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.
On a day that’s dolorous for many of us, let’s have some music. Here is a fantastic song by a fantastic band, featuring one of the greatest guitar solos in the history of rock: fifty short seconds of sublime inventiveness. The song is “Kid Charlemagne,” the band is of course Steely Dan, and the guitar solo is by Larry Carlton (b. 1948), a great studio musician who isn’t well known because he mostly backed up others. (I once saw him play as a solo act.)
Nearly all Steely Dan’s songs have opaque lyrics, but at least these lyrics were explained by the writers:
Writers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have stated that the lyrics of “Kid Charlemagne” were loosely inspired by the rise and fall of the San Francisco-based LSD chemist Owsley Stanley, augmented with other images of the counterculture of the 1960s:
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your Technicolor motor home
The first two lines draw on the fact that Owsley’s LSD was famed for its purity. The “Technicolor motor home” of the third line is likely a reference to Furthur, the Merry Pranksters‘ modified school bus; Stanley supplied them with LSD.
The final verse describes Stanley’s 1967 arrest after his car reportedly ran out of gas:
Clean this mess up else we’ll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get it all out of here
Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there’s gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are.
More from Wikipedia:
Larry Carlton’s guitar solo starts at 2:18 into the song and ends at 3:08. Pete Prown and HP Newquist described it as consisting of “twisted single-note phrases, bends, and vibrant melody lines”; they called it and Carlton’s “joyous, off-the-cuff break” during the song’s fade-out “breathtaking.” According to Rolling Stone, which ranked “Kid Charlemagne” at #80 in its list of the “100 Greatest Guitar Songs”: “In the late seventies, Steely Dan made records by using a revolving crew of great session musicians through take after take, which yielded endless jaw-dropping guitar solos. Larry Carlton’s multi-sectioned, cosmic-jazz lead in this cut may be the best of all: It’s so complex it’s a song in its own right.” In 2022, Far Out Magazine listed it as the fourth-greatest guitar solo on a Steely Dan song, calling Carlton’s playing “intense, fluid, and frequently on the brink of spinning out of control”.[10] Nick Hornby, in Songbook, spoke of the solo’s “extraordinary and dexterous exuberance”, though he questioned its relationship with the “dry ironies of the song’s lyrics”.[11]
“It’s my claim to fame,” Carlton told Guitar World in 1981. “I did maybe two hours worth of solos that we didn’t keep. Then I played the first half of the intro, which they loved, so they kept that. I punched in for the second half. So it was done in two parts and the solo that fades out in the end was done in one pass.”
. . . Carlton called his solo on “Kid Charlemagne” the high point of his career at the time, saying, “I can’t think of anything else that I still like to listen to as strongly as that.”
Carlton also plays the “outro” at the end.
Rick Beato’s third episode of his well know What Makes This Song Great series was an analysis of “Kid Charlemagne”, and you can hear it here. It’s a good one.
Listening to Steely Dan songs and reading comments, I see that many people think that Donald Fagen has a horrible voice. I disagree. Yes, it’s nasal, but I thinks it fits very well with their unusual songs.
The band, which included many studio musicians, is vastly underrated, and I wonder if today’s young people even listen to its music. It is sui generis and unmistakable: a melange of jazz, rock, and ballads. Some of my other favorites are “Dr. Wu,” “Dirty Work,” “Bad Sneakers” (totally opaque), and, of course, the song below,” which mentions my alma mater William & Mary—one of the few rock songs to mention a college or university (can you name two others?) Oh, and the guitar-rich stop time during the song is great.
This article, published in the Journal of Anatomy four years ago, was also highlighted in ScienceAlert this January 18, which is how Matthew Cobb found it. And although the results aren’t new, I find them interesting from an evolutionary point of view and sure didn’t know about them before. (I’m not sure why ScienceAlert chose to highlight them this week.)
The paper (and the shorter popular summary) describes an Australian study of a variable trait: an extra artery in the forearm and hands of humans called “the median artery”. It is present in fetuses, where it feeds the growing arm and hand, but regresses during development so that it’s not usually present in newborns. However, in a substantial number of cases—now about 30%—it remains as a functioning artery in adults. The paper describes a present study of the incidence of this “vestigial artery” in modern adult Australians, and compares this incidence with that seen in adults going back to the late 19th century. There has been a marked increase in persistence—threefold!—over that period. What we don’t know is why this is happening. It could be strong natural selection, an environmental change we don’t understand, or both.
You can see the paper by clicking on the title below, or download a pdf here.
First, here’s what the artery looks like in an adult (caption from the paper). I’ve put a red oval around the artery:
Median artery and superficial palmar arch (anterior dissection of the left lower forearm, wrist and hand) – Median artery accompanied the median nerve and completed the superficial palmar arch laterally.
Now although the artery feeds the arm and hand, we don’t know whether it actually benefits those who have it. The authors and ScienceAlert appear to favor natural selection as the reason for the increase over time, but we don’t know that. To know for sure, we’d have to do long-term studies of the reproductive output of individuals having the artery versus those lacking it, or perhaps genetic studies (see below). We don’t have that data and therefore cannot say anything about natural selection.
Further, perhaps its increased persistence into adulthood is due to some environmental effect. We have no data on that, either. All we can say, and we can’t even say that with a high degree of confidence, is that the percentage of adults having the artery seems to have increased drastically over time.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The authors dissected 78 arms of Australians aged from 51 to 101 years who died between 2015 and 2016, determining how many of them had the persisting median artery. Individuals were excluded who might have skewed the studies, including individuals with only the hands and not arms examined, people who had carpal tunnel syndrome (possibly caused by persistence of the artery), and examinations using angiography, which has a greater ability to detect arteries. Exactly a third of adults (33.3%) showed the artery.
The authors then went back and scoured the literature, using data on adults from 47 published papers going back to 1897. Using data from that arms in individuals who died at a known age, we have a dataset of individuals born from about 1846 to 1997—a span of roughly 150 years, or about 5 human generations. That’s a remarkably short span of time from an evolutionary viewpoint.
Nevertheless, they found a significant increase over this period of the proportion of individuals having a median artery nearly tripled—from about 10% to 30%. Here’s the most relevant graph plotting the percentage of individuals showing the artery as adults born between 1880 and 2000. (There’s considerable scatter because sample sizes at each date are small.). The authors gives a probability of less than 0.0001 that this temporal trend would be due to chance, so it’s highly statistically significant (they don’t specify whether they’re testing the regression coefficient or the correlation coefficient, but it doesn’t really matter with p values that low.
They also extrapolate this trend and say that one “could predict that the median artery will be present in 100% of individuals born in the year 2100 or later.” It will then no longer be a persisting fetal trait, but a trait that persists throughout life, and the persisting adult trait could no longer be seen as “vestigial”, like persisting wisdom teeth in some people.
The authors do suggest that environmental factors could play a role in this increase, but also that it could be due to natural selection. Such selection, to cause such a strong change in just a few generations, would have to be strong! The ScienceAlert article plays up the selection part, saying this:
“This increase could have resulted from mutations of genes involved in median artery development or health problems in mothers during pregnancy, or both actually,” said Lucas.
We might imagine having a persistent median artery could give dexterous fingers or strong forearms a dependable boost of blood long after we’re born. Yet having one also puts us at a greater risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, an uncomfortable condition that makes us less able to use our hands.
Nailing down the kinds of factors that play a major role in the processes selecting for a persistent median artery will require a lot more sleuthing.
Indeed, a TON of more sleuthing. What would be required to show selection would be either or both of two things:
1.) Show that, over a long period of time, individuals with median arteries as adults leave more offspring than individuals lacking these arteries. This is how the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948, showed that there appeared to be natural selection in women for reduced height, increased stoutness, reduced total cholesterol levels, and lower systolic blood pressure. Further, there appears to have been selection for women to produce their first child earlier and to reach menopause later. This is what I tell people who ask me, as they inevitably do when I lecture on human evolution, where our spercies is going. Not that exciting, is it? But of course the time span of such studies are necessarily limited.
2.) Find the genes responsible for the persistence of the artery and show, by population-genetic analysis, that those genes leading to persistence have been undergoing positive selection. This would be even harder because we have no idea what those genes are.
Absent those two types of studies, all we can say is that we have a putative case of evolution occurring over a short period of human evolution.
Caveats: The authors offer these caveats, and I have one more:
Limitations of the present study include the fact that the number of whole cadavers that were available for the study was not adequate. In addition, our search of the literature may have missed some publications not listed in Google Scholar. Finally, the definitions of ‘persistent median artery’ may have differed somewhat among the various published studies included in the present study.
Finally, as far as I can determine from looking at a few of the papers they cite in the older literature, the samples of arms came not just from Australia, but from other countries like Brazil and South Africa. Given that we know that at present populations from different places differ in the persistence of the artery, this could also throw some bias into the data. However, to create a time course this significant, I don’t think that using arms from different places could be the explanation, for it would require that arms from older people tended to come from places which had a lower incidence of the artery in general.
The video of Day 1 of our “Censorship in the Sciences” conference is up (and down below), and this baby is nearly seven hours long. Few people have the patience to listen to the first day’s sessions all at 0ne go, but I want to single out a few talks. The first is by Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, an excellent book. His talk begins at 12:01, outlines how knowledge acquisition should work, and is quite eloquent.
Later, the four-member panel on “Examples of Censorship” gives a good account of how ideology has led to suppression of science. Luana introduces it at 2:43:26 and Lawrence Krauss kicks it off at 2:44:45 via Zoom. His examples are numerous and disturbing—and not just from physics. He pulls no punches, and even calls out America’s National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the most prestigious honorary organization of scientists in the U.S. It so happened that the NAS President (Marcia McNutt) was in the audience, and heard Krauss call out her organization for identity-based choosing of candidates for a supposedly meritocratic society (see 2:55:45). As Krauss shows, the NAS even admitted this explicitly in a quote from an executive of the organization, and it’s widely admitted by Academy members themselves. (Note that at the end of her later talk, at 4:39:30, President McNutt denies this. accusing Krauss implicitly of ignorance, but her own organization’s stated policies belie her words.) Finally, Krauss gives evidence that both the NSF and DOE have likewise been captured by ideology in their funding of grants.
If you want to hear about how indigenous peoples are preventing anthropologists and forensic scientists from studying relics likes bones and objects used by Native Americans, Elizabeth Weiss’s short talk in that panel, beginning at 3:23:43, gives a good idea. She has a new book about these issues.
I heard all the talks, and some of the others engaged me as well, but I’ve just mentioned the ones I enjoyed the most.
Rauch’s opening speech highlighted surveys which found that almost half of Americans think that colleges have a negative effect on the country.
“It really is a crisis,” he said, adding a combination of factors are to blame, including students’ emotional fragility, the politicization of hiring, tenure and funding based on ideology, and a newer trend of academic journals refusing to publish findings that allegedly harm some communities.
On the issue of censorship of research publication, many speakers at the conference objected to the idea that claims about potential harm to vulnerable populations should be used as a reason to stop, force changes to, or retract research reports. Some raised the question of the harms that arise from alleged-harm-reduction censorship–that is, the harms that arise from stopping valuable research out of fear of harm
In response to a Saturday morning presentation by Nature editor Stavroula Kousta, journalist Jesse Singal, also a speaker at our event, published a critique of some the ideas presented.
Conference organizer and panelist Lee Jussim wrote about the conference (and whether we should just burn academia down).
Panel chair Abhishek Saha wrote up excellent Twitter threads (in real time!) detailing conference proceedings. Here is one on the first day of conference.
Today’s photos come from mathematician and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson of UC Davis, whose avocation is photographing California tide pools and their invertebrates. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
New year’s tidepool pictures from Dillon Beach in northern California, plus a few older photos. It’s not that much colder during the winter here- August can be freezing, December delightful. To see much in December you have to be willing to go out after dark, which is a little spooky, but has the advantage that you often get to see racoons foraging on the rocks. Sadly the only pictures I get of them look like two red dots (their eyes) on a black background.
As usual I got help with some of the IDs from people on inaturalist.
This is through a microscope, taken with my iphone. In the tidepools it appears as a small very pink blob stuck to a rock. These are hydroids, closely related to jellyfish, unlikely as that seems.
Kelp crab:
These crabs are one of the few things you should be cautious about in the tidepools here- they are reported to have a strong bite with their claws (I haven’t tested this), and they’re not shy.
The next four pictures are all nudibranchs. As you can see, their coloration is quite varied, but nevertheless they are all the same species. Keep this in mind for when we get to pictures 7,8 and 9.
Ok, the next two pictures are two distinct species of nudibranch. To my eye, the difference in coloration here is a bit more subtle than for the Triophas; H. crassicornis has white “stripes” on the frilly stuff on its back.
And the next picture is of these two local species of Hermissenda hanging out together. Not exactly in flagrante (nudibranchs spend an awful lot of their time mating and laying eggs), but still, looking pretty friendly. Maybe Jerry will chime in with some info on delimiting species? and how exactly it is done, for us non-experts. [JAC: two different forms copulating doesn’t resolve their species status!]
Hermissenda opalescens and Hermissenda crassicornis:
Clam siphons:
There is not enough appreciation of bivalves in the world, except as dinner, Their siphons can be lovely (I admit this may be in the eye of the beholder).
Welcome to a holiday Monday, January 20, 2025. It’s Martin Luther King Day, and I always put up a clip of his “I have a dream” speech of August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial at Washington, D.C. 250,000 people were there to hear him. It is the best piece of rhetoric of our era, and no doubt contributed to the civil rights laws of the ensuing years. Please listen to it (the sound is a bit out of synch with the visuals).
Oh, it’s also Inauguration Day; Trump becomes President. Ceiling Cat help us, every one. The Inauguration, scheduled to take place indoors because of the cold, will be at noon. Ceiling Cat give us the strength to stand the madness of the next four years, and to get the Democratic house in order.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 20 Wikipedia page.
Oh, and there’s a Google Doodle today honoring Martin Luther King Day (click on picture to see what it links to:
Finally, it’s Bill Maher’s 69th birthday, and reader Rick sent one of his quotes:
Maybe every other American movie shouldn’t be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.
-Bill Maher, comedian, actor, and writer (b. 20 Jan 1956)
Da Nooz:
*The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel began today, with three Israeli hostages released in return for 90 Palestinians, many of them convicted terrorists. To me, this is the beginning of the end of a war that Israel lost. I am of course delighted that the families got their relatives and loved ones back (though many families will just get bodies), but the disproportionality of the exchange, the demand that Israel flood their enemies with humanitarian aid (Hamas will get the lion’s share), and the fact that Hamas remains in control of Gaza are dispiriting. From the NYT: (archived here):
Three hostages were released from Gaza on Sunday and reunited with family members in Israel, the Israeli military said, as a long-awaited cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas went into effect. The truce prompted celebrations in Gaza, relief for families of Israeli captives and hope for an end to a devastating 15-month war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office identified the freed hostages as Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher. They were captured during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in Israel that set off the war. Israel was expected to release 90 Palestinian prisoners, all women or minors, later on Sunday in exchange for the hostages.
As the truce took effect on Sunday morning, joyful Palestinians honked car horns and blasted music in the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah, where celebratory gunfire rang out and children ran around in the streets.
And as Israeli officers said their forces had begun to withdraw from parts of Gaza, including two towns north of Gaza City, Hamas sought to signal that it was still standing and moving to reassert control, with masked gunmen parading through cities. The Hamas-run police force in Gaza, whose uniformed officers had all but disappeared from the streets to avoid Israeli attacks, said that it was deploying personnel across the territory to “preserve security and order,” according to the government media office.
Achieving the agreement on a delicate, multistage cease-fire required months of talks mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States. The start of an initial, six-week phase on Sunday was delayed by almost three hours, with Israel saying it had not formally received the names of the first three hostages to be released.
See this video with Einat Wilf, who should be Israel’s Prime Minister (thanks to a reader who posted this earliers but I can’t find it). I am not sure the war is really over, and hope that if it is, Hamas won’t be in charge of Gaza, but those two aims seem incompatible. I will just watch and wait, and hope that there are not a lot of dead hostages.
Here’s a video report on the hostage release, as well as a show of force by Hamas. One hostage appears to have lost two fingers, but the hugs and reunions make me tear up.
*Tik Tok was pretty much silenced in the U.S. yesterday, as the government didn’t want a Chinese company collecting information on American users, but Trump has decided to walk back that decision.
President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order on Monday to reinstate TikTok in the U.S. and that he wants the country to have an ownership position in the app.
Trump’s comments on Truth Social come after TikTok went dark in the U.S., erasing the popular app for its American users in an unprecedented move.
“I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!” Trump wrote Sunday. He said the order would extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that the administration can make a deal to protect our national security.
Trump said the order would “also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.” TikTok was seeking such an assurance from the Biden administration.
The president-elect said he wants the U.S. to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture, although he didn’t provide further details about how such a joint venture would be structured. “By doing this, we save TikTok,” he wrote.
The app started halting service Saturday night for 170 million users in its most important market shortly before a law took effect requiring it to shed its Chinese ownership or close in the U.S. It marked the first time the U.S. government has compelled the closure of such a widely used app, and disrupted millions of American businesses and social-media entrepreneurs who use TikTok to connect with customers and fans.
I can see the point of not allowing a quasi-enemy country collect information on Americans, so I wasn’t opposed to the darkening of Tik Tok. But if a foreign company owns, say 49% or 50% of the company, are they not allowed to get any information on users?
*All of us in Chicago have been warned multiple times about impending deportations of local immigrants as mandated by Trump. While I think he would enact all these deportations if he had the power, I have been skeptical about them for two reasons: Trump has made multiple promises (i.e., threats) before, as in the 2016 election, that he never followed through on. Second, to enact the kind of immigration changes he wants he would surely need Congressional approval, and that is not coming from the Senate, which, though controlled narrowly by the GOP, does not have enough Republicans to stop a filibuster. And indeed, the Chicago threats seem to have been dialed back:
President-elect Donald Trump’s handpicked “border czar” Tom Homan said in an interview Saturday that the incoming administration is reconsidering whether to launch immigration raids in Chicago next week after preliminary details leaked out in news reports.
Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The Washington Post that the new administration “hasn’t made a decision yet.”
“We’re looking at this leak and will make a decision based on this leak,” Homan said. “It’s unfortunate because anyone leaking law enforcement operations puts officers at greater risk.”
ICE has been planning a large operation in the Chicago area for next week that would start after Inauguration Day and would bring in additional officers to ramp up arrests, according to two current federal officials and a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal law enforcement planning.
Homan said he did not know why Chicago “became a focus of attention” and said the incoming administration’s enforcement goals are much broader than one city.
“ICE will start arresting public safety threats and national security threats on day one,” he said. “We’ll be arresting people across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines. Why Chicago was mentioned specifically, I don’t know.”
“This is nationwide thing,” he added. “We’re not sweeping neighborhoods. We have a targeted enforcement plan.”
I don’t believe that the “day one” arrests will occur, either. But one thing is for sure: if the Democrats want to get some governmental power back and start winning elections, they have to jettison their appearance of supporting an “open border” policy and start trying to get some bipartisan immigration reform. That, after all, was one of the two major concerns that got the Democrats defeated last November.
*I didn’t realize that black activist and nationalist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) had been convicted of a federal crime, but sure enough, he was convicted for selling shares in a ship he didn’t own (it was a “back to Africa” ship for his proposed “Black Star Line”). He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment but served two, with his sentence commuted by Calvin Coolidge on condition that Garvey be deported. Garvey moved to Jamaica, where he was born, and then moved to London in 1935, where he died five years later. Why I bring this up is that Garvey’s pan-Africanism has always fascinated me, and mainly because Biden has just given him a posthumous pardon:
President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”
It’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office Monday, will pardon people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.
Issuing preemptive pardons — for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration — would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.
Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.
The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.
Among those pardoned on Sunday were:
— Don Scott, who is the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in a chamber narrowly controlled by Democrats. He was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.
“I am deeply humbled to share that I have received a Presidential Pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 — one that changed the course of my life and taught me the true power of redemption,” Scott said in a statement.
—Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars. She has since become a prison reform activist. President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000.
—Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Delaware, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison. He studies and writes about gun violence prevention.
I don’t know of most of these people, and thus have no opinions of their pardons, but I certainly have no beef with the pardon of Marcus Garvey, though it does him little good now. Although his view of black separatism and movement back to Africa conflicts with the Civil Rights Movement of the Fifties and Sixties, he was certainly one of the first leaders to galvanize black people into the mindset that they were a group that had been treated unfairly and needed redress.
Here’s a very good six-minute short of Garvey’s life:
Beginning life during the development of Lynch’s cult TV show Twin Peaks, the director eventually pitched an idea for Mulholland Drive as a series in 1998. He was given a green light by US cable network ABC, which hoped to replicate the success of the director’s small-town mystery serial.
ABC was unimpressed with the first episode, which they considered slowly paced and drawn out – 37 minutes too long to fit into a conventional TV timeslot. They also objected to several things captured in the shoot, including an extreme close-up of dog excrement. In early 2000 Lynch managed to rescue the project by agreeing to turn Mulholland Drive into a feature film, equipped with a budget twice the original size.
One of several small, shady characters is the mysterious Mr Roque (Michael J Anderson) who appears to control Hollywood from a wheelchair in his shadowy office. One of the plotlines involves a hotshot director (Justin Theroux) who is bullied into casting a leading actress the powers that be want for his new picture, but he doesn’t.
Infusing Mulholland Drive with pointed, perhaps pessimistic commentary about market forces in Hollywood, but also cramming it full of beguiling images, Lynch created a very appealing package for critics. They could get lost in the dream-like ambience of it while being engaged in an intellectual exercise deeply critical of the commercial realities of filmmaking: a sort of backhanded valentine to Tinsel Town.
In a discussion about the best critically received film so far in the new century, perhaps insights can be gained by comparisons to the best critically received film of the previous one. The title that repeatedly arrives at or near the top of the list is Citizen Kane, writer/director Orson Welles’ esteemed 1941 feature film debut – BBC Culture’s 2015 critics poll of the 100 greatest American films put Kane at number one.
If Kane can be viewed as an essay on the nuts and bolts of film-making – a masterclass in technical processes, from montage to deep focus, dissolves and the manipulation of mise en scène – Mulholland Drive’s appeal is more thematic and conceptual. It is less a demonstration of how great cinema is achieved than what great cinema can achieve, its capacity for ideas seemingly endless.
HOWEVER, this film is only #11 on the Guardian’s list of the best 100 films of the 21st century, with the top five, from top to lower, being “There Will Be Blood,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Boyhood,” “Under the Skin”, and “In the Mood for Love.” I’ve seen #1, #2, and #5, and it’s been years since I’ve seen “Mulholland Drive,” which is certainly a great film. I’d have to see it again to compare it to the Guardian’s list, especially “There Will Be Blood,” but let me put a nod in for the Japanese animation “Spirited Away,” which is surely the best animation I’ve seen in the 21st century.
The trailer from Mulholland Drive (whatever happened to Laura Harring?):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej moved to give Hili his chair! This is a rare event!
Oh, sure, the Islamic Republic of Iran is totally harmless. I mean, a regime that chants ‘Death to America’ like it’s their national anthem, funds terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas and The Houthis
as if it’s a charity drive, and sends hitmen with AK-47s to kill women like me on… https://t.co/wi7ZepprjQ
From Luana. I was a big fan of the ERA and lobbied for it. But it didn’t go through, and Biden can’t short-circuit democracy now to push it through.
People laugh at this misfire from Biden in ‘declaring’ the Equal Rights Amendment as US law. But the tactic of pushing through law changes without the democratic consent of the people is a common strategy used by Democrats, and it can succeed.
From Simon; I thought the only joke you could make on this would be “an in-bread gull”. But wait! There are more!
"What happened?""I’m stuck. It's so embarrassing."“I guess things went… a-rye?”“Please do shut up.”"You should get out of the sun.""Why?""Otherwise, you'll be toast.""You're an asshole, Charlie."“You’re right, you deserve butter.”
Here is a live video of a group of Israelis watching the release of three of the hostages, Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, captured during the October 7 massacre. They are all young women, and of course they are alive. We know that some families will be getting their relatives in boxes, which is ineffably sad, but today we can rejoice at this reunion of the living.
The released:
(From the NYT): Undated handout photographs from the Hostages Families Forum Headquarters of the freed hostages Romi Gonen, left, Emily Damari, center, and Doron Steinbrecher.Credit…The Hostages Families Forum
This will be the next-to-last item I write about my entanglement with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)—I hope.
I am pretty sure that the joint statement below resulted from the fracas that ensued after the FFRF took down my post about biological sex, followed by my resignation and those of Richard Dawkins and Steve Pinker—all of us members of the FFRF’s Honorary Board. This censorship didn’t look good, and although some blogging miscreants defended the FFRF’s claim that what I wrote was “harmful”, the real press didn’t make the FFRF’s censorship look so good. Further, the organization then simply dissolved its entire honorary board of 15 remaining members. The FFRF’s announcement of that, below, actually comes from an Intelligent Design site run by the Discovery Institute:
Here’s the announcement from the FFRF site (archived here as well); rectangle is mine:
and from the Intelligent Design site Mind Matters:
They really need some competent people to run their website, even more so because there’s still a page listing the entire Honorary Board. Oy! I suspect the “Mind Matters” citation will be removed within a day or so. (This reminds me of the “”cdesign proponentsists” vestigial wording found by Barbara Forrest and revealed during the Dover Trial as evidence that “Intelligent Design” was simply a recasting of creationism.)
At any rate, the FFRF got together with 16 other humanist organizations to issue a joint statement that is below, and which you can find here . The words are indented below the headline. I have bolded three passages.
As the 119th Congress and state legislative sessions begin across the nation — and the incoming Trump-Vance administration prepares to take office — the extreme White Christian nationalist movement and their politician enablers have made it clear that LGBTQ-plus Americans, particularly trans people, will be singled out for discrimination, exclusion and attacks in 2025. Indeed, this dangerous movement has made anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies a cornerstone of their agenda.
As organizations committed to protecting the separation of government and religion, as well as universal human and civil rights threatened by the White Christian nationalist ideology, the undersigned organizations reaffirm our commitment to forcefully advocate for the rights of LGBTQ-plus Americans, create inclusive and welcoming communities, represent the interests of our diverse constituents, and act in accordance with our values.
We will not permit religious extremists to foment a moral panic, encourage harassment or violence, and enact dangerous policies that seek to force LGBTQ-plus Americans generally — and trans Americans in particular — out of public life and out of existence. Nor will we sit silently or ignore when the talking points, misinformation and outright fabrications of anti-LGBTQ-plus extremists are laundered and given a veneer of legitimacy or acceptability by those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science.
In just the past year, we have seen book bans forcing libraries and schools to remove materials that even mention LGBTQ-plus characters; bathroom bans and “bounty” laws that threaten harassing lawsuits or even criminal prosecution against trans Americans simply for using the restroom; religious refusal laws allowing medical providers to deny treatment; outright bans on a range of medical care for gender dysphoria, substituting the judgement of state governments for that of patients, parents, and physicians; and even investigations threatening to remove trans and gender nonconforming children from their families. More of the same is coming in 2025.
For the more than 1.5 million trans Americans, this is the reality they are forced to live every day. It is not merely some academic debate.
These unworkable, ill-conceived and plainly discriminatory laws and policies are about one thing: forcing a regressive, largely religious view of gender norms onto the American people. They are “solutions” in search of a problem that simply doesn’t exist. Instead, the extremists advocating for these actions intend to send a clear message that trans Americans are not worthy of dignity or respect — and their cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric only confirms that intention. We cannot and will not ignore such bigotry, no matter its source.
Instead, we stand with our trans members, supporters, and constituents. We will continue to advocate for policies that protect the civil and human rights of every community that comes under threat from the White Christian nationalist ideology. And we will ensure that the inherent dignity and worth of all people is respected within our community and beyond.
American Atheists
Nick Fish
President American Humanist Association
Fish Stark
Executive Director Association of Secular Elected Officials
Leonard Presberg
President Black Nonbelievers
Mandisa Thomas
President Camp Quest
Alyssa Fuller
Executive Director The Clergy Project
Duane Grady
President Freedom From Religion Foundation
Dan Barker & Annie Laurie Gaylor
Co-Presidents Freethought Society
Margaret Downey
President Hispanic American Freethinkers
David Tamayo
President Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers
Jason Torpy
President Recovering From Religion
Gayle Jordan
Executive Director Secular Student Alliance
Kevin Bolling
Executive Director Secular Coalition for America
Steven Emmert
Executive Director Secular Woman
Monette Richards
President Society for Humanistic Judaism
Paul Golin
Executive Director Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association
Leika Lewis-Cornwell
President
Now I largely agree with this statement! As I have made clear many times, I think that LGBTQ+ individuals deserve exactly the same rights and dignity afforded to everyone else, save for a few areas in which the rights of such people (mostly of the “T” persuasion rather than the other letters) clash with the rights of other groups. But singling out these few areas (like sports or hormones given to children) gets one called a “transphobe”. So be it. I am not sure whether the organizations above approve of things like infusing children with hormones, proselytizing them with “affirmative” therapy, or allowing a biological male who self-identifies as a woman to compete in women’s athletics. If they wouldn’t, then we largely agree! But they don’t tell us.
Further, it is not just “White Christian Nationalists” who are wary of giving unlimited rights to trans people. A new NYT poll, summarized here, shows that the American public in general has pushed back against the two trans rights I mentioned above. Here’s a summary of the NYT data, divided by political affiliation. As you see nearly 80% of Americans, including 67% of Democrats, don’t think that trans female athletes should be able to compete in women’s sports. These are clearly not all “White Christian Nationalists”! For these people, as for me, the views on sports reflect a simple concern of fairness for women. And the concerns about drugs and hormone therapy on minors comes from the fact that we don’t know the long-term effects of these drugs plus people should be of a certain age (I think about 18 or 21) before they can decide whether to take hormone therapy or surgery to assume some secondary traits of their non-natal sex. There are, after all, permanent effects of such treatment that require a certain maturity to grasp and understand.
As for “White Christian Nationalists,” well, I suspect that many people of color share the attitudes given in the tables above. Where does the “White” come from? Are there no Christian Nationalists of Color? And, of course, neither I nor, I suspect, most of the Democrats (or even Republicans) mentioned above, are Christian Nationalists. In fact, as far as I see, their views seem to me to be based on ethics, not religion! But it is in the interest of humanist organizations to blame religion for every ideological or ethical view they don’t like, as it keeps the members and money flowing in.
Finally, I have no doubt about one thing: the statement below was aimed at me, Steve Pinker, and Richard Dawkins:
Nor will we sit silently or ignore when the talking points, misinformation and outright fabrications of anti-LGBTQ-plus extremists are laundered and given a veneer of legitimacy or acceptability by those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science.
I stand by my “talking points”, affirm that sex in humans is binary, and reject assertions that “a woman is whoever she says she is.” If that is not misinformation, then I’m a monkey’s uncle (actually, I’m a monkey’s relative).
As one reader emailed me, and I quote with permission:
[The FFRF] apparently canvassed other humanist/atheist organizations and got them to endorse the statement as well, though I’d guess at least some those organizations viewed it as a boilerplate expression of support for those communities and weren’t aware of FFRF’s larger agenda.
This is a textbook and quite literal case of “virtue signalling” — a full-throated declaration that they are the virtuous ones, complete with a strenuous denunciation of heretics to demonstrate that virtue. It’s incredible, and incredibly disappointing to see this level of ideological and (frankly) religious capture within the allegedly-secular community.
Now I don’t know if the FFRF instigated this group statement, but, as I said, I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have been issued had I not written my short essay (archived here) that was taken down after a day by the FFRF.
Now, onto what seems to be one of the few remaining secular/skeptical organizations that remains sensible: the Center for Inquiry. Click to read. It was written by Robyn Blumner, the President and CEO
The text:
January 17, 2025
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) stands for reason, science, and secularism and has been doing so for nearly fifty years.
We are often the speakers of inconvenient truths: There is no evidence that you will see your departed loved one in a place called heaven. There is no evidence that a loving god is answering your prayers. Ancient indigenous medicine is not on a par with western medicine. GMO crops are not harmful per se and can be hugely beneficial.
Lately, there has been a disagreement among secular groups with regard to transgender activism. As disagreements go, this one is rather narrow, though it has been made to seem gigantic.
Biological science indicates there are two biological sexes, a fact consistent throughout the animal world of which humans are a part. There is also a more fluid concept of gender that allows for a more complex picture of human sexuality. Both things can be true at the same time. There can be two biological sexes and multiple gender identities. And when public policy is enacted, it should be sensitive to the former as well as the latter.
This appears to be an inconvenient truth in light of the response by some secular groups.
Some secular groups are taking the position that any discussion of biological facts is transphobic and a denial of civil and human rights. They posit that giving reasons for understanding the natural world as a place divided into biological male and female members of species isn’t just a scientific discussion but a cover for full-on Christian nationalism.
CFI is opposed to Christian nationalism in all its guises. And to the extent Christian nationalists have used transgender issues to gin up outrage and make gains politically for their agenda of injecting religion into public policy, we are opposed.
None of that changes biological facts or the complexities of the issues involved. Good people of good will should be willing to grapple with these complexities without imputing bad motives for divergent views.
For instance, if there is a medical clinical trial for women to determine if a medication has a different impact on women than men, should transgender women participate? If transgender women are to be considered the same as natal women, the answer is “yes” they should participate. However, science suggests otherwise, because they are not biologically the same.
Saying as much doesn’t make you a tool of Christian nationalism.
There are other places where the biology of sex has a significant role to play. In sports, for instance. Once male puberty has occurred, it is no longer fair physiologically for whoever has benefited from it to compete in almost any category of women’s sports. At least that is what the science and evidence demonstrate.
One of the most contested areas involves transitioning minors before they reach the age of majority. In light of the latest research and actions by several European countries that have stepped back from such medical interventions, the way “gender-affirming care” is practiced in the United States is no longer universally accepted as the most beneficial approach. There are increasing numbers of detransitioners, whether transgender activists want to believe it or not, and those stories can be just as heartbreaking as the stories of transgender-identifying children seeking medical intervention.
To elide past these complex issues and claim that only one side involves civil and human rights is simply wrong. Natal women athletes have civil rights as well. Children have human rights that include not having permanent disabling surgeries before they truly understand the consequences.
Those who think these and other areas are open to rational, scientific, evidence-based debate are not laundering the fabrications of Christian nationalists as has been charged. They are recognizing that these are not simple matters of right and wrong and that the full panoply of interests at stake should be considered.
But if the conversation is over before it even begins, if any crack of daylight between one’s point of view and that of the most extreme transgender activist is considered hateful bigotry and shall not be uttered without fear of cancellation, then that is a place where reason and science have disappeared and all that remains is vitriol, anger, and self-righteousness.
That won’t happen at CFI.
CFI will continue to promote the separation of church and state, the rights of nonbelievers here and around the world, and the end of pseudoscience wherever it arises. And we strongly disagree with people or groups who think discussion is dangerous, biology is bigotry, and science is Christian nationalism in disguise.
Robyn E. Blumner,
CEO and President, Center for Inquiry
Executive Director, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science
This is eminently rational, and I have nothing to add to it. But I have to repeat this part, which I especially like:
But if the conversation is over before it even begins, if any crack of daylight between one’s point of view and that of the most extreme transgender activist is considered hateful bigotry and shall not be uttered without fear of cancellation, then that is a place where reason and science have disappeared and all that remains is vitriol, anger, and self-righteousness.
That won’t happen at CFI.
No, it won’t happen at CFI—not as long as they steer the course that Robyn describes.
While I continue to admire the work that the FFRF does in keeping church and state separate, I will no longer support them financially given their new ideology and behavior. Instead, my donations will go to the Center for Inquiry as the sole secular/skeptical organization I support. If you have rescinded membership in the FFRF, I would suggest that you simply give that money to the CFI, which will need it since it may lose some donors over this fracas.
