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.
“TMZ” of course, is an entertainment news network, including a TV show and a website. The reference is to kids of this generation being filmed and photographed all the time, which is said to cause anxiety and paranoia. One example is his reference to the Wall Street Journal article, “Suddenly everyone is scared to dance at concerts and clubs.” But the whole culture has turned voyeuristic, making everybody afraid to be themselves.
This is not a particularly good episode, as the point is not that earthshaking, but I post it for the record.
Bruce Lyon, who’s now retired and is an emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolution at UC Santa Cruz, sent a batch of bird photos. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
I have already shared some recent photos of seabirds (here) and foxes (here) on St Paul Island, Alaska. In addition to these treats, the island is a mecca for bird watchers who keep regional bird lists. Various islands in Alaska are magnets for vagrants from Asia and birders who are serious about keeping lists visit the Island to beef up their official American Birding Association species lists for North America. Specifically, vagrants are birds that show up beyond their typical breeding, migration or wintering areas.
I am not normally a lister, but friends on St Paul bird are local guides who fid amazing vagrants, which they then very generously share with biologists such as me. I have also learned that the list of vagrants is not completely random—some species are pretty regularly visitors from Asia. Some species are more likely in spring, while others are in fall. If you are interested in the biology of vagrants I can recommend Steve Howell’s Rare Birds of North America. Howell has a nice section that goes through various patterns and the different reasons for why birds become vagrants.
This post will focus mostly on shorebirds, because they are pretty common vagrants, and I will also include some species that breed on the island. All of the vagrants I feature are birds that breed in northern Asia.
The Terek sandpaper (Xenus cinereus) was the show stopper for me this year. We initially got really crappy views but then it showed up on the mudflats in front of our lodging and actually flew towards me and landed 20 feet away. What a cool shorebird!:
Eurasian whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) (the result of a recent split into two species, the North American species is now Hudsonian whimbrel). The Eurasian has white rump and white stripe up the back. Sadly the photos do not show the white on rump because bird was always tilted the wrong way:
Far Eastern Curlew (Numenius madagascariensis). This is a rare bird everywhere and was a really good bird to get. It was using its long beak to access giant isopods hiding under the rocks that none of the resident shorebirds could get:
Red-necked stint (Calidris ruficollis). This species was particularly common this year and up to 5 at a time hung out on the mudflats in front of our lodging:
It was very windy, and the duck flipped over and showed the cool plumage pattern on its back:
The remaining birds are birds that breed on St Paul or nearby mainland Alaska.
A gorgeous and very tame female red phalarope (Phalaropus fulicarius) that hung out in front of our lodging. This species doesn’t breed on the island. This is a ‘role reversed’ species, where females are more colorful than males, compete for males, and the males then do all of the work of incubating the eggs and raising the chicks:
A red-necked phalarope (Phalaropus lobatus), also in front of our lodging. These breed locally:
Rock sandpiper (Calidris ptilocnemis) chick and parent. Unlike most shorebirds, which are neurotic when they have chicks, these particular parents were very relaxed and the chicks were running around and feeding right in front of us on the road without the typical alarm calls that cause the chicks to hide. I lay on the road to get a nice out of focus bokeh background:
Sandpiper chicks have a beautiful plumage that makes them very camouflaged when they are hiding on the ground (tundra, grasses). They are also all leg!:
Rock sandpiper with a ‘wingup’ display used in courtship. Who knew that armpits are sexy!:
Semipalmated plovers (Charadrius semipalmatus) trying to lure me away from their nest with a broken-wing display. Many shorebirds use a display that fakes having an injured wing to lure predators away from the nest. To a predator, a bird with an injured wing should be an easy dinner and worth following. The faker leads the predator far from the nest, keeping its distance all the while, and then eventually returns to its nest. This first bird is the male—his eyering is orange:
Here is the female with a more yellow eyering and slightly more subdued plumage:
Welcome to Welcome to Sunday, October 4, 2026, Sabbath for goyische cats and National Taco Day. Here’s a couple I got in a Chicago Mexican restaurant in 2014:
It’s also Cinnamon Roll Day, National Vodka Day, and World Animal Day. Here’s a lovely kea (Nestor notabilis), a famous but endangered parrot from New Zealand. It took me all day to find this one, observed hanging out at a rest stop near Arthur’s Pass, New Zealand. They are famous for being wags as well as vandals; that sharp beak can rip the chrome off cars! Note that it’s banded.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 4 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*More good news from the NYT (in the “news”) section: “Democrats may have found the recipe for flipping red-state Senate seats” (archived here). But there is no “recipe” save what Trump has done that made his approval rating plummet. Oh, and they add that in the states below, the Democrats have high-quality candidates.
On paper, the Democrats’ path to winning the Senate in November is daunting. They need to flip at least two seats that President Trump won by 11 percentage points or more — no party has pulled off a similar feat since 2008.
But in polls over the last month, the party’s path to the Senate hasn’t seemed daunting at all. Since Labor Day, Democrats have been tied or ahead in nearly every nonpartisan poll of not just two but five states that voted for Mr. Trump by between 11 and 16 points: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas.
Today’s latest New York Times/Siena polls continue the streak. They find Democrats ahead in Texas, Alaska and Ohio; tied in Kansas; and down by only one point in Iowa. If the polls were to be exactly right — they won’t be — Democrats would take the Senate with room to spare.
Here are the polls (click to enlarge):
This is an extraordinary run of polls for Democrats, most of all in Texas and Alaska. The Times/Siena polls — and others over the last month — show Democrats building a consistent and potentially meaningful lead in both states. If Democrats won Texas and Alaska, held their own seats and added North Carolina, as expected, they would need to win only one more Republican-held state, whether in Maine, Ohio, Iowa or Kansas, or elsewhere.
Of course, leading polls in September is not the same thing as winning in November — especially in Republican-leaning states, where polls have often overestimated Democrats. And even if they’re not overestimating them this time, Republicans need only to win back reliably Republican voters over the next month to prevail. This is harder than it sounds in this political environment, but it would not be a surprise if they did so. Republicans will have the financial resources they need to make their case.
Nonetheless, just about everything has gone right for the Democrats so far. They enter the final month of the campaign in a better position than anyone would have imagined when the year began. While the story varies somewhat by state, Democrats are cooking with the same recipe across all five contests: At a time when Mr. Trump is very unpopular, Democrats have nominated popular, relatively moderate candidates against surprisingly unpopular Republicans.
The article (it’s news, not opinion) concludes that it’s very likely the Democrats will flip the whole Senate. Since the prediction markets tell us that there’s a chance of over 90% that the Dems will also control the House, the entire Congress may well be in Democratic hands. But remember that it takes at two-thirds vote of both houses to overturn a Presidential veto, so we may wind up with several years of a stifled Congress at odds with Trump.
Like New York, this West Coast city narrowly elected a Democratic socialist as mayor last year. On the campaign trail, Katie Wilson pitched an ambitious agenda: lower costs, tax the wealthy and build thousands of shelter units for the homeless.
Then came reality.
In recent days, the mayor stunned allies and observers alike by proposing a city budget with no new taxes, scaled-back pledges and nearly $50 million in cuts across various departments—all while boosting spending for police officers.
The small-c conservative proposal bears little resemblance to the rent freezes, city-run grocery pilots and luxury second-home taxes emerging from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York.
Since taking office in January, Wilson has struggled to shake up City Hall like liberal Seattle hoped. The 44-year-old former transit organizer, described as a quieter Mamdani, has been hobbled by a $175 million budget deficit, staff upheaval and a steep learning curve on public safety—Seattle’s most intractable issue, and one progressives nationwide have been eager to show they can tackle.
A summer shooting near the iconic Space Needle, at the Bite of Seattle food festival, left three people dead, including a suspect, and exposed acute governance gaps. A communication breakdown between the mayor’s office and Seattle police kept the public in the dark about the shooting for five hours, and the official emergency alert system went unused. At least one suspect remains at large, and the fallout has haunted City Hall for weeks.
“I don’t know who is in charge but someone needs to assume command,” Wilson’s police chief, Shon Barnes, texted command staff an hour after the shooting, according to messages released by the Seattle Police Department. Barnes, who was out of town at the time, resigned days later, and the mayor has apologized for making mistakes. Prominent Seattle-area companies such as Microsoft, Nordstrom and Starbucks have demanded a public-safety plan from Wilson by year-end.
For her signature initiative on homelessness, Wilson promised 4,000 shelter units by the end of her term—double her predecessor’s target—ignoring some campaign advisers who warned the figure was unrealistic, according to a senior staffer on Wilson’s campaign. After she took office, Seattle’s business community donated $3 million to kick-start the project, but the funds sat unused for months as City Hall stumbled through bureaucratic hurdles to scope out sites for tiny homes, according to Joe Nguyen, who runs Seattle’s business lobby.
By September, Wilson slashed her goal to around 1,000 beds in two years, blaming budget constraints and the pace of government. She called her original goal aspirational. “The point of putting that big number out there is we need to talk about the scale of the crisis,” Wilson told the Seattle Times.
Nguyen, a former state senator, was less generous. “Welcome to government,” he said in an interview.
Because of publicized public crimes, Wilson’s also expanding the network of surveillance cameras, breaking her campaign pledge to reduce their number. This might be a lesson for the mayor of New York City, who made similar promises, but it looks like there’s nothing Mamdani can do that can screw up his popularity. He’s just like Trump, who famously said this in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”
*Pamela Paul was the NY Times’s book-review editor from 2013-2022, and after that an op-ed columnist for the paper. But she was heterodox, a liberal who attacked the pieties of progressives, including on transgender issues, and when she and the paper parted ways in 2025 I suspected she’d been fired. This video, in which Paul converses with Meghan Daum, confirms that., saying she was “let go.” But Paul is an excellent journalist, and now Paul is writing for the Wall Street Journal, where she can continue her efforts without being fired. Reader Enrico contributed an archived link to one of her recent columns, “Antisemitism charges plague the literary world. New publishers are pushing back.”
. . . today, many Jews believe that publishing is biased against them.
Jewish authors, agents, scouts, editors and other book professionals describe an ecosystem from big publishers to #BookTok that is suppressing Jewish and Israeli voices. Agents and scouts say it’s become impossible to sell foreign rights to works by Israeli writers. Established authors say their recent projects have been inexplicably turned down. Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.
Multiple agents now post explicitly on their websites that they aren’t interested in “Zionist” submissions; one specified that neither “Nazis nor Zionist” writers need apply. One author shared an email from her former agent telling her to put her biography of a major Israeli figure on hold until “anti-Zionism” within publishing dies down.
That’s the bad news, and it’s pretty damn bad. “Zionist” writers? Do they mean “Jews”? Israeli writers are out, too, and this seems to be regardless of the quality of the work. It is pure censorship, and antisemitic to boot. Now the sort-of-good news:
Now a handful of publishing startups focused on Jewish and Israeli writers are emerging in response. High Line Publishing Studio, founded by Neil Blair, a London-based literary agent best known for representing J.K. Rowling, launches today with the goal of publishing writers whose ideas and subject matter he believes have been shut out of mainstream publishing. Upcoming titles include U.K. editions of recent books by Dara Horn and Matti Friedman; and world rights to new books by Adam Louis-Klein, an influencer and founder of Movement Against Antizionism; and “Anatomy of a Failure: The Road to October 7th” by Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which examines strategic errors on Israel’s part before and after Oct. 7.
High Line joins Canary Publishing, a nonprofit publisher of Jewish, Israeli and Zionist writers, founded earlier this month by Howard Lovy, an independent editor based in Michigan. Meg Keene Books, a fiction imprint of Wicked Son press, launched in July. Its first title will be the American edition of Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson’s “Howl,” a 2026 satirical novel about post-Oct. 7 diaspora Jews, which came out in the U.K. in March, but which had been unable to land a U.S. publisher.
Bookstores are canceling events by “Zionist” authors, books by those authors get “bombed” with one-star reviews on Amazon, and Israeli authors are simply boycotted. There’s a ton of additional forms of boycotting; here are two more examples:
In 2024, more than 5,000 writers and literary professionals, some of them Jewish, signed a pledge not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications “that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” That same year, a spreadsheet labeled, “Is your fav author a Zionist???” went viral on social media, singling out authors who participated in Israeli book festivals or included Zionist characters and those who, by contrast, had issued statements supportive of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Increasing numbers of authors, both Jewish and not, are declining to sell Hebrew rights to their books and refusing to join panels with authors they deem Zionist.
To be sure, Paul quotes people who deny that publishing is antisemitic, some on the grounds that being “anti-Zionist”, opposing the existence of the Jewish state, is not the same as antisemitism. As Steely Dan sang, “Only a fool would say that.”
Nevertheless, the conclusion is dire:
“Zionism is out of fashion in the publishing world and it’s not ever going to be in fashion again,” said Benjamin Moser, author of “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” publishing this month. Book publishing, he and others emphasized, is now an overwhelmingly progressive industry, and opposition to Zionism is a strong component of that.
Moser has publicly rejected Zionism and identifies as an anti-Zionist. That gives him the credibility to get published. Imagine having to sign an ideological pledge in order to get your book even looked at! And if you’re not worried about this trend, you should probably be reading some other website. How does Moser define anti-semitism? This is what Grok tells me:
Moser defines Zionism as the project of founding and maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine. In a September 2026 NRC interview he put it in one sentence: “Het stichten en het voortbestaan van een Joodse staat in Palestina” (“the founding and the continued existence of a Jewish state in Palestine”).
I call that antisemitism.
*This was clickbait for me: an article in The Atlantic called “The Right’s identity politics take a bizarre turn” with the subtitle, “MAGA activists are having a meltdown over a throwaway character in Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s political ad.” (The article is archived here.)
If you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.
That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.
That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”
Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”
The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.
Here’s the tweet; judge for yourself:
You pay taxes to cover welfare for people who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.
If you’re young, healthy, and get government assistance, you should work, go to school, or volunteer. pic.twitter.com/M83nxNMdry
I don’t quite get the outrage over the race of this guy; given the state’s composition, it could be seen as a random pick, though not a random person (this one’s able to work). I thought that identitarianism was the purview of progressives, but it’s clearly not. Clearly those who don’t have the ability to get a job, or do have the ability but aren’t looking for one, shouldn’t qualify for Medicaid benefits.
*Reader Pyers pointed out an article in The Economist about the possibility of creating “mirror life”: life in which the chirality of molecules like amino acids and the proteins that they make up is reversed (right now organisms use only left-handed (“L”) amino acids, while the sugars in DNA and RNA are in the “D” forms (as opposed to “L”). The handedness of these molecules could be a “frozen” accident of evolution, but once in place it can’t be changed—except by humans. As this article notes, such anthropogenic change could pose a serious danger to our planet.
BIOLOGY IS HANDED. In other words, many molecules essential to living organisms come in two distinct forms which, like human hands, are non-identical mirror images of one another. For a lot of those molecules, though, life on Earth employs only one of the two possibilities.
Why this should be so is lost in evolutionary history. And, until recently, only evolutionary biologists cared. But that is changing. Although biotechnologists are not there yet, they can see on the horizon the possibility of synthesising biological cells from scratch. This has led some to wonder what might happen if someone tried to reverse life’s handedness and create a cell—probably a bacterium—that held a mirror to normal biochemistry.
The answer, discussed this week by a conclave of concerned biologists meeting at the Singapore Conference on Mirror Life, is potentially terrifying. If such an organism were to escape the confines of the lab it might create an unstoppable plague or devastate an entire ecosystem. Scientists are, therefore, keen to see what can be done to nip such research in the bud.
. . . .Fears of mirror life came to public attention in a paper published in Science at the end of 2024. At first sight, the idea of through-the-looking-glass creatures seemed like a curiosity rather than a threat. The paper’s authors begged to differ. The handedness of biomolecules is so deeply embedded into biological systems that their chiral opposites go largely unnoticed. A mirror version of a bacterium would thus, those authors posited, evade immune systems, human and non-human alike, and could reproduce unchecked.
Mirror bacteria could also, they noted, be indigestible to single-celled creatures, such as amoebae, that are the principal predators of bacteria, and resistant to the viruses, called bacteriophages, which also keep bacterial populations under control. It could, in other words, multiply indefinitely. Hence the risk to ecosystems.
Nature would push back a little. Mirror life would be unable to metabolise all the left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars of the natural organisms it encountered, restricting its food supply. But lots of biomolecules have no handedness, and it could feed on them instead.
All this assumes mirror life could be made in the laboratory. With existing technology, that possibility is remote. But synthetic biology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and is accelerating as AI is applied to the process. Novel viruses of certain types can already be designed and synthesised from scratch. What in 2024 looked at least 15 years away may thus arrive sooner than expected.
Meanwhile, lest anyone have lingering doubts about the nature of the threat, Deepa Agashe, another of the 2024 paper’s authors, who is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India, was there to disabuse them. She showed data on what was previously an unquantified point: the amount of achiral nutrients in soil, blood and the contents of the gut. Each of these habitats, she opined, would be able to support the well-studied bacterium E. coli without its needing to resort to chiral foodstuffs. And if E. coli could manage it, a mirror bacterium would probably be able to do likewise.
Dr Agashe also offered a telling analogy. She likened the lack of predators and pathogens a mirror organism might encounter to the experience of a successful invasive species, such as the neotropical cane toads that are running riot in Australia for lack of predators adapted to consume their toxic bodies. Such invaders can sometimes be controlled. They have never yet been eliminated.
Better, then, to act early, before the threat becomes tangible.
I can’t see this happening any time soon, but a mirror bacterium or virus wouldn’t have to be a pathogen to be deadly: any bacterium could take over bodies so long as it is resistant to our immune systems or can use resources that normal microbes can’t. Given the pace of change in synthetic biology these days, the threat is well worth pondering, and ways devised to control it.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the feud between Kulka and Hili continues (and will forever):
Andrzej: Humility is one of the greatest virtues. Hili: I know. Kulka really ought to hear that.
In Polish:
Ja: Pokora jest wielką cnotą.
Hili: Wiem, muszę to powiedzieć Kulce.
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First, two memes based on last week’s unsuccessful hijacking.
From Luana; a zebra that’s probably a mutant. Stripes protect against flies, and I wonder if this pattern will be protective:
This zebra was born with a pattern almost no other zebra has
Tira was born in Kenya with a rare genetic condition that disrupted the normal zebra stripe pattern, leaving him with a dark coat covered in white spots pic.twitter.com/knKH60Sb5I
From Malcolm; bobcat vs. rattlesnake (sound up). Do those cats have no fear?
Angeles National Forest, California: Southern Pacific Rattlesnake, Crotalus helleri, adalah salah satu ular berbisa dengan gerakan menyerang tercepat di dunia.
Bobcat, Lynx rufus, memang tidak berbisa, tapi bagaimana dengan kecepatan menyerangnya?
I was once a huge fan of Rawan Osman. But 100% of this tweet’s text is AI-written (this isn’t a one-off for her, either), and I’ve lost interest in what she has to say.
This is a new level of pressure, and it deserves a clear answer.
Why are we afraid to say out loud what so many say behind closed doors? If the world truly cares about the people living under Hamas and the PA, why keep this charade alive? Or does the anti-Israel agenda matter… pic.twitter.com/4Mf1nPuPhq
Today’s music: Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me,” the first song he ever wrote. This is the 1972 version (there were three). Laura Nyro was an influence; as Wikipedia notes:
Rundgren’s songs in this phase of his career were influenced by the work of Laura Nyro, but in a 2005 interview he said that the basic structure of the song was adapted from the introduction of a Jimmy Smith recording:
…the main influence for Hello It’s Me was an eight bar intro that Jimmy Smith played on a recording of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. He had this whole sort of block chord thing that he did to set up the intro of the song. I tried to capture those changes, and those changes became what are the changes underneath Hello It’s Me. I then had to come up with melody and words, but the changes are actually almost lifted literally from something that was, from Jimmy Smith’s standpoint, a throwaway.
— Todd Rundgren, puremusic.com
You can hear Jimmy Smith’s version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, with the introduction, here.
Thanks to readers, we’ve scraped up enough cat-related articles to have another Caturday felid post. But it’s precarious! We have contributions but not enough ailurophiles.
First, a rare cat article from the NYT praising “cat men”. Now you don’t need two X-chromosomes to be stereotyped. Click below to read, or find the article archived here.
An excerpt:
Before [joseph] Clayson drove trucks, he spent six years in the military, which he described as “not really a career that draws cat lovers.” He rarely sees other truck drivers with cats, but when he does, he said, it signals an understanding.
“When I see another dude with a cat in his truck and I walk up to say hi, I feel like they’re on the same wavelength as me,” he said. “They’re not worried about looking ultramasculine.”
Cats haven’t changed: They’ve always been independent, mercurial, complex and selective with affection. But as cat ownership in the United States surges, many men’s perceptions of what it means to own a cat — and culture’s perceptions of the men who own them — are shifting.
In the United States, the ranks of cat people have continued to grow. According to the American Pet Products Association, 2024 was a record year, with cat ownership surging 23 percent. And an APPA report published Monday found that men account for 43 percent of U.S. cat owners, with a particular bump in Gen Z male cat ownership.
Amid this growth, a slew of recent ad campaigns celebrate the idea of the “cat dad” as not simply a man who owns a cat, but a softer, more emotionally literate version of a man.
People magazine teamed up with Temptations treats to name the actor Dave Franco the magazine’s first “Sexiest Cat Dad” last fall. In February, Christina Najjar, an author and lifestyle influencer known as Tinx, began a partnership with the cat food brand Jinx built around the idea that being a cat person is now a dating green flag. For Father’s Day 2025, the cat food brand Smalls ran a campaign that framed cat dads as role models, with the slogan “cat dads > other men.”
Here’s a video from Temptations cat treats showing how they rejiggered their advertising to appeal to “cad dads”:
. . .Smalls got the inspiration for its cat dad campaign from the N.B.A. star Jordan Poole’s reveal of the “Secret Society of N.B.A. Cat Dads,” where the famous cat lover confessed he was persuading fellow players, including Steph Curry and Myles Turner, to get cats.
The professional athlete cat dad flies in the face of men-with-cats stereotypes. A 2020 study from Colorado State University found that men holding cats were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable and open; and therefore, less datable by women. (The study did not cover how cats affected gay men’s perceptions of potential partners.)
. . .In her 2022 documentary “Cat Daddies,” which features nine cat dads and their furry companions, Mye Hoang follows a firefighter, a police officer and an immigrant living on the streets of New York City, among others. She became interested in the topic after seeing more men with cats on Instagram. “Seeing men being vulnerable with a little creature is just something I hadn’t thought about,” she said. Her new documentary, “25 Cats From Qatar,” which is about a cat rescue in the country, is screening now.
Hoang said she had seen an uptick in single men in the cat community in recent years, and was even considering moving to Portland, Ore., or Minneapolis, which reportedly have higher concentrations of single cat dads. “If you’re willing to put up with a cat, you’re probably willing to put up with me,” she said. “You are probably a good partner.”
And, for your delectation, here’s the full 1.5-hour documentary “Cad Daddies”:
And here’s the trailer for Hoang’s “25 Cats from Qatar”:
Finally, an adorable Cat Daddy:
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We just finished the Fat Bear Contest with Backpack taking gold. Now it’s time for the Chonky Cat Contest, run by Jonathan Edward Durham on Facebook. Vote for the chonkiest cat and notice that “It’s not just about size. It’s about vibe. . . ”
There are nineteen potential winners and I’ll show a selection below. You vote in the comments on a particular chonkster you love.
Here are six, but go over and see ’em all:
Now of course it’s not healthy for a cat to be a chonk, so I’m not encouraging the production of fat cats!
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Fox News 4 in Dallas-Fort Worth reports on the birth of twin Sumatran Tiger cubs at the Fort Worth Zoo. Click on the headline below to read, and watch the video at bottom:
The short article:
The cub sisters were born in July to first-time mom, Ndari, and dad, Rakan.
They’re now 12 weeks old and weigh about 20 pounds. That’s about the same as a large pumpkin.
The smaller of the two cubs is named Barani, which means “brave.” Her sister’s name is Malu, which means “reserved.”
Sumatran tigers are critically endangered, with fewer than 650 left in the wild.
Fort Worth Zoo’s Samatran tigers live in the newly renovated Predators of Asia and Africa habitat, which opened in 2023.
The cubs’ birth marks the first time Samatran tiger cubs have ever been born at the Fort Worth Zoo.
. . . The zoo said the cubs will make their public debut in the coming weeks.
Now the Sumatran tiger is not a species of tiger, as there is only one, Panthera tigris. Rather, as Wikipedia notes, it’s a subspecies of the tiger, a population called Panthera tigris sondaica that lives on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. There were population on Bali and Java, but they went extinct in the last century, and now there are nine named subspecies.
Here are the adorable cubs:
Lagniappe:
I don’t know who Colin the cat is, nor can I find any information about him on the Internet. But someone is interested in where he wanders:
Here’s a hyper-excited man talking about the Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), described by Wikipedia as
. . . . one of the last great masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and painting.[2] He was a member of the Utagawa school.[3]
The range of Kuniyoshi’s subjects included many genres: landscapes, women, Kabuki actors, cats, and mythical animals. He is known for depictions of the battles of legendary samurai heroes.[4] His artwork incorporated aspects of Western representation in landscape painting and caricature.[2] He was an excellent teacher and had numerous pupils who continued his branch of the Utagawa school. His most important student was Yoshitoshi.
You can see several of Kuniyoshi’s cat paintings at the Wikipedia site. Here’s one in which he’s used cats to form the Japanese symbol for “catfish”:
Here’s Jen, the Good News Girl, desribing Kiki the Scottish cat, who goes to school with her servant every day and hangs around until the servant goes home.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 3, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats and, importantly, the birthday of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), one of my favorite authors, and one who is much denigrated by the literati for “overwriting.” And yes, he did overwrite at time, but he was so frantic to capture the tone and color of America that he couldn’t stop himself. He was quite restrained in his first and best-loved novel, Look Homeward, Angel, but then he let himself go in the other three long novels (two published posthumously), which together comprise a lightly fictionalized autobiography. I’ve read them all several times, and there are wonderful set pieces if you can’t take a diet of desserts. Read, for example, the chapters “The Child by Tiger” or “I Have a Thing to Tell You” to see what he could do (both are free at the links), or read “The Party at Jack’s,” first a novella and later incorporated into the posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again. I posted his “Hymn to October” in yesterday’s Hili.
Without the editorial help of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s—perhaps the greatest of all American editors (he also discovered and edited Fitzgerald and Hemingway)—Wolfe, who was unable to stop writing, would never have been able to mold his gazillion pages of prose (often written on top of a refrigerator as Wolfe was so tall) into sell-able books. Wolfe eventually had to write about Perkins, since all of his novels were autobiographical, and it was not exactly a flattering portrait. The two men fell out and Wolfe found another publisher. But as Wolfe lay on his deathbed (he died at 37 of TB after a brain operation), he made amends with Perkins in this wonderful letter, which always makes me tear up. (h/t Work-in-progress):
August 12, 1938
Dear Max:
I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.
I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.
—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—
A senior United Arab Emirates political figure and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the near-downing of FlyDubai Flight 1073 as terrorism on Friday, a clear indication investigators view the incident as an ideologically motivated act.
The comments from Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E. president, came a day after an Emirati security team escorted the jet’s wounded captain and the co-pilot who stabbed him back to the U.A.E. from Saudi Arabia, where the plane made an emergency landing after passengers intervened.
Netanyahu said the picture of what happened on Wednesday’s flight is becoming clearer, calling the co-pilot a terrorist who had been radicalized. The prime minister and people familiar with the matter said the attacker was Omani, but other details of his identity remained unclear.
The prime minister said Israel has launched an investigation into who was behind the attack and promised retribution.
Other officials haven’t gone as far in defining the attack. Saudi Arabia said the co-pilot assaulted the captain but didn’t suggest a motive.
President Trump told reporters Thursday that Iran may have had a role in the FlyDubai incident. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials said there was still no concrete evidence about who, if anyone, was behind it. No other country involved has formally blamed Iran.
. . . [Pilot] Machchhar described a fierce fight with his co-pilot in a call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The captain said he had collapsed on the cockpit floor after being repeatedly wounded while fighting for his life, then felt the plane pitch into a dangerous dive. Fearing for his passengers, he made a desperate lunge and opened the cockpit door, allowing rescuers to burst in.
“I knew I could not let him kill everyone,” he told the prime minister.
. . . Once the plane was stabilized, passengers took control of the cabin. Opher Dubrovsky, who works in tech at Amazon.com, said some passengers worried that crew members might have been involved in what they suspected was a terrorist attack. They decided to keep close watch on the crew, and someone would shadow their every move until they landed.
My Bayesian probability that it was at least partly motivated by terrorism is increasins, but that’s based on evidence that the copilot had been radicalized. Suicide is another possible motive, though it would be hard to explain as the sole motive when the copilot wanted to take 200 Israelis with him. We shall wait and see.
It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.
Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.
. . .When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump’s rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.
The president’s aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper’s nest.
Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president’s behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.
And here are the two Senate Republicans that Will thinks should keep their seats:
If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan’s next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him. Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.
I don’t know if Maine Democrats even know about Collins’s stand on Kavanaugh—unless the Democrats are making a big deal about it in campaign ads. But it’s not something that would cause most people on the fence to vote for or against Collins. As for El-Sahyed, I consider him an Islamist antisemite, and I’m glad I don’t have to vote for him.
*The other day I described an op-ed in the NYT by Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy at Williams College (where Luana teaches; she sent me this link). Cruz maintained that AI isn’t as much of a danger to higher education as we think, for students can simply discuss matters and learn things orally and verbally—the Socratic method. Writing, he argued, is not nearly as important to learning to think as is discussing. I gave a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work in general, but now Matt Taibbi has taken on Cruz on Taibbi’s substack: “Writing is good (he said controversially.”
The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”
After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:
I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.
It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.
Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.
To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?
. . . I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”
And here’s a point I made in my critique (Taibbi’s words):
The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?
Of course those of us who love writing and reading, and who have done a lot of it in our careers, will naturally defend the practice as compared to speaking. But it’s more than that. There is no reason why a dialogue can’t be had in writing, and there are clear advantages of that form, including needing to weigh your words and arguments most carefully, and the fact that the words are permanent compared to oral discussion. (I used as one example my written exchange with Adam Gopnik, comprising four letters each on whether the methods of science constitute the only “way of knowin.”
I wonder if Cruz is rethinking his essay. (I doubt it.)
A Baltimore opera group ousted its recently hired white executive director after she sported cornrows at Burning Man.
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) canned Kelly Carnes on Sept. 23 after a video posted to social media showed her with the new hairdo at an organizational event, according to an email sent to volunteers and obtained by The Baltimore Banner.
Carnes said she styled her hair in cornrows as a form of protection from the elements at Burning Man — a nine day festival in the Nevada desert.
But her appearance apparently raised concerns of ‘cultural appropriation’.
. . .Carnes confirmed her sacking to The Banner on Wednesday, saying she was stunned that an organization claiming to celebrate creative freedom would suddenly police her personal appearance.
“I believe the circumstances surrounding my termination raise serious questions about discrimination, governance, and whether the values BROS presents publicly are actually extended to the people it employs,” she wrote.
. . . . BROS proudly announced on Instagram Sept. 14 that they were welcoming Carnes — who also goes by the moniker “AWOL” — as executive director.
“BROS is excited for the new stories about to unfold under AWOL’s leadership as she supports us in our 7,000 year mission of incredible rock theater,” the group said.776
Just two days later, BROS completely changed course, declaring on Instagram that they were “taking action” after the controversial video showing Carnes’ cornrows was posted.
“We regret removing the video without an explanation and take responsibility for the confusion that [it] caused,” the organization posted, adding, “more importantly, we are taking action.”
This is palpably ridiculous. A fair number of white people, both male and female, like cornrows, and adopting them is either a form of hair protection or of admiration. It is not at all like blackface; it is appropriation based on appreciation. Why on earth do only black people have the right to wear cornrows? And isn’t just as much appropriation for black people to straighten their hair to emulate the hair of whites? Neither is something to beef about. As I’ve said before, “cultural appropriation” is worth criticizing only when someone steals stuff from another culture and, by so doing, denigrates, anonymizes, or impoverishes members of that culture. Nothing like that is going on here.
Here’s the poorly treated Ms. Carnes from a Facebook post.
Facebook/kelly.carnes
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: No fatties, no beardos, no weirdos.”
→ Iran writes a letter to its American fan base: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps published “An Open Letter to the Honorable People of the United States of America,” addressed to “the scholars, the students, and the members of the media”—Iran certainly knows its audience!—urging Americans to use the midterms to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians” and end U.S. support for the war against Iran. Iran, could you issue local district by district voting guides? I think that would really help out the media workers and the grad students! Also, a “Where Iran Eats with Friends in NYC” Apple Maps guide, and a “10 Things Iran Loves/Hates” list? Hates: 1. Loud restaurants; 2. People that say “mm-hmm” instead of “thank you”; 3. Women voting. The ayatollah should go on Subway Takes.
→ Were the Canadian doctors busy?: A woman was set to be executed in Tennessee this week, but survived two rounds of the death drug and was taken to a hospital for treatment. Apparently the drug, pentobarbital, was old and degraded? Or her veins were too small. At one point she asked if it was supposed to burn. This is the stuff of nightmares. Just hell. And here it was an “all-female lethal injection team” and everything (was that a glass ceiling we were worried about?). But Christa Pike, who’s been on death row for 30 years for the torture and murder of a classmate, survived the execution attempt. My conspiratorial gut is that someone wanted to sabotage the controversial execution (controversial because she’s a woman and, although we can vote and drive, the consensus of both sexes is that women should sort of be treated like minors when it comes to crimes). Anyway, my question is this: Canadian doctors are executing people constantly (sorry, performing medical assistance in dying), and it seems to have a 100 percent successful death rate. They do it with IVs, too. Have we called any of them to help? Right now, Christa Pike is receiving life-saving medical care so that. . . the state can potentially try to kill her again. Professionally, this time. As Robbie Soave of Reason put it: “This is a level of mania, incoherence, and incompetence that only the government could possibly deliver.”
→ A thwarted plane hijacking: On a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot allegedly decided to try to do a little plane terrorism. He’s accused of stabbing the flight captain and steering the plane into a nosedive over Saudi Arabia. After a young girl heard screams in the cockpit, passengers and crew snapped into action. They tied up the attacking co-pilot with headphone cords and zip ties. A dentist on board tended to the brave captain’s wounds. The crew was able to land the plane safely. It’s like a movie! Let’s see how this was covered in the press.
The paper was then very defensive about the post and made a whole thing about how no one knew anything yet so we have to keep it real vague. First of all, we knew a lot, and it had been reported all over the place by that time. Also: Funny how they’ll blast entirely fake headlines about Israel bombing a hospital, including fake fatality numbers for an attack Israel never did. But if the news might look good-ish for Israelis? Well, we all need to wait a good, long while to hear the facts. These are Israeli officials making these claims, after all; we should be careful. Certainly there must be some other explanation. And of course, now we have the chic leftists saying it’s a false flag.
“I’m not saying this is a false flag. I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I think it’s fishy,” says popular political commentator Ana Kasparian. And so Ana becomes Candace, and Candace becomes Ana, and we press on.
Kasparian is getting more and more antisemitic and odious.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej’s book launch went spectacularly well, with friends and readers of all stripes showing up:
Hili: So many wonderful people have come to see us. Andrzej: You’re right. Now we have to make friends with the silence again.
In Polish:
Hili: Tak wielu miłych ludzi odwiedziło nasz dom.
Ja: Masz rację, a teraz musimy znowu polubić ciszę.
There are high-school demonstrations and closures all over France (accompanied by fires and other violence), and I haven’t seen anything about this being a protest largely immigrants, but Luana thinks it is, and tenders these two tweets:
A French woman tells one of the second and third-generation migrant rioter no to vandalize her city
Regarding the riots in France, on could think that at least now people can see the dangers of allowing this much immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
But regrettably, no. We won’t even get that. The angle the news media is going with is something along the lines of “a… pic.twitter.com/7YOGGj5e6s
And I found this one. English translation: “Marseille has fallen. Now, Emmanuel Macron may finally be able to designate Marseille as the Palestinian state he so fervently desired.” That’s pretty hyperbolic, but I’ll find out what I can about the stuff going on in France.
Marseille est tombée.
À présent, Emmanuel Macron pourra peut-être désigner Marseille comme l’État palestinien qu’il souhaitait tant. pic.twitter.com/cGcrxADADZ
One from Dr. Cobb, who’s off to Dijon. This is T.H. Morgan’s lab at Columbia, and yes, he did get a Nobel Prize out of the fly work. The bananas are making fly food, and in the lab only Morgan himself was allowed to eat one.
Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866.If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it."🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM
I love Fleetwood Mac, now dissolved, but of all their great songs, the one I most favor is below: “Landslide,” written by Stevie Nicks and here performed by her and her erstwhile paramourLindsay Buckingham.
Stevie Nicks has said that she wrote “Landslide” while contemplating either going back to school or continuing on professionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, Nicks was financially supporting both herself and Buckingham by taking up jobs as both a waitress and a cleaning lady. Following the release of their debut album Buckingham Nicks, they had been dropped from their recording contract by Polydor Records before they could release a follow-up. Nicks wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone’s living room “looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us … at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”
On the studio recording of “Landslide”, Buckingham played a Martin D-18 acoustic guitar using a Travis picking technique with the thumb alternating between bass notes. He described the part as a “three against four pattern that crosses the bar line and gives the chorus another level of lift.”In 2007, Buckingham told The Austin Chronicle that the song addressed some of the interpersonal issues between him and Nicks. He thought that the song possessed a “nice” guitar solo and also maintained that “Landslide” was not a “signature guitar piece”.[10] In a different interview, Buckingham discussed how he bristled at the notion that “Landslide” was associated with country music.
This is what can be done with just a guitar and a voice (I love Buckinham’s three-finger picking). Fleetwood Mac is one of those groups that sounds just as good in concert as on records, and this is a live version.
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.
