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.
Today’s wi8ldlife photos came from Charles Dunlop, who notes that they were taken in Costa Rica in 2019. I’ve indented his brief captions, and my own IDs are in brackets. Some of the animals are unidentified, so feel free to weigh in in the comments. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“수요일” in Korean): October 22, 2025, and National Tavern-Style Pizza Day. As Wikipedia notes, this is a thin pizza with a crunchy crust and is cut into squares rather than slices. It’s popular in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. Here’s one. I don’t like it: pizza should be in SLICES (do you eat pie in squares), and a square is not a substantial amount:
Shsilver at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ahead of the past weekend’s No Kings rallies across the country, the Trump administration and its congressional allies warned that protests would be ugly.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that they would feature the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they were “part of antifa.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson wrapped up this bill of particulars with a prediction during a press conference last week. “We call it the Hate America Rally that will happen Saturday,” Mr. Johnson said. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists in full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”
The speaker lost this bet. That isn’t what I heard when I talked with rally attendees from my synagogue, not exactly a nest of Marxist Hamas sympathizers. That isn’t what I saw when I drove by rallies in my neighborhood. For the most part, that isn’t what America saw. Instead, we saw millions of Americans exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This right is pretty central to a constitutional democracy. You might even call it foundational.
The administration’s supporters seem to believe that if you criticize President Trump, you must “hate America.” If so, a solid majority of Americans hate their country. They turn their thumbs down on his job performance, overall and on specific issues, and they believe that he is acting in ways that exceed his constitutional authority.
Before the rallies, Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) predicted on Newsmax that No Kings would be paid for by George Soros, and that “agitators” would show up to demonstrate. “We’ll have to get the National Guard out,” he said. Wrong again. The rallies were almost completely violence-free, as Mr. Johnson acknowledged during an ABC interview the day after the protests.
This was no accident. The nonviolence resulted from the organizers’ message to, and training for, rally attendees. The No Kings website includes this warning: “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”
It was peaceful in Chicago, too, and even humorous in places, as demonstrators dressed up in animal costumes and offered doughnuts to the cops. I am very glad about this: the demonstrations that really make a difference have always intended to be peaceful (Vietnam, the Civil Rights marches, etc.), and they make even more of a difference if the cops or National Guard brutalize the demonstrators (Bull Connor, Kent State, etc.), for that shows the immorality of the powers that be. However, I wouldn’t want the “No Kings” demonstrators to be attacked, as that wouldn’t, at least to me, do much towards getting rid of Trump. The massive scale of the demonstrations conveyed the public’s message clearly, a message reflected in Trump’s low approval rating.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.
Departments that would only have one new Ph.D. seat after accounting for the percentage reductions will not be allowed to admit any students, according to a faculty member with knowledge of the matter, who added that there might be some narrow exceptions.
The German department is currently projected to lose all its Ph.D. student seats, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter. The History department will be admitting five students each year for the next two years, down from 13 admitted students last year, according to two professors in the department.
The Sociology department has opted to enroll six new Ph.D. students for the 2026-27 academic year, but forfeit its slots for the following year, according to an email from the department’s chair.
The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.
The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.
The reason, then, is this increased tax on endowments and research funding, which involves not just the Trump administration’s cuts to Harvard’s grants but also a general reduction in the NIH and NSF budget (Harvard is apparently looking over the long term, as Trump will be gone in three years).. It’s a shame, but the OEB cuts are the hardest for me, because I was in OEB when it was thriving (1973-1978). Now it is a meershaum of what it was then. In other words, it doesn’t smoke. Still, Harvard has an endowment of $57 billion, and isn’t now the time to use it?
*Two bits of news from the NYT. First, VP Vance in Israel, would not give a deadline for Hamas to surrender all its weapons, and also waffled on other questions.
Vice President JD Vance, in a visit to Israel, declined to give a deadline for Hamas to disarm, and sidestepped questions of how officials would guarantee several critical planks of the fragile U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza. While Vance echoed President Trump in saying Hamas would be “obliterated” if it refused to disarm, he said he didn’t know if the militant group would play of a role in the territory’s future governance — a prohibition that is explicit in the plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas.
Also:
Kushner just said the United States and its allies were considering beginning the reconstruction of Gaza — much of which has been reduced to rubble — in parts of the enclave currently held by Israeli forces. That’s about half of Gaza, according to the Israeli military.
“No reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas still controls,” he added, even as the cleanup could commence in a “new Gaza.”
That would “give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live,” Kushner said. He added that this was just one proposal under consideration, and left unclear whether the area in question would be under the control of the Israeli military or an international force that has not yet been created.
Kushner has been a lot more savvy about things than Vance, who basically knows nothing about what to do. His failure to say explicitly that Hamas will NOT play a role in the future governing of Gaza shows what a dumbass he is. If there is to be peace, Hamas must not be a part of governing, as it would metastasize into more terror no matter what its role was. Kushner’s decision is, to me, far more sensible, and provides a Hamas-free way for Gazans to reclaim their homes, jobs, and lives.
The second is that countries that should be able to send troops to Gaza to control it until a proper government is set up are waffling:
The fragile cease-fire in Gaza that came into force last week rests on some key assumptions: that Hamas militants give up their weapons and that an international troop presence keep the peace as Israel withdraws its military from the enclave.
But the countries that might make up that force are skittish about committing soldiers who could potentially come into direct conflict with Hamas while it is still an armed group, diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations say.
President Trump’s 20-point plan, which led to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, envisioned the immediate deployment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The idea was for the international corps to secure areas where Israeli troops have withdrawn, prevent munitions from entering the territory, facilitate the distribution of aid and train a Palestinian police force.
The creation and deployment of an international force in Gaza could determine whether the current cease-fire has a chance to evolve into a lasting agreement, and whether Israelis and Palestinians move toward the broader aim of a durable peace.
Diplomats and other officials from several countries who are familiar with the situation say there has been little progress on when the force might be assembled because of confusion over the force’s mission, which appears to be the most serious stumbling block.
This is going to delay things farther, and will be harder on the Gazans than on Israel. Gazans deserve to start normal, non-terrorist lives NOW, and we need a peace force in the area.
*Trump has ordered (and I didn’t know he had the power) that large portions of the East Wing of the White House be demolished to make way for an unnecessary ballroom, one larger than the working portion of the White House itself. The demolition has started, but it’s a mystery about who’s paying for it. The President has said it will be covered by private donations, but of course that could lead to organizations donating to curry favor with Trump.
As construction begins on President Donald Trump’s new, $250m (£149m) White House ballroom, mystery continues to swirl around the identities of the wealthy donors and corporations paying for it.
Groundbreaking for the ornate 90,000 sq ft (8,360 sq m) project began on Monday, with excavators and construction workers tearing out portions of the East Wing.
The US president has said that he personally will pay for significant portions of its construction, and suggested that some still anonymous donors would be willing to spend more than $20m to complete the project.
The funding model has sparked concern among some legal experts, who say it may amount to paying for access to the administration.
“I view this enormous ballroom as an ethics nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House between 2005 and 2007, told the BBC.
“It’s using access to the White House to raise money. I don’t like it,” he added. “These corporations all want something from the government.”
A dinner for potential donors held at the White House on 15 October included senior executives from prominent American companies including Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
. . .The White House had originally said that the gigantic structure would have a seated capacity of 650 people. This week, Trump said that it will be able to hold 999.
Only one contributor has so far been revealed.
Court documents show that YouTube will pay $22m towards the project as part of a settlement with Trump regarding a lawsuit over the suspension of his account following the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Also, the Wall Street Journal reports that employees if the Treasury Department (right next door to the White House; my dad used to work at Treasury) have been ordered not to show any images of construction of the ballroom, as parts of the White House are being demolished. Here’s a video, and the demolition is more extensive than nearly everyone suspected.
*You may have heard that “away” fans from the Tel Aviv soccer team Maccabi have been banned from a scheduled Nov. 6 soccer match between Aston Villa and the Israeli team. That caused a huge fracas, with cries of antisemitism, but it looks as if this isn’t antisemitism, but a way to prevent violence, which has broken out between even British teams (there’s a lot of nastiness in British footy). The website The Empty City goes through the issue and concludes that the ban on “away” fans (mostly Jews, of course) is justified as a way to protect public safety.
Indeed, banning away fans or even cancelling matches for public safety reasons happens a lot.
. . . . Indeed, in Israel itself, a match has recently been called off on public safety grounds:
Many have strong opinions about whether teams from Israel should play in European competitions – but the public safety issue is not and should not be a proxy for that issue.
The away fans of Legia Warsaw were not allowed at Villa Park in 2023 because of public safety concerns, and two years later the away fans of another team were not allowed on the same basis.
But whether it is Legia Warsaw or Macabbi Tel Aviv or any other club the issue of public safety must be paramount.
Further, according to the Guardian, history shows that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble.”
Matthew agrees, writing this to me:
As you may have heard, Maccabi have decided they will not accept any tickets so there will not be any Israeli fans coming officially to the match.
This blog post [above] is by David Allen Green, a very smart lawyer, a Villa fan and a Jew. It is, as you might imagine given his profession, very precise. The whole situation has become a complete mess, largely because politicians have got involved, but this is clear. DAG (as he is known) emphasises that the police decision was simply about security, not to do with antisemitism. It got turned into a political row by politicians interfering, both for and against. As a regular match-goer he is very aware of the dangers and his article emphasises the problems there have been when the police have not emphasised public safety (not simply because of a threat hooliganism but when they did not take heed of the crowds (eg in Paris in 2022 wheee catastrophe was narrowly avoided).
This seems sensible to me, and you won’t hear me crying anti-Semitism. It’s not justified given the fact that non-Jewish fans have been banned in several games to avoid violence.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, both cats are checking up on Andrzej:
Hili: What is he doing?
Szaron: I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s what he’s supposed to be doing.
In Polish:
Hili: Co on robi?
Szaron: Nie wiem, ale chyba nie to, co powinien.
Kangaroo Breaks Into Grow Farm Held 4 Days Until He Sobers Up. Farm workers in Australia were stunned this week after discovering an unexpected intruder inside their grow operation: a kangaroo that had broken in and helped himself to the crop.By the time authorities arrived, the marsupial was stumbling, glassy-eyed, and clearly not his usual self. Rangers said he had been feasting for hours before anyone realized. The kangaroo was safely detained and placed in custody for monitoring. Officials reported it took nearly four full days before he fully sobered up.
You can guess what the crop was! (In Australia, cannabis is grown for medicinal purposes.) I am assuming this is true, as there’s a YouTube video about it.
Masih has a nine-minute report on the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime. It’s in Farsi, but there are English subtitles (it’s intended for Iranians, but worth watching).
Watch my investigative report. The children of Iran’s regime, the same people who jail women for showing hair throw luxury weddings, then move to America to enjoy freedom and wealth. Hypocrisy at its peak.
Crush freedom at home, then cash in on it here. pic.twitter.com/GRj5jDkGTIhttps://t.co/HvWwxPX2H5
From Luana. Yes, cellphones should be banned in school and now we have some evidence:
New evidence on the effect of cell phone bans in schools just dropped.
“Enforcement of cellphone bans in schools led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the short-term … but disciplinary actions began to dissipate after the first year, potentially suggesting a… pic.twitter.com/cgXpzTmW3s
The president-elect of the Oxford Union has lost a no-confidence vote after he was criticised for comments appearing to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.
The motion against George Abaraonye had met the required two-thirds threshold to oust the student from his position, the society has announced.
The Oxford Union is way woke, but I’m actually surprised at this vote:
Mr Abaraonye is disputing the no-confidence vote, telling the BBC people campaigning to oust him had “unsupervised access” to the email account collecting proxy ballots.
George Abaraonye has lost his vote of no confidence at the Oxford Union in a landslide, with 70% voting to remove him as President-elect.
Today is a good day for Britain. At last, we can say goodbye to this nasty little thug and his gang of bullies.
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death along with her three siblings, all soon after their train pulled in at Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be ninety today has she lived.
Two from Dr. Cobb, soon to be back in the UK. First, a reprise from above:
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%- Social Sciences by 50–70%- History by 60%- Biology by 75%- The German department will lose all PhD seats- Sociology from six PhD students to zero
And a lovely murmuration, whose significance is unknown (it gathers birds together before nightfall, but why all the flying about?). Click the screenshot to go to the original because for some reason the video won’t embed:
This proposal promoted by “progressive” scientists on how to change the scientific literature is not new. But it may hang around for decades, as it’s also being pushed on young people by scientific societies. It may even persist in the coming years when we have a Democratic President and Congress (fingers crossed).
Up until recently, the normal way to write a paper is this: when you make a statement of known fact, or refer to previous literature, you cite the most important, comprehensive, or relevant papers in parentheses after your assertion An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).
The “progressive” scientific ideologues want that changed, as the first article below (just published by the Heterodox Academy and written by Erin Shaw, a woman researcher for the Academy) describes. Instead of citing papers you think best support your statement, one is supposed to cite papers written by people from marginalized groups (usually people of color or women) as a way of bringing equity to the field. This practice is called “citation justice”.
But there are several problems with this practice. Here are a few:
1.) “Citation justice” does not advance science, but is a form of social engineering, turning the scientific literature into a form of affirmative action. It values ethnicity or gender above merit or readers’ knowledge of the field. As Shaw says at the end of her piece:
Engaging with a variety of ideas, texts, and research from an array of scholars across the field is essential to the spirit of the academy and scholarship itself—not to mention necessary for knowledge production. It should be second nature for academics to wade deeply into the literature of their disciplines. As Erec Smith observed last year regarding Nature Reviews Bioengineering’s reasoning for requesting citation diversity statements, “… thoughtfully choosing references and giving sufficient time to survey an entire field is already considered a significant part of scientific research, academic discourse, and critical thinking in general. If scientists are not doing this, the problem isn’t that they are biased; it’s that they are bad scientists.” References should be included in an article because of the ideas within them, not because of the skin color or gender identity of the writers.
Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. In explicitly asking authors and reviewers to consider the demographic characteristics of cited sources (and tally them up for presentation), these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves, which, for better or worse, are the cornerstone of scholarly dissemination.
2.) This practice is often justified, as noted in Shaw’s piece, by saying that minoritized groups are under-cited relative to the quality of their published work. Well, one can’t dismiss that out of hand, but before you go changing the practice of citation, you need to document your claim (this is, after all, science). And I can’t find any evidence that published research by minority groups is cited less than it should be. Also, undercitation is supposed to reflect bigoty, but that too has not been demonstrated and, as those of us in science know, departments are falling all over themselves to hire women and minority scientists and accept them as grad students. If you are indicting “structural racism” as the cause of this phenomenon, which is implicitly the case, then you must show that.
3.) Even if you are committed to this practice, how do you know which authors are to be moved up the citation scale? Well, women may be told apart by their names, though authors are often listed by initials. And imagine what you’d have to do to show undercitation: determine whether a paper should be cited but was not. I haven’t found any literature supporting that (I may have missed some), but without that data one has little empirical justification for initiating “citation justice”. One can’t just show that minoritized authors are under-cited relative to these authors’ publication rate; rather, one has to show that their papers are as good as or better than papers that ARE cited. This becomes even more difficult when one realizes that most scientific papers are never cited at all, or cited maybe once or twice, regardless of authorship.
4.) How do you determine whether a paper is by someone in a minority group? Shaw notes the problem:
Prompting scholars to consider author demographics as they develop their reference lists threatens scholarly rigor. Instead of grappling with the complexity of arguments, theories, and data presented by fellow researchers, academics may find themselves Googling photos of scholars they might cite to see if they can (literally) get more diversity tallies in their reference list to appease the journal. Consequently, the actual accomplishments of scholars, many of whom may have indeed worked very hard to overcome obstacles, risk being tokenized by identitarian orthodoxies.
5.) Inequities in citations may reflect inequities of output, perhaps caused by discrimination in the past that has prevented minorities or women from going into science. But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry:
Authors of a new paper claiming minorities are discriminated against in academia inadvertently revealed that Blacks & Hispanics average far fewer publications than whites & Asians.
But of course citation justice is supposed to remedy citation inequities, whatever their cause.
6.) There are other groups that are said to be oppressed, like people who are disabled or “neurodiverse”. How would one ever find these? Or is the search limited only to women and scholars of color? Shaw’s conclusion is this:
In theory, citation diversity aims to broaden representation; in practice, it reduces scholarship to a superficial numbers game. True intellectual diversity emerges when scholars engage deeply with the best ideas, wherever they originate—not when journals ask researchers to audit the demographics of their bibliographies. If the goal is to advance science, then intellectual rigor, not ideological conformity, must be the guiding principle.
Again, click the screenshot to read:
I’ve given above some of the problems with “citation justice”. But the article above also documents journals that recommend it. I’ll give a few quotes:
Nature Reviews Psychology editors ask authors to describe how they “explore[d] relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft.” The editors suggest these optional citation diversity statements are a way that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control.” In other words, authors are expected to remain steadfastly committed to the same principles that the federal government is attempting to aggressively quash within universities.
Nature Reviews Psychology’s decisionto encourage citation diversity statements appears to be the latest in a small yet noteworthy movement to embed equity goals explicitly in the scientific publishing process. Severalpapers have advocated for the practice, and a small number of journals have adopted optional citation diversity statement requests as a part of their article submission processes. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, a sister publication of Nature Reviews Psychology, may have served as an early pilot of the citation diversity statement with Nature after it adopted such a policy in 2023.
The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) was an early adopter of citation diversity when, in 2021, editors integrated an optional citation diversity statement into the article submission process for its four journals, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and Biomedical Engineering Education.
BMES editors followed the suggestions of citation diversity advocates to straightforwardly ask authors to tally up diversity points. Authors opting into the diversity statement are asked specifically for “the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors” and “the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations.”
BMES even provides detailed instructions on how proportions should be presented: “The proportions of authors by gender should be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: woman/woman, man/woman, woman/man, and man/man. Race and ethnicity proportions should similarly be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: author of color/author of color, white author/author of color, author of color/white author, white author/white author.” This numeric scheme raises many unanswered questions about target proportions, cross-cutting identities, and whether authors are deciding which scholars to reference based on perceived demographics rather than scholarly ideas and data presented in their papers.
The practice is spreading into other scientific areas, most distressingly into my own field of evolutionary biology. An article in The College Fix describes an entire session on citation justice at a (2024) Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution:
“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”
“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.
Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”
I now see that ableism has made it into the list of factors to be considered when citing papers. But Christianity and “heteronormativity”? Are we supposed to cite more non-Christian and gay authors? And how would you know? This suggestion is invidious.
At any rate, here’s the Nature Reviews Psychology paper, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below:
A quote:
. . . . scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control. For example, in a Comment in this issue, Carolyn Quam and Teresa Roberts describe how researchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively. Inclusive writing is an iterative, multi-step process that aims to ensure that scientific writing (including review articles, grant applications and literature-review portions of original research reports) does not centre privileged identities as optimal and normative. Quam and Roberts provide an example of an inclusive writing process for a paper they wrote about language development, illustrating that inclusive writing need not be limited to research that is explicitly about marginalized groups or diversity. Importantly, although inclusive writing is an individual act, it can inform systemic change by influencing scientific norms.
At Nature Reviews Psychology, we are now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.
The number of citations a paper receives does not necessarily reflect the quality of its research. However, citations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.
To address such citation biases, we are encouraging authors to explore relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft. We are further encouraging them to include a citation diversity statement in the article to acknowledge these efforts (see here for an example from one of our sister journals) and to make others aware of citation imbalances.
Note that they add geography and career stage to the list as well as gender and ethnicity. It’s hard enough to write a paper when you know your research area, much less having to look up the age, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, and able-ness of an author.
And the Nature paper gives this as a peroration:
Part of the stated mission of Nature Reviews Psychology is to represent the diversity of psychological science and all those who consider themselves psychological scientists. We act with this mission in mind when we consider who we invite to write and review for us. We are now asking authors to participate in our mission by actively thinking about who they are citing, which will ultimately improve the diversity and quality of the science we publish.
The last paragraph explicitly equates (citation) diversity with quality of the papers that employ citation diversity. That is an assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. But it doesn’t need evidence because the editors are dissimulating here: they are not interesting in increasing the quality of science, but in promoting “equity” among scientists.
Science is best served not by using it as a tool to advance DEI, but as a tool to advance our understanding of nature. If you want to engage in DEI, by all means do so on your own time, not in your scientific publications.
Further, it’s stuff like this endeavor that may have contributed to America’s declining trust in both academia and science. I have no proof for the causation of these phenomena, but I doubt that people would trust science more if they knew it was being used for social engineering in a “progressive” way, not to help us understand nature.
Send in your photos if you have some good ones, please. Thanks!
Today’s landscape photos come from reader Jim Blilie. Jim’s descriptions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
I’ve been having some fun participating in a Facebook group for black and white landscape photography. I’ve been revisiting many of my old images in software (Lightroom), creating what you might think of as “new prints” in black and white only.
These are all landscape photos from Washington and Oregon.
First a group from Cannon Beach, Oregon, a favorite retreat for us when the summer weather at our home in Klickitat County, Washington gets too hot:
Then three from the Palouse, the rolling loess-soil, wheat-growing region of Washington State (primarily) near Pullman, Washington, where our son, Jamie is now a junior studying engineering at Washington State University:
Then a photo of Mount Hood taken in winter from our place:
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) leaves taken this past spring in Oregon:
Finally: A photo of Baker Lake, taken in September 1989 on a kayaking trip. This is scanned Tri-X Pan film:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 21, 2025, and National Reptile Awareness Day. here’s a video of a very weird turtle, the mata mata turtle (Chelus fimbriata). The video is on FB and can’t be embedded, but if you click on the screenshot you can see the video. Wikipedia describes the turtle’s appearance, which takes advantage of crypsis (camouflage).
The appearance of the mata mata’s shell resembles a piece of bark, and its head resembles fallen leaves. As it remains motionless in the water, its skin flaps enable it to blend into the surrounding vegetation until a fish comes close. The mata mata thrusts out its head and opens its large mouth as wide as possible, creating a low-pressure vacuum that sucks the prey into its mouth, known as suction feeding. The mata mata snaps its mouth shut, the water is slowly expelled, and the fish is swallowed whole; the mata mata cannot chew due to the way its mouth is constructed.
Click below to see one:
Reader Divy, who runs a veterinary business with her husband Ivan, a business concentrating on reptiles, also sent in a photo with the caption:
Here is a picture of our pet Shingleback skinks (Tiliqua rugosa aspera), Boggy and Bindi. We’ve had Boggy since 2004, and we got Bindi in 2008 when she was 6 months old. Sadly, we lost Bindi last year, and we’re still so sad about it.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT editorial board is now weighing in about what the the Democrats need to do to win future elections. The title of their long op-ed, called “The partisans are wrong: moving to the center is the way to win“. They begin with a cool moving graphic showing that in the last election 16 Representatives (13 Democrats and three Republicans) won their seats in Congress in districts that were predominantly from the other party. And all of the winners were moderates, which launches the editors’ message:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.
The evidence is vast. Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating extremist candidates, while Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who represents a state that reliably votes the other way in presidential elections. On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.
One way to see the pattern is to examine the 17 Democrats — 13 in the House, four in the Senate — who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won. Moderation dominated their campaign messages. Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration. Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada criticized other Democrats’ tolerance of illegal immigration. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats who had imposed needless regulation. Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.” No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these.
Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns. They are wrong, but their argument does contain an element of truth: As the country has become more polarized and many voters cannot fathom crossing over to the other party, persuasion has become harder. It is not impossible, though — and it remains far more effective than pursuing the fantasy that America has a latent left-wing or right-wing majority waiting to be inspired to turn out.
. . . As Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, said in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course.” She cited “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.” Although Mr. Trump won her district by seven percentage points, voters re-elected her.
The op-ed is long, informative, and correct. The sad part is that Democrats are moving away from the party itself, particularly young people. Regardless of the electoral success of people like AOC or Mamdani, if we want to win the House and Senate, and especially the Presidency, we need to stay towards the center. Damn the “progressives,” and full speed away!
*My friend and collaborator (we co-wrote a philosophy paper), the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry, has a good article in Quillette called “They Don’t Believe It Either,” with the subtitle “The ‘Gaza genocide’ calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the ‘stolen election’ hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence.” Maarten is a brave guy: not Jewish, he’s nevertheless defended Israel in the Gaza War on moral grounds, and has suffered professionally for his stand. (Belgian academia is rife with antisemitism.) His topic: dispelling the bogus accusation of genocide against Israel. An excerpt:
If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, the overwhelming majority of casualties are male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).
🧵GAZA FATALITY UPDATE: Hamas issued new list of 50,021 fatalities. Findings: (a) Fatalities age 13-55 are 72% men (b) Teen soldiers confirmed; males=65% of deaths age 13-17 (c) Natural deaths are ~8,300 of total fatalities. (4) IDF targeted combatants; NO genocide. Analysis: 1/ pic.twitter.com/gP2nl4ztLc
Israel also enabled the delivery of tens of thousands of trucks with food and medical supplies, organised humanitarian pauses and aid corridors, and even facilitated a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of the war. This is not the behaviour of a state attempting to wipe out a population group. Even the provisional ruling from the ICJ acknowledges that Israel delivered water, food, and medical assistance in Gaza throughout much of the conflict, behaviour inconsistent with charges of deliberate starvation.
From the very beginning of the conflict, Israel’s war objectives were unambiguously clear: recover its hostages and secure the surrender and disarmament of Hamas. Now that Hamas has released the surviving hostages it held in Gaza and has agreed to release the remains of the Israeli dead, the fighting has ceased. If Hamas disarms in accordance with Donald Trump’s peace place and plays no further part in Palestinian governance, the war will be over, just as Israel always said it would be once it achieved its objectives.
Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? Because Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracise, delegitimise, and boycott Israel.
The absurdity of the genocide charge should not obscure valid criticisms of the mistakes Israel made during this conflict. Particularly in the last few months, Israel’s miscalculations have been infuriating at times. The decision to wrest humanitarian aid from Hamas’s control and establish an alternative distribution system seemed to make sense at first, but the eleven-week aid blockade employed to put the screws to Hamas was a moral and strategic error. This kind of tactic was never likely to work with a jihadist organisation that employs human shields to maximise its own side’s civilian casualties. The cynical exploitation of Palestinian suffering to bring international pressure to bear on Israel is central to Hamas’s strategy.
Nevertheless, nothing Israel has done over the past two years reveals an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—as the UN definition of genocide stipulates. It is fine to criticise Israel for taking insufficient steps to protect civilian lives in a particular operation, or to question the proportionality judgements made before executing a strike. But the very framing of these criticisms implies that the avoidance of civilian deaths is integral to the moral calculus of the IDF. The only genocidal party to this conflict is Hamas, which fantasises about the eradication of Jewry in its apocalyptic foundational covenant, and which has openly vowed to repeat the 7 October pogrom as soon as the opportunity arises.’
This explanation is particularly insightful:
The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the wilful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel, even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
What can I say?—Maarten’s right. When I hear people accuse Israel of genocide (and ignore the fact that Hamas deliberately made genocide of the Jews an object in its founding charter), I write those people off as obtuse. For the accusation is both false and also a sign of virtue signaling. It is a token of wokeness. For sure Maarten will get into even more hot water for writing this article!
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rallying the support of his European partners after a bruising meeting with President Donald Trump, in which he was told to make concessions to end the war or risk facing destruction at the hands of Russia.
In a tense meeting at the White House on Friday, Trump tossed aside maps of the front line and urged Kyiv to concede its entire Donbas region to Russia to clinch a deal, according to people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive diplomacy.
“He said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will destroy you if you don’t agree now,” one of the people said. “Zelensky had his maps and everything, and he was explaining it to him but [Trump] wanted nothing to do with it.”
Trump listened but was not responsive to the Ukrainian message, the person said. “It was pretty much like ‘No, look guys, you can’t possibly win back any territory. … There is nothing we can do to save you. You should try to give diplomacy another chance.’”
. . .As European leaders issue proclamations of support for Zelensky, hisWhite House disappointment is set to dominate diplomatic talks this week, including a European Union summit Thursday.
Just days after musing about giving Zelensky Tomahawk missiles to strike Russia, Trump’s latest swerve on the war appeared to stem from a call with Putin last week. Putin demanded that Kyiv surrender Donbas as a condition to end the war.
A European official said Trump moved from talk of long-range missiles before the call to land swaps in his meeting with Zelensky. “Now he was saying the U.S. needs Tomahawks and doesn’t want to escalate.”
A European diplomat briefed on the White House exchange described itas a mess and said Trump also “went on and on” about “his grievances of not having gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Good lord! Trump’s surrendering land to Putin is not going to help him win the Nobel Peace Prize and, in my view, the cease-fire in Gaza isn’t enough for the Prize: the peace there has to be more lasting before it counts as “peace” (of course, Obama did bupkes to get the Prize). On moral grounds the U.S. should be supporting Ukraine as far as it can.
*I can’t believe that thieves broke into the Louvre in broad daylight, using a truck equipped with a ladder, climbed up to the second floor and smashed glass containing priceless historical jewelry, then making their escape on motobikes. How could that happen? The NYT describes the heist:
The police in France were racing against time as they searched on Monday for four thieves who carried out a daring heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, aware that the chances of recovering the stolen jewels risked diminishing with every hour.
The robbery on Sunday stunned France and has raised uncomfortable questions about security at one of the world’s most famous cultural institutions, which remained closed on Monday.
Much about the heist remained unclear. But the authorities said that organized crime was most likely involved and that investigators were looking into how the museum’s alarm systems functioned.
Many are now worried that the thieves, ignoring the jewelry’s historical value, might break the pieces apart to sell the stones on the black market and melt down their precious metals for sale.
“This morning, the French people, for the most part, feel as though they have been robbed,” Gérald Darmanin, the country’s justice minister, told France Inter radio on Monday. “In the same way that when Notre-Dame burned, it was our church that was burning — even if you weren’t Catholic — such an incredible jewelry robbery at the Louvre looks bad.”
“We cannot completely secure all locations,” Mr. Darmanin added. “But what is certain is that we have failed.”
. . .They took eight precious pieces of jewelry, including a royal sapphire tiara, necklace and matching earring; a royal emerald necklace and its matching earrings; and a tiara and a brooch worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.
But they dropped a ninth item, which the authorities recovered later: Empress Eugénie’s crown, which features 1,354 diamonds, 1,136 rose-cut diamonds and 56 emeralds.
They haven’t provided a net worth for the items, but that may be impossible because of their historical value but they say this about one item:
But one of them, a decorative bow with jeweled tassels that also belonged to Empress Eugénie, is listed by the Society of Friends of the Louvre as worth 6.72 million euros, or about 7.8 million dollars. The Society, a private sponsor that helps the museum buy objects of artistic or historical value, helped acquire the bow from the United States in 2008.
And given that, the thieves may well take the jewels out of their setting and sell them, along with the gold and other precious metals used. That’s why the cops are racing for time. But it’s unthinkable to me that security wasn’t better (the Louvre was OPEN then), and nobody noticed the truck with the ladder pulling up to the museum.
To put his performance in more simplistic terms: There are three main components to baseball — pitching, hitting and fielding. Ohtani pitched for two-thirds of the game and allowed the fewest runs possible. He had four opportunities at the plate and did the best thing possible in three of them. The other was a walk.
It would have been hard for him to do any better unless he pitched more innings — or maybe played in the outfield and robbed a couple homers.
When Don Larsen threw his perfect game for the New York Yankees during the 1956 World Series, he dominated on the mound only. And it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. He went 0 for 2 with a sacrifice at the plate that day, according to Baseball Reference.
Other comparisons involve fewer skills:
Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a game. Carli Lloyd had a hat trick in the first 16 minutes of a World Cup final. Secretariat’s 31-length win at the Belmont was so jaw dropping even non-horse racing fans can understand the enormity of it. You could argue those three — or even Larsen — were more dominant on those days than Ohtani. But their performances didn’t combine two increasingly incompatible skills in such a wondrous way.
Comparable examples of using more than one skill:
In the NFL, passing and running are distinct skills, but plenty of players possess both. Colin Kaepernick threw for 263 yards and ran for 181 in a 2013 playoff game. Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes have both surpassed 500 yards passing plus running in a game, but the fact that multiple players have done it makes it less of a novelty.
The reverse — a great running back who also throws — is less common. Darren McFadden was a two-time Heisman Trophy finalist at Arkansas, dominating games on the ground while also taking snaps at quarterback in the Wildcat formation. He once tied an SEC record with 321 yards rushing in a game — and also threw a TD pass that night.
The article ponders other performances (soccer is presumably out of the running), and winds up with baseball again:
It’s probably easier to compare Ohtani to other baseball performances. The two previous pitchers with three-homer games were Jim Tobin with the Boston Braves in 1942 and Guy Hecker with the Louisville Cardinals in 1886. Both pitchers allowed five runs in complete-game victories.
Perhaps the closest feat to Ohtani’s came in 1971, when Rick Wise of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a no-hitter against Cincinnati while also hitting two homers. Although it wasn’t a postseason game, Wise is one player with a legitimate case to have bested Ohtani’s effort last week.
And later in that 1971 season, Wise pitched a 12-inning complete game — retiring 32 batters in a row at one point — and won the contest himself with a walk-off hit.
Rick Wise’s performance is comparable, but he pitched a complete game while hitting two homers. That’s one less homer than Ohtani, but he pitched a full game. Wise, I think, is tied with Ohtani. And I won’t consider other sports, which I don’t know as well as baseball (which has been very, very good to me).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is beefing even though she doesn’t eat grapes. Or maybe she’s just observing.
Hili: The grapes have been picked. Only the ones no one wanted are left.
Andrzej: I pick them sometimes. They’re really sweet.
In Polish:
Hili: Winogrona zebrane, zostały takie, których nikt nie chciał.
Ja: Czasem je sobie zrywam, są bardzo słodkie.
*******************
A letter to the editor found by Ant (not sure where it came from) and posted on Facebook:
From Jesus of the Day. You better know your Bible if you use these:
Masih has resumed tweeting. Read the full text (reading time: 1.5 minutes)
I love you, America!
In this photo are two faces of the same regime of terror.
One was the head of Revolutionary Guard in Iran, Hossein Salami, he ordered my assassination. The other was the man sent to kill me on U.S. soil, at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to… pic.twitter.com/Rmbjva3G5J
From Luana. Take care of any jumping spiders in your house: they are awesome, cute, and harmless.
This is Ocho. Ocho lives in my bathroom and hangs out on my orchid plant. Every day I soak a Q-Tip in water and put it down for him wherever he is (on the plant or behind the toilet or on the vanity) and he comes running over and gets a drink. Was my first reaction to smash him?… pic.twitter.com/dDbq6BZjyq
. . . and another from Luana. I suspected Greta was making stuff up:
Breaking: The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirms Greta never reported any abuse to the Swedish diplomats who repeatedly visited her in Israeli custody. Israeli court transcripts likewise show she made no such claims before the judge.
A Dutch Jewish girl and her mother were both gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. The girl was three years old, and would have been 87 today had she lived.
One post from Dr. Cobb, and it’s a good one. Click screenshot to go to the original:
Click below to see the obscene video that our President posted on Truth Social, showing him dumping feces on the “no kings” protestors. Because it only embeds part of the “tweet,” I’ll put the YouTube video below that:
Although the times when Homo sapiens reached Australia are under revision, the latest data suggests that they arrived between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago—about the time that our species left Africa for parts east. And although changes in water levels made it easier to get to Australia by water then now humans still had to use boats of a kind. What kind of boats they used is a mystery.
But there are a number of other questions that remain about the colonization of Australia. How many colonizations were there? Did any of the colonizing H. sapiens carry genes from H. erectus? How much genetic material in the colonists came from Denisovans? (There are some suggestions of both of these possibilities based on aspects of skull morphology.) Did the aboriginal colonists evolve in the last 50,000 years? Regardless of how many colonizations were there, what was the population structure of indigenous people since they arrived here? And based on artifacts, what were the cultures of the early indigenous people?
All of this can be studied not just by digging up skull or artifacts, but also now by genetic testing: looking a “fossil DNA” from specimens. Unfortunately, what is happening in the U.S. and Canada is also happening in Australia: people who identify as “aboriginal” (and you can do this by self-identification, not necessarily by ancestry) are preventing the scientific study of skulls and artifacts by claiming that fossils or artifacts were from their ancestors, even though, as in the U.S., determination of “ancestry” of fossil remains can be dubious. Further, some indigenous people living today want to know their history, but are blocked by the reburial policy adopted by the some state governments. Further, many people recognized as aboriginals today also claim that their ancestors have been in Australia forever, and don’t want data that dispels the myth.
The article below, in Palladium Magazine, recounts the tremendous loss to science of specimens that, even without firm ancestral documentation, get reburied without study. This is even true of material found in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, which is in fact a World Heritage Site and contains important human remains:
The Region contains important natural and cultural features including exceptional examples of past human civilization including the world’s oldest evidence of cremation. . . .’
. . . . Aboriginal people lived on the shores of the Willandra Lakes from 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. It is one of the oldest known human occupation sites in Australia. There is abundant evidence of Aboriginal occupation over the last 10,000 years.
Interesting and controversial fossils like WLH-50 have been found in Willandra, but now many fossils are being reburied, and fossils found weathering out of that region cannot be excavated or studied scientifically.
Click the headline to read the article:
I’ll give some quotes to apprise you of the situation. In toto, it seems that the study of human evoution (not, as the title implies, “evolutionary science”) is dying in Australia. But there are many other creatures besides humans, including the many marsupials.
Quots from the article are indented, while bold headings are mine:
Possible evolutionary change from the earliest inhabitants until now:
As more fossilized remains were discovered [after WWI], sometimes hidden within collections of recent bones, comparisons could be drawn between ancient Australians and the ones first encountered by Europeans. While sharing some skeletal similarities with recent populations, ancient individuals were often distinguished by “heavy-boned faces, enormous teeth and jaws, receding foreheads and flask-shaped skulls.” The mosaic of modern and archaic traits, seen to a lesser degree in contact-era skulls, emphasized the importance of these fossils to evolutionary history. The largest collections included Kow Swamp (c. 20,000 years old), Coobool Creek (c. 14,000 years old) and Willandra Lakes (c. 43,000 to c.14,000 years old).
One exceptional specimen was designated “Willandra Lakes Human 50,[WLH-50] also known as Garnpung Man. It shared traits with Javan Homo erectus and was more similar to ancient humans from Skhūl Cave in Israel than contact-era Australian foragers. At an estimated 26,000 years old, it may have had significantly more Denisovan ancestry than the 2-4% seen in recent Melanesians and Australian foragers.
The morphological variability seen in the fossil record led some researchers to hypothesize multiple migrations into Australia, with some genes coming from Homo erectus and some from ancient Chinese Homo sapiens. Others argued for local adaptation of a single Homo sapiens founding population. This debate featured significantly in the global discourse between proponents of “multiregional evolution,” which claims that modern Homo sapiens evolved simultaneously in multiple parts of the world, versus the “Recent Out of Africa” theory, which holds that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa and then spread into Europe and Asia, replacing older human species.
What made these collections particularly valuable was their status as a comparative series. The ability to compare a group’s average morphology across eras and regions allowed scientists to track evolutionary changes and adaptations in ways that singular remains could not.
Who counts now as “aboriginal”? Bolding in the text below is mine.
Today, three separate groups are often conflated under the single term “Aboriginal.” These are:
The ancient humans who first settled the continent.
The contact-era foragers encountered by British colonists.
The citizens currently classified as “Aboriginal” by the government.
This third category was formed when Australia’s 1967 constitutional referendum empowered the federal government to make laws for people of the “aboriginal race.” The government subsequently changed its definition of Aboriginal from requiring over 50% forager ancestry to a new standard based on self-identification, any degree of biological descent, and community recognition. This pivotal change meant even those with minimal forager ancestry could join the Aboriginal “class.” A separate legal class, “Torres Strait Islanders,” was eventually split off, with both classes now subclasses of the “Indigenous” slash “First Nations” class.
Before 1967, “Aboriginal” was a legal class with restricted rights. To avoid stigma, many mixed-descent Australians kept their forager ancestry a secret. But as membership criteria relaxed, and additional rights and privileges granted, more people publicly claimed forager ancestry. The Indigenous population exploded and is still growing faster than birth rates can explain. This is the result of people joining the class as adults, sometimes inspired by family legends or personal conviction. Also notable is that most Indigenous-class Australians marry non-Indigenous-class partners, but 90% of children from these unions are assigned Indigenous at birth. Archaeologist Josephine Flood observes that “Many people who identify as Aboriginal have white skin, blue eyes, narrow noses and blond, brown or red hair. Others resemble Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, Polynesians, or Afghans.” In 2015, a government official estimated that 15% of Indigenous citizens had no forager ancestry whatsoever.
This of course means that many people can have a claim to have ancient aboriginal ancestry, and then bring lawsuits against scientists taking and studying skulls. There need be no genetic evidence of ancestry to bring such suits, as the genetic ancestry has been muddied by state-specific laws that prevent the study and excavation of the skulls or DNA analysis.
Not all human remains or artifacts must be repatriated: WLH-50, for example, is still in the hands of scientists. But AI says this about laws, and I’ve verified the claims by looking at several other sites:
In Australia, laws prohibit the burial of Aboriginal ancestral remains, sometimes referred to as fossils, by anyone other than the relevant Aboriginal community with traditional or familial linkes to them. The legal and ethical framework is centered on the principle of repatriation: the return of ancestral remains from museums, universities, and private collections back to their Traditional Owners for culturally appropriate care and reburial.
This system is governed by a combination of federal and state or territory legislation.
Reburials began en masse in the 1980s, though there were some that were earlier. Now, it seems, the Australian government, perhaps infused with a view of the “sacralization of the oppressed,” seems ready to rebury fossils and artifacts in view of simple and poorly documented claims. And given the difference in time between modern aboriginals living in the same area as ancient aboriginals, the claim of “ancestry” giving one rights over fossils from tens of thousands of years ago seems weak, especially because no genetics is involved. But it’s strong enough to overrule the scientists:
By 1984, the massive Murray Black skeletal collection had been transferred following legal action by the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and, in 1985, remains of thirty-eight foragers were buried in a public ceremony in Melbourne’s Kings Domain park.
The movement now targeted fossilized remains with only tenuous connections to contact-era foragers. The ancient skulls from Eagle Hawk Neck and Mount Cameron West (c. 4260 years old) were transferred to the TAC in 1988 and cremated. In Victoria, the Coobool Creek collection was reburied in 1989, followed a year later by the Kow Swamp collection. In 1991, Alan Thorne voluntarily surrendered Mungo Lady, the first individual excavated at Willandra Lakes. During the handover, he implored the 3TTG (Three Traditional Tribal Groups) to preserve the fossils for future generations.
But as the voices of opposition grew weaker, the burials continued: in 2022, both Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied, secretly. The final blow came in March 2025 when the rest of the Willandra Lakes collection, 106 fossilized individuals, was buried in an unmarked grave, despite a last-minute legal appeal from Gary Pappin, a local Mutthi Mutthi man, and efforts by archaeologist Michael Westaway, who compared it to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. As of this year, Australia’s human fossil record, as well as the biological history of many extinct contact-era populations, has been effectively erased.
The rationale for reburial is weak, and even involves the supernatural. Get a load of this:
In general, the activists won the war of words. They used language that bolstered ownership claims like “repatriation,” “return,” and “ancestors,” which implied already-proven connections. While scientists used rigorous but dry terminology, activists referred to bones as “our Old People” whose “spirits cannot rest,” claiming that the mere existence of museum collections caused unverifiable harms like “cultural trauma.” Opponents who accepted this linguistic frame found it hard to argue without appearing callous.
Michael Mansell soon took the campaign overseas, convincing European institutions to hand over remains they had acquired during the colonial period. By the 2000s, the removal movement had won widespread support from museums, governments, and even previously-opposed archaeologists. This shift in attitudes resulted in formal policies and funding that allowed the transfer of thousands of forager remains to Aboriginal-class organizations.
The upshot is indeed the dying of ancient human anthropology in Australia. Even new Willandra Lakes fossils, which are important ones, cannot be removed or studied:
Happily, local Aboriginal land councils have allowed a few accidental discoveries to be briefly studied and dated, such as Kiacatoo Man (c. 27,000 years old), the largest Pleistocene skeleton ever found in Australia. But no intentional excavations have taken place for decades. At the Willandra Lakes UNESCO World Heritage Site, fossilized skulls are occasionally observed eroding from the ground but study is forbidden and they soon disintegrate.
According to archaeologist Colin Pardoe in 2018, “The repatriation of skeletal collections has meant that student access to teaching collections containing Australian material has become almost impossible…. This has resulted in researchers moving into other fields or other parts of the world.” And Vesna Tenodi explains, “Replicas or even drawings cannot be displayed, or discussed, as that also is too offensive without ‘Aboriginal permission.’”
Replicas and drawings have been forbidden in the U.S. too, as Elizabeth Weiss documents. She wasn’t even allowed to photograph the boxes containing fossil bones found in the U.S.! The article continues
Other archaeologists note that “fieldwork in Australia essentially ground to a halt as much of the modern debate over the origins of modern humans was beginning to take shape.” Just as DNA analysis, 3D imaging, and other revolutionary techniques were entering the field, the fossil record of an entire continent was wiped clean. Only a handful of specimens were ever studied by geneticists. Archaeologist Steve Webb estimated that the Pleistocene series from Willandra Lakes contained 38 individuals suitable for DNA testing. But that analysis was never done and the window of opportunity has now closed.
This kind of “anthropological activism” has been extensively documented by Elizabeth Weiss in other countries (see her books here), and the power of indigenous peoples to impede scientific study is strong. They have tried compromises in Australia, like allowing scientists to study remains over 7,000 years old, but these have failed. And there is virtually no possibility of compromise in the United States or Canada.
Now that these activists have acquired most of Australia’s human fossils and bones, they have expanded their removal and censorship campaigns to “include the return of cultural heritage materials, including objects, photographs, manuscripts, and audio-visual recordings.” Each concession leads to more expansive claims rather than resolution. They claim ownership over what questions can be asked about the past and the very words that can be used to ask them.
And the same script is being followed in Canada and the United States, with Indigenous-class activists reburying ancient remains and artifacts under NAGPRA legislation, censoring photographs, and even asserting ownership over dinosaur fossils based on creationist mythology. In 2017, the 9,000 year-old fossil Kennewick Man was buried after years of controversy. In Europe as well, museums and universities face shrinking collections and pressure to censor information.
Everyone agrees that the loss of ancient hominin fossils during World War II was a tragedy. Someday, hopefully, they will feel the same way about the artifacts and fossils currently being destroyed.
The future. As the article notes, not every state government has bowed to these demands, and some museums are refusing to surrender their collections. Other people are trying to forge productive relationships between “colonists” and modern aboriginals to permit research, including DNA research. More compromises could be forged that allow at least some scientific study, including extraction of DNA, which takes only a bit of earbone, before remains are reburied. But governments have been all too timorous to stand up to the increasingly strong demands of modern aboriginals to force reburial. In the absence of demonstrating recent ancestral-descendant relationships between modern and older aboriginals, or to set cutoffs to allow study of older remains, science should trump mythology. In the end, this seems to be more about power than anything else.
Today we’re featuring photos of the birds of Perth taken by Scott Ritchie, who hails from Cairns. Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Social media, including Facebook, gets quite a bit of negative press these days. I get that. But one of the great values of social media is that it can put you in contact with people who can really help you out. In Sept. 2025, I started posting bird photos from my Western Australia trip. I was contacted by John Edmond, who lives in Perth. Last year, I met John in Cairns on our regular Tuesday AM bird walk, and then showed him some local birds along the Cairns Esplanade. John loves a twitch, and was especially happy to see Nordy, Nordmann’s Greenshank.
So John reached out on FB and offered to take me for a day’s birding in Perth. We had a great time and I particularly touring around Herdsman Lake. Here is some of my favourite images from that day’s birding.
The Pink-eared Duck (Malacorhynchus membranaceus) is one of my favourite birds. I was lucky to get nice close images of this bird. If you’re wondering about the name, look carefully at the head. You can just see a little bit of pink behind his eye. Personally, I’d name it the Zebra-breasted Duck:
And another. The flaps along the bill are used to help funnel microbe-rich water into their mouth:
The Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus) is another amazing bird. I just love the hairdo and the neck feathers during breeding season. Interestingly, this bird is found in wetlands from Asia Europe, Africa, Australia. This is one of the grebes that does a upright mating dance that you may have seen on TV:
JAC: Here’s a YouTube video of the mating dance:
So am I gonna get lucky tonight? Let me think about it:
I love the raking light on this stunning bird:
The Australian Shelduck (Tadorna tadornoides) during breeding season. The female is the one with the spectacles. It’s obvious she’s the only one with a good sense to wear glasses:
I like these this couple out for an evening promenade in the quiet water:
Herdman Lake like has more than water birds. This pair of Tawny Frogmouths (Podargus strigoides) are a bit of an institution there. People come around looking for these interesting, well-camouflaged birds. See me if you can:
Australian Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus australis) was regularly heard singing in the rushes. Lovely calls, the sound of the Aussie wetlands:
At an earlier stop, I was happy to see the Western Spinebill (Acanthorhynchus superciliosus). It’s not the world’s best shot, but it’s still beautiful bird and I hope to get better views of it in the future:
And finally, I’ll leave off this WA tour with a robin, a male Scarlet Robin (Petroica boodang). Robins are so cute and they sit nicely for the camera, not jumping around like some crazy caffeinated gym rat like so many birds do. Speaking of which, I’m off for a coffee and a workout to work off some of the pounds I put on during this trip:
