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.
I have been wondering about the question above for a while, as I’ve read quite a few novels lately that use the word “luncheon”, with seemingly no distinction between that word and “lunch”. I was too lazy to look it up, but, typing it in the search box, I found this short (1.5-minute) YouTube explanation below:
The Oxford English Dictionary agrees (the first meaning is “A large chunk of something, esp. bread, cheese, or some other food; a thick slice, a hunk; = lunch“). The relevant entry:
There you go. But I still would like to be able to invite a friend to a restaurant for an informal luncheon. That’s not correct, but it’s fun to say. And, at any rate, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “luncheon” lately, even referring to a formal meal. And in fiction it’s used incorrectly all the time.
Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant. “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.
Here’s my count:
“Pregnant people”: Used 41 times
“Women”: Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others
Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.
The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:
The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):
Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:
Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”. Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà: “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”
Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):
Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like TheLancet, “bodies with vaginas”:
Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
Well, this is the last batch of photos I have, and it’s very sad that the tank is empty. Please send some in if you have them. Don’t make me beg!
Today we have photos of ducks—or rather, one female duck— rom Aussie reader Keira McKenzie in Perth. Keira’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Here is a series of photos I took of a lone Pacific Black Duck [Anas superciliosis] from this afternoon [Feb. 11] at the park. Since the islands in the ponds have been completely cleared of all vegetation (the western island) and all the undergrowth cleared from the eastern island (this is because of the devastation throughout Perth’s trees from the polyphagous shothole borer), moat of the waterbirds have left for areas where they can roost & nest.
The photos are taken in Hyde Park, Perth, Western Australia, on a hot humid afternoon.
I am very fond of them. I rescued one when it flew into the electric wires on the other side of the road one night. I carried it back across the road and into the park, putting it near the water’s edge. It was a pond-smelling little bundle, seemed uninjured and was very calm, and waddled off into the water and sailed into the night.
What a beautiful hen! It makes me eager for Duck Season to arrive at Botany Pond. Keira also sent a picture of her cat:
I shall sign off with a pic of my little Baba (currently zooming around the place for no apparent reason) slothing in the armchair in the heat with one of her favourite toys (the other is a wombat).
Welcome to Friday, February 13, 2026. Yep, you got that right: it’s Friday the 13th, and you’d best stay in bed. You can nibble on cheese, though, as it’s National Cheddar Day. English cheddar is better than American, and my favorite is an English farmhouse cheddar like Keen’s, preferably aged to the point where a bit of mold is growing on it. Here’s how that kind of cheese is made:
Minnesota officials said the nearly six-week surge of immigration enforcement in the state would leave deep economic and psychological scars that last long after the drawdown of federal agents, which President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced on Thursday.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the announcement and would now turn his attention to the state’s economic recovery. “They left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” he said. “They left us with economic ruin, in some cases.”
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis praised city residents for challenging the conduct of federal agents, who killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the crackdown, and protecting immigrants in the city.
“They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” he said in a statement, adding that it was time for a “great comeback” for Minneapolis families and businesses that suffered under the ICE crackdown.
Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, said he doubted whether the announcement by Mr. Homan could be trusted.
“I’m going to continue patrolling,” Mr. Payne said, referring to the practice of keeping watch for immigration agents, blowing whistles to warn residents and recording their operations. “I’m going to continue to ask my community to patrol and keep eyes on them,” he added.
I’m not sure whether this means that there will be a complete halt to find immigrants who are either here illegally or have committed crimes in addition to that, but it will surely quell the uproar for a bit. However, one shouldn’t forget the remaining major scandals many involving Somalis (either citizens or immigrants) that cost taxpayers a lot of money. It is for that reason that Walz decided not to run for governor again.
Attorney General Pam Bondi combatively defended her leadership at the Justice Department to House lawmakers on Wednesday amid sharp criticism that she botched the release of the Epstein files and has wielded the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to heed President Donald Trump’s calls to prosecute his political foes.
In exchange after exchange, Bondi lobbed brash insults when Democratic lawmakers questioned her decisions and repeatedly portrayed the expansive Justice Department as unfairly maligned by Democrats and those who dislike Trump.
In her opening remarks before the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi — highlighting her allegiance to the president — thanked Trump for his investment in fighting violent crime and said the Justice Department is working to advance the president’s priorities. The attorney general blamed the Biden administration for politicizing the department and, echoing claims from conservative activists, said it is fighting against “liberal activist judges” working to stymie the president’s agenda.
“America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition to a presidential administration,” Bondi said.
The attorney general did not buckle in her defense of the department and frequently attempted to shift attention to its efforts to reduce violent crime, a topic that earned her praise from Republicans.
Bondi came armed with scripted insults for Democrats.
“I’m not going to get in the gutter with these people,” Bondi said repeatedly in response to pointed questions. She lashed out when the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, directed her to respond to the panel’s inquiries.
“You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer,” she said. “You’re not even a lawyer.”
Good Lord, that is lacking in respect! You can hear Bondi say that in the video below. But the committee was nasty, too:
Raskin, a lawmaker from Maryland, denounced Bondi for her handling of the Epstein files, the department’s response to deadly shootings by federal personnel in Minneapolis and her oversight of cases involving people whom Trump has publicly called to prosecute.
“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time,” Raskin said. “You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.”
Bondi did miss a chance to have bridged the rifts a bit: when a Representative asked her to turn around and face the Epstein sex-trafficking survivors who were standing up—survivors who haven’t been able to talk to the Administration—and apologize to them. Bondi wouldn’t even turn around. She had nothing to lose, and something to gain, by apologizing. In the end, Bondi, the personification of the word “insouciance,” accomplished nothing save defend the administration in an impolite way. It was an interesting show, though.
The GOP-led House passed a resolution Wednesday designed to roll back President Trump’s tariffs on Canada, as a half-dozen Republicans joined Democrats in rebuking the administration’s signature economic policy.
The House voted 219-211 to approve a Democratic resolution that would invalidate the emergency declaration that underpins Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Six Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for the measure, another setback for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who couldn’t keep his conference united in support of the president.
Passage of the antitariff resolution sends it to the Senate, which must vote on the issue again despite approving a similar one on a narrow, bipartisan basis last year. If it passes the Senate—where it can advance on a simple majority vote, not the 60 usually required—the measure would move to Trump, who would almost certainly veto it.
The Republicans who voted with most Democrats to end the tariffs were Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Jeff Hurd of Colorado. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a centrist, sided with most Republicans.
Immediately after the vote, Trump said that Republicans who broke rank will face electoral backlash.
“Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
Of course Trump, who never forgets, will take retribution. To overturn the inevitable veto if the bill passes the Senate, it would take two-thirds of both Senators and Representatives to vote again on repudiating tariffs, and that ain’t gonna happen. The Republicans who voted with the Democrats will, in the end, suffer for having espoused their principles.
*Several readers quailed when I said the other day that I thought having voters show identification was reasonable. But Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, defends the policy in an op-ed called “Voter ID is reasonable. It’s also popular.” There are in facts good reasons to require it, he says.
President Trump says that “Republicans” should “nationalize the election” or at least take over voting in up to 15 places where he says voting is corrupt. His evidence of fraudulent voting is that he lost in such places in 2020, and since it is axiomatic that he won everywhere, the reported results are proof of the fraud.
This is all delusional, narcissistic nonsense. But at this point, if you still claim it’s an open question whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election (he did), you’re immune to the facts or just lying—either about not having made up your mind or about what actually happened. So, I don’t see much point in relitigating an issue that was literally litigated in more than 60 courtrooms.
But Republicans’ inability simply to tell the truth about Trump’s lies makes talking about elections and election integrity infuriatingly difficult. One tactic is to assert that Trump didn’t say what he plainly said. “What I assume he meant by it is that we ought to pass—Congress ought to pass the SAVE Act, which I’m co-sponsor of,” is how Sen. Josh Hawley responded to questions about Trump’s remarks.
Before later correcting himself, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy insisted the president never said he wanted to “nationalize” the elections. “Those are your words, not his,” he told reporters.
But Democrats are wrong to suggest that all of the difficulty is generated by Trump’s lies and the Republicans’ inability to reject them.
Here are Goldberg’s reasons to favor IDs:
. . . .Now there are reasonable objections to proof-of-citizenship requirements in the SAVE Act, but the framing of both the question and the answer is flawed.
Americans—including large majorities of Democrats—have favored voter ID for decades. Since long before anyone dreamed Donald Trump would run for president, never mind get elected, the idea has been wildly popular. In 2006, 80 percent of Americans favored showing proof of ID when voting. The lowest support over the last two decades, according to Pew, was in 2012 when a mere 77 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Democrats, favored voter ID. Last August, Pew found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favored having to provide government-issued ID when voting.
Two things have bothered me about Democratic opposition to voter ID. First is the claim that millions upon millions of Americans lack adequate ID. While it’s true that the SAVE Act’s provisions for providing proof of citizenship creates novel challenges—lots of people don’t have their birth certificates, and many forms of ID don’t specify citizenship—Democrats were making this argument years before the citizenship issue ripened. (To be clear, evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers is scant to nonexistent.)
Regardless, if the problem is that huge numbers of “marginalized” people don’t have sufficient ID to vote, that also means they don’t have good enough ID for all manner of things. Indeed, I can think of few things more likely to marginalize someone than not having ID. You can’t get a credit card, buy or rent a home, apply for welfare benefits, travel by plane, or open a bank account without identification. That’s some serious marginalization.
Second, if you want people to trust the integrity of elections and the sanctity of “our democracy,” waxing indignant over the idea of presenting ID when democratic majorities favor it is an odd choice. It arouses the suspicion that there’s a reason for opposing such measures. Mostly thanks to Democratic initiatives, America has made it wildly easier to vote over the last three decades. Why is it so preposterous that new safeguards be put in place amid all of the mail-in and early voting?
My theory is that at some deep level there is a dysfunctional bipartisan consensus that lax voting rules benefit Democrats. That’s why Republicans want to tighten the rules and Democrats favor loosening them.
I think the second reason is the best: the sight of Democrats arguing strenuously against IDs is not good optics. Giving IDs also helps shut up people who argue, as did Trump, that elections have been crooked (granted, Trump can argue about voting machines, absentee ballots, and other stuff, but every bit helps). Really, it resembles Democrats seeming to favor completely open borders.
*From the UPI’s “Odd News” section, a big YUCK! A huge “fatball”—a conglomeration of fat, oil, and grease (not to mention human waste), has been found under a Sydney, Australia wastewater plant, and is thought to be the source of huge “greaseballs” that wash up on Australian beaches.
Australia’s Sydney Water confirmed there is a massive fatberg estimated to be “the size of four buses” in a difficult-to-reach position under a wastewater plant.
The supersized fatberg — a collection of fats, oils and greases — under the Malabar wastewater treatment plant is now believed to be the source of black balls that have periodically been washing up on Sydney-area beaches since 2024.
The balls were originally thought to be tar from a possible oil spill, but an analysis at the University of New South Wales discovered they contained human feces.
Sydney Water managing director Darren Cleary said officials are now aware of a giant-sized fatberg in the tunnels underneath the Malabar plant.
“We don’t know exactly how big the fatberg is,” Cleary told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “The size of four buses, that would be the maximum potential extent of it. It may be that, it may be slightly smaller. We don’t exactly know.”
He said the blockage is located in an “inaccessible dead zone.”
“There’s a component of that tunnel which we can’t safely access,” Cleary said.
He said the balls that have been washing up on beaches are likely caused by water flows in the tunnels skimming across the surface of the fatberg and breaking off small pieces.
Here’s a short ABC video about the fatballs and greaseballs:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s messing with Andrzej:
Hili: You did something you had never done before.
Andrzej: What was that?
Hili: You didn’t listen to what I was saying to you.
Andrzej: And what were you saying?
Hili: Nothing important.
In Polish:
Hili: Zrobiłeś coś, czego nie robiłeś nigdy wcześniej.
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Nie słuchałeś co do ciebie mówię.
Ja: A co mówiłaś?
Hili: Nic ważnego.
From the New Yorker via Masih; the medical workers of Iran strike back at the regime, which had targeted doctors and nurses for helping wounded protestors:
The Iranian regime has targeted wounded protesters seeking help. In response, medical workers throughout the country have forged secret units to treat those injured in the uprising. https://t.co/ZYA12KWwdn
The point of this tweet is clear given that it’s from Maya Forstater:
Oat Milk not Milk (who knew?)
You can bet that 9 months from now (or even tomorrow) Oatly is not going to be wringing its hands and pretending not to understand what the Supreme Court said. https://t.co/yQbhuuma36
Yep, here I go again pointing out the decline in the quality of rock and pop music. But this time I’m joined by the music maven Rick Beato, who has always had the same opinion. In this video he compares music from 1984 vs. 2026, juxtaposing the Grammy nominees for Song of the Year from both years. Save for one song, he finds the 2026 nominees lame, so there’s no contest. Music, he argues implictly, has gone downhill in the past four decades.
I’ll list the nominees and make some comments below. The winner for both years is is at the top. My own comments are flush left.
Had I voted, there would be no hesitation in my dubbing “Billie Jean” as Song of the Year, but all of these songs, as Beato agrees, are good and memorable. They will last, and will still be popular years from now (they’re still listened to 42 years later!).
Beato finds “Wildflower” the best for this year; it is, he says, a “great song”. (This is Eilish’s tenth Grammy.) While I don’t think it’s great, it is very good, and miles above all the other nominees. And it won. I’ll put it below. He simply dismisses the other seven songs, though a few have some merit, like being “well produced.”
The reasons Beato finds this year’s songs worse are that they are in general lame, derivative, often include many songwriters (too many writers spoil the song), and sometimes include sampling from older songs.
In contrast, only one of the 1984 songs has more than one writer, and all include the singer as a composer. (Note that one is by Bad Bunny, and Beato can’t understand the words!) Beato’s takeaway is that nobody will remember songs written by so many people, and nobody will remember these latest songs more than three years from now.
Beato:
Here is “Wildflower,” live with Billie Eilish (the official release is here, and the lyrics are here). The only accompaniments are a guitar, bass, two sets of drums, and three backup singers.
There’s an potpourri of Darwin-related material at the Friends of DarwinNewsletter website, especially extensive because today is Darwin Day. Click below to read it; it discusses pollination (Athayde’s favorite topic), recommends two new books, and has a bunch of evolution-related links. I’ll put those below the screenshot. Today’s newsletter was written by Richard Carter.
The “missing links” (indents are quotes from article)
Some Darwin-related articles you might find of interest:
The importance of Charles Darwin’s documentary archive has been recognised by its inclusion on the UNESCO International Memory of the World Register. The Darwin Archive comprises documents held at Cambridge University Library, the Natural History Museum in London, the Linnean Society of London, Darwin’s former home at Down House in Kent, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the National Library of Scotland.
Podcast episode: The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Darwin.
David Runciman talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the book that fundamentally altered our understanding of just about everything: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.
Darwin Online has published Charles Darwin’s address book. Here’s their introduction, and here’s the address book.
The University of Edinburgh recently completed a five-year programme to catalogue, preserve, and enhance access to the Charles Lyell Collection. Geologist Lyell was a close friend of Darwin, and major influence on his work. Here’s the collection’s snazzy new website.
Leonard Jenyns on the variation of species and Charles Darwin on the origin of species 1844–1860
At the 1856 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Rev. Leonard Jenyns (1800−1893) delivered one of the most significant statements on the nature and the origin of species in the years immediately preceding Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jenyns was a long-standing friend of Darwin and had turned down the place aboard HMS Beagle subsequently taken by Darwin.
The November 2025 issue of the journal Paleobiology contained a collection of papers exploring Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s 1972 paper on punctuated equilibria, in which they argued that species don’t always evolve through slow, steady change. Instead, the fossil record shows long periods in which species remain remarkably stable, interrupted by relatively brief bursts of evolutionary innovation linked to the origin of new species. The Paleobiology papers include a retrospective review of the importance of the idea of punctuated equilibria, and Niles Eldredge’s personal reflections.
Thumbs and brains are all well and good, but paleoanthropologist John Hawks explores another human characteristic that remains an enduring evolutionary enigma: what the heck are chins for?
I haven’t looked at them all, but I did look at two related to my own field—speciation. I like article #10, called “In praise of subspecies,” which explains what subspecies are (they’re called “races” of plants and animals by many biologists), and tells us how recognizing them will reduce the number of species. (This won’t satisfy all biologists, for many disagree with me that modern humans and Neanderthals are subspecies, not distinct species.) But I disagree with the author, Richard Smyth, who thinks that all subspecies should be units of conservation. That is, genetically and morphologically different populations of a species should all be conserved if they are considered “endangered”. One should do that when possible, of course, but I feel the unit of conservation—the thing that must be saved, is the biological species. But Smyth gives a good summary of what subspecies are.
Biologists have long thought (and Allen Orr and I have a chapter on this in our book Speciation) that sexual selection promotes speciation by driving isolated populations in different directions, eventually leading to some of them becoming reproductively incompatible, through either unwillingness to mate or creating problems in hybrids. The experiments described in #11 are interesting, and show more divergence in populations of beetles that are subject to sexual selection than in those constrained to be monogamous, but they don’t show the advent of reproductive barriers between populations. They do, however, show more divergence in the sexually-selected population, which is posited to be the first step in speciation.
Remember, Darwin’s greatest book was called On the Origin of Species (a shortened title). Yet he didn’t help us understand species very much, as he had no concept of species being groups separated by reproductive barriers. It wasn’t until the 1930s that biologists began to understand how new species originated when they realized that the key to understanding the “lumpiness” of nature—distinct species in one area—was figuring out how those groups could coexist, and that meant understanding how reproductive barriers arise. Darwin’s book would have been more appropriately titled On the Origin of Adaptations.
And that is my pronouncement for Darwin Day. I do recommend reading the first chapter of Speciation, but if you’re not an evolutionary biologist you can forget about the rest, which becomes technical at times.
In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.
Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?
Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it. I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.
Click below to access the general announcement.
Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.
This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.
We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.
THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.
Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.
This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.
JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:
The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.
“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”
Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.
THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:
Town Halls:
Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.
In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.
Debates:
Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?
God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?
The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?
Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.
