to climate change, but also to the progress of modern science.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “sperm2” (!), Mo adopts the common fundamentalist view that scripture (whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim) really did anticipate the findings of modern science. Here Mo defends the Qur’anic position that the first humans came from “a spurting fluid), but one that comes from the wrong place.

If you want to see a really detailed defense of this position, with various Islamic interpretations, it’s a hoot to read the Sapience Institute’s piece “Does the Qur’ān make a mistake on where semen or sperm is produced?”  Of course the answer is “no,” for the Sapience Institute’s vision is of “a world convinced of Islam.”  

Here’s the original Qur’anic story:

Let people then consider what they were created from!
˹They were˺ created from a spurting fluid,
Stemming from between the backbone and the ribcage.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow, when PCC(E) is back in action and recovered from his trip.

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili suspects she is being short changed over her meal:

A: What are you deliberating about?
Hili: I have the impression that there is ham in the fridge.

Ja: Nad czym się zastanawiasz?
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że w lodówce jest szynka.