Welcome to the top o’ the week: Monday, May 12, 2025, and National Nutty Fudge Day. I prefer mine without nuts. Here’s some fruity fudge, which looks pretty good:
It’s also International Nurses Day, National Odometer Day, and Limerick Day. Here’s one I wrote as a postdoc to answer a professor in molecular genetics who asserted that natural selection was unimportant and that development explained the appearance of animals:
“The giraffe,” said John Kiger last fall,
“Causes me no amazement at all;
“Why, the gene for the neck
“Is repeated, by heck
“And that’s why the damn thing’s so tall!”
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT goes after Colossal Bioscience’s wonky “de-extinction program” (as I did) in a piece called “There’s no ‘undo’ button for extinct species.” (Article archived here. h/t Enrico) A lot of the criticisms were given in my earlier Boston Globe piece. I bolded one sentence.
De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal’s advisers include the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show’s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.
. . . Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi began life as gray-wolf cells that were edited, grown into embryos and implanted in the wombs of surrogate dog mothers. The edits, which consisted of 20 modifications on 14 genes — a small fraction of the 19,000 genes that make up a gray-wolf genome — were based on comparisons between gray-wolf genomes and those reconstructed from dire-wolf DNA found in ancient tooth and bone fragments. (Gray wolves and dire wolves share superficially similar skeletons, which once led scientists to conclude they were closely related, but they’re actually quite distinct, with evolutionary lineages that diverged millions of years ago.) The resulting animals were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”
A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.” The scientists who specialize in canids for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group that monitors biodiversity and maintains lists of threatened and endangered species, responded to Colossal’s announcement with a news release of its own, declaring that “the three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves.” For one thing, they said, there is no way to know if these wolves are good physical proxies for animals no one has seen for 12,000 years. For another, pure physicality ignores the ecology and behavior and culture of the original dire wolf — the very things that made it one.
I LOVE Grenyer’s comment; I wish I was that clever. At any rate, the tenor of the piece is that “de-extinction” is a false promise.
Even if Colossal had managed to reproduce the dire-wolf genome, that would be very different from reproducing a world in which a vanished creature might thrive. It’s also different from reproducing all the ways in which those creatures once affected their environment. Shapiro has referred to Colossal’s work as “functional de-extinction” — a concept borrowed from the rewilding movement — which argues for bringing back the animal activities that maintained an ecosystem, if not the exact animals that once performed them. It’s also a play on the ecological term “functional extinction,” which designates species that are still, technically, present in the world but in such starkly diminished numbers they no longer eat or pollinate or otherwise have a meaningful impact on their ecosystems. It’s a term that’s getting more and more play, given that the average size of global wildlife populations declined by 73 percent from 1970 to 2020.
. . . .Extinction is not a phenomenon of the mythic past. It’s an active and ongoing crisis, one that’s making our world less resilient and more impoverished. The potential victims, as the scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted, include many canids, the real-life extended family of dire wolves, now facing a raft of threats: “habitat loss and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, disease and the overall disruption of natural processes.” By providing the appearance of an escape clause, so-called de-extinction could undermine not just the few protections that endangered species have but also the idea that we need to make any changes at all.
The day Colossal released its promo video, Doug Burgum, the Trump administration’s secretary of the interior, wrote a long post on X celebrating the news as the first step in ending protections for endangered species. In the future, populations would never really be at risk of disappearance, no matter how diminished their presence. And if they did vanish? Well, we would just bring a few of them back, Burgum told Department of Interior employees during a town hall: “Pick your favorite species,” he said, “and call up Colossal.”
I found that last quote, too. Watch for the appearance of those woolly mammoths in three years!!!
*And another NYT article from Enrico is about who should set the rules for protests at Columbia University (archived here).
In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found a formidable ally in the university senate, a body that was given authority over campus protest policy in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.
Now, the powerful senate finds itself under a microscope. University administrators and trustees, eager to reclaim authority and answer criticism from the Trump administration, have ordered a review of the senate, a move that could fundamentally alter Columbia and redefine control of student protests and disciplinary action.
Some trustees and administrators have blamed the senate for delaying and obstructing discipline of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who broke university rules, and some appear to have accused the 111-member elected body of antisemitism. Senators hotly rebut those charges and say that the senate is standing up for Columbia’s rules and proud tradition of protest against outside pressure.
. . .While a Trump administration task force has demanded that Columbia make a series of changes to get the $400 million back, the decision to review, and perhaps overhaul, the senate goes beyond those demands. It highlights the broad ideological divide between the left-leaning faculty members who dominate the senate and want to protect it and the trustees, who are mostly wealthy businesspeople and lawyers with a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the university functions.
If the Senate punished Columbia students for encamping, or invading a building, I don’t know about it. A bit more:
The trustees wanted to strictly limit when, where and how protests could take place — setting “time, place and manner” restrictions — but were worried that the senate, which is in charge of disciplining protesters who break rules, would not enforce it.
Yep!
. . .At another point, two deans who had negotiated with the demonstrators on behalf of the administration joked about how the senate was almost as pro-Palestinian in outlook as Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, the student movement that established a tent encampment on campus last spring.
“Senate sounds like CUAD,” the dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, wrote in a May 5, 2024, text message to Jelani Cobb, the journalism school dean, a few days after protesters occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. “It’s a spinoff,” Mr. Cobb replied.
Mr. Cobb said on Tuesday that the texts were a joking exchange and did not reflect the deans’ view of the senate.
If you believe that, I have some land in Florida to sell you. I won’t say the Senate is antisemitic, but I’ll note that they’re Israel-haters. They are largely progressive humanities people, and you know what that means, BUT. . . read the next entry:
*SURPRISE! Columbia suspended 65 pro-Palestinian students who took over part of the campus library last week.
Columbia University suspended 65 students involved in a pro-Palestinian protest Wednesday that took over part of the school’s main library.
The students won’t be able to take their final exams or enter campus except to access their dorms. Seniors won’t be able to participate in graduation ceremonies, a school official said.
Columbia barred 33 other people from campus, including students from other colleges and alumni who took part in the protest.
“When rules are violated and when our academic community is purposefully disrupted, that is a considered choice—one with real consequences,” a Columbia spokesperson said.
The disciplinary actions come as Columbia is negotiating with the Trump administration over its federal funding and autonomy. The government has presented Columbia with a proposal for a consent decree, a form of federal oversight that would give a judge responsibility for ensuring Columbia complies with the agreement.
I hate to say this, but I don’t think they wouldn’t have done that without the threat of Trump. And for sure the invasion of the library, which involved pushing security guard and vandalism, was against university regulations.
The school’s response to the protest contrasted with its approach last year, when chaotic and sometimes violent pro-Palestinian protests and encampments led the school to move classes online and cancel its main graduation ceremony. Now, for the first time in more than 50 years, the school employs campus police with expanded authority to arrest students.
I’d prefer that the school did this on its own rather than have its hand forced by our “President.” But seriously, breaking into a library and pushing guards, and then vandalizing the library during finals, no, that is not free speech. I just hope that the school doesn’t drop the charges.
Here’s a Global News video of the assault, demonstration vandalism, and arrests. Note most of the protestors have covered their faces in the usual cowardice. Remember, these are the students who want to turn America into Palestine:
*Pizza Assault! Judges in cases adjudicating Trump’s recent policies have been intimidated by, yes, unordered pizzas. And I can imagine that that would be unsettling:
Some of the pizza deliveries have gone to judges’ relatives. In recent weeks, orders have been placed in the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot at the family home in New Jersey in 2020 by an attorney who posed as a delivery person.
In an interview with The Washington Post, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves in Washington, said she has received seven anonymous pizza deliveries at her home in the past few months — one shortly after she took part in a ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit over the firing of an independent government watchdog.
“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” said Childs, president of the Federal Judges Association.
“It’s really an unnecessary and an unfortunate threat to our security when we’re trying to be judicial officers in a very neutral position with respect to our cases,” she said. “You need a strong judiciary for the system to work. This is infringing on democracy generally.”
Childs and Salas said that they and other judges have discussed the deliveries with the marshals, relaying information to them each time a pizza arrives at the door. Childs serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Salas serves on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
I never order food to be delivered, but don’t you have to leave a credit card number when you order? What numbskull thought up this stunt? And what law is being violated here? I’m sure there is one, probably falling under the rubric of “intimidation.” Perhaps “intimidation through pizza.”
*This can’t be legal: Trump may accept a jet from the corrupt country of Qatar to use as Air Force One!
President Donald Trump reportedly is set to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar during his trip to the Middle East this coming week, and U.S. officials say it could be converted into a potential presidential aircraft.
ABC News reported that Trump will use the plane as a new version of Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office in January 2029, when ownership will be transferred to the foundation overseeing his yet-to-be-built presidential library.
The gift is expected to be announced when Trump visits Qatar as part of a trip that also includes stops in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the first extended foreign travel of his second term. The Qatari government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Administration officials, anticipating questions about the president accepting such a large gift from a foreign government, have prepared an analysis arguing that doing so would be legal, according to ABC. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause bars anyone holding government office from accepting any present, emolument, office or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State,” without congressional consent.
. . . . One expert on government ethics, Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, accused Trump of being “committed to exploiting the federal government’s power, not on behalf of policy goals, but for amassing personal wealth.”
Air Force One is a modified Boeing 747. Two exist and the president flies on both, which are more than 30 years old. Boeing Inc. has the contract to produce updated versions, but delivery has been delayed while the company has lost billions of dollars on the project. Delivery has been pushed to some time in 2027 for the first plane and in 2028 — Trump’s final full year in office — for the second.
Qatar, as you know, is the home of most immensely wealthy Hamas officials, and supplies plenty of dosh to the terrorist organization. For us to accept a gift from such a state is an arrant travesty, and, I hope, illegal. What does Trump flying around in a Qatari jet symbolize?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is exercising self help:
A: What are you thinking about?Hili: Where to look for happiness.
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?Hili: Gdzie szukać szczęścia.
*******************
From reader Wayne:
From reader David Jorling, and this must be Lamarckian evolution!
From reader Stacy, the new Chicago pope:
This is a story you should know about. The BBC gives the full story.
(1) MAJOR BREAKING STORY ON THE DARLINGTON NURSES
This is why it is untenable for men to have access to female changing rooms in the NHS.
Karen Danson, a Darlington nurse, anonymous until now, has gone public on her chilling story on how, after saying that she has experienced… pic.twitter.com/FqkOaBemRH
— Christian Concern (@CConcern) May 11, 2025
From Luana: a thread by Lee Jussim about some replies to Nate Silver’s dissing of the Bluesky site. The thread is worth reading, as is one reply:
My own contribution https://t.co/i5bcw7kKRH
— HeterodorxPodcast🍂🧑🦳 (@heterodorx) May 11, 2025
From Simon, who says, “As imaginary as the true value of cryptocurrency.”
Brilliant!
— Peggy Stuart (@peggystuart.bsky.social) 2025-05-09T20:42:12.618Z
From Malcolm; a parrot and AI talk on the phone. It’s hilarious.
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973c) March 12, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
12 May 1928 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Max van den Berg, was born in Rotterdam.In August 1942 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T02:00:40.816Z
Two tweets from Matthew. First, some ducklings:
I went to the park to film some water textures with a fancy ultra slomo camera, but got distracted by ducks, so here is some very wholesome content of ducklings having a great time chasing lil bugs in extreme 900fps slow motion:
Colossal’s patent is for the final, gene-edited animal, so I don’t think that’s a violation of research ethics, but I doubt anybody is going to infringe on their patent anyway. The toys are clearly AI generated bya a prankster.
Colossal Biosciences is trying to win patents on the "Woolly mammoth" and the "dire wolf."www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1…
— Antonio Regalado (@antonioregalado.bsky.social) 2025-04-16T12:46:46.386Z
” Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.” ”
🎯🤣
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -Dante Alighieri, poet (c. May 1265-1321)
About the quote :
“QI believes that the statement under investigation evolved in a multistep process from a changing and imperfect interpretation of Dante’s work.”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/14/hottest/
… perhaps I’ll check Canto 3 of “Inferno”…
Thanks for that. I like Theodore Roosevelt’s version of the quote
Thanks for the link! Great research about the alleged quote.
I loved this line from Dante quoted in the article:
“the sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise”
I gotta read it again… it was a thing – read The Divine Comedy so you could brag about it! 😆
The tariff cartoon was a bit cryptic to me.
But in any case, here is a story from MSNBC about how Trump got onto this whole tariff thing back in his first administration. O…m…g… it was so incredibly stupid if true.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BphUVJwWN/
Yeah. It could have been better. Let’s see how we can fix it.
Trump could have said: “Everyone is ripping us off, and I see big beautiful tariffs as the answer—always have.”
After which, Dr. Freud(ish) could have said: “Are they in the room with us now?”
Better?
Yes, it’s a standard psychiatrist question. Patient describes what the shrink thinks might be delusions of demons or hallucinations of voices. If the patient answers the “room” question by saying, “Oh, no. I know they’re all in my head, they just seem real to me sometimes,” there is some reassurance the patient is not psychotic. But if he says, “Kripes, yeah, there’s one right behind you. Look out!”, fill out the Form One.
Ah! So not even tariffs are really a personal plan. It does support Penn Jillette’s option on Trump: that he doesn’t lie in the traditional sense, that requires understanding of the truth. Trump simply says whatever he feels at the moment, without concern whether it’s true or false.
It’s true. It’s a well known story.
The plane thing strikes me as another smear-job by the Press, but the facts aren’t clear. Here’s what Qatar said, as quoted in the New York Post:
Even if reports that the jet is being gifted to Trump are inaccurate, there’s nothing inaccurate about reports that Trump intends to accept the gift if it is made – and that is the appalling part of all of this. These are Trump’s own words:
The whole idea of the plane being an innocent gift to Trump’s presidential library – one which DFT just happens to be taking possession of a few years early – and not a naked bribe of a sitting US president is preposterous.
In the first place, what use does a presidential library have for a luxury 747? It’s not as if it would be used or needed to ferry library staffers around. The reality is that DFT certainly knows and anticipates that it would be 100% reserved for the use of himself and his guests, to flatter his ego by enabling him to continue traveling in all the magnificence of a US President even when he’s out of office.
In the second place, the plane won’t save the US government one penny. Since DFT will take possession of the plane after leaving office, the US government will have to pay full price to replace the plane. That means that the only person who will be saving money by accepting this gift is DFT himself. HE is the sole beneficiary of this ‘gift’, and under the circumstances that makes it a bribe. A bribe from Qatar!! JFC
President Reagan’s Presidential Library has a 747 built into it. It’s a beautiful place to visit—way exceeded my expectations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Presidential_Library.
The Qatari plane will be liberally fitted with electronic bugs and listening devices. It may even have unobtrusive tracking beacons and other artifices built into the fuselage. This gift is surely a bribe, or worse. Beware, Mr. President!
A Trojan flying palace, perhaps?
A Trojan clown car?
Agreed Norman. The walk through Air Force One was fascinating as was being able to get into the Presidential helicopter.
I agree with you that Columbia would not have sanctioned those students without pressure from the Trump administration. (Based on my reading,) the school is a mess. And the question of who runs the place is an interesting one, as it touches on the concept and practice of faculty governance. One can easily imagine—and perhaps even see in the flesh—how the takeover of a faculty by radicals and political players can ruin an entire institution. Suddenly—or over a period of a decade or so— the inmates are running the asylum and saner minds don’t have the power to stop it. Ironically, it takes a less sane mind—the deranged President Trump—to restore some semblance of order.
And, in other news, Rich Grenyer’s quip about “de-extinguished” dire wolves being analogous to a short Frenchman wearing Napoleon’s hat is one for the ages!
The slow motion videos of ducklings hunting bugs were interesting. Seems a lot of work for such a small bite, but maybe those bugs have other things they need. Or maybe they’re just a fun snack.
I had never before thought of a ducking as a relentless killing machine.
Maybe it’s play. That’s how young animals hone the skills they’ll need later.
I can only hope that all the scientists who understand why the Dire wolf hasn’t really been recreated apply that same reasoning to the sex/gender issue.
As a thought experiment, I wondered to myself whether anyone think that Collosus had ‘de-extincted’ Neanderthals if they tweaked a human genome to give a baby a heavy brow, a more robust skeleton, a receding chin, greater cold tolerance, and a few of the other physical traits that distinguished Neanderthals from homo sapiens? I think not.
Somehow, it seems obvious that a person would remain entirely a homo sapiens even if you tweaked a few genes so that they more closely resembled a neanderthal – or even if you went further and tweaked their genes so that they more closely resembled a gorilla, for that matter! Why? I think it is because, as members of homo sapiens ourselves, we have an ‘inside’ view of what it is like to be human. For that reason, we can’t help but be well aware that we not only differ morphologically from other species, but behaviorally, psychologically, and sociobiologically as well.
I suspect that if dire wolves were self-aware and intelligent, they would tell you the same thing – that there is a lot more to being a dire wolf than morphology and physiology.
This also applies to being trans. Even though a male, for example, can change aspects of their anatomy and their hormonal milieu to more closely resemble a female, those interventions are as superficial as Collosus’ gene tweaks and don’t come close to being sufficient to change a male into a female, or vv.
I’m an aviation fan and a few years ago I saw some photos of the Qatari plane concerned.
hahah And I thought: “Very Trump” before all this scandal started.
There are some pics of it under searches like at
https://onemileatatime.com/qatari-royal-family-747-sale/
A snazzy ride for sure.
Corruption like this is hard to get our heads around. I saw a tweet: “Can I have 30 dolls if they’re a gift from Qatar?”
Days of idiocy and rot we live in.
D.A.
NYC
The treatment of Karen Danson by her employer – both in her capacity as a nurse and as a patient – is beyond belief. It’s certainly going to be interesting when she and her colleagues have their day in court!
The discussion (?) between the parrot and the IA is funny at first, but also after a while … weird. Which of the two was most “conscious”?