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.
Sadly, the tank has run dry. To proffer some content today, I’ve dug into my personal photo bank and will post a few miscellaneous shots with brief captions. Click to enlarge the photos
Woman collecting land snails for dinner, São Tomé, 2004:
BBQ dinner at City Market, Luling, Texas, 2004. Brisket, sausage, and the trimmings (beans, potato salad, and the mandatory white bread):
Death Valley and a rare post-rain desert bloom, 2005. Where do the insects come from since these blooms occur only about once a decade? (If you can ID the lepidopteran, do so.)
Usually there is only saltbush and creosote growing on the land, but in a bloom all sorts of flowers emerge from dormant seeds:
A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it:
Doing flies, 2005. This is what I spent most of my time doing before I retired.
Flying onto a glacier at Denali (Mt. McKinley). They were dropping off two climbers in a four-seater bush plane, and I hitched a ride there and back. I got to sit next to the woman pilot. From Talkeetna, Alaska. The peak in the center is Denali.
After we landed on the snow-covered glacier, the pilot had to make a runway to take off from, going back and forth on the snow about ten times to pack it down:
The famous polymorphism of color and banding within the snail Cepaea nemoralis, studied intensively by evolutionary geneticists for years. Despite that work and subsequent population-genetic analysis, we still don’t understand the significance of the variation. For some reason the field was covered with snails; these were on a fencepost. Dorset, England, 2006:
The cottage where poet and author Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and grew up. Upper Brockhampton, Dorset, 2006.
When Hardy became famous and wealthy, he moved to a house he designed (also in Dorset), Max Gate, where he lived from 1885 until he died in 1928. In the garden by the house are the burial sites of his beloved dogs and cats. Here are two graves of his cats, Snowdove and Kitsy; I was told that they were inscribed by Hardy himself, who had worked as a stonemason when younger, but I can’t vouch for that story:
A draft manuscript of the famous novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles in Hardy’s hand (taken at the local museum):
T. E. Lawrence‘s (1888-1935) final residence the cottage called Clouds Hill. He lived here after he gave up his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia” and served in the RAF under the pseudonym “T. E. Shaw” beginning in 1935, commuting back and forth to the airbase on his motorcycle. The cottage was very spartan, and had no electricity. As Wikipedia notes,
In a 1934 letter to Francis Rodd, Lawrence (who had changed his surname to Shaw) described his home thus:[5]
“The cottage has two rooms, one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep time I take a great sleeping bag… and spread it on what seems the nicest floor… The cottage looks simple outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection… Yours ever, T. E. Shaw”
Lawrence had an education in the classics, and is one of my heroes as he was both a man of action and a man of learning. Here’s the inscription in Greek over the door above: οὐ φροντὶς (“why worry”), taken from Hippoclides.
Lawrence’s bathtub and shaving mirror:
Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash on May 13, 1935, soon after leaving the RAF. Heading home on his motorcycle, he didn’t see two boys on bicycles ahead of him because of a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them at the last moment, he crashed his bike, sustained a serious head injury, and died six days later. A study of his death by a neurosurgeon who tended the dying Lawrence eventually led to the use of helmets by motorcyclists.
The crash site is a km or two from Clouds Hill, and my friend and I scoured the road on foot looking for the crash site, now marked by a memorial (I saw no dip in the road). We finally found the stone:
Ironically, there had been a car crash at the site right before we found the memorial:
When he crashed, Lawrence was riding aBrough Superior SS100 motorcycle. Here’s a picture of him from Wikipedia riding one (clearly not the death vehicle) that he called “George V”. If you go to Clouds Hill, you’ll see several of his motorcycles in a small garage.
Lawrence on George V, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown
Welcome to Thursday February 26, 2026, and only two days until Duck Month begins! It’s also National Pistachio Day, one of the trio of World’s Best Nuts (the others are macadamia nuts and cashews).
The seeds of Pistacia vera are not nuts but seeds, at least in the botanical sense. From Wikipedia:
The fruit is a drupe, containing an elongated seed, which is the edible portion. The seed, commonly thought of as a nut, is a culinary nut, not a botanical nut.
Here’s a video about their harvesting and production in Iran, the world’s largest source of the seeds:
Going into the speech, Mr. Trump knew that he needed to use it to maneuver out of a politically treacherous moment for himself and his party. A majority of Americans oppose how Mr. Trump is pursuing his anti-immigration agenda, and more than 70 percent of them think his priorities are in the wrong place. His approval rating has plummeted to 41 percent.
His solution was to wrap himself in the imagery of American heroism with staged asides throughout the speech while throwing the blame for every problem, from the security of elections to the state of the economy, back on his opponents.
In a number of cases, Democrats gave Mr. Trump the confrontations he sought.
Representative Al Green of Texas, who was ejected from the chamber last year for waving his cane at Mr. Trump, was once again removed after he held up a sign proclaiming “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES” — a reference to a racist video Mr. Trump recently shared on social media.
Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois got up and walked out rather than “take another minute” of the speech. And Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s, was one of a handful who yelled at him.
“You’ve killed Americans!” she shouted as Mr. Trump talked about immigration enforcement.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the president shot back.
When did these speeches become barroom brawls? Both sides are guilty of disrupting the President when he’s from the other party, and I’d be happier if the audience would be respectful; this would set an example, for instance, for speakers on college campuses. And I’m not sure about whether the Democrats should have remained seated when Trump asked Congress members to stand if they prioritized Americans over immigrants. This was a trap of the “are-you-still-beating-your-wife” variety, but I don’t think it will help the Democrats. Readers?
*In an article called “Why Iran will escalate” (article is archived), Foreign Policy assesses Trump’s motivations for attacking Iran and warns of potentially dangerous fallout from such an attack.
Trump’s own behavior also increases the risk of escalation. The president’s ever-intensifying wish to be seen as a historic peacemaker has led him to an unnecessarily binary choice—strong-arm Tehran into a major new deal or use substantial force. And the nebulousness of his motives makes this flash point much more dangerous. Trump seems interested, in no particular order, in demonstrating the prowess of the U.S. military, strengthening his negotiating position, showing he was serious when he vowed in a January Truth Social post to protect Iranian protesters, and differentiating his approach from President Barack Obama’s. This mishmash of objectives contrasts with the focus he brought to his previous successful operations and will make him less prepared if a strike does not yield the expected, swift capitulation. All told, today’s conditions mean that an attack by the United States on Iran could result in unexpectedly deadly retaliation—and a much longer and potentially damaging conflict for Washington.
. . . Iran knows that it cannot win an outright war with the United States or Israel. In theory, if Trump strikes, Tehran would be best off seeking a quick de-escalation—as it did with Israel in April and October of 2024 and with both countries in June 2025. But Iran is facing a very different situation now than it did then. Today, Israel and the United States both perceive Iran as a paper tiger. The proxy militias that it used to deter Israel and terrorize the Middle East for years have largely been neutralized. Its nuclear program is in ruins. Its air defenses are in tatters: the June strikes destroyed most of its surface-to-air missile sites and punched massive holes in its early-warning radar network. And in December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Mar-a-Lago and got Trump’s permission to strike Iran’s ballistic missile program, the keystone of the country’s defense, at a time and place of Netanyahu’s choosing. This development threatens the very existence of the Islamic Republic. The program is Iran’s only remaining means of threatening Israel. (Iran also mostly makes these missiles domestically, so Israel would have to strike Iran every six months or so to keep the arsenal sufficiently degraded.)
. . . The ambiguity of Trump’s current intentions also changes the Iranian calculus. The U.S. president is not threatening to attack Iran because of any imminent threat or in response to any act of Iranian aggression. His motives are various and unclear: he is disappointed by the negotiations’ progress, he feels compelled to defend the redline he established with his Truth Social post, he is desperate to avoid unflattering comparisons to Obama, and he believes he can undertake major operations with minimal consequences. From Iran’s perspective, both Israel and the United States appear to have concluded that they can strike without any direct provocation and when doing so serves domestic political needs; Iran even thinks the two countries will be tempted to strike frequently. As a result, Iranian officials feel they need to give Trump a bloody nose or they will perpetually be at risk.
. . . . Finally, Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to selectively seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly. In 2019, during Trump’s last “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran directly attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, the world’s largest. That assault appeared to be designed to damage easily replaceable components, thus limiting the consequences to the global energy supply. But if Tehran instead assaulted infrastructure that it knows would take longer to repair, the results would be much more damaging. The relationships between Iran and the Gulf Arab states are stronger now than they were then, but Tehran knows that Gulf leaders carry real influence with Trump and could appeal to him to back down if they came under pressure.
Iran may be weak. But it still has ways to inflict real pain on the United States—and much more incentive to try than it did before. If Trump wants to maintain the playbook that has worked for him, he will need a decisive and low-cost end to this saga. But powerful forces, both within him and external to him, have led him to dismiss the many off-ramps he already had. Iran hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham are urging Trump not to “talk like Reagan and act like Obama,” a comparison Trump hates and fears. It may seem implausible that Trump, who promised his supporters an end to forever wars, would take out Iran’s leaders or commit ground troops to regime change and nation building. Yet he has come this far. He may well be pushed onward, regardless of the cost
The author, Nate Swanson, clearly doesn’t think the U.S. should attack Iran, noting that he’s not alone: “70 percent of Americans—and a majority of Republicans—oppose military intervention in Iran. Trump will struggle to justify any American deaths in a conflict of his own making.” I have predicted that Trump will attack, but also that if he really wants regime change, he’ll have to put American boots on the ground, and, as Swanson notes, any American deaths will be hard to justify to the public. But if he just wants to stop the nuclear program, the U.S. and Israel will have to bomb the country over and over again.
To figure out which Trump measures stand out to the public, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll asked more than 2,300 Americans to name the best and worst things he has done since January 2025. People who support Trump — 39 percent of U.S. adults in the poll approved of his job performance — were asked to describe his best actions, while the 60 percent of Americans who disapproved were asked to name his worst actions.
Here’s what Trump’s supporters and opponents said. (I added screenshots; the article is archived here):
Immigration is by far the area for which Trump gets the most approval. And while he’s reduced it to nearly a trickle, he’s done it in a scattershot and often hamhanded way, with most of the people apprehended not having committed criminal acts besides illegal entry into the U.S.:
Note that the first two areas, immigration and the economy, are the very areas cited by his supporters as his big accomplishments:
I agree that the Trump presidency has been a disaster for the U.S., but one has to admit that some of his actions (Title IX changes, cutting back on DEI initiatives) have been salubrious. Yet when I asked readers to name one or two things that Trump did that was good, I was excoriated, and got heated emails that some people had unsubscribed from the site. People can’t admit that any Presidential actions have been a net good, even if the intention wasn’t benevolent. So be it. It’s still good to “steelman” (I hate that verb) the other side, as it increases your own credibility when criticizing it.
*A math professor at Vanderbilt University was the focus of social-media opprobrium when he published a math problem that was really propaganda for Palestine and against Israel. (I believe I reported this before but can’t find the post). The problem is given in the tweet below:
Vanderbilt University – why is mathematics lecturer Tekin Karadǎg bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom?
I actually emailed Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (the University of Chicago’s Provost not long ago), calling his attention to this guy, though not asking that he be penalized or fired. Now we I that even before I wrote Dr. Karadag was under investigation.
Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.
Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.
. . . Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”
In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.
“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”
. . . .The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.
In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Last year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”
Sadly, the University of Chicago never penalized anyone who violated University rules in a meaningful way and the ADL gave us a D+ (see below and here; for other schools go here):
The administration has been loath to penalize anyone who, during protests, violates rules like deplatforming speakers, participating in prohibited sit-ins, or encamping. Diermeier would have done a better job.
*New Zealand’s kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), the world’s only flightless parrot, is one of my favorite birds as it’s ineffably cute—and highly endangered. Moved to islands and isolated areas to stave off invasive predators, the kakapo is now making a comeback. And, as the AP reports in its “odd news,” this is promoted by a bumper crop of berries this year.
. . . the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird ’s fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades. This year, with a bumper crop of the strange parrot’s favorite berries prompting a rare enthusiasm for mating, those working to save the birds hope for a record number of chicks in February, which would move the kakapo closer to defying what was not long ago believed to be certain extinction.
Kakapo live on three tiny, remote islands off New Zealand’s southern coast and chances to see them in the wild are scarce. This breeding season has launched one of the birds to internet fame through a livestreamed video of her underground nest, where her chick hatched on Tuesday.
The kakapo is a majestic creature that can live for 60 to 80 years. But they’re undoubtedly weird to look at.
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Birds can weigh over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds). They have owllike faces, whiskers, and mottled green, yellow and black plumage that mimics dappled light on the forest floor.
That’s where the flightless parrot lives, which has made its survival complicated.
“Kakapo also have a really strong scent,” said Deidre Vercoe, the operations manager for the Department of Conservation’s kakapo program. “They smell really musky and fruity — gorgeous smell.”
The pungent aroma was bad news for the parrots when humans arrived in New Zealand hundreds of years ago. The introduction of rats, dogs, cats and stoats, as well as hunting by people and destruction of native forest habitats, drove species of the country’s flourishing flightless birds — the kakapo among them — to near or complete extinction.
By 1974, no kakapo were known to exist. Conservationists kept looking, however, and in the late 1970s, a new population of the birds was discovered.
Reversing their fortunes hasn’t been simple.
It’s hard, with every bird sporting a small backpack that allows researchers to track it. And they remove eggs from females (replacing them with dummy eggs), putting them in incubators to ensure hatching before replacing them beneath the females.
Since January, admirers of the birds have had a rare glimpse into the process through a livestream showing the underground nest of 23-year-old kakapo Rakiura on the island of Whenua Hou, where she has laid three eggs, two of them fertile. So precarious is the species’ survival that the eggs were exchanged for fake replacements while the real ones were incubated indoors.
Go read about their weird behaviors (e.g., male “booming’) and do look at the livestream above. New Zealand is devoting considerable effort to saving this bird, and I think it’s worth it. There’s nothing even close to it in the parrot world. And thank Ceiling Cat for the bumper crop of berries!
“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids, but we do have kakapo and kiwi,” [Operations Manager Deidre] Vercoe said. “It’s a real New Zealand duty to save these birds.”
For sure. And I can’t write about the kakapo without again showing this classic video clip of Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine studying the bird, with Carwardine becoming the subject of Sirocco’s romantic longings:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has an armful o’ cats:
Hili: A penny for your thoughts. Szaron: He’s probably thinking that at least during the night we’ll leave him in peace.
In Polish:
Hili: Grosz za twoje myśli.
Szaron: On pewnie myśli, że przynajmniej w nocy damy mu święty spokój.
From Joolz, a house known as the “Hitler House” because it looks like him, Joolz took the photo from Google Earth, but you can also see it, along with a bunch of human-faced houses, at this site. Some info:
Probably one of the most recognisable face houses in the world, this end-of-terrace property went viral in 2016, when someone spotted that its exterior looks like German dictator, Adolf Hitler. Its slanted roofline and prominent door lintel definitely bear a resemblance to Hitler’s side-parting and moustache, don’t you think?
Located in Swansea, Wales, the property hit the headlines again when it went on the rental market for just £85 ($108) per week. Rather unsurprisingly, the Hitler House has been dubbed one of the ugliest in the world.
From Masih, a tweet that I can’t embed (why??). Another woman protestor killed by Iranian cops (click to go to original):
From a reader, a blockheaded and misguided doctor who signed a petition he hadn’t read:
Today on Beyond Gender we interviewed Dr. Gordan Guyatt—the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine—who recently signed a statement calling paediatric gender medicine “medically necessary” despite knowing there is no good quality evidence that it is safe, beneficial and effective.… pic.twitter.com/G8SpVqDQPG
AOC trying to rebut the word salad she emitted when talking about foreign affairs last week. What’s hilarious about this is that her partner is snoring in the bed right next to her, and snoring LOUDLY. Sound up!
Wikipedia tells us that another word for “conceptual conservatism” is “belief perseverance,” and characterizes it this way:
Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism) is maintenance of a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.[2]
Since rationality involves conceptual flexibility, belief perseverance is consistent with the view that human beings act at times in an irrational manner. Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller holds that belief perseverance “deserves to rank among the fundamental ‘laws’ of nature”.
The data adduced by the barmaid are under the heading “evidence from experimental psychology,” and she’s right, though it doesn’t cite “hundreds of studies”.
Not long ago I was asked by Jason Flores-Williams to contribute to his online/free paper newsletter Alma Asfalto, a Mexican publication (translation: “asphalt soul”) that has English translation. Flores-Williams wanted me to answer a few questions about evolution, and I agreed for two reasons. First, I wanted to help promote the understanding and acceptance of evolution among our southern neighbors. Second, if you click on the first link (to Wikipedia), you’ll see that Flores-Williams is a guy worth helping:
Jason Flores-Williams (born 1969, Los Angeles, CA) is an author, political activist, and civil rights attorney. He is best known for his legal work on behalf of death row clients, political protesters, the homeless population of Denver, and his suit to have the Colorado River recognized as a legal person. Flores-Williams is an acknowledged expert in conspiracy law and First Amendment cases whose views are frequently sought by media organizations, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He was also a lead organizer of the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
How could I refuse a guy who did that? And so I agreed, answering his five questions. These answers appear on pp. 6-7 of the 16-page March edition of the paper, along with interviews and short essays by other scientists and humanities folks (these include author and filmmakerSasha Sagan, the daughter of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan). I’ll give here the five questions I was asked, but to see my answers you must to the paper by clicking on the screenshot below. (You can also download the whole paper. Warning: the site loads slowly.)
Here are the questions I was asked. Again, see the answers at the site.
In the simplest terms, what is evolution—and what do people most often get wrong about it?
Why does evolution still make some people uncomfortable, even though it’s one of the most well-supported ideas in all of science?
Does accepting evolution make human life feel less meaningful—or, in your view, more remarkable?
People sometimes say that evolution promotes selfishness or brutality. What does evolution actually tell us about cooperation, empathy, and morality?
If you could change one thing about how evolution is taught or talked about in public life, what would it be—and why does it matter right now?
Here are the contents:
Mexico City
March 2026
Reality is being branded.
Truth manipulated.
Disengagement marketed.
But something real is gathering.
Across science, philosophy, art, and film, the real is now contested ground.
For two reasons I think that Jesse Singal‘s long op-ed (really a “guest essay”) in today’s NYT will mark a turning point in public and professional attitudes towards “affirmative care.” First, the NYT saw fit to publish a piece showing that many American medical associations have promoted “affirmative care” of gender-dysphoric adolescents, despite those associations knowing that there was little or no evidence for the efficacy of such care. Indeed, it seems that some of those associations lied or dissimulated about it, all in the interest of pushing a “progressive” ideology. As we know, left-wing “progressives” have been in favor of immediately accepting a child’s self-identification as belonging to its non-natal gender, so that teachers, parents, therapists, and doctors have united to start such children on puberty blockers and, later, surgery and hormones.
The NYT, while it has published pieces questioning the evidence for affirmative care, has been reluctant to come out as strongly as Singal does in the essay. That America’s Paper of Record deems this worthy of publication is news in itself.
For a number of reasons, most concerned with recent evidence (e.g., the Cass Review), the rah-rah affirmative therapy treadmill is grinding to a halt. As Singal relates, recently two American medical associations—the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and now the powerful American Medical Association (AMA)—have admitted that we don’t know whether a gender-dyphoric child will “resolve” as gay or non-trans without medical intervention, and also that there should be no surgical intervention aimed at altering the gender of minors.
Singal has long called attention to these problems, and for his troubles he’s been branded a “transphobe,” shunned and blocked on social media. There was even a petition to ban him from the site Bluesky, though, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t work. Now, at long last, his views are getting a respectful airing, and society is coming to realize that the American zeal for “affirmative care”—not shared so much in Europe—is not only misguided but harmful.
The second reason is that the author ID says this about Singal:
Jesse Singal is writing a book about the debate over youth gender medicine in the United States and writes the newsletter Singal-Minded.
Although he’s already written one book. The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, this is his first book on gender medicine, and if it expands on the theme of this article, it will be a landmark work with the potential to create big changes in gender medicine and how we view it. Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design.
Click on the headlines to read the article at the NYT, or find it archived for free at this site.
A few excerpts:
It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatme
. . .The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.
At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk — and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them.
And then Singal documents how organizations representing mainstream science and medicine haven’t been so trustworthy. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been particularly vocal—and clueless—in relentlessly pushing affirmative care:
A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”
Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.
Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.
In the face of a lack of studies supporting their preferred ideology, organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA) have waffled, weaseled, and dissimulated, sometimes making contradictory statements. Here’s one example (the AMA has also changed its stand but wouldn’t give Singal an interview). Bolding is mine:
The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024 it published what it hailed as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.
The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”
In 2024 the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025 it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity and that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A. considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)
Behavior like this should anger anyone wedded to evidence-based medicine and science, especially because the APA simply lies when it says that its stand has been consistent all along. And the APA is not alone in its bad behavior. Other organizations are digging in their heels, maintaining unsupportable positions in the face of counterevidence—all because of the ideology that people can change sex and we should believe them when they say they are really of a different sex than their natal one. This is wedded to the view that surgery and hormones designed to change gender have been proven to be safe.
I should add here that many adults who have transitioned are nevertheless happy with the outcomes of their treatments. But note that Singal’s forthcoming book is about youth gender medicine. This is the focus of the controversy, and few people (certainly not me) would deny adults the right to go ahead with surgery and hormones, though perhaps the public shouldn’t have to pay for it.
Singal’s conclusion, which I hope is the theme of his book, is short and sweet:
Should we trust the science? Sure, in theory — but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.
It looks like most medical organizations should not be trusted until they start speaking the truth.
Plant lovers and botanists will be especially pleased by today’s selection of lovely photos from Thomas Webber. Thomas’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them (recommended).
The theme for today’s installment is Gone to Seed. Here are a few north-Florida flowers shown in their prime and afterward, when their glamor parts had been replaced by seed enclosures, bare seeds, or merely the dried remains of the flower bases. All of them grew within Gainesville’s city limits, at sites from semi-pruned to semi-wild. I think I’ve identified them all correctly to species this time, but I invite corrections.
Frostweed, Verbesina virginica. Individual flowers 1 cm. Native:
These bracts, called phyllaries, surround the bases of the flowers. In late February a few of their papery remnants are still aloft on their brittle four-foot stalks:
Showy rattlebox. C. spectabilis. 3.5 cm across. Native to southern and southeast Asia, now widely naturalized in southeastern North America:
C. spectabilis seed pods. 4 cm long. The pods of C. pumila look similar but are smaller. Crotalaria, and especially their seeds, are laden with toxic alkaloids. Larvae of the rattlebox moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, bore through the walls of the pods and feed on the seeds. Somehow the caterpillars manage to detoxify the alkaloids enough so they aren’t poisoned, while remaining poisonous enough to deter most animals that might try to eat them. The larvae retain the toxins into the flying-moth stage, and at both stages their distinctive vivid color pattern warns predators to leave them alone.
A rattlebox-moth caterpillar. About 3 cm. I doubt that I could have found any of these if I’d gone looking for them, but this one crawled right in front of me while I tried to get a picture of the low rattlebox. It held fairly steady for a few seconds, letting me capture enough detail to identify it. I didn’t have my choice of background:
Tropical sage, Salvia coccinea. 3 cm. Native. At this latitude these remain at their peak through late December:
All that’s left in late February are these cones called calyces, which are fused sepals:
Spanish needles, Bidens alba. 2.5 cm. Native. This is the king weed of these parts, growing everywhere and sometimes in great masses; one dense bunch covers an acre of a low damp lot in the middle of Gainesville:
Seeds of Spanish needles. 1 cm long. The name of the genus, meaning two-teeth, derives from the forks at the tips of the seeds. The barbs on these projections are part of an impressive example of convergent biological and cultural evolution, and have turned out to be just the thing for attaching the seeds to socks and shoelaces:
Dotted horsemint, Monarda punctata. Whole flower head 2.5 cm wide. Native. The most complicated flowers I find around here:
All of that elaborate presentation goes to produce seeds 1 mm in diameter, too small to show well with my basic macro gear. At this stage you can still shake a few of them from the calyces. Thanks to Mark Frank of the Florida Museum of Natural History herbarium for a remedial lesson in the difference between calyces and phyllaries:
Beggarweed, Desmodiumincanum. 1 cm across. Native to Central- and South America, naturalized in the southeastern U.S. This year, by means unknown, a few of them showed up for the first time in what passes for my lawn:
Morning-glory seed pods, 7 mm. The hard little capsules cleave along their sutures and split open to release black seeds the shape of orange sections, exposing the translucent porcelain-like septa that divided them:
Welcome to a Hump Day (“יום הגיבנת” in Hebrew): Wednesday, February 25, 2026, and National Clam Chowder Day. Of the several varieties, I can recommend only one, the New England variety made with cream and plenty of clams. Avoid anything with tomatoes in it! Your bowl should look like this:
Jon Sullivan (original uploader Y6y6y6 at English Wikipedia)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
*I didn’t listen to the State of the Union address, as I couldn’t bear more braggadoccio and chest-thumping. Here’s a short summary from the NYT, and I’ll put the video below.
In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line. He did not seem concerned with making the case that he gets it when it comes to the issue Americans are most worried about. “Affordability,” he said, was part of a “dirty, rotten lie” perpetuated by the Democrats.
Instead, with the slashing style of a natural campaigner and the instincts of a onetime reality television producer, he spent the better part of two hours baiting the ranks of incensed Democrats in the chamber and endeavoring to define them to the electorate as “sick,” unpatriotic and utterly out of step with the values of most Americans.
“These people are crazy, I’m telling ya, they’re crazy,” Mr. Trump said at one point, while relaying the story of a young person who had been forced to undergo a gender transition. “Boy oh boy, we’re lucky we have a country with people like this — Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time.”
Several Democrats walked out and one was ejected. Here’s the full speech, nearly two hours of bombast:
The British police said on Tuesday that they had released Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, following an arrest the previous day amid allegations that he had passed confidential government information to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
London’s Metropolitan Police, which began an investigation into Mr. Mandelson earlier this month, said in a statement on Monday, “Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public office.”
The statement added that the man had been taken to a police station in London to be formally interviewed. He was released on bail pending further investigation, the police said in an updated statement early Tuesday morning.
The police did not name Mr. Mandelson, in line with British rules that ban them from identifying suspects before any charges are brought. But footage broadcast by the BBC showed Mr. Mandelson being led from his home into an unmarked police car by plainclothes police officers and driven away, at around 4:30 p.m. local time. Mr. Mandelson was not handcuffed and was carrying a bottle of water.
The arrest is the latest dramatic development in Britain to follow the U.S. Justice Department’s release of files related to Mr. Epstein, and marks a new low for Mr. Mandelson, a veteran Labour Party strategist and one of Britain’s best known political figures.
It comes just days after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, on suspicion of the same offense — misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
. . .Official guidance to British prosecutors says that the offense is committed when a public officer, such as an elected politician or government official, “willfully neglects to perform their duty” or “willfully misconducts themselves” in a way that abuses the public’s trust.
Previously a Labour lawmaker representing Hartlepool in northeast England, Mr. Mandelson served as a minister in Tony Blair’s government between 1997 and 2001, and under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010.
In September, Mr. Mandelson, 72, was fired from his diplomatic post in Washington when the depth and duration of his friendship with Mr. Epstein became clear after the publication of emails between them.
The release of new material by the U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 30 increased the scrutiny of Mr. Mandelson’s relationship with the sex offender and provoked a political crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The latest batch of documents appears to show that in 2009, when Mr. Mandelson was a senior cabinet minister, he gave potentially confidential and market sensitive information to Mr. Epstein.
Like The Andrew Formerly Known as Prince, the report says that Mandelson, though arrested, “has not been charged with a crime.” I guess those charges will come, but that we won’t know what they are until they are announced in court. I predict that Andrew won’t spend a day in jail (I don’t know about Mandelson).
There are more than 900 confirmed measles cases in the United States, as of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent weekly count. It’s less than two months into the year, “and we already have over a quarter of [the measles cases] we had all of 2025, so things are not great,” said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
. . .When vaccination rates decrease, the most highly contagious diseases pop up first, “and that’s why we call measles the canary in the coal mine,” said Wallace. Other vaccine-preventable infectious diseases could follow, the World Health Organization warned in a joint statement with UNICEF and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, last year. Some already show a worrisome upward trend.
“Measles is the most contagious disease that we have, period,” Wallace said. “So as soon as we start to see measles, we know that the [vaccination] rates in that county or state are starting to drop, and so other diseases will follow on to that, but they just take longer to rip through the communities.”
Here are the other nine diseases poised for comebacks:
Pertussis (“whooping cough”). The frequency of cases is rising, but there is an effective vaccine.
Meningitis. “Meningococcal disease, or meningitis, isn’t as widespread or infectious as measles and pertussis. But cases have been increasing since 2021, and the meningococcal vaccine was recently removed from the CDC’s universal recommendation for adolescents.”
Polio. “Children receive four doses of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) starting at 2 months old. Poliovirus infection can be serious, leading to paralysis or death.” There were still outbreaks when I was a kid, and they were plenty scary. We do NOT want it to return.
Rotavirus. “Rotavirus can cause babies and other young children to become rapidly dehydrated. Before the availability of rotavirus vaccines, which can be given by 15 weeks, ‘almost all children during the first two years of life would get rotavirus infection,’ Kotloff said.”
RSV. “Like rotavirus, symptoms of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are often mild. But certain people are at risk for severe illness, particularly kids who are born prematurely or have underlying diseases, such as heart defects, according to Kotloff.”
Tetanus. “Unlike many other vaccine-preventable diseases, herd immunity doesn’t exist for tetanus, a rare but potentially life-threatening infection caused by Clostridium tetani bacteria.” I got a tetanus shot before I went to South Africa last year.
Rubella. “Like measles, rubella may be mild, with symptoms like a cough, fever and red rash. But serious complications can develop, too, particularly if someone contracts rubella during pregnancy.”
Hepatitis B. “Hepatitis B is a liver infection spread through bodily fluids, often from mother to child. Getting infected at a young age carries a high risk for developing cancer later on, ‘so early vaccination at birth is key to prevent this,’ Lo said.” I also got a Hep-B shot before I went to South Africa.
Diphtheria. “Diphtheria is no longer common in the U.S. But the bacterial disease still circulates in parts of the world with lower vaccination coverage, and there have been cases where it was brought back by travelers.”
The moral is this: get your shots and ensure that your kids are vaccinated (as always ASK YOUR DOCTOR. I believe I’ve had every one of these shots and I’m as healthy as a bull.
*Over at Quillette, Israeli historian Benny Morris discusses “Trump’s Iranian Dilemma“. The subtitle, and dilemma, is this “President Donald Trump must choose between a military strike on Iran, whose consequences no one can predict, and a deal that would leave the Islamic Republic still able to attack its own citizens, menace Israel, and export terrorism worldwide.” Bolding is mine:
The Middle East—indeed much of the world—is currently waiting with bated breath to see whether the United States will attack Iran or whether it will agree to prolong the negotiations in the hope of achieving a peaceful resolution. Back in early January, President Donald Trump assured the Iranian masses protesting against their totalitarian rulers that help was on the way. But that help was not forthcoming, and, on the orders of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s security forces, led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia, proceeded to mow down some 32,000 protesters and arrest and torture tens of thousands, suppressing the incipient revolt.
Since then, Iran and the US have traded threats while Trump has steadily beefed up America’s offensive and defensive capabilities around Iran. This past weekend, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, and its attendant battle group, arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, thus completing the planned American deployment. For its part, Iran has carried out large naval and missile exercises around the Straits of Hormuz, implicitly threatening to close the waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean, and hence cutting off the main route for oil and gas exports, should America strike. The Iranians have also threatened to rocket America’s Sunni Arab allies and its bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Israel. Meanwhile reports suggest that Khamenei, advised by the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, has prepared the country for war, naming successors for himself and for the holders of top civilian and military posts in case of their deaths.
The Sunni Arab states abominate the Shi’ite regime in Tehran but fear its wrath and armaments and, at least publicly, they have pleaded with Washington not to loose the dogs of war. The Saudis especially remember Iran’s devastating drone and cruise missile attack on their oil installations in 2019 and the intermittent Iran-backed terrorist attacks on their cities. Iran has explicitly threatened to broaden any clash with America into a regional war. But while a closure of the Hormuz Straits would hurt the revenues of the Arab gulf states and cause a global chain reaction that would result in massive hikes in fuel prices, it would also halt Iranian oil and gas exports and possibly trigger an American or joint American–Israeli bombardment of Iran’s oil installations at Abadan and Kharg Island. Blocking oil exports from the gulf would also badly affect China, which is reliant on Iranian oil, though a hike in oil prices might please Russia, which is itself an oil exporter. But bluster notwithstanding, neither power is likely to come to Iran’s aid should hostilities break out between the Islamic Republic and the US.
Since the twelve-day Israel–Iran war in June 2025, during which the United States bombed key Iranian nuclear installations, Washington has tried to engage Tehran in talks designed to halt the country’s march toward nuclear weaponry. At first, Iran refused to play ball. However, the massive anti-government demonstrations last December and January, coupled with the American threat to intervene, propelled the ayatollahs to begin negotiating with Washington, albeit through Omani mediation. The Iranians refused to meet the lead American negotiators—Stephen Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—face to face, who both happen to be Jewish.
As Israeli officials feared, the Iranians have succeeded in dragging out the negotiations and have insisted that they be restricted to the nuclear issue. Washington is demanding the complete cessation of uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and has asked the country to relinquish the 400-plus kilogrammes of enriched material it already possesses. For their part, the Iranians have declared that they will never give up uranium enrichment—which they see as a natural right and a matter of national honour and pride—and are demanding the lifting of the American and European economic sanctions as a quid pro quo for whatever concessions they may make. Some of these sanctions were imposed before the multilateral nuclear deal of 2015: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) and the EU, which curbed Iran’s progress toward the Bomb. Further sanctions have been imposed since Trump pulled America out of the JCPOA in May 2018.
So long as the talks are limited to the nuclear issue, they will fail. The alternative is that they strike a “deal” in which Iran pretends to cut back on enriching uranium, and the U.S. pretends to believe Iran. That’s a bad bargain, and if Trump thinks he can pull it off, it may bring peace, but only at the price of more Iranian protestors shot dead and a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic looming over Israel. I still think Trump will attack, but without U.S. soldiers in the country, there’s no chance of regime change.
In the documentary, The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, men give detailed accounts about how they were tortured for refusing to take part in assaults they describe as verging on suicide missions. Russian troops call these attacks “meat storms” as waves of men are sent across the front line relentlessly to try and wear down Ukrainian forces.
For the first time, the BBC believes, Russian soldiers from the front line say on the record how they witnessed commanders ordering executions of their own men.
One of the men, whose job was to identify and count dead soldiers, provided detailed lists showing that he is the sole survivor from a group of 79 men he was mobilised with. Because he refused to go to the front line, he says he was tortured and urinated on. Others in his unit who refused would be electrocuted, starved and then forced into meat storms unarmed, he says.
The four men, who are on the run, told of the horrors they witnessed at an undisclosed location outside Russia.
Almost all public opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been stamped out in Russia. Official casualty numbers are not released by Moscow, but the UK’s Ministry of Defence says more than 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.
. . . The detailed first-hand testimony from all four men also verifies reports of a breakdown of law and order on the Russian front line.
. . .All four men told us in graphic detail about the dreaded meat storm missions – part of the Russian military’s wider “meat grinder” tactic on the Ukrainian battlefields.
The storms are so deadly, they are likened to suicide missions.
“I saw them [commanders] send wave after wave, throwing men like meat at the Ukrainians, so they run out of ammo and drones and another wave can reach their objective,” says another former soldier, Denis.
“You send three guys, then another three. It didn’t work out, send 10. It didn’t work out with 10, send 50,” he says. “Eventually you will break through. That’s the logic of the military.
The Russians are, in effect, conducting “banzai” suicide charges, like the Japanese in WWII. They conscript criminals or anybody with a record, send them to the war to die, and execute them if they won’t go. And then the officers take their bank cards. And, as the article says, no criticism of the war is allowed in Russia.
The violence in the Puerto Vallarta area is unnerving America’s community of expat retirees in Mexico, a destination popular with the growing number of people retiring abroad.
The Pacific coast tourist city is home to thousands of American retirees. They include Bill Huebsch, a 79-year-old New Yorker who spends about two months a year in nearby Nuevo Nayarit, also known as Nuevo Vallarta, where he purchased a condo with his late wife, Joanne, in 2012.
. . . More Americans are choosing to spend their golden years abroad, and the violence in Puerto Vallarta is underlining the risks. Advisers to people considering expat retirements are telling clients to consider the risks of natural and man-made disasters, from political upheaval to organized criminals. That is in addition to the financial and personal preparations that come with moving abroad.
. . . Ken Schmier, 75, said he and his wife recently purchased a $2.5 million condo on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. “I can see the thing depreciating in half in the last day,” said Schmier, before adding that he was joking. The real-estate developer, who also lives in Larkspur, Calif., said he believes the area is safe thanks in part to its thriving tourist economy.
I had thought of retiring abroad, but changed my mind. If I want to see foreign countries, I will travel, and I am comfortable enough to live my life in the U.S. But I do need to travel more, though I’m not contemplating any parts of Mexico in the near future. (France is more appealing.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is reproving Andrzej, even giving him the STINK EYE! (Look at her picture, which I’ve made my Twitter avatar.)
Hili: Yesterday you did not write a single sentence.
Andrzej: I was reading a book.
Hili: That is not an explanation.
In Polish:
Hili: Wczoraj nie napisałeś ani jednego zdania.
Ja: Czytałem książkę.
Hili: That is not an explanation.
From Masih, more protests in Iranian universities. I fear that the shooting and killing will resume. (Sound up.)
Today, Tuesday, February 24, students across universities in Iran, for the fourth consecutive day, held protest gatherings and chanted slogans against Khamenei and his regime.
At many universities, Basij forces attacked and beat students, leading to violent clashes. The… pic.twitter.com/iEzxDPM4UT
From Emma, highlighting this article. A film called “I Swear”, about Tourette’s Syndrome (which sometimes causes it sufferers to yell out obscene or forbidden words), was up for a BAFTA Award when its subject shouted out the n-word inadvertently when several black people went onstage. The sufferer, John Davidson, was then demonized for something he could not control. I just found another piece in the free press about the same thing: “It’s not his fault he used the n-word.” The article adds that “the audience had been alerted that someone with Tourette’s was in the building.”
“Only an industry located so firmly up its own backside could gather to honour a film illustrating the grim realities facing someone living with Tourette’s and then be so publicly aggrieved when the actuality of that illness – and the involuntary nature of its effects on those… https://t.co/tfdG9ANAH6
*Here the pious Cathlic Ross Douthat (author of a new book about why we should believe in God) debates atheist Phil Zuckerman on God. I still haven’t found out the details for Steve Pinker’s debate with Douthat, which I thought was on Thursday. Stay tuned. I haven’t listened to this full debate yet, but the parts I have heard shows Douthat using the “fine tuning argument” and the existence of consciousness as evidence for God. Big yawn!
Should Everyone Be Religious? Phil Zuckerman, in conversation between Ross Douthat, eloquently explains why we shouldn’t. https://t.co/K3XuaZcC2j via @YouTube
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…”This quote from Darwin's Descent of Man, published #OnThisDay in 1871, pretty much sums up the challenges the world is facing now, a century & a half later.
