Welcome to Thursday, February 12, 2026, and it is, of course INTERNATIONAL DARWIN DAY, the day Charles Darwin was born in 1809 (he lived to be 73). It was Daniel Dennett who said that natural selection was “the single best idea anyone ever had” in Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), and surely it is at least among the best. Below is a famous photo of 59-year-old Darwin in 1868 taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, and below that are three photos of one of our readers aping (excuse the pun) Charles Darwin.
If you want to see the complete set of known pictures of Darwin, John van Wyhe has the collection at Darwin online. (Note that the oft-used photo of Darwin whispering with his finger over his mouth is a fake.
Below the Darwin photo I’ve added an audio/video presentation by John showing various photos of the Great Man.
Here’s a 9½-minute audio/video made by John van Whye about Darwin photos; lots of them here:
Reader Norm Gilinsky used to dress up as Darwin and give public lectures on evolution as the man. Here are three photos Norm sent, saying, “One of the pictures shows what I looked like at the time before the artist added makeup, and another shows what I looked like as makeup was being applied. The others show me all made up. I gave a lecture in Darwin’s character annually between 1983 and about 1990. I was about 30 years old at the time.
Not bad, eh?:
It’s also Lincoln’s Birthday (he and Darwin were born on the same day in 1809!), Fat Thursday (before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent), Hug Day, Plum Pudding Day, NAACP Day, and Paul Bunyan Day (the mythological lumberjack is said to have been born on this day in 1834, and I like to say that there’s as much evidence for a historical Jesus as there is for Paul Bunyan).
The new Google Olympic Doodle celebrates slopestyle, a new event. Click on the screenshot below to read about it (via a bot!):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*For security reasons, the Federal Aviation Administration had originally stopped all flights in and out of El Paso, Texas for ten days. Apparently a drone was involved. The airport is now open again.Here’s the latest:
The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.
The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House.
Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that “the threat has been neutralized.”
But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.’s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said.
The Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The F.A.A. declined to comment.
The military has been developing high-energy laser technology to intercept and destroy drones, which the Trump administration has said are being used by Mexican cartels to track Border Patrol agents and smuggle drugs into the United States.
The airspace closure provoked a significant backlash from local officials and sharp questions by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, who expressed skepticism about the administration’s version of the events.
Who’s running this railroad? It seems that a main problem of this Administration is failure to coordinate between various agencies. In this case the fault appears to lie with Customs and Border Protection, who shot down a damn party baloon with a laser a few days ago.
*In a Washington Post op-ed, Adam Omary, identied as “a psychologist and research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity,” asserts that “The autism epidemic is a myth.”, with the subtitle, “Most new cases reflect mild or no significant impairment. Moderate and severe cases have declined” (article archived here).
Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 464 percent increase in diagnoses among children with no significant functional impairment whatsoever. In fact, during the same time period, there was a 20 percent decrease in the prevalence of moderate or severe autism,from 15 to 12 cases per 10,000 children.
There is often a lag of several years before such epidemiological datasets are released, and years more for researchers to perform statistical analyses, publish the findings and enter public policy discussions. We do not yet have data more recent than 2016 breaking down symptoms by severity level while controlling for other psychological factors such as intellectual disability. However, it is likely that the 74 percent increase in cases reported between 2016 and 2022 will reflect a continuation of the previous problem of overrepresentation of children withmild symptoms and no significant functional impairment.
Despite that, some advocates support the narrative that autism is on the rise, because an ever-expanding “spectrum” that produces more diagnoses draws more attention and research funding — even if children’s underlying psychology remains unchanged.
Some of the CDC’s data documenting the supposed rise in the characteristics ofautism, meanwhile, comes not from gold-standard in-person psychiatric assessments but from parent-reported surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale. The SRS includes statements such as “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird,” which parents rate from “Not true” to “Almost always true.” In my own doctoral research on adolescent mental health, I included the SRS to account for the extent to which other psychological outcomes were explained by social difficulties. However, I was always careful to use hedging language — these are behavioral traits known to be associated with autism, not diagnostic markers. Unfortunately, many studies use high scores on the SRS as a substitute for clinical assessment of autism — accounting, for example, for at least 12 percentof “suspected cases” in the 2022 CDC data.
. . . We should be concerned about the rising number of quirky children “on the spectrum,” but not because they are being exposed to neurotoxins that older generations were insulated from, nor because a growing number of children face clinically–significant social impairment. Rather, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy,” the more pressing concern may be a cultural and institutional drift toward overdiagnosis across child psychiatry. Like the rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression diagnoses among young people, the surge in autism labels may reflect shifting norms, looser diagnostic criteria and excess therapeutic attention directed toward ordinary struggles. If autism were truly increasing because of a new environmental insult, we would expect to see increases across all levels of severity. But that is not the case.
I recommend Abigail Shrier’s book, which is even better than her first one. It will convince you that children are being inundated, to their detriment, with a “neurodivergence” narrative, so that the normal problems of childhood have now become genuine psychological difficulties that need professional treatment.
*Mass shootings are largely an American phenomenon, but a bad one occurred in British Columbia, Canada on Tuesday: At first the shooter, who apparently committed suicide, was identified as a female, but Luana guessed that it would likely be a trans-identified man—based on the extreme rarity of female mass shootings (I can’t think of single one, though there may have been a couple). It turns out Luana was right, but of course that doesn’t mitigate the tragedy. The perp has now been identified (see Torygraph article below.)
Police received a report of an active shooter at the school about 1:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement.
Upon entering the school, police found six people dead inside. A seventh died while being transported to a hospital. A person believed to be the shooter was also found dead with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Two additional victims were found dead in a home in an incident that is believed to be connected, police said.
. . .Details about the victims and suspected shooter have not been disclosed, and authorities have asked for patience while they carry out the early stages of the investigation. Emergency responders, major crime units and victim services teams have been deployed to support the investigation, the RCMP said.
“We are not in a place now to be able to understand why, and what may have motivated this tragedy,” North District RCMP superintendent Ken Floyd told reporters. He said the shooter was the person described in an alert sent out to the community earlier in the day. The alert described the suspect as a “female in a dress with brown hair,” according to media reports.
In a news conference, British Columbia Premier David Eby called the event an “unimaginable tragedy.” He said that some injuries from the school shooting were “profoundly serious” and some “more minor.” Two people were airlifted with life-threatening injuries, and about 25 others are being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
. . . Mass shootings are rare in Canada, and the nation’s deadliest, in April 2020, prompted the government to restrict access to weapons. In that incident, Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people in a 13-hour rampage in Nova Scotia before being shot dead by police. Two weeks later, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on more than 1,500 “military-style assault weapons,” making it illegal to fire, transport, sell, import or bequeath the weapons.
(Updated): Canadian police confirmed ten deaths and at least 35 injuries following a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia. The shooter, who also killed himself, was identified by a close family member as Jesse Strang, a transgender person identifying with ‘she/her’ pronouns.
A school shooter who killed eight people during a rampage in a remote part of Canada has been identified as a transgender teenager.
Jesse Van Rootselaar, who was born male but identified as female, shot and killed his mother and brother at home on Tuesday before killing five students and one teacher at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia.
Van Rootselaar opened fire on police when they arrived and “rounds were fired in their direction”, said Dwayne McDonald, deputy commissioner of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Van Rootselaar, who police had earlier described as a “gunperson” wearing a dress, died at the school. He was not a student at the time of the shooting.
*In its continuing anti-vax campaign, the FDA has simply refused to even review a new flu vaccine from Moderna.
The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, rejected the company’s application for approval over a concern that Moderna’s clinical trial had compared its experimental vaccine against a product the agency did not consider the best on the market. People in the comparison group received Fluarix Quadrivalent, a flu vaccine sold by GSK.
Moderna had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars testing its flu vaccine, enrolling 41,000 people and aimed at a market of adults ages 50 and older. The company concluded that its shot was superior to GSK’s product.
Dr. Stephen Hoge, the company’s president, said in an interview on Tuesday that the new flu vaccine was designed to be better tailored for a single nation than the ones that tended to be used by an entire hemisphere. He also said the F.D.A. had earlier indicated support for the company’s study plan.
“This refusal to start a review is all confusing, to say the least,” Dr. Hoge said, adding: “It is surprising, and we’re trying to understand what has changed.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., said the agency did not comment on communications with individual applicants for drug approval.
Moderna said it had received what is known as a “refuse to file” letter from the agency, meaning that the company tried to submit an application for approval, but was dismissed. Such cursory rejections are unusual; the agency tends to complete a thorough review before denying approval.
. . .This latest move by the F.D.A. reflects expansion of a new policy under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly criticized the mRNA technology used most successfully against Covid and made by both Moderna and Pfizer. Recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023, the technology instructs the body to produce a fragment of a virus that then sets off the body’s immune response.
But Mr. Kennedy has scuttled the use of mRNA in vaccines and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research using the technology, claiming it is not safe or effective. During his first year as health secretary, he has quashed several projects involving the technology, including an effort by Moderna to develop a shot against bird flu.
I admit to confusion about this. The “control” vaccine was not “tailored to a single nation” (the US?), so is the rejection by the FDA based on just a comparison of relative general effiacy, or is it really because RFK, Jr. doesn’t like mRNA vaccines? Stay tuned.
*Lordy be! Harvard has put a stringent cap on “A” grades at 20% per course, though not all faculty approve. From The Crimson:
Faculty voiced cautious support for a proposal that would cap undergraduate A grades at roughly 20 percent and introduce an internal ranking system, saying the policy would curb longstanding grade inflation at the College.
But the proposal has also prompted concerns among some professors, who warned that the cap could impose an unrealistic standard for distinction, threaten faculty autonomy, and foster unhealthy competition.
A faculty committee released the proposal last week as part of a broader effort to rein in grade inflation. The recommendations, which will come to a full faculty vote later this spring, would limit A grades to 20 percent per course, with flexibility for up to four additional As per class, and introduce a percentile-based ranking system to determine internal honors and awards.
In interviews and statements, more than a dozen faculty welcomed the attempt to impose a systematic check on grade inflation.
Although professors already dropped the share of A grades they awarded from 60.2 percent to 53.4 percent last fall, several said the new proposal would address a structure problem by shielding individual instructors from pressure, or backlash, for grading more stringently.
“Grading is a collective action problem. When some instructors raise their grades, that puts pressure on other instructors to raise their grades too, and the pressure for higher grades snowballs over time, making it hard for any course to hold the line,” Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 wrote in a statement.
Some faculty initially worried that the cap could discourage students from enrolling in demanding courses.
Molecular and Cellular Biology professor Sean R. Eddy, who teaches an undergraduate course that averaged nearly 12 hours of work a week in 2024, said he feared the policy would deter students from taking classes like his.
After reviewing the committee’s report, however, Eddy said he was reassured by its framing of A grades as markers of “extraordinary distinction” rather than mastery alone.
. . . . Other professors cautioned that the proposal could pose a danger to faculty autonomy. Government professor Steven Levitsky said he disliked what he described as the inflexibility of the recommendations, arguing that they infringed on faculty authority in the classroom.
If everybody does this at once, as Harvard dictates, then there is no motivation for students to gravitate to “easy” courses, since of course every professor will give 20% As. This is a great move to curb grade inflation, and they could give the median grade for any course on the transcripts, though I don’t know if anybody does that.
But of course there is an op-ed in the Crimson by two Harvard undergrads objecting to the grade cap as making grades a “relative” distinction rather than an absolute one. That it does, but Harvard students are smart to begin with, and if everybody got As, as they almost do now, there is a need for relative distinctions. Good for Mother Harvard! (I never got a grade there, as I vowed never to get a grade again after I left college, and I placed out of any required courses when I took the grad entrance exams at Harvard. But I still took 2-3 courses per semester for the first two years, doing all the required work but not getting a grad; I simply audited them with the teacher’s permission and they are not even on my record.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej prognostates Armageddon:
Hili: Do you also see the end of the world coming?
Andrzej: Yes, though I have more trouble than most choosing the precise date.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy też przewidujesz koniec świata?
Ja: Tak, tylko mam większe niż inni problemy z wyznaczeniem konkretnej daty.
*******************
From Stacy:
From Grandiloquent Word of the Day via Stash Krod:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From Masih; a group of blinded Iranian women, shot for protesting:
A regime that blinded these women and hanged men for peacefully demanding freedom must be met with handcuffs in democratic countries, not handshakes.
This is exactly why I stood at the UN Security Council and directly criticized the Secretary-General of the United Nations.… https://t.co/1SsCKPnaWd pic.twitter.com/Gi1GaRmVBg
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 11, 2026
A tweet from Carole Hooven after the shooting in Canada:
Most men (adult human males) are not violent, and the same goes for trans-identified ones. But the vast majority of those who are extremely violent are men. Journalists who lie about the sex of perpetrators of violent crime mislead the public, harm public safety (including for… https://t.co/XJhrxU3mDD pic.twitter.com/q3QFuHn7KW
— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) February 11, 2026
From Luana, an unfair comparison. Chicago, for example, strives for viewpoint diversity as opposed to other kinds of diversity; and when you see the word you can usually place “racial” in front of it automatically:
Professor of history and co-president of the Stanford AAUP chapter:
Calling for more “viewpoint diversity” is like saying “all lives matter.” pic.twitter.com/XgcTdU9UYL
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 11, 2026
From Bryan, an entire thread of competing explanations:
I’m tired of pretending… What’s this for? pic.twitter.com/bYceGYrqbe
— Igor Smirnov (@GMIgorSmirnov) February 11, 2026
From Malcolm, an illusion. I can no longer tell AI pictures from real ones, so I’ll just show it and let you decide:
— The Pets 𝕏 (@ThePetsX) January 31, 2026
One from my feed: a lovely hovering kestrel:
The common kestrel is a member of the peregrine falcon family and is one of the world’s best hovering experts.
Its ability to skillfully use headwinds to hover perfectly in one spot in the air is truly a work of art. pic.twitter.com/hfw0iGg82o— The Figen (@TheFigen_) February 10, 2026
From Islamicat, the Twitter site where cats are seen as jihadists (h/t Muffy):
Wife asks to leave the house? Is she high? pic.twitter.com/JnCXs4UyvB
— Islamicat 💣😾🕌 💥 (@_Islamicat) February 5, 2026
One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
A Dutch Jewish girl and her mother were both gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. The girl was nearly three years old, and would be 86 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T11:47:08.126Z
. . . and one from Dr. Cobb, showing the humor of an Olympic curler and gold medalist:
Isabella Wranå won gold for curling, but should've for this video
Norman as Darwin. That’s incredibly cool! Wish I’d have seen the lecture/show.
They do a good job with the make-up. Make up skill and tech are amazing.
D.A.
NYC
Great to see the young Norman. I enjoyed the WEIT series of readers photographed in their natural habitats a few years ago…maybe during Covid quarantining.
Great fun, great eyebrows, but hard to emulate that protruding Darwinian forehead🤓
Yeah, I think Norman is missing some Neanderthal alleles. . .
99.9% Ashkenazi Jew (atheist Jew, of course). Very little Neanderthal component if I remember the analysis correctly.
I wish the boss would bring that section back so I can put a face and story to some of the frequent names I see here. If you were there you could still post your link though. Luckily I got featured!
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
D.A.
NYC
Thank you! It was fun to do, the best part being how the students reacted as I walked onto the stage: bewilderment, then applause. It was always the same.
Taking the makeup off afterwards was a huge chore. The bald pate (with attached hair), beard, mustache, and eyebrows were held on by spirit gum—basically pine tar—which had to be removed chemically using alcohol or paint thinner. (I used alcohol.) Spirit gum stuck to my actual hair and took days to get out completely. Similarly, the foundation makeup came off only with continued washing. The makeup artist even slathered makeup—including age spots—on my hands, as you can see in one of the pictures.
I planned the Darwin presentation for my History of the Earth and its Life course, but when word got around I was asked to do it for other university events and by the Roanoke (Virginia) Museum of Natural History. It got to be too much, so I eventually said no to more performances.
Regarding Darwin’s great book, which he rushed into print in 1859, I used it every year in my graduate-level Fossil Record of Evolution course (facsimile of the 1st edition). The graduate students read the book for the first time, while I read it over again and again. Every time I read it I gained more insight—particularly into how absolutely brilliant Darwin was and how absolutely revolutionary his idea was—and is. The first time I read the Origin (6th edition), it was on my own in high school. Darwin’s book seems so modern. Of course it does! It’s the foundation of modern evolutionary biology.
There will never again be another Darwin; the closest I could ever hope to get to the man was to pretend.
In the UK’s counterpart to the Canadian shooting, “A 13-year-old boy has been charged with attempted murder after two boys, aged 12 and 13, were stabbed at a school in north-west London”.
What this BBC report carefully makes no mention of is that the 13-yr-old is the child of Afghanistani migrants, shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the attack, and was arrested at a Mosque.
I wonder how long those court records will be kept if he is prosecuted. Hasn’t Starmer order destruction of some court archives? Or is it a unsubstantiated rumour?
in 1994 the DSM IV widened the diagnostic criteria and a sixteen-fold rise in diagnoses followed. In 2013, the DSM V folded the much more common Asperger’s syndrome into “autism spectrum disorder” and in consequence, we can account for a sixty-fold increase in diagnoses since 1994 for reasons of classification alone. It is certainly true that a greater awareness and reduction of stigma has also led to more diagnoses.
It is also quite correct that the nature of cases seen is changing. The severely handicapped non-verbal cases associated with birth anoxia and intrauterine infections have become rarer with better obstetric care, whilst the milder cases that appear to be genetic are rising (perhaps via assortative mating).
One of the problems with including very questionable to mild cases of autism under the heading “Autism” is that activists are increasingly claiming it’s an “identity” to be appreciated rather than a disorder to be cured. As a result, severe forms are being increasingly marginalized. I read an account written by a mother who took her nonverbal, wheelchair-bound son to an Autism Convention; not only did she fail to find other parents to talk to, but when, during an open mike session, she objected to the lack of medical information, she was made to feel distinctly unwelcome. They wanted to hear talks given by autistic physicists about their challenges at Harvard.
If a diagnosis includes some of the world’s most brilliant, successful people along with those who struggle to focus on objects and require 24 hour care, something seems very wrong.
It was much more sensible in the days when “autism” meant severely impaired and “Asperger’s” meant socially awkward but otherwise copes fine. Can anyone explain why this was changed? (Was it because Asperger was a dubious character?)
A long time ago there was less specificity with regard to autism, with labels like pervasive developmental disorder being used, and when there was no form of treatment a lot of people were simply labelled as mentally handicapped and there was no reason to add the extra label of autism. Then it was felt that Asperger’s might be a separate condition, and so the DSM was altered to separate Asperger’s from (Kanner’s) Autism so that they could be studied as distinct disorders. However, the more they were studied, the more it became apparent they were the same, differing in degree rather than in quality. That led to the concept of a spectrum disorder and they were unified again. At the same time, the goalposts were moved somewhat allowing more people to be included in ASD, so more mildly affected people now qualify for the diagnosis. It is also true that we are diagnosing some of the more severely affected individuals as autistic rather than just as mentally handicapped, because there are worthwhile interventions to offer so the label matters. In short, no it wasn’t to bury the name of Hans Asperger because of his (possible) complicity with the T4 program.
In the UK students can get extra time in exams if they have an autism diagnosis. The diagnosis can be provided by privately paid for experts.
The incentive seems obvious.
Exactly. The DSM’s rather expansive definition of “autism spectrum disorder” created what is now sometimes described as an epidemic. More recent contributing factors are no doubt reduction of stigma, introduction of measures like the Social Responsiveness Scale, and the general trend to therapize everything noted by Abigail Shrier, among others.
And here in Oz, taxpayer money is doled out to families who can get such diagnoses of their children, even if minimally impaired. Likewise special considerations for university students who claim such “disabilities”.
As soon as they started saying that the shooter in Canada was “female” I knew they were transgender. It’s bad enough that this kind of delusion and mental illness has been encouraged rather than treated in the last several years. But that the media and so much of official-dom, especially the police, has bought into it, including in their use of language, is just utterly baffling to me. I suppose fear of losing one’s job if you don’t toe the accepted line is always a rational if weak reason, but that people at “the top” of the various organizations felt the need to capitulate as well is pathetic.
I had the same reaction as you and Luana based on the facts that I) I could not remember any women mass shooters (I have been reading the newspaper pretty much every day for decades), II) trans-identified people have, relatively speaking, a lot of mental-health comorbidities.
The police should have simply waited until they could with certainty identify the sex of the shooter before making pronouncements about it, given that they, of course, know about the extreme rarity of female mass shooters. In such a context, to identify sex off the dress the shooter wore does not seem advisable.
This reminds me of asymptomatic disease screening: If the disease is very rare, then most positive test results will be false positives.
If you are female and undergo asymptomatic breast cancer screening and you get a positive test results, the probability that you actually have breast cancer (the probabiliy of a true positive) is about 10%. Hence 90% of positive test results are false positives. And breast cancer is considerably more common than females being mass shooters.
When I heard the news of the Tumbler Ridge (British Columbia) mass shooting, I could easily remember that there recently was a mass shooting in the US where the shooter was a trans-identified individual. From Wikipedia:
Though what I did not remember about this mass shooting in Nashville was that the shooter was a trans-identifying female (as in a biologically female individual).
On YouTube, I just saw this 6-minute CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) clip of an interview (uploaded today) with a US criminologist who has a database of mass shootings in the US (I assume recent shootings, though no time period is given): of 201 mass shootings (defined as having killed at least 4 persons), in 196 cases the shooter was male, 4 were female and 1 transgender.
The video is entitled “False claims about trans people circulated online after Tumbler Ridge shooting”, if you are interested.
Friend of WEIT Caroline Hooven tweeted today the % of female mass (meaning 4+ I assume) shooters was 3%. Higher than I’d have guessed.
D.A.
NYC
Peter, there have been at least five trans-identified school mass shooters in the US since 2019: Alex McKinney, Lee Aldritch, Audrey Hale, Dylan Butler, and Natalie Rupnow. (Audrey Hale was a girl who identified as a boy. All the rest were boys.)
You also need to take into account how “mass shooting” is defined and the type of mass shooting. How many people were shot or how many actually died? Are you counting domestic violence, gang violence, and robbery? Incidents like school shootings make up a small percentage of shootings where 4 or more people are murdered at one time.
Alex McKinney was also born female (identified as a boy). Natalie Rupnow, as far as I know, was falsely identified as trans, and was simply a female. Dylan Butler also just seems to have been a male, falsely identified as trans by the same online people. Aldrich was not a school shooter.
Wayward Son, thank you. Obviously my source was unreliable.
However, I think Hale probably was trans (“non-binary”.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/details-nashville-shooters-gender-identity-sow-confusion-disinformatio-rcna77424
I’m not sure about Butler. Looks like there’s a big problem getting at the truth here. Some will be too quick to assume that a shooter claims trans identity. Meanwhile supporters of the trans narrative are liable to downplay or, if possible, erase any evidence of it.
It was ridiculous that the police said it was a gun-person and not a gun man. Oh please respect for the shooters gender is paramount in the police forces minds now. Give me a break.
It is not surprising that many of the mass shootings are done by trans people if you going to give an endocrine disrupter to a mentally ill person one should not be surprised if they commit an insane act.
I think that’s a bit harsh, Loretta. Everyone in Canada all the way up the food chain to “the top” is terrified of losing his job if he doesn’t get pronouns right, even for a mass killer, even a dead one. “She has family who loved the woman she always was, you heartless transphobe!” People in authority are willing to say this individual was a woman to protect their own jobs and so must all their underlings. We all know he’s a man but we don’t count to the bosses of the chief of a local RCMP detachment in a remote town in northern Canada. Tumbler Ridge isn’t exactly a plum assignment even by the standards of rural policing. The cops have rules in reporting the news about people they get to know and they follow them. To them, none of this matters.
Look what happened to Amy Hamm, RN, also from British Columbia. She is now unemployable as a nurse even if she keeps her licence, which has been suspended and will be revoked if she doesn’t pay her regulator scores of thousands of dollars for its costs in her discipline hearing for what amounted to misgendering unnamed trans people who weren’t even her patients. If I was still licensed and not comfortably retired I wouldn’t have said Boo about this, either.
To a Mountie in a small town, it’s not worth insisting on the truth if everyone above him says 2 + 2 = 5. He was taking a chance even releasing that the gunman was “trans identified”. The activists say she should have been described only as the woman she said she was. That very announcement stirs up anti-trans hate.
This is Canada. We have voted for Liberal governments in four consecutive elections now, and will probably do it again this spring if the Liberal Party bets on a Trump-given Majority. You’re looking at the wrong country if you expect people at the top not to capitulate. This is where “kindness” led us: to intimidation all the way to the top and from the top.
I am afraid you are right about Canada, Leslie, though I agree with Loretta that it is pathetic. What they continue to do to Amy Hamm is shocking.
I felt like “female in a dress” was code to try to break through the gender nonsense without getting fired. It’s a bizarre phrase in this situation, and makes the listener ask WTF? When you realize this is from Canada, you know they’re talking about a man.
It’s a very sad state of affairs, grossly offensive not only to women, but to anyone with a brain. Yet somehow it continues.
Indeed. So now if I for some reason put on a dress, I instantly become a female. And I thought we had transcended sex stereotyping!
The EU parliament has now declared trans women are women. The madness never ends.
How does the kestrel work? It must be doing some kind of work/exerting some kind of force, but it doesn’t seem to be moving. Is it jet propelled?
The wind is doing the work. Relative to the wind the kestrel is continually falling, but its falling motion and the wind’s motion cancel out. It’s similar to supporting a ping-pong ball on a jet of water from an upward-pointing fountain.
We hang glider pilots do the exact same thing at places like Lanzarote. The wind comes off the ocean, hits the cliffs, shoots up over the ridge, forming a flow of air that you can soar in for hours.
And I don’t think that the common kestrel “is a member of the peregrine falcon family.” The kestrels are of course closely related to the peregrine falcons, but one must describe the relationship a bit differently.
Yes, agreed, they are both members of the family Falconidae (usually described in English as “Falcons and Caracaras”).
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins.
One of my favourite poems/sonnets. Hopkins was writing about how Jesus was manifest in all things, hence his ‘O my chevalier’, but I recall it just about every time I see a Black Shouldered Kite ‘hanging on the rein of a wimpling wing’ above the stubble, anticipating his breakfast.
I was a bit cranky above, so I’m switching to awe and wonder here:
The headwind (horizontal, not vertical) is generating lift as it passes over and under the bird’s wings. At the same time, the weight of the bird is a downward force which the wings resolve into a forward component to keep it from being merely pushed backward tumbling beak over cloaca. It is indeed continuously falling balanced by its lift but this falling is what provides forward force, too, which allows it to resist the headwind and hover over a point on the ground.
Yes, updraughts (thermals) help large soaring birds (and hang gliders.) In this video the wind off the water may be deflected partly upward by the vegetation at the water’s edge. But that’s not what propels the bird upward late in the video. Rather, he just adjusts the lifting shape of his wings to get briefly more lift from the horizontal wind.
There is ground effect very close to the surface. Large-winged sailplanes and the U-2 can be very difficult to set down on runways. But the kestrel can hover at any altitude merely by turning into the wind if the wind is fast enough. A fixed-wing aircraft can do this too, in principle. The danger is that the wind speed (and therefore the airspeed seen by the wing in the attempt to hover) is likely less than the stall speed for that airplane — typically at least 70 mph for light planes in level attitude but much higher in fast jets — and the wing will then lose all lift abruptly.
Notice how at the end he suddenly does just that: he dumps lift (“stalls”) to plummet by gravity onto his prey. Beautiful.
To expand on this question, because I’m afraid I still don’t follow the answers:
The kestrel isn’t accelerating, so the sum of the forces acting on it must be 0.
Gravity is purely vertical, so the net force of the wind acting on the kestrel must also be purely vertical.
I tentatively believe that wind blowing on an angled surface can exert a force arbitrarily close to at right angles to the direction of the wind, but not actually at right angles.
So either I’m wrong about that, the wind is blowing upwards, or the kestrel is cheating.
This response is brought to you by the “Not a Physicist, But” Department:
The kestrel’s wings (and maybe its body as well) are airfoils. As such, they accelerate the wind rearward and down, counteracting the force of the headwind and gravity.
I suspect that the wind is indeed upwards, blowing horizontal across the water and then deflected upwards by the bank.
Darwin’s idea was assuredly great, but there is competition. What about Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, Confucius, etc.? The last two thousand years has produced many great ideas.
I’ve often thought about this. When I was a graduate student, I had the illusion that one day I would be a famous scientist. It took only a few short years to disabuse me of the fantasy. Indeed, there have been a number of great scientists and thinkers. To still be remembered after hundreds or even thousands of years testifies to how great their ideas have been—and still are. But in the grand scheme of things—with billions of humans having come and gone without issue—the number of truly great thinkers has been vanishingly small. I suppose that is as it should be.
Yes. It’s a bit like asking what is the best book ever written, isn’t it? Lots of competition. Still, in terms of inflection points for humanity, Darwin’s dangerous idea must rank at the very top. It wasn’t just a useful idea like those of Archimedes, nor was it in any sense a guide, as Confucius gave us, on how to live. It was essential and explanatory like Newton’s discoveries, but it was more than that.
Darwin’s elegantly simply idea swept away millennia of comforting lies we told ourselves, and for that it earns my award for the bestest idea ever. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out (more or less), “religion it must be said, comes from the bawling infancy of our species”. Darwin forced us to an adult awareness, to confront what were probably the most important questions about us we’ve ever had, the answers to which we had lied to ourselves about all along; where did we come from and what is our place?
That’s how I’ll honor him on his day. I would have loved to see Dr Gilinsky as MC Chucky D. Bet he talked about tangled banks and grandeur in Darwin’s view of life.
“Bet he talked about tangled banks and grandeur in Darwin’s view of life.”
Of course “he” did!
Alongside Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, etc. etc., we should rank the inventor(s?) (we don’t even know who) of eyeglasses. In the long run, this might have been the most consequential invention between the cooking of food and electromagnetic induction.
then there’s the wheel, printing press and anesthesia…
so many to choose from, really.
I’m willing to assert that denial of the Moderna mRNA flu vaccine was in part due to Moderna being headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Trump has established a record of selectively punishing blue states.
It’s also possible Moderna didn’t accept to bribe the “family” so revenge was planned. I don’t think Trump’s Administration does things without implying personal profits
Re capping the number of As in a course at 20%: I disagree with that idea because I taught German at a local college. I always began the 101 course with the statement that, as of the first day of classes, everyone had an A; their final grade would be a result of their having proven they didn’t deserve one. Had everyone studied, learned vocab, attended class, etc. it would have been theoretically possible for at least most of a class of 20 to achieve an A. There were fixed components, such as tests, quizzes, homework, etc., each of which received a specific percentage. If the total percent out of 100 is above 90, then all students who achieve that should receive an A. Why should the numbers be manipulated downwards to ensure only 20% receive an A? Granted, most college courses cannot be made relatively “cut and dry,” as a beginning language course can be (and upper level courses tended to have a closer correlation with the 20% A model).
If Harvard follows through with the proposal of a 20% cap on A grades, then receiving an A means: at worst, you were in the top 20% of the class.
Right now where about 60% of grades are A grades, an A grade means: you were in the top 60% of the class.
So the question here is: Should there be a way in the grading system for the truly exceptional students to stand out among their fellow Harvard students? I say, yes.
Note that as a graduate of Harvard you already stand out among all college students simply by having been admitted and then graduated from Harvard.
If you are working under such a 20% cap on A grades, as an instructor, you will have to create tasks or test items that identify exceptional students. This leads to more opportunities for the best students to challenge themselves in the classroom – which is a good thing.
When the best students cannot distinguish themselves in the classroom they look for such opportunities elsewhere:
Rose Horowitch: The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A. The Atlantic, Aug 28, 2025
https://archive.ph/2u7At
Aden Barton: AWOL from Academics. Harvard Magazine, March-April 2024
(this article by a Harvard student is freely available on the web)
Excerpts:
As a Harvard professor one can take the view: Harvard students are the best in the nation. Hence they should get the best grades. But that does not change the facts mentioned in the two articles I just cited: the current grading system has led to a devaluation of learning in the classroom. If not a cap on A grades, what do you propose to deal with this devaluation of academic activity?
The ginger moggy pic is likely for real. There are a number of sites that check pics for AI or not. I just ran it through 3 such checkers and 2 gave it a pass. The third was 65% possibility of being AI. Here’re a few such sites :
https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection
https://sightengine.com/detect-ai-generated-images
https://decopy.ai/ai-image-detector/
Thanks! I’ve saved the sites.
Very glad to see the WaPo op-ed calling out Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy, which Professor Coyne has called our attention to before. I used to be a trustee at a liberal arts college that always had 10-15 students (a total population of ~1800 so small school) wearing “NEURODIVERGENT” banners at their commencement. Because they felt nervous before taking finals. Or were shy at parties. Etc. So they were given accommodations, and then celebrated for making it through college despite all that.
I think that particular ideology you mention Ms. Mead, as per Abigail Shriver, is the main problem of today’s youth more than individual, treatable pathologies.
Matthew Morycinski below talks about constraints on the Canadian healthcare system but I’m not sure whatever treatment that young man could have obtained would have helped. Individual psychiatric problems, partly ideological in this case, aren’t really fixable like that. Social contagions of bad ideas are more systemic/ society wide.
D.A.
NYC/CT
When Vinay Prasad rejected Moderna’s application for review, he included this reasoning: “This is because your control arm does not reflect the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study. I note that this determination is consistent with FDA’s advice given to you prior to your study.”
I find that second sentence of interest. Moreover, while I understand the inclination, I am hesitant to contribute this to either “antivax” sentiment or to RFK Jr. Prasad has been a long-time critic of what he sees as overpriced pharmaceuticals that range from unnecessary to useless—at best. His books “Ending Medical Reversals” and “Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People With Cancer” long predate the arrival of RFK Jr and his relationship with Donald Trump. Prasad, himself, comes at these issues from a position decidedly to the political left.
One thing I have heard Prasad critique is a perceived lack of adequate testing for vaccines targeting respiratory viruses in the senior population. Those over 65 are simultaneously the ones who could most benefit from an effective vaccine as well as the group in which it is more likely to fail. Where I agree strongly with Prasad is that much mainstream reporting can come across as little more than an extension of pharma PR offices—with insufficient skepticism, overreliance on industry sources, and inadequate consideration of the revolving door between industry and the regulatory agencies. Deciding whether Prasad is correct in his current actions will require going beyond most of the reporting spin and examining all relevant primary sources.
What compounded the psychiatric issues of the Tumbler Ridge shooter was the fact that it is almost impossible to get psychiatric care in BC with less than a year of waiting. The Canadian medical system is government-pay-for-service, but doctors are still working as private businesses. They don’t work FOR government, it just pays the fees for patients. As a result, there is no motivation among either doctors or politicians to have more doctors trained. More doctors would mean either bigger health care budget or less pay, both unacceptable. Once a psychiatrist appointment happens, it concentrates on drugs to be given rather than comprehensive help or therapy that is not available in small towns anyway. Psychology as such is not insured because it’s not part of Canadian medical system, so only people who have private insurance can afford it. This is all an effect of tax base being insufficient to provide proper medical care, especially in tiny far-off settlements like Tumbler Ridge. Ever since the 1990s international fiscal race to the bottom, the Canadian health care system is struggling because of insufficient health care budget.
One female mass shooter was Brenda Spencer.
From the Wikipedia article “Cleveland Elementary School shooting (San Diego)”:
The Cleveland Elementary School shooting took place on January 29, 1979,
at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, United States.[1][2]
The principal and a custodian were killed; eight children and a police officer were injured.
A 16-year-old girl, Brenda Spencer, who lived in a house across the street from the school, was convicted of the shootings.
Charged as an adult, she pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon,
and was sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years. As of 2026, she is still in prison.
This incident was memorialized in the song “I don’t like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats, released in July 1979. While barricaded in her parents’ house, Spencer told a newspaper reporter that she had shot at the school children and adults because, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
There are varying definitions of “mass shooting”, some of which are based on the number of people killed or injured by gunfire, others of which are based only on the number of people killed. The latter group of definitions would not count Brenda Spencer as a mass shooter, because only two people were killed.
As to the general point about mass shooters being overwhelmingly male, Statista.com, in an article “Number of mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and August 2025, by shooter’s gender”, gives the following counts:
149 Male
4 Female
2 Male & female (i.e. there was more than one shooter)
The Statista count is based on the number of fatalities and excludes non-fatal injuries. “Gender” is their term; it may actually mean “biological sex”.
Carole Hooven reports that women make up less than 3% of mass shooters, which jibes with your figures.
Additionally, the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA was committed by a pair of gunpersons of differing genders assigned at birth (note on terminology at post #15).
Also the antisemitic one in Jersey City in 2019. I assume that both were counted in the statistic cited by Eric in #15.
The San Bernadino shooters were of the Jihadi gender.
The shooting in Canada is, needless to say, nothing to make fun of, but the Canadian authorities, who initially referred to the shooter as a “gunperson,” are. As the Babylon Bee reported, Canadian Reporterperson Announces Policepersons Have Identified Gunperson
Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and my mom, who turned 99 years young today.
Congrats!
I suspect – certainly hope – that we will hear a rebuttal from Moderna. Flu is such a moving target – part of this has to be selecting an existing vaccine that most closely matches the strains expected to be circulating during the study to use as a control vs. the vaccine that you’re producing against the same expected strains. You can’t develop a control vaccine too. So this story is going to have to accept some of the realities of the virus being addressed. It’s not like trying to develop an mRNA vaccine against measles, which basically stable. But there’s no need for that given the efficacy of the current measles vaccine.
The advantage to an mRNA flu vaccine, as I see it, is that it can be rolled out more rapidly, so the choice of flu strains to base the vaccine on can be made far closer to flu season,
One side effect of what I hope will wind up being a kerfluffle that Prasad loses is that it may put a dagger in the heart of Junior Kennedy’s refrain that vaccines are not tested against a placebo – which he takes to mean saline. That’s only done when the vaccine is against a novel target. To evaluate a novel vaccine against, say, measles, vs saline would be unethical. Prasad’s complaint tacitly recognizes this.
It seems to me that Prasad is taking issue with the control being not the best standard vaccine, which could cause the new vaccine to “win” the trial even if it is no better than the best current standard (which it wasn’t tested against.) He seems to be saying to Moderna that he wants them to show their vaccine is at least as good as (no worse than) the current best standard and for that they need to run a non-inferiority trial against the best standard as control, not a superiority trial against a second-best control. Non-inferiority trials are difficult to do and interpret, partly because demonstrating therapeutic equivalence (“close enough for government work”) is statistically challenging, but which non-inferiority trials are designed to overcome. At least they state their assumptions explicitly which are needed for equipoise. I realize there could be argument from the Pharma that their control was appropriate.
I’m not taking sides, just identifying that this is indeed a red flag. This would be a fair complaint, especially if he gave this caution to Moderna and they blew him off.
Why do a trial to license a vaccine that is “no worse” than the best standard? Why would public health departments switch? Well, as you say, the mRNA technology would make it possible to design the vaccine each summer for the virus already circulating in the Southern Hemisphere winter instead of having to guess way back in our late winter what will be circulating and hope we nail it sort of. This would be a significant advance….provided the vaccine works as well inherently as a vaccine as what we currently use. It sounds like an ideal setting for a non-inferiority trial. (Some non-inferiority trials are considered dodgy ethically because they ask, “Is this cheaper drug close enough to the standard expensive treatment that we would switch to it as long as it is not too much worse by some statistical measure.” This trial isn’t that. mRNA tech. would actually be better if it works. And if you don’t need to grow it in eggs, it would be cheaper but not in a way that shortchanges patients.)
And yes, of course you can’t evaluate any new vaccine or any other treatment against placebo if there is already a recognized effective standard.
But the flu virus is a moving target. Different strains every year. Different combinations of the H (hemagluttinin) and N (neuraminidase) components. You can’t legitimately use a control agains one strain when your vaccine is against another strain. My guess is that they selected an existing vaccine against a strain that was closest to the one they targeted that might have had an efficacy of say 50% while there’s one that was 70% but vs. a different strain.
I expect that This Week in Virology will address this soon.
I look forward to TWiV commentary on this one. I have the sense that they will disagree with the FDA action, and for good reasons.