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.
Canadian wildfire smoke pouring into Chicago has made its air quality the worst in the world Tuesday.
The World Air Quality Index ranked Chicago as the worst for air quality, with Minneapolis, Dubai, Detroit and Delhi rounding out the top five. Chicago’s air is labeled an “unhealthy” 200 by the index.
The National Weather Service blamed the conditions and low visibility on the wildfire smoke that has wafted down from Canada and impacted large regions of the United States. The service suggested limiting prolonged outdoor activities.
The funny thing is that although it’s a bit hazy out, I don’t smell smoke at all. My sniffer may be insensitive, but it hasn’t been in the past. The Washington Post says this:
Visibility in the city was down to two miles, with smoke reported in the observation from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The Weather Service expects visibilities of 1 to 3 miles across the region for much of the day.
“You can literally smell the smoke in the air today in Chicago from the Canadian wildfires,” wrote a Twitter user.
It’s warm and partly sunny out, and normally I’d be able to see the skyscrapers of downtown from my crib. They’re six miles away. But now this is what I see: bupkes.
I guess I should stay inside, though I walked home for 25 minutes at a rapid pace and didn’t feel wheezy or anything.
Yes, a mother and ten ducklings are marooned on the garden plaza connecting two dorms here, and I was called as the Duck Rescuer to deal with them. Our plan is to let them grow up on the plaza, as there’s plenty of space, shrubbery and lawns, as well as a cement area, and we will ensure that they’re fed and watered until they’re able to fly (they cannot jump off the plaza as it’s surrounded by a high wall). There are no students here, so there’s nobody to disturb them. Facilities and a kindly worker in the dorm are looking after them when I can’t get in—which is most of the time.
So, meet Maria and her ten ducklings (there were ten when I first saw them, so none have disappeared). “Maria” was the name of the grandmother of the woman at Facilities who alerted us to the brood and is helping us,
As a duck rescuer once told me, “Ducks are really good at finding safe places to nest, but not so good at finding safe places to nest near water.” This is the case here, but we’re giving the babies plenty of water to splash around in.
Ten—count them—ten.
Ceiling Cat help me—I do love my ducks!
And they’re in very good shape. Look at those full crops!
Of course Amy is still incubating her brood on a Regenstein Library window ledge, and we’ll have to figure out how to deal with the hatchlings when they jump to the ground to be with mom.
Here’s a prediction that’s a no-brainer: this week the Supreme Court will override the Bakke decision and rule that race-based school admissions are unconstitutional. (Several states, including California, have already done this.) This will leave schools in a quandary, since nearly all universities have declared that they’re in favor of “diversity” (they mean ethnic diversity), but they’ll no longer be able to attain it using race as one criterion for admission. (Bakke prohibited “quotas”.)
The title of the article below, from the Free Press, is a bit misleading, as we already know what will happen: schools will try to do an end run around the Court’s ruling by eliminating or downgrading indices of “merit” like grades or test scores, and concentrate intead on “holistic admissions”, a backet of intangibles that includes skin color, ethnicity, and “personality”.
And it’s the “personality” issue that ultimately brought this case to the Supreme Court. Investigation of Harvard’s admissions policy revealed that assessment of personality scores was used, probably deliberately, to lower the apparent “merit” of Asian American Applicants. As the article below notes:
A 2018 analysis of 160,000 applicant records uncovered during discovery in the suit showed that Asian Americans, while outperforming every other group on academics and extracurriculars, received low marks from Harvard admissions officers when it came to personality traits—lowering their odds of admission. Asian American students were consistently deemed less “likable, courageous, kind, and respectable.”
That this method was invidious was revealed by showing that when applicants were interviewed in person by Harvard alums or other university people, their scores were not lower than those of other groups. They were lower only when Asian Americans were assessed on paper by admissions officers who never met them. To me, this gave little doubt that there was deliberate discrimination going on here, though two sets of Federal courts unaccountably ignored this and ruled for Harvard. An appeal took the case to the Supreme Court.
As I’ve said before, affirmative action is a tough one for me. I am pretty much a merit-based admission person, but I don’t want to see colleges—especially “elite ones”—devoid of people of color. There’s something about the “optics” of that situation that bothers me. We are a multicultural and multiethnic America, and that should be reflected in higher education. On the other hand, I don’t favor using “holisitic” admissions, which, in the Harvard case (and probably others) led to palpable racism against Asian Americans. One solution I’m gravitating towards is class based admissions, which acts to give up a leg to all the socioeconomically disadvantaged regardless of ethnicity, and it’s legal.
I do not, however, favor lowering the merit bar so much that people unqualified to attend a college get in. After all, there are tons of colleges with widely varying admission standards, there are also technical colleges, and, as John McWhorter claims, perhaps not everyone needs to go to college. But in effect, there’s higher education for everyone.
At any rate, this article tells you what you really know: “holistic admissions” is in the offing. Click to read
Quotes from the piece are indented. The article begins by recounting what UC Berkeley did to boost diversity after affirmative action was banned in California, first by university rules and then by law:
Ultimately, the task force concluded that, to achieve racial diversity and not violate University of California policy, it had to deemphasize quantitative yardsticks like grades and test scores and focus on other things. “The prevailing opinion was that if we focused on these qualitative assessments of a person’s interests, lived experience, that would contribute to the diversity of students,” Carson said.
The task force’s conclusion was borne out when, in the spring of 1997—after affirmative action had been prohibited at the University of California but before Boalt could implement the task force’s recommendations—the numbers of minority students admitted to the law school plummeted.
That year, the number of black students admitted to Boalt declined from 9.2 percent the year before to 1.8 percent. Latino admits dropped from 4.2 percent to 2 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Asian American students jumped from 15.5 percent to nearly 19 percent, and that of white students, from 57.3 percent to nearly 68 percent.
Which made the task force’s proposal all the more urgent.
Within a few years, admissions officers across the country started to call the new ideas “holistic admissions” or “holistic review.” It sounded more palatable than affirmative action, but really it was a way of achieving the same outcome without saying so explicitly.
Over the past three decades, colleges across the country—public and private—have adopted this approach in an effort to boost their student bodies’ racial diversity.
“Holistic” now includes as a criterion “lived experience”:
Yvonne Berumen, the vice president of admissions and financial aid at Pitzer College, east of Los Angeles, shared Green’s perspective. “One of the most important things in the admission process is the lived experience,” she said. “Race is a part of that.” (“Lived experience,” affirmative action critics said, is like “holistic admissions” or “diversity.” It’s a way of signaling a preference for black and Latino students, while not appearing to be discriminatory.)
If schools are barred from taking all that into account, Berumen said, “it would really change the demographic landscape of higher education.”
The “Green” above is Sonia Green, a black student at Duke, who makes no apologies for using “lived experience” as a criterion:
Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”
But the problem with this is that ethnicity is not a great indicator of “lived experience”. Does a well-off Nigerian student, or a black student from a middle-class home, have the same “lived experience” as, say, a kid from an impoverished home on Chicago’ South Side? I doubt it, yet I don’t doubt that race will be an important component (if not the only component) of “lived experience.” Green’s view seems to be that there is a relevant commonality of the communities that black student grew up in that should give them a leg up in admissions. Well, you can make the argument that ethnicity is a good index of lived experience, but you don’t need it if you use socioeconomic status, combined with merit, as criteria for admissions.
Further, the “holistic” route was exactly what was used to keep Jews out of places like Harvard in the earlier 20th century:
In the 1920s, he recalled, Ivy League schools introduced “holistic admissions” to keep out high-achieving Jewish newcomers—only then they simply called them quotas. The much revered Harvard Man (or, for that matter, the Yale Man or Princeton Man) was a type: WASPy, athletic, well-connected, well to do.
After World War II, the old antisemitism gave way to the new meritocracy, which emphasized quantitative metrics like the SAT and grade point average to ensure that discrimination against Jews or any other unwanted minority wouldn’t rear its ugly head.
One asks: why do we consider it odious to have used holistic criteria to keep Jews out of schools, but perfectly fine to use the same criteria to keep Asian Americans (or whites out of schools)? You can respond that “discrimination like that is okay if it allows for more blacks and Hispanics to get into college,” but the whole problem is moot if you use socioeconomic criteria, which of course are correlated with ethnicity, but not perfectly. And to me, the imperfect correlation makes the whole process fairer, for there are disadvantaged people in every group.
The article winds up by noting that Asian Americans are pretty divided on the “holistic admissions” issue, but are gradually moving against this kind of affirmative action as they’re gravitating more towards the political right. In fact, as a new YouGov poll reveals, “considering race at all in the admissions process is viewed as unacceptable by 65% of Americans, while 25% say race should be allowed to be considered among other factors. About half of Democrats (48%) and Black Americans (47%) reject allowing colleges to consider race in admissions decisions.”
The graph:
I didn’t realize that so many Americans were opposed to any consideration of an applicant’s race. Surprisingly, 9% more black and 34% more Hispanics oppose using race as even one of several criteria. Even 8% more Democrats oppose affirmative action than support it. (The gap, of course, is much larger among Republicans, who don’t differ much from Independents.
Well, the decision will come down, perhaps today but almost surely within a week. Affirmative action will be dead, singing with the Choir Invisible. And colleges are already plotting workarounds. This will involve devaluating data like grades and test scores, and more “holistic” admissions. But I don’t think that, in the future, universities will be able to get away with what Harvard did: using bogus “holistic” criteria to achieve the ethnic mix they want. Let’s just think about to socioeconomic status, with more consideration of measurable “merit” and less “holism”.
I have to tend rooftop ducks this morning, so posting may be a bit light. As always, I do my best, but ten ducklings and their mom need food and water.
Although I generally avoid watching long videos, I watched this one and highly recommend it. The occasion was Ricky Gervais getting the 2019 Richard Dawkins Award, bestowed yearly by the Center for Inquiry. I’m not sure why it was posted four years later, but I found it on Dawkins’s Poetry of Reality Substack site along with these brief notes. (UPDATE: I just found that there is a three-year-old video that’s a tad different, with a pre-introduction introduction by CFI President Robyn Blumner. Both videos are otherwise the same.)
The inaugural episode of #ThePoetryOfReality is finally here! Join me & Ricky Gervais, actor, writer, irreverent comedian & poignant tragedian. CFI gave him the 2019 Richard Dawkins Award. Then I had an on-stage conversation with him & Richard Wiseman, psychologist, comedian & conjuror.
Lots of laughs, lots to think about. See for yourself.
The Center for Inquiry presents the Richard Dawkins Award annually to a distinguished individual from the worlds of science, scholarship, education or entertainment, who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead.
It has been awarded each year since 2003 and was originally given by the Atheist Alliance of America in coordination with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (RDFRS). Since 2019, the award has been given exclusively by the Center for Inquiry of which RDFRS is a part. Richard Dawkins must approve the recipient and bestows the award with a personal tribute to the awardee.
The video comprises a really good (and funny) introduction by Dawkins, and then a rousing discussion by Dawkins and Gervais, moderated by an equally lively Richard Wiseman. Gervais is quick and adept with the impromptu humor, but there’s also some serious discussion of science and atheism. It’s a good package.
Note that Gervais has a beer to quaff during the discussion, an amenity that should be offered to more discussants. It’s a good lubricant for conversation—not that Gervais needs one!
Gervais is a hero of mine: he’s eloquent, funny, and a superb screenwriter and actor (if you haven’t seen “After Life”, do so). And he doesn’t much care what people think of him. As someone who got that award a while back, I’m really humbled to be in his company—and the company of other recipients, many of whom are also personal heroes, like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry.
Richard’s introduction goes from 1:33 to 11:39, and the rest of the 74-minute video is the discussion. There’s also a brief private intro and outro by Dawkins. I was surprised at how young the audience was!
The segments (from YouTube). The links go to the right places, but I recommend watching it all.
00:00:00 Prologue 00:01:26 Introduction 00:12:13 Start of Discussion 00:08:04 The Reward Of Living A Good Life And Ricky’s Belief In Kindness 00:12:32 Ricky Gervais: Confronting Evil With Humor 00:17:07 Fear Of Eternity, Not Death 00:20:41 Analogies And Crocodiles 00:26:46 Cloning Mammoths: An Ethical Dilemma 00:31:19 Atheism Perception And Personal Boundaries 00:37:00 The Debate On The Existence Of God And The Category Mistake 00:40:16 The Importance Of Honesty And Bravery In Comedy 00:45:11 Author’s Thoughts On Their Books And Most Original Contribution 00:50:34 The Differences Between The Us And Uk Versions Of The Office
Tomorrow might be the last day for Readers’ Wildlife unless I get more submissions. Just sayin’.
Gregory Zolnerowich, an entomologist at Kansas State University, sent some pictures of a kayaking trip and associated sights. His narrative is indented and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Several of us spent three days kayaking and camping on the Current River and Eleven Point River in south-central Missouri. These are clear, spring-fed Ozark rivers often bounded by dolomite cliffs that date to the Ordovician. Forty-four miles of the Eleven Point River were designated as a National Wild and Scenic River in 1968, which means it is free of impoundments and is largely undeveloped. We saw bald eagles, assorted ducks and geese, mink, otters, raccoons (they would raid our camp at night), deer, turtles, frogs, and a great variety of insects.
The beds of the rivers are mostly rock and gravel, occasionally sand, with water that is clear in the shallow areas and then turns a lovely aquamarine in the deeper sections. I assume that color comes from dissolved minerals.
A lunch stop had butterflies puddling for entertainment. The top two are spicebush swallowtails (Papilio troilus) and the bottom two are pipevine swallowtails (Battus philenor). They were so engrossed in their activity I could get quite close. The small blue lycaenid butterfly was very skittish and would sometimes land on the swallowtails. Zebra swallowtails (Eurytides marcellus) were very common but too flighty to photograph.
I loved the way the plants would cling to the surface of the rocky cliffs. Water often was seeping and dripping from the faces of the cliffs.
This stag beetle (Lucanidae) ambled by.
The rivers often had long shoals or rapids which made for a nice ride.
Cave Spring at the base of a cliff on the Current River is a popular stop for people.
This large water wheel, 25 feet in diameter, is all that is left of Turner Mill, which is situated a short distance below Turner Spring along the Eleven Point River.
Turner Spring is one of the smaller springs that feeds the river and averages 1.5 million gallons of water per day.
This should be a sanddragon in the genus Progomphus (Gomphidae), but I’m not sure of the species.
It was pretty docile and rode on my finger for a few minutes.
Boze Mill Spring is about 150 yards from the Eleven Point River, it is a large chasm that discharges 12-14 million gallons of water per day.
The outflow from Boze Mill Spring just before it meets the Eleven Point River. The water was quite cold.
Good morning to you on The Cruelest Day, Tuesday June 27, 2023, and it’s National Orange Blossom Day. This refers to the flowers, whose aesthetic beauty we are supposed to admire today, but it also refers to a drink made with orange juice, gin, grenadine, orange liqueur, and vermouth. It’s a healthy cocktail:
In the Islamic and Christian traditions, the Seven Sleepers (Greek: επτά κοιμώμενοι, romanized: hepta koimōmenoi,Latin: Septem dormientes), otherwise known as Aṣḥāb al-kahf, Sleepers of Ephesus and Companions of the Cave, is a medieval legend about a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus (modern-day Selçuk, Turkey) around AD 250 to escape one of the Roman persecutions of Christians and emerged some 300 years later. Another version of the story appears in the Quran (18:9–26). It was also translated into Persian, Kyrgyz, and Tatar.
Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin resurfaced Monday for the first time since his Saturday mutiny, and declared that his motive was to save the private militia from being subsumed into the Russian military — not to topple President Vladimir Putin.
Prigozhin, who did not disclose his whereabouts, said he ordered the rebellion after Russia’s military killed 30 Wagner fighters in a missile strike on one of the militia’s camps, and he said he accepted a deal to avoid prosecution and move to Belarus because it would allow Wagner to continue its operations there.
. . . Speaking in an 11-minute audio address posted on Telegram on Monday, Prigozhin said Wagner fighters were strongly opposed to signing a contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry — as they had been ordered to do by July 1 — because it would have effectively dismantled the group. Wagner had decided to hand back its equipment to the Defense Ministry when the missile strike occurred, he claimed.
He boasted that Wagner was perhaps the “most experienced and combat-ready unit in Russia, and possibly in the world” and had performed a huge number of tasks in the interests of the Russian state, in Africa, the Middle East “and around the world.”
“Recently, this unit has achieved good results in Ukraine,” he said, adding that Wagner had received an outpouring of support from Russians in Saturday’s revolt, which he called a “march for justice.”
While Prigozhin issued his defiant statement, Russia’s embattled leadership tried to demonstrate control on Monday after the bruising, chaotic mutiny by airing a video of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visiting a command post. The Kremlin released video of a recorded address by President Vladimir Putin to young engineers.
Finally, there’s still rancor between Putin and Prigozhin:
State-owned media, meanwhile, reported Monday that the insurrection charges against Prigozhin had not yet been rescinded. The Kremlin on Saturday had announced that the charges would be dropped as part of the deal in which Prigozhin agreed to halt his military advance on Moscow and leave Russia for Belarus.
Key questions about the deal remained unanswered, and messaging from Russian officials about Wagner’s future appeared confused, amid signs that the militia would be allowed to continue to function, despite calls for it to be curbed.
And who, exactly, is going to curb Wagner save Prigozhin? Not Belarus, for sure, and not Russia? It’s a militia, Jake, and they make money. I can’t imagine it not functioning in some capacity.
To some Ukrainian forces, soldiers from the Wagner Group were the best-equipped fighters they had seen since Russia invaded last year. To others, it was their training that distinguished them: Ukrainian soldiers recalled battlefield stories of aggressive tactics or a sniper downing a drone with a single shot.
But after the short-lived mutiny led by the head of the group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, it is not clear whether Wagner will still be a fighting force on the battlefield with its fate now in question.
For now, the uncertain status of Wagner is bound to be a relief for Ukrainian soldiers. Though the front lines in Ukraine are likely to remain unchanged in the short term, depending on how events unfold in Russia, the Ukrainian military may be able to capitalize on the chaos and weakening morale to try to make some gains, according to independent analysts and American officials.
Still, it is too soon to determine the long-term implications of the feud between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian military establishment, American officials said. In Bakhmut, Wagner played an outsize role in the campaign to take the eastern city, Moscow’s one major battlefield victory this year, and solidified an uneasy alliance with the Russian military — only to see the partnership break once the city was captured.
“The previous relationship between Wagner and the Russian government is likely over,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Even had this not happened, it was unclear if Wagner would have played the same role in this war as it had in the battle for Bakhmut.”
. . .After seizing Bakhmut, the Russian Defense Ministry took steps to integrate Wagner into the broader military, which would have reduced Mr. Prigozhin’s power. When Russia forced all volunteers fighting in Ukraine to sign contracts with the ministry, it meant that Mr. Prigozhin would have had to put his forces under the control of the military, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“This is one of the reasons Prigozhin went mad,” Ms. Stanovaya said, “because he realized now he is out of Ukraine.”
And here’s the bit suggesting how Wagner may disappear:
The Kremlin announced that Wagner troops who did not participate in the revolt would be allowed to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry. Those that had joined the convoy would not be prosecuted. The statement suggested that Wagner in its current form would no longer exist.
Though part of Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary cadre is likely to continue under Russian Army control, how many Wagner soldiers would be willing to fight under the ministry’s umbrella is an open question.
The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear arguments in a tax law case that could yield billions of dollars for large corporations, block Democrats’ proposals to tax wealthy Americans and upend longstanding chunks of the tax code.
The court, in an unsigned order, said it would decide a case that asks whether people and companies have to receive, or realize, income for it to be taxed under the 16th Amendment. Arguments will happen in the court term that starts in October.
The case stems from a one-time tax on accumulated foreign profits that Congress created in 2017 in the tax law signed by then-President Donald Trump. That tax applied to 30 years of profits that U.S.-based companies held overseas and hadn’t repatriated. It also applied to individuals who owned at least 10% of foreign companies.
The tax, projected to raise $339 billion to help pay for rate cuts and other business-tax changes, was designed to smooth the transition to new tax rules that no longer allow companies to defer U.S. taxes on their foreign income.
Charles and Kathleen Moore, a Washington state couple, challenged the tax and sought a $14,729 refund. They argued they hadn’t realized any income on their investment in an India-based company and thus couldn’t be taxed.
Here are the implications if the Moore’s win, which is by no means a sure thing (the law and precedents are unclear on this point):
. . . if the court rules in favor of the Moores, it could have widespread implications, depending on what the justices say.
First, if the court sided with the Moores, it could mean that companies that have been paying the one-time tax may be able to seek refunds totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.
Second, it could affect existing pieces of the tax code that impose taxes without realization of income. That includes taxes on individual shareholders in foreign companies with passive income, investors who buy certain discounted bonds, and wealthy people who renounce their citizenship.
. . . And, looking forward, a realization requirement could block some of Democrats’ most ambitious tax proposals. President Biden has called for an annual minimum tax on wealthy Americans, based in part on their unrealized capital gains. And some Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), want an annual tax on the net worth of the richest households.
Affirmative action. The survival of affirmative action in higher education is the subject of two related cases, one involving Harvard and the other the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court has previously approved of the use of affirmative action in higher education in decisions reaching back to 1978. But the justices’ decision to take the cases suggested a willingness to revisit those rulings. And when the high court heard arguments in the cases in late October, all six conservative justices on the court expressed doubts about the practice.
Student loans [$10,000 relief for those who make less than $100,000 per year.] The justices will also decide the fate of President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe away or reduce student loans held by millions of Americans. When the court heard arguments in the case in February, the plan didn’t seem likely to survive, though it’s possible the justices could decide the challengers lacked the right to sue and the plan can still go forward.
Gay rights. A clash of gay rights and religious rights is also yet to be decided by the court. The case involves a Christian graphic artist from Colorado who wants to begin designing wedding websites but objects to making wedding websites for same-sex couples.
State law requires businesses that are open to the public to provide services to all customers, but the designer, Lorie Smith, says the law violates her free speech rights. She says ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their beliefs. Her opponents, meanwhile, say that if she wins, a range of businesses will be able to discriminate, refusing to serve Black, Jewish or Muslim customers, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants.
This will be a tough one, involving two clashes of well established rights: freedom of religion and laws against discrimination. This next one I didn’t know about:
Religious rights. Another case that could end as a victory for religious rights is the case of a Christian mail carrier who refused to work on Sundays when he was required to deliver Amazon packages.
The question for the high court has to do with when businesses have to accommodate religious employees. The case is somewhat unusual in that both sides agree on a number of things, and when the court heard arguments in April both liberal and conservative justices seemed in broad agreement that businesses like the Postal Service can’t cite minor costs or hardships to reject requests to accommodate religious practices. That could mean a ruling joined by both liberals and conservatives.
Voting. As election season accelerates, the Supreme Court has still not said what it will do in a case about the power of state legislatures to make rules for congressional and presidential elections without being checked by state courts.
In a case out of North Carolina the justices were asked to essentially eliminate the power of state courts to strike down congressional districts drawn by legislatures on the grounds that they violate state constitutions.
However, the state Supreme Court threw out that law, and the Big Supremes could throw out this case on that basis. But there’s a similar case waiting from another state.
*If you want to understand why biological sex is defined by the reproductive system one has for producing gametes, and not by chromosome type, have a look at Zach Elliot’s recent piece on “Reality’s Last Stand” Substack site, “Sex isn’t all about chromosomes.” In many animal species, including ours, biological sex is highly correlated with chromosome constitution, but genes affecting biological sex can move around on those chromosomes, making them less than ideal for defining sex. Further, sex is defined by gametes not arbitrarily so there is a true sex binary (which there is), but because this binary is ubiquitous in animals regardless of how sex is determined (social environment, chromosomes, haploidy or diploidy, temperature, and other factors Elliot mentions), and, most important, the gametic definition explains a lot about animal evolution, most notably sexual dimorphism that arises via sexual selection that comes ineluctably from the difference between males and females in the investment they put into their gametes.
This is worth reading if you’ve followed the kerfuffles about sex:
There are two primary reasons why the chromosomal definition of sex is flawed, which I will outline below.
First, many species do not have the X-Y chromosomal system, and yet males and females are still produced. Across the plant and animal kingdom, nature has evolved many mechanisms for developing individual organisms into males or females.
For instance, birds use Z and W chromosomes, where the females develop with ZW and the males develop with ZZ.⁶ Reptiles, however, don’t have sex chromosomes and rely instead on environmental factors such as temperature for sex determination. A specific temperature range triggers male development, whereas a different range promotes female development.
Second, genetic disorders can result in a sex opposite of what one would expect from the chromosomes. Three case studies help illustrate this fact:
These cases involve XX males, SSR Y-negative females, and XY CBX2 negative females. I won’t summarize the rest of the article, but it does show that the common assertion that “sex is determined by chromosomes” is generally correct, but it’s not the same as saying “sex is defined by chromosomes,” which is wrong, even for humans. This is what’s correct: “the sexes are defined by their structure and function: the reproductive anatomy that produces sperm or eggs. Biological sex is highly correlated with chromosome type, though, but the chromosomal constitution is not involved in the definition of sex in any organism.”
Masih retweeted this from former chess champion and anti-Russian activist Garry Kasparov:
Don't wonder what will happen if Russia collapses. It already did! Years ago. It's not a state, it's a mafia front with factions fighting each other for money, resources, and power.
From Ken, who dubs this, “The Donald sampling HUAC and Joe McCarthy”. I guess all the Marxist professors here will have to be deported if Trump wins. . .
Trump: Using federal law, I will order my government to deny entry to all Communists and all Marxists.. So we're going to keep foreign Christian hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America pic.twitter.com/BXWcJIdGZF
Two Duck Leaps Into the Unknown. Translation of the second one:
A baby duck that is afraid of steps and can’t get off… At that time, the mother’s perseverance gave courage to the chicks https://youtu.be/K1sDWF0reqU?t=779
A week from this coming Thursday, Luana Maroja and I will appear on a Skeptical Inquirer podcast for about an hour to discuss our “ideology in biology” paper and to answer questions. We’re lucky to have Robyn Blumner, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry (publisher of the magazine) as our interlocutor. (She’s also executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which is connected with CFI.)
You can click the screenshot to get more information and to register. I’ve put some relevant information from CFI below, and registration, which is free, is here. I understand that readers can submit questions during the podcast.
Fom the site:
In “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” the cover feature of the July/August 2023 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja deliver a powerful and provocative warning about the dangers of trying to make scientific reality conform to the political winds. It’s an absolute must-read for anyone who agrees that science must be objective and empirical—not ideological.
Join us on Thursday, July 6, at 7:00 p.m. ET for a special Skeptical Inquirer Presents livestream with Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja, hosted by Robyn E. Blumner, CEO and president of the Center for Inquiry. They’ll discuss how the field of evolutionary and organismal biology has been “impeded or misrepresented by ideology,” how the erosion of free inquiry in science due to progressive ideology is damaging both intellectually and materially, and, most importantly, what can be done about it. If things don’t change, they warn, “in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.”
Free registration is required to take part in this live Zoom event, so sign up right now.
