Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The only television show I watch regularly is the NBC Evening News: I watch the whole thing from 5:30-6, completely ignoring phone calls and other disturbances. Last night the lead story was about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, a well-liked NBC news journalist and co-anchor of the network’s Today show. Mother and daughter were close, with Nancy often appearing on Savannah’s show.
Nancy Guthrie was 84, and simply disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona on Sunday. She has limited mobility, and when she didn’t show up for church a friend called the police, who discovered her disappearance. Nancy Guthrie relies on medication that she must take every 24 hours or she might die. An interview with the local sheriff revealed that there were signs of violence, and that Nancy was probably abducted. It’s now Tuesday, so she might already be dead.
The NBC news, both national and local, gave the disappearance not only the lead story, but also lots of air time because Savannah’s a member of the network family. The first paragraph of the NBC national news story is this:
“TODAY” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie is asking for prayers for her mother’s safe return as Arizona authorities continue to investigate her possible abduction.
Savannah also related, on the evening news, that the greatest gift she got from her mother was a deep belief in God, as you see in the plea for prayers above. On the local NBC news, anchor Alison Rosati ended her report on the disappearance by saying that she and other NBCers were also praying for Nancy Guthrie.
This is a tragedy for the Guthrie family, especially because Savannah and her mom were so close, and I won’t be dismissive of the call for prayers by nearly all the reporters. It did, however, get me thinking about people’s views about what prayers are supposed to accomplish, how they’re received by the God people imagine, and how educated people (Savannah has a J.D. from Georgetown Law) come to think that prayers are useful.
It’s clear that all the calls for prayer by newspeople reflect the still-pervasive religiosity of America, though I’m not sure whether, for some, the call for prayer is just a pro forma expression of sympathy. But surely for many prayers are supposed to work: God is supposed to hear them and do something—in this case intercede to help bring Nancy Guthrie back alive. And that got me thinking about how people connect prayer with the listener: God. Religious Jews are, by the way, among the most fervent pray-ers, with prayer serving as a constant connection with God. And, like prayers in other religions. Jews sometimes use prayer to ask for personal benefits or simply to propitiate God.
The train of thought continued. What kind of God is more likely to effect changes requested in prayer? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and good, wouldn’t He know that people want things, like Nancy Guthrie’s return, and not need their prayers to find out? (He presumably can read people’s minds.) A god who requires prayers to effect change would be dictatorial and mean-spirited, demanding that obsequious people supplicate and propitiate him. But surely that’s not the kind of God most Christians imagine. (My feeling is that Jews envision a somewhat angrier God—the one in the Old Testament.)
Nevertheless, despite quasi-scientific studies showing that intercessory prayers don’t work, people ignore that data, as of course they would; it’s tantamount to admitting that there’s no personal God who has a relationship with you. Sam Harris has suggested that these studies are weak, and Wikipedia quotes him this way:
Harris also criticized existing empirical studies for limiting themselves to prayers for relatively unmiraculous events, such as recovery from heart surgery. He suggested a simple experiment to settle the issue:[32]
Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.
He has a point of course, and that experiment would never work. But it’s intercessory prayer. Perhaps God answers only prayers coming from the afflicted themselves. But that implies that the “thoughts and prayers” of other people, as in the Guthrie case, are useless. In the end, the very idea of petitionary and intercessory prayer being effective implies that God is, as Christopher Hitchens said, like a Celestial Dictator presiding over a divine North Korea, requiring constant propitiation by obsequious believers. How could it be otherwise?
One response by liberal religionists is that one prays not for help, but simply as a form of meditation or rumination. In other words, perhaps putting things into words—even words that nobody is hearing—helps you as a form of therapy, or in sorting out your thoughts and problems. That’s fine, though it’s unclear why rumination alone wouldn’t suffice.
I won’t deny anybody their belief in God, but I don’t want people forcing their beliefs on me, which is what occurs when newspeople ask for my prayers. I have none to give, though I wish people in trouble well, and hope that Nancy Guthrie returns.
These thoughts may sound cold-hearted, but they’re similar to what Dan Dennett wrote in his wonderful essay, “Thank Goodness“, describing who should really have been thanked for saving his life after a near-fatal aortic dissection:
What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends’ remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: “I’ve been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK.” The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.” What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don’t expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.
In other words, “thoughts” are fine; “prayers,” not so much.
I’m writing this simply to work out my own thoughts about prayer and its ubiquity, but I would appreciate hearing from readers about this issue. What do you think when you hear others asking for prayers. Is prayer a good thing, and what does it presume about God? Any thoughts (but no prayers) are welcome, and put them below.
This is my last batch of photos, so please help us (i.e., me) out and send your good wildlife photos.
Today’s photos of sunflowers come from Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.
I have shared some stories about our Maximilian Sunflowers before. This batch is a set of images of the sunflowers in bloom from the fall. They bloom for a relatively shorter time (a couple of weeks), but it creates a wonderful sunny vibe at that time and the pollinators, especially the migrating ones, definitely appreciate the buffet. Here are some insect photos on or near the sunflowers.
The Maximilian Sunflower (Helianthus maximiliani) plants bordering our property. They are not just low maintenance (no water required even during hot Oklahoma summers), but also kind of hard to kill if one wants that! We had them accidentally mowed down to the ground by a neighbor during the first year, and they grew back up just fine:
A leafcutter bee (Megachile, not sure about the exact species) flying over:
Painted lady (Vanessa cardui) butterfly taking off:
The bloom coincides with Monarch (Danaus plexippus) migration as we see plenty of Monarchs stopping by:
I called this image “The flame and the bee”. It’s the same leafcutter bee from the other image:
A close view of the bee nectaring on the sunflower:
A Spotted Cucumber Beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata). These are considered pests, but we see a good number of them every fall and they had never caused any trouble in our vegetable garden:
I think these are Goldenrod Soldier Beetles (Chauliognathus pensylvanicus), or something closely related to them:
Some kind of Meadow Katydid (Orchelimum). I love these with long antennae. They keep us entertained all fall and the garden suddenly sounds so quiet after the frost sets in:
Another Painted Lady. Note how it does not have the typical white spot of the American Ladies (Vanessa virginiensis) on the orange patch. The smaller one is likely a Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus):
The skippers are often overlooked but they have a lot of character! I can spend hours watching them interact with each other. I find them quite hard to properly identify sometimes even with a field guide. This one is probably a Sachem (Atalopedes campestris):
The skippers are fast, but they can still fall prey to these efficient hunters: Goldenrod Crab Spider (Misumena vatia). These spiders can change their color (during molts) to match their surroundings. It’s not a surprise that this one was yellow, efficiently camouflaged among the sunflowers:
I like playing with the backlight through the leaves of these plants. I was happy to capture this little Eastern Amberwing (Perithemis tenera) dragonfly coming back to its favorite perch:
Another backlit image of a sunflower plant with some nice bokeh of out-of-focus mosquitoes/gnats:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 3, 2026, and National Carrot Cake Day, one of my favorite cakes even though it’s made with a vegetable. It must, however, have cream-cheese frosting, like this beauty I consumed in a Chicago restaurant on June, 2024. Note the generous size, the carrot curls on top, and the largesse of cream-cheese frosting:
The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation, as opposed to the amputation normally carried out.
Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats—this is just prior to the adoption by American surgeons of a hygienic surgical environment (asepsis) which was becoming standard in Europe. Dr. Gross, in fact, regarded antiseptic surgery, or Listerism, as quackery until the end of his life.The Gross Clinic is thus often contrasted with Eakins’s later painting The Agnew Clinic (1889), which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater, with the participants in “white coats”. In comparing the two, the advance in understanding of the prevention of infection is seen. Another noteworthy difference in the later painting is the presence of a professional nurse, Mary Clymer, in the operating theater.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 3 Wikipedia page.
The sole border crossing between Gaza and Egypt reopened on Monday after being largely closed for 20 months, a step forward in Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas.
The reopening of the crossing, in the Rafah area of southern Gaza, will for the first time allow some Gazans who fled during the two-year war to return, but only in limited numbers for now. It is also expected to expedite the exit of thousands of sick and wounded people waiting for medical treatment abroad.
The hope is that the reopening of the Rafah crossing will be a move toward gradually improving conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.
The first groups of Palestinians started passing through the crossing on Monday morning in both directions, according to Israeli officials, who said that they would have final numbers of how many crossed by the end of the day.
At a Palestinian Red Crescent Society hospital in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, a minibus departed for the Rafah crossing shortly after 1 p.m. with five patients, each accompanied by two caregivers.
Mohammed Mahdi, 25, was escorting his father, Akram Mahdi, 61, a mechanical engineer. The elder Mr. Mahdi was wounded in April 2024 in an Israeli airstrike near their home, in a refugee camp in central Gaza, according to his son. Shrapnel tore into his face, blinding him in his right eye and damaging his left one. Doctors in Gaza could do little more than stabilize him, his son said.
“Finally, we can get advanced treatment abroad,” Mohammed Mahdi said before boarding the minibus.
It was unclear by midday how many Palestinians had actually crossed the border in either direction. No returnees appeared to have arrived in Gaza as of early afternoon.
Israel and Egypt disagreed for months over the terms of the reopening, which is part of President Trump’s plan for ending the Gaza war. A shaky cease-fire took effect in October, but Israel kept the crossing closed as leverage until the last of the hostages seized in the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, were returned to Israel, alive or dead.
A week ago, the Israeli military said it had retrieved the remains of the last remaining captive, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, a police officer who was shot during the Oct. 7 attack, which set off the war.
. . . .Now that it has been opened again, the crossing will be strictly supervised and operated in a limited capacity, with dozens of people allowed at first to enter or exit each day, according to officials.
This of course is a good thing, though it would be even better if Egypt let Gazans migrate to Egypt for good. Those leaving are getting medical care, and will likely have to return. And although this opening is one of the provisions of the cease-fire, the really important one—the surrender, disbanding, and disarming of Hamas—shows no signs of occurring, as everyone knows. Israel attacked Hamas targets on Sunday, and that will continue until there is no more Hamas. Those who think that an interim government involving the Palestinian Authority will finally bring peace (and the “two-state solution”) are deluded: Gazans and Hamas hate the PA and if there are ever elections in Gaza, Hamas, if it ran, would win.
*One or two of the photos released in the latest batch of Epsteiniana showed Britain’s Price Andrew kneeling over the supine body of a woman or girl, whose face was redacted. That’s somewhat incriminating, though it’s not clear if the woman was underaged. At least it attests to the Prince’s randiness. He was asked to testify before Congress but didn’t respond; but in light of the new photos, he may have to show up in the U.S. and give sworn testimony. Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S., also implicated in the scandal, may also have to testify:
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is pressuring the U.K.’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson to provide evidence to American authorities over Jeffrey Epstein, after a cache of emails appeared to show that Mandelson leaked confidential British government correspondence to the disgraced financier.
The emails also show that Mandelson, long an influential figure on the British left, had received $75,000 in wire transfers from Epstein years earlier.
Starmer ordered an urgent investigation into Mandelson on Monday after a trove of emails released by the Justice Department in recent days provided fresh details about the long-standing relationship between Epstein and the British politician, a relationship that continued well after Epstein was first charged with sex offenses.
Mandelson was removed as ambassador last year after earlier details of his dealings with Epstein came to light, and the latest revelations will add pressure on the politician. Starmer on Monday also demanded that Mandelson resign from the House of Lords, the U.K.’s upper chamber in Parliament.
Mandelson said in a statement on Sunday that he had no recollection or record of receiving the funds and that the payments “need investigating by me.” Mandelson quit the ruling Labour Party on Monday but he remains a member of the House of Lords. On Sunday, he said he wanted to repeat “my apology to the women and girls whose voices should have been heard long before now.” He didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting further comment on Monday.
And Prince Andrew:
The latest batch of emails released by the Department of Justice include other high profile members of the British establishment, notably Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the former prince and brother to King Charles, who has already had his titles removed and is being forced out of his mansion on Windsor estate.
The latest emails, which all date after Epstein pled guilty to procuring minors for prostitution in 2008, show Andrew invited Epstein for tea at Buckingham Palace in 2010. Photos also released by the Justice Department show Andrew photographed kneeling over an unidentified woman.
Andrew, who didn’t reply to an email requesting comment, last year said he continued to “vigorously deny” allegations that he abused an American teen introduced to him by Epstein.
Epstein wrote to Andrew in August 2010, “I have a friend who i think you might enjoy having dinner with, her name is irina she will be london 20-24.” “I am in Geneva until the morning of 22nd but would be delighted to see her. Will she be bringing a message from you?” Andrew replied.
A U.K. government spokesman said that the former Prince Andrew should also provide evidence to the U.S. authorities regarding Epstein.
Andrew has been more or less demoted to being a rich commoner since the scandal, and the BBC further reports two allegations that Epstein sent to women to the UK to have sex with Prince Andrew. Fortunately for Sarah Ferguson, who used to be married to Randy Andy, she won’t have to deal with this. I originally thought that nobody beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell would face consequences from involvement in the scandal, but Andrew may be guilty of sex trafficking, which would be a first for the Royal Family.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he plans to close the Kennedy Center for roughly two years for the facilityto undergo construction. The proposal comes amid a series of cancellations and internal upheaval since he took over the arts institution and presidential memorial nearly a year ago and remade it in his name and image.
“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer.”
Under Trump’s proposal, which he said is subject to board approval, the Kennedy Center could close on July 4, coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, with construction beginning immediately.
“Financing is completed, and fully in place!,” Trump wrote. “This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center … and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.”
Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell confirmed the plans in a Sunday evening email to staff obtained by The Washington Post. “We will have more information about staffing and operational changes in the coming days,” he wrote.
In a post on X, Grenell cited the $257 million designated “for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” through the One Big Beautiful Bill last year.
Grenell confirmed the necessity of repairs, but also issued a groveling tweet. You can bet that Trump will be over seeing the design and construction, and that there will be more Trumpiana included in the new building.
I am grateful for President Trump’s visionary leadership. I am also grateful to Congress for appropriating an historic $257M to finally address decades of deferred maintenance and repairs at the Trump Kennedy Center.
Our goal has always been to not only save and permanently…
*How long are you going to live? Well, you could get hit by a truck tomorrow, as they say, but barring that you can get an estimate of when you’ll die from various programs (go here, for example to estimate your longevity; mine was 96!). They do ask about your family history, and a new article in the NYT says, to my joy, that genes may be more important than environment or behavior in determining your longevity (remember that the propensity to9 smoke and drink are also partly coded by your genes).
Your potential life span is written in your genes, according to a new study. You can lengthen it a bit with a healthy lifestyle. But if your genetic potential is to live to be 80, for example, it is unlikely that anything you do will push your age at death up to 100.
That, at least, is the conclusion of a paper published Thursday in Science.
Uri Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and other researchers drew the data for the study from three sets of data from pairs of Swedish twins, including one set of twins that was reared apart. To test how generalizable the results are, the group also examined data from a study of 2,092 siblings of 444 Americans who lived to be over 100. Their goal was to identify outside factors that can affect how long someone lives, like infections or accidents, separate from the intrinsic factor of genetics.
They report that aging is mostly hereditary, a conclusion that flies in the face of much conventional medical wisdom regarding dieting, exercising and healthy habits. These habits are important for the quality of a person’s life, but they run into another form of conventional wisdom: You can’t make someone into a centenarian, unless that person also has a genetic inheritance of longevity.
“If you are trying to gauge your own chances of getting to 100, I would say look at the longevity in your family,” said Dr. Thomas Perls, a geriatrician and the director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University. His study’s published data on U.S. centenarians were used in the new analysis, although he was not associated with the study.
“This paper has a pretty powerful message,” said S. Jay Olshansky, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who was not involved in the study. “You don’t have as much control as you think.”
Here’s the paper; click to read:
Now a heritability of 50% really means that of the variation of longevity among people, about half of that variation is due to variation in people’s genes. That does show a sizable genetic component of longevity, and the rest is due to environment, gene-environment interaction, and other arcane factors (as the authors say, “(“This remaining variance likely stems from environmental influences (lifestyle, socioeconomic factors, health care access, intrinsic biological stochasticity , nonadditive genetic effects, and epigenetic modifications”).
The heritability is based on the correlation between twins, and remember that many behavioral factors that affect longevity, including drinking and smoking, are also affected by genetic variation. The estimated heritability of 50% is a lot higher than many previous estimates, which the authors argue is due to elimination of extrinsic factors like accidents, birth year, or infections that fuzz out the data and reduce heritability,
This does NOT give you a license to go hog-wild and start drinking, smoking, and having dangerous sex. Remember, half of the variance is due to factors that may not have a genetic component (not all drinking and smoking is based on the genes you have). But it does make me a bit happy as I want to live forever and my family, especially the women, live a long time. My grandmothers lived into their upper 90s, and although the men didn’t live as long, nearly all of them were heavy smokers. I know I’m not immortal, but, unless I get some debilitating condition, I want to live as long as I can, for I want to see what happens at the party.
Just weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics, a cheating scandal that is equal parts bizarre and brazen, rocking one of its foundational sports and becoming a cause for national shame in Norway, has taken its latest turn.
On Thursday, after 11 months of investigation and litigation, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation’s (FIS) ethics committee handed down a harsh 18-month suspension to two disgraced former coaches and the former equipment manager of Norway’s ski jumping team. The trio admitted conspiring to manipulate the suits of the team’s top jumpers to help them beat the competition at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Trondheim, Norway, last year after a whistleblower filmed them through a curtain.
“In the panel’s view it is the fact of the violations, the admission of which was compelled by the video evidence, that justifies the imposition of the sentence,” the decision stated.
At the world championships, Magnus Brevig, the head coach of the Norwegian national team, and Adrian Livelten, the team’s suit technician, were caught on a video posted anonymously to YouTube inserting illegal stitching into the crotch area of the suits of two star jumpers, reigning Olympic champion Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, after the suits had already passed inspection. The stitches essentially served to make the suits more aerodynamic, allowing the jumpers to fly farther than the competition.
Here’s the damning video, though I can’t make heads nor tails of it. You be the judge; actually, the IOC will.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili made me genuinely LOL with this:
Andrzej: Hili, these are very important papers!
Hili: That’s exactly why I’m sitting on them.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, to są bardzo ważne papiery!
Hili: Właśnie dlatego na nich siedzę.
From Masih: an Iranian hero who later died. Very sad.
Hollywood spends hundreds of millions creating heroes.
I dare you to look here. 👇
This is a real hero: an Iranian man carrying a wounded protester on his shoulders after the IRGC shot him. He saved multiple lives under live fire in Mashhad. His video went viral.
They later… pic.twitter.com/tQtNgy0Zy6
In the autumn of 1942, a slight, 32-year-old Polish social worker named Irena Sendler passed through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto with a carpenter’s toolbox in her arms. Beneath the hammers and nails lay a drugged six-month-old infant, breathing softly, utterly silent. One cry… pic.twitter.com/8eOYemB6gf
Two from Matthew. The First is from a Guardian article (linked) about the woman who makes road signs keeping animals and drivers safe. Besides ducks, she made the cow signs.
I don’t remember this duck sign from when I learned the Highway Code but it was half a century ago and tbh it’s fairly clear what it means…
Divers fouled by amphipods (a type of crustacean)!
We did a scuba dive today to swap out an instrument on one of our offshore moorings. While clearing off the biofouling, we got biofouled, hood to flipper, by caprellid amphipods (aka headbangers). Here’s my leg after moderate scraping… 🦑🧪🌊
Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.
Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously. And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand. Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:
Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:
Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.
Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.
But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.
I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.
a.) There is something rather than nothing.
b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation.
I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)
c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die.
In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God Daseler adds further evidence:
Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.
d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray
This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer. But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.
e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.
Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior. Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt). Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:
There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.
And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?
Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.
Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:
Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”
The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”
In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:
I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.
I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it? Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.
If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better. But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”
But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.
Over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, they dragged out a groggy groundhog (Marmota monax), Punxsutawney Phil, from his wooden-box den, and determined whether he could see his shadow.
He did, and that means that we have six more weeks of winter weather to come. Is that any surprise?
Below is a short video in which Phil is forced to look at a piece of paper. Who knows if he actually saw his shadown, but the top-hatted flacks, members of the so-called “Inner Circle” who interpret Phil’s predictions, did.
The Inner Circle claims a 100% accuracy rate, and an approximately 80% accuracy rate in recorded predictions. If a prediction is wrong, they claim that the person in charge of translating the message must have made a mistake in their interpretation. Empirical estimates place the groundhog’s accuracy between 35% and 41%.
So it goes. It’s a groundhog, for crying out loud, not a weatherman. And the Inner Circle is a religion. . . .
Well, this is the last batch of submitted photos, but I hope for me. Don’t dash my hope!
Today we have a lovely text-and-photo post by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, featuring a bizarre and mimetic beetle. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Fabulous pretenders
Termites, cockroaches’ sophisticated cousins (Order Blattodea), live in intricate, organized societies with division of labour and a caste system. The mound-building species are also skilled engineers, constructing temperature-controlled, ventilated nests that protect their inhabitants from the harsh conditions of the outside world. Colonies may comprise millions of individuals, including eggs, larvae and workers. Just like other social insects, termites have to be on guard against many an envious enemy: their cosy nests are tempting to would-be squatters, with the even more tempting bonus of being packed with energy-rich morsels.
Damage to a nest of Formosan subterranean termites brings hoards of workers and soldiers with dark, oval shaped heads scrambling to repair the hole. Termites shown about 4 times actual size. USDA photo by Scott Bauer.
Termites are mostly successful in keeping invaders at bay, but a sizable group of outsiders has evolved skills that allow them to breach those defences. These are the termitophiles: macro-organisms that live in association with termite colonies. Termitophiles, ranging from harmless inquilines to predators and parasites, rely on chemical mimicry and numerous morphological and behavioural adaptations to avoid detection and mingle with their hosts.
Among the many impostors, rove beetles from the subfamily Aleocharinae are particularly noteworthy. This is a huge group (~16,000 species) within the humongous Staphylinidae family, which comprises some 66,000 species, one of the largest families of organisms. Many aleocharines are myrmecophilous (associated with ants); some 670 species are termitophilous.
Aleocharines have reached extraordinary levels of deception, but two termitophilous species of the genus Austrospirachtha from northern Australia – the only known species so far – take their art to a new level. On first seeing their images, one may think they are AI-generated. Or pranks devised by putting together bits of different insects, entomological versions of the Piltdown Man hoax.
The termite puppets on their backs, complete with dangling pseudo-appendages that resemble antennae and legs, fool their hosts into accepting them as nestmates. You may see these beetles as rough simulacrums of the real thing, but in the pitch-dark confines of a termite nest, mimicry is based on palpation rather than vision (Watson, 1973). The mouthparts of A. carrijoi are very small, which suggest it dupes termite workers to feed it, a process known as trophallaxis (Zilberman & Pires Silva, 2023). Presumably, the same happens with A. mimetes.
We know very little about these beetles or any other symbiotic aleocharines. But the rare insights into their outlandish appearances are glimpses of the marvellous workings of natural selection.
References
Pires Silva, C.M. 2024. Cladistic analysis, taxonomic revision & biological notes of the termitophilous genus Xenogaster Wasmann, 1891 (Staphylinidae, Aleocharinae, Corotocini). Master’s Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Watson, J.A.L. 1973. Austrospirachtha mimetes, a new termitophilous corotocine from Northern Australia (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae). Journal of the Australian Entomological Society 12: 307-310.
Zilberman, B. et al. 2019. Viviparity in Staphylinidae and reproductive behavior of Corotoca Schiødte, 1853. Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia 59: e20195919.
Zilberman, B. & Pires Silva, C.M. 2023. A new species and morphological notes on the remarkable termitophilous genus Austrospirachtha Watson from Australia (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Aleocharinae). Zootaxa. 5336: 424-432.
Welcome to the first Monday in February: February 2, 2026, and it’s National Tater Tot Day, celebrating the commerical nubs of grated and deep-fried potato. They’re good, though I almost never have them. Some of the history:
Tater tots were developed in 1953 when American frozen food company Ore-Ida founders F. Nephi Grigg, Golden Grigg, and Ross Erin Butler Sr. were trying to devise a recipe to use leftover slivers of cut potatoes that would otherwise be thrown away. They chopped up the slivers, added flour and seasoning, then pushed the mash through holes and sliced off pieces of the extruded mixture.
The product was first offered commercially in stores in 1956. Originally, sales were slow; the family speculated the product was priced too low, so it had no perceived value. When the price was raised, people began buying it. By 1960 Ore-Ida captured 25% of the frozen potato market.
The Tots can also be made into a casserole with ground beef and other stuff; I’ve always wanted to try it but haven’t (it’s popular in the Midwest). Here’s what it looks like, and you can find a recipe here. It uses just a few common ingredients, and takes only 5 minutes to prepare (and 40 minutes to cook). Somebody make one!
Here’s the best song I know that incorporates a ukulele. The song was, of course written by George Harrison, who loved the ukulele, and here Macca plays an instrument that belonged to the late Harrison. One of the YouTube comments says this:
Paul is playing a 1920’s Gibson Tenor Ukulele that was gifted to him by George. George Harrison had a very impressive ukulele collection, including two of George Formby’s banjo ukuleles.
Look at all the great musicians! This is a live performance from the Concert for George, performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002: the first anniversary of Harrison’s death.
The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to arrest and detain as many people as possible during its immigration crackdown. But in recent weeks, a deluge of court cases has led federal judges to release hundreds of immigrant detainees back into the country, and threatens to overwhelm the court system.
In case after case, federal judges have found that the Trump administration has been ignoring longstanding legal interpretations that mandate the release of many people who are taken into immigration custody if they post a bond.
The surge in such cases has dominated the court dockets in some districts, overwhelming government lawyers who have to defend the detentions. And the wave of people who have been set free has upended the Trump administration’s effort to keep detained immigrants locked up indefinitely, even if they do not pose a public safety threat.
Lawyers representing detainees have been filing rafts of what are known as habeas corpus petitions — court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. In the vast majority of cases, judges are siding with the detainees and ordering their immediate release, or ordering immigration judges to hold bond hearings, according to 10 lawyers interviewed by The New York Times, who said their practices had filed dozens of habeas petitions over the last couple of months.
Jessie Calmes, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said that she had filed at least 40 petitions since November. Every one had been granted, she said.
“A lot of these people have been here more than 10 years and have U.S.-citizen kids,” she said. “They’re people who were picked up on the way to work, at their job site or for a traffic violation.”
The surge in habeas petitions has strained federal courts in some states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, with hundreds of new cases a month in some court districts, according to a person with knowledge of the
And the explanation:
The wave of habeas petitions traces to a key change the Trump administration made in how immigration detention decisions are made.
For decades, immigration judges — who are separate from the federal courts and overseen by the Justice Department rather than the judiciary — granted bond to immigrants in detention who were not public safety threats or flight risks, allowing them to live and work in the community while pursuing their cases.
But last year the Trump administration moved to make virtually everyone who is in the country unlawfully subject to mandatory detention. When the policy change was affirmed by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, it took discretion away from immigration judges.
Well, I’m glad that everyone gets adjudicated now instead of just snatched up and deported. But what puzzles me is that immigration justices are said to be overseen by the Department of Justice, but Trump’s policy change has been affirmed by that very department. So why are the judges taking precedence here when, one would think, they should be judging cases by the policy created by the DOJ. Regardless, it’s clear people want deportation policy applied most strongly to undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes beyond entering the U.S. illegally.
*I’m still betting on (and still ambivalent about) the likelihood that the U.S. will attack Iran in a week. But remember—I am not pundit. The NYT’s Bret Stephens is, however, and in his latest column he ponders the question, “Can we let Iran get away with mass murder?”
So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times of having seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”
ran could always become more pliant, if only to play for time. But the odds are growing that the president will order some sort of attack once sufficient U.S. forces are in the region, which could happen as early as this week. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Israel will become involved — either because it will respond to Iranian retaliatory missile strikes or because it will seek to pre-empt them by hitting first. Whichever way, this will not be a Venezuela-style sub-three-hour war.
Is the military option wise? The argument against it is that it’s unlikely to achieve much.
. . .And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?
I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.
But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?
I think Stephens’s answer to his title question is “no.”
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a destransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.’
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
The idea of her 16-year-old daughter receiving a mastectomy made her “physically ill,” Deacon said. But Deacon was led to believe by Einhorn that Varian would be unhappy unless she was affirmed in her gender dysphoria. It was the “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.
Defendants Einhorn and plastic surgeon Simon Chin implied that Varian wanted the medical procedure, and was even at risk of suicide should she not receive a mastectomy. Chin’s attorney called Deacon’s consent a “critical fact” of the case, and asked jurors what might have happened to a potentially suicidal Varian had Chin refused the surgery.
Varian’s legal team argued that the matter in question was not if the surgery should have been performed on her because she was a minor, but if the doctors correctly assumed Varian had gender dysphoria. Defendants did not notify Varian of “the risks, hazards, and alternatives” before surgery, her legal team claimed.
We will see a lot more of these cases, since “affirmative care” is not “objective care”, but a form of rah-rah pushing of those with gender dysphoria to get hormones and then surgery. Especially when this is performed on kids under 18 or so, one can persuasively argue that such children cannot make rational decisions; nor do doctors always apprise patients of the risks of transitioning. This verdict alone is going to put a big chill on the “affirmative care” movement for children with gender dysphoria: $2 million is a lot of dosh.
I spoke about the trial with three prominent pediatric gender-care psychologists who have beencritical ofthe field: Amy Tishelman, Laura Edwards-Leeper, and Erica Anderson, the latter of whom served as an expert witness for the plaintiff. All three said that pediatric gender medicine is facing a long-overdue legal reckoning.
Varian’s case, Edwards-Leeper said, “should be a wake-up call to American medical and mental health organizations to stop ignoring the growing body of research showing how the patient population has changed and revealing serious flaws in current practices. If we do not course correct immediately, I predict we will see either continued lawsuits and detransition tragedies or increasing bans on care, both of which will hurt the gender-distressed youth the field is trying to help.”
“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say not yet, to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch said during his closing argument of Einhorn and Chin’s care of Varian. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails, and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”
Promoted by President Donald Trump as “a must watch,” the Melania Trump documentary “Melania” debuted with a better-than-expected $7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The release of “Melania” was unlike any seen before. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights, plus some $35 million to market it, making it the most expensive documentary ever. Directed by Brett Ratner, who had been exiled from Hollywood since 2017, the film about the first lady debuted in 1,778 theaters in the midst of Trump’s turbulent second term.
While the result would be a flop for most films with such high costs, “Melania” was a success by documentary standards. It’s the best opening weekend for a documentary, outside of concert films, in 14 years. Going into the weekend, estimates ranged from $3 million to $5 million.
But there was little to compare “Melania” to, given that presidential families typically eschew in-office memoir or documentary releases to avoid the appearance of capitalizing on the White House. The film chronicles Melania Trump over 20 days last January, leading up to Trump’s second inauguration.
The No. 1 movie of the weekend was Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” a critically acclaimed survival thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The Walt Disney Co. release debuted with $20 million. The film, with a $40 million budget, was an in-between kind of release for Raimi, whose hits have typically ranged from low-budget cult (“Army of Darkness”) to big-budget blockbuster (2002’s “Spider-Man”).
. . .But most of the curiosity was on how “Melania” would perform. A week earlier, the White House hosted a black-tie preview attended by Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Apple chief executive Tim Cook and former boxer Mike Tyson.
. . . . “Melania” didn’t screen in advance for critics, but reviews that rolled out Friday, once the film was in theaters, weren’t good. Xan Brooks of The Guardian compared the film to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a “cheese ball informercial of staggering inertia.” Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To say that ‘Melania’ is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.”
But among those who bought tickets over the weekend, the response was far more positive. “Melania” landed an “A” CinemaScore. Audiences were overwhelmingly 55 and older (72% of ticket buyers), female (72%) and white (75%). As expected, the movie played best in the South, with top states including Florida and Texas.
Here are the critics’ and public’s ratings of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. I have never seen such a huge disparity, nor a critics’ rating that low! The Popcornmeter must reflect a dogpiling of Republicans on the site, as well as those “old, white females”:
I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.
Since then there have been Congressional hearings involving, not tinfoil-hat-wearing kooks, but — for example — former Navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves and government intelligence employees Luis Elizondo and David Grusch, who told Congress and millions of online viewers that the U.S. government was covering up evidence of alien visitation. The UAP acronym, gradually adopted by the Pentagon around 2020, signifies the subject’s transformation into the official conversation.
All of this was packaged into a documentary released last year by the noted filmmaker Dan Farah, “The Age of Disclosure,” which has been widely reviewed in mainstream media and discussed not only on popular podcasts with UFO enthusiasts but at the highest levels of government, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
. . .In my own classification system, I put reported UFO and UAP [“unidentified anomalous phenomena”] sightings in three categories: 1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) and 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).
I strongly suspect that all UAP sightings fall into the first category, but other commentators suggest the second, noting that they could represent Russian or Chinese assets using technology as yet unknown to American scientists, capable of speeds and turns that seemingly defy all their physics and aerodynamics.
That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies. It would be as if the United States were flying biplanes while the Russians or Chinese were flying Stealth fighter jets, or we were still experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets while they were testing SpaceX-level rocketry. Impossible. We would know about all the steps leading to such technological wizardry.
Finally, could UAPs really be space aliens? It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.
What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).
From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.
It’s a religion, Jake! That’s what I concluded a while back from the fervor of adherents, who refuse to listen to any evidence against their faith. Where are the crashed spacecraft and pickled bodies that the adherents claim are somewhere in the U.S.?
*The Wall Street Journal has a list and description of “20 songs that defined America“: basically a song for each decade since the 1840s. I’ll list the last 8 (songs that arose since 1956), and make a few comments:
First, the criteria:
In the 19th century, a song that sold 2,000-5,000 copies of sheet music could be considered a hit; a blockbuster moved 10,000-20,000. By the 1890s, the industry’s scale exploded, with top songs selling more than 100,000 copies, and rare megahits supposedly reaching the million mark (their publishers at the time may have been inflating numbers, according to the Library of Congress).
When radio—then record players, then TV, then MTV, then streaming services—emerged, tallies were taken differently, and success was measured accordingly. But almost since its founding, America has had hit songs that often defined an era.
Here’s a look at 20 such songs, the artist that made them famous, and what they reveal about their times.
12.) Hound Dog (Elvis Presley, 1956)
13.) I Want to Hold your Hand (The Beatles, 1963)
14.) Stayin’ Alive (The Bee Gees, 1977)
15.) Billie Jean (Michael Jackson, 1983)
16.) Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks 1990)
17.) Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, 1991)
18.) Porcelain (Moby, 1999)
19.) Hey Ya! (Outcast 2003)
20.) Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars, 2014)
It’s not a bad list, though I’d put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (released 1954) in place of “Hound Dog,” since I think the Haley song was really the first popular rock and roll song. I still remember the first time I heard it, when I was a kid in Greece, and I recognized that something new had arrived. Songs after the Nirvana record I can’t comment, as that’s where my experience stops. As for why “I Want to Hold Your Hand” defines the era, the paper says this:
What it says about America: Amid protest and upheaval, America embraced catharsis and connection in its pop music. “You can make the case that the same girls who were flocking to these stadiums, 10 years later were marching in the streets for women’s liberation,” says Fink. With Beatlemania, argues Fink, “huge masses of women got used to smashing through police barricades.”
Well, I don’t agree that the song is a harbinger of feminism—that’s stretching it. It was simply the first really popular song of the best rock group that ever existed. And there’s a good argument for adding to the list Sam Cooke’s “A change is gonna come“, as there are really no soul songs, much less songs that limn the civil rights movement of the Sixties, an epochal change in America. Pity that the song came out in 1964, in the same decade as the Beatles’ song. Here it is anyway, because I love it:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili casts a cold eye on postmodernism:
Hili: What is this postmodernism?
Andrzej: It’s a synonym for post-rationality.’
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest ta ponowoczesność?
Ja: To synonim postracjonalności.
From Masih. This protestor was killed by the Iranian regime not long after being arrested:
Do not stop talking about Iran.
This is what is happening right now.
Taha Soleimani, a 19-year-old young man, disappeared on Friday, January 9.
Twenty days later on January 29, his body was returned to his family from Kahrizak, bearing clear signs of torture.
Taha was buried in… pic.twitter.com/KUO26BsTJK
We don’t talk enough about the student protests at Wellesley College in Feb 2014 against an outdoor public sculpture called “Sleepwalker” which students claimed was “harming” them. https://t.co/PE4bFFo1cJpic.twitter.com/lJDt1yppxI
The Brooklyn-based artist had installed the piece outside of the college’s Davis Museum, which was hosting a concurrent exhibition of his work. Sleepwalker was immobilized in the frosty landscape, but students saw a threat and created a petition for its removal from the lawn. Their claims that the sculpture produced apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts about sexual assault on the all-women’s campus—well-founded or not—in many ways presaged the debates still raging today about free speech and abuse.
From Simon. The public doesn’t agree with this tweet, though:
Two from Matthew. There are a lot more images and manuscript pages at this remarkable site documenting sixteenth-century Mexico:
One of the most extraordinary documents ever created by humans. The 12 volume manuscript "General History of the Things of New Spain", created in 1577 by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists, it describes the culture of indigenous Mexico.
