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 four books together could be considered the foundation of “New Atheism”, which is pretty much like “old atheism” save that it leveled more aggressive attacks on religion, emphasizing its harms, and was more science-oriented than was the atheism of, say, Robert Ingersoll. (Carl Sagan wasn’t quite so aggressive against faith, but did use science to attack religion.). Now I can’t prove that these books helped promote America’s continuing rejection of faith, instantiated in the rise of the “nones,” but a lot of people have told me that this was indeed the case.
What I can say is not the case that “New Atheism” is dead. That’s like saying that “Mendelian genetics is dead”: it was an advance that changed a lot of minds, and it’s been assimilated into the culture as we move on. The blockheads who proclaim that “New Atheism is dead” are simply saying that “the arguments against faith by Dawkins et al. fail to embrace woke-ish social justice”. (This led to the lame movement “Atheism Plus”, which really is dead except in those few people who still insist that arguments against religion and gods must perforce embrace their preferred moral philosophy.)
At any rate, Dawkins has just published in the Torygraph his two-decade retrospective on The God Delusion, and you can read it for free by clicking on the headline below. He claims no particular expertise in physics, but does show the intellectual vacuity of “scientific” evidence for God I discussed the other day, like the “fine-tuning” and “Big Bang” arguments.
If clicking on the headline doesn’t work, you can find the article archived here.
You can (and should) read the whole thing, but I’ll give a few choice quotes about arguments for God that are being resurrected by the likes of Stephen Meyer and Ross Douthat:
On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”.
We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.
The delusion of God will not lie down. Partly because it serves as a comfort blanket for those whose idea of logic takes the form, “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X must exist”. Then there’s the Great Stalin Syllogism: “Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a horrible man. Therefore God exists.” The variant that begins, “Hitler was an atheist” is equally illogical, and therefore untouched by the fact that he wasn’t.
My guess is that the “life will be intolerable without X” argument is the one underlying the weakness of the media for religion, including places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Free Press. These places are too savvy to tout the “scientific” arguments for God. Instead, they proclaim the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in our minds, ergo there must be a god which fits that hole.
Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?
Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?
But the arguments below still have a puff of stale air in their sails:
If Paley’s relative judgment is now reversed, it is not because the cosmology version of the argument from design has grown any more powerful. Rather it is that the biological version has disappeared altogether. If Paley had lived after Darwin, he would probably have agreed, for his knowledge of biology was deep and detailed.
What, then, of the cosmology version today? Our universe began in a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. The “Let there be light” moment – when conditions cooled enough for electrons to bond with nuclei, forming the first neutral atoms – came about a quarter of a million years later.
There was then a further delay of about nine billion years before the sun (and Earth) came into existence. In a triumph of wishful thinking, this sequence of events is seen by some as a vindication of the Book of Genesis. Seriously!
Nobody knows what came before the universe. A strong school of thought among physicists denies the very word “before”, because time itself began in the Big Bang. Commonsense abhors this paradox, but common sense evolved to think no more deeply than was needed to survive and reproduce.
. . .Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.
Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.
As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.
But of course the argument from design is still with us, albeit in a more sophisticated form. It is “the argument from design of features that could not have arisen in a continuously adaptive step-by-step way.” In other words, say the proponents of this nonsense, now known as “intelligent design” (“ID”), there are adaptive features of organisms that could not have arisen by natural selection itself. All the examples touted so far, including the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting, now have plausible scenarios of origin by selection. Yet ID hangs on. That is not because its arguments are plausible. I have never seen anybody make “scientific” arguments for God, including ID, who wasn’t a believer themselves. If those arguments were plausible, we’d see a ton of avowed atheists suddenly becoming religious, but that doesn’t happen.
There’s a lot more in the piece, including Richard’s answer to the claim that he’s a cultural Christian, ergo God, but I’ll mention just one more response:
“But Dawkins,” the critics cry. “If you’d only read your theology you’d know that God is not complex at all. It’s just Theology 101. God is profoundly simple.”
Ah yes, so simple that he’s capable of listening to a billion prayers simultaneously. So simple he has the bandwidth to judge each and every sin on its merits. So simple that “the very hairs of your head are numbered” and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. All this on top of knowing exactly how to fine-tune the laws and constants of physics to ensure our eventual existence. Ah me, theology. Is it actually a subject at all?
Well, as Dan Barker said, “Theology is a subject without an object.”
Is New Atheism dead? Nope, not at all. It lives on in the minds of every erstwhile believer who, having read the arguments of Dawkins & Co., realized that there’s no more evidence for God than there is for the Loch Ness Monster.
Richard ends his piece with this sentence, “Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote in The God Delusion.”
If you are reasonably smart, how can you possibly see a rational person’s unwavering belief in God as anything other than a weakness of mind or character? (I am excluding those who were brainwashed into having faith.)
This week Bill Maher’s comedy/news bit on “Real Time” mourns the lack of bipartisanship in American politics—something that was once admired but now is denigrated. His two examples of how both parties contributed to improving society involve drugs—the dramatic decrease of death from street drugs like fentanyl as well as the price drops in widely-used prescription drugs. Maher argues that this wasn’t due to deliberate collaboration between the Dems and GOP, but was “accidental bipartisanship”:each party independently did things that contributed to the overall welfare.
People aren’t going to be happy with Maher saying that the GOP did anything worthwhile, though.
Welcome to Friday, October 2, 2026. We’ll have a shortened Hili dialogue today as I was at the doc’s yesterday, having my retinas inspected nine days after cataract surgery. And the news is very good: my operated-on right eye is healing well, with the hemorrhage decreasing in size, and it should be gone in 1-3 months. In the meantime, I have no symptoms except EYE PAIN since they not only created an incision on the right side of my right eye during the cataract operation, but, in the frantic period thereafter when the eye pressure skyrocketed, the opthamologist POKED THREE HOLES IN MY EYEBALL with tweezers. And oy, did that hurt! The pain comes when I look down and the four wounds make contact with my lower eyelid.
But still: I’m a very lucky boy as this rare occurrence of a hemorrhage (1/1000 at most) could have been much worse. I also found out that while I had the impression that the hemorrhage was small, in fact it covered 25% of the inside of my eyeball. But it did not encroach on the crucial central area of vision, the macula.
Enough about my medical issues. It’s October and I missed putting up the month’s painting from the 15th century manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Here it is: none other than the Louvre itself, which of course used to be a palace surrounded by country.. Celtic Studies Resources describes the painting:
In this calendar image for the month of October from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (f. 10v) the labor of the month is sowing the winter grain. This is one of the images that was left uncompleted when Jean Duc de Berry died in 1416. The original artists responsible for most of the image in this book of hours, the Limbourg brothers, also died.
The manuscript passed to King Charles VII, the Duke’s brother, and the image for the October calendar was finished by another artist.
In the warmer parts of Europe, the wine regions, October marked the month when the grapes harvested in September were put into barrels for aging. In the regions less friendly to grapes, October’s labor is sowing the winter grain, or sometimes, plowing.
As it says in the medieval lyric listing the labors of the month “And here I sawe my whete so rede” (Bodleian MS. Digby 88).
In the background, you can see the Louvre; this Parisian palace was built by the Duke’s older brother, King Charles V. The medieval Louvre was substantially changed by successive royal owners; here’s a reconstruction showing what we think it looked like in the 15th century. The Très Riches Hours calendar image shows three central towers. Between the three central towers are two balconies, or brattices, each pierced by three windows from which, during a siege, defenders could hurl boing water or hot oil on to the attackers below.
Beneath the towers and the central donjon of the the Louvre, you can see a small door that opens in the thick wall, exiting on to the banks of the Seine. People chat in a small group right at the door. A set of steps leads down to the Seine, where women do their laundry by beating it with a stick, near a small boat that’s moored. To the right, in front of one of the central towers, two dogs play. There’s a second set of stairs down to the Seine, and three more boats are tied up.
In the central scene below the Louvre and the river, a man in red mounted on a horse drags a harrow across the field. The wooden harrow is weighted with a rock. The weight of the rock forces the tines of harrow into the earth. As the horse drags the harrow along, the tines break up the dirt clods. This is particularly useful after plowing since the harrow helps cover the previously sown seeds as it smooths the soil. Beyond the mounted rider, in the central part of the image, there’s a field that’s already been sown with seeds and a scarecrow dressed as an archer. The strings tied with rags that criss-cross the field around the scarecrow are meant, like the archer scarecrow, to ward off marauding birds.
To the right in the front of the image, a peasant dressed in blue scatters seeds, hand-sowing, while magpies (the black-and-white birds) and crows devour the freshly sown (but not yet covered by the harrow) seeds. Notice the naturalistic detail of the footprints left in the soft earth as the seed-sower progresses along the row. Those footprints, like the shadow cast by the scarecrow, the reflections cast by the boats, or the vaporized breath and the smoke from the chimney in the image for February are other early examples from the Très Riches Heurs of the artists using realistic, technical, details in European art of the Middle ages.
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And of course yesterday I missed Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Hymn to October, which I always put up on October 1. Here it is. from his novel Of Time and the River:
Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. .
October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.
The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.
Wolfe in 1937 (he died of TB in the next year only 38 years old):
Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 2 Wikipedia page.
The Omani copilot who stabbed the pilot on the flydubai flight yesterday discussed killing Jews on social media, an Israeli official tells The Times of Israel.
The official adds that the attacker asked the Emirati crew members to kill him, citing conversations with passengers on the flight.
“This was a person who was willing to commit suicide,” says the official. “His social media accounts [say] clearly that he has been radicalized into jihadist ideology. He talks about killing Jews.”
“We can’t say for sure until the investigation’s over,” the official continues, “but it certainly seems like he was a suicide actor who was probably going to try to down that plane.”
“Our understanding is he’s going to be transferred to the UAE,” the official continues. “We will be part of that investigation.”
In the meantime, Israel is doing its own internal investigation and making changes to security procedures, says the official.
Ergo it might have been a suicide attempt and an attempt to kill Jews. We don’t know now, and perhaps we never will.
*And if you are pleased that 200 Jews did not die in the flydubai hijacking the other day, and have any sympathy for Israel you will like the Substack piece by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.: “The meaning of FZ 1073″ (h/t Bat):
, . .Israel’s response to October 7, however, unique in the contemporary world, has not been cost-free. Our people remain agonizingly divided over which of our leaders bore responsibility for that morning’s failure and for decisions made in the subsequent war. A no less bitter schism separates those who are willing to fight from those who, avowedly for religious reasons, are not. Some 924 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 8, and thousands physically and emotionally wounded.
And yet, we keep fighting. We will defend ourselves in the court of international law, we will stand up for truth in the media. We will battle Hamas and Hezbollah again as the need arises, and mount crippling operations against Iran should America resume the war. Missiles may once again smash into our neighborhoods, schools and businesses may close, and the world will continue condemning us for doing what so much of it no longer has the will to do—for defending our homes and families. We will celebrate births, bar mitzvahs, and weddings, and pioneer technologies that benefit humankind. We will do all of this not because, it is often stated, we have nowhere else to go, but because of who we are. We, the Jewish people, are indomitable.
We are the people who, for nearly two thousand years, never forfeited our hope of returning to our ancestral homeland. The people who, a mere three years after the Holocaust, declared our independence in that land and thwarted successive enemy efforts to destroy us. We are the people who, despite grave disagreements between religious and secular, right-wing and left, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi, geographical periphery and center, still coheres. We are a people that, less than a month from now, will go to the polls, demonstrating once again our uniqueness as one of the very few nations never to have known a moment of non-democratic governance.
That, then, is the meaning of FlyDubai Flight FZ1073. While their airliner plunged nearly 20,000 feet in under two minutes and their courageous wounded pilot struggled to open the cockpit door, ordinary Israelis overcame paralyzing uncertainty and rushed to the front of the plane. There, regular citizens—not commandos, not armed air marshals—with their bare hands and headphone wires, disarmed, subdued, and bound the co-pilot suspected of trying to kill everyone on board precisely because most of them were Israelis. Were Jews. And once the danger passed, the Jews of FZ1073 didn’t wallow, didn’t shrink, but instead broke into song. They sang words of the late 18th and early 19th-century Hasidic genius, Rabbi Nahman—“All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear”—and “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel live.
FZ1073 has a message for the world. For the terrorists striving to take innumerable Israeli lives and make the survivors’ lives unbearable—the message is that your love of death will never diminish our love of life nor make us any less determined to defend it. For the European leaders who prefer to boycott Israeli Jews rather than confront the extremists who are conquering their countries from within. FZ1073 stands as an example of what a proud, strong, and self-respecting people can still accomplish. And for Israelis soon to celebrate the completion of the yearly Torah readings—Simchat Torah—and commemorate the anniversary of October 7, FZ1073 reminds us of who we are, what we stand for, and what we are willing to do to remain Israelis. The sheer heroism displayed by the Israeli passengers of FZ1073 shows why nothing can ever defeat us.
Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was set to be executed on Wednesday, survived two doses of a lethal drug that had been administered, according to her lawyers.
Ms. Pike, who was convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, is the only woman on death row in Tennessee. Before the failed attempt to put her to death, she was set to become the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.
Ms. Pike was in “critical condition, receiving life-saving care” on Thursday afternoon, one of her lawyers said.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the lethal drug on Wednesday night.
Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered, she did not lose consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.
. . . The Tennessee Department of Correction later said Ms. Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility.
This was the second time this year that Tennessee had struggled to administer a lethal injection. In May, the state called off an execution because staff members could not find a vein to administer lethal drugs.
. . .The failed execution on Wednesday night was the state’s second bungled death penalty attempt this year, and Mr. Lee on Thursday said he was suspending executions — including Ms. Pike’s — to allow an independent review.
Lawyers for Ms. Pike said that did not go far enough, and urged Mr. Lee to take her off death row. “This is awful, and this kind of thing should never happen again,” said one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey.
Mr. Lee previously denied a similar request and his office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, he said the failed execution “shouldn’t have happened.” He added, “We should find out what happened and make those changes necessary to do what the people of this state want done.”
. . . The death row inmate Christa Pike was in critical condition and receiving medical care, her lawyers said Thursday, a day after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her. They called for Gov. Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison, calling the botched attempt to end her life with two doses of pentobarbital “cruel and torturous.”
The operating company that runs the Eiffel Tower said Tuesday its chief would step down at the end of this year in the wake of a controversy over the removal of women staff during a visit by a Hindu religious group.
Patrick Branco Ruivo, who has been director general of the Paris landmark since 2018, would leave his job at the end of the year after an internal probe revealed that “operational flaws and shortcomings” in organising the visit led to the “unacceptable” removal of women staff, the company SETE said in a statement.
The removal of women staff during a visit by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement on September 5 prompted a staff walkout and the closure of the monument for a day, as well as an outcry across political spectrum in France which prizes secularism and gender equality.
At the time, SETE acknowledged the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit “interactions with women” and said that “these conditions should not have been accepted”.
. . .The Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Gregoire, had lambasted the move to remove women staff as an “absurd, unjust and unacceptable decision” and ordered two separate probes.
The mayor Tuesday “acknowledged Patrick Branco Ruivo’s responsible decision” and commended “his commitment to the Eiffel Tower and SETE” since his appointment in late 2018, a person close to him told AFP, asking not to be named,
Yay for the French! There’s not even a conflict of rights here: the Hindu delegation had no right to have an environment free from women, though the women had a right to be on the job. They should light up the Eiffel Tower for one night in purple, white, and green: the colors of the feminist movement.
The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder case on Thursday refused to declare her not guilty, turning down a defense motion that had argued there wasn’t enough evidence to prove she was responsible for killing her three children.
During Clancy’s first trial, which ended Sept. 4 with a deadlocked jury, her defense argued that she was not criminally responsible because of a mental disease, specifically a rare condition called postpartum psychosis. As such, the defense didn’t dispute that the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse carried out the killings at her family’s Massachusetts home in 2023.
However, in a hearing earlier this week, Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington tried to persuade the judge that prosecutors had not offered any proof that Clancy did it. Prosecutors argued there was plenty of evidence, calling Reddington’s claim “laughable.”
Prosecutors have yet to decide whether they will put the case in front of a jury for a second time. They could choose to retry her on first-degree murder charges or seek to try her only on lesser charges, including second-degree murder or manslaughter, or drop the case entirely.
In his ruling Thursday, Judge William Sullivan noted that for the purposes of his decision, he was required to analyze the evidence in the light most favorable to prosecutors — and that it was up to the jury, not the judge, to decide whether to believe expert witnesses for the defense who testified that Clancy was not responsible for her actions because of mental illness.
“There was evidence introduced, both physical and circumstantial, that would permit a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt the elements of the charge of murder,” Sullivan wrote.
Clancy admitted she killed her kids in order to plead “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but she never did so on the stand. Here, from Grok, is the evidence that she did the deed:
“Medical examiner findings of asphyxia/strangulation as the cause of death for all three children, with ligature or manual compression marks consistent with intentional constriction of the neck rather than accidental injury or natural causes.
The children were discovered in the basement with exercise bands or similar items nearby that investigators linked to the mechanism of strangulation; the scene showed no signs of forced entry or third-party involvement.
Lindsay Clancy was the only adult present with the children during the relevant period. Her husband had left the house earlier that day at her request (she had asked him to pick up takeout and medication).
After the jump, while hospitalized and before formal charges, she made statements to police and medical staff acknowledging that she had harmed the children. Those statements have been referenced in court proceedings, though their precise admissibility and weight remain subject to litigation given her injuries and mental state.
Digital and physical evidence recovered from the home (including her phone and notes) has been described in filings as reflecting planning or awareness in the hours beforehand, alongside a documented history of postpartum mental-health treatment.”
This defense maneuver is just that—a ploy—and won’t fly. If there is a retrial and she’s declared “not guilty by reason of insanity”, she will still be committed to a psychiatric facility (this will be the case, I think, even if they don’t try her again. That, however, might be a much shorter period that a sentence of guilty for first- or second-degree murder.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to Andrzej’s new book (English title: The Blue Stone of Sisyphus),with the book launch party having taken place in Dobrzyn last evening. Here’s the book:
Hili: Fascinating. Sharon: What’s there?
Hili: No idea. Some Sisyphus is trying to push a pebble up through the ground.
In Polish:
Hili: To fascynujące.
Szaron: Co tam jest?
Hili: Nie wiem, jakiś Syzyf wypycha kamyk spod ziemi.
From Masih: Two Iranian protestors were hanged yesterday. The charge:
Another morning, another gallows in Iran.💔
The Islamic Republic executed Ali Hemmati Sistani and Majid Nikandish at dawn today in Mashhad. Majid was just 25 years old. Ali was married and a father of two. Both were arrested during the January 2026 protests and sentenced to… pic.twitter.com/9QIl6OjiMC
From Luana; yet another professor who thinks colleges need to revert to all-oral testing along Socratic lines:
Another professor suggests a return to Socrates in the age of AI:
“Implementing AI-detection software, blue books and oral exams” addresses “only symptoms of the transformation of the university we are seeing in real time. The challenge is to identify that transformation and… pic.twitter.com/K2IxgB9Hfr
🚨 At tonight’s Harvard Medical School event, artist-in-residence Roxane Gay responded to a question about the health insurance industry with “Free Luigi.”
Minutes earlier, Gay admitted she uses concierge medicine after deciding to “throw money at this problem” and “buy my way… pic.twitter.com/i8EBRhPopA
Two from Doctor Cobb. First, a fantastic photo. It took the photographer six years to get the conditions right; read about that here .It’s an amazing photo!
In this splendid photo from Valerio Minato three wonders were captured in a single shot:- the Basilica of Superga, located near Turin (Italy)- the Monviso, the highest mountain of the Cottian Alps- the setting Moon, captured in a crescent phase➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap23122…🔭 🧪 #sciart1/2
‘Today’s music: “Rockin’ Chair” with trumpet solo by Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa’s band. When I first heard this solo by “Little Jazz,” as Eldridge was called, I was mesmerized. Wikipedia gives the details:
One of Eldridge’s best known recorded solos is on a rendition of Hoagy Carmichael‘s tune, “Rockin’ Chair”, arranged by Benny Carter as something like a concerto for Eldridge.Jazz historian Gunther Schuller referred to Eldridge’s solo on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a strong and at times tremendously moving performance”, although he disapproved of the “opening and closing cadenzas, the latter unforgivably aping the corniest of operatic cadenza traditions.” Critic and author Dave Oliphant describes Eldridge’s unique tone on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a raspy, buzzy tone, which enormously heightens his playing’s intensity, emotionally and dynamically” and writes that it “was also meant to hurt a little, to be disturbing, to express unfathomable stress.”
This is jazz at its best. (I do agree that the final cadenza is a bit out of place.)
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the oldest natural history museum in the United States, is closing. Drexel University, with which the Academy became affiliated in 2011, announced on September 1 that the museum, located at 19th and the Parkway in Philadelphia, would close at the end of the month. The closing of the museum is a tragedy.
Two of the Academy’s acclaimed ornithologists, Rodolphe Meyer de Schaunsee and James Bond, in 1983.
The Academy was founded in 1812, and, in 1828, opened the museum at its first location, 12th and Sansom Streets; it opened at its current site in 1876. The Academy was the oldest surviving institution of its kind in America. As such, it was extremely influential in the development of American science, at a time when the scientific community, such as it was, was small and concentrated on the East Coast. Many 19th century scientists and naturalists were associated with the Academy in various capacities: Titian Peale, William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, Spencer Fullerton Baird, John Cassin, Joseph Leidy, and Edward Drinker Cope, to name just a few. Charles Darwin was elected a corresponding member in 1860. Later Academy scientists include the original James Bond, the influential ecologist Ruth Patrick, and the co-describer of Tiktaalik, Ted Daeschler. The Academy sponsored expeditions all around the world, to places such as West Africa, Greenland, Mongolia, South America, and the West Indies. The American Medical Association (AMS; 1847) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 1848) were both founded at the Academy.
The collections of the Academy are priceless. Because of its age, influence, and international connections, it has received, by gift, exchange, and purchase, parts of the collections of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the United States Exploring Expedition, Thomas Jefferson, Captain Cook, and John Gould (the British ornithologist who described Darwin’s Galapagos specimens). These collections of specimens, and the associated written records and library of the Academy, form the core of the Academy’s scientific (and history of science) enterprise. But, as James Smithson enunciated in his bequest that founded the Smithsonian Institution, such institutions are for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge ” (emphasis added).
The public facing side of the Academy– it’s museum, public programs, and educational outreach: the way it “diffuses” knowledge– are as integral to a great institution of natural history as are its scientists. Institutions vary in how much effort is devoted to the increase vs. the diffusion sides of their missions. Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology lean towards “increase”, having an at most modest public face; Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History is almost all “diffusion”; while the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History excel at both. The Academy has always been among the latter– excelling at both, with an excellent public museum, as well as an active research program among its affiliated scientists.
I have several times visited the Academy to work in its collections and get information from its archives. My most recent visit was last summer, to the Bird division, where I was hosted by an active and welcoming community of senior scientists and graduate students. I regret that I did not have time to go see the exhibits– I could never, at the time, have fathomed that it would be my last chance to see them. I contemplated trying to get to Philadelphia during this final month, but the logistics and scheduling of such a trip during the first month of my semester were daunting. Had the closing been announced well ahead of time (say, the end of this year), rather than just one month ahead, I would have made it.
Drexel University promises in some vague way to preserve the “legacy” of the Academy, but past experience does not augur well. I am reminded of other university’s casual loss of their collections (Princeton’s, for example), while others had theirs saved only by an outside institution willing to take the specimens (Duke’s, for example). If the Academy’s building is closing, where will the collections go? (They are in the same building as the public exhibits.) And what will happen to the scientists, students, and other staff who are working there? The Academy has had its ups and downs over the years (as will any 200+ year old institution), and perhaps this is just a low spot from which public-spirited citizens, perhaps with the support of the city and the state, may be able to effect a rebound. But based on what I know now, I very much fear for my colleagues and the collections, not to mention the people of Philadelphia and the world who experienced the Academy’s “diffusion”.
Peck, R.M., and P.T. Stroud. 2012. A Glorious Enterprise: the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. A wonderful, well-illustrated, history of the Academy, celebrating its first 200 years, and intended to look forward to continuing glory. Now, it practically induces tears.
There will be no long Hili today, and probably not tomorrow, as I have to have my retina scrutinized (I think things are okay). Wish me luck, and bear with me.
Speaking of bears, we have a winner in Alaska’s Fat Bear Contest involving the ursines of Katmai National Park and Preserve. The champ: Backpack! The voting was close:
In the annual battle of the big bears, only one can be the winner. This year, 89 Backpack, was crowned the winner of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week.
The match came down to two single bears in a battle of the sexes. Backpack is an adult male who overcame an injury in 2007 and has what park staff describe as a “quiet toughness,” according to his bio on Explore.org, the media organization that helps host the event. And on the other side, representing the lady bears, was 910, an adult female whose mother, 409 Beadnose, was a previous Fat Bear Week champion.
It was a nail-biter: Backpack won by just over 5,000 votes, coming in with 103,344 over 910’s tally of 98,253 votes.
His name comes from childhood, when Backpack was often seen clinging to the back of his mother, Holly, while she swam across the river. (Holly was also a former Fat Bear Week champion.)
Earlier in the competition, Naomi Boak, a former communication specialist for the Katmai Conservancy who was a producer for the event for several years, said she was excited to see that 89 Backpack had earned a spot in the bracket at long last.
Backpack can be “elusive,” Boak said, making it hard to photograph him at the beginning and end of the season, which is necessary to enter a bear into the competition.
Boak was actually inspired to move to Alaska and work with the park when she watched Backpack from her New York City apartment in 2019 on the park’s livestream. She described him as her “gateway bear.”
Backpack, according to his bio, has fewer scars than might be expected on a male bear his age, because he is less aggressive than some of his peers.
“Unlike many large adult male bears, Backpack hasn’t shown much aggression toward his competitors,” his competition bio said. “He’ll stand up for himself when necessary, but he prefers to use a quiet strength to gain access to preferred fishing spots.”
There were four flydubai pilots aboard flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday when an alleged terror attack inside the cockpit sent the aircraft plunging thousands of feet and ultimately forced it to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.Israeli officials said the co-pilot stabbed the captain and attempted to crash the aircraft before passengers and crew intervened. The flight transmitted the international 7500 code for unlawful interference, initially prompting fears of a hijacking, and Israeli fighter jets were scrambled as the crisis unfolded.Now, The Jerusalem Post can confirm why two other pilots happened to be aboard.The additional pilots had been placed on the flight because possible regional rerouting could extend the journey and push the original crew beyond permitted duty hours, a person familiar with the matter told the Post.
Their presence was unrelated to any advance security warning.
UAE investigators will now determine “whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose, or involved prior planning or direction”, according to the UAE’s state news agency.
Abu Dhabi authorities have jurisdiction over the incident because the aircraft is registered in the UAE and flies under its flag, the statement said.
It comes after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is “too early to say” who was behind the incident, as he hailed the actions of the flight’s captain.
Netanyahu blamed “fanaticism and hatred of an incalculable level” during a Fox News interview but said he has no confirmation yet of the motive for the attack. The attacker was arrested in Saudi Arabia.
A Tennessee woman convicted of murder survived two doses of lethal injection on Wednesday night before state officials suspended the execution and had her taken to a hospital for medical care, her lawyers said.
It was the second botched execution in the state this year.
The apparent failure came after dueling court rulings delayed the execution of the woman, Christa Pike, by about nine hours. The state had raced to go ahead with the execution before the day ended and to avoid having to reschedule.
In a pair of emergency legal filings, Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital, the lethal drug, had been administered, Ms. Pike had not lost consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the drugs, or what Ms. Pike’s medical condition was. In a statement late Wednesday, her lawyers said that she was at a nearby hospital but that they did not know her condition. Tennessee officials confirmed to a federal judge late Wednesday that Ms. Pike was receiving medical care.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
. . . It was the second time this year that Tennessee failed to administer the lethal drugs. In May, the state called off one of four planned executions because medical staff could not find a vein while administering a lethal drug.
Just one of several reasons I oppose the death penalty. It would have been more humane to shoot her, but I don’t think the state should kill anyone.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, fall is here in a big way:
Hili: And the apples are dropping again. Andrzej: It’s all because of that Newton.
In Polish:
Hili: I znów spadają jabłka.
Ja: To wszystko przez tego Newtona
Yes, the birds of Botany Pond have left, and by that I mean Miss Duck’s brood of four ducklings have taken wing and flew away to who knows where. The good news is that they all fledged, even though the “good” mother had abandoned the brood over a week beforehand,—when the young weren’t yet flying. The ducklings were zooming and even taking off a bit, so as long as I could keep them fed and safe, I knew they’d be okay. They clearly missed their mom, and weren’t eating as much, but they stuck together and, around September 14, three of the four were gone.
That left one duckling, whom I named Rupert. I don’t know if his wings weren’t yet fully developed, or he hadn’t learned to fly, but he stuck around looking forlorn and disconsolate, sitting on the bank of the channel. Here he is (the greenish hue at the base of his bill tells us he’s a male):
A sad duckling. He wouldn’t eat nor approach me, but mostly slept and rested on the bank of the channel.
But around September 19, Rupert was gone. Hooray!
Of course I don’t know where they are, but I hope they found some other ducks who will migrate south with them. As for the wanton Miss Duck, if she ever returns she’ll get a stern lecture about staying with her babies until they fledge.
Here she is, with her long periscope neck and gray coloration. If Miss Duck returns, I will know her for sure (I also have close-up photos of her bill).
The brood a few days before they started leaving. I call this iPhone photo “Golden Slumbers” after the Beatles song:
I call these “ducklings,” but they’re clearly adults: freshly minted mallards. Ba
This one, with an orange hue at the base of her bill, is a female (a “hen”; the males are called “drakes”).
We had a bit of duck drama/trauma a few days before they left. When I came to the pond, one of the females (below) was quacking continuously, and nobody would eat. I didn’t know what was going on. I asked someone on a nearby bench how long the duck had been quacking, and he told me that a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) had been standing in the channel a while back.
That was it! The young female (only female mallards make the classic “quack”) was freaked out by the heron, as these birds can prey on young ducklings. While herons can’t take a duck of this size, these ducklings had clearly evolved to react to a potential predator of the young. When I took the video below the heron was gone, but while I was watchingfor an hour it flew over the pond twice, and each time the female quacked loudly, and all the other ducks froze in place. They stayed freaked out for several hours after I drove the heron away.
I learned later that the different calls have different meanings, and that this is a specific alarm call for predators (the differences among calls are small, and inaudible to most of us). The ducks know how to distinguish predators from harmless birds. When a heron or Cooper’s hawk flies overhead, even high up, they quack and freeze. If a crow, an airplane, or a goose flies over, there is no reaction. The marvels of natural selection!
Note that her wings are raised, too, something that the other ducklings did. I have no idea what that means.
How fast they grew! I’ve reversed the second picture below so you can see the difference between the brood at 1 day old and a little less than eight weeks old.
Note the bill color. The two ducks in front with the grayish-green bill bases are drakes, the two behind, with orangish bills, are hens. (The drakes develop their color and patterns, including the green heads, while overwintering.) We had a 50:50 split this year.
And a panorama of our summer home, Botany Pond:
We musn’t forget the other critters. We still have six turtles, since we lost one but two were added. Here’s one clambering painfully onto the rocks to get some sun. They are strong! (This took place during the heron-induced QuackFest, so you can hear some quacking in the background.)
And my squirrels, who grew quite tame. They clambered onto me to get nuts, and several even let me kiss them. They will be here this winter, as will the turtles, but we won’t see the latter as they’ll be dug into the pond bottom overwintering.
A smooch:
And so the latest Duck Year drew to a close. We had five broods, two of which wandered away after harassment by horny drakes, one of which we captured with a fence below their nest, but had to take to rehab when we couldn’t capture the mother, and one of which got mired in the algae, with three ducklings drowning, while I saved five and sent them to rehab. It was depressing, but then Miss Duck had a late brood in July and allowed us to bring a brood up from hatching to fledging. (The drakes had left by then.)
All the birds are leaving—the Great Duck Migration south is beginning in the Midwest—but perhaps one of them will return. I won’t recognize them unless Miss Duck is the one who comes back. And she faces a talking-to!
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bang2“, is an old one that I don’t remember, but it’s a good one. The term “retrodiction” is mine, though someone might have throught of it before I did.
The strip came with a note, and notice the new book on sale:
A resurrection from 2008 today, slightly edited. In other news, there’s a new J&M book out! It’s a best-of compilation, selected by me. 150 pages of J&M, without any crap ones!
In the strip below, of course you know who “Al” is, right?
