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.
Clapton has let me down for the third time (see also here and here). NME, a news, music, and entertainment site, has an article about a new Eric Clapton song, “This Has Gotta Stop”. It’s not rocket science to see that this is a protest against lockdowns, if not masks and vaccinations.
I quote the website:
The veteran rocker has been publicly vocal about his opposition to lockdown restrictions and vaccinations in recent months and last December he teamed up with fellow sceptic Van Morrison for the track ‘Stand and Deliver’, one of many anti-lockdown songs Morrison recorded and which were met with significant backlash.
Now, Clapton has shared ‘This Has Gotta Stop’, a new song on which he appears to air his frustrations with the measures in place to help curb the spread of COVID-19 while criticising the vaccine.
“I can’t take this B.S. any longer/ It’s gone far enough/ You wanna claim my soul, you’ll have to come and break down this door,” Clapton sings on the track.
Appearing to touch on his “disastrous” reaction to the vaccine – which he detailed in May after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine – he continues: “I knew that something was going on wrong/ When you started laying down the law/ I can’t move my hands/ I break out in sweat.”
The track comes with with a video that features illustrations of an evil puppeteer, hypnotised people, and protesters displaying signs that say “Liberty” and “Stop”. You can watch it below.
He doesn’t do politics very well, at least in song. What ever happened to the guy who wrote “Layla” or performed “Promises”? It all goes to show that you can be brilliant about music and a moron about public health.
As we all know, Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine, having hardly anything the science-hungry reader wants to see any more. I urge you to peruse its website and look for the kind of article that would have inspired me when I was younger: articles about pure science. Now the rag is all about inequities and human diseases.
In the past couple of months, there have been some dire op-eds, and here’s another one—not as bad as some others, but (especially for a science magazine) riddled with unexamined assumptions. Click on the screenshot to read it. Apparently the “racial reckoning” that began last year has now crept into mathematics.
After reading it, I have two questions: Is mathematics structurally racist? And why has Scientific American changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology?
The article, of course, claims that mathematics is a hotbed of racism and misogyny, which explains why there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics.
The article begins with stories of thee women mathematicians, all of whom report that they felt discriminated against or at least looked down upon. All of them have academic jobs, two as professors and one as a postdoc. I don’t doubt their stories, but what we have are three anecdotes. At face value, they show that there is some racism or sexism in academic math, but these are cherry-picked anecdotes that demonstrate little except that, like all fields, math is not entirely free of bigotry. I also procured two anecdotes with no effort. First, I asked one of my female math-y friends, Professor Anna Krylov, a theoretical and computational quantum chemist at USC, who deals extensively with mathematicians, if that had been her experience, and she said what’s indented below. (I quote her with permission; we’ve met Anna before.)
I was often a single women in a room — but so what? It did not turn me away from the subject I was passionate about. I experienced some forms of discrimination throughout my career and can tell stories… But — as McWhorter often says — “there was then and there is now”! These anecdotes [from Sci. Am.] are blown out of proportion and completely misrepresent the current climate.
She also worried that these narratives, which don’t resemble her own, cultivate a victim mentality in women. (Anna is no anti-feminist, either: she helped initiate a protest against an all-male speaker agenda at a chemistry conference.)
Anna also mentioned another female math professor in the U.S. who agrees with her own experience. So we have two anecdotes on one side, and three on the other. (I have to add that, as I’ve said before, I myself felt inferior and suffered from “imposter syndrome” for several years in graduate school, constantly thinking about dropping out. But I finally realized that I could find my own niche.)
Author Crowell also gives two examples of undeniable racial discrimination against black mathematicians, but those took place in the early 20th century and in the Fifties, and it’s undeniable that at that time there was academic racism. But, as Anna said, “there was then and there is now”. If we’re to accept that mathematics is now structurally racist and misogynist, with an endemic culture of bigotry that leads to inequities, we need to do better than that.
So beyond the academic data, the article adds this:
Racism, sexism and other forms of systematic oppression are not unique to mathematics, and they certainly are not new, yet many in the field still deny their existence. “One of the biggest challenges is how hard it can be to start a conversation” about the problem, Sawyer says, “because mathematicians are so convinced that math is the purest of all of the sciences.” Yet statistics on the mathematics profession are difficult to ignore. In 2019 a New York Times profile of Edray Herber Goins, a Black mathematics professor at Pomona College, reported that “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans.” A 2020 NSF survey revealed that out of a total of 2,012 doctorates awarded in mathematics and statistics in the U.S. in 2019, only 585 (29.1 percent) were awarded to women. That percentage is slightly lower than in 2010, when 29.4 percent of doctorates in those areas (467 out of 1,590) wereawarded to women. (Because these numbers are grouped based on sex rather than gender, that survey did not report how many of those individuals identify as a gender other than male or female.)
This is the Kendi-an idea that inequities in achievement are prima facie evidence of bias. But if you think about it for both women and African-Americans, that need not be true. This is a true case of begging the question: assuming that there is structural racism and misogyny in math and thus the lower representation is simply its result.
The problem with this, as we’ve discussed before, is that there are reasons for these inequities beyond structural racism, so you can’t just assume its existence. (As I said, nobody with any sense would deny that there are racist or sexist mathematicians; the claim is that the field is permeated with bigotry._
Regarding women, we’ve learned that the sexes differ in interests and preferences, with men being “thing people” and women being “people people” (these are of course average differences, not diagnostic traits!). As Lee Jussim points out in a Psychology Today op-ed, on the advanced high school level, men and women do about the same in math, but women do better than men in demonstrating verbal and reading skills. In other words, women are better than men at everything, but many choose areas that are more word-heavy than math-heavy. That itself, combined with different preferences, causes inequities. As Jussim writes,
This same issue of differing interests was approached in a different way by Wang, Eccles, and Kenny (2013). Disclosure: Eccles was my dissertation advisor and longterm collaborator; I am pretty sure she identifies as a feminist, has long been committed to combating barriers to women, and is one of the most objective, balanced social scientists I have ever had the pleasure to know.
In a national study of over 1,000 high school students, they found that:
1. 70 percent more girls than boys had strong math and verbal skills;
2. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have strong math skills but not strong verbal skills;
3. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) who had only strong math skills as students were more likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were other students;
4. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) with strong math and verbal skills as students were less likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were those with only strong math skills.
Thus inequities in academic math may be a matter of differential preferences or other factors not reflecting bigotry. And this may be one explanation for why, although Sci. Am. notes that only 29.1% of doctorates in math were awarded to women in 2019, it looks from Jussim’s bar graph that about 35% of first time graduate enrollees in math and computer science are women. That bespeaks only a slightly higher attrition rate among women than men—something that needs to be addressed. But again, the go-to answer is not automatically “misogyny.”
As for African-Americans, yes, there’s way too few doctorates awarded in mathematics. To me this does bespeak racism, but racism in the past, not necessarily now. The situation is that due to inequality of opportunity, blacks almost certainly lack easy entry now into mathematics studies. This is a narrowing of the pipeline from the outset that needs to be rectified. But again, the figures do not show that the low output at the pipeline’s terminus is due to racism.
As to what happened to Scientific American, well, it’s gone the way of all the science journals. It is doing performative wokeness.
One more item: Have a look at MathSafe, an organization hired by the American Mathematical Society to police meetings like beagles sniffing out impurities. It’s as if we are no longer adults who can police our own behavior at meetings, and need to pay others to do it for us.
Yesterday I wrote about an unbelievably weird paper in the Elsevier journal Ethics, Medicine and Public Health. It reports a survey on Facebook and Twitter by three European scientists, curious about which saints respondents thought were the best ones to pray to for those who get Covid. This wasn’t just a survey of Catholic opinion, but was presented almost as a crowdsourced guide about which saints to call upon should you get the virus. The title is below, but presents only bits of the paper, and I couldn’t access the full thing because our library doesn’t get that journal. To see the snippets, click below:
Further, trying to ascertain if this paper was real by looking on the journal’s website (yes, it’s real), I also found that there was a “comment”, which I automatically assumed was a critical letter. (Click on screenshot below to see the site, but again, it’s paywalled):
Now, however, several kind readers have gotten hold of both the entire original paper and the reply, which you might be able to see via judicious inquiry. The short original paper is as bad as I suspected from the snippet, and the letter is completely weird, as it praises the original paper and then suggests that the authors left out one important saint. San Gennaro, known to Catholics as St. Januarius. (You might recall that the young Godfather murders Don Fanucci during the San Gennaro festival in New York City, with the fireworks masking the gunshots.)
First, the original paper. The authors surveyed, over just four days, followers on Twitter and Facebook. They asked the following question (it’s not really a question; this paper badly needs editing for English):
“Which saint you would pray for fighting against a Covid infection?”
They asked 15,840 people (92% from Europe) and got 1158 responses. There’s no information on the sex, age, or cultural background of the respondents. Here are the answers:
St. Rita is said to practice self-mortification, had a difficult marriage, and “is considered patron saint of lost causes.” The next two, Saints Roch and Sebastian, are seen as protectors from the plague. The authors go on to discuss the saints not only as if they were real, but as if the miracles they were said to perform were real! An example (I can’t copy from the pdfs so am giving screenshots).
Bow wow! Here’s your loaf!
And here’s the paper’s summary, which certainly lends credibility to my guess that the authors do think this list will help people get over the virus. You could argue that it’s just a sociological report of what Catholics think, but I suspect there’s more behind it.
As for the “letter,” it’s not a critique, but praises the “brilliant” paper of Perciaccante et al. and then adds that the authors missed an important saint—perhaps because some regions of Italy that worship St. Gennaro (e.g., Naples) weren’t included in the survey. They end by saying that there are conflicting results about whether prayer “works” in curing disease, but that it does make people feel psychologically better. Here’s the whole thing, written by three Italian researchers:
Note that the miraculous liquefaction of St. Januarius’s blood is taken for granted as a real miracle. (See here for naturalistic explanations.)
Two papers are cited (#3 and 4) that, say Brancaccio et al., show conflicting effects of remote intercessory prayer on the outcome of coronary patients. The first coronary care paper is well known, and found no effect (in fact, there was one negative effect of remote intercessory prayer on healing). The second, which I just scanned, appears to give marginal positive results, with the probability that the “improved” effect of prayer could be due to chance alone being 4% (lower than 5% is considered significant, but the authors did not correct for using multiple indices of healing, which one would normally do using a Bonferroni test). The effect of prayer, even accepting their wonky probability, is very small.
Regardless, even if researchers are going to waste their time trawling for marginally significant effects of prayer on healing, do they need to also investigate which saints should be prayed to? What is the patron saint of heart issues? Did the intercessory prayers evoke that individual, or were the prayers generic? The paper doesn’t say, so apparently the selected “pray-er” was just given the first name of the patient and told to go to town.
Given the possibility that prayer promotes favorable medical outcomes, I’m surprised that doctors and scientists aren’t doing tons of research on this important issue. I wonder why.
I’m not writing this to diss atheist Greg Epstein, Harvard’s newly elected “chief chaplain” whom I wrote about a few days ago. By all accounts he’s a terrific guy who does a great job. But I have to issue a correction, as a reader who works at Harvard has characterized the New York Times article on Epstein (and hence my post, which drew from that article) as “misleading.” Apparently Harvard does have its own chaplain, who is religious (the NYT didn’t mention that), and Epstein was elected as a leader of the group of unpaid chaplains who deal with people from forty-odd faiths.
Here’s what the reader said, by way of correction:
The NYT article on Greg Epstein is somewhat misleading. It is true that Epstein is a widely admired chaplain within Harvard’s system, but he is not really the “chief chaplain.” Harvard has a two-tier structure of campus ministry. The university directly pays the staff of its Memorial Church, which is led by the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey minister in the Memorial Church, Matthew Ichihashi Potts. Potts is an Episcopalian priest; his predecessors Jonathan Walton and Peter Gomes were both Baptist ministers. None are/were atheists! Potts is in effect the university chaplain, responsible for the pastoral care of the whole university community and for various ceremonial functions. At the same time, Harvard provides office space but not salaries to about thirty tradition-specific chaplains who are supported in various ways by their respective traditions. Epstein is the humanist chaplain within this structure, and he is also the elected chair of the group—which, as the article explains, gives him the authority to represent the group to the university’s leadership.
It’s Sunday, ergo we have a batch of themed bird photos from biologist John Avise. Today’s photos are about flocking in formation. The IDs are John’s; click on the photos to enlarge them.
When birds fly in tandem or in groups, they sometimes save energy by slipstreaming in another’s wake, much as do racecar drivers or racing bicyclists. [Trailing birds also benefit by updrafts from the wing-tip vortices of leading birds.] But trailers also need an unobstructed forward view, which motivates them to move a bit to one side or the other of a lead bird. For larger groups in flight, this behavior can morph into beautiful “V-formations”, much like those used by skilled pilots such as the Navy’s Blue Angels.
Incidentally, do you know why one arm of an avian V-formation is often longer than the other? . . . . . . . Answer: it’s because the longer arm has more birds! [ha ha].
We’ve reached the tail of the weekend: it’s Sunday, August 29, 2021: National Chop Suey Day, a day of not only cultural appropriation, but also degradation (the was devised in America). My mother used to serve it with those crunchy canned noodles and cooked celery, which was dire.
Wine of the Day: I couldn’t have paid much for this Spanish red, as it appears to sell for $20 now, but given the (high) review from Robert Parker, I worry that it’s going downhill. My palate is not good at translating flavors and smells into words, so here’s Robert Parker’s take, written in 2014. Drink until 2020? Well, let us have it with good cheese, a crispy baguette, and a huge heirloom tomato drenched in first-class Italian olive oil. . .
Parker’s take:
From one of Priorat’s coolest micro-climates, this 2012 Black Slate is composed of 60% old vine Grenache (60+ years) and 40% old Carignan (80 years), and aged 12 months in concrete tanks, old wood foudres, and two-year-old barrels. It reveals lots of licorice, crushed wet rock, sweet blueberry and black raspberry fruit characteristics along with a full-bodied, moderately tannic mouthfeel. The tannins are sweet and well-integrated, and the wine is drinking beautifully already. For a relatively expensive Spanish appellation, this is an outright steal! Consume it over the next 3-6 years. (RP)
I’m pleased to report that it’s still drinking superbly in 2021. Although I couldn’t detect the crushed wet rock or licorice, it did taste like alcoholic raspberry juice, and went down like velvet. An excellent wine; check the reviews for a given vintage, and buy it if it’s not expensive.
News of the Day:
I keep harping on the fact that Biden should get the White House Cat he promised us several hundred days ago. Now we learn that the First D*g, Major, bit Secret Service agents eight days in a row, while Press Secretary Jen Psaki described this duplicitously as “one biting”. She lied! Here’s her evasive answer about why she wasn’t transparent.
More important, Joe, ditch that dangerous d*g and get the First Cat, for crying out loud!
Here are the 13 U.S. troops killed in the suicide bombing and ensuing gunfire: 11 men and 2 women. Click on the screenshot to see their stories at the NYT:
Hurricane Ida will have begun striking the Gulf Coast of the U.S. as you read this, with some predicting that it will be the strongest hurricane since the beginning of the 20th century. It may well become a category 4 storm with winds as high as 130 mph (209 kph) and a storm surge of 15 feet in New Orleans—a city averaging seven feet above sea level! Tomorrow will be exactly 16 years since the devastating Hurricane Katrina struck the same area, killing more than 1,800 people and causing $125 billion in damage.
The trial of startup prodigy Elizabeth Holmes for wire fraud begins August 31, and it now seems possible that Holmes’ lawyers will mount a mental-instability defense. New court documents reveal that Holmes might claim that she was in an abusive relationship with her romantic and business partner Balwani. If you’ve read John Carreyrou’s book on the debacle, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (a wonderful read), you won’t see evidence of such abuse. An excerpt from the new WSJ story (Carreyrou worked for the paper):
Ms. Holmes claims the abuse by her former business and romantic partner was psychological, emotional and sexual, according to the documents.
Ms. Holmes accused Mr. Balwani of controlling what she ate, when she slept and how she dressed, throwing sharp objects at her and monitoring her text messages and emails, among other things, according to one of the filings.
Mr. Balwani “unequivocally denies that he engaged in any abuse at any time,” according to one of the newly unsealed filings. His lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, argued this week that the filings should remain under seal so that Mr. Balwani’s trial, currently scheduled for early next year, can be fair.
“Make a list,” prods another Caitlin, so I try again and again and again. Lists of places to go. Dreams to interpret. Careers I might have enjoyed. Enormous statues I want to see. Languages I have learned and promptly forgotten. My line items are alternatively boring, plausible, unlikely and all of them seem to include an unmet Canadian need to drive a Zamboni.
What strange math. There is nothing like the tally of a life. All of our accomplishments, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started. We can only pause for a minute, clutching our to-do lists, at the precipice of another bounded day. The ache for more — the desire for life itself — is the hardest truth of all.
But I disagree. In my view, you should make a bucket list well before you know you’re dying, and do the things that you think would enrich your life. As they say, “Nobody wishes on their deathbed that they had worked harder.” That’s true, and I can’t imagine dying without seeing Antarctica again, or visiting Australia (all my bucket list involves travel). I can well imagine, on my deathbed, saying “I should have taken that chance to go back to Antarctica.” Of course, all of this is determined by the laws of physics, but you can be influenced in what others tell you.
This 3-mile track is the second steepest Cog Railway in the world, with an average grade of 25% and the steepest grade of 37%. Here’s a photo of the tracks in 1893. There used to be a resident cat at the weather station atop the mountain, but he died.
Here’s a replica of that first motorcycle, which looks rather cumbersome:
1898 – The Goodyear tire company is founded.
1911 – Ishi, considered the last Native American to make contact with European Americans, emerges from the wilderness of northeastern California.
I read about Ishi in anthropology class in college; he was the last supposedly “uncontacted” Native American in the country, a member of the Yahi tribe (his tribal affiliation is now questioned). In “captivity” he spent the last five years of his life as a janitor at the University of California at Berkeley, living in a University building in San Francisco. He was often sick because he lacked immunity to the diseases of white people. Here he is in 1914 with a “fire drill”:
1930 – The last 36 remaining inhabitants of St Kilda are voluntarily evacuated to other parts of Scotland.
This island was 64 km from the mainland, and its inhabitants lived in unique stone structures (it’s now a World Heritage Site). Here’s a 1908 video about the isolated island and its inhabitants. I don’t like the bit about gathering puffins.
And here’s a rare clip of Bird and Diz in 1951; they’re playing “Hot House”:
1923 – Richard Attenborough, English actor, director, and producer (d. 2014)
1924 – Dinah Washington, American singer and pianist (d. 1963)
1947 – Temple Grandin, American ethologist, academic, and author
1958 – Michael Jackson, American singer-songwriter, producer, dancer, and actor (d. 2009)
Here’s a great 12-minute video showing the evolution of Michael Jackson’s style of dancing, extending from 1968 until two days before he died in 2009. Ignore the “NFL content” sign and click on “Watch on YouTube”:
1967 – Neil Gorsuch, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Those who took had The Big Sleep on August 29 include:
1769 – Edmond Hoyle, English author and educator (b. 1672)
Here’s the venerable bearded religious icon, second president of the Mormon Church and founder of Salt Lake City:
1982 – Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress (b. 1915)
Note that she died on her birthday.
2016 – Gene Wilder, American stage and screen comic actor, screenwriter, film director, and author (b. 1933)
2018 – James Mirrlees, Scottish economist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1936)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Kulka change places:
Szaron: I’m going in.
Hili: I’m going out.
In Polish:
Szaron: Wracam do domu.
Hili: Wychodzę.
Kulka and Szaron are pals (and sleep together every night), and Szaron and Hili are friends, too, but Hili hates Kulka. Cat friendships are not transitive:
Here’s a beautiful cat painting from A Room with a Mieux. The artist is Léa Roche from Spain:
From Masih and a retweeter on the burqa:
I never thought that burka, which I call “the blue prison” would make a comeback in Afghanistan. Thank you @AlinejadMasih for giving me a chance to share with your followers my experience about wearing burka. https://t.co/XKYxk85WEk
Today from the Auschwitz Memorial. You can tell from these photos that even if an inmate survived the “selection”, he or she didn’t live long in the camp:
29 August 1910 | A Pole, Kazimierz Malinowski, was born. A confectioner.
From Ken, who says, “Will the real Mike Pompeo please stand up?”
I know it's from my own show, and I know it's inspired by @saletan's excellent Slate piece and research, but this is the best thing you will see on TV all day. I promise.
The hypocrisy of Mike Pompeo on Afghanistan – then and now – watch/share/enjoy:pic.twitter.com/W3bED3wtZn
Tweets from Matthew. Sound up on this first one from Sacramento.
Coyotes sit on the Capitol grounds,
Making some ungodly sounds.
SOUND ON: Viewer Leslie Hurlburt sent in this video of coyotes howling outside the state Capitol as fire trucks whizzed down N Street on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/QEvbsFoZkl
What they’re doing here is above my pay grade, but I’m still impressed.
Our species has built an artificial eye powerful enough to detect the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the moon, search exoplanets for signs of alien life, and peer back in time > 13.5 billion years to when the first galaxies formed: the James Webb Space Telescope pic.twitter.com/hUuMnU3uA9
This isn’t exactly news, since the feat, whether you see it as either brave or foolhardy, was accomplished in 2005 by Didier Delsalle, identifed on YouTube as “a fighter pilot and helicopter test pilot.” The video below tells all.
On May 14, 2005, at 07:08 NPT in the early morning (01:23 UTC), Delsalle set the world record for highest altitude landing of a helicopter when his Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel touched down on the 8,848 m (29,029 ft) summit of Mount Everest. The flight and the summit landing were recorded by multitude of cameras and other equipment to validate the record. After sitting on top of the world for 3 minutes and 50 seconds, Delsalle lifted off and returned to the Tenzing-Hillary Airport at Lukla, Nepal.
This accomplishment had required extensive testing on site, especially because of the low atmospheric pressure available for the helicopter rotors, winds over 299 km/h (186 mph) at these altitudes, and oxygen depletion for both Delsalle and his helicopter’s engine. Delsalle had to find areas of downdrafts and updrafts to complete the flight, stating: “I found an updraft so strong that I could rise up with almost no power.”
Delsalle repeated the Everest summit landing the next day, May 15, 2005, to prove that the previous day had not been simple luck. Conditions the second day were much more difficult, but Delsalle chose not to wait any longer so as not to squander the opportunity for ‘conventional’ climbers waiting to summit Everest during the limited good weather conditions available in May.
Delsalle used a virtually standard version of the Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel B3, only removing unnecessary elements, such as passenger seats, to reduce the standard weight by 120 kg (265 lb) and thus extend the 1-hour fuel range.
What a view he must have had! I’ve flown in or out of the Lukla airport twice, but had to hike to Everest, which took five or six days with acclimation periods. It’s unbelievable that this guy could do it, and nobody’s done it since.
In the past month, two papers have appeared, one in Science and one in Cell, addressing the issue of whether the Covid-19 infection began in a wet markets in Wuhan as a zoonotic infection, or, alternatively, as an escaped virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). While we’ll never know for sure where the virus came from, the wet-market origin is looking increasingly likely.
Why is this important? Well, as the article below in the LA Times notes (click on screenshot, and if you hit a paywall, it’s republished for free on yahoo! finance), the precautions we’d take depend on the pandemic’s origin. If it came from a wet market, we’d want to take a close look at these markets, and possibly close them. (I think they should be closed anyway, for, as I’ve seen, the animals for sale are kept under horrible conditions.) If it escaped from the WIV, on the other hand, we’d want to institute more stringent regulations in lab.
Click below or on the link above.
Now the column is written by Michale Hiltzik, a business writer for the Times, so you might want to take that into account. Still, he reprises the evidence in the two papers (both in top-tier journals) that makes a lab origin look pretty unlikely. In fact, he claims there’s no good evidence for the lab-leak theory, which is a lesson emphasized in those two papers. A quote from the LA Times article:
It would be inaccurate to say that evidence for the lab leak theory is fading. That’s because there never was any evidence for the theory, just conjecture.
Virtually from the outset, the lab leak theory was driven by ideology, not science. It employed the vocabulary of science, but that’s a familiar technique for bamboozling a susceptible public.
“The only evidence for a lab leak, period, is just that the virus emerged in Wuhan, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is,” Rasmussen told me. “That’s it. Since day one, that has been the only piece of evidence.”
The assertions supporting the lab leak theory are not only conjectures, but in many cases provably wrong conjectures. They’re often based on misinformation, scientific ignorance, or even bad translations from Chinese documents.
Proponents have made much of the fact that the Virology Institute is only about 300 yards from the animal market that appeared to be the source of the first infections, for instance.
But that’s wrong. The facility 300 yards away is the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which doesn’t conduct research on raw viruses; the Virology Institute is about 7.5 miles from the market and on the far side of the Yangtze River.
Attributing the disease outbreak to the lab would be akin to stating that a disease outbreak in Santa Monica had to have originated in a lab at UCLA about seven miles away.
The WIV-origin theory was also supported by a mistranslation: when Texas congressional representative Michael McCaul claimed that the WIV put out a $606 million contract for a new air-conditioning system—something reported by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (the amounts now appear to have been corrected)—it turned out that the amount was actually $606,000, which is about what it would take to put in a new A/C system in my lab.
Other evidence supposedly favoring the WIV origin, like the so-called “engineered adaptation” of the virus to humans, has fallen apart, since the virus infects many mammals. The famous “furin cleaveage site” supposedly put into the virus’s code for the spike protein to make it more infectious—a site said to be too novel to have been a natural occurrence—has now been seen in other coronavirus spike proteins.
Finally, Christopher Ford, a former Assistant Secretary of State, has recounted in an open letter how the State Department itself pushed the WIV-origin theory without scientific evidence, motivated mainly by the intelligence division, which saw sinister motives more strongly than evidence.
As I said, we’ll never know for sure where the pandemic came from, but to me the epidemiological evidence is telling, and it points strongly to a wet-market rather than to a WIV origin. They also found viral material in the wet market.
This article concludes with some common sense:
Research supporting the theory that the pandemic originated in a natural jump from animals to humans has moved ahead, with more evidence accumulating drawn from the virus’ genetic footprint. Evidence for the lab leak, however, has stagnated. Nothing has been posited about the possibility of a laboratory leak this year that wasn’t posited in 2020, when the theory was widely dismissed.
No reputable scientist would assert that a laboratory origin of the SARS2 virus is impossible or inconceivable. But it’s looking more and more like a dead end. That means pursuing it, especially to the exclusion of natural explanations, may not be merely foolhardy, but dangerous for the health of humankind.
Here’s the wet market, closed, photographed on January 21, 2020. (AP Photo by Dake Kang)
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a virus, sits closed in Wuhan, China, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. Heightened precautions were being taken in China and elsewhere Tuesday as governments strove to control the outbreak of the coronavirus, which threatens to grow during the Lunar New Year travel rush. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)
Inquiring minds want to know, and three Europeans (perhaps in cahoots with the divine) have answered:
When a reader sent me this article, and I read the online condensed version (it takes two minutes), I thought it as a joke. But no, it’s for real. You can see the journal site here, and a response to the article is the first one listed on the contents page of the latest issue. I’d love to see the response, or the full original paper (you can see a precis by clicking on the screenshot below). I’ve archived the article’s precis here in case that for some reason they ditch the article.
Okay, I’m going to show you the whole “snippet” of the paper as presented by the journal:
Short report
Which Saint to pray for fighting against a Covid infection? A short survey
In the absence of a treatment still considered universally effective, and of a vaccine validated by the health authorities, we wanted to know which Catholic saint the European Christian community turned to in the event of infection with Covid-19 to request a miraculous healing.
Methodology
An online survey was carried out on a sample of 1158 adults using social media tools.
Results
All results are presented in this research, with a few saints in the majority, and some dictated by the symptomatology of the Covid-19 infection or the personalities of certain « doctor guru ».
Conclusion
This medico-anthropological study is revealing the psychology of Western patients vis-à-vis the magic-religious means used in the fight against diseases, particularly in the epidemic/pandemic context.
Section snippets
Background
The relationship between religion and medicine is well known in human communities since antiquity. Medieval medicine was based on Hippocratic and Galenic doctrines, but it was also characterized by spiritual and divine influences. So, in European countries, in Middle Ages, Saints’ invocation for the curing of diseases was an usual practice.
Despite, the spiritual and religious dimensions have deviated from medicine after the Renaissance and the Late Enlightenment, the intercession to the Saints. . .
Methodology
We conducted a survey on two of the most used social networks: Twitter and Facebook. The survey was conducted between August 21 and 25, 2020. Each author posted on his Twitter and Facebook page, the following question: “Which saint you would pray for fighting against a Covid infection?”. The total number of followers targeted by the question was 15,840 people (92% from Europe).
Results
A total of 1158 adult anonymous participants (mainly from France and Italy) answered to our question. For obvious ethical reason, no sex, age or cultural background are available. All results are summarized in Table 1.
Discussion
Analyzing the results in more detail, from the survey it emerges that the majority saint is St. Rita (Fig. 1). From a young age, Rita of Cascia (Italy, 1381-1457) dreamed of consecrating herself to God, but she was destined to marry a violent man. Rita’s patience and love changed her husband’s character. After the violent death of her husband and two children from illness, Rita decided to follow the youthful desire by entering the monastery of the Order of Sant’Agostino in Cascia (Italy) [4].
Conclusions
This short medico-anthropological study is revealing the psychology of Western patients vis-à-vis the magic-religious means used in the fight against diseases, particularly in an epidemic/pandemic context. The survey confirms that Catholic people continue to entrust their sorrows, their anxieties and their hopes to the divinity, especially in time of global stress, mainly if it is a suddenly-presented difficulty that have changed the people’s lifestyle. Moreover, the choice of the Saints to. . .
Authors’ contributions
AP had the initial idea of the search and contributed to the survey. AC contributed to the survey. PC wrote the first draft of the manuscript, with significant critical input from all other coauthors. All authors have read and approve the final article. PC is the manuscript guarantor.
Disclosure of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interest.
So if you don’t get vaccinated, you better start praying to Saint Rita.
This is unbelievably stupid. And their research used subjects garnered from Twitter and Facebook!
Note that this isn’t just a survey of opinion, but is somewhat prescriptive: “In the absence of a treatment still considered universally effective, and of a vaccine validated by the health authorities, we wanted to know which Catholic saint the European Christian community turned to in the event of infection with Covid-19 to request a miraculous healing.”
Elsevier should be ashamed of itself. If anybody has access to the letter of response, I’d love to see it.
It’s time for the Caturday felidae, and we have three items today plus lagniappe (if you’ve been good). These are all videos, so the print-averse will be pleased:
First, seven minutes of people on television, Zoom, Skype, and even a concert—all with cat interruptions. Cats don’t care if you’re on the computer! And in cat-loving Turkey, there are three cats on the summit stage, and one on the catwalk, where it licks its bum and then walks the catwalk, swiping at the models.
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This video is somewhat deceptive, as the DNA test of the cats doesn’t appear until 13 minutes in (the rest shows the “evolutionary” relatedness of domestic cat breeds and the three cats of the narrator.
The question is why you want to test your cat’s DNA. If you have a plain moggy, who cares what breed it belongs to? As for health markers, taking your cat to the vet regularly is sufficient to stave off any worries that could come from a DNA test. And if you have a purebred, well, the papers will tell you where it come from. And I don’t really trust the diagnosis that such pet companies provide. How many samples did they take to ensure accurate ancestry? The video doesn’t give you a lot of confidence.
If you want a more reliable result, I’d suggest doing your own DNA. BasePaws charges $129 for a standard cat analysis, while 23AndME charges $99 for your own basic human ancestry (another hundred bucks if you want to know what you’re gonna die from).
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Catoholic.net (note that this is not a religious site) announces the rare birth of an ocelot kitten (Leopardus pardalis) at the Audubon Zoo (likely to be renamed) in New Orleans. Although the article announces proudly that with the birth “Hope is restored”, in fact ocelots are not endangered. They are considered “species of least concern,” though some populations are decreasing because of habitat destruction. Here’s part of the announcement:
Kylie Linke, a member of the animal care team at the zoo, reported the following about the health of the kitten and his mother:
“The mother and kitten are doing great and he is eating like a champ. Milagre has been very accepting of us weighing him and always is ready to carry him back into the den when we’re done. He’s gone from around 200g at birth to now weighing more than 700g in just three short weeks! We’re already seeing personality and he’s just starting to zoom around on his own.”
Regarding the kitten’s name, Linke said,“He doesn’t have a name yet, but he’s already stolen our hearts!”
Born on May 6 of last year, the kitten has now been named Batata (WTF?), and must be a Cat of Size by now. I still object to keeping large, free-ranging mammals in captivity like this, as the excuses they use—education and conservation—can easily be conveyed by watching videos, and ocelots aren’t endangered. Zoos rarely publish research papers, so what they “learn” about animals biologically is minimal (stop right now and read “The Zoo” by H. L. Mencken). It’s one of his wonderful essays, and I’d love to be able to write like this (without the ethnic slurs):
Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats smell worse than Greek ‘bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by the Romans) is Procyon lotor. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs.
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.
Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent study of their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy and physiology, and particularly of the pathology, of man. They are necessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, and in testing the virtues of those already devised; out of the mute agonies of a rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, or means for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthful follies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere study of their habits, instincts and ways of mind — knowledge that, by analogy, may illuminate the parallel doings of the genus homo, and so enable us to comprehend the primitive mental processes of Congressmen, morons and the rev. clergy.
But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals, to begin with, provide no material for the biologist; he can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from a safe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germs and specifics upon them; he is not allowed to vivisect them. If he would find out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that, he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guinea pigs and street dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he get any chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lack of exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their carcasses are not handed to him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior and placed in some museum.
Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well proceed to a study of the psychology of a jurisconsult by first immersing him in Sing Sing, or of a juggler by first cutting off his hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Not even a college professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit.
I love that last paragraph.
Granted, for rare species zoos have been important in conservation, particularly in breeding animals to restore them to the wild, but this ocelot and its parents are in the zoo for one reason only: entertainment (at the cost of the animals’ boredom) and dosh for the zoo. Like penitentiaries are prisons for humans, zoos are prisons for animals. The benefit of the penitentiary is that they don’t charge people to come and gawk at the inmates.
That said, Batata is a cutie, and here are two videos:
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Lagniappe from Facebook: what a strange looking cat!
