Polynesian navigation and Indigenous “ways of knowing”

October 30, 2026 • 9:30 am

One of the most-cited empirical achievements of indigenous peoples is the ability of Polynesians, Melanesians, and Micronesians to navigate their way across vast, unmarked expanses of the Pacific Ocean to get to small, uninhabited islands. How did they do it? And, regardless of their navigational methods, how many attempted voyages failed, with the navigators and their human cargo perishing?  We’ll never know because there was no way to keep records.

One could think of the process of developing the techniques of cross-Pacific navigation as a form of natural selection on cultural variation, with the methods being refined incrementally because navigators who were successful survived to pass on their techniques. Over time, navigation would become increasingly refined and successful, though, even when “perfected,” people would still fail and die.

Finally, how did they know there were unihabited islands to go to, and where, roughly, they were? How, for example, did they get to Hawaii?

An article by science writer Patrick Whittle in Quillette, which you can access below or read part of it in this archived version, says that the methods of Pacific way-finding were uncovered by New Zealand physician and adventurer David Lewis by interviewing the few older Pacific people who recalled navigational techiques. His results were summarized in the 1972 book We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific.

Click on the cover image to go to the Amazon site:

I really need to read this book since the history and methods of long-distance voyaging have always fascinated and puzzled me. My most pressing question is “How did the navigators know where they were going; that is, how did they know there were nice uninhabited islands out there, and where they were?” I discovered that our library has this book (the second edition) and I’ve just requested it be pulled so I can pick it up.

Click below to read Whittle’s piece in Quillette (if you have a subscription)

The point of Whittle’s article, though, is not navigation: it’s whether the methods of navigation qualify as indigenous “ways of knowing,” and how this relates to modern science. This is a topic we’ve debated at length, and I have to say that Whittle comes to a fairly sensible conclusion, one that I wouldn’t deny. And that is this: indigenous ways of knowing that have an empirical basis, like navigation, can sit side by side with modern science, and can be taken as science insofar as they express empirical “truths” (in this case, a set of methods that with some reliability can get you from island to island). But, says Whittle, indigenous knowledge like this oten comes with a cultural overlay: stuff like taboos, spiritual interpretations, and so on. Here’s Whittle’s thesis:

Across the Anglosphere, traditional Indigenous knowledge systems are increasingly being discussed not simply as accumulated practical expertise, but as distinct “ways of knowing”—often described as holistic and relational, and as inseparable from ancestry, place and lived experience, rather than, like modern science, a detached body of objective knowledge. These ideas form part of a wider movement to “decolonise” knowledge by challenging the historical dominance of Western intellectual traditions. In New Zealand, for example—the largest landmass settled by ancient Pacific sailors—the incorporation of Mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) into the school curriculum has prompted fierce debate about the relationship between traditional knowledge and empirical science. At stake is not merely cultural authority, but whether different knowledge traditions should be judged by the same standards, and even what it means for something to count as knowledge in the first place.

In my view, the spiritual overlay belongs in the realm of anthropology and sociology, while the empirically true and replicable kernel of knowledge should be incorporated into modern science. That is not the argument Whittle mentions, though. The “fierce” argument, as in New Zealand, is whether the whole panoply of “ways of knowing”, including their spiritual, religious, cultural, and ideological components, should be taught as coequal to modern science, as in the entire worldview of Mātauranga Māori  (“MM”; see my many posts on this subject here). It has been proposed that the whole gemisch of MM should be taught in New Zealand university classes, though I think that scheme is dead.

There are, however, two distinctions between modern science and indigenous “knowledge”. The first, which Whittle doesn’t mention, is that indigenous “knowledge’ is often scientifically wrong, but is retained anyway. One example is the NZ government-funded project to stem the fungal blight destroying kauri trees by dousing the trees with whale oil and playing whale songs to them. This is based on a Māori myth that kauri trees (Agathis australis) and whales were once related (brothers) in ancient times, but whales were sent to the sea. As the story goes, playing whale songs to the trees and dousing them with whale oil will enable whales to cure their landlocked and afflicted brothers.

This is palpable nonsense, of course, and though it’s part of the Mātauranga Māori “way of knowing,” there’s no scientific basis to pursue this project, and the Kiwi government is wasting its money by funding it.

Further, a huge part of indigenous “ways of knowing” involve spiritual and herbal cures for diseases, most of which have not been tested in modern scientific ways to see if they’re effective. Thus, any untested claims are not “modern science” in any sense, but hypotheses.

Second, the fundamental methods of establishing indigenous knowledge and modern science differ, with the former involving trial and error (as in navigation) and the latter involving hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, toosl like statistics and blind testing, and establishing universal truths.  A lot of indigenous knowledge is locality specific, like “here is how we create mussel beds in New Zealand.” That still counts as knowledge, but is not universal in the modern scientific sense. And the religious, teleological, spiritual, and mystical overtones of indigenous ways of knowing do not belong to modern science.

Like the seven Auckland Unversity professors who started off this controversy in 2021 with a letter in The Listener, I think that indigenous knowledge systems as a whole should be taught in anthropology and sociology classes, not in science classes, though the empirically true kernel of knowledge in such systems can fit into science class. (But I have to add that that kernel is tiny compared with the huge ambit of modern chemistry, physics, and biology.) So I don’t take much issue with Whittle’s conclusion:

Ironically, in trying to escape the seeming Western hegemony over what counts as “knowledge,” scholars sometimes simply replace one highly abstract category with another—Indigenous “ways of knowing”—that perhaps tells us more about contemporary academia than about the historical traditions it purports to describe. In reality, traditional practitioners like Lewis’s ancient mariners were not extraordinary masters of esoteric knowledge; they were ordinary human beings who had mastered the extraordinary capacities of cumulative culture.

Ultimately, when we clear away the institutional power dynamics and the culture war crossfire, a simple principle emerges: Indigenous knowledge deserves neither romanticisation nor dismissal. These traditions should be studied seriously, criticised where necessary, and appreciated for what they truly are—not timeless, inaccessible mysteries, but a vital part of humanity’s shared and evolving intellectual inheritance.

Who could disagree with that? But what we can dismiss are myths and religious stories like the actual brotherhood of kauri trees and whales.  That story has about as much credibility as saying the Moon is made of cheese; neither is science and neither deserves serious study since there is no substantive basis for the hypotheses.

This still leaves me with the mysteries about navigation discussed above. Apparently Lewis, in his studies, discovered that the navigators had a completely (to us) non-intuitive system of wayfinding, described like this:

For example, [Lewis] was initially baffled by the concept of etak, or “moving island.” As he came to realise, however, the old navigators weren’t treating the canoe as travelling across a static ocean; rather, they were seeing their vessel as fixed beneath the stars, with the islands and the sea moving past it (much as passengers on a moving train might imagine the landscape sliding backwards while they themselves remain stationary). To keep track of progress, therefore, the navigator would visualise a reference island off to one side—the etak—that would drift backwards under successive stars on the horizon. By noting which star this island was under at a given time, the navigator could work out how far the canoe had travelled and where it lay along its route. What at first appeared mystifying to Lewis gradually revealed itself as an ingenious mental framework—a “polydimensional system,” as he called it—for organising spatial information without maps or instruments.

I still don’t understand how the concept of a “moving island” would work, since it requires reference islands nearby, and often there weren’t any.  Further, the crucial question of “how often did this system work rather than fail?” must remain unanswered, as we lack the necessary data. Thus, even with the amazing navigation of the Pacific, we don’t have a scientific answer to a crucial question: was the system infallible or not, and if not, how fallible was it?

I’m just going to have to read Lewis’s book. There’s a fair amount of information about ancient navigation methods (use of the sun, birds, and so on) in the Wikipedia article on Polynesian navigation, including their use of double-hulled canoes:

 Polynesians made contact with nearly every island within the vast Polynesian Triangle, using outrigger canoes or double-hulled canoes. The double-hulled canoes were two large hulls, equal in length, and lashed side by side. The space between the paralleled canoes allowed for storage of food, hunting materials, and nets when embarking on long voyages

Here’s a modern replica of one, labeled, “Hōkūleʻa, a fibreglass-hulled replica of a Hawaiian double-hulled canoe sailing off Honolulu, 2009″:

Posted to Flickr, uploaded to Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 using Flickr upload bot on 27 September 2010, 07:17 by Kahuroa.

Friday: Hili dialogue

October 30, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of the work week and the penultimate day of the month: Friday, October 30, 2026, the day before Halloween, and National Buy a Doughnut Day (note that it says nothing about eating them. But here’s a special doughnut I bought in 2005, along with 0thers for the lab. It’s a “Big Dat,” a monster creation of Dat Donuts near the University of Chicago. The websote calls it a “colossal shareable treat,” but of course I ate the whole thing.

It’s also National Breadstick Day, Pumpkin Bread Day, National Candy Corn Day (celebrating the world’s absolute worst candy, made of wax, sugar, and petroleum byproducts), and World Lemur Day.

Here’s a mother ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) and her baby photographed in 2006 at the Duke Lemur Canter:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This is amazing: the NYT broke a story that could cost the Democrats a Senate seat from Alaska. We all know that the Republicans are running two candidates with the same name: Dan Sullivan. Trump was furious about that as in this election, Alaska is a swing state, and Trump threatened to have the DOJ file charges if Republicans lost. Now, from a NYT exclusive exposé, we know that the faux Dan Sullivan, the ringer, was ginned up by the staff of the Democratic candidate, Mary Petola, who was apparently aware of this effort and said did about it. I’ve given a bit longer excerpt than usual, and bolding is mine.

In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.

The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.

This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.

The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.

The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy. But The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.

The endeavor, which was internally called the ballot composition project, involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.

It also involved the Peltola campaign’s lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in Senate races across the country. From Washington to Anchorage, those advisers participated in regular conversations about the effort and even considered forming a new political party to draw conservatives onto the ballot.

Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.

“Alaskan voters need to know,” said Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired amid a staff shake-up in August, and agreed to a series of interviews with The Times since then. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”

Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the project, Ms. Rios said, but she was “definitely aware.”

The operation had impact. On Tuesday, Ms. Peltola will be the only Democrat on the ballot, facing off against the two Mr. Sullivans and a long-shot candidate named Gerald Heikes who was also recruited into the race, according to The Times’s reporting. Polls give Ms. Peltola a strong chance of winning.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win.

Granted, the real incumbent Republican is on the ballot as “Sullivan, Dan S., Republican (incumbent)”, while the faux Sullivan is on as “Sullivan, Daniel J., Jr.”, but you can see how some voters might be confused. Rios tried to retract her comments by asking the NYT, but they didn’t have to, and didn’t do so.  This is Democrats playing dirty pool, something I’m not used to compared to Republicans, and if Poltola tried to win by this method, well, she doesn’t deserve to win. I don’t know what will happen with Trump’s lawsuit if she does win.

*There’s also an article about this by the editors of the Free Press (the first “editors-authored” piece I’ve seen, called “Democrats subvert democracy to save it.”

In the race to the bottom that is American elections, there is officially no high ground left to stand on. Democrats are demanding that voters elect them to save democracy, which they insist is threatened by President Donald Trump’s desire to meddle with the midterms. Now Americans will learn whether they meant any of it based on how they respond to brazen election meddling by one of their own.

The FP then describes the details of the NYT article given above.

. . . The false-flag candidacy was made possible by Alaska’s open primary, in which candidates can run under whichever party they’re registered with, and the top four finishers advance to the general election. The organizers of the scheme were not only determined to win at any cost but were also amused by their own craftiness and contemptuous of the voters they were hoping to trick. “Peltola advisers seemed to make fun of voters while watching a focus group, surmising the participants would be susceptible to being tricked into voting for a ballot spoiler,” the Times report says.

The DSCC denied any connection to Decoy Dan’s campaign in the wake of the news, while the Peltola campaign and Democratic leaders have largely remained silent. But as reporters continue to press them, they will have to account for what looks like a straightforward attempt to subvert democracy.

. . . The report also shines a new light on a Trump administration lawsuit regarding the Senate race. The Justice Department sued Alaska on Friday, seeking to delay certification of the result if the challenger Sullivan draws enough votes to swing it from the incumbent to Peltola. As our colleague Jed Rubenfeld noted, the suit was launched on a flawed legal basis and likely won’t hold up in court. Yet the basic premise of the challenge has now been vindicated. While a state court in Alaska previously declined to remove Decoy Dan from the ballot because his motive for running couldn’t be proved, the Times report makes clear that he was running in bad faith, which state law should preclude.

The news also reframes the outrage Democrats expressed in reaction to the Justice suit. “This is clearly corruption,” Peltola said in an interview. “This is clearly a very desperate attempt to cling to power, using his allies in Washington, D.C., to rig the system even further.” With full knowledge of her own campaign’s scheme, she was bold enough to accuse Trump of meddling in the midterms. Other Democrats may not have had the full picture, but one after another suspended their disbelief in the likelihood of a second Dan Sullivan joining the race on his own. “This is an outrage. It shows they know they’re going to lose. We will fight tooth and nail. And we will win,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in response to the lawsuit. A better reaction to the unlikely coincidence of two Sullivans may have been to privately lean on Peltola’s campaign for answers, or at least decline to comment while the facts take shape.

Ironically, the Times shares a piece of the blame for hyping the Trump election-meddling angle. Days before its report that showed Peltola’s role in the campaign deceit, it ran a headline saying “Justice Department Seeks to Block Alaska Vote if Republican Loses,” making it seem as though Trump sought to throw out the result rather than merely verify whether the second Sullivan was a legitimate candidate.

It’s become a familiar pattern. Trump and many of his allies earned their reputation for dishonesty after a failed campaign to overturn elections in 2020, yet ever since, Democrats have sought to cast themselves as saviors of democracy, hoping voters will forget their many attempts to subvert public choice. That includes suppressing stories about Hunter Biden and conjuring flimsy indictments to discredit Trump. The tale of two Sullivans is only the latest example, and a reminder that there was never any high ground to begin with.

This saddens me for reasons given above. I would like to think that Democrats do have the high ground. In general I think they do, especially given Trump, but even one screw-up like this is bad.

*The Guardian describes the burgeoning of scam offers to authors and filmmakers (h/t Peter). The authors, Snigdha Poonam, wrote a book about India and was inundated with scamss.

Why would a hyperlocal life-drawing community in Seattle be interested in a nonfiction book about the shifting aspirations of young people in India’s small towns? The book was published seven years ago. What did they want from me?

I accepted the invitation. The next email had a slick poster promoting the Zoom event, with the book cover as the backdrop and blurbs from the Economist and other publications. My attention was drawn to something more intriguing: a request for a “contribution fee”, with no amount specified. It would cover promotion, coordination and administration. But, oddly, this email didn’t come from Timothy. Signing off this time was Stephen – “Organiser, Community Improv LA”, which was another group in another city. According to the improv community’s Facebook group, Stephen is indeed the name of the organiser. However, Stephen had written to me using Timothy’s email address. To add to the chaos, Stephen/Timothy had also left what I suspect was an AI prompt in the email, which included the line: “MAKE IT MORE PROFESSIONAL.”

This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?

Had these individuals actually read my work, they would have wanted to stay away from me. I have spent the last 10 years reporting on transnational fraud. My first book, Dreamers, closed with a chapter on fake call centres in India; my second, Scamlands, travelled to other low-income countries in Asia to portray an invisible empire that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust.

Along the way, I met and interviewed the scammers whose labour keeps this empire running. For some, fraud was a route to upward mobility; for others, an act of revenge against the privileged. Though I have formally emerged from this underworld, I can never delete a scam email without wanting to know more.

I agreed to pay the book club – but after rather than before the event. After clarifying that “Stephen” was a typing error, “Timothy” sent me a Google Meet link for the book discussion. I joined the meeting to find about 20 people already in there: Alexander, Andrew, Mira, Rajnish, another Alexander, and several others. Timothy was also there and so was Stephen. None of them had their cameras on. Going by the profile pictures they used, most of them appeared to be white.

. . .I am not the only author to have found myself stuck in a Zoom book club with fake readers. Countless writers with published books have been receiving invitations from reading communities that start to unravel after a basic Google search.

As often happens with scams, most invitations sound too good to be true – thousands of members, incredible Goodreads clout and, at times, something even more alluring for an author: a deep understanding of their book.

Many authors spot red flags from the first email onward, but not all.

I guess this is a worldwide scam, or at least one directed at Anglophones.  The “contribution fee” is the way these organizations make money. At any rate, authors should publicize who and where these scams come from so that people can Google these offers (all of them seem to be fake). This one was from Timothy Firth, organiser of a Seattle-based life-drawing community called CAM Life Drawing.  There should be an “s” before the first word.

*Reader Reese called my attention to an ars TECHNICA article about how the execrable RFK Jr. has, against FDA advice, allowed six dubious peptide drugs to be sold in pharmacies.

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration.

The peptides are popular among members of Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, and many prominent MAHA figures and Kennedy allies sell them. Kennedy said he uses some of the peptides and called himself a “big fan.” But FDA scientists continue to say there is insufficient evidence to show if they’re effective, and they are potentially dangerous. In 2023, the safety concerns led the FDA to remove the six peptides from a list of drugs that can be made by specialty pharmacies called compounding pharmacies—which make customized formulations of drugs for patients, or, in cases such as this, specialty drugs in bulk.

Kennedy’s new rule sidesteps the need to formally undo that FDA action. The rule is titled “Enforcement Discretion Policy Regarding 503A Compounding Using Certain Peptide Bulk Drug Substances” and was made available Wednesday on the Federal Register, with the final publication date set for October 30. The rule does not change the regulatory status of the peptide; instead, it states the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer take enforcement action against compounding pharmacies for making the peptides, essentially giving them a green light to freely produce and sell them. Kennedy had quietly proposed this rule earlier this month.

. . .Along with the notice in the Federal Register, HHS also posted a more detailed explanation of the policy today that includes more of Kennedy’s rationale for easing enforcement of the six select peptides, which are: BPC-157, Epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax, and TB-500.

One reason cited for all the peptides was that an FDA advisory panel voted in July to add these six peptides back to the list of drugs compound pharmacies can make. However, prior to the vote, Kennedy stacked that 12-member committee with eight new members. At least six of Kennedy’s additions have ties to peptide-related businesses and clinics, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.

Another explanation for allowing the peptides is that the safety concerns are mainly hypothetical or “inferential” and not based on observed harm in humans. But this is mainly because there are few to no studies involving humans that show either benefits or harms from the peptides.

I looked up these peptides, and none of them have support for their efficacy from rigorous human clinical studies. Indeed, there have been no clinical studies at all in about half the peptides. RFK Jr.’s policy is not only unsound, but possibly dangerous.

*I just voted a straight Democratic ticket in Illinois, so don’t chew my tuchas when I criticize my own party, for they’ve disappointed me terribly in the last several years. I’m going to chew the Democrats’ rump by calling your attention to another Free Press article, “The Democratic case against Abdul El-Sayed.”

Democratic voters are being instructed to do exactly what Democrats lectured Republicans not to do in 2016—which is to put party over country. They are being lulled into a tribalist fury, made to believe they have to set aside any reservations they may have about their nominee or the creeping forces of illiberalism co-opting their party, because right now the only thing they are allowed to worry about is Donald Trump.

Indeed, instead of addressing Jewish Michiganders’ very legitimate concerns about El-Sayed—he who campaigned with far-left, “America deserved 9/11” streamer Hasan Piker, he of “hurt people hurt people” fame, he who once urged an Egyptian president to “purge” the police and the media of non-Islamists, he who refused to say anything about an Iranian ayatollah’s assassination because voters in Dearborn, Michigan, were “sad”—Obama sidestepped all that, offering up some of the old kumbaya cha cha cha that worked in 2008 but feels ridiculously stale now.

. . .It does not matter that El-Sayed has apologized for or tried to distance himself from some of his excesses. That is what one does in the heat of a campaign. We should assume his beliefs are unchanged.

I am amazed at how many Americans assume an apology equates to a complete change of views.

Which should be more than enough for Democrats to reject him.

But Democrats, like Republicans, have mostly succumbed to a partisan muddleheadedness that makes it impossible for them to see beyond the next election. Right now, the next election is one week away, and the only thing the partisan can think about is who will control the House and Senate. El-Sayed, of course, is very important. He is a candidate in one of the two or three races that will decide what happens in the Senate, and it does not matter that he’s not sure whether Iran or Israel poses a greater national-security threat to the United States. What matters is winning—clobbering Trump, derailing his agenda. Once they take care of Trump, Democrats imagine, they’ll have the luxury of worrying about other things. Like how big, exactly, their tent should be.

. . .Democrats should not simply reject El-Sayed because he’s hateful. They should reject him because he will cost Democrats election

His victory will confirm voters’ worst fears about the Democratic Party, that the red-green alliance—the partnership between radical leftists and Islamists that threatens France and other European countries—is coming for America. Like New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed will obsess over the Jewish state. He will prioritize ending the U.S. relationship with it (he’s already indicated he wants a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee), and every time someone, Republican or Democrat, points out all the advantages of supporting a multiracial, multireligious democracy in the Middle East—the shared intelligence, the reining in of extremists, the stability, the tech, the commercial opportunity—El-Sayed will scream “genocide,” and the Democrats will roll over. They will be scared of being called Islamophobic, and they will welcome more radicals into their gargantuan, oversized tent. They will look weak, and they will sound detached from reality, because they will be.
The positives are fixing a party that has values: “We believe in markets and the Bill of Rights and the West, and we don’t make excuses for terrorists attacking synagogues, and we don’t cavort with Maoist streamers, and even though we have many problems with Donald Trump—the corruption, the embarrassing spectacle of it all—we’re not about to surrender our principles, even if that means losing a Senate seat. The republic is so much bigger than that. We are so much bigger than that.”  The FP doesn’t go so far as to say that Michiganers should vote for Republican Mike Rogers; that advice is not mentioned once.

El-Sayed is a terrible candidate and a semi-closeted antisemite. You might remember that when a man attacked a Michigan synagogue last spring, El-Sayed offered an explanation: the man was getting revenge for the death of his relatives in an Israeli airstrike—in Lebanon. “Hurt people hurt people” said El-Sayed, and though he later apologied for his remark, this is one of several that indicate his animus towards Jews and amity towards terrorists. I’m glad I don’t have to vote in Michigan, but if he wins the Senate will go in a bad direction. (I’d probably write in a candidate rather than vote for him.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a strange desire:

Hili: Can we go to Egypt?
Andrzej: I’m afraid we’ll have to strike that category of dreams off the list.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy możemy pojechać do Egiptu?
Ja: Ten gatunek marzeń musimy już skreślić.

*******************

From Divy (and the “doctor” is correct):

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices. Was this sold at an airport?

From Meow Incorporated:

Here’s Masih in Poland, showing her bodyguards, her meeting with Salman Rushdie, and part of her speech at a meeting:

From Luana. This is incredibly juvenile: I say or write the word “trump”, meaning “override”, all the time:

From Sue, a heartening (and true) story. And the guy liked kittens, too!

From Malcolm/ weird deep-sea fish:

Two from my feed. First, a new cat song (AI, natch):

One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb (I may have posted this before). It’s surely causation!

The distance between Saturn and the moon correlates with Bachelor's degrees awarded in Physical sciences (r=0.987)

— Daily Spurious Correlation 🤖 (@dailycorrelation.bsky.social) 2026-10-23T13:33:21.496Z

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 29, 2026 • 9:30 am

Today we have part 2 of Jan Malik’s photos from New York State (part 1 is here). Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Here’s his intro to both sets:

It is a little tradition of mine to spend at least one day each fall watching raptors from an exposed ledge on Millbrook Mountain, which is a part of the Shawangunk Ridge, NY. I would call it a “hawk watch”, but hawks are attracted on their way south by the nearby Hudson River, which is a much better navigational aid. Instead, a whole day is spent observing vultures. This year the foliage was not at its best and the light was below average, so I’m mixing pictures from the past couple of years.

The cliff is home to a mix of about 50 Turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) and Black vultures (Coragyps atratus), our only Northeast vultures. Neither the California condor nor the King vulture makes it here, and the peculiar Crested Caracara, half vulture-half hawk, doesn’t live north of Texas.

I think of vultures as an “underrepresented minority” of the avian world, with charismatic eagles, feisty ducks, or cute songbirds capturing nearly all the attention of birdwatching crowds, while these humble aerial sanitation workers remain in the shadows, unjustly. At least, with the large population of deer in the Northeast combined with vehicular traffic, their food supply is abundant:

This is an immature Turkey vulture, with its head not quite as red as in the adults. It is looking up, since while they feel safe when soaring, they may be occasionally harassed by other local inhabitants on the Ridge:

One of them, quite aggressive, is a resident Peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus). I see it every time I visit these cliffs, but to photograph a lightning-fast bird is difficult. This being outside their nesting season, it didn’t dive-bomb a human intruder with the intention of scalping or eye-gouging, but simply zoomed past:

Occasionally, Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) also use the Shawangunk Ridge for navigation:

Other raptors, like this Red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) also pass by, but usually high above the Ridge:

The largest songbird, the Common Raven (Corvus corax) also lives on the ridge, and a mated pair can engage in their synchronous flight even in the fall:

The Gunks being the best climbing area of the Northeast (de gustibus..) let’s not forget about the local hominid variety, the Homo verticalis. This one is scaling an arête on the route “Nectar Vector” 5.12b/c R, a pretty bold climb. That letter “R” (as in scaRy or an R-rated movie) will scare off an average gym climber:

But humans aside, vultures are the most visible vertebrates on the Ridge:

In good flying weather, one can be surrounded by many vultures who sometimes form a “kettle”, circling on thermals to gain altitude. The swish of wind on your face from them flying within several feet is unforgettable:

As usual in the fall, Canada geese form skeins flying south above the Ridge:

I stay until sunset, just to absorb the subtle colors of the New York backcountry in the fall. This year, I was alone at dusk – all the vultures were gone in the late afternoon, likely attracted to a roadkill. They share with us humans a love for well-seasoned meat, so bon appétit!:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 29, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, October 29, 2026 and it’s National Cat Day!

Here is a reader’s cat: Jango, staffed by Divy and Ivan in Florida. He is a male rescue tabby with a lovely ticked coat. Here he crosses his paws for you.

It’s also International Carignan Day (that’s a wine grape) and National Oatmeal Day.

. . . and here’s a lovely bowl of oatmeal I had at my inn where they put me up during the Kent Presents meetings in August of 2018. Look at all those goodies: dried fruit, nuts, cream, maple syrup, and fresh fruit on the side. I would eat this every day if I wanted to live forever. Leslie Stahl was sitting at the next table, an hour or two before she interviewed Henry Kissinger onstage. The previous night I rode back to the inn in a limo with her and asked her what she was going to ask Kissinger.  She told me she was going to wing it. Good times.

About an hour later, Leslie interviewed Henry. Kissinger actually lived in Kent, Connecticut, where the meeting was held. He died in 2023 at age 100. He must have been 95 in this photo.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A train crash in Spain yesterday killed at least 68 people.

Spain is living through a recurring nightmare. For the second time in less than a year, a high-speed crash between the same two train operators on the same busy line from Madrid to Seville threw the country into official days of mourning, shook its confidence in the security of it once-vaunted rail system and undercut its international image as a modernizing tourist mecca helping to thrust Europe forward.

Apparently the safety system on the tracks first went down, automatically stopping six trains in the region. But someone in the traffic control center told another train to keep going at normal speed, and it crashed into a stopped train from the rear at 120 mph.

At the moment of impact, Antonio de la Corte, 77, was napping in the third carriage in the back of the Renfe train. “Bam!” he said, recalling that he was immediately awakened, lurched forward and banged his knees while his brother, with whom he was traveling, hit his head. A rail shot through the inside of his train car like a skewer, killing people seated to his right, he said.

As he and his brother climbed down to the field, farmhands cut the fences around the embankment so passengers could take shelter in the fields of alfalfa and almond trees. Word of the disaster quickly spread, and Yahadi Mohamed Maulud, 41, a resident in the nearby town of Yébenes, loaded his car with water bottles and rushed to help.

“We found a massacre,” he said, describing torn limbs and one woman, drenched in blood, searching for her brother. He said he was one of the first people on the scene and helped move the injured passengers on makeshift stretchers.

Soon, a long procession of ambulances, police cars and fire trucks arrived under the whir of rescue helicopters flying low overhead. Dozens of Civil Guard officers, many wearing the white protective suits and masks used by forensic investigators, inspected the scene and gathered evidence.

. . .The scene was eerily quiet because people were either dead or so hurt they couldn’t speak. He said survivors used parts of the destroyed train as makeshift stretchers to extract the injured from the wreckage. That’s when the screaming started. Doctors among the passengers treated people in what became a field hospital among almond groves.

At least 68 people died in the crash. More than 50 others were injured, some critically.

This is the second train crash in a year on the same rail line from Madrid to Seville, and involving the same train companies.

*The Times of Israel reports the latest on the Israel elections, nothing reasons why Netanyahu might stay in power even though his Likud Party got a narrow plurality of seats.

Near-final results show that a clear majority of Israelis voted for parties opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued rule, yet the longtime premier could remain in power — not because his opponents lack the numbers to replace him, but because some refuse to recognize Arab lawmakers as legitimate political partners.

A historic surge in Arab voter turnout in Tuesday’s election has placed Israel’s Arab-majority parties in a position to determine the next government, putting the Zionist opposition’s longstanding refusal to rely on their support to a potentially decisive test.

With 85.6 percent of ballot boxes counted as of 2:32 p.m. Wednesday, partial results published by the Central Elections Committee gave 53 seats to Netanyahu’s bloc and 48 to the bloc led by Eisenkot’s Yashar party. The two Arab-led parties are projected to win a combined 19 seats — an unprecedented high — with 12 for the Joint List and seven for Ra’am. The two parties have five seats apiece in the outgoing Knesset. The previous combined record was 15, in 2020.

Despite leading the largest party, Netanyahu has no obvious path to expanding his bloc beyond his existing far-right and ultra-Orthodox allies to get the 61-seat majority he needs to form a government.

Meanwhile, the Zionist opposition and Arab parties are projected to hold 66 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, reflecting widespread opposition to Netanyahu’s government, in part due to the extraordinary turnout by Arab voters driven by deep animus toward Netanyahu’s government and its far-right ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Indeed, in a Trump move, Likud claims the election was “stolen” by Arab parties:

Claiming yesterday’s election was “stolen” by Arab parties, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party demands an investigation by police and the Shin Bet into allegations of widespread voter fraud and intimidation.

“The elections in Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terror and the elimination of the Jewish state through serious criminal offenses of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries and the use of illegal software to mobilize voters,” insists the Likud party in a statement.

The Arab-led political parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, which run in every election and hold seats in the Knesset, received a record number of votes yesterday, and are projected to win a historic high of 19 seats. That number means that both Netanyahu’s bloc and the Jewish-led parties opposing him will be far from achieving a Knesset majority.

Here’s a bar chart of the votes published by the ToI.

Like my heartthrob Gal Gadot, who went back to Israel to both get an honorary degree and to vote (there are no votes by mail), I would have “voted for change” too.

And so much for the apartheid state! The Israeli Arabs may decide the fate of the government!

*The El-Sayed campaign in Michigan is distancing itself from this ad, produced not by them but by Cenk Uygur’s “Rebellion Pac”. It’s pretty dire, for it blames Israel and its war with Hamas on high American grocery prices. Here, watch it by itself (it’s hard to find the ad without commentary!)

From the NYT:

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, sought to distance himself on Monday from an outside group’s political ad that endorses him and attacks his Republican opponent over support of Israel, a longtime U.S. ally.

. . .Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign emphasized that the ad, created by a left-wing political action committee called Rebellion PAC, was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.

“Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders,” the campaign said in a statement on Monday. “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.”

Dr. El-Sayed has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which was set off by the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people. The war has killed at least 74,000 people, according to Gaza health officials.

The ad, a version of which first ran in 2024, has garnered more than six million views since it was posted on X on Friday. On Monday, Representative Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat whom Dr. El-Sayed narrowly defeated in the Senate primary, publicly criticized it for what she called “fearmongering about Israel.”

And from the Free Press‘s piece “Abdul El-Sayed and the Banana Libel“:

Antisemitism is said to be the socialism of fools. Well, it turns out that it’s also the populism of the innumerate. U.S. military aid to Israel comprises at most a half a percentage point of the U.S. federal government budget. The overwhelming majority of that money is poured back into the American economy because Israel is required to spend the aid on U.S. weapons systems. Also—not that it needs stating—the U.S. does not pay for Israel’s health insurance system. Claiming that aid to Israel is responsible for high grocery prices is a grotesque lie that resurrects an ancient and sinister trope that blames international Jewry for economic misery.

So it’s not surprising that prominent Democrats like the party’s former chairman, Jaime Harrison, and El-Sayed’s opponent during the primary, Haley Stevens (who has endorsed El-Sayed in the general election) have offered full-throated denunciations of the ad.

One might think El-Sayed would take the opportunity to forcefully demand that Rebellion PAC take it down. This would be an easy way to win back some of the Michigan Democrats that have committed to his Republican rival, Mike Rogers. It would help dispel the Rogers’ campaign message that El-Sayed has ties to the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood and can’t be trusted with national security. And yet, the only comment from the El-Sayed campaign has come from a spokesman, who said the ad was “not affiliated in any way” with the campaign. That’s not a denunciation so much as a weasel-word salad.

So, why not take the high road? One reason might be that Rebellion PAC is run by an ally of the campaign, Cenk Uygur. He was once a middling progressive influencer. In recent years he has transformed into a hollering podcaster obsessed with the perfidy of Israel and its supporters in America. El-Sayed appeared on a panel with Uygur in September at a conference sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America. Uygur’s nephew is the anti-American streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed in the final weeks of his primary campaign. Piker has said that the authors of the October 7 massacre, Hamas, are morally superior to Israel. He once said his favorite flag was the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group that until recently rained rockets and missiles over Israel. He has also said that America “deserved” 9/11.

. . .It’s accurate to say that AIPAC tries to influence U.S. foreign policy to pursue a good relationship with Israel. But claiming that the lobby dictates U.S. foreign policy to presidents is an exaggeration that is a mirror image of the antisemitic libel that Jews function as a disloyal fifth column inside their host countries—or the idea that you can’t afford groceries because of military aid to Israel.

Indeed, El-Sayed offered a very similar argument as the Rebellion PAC grocery ad in an interview with The Ink published on August 3. “Israel is an affordability issue,” he said. “Every time you want to put glasses on kids’ faces or give people healthcare or fix a school, somebody pops up and is like, ‘Well how are you going to pay for that?’ I don’t know. Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals. That’s our money.”

So maybe the reason El-Sayed is not denouncing Uygur’s antisemitic ad is because he pretty much agrees with its content. At the very least, he doesn’t want to offend the antisemites in Michigan who he hopes will make him the state’s next U.S. senator.

Call me ignorant, but I didn’t know that Hasan Piker was related to Cenk. But they’re both odious human beings: is it in the genes? As for “hollering,” yes, I fear that Cenk is going to blow an artery some day. As for the disgusting ad, well El-Sayed should denounce it, as it’s damaging him. But he can’t, as he’s walking a fine line between being an anti-Semite and being someone that Democrats will vote for.

*Defeated Brazilian Presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, who had his passport lifted after votes were counted, nevertheless managed to flee to the U.S. (with Trump’s help, of course):

The defeated Brazilian presidential candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, arrived in Miami Wednesday after fleeing to Argentina with his family and boarding a private plane to the U.S.

Television images showed Bolsonaro and his family stepping off the private jet they boarded in Argentina late Tuesday after fleeing across the border from Brazil.

The Trump administration has said it would issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family to allow them legal entry upon arrival.

The long journey, carried out largely in secret, came after Bolsonaro lost the presidential election to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday by a close but convincing margin. Shortly after the results, Brazilian authorities demanded Bolsonaro turn over his passports and remain in the country as he faces investigation over alleged financial crimes.

The son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing and says he and his family are the victims of a witch hunt by Brazil’s Supreme Court. He has refused to recognize Sunday’s election result—a position backed by Trump who told reporters Monday the race looked “rigged.”

Bolsonaro crossed from Brazil into Argentina at 10:50 p.m. local time Tuesday accompanied by his wife, Fernanda, and daughters Carolina and Luiza, Argentine authorities said. The family crossed into Argentina via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge in Misiones province, a remote area where the borders of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet.

Authorities in Argentina, where President Javier Milei has been one of Bolsonaro’s most fervent supporters, said they presented valid travel documents and faced no legal restrictions on entering the country.

At 11:30 p.m., just 40 minutes later, the family boarded a private aircraft operated by Baires Fly, with Guayaquil, Ecuador, listed as its destination on the flight plan—flight LV-JQW, according to Argentina presidential spokesman Fabian Fernandez.

I’m told the guy is a crook (but can’t vouch for any of that), but is he classified as a “refugee”? For sure he’s fleeing likely jailing, but I’m not sure how many dubious politicans we can absorb. After all, we abducted Maduro, who’s now in jail, whil Bolsonero will live a sweet life in the U.S. of A.

*In an op-ed in the WaPo, Theodore Johnson explains why debates between gubernatorial or Congressional candidates are waning, with candidates relying more on attack ads. It’s apparently due to fear of screwing up, as minor gaffes can be amplified in this age of social media.

At a Rhode Island debate last week, two candidates for governor turned into hall monitors. Democratic front-runner Helena Foulkes and Republican Aaron Guckian each called out independent businessman Ken Block for bringing typed notes onstage in violation of the rules. The payoff for tattling came in the ensuing made-for-TV moment: Everyone watched a sheepish Block eat crow, tucking his cheat sheet away and showing his hands to the audience.

Fear of such minor missteps going viral is just one reason there have been fewer debates this midterm year. A review by ABC News found that 21 of 36 gubernatorial races will pass without a debate. In 2018, just two states skipped them. The same trend holds for Senate elections — 21 out of 35 races will not feature a debate, a 50 percent increase from four years ago. For all the advantages that can be gained from a solid performance, a gaffe or shaky showing can be disastrous. Today, a candidate’s calculus increasingly hinges on a simpler question: Why bother?

Their reasons for opting out are all over the place. In Alabama’s gubernatorial election, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R), a MAGA firebrand sitting on an 11-point polling lead, refused to debate on pragmatic grounds, declaring, “There’s no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion.”

In Florida, Democratic nominee for governor David Jolly took an ideological stance, saying the nation’s politics are broken, and debates only “further the division, further the toxicity, further the insults, further the mistruths, further the bad faith.” And in North Carolina, both Senate candidates have taken a strategic approach: be open to debate but never agree to one; better to spend that time on cable news appearances and curated events to rally the base. No matter the explanation, the outcome is the same: Voters are denied the chance to see the candidates face scrutiny and each other.

Political debates are most useful when they have clear rules and formats, when candidates believe engaging their opponent is worthwhile to the campaign and the public, and when they serve as important civic rituals in a democracy. Since the late 20th century, televised debates have been common and widely expected for candidates competing for federal and statewide office. They offer a rare chance to speak to large audiences, followed by extensive media coverage. And they provide voters an opportunity to see the candidates largely unscripted and in the hot seat — conditions favorable to getting a glimpse of character and preparedness rather than monologued quips in safe spaces.

. . . Sometimes they’re successful. . . But extreme polarization, alongside candidates’ ability to bypass traditional media for direct-to-voter social platforms, has upended the landscape. The civic ritual now is to flood airwaves and mobile devices with attack ads and caricatures of opponents. If the age of debate is ending, then what replaces it should be worrisome to voters.

. . . Besides, what advantage does debating offer candidates when there’s little penalty for skipping them altogether? The rebuttal from Republican candidates can be summarized this way: “Well, what are you going to do — vote for communism?” Democrats who opt out suggest that elections are not helped by giving credence to MAGA politicians co-signed by the historically unpopular President Donald Trump. Better to avoid the unpredictable made-for-TV moment by producing short ads clipping an opponent eating crow, perfectly curated for a media-saturated electorate to devour.

Unfortunately, the author is right. Nixon lost to Kennedy because Tricky Dick wasn’t as charistmatic and sweated too much. Biden dropped out after his debate performance was abysmal. But there’s no political theater better than a good debate. It’s much more fun that watching attack ads or listening to stump speeches.

*The AP’s “Odd News” section reports that the originally drawn map of the Mason-Dixon line, the line that historically divided the American North from the South, is up for auction.

It’s perhaps the most consequential map in American history. And it could be yours.

The hand-drawn chart of the Mason-Dixon Line that eventually divided the free from the slave states is going up for auction. Remounted on backing made of Japanese rice paper, the document will go on sale Thursday in a livestreamed auction.

“It’s not that often that you can really get this close to something that is so historically important,” said Lauren Brunk, vice president of Brunk Auctions in Asheville, North Carolina. “And it was awe-inspiring, really.”

Brunk estimates it could fetch anywhere from $800,000 to $1.2 million for the anonymous seller.The survey by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon was originally meant to settle a border dispute between the then-colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. But when it was used in the 1820 Missouri Compromise to establish the limits of human bondage in the still adolescent United States, it became synonymous with the fundamental divisions that exploded into civil war four decades later.

You can see the original map here (the current bid is $400,000), and here’s a map of the Mason-Dixon Line from Wikipedia:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili (who is not feeling well and went to the vet) ponders time and mortality with Andrzej:

Hili: October is coming to an end, and soon the trees will be bare.
Andrzej: If we live to see spring, we’ll enjoy the greenery again.

In Polish:

Hili: Kończy się październik, zaraz drzewa będą gołe.
Ja: Jeśli dożyjemy do wiosny, będziemy się znowu cieszyć zielenią.

*******************

From The Foundation for Homeless Cats:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Shit Signs:

Just a few tweets as I was at the eye doctor yesterday (n.b. I am healing well):

From Malcolm: A man cudles a giant owl:

 From the spoof site Babylon Bee via Luana; I bet you can guess what it’s about:

Cenk is blowing an artery on “X”. Here’s his latest rant:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Matthew; yesterday was the 113th anniversary of the cartoon strip Krazy Kat, created by George Herriman. It’s a cartoon series that both Matthew and I love. Click to go to the tweet.

Is Jesus back?

October 29, 2026 • 6:30 am

Curiously, yesterday my spam email included an announcement of Jesus’s return. The email was very long, so I’ll give about a quarter of it below. The funny thing is that I saw Jesus in the CVS store on the very same day! (See below; I had the presence of mind to take a photo.)

Coincidence? I think not—not when it comes to The Lamb of God.

Here.  Jesus is apparently a senior white woman, and thus has to wear identification. We have mixed up her pronouns all these centuries:

Eliyah Lap<eliyah.lap@aol.com>

Good day,

The Return of Yeshua (Jesus Christ) is very Near! Are we ready?
Le retour de Yéshua (Jésus-Christ) est très Proche ! Sommes-nous prêts(es) ?
BibleMiracle.wordpress.com
TomorrowsWorld.org
MondeDemain.org
Eliyah.jimdosite.com
MountainOfFire.org
MFMottawa.ca
DKOebooks.com
JesusFilm.org
BibleHub.com
FaithComesByHearing.com
GlobalRecordings.net
ElMundoDeManana.org
YHWH2033.blogspot.com
JesusChrist1.tv (Youtube)
Youtube = Dà youpké Shupamöm.
Amen ! Alleluyah !
The Rapture of the Church !
L’enlèvement de L’Église !
Yésu yitna ! Christ arrive. Christ is arriving. . . .
The email goes on and on and on and on and on. . . I guess you can’t give the Good News too many times!

The Neutral Theory: a genuinely important supplement to evolution’s “Modern Synthesis”

October 28, 2026 • 9:45 am

In my critique yesterday of Nathaniel Comfort’s take on The Selfish Gene, I forgot to mention one important supplement to evolution’s “Modern Synthesis,” though I believe a reader caught it. This is the “neutral theory” of evolution, proposed by Tomoko Ohta and Motoo Kimura in 1968 and described by Motoo Kimura in his 1983 book The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. 

This theory proposes that many “substitutions” (mutations) in the DNA have no detectable effect on the fitness of the carrier.  In other words, compared to other variants at the gene (or site), they make no difference in the relative rate or replication of the gene: they are neither “selfish” nor “retiring”.  One example is a mutation in the second or third position of some three base “codons”, the triplets that code in the DNA (and trascribed RNA) for proteins.  Because there are more nucleotide triplets than amino acids in proteins (64 triplets but only 20 amino acids), some triplets are “synonymous”: coding for the same amino acid.

Here’s the genetic code from Wikibooks, showing that, given the first, second, and third nucleotide base in a codon, you can see which amino acid it codes for.  The four bases are T for Thymine (which become uracil in the mRNA transcribed), C for Cytosine, G for Guanine, and A for Adenine.

As you can see in the table, nearly every one of the 20 amino acids can be coded for by different triplets (“stop” codons are those that, when present in a DNA sequence, terminate the production of a protein by the matching RNA that gets translated to proteins).  In the first column, for example, you can see in the last four rows that all four codons that begin with “GT” will code for valine in the resulting protein. That means that whether the last base is a T, a C, a G, or an A makes no difference in what amino acid is in place in the protein.

So if there is a mutation in the DNA changing GTT to GTC, GTA, or GTG, the protein produced will be the same. This means that, nearly without exception, the “fitness” of these four different variants will be identical, and the mutational variants will neither be selected for or against.  You can see the number of “synonymous” codons: they comprise about a quarter of all mutations in genes that code for proteins. And that means that nearly a quarter of mutations in the DNA will not affect the “fitness” of the carrier.

But it could be even a larger number, as there are huge portions of the DNA that seem to have no function at all. This is called “junk DNA”, and constitutes about 90% of the DNA in our own genome. (There is important DNA that does not code for proteins but is not “junk,” such as bits of DNA that control the expression of other genes.)

You see that I’ve been talking about the sequences of DNA rather than organismal traits, although mutations in the former can affect the latter. This is why the “neutral theory of evolution” is often called the “neutral theory of molecular evolution.” And that, in turn, is because it’s easier to construct evolutionary theory using the frequencies of gene variants rather than traits.  But some differences in traits can also be neutral if they don’t affect fitness.  Some possible examples in humans based on mutations include whether or not your earlobes are attached, whether you can roll your tongue or wiggle your ears, and maybe your Landsteiner blood type (A, B, or O).

But I digress. Since 1963 there has been a tremendous amount of both theoretical and empirical work on the neutral theory and on the dynamics of neutral mutations.  As you might expect, truly neutral variants bounce around in frequency in populations because they’re neither selected for nor against. We know that neutral variants tend to be more visible in larger populations because small populations lead to loss of variation. We know the rate of evolutionary change of neutral variants: how often they arise in populations and how fast they become “fixed” in every member of a population (for a single change, these two rates are, curiously, equal).  We know that “nearly neutral” mutations with weak effects on replication can even overcome selection, and act as if they are truly neutral in small populations whether they be good or bad. (This depends on the relative size of the selection coefficient and the inverse of the population size.)

There’s a whole mathematical analysis of these things, but I won’t go into it. I just want to make three points.

First, the neutral theory is important, especially if you’re looking at the evolution of DNA sequences, which happens pretty often in evolutionary biology. But it can also play a role in some traits in which mutations cause visible differences (ear attachment or shell color and pattern in some snail species).

Second, the neutral theory is a truly novel modification of Darwinism that was proposed within our lifetime, though earlier evolutionists sometimes alluded to the possibility of neutral mutations.  The neutral theory is far more novel than other modifications that are said to help “overturn” evolutionary biology, like niche construction or plasticity.

Finally, Comfort does not mention the neutral theory in his article as a discovery that requires us to retool evolutionary theory, even though if there’s anything that seriously modifies our view of evolution, it is the neutral theory. The Selfish Gene doesn’t discuss it, either, even though the theory was already out when TSG was published. That’s probably because Dawkins’s book was a book about adaptive evolution, not nonadaptive or neutral evolution. (Dawkins does mention it in later books like The Blind Watchmaker.) Thus, when critiquing modern evolutionary theory, it is Comfort who should have mentioned what I think is the most important modification of our view of evolution in the last 65 years.

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 28, 2026 • 8:30 am

We are of course lacking readers’ wildlife photos, though I don’t know why. If you have some good ones, please send them in.

We do have a batch today, though, sent in by reader Jan Malik. Today’s photos feature vultures from New York State, and there are photos of other birds that will come in a part 2. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

It is a little tradition of mine to spend at least one day each fall watching raptors from an exposed ledge on Millbrook Mountain, which is a part of the Shawangunk Ridge, NY. I would call it a “hawk watch”, but hawks are attracted on their way south by the nearby Hudson River, which is a much better navigational aid. Instead, a whole day is spent observing vultures. This year the foliage was not at its best and the light was below average, so I’m mixing pictures from the past couple of years.

The cliff is home to a mix of about 50 Turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) and Black vultures (Coragyps atratus), our only Northeast vultures. Neither the California condor nor the King vulture makes it here, and the peculiar Crested Caracara, half vulture-half hawk, doesn’t live north of Texas.

Here’s an early morning view from my perch, which is quite exposed but ensures privacy from the numerous hikers. Progressively fading into the distance are other parts of the ridge: Near Trapps, the Trapps, and Skytop, while the Hudson Valley is on the right:

Vultures are late-morning flyers. The unpredictability of their food forces extreme energy-saving behavior, such as efficient soaring flight and lowering body temperature at night by several degrees to minimize heat loss. In the morning, they use sheltered depressions in the cliff to sun and warm themselves. Here, three Turkey vultures spread their wings in the so-called horaltic pose, maximizing exposure to solar radiation:

Eventually, at 9-10 AM, the Millbrook cliff rocks heat up a bit and thermals—vertical movements of air based on density differences—develop enough to allow soaring flight for the Turkey vultures, who in good conditions can stay aloft indefinitely, flapping their wings only when taking off or alighting on a perch:

An hour or so later than for the Turkey vultures, flying weather develops for the Black vultures. Turkey vultures are possibly the most efficient flying organisms (outside of invertebrates), while the Black vultures need a little more effort to stay aloft – flapping their wings often enough that it is possible to tell them apart from a distance:

Another difference is the underside of the wings – it is mostly silvery-white in Turkey vultures:

Black vultures have white markings on the tips of their wings’ underside only:

Additionally, while Turkey vultures have uniformly black/dark brown wing coverts, Black vultures have white markings on their primary feathers, making them appear from a distance as white spots:

Black vultures often fly or soar with their feet down. This is paradoxical since it obviously increases aerodynamic drag, and I’d think that the Black vultures – having higher wing loading than the Turkey vultures – would do everything possible to avoid that. But apparently it is needed to stabilize the flight, possibly due to a different aspect ratio – Black vultures have slightly shorter tail feathers than do Turkey vultures:

When at rest, Black vultures stay together and a bit apart from the Turkey vultures, but I did not notice any particular animosity between these species. Each vulture group has social rules, with the best perches reserved for dominant birds. Scuffles are infrequent and posturing is usually enough to make a contender vacate a prime spot:

From time to time, Turkey vultures also conglomerate to rest and warm themselves in the sun. The same wing anatomy that allows hours-long soaring flight also lets them spread their wings effortlessly by locking their joints:

But then it’s taking to the air again, soaring up and down the ridge, in the hope of catching a whiff of decomposing flesh. What helps them in finding food is their good sense of smell, which they have in common with pelagic seabirds. From my observations on the Shawangunk Ridge (or, as climbers call it, the Gunks), their hearing is sub-par; a few times when scrambling on a ledge I caught a resting vulture quite unaware of my presence until I was nearly touching it:

Part 2 to come.