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.
Portugal’s parliament has approved a bill banning face veils worn for “gender or religious” reasons in public, in a move seen as targeting Muslim women who wear face coverings.
The measure was proposed by the far-right Chega party and would prohibit coverings such as burqas (a full-body garment that covers a woman from head to foot) and niqabs (the full-face Islamic veil with space around the eyes) from being worn in most public places. Face veils would still be allowed in airplanes, diplomatic premises and places of worship.
The bill stipulates fines for those wearing face veils in public ranging between 200 euros and 4,000 euros (£175 and £3,475).
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa still has to approve the bill. He could veto it or send it to the constitutional court for review.
Jesus and Mo seem to agree, but for different reasons! What do you think about the ban?
This new column from The Atlantic, arguing that the existence of God is just as likely as that of any scientific phenomenon we can’t see, comes from reader Norman, who said this: “I think that this whole thing is just a passing fad, but God seems to be making a bit of a (local) comeback.”
Indeed. In fact, I was surprised that The Atlantic, a publication I respect, would resort to publishing such ridiculous arguments for the existence of a god. Brooks’s argument comes down to this syllogism (examples come from both me and Brooks):
a.) Science accepts a lot of things we can’t see directly, like quantum phenomenon, electrons, or the use of infrared radiation and electricity as ways animals use to detect their environment. Those phenomena have subsequently been verified, though science still is studying things we can’t yet verify, like dark matter and energy
b.) Similarly, humans accept a lot of things we can’t see—most notably God
c.) Therefore, just as we shouldn’t dismiss the non-seeable phenomena of science, we shouldn’t dismiss the existence of gods.
You’ve probably already detected the fallacy in this argument, but I’ll wait a bit until you read Brooks’s piece. Click on the headline below to go to the archived version.
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.
This bio implies he’s a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!
But click below to see how low the mighty Atlantic has fallen:
Here is the thesis Brook’s defending (in the second paragraph; his quotes are indented). First, he quotes cosmonaut Gherman Titov—the first human in space—who said he didn’t see either angels or God during his space flight. Bolding is mine:
[Titov’s claim] a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and can’t physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn’t exist. If you insist on that thing’s existence because you feel it, believe in it, or have faith in it, you are deluded or a fool.
No matter your stance on religion, the Titovian philosophy is a foolish position. Indeed, life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.
It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today’s scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter—the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons.
Quarks are so small that they cannot be observed at any visual scale; they are understood to be pointlike entities that have zero dimensionality. And yet, no physicist believes quarks don’t exist, because the theoretical and indirect empirical evidence that they do is overwhelming.
Here you see his big fallacy. Yes quarks are unseen, and so were electrons or their quantum-mechanical movement (until recently). But they were hypotheses that weren’t accepted until we found empirical evidence for them. This often takes the form of predictions that were later verified. You can see some evidence for quarks here, and below you can see a photograph that actually uses fancy technology to visualize not just electrons, but their predicted orbitals, which shows the probability of finding an electron in a given position. The photo comes from the site of Quantum Physics Lady (caption from her site, too), and the method for generating this “photo” of electrons in a hydrogen atom was outlined in New Scientist as below:
But how on earth do you make an image of such an object? Measuring the position of a single electron “collapses” the wave function, forcing it to pick a particular position, but that alone is not representative of its normal, quantum presence in the atom. “Wave functions are difficult to measure. They’re exquisite quantum objects that change their appearance upon observation,” says Aneta Stodolna of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Her team decided to make a picture using a technique dreamed up 30 years ago that can be thought of as a quantum microscope. Rather than taking an image of a single atom, they sampled a bunch of atoms. This removes the quantum nature of each individual atom’s electron, forcing it to choose a particular location from those it is allowed to reside in. Do it with enough atoms and the number choosing each spot will reflect the quantum probabilities laid out by the wave function.
Stodolna’s team made a beam of atomic hydrogen and zapped it with two separate lasers that excited the atoms’ electrons by precise amounts. An applied electric field then pushed the excited electrons away from their respective nuclei, towards a detector about half a metre away.
The electrons emitted waves that produced an interference pattern on the detector (see “An atom undressed”). Crucially, the pattern was a projection of the spacings of the energy levels in the hydrogen atom, as laid out in the wave function, with bright rings where electrons were present and dark lanes where they were not (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/mmz). “You can think about our experiment as a tool that allows you to look inside the atom and see what’s going on,” Stodolna says.
Isn’t that fascinating?
(From Quantum Electron orbitals at four energy levels–increasing from (a) to (d). Each image was computer-generated by combining images of many electrons. [Image source: “Smile Hydrogen Atom, You’re on Quantum Camera.” Reporting on the scientific work of Aneta Stodolna and others; FOM Institute AMOLF, Amsterdam, Netherlands]
But of course quantum mechanics and electrons were already accepted as provisional truths before this photo, as their existence (like the earlier existence of atoms) made predictions that were absolutely met. (Now we can actually visualize atoms.) And you can think of lots of physics and chemistry phenomena that we can’t see with our eyes, but whose existence is virtually certain because they make testable predictions.,
But what testable predictions of an unseen God can Brooks make? He doesn’t give us any; he just compares science and religion without mentioning the crucial role of testability.
The eyes, of course, are not the only way to find scientific truth. If a hypothesis or theory predicts other phenomena we can test, we can take it as provisional truth. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted that mass warps space-time, and thus could bend light. Subsequent experiments and observations verified that, so we can have some confidence in the “truth” of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
On a more macro scale, the existence of evolution was doubted for years because “we’ve never seen anything evolving.” Well, now we have: instances of “microevolution” occurring within a human lifetime. But the phenomenon of evolution in general, or of macroevolution (one “type” of organism evolving into another over large spans of time) have now been indirectly proven true (again, I mean “provisionally” true, though I’d bet thousands of bucks that birds evolved from reptiles). The verification of evolution and macroevolution comes from fossils, biogeography, molecular biology, and so on. It’s in WEIT.
Throughout the article, Brooks shows his complete ignorance of how science works by making arguments like the one above, and also pointing out stuff like this:
Although some components of the material world are too small to see, the existence of such facets of reality beyond human perception enjoys widespread and uncontroversial belief. Multivariate calculus, for example, is a rudimentary mathematical tool commonly learned at school that can solve real-life problems such as how to optimize the schedules of, say, five people at once. Yet when it involves more than three variables, calculus is operating in a dimensionality that cannot be depicted graphically in any conventional way. This makes scientific sense, too, because neuroscientists have shown that we can think in dimensions higher than those we can actually see. That itself constitutes a belief in an unseen—indeed, unseeable—reality.
This sounds pretty much like gobbledygook, and if you read the Nature paper on “dimensions of thinking”, you see that those dimensions are very different from the spatial dimensions with which we’re familiar.
But it gets worse. Brooks slots into his specious analogy the fact that some animals have senses using phenomena like infrared radiation or electrical fields—phenomena that we can’t perceive with our own senses. But he forgets that we can perceive how these senses work simply using conventional science: doing empirical tests. We can manipulate radiation and electrical fields, we can remove organs that use them, and so on. Here’s another specious bit:
Beyond the abstract realms of mathematics and physics, the natural sciences (such as zoology and biology) offer similar proofs. We know for a fact that senses beyond the five that humans possess exist for other species. Sharks have specialized sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which give them electroreception, the ability to detect electrical fields generated by the muscular and neural activity of other living organisms. Jewel beetles have infrared organs that register the radiation emitted by fires. Many snakes have a sense similar to infrared vision, which enables them to perceive a thermal image of potential prey.
Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don’t exist would be silly, even dangerous.
That made me laugh. How does Brooks think that we’ve verified the existence of these senses? I can assure you that it’s not through faith or revelation.
These existence of these senses would remain as hypotheses, not facts, unless we were able to test whether ther really was electroreception. Now, can we find any direct or indirect empirical evidence for God? No, in fact, if you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God—or, indeed, any kind of divine force that doesn’t act according to physical laws—your predictions flout reality. Such a god would never kill thousands of people with tsunamis, or give children fatal cancers. The theological response, of course, is that “God works in mysterious ways.” If that’s the response, then, we’re not able to make any predictions based on God’s existence, and of course we lack any evidence for that existence in the first place. The “answers”, if there are any, are untestable claims that theologians simply make stuff up. As the late Victor Stenger said,
We have countless examples where evidence for God should have been found, but was not. This absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It refutes the common assertion that science has nothing to say about God.
Similarly, we have no reason to believe that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware—and which are as yet undiscovered.
You can see this same argument in the famous “invisible dragon” analogy made by Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World. In this great piece, Sagan describes the arguments of a proponent of the existence of an invisible, fire-breathing dragon in his garage. This proponent is implicitly compared to a theologian who keeps defending the existence of a deity for whom, like the dragon, no evidence can be adduced. The difference between the unseen stuff that Brooks says leaves open the existence of God and the unseen stuff that science doesn’t yet understand is that science does not give credence to unseen stuff until there’s evidence for it.
In contrast, religionists like Brooks tout “feelings, belief, and faith” as things that may point to a God. He should read my Slate article, “No Faith in Science,” which shows how religious faith differs from scientific “faith”, which is merely a synonym for “confidence based on evidence.”
Brooks’s final argument is that God’s existence is plausible because many scientists believe in God:
This can’t simply be dismissed as premodern thinking. In a 2009 survey, the Pew Research Center found that among scientists who belonged to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, just over half (51 percent) believed in “some form of deity or higher power.” Defying the general trend that young adults are becoming less religious than their elders, scientists under 35, who have grown up amid the latest breakthroughs, were the most religious in the survey: 66 percent were believers, as opposed to 46 percent of scientists 65 and older.
But he neglects these data I adduce in Faith Versus Fact—data that are publicly available. This is from p. 13 of my book, and the data are from later than 2009.
Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling.
When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.
Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.
I go on to discuss various explanations for the correlation between degree of scientific achievement and atheism, and you can probably think of at least two. But of course scientists are human, and the fact that some of them believe in God or a “higher power” doesn’t give an iota of evidence for that higher power. Remember, scientists are far more atheistic than members of the general public.
In the end, though, the answer to Brooks’s title question is this: “You can keep an open mind, but as the lack of evidence becomes more pervasive, your mind should start closing.” In this case, the lack of evidence for God compared to the evidence for scientific phenomena that we can’t see directly should start making Brooks doubt the existence of God. Brooks should be even more hesitant because many phenomena previously not understood and thus touted as evidence for God —lightning, plagues, and so on—eventually yielded to empirical study. Revelation and faith are no way to find truth, and no way to find God, either.
When the existence of God likewise starts yielding to empirical study, then we can start thinking about Brooks’s claims. Right now they are just foolish, bespeaking an ignorance of the difference between science and religious faith. It should embarrass The Atlantic for having published this stuff.
Today’s lovely photos are of scissor-tailed flycatchers, and come from Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistician at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
This is a collection of photos of Scissor-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus forficatus) that I have taken over the past few years after I moved to Oklahoma. I don’t remember the exact date taken for each individual photo (all taken during the summer months); so I have skipped that information and included some stories behind in each photo.
When we moved to North-central Oklahoma four years ago, my wife and I, both birders and photographers, were not very hopeful about the bird photography opportunities in this part of the country. Given the fact that we have stayed in places with amazing photo opportunities in both the Eastern and Western parts of the US, there were very few new birds we could get, except, of course, the chance to photograph inarguably the best state bird of all states on its breeding ground. Over the last few years, we have got many photos of these Scissor-tailed Flycatchers that we liked. This photo was captured at one of our local lakes.
A long-tailed male posing here. Females typically have slightly shorter tails:
These birds are quite territorial and vocal while establishing their territories:
Some aerial action of the Scissor-tailed Flycatchers. Love their social interactions!:
This is another image immediately after their spring arrival when they are most conspicuous:
These two seemed to be a mated pair… So this was more like playful chasing rather than territorial battles:
This looks more fierce, but these two were also a pair:
While photographing Scissor-tailed Flycatchers at my favorite spot, I was wondering how beautiful the golden light on the dark clouds looked like and it would be so great if a bird posed for me in this light. Right then, this scissortail flew in and started flycatching right in front of me. These birds can easily go for at least 10-20 insects within a span of five minutes during this time at the end of the day. This shot was taken a split second after catching a mosquito:
Those long tail feathers of the males look quite beautiful when the perform their aerial courtship displays:
The females and immature scissortails have shorter tail feathers than the male birds, but these shorter-tailed ones are more abundant during the fall before they migrate South (mostly due to all the new ones born in the current year):
Right before catching an insect!
When there is more than one option to pick from!:
Another image from the same series:
I have noticed that the flycatchers shift to a diet consisting of larger insects as they get ready for their fall migration. I have seen them regularly eating larger moths and butterflies during this time, which is relatively uncommon earlier in the season. In this case, the bird caught a big cicada. In our area, cicadas are common food source for larger birds such as Mississippi Kites (Ictinia mississippiensis), but I was surprised to see the flycatcher being able to grab one in the air:
A cellphone image of scissortails congregating before their migration. There are 30 of them in this photo:
I think most of them have left our area now. Looking forward to seeing them back next spring:
Welcome to Oct. 31, 2025; it’s a Friday, which is good because it’s also Halloween, so American children will be roaming the streets tonight schnorring for candy. The first reader who sends me a photo of their cat with a Halloween them (and a few words about the moggy) will have their cat featured below:
*In a joint NYT op-ed discussion called “There are so many ways to shut down a country” (archived here), writers Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens debate the meaning of Mamdani’s inevitable victory as mayor of NYT:
Frank Bruni: Greetings, Bret. I’m especially eager to hear your thoughts this week because this is our last conversation before Tuesday’s elections, the results of which will be read like rune stones. We’ll see in them the fortunes of President Trump and of the Democratic Party in — and beyond — the 2026 midterms. What do you think these contests will (or won’t) reliably tell us? And while we can’t know who’ll win, which of the races do you find especially significant?
Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. My concern is that a blowout victory for Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race and tight governors’s races, or even a loss, for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia or Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey will send a misleading signal that voters want more progressive Democrats, not more moderate ones. And I think that’s the worst possible lesson if Democrats want to take back Congress and win nationally.
Frank: I don’t worry too much that a Mamdani victory in the city — which is its own political ecosphere and the very antonym of a national bellwether — will be seen for very long as an instruction manual for the Democratic Party writ large. Whether Mamdani is dangerous baggagefor the party, in terms of being a convenient foil for President Trump, is another matter.
Bret: We’ll get to that in a minute. Go on …
Frank: But in terms of election postmortems, it’s the New Jersey results that I think will resonate most profoundly. Jersey isn’t purple; it’s light blue. If Sherrill loses to or only squeaks past Jack Ciattarelli — a Republican who, in his third bid for the job, is aligning himself with President Trump and the MAGA movement as never before — Democrats will have great reason to sweat, but not about whether they need more progressive candidates. About the fact that after the madness and melodrama of Trump’s presidency so far, association with him isn’t toxic to swing voters, which means that campaigning against him won’t be nearly enough in 2026.
Bret: You’re right that it isn’t enough for Democrats to be the un- and anti-Trumps; that was probably the biggest lesson of the Kamala Harris disaster last year. Where I think you’re mistaken is that a Mamdani win, which, as I’ve written before, I think will be terrible for New York on its own terms, will also scramble Democratic brains. The argument will be that Democrats win big when they move to the left and generate fresh enthusiasm among young voters and minorities, but lose, or struggle, when they choose moderates who appeal to the center. And, as the late, great John McLaughlin might have said: WRONG! Republicans will have a field day in the midterms if they can run against the “Mamdani Democrats.”
Stephens is a no-Trumper conservative, but I think he’s right about a Mamdani victory, though I know squat about what’s happening in New Jersey. Right now a lot of information is emerging about Mamdani’s associations with terrorist sympathizers or other Islamists (see here, and here, and here, for example, though you won’t find this stuff in the NYT). He also founded a chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College, and SJP is, to me, an Islamist and somewhat antisemitic organization (this is based on my experience here and what I hear from other schools). So far the Democrats are not de-wokeifying themselves, but rather doubling down, and it worries me. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. But I’m glad I don’t live in New York City!
*A poll reported in the WaPo (archived here) shows that Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House to build a superfluous 1000-seat ballroom.
Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom building by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Thursday.
Twenty-eight percent of Americans say they support the demolition project, paid for by $300 million in private donations from U.S. businesses and individuals, compared with 56 percent who oppose it, the poll finds. Another 16 percent are not sure whether they support or oppose the project.
The findings echo other recent surveys, including an Economist-YouGov poll conducted from Oct. 24 to Oct. 27 that found 25 percent of Americans supported the project and 61 percent were opposed.
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll also finds partisan splits in how Americans perceive the project, with nearly 9 in 10 Democrats and roughly 6 in 10 independents opposing it, compared with about 2 in 10 Republicans. However, Democrats feel more intensely about the issue than Republicans. Some 78 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of independents strongly oppose the project, compared with 35 percent of Republicans who strongly support it.
“People are loving it,” the president said in remarks in Tokyo on Tuesday, citing an editorial in The Washington Post and an op-ed in the New York Times that supported his project. (The Washington Post’s editorial page is independent from the newsroom.)
Well “people” doesn’t mean “The American people” but his people, also known as “toadies”. Look, this should not be a partison issue. Trump, who will be gone in about three years, is removing a historic wing of the White House. And yes, he has the power to do it, but that doesn’t mean he should do it, for the People’s House doesn’t need a thousand-person ballroom. It’s partly my house, too, and I don’t like it a bit. But Republicans do; here’s the NYT breakdown of the Ballroom Approval Issue by party. As with all issues, there’s a sharp split between right and left, but Independents don’t like it, either.
Here: look at this video showing what Trump has done:
*On her Substack site, Nicole Barbaro Simovski, a social scientist who Director of Communications at Heterodox Academy, has read and reviewed Ross Douthat’s book Believe, in which he not only touts the filling of his God-shaped hole with Christianity, but says that everybody else needs to plug their holes as well. She is not a fan of the book, to say the least. Have some excerpts:
Douthat’s main thesis is as follows:
“…that faith in its traditional form could accurately describe reality, that the God of the old-time sort of religion – supernaturalist and scriptural religion, angels-and-miracles religion, Jesus-was-resurrected religion – might actually exist, that religious belief might be not only socially or psychologically desirable but also an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality and the destiny of humankind” (my emphasis).
Me being kind (and reasonable), I can absolutely grant that religion serves many positive functions in society (and many negative), and many people who believe and practice experience social and psychological benefits. That religion is “an entirely reasonable perspective on the nature of reality”? Absolutely not. And this book did nothing to provide evidence of that aside from baseless assertions and rhetoric. And many of the assertions and lines of reasoning brought in other implicit claims that I presume would see weird even to many religious people.
This review is longer than a typical one of mine, but it won’t address all the points in the book and I’m not going to dismantle each point with the scientific evidence (go read Jerry Coyne’s books Why Evolution is True and Faith vs. Fact for that). But I’ll point out some of the wilder things that stood out to me in Douthat’s argument for creation. I also won’t spend any time on the personal or social benefits because I largely think that if it makes you happy then that’s great, and there is evidence to that effect. But you mostly can’t get those benefits unless you also believe in the “reality” or “facts” of whatever religion you chose, and I still don’t understand how one can legitimately believe in that “perspective on reality” having had any legitimate science education.
I appreciate the shoutout, but if you want confirmation that religious people really do believe in the “factness” of their faith’s truth claims, read the philosophy paper I wrote with Maarten Boudry. A bit more from Simovski:
The arguments all generally fall into two camps: the scientific evidence is actually evidence for God, with the latter being more parsimonious than any physics or biology theory you could think of; and “we just don’t know, so therefore God!” It’s utterly unconvincing and unoriginal. At least science has humility.
Then, when discussing how the mysteries of consciousness bolster his argument for the divine and supernatural, he uses the classic “we can’t just be an ape!” which shows a lack of scientific knowledge more than anything else.
The book is probably frustrating to anyone with a general science degree and especially to those who have studied biology and physics. I want to be clear that I think the “argument for religion” is actually two separate arguments. Do you believe in a literal God that created the universe in some sense, and do you derive benefits from being religious? I think the latter depends a lot of the former, but I think most religious people don’t really care to think too hard about the former because they never studied the science deeply enough to care, and therefore, there is little internal cognitive conflict.
If you can’t accept the factual claims of a faith (in Douthat’s case, that Jesus was the son of God and was crucified and resurrected, giving us a route to salvation), then you can hardly call yourself a member of that faith. And, as the late Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do eveil; but for good people to do eveik—that takes religion.” Finally, how can a set of propositions make you feel good if you don’t fully embrace them?
The French police have arrested five more people in connection with the spectacular jewel theft at the Louvre, including one who is believed to have been among the thieves at the scene, the prosecutor overseeing the investigation said on Thursday.
The DNA of one suspect connected him to the crime, Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in an interview with RTL, a French radio station. The other four “are people who may potentially inform us about the unfolding of these events,” she said.
The arrests were made on Wednesday evening in operations across the Paris region. But the jewelry has not been recovered, Ms. Beccuau said.
Two thieves broke into the Louvre Museum more than a week ago, using disc grinders to cut through a window to the second-floor Apollo Gallery. They stole some of France’s crown jewels that were worth more than $100 million before escaping on high-powered motor scooters driven by two accomplices.
Two other suspects were arrested four days ago, including one at the Charles de Gaulle airport as he was trying to fly to Algeria. The two men have been charged with theft by an organized gang and with criminal conspiracy. They are accused of riding a truck-mounted electric ladder that was used to reach the gallery’s balcony from a road outside and cutting into the display cases inside before escaping on the scooters.
Ms. Beccuau said investigators, who number about 100, used various techniques to track the thieves. The thieves escaped less than a minute before police and security agents arrived on the scene.
“Everything obviously begins with the DNA traces, the fingerprints, everything that can be found at the scene,” she said. “Then, we have everything related to video surveillance, and then we have their phones, and then we have the discovery of other objects during the searches, and, brick by brick, the investigation is being built and tightening around those who may be involved.”
Given that they had their phones and DNA evidence, this became much easier. Still, it’s really hard to get away with this kind of crime these days, given cameras and the armamentarium of scientifically-based forensics. Still, I doubt whether those jewels will ever show up again.
Harvard students pushed back forcefully against a new University report condemning grade inflation, arguing that it misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.
The 25-page report, released Monday by the Office of Undergraduate Education, suggested that Harvard’s grading system had become so lenient that it no longer meaningfully distinguished between students. It warned that current practices were “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and were “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
But in interviews with The Crimson, more than 20 students said the report missed the complexity of academic life at Harvard. Many objected to its suggestion that students were not spending enough time on coursework and warned that stricter grading could heighten stress without improving learning.
Sophie Chumburidze ’29 said the report felt dismissive of students’ hard work and academic struggles.
“The whole entire day, I was crying,” she said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”
“It just felt soul-crushing,” she added.
The report called on Harvard affiliates to work with officials to “re-center academics” and devote time towards tougher and more strictly graded courses. But many students said the push felt misguided, warning that tougher grading, without attendant changes in academic quality, would shift their focus from learning to chasing grades.
Kayta A. Aronson ’29 said stricter standards could take a serious toll on students’ mental health.
“It makes me rethink my decision to come to the school,” she said. “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.”
The most incredible part of this report might be when Harvard acknowledges that its pedagogical crisis is partly due to coddling underprepared students:’
. . . .But several students said their involvements outside of the classroom were integral to Harvard’s identity.
“What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars,” Peyton White ’29 said. “Now we have to throw that all away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”
A tweet that explains some of the grade inflation (h/t Luana)
I’ve never heard such a diverse litany of kvetching from students, involving extracurriculars, having to do actual work (I know; I went there, though as a Ph.D. student, but I did teach undergrads), and sobbing on a bed because you got a “B”. The media GPA at harvard is 3.8 this year, with 4 being the top grade (an “A”). Cry me a river, you entitled gits, and get your butt to the Widener!
As the 2025 World Series heads back to Canada for Friday’s Game 6, the Toronto Blue Jays need just one more victory to win the Fall Classic.
Behind back-to-back home runs by Davis Schneider and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to lead off the game — the first time that has happened in World Series history — and a masterful pitching performance by record-setting rookie Trey Yesavage, they drubbed the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 to take a 3-2 series lead.
Yesavage started the season not just in the minor leagues, but pitching in the A leagues (there are AA, AAA, and High-A leagues above that, with the major leagues topping them all), and yet he still wound up pitching 7 great innings in the last game. It’s America, baby, and big talent rises quickly! He’ll get a fat contract next season.
Here’s a video of Wednesday’s game highlights. It may be all over tonight, though I’m rooting for the Dodgers.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili continues to hate on Kulka:
Hili: Kulka has drank all the water again.
Me: Some accusations carry a hint of prejudice.
In Polish:
Hili: Kulka znowu wypiła całą wodę.
Ja: Niektóre oskarżenia noszą znamiona uprzedzeń.
I knew Masih would post a tweet of elation today, and so she did. Good for her!
Justice is beautiful ✌️🌻
They wanted to see me on the porch of my Brooklyn home, covered in blood.
I wore red instead to face my would-be assassin and to celebrate life, justice, and freedom.
The Russian mobsters hired by Iranian regime sent to kill me on US soil were… pic.twitter.com/xffWgwQAoT
From Luana. And there’s a residuum of these origins in the language and intonation:
People from different regions of the British Isles settled different regions of the U.S. These groups had deep geno-cultural differences that are still noticeable today. Appalachia and New England are deeply different, in a way mirroring the differences that were present in… pic.twitter.com/zDdJ4BK9WL
From Simon. Let nobody say that Larry the Cat is self-denigrating!
Wishing all my friends in the United States a happy National Cat Day. We don’t have a National Cat Day in the UK, just a National Cat. Me.
(Pic @PjrFoto) pic.twitter.com/5Hlf5OI2tV
This eight-year-old Austrial Jewish boy was gassed, together with a bunch of other boys from a children’s home, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. https://t.co/tZU5Svfn2w
And two posts from Dr. Cobb. This seems a bit unethical since Church founded the company (Colossal Biosciences) that Lamm works for. I can’t wait to see those Woolly Mammoths!
🧪 I see Ben Lamm of Colossal is in Time as a "2025 World’s Most Influential Rising Stars, Innovator class" with a profile written by… George Church.Amongst other things, it says: "Ben has faced technical hurdles and skeptics with respect and humor."🤔time.com/collections/…
And since the furin cleavage site was supposed to be hard evidence for human genetic engineering of the Covid virus, this new finding that such sites can occur naturally adds credibility to the alternative “wet market” hypothesis:
That would have been big news a few years ago, unfortunately the great science that gives important understanding in coronaviruses is now back to the small circle of scientists. Anyway: A fully functional furin cleavage site in a bat betacorarnavirus! Congrats to the authors!
Reader Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, Flickr page here) is now fighting a battle to keep her family’s reserve (i.e., her property, which has been made into a wetland wildlife sanctuary), from being overwhelmed by a subdivision that might be built across the highway. She reports on the problem, giving one of her videos of the wildlife on the sanctuary. From her post on Facebook:
There is a large church property directly across the truck route from our wildlife sanctuary, and a developer is about to meet with the county to discuss building a 108-single family subdivision on part of the property. According to the neighbor who is working to inform those affected by the proposed development, “Any development of that size would have devastating impacts on the character of our surrounding neighborhoods. The traffic impacts would further clog our roads, making traffic even worse than it already is. The light pollution coming from a site with 108 new homes would disrupt our tranquil way of life. Water runoff from the site will only worsen the flooding we see after rain events, especially to our neighbors in Riverwood Acres. And no one really knows of the impacts a new development would have on the wildlife we currently enjoy year-round.”
Some in the neighborhood are meeting with a reporter from a local TV station to make people aware of what is happening, and I was asked to provide video footage of some of the wildlife that nest, spend time in, and pass through the sanctuary, and I wanted to share it here as well.
Although Tara’s up against seemingly unstoppable property development, she’s fought back with the most powerful weapon she has now: video and public opinion. Here’s her video, and a lovely one it is, too. Keep an eye out for the ducklings!
UC Davis math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson sends us some intertidal photos (with one mammal). Abby’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
And don’t forget to send in your photos!
A late summer entry from the tidepools, including a mystery through the microscope:
First, two handsome chitons: these are the fellows who cling to rocks like a limpet, and, if dislodged, curl up like a pill-bug to protect their soft undersides:
Genus Themiste (peanut worm); the species is uncertain. The body of the worm lies below the sand. The tentacles are very active (and very skittish), sweeping in particles towards the mouth:
I’ve posted some pictures of the deer that often come down to the beach before dawn. The cliffs down to the beach are quite steep in places, and sadly sometimes the deer slip and fall. This must have been a fawn (based on size). Skip the next picture if you’re not a nature-tooth-and-claw person:
Dead deer- probably a mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus:
Diaulula odonoghuei (Northern leopard dorid): This species is typically further north, although I’ve found it here a few times:
The next three photos are a puzzle to me, maybe some readers have a suggestion. They’re through a microscope. I was looking at bryozoans on a piece of kelp, when I noticed some ring-like things on stems growing out of the bryozoans. The first picture is a side view showing the stems. In the second picture you can see the (greenish) rings forming inside one of the bryozoans- the rings seem to turn peachy as they mature. The final picture shows the mature rings from above. Inaturalist hasn’t come up with a suggestion so far. From what I’ve read of marine bryozoans, I don’t think this is part of their reproductive cycle. A tentative suggestion from the Bodega Marine Lab (thanks!!) is “stemmed diatoms”; the world is a mysterious place:
Welcome to Thursday, October 30, 2025: the penultimate day of the month as well as National Candy Corn Day, honoring what has to be the worst candy ever. I can’t eat it, even though I have a sweet tooth! It tastes like wax mixed with petroleum byproducts. Wikipedia even says it’s coated with a glaze made from BUG SECRETIONS! Invented in the 1880s, it was first called what it tastes like, “Chicken feed.” Here’s how the sausage is made (near Chicago!):
The U.S. economy will lose between $7 billion and $14 billion due to the federal government shutdown, according to a new report released Wednesday by Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper.
Federal workers missing paychecks and the interruption of food benefits for low-income Americans are expected to temporarily lower gross domestic productby 1 to 2 percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2025, the Congressional Budget Office reported.
Output is expected to spring back once the government reopens and services resume, reversing most of the economic slowdown. But the hours lost by furloughed federal workers would permanently impact real GDP — an effect that would get worse the longer the shutdown drags on.
“In CBO’s assessment, the shutdown will delay federal spending and have a negative effect on the economy that will mostly, but not entirely, reverse once the shutdown ends,” CBO director Phillip Swagel wrote in a letter to House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who requested the analysis.
If Congress agreed to reopen the government this week, the economy would lose $7 billion by the end of 2026 compared to if there had not been a shutdown, according to CBO.
If the shutdown ends after six weeks — which would bearound Nov. 12 — the economy would permanently lose $11 billion in GDP by the end of 2026. That loss would grow to $14 billion if the shutdown lasts until the end of November,
. . . . the shutdown will soon become more painful for those who aren’t federal employees: SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program commonly known as food stamps, is set to run out of funding on Saturday. The Agriculture Department has said it cannot use $5.5 billion in contingency funds to keep the program running, which means SNAP benefits will temporarily halt in states that cannot make up the difference.
. . . and that means that poor people won’t get food. I am not a pundit and won’t place any blame on the parties except for their stubborn refusal to talk to each other. But feel free to place blame in the comments. One thing is clear so far: the Democrats will not compromise unless the Republicans agree to extend healthcare subsidies that were going to expire under the law.
*False alarm department: Trump, as well as the Speaker of the House, have admitted that Trump can’t run for a third term (though a few of my friends claim Trump will really try0. It was, said, Speaker Johnson called Trump’s musings just a form of “trolling”:
President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge Wednesday that he cannot run for a third term, after previously declining to rule out the possibility.
“I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had, and, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So, we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Gyeongju, South Korea.
“I would say that if you read it, it’s pretty clear. I’m not allowed to run. It’s too bad, but we have a lot of great people,” he added.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he does not “see the path” for Trump to seek a third term.
“It’s been a great run, but I think the president knows, and he and I have talked about, the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many of the American people lament that,” Johnson said during a news conference on Capitol Hill.
Trump sidestepped questions about Johnson’s comments, instead touting his strong polling numbers.
“I don’t want to even talk about that because, you know, the sad thing is, I have my highest numbers that I’ve ever had,” Trump continued.
Trump has repeatedly raised the prospect of serving a third term, despite being barred from doing so by the Constitution. The 22nd Amendment explicitly states that no person shall be elected president more than twice.
On Monday, Trump said he would “love to do it” when asked about a potential 2028 bid but Johnson, on Tuesday, said he doesn’t see a way forward when it comes to amending the Constitution.
“I don’t see a way to amend the Constitution because it takes about 10 years to do that,” Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, said. “As you all know, to allow all the states to ratify what two-thirds of the House and three-fourths of the states would approve. So I don’t, I don’t see the path for that, but I can tell you that we are not going to take our foot off the gas pedal.”
So that’s that, and I will take great pleasure in telling my friends with extreme TDS that no, this joker will be gone as of January, 2029. Our energies should be finding a good Democratic candidate to replace him.
Elon Musk launched Grokipedia on Monday as an alternative to the nonprofit-powered Wikipedia.
Musk’s version is backed by xAI but still uses Wikipedia as a source on most subjects. The subsections and citations on Grokipedia resemble that of its predecessor but refrain from reporting on topics critical of Musk, its maker.
For example, no mention of his gesture resembling a Nazi salute made on stage during a celebration of President Trump’s inauguration or ties to the development of toxic waste spread at data center for xAI in Memphis, Tenn., could be found in the search engine.
The site offers 885,279 articles so far.
It’s the fruition of an effort first announced in late September with the goal of developing a “massive improvement over Wikipedia,” Musk previously wrote in a post on the social platform X.
In the past, he’s called the site “Wokipedia” following similar accusations from GOP lawmakers in Congress and White House AI czar David Sacks, who slammed the site as “hopelessly biased.”
“An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections,” Sacks alleged on X. “Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”
However, The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, defended itself from those claims last mont
There’s no doubt that Wikipedia is slanted to the left, though that would put a slight tilt to Grokipedia if it drew text from Wikipedia. I haven’t even looked at the new one, but Luana sent me this tweet from Musk and you can see the difference in the entry for George Floyd.
Note the difference between Wikipedia’s first paragraph on George Floyd compared to the first paragraph from Grokipedia. The nuance and detail on Grokipedia is FAR superior to Wikipedia and is clearly not pushing any ideologies, unlike Wikipedia. Corrections like this are… pic.twitter.com/NoTnLq2pxe
The Wikipedia George Floyd article is here; and the one from Grokipedia is here.
You be the judge. I’m going to go to Grokipedia now and see if I’m in it (I’m in Wikipedia). And yes, I found myself and the article is much longer than the Wikipedia one, and I suppose you can consider it fair, though Grokipedia just regurgitates everything rather than having its contents vetted by arguments. (In Wikipedia the arguments are usually won by progressives.) It looks like the topics themselves, and much of the text, comes from Wikipedia, so I’m pretty confident Grokipedia won’t be a big hit.
*This post (I can’t embed it, so click to go to site) is worthy of a news item in itself—if it’s true. Do realize that the UK has formally recognized a Palestinian state to facilitate the elusive “two-state solution.”
This seems to me to be a premature tweet based on my attempt to verify it elsewhere. The closest thing I could find is this speculation from the Jerusalem Post on August 8, before the UK recognized Palestine: (click headline to read):
An excerpt:
Israel may withdraw defense and security cooperation with the United Kingdom should Prime Minister Keir Starmer recognize a Palestinian state, diplomatic sources told The Times on Thursday.
According to the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is examining potential options for retaliation against the UK’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state in September.
In July, Starmer said that Britain would recognize the state of Palestine unless Israel allows for more humanitarian aid into Gaza, stops Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and agrees to a ceasefire and commits to long-term peace.
An official told The Times that the UK and other countries seeking to recognize Palestinian statehood must “carefully consider” the consequences of that action.The Times cited another source as saying, “London needs to be careful because [Benjamin Netanyahu] and his ministers have cards they could play too. Israel values its partnership with the UK, but recent decisions mean it is coming under pressure, and the UK has a lot to lose if Israel’s government decides to take steps in response.”
The report added that Israel’s potential withdrawal of security and defense cooperation with Britain would have significant economic and security implications. For example, Israeli intelligence has provided significant information to UK spy agencies about Iranian-backed threats. The Times said that Mossad has passed crucial information to British counterparts that thwarted an Iranian-linked terrorist plot on the Israeli embassy in London, resulting in large counterterror raids in the UK. Additionally, the UK has used Israeli-made drones for surveillance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Israeli defense equipment, saving the lives of British soldiers.Israeli companies have also sold weapons systems, parts, and software to British firms such as BAE (British Aerospace Public Limited Company), and the overall trading partnership between the two countries is worth 6 billion pounds and supports 38,000 jobs.
The tweet, then, looks like a premature ejaculation. If readers know anything about this, let me know. The only other sign of friction is that Israel withdrew from a major UK arms show in late August because of restrictions placed on its exhibits by the UK. And that withdrawal is considered serious. At any rate, nobody should be recognizing a Palestinian state until there is a stable, non-terrorist-promoting government in place, and that hasn’t yet happened.
*As I mentioned yesterday, on Tuesday the Toronto Blue Jays, winning 6-2, evened the World series against the Dodgers, with each team having won two games. And this was despite Ohtani being the opening pitcher for Los Angeles. A summary from ESPN and then a video.
UPDATE: Toronto won again last night by a score of 6-1, and they used a 22-year old pitcher. If Toronto wins the next game, it’s all over. I wonder what Trump will say when the “51st state” wins a game that was started in the U.S.!
It was over when …:Shohei Ohtani hung a breaking ball to Guerrero in the top of the third inning, not long after the Dodgers took a 1-0 lead. The Jays slugger hit it 395 feet to left-center field, also scoring Nathan Lukes, who had singled ahead of him. — Jesse Rogers
Game 4 hero:Shane Bieber. On a night when both starters had to give their respective teams some length, Bieber outpitched Ohtani, navigating around four hits and three walks over 5⅓ innings and doing what no one has been able to do at Dodger Stadium lately — get Ohtani out at the plate. Bieber struck out the Dodgers’ two-way star twice. — Rogers
The stat that defined the game: With his seventh postseason home run, Guerrero broke a tie with Joe Carter and José Bautista for the most career long balls in Blue Jays playoff history. Guerrero’s 14 postseason RBIs are also a franchise record, while his 10 extra-base hits are tied for the most in Blue Jays playoff history. — ESPN Research
What’s next for the Dodgers: In hopes of retaking control of this series and avoiding having to win back-to-back games in Toronto to seal a championship, the Dodgers will turn to Blake Snell in Game 5 and hope for a turnaround. The last time Snell took the mound, in Game 1 of the World Series, he lacked command of his fastball, struggled to generate whiffs with his changeup and labored like he hadn’t in quite a while, getting chased from a sixth inning that saw the Blue Jays score a whopping nine runs. In three playoff starts before that, Snell allowed just two runs in 21 innings.
This will mark the first time he faces the same opponent twice in a series, but Snell faced the San Diego Padres in back-to-back starts during the regular season and faced the Philadelphia Phillies really close together in September and October. It wasn’t a problem then. The Dodgers will hope it isn’t a problem now. — Alden Gonzalez
What’s next for the Blue Jays: A Game 5 win on Wednesday might feel like gravy for the Blue Jays, as they’re handing the ball to rookie Trey Yesavage for his first road start of the postseason. They’ve already secured another game in Toronto, where they won Games 6 and 7 in the ALCS — along with Game 1 of this series. If Toronto can capture a second victory in Los Angeles — with several relievers likely available again to follow Yesavage — it can turn the favored Dodgers into underdogs.
Here are six minutes of highlights. This series is a real roller-coaster.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is vetting the guests, two readers of Listy who decided, out of the blue, to pay a call on Andrzej.
Hili: Such lovely guests, they’re curious about our books.
Andrzej: Hush, silly, that’s not appropriate to say.
In Polish:
Hili: Co za wspaniali goście, interesują ich nasze książki.
Ja: Ciszej głuptasie, nie wypada tak mówić.
And an extra photo of Andrzej with his favorite companion: a child (probably the offspring of the couple who lives upstairs). The caption is “A moment of break for shooting from the category – different.” (In Polish: “Chwila przerwy na zjęcia z kategorii – inne.”):
Palestinian opinion is polarized: the Trump Plan is widely known but support is split, with Gazans more favorable than West Bankers. Majorities back Hamas’s response yet reject disarming Hamas; most doubt the plan will end the war or deliver statehood. A leadership crisis endures—dissatisfaction with Abbas and the PA, Marwan Barghouti leading, and Hamas outpolling Fatah. Since Oct 7, support for the attack persists even as expectations of Hamas victory wane. Gazans are more open to non-violence and the two-state solution; West Bankers favor armed struggle. Across both, skepticism of external plans coexists with demands for elections and self-defense.
New survey: Hamas remains the most popular political party among Palestinians. Its support is increasing. Satisfaction with Hamas is at 60%. Most Palestinians believe the 10/7 attacks were a good idea.
A Dutch Jewish girl and her older brother were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. She was three years old. Had she lived, she’d be 86 today. https://t.co/HICmYjr4Ht
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The question about the first one is whether the color mutation has a pleiotropic effect on behavior:
Last year, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal.Learn more on #NationalCatDay: https://scim.ag/3LdWP8b
