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At the moment this post appears—9:03 Chicago time—winter has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere.  Time to celebrate Yule!

In Chicago, however, it feels as if winter has been her for several weeks. The good news is that the days will begin getting longer.

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below. Especially with the wrong number of candles on the menorah, like the two superfluous ones in the photo below!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

 

Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)

As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)

The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,

And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors. They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:

Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.

Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.

That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :

[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.

In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others.  One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.

You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.

Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes.  I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?

Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on.  Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:

Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.

This article from The Piedmont Clearinghouse MAY be a spoof. I don’t know, but if so it’s a bad spoof because a spoof will eventually let you in on the joke. Certainly many of the readers took it seriously, and the author doesn’t suggest it’s a spoof in the comments. To be sure, it is humorous, and maybe that’s the key to the fact that it’s tongue-in-cheek.  You be the judge.

It touts dgs as better pets than cats, but in fact cats are not “pets”; rather, we are their staff (we could be considered cats’ pets!). That is not the case for the obsequious dg. So even at the get-go Zack Morris is just dead wrong.

Click screenshot to read.

Some excerpts:

One of the most reliable cultural memes of the last hundred years or so is whether a dog or a cat is the better domestic pet. Everybody likes to debate it. This feels, in the main, very dumb. It is really inconceivable that a cat could ever be considered a better pet than a dog. Cats are awful. They are really terrible pets from start to finish. There is virtually nothing a cat does well that a dog doesn’t do much better, and there are countless things that cats do terribly, even horribly, that cat defenders hold up as positives rather than obvious negatives.

Up front let’s identify the one virtue cats possess over dogs: They can often catch mice and rats and other pests very well. This is a great skill. But it’s also something better suited to a working farm, or a wharf, or maybe a prison complex. I’m not saying it’s not a good skill for a pet to have, but look, if your house is being overrun with mice and rats, you’ve got bigger problems than the dog-vs-cat debate. You have to deal with that on a structural level. A cat can kill a lot of rodents in one day, which is great. But also, maybe you should clean up your house a bit, sweep up the crumbs and pick up the burger wrappers and whatnot. Then you won’t have so many mice to deal with anyway. If you do that—if you make your home less inviting to vermin—then you’ll just naturally have fewer mice and rats running around, and the cat’s one tactical advantage more or less vanishes.

Thus on an even footing, a cat will lose this endless debate, and a dog will win. A dog is overwhelmingly just better suited as a human companion. Of course, people like to try and qualify this in all sorts of ways. “It depends on your lifestyle and needs!” “It really depends on your personality!” “It depends on what kind of pet you want!” That’s really the point, though: You shouldn’t want a cat, any more than you should want to live in a mud hovel or eat raw slugs for dinner. Some things are objectively not good!

The main point is this: The idealized dog is a good, affectionate, fun, loyal pet. I say “idealized” as a qualifier, because of course bad dogs exist, but in truth it’s really not that hard to create the idealized dog. Some dogs are smarter and others are dumber, some are more eager to serve and other are just looking to loll about, but if you fulfill a few certain obligations for a dog—if you get it pretty young, feed it well, train it even moderately, play with it, give it decent living conditions, keep it reasonably stimulated—then it will almost certainly be a good pet. The same is not true for cats, none of whom you can really train beyond teaching it to shit in a box, inside your home, which you then have to shovel out yourself as if you are the cat’s personal valet. (We’ll get to that.)

The author then further describes an idealized dog, which more or less resembles the kind of associate Donald Trump would like: an obsequious creature who jumps all over you, licking you and making you feel like you’re the BEST PERSON. I won’t go into the advantages of the d*g touted here, except to say that you have to walk dogs, clean up their poop, and they smell bad so you have to wash them.  They are not like people but more like  Karoline Leavitt.  Then the author goes on to debunk the supposed advantages of cats. which include these:

 

• “It’s independent!”
• “Cats make you work for it!”
• Cats shit and piss in a box inside your house.
• Cats bite and scratch for no reason at all.
• “He wouldn’t come near me for a week!”

He doesn’t seem to dwell on the fact that you have to haul yourself out of bed every morning and take the dog out so it can poop, then picking up the poop with a plastic bag. I could go on and on about this, but won’t. Readers will either agree or not. At any rate, here’s the ending:

Again: These really reprehensible behaviors and personality traits are largely held up as good things about cats. Even in the case of the litter box, meanwhile, it is seen as a point of pride how effectively one masks the smell of cat waste in one’s one home, rather than a source of shame and chagrin that one even has to be doing it in the first place.

I guess I am ultimately not sure why anyone would want a cat at all, at least not when a dog could provide every good benefit that a cat infrequently provides—companionship, entertainment, etc—without all of the chronic downsides to catdom. Why opt for something worse when you could have something better? “Pick the one right tool.” Embrace the dog!

If nothing else, at what point can we just admit that cats are very bad pets and dogs are almost universally better? Why is there even the faintest debate over this? When will this madness end?

The only relevant question is this: “Which makes you happier: a cat or a d*g? For me the answer is clear.

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Now one could add that there are seeing-eye dgs and emotional support dgs, but not seeing-eye cats or emotional support cats. But the former assertion comes from dgs having being bred to do what humans want (question: could cats have been bred that way? I doubt it, and it goes along with the lack of sociality of wild cats versus the nearly obligatory sociality of wild dgs.).  But there are indeed emotional support cats, as outlined in this article from petful.com, which you can read by clicking below. The thing is, an emotional support cat doesn’t have to do any tasks save be there, allow itself to be petted and hugged, and sometimes purr. That’s not too much to ask.

A few excerpts:

How Emotional Support Cats Sense our Needs

After my dad’s heart attack, my grandmother got me a comforting companion, Alexander, a lanky red tabby. He stayed by my side through that strange, uncertain time, and even after Dad returned home, Alexander remained my go-to feline. Although he lived outside with our other cats, my brothers always brought him to me whenever I was sick or hurt.

Since Alexander, many emotional support cats have filled this role, sensing my needs even before I realized them. Here’s how these cats offer emotional support:

• Attentiveness to Emotions: Cats who form close bonds with their owners often become attuned to their human’s feelings.
• Natural Comforting Behaviors: Some cats instinctively respond with comforting actions, such as sitting close or gently nuzzling.
• Adaptability in Domestic Spaces: Indoor cats, in particular, develop behaviors that help them connect more closely with their humans.

As Patricia Fry observes, their cats try to console them when they’re unhappy, and indoor cats often reflect comforting characteristics due to this close connection.

The Comforting Legacy of Emotional Support Cats

Despite some misconceptions, emotional support cats have a history of providing comfort to humans. Here are a few stories showcasing their unique ability to console and uplift:

• Hima’s Gentle Comfort: A plushy gray cat named Hima consoles her young owner, who has just hurt her foot. Hima responds instinctively, nuzzling and gently patting the child as if caring for a kitten in distress.
• Historical Figures and Their Cats:
  • Abraham Lincoln: Even during the Civil War, Lincoln found solace by rescuing three kittens while visiting General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters.
  • Florence Nightingale: Struggling with chronic brucellosis and depression, Nightingale found companionship and comfort from her cats, whose paw prints marked her personal papers.
  • Edgar Allan Poe: Although his life was often plagued with hardship, Poe’s tortie cat, Catterina, provided comfort by sitting on his shoulder, “purring as if in complacent approval” as he worked.
• Modern View of Cats as Therapists: Today, furry therapists like emotional support cats are recognized for their calming influence. Though dogs are typically chosen for therapy, cats remain invaluable due to their intuitive, independent nature, often comforting people in ways dogs cannot.

These examples illustrate how cats have provided companionship and relief, offering therapeutic support across generations.

The Unique Role of Emotional Support Cats in Therapy:

While dogs are often chosen as therapy animals, emotional support cats play a unique and irreplaceable role in therapeutic settings, particularly for individuals with complex emotional needs.

• Limitations of Dogs in Therapy: According to Animal-Assisted Therapy Programs of Colorado, dogs are excellent for initial therapy due to their accepting and non-judgmental nature. However:
  • Dogs may struggle to set boundaries, which can be challenging for clients dealing with social skills or family issues.
  • Unlike dogs, cats do not tolerate poor behavior, which can encourage healthier interactions and reinforce boundaries.
• Support for PTSD and Trauma: Cats have a special capacity to comfort people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma. In one instance, a woman described how her cat, Simon, became her emotional anchor following a traumatic event. She would often wake up in distress, only to find Simon gently “licking her tears,” offering solace that helped her reconnect with the world.

Emotional support cats provide a balance between comfort and boundaries, making them invaluable companions for individuals facing deeper emotional challenges.

The other sections are called “Emotional Support Cats: Companions for Seniors”, “Emotional Support Cats: A Matchmaking Service for Companionship”.  And there’s a short video captioned, “Watch Hima comfort her sad human”. The YouTube caption is this:

Contrary to popular perception, cats can be as loving as other pets. Take, for instance, Hima, a cat from Japan who is currently winning hearts on social media for the way she comforts her crying owner. When Hima’s owner, a little girl, hurt her foot on a chair and started crying, she tried to comfort her with some loving cuddles. The video, which has received over 9 lakh views on Imgur, shows Hima, a Russian blue cat, snuggling up to her owner as she cries in pain. Watch the unbearably adorable video below on Hima’s own Instagram, where she has over 2,600 followers.

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Finally, as it turned Yule yesterday (the first day of winter), it’s appropriate to learn about the Yule cat, which is not an emotional support cat but an Icelandic legend about a killer cat!  First, a tweet:

The icelandic cat who eats those who are not wearing their new clothes.

The Jólakötturinn, or the Yule Cat is a monstrously large creature from Icelandic folklore that is said to roam the snowy countryside during Christmas, with a particular appetite for anyone who has not… pic.twitter.com/hdaZJ0CDwn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 14, 2025

Click below to read about Jólakötturinn at The Great Cat site, your go-to site for all things Cat.

I can’t embed it, but it has photos and drawings.  You can also read about it in Wikipedia, and I’ll give a few excerpts:

The Yule cat (Icelandic: Jólakötturinn, Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈjouːlaˌkʰœhtʏrɪn], also called Jólaköttur[1]) is a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing. Jólakötturinn is closely associated with other figures from Icelandic folklore, considered the pet of the ogress Grýla and her sons, the Yule Lads.

The first definitive mention of the Yule cat is from an 1862 collection of folklore by Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (is). It was described as an evil beast that would either eat those who did not get new clothes for Christmas, or eat their “Christmas bit” (an extra portion of food given to residents of a farm). Jón gave no source for either story.[2][3]

. . . . The Yule cat was traditionally used as a threat and incentive for farm workers to finish processing the wool collected in the autumn before Christmas. Those who took part in the work were rewarded with new clothes, but those who did not would get nothing and thus would be prey for the Yule cat.

. . . The establishment of the Yule cat as part of classic Icelandic Christmas folklore came in 1932, when Jóhannes úr Kötlum published his poetry collection Jólin koma (is) (lit. ‘Christmas is Coming‘). One of the poems, Jólakötturinn, centered on the eponymous man-eating monster which subsequently became a common part of Christmas festivities and decorations in Iceland

You can see Kölum’s poem at the “Legend of the Yule Cat” site above; it’s too long for me to reproduce here.

Here’s a three-minute video explaining and showing the Yule Cat:

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Lagniappe. First, a meme.

Still more lagniappe: Hispanic cats injure Jesus and his family, as well as the Good Shepherds. They have no respect, for they are cats. Sound up.

View this post on Instagram

More lagniappe from ISTANBUL! This is more or less what you’ll see if you go there.

And even more lagniappe: free accommodations on a Greek island if you take care of kitties!

h/t: Thomas, Nicole, Marion, Ginger K., Cate, Reese

I have written a piece that will be published shortly on another site; it’s largely about whether academic disciplines, including the arts, can produce “propositional truths”, that is, declarative statements about the world that are deemed “true” because they give an accurate description of something in the world or universe.  Examples are “Jerry has five fingers on each hand”, “Sheila plays the violin in an orchestra,” or “humans and other apes shared a common ancestor.” The reason I was concerned with propositional truths is that it’s often said that the search, production, preservation, and promulgation of such truths is the primary purpose of universities.  Is it? Read my piece, which will be out next week, to see. I’ll post a link when it’s up.

I won’t give my thesis here about truth and the various academic disciplines, as that’s in the other article, but inmhy piece I omitted two areas: mathematics and philosophy. That’s because there’s a big controversy about whether these disciplines do produce propositional truths or, alternatively (and in my view), give only the logical consequences of assumptions that are assumed to be true.

For example, a “truth” of mathematics is that 16 divided by 2 equals eight.  More complex is the Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This is “true”, but only in Euclidean geometry. It is not true if you’re looking at triangles on a curved surface.  The “truth” is seen only within a system of certain assumptions: geometry that follows Euclid’s axioms, including being planar.  All mathematical “truths” are of this type.

What about philosophy? Truths in that field are things that follow logically. Here is a famous one:

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man;
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s true not just because of logic, but because empirical observations for the first two statements show they are propositional truths! If they weren’t true, the third “truth” (which was tested and verified via hemlock) would be meaningless.

Here’s another of a similar nature that came from a friend:

“All As are B; x is an A; therefore x is B—doesn’t depend on the content of A and B: it’s a *logical truth*.”

Again, the statement is indeed a logical truth, but not a propositional truth because it cannot be tested to see if it’s true or false. Nor, without specifying exactly what A and B is, can the empirical truth of this statement be judged. I claim that all philosophical “truths”—logical truths without empirical input—are of this type.

When I told my friend this, I got the reply, “This is analytic philosophy. The people who do it work in philosophy departments and call themselves philosophers: and most philosophy BA and PhD programs require a lot of it. I’m sure any of our competent philosophers would be happy to supply hundreds of propositional truths that are philosophical.”  The friend clearly disagreed with my claim that philosophy can’t by itself produce propositional truths. Insofar as philosophy is an important area of academia, then, I am not sure that it’s discipline engaged in producing or preserving truth.

Two caveats are in order. First, this is not meant to demean philosophy or argue that it doesn’t belong in a liberal education. It certainly does! Philosophy, like mathematics, are tools for finding truths, and indispensable tools. Philosophical training helps you think more clearly  Unlike many scientists, I see philosophy as a crucial component of science, one that is used every day. Hypotheses that follow logically from observations, as in making predictions from observations (e.g., Chargaff’s observation, before the structure of DNA was elucidated, that in organisms that amount of A equals the amount of T, and the amount of G equals the amount of C), are somewhat philosophical, and certainly logical. Dan Dennett is a good example of how one can learn (and teach others) to think more clearly about science with a background in philosophy.

Second, I do not feel strongly about what I said above. I am willing to be convinced that mathematics (but not necessarily philosophy) gives us propositional truths. There is, for example, a school of philosophers who accept “mathematical realism,” defined this way in Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Mathematical realism is the view that the truths of mathematics are objective, which is to say that they are true independently of any human activities, beliefs or capacities. As the realist sees it, mathematics is the study of a body of necessary and unchanging facts, which it is the mathematician’s task to discover, not to create. These form the subject matter of mathematical discourse: a mathematical statement is true just in case it accurately describes the mathematical facts.

An important form of mathematical realism is mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is about a collection of independently existing mathematical objects. Platonism is to be distinguished from the more general thesis of realism, since the objectivity of mathematical truth does not, at least not obviously, require the existence of distinctively mathematical objects.

A corollary of this is my own claim (which is mine) that although the objects and “truths” of mathematics and philosophy are inapplicable to all species outside of our own, as only Homo sapiens can grasp, discover, and use them. The earth spins for all creatures and plants upon it, but the integers and prime numbers are “real” only for us. (Do not lecture me that crows can count!).

I have read some of this controversy about mathematics, but it rapidly becomes abstruse and tedious, and so I’m proffering the view of a biologist, not a professional philosopher.  I am more open to the idea of mathematics producing truths than philosophy, simply because, as one reader once commented, “You can’t find out what’s true by sitting in an armchair and thinking.”

So it’s clear I’m soliciting readers’ views here to help clarify my own thinking. Comment away!

Ecologist Susan Harrison contributed another batch of photos from her visit to Belize (see part 1 here). The IDs and her captions are indented below, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Belize – Birds of the Mennonite Farmlands

Diverse agricultural landscapes came as a pleasant surprise on a recent birding trip to northern Belize.  Small to medium-sized family farms, neatly arrayed, grew rice, cattle, chickens, fruits and vegetables.  We saw native birds of many kinds in the fields and around the homes, barns, ponds, hedgerows and woodlots.  Is this what U.S. farmlands looked like before the modern agro-industrial era, I wondered?

Many of the farmers are pious German-speaking Mennonites who settled here in the 1950s to practice their ways in a society tolerant of their anti-militarism and anti-modernity. The most conservative among them avoid not only cars but also rubber tires, and use machinery with metal wheels or treads only.  While it felt impolite to photograph the people in their hand-sewn overalls and dresses, I did grab a tractor shot or two.

Mennonite steel-wheeled tractor:

Our main quarry here was the Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria), a massive tropical stork that is scarce in much of its range but flourishes in the northern Belize farm country.

Jabiru in a rice field:

Jabirus mixed with smaller Wood Storks (Mycteria americana) and Northern Jacanas (Jacana spinosa) in a pasture of Brahman cattle:

Other birds we saw in these farmlands:

Laughing Falcons (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Aplomado Falcons (Falco femoralis):

Bat Falcon (Falco rufigularis) pursuing dragonflies over a rice field at blinding speed:

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana):

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus):

Mangrove Cuckoo (Coccyzus minor):

Northern Potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis), a bizarre giant nightjar:

Ringed Kingfisher (Megaceryle torquata):

Roadside Hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

Morelet’s Seedeater (Sporophila morelleti):

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

Last night Trump did one of his prime-time self-justifications speeches. I skipped it but listened to the 18-minute bit of bombast and braggadocio just now. It’s the usual palaver, extolling his administration as having effected more positive change than any other administration in American history. (He settled eight wars in ten months!!)  There’s a lot of Biden-bashing. I suppose this is a response to his slipping approval ratings.

If you didn’t hear it, you can listen to the one below.

Here’s Jimmy Kimmel’s 16-minute response from the same night, as well as his intro to his show. The video below has garnered over 1.5 million views since it was put up last night.  Here’s the YouTube intro, but it’s no substitute for the clip, which you should watch (h/t Bat).

We had a surprise national address from Donald Trump tonight, former special counsel Jack Smith testified that his team gathered “powerful evidence” to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump broke the law, Trump has been spending his time putting up plaques on the White House insulting and trolling other Presidents, there was a Senate hearing this morning about the little incident with the FCC that got us an unwanted vacation a couple of months back, Ted Cruz took the opportunity to call Jimmy “profoundly unfunny,” the new footage from the soon-to-be released documentary about Melania came out today, the Oscars are now moving to YouTube starting in 2029, and we sent Mark Hamill out to Hollywood Blvd to stand on his star and see who noticed and who did not!

It’s pretty heavy-handed, and not as funny as Bill Maher would have been, but it’s decent satire, with a lot of truth in it. Trump definitely has a loony side: bave a look at the plaques he put under the photos of previous Presidents. So much narcissism!

Kimmel also discusses yesterday’s Senate hearing about the FCC’s temporary ban on Kimmel’s show, with Kimmel lambasting Senator Ted Cruz.  Don’t miss the made-up exchange at 8:55, and then a funny bit at the end with Mark Hamill.

We are back today with a series of underwater photos of SHARKS taken by Peter Klaver. Peter’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

During scuba diving off Bimini, Bahamas my scuba diving buddies and I went on two hammerhead shark feeding dives. The waters around Bimini are home to the Great hammerhead, Sphyrna mokarran, that typically grows to over 4m and over 400 kg. We saw several smaller ones and a large female that one of our dive guides said was ~14 feet long.

While the shark feed dives are not a very natural setting, such objections quickly disappeared from my mind as I saw a nearly half metric ton shark sometimes pass by less than 1 foot away from me. Below are some video frames, with a few divers (further away from the camera than the shark admittedly, making the shark look bigger) included in the last frame for size.

Once again I proffer a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have several Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: no AI pictures like the one I made below.)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “obvious”, came with a note and a  link:

They UK gov just aren’t going to let this one go, for some reason: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjrjzp42v4zo

It’s paywalled, but you can find the full article archived here; it’s titled, “Ministers finalising definition of anti-Muslim hatred.”  Here’s an excerpt (for some reason the BBC turns every sentence into a paragraph). I’ve put the draft definition in bold.

The government is considering a draft definition of anti-Muslim hatred which does not include the term “Islamophobia”.

The BBC has seen the form of words from the Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim hatred working group, which the government has taken to stakeholders for consultation.

Free speech campaigners have expressed concerns that protections for “Islamophobia” would mean it would not be possible to criticise the religion itself.

Members of the working group argue the definition protects individuals while avoiding overreach.

A working group was established in February to provide the government with a working definition of anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia.

A working group was established in February to provide the government with a working definition of anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia.

They submitted their proposal to the government in October.

The definition will be non-statutory, meaning it is not set in law or legally binding, but will provide a form of words public bodies can adopt.

It provides guidance to the government and other bodies on what constitutes unacceptable treatment of Muslims, aiming to help them better understand and quantify prejudice and hate crimes against this group.

The draft definition is: “Anti-Muslim hostility is engaging in or encouraging criminal acts, including acts of violence, vandalism of property, and harassment and intimidation whether physical, verbal, written or electronically communicated, which is directed at Muslims or those perceived to be Muslims because of their religion, ethnicity or appearance.

“It is also the prejudicial stereotyping and racialisation of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics, to stir up hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals.

“It is engaging in prohibited discrimination where the relevant conduct – including the creation or use of practices and biases within institutions – is intended to disadvantage Muslims in public and economic life.”

In today’s cartoon, Jesus is right: if all religions are protected from hatred and discrimination, there’s no need to single out Muslims, giving them their own special protection that’s identical to everyone else’s. If the government wants to protect everyone equally, they only have to change the draft definition from “Anti-Muslim hostility” to “Anti-religious hostility.”  Jesus points this out:

Once again I tender a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have five Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: the picture I generated the drawing below by AI  we don’t want those!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

The newish government of New Zealand is finally seeing the light, and has mandated that every one of the country’s eight universities (all government funded) must at some point adopt a policy of freedom of speech and institutional neutrality (the latter resembles Chicago’s Kalven Report).

The University of Auckland, the country’s flagship university and its best and most important one, issued a public announcement after adopting this policy, which happened this month via the University’s council. The PR announcement is here, and reads like this:

Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland has formally adopted its Freedom of Expression Statement, following approval by the University Council at its meeting on 10 December.

The statement outlines the University’s commitment to protecting and promoting freedom of expression and academic freedom, and reaffirms its role as a critic and conscience of society. It sets expectations for lawful, constructive and civil debate across the University and outlines the principle of institutional neutrality, which helps create an environment where conversations can freely take place.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater says the statement reflects extensive engagement and consultation with the University community.

“Freedom of expression and academic freedom are foundational to our role as a university. This statement provides clarity about our responsibilities and expectations as a community, and reaffirms our commitment to fostering an environment where diverse viewpoints can be expressed lawfully and constructively.”

The statement’s development involved an extended period of careful discussion and refinement through both a Senate working group and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group.

Professor Cathy Stinear, Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity and a member of the Advisory Group, says the work was challenging but rewarding for those involved.

“I’m particularly proud of the way we respectfully debated the issues and carefully balanced the tensions between free expression and caring for the diverse communities that make up our University.”

istinguished Professor Sir Peter Hunter, who chaired the Senate working group and led the development of the statement with support from Professor Nikki Harré and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Freedom of Expression, says the process was shaped by robust feedback.

“In my view, the process of finding common ground between many different points of view has been as important as the statement itself. Universities must demonstrate the ability to freely debate contentious issues.

“I would like to thank the members of the groups involved and the near unanimous endorsement from Senate.”

And below is the official statement itself. Notice the critical neutrality phrase, “The University will not take public positions on matters that do not directly concern university roles, functions or duties.”  That’s very similar to the Kalven report. Further, the last sentence justifies institutional neutrality as a way to avoid chilling speech—exactly the same rational that the University of Chicago has.

I’ve also obtained a copy of the Senate’s minutes that resulted in this outcome, and here’s a brief excerpt:

The majority of Senate voted in favour of the motion with only a few votes against and abstentions recorded.

The motion was declared carried.

Professor Hunter expressed appreciation for the extensive work undertaken by the Working and Advisory Groups and all contributors throughout the consultation process. He observed that the process had demonstrated the value of constructive debate and the willingness of participants to listen and adapt their views. He acknowledged all involved in the process and specifically Professors Stinear and Clements and encouraged commitment to ongoing dialogue and improvement.

The Vice-Chancellor concluded by encouraging Senate to continue fostering an environment in which open and respectful debate could take place and the voice of academic excellence could be heard. She recommended that Senate would continue to provide leadership in this regard.

Note that Sir Peter Hunter, the head of the working group, thanks not only Professor Cathy Stinear for help, but also Kendall Clements, one of the demonized signers of the infamous “Listener Letter” arguing why indigenous “ways of knowing” are not the same as modern science.  I find it interesting and heartening that all three of these people are in STEM: Hunter is a bioengineer, Stinear a neuroscientist, and Clements is an evolutionary biologist and ichthyologist. And note that there was very little dissent about passing this.  I suspect, though I don’t know, that the administration of Auckland Uni had put this on the back burner for years.  I find it ironic as well that the Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Dishwater, now says she’s in favor of this policy when for years she has put roadblocks on freedom of speech. (Remember when she promised an open discussion of indigenous versus modern science and then it never took place?)

Now why is this important?  Because it codifies what the rules are in the country’s most notable university, and one hopes that other universities will follow suit. They will more or less have to in principle, and draft their own statements, but what happens in practice in New Zealand could be quite different.  The country and its universities are rife with intimidation and peer pressure, and, as I’ve written about repeatedly, there is a huge amount of self-censorship. Nobody dares criticize indigenous “knowledge” nor even arrant preferences given to indigenous people. If you criticize any of that, you’re likely to lose your job. This kind of pressure has turned the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi into a sacred document, in effect the Constitution of New Zealand, despite the fact that “Te Tiriti,” as it’s called, is both ambiguous and wasn’t even signed by all the indigenous leaders. The Treaty has been interpreted as saying that indigenous people get half of everything, including presence of indigenous “ways of knowing”—which include superstition, legends, morality, and rules for living)—in science classes

 

This intimidation is especially notable in New Zealand’s universities.  The hope of those who pushed this policy is that the University of Auckland will be a model for the country’s other schools. But the policies outlined above will face stiff opposition—opposition from an entrnched academic and ideological culture based on identity politics. Fingers crossed! At least it looks like a step forward.

Today, courtesy of Rik Gern, we once again enter the mysterious world of fungi. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the second batch of photos of Pinewood gingertail (Xeromphalina campanella) mushrooms from Wisconsin’s northwoods.  I tried to focus on portraits of individual mushrooms in this series.

This picture of the gills on the underside of the cap was taken using natural light.

The following two shots utilized a flash. (3-4) I like how they reveal more detail, and the flash sure makes the exposure easier, but something about the lighting doesn’t feel quite right.

This picture was a lot harder to process, but the natural light made it more satisfying:

The last several pictures are all of the same cluster of mushrooms. There was something about this grouping that seemed majestic and it was fun to try to give each shot a different feel:

This is a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukkah theme, as we now have four Jewish cats).  The instructions are here and we have acquired the requisite 20 photos for posting. (Note: the cats below, a pair of Christmas-y Pallas’s cats (Otocolobus manul)), is AI generated;  we don’t want those!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

As I reported before, Bari Weiss, former NYT columnist and then founder of The Free Press, has become Editor-in-Chief of CBS News as the Free Press has joined Paramount, which owns CBS.  I was wary of this for one reason: how this might slant CBS News, though I never watch it anyway. The Free Press is heterodox and, most disturbingly, seems to be soft on religion. Will that infect CBS?

On Saturday night Weiss made her first appearance as a CBS news person, hosting a 45-minute “town hall meeting” with Erika Kirk, the widow of recently assassinated Charlie Kirk, head of  the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA).  I’ve put the video below.

It was not a propitious interview; in fact, it was pretty boring and repetitive. But that might have been because Erika Kirk seems to be a one-note person, devoted not only to dutifully following the principles of her husband, whom she idolized, but especially devoted to proselytizing about Jesus and God. For religion is one of the main pivots of both Kirk and TPUSA. (Kirk recently issued a book urging us all to rest on the Biblical Sabbath, called Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life.)

The format of this town hall will probably be the one Weiss uses in her future town halls, and she promises many of them. She interviews a subject, and then select members of the audience (an audience relevant to the speaker’s beliefs) ask questions. You can see the video below.

First, let me note that Kirk is entitled to her beliefs, though I don’t think Weiss did her any favors by allowing her to proselytize ad infinitum in the interview.  Second, I do have immense sympathy for Ms. Kirk, who is left with two small children after her husband’s brutal assassination.  And the joy and glee that came out when Kirk was killed was unseemly, and surely deeply hurtful to Erika. This is not a critique of Erika Kirk, but of the show itself. And I’ll add that though I think Kirk’s murder was abhorrent and reprehensible, I still disagreed with almost all of his political stands, stands instantiated in TPUSA.

What struck me most were two things: Kirk’s evasion of any questions that were “hard”, like one asking her if she condemned Trump’s violent political rhetoric or whether words could constitute violence. Her response was almost invariably to say that the Lord (aka Jesus) will take care of everything.  For example, when she was asked whether she’d condemn Trump’s political rhetoric that was sometimes violent, she simply said that the problem was “so much deeper than just one person.” When asked to respond to Charlie’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, she simply said that she was in favor of merit. (The Civil Rights Act was not “affirmative action” it was enacted to give blacks their Constitutional rights.)

The other issue was Kirk’s incessant proselytyzing. When asked why, she thought, God/Jesus allowed Kirk to be murdered, she said that it unleashed a big revival (I doubt it), that “the Lord is moving in ways we have no idea, and that God is going to use Charlie’s death to show the world something. Big.  God, she thinks, will use the event to allow her “to bring glory to her and his kingdom.”

The father of a murdered Jewish person asks Erika about growing antisemitism on the Right, and will she condemn individuals spreading that hate? She responds simply that we all need the Lord and Saviour (she’s referring to Jesus, but the guy asking questions was a Jew). She adds, “You cannot separate the Old Testament from the New Testament,” but I doubt she believes that. Kirk himself, though a supporter of Israel, made several remarks that seem overtly antisemitic, and TPUSA is aligned heavily with the Christian right. You do not tout Jesus to Jews.

It is God and Jesus all the way down, and Weiss did not question the foundations of Kirk’s faith, which perhaps would have been an unfair question give Erika’s emotionality.

Kirk reiterates constantly the fact that Charlie only wanted to have conversations, but that’s a bit of dissimulation, for Charlie Kirk was firm in his right-wing ideology and I doubt the conversations would ever have changed his mind. I applaud the desire to have mutual, civil, and nonviolent exchanges of views, but those conversations should be conducted in a way that each person should be able to tell us what evidence would change their minds. Charlie would never change his mind, despite the fact that he sat behind tables with signs making provocative statements and adding . . . “Change my mind.”

To her credit, Weiss and others do try to ask some hard question, like how does she intend to take up Charlie’s mission while maintaining a family. (Answer: the Lord will help her do it, and, anyway TPUSA is not a job, but her family.) When asked how she was able to trust God in the “midst of unfair and immense suffering,” Erika cites the story of Job, who was made by God to suffer for no good reason, but in the end came out okay simply because Job prayed for his friends, which made the angry God change His mind. I have never understood the point of that story, but theologians have tied themselves in knots trying to interpret it in a way that puts God in a good light.

Kirk’s views are all summed up in her answer to Weiss’s question about how she met Charlie. Erika responds that the Lord helped her to find Charlie in a job interview, and Erika asked God if Charlie was the right guy. He was, for, as Erika says, “If I remain in the jetstream of God’s will, then he will provide for you.”  And that’s pretty much her answer to every question in the town hall.

This was not a good first foray of Weiss into t.v. journalism, but surely things will improve as Weiss interviews people who don’t cling to superstition. But the goddiness of this show struck me as overbearing and unevidenced, and I hope religion is not a frequent “Town Hall Topic”.

One more note before I get to the video. Variety weighed in on the Town Hall, and not in a positive way; click to read:

The content:

During a Saturday-night town hall led by Bari Weiss, the recently named editor in chief of CBS News, most of Madison Avenue sought an off-ramp.

The program featured an in-depth interview with Erika Kirk, the CEO of the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA and the widow of Charlie Kirk, the group’s former leader. He was assassinated during one of the organization’s events at Utah Valley University, throwing a harsh spotlight on the political and cultural divides present in the U.S.

The event marked a new offering from CBS News. The organization does not typically host town halls or debates on trending issues or with newsmakers. And the choice of Weiss as moderator also raised eyebrows, because in most modern TV-news organizations, senior editorial executives remain off camera, rather than appearing in front of it.

More may be on the way. During the program, Weiss told viewers that “CBS is going to have many more conversations like this in the weeks and months ahead, so stay tuned. More town halls. More debates. More talking about the things that matter.” That would suggest CBS is planning to devote more hours to the programs.

The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.

Now, after that long introduction, here’s the video. Feel free and encouraged to weigh in below.

Susan Harrison is back from Belize with bird photos for us. (And if you have any photos of your own, please send them in!).  Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Belize:  the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary

Your correspondent has just returned from a birding trip to Belize, a wonderful country that has preserved over 30% of its land area for wildlife, and where a relatively small-scale and bird-friendly style of agriculture is widely practiced.  Today’s photos are from the last place we visited, the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, a massive complex of lagoons, swamps and forests in middle northern Belize.  Our exceptionally talented guide grew up here when the small village of Crooked Tree was accessible only by boat in the wet season.  When not guiding birdwatchers, he farms coconuts and avocados here.

We were most fortunate to see the elusive Sungrebe (Heliornis fulica).  Despite its name, this waterbird haunts densely shaded riverbanks and is not a grebe; it has no close relatives.  On the heels of a heavy downpour, we observed this one rapidly plucking damselflies off of overhanging foliage.

Sungrebe:

Another exciting sighting was a colony of Boat-Billed Herons (Cochlearius cochlearius).  These nocturnal hunters do not seize their prey like other herons but instead use their enormous bills in a baleen-like fashion.  During daytime they hide in dense thickets.  This one showed us a yawn.

Boat-billed Heron:

Among the many large, fish-devouring water birds were Bare-throated Tiger Herons (Tigrisoma mexicanum) and Anhingas (Anhinga anhinga).

Bare-throated Tiger Heron:

Anhinga:

We watched as Limpkins (Aramis guarauna), a weird wading bird in its own family, speared and gobbled Apple Snails (Pomacea), this bird’s single food source.  At the same time, these snails were equally of interest to Snail Kites (Rostrhamus sociabilis), who sometimes plucked them away from the Limpkins instead of from the mud.

Limpkin, with a Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa) in front:

Northern Jacana closeup, showing its massive feet:

Snail Kites:

Skulking by the shore we saw several Russet-naped Wood Rails (Aramides albiventris), an almost comical bird that makes all other rails seem drab indeed.

Russet-naped Wood Rail:

Raptors were also abundant, and two of the more exciting finds were Black-collared Hawks (Busarellus nigricollis) and a Gray-headed Kite (Leptodon cayanensis).

Black-collared Hawk adult and immature:

Gray-headed Kite:

We also saw many wonderful land birds at Crooked Tree, of which I’ll show just a few of the most special.  Yellow-headed Amazons (Amazona oratrix) are among the many parrots that visit Crooked Tree to feed on the local cashew crop; this species is endangered because its intelligence makes it popular in the pet trade.

Yellow-headed Amazons:

Rufous-tailed Jacamars (Galbula ruficauda) resemble giant hummingbirds but are actually insectivores more closely related to woodpeckers and toucans.    The cliffs that Jacamars require for nesting are scarce in low-lying Belize, but Mayan ruins serve the purpose nicely.  We saw this Jacamar at the impressive Lamanai ruins complex.

Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

Detail of the Jaguar Temple at the Lamanai ruins, in which the rectangular holes create a stylized jaguar face:

Olive-throated Parakeets (Eupsittula nana) occurred everywhere we went in Belize, but only in the Caribbean Pine (Pinus caribaea) woodlands of Crooked Tree did they pose low enough for decent photos.

Olive-throated Parakeets:

What’s up, people? You don’t have cats or holiday decorations? If you do, see below.

This is a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukah theme, as we now have three Jewish cats.  The instructions are here and we have acquired only about 12 photos. (Note: the cat below is AI generated;  we don’t want those!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please! I’ll make the Deadline 9 a.m. December 24; the day before Koynezaa.

Although, as the authors of this new Nature article note, there is some evidence of human fire use in Africa going back 1.6 million years, they don’t consider the evidence definitive because “the evidence for early fire use is limited and often ambiguous, typically consisting of associations between heated materials and stone tools.”   They also note that there is more direct evidence but it’s quite recent:

. . . . direct evidence of fire-making by pre-Homo sapiens hominins has, until recently, been limited to a few dozen handaxes from several French Neanderthal sites, dating to around 50 ka, that exhibit use-wear traces consistent with experimental tools that were struck with pyrite to create sparks.

In this paper the authors investigate a site in Sussex, dated about 400,000 years ago, that has several lines of evidence suggesting regular use of fire, and controlled use, since there were materials like pyrite that could be used to strike sparks.  Note that the paper considers this the earliest evidence for making fire, not simply using fire.  The authors consider their work to provide pretty definitive evidence of fire-making and fire use in H. sapiens. (Note that we are the only species to use fire.)

Click the headline below to read the article, or you can find the pdf here.

The evidence came from an unused clay pit in the Breckland area of Suffolk, with deposits of clay and silt as well as human artifacts like hand axes. The evidence for persistent fire use at this site (the authors suggest at least two groups of humans, and comes from five observations and experiments. I’ve put them below under the letters.

a.) Red clayey silt (RCS) in the layers, silt that seems to have required prolonged heating to form. Here’s what it looks like.  The unexcavated section is in the top photo, and the bottom is the partly excavated area which is an enlargement of the box in (a). I’ve put a red arrow in (a) at the RCS layer thought to reflect heating of the sediments by the presence of “hearths”: areas where cooking or other uses of fire regularly took place. The layer is more obvious in the bottom photo:

The authors say that the red layer reflecs heating or sediments containing iron:

The reddening is attributable to the formation of haematite—a mineral produced through heating of iron-rich sediments. Its distribution is homogeneous and not associated with particular microfacies or voids, indicating that it was preserved in situ.

b.) Experimental heating of the non-red sediments. The authors showed that the magnetic properties of material in the RCS differ markedly from unheated “control” samples of material taken from the lower layer (“YBCS” in second photo above). But by heating the YCBS layer extensively, it assumed some of the magnetic properties of the RCS, suggesting that the RCS involved heating of clays by fire. As they say (bolding is mine):

Three samples were taken from the RCS and two from the adjacent YBCS, which served as unheated control samples. The magnetic properties of the RCS (Supplementary Information, section 5) differ markedly from those of the unheated control samples, exhibiting elevated levels of secondary fine-grained ferrimagnetic and superparamagnetic minerals of pyrogenic origin, unlike the control samples. To assess whether these characteristics could result from heating, a series of experiments of single and multiple heating events of varying durations, was conducted. The aim was to determine whether the reddening could have arisen from one or multiple heating events, as repeated, localized burning is more typical of human than natural fire events (S.H. et al. manuscript in preparation).

The closest experimental analogue in terms of the minerology and grain size distribution, was observed after 12 or more heating events, each lasting 4 h at temperatures of 400 °C or 600 °C. Although the archaeological samples exhibit substantially lower magnetic susceptibility values, this may result from post-depositional mixing with unheated illuviated clay. Overall, the experiments indicate that the magnetic properties of the RCS result from an indeterminate number of short-duration heating events, consistent with repeated human use (Fig. 3).

Note that prolonged heating—nearly 50 hours of heating at 400-600 degrees C, was required to approximate the magnetic properties of the presumed fire-use layer.  This suggests also that the heating did not reflect wildfires, but repeated, localized, and intentional burning.

c.) Infrared spectroscopy of heated control samples changed in infrared absorbtion spectra of the “control” samples, making it closer to that of the presumed hearth layer of RCS.

d.)  The area contained four handaxes that showed marks of heat-shattering.  Here is a picture of a handaxe with “closeup of fractured surface caused by fire.”:

Presumably this is based on experiments using recently made handaxes, with some treated by fire and then compared to unheated controls.

e.) Fragments of pyrite were found in the heated area, and pyrite  is used with flint to produce fire (before that, people presumably had to get fire from lightning burns and somehow preserve it). Moreover, pyrite was not found in this locality; the nearest accessible mineral was about 15 km away, suggesting that people picked it up and brought it to the site to strike against flint (flint was also found in the area). As the authors note:

The occurrence of pyrite at Barnham warrants further consideration. Pyrite is a naturally occurring iron sulfide mineral that can be struck against flint to produce sparks to ignite tinder. Its use for this purpose is well documented in ethnographic accounts worldwide. Pyrite has been recovered from European archaeological sites dating from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the historic periods, occasionally bearing wear traces consistent with use for fire-making and, in some cases, found in association with flint striking tools.

Here are some fragments of pyrite; caption is from paper:

(from paper): b, Fragment of pyrite found on the surface of palaeosol in Area IV(6). c, Fragment of pyrite from palaeosol in Area VI, found in association with concentrations of heated flint.

e.) The heated sites were located in areas amenable to prolonged fire use. This is weak evidence, but I present it nevertheless. From the authors:

Notably, all three sites occupy marginal locations, away from the main river valleys and associated with small ponds or springs. In the absence of caves, these locations probably provided safer, more sheltered environments for domestic activities. Taken together, these findings present a strong case for controlled fire use across the Breckland region during MIS 11.

The upshot:  We often forget that any meat eaten by people before the advent of cooking would have to be raw, and raw meat is tough and, at least to us, somewhat unpalatable. (I do like a very rare steak, as well as steak tartare, though.) But our ancestors didn’t grind up meat, though they may have pounded it to make a kind of raw Pleistocene schnitzel. By making meat more palatable, cooking would promote eating more of it, and that itself could change the selective pressures on humans, giving them the extra nutrients they’d need if they were to evolve big brains (brains use a lot of energy!).  This is one (disputed) theory for a rapid increase of human brain size that lasted between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, though brain size was also getting bigger, albeit at a slower pace, before then. Cooking has also been suggested to have changed human social behavior (and perhaps social evolution), with pair bonding and mutual aid increasing as a way to gather, store, and protect food that needed to be cooked. And more complex social behavior could itself have promoted the evolution of larger brains to figure out how to regulate and get along in your small social group.

These theories, while suggestive, really should be downgraded to “hypotheses,” since there isn’t much evidence to support them—only correlation and speculation. However, they are interesting to contemplate, even if we never can get strong evidence for them.  At the end of the paper, the authors do seem to sign onto some of these, but not strongly.

The kernel of this paper is the several lines of evidence that do, to my mind, support the idea that humans were making and using fire at least 400,000 year ago.  Here’s what the authors say about the advantages, evolutionary and otherwise, of controlling fire:

The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability, which facilitated better planning of seasonal routines, the establishment of domestic sites in preferred locations and increased structuring of the landscape through enculturation. Year-round access to fire would have provided an enhanced communal focus, potentially as a catalyst for social evolution. It would have enabled routine cooking, could have expanded the consumption of roots, tubers and meat, reduced energy required for digestion and increased protein intake. These dietary improvements may have contributed to increase in brain size, enhanced cognition and the development of more complex social relationships, as articulated in the Social Brain Hypothesis. Moreover, controlled fire use was instrumental in advancing other technologies, such as the production of glues for hafting. The widespread appearance of Levallois points from Africa to Eurasia by MIS 7 (243–191 ka), often interpreted as spear-tips, provides strong evidence of effective hafting. This interpretation is supported by use-wear evidence and the identification of heat-synthesized birch bark tar as a stone tool adhesive.

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has returned with his patented text-and-photo piece on (you guess it) pollination. Athayde’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Delicate trade agreements

In one of the regular letters to his close friend, explorer and botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin vented his frustration at a puzzle he hadn’t been able to crack: …I will return the 3 Melastomateds; I do not want them & indeed have cuttings; I am very low about them, & have wasted enormous labour over them & cannot yet get a glimpse of the meaning of the parts. (Darwin, 1862). The ‘Melastomateds’ cuttings belonged to the family Melastomataceae, a huge group (some 5,000 known species) of mostly tropical shrubs, trees, herbs and lianas. The ‘parts’ whose meaning eluded Darwin were the stamens and anthers.

A complete, hermaphroditic flower. The pistil comprises the ovary, the style (a pillar-like stalk through which pollen germinates to reach the ovary) and the stigma (a sticky tip at the top of the style that receives pollen). The stamen has a filament that supports the anther, where pollen is produced © Anjubaba, Wikimedia Commons:

For a range of Melastomataceae species and at least 15 other flowering plant families, there are two (sometimes three) types of morphologically distinct stamens and anthers in each flower, a condition known as heteranthery. Typically, one set comprises short, colourful stamens located at the centre of the flower. The other set has longer, less colourful stamens that are deflected to the flower’s side and curved inwards. Darwin wrote a whole book about flower morphologies and their bearings in natural selection (Darwin, 1877), but the relevance – if any – of heteranthery puzzled him. He suspected the condition was related to reproduction, but he couldn’t figure out how.

An Asian melastoma (Melastoma candidum) flower with shorter stamens/yellow anthers, and longer stamens/reddish anthers © Hachiman et al., 2024:

Darwin got his answer from his correspondent and enthusiastic evolutionist Fritz Müller (1822- 1897) working in faraway southern Brazil. Müller, a Prussian immigrant, was a brilliant naturalist who wrote about biology, morphology, systematics and evolution of plants, marine invertebrates, butterflies, ants, termites and other insects. Müller discovered the nutritious bodies (today called Müllerian bodies), which are plant glands that secrete ant food, and demonstrated that pairs of poisonous, unpalatable species benefit from evolving a similar appearance to reduce their chances of being attacked, a form of protection we know as Müllerian mimicry.

Fritz Müller kitted out to go exploring a Brazilian tropical forest © O Município;

From his observations of Melastomataceae, Fritz Müller and his botanist brother Hermann – who stayed in Prussia – proposed that the two types of stamen played different roles. One type was specialised in transferring pollen to flower visitors; the other was responsible for feeding them. But why would a plant come to such an elaborate ruse?

Most Melastomataceae and many heterantherous species are pollinated by bees, but their flowers don’t produce any nectar: pollen is their sole food reward. This creates a dilemma. Plants must hand out pollen, otherwise bees wouldn’t pay a visit. But the giveaway must be sparing, otherwise reproduction could be curtailed or prevented altogether. Heterantherous plants sorted this problem by dividing up pollen allocation. The showy, central stamens attract bees, who store the collected pollen in their pollen baskets (scopa): this pollen is no longer available for fertilisation. The longer stamens that curve away from the centre are in a convenient position to sneak on a foraging bee and deposit pollen on parts of her body from where they are not easily scooped up by grooming. With luck, these pollen grains will be transported to another plant’s stigma.

Xylocopa flavifrons (A) and Amegilla urens (B) collecting pollen from Melastoma malabathricum‘s feeding stamens (yellow) and being exposed to pollinating stamens (red). Arrows indicate the pollen-receiving stigmas © Hachiman et al., 2024:

The Müller brothers’ ‘division of labour hypothesis’, as it is known today, was a revelation to Darwin: I have had a letter from Fritz Müller suggesting a novel and very curious explanation of certain plants producing two sets of anthers of different colour. This has set me on fire to renew the laborious experiments which I made on this subject, now 20 years ago (Darwin, 1887).

Division of labour is beautifully exemplified by the pollination of Rhynchanthera grandiflora, a shrub native to the Neotropical region. This plant has flowers with four short stamens and one long stamen, all of them with upwards-facing anthers. A bee lands on a flower, grabs the short stamens and starts flexing her thoracic muscles at high frequency, generating vibrations that are transmitted to the anthers. These moves, known as ‘buzz pollination’, release pollen that lands on the bee. This tricky form of pollen extraction is restricted to some specialised bees such as bumble bees (Bombus spp.) and carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp.). Pollen released from anthers in the short stamens is scooped up by the bee. Pollen from the anther on the long stamen shoots up and sticks to the bee’s dorsal side (Konzmann et al., 2020).

L: A R. grandiflora flower. R: A bumble bee buzz-pollinating depresses the long stamen with its abdomen. The dotted line and cone show the mean direction and scattering angle, respectively, of the released pollen © Konzmann et al., 2020:

The division of labour hypothesis has been confirmed for a few other heterantherous, bee-pollinated species. But, as is invariably the case in biology, things are a bit more complicated.

The hypothesis requires that both types of stamens produce pollen at the same time. But that’s not the case for speckled clarkia (Clarkia cylindrica) and elegant clarkia (C. unguiculata), both natives to western North America. These plants have two types of stamens that mature gradually and at different times. Moreover, pollen from both types of stamens is collected for food and transferred between flowers in equal proportions, so there’s no indication of labour division. For Kay et al. (2020), heteranthery in Clarkia spp. and possibly other heterantherous plants is a mechanism to dispense pollen gradually, during several visits by bees. This strategy would enhance pollination because a bee with only a few pollen grains attached to her body is likely to move to another flower without wasting time grooming herself to remove pollen from her body. Why then bother with two types of stamens? Different morphologies and development times represent additional insurance against excessive pollen harvesting.

A speckled clarkia is a miserly pollen-giver © U.S. National Park Service, Wikimedia Commons:

We don’t have enough studies to assess the relative significance of the division-of-labour hypothesis or the pollen-dosing strategy. Either way, dividing up the pollen stock or releasing it slowly are tactics to give away as little as possible a metabolically expensive product without discouraging flower visitors, who aim to gather as much of it and as fast as possible. The morphological adaptations exhibited by heterantherous plants are examples of the true nature of plant-pollinator interactions: an equilibrium between two parties with conflicting interests fine-tuned by natural selection.

References

Darwin, C.R. 1862. Letter no. 3762, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/.
Darwin, C.R. 1877. The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species. John Murray.
Darwin, F. (ed). 1887. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. John Murray.
Hachiman, S. et al. 2024. Division of labour between dimorphic stamens in Melastoma candidum (Melastomataceae): Role of stamen strength in the biomechanics of pollination. Journal of Pollination Ecology 37: 284–302.
Kay, K.M. et al. 2020. Darwin’s vexing contrivance: a new hypothesis for why some flowers have two kinds of anther. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287: 20202593.
Konzmann, S. et al. 2020. Morphological specialization of heterantherous Rhynchanthera grandiflora (Melastomataceae) accommodates pollinator diversity. Plant Biology 22: 583-590.