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.
It’s a long story but I got all eight and rescued one yesterday that went to rehab. Mom and eight are in the pond. I need a name for the hen.
They came out of nowhere. Vashti’s brood is still being incubated. I do not know this mother.
We have made it through the work week intact: it’s Friday, May 22, 2026 and World Paloma Day, celebrating a cocktail that I haven’t had, much less heard of. It sounds good: a mixture of tequila, lime, and either grapefruit soda like Squirt, or grapefruit juice. Here’s one from Wikipedia:
It’s also Canadian Immigrants Day, Harvey Milk Day (Milk was born on this day in 1978 and assassinated in 1978; he was the first openly gay man to hold public office in California), International Day for Biological Diversity, National Vanilla Pudding Day, World Goth Day (do they even exist any more?) and the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. It is of course celebrated with food:
Special meals are eaten, consisting of dairy products. Common foods include cheese blintzes, quiches, and casseroles. Jews do not work on the day, although Jewish custom says that cooking, baking, carrying objects and equipment, and transporting fire are permitted. Jewish confirmations sometimes take place around the same time as the holiday.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 22 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first, and this time, sadly, for Barney Frank, who died on Tuesday. The NYT has a long memoriam and celebration of his life.
Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.
His friend James Segel confirmed the death. Mr. Frank said last month that he had entered hospice care with congestive heart failure.
Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat who represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981, was the first gay member of the House to come out voluntarily; others had been outed in scandals. His public declaration of his sexual orientation in 1987 — spurred by a fear of being outed, by the death of a closeted colleague and by his own determination to show that homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of — helped normalize being openly gay in public life.
“Prejudice is based on ignorance,” Mr. Frank told The Boston Globe in 2011, as he prepared to retire. “And the best way to counterbalance it is with a living example, with reality.”
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase and a zest for verbal combat.
His shivs were often cloaked in wit. Referring to the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian organization that opposed abortion but also opposed child nutrition programs and day care, Mr. Frank said in 1981: “From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Of the flawed intelligence behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that led to nearly a decade of combat, he said the problem “is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.”
In Washingtonian magazine’s annual poll of Capitol Hill staffers, he was frequently voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House.
Here’s a two-minute memorial to Frank showing some of his own words:
*Two votes involving were canceled or questioned in Congress. First, the vote to force Trump to go to Congress if he wished to continue the war in Iran:
House Republicans on Thursday abruptly canceled a vote on a resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after it became clear they lacked the votes to defeat the measure.
The retreat was a striking setback that exposed fractures within the G.O.P. over the conflict at a moment when the party has begun pushing back forcefully on Mr. Trump and his agenda.
And in the Senate, Republicans are peeved at Trump’s self-aggrandizing deal with the IRS, which could prevent him from ever being audited and compensate his friends who were “unjustly” treated by the law, like the insurrectionists of January 6. In response, they canceled a vote approving an immigration crackdown.
When Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, arrived at the Capitol on Thursday to meet with Republicans questioning the Justice Department fund that President Trump has said he wants to use to pay people who claim to have been unfairly targeted by the government, he may have expected a few strident complaints.
Instead, what unfolded in an ornate room just off the Senate floor on Thursday morning was a two-hour blowup in which dozens of Republican senators vented their anger and concern about the president’s fund at Mr. Blanche.
They questioned its legal basis, whom it would pay and how the process would work. And they made it clear they wanted no part of the plan, the product of a deal struck between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his own administration to use money that Congress does not control to pay off purported victims of government mistreatment, potentially including some of the rioters who violently assaulted their workplace during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
By the end, Republicans were so livid that party leaders scrapped planned votes on the party’s top priority — a $72 billion immigration crackdown measure it had planned to muscle through before Memorial Day — punting action for fear of having to cast votes on the fund.
It’s strange: Trump is showing muscle in getting his approved Republican candidates winning in primary elections, but the Congress is showing strong disapproval of his policies.
The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.
The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government at a moment when President Trump has been seeking to topple it.
The charges brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the vast powers of the U.S. criminal justice system, saddling him with a possible maximum penalty of life in prison. They also raised the possibility that the United States could be paving the way for its military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.
The indictment, which also accused five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the planes, was secretly returned last month by a federal grand jury and built on earlier charges, first filed in 2003, against one of them.
At a news conference in Miami, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, accused Mr. Castro and the pilots of killing four people when the Cuban military shot down the planes on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that often scoured the seas for Cubans fleeing the country.
Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were brought from the sky, claiming that the organization had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights. The indictment said that Raúl Castro was also responsible because he and his brother were “the final decision makers” in the Cuban military chain of command.
The wife of one of the men killed in the February 24, 1996 attack was on the news last night, saying that her husband was an American citizen (her point was that this supported the murder indictment against Castro). I don’t think the U.S. should be invading other countries and removing their leaders, as they did with Maduro, but if I were Raúl Castro, I would go into hiding. Given the ability of U.S. intelligence to use precise intelligence to capture people, as they did with Maduro, though, perhaps there is no safe place to hide. Whether you think attacking Cuba to apprehend a 94-year-old man is worthwhile is another question. There are other cases in which Americans unjustly executed on foreign soil have not been avenged in this way.
*I knew that Israel went after all the Israeli-killing Black September terrorists involved in the Munich Olympic shooting in 1972, but I didn’t know (but should have guessed) that Israel is now trying to take out the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre of Israelis. The details of this campaign are given in a new WSJ article, “Inside Israel’s high-tech campaign to kill or capture every Oct. 7 attacker.” And apparently the list of targets is very long:
Noa Argamani, who was seized less than a week before her 26th birthday, spent 245 days captive in Gaza. After she was freed in a rescue mission, two men seen in the video holding back Argamani’s boyfriend were tracked down by Israeli intelligence officials and killed in separate airstrikes.
The men were crossed off a list of thousands of names kept by an Israeli task force created for one job—to kill or capture all who planned or joined in the Oct. 7 attack, said current and former Israeli officials. Hundreds have been struck from the list, in one of the most personal and highly technical targeting campaigns in the history of warfare. The campaign continues amid the demands of the war with Iran and a cease-fire agreement in Gaza.
No participant is deemed too insignificant—down to the man who drove a tractor through a border fence that day. Nearly two years after he breached the border, the tractor driver was identified, located and blown up in an airstrike as he walked a narrow urban street in Gaza, according to footage released by Israel’s military.
The campaign spans the rank-and-file to Hamas’s top leaders. On Friday, Israel killed Ezzedin al-Haddad, one of the last living senior militants from the group’s military leadership that planned the Oct. 7 attacks. He had been Hamas’s military commander in Gaza since 2025.
“The IDF will continue to pursue our enemies, strike them and hold accountable everyone who took part in the October 7th massacre,” Israel’s military chief Eyal Zamir said Saturday after Haddad’s killing was confirmed.
Militants who videotaped their Oct. 7 exploits on phones or GoPro cameras to share on social media, or those who phoned home to brag, learned too late the degree of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution.
Security forces mark men for death without trial if they find at least two pieces of evidence showing they took part in crimes during the Oct. 7 attacks, according to current and former Israeli security officials. Agents from military intelligence and Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, pore over militants’ videos posted on social media, these officials said.
Agents run the images through facial recognition programs to sift for names, the officials said, and comb through intercepted phone calls. They view location data from cell tower logs and interrogate Gazan detainees to uncover who did what.
Despite the October cease-fire with Hamas and release of the last surviving hostages, names continue to be crossed off the list. Israel says it kills targets who allegedly pose a threat, such as approaching the front lines or planning an attack.
. . .Israeli agents, after failing to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, approached the head of Shin Bet to set up a task force they named NILI. It is a Hebrew acronym for the words, “The Eternal One of Israel Doesn’t Lie.” The name, first used by a band of World War I-era Jewish spies, signified that no one identified in the attack would be forgotten.
The campaign is centered in Gaza but has struck Hamas leaders in Lebanon and Iran. It echoes Israel’s assassinations of a dozen or so Palestinians responsible for killing 11 of its athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
“The clear message to all future enemies is to think again about the price of a terrorist operation like that,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former senior official in Shin Bet.
The issue, of course, is whether this is a deterrent given that many jihadis apparently want to be martyrs, and may not be deterred by such Israeli revenge. (It’s another issue whether Israel should be killing these people instead of capturing them and trying them; one problem with that is that prisoner swaps often dramatically shorten long sentences.)
*Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” finishes up this week, ending 33 years of the show’s run. This, says the WaPo, portends a general decline on the late night multi-guest format.
While the show’s cancellation carries the stench of suspected political interference for many fans and viewers, its conclusion also comes at a moment of seismic changes for the classic television format.
“Like all broadcast television, it was cultural glue. We all fed from the same cultural trough at the same time,” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television and popular culture. “That is gone and only remains in a few pockets, and those pockets are falling one by one. When Colbert leaves, another one of those important pockets will have fallen.”
. . .We no longer choose from a handful of late-night hosts to get our fix of breezy celebrity interviews; there’s a seemingly endless supply of video podcasts for that. And airing in Colbert’s place starting Friday? A decidedly non-topical comedy show, “Comics Unleashed,” that CBS isn’t even paying to make. In fact, CBS is being paid to air it.
It’s quite the conclusion for “The Late Show,” a program that debuted in an era when late night was so important to network television that the ratings rivalry was dubbed a “war.” The program premiered in 1993, born out of a beef between Letterman and Jay Leno over who would inherit Johnny Carson’s vaunted perch as host of “The Tonight Show.” Letterman got passed over, went to CBS and started a rival program with a hefty contract.
When Colbert took over from Letterman in 2015, the late-night show still reigned supreme — in part because of renewed cultural relevance after Jon Stewart began hosting “The Daily Show” and turned late-night into urgent political satire. (He also introduced most of America to one particularly deadpan correspondent: Colbert.) A rash of similar shows premiered across networks and streaming services.
A host “getting up, telling a bunch of jokes, sitting down at a desk and interviewing people is the fussiest, most old-fashioned thing in the world,” Thompson said. “The paradox is that, starting in 2000, the late-night talk show completely transformed itself.”
Hosts’ monologues and jokes were constant internet fodder, and celebrities still needed to go on the talk-show circuit to promote new movies. Colbert, on “The Late Show,” found his footing with funny and unexpectedly profound interviews, but also by getting political. It was the first Trump administration, and there was no shortage of material in skewering the first reality TV star turned president.
But as the years went on, people increasingly turned to the internet for entertainment and away from linear television. Broadcast audiences declined, including for late night. Colbert would top the ratings among his peers, but the overall pie was much smaller. Meanwhile, video podcasts have boomed. This is the new late night: stars sitting for multiple celebrity-hosted podcasts during the same press tour, and on each show, having the whole episode to themselves.
I have to admit that when I want to watch celebrity interviews and the like, as when I’m going down rabbit holes on YouTube, I wind up listening to Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and regular late-night t.v. hosts rather than podcasts. The interviews are shorter and sharper, and the hosts were simply damn tood at their jobs. And, frankly, since I spend a lot of the day reading the news (which includes mockery of politicians), that’s the last thing I want to hear to relax. This is the kind of stuff I prefer to podcasts:
*Speaking of podcasts, readers know, I’m not a fan and hardly ever listen to them (I can read much faster than listen). Over at the Free Press, Liel Leibovitz likens them to a faith in “The strange religion of the American podcast.” (Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided them!)
As you read these lines, the single greatest event in American history has already unfolded: Candace Owens has interviewed Hunter Biden on her podcast, in an episode that will drop on Thursday. Hookers, blow, shady deals with Ukraine—there’s no telling what we’re going to learn.
All right, so perhaps the interview isn’t exactly the single greatest event in American history—the Battle of Yorktown is a slightly better fit for the title—but many of us no longer live in America. We live in the People’s Republic of Podcastistan, where Candace is queen and every new revelation is just the greatest, the wackier the better.
In case you’re new to our fantasyland, here, in no obvious order, are a few gems shared recently by our most popular podcast hosts: Charlie Kirk was a literal time traveler who predicted his own death (Owens); Joseph Stalin was a great man whose birthday we should all be celebrating (Nick Fuentes); Israel manipulated America into fighting the war in Iran (Dave Smith); officers at the highest ranks of the military are telling their soldiers that the ultimate goal of the war in Iran is to usher in the return of Jesus Christ (Joe Rogan).
I could go on. After all, these hosts frequently sit down to bounce their outlandish theories off each other. Just this Monday, we were gifted with a three-hour conversation between Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes himself.
What ought we to make of this torrent of mind-bendingly, earth-shatteringly stupid pronouncements? Ask the medium’s many critics, and you’ll hear one of two prognostications.
The first is that the Era of the Podcast is over, done with, finished. Media malignancies metastasize rapidly these days, this argument goes, and podcasting as a medium spread so quickly and aggressively that it eventually killed its host body. Now, podcasting has become just a bunch of hotheads chatting with one another and competing to see who can come up with the most outrageous conspiracy theories—so people have simply stopped taking the medium seriously.
Not so fast, argues theory No. 2: Podcasts are still popular.
. . . . So, which of these theories is true? Is Podcastistan growing stronger, or is it collapsing in on itself?
The answer, sadly, is both.
Pay close attention, and you’ll see that your average superstar podcast host is busy building a theological universe for the social media age.
They borrowed the cadences and clout of religious fervor to deliver something new and intoxicating—a hermetically sealed universe where nothing is true and everything is permitted.
No one, alas, does it better than Owens. Her insistence that Charlie Kirk was actually, literally, and physically a time traveler was met with much derision—look at that nutjob Candace!—but it was actually extraordinarily sophisticated. People, Owens realizes, are innate believers. Tear down their churches and their synagogues, tell them the faiths of their fathers are bad and oppressive and passé, and they’ll merely look for something else to believe. In telling her listeners that Kirk was a time traveler, that he always knew he would die young, that he was “marked since he was a child,” Owens turns Kirk into that “something,” cloaking his life and death in the kind of religious language that inspires rabid devotion. Call it the law of spiritual thermodynamics: Spiritual energy never dissipates, it just searches for a different form.
Other examples of religiously tinged performances abound. Theo Von, for example, has transformed himself from a dudebro par excellence into something like a St. Augustine with a mullet, regularly engaging in teary on-air confessions about faith, shame, and trauma. And after Joe Rogan riffed on Von’s mental health on a recent episode, saying Von’s use of antidepressants “freaks” him out, Von responded, “Sad to see this kind of stuff”—compelling Rogan to apologize publicly with an earnest, lengthy mea culpa exploring friendship, loyalty, and love.
The religious element of this second interaction is evident less in the language than in the collaboration itself. That Rogan spends so much time talking about—and to—Von is no coincidence. The principals of Podcastistan love having each other on their shows not because theirs is a tiny and airless bubble, but because they realize that there’s nothing more appealing to an audience than feeling you’re being let into a small and persecuted circle of courageous truth-tellers. . . .
This is all Greek to me, as I don’t watch these things. I can’t see any reason to watch Owens save to marvel at her insanity, canny or not, and I can take only about a minute of Rogan. Perhaps, when it comes to podcasts, I’m an atheist.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has no time for persiflage:
Sharon: I need to tell you something.
Hili: Not now, I’m thinking about serious matters.
In Polish:
Szaron: Muszę ci coś powiedzieć.
Hili: Nie teraz, myślę o poważnych sprawach.
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From Things With Faces:
From Meow Incorporated:
From Emma, who disdains the muscular beefcakes:
No. Just no.
Big muscles wrapped in too-low body fat is uncomfortable to cuddle, and means the fella is gonna be counting not just his but your calories/macros, obsessively.
No thanks. A strong, squishy man is cool. https://t.co/Uf8cAuVJuC
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 20, 2026
From Captain Ella (really a Lt. Col.), the official Arabic spokesperson for the IDF (yes, she’s a Muslim). The translation from the Arabic is below:
On the eve of the blessed Eid al-Adha, I toured the various fronts to listen to the latest field assessments, and there I met the sons of the Israeli community—Muslims, Druze, Christians, and Jews—standing shoulder to shoulder in defense of humanity and the home.
From the south of #Lebanon to the #Gaza Strip, I saw our youth in the field… the guardians of this country, and the watchful eye that never sleeps.
May this Eid bring with it goodness, security, and peace of mind for all.
Wishing you all a happy Eid
قبيل عيد الأضحى المبارك، تجولتُ في مختلف الجبهات لأستمع إلى آخر التقييمات الميدانية، وهناك التقيتُ بأبناء المجتمع الإسرائيلي، من المسلمين والدروز والمسيحيين واليهود، يقفون جنبًا إلى جنب دفاعًا عن الإنسان وعن البيت.
من جنوب #لبنان إلى قطاع #غزة، رأيتُ شبابنا في الميدان…حماة هذا… pic.twitter.com/HlQeABwvWc
— Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya | إيلا واوية (@CaptainElla1) May 21, 2026
From Luana. Remember that correlation is not causation, but it may be in this case:
The impact of AI in four charts pic.twitter.com/rmiRkGG9Ql
— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) May 20, 2026
Larry the Cat follows footie. The PM’s team is clearly Arsenal, and the Prince of Wales favors Aston Villa, which won the Europa League final.
Yesterday the Prime Minister’s team won the Premier League for the first time in two decades, today the Prince of Wales’ team won a trophy for the first time in three decades; anyone know who King Charles supports? https://t.co/yvHA8FvWFO
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 20, 2026
One from my feed; such trust!
😺: could you please look after my babies while i go and take a nap? pic.twitter.com/oJzkEZUmSY
— Kitty Cat Empire (@KittyCatEmpire) May 21, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Italian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old and would be 89 today has she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-22T09:30:07.241Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this M.C. Hammer bee!
Hooray, it’s happy #worldbeeday !For 10 points can anyone tell me why these bees are called Pantaloon bees 😂😂😂😂Canon R5 and Sigma 150mm SS1/2000 F8. ISO8000Natural light handheld while laying down 👌🏿#bee #bees #macro
— @macro_action (@birdzandbees.bsky.social) 2026-05-20T19:41:00.263Z
Matthew says, “This and linked post have a vid of 3 tradesmen from around Manchester in a van cooking spaghetti carbonara.”
Saving this as reference for the next time the Brits get frisky about accurate assessments of the dire state of British “food”. (1/2)
Part 2/2
“Chiropractic” (a name that in my mind should really be “chiropracty”) is a form of treatment for various disorders in which the cure supposedly comes from mechanical manipulation of the body, especially the spine. It is considered “alternative medicine,” and, as Wikipedia says, is of dubious efficacy for everything:
Many chiropractors (often known informally as chiros), especially those in the field’s early history, have proposed that mechanical disorders affect general health, and that regular manipulation of the spine (spinal adjustment) improves general health. A chiropractor may have a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degree and be referred to as “doctor” but is not a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.). While many chiropractors view themselves as primary care providers, chiropractic clinical training does not meet the requirements for that designation. A small but significant number of chiropractors spread vaccine misinformation, promote unproven dietary supplements, or administer full-spine x-rays.
There is no compelling evidence that either primary or maintenance chiropractic adjustment is effective for any symptoms or diseases, including low back pain. A 2011 critical evaluation of 45 systematic reviews concluded that the data included in the study “fail[ed] to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition.” Conclusions about cost-effectiveness are limited by low-quality studies, uncertainty about efficacy, and insufficient evidence.
There is not sufficient data to establish the safety of chiropractic manipulations. It is frequently associated with mild to moderate adverse effects, with serious or fatal complications in rare cases. There is controversy regarding the degree of risk of vertebral artery dissection, which can lead to stroke and death, from cervical manipulation.Several deaths have been associated with this technique and it has been suggested that the relationship is causative, a claim which is disputed by many chiropractors.
Here’s the meta-analysis article referenced by Wikipedia, click to access:
Part of the paper’s abstract:
Results Forty-five systematic reviews were included relating to the following conditions: low back pain (n=7), headache (n=6), neck pain (n=4), asthma (n=4), musculoskeletal conditions (n=3), any non-musculoskeletal conditions (n=2), fibromyalgia (n=2), infant colic (n=2), any medical problem (n=1), any paediatric conditions (n=1), carpal tunnel syndrome (n=1), cervicogenic dizziness (n=1), dysmenorrhoea (n=1), gastrointestinal problems (n=1), hypertension (n=1), idiopathic scoliosis (n=1), lateral epicondylitis (n=1), lower extremity conditions (n=1), pregnancy and related conditions (n=1), psychological outcome (n=1), shoulder pain (n=1), upper extremity conditions (n=1) and whiplash injury (n=1). Positive or, for multiple SR, unanimously positive conclusions were drawn for psychological outcomes (n=1) and whiplash (n=1).
Conclusion Collectively these data fail to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition
Based on the reports of fatalities associated with this procedure (see here for one study of 26 deaths from arterial dissection associated with neck manipulation), I would avoid this therapy: as the paper says, “The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit.”
A new article in the NYT, however, while warning people of using chiropractic for most things, says that it can be useful in alleviating lower back pain. Click below to read it and you may find it archived here (I can’t access it). We thus have a contradiction between the paper and the analysis above.
From the article:
While chiropractors often refer to themselves as doctors, their degree is different from medical doctors.
To practice in the United States, chiropractors typically attend a four-year program where they take courses in basic science and lifestyle and nutrition counseling. They also learn how to perform manual adjustments, which involve putting pressure onto the joints and creating a deep stretch in the tiny muscles that connect the spine’s vertebrae, said William Lauretti, a professor of integrated chiropractic therapies at Northeast College of Health Sciences and a spokesman for the American Chiropractic Association.
(The popping sound heard during this adjustment is a result of gas being released from the fluid that surrounds your joints. While satisfying, Mr. Lauretti said the sound is not the goal of the adjustment.)
After training, chiropractors must pass a national board exam to be eligible for state licensure.
What chiropractors can and can’t do depends on where they practice. For example, in Oregon chiropractors are legally allowed to deliver babies (though they do so rarely) and perform very minor surgery, like stitches and removing skin tags. New York, which has stricter laws for chiropractors, requires them to focus to spinal conditions.
Many insurers will cover many services offered by chiropractors, including adjustments, nutrition counseling and X-rays. Medicare coverage is more stringent, often only covering adjustments, though chiropractors are lobbying Congress to change this.
The paper does say that they’re of some use for lower back pain, in contrast to the Wikipedia article, but I would still consult a genuine M.D. for any pain. As for neck pain, I myself would stay far away:
Chiropractors advertise their services for a wide range of conditions: back pain, arthritis, diabetes, asthma and ear infections. But what the research says chiropractors are effective at treating is doesn’t necessarily match up.
There’s robust evidence that shows chiropractic adjustments can be mildly to moderately effective at managing lower back pain, said Christine Goertz, a professor of musculoskeletal research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and a licensed chiropractor. An analysis of 47 randomized controlled trials — often considered the gold standard of scientific evidence — determined that manual manipulation was equally effective as treatments like acupuncture or massage therapy.
The article referenced above is from the British Medical Journal, and you can find it here. Back to the NYT:
And the risks of side effects are low compared to some other common interventions, like anti-inflammatory medications and corticosteroid injections. Fractures or other serious complications from spinal manipulation are possible but rare, occurring in roughly 1 per 2 million manipulations, according to one study.
For that reason, spinal manipulation is often recommended as a first line of treatment for low back pain, including in guidelines from the World Health Organization and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“It is at least as good as, or maybe a little bit better than, other care options for low back pain,” Dr. Goertz said. (Though, as skeptics note, treatments for lower back pain are not very effective in general.)
There is less evidence supporting the use of chiropractic treatment for neck pain. A review of six studies found that chiropractic adjustments did improve acute neck pain. However, the researchers noted that more research was needed to draw any firm conclusion, since many of the studies had only a small number of participants and other limitations.
Some doctors advise against manipulating the neck because of the potential risk of arterial dissection, in which vessels that supply blood to the brain are torn. This can lead to stroke or death. Some analyses have suggested an association between neck adjustments and this injury, but it’s not clear there is a causal link.
I don’t know of a causal link between the spine’s position and stuff like diabetes and ear infections, so I would never go to a chiropractor for anything. But I’m sure some readers have, and perhaps they’ve been helped, though there’s no blind test with individual readers’ cases. If you have experience with chiropractic, describe it below. Note: I am not touting this therapy; use your own judgement. As I said, I will never use it myself.
The article ends with a section on what you should look for if you’re shopping for chiropractors, but I’ll let you read that yourself.
A reader sent me this “paper” and asked me if I really wrote it. It is not only garbage, but, in parts, complete gibberish.
I’ll use this space to assert that NO, THIS IS A FAKE. The “Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation” does not exist. Googling it yields no results, and asking Grok yields this:
No, there is no journal titled Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation (or any close variant like Journal of Evolutionary Genetics).
Searches across academic databases, journal lists, and publishers turn up zero results for a journal by that exact (or near-exact) name. No ISSN, publisher page, or official record exists for it.
There is an American Journal of Science, mentioned as the place I published this garbage, but it is an earth sciences journal devoted to geology. I’ve never published in it.
Although the content below is opaque, it may be an attempt to say I’ve worked on the developmental genetics of skin color in some bizarre species, which may be a guilt-by association thing with racism. Who knows?
At any rate, I’m making this post only to assert, for the record, that what is below is a complete fabrication. It appears to be the product of an addled mind.
Click on the picture if you want to see some lunacy:
Welcome to Thursday, May 21, 2026, and Hummus Day (the third Thursday in May). Didn’t we just have one? Well, it’s good stuff, and I ate a ton of it when I visited Israel in 2023. Here’s a nice plate from Jerusalem with plenty of tahini in it:
It’s also American Red Cross Founder’s Day, International Chardonnay Day, International Tea Day, National Apéritif Day, and National Strawberries and Cream Day.
While traveling, reader Bill sent me this photo of a handmade metal mallard he saw on sale in a shop. I wrote, “I WANT IT!”, and he asked if I wanted to buy it through him. Of course I did, and he bought it, wrapped it carefully, and sent it to me. (I reimbursed him.) It now reposes on a cabinet overlooking my office. Isn’t it beautiful? All the feathers are metal, too, forged separately:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.
Oh, I had a dream last night, and again it was a weird one. This time I was walking in the middle of two long, long rows of Army tents. Between the rows of tends were two long rows of picnic tables, all occupied by soldiers. And all the soldiers were eating–tins of mussels! The tins were flat and had to be opened with a key, like sardines. But the contents were not just the meat of mussels, but the entire gastropod, shell and all. As I walked down the row of soldiers, all I could hear was the opening of tins and crunching of shells: a real cacophony. Why I had this dream I had no idea.
Da Nooz:
*I can’t believe this has happened. Trump made a deal with the Internal Revenue Service that he would give up his lawsuit against the IRS but, in return, gain immunity from being investigated and prosecuted FOR ALL TIME for any tax dealings. Further, the government agreed to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to be used to compensate people who, Trump thinks, were wrongly persecuted or investigated (read: January 6 insurrectionists). Oy gewalt! Read and weep (article is archived here):
The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.
The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.
The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.
The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal.
That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.
The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.
A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions.
Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.
But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.
It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal ponders the ethics and efficacy of assassinating leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Much like the movie Groundhog Day, Washington and Jerusalem—from the think tanks to the command bunkers—are once again grappling with the exact same question they have faced before: Should Khamenei be assassinated? This time, however, it’s Mojtaba, not Ali. Other than that, almost everything is exactly the same.
In the heat of events, the fact that Israel had—for the first time in its history—killed the leader of an enemy state was overshadowed. The country had rehearsed the assassination of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1992, but ultimately, due to an operational disaster, the mission did not materialize. It also toyed with the targeted killing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in 2002. Uri Dan, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, recounted asking him if Arafat had died naturally two years later. Sharon replied: “It’s better not to talk about it.” The United States had imposed an absolute veto on an overt assassination.
In 2026, the United States coordinated with Israel on the assassination of the leader of a country with nearly one hundred million residents, hoping to destabilize the regime’s foundations. That hope was partially fulfilled, or partially disappointed, depending on how you look at the glass. On the one hand, the undisputed, top-down control vanished. Iran sank into an internal battle, evident in attacks on the Gulf states that completely defied the political echelon’s position. The replacement son is pale, corrupt and wounded; it is doubtful whether he is leading or merely being dragged.
On the other hand, there is still a command structure; there is still someone to lean on. As long as there is an ayatollah named Khamenei, Iran maintains the facade of a functioning state. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi do allow themselves to deviate slightly from the supreme leader’s rigid line on the nuclear issue—something they would never dare do during his father’s time—but they do not dare deviate much.
So in the war games, here is the dilemma: On one hand, Mojtaba is the last survivor, the only remaining natural heir. If he is assassinated, Iran could sink into leadership chaos that might help the more moderate wing secure an agreement. This is what Israel attempted in the Doha strike last September. It fired advanced missiles at the building housing the more recalcitrant wing of Hamas, the faction that had thwarted a hostage deal.
On the other hand, it’s not as if there are true moderates in Iran. If there is no Khamenei, no Anwar Sadat is waiting in the wings. Without him, there is the danger of securing an agreement that looks good on paper but is not fundamentally different from Barack Obama’s. Mossad Director David Barnea used to tell his American counterparts how, in the previous decade, the administration allayed his fears by arguing, “Who knows what will happen in the long term, in 2026, when the agreement begins to expire.” Well, here we are in 2026—welcome to the long term. Even if a different leadership agrees to freeze the nuclear program for 15 years, 2041 will eventually arrive just the same.
In short, a severe dilemma.
But it’s not clear whether Mojtaba is even alive, as he hasn’t been seen since the airstrike that killed his father on Febraury 28. Or he may be in a coma, or simply staying out of sight. But it would have been possible, if he were sentient, for him to release a video whose location could not be identified. I think he’s out of action, whether dead or comatose. Segal does, however, characterize the dilemma aptly. Even if Mojtaba is dead, there are no “moderates” to replace him. If they can pretend a dead man is still alive, they can pretend there’s still an Ayatollah calling the shots. Israel would not only have to kill him, but also prove that they did, which is very difficult.
*This tweet by Maarten Boudry called my attention to a new NYT op-ed by Bret Stephens, “Hatred of Israel and the degradation of the West” First the tweet
No matter how biased the @nytimes is against Israel (#dogrape, anyone?), they still publish columns by unapologetically pro-Israel voices like @BretStephen_NYT. You will never read anything comparable in a Belgian or Dutch newspaper. Occasionally, papers with syndication… pic.twitter.com/UdFBanW8vq
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) May 20, 2026
Excerpts from Stephens, a good palliative to the odious Nicholas Kristof, which he alludes to at the beginning:
[Israel] is not a country of saints. As is true of every other country, the United States not least, plenty of sins past and present can be laid at Israel’s door. They include allegations, by Israelis and others, regarding cases of abuse of prisoners in Israeli jails. Those cases should be thoroughly investigated, just as in the United States the 8,628 allegations of staff-committed sexual misconduct victimizing adult inmates tallied in 2020 alone by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics need to be deeply investigated.
Yet this kind of good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It’s a hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country. It’s a belief that Israelis are perpetually out for the blood of their enemies, even when it comes at the cost of the blood of their friends. It’s the sense that it’s socially acceptable to boycott, assail and sometimes assault Israelis for the supposed sins of their government. It’s a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now.
None of these impulses are justified indictments of Israel. They are indictments of the indicters. More broadly, the fashionable frenzy that is today’s loathing of Israel, coming from the far right but especially from the far and not-so-far left, is a sign of the degradation of the West. Societies that value critical thinking and reasoned moral judgment do not make a fetish of demonizing one small country and its people while imagining that peace, justice and freedom would somehow be achieved if only the country and its people were made to disappear.
I’ve been closely covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 25 years. It’s given me something of a front-row seat to this degradation.
This is a declaration of war on Kristof by Stephens, implying that he is making a fetish of Israel-hatred and abandoning critical thinking. Stephens then gives a lot of stories in which unjust accusations were leveled at Israel, and the stories were later corrected by journalists. I’ll quote more than usual here, as this is an important take on accusations like those made by Kristof, but also by many others:
The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty. This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.
Over time this does at least three kinds of damage.
The least of it is damage to Israel, which has been living under the endless drizzle of orchestrated propaganda and media hostility over the course of its 78 years while still managing to transform itself into a military, technological and economic powerhouse — as well as one of the happiest countries in the world.
A more serious form of damage, paradoxically, is to Palestinians. Israelis have become so inured to the tide of tendentious allegations about their supposed perfidy that they can too easily shrug off real scandals, as it is with West Bank settler violence. And the endless parade of anti-Israel stories too often means the Western media pays too little attention to the domestic tyrannies that are Hamas’s rule in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s rule in the West Bank.
But the gravest damage is to Western institutions, particularly those entrusted with the dissemination of hard truths.
That goes not only for journalism, but also once-admired organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which in recent decades have turned themselves into factories of anti-Israel invective. “Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank,” noted Michael Powell last year in The Atlantic.
It’s a similar story with much of academia, in which the anti-Israel furies stirred by the attacks of Oct. 7 were both a symptom of the broader intellectual rot within them and an invitation to the political and legal blowback from which they are still suffering.
. . . this obsession has contributed to the relative neglect of the region’s other fundamental problems, above all the abiding grip of authoritarian politics in places like Cairo and Ankara and totalitarian religious fundamentalism in Gaza and Tehran. When was the last time you heard of an American campus protest against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey (a NATO ally and longtime beneficiary of U.S. security guarantees), or the genocide in Sudan? Why is this year’s arts biennale in Venice being roiled by the inclusion of Israel, but not of China? Why has the recent report detailing the extensive documentation of systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas and its collaborators received little attention?
These aren’t just questions of hypocrisy or double standards. They are evidence of minds that have lost the capacity to think dispassionately and critically. What we should really be worried about isn’t the future of Israel; it’s the fate of the West.
I can’t help but read this as a critique of his colleague Kristof. Of course Stephens will face all kinds of accusations for this piece, but note that he does call out Israel for things that he really thinks are wrong, like the treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank. But Stephens is right that this kind of mindless and obsessive accusation of Israel hurts Western institutions, which are already assailed by assucations of genocide, apartheid, and the mindless blatherings of protestors like “Globalize the intifada” that we hear regularly.
*Both the Harvard Crimson and the Wall Street Journal report that, completely against my expectations, Harvard has voted to curb grade inflation by capping the number of A grades in each course. Glory be!
From the Crimson:
Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.
The measure passed with 69.5 percent of votes cast.
Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
But faculty rejected the proposal’s third plank, which would have allowed courses to petition to opt out of the A cap if they were graded on an unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis. That measure failed 292 to 364.
This is unclear; my inquiries at Harvard have revealed that what was rejected was a plan that would allow courses now graded either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” to add the grade “satisfactory plus”. That was turned down. Back to the Crimson
Together, the votes represent a sweeping intervention in Harvard College’s academic culture — one that will sharply reduce the share of A’s and place new constraints on grading decisions traditionally left to individual instructors.
The decision marks a major victory for Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and the faculty subcommittee that designed the plan after warning that Harvard’s grading system had become too compressed at the top to distinguish exceptional work from merely strong performance.
It also signals that faculty were willing to endorse a mandatory cap despite months of objections from students and professors who argued that the proposal could heighten competition, discourage intellectual risk-taking, and infringe on faculty autonomy.
Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Harvard spent years researching ways to fight grade inflation, including examining prior efforts at Princeton and Wellesley.
A Harvard committee looked at 25 years of grades to model a range of possible remedies, including introducing A-pluses, according to Claybaugh.
Their conclusion: “Anything short of a cap doesn’t work,” she said.
Campus debate increased in the fall, when Claybaugh released a report noting that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06.
Note that the cap is on straight-out “A” grades, and does not include “A-” (“A minus”) grades. This means that there is nothing preventing professors from giving 20% As and 80% A-s. It turns out that my colleagues at Harvard get beefed at by students who get an “A-“, as that
Here’s the graph of the inexorable rise in percentage of “As” (the unadorned “A”) at Harvard, Look at the greater-than-10% increase in 2020, attributable to the pandemic and, I think, the desire of Harvard to reward students who, they thought, were being forced to get a substandard remote education. At any rate, the mean grade at Harvard is no an unadorned A. What will happen when As are capped at 20% in 2027? Who knows, but I think this is a good move.
Today there’s a op-ed on these data: “60 percent of grades were A’s. Enough is enough.” The authors are two professors who teach economists at Harvard. They say that capping As is not a perfect solution (and don’t mention that 80% of the students who don’t get As could get A-s), but add this:
When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.
There will be only four news items today as I’ve quoted at length from Stephens’s piece.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili the editor is policing Andrzej’s behavior:
Hili: What are you doing?
Andrzej: I’m cleaning my desk.
In Polish:
Hili: Co ty robisz?
Ja: Sprzątam moje biurko.
*******************
From Band Director Jokes:
FromTherionArms, ancient script:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
Masih is quiet today, but here’s a comment on how Australia is policing extremist gender ideology; it was posted by JKR:
“There appears to be this organized plan to punish anyone in the country for not adhering to gender ideology. So is it worth fighting that? 100%. Because if we can’t look at a man & say that’s a man we literally don’t live in a free society.” pic.twitter.com/Ycr5AGRRgV
— Sall Grover (@salltweets) May 20, 2026
I probably posted this one before, but listen to those seagulls meow!
Everybody wants to be a cat… https://t.co/TFPd4jCPL6
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 17, 2026
Three from my feed. First, a robot “tries” to imitate Michael Jackson:
This is the greatest video I’ve ever seen. No notes. The lifeless clanker carcass just laying there. No crowd reaction, anything. Just Billie Jean. Until its lifeless shell is shamefully dragged off. Purely amazing. pic.twitter.com/4WSUwZr7nO
— Tatum Turn Up (@tatumturnup) May 20, 2026
Allah didn’t help this time:
Still the best video of all time,
hands down. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/FKmDIK2TLj— Ahmed Khalifa (@_A_khalifa) May 20, 2026
The Old Man and the Ray!:
For years, an old man has been caring for this ray ever since it was a baby, feeding and looking after it.
The ray recognizes him as its human grandfather and approaches him like a giant friendly sea pet. pic.twitter.com/vKSbYzRwgf— The Figen (@TheFigen_) May 19, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T09:55:27.941Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a flatulent symphony:
Well, I missed the 11th anniversary of this on Sunday, which was an appalling dereliction of duty, but good morning anyway
— Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T06:10:23.889Z
A beautiful grouping of drakes in flight:
Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #DucksInTheAir. Mine today is mallards.#bird #birdphotography #mallard
— Tor Berg (@torbergen.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T17:03:48.003Z
Here’s an entire BBC concert by Joni Mitchell, filmed in September, 1970. I’ve always thought that BBC concerts were the best, as they will always live and without accompaniment. This one is 48 minutes long, and she had long career after this with some great albums (“Blue,” “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark”).
I have nothing to add to this music save to say that I think she’s the greatest combination of singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of our time, and like most boys my age (I was 21), I was hopelessly in love with her. James Taylor, who also had a BBC concert that same year, rivals her on the male side for the trio of talents, but Joni has the overall edge.
Oh, and some of my favorite songs here are “Chelsea Morning” (at the start), “My Old Man” (16:47), “Woodstock” (25:10), “All I Want” (31:00, on the dulcimer), “All I Want” (31:45), “California” (36:45), and of course “Both Sides Now” (44:25)
Can you imagine being in the audience and hearing these songs for the first time?
The first comment is ineffably poignant:
After announcing that it would “de-extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth, and that it had in fact “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf, the company Colossal Biosciences is now making big noises about its effort to bring back extinct big birds: the giant moas of New Zealand (driven extinct by humans around 1300 AD) and the dodo of Mauritius (also killed off by humans in 1662). These are big birds (dodos weighed from 20-40 pounds, moas, of which there were nine species, from 55 to 600 pounds), and this fact alone makes it hard to de-extinct them.
But, as with the “woolly mammoth”, the concept of bringing back extinct species is impossible given our current technology, and saying that you can is grossly misleading. And that’s for several reasons (the indented bits below are mine):
1.) You need the DNA of the extinct species if you’re going to create a simulacrum of it by injecting bits of the extinct animal’s DNA into the genome of a modern relative.
2.) You need to know what the DNA segments you have actually do in the animal, and how sequences differing between it and the donor genome can produce an animal with some traits of the original species. Where are the “big genes” in a mammoth, for example?
3.) Species are not “de-extincted”: what happens is that a living relative is genetically engineered by putting in a few bits of ancient DNA to create a “partial hybrid” that superficially resembles the ancient species. This involves finding and inserting a few bits of ancient DNA that you think will make the donor species look more like the extinct one. For example, I think fewer than 20 genes were engineered into a gray wolf genome to make the “dire wolf”. These included both dire wolf genes and mutant genes of modern dogs inserted into a gray wolf genome. The tweaked embryo was then implanted in a domestic dog. It’s important that you (and the press) realize that the ancient species is not brought back; what we get is a modern species that looks a bit like the ancient species. (See my post on the “dire-ish wolf” here.)
4.) There are problems with rearing the “tweaked” (I won’t call it “de-extincted”) species. We cannot artificially inseminate elephants with elephant genomes that have been engineered for hairiness and bigger tusk. We don’t have the ability to do this (though we might in the future), the embryos might not develop properly, and the mother is unlikely to take care of them. This is why Colossal has spoken of using “artificial uteruses” to rear the tweaked “mammothy” elephant.
5.) For giant birds like the dodo and moa, you need to be able to rear the tweaked species—presumably adjusted to be larger than its surrogate relative—in big eggs. Because those eggs don’t exist, they have to be made somehow. This week Colossal announced the creation of 3-D printed eggshells that could be used to contain a chicken embryo that develops to term. But of course hatching is one thing, and rearing is another. What mother will rear a tweaked “dodolike” bird. The closest relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon, a bird considerably smaller than the dodo (the pigeon weighs about a pound). The closest living relative of the moas is the tinamou, which weighs about as much as a big chicken: five pounds max. Rearing such birds to maturity is a serious problem, even if they were full dodos or moas rather than tweaked pigeons or tinamous.
6.) Colossal has announced that a crucial part of “de-extinction” is “rewilding”: releasing the tweaked animals back into nature to restore their niche. This is one of the most questionable parts of the whole enterprise. The tweaked hairy elephant, for example, should be released on the tundra (and in groups of individuals, which is yet another problem, as you need to engineer more than one hybrid). That tundra doesn’t exist in the form it did in the past, and, of course, the tweaked hairy elephant has to have all genes necessary to seek out and use the food that a real woolly mammoth would eat, as well as genes for preferring as a mate others of its kind. It has to be able to survive extreme cold. We don’t know what genes these are! All we have are DNA sequences.
An example of the problems is Colossal’s announcement that it had “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf. It hadn’t: it engineered a gray wolf with about 20 inserted genes taken from both wolves and domestic dogs, producing a whitish wolf that seems a bit larger than gray wolves. Three of these creatures were made. Not only were they not released in the wild, but they are sequestered in a secret and tightly-controlled fenced area that is off limits to all but selected journalists.
All the brouhaha, then, is misleading. We don’t get extinct species back, we may not even get “tweaked” species back, and they are very unlikely to ever see the wild again. I discussed many of these problem in an op-ed last year in The Boston Globe (archived here). See also the New Scientist article below.
Because Colossal has misled the public—they originally said they’d de-extincted the dire wolf, then retracted that claim, then reinstated it, saying that if it looks like a dire wolf, it is a dire wolf—each time they accomplish something they tout it as a huge advance towards real de-extinction. After all, they have to keep their rich investors and the public happy.
The latest Colossal announcement, which came through the mail, is that of their developing an artificial chicken eggshell. The problem is (see below the fold) that this has already been done by others some time ago. A further problem, of course, is that this is only a minor issue in the problem of putting dodo-like or moa-like embryo in an artificial egg. Here’s Colossal’s announcement, and note the emphasis on “de-extinction”:
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Here’s a breathy, chest-thumping video, accompanied by triumphant music, making it seem that the problem of de-extinction is on the way to being licked:
This is an achievement, of course, but to me it’s not a substantial step towards getting back moas and dodos. as it’s not that new.
And of course the press has picked it up, but this time they are careful to quote Colossal’s many critics as well as its chief propagandist, Ben Lamm. The Times of London talks about the eggshell as a step in resurrecting moas, using emus as surrogate moms. Click headline below to read:
Excerpts from The Times piece:
Colossal Biosciences, a Texan biotechnology firm, has developed a shell-less system it says is capable of supporting a bird embryo from early development through to the point of hatching.
So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.
. . . . So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.
. . .Eventually, the hope is that emu cells can be edited, introducing genetic changes that would make any resulting animal more moa-like. The hurdle then would be where to grow an embryo. According to Colossal, the eggs of the South Island giant moa were roughly eight times the volume of an emu’s. No living bird would be large enough to play mother to it.
This is where the artificial egg would come in. Colossal says the device could be scaled up, allowing embryos of much larger birds to develop in a controlled chamber. It claims this could remove the need for a living surrogate mother and make it possible to incubate embryos at sizes no modern bird can manage.
But they quote critics!
. . .Critics say such claims need careful handling. To recreate a mammoth, for instance, Colossal plans to alter the genetic code of an Asian elephant.
Even if that succeeds, sceptics argue the result would not truly be a mammoth, but an elephant engineered to have some mammoth-like traits, such as shaggy hair and extra fat reserves.
The same issues apply to the moa. The project, which is being backed by Sir Peter Jackson, the film director behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plans to compare ancient DNA from the extinct species with living relatives such as emus and tinamous to work out which genetic features helped make a moa a moa.
Well, there’s the rub! But Ben Lamm is always around to give the necessary donation-promoting optimism:
Ben Lamm, chief executive of Colossal, said: “Restoring species like the South Island giant moa isn’t just about reconstructing ancient genomes and editing [primordial germ cells, which eventually become sperm or eggs] — it requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists.”
He added: “It’s a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit.”
Again, I’m not saying that the artificial egg is not of any value. I’m just saying that insuperable problems remain with bringing back moas (or dodos).
Here’s a tweet that Matthew sent me, which called my attention to a New Scientist article that, mirabile dictu, strongly criticizes the de-extinction program as a whole:
Colossal says its "artificial egg" will help it bring back the moa, which had larger eggs than any living birds 🧪But it's really just an artificial eggshell, and even clingfilm will work – sort of – as an artificial eggshell. Plus there's the yolk problem…www.newscientist.com/article/2527…
— Michael Le Page (@mjflepage.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T12:19:10.242Z
The article at New Scientist can be found by clicking on the screenshot below, or finding it archived here:
A few Q&As from the piece:
Is this the first-ever artificial bird egg?
Colossal does use the term “artificial egg” in its press release, but it is really just an artificial eggshell. Either way, it isn’t a first – in fact, it’s possible to remove chicken eggs from their shells and hatch them from anything from plastic cups to cling film. However, the survival rate is usually low because, without an eggshell, the developing chicks may not get enough oxygen. A number of teams around the world have been working on more sophisticated so-called ex-ovo approaches.
How much better is it than cling film?
Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”
Colossal doesn’t publish much of the data that would enable scientists to see exactly what it did, which genes it used, and what the results are. Three more issues:
Does this mean we could create a giant artificial moa egg?
Even if Colossal’s approach does work well for chicken eggs, it won’t necessarily work for larger eggs. Larger eggs might need shells with different properties because of their lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, but this could probably be solved by tweaking the permeability of the membrane. Making a big egg also requires more than just a big eggshell. Moa eggs were up to 24 centimetres long and 18 cm wide, so they contained a lot more egg white and yolk than the eggs of living birds. Adding more egg white should be relatively straightforward. Chickens have been successfully hatched in the egg white from turkeys, says Novak, which suggests it won’t matter much what animal’s egg white is used.
How much better is it than cling film?
Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”
What about the extra yolk required?
That’s more of a problem. Each egg yolk is a single cell, meaning ostrich yolks are the largest single cells found on the planet. To make a yolk larger would require penetrating the cell membrane and injecting more yolk, says Novak, which would likely cause the cell to burst. So it might be necessary to somehow enlarge the cell membrane so it can hold the extra yolk. Which is probably doable, given enough time, effort and money.
And the $64,000 question (and answer):
If all the problems with making really big eggs are solved, could we then bring back the moa?
Absolutely not. The big problem is that DNA breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces over time, and all nine species of moa went extinct around 600 years ago. It’s never going to be possible to get a complete, working copy of a moa genome and produce a living animal genetically identical to any of the extinct species. Even the human genome wasn’t completed until 2023.
. . . . Is this what Colossal aims to do with the moa? [i.e., tweaking existing species with a few gene edits]
Colossal hasn’t revealed its plans, but based on what it did with grey wolves and “woolly mice”, its aim will likely be to tweak a few genes in the emu to create something a bit like the moa in appearance, even if that means making genetic changes not present in the moa genome. Five of the 20 gene edits made to the grey wolves were changes not found in the dire wolf genome, for instance. Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand doesn’t think Colossal is close to achieving even this for the moa. “The development of a genetically engineered emu and calling it a moa for no good conservation or ecological reason, but rather an ecotourism venture, is still a long way off,” says Rawlence. Nor is the idea of bringing back the moa universally welcomed, he says. “There is widespread Māori and public opposition in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
Grok agrees with all this when I asked it the question below:
From Grok:
Question I asked it: Will Colossal be able to bring the moa and the dodo, that is, “de-extinct” them?
No, not in the sense of resurrecting the exact extinct species—but Colossal Biosciences could plausibly create moa-like and dodo-like engineered proxy birds (genetically modified versions of living relatives) within the next 5–15 years, assuming continued progress. True de-extinction (reviving genetically identical copies of the original species) is not possible with current or foreseeable technology.
There’s more at New Scientist, but you can read it at the link or the archived link. I hope I’ve shown that Colossal is engaged in misleading the public (and I can’t help but think it knows this, since it de-emphasizes the “tweaking” part), and that you’ve learned some of the problems with its “de-extinction” claims.
Below the fold I’ve put Grok’s answer to my question about whether previous workers had reared chicken eggs using artificial “shells” previously. The answer is “yes,” though Colossal’s expensive shell is more sophisticated. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Grok’s answers, but of course it tells you how to investigate them.
h/t Pyers.
Click below to read more:
Continue reading “More on Colossal’s futile efforts to “de-extinct” ancient giant birds”
Egg-shaped frame: a lattice shell that gives the whole system its structure and protection.
Colossal membrane: the secret weapon. A bioengineered, gas-permeable layer that matches a real shell’s oxygen transfer, so O₂ flows in and CO₂ flows out exactly the way nature does it.
See-through build: the largely transparent design that lets us watch development in real time. This is critical for research and for de-extinction, where visually confirming milestones and the gene-edited traits we’ve put back is everything.
Modular scale: the platform will stretch to fit eggs of any size, including the South Island giant moa egg, roughly 80x the volume of a chicken egg.