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, shabbos for cats of the Tribe and July 18, 2026, as well as Nelson Mandela International Day, celebrating his birthday (he was born on July 18, 1918, and died at in 2013 at 95). Mandela is one of my heroes, and when I was in South Africa two years ago I visited the prison on Robben Island where he was confined for 18 years (it’s now a World Heritage Site). Here’s the sparsely furnished cell that I photographed, with only a table, a pad and blanket for sleeping on the floor and a slop bucket. I didn’t see any pillows. And, as I recall, the lights were left on 24 hours a day.
And here from Wikipeida is a photo of “Mandela casting his vote in the 1994 election”, the country’s first election in which citizens of all races could vote. That resulted in a big victory for the African National Congress and the appointment of Mandela as the country’s first black President.
Paul Weinberg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 18 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy news. First, if you’re a soccer tan, I urge you to read this post from 2012, in which I interviewed soccer broadcaster and journalist Seamus Malin about the greatest performance, players, and teams in the game. There are videos, too. Seamus, who’s seen all the greats of modern soccer live, considers Lionel Messi the best player in the history of the sport.
At 39, Messi, one of the oldest players in the tournament, sprints less often than he once did and covers less ground. On Sunday, he will play what is almost certainly his final World Cup match. In past tournaments, Argentina has doubted his genius, blamed him for every failure. But he has, without doubt, transformed soccer; he changed not only what a player could do with the ball but also what a player could see before the ball arrived. He made patience an attacking act.
A match contains more than one clock. There’s the official one, bright and remorseless, and there’s the quieter time in which a defender tires, a midfielder loses half a yard, a passing lane remains open one second longer than it should. Messi moves slowly enough to watch that second clock: who follows him, who stops following, where the next space will be. The running belongs to the match everyone can see. Messi waits for the one concealed inside it.
Messi walks not because he’s left the game.
He walks in order to enter it.
He walked like that at 29. He walked like that at 19, too.
The mythology of young Messi was his speed: his low center of gravity, the ball so close to his feet that it appeared less controlled than persuaded, the sudden passage through spaces that didn’t seem to exist until he entered them. But even then his deeper skill wasn’t simply that he moved faster than the game. It was that he saw the game sooner than anyone else.
. . .From 2014 to 2016, Argentina lost three finals in three summers. Germany scored late in the World Cup final. Chile defeated Argentina on penalties in each of the next two Copa América finals. Messi converted his kick in the first shootout and missed in the second; teammates missed, too. But the cameras kept returning to him.
By that third defeat, Messi was no longer merely the greatest player on the losing side. He had become the explanation for why Argentina lost. His genius had become Argentina’s emergency service: Whatever the team failed to solve, he was expected to solve alone. Afterward, he said he was finished with the national team.
But he returned.
In 2018, Lionel Scaloni took over as coach and stopped asking Messi to be the beginning, middle and end of every attack. He assembled midfielders who could win the ball and carry it forward, forwards who could run beyond Messi and pull defenders away, defenders willing to step toward danger rather than retreat from it. Their work created choices. Messi’s genius remained exceptional; it was no longer the entire plan.
Scaloni also surrounded him with younger players who had grown up watching him. They ran for him, argued for him, sang with him. They didn’t ask him to prove his love of Argentina. They played for him, and for one another, as if it were already known.
The transformation became visible in the 2021 Copa América final against Brazil. That victory gave Argentina its first major trophy in 28 years and Messi his first with the senior national team. At the final whistle, he disappeared beneath his teammates’ bodies. He had carried Argentina through the tournament. Now they carried him.
Messi hadn’t outrun England. Argentina had organized the night so that he could outlast it.
The final will have its official clock, bright and remorseless. Messi will be watching the other one.
Well, that’s what a poet sees in Messi’s story. I can’t disagree as a don’t follow Messi that much. But I am rooting for Argentina to win the whole hog. The final, Argentina vs. Spain, will be tomorrow at 2 pm Chicago time, 3 pm Eastern time. Today France battles England for the third-place slot; that game is at 5 p.m. Eastern time (4 p.m. Chicago time), and will be played in Miami.
Here are 20 great goals by Messi. There’s a great bicycle kick for goal #7.
Andy Burnham has declared himself ready to “beat Britain’s new right” with a fresh, united approach as he becomes the leader of the Labour party before taking over as British prime minister on Monday.
The former mayor of Greater Manchester won the overwhelming support of MPs, trade unions and party branches, making him the only choice to take over from Keir Starmer.
At a special party conference at TUC headquarters in London on Friday, Burnham was declared leader by Shabana Mahmood, the frontrunner to be his chancellor, who is also chair of the party’s ruling executive.
Addressing a room of senior Labour politicians and supporters, Burnham said the country was “crying out for a new politics”. But he also warned that it was Labour’s “last chance to change” and the party must do so together, as a united movement.
“This is a proud moment you have given me and my family, and an emotional one,” he said. “It is one for which I am ready – ready to lead and to build on the foundation laid by one person more than any other. Under Keir Starmer’s leadership we went from our worst defeat to one of the best victories in history.”
He said Labour was now united, “and we put the power that comes from that unity at the service of people and places who have been waiting too long for politics to bring them hope again”.
Despite praising Starmer, Burnham sought to draw a line under the past by asking whether Labour has “been good enough”, and pledging to “do better”.
“First, I will work relentlessly to build a culture of one Labour team, because change starts with us,” he said. “We won’t beat Britain’s new right if we are consumed by infighting and pulling in different directions. That is an indulgence.”
I asked Matthew Cobb, who lives in Manchester, if he could give me a quote for publication, and he said this:
“He’s from in between Liverpool and Manchester (supports Everton) but has been mayor of Manchester for the last decade.
“He is a good communicator (unlike Starmer) and doesn’t take himself too seriously. Not clear yet what his government will actually do, although he has made clear his intention to devolve power – his speech correctly identified the 1980s as the source of all Bad Things: neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, denationalisation and loss of local power. (Strikingly and disappointingly he did not mention climate change.)
He took responsibility in the name of his generation of politiicians for letting down people’s hopes and contributing to the current state of public opinion (pessimistic), and said that this was their last chance. Which again seems accurate.”
A liberal Brit has spoken! I need say no more.
*Conor Friedersdorf writes in TheAtlantic about the pathetic defense of Carolyn Rouse (President of the American Anthropological Association) against accusations that her discipline (as well as much of the humanities) has been captured by “progressive” ideology (see my recent post here). Friedersdorf’s article, “Explaining sex to an anthropologist“, is good and also free to access. (Paul Boghossian also has a clearly-written summary of his committee’s report in The Philosopher’s Magazine.)
Rouse, who is also a tenured professor at Princeton, addressed the question during a lengthy interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect,” she stated, arguing that “all you need to do is literally type into Google” to see that we know “there are different types of ‘sexes’ and ‘genders.’” In a curious aside, she added, “You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.” In Rouse’s telling, scholars who believe that biological sex is a useful analytic category are not only wrong but engaging in “nonsensical” speech that is no more fit for consideration in their field than astrology is fit for astronomers. “I still don’t know what people mean” when they assert that sex is binary, she said, or “why that matters to people so much.” She called the belief “very strange.”
Rouse’s comments reveal that she does not even understand the position that she is dismissing. Anthropology is the study of humanity, and scholars in the field are charged with understanding our species, past and present, in all of its diversity. Their ambit includes our belief systems. And a belief in two sexes is one of the most common in human history. That a belief is common does not make it correct, but it is jarring for a leader representing anthropologists to talk about a position held by billions of humans in wildly different times and places as if it is both “very strange” and beyond comprehension.
Scholars are well within their rights to reject the notion that sex is binary—many anthropologists share this view, including Princeton’s Agustín Fuentes, who explains his logic in Sex Is a Spectrum. But instead of a fair-minded appraisal of the matter, Rouse showed conspicuous incuriosity about other scholars’ work. It is striking how little she seems to know about the particular reasons that many fellow scholars believe that biological sex is binary. Just as striking is how she responds to not knowing. She could apply her scholarly tool kit to understand what others think and why. Instead, she treated their view as unworthy of debate and said that academics might be right to keep it out of conferences. She doesn’t “know what people mean”––yet she is certain that their wrongness is settled.
Her interviewer, Stephanie M. Lee, reacted by pointing out that in 2022, in a survey of forensic anthropologists, 42.4 percent of respondents expressed the belief that sex is binary, implying that the question simply isn’t settled in the field. Lee said, “I was wondering how you explain that.” Rouse responded, “I don’t believe in opinion research,” then added, “Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.” In fact, the journal Forensic Anthropologypublished data on the respondents: 57.9 percent had a doctorate, and another 25.7 percent had received a master’s degree; the most common degree concentrations among respondents were forensic anthropology and biological or physical anthropology. Just 20.5 percent worked in a coroner’s office. And flimsy claims aside, these attacks on survey respondents’ credentials evaded the substance of the matter.
All of this seems contrary to the spirit of anthropology. If the goal of the field is to understand humans, what kind of scholar professes ignorance of a common viewpoint andwhy its adherents value it, and rejects surveys, panels, and debates that clarify what others believe?
. . .In popular discourse, one can doubtless find many weak and flawed arguments for why sex is binary. What hope does anthropology have for understanding those beliefs––which its scholars should try to do, given their overall mission of understanding people––if the field can’t even give a fair shake to scholars with the steelman version? These academics have presented a coherent, internally consistent, scientifically grounded case for sex as binary that many scholars share.
Anthropologists would do their discipline’s reputation some good if they collectively signaled that they have no confidence in leaders who behave this way. To understand humans, anthropologists must be able to understand the humans with whom they disagree.
Well, there may be “many weak and flawed arguments for why sex is binary,” but those are made by ignorarmuses. It remains that if you recognize biological sex among organisms as having to do solely with gamete type, then although some arguments may be poorly made, biological sex is as close to binary as you can come, with the number of exceptions to the concept (not really a “definition”) being roughly between 1 in 20,000 and 1 in 5000. That’s as binary as it gets, and the “exceptions” do not produce a third type of gamete.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: The high-T Department of War” (she’s referring to Pete Hegseth’s plan to measure the testosterone in U.S. military men, and offer replacement therapy for those with low titers).
→ Joe Biden’s memoir: Joe Biden this week announced his new memoir coming out in November, called Promise Me, America. I keep repeating the title out loud to sort of understand the tone. I guess it’s supposed to be like, promise me you’ll do good. Like a “keep your head up, kid, I’ll be watching from the sky.” But it reads more like, “America was promised to me on my Christmas list.” Anyway, he released a video announcing the book, and it’s very sad to watch. Biden has declined further, as happens in life. The camera cuts every two seconds. His voice is slurred and hushed. Some of his longer words are barely intelligible. After 80, why even be on camera? Who is the one saying “we need him to be doing more on-camera stuff”? And why do I feel like Dr. Jill is gearing up to get him onto Dancing with the Stars?
I don’t say this to be mean. The brutal hands of time come for all of us, if we’re lucky. I say this because the mainstream American media tried to convince us that Biden was completely capable of serving a second term, and that it was conspiratorial and ageist to question it. Does anyone else remember Robert Hur’s report and how brutally he was dragged for it?
Please, Bidens, let this man retire from public life. He’s earned his cantaloupe, and to eat it in peace.
→ Gender-affirming care for all: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced that the government is now going to provide testosterone replacement therapy to troops. He’s calling it “The High-T Department of War.”
“I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members.” And: “This initiative, it’s not about artificial enhancement. It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities.” Injecting yourself with testosterone cypionate or enanthate is not artificial enhancement. It’s just rediscovering your natural self, says our chief war man. Also: Breast implants are not artificial, they are a repair; they are the large, perky tits you were supposed to have at age 50 but modern life and evil feminists took from you. We’re simply going back to the natural order of things—and restoring your natural capabilities. Botox is required now too, since you can’t be expected to wage drone warfare with crow’s feet.
Honestly, I support this. I’m pro-optimizing! Give ’em the drugs. Boost up, baby. I’m too lazy and beautiful for plastic surgery, personally, but when I see someone nipped and tucked I salute them. I think to myself: That’s another valiant soldier fighting certain death. We have one life to live—why not risk it all for an extra whistle or two at a construction site? I’m serious. God be with you, I think, when I see a 60-something woman with pillowy, billowy lips. Mine are two pieces of linguini, soon spaghetti, eventually angel hair. In our new, optimized future, people like me will look like Día de los Muertos costumes here for a haunting.
→ DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE: Netflix is very upset aboutGone with the Wind. How would we describe the movie? Evil. You want a plot summary? Racism. This is, honest to god, how Netflix summarizes the classic (until people noticed and made fun of it this week and so Netflix deleted it).
I mean, fair enough. I forget the racist parts but I’m sure it’s a racist epic. It was made in 1939. I’m sure it’s also homophobic, if you asked it, and also skeptical of women’s suffrage. We cannot simply light every piece of art on fire because it does not conform to our 2026 morals, I’m sorry, I say, as I flip though my beloved Leni Riefenstahl photography collection, but this is just the way of the world.
My favorite part is that Netflix still describes the movie as “romantic.” Not even “known for its racism” can dim the flame of a steamy romance.
→ Welcome to the DSA: An activist attending Denver’s biggest DSA general meeting to date posted a pic from inside.
“Packed house, line out the door. Big things are happening!” said the caption. Nothing says “I am easily manipulated” like wearing a mask fiveyears past when it is necessary. It’s perfect. Welcome to the DSA! We’re here to make your windows tiny and your breathing difficult.
*The NYT has given a rave review to Christopher Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey,” based of course on Homer’s poem. The movie is nearly 3 hours long, and since it’s the first movie ever filmed in IMAX 70mm format, you’ll have to find a theater with a screen that can handle it properly.
Nolan’s love of movies and commitment to them — to what they can do, what they can be, what they should be — runs like an electric current through his filmography, lighting it, and oftentimes you, up. That passion is in every frame of his monumental adaptation of “The Odyssey,” one of the most Nolan of Nolan spectacles in its thematic concerns, formal playfulness, kinetic thrills and unabashed showmanship. Few directors close the divide between the art film and the blockbuster like Nolan does; fewer still give the audience something to not simply look forward to but also be excited by. Even as he has continued to refine his filmmaking, notably in his narrative experimentation, he always aims to please.
. . .It seems inevitable that Nolan would eventually take on “The Odyssey,” one of the foundations of Western literature. And why not? The story is a trippy, far-out blast, and has the kind of sinuous, complex layering that has become one of his signatures. Credited to Homer, the original poem consists of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals and oceans of blood, tears and wine. Whatever the adaptation, the tale is so ingrained in our cultural DNA that even those who haven’t read the original — or Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey — will be familiar with it, having seen a movie or two. It’s Luke Skywalker’s path and WALL-E’s, too.
The most striking thing about this film, other than its being the first feature shot entirely in IMAX, is that it exists. It is an anomalous big-studio entertainment that Nolan has filled with stars — Matt Damon is Odysseus! Zendaya is Athena!— and polished to a high gleam, turning a 3,000-year-old poem into a smart, thoughtful film with Old Hollywood allure. It’s a throwback and of its moment, including in how it adjudicates the costs of war. (Who benefits, and who suffers?) Its hero is, to a degree, the cunning, complicated Odysseus who leaps off the page, but he’s been sweetened and made more psychologically legible for contemporary sensibilities. He’s also played by an appealing actor who excels at elevated everymen.
. . . . The performances are uniformly good, though Damon’s Odysseus is tamped down and notably devoid of charisma, as if he were as hollow as the wood decoy. In action-adventure terms it’s a counterintuitive choice even if it serves Nolan’s tricky, more non-triumphalist ends. One upshot, though, is that few of the actors, Damon included, manage to hold you with the same emotional force that Nolan’s filmmaking does. Both Holland and especially Hathaway have bracingly strong moments, but his character has too little presence and hers remains shrouded in mystery, which Nolan expresses by filming her behind a latticed screen or the threads on her loom. Mother and son are sympathetic; they’re also routinely upstaged by Pattinson’s wildly enjoyable flop-sweating suitor whose demise you hunger for.
. . . .After watching “The Odyssey” again, I flashed on something that Martin Scorsese once said about another film: “The emotion is the emulsion.” Nolan’s gifts are excessively obvious, and even when his characters don’t stir you, his filmmaking does. Among other qualities, he doesn’t know how to make an ugly image and this one is filled with rapturous beauty. Nolan employs beauty strategically, using it to seduce viewers into stories that can seem needlessly byzantine to some — especially by impoverished mainstream industry standards — more the province of the art house than the multiplex. Nolan asks us to dream bigger. His “Odyssey” is a classic in every sense, a transporting affirmation of the art and a work of pure cinema.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej got a gift. He said it was from his “book’s editor used to restore stained glass windows, and she brought this flower for me as a gift. ”
Hili: I know who you got that weird little flower from. Andrzej: So do I.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiem od kogo dostałeś ten dziwny kwiatek.
Ja: Ja też wiem.
From Masih; an Iranian woman talks back to the Morality Police, and then sends the video to Masih:
Now in the middle of the war the Islamic Republic’s intelligence service warns that anyone who sends me videos to Masih Alinejad could face up to 5 years in prison.
Watch it yourself ! This is how Iranian women responded when you criminalized this simple act of civil… pic.twitter.com/ygP1U9NtO3
— Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino) July 16, 2026
From reader joolz, who says this:
Amnesty UK is in serious trouble. JKR set up a fund a while ago to cover legal fees for women being persecuted by trans activists. She is now offering support for most of the other 117 groups libelled by Amnesty UK….
Also, the Scottish Express reports that the Charity Commission is conducting an investigation of Amnesty International after Rowling lodged a complaint:
Amnesty UK was already smearing feminists as ‘anti-rights’ back in May, according to @thetimes. It appears that, far from being an accidental slip up or an editorial error, the latest defamatory report accurately represents Amnesty UK’s deep-seated hostility to all organisations… https://t.co/U6ldT0134Q
The Young Turks with Cenk and Ana have become Antisemitism Central. Instead of Ana today, let’s look at Cenk, who’s taken to calling all Congressmen who vote to support Israel “Israelis”:
Cenk is upset that the US Congress does not want more Jews to die. So much so that he reverts to labelling (literally) ALL those who disagree with him as “Israeli”, when in fact these members of US Congress are elected, exclusively, by the American public — which he knows.
One from my feed. This is amazing, and I wondered how they got up on those stilts:
A traditional technique used by young shepherds of Ethiopia’s Banna tribe. They use stilts to watch over their livestock in tall grass, move through wetland areas, and avoid snakes and predators like lions and leopards. It requires strength, balance, and training from a young… pic.twitter.com/ef6Rw1T26Z
This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old, and woul dhave been ninety today had he lived. https://t.co/QRXm3JPGTl
And one from Dr. Cobb: a fabulous fossil—bird tracks!
For #FossilFriday, abundant Eocene (~50 mya) shorebird tracks from the Green River Formation, WY; seen last week in the Tellus Museum of Science, Cartersville GA. 🧪🪨⚒️🐾🐦
I am a bit less sanguine about Andy Burnham. I should note that Margaret Thatcher was one of the reasons I left the UK in 1985. In retrospect, I missed the good that she did (which like Brutus’s evil, lived on after her). My excuse is that I was working in the nationalised health service and I was surrounded by people who were used to living on government money without having to be efficient or productive. So while I have no regrets about becoming a Canadian, I still keep an eye on events back home.
There are two main issues enraging the British public: illegal immigration and welfare. No one does anything effective about the thousands arriving by small boat every day, and they exacerbate the welfare bill by immediately being eligible. And all Labour is willing to do is to increase taxes even further, destroying the economy, in order to pay all that welfare. I am not hopeful that Burnham will be able to reverse that course, even if he wanted to do so. It seems he thinks more devolution will distract everyone from such issues (and the Scottish and Welsh parliaments have hardly been stunning success stories!)
From here in Blighty I agree with all your comments. As far as I’m concerned, Burnham has no legitimacy as Prime Minister whatsoever. The only people who’ve voted for him are those in Makerfield who elected him as their local MP. Awful though he was, Starmer at least won a General Election in which people knew who they were voting for as PM. I expect Burnham’s government to follow the same calamitous path as his prececessor – more taxation, more borrowing, more welfare, more immigration, a flatlining economy and increasing social unrest. The only crumb of comfort is that once his failure becomes apparent, the Labour Party has no cards left to play – it will be finished as a party of government. I only hope there’s enough of the country left for an incoming Reform UK administration to rebuild once Labour have been swept out of office in two or three years time.
I took a similar route with an excursion or two. While born in Canada, all my formative years were spent in Birmingham. In ’79 voted for Maggie and left the country the next January. At the tail end of the Wilson and especially the Callaghan time, the UK was a mess. Returned to the UK in ’86 to look for work in North America.
My take on taxes is I really don’t care, so long as the money is spent wisely. This would be my main criticism of Maggie … the North Sea bonanza was not spent wisely. The general population can always be led to be enraged about something.
And regarding Burnham, while charisma is an asset, in the UK we elect parties via our MPs. We have not completely succumbed to the cult of the individual. So it is irrelevant whether we think Burnham is legitimate or not. The MPs of the UK have elected Burnham to lead on the behalf the UK voter.
Matthew Cobb seems to think life in the UK before Thatcher was good. I remember a country dominated by Trade Unions and inefficient nationalised industries.Thatcher was a desperate attempt to reverse decline.
I read a review of “The Odyssey” yesterday in The Economist (“A very silly adaptation of ‘The Odyssey'”), which quoted a YouTuber’s comment on the trailer: “If this were shown on a plane, I’d walk out.”
Isn’t it strange that the reviews are bimodal—either one star or five stars. It makes me wonder of reviewers are voting up or down on the political aspects of the film or its casting.
I am puzzled about this too. Early reviews on YT tended to trash the movie for errant Wokery. So I don’t know what to think.
I see a movie in theaters maybe once a year, and I’ve more than cashed in on that by watching Project Hail Mary (having seen it 2x, now). So I will give it a pass.
I was moved by the emotional arc of PHM (and as an ex tertiary teacher the ending was wonderful), but I hope for more than that from the Odyssey, given its source material. It may be my once-in-a-decade IMAX.
FWIW, “the wily Odysseus” doesn’t seem to be a good candidate for a woke folk hero.
Stilt walking never ceases to amaze me, wherever it is (although I’d never seen it in Africa). Funnily enough, I went to the dentist the other day, making my way to the second floor where his office is, only to find the entire floor being completely renovated (with the exception of my dentist’s office). While waiting for the elevator to go back down, some workman comes clomping around the corner wearing metal stilts that had to be five feet high, with no handhold to be seen. He seemed to be quite comfortable with the arrangement, much to my amazement.
The practical utility of the stilts in that environment is really dramatic, and I wonder why this ability has not been developed more widely among pastoral people.
Stilts are extremely convenient for dry wallers, since they don’t have to fuss with ladders. One huge advantage that drywaller’s stilts have over the regular type of stilts is that they don’t require handholds. I was tempted to buy some stilts for some diy work, but they’re kind of pricey.
About the Rouse imbroglio on the number of sexes. She isn’t entirely wrong about what Google says. I asked Google: “How many sexes are there scientifically?”, choosing one of several offerings to complete my sentence. The AI says:
Biology: Biologists usually refer to biological sex (male and female) rather than gender. In biology, sex is defined by the type of gametes produced (sperm vs. eggs). However, even biological sex exists on a spectrum due to naturally occurring chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical variations.
Sigh
It goes on to describe gender identity in a way that I think is pretty reasonable.
So the AI hedged on its definition, but an AI includes a weighing of consensus opinions, and because there are miscreants who spout off a lot online, the result can be a wrongly slanted answer. A famous example is if you ask it about the function of non-coding DNA. Last I checked, the answer was pretty much a disaster.
Of course Google AI can lean left.
So I asked Grok the same question. It was amazingly accurate and even explained why this state had evolved.
RE: Rouse “isn’t entirely wrong about what Google says.”
But as you, Mark, show (Google vs Grok vs what most biologist really think about sex) Rouse is wrong about Google being reliably accurate on issues with political valence. It’s amazing that she is so uncritical about Google’s output here. (But maybe it’s not amazing at all since she is probably citing Google because it gives her the answer she prefers.)
The Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf is excellent. Rouse seems to be the typical DEI hire. (She reminds me of Harvard’s Claudine Gay.)
As a reminder: Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design? The Economist, Feb 28th 2024
The tech giant’s new artificial-intelligence model invents black Vikings and Asian popes https://archive.ph/vsYgU
IT ALL STARTED with black Vikings and Asian Nazis. Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, German soldiers from 1943 or America’s Founding Fathers produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Gemini had been programmed to show a range of ethnicities … depicting George Washington as black and the pope as an Asian woman.
it was a gift to the tech industry’s right-wing critics. On February 22nd Google said it would halt the generation of images of people while it rejigged Gemini. But by then attention had moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising.
So Google is her source for an academic argument?
Really?
I really wonder how many academics allow use of Google as a source. I know that it is not legitimate in the sciences, and I would bet that the answer varies by disciplines.
Seems like a further indictment of present-day anthropology.
The interview with Carolyn Rouse not only illustrates her lack of leadership*—she seems to think that defending anthropology means defending all views in the field as being of equal stature—it also includes this quotation, which jarred me: “You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.”
Really? She thinks that people want to kill babies that don’t “present” in a manner consistent with their karyotypes? That’s a pretty sick statement if you asked me.
*Or maybe it’s just a lack of understanding of biology.
That ‘killing babies’ comment puzzled me too. Maybe the comment is grounded in the claim that rejecting trans ideology is not merely a difference of opinion but is for trans individuals (said to be) ‘existential’? If so, then maybe we’re watching the meaning of ‘killing’ shifting. The meaning of ‘racist’ has broadened to a state of near meaninglessness. ‘Killing’ might be too. (But I’m not a linguist.)
“Harm,” “Nazi,” “fascist,” “genocide” — may as well add “kill” to the list of words abused by the Woke.
Though it may simply be that she truly believes that everybody who rejects transgender woo wants to kill babies with Klinefelter Syndrome. Can’t put it past her.
Of course, Milady and others commenting on the subject. Accusing opponents of being (potential) murderers is just part of the same rhetoric that claims that LBGTQ+++e^6 people are “threatened” by people that claim that there are two biological sexes, based on something called empirical data. After all, what kinds of an argument is empirical data when it results in people being threatened?
I don’t know if Rouse is qualified for her position. Such decisions are for her peers, primarily those in her field, which seems to me to have been so corrupted —where the primary qualification is ideology as opposed to scholarship, that she may well be a rock star in her field. A CV similar to hers, in my field, would not qualify one for a professorship based on research in men field or any of the hard sciences, and (as I imagine many others here) have sat on enough hiring and promotion committees to be qualified for the statement.
It is tie fair universities to take a stand. To state that people from such fields are not qualified for all-university positions such as dean, retro, provost, president etc, as their fields have determined that scholarship and research are not functions of their disciplines. By all means, let them play in their own corners of the campus, let them come to the wine and cheese parties, and even give them university parking spaces. But they should not be able to hold positions influencing general university policy.
Of course, the anthropologists/ X-studies faculties might say the same about people like myself: “Those people from the hard sciences, and those who care about scholarship in subjects like psychology, history, literature etc, being unconcerned about Social Justice, which is the primary purpose of academia, should be herded off to the labs and libraries in one corner of the university, and leave actual policy to us.”
And they might win. There may be more of them than us. But if we retreat in to our labs, libraries, field observations, and other research, as many of us (myself included) are tempted to do, the result will be the destruction of universities as we know them.
So much for the morning rant from the old curmudgeon.
So Amnesty UK is claiming that anyone who discriminates against trans women is guilty of discriminating against women and LGBQT etc. people – even if they are out and proud (cis) lesbians.
Here’s a question: why don’t they identify it as “discrimination against trans women”? The only answer I can see is that using that formulation would entail the tacit admission that trans women are identifiably different from natal women.
But that admission would contradict their adamant claim that “trans women are women, full stop.” So, despite the absurdity, they are logically forced to term discrimination against trans women as misogyny, instead.
What a tangled web we weave when we first we practice to deceive.
I much enjoy the medieval letters, but what/where is “TherionArms?” The link returns a “no content” (for me) and my more general search identifies only a dealer in historical reproduction weapons.
The DSA picture has some history behind it. The DSA picture was posted online, and then taken down (too embarrassing). The picture was copied before it was deleted.
Carolyn Rouse’s general perspective is made perfectly clear in this statement: “they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.” She no doubt dismisses other real world specialisms, grubby practicing fields like Engineering and Medicine, for their lack of the elevated qualities of “advanced schooling”. Her view of the “advanced” category shows what underlay the whole woke adventure from the start: the pursuit and concoction of status. It also suggests, as I’ve commented before, that Professor Rouse is a perfect candidate for the post of Harvard presidency pioneered by Claudine Gay.
I’d like to add some things to Matthew’s analysis of Burnham that matter to women, girls and gay people.
Burnham doesn’t respect women’s human rights to safety and dignity. His stance prioritises men over women, which is a very old fashioned, northern, working class, left wing stance.
Burnham wants to eradicate single-sex spaces as he says that places like toilets and changing rooms should be accessible to men who claim to be women. He’s on record describing people who want men to stay out of women’s spaces (over 80% 4 years ago, probably a lot more now), and to make them exclusively for biological women as having a “minority view”.
That makes a mockery of his declared plan to tackle misogyny.
He hasn’t stated how he will keep out men in dresses who aren’t actually gender dysphoric, like rapists ‘Isla’ Blair and ‘Karen’ White, or paedophiles like ‘Amy’ Miller or Toni Prince, or fetishist AGPs. As there is no identifiable difference between a gender dysphoric man in a dress and paedophile in a dress, I look forward to hearing how he plans to keep paedophiles and peeping Toms out of women’s spaces.
He doesn’t seem to have discussed puberty blockers, but he hasn’t said that he will reverse the recent decision to continue with the trial of giving these off label drugs long term to sterilise children who think they are trans.
He supports the ban on “conversion therapy” which, in effect, allows homophobic parents to ‘trans away the gay’ by pushing, their gay children down the route of transitioning. Gay organisations have spoken out against the bill.
I don’t know any women who will vote for Labour while he is PM.
😂 A perfect analysis of why we need single sex spaces 😂 Although I confess that some women’s bathrooms in clubs at 2am are places where you wouldn’t want to tie your shoelaces! 😱
It’s also Ulysses Everett McGill’s path (George Clooney) in the excellent Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? John Goodman is the Cyclops and this scene shows the fabulous singing of the sirens.
I love this film.
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
I am a bit less sanguine about Andy Burnham. I should note that Margaret Thatcher was one of the reasons I left the UK in 1985. In retrospect, I missed the good that she did (which like Brutus’s evil, lived on after her). My excuse is that I was working in the nationalised health service and I was surrounded by people who were used to living on government money without having to be efficient or productive. So while I have no regrets about becoming a Canadian, I still keep an eye on events back home.
There are two main issues enraging the British public: illegal immigration and welfare. No one does anything effective about the thousands arriving by small boat every day, and they exacerbate the welfare bill by immediately being eligible. And all Labour is willing to do is to increase taxes even further, destroying the economy, in order to pay all that welfare. I am not hopeful that Burnham will be able to reverse that course, even if he wanted to do so. It seems he thinks more devolution will distract everyone from such issues (and the Scottish and Welsh parliaments have hardly been stunning success stories!)
From here in Blighty I agree with all your comments. As far as I’m concerned, Burnham has no legitimacy as Prime Minister whatsoever. The only people who’ve voted for him are those in Makerfield who elected him as their local MP. Awful though he was, Starmer at least won a General Election in which people knew who they were voting for as PM. I expect Burnham’s government to follow the same calamitous path as his prececessor – more taxation, more borrowing, more welfare, more immigration, a flatlining economy and increasing social unrest. The only crumb of comfort is that once his failure becomes apparent, the Labour Party has no cards left to play – it will be finished as a party of government. I only hope there’s enough of the country left for an incoming Reform UK administration to rebuild once Labour have been swept out of office in two or three years time.
The UK isn’t very big. How can it keep accepting people who arrive illegally on boats?
The place must be getting awfully crowded. I’m glad my grandparents left in late 19th – early 20th century.
I took a similar route with an excursion or two. While born in Canada, all my formative years were spent in Birmingham. In ’79 voted for Maggie and left the country the next January. At the tail end of the Wilson and especially the Callaghan time, the UK was a mess. Returned to the UK in ’86 to look for work in North America.
My take on taxes is I really don’t care, so long as the money is spent wisely. This would be my main criticism of Maggie … the North Sea bonanza was not spent wisely. The general population can always be led to be enraged about something.
And regarding Burnham, while charisma is an asset, in the UK we elect parties via our MPs. We have not completely succumbed to the cult of the individual. So it is irrelevant whether we think Burnham is legitimate or not. The MPs of the UK have elected Burnham to lead on the behalf the UK voter.
ps I hope the Binman does well.
Matthew Cobb seems to think life in the UK before Thatcher was good. I remember a country dominated by Trade Unions and inefficient nationalised industries.Thatcher was a desperate attempt to reverse decline.
I read a review of “The Odyssey” yesterday in The Economist (“A very silly adaptation of ‘The Odyssey'”), which quoted a YouTuber’s comment on the trailer: “If this were shown on a plane, I’d walk out.”
Isn’t it strange that the reviews are bimodal—either one star or five stars. It makes me wonder of reviewers are voting up or down on the political aspects of the film or its casting.
I am puzzled about this too. Early reviews on YT tended to trash the movie for errant Wokery. So I don’t know what to think.
I see a movie in theaters maybe once a year, and I’ve more than cashed in on that by watching Project Hail Mary (having seen it 2x, now). So I will give it a pass.
I was moved by the emotional arc of PHM (and as an ex tertiary teacher the ending was wonderful), but I hope for more than that from the Odyssey, given its source material. It may be my once-in-a-decade IMAX.
FWIW, “the wily Odysseus” doesn’t seem to be a good candidate for a woke folk hero.
I saw it at an IMAX theatre and it was amazing.
Carolyn Rouse — Queering Anthropology.
Stilt walking never ceases to amaze me, wherever it is (although I’d never seen it in Africa). Funnily enough, I went to the dentist the other day, making my way to the second floor where his office is, only to find the entire floor being completely renovated (with the exception of my dentist’s office). While waiting for the elevator to go back down, some workman comes clomping around the corner wearing metal stilts that had to be five feet high, with no handhold to be seen. He seemed to be quite comfortable with the arrangement, much to my amazement.
The practical utility of the stilts in that environment is really dramatic, and I wonder why this ability has not been developed more widely among pastoral people.
Stilts are extremely convenient for dry wallers, since they don’t have to fuss with ladders. One huge advantage that drywaller’s stilts have over the regular type of stilts is that they don’t require handholds. I was tempted to buy some stilts for some diy work, but they’re kind of pricey.
The shepherds in the wetlands Landes region of Gascony, France, used stilts throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
How do stilt-wearers dismount?
About the Rouse imbroglio on the number of sexes. She isn’t entirely wrong about what Google says. I asked Google: “How many sexes are there scientifically?”, choosing one of several offerings to complete my sentence. The AI says:
Sigh
It goes on to describe gender identity in a way that I think is pretty reasonable.
So the AI hedged on its definition, but an AI includes a weighing of consensus opinions, and because there are miscreants who spout off a lot online, the result can be a wrongly slanted answer. A famous example is if you ask it about the function of non-coding DNA. Last I checked, the answer was pretty much a disaster.
Of course Google AI can lean left.
So I asked Grok the same question. It was amazingly accurate and even explained why this state had evolved.
RE: Rouse “isn’t entirely wrong about what Google says.”
But as you, Mark, show (Google vs Grok vs what most biologist really think about sex) Rouse is wrong about Google being reliably accurate on issues with political valence. It’s amazing that she is so uncritical about Google’s output here. (But maybe it’s not amazing at all since she is probably citing Google because it gives her the answer she prefers.)
The Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf is excellent. Rouse seems to be the typical DEI hire. (She reminds me of Harvard’s Claudine Gay.)
As a reminder:
Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design? The Economist, Feb 28th 2024
The tech giant’s new artificial-intelligence model invents black Vikings and Asian popes
https://archive.ph/vsYgU
IT ALL STARTED with black Vikings and Asian Nazis. Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, German soldiers from 1943 or America’s Founding Fathers produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Gemini had been programmed to show a range of ethnicities … depicting George Washington as black and the pope as an Asian woman.
it was a gift to the tech industry’s right-wing critics. On February 22nd Google said it would halt the generation of images of people while it rejigged Gemini. But by then attention had moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising.
So Google is her source for an academic argument?
Really?
I really wonder how many academics allow use of Google as a source. I know that it is not legitimate in the sciences, and I would bet that the answer varies by disciplines.
Seems like a further indictment of present-day anthropology.
The interview with Carolyn Rouse not only illustrates her lack of leadership*—she seems to think that defending anthropology means defending all views in the field as being of equal stature—it also includes this quotation, which jarred me: “You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.”
Really? She thinks that people want to kill babies that don’t “present” in a manner consistent with their karyotypes? That’s a pretty sick statement if you asked me.
*Or maybe it’s just a lack of understanding of biology.
That ‘killing babies’ comment puzzled me too. Maybe the comment is grounded in the claim that rejecting trans ideology is not merely a difference of opinion but is for trans individuals (said to be) ‘existential’? If so, then maybe we’re watching the meaning of ‘killing’ shifting. The meaning of ‘racist’ has broadened to a state of near meaninglessness. ‘Killing’ might be too. (But I’m not a linguist.)
“Harm,” “Nazi,” “fascist,” “genocide” — may as well add “kill” to the list of words abused by the Woke.
Though it may simply be that she truly believes that everybody who rejects transgender woo wants to kill babies with Klinefelter Syndrome. Can’t put it past her.
Of course, Milady and others commenting on the subject. Accusing opponents of being (potential) murderers is just part of the same rhetoric that claims that LBGTQ+++e^6 people are “threatened” by people that claim that there are two biological sexes, based on something called empirical data. After all, what kinds of an argument is empirical data when it results in people being threatened?
I don’t know if Rouse is qualified for her position. Such decisions are for her peers, primarily those in her field, which seems to me to have been so corrupted —where the primary qualification is ideology as opposed to scholarship, that she may well be a rock star in her field. A CV similar to hers, in my field, would not qualify one for a professorship based on research in men field or any of the hard sciences, and (as I imagine many others here) have sat on enough hiring and promotion committees to be qualified for the statement.
It is tie fair universities to take a stand. To state that people from such fields are not qualified for all-university positions such as dean, retro, provost, president etc, as their fields have determined that scholarship and research are not functions of their disciplines. By all means, let them play in their own corners of the campus, let them come to the wine and cheese parties, and even give them university parking spaces. But they should not be able to hold positions influencing general university policy.
Of course, the anthropologists/ X-studies faculties might say the same about people like myself: “Those people from the hard sciences, and those who care about scholarship in subjects like psychology, history, literature etc, being unconcerned about Social Justice, which is the primary purpose of academia, should be herded off to the labs and libraries in one corner of the university, and leave actual policy to us.”
And they might win. There may be more of them than us. But if we retreat in to our labs, libraries, field observations, and other research, as many of us (myself included) are tempted to do, the result will be the destruction of universities as we know them.
So much for the morning rant from the old curmudgeon.
So Amnesty UK is claiming that anyone who discriminates against trans women is guilty of discriminating against women and LGBQT etc. people – even if they are out and proud (cis) lesbians.
Here’s a question: why don’t they identify it as “discrimination against trans women”? The only answer I can see is that using that formulation would entail the tacit admission that trans women are identifiably different from natal women.
But that admission would contradict their adamant claim that “trans women are women, full stop.” So, despite the absurdity, they are logically forced to term discrimination against trans women as misogyny, instead.
What a tangled web we weave when we first we practice to deceive.
I much enjoy the medieval letters, but what/where is “TherionArms?” The link returns a “no content” (for me) and my more general search identifies only a dealer in historical reproduction weapons.
Larry is the one and only true Prime Minister of Great Britain. 😀
The DSA picture has some history behind it. The DSA picture was posted online, and then taken down (too embarrassing). The picture was copied before it was deleted.
I had to search for the acronym DSA, and the first hit on google was ‘Dementia Support Australia’.
I think this link (https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2076495457887334754) will work
Carolyn Rouse’s general perspective is made perfectly clear in this statement: “they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.” She no doubt dismisses other real world specialisms, grubby practicing fields like Engineering and Medicine, for their lack of the elevated qualities of “advanced schooling”. Her view of the “advanced” category shows what underlay the whole woke adventure from the start: the pursuit and concoction of status. It also suggests, as I’ve commented before, that Professor Rouse is a perfect candidate for the post of Harvard presidency pioneered by Claudine Gay.
I like this version of the Virtue Sign:
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1712983687308931374
By their own logic, Cenk and Ana are Iranian Islamofascist theocrats.
I’d like to add some things to Matthew’s analysis of Burnham that matter to women, girls and gay people.
Burnham doesn’t respect women’s human rights to safety and dignity. His stance prioritises men over women, which is a very old fashioned, northern, working class, left wing stance.
Burnham wants to eradicate single-sex spaces as he says that places like toilets and changing rooms should be accessible to men who claim to be women. He’s on record describing people who want men to stay out of women’s spaces (over 80% 4 years ago, probably a lot more now), and to make them exclusively for biological women as having a “minority view”.
That makes a mockery of his declared plan to tackle misogyny.
He hasn’t stated how he will keep out men in dresses who aren’t actually gender dysphoric, like rapists ‘Isla’ Blair and ‘Karen’ White, or paedophiles like ‘Amy’ Miller or Toni Prince, or fetishist AGPs. As there is no identifiable difference between a gender dysphoric man in a dress and paedophile in a dress, I look forward to hearing how he plans to keep paedophiles and peeping Toms out of women’s spaces.
He doesn’t seem to have discussed puberty blockers, but he hasn’t said that he will reverse the recent decision to continue with the trial of giving these off label drugs long term to sterilise children who think they are trans.
He supports the ban on “conversion therapy” which, in effect, allows homophobic parents to ‘trans away the gay’ by pushing, their gay children down the route of transitioning. Gay organisations have spoken out against the bill.
I don’t know any women who will vote for Labour while he is PM.
A commentary on men’s and women’s restrooms from an expert (Pauline on the Sopranos).
😂 A perfect analysis of why we need single sex spaces 😂 Although I confess that some women’s bathrooms in clubs at 2am are places where you wouldn’t want to tie your shoelaces! 😱
“It’s Luke Skywalker’s path and WALL-E’s, too.”
It’s also Ulysses Everett McGill’s path (George Clooney) in the excellent Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? John Goodman is the Cyclops and this scene shows the fabulous singing of the sirens.
I love this film.
https://youtu.be/jI99ScMCWMg?is=yXf01HZr8GnzyAT0