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.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 6, shabbos for Jewish cats, Convocation Day at the University of Chicago (there’s a livestream at the link; festivities start at 9 a.m.), the anniversary of my late parents, and the anniversary of D-Day, the day the Allies landed on Normandy in 1944: the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Here’s an actual photograph of the landing called “Into the jaws of death,” with the Wikipedia caption:
Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sargent. Original caption: Down the ramp of a Coast Guard landing barge Yankee soldiers storm toward the beach-sweeping fire of Nazi defenders in the D-Day invasion of the French Coast. Troops ahead may be seen laying flat under the deadly machinegun resistance of the Germans.
This was in fact at Omaha Beach, the deadliest of the beaches for landing, and the one depicted in the opening scene of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (see below)
By Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHoM) Robert F. Sargent. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Here’s the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” depicting the landing on Omaha. Veterans who were there praise its accuracy, though landings were not this bloody on other beaches. WARNING: it’s bloody!
Here’s a young pineapple I photographed in 2022 in a botanical park in the Canary Islands:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Speaking of graduation here, the news is now saying that 14 U.S. colleges cost more than $100,000 per year to attend starting this fall, including fees, tuition, room and board, books, and other requisites. Business Insider has a list of the 30 most expensive colleges, and guess what? The University of Chicago is the second highest, though the figures given are for this year, and include tuition and fees at $79,395 and room and board: $21,414 for a total of $100,809. This fall will be more, but realize that U.S. students don’t really pay that much because of scholarships and the like. Chicago also has America’s highest tuition; Harvey Mudd is the most expensive At $102,312, but tuition is lower than Chicago and room and board costs more. Most of the colleges on the list are small and elite, and Harvard is not to be seen.
t’s Friday, June 5, and Hezbollah has officially rejected the ceasefire. Two days after Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to a conditional pause, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem dismissed the deal as a “surrender,” vowing to maintain fire on northern Israel as long as strikes in Lebanon continue. This hardline stance certainly jeopardizes the “pilot zones” intended for the Lebanese Armed Forces to deploy. However, it hasn’t shifted the calculus in Tel Aviv; for the IDF’s top brass, the book on the terror organization has already largely been closed.
On the streets, it’s easy to spot the sourness and bitterness regarding the events on the northern front, from the children running to bomb shelters, to the devastating news from the drone fields across the border, all the way to slamming the brakes on an attack in Beirut. The difficult conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t help the feeling that there is a plan, either. These feelings do not reach the upper floors of the Kirya, Israel’s Pentagon. At the top of the military, they speak of an achievement unseen in years, and of an opportunity for peace and quiet for many long years. Reconciling these two pictures is impossible, but describing them is.
The IDF’s top brass is convinced that Hezbollah is a semi-dismantled organization that has absorbed the hardest blow in its history. It had 30,000 fighters on Oct. 6, 2023; since then, 8,000 have been killed and about the same number wounded. “Even a jihadist enemy is dying for a ceasefire.”
The chief of staff, for example, said in closed discussions that he is in favor, under the following conditions: One, Hezbollah’s withdrawal beyond the Litani River. Two, the destruction of all its infrastructure, this time not by the impotent Lebanese army but by an Israeli-American mechanism. Three, an IDF presence on the Yellow Line, which includes, for example, the infamous Beaufort Castle.
. . . It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a gap between the harsh public sentiment and the sweeping optimism at the top. How long? Twenty years minus two months, at the end of the Second Lebanon War. Back then, the public was right that the war was a dismal failure and Hezbollah had grown stronger; hopefully, this time the decision-makers are right.
And some news about women in the IDF:
Israeli special forces are navigating through broken shards as yet another glass ceiling shatters. Yesterday, the IDF announced that for the first time in history, a woman has graduated from the incredibly intensive special forces course for the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal)—Israel’s equivalent to Delta Force. She is now slated to join the unit’s operational activities.
As part of a pilot program launched in December 2024, this soldier spent 18 months enduring one of the most grueling training pipelines in the world to join Sayeret Matkal. Internal reports have revealed that certain entry thresholds were adjusted for women and that she bypassed the standard selection phase; still, her graduation remains a significant achievement. Step away from the broader debate over women in combat and you are left with a simple truth: she endured immense physical and mental strain, she passed the tests the IDF applied, and she earned her spot.
. . . This groundbreaking soldier joins a growing legacy of female combat heroes in the IDF. Her milestone echoes the bravery seen on October 7, when seven female tank crew members fought Hamas militants continuously for 17 hours. That battle marked the first time in modern military history that an all-female armored unit engaged in active combat, successfully eliminating roughly 50 terrorists. Those warriors—and the IDF’s newest special forces graduate—prove that when the nation needs them most, women can, and will, hold the line.
When I was in Israel, I was always impressed to see women in uniform—and a lot of them. Each Israeli woman, save Arabs and ultra-Orthodox, must spend two years in the military—one year less than the three required for men (a difference based on reproductive biology). Here’s a photo I took in Jerusalem in September, 2023. The might have been police rather than IDF soldiers, but they have the weapons and Jerusalem’s Old City, after all, is not the world’s safest place. Note that it’s on the Via Dolorosa.
Republicans managed to push through the $70 billion legislation, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term, on a 52-47 vote after weeks of delays.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was the only Republican to vote against the final package, which was also opposed by all Democrats. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., missed the vote.
Murkowski criticized the use of the budget reconciliation process, which allows senators to advance legislation related to taxes and spending with a simply majority vote rather than the usual 60-vote threshold needed to overcome legislative filibusters.
“I believe very strongly that we needed to fund ICE and CBP, but to completely bypass regular order and the appropriations process by funding for three and a half years, to me … it takes it out of the process that we have always looked to for funding our agencies,” Murkowski said.
She added that she also “had a problem with” including the “anti-weaponization” fund — a proposed settlement fund intended for payments to Americans who are allegedly targeted by the federal government — in the package. The payout fund was created by the Trump administration as part of the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns.
The bill includes$38.6 billion for ICE, $22.6 billion for the Border Patrol, $5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and $108.5 million for child exploitation investigations.
It does not include security funding for the White House ballroom, or any guardrails on the creation of the pot of money seen by Democrats and some Republicans as a “slush fund” to funnel taxpayer money to potentially pay Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies.
The final vote, shortly before 5 a.m., followed an 18-hour “vote-a-rama” during which senators could offer amendments. Senators from both parties proposed 29 amendments and motions before voting on final passage, with some Republicans supporting amendments that broke with Trump’s priorities.
I don’t know much about the final bill and can’t offer comment save that like nearly all bills, it was decided on a vote almost eleanly split between the parties.
*In “Awakenings,” the Washington Post‘s religious newsletter I’ve subscribed to, a doctor describes how, as a nonbeliever, he came to God—through cancer. (I don’t have a link.) The doctor is John V. Campo, described as “a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
As an academic physician, trained first in pediatrics and then psychiatry, a field highly skeptical of religious faith, I was unprepared for a transcendent experience that followed what I will call a housecleaning misadventure last spring. I have since come to view my previous skepticism of religious experience — one that prevails across much of medicine — as something that can impair doctors’ understanding of patients and their needs.
. . . . Later that week, I awoke in the middle of the night, my wife sleeping quietly beside me. My mind was filled with a message that felt like it came from outside me, in words that were not my own: “Someday your body will fail you, and all you will have is me. It will be enough.” I pulled a piece of paper from my nightstand and wrote the words down.
Several months later, after a long walk on the beach during a family vacation, the symptoms I had while cleaning our shower recurred. It was a focal seizure, as I would later learn. An MRI scan showed a mass in the right posterior frontal lobe of my brain, abutting the motor strip. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with a poor prognosis. Although I had noticed some facial weakness and a droopy eyelid on my left side while watching an interview I had done on a news program earlier that year, my wife and I dismissed it as part of getting older.
Glioblastomas are deadly: the five-year survival rate is about 6%, with a median survival time after diagnosis of 12-18 months. And so Campo gradually accepted God:
Whether this reflects a newfound stigma is hard to say, but taking our patients seriously requires physicians to explore issues of ultimate concern, suggesting that a spiritual history should be an expected component of any comprehensive clinical evaluation.
I have never been asked about my “spirituality” or “religious beliefs” by any physician, and I don’t buy the need to ask. Campo reveals that he’s a believer here:
One problem I faced was my belief that knowledge of God could be arrived at via the intellect, or not at all. The folly of this attitude would have been apparent to the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, had a transcendent experience that he recorded on a scrap of paper.
One portion of that text read: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of philosophers and scholars.” Pascal did not meet God by constructing a proof for divine existence; he encountered God unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
Such a moment of sudden revelation or insight is often referred to as an epiphany, derived from the Greek “epipháneia,” meaning appearance or manifestation. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having such experiences. Discounting these occurrences as purely subjective has potential to limit practitioners’ connection with patients in medicine and psychiatry.
My story isn’t complete, but the words that came to me in the quiet of the night are true enough: Someday my body will fail. Indeed, that process has already begun. Following a craniotomy and partial surgical resection of the tumor, along with radiation and chemotherapy, I have experienced changes in sensation and strength on the left half of my body. Although the remaining words of the message contain some mystery, I’m hopeful and confident that the love of God surrounding me “will be enough.”
It appears that Dr. Campo has found God, and through experience alone, though had he not had a brain tumor I wonder if he would have “found” God. This newsletter, like the New York Times’s “Believing” newsletter, is one way that a paper can osculate faith without having to do so on its main pages. And you’ll never seen nonbelief touted in such newsletters.
*Nellie Bowles is back writing TGIF’s for the Free Press, and her news-and-snark column this week is called “TGIF: I would never have forgotten my drugs.” As usual, I will steal a few items. She begins it by saying, “No, I will not be commenting on 60 Minutes other than to say that there are 11,492,640 minutes until I am 60. Do with that what you will, Puck.”
→ But Trumpo giveth and Trumpo taketh away. He classes up the city with a deep clean of the fountains, and then he builds a giant UFC fight arena in front of the White House. He’s now suggesting that the White House UFC fight arena should be permanent, like the Eiffel Tower. This week he’s whipping out posters showing that after he gets his excavators in there, the Lincoln Memorial Reflection Pool is going to be bigger than a skyscraper. Just like the Founders intended.
Here is the White House from above. As an anonymous X user put it: “It’s like a meth family moved in.”
→ Them’s fake oysters: Graham Platner [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine] is the flower that keeps on blooming. First, the part about him that people love most: He put a huge Nazi tattoo on his chest, the one that honors only the finest concentration camp guards. At this stage in the antisemitism cycle, that’s a plus for the average voter. Now to the negatives: According to his financial disclosures, our oysterman is—well, let’s just say he’s all shell and no belly. He’s all fringe and no gills, if you know what I mean. According to last year’s disclosure he made only $3,000 from his stipend as a town harbor master, which sounds more like a position in a frat house. As far as his oyster farm, for which he does not take a salary, his biggest client is his mom (cute) and almost all of his income seems to come from disability checks. He said he bought his house thanks to the VA, but it was actually thanks to a few hundred thousand dollars from his dad. I mean, guys, he went to Hotchkiss and did the richest thing ever, which is stop going to class—he was subsequently expelled! Just because he grew a beard and talks like a burly man instead of gay-like does not mean he isn’t still one of us. Your oysterman’s a debutante with a lemonade stand.
Then came the really bad news: The married man has an account on Kik. And he’d been messaging with “up to six” women prior to launching his Senate bid, his campaign said. Which is a kind of weird way to phrase it, like it’s some sort of quota to hit. Like he’s putting up infidelity numbers “in the six range.” Oh, also: The account was still online as of three days ago, though the campaign claims that Platner stopped his Kik activity when the campaign started. Which I, for one, think is very mature.
Can’t the Democrats find somebody NORMAL to run? If I were a Democrat in Maine, I’d be hard pressed to vote for this joker!
Watch the two videos to which Nellie links in this last item:
→ The killing of Henry Nowak: Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old in Southampton, UK, was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa. Vickrum’s brother then called the cops and said something brilliant. He said that they had just been “attacked racially by some white person.” Holy mackerel! A racism!!!! Every cop in the UK was called up for service. Then, when the police got there, Henry was weak, on the ground, saying to them over and over: “I’ve been stabbed.” And: “I can’t breathe.” In bodycam footage released this week, the police casually note that he has a mouthful of blood but don’t believe he’s been stabbed. “You’ve been stabbed? Don’t think you have, mate,” a cop says coldly. They don’t even look! They focus on Vickrum to make sure he’s okay, and he shows them a little scuff on his cheek. Poor thing! Then they force Henry to sit up, and cuff and drag him across the gravel. Henry Nowak eventually falls silent, unresponsive as a cop reads him his rights. “His pupils aren’t even reacting,” an officer says in the video, shining a light into his dead face, sounding more annoyed than worried, like of course this lazy racist can’t even be bothered to move his pupils a little. Typical.
The video is hard to watch but I do think you must, and also his father’s statement. As of June 1 (the stabbing happened in December of last year), the killing had received very, very little coverage. The New York Times eventually covered the story this week, begrudgingly, only as an event that’s been “increasingly politicized,” probably by bad, racist actors, like what Henry was said to be, by his stabber. You see, he died maybe racistly, is their argument, so really, could you even call it a stabbing? More like a self-inflicted wound, they’d say. You really can kill anyone you want if you say they did a racism. Fun to consider your options, and good to know for the next time you get cut off in traffic. Here’s how Sky News covered it:
When you are stabbed, you must die quietly in those handcuffs. Stop speculating about it or we’re going to tell the police watchdog on you. It means nothing. It signifies nothing. “I can’t breathe” was an obvious George Floyd copycat attempt. That rallying cry is already taken, mate.
Oh, one more:
→ Crimes against heterosexuality: A Mauritanian man allegedly entered the U.S. illegally in 2023 and then claimed asylum on the basis of being gay, a crime in his home country. Asylum granted, get in here ya Martian! But. . . oh no. Was he really gay? According to authorities, he was exposed as a fraud after marrying the sheriff’s stepdaughter in Portland, Indiana, where he’d been working as a corrections officer! Okay, now this is actually starting to seem like an awesome country song. (We covered an almost identical story to this just a little while back in TGIF! As a real gay, I will always track fake gays.)
As of this week the man is reportedly being held at an ICE detention facility in Indiana (as all heterosexuals should be), and is fighting deportation. He just had to go for the sheriff’s daughter. Couldn’t he have extinguished his unnatural, unholy desires with someone not related to the sheriff? Straight people, why are you like this? It sounds like a Pornhub title on page 14: Fake-gay refugee sneaks around with police boss’s hot daughter. But on a serious note, why do we only let in gay migrants? Everyone in Mauritania wants to be in Sonoma, California, instead! That’s life. I’m not saying don’t let gay men in; I’m saying what if there are other metrics we might consider in deciding who from Mauritania to let in? Maybe a points system where being gay gives you a few points, but other things count too? Just like college admissions!
The federal government’s Medicaid program is paying Native American shamans in California $826 a day to perform ancient rituals such as drum circles and spiritual dances to treat drug and alcohol addicts. The alternative treatments are part of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s embrace of “indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscience that claims Native Americans have mystical healing powers that transcend the realm of traditional medicine.
The Biden Department of Health & Human Services gave its approval in October 2024 for California to reimburse Native American “Traditional Healers” with federal Medicaid dollars to treat addicts by drawing on their innate knowledge of ancestral healing rites. The treatments are an effort to combat alcohol and drug addiction in the Native American community, which has a significantly higher rate of substance use disorder than the general population.
Since then, 21 Indian Health Care Providers across the state have enrolled in the program, with the California Department of Health Care Services offering $826 per day to unlicensed “Traditional Healers” and “Natural Helpers” to host spiritual ceremonies, rituals, herbal remedies, and musical drum and dancing therapy for addicts.
But there’s little evidence these ancestral rituals are effective in helping Native Americans and other patients to recover from their drug and alcohol addiction, with some studies showing the alternative treatments may actually be harmful. One study reviewed by the National Institutes of Health found that a significant portion of participants in a Native American Drum Circle study reported drinking more alcohol than usual after participating in the intervention. Another study found that the use of Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremonies to treat alcoholics was mostly ineffective.
The California Department of Health Care Services has crafted the “Traditional Healers” program with a set of lax oversight rules that could render the program vulnerable to fraud and make it a target of the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. The task force has identified billions of dollars’ worth of federal government contracts that have been awarded to potentially fraudulent businesses, many of which are in the medical sector. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance, who heads the task force, announced that the federal government has frozen $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California, in part because the state is not taking fraud seriously, he said.
“We’re talking about taxpayer-funded drum circles,” a senior White House official told the Washington Free Beacon. “Someone in the Biden administration said, ‘That sounds like a good idea.’ It’s disgusting. These were the experts running around telling everyone how much smarter they are. And they’re using taxpayer dollars for drum circles.”
They note that the “drum and dancer” healers need not have any qualifications to be eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. This is your taxpayer money being used for what can only be described as quackery. It of course reflects the sacralization of indigenous people, regarded as possessing knowledge different from but as efficacious as that used in modern medicine. That’s wrong. You might say that there’s a placebo effect involved, with Native Americans “healing” their own kind, but not only is the evidence against that, but I for one don’t want my taxes spent on placebos.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the kitchen is the center of the cats’ world:
Hili: He’s doing something in the kitchen. Szaron: I’ll go check.
In Polish:
Hili: On coś robi w kuchni.
Szaron. Pójdę sprawdzić.
*******************
From TherionArms, another medieval letter (I love the captions of these things:
Masih reposted this tweet from a woman who has her own “X” account. Translation from the Farsi:
A short excerpt from my speech at the “Vienna Court,” a theatrical-political event at the Vienna Festival.
«The moment he smirked…
and then fired at my eye.
I heard the sound of my eye bursting.
The world spun around my head.
Not darkness…
an explosion of pain.
I could hear people shouting:
Hot blood poured down my face”
and I… had just one wish:
to see the world again with my right eye.
This is not just a memory….»
بخش کوتاهی از سخنرانیم در «دادگاه وین» يك اتفاق نمايشى_سياسى در جشنواره وين.
«لحظهای که نیشخند زد…
و بعد شلیک کرد به چشمم.
صدای ترکیدن چشمم رو شنیدم.
دنیا دور سرم چرخید.
نه تاریکی… یک انفجار از درد.
— Kosar Eftekhari 🕊️ (@kosareftekharii) June 2, 2026
From Luana, more information about the murder of Henry Nowak. The Daily Fail reports that the murderer’s mother hid the murder weapon (a knife) in her home.
DIGWA TAUNTED AND TORTURED HENRY FOR 10 MINUTES!!
Henry lay dying, pleading for help. DIGWA AND the POLICE mocked and laughed at him.
They didn’t play the additional clips or recordings in court. They said “it’s too disturbing.”
6 June 1936 | A Czech Jewish girl, Eva Steindlerová, was born.She was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt Ghetto on 16 October 1944 with her mother Gertruda. They were both probably murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—▶ Gas chambers of Auschwitz: https://youtu.be/-A05i25j9Ck
And two from Dr. Cobb: He says the first one is “not entirely true” as one can see further down the thread. Sadly, I cannot see that post because I am blocked (BlueSky is famous for blocking people):
There are almost no crustaceans in the deep ocean.Not because they would get crushed, but because they would DISSOLVE.The cold & high pressure cause changes to water that make it very corrosive to calcium carbonate shells.But there's one crustacean who solves this problem with ALUMINUM ARMOR.
I may have posted this one before but can’t be arsed to check. Anyway, it’s beautiful:
Display of a Bohemian waxwing. These are largely found in the northern boreal forests of North America/Eurasia, and are social birds that form large noisy groups-sometimes in the 1000's- as they scour the landscape looking for fruit. 📹 wildsafarisaga on IG
