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 the tail end o’ the work week: Friday, August 14, 2026, and National Navajo Code Talkers Day. (Wikipedia lists other Native American languages also used as codes during WWII.) Here’s a short video of this remarkable endeavor:
Jon Ossoff, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock and other newish names: The Democratic base seems hungry for new leaders right now. Ossoff, the 39-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia, is fitting that bill in a big way. He’s getting millions of views for his sharp social media posts and campaign speeches that mercilessly criticize President Donald Trump.
“This is the cruelest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high office in modern American history,” Ossoff told supporters in July.
He is running for reelection in Georgia, and his race will be one of the most competitive in the country.
Other Democrats point to Ossoff’s fellow senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, as a potentially strong contender. (Warnock is not up for election in November.)
“For the first time since Obama, there’d be a candidate that unites the progressive Democratic lane and Black voters,” Texas-based Democratic pollster Nancy Zdunkewicz said.
Moore, the first-term Maryland governor and only sitting Black governor, is described by some Democrats as young and vibrant.
“Ossoff is currently on fire,” Anzalone said, “and Moore is also the type of guy who could really catch fire.”
Kamala Harris: This summer, Democrats recommended South Carolina vote first in the 2028 Democratic nominating process. That boosts Black voters’ representation in picking the nominee and Harris’s fortunes, given the former vice president and 2024 nominee is probably the candidate on this list with the most support among Black women. She’s been rallying voters for the midterm elections by touting her “controversial” plan to abolish the electoral college and add justices to the Supreme Court. “They are ruthless! We need to be ruthless too,” she said recently of Republicans. Some Democratic insiders don’t see her as a viable candidate, given she lost to Trump.
Gavin Newsom: The other California Democrat on this list aside from Harris has used his position as governor of the largest Democratic-run state to consistently oppose Trump. This summer he announced he and his wife were under federal investigation. (The Post has reported prosecutors are looking into potential tax crimes related to a nonprofit Newsom’s wife is linked to.) Newsom framed it as a compliment: “He’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president,” Newsom said of Trump.
Josh Shapiro: The popular Pennsylvania governor has had a relatively low-profile summer compared to other candidates on this list. He appeared in a music video. He has declined to take sides on the progressive-versus-centrist split in the party (at least for now). His breakout moment may be coming. He’s up for reelection in November and is trying to help Democrats take back control of the House by helping his party win four of the most competitive races in the nation, all in his state.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Democratic socialists are having their own moment. After helping elect New York City’s mayor earlier this year, they and the broader progressive movement ousted longtime members of Congress in deep blue cities and won a hard-fought primary in Michigan. Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, was one of the first members of the Democratic Socialists of America to win federal office, and she’s an obvious pick for the broader progressive movement to get behind if she runs for president. She hasn’t ruled it out, though she could also run for Senate.
Mark Kelly: The senatorfrom Arizona has emerged as a forceful pushback against his party’s turn to the left. He’s also a candidate some Republicans say scare them: He’s a former astronaut (at a time when astronauts are cool again) and an astronomical fundraiser from a swing state.
Pete Buttigieg: President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary is cited by Democrats as one of the party’s best messengers and another young candidate who can catch fire. Despite not currently holding office, he’s near the top of several polls of Democratic primary voters.
The only one of these I can get behind now is Buttigieg. I don’t know enough about Ossoff to give an opinion.
*As you know, Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist, was favored to win the Democratic primary for Governor in Wisconsin. She lost by a hair. And the winner was James Crowley, a moderate Democrat and, in the pre-voting polls, was a distant second. The NYT explains “How the polls got it so wrong in Wisconsin” (the article is archived here).
Why were the polls so wrong?
Possible explanations range from a genuine, last-minute change in voter sentiment — Ms. Hong, a state representative, faced significant negative publicity in the closing days of the race — to miscalculations by pollsters about the makeup of the primary electorate.
The disparity between polls and results in Wisconsin and Michigan prompted Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant, to jokingly call for “a total and complete shutdown of primary polling in the Midwestern United States until we can figure out what the hell is going on” in an early-morning X post on Wednesday.
. . . Polls failed to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s election, but they did not significantly overestimate Ms. Hong’s portion of the vote. Most surveys estimated she would win about 40 percent of the vote, and she ended up winning 39 percent.
What changed was Mr. Crowley’s support. In a ballot-counting marathon that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he over-performed the Marquette poll’s estimate by more than 30 points.
Explanations:
Many primary voters tune in at the last minute
Mr. Crowley may owe much of his success to the support of previously undecided voters.
Polls expected more young voters to show up
Even after an internal poll found that Mr. Crowley was trailing Ms. Hong last week, his campaign manager predicted that polls would not reflect the primar
. . . Across elections, primary voters tend to be older, and Wisconsin is no exception. Older voters and moderates were also more likely to remain undecided until close to the end, Mr. Franklin said, based on his polling data.
Hong’s supporters may have been more eager to respond to polls
Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of the firm State Navigate, which conducted polls in Wisconsin, suggested that Ms. Hong’s early and enthusiastic supporters may simply have been more willing to respond to polls, thus skewing the results.
Republicans and independents were wild cards
Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.
That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.
As pollsters attempt to target likely Democratic primary voters in surveys, they are often unsure about the percentage of
Republicans and independents were wild cards
Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.
That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.
In other words, Republicans who voted in the primaries were not supporters of Hong. I suppose some of these explanations are empirical claims that could be tested, but I’m satisfied enough that Hong lost. It was a bright spot in a dark season of DSA and “progressive” candidates winning.
The IDF on Thursday ordered the evacuation of 15 homes in the northern West Bank village of Qusra, as part of an operation that was purportedly aimed at clearing several Israeli illegal outposts surrounding the town.
But while Palestinians were ordered to leave the area, settlers from the outposts who have been laying siege to a pair of homes in Qusra since Sunday remained on site.
It was unclear why the IDF needed to remove Palestinians from their homes in order to clear settlers from the area, but the IDF rescinded the evacuation order shortly after it began making headlines.
Some Palestinians were allowed to return to their homes, but one of the two besieged families told The Times of Israel that they were still barred from reaching their house.
Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee slammed the settlers as “terrorists” and said Israeli security forces were in the area at the US Embassy’s request.
From It’s Noon in Israel:
For four days, the most capable military in the Middle East could not clear a path for a family to reach its own front door. The family lives on the outskirts of Qusra, south of Nablus. On Sunday, settlers from the encampments seeded by the Tel Talpiot outpost sealed the entrance to their home and would not let them in or out.
The most damning verdict of the event comes from Israel’s most faithful friend, Mike Huckabee. The most pro-settlement ambassador in the history of the post, a man who will not so much as use the word “settler”—called the men at Qusra “Israeli terrorists.” He described what they did as a deliberate act of intimidation and harassment against the family, with “no excuse for such thuggish behavior.” One of the besieged homes belongs to an American citizen, and Washington is rightly furious.
The army moved to end it. But the plan leaked to the press, and by the time the troops arrived, dozens of activists were waiting, blocking the roads with boulders. That a handful of stones could stop a military that routinely penetrates through tens of meters of solid rock deserves an explanation.
Start with the obvious. These are not Hezbollah fighters or Iranian operatives. For all their open contempt for state authority, they are Israeli citizens, and overwhelming military force is not an option.
Then consider who actually showed up. The first forces on the scene were not Border Police or infantry trained for this, but Home Front Command reservists—a consequence of the manpower shortage the army has been running on for three years. They did not understand the scenario they had walked into. Some of them joined the prayer at the outpost, which has since been reported as solidarity. It was ignorance.
. . . Settler violence is a sensitive issue in Israel. Only a vanishingly small share of the settler population supports or takes part in such acts, but because the problem is exaggerated and used to obscure Palestinian violence against them, they bristle at hearing about it—even from Israel’s greatest friends.
Yes, but the reason we should prevent such acts is not because they look bad, but because they are bad. Yes, Israel may be held to a higher standard than other countries, but the solution is for Israel to behave impeccably, not ask others to lower their standards.
*I’ve written a bit about why I don’t use AI to write and look down on those who do. It turns out that Bret Stephens agrees, and in his latest NYT column, “I’m begging you: Never write with A.I.,” tells us why (article archived here).
This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.
Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.
Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, not because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.
The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.”
What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.
. . .We become better writers by the constant effort that mundane writing demands. We become better thinkers by investing into that writing a degree of attention we’d never give it if we relinquished the task to A.I. We become more creative when we learn how to put a personal stamp even on routine things, making them unmistakably our own.
These skills are now evaporating. A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance.
‘Nuff said! I will never use AI to write prose on this site, and when I use AI to answer questions, as I did today, I will of course inform people.
*Whan AOC announced she was freezing her eggs, I thought it wasn’t anybody’s business, and any criticism about that was dumb. But if it’s just her businesss, why did she post all that information in a long Instagram video? Now, however, Caitlin Flanagan at the Free Press adds that AOC, who’d apparently just split from her fiancé, should, if she intended to empower other women to do the same, have added the success rate of the procedure.
Lately, it seems, every possible phenomenon can be categorized as something that should or should not be “normalized.” AOC feels strongly that egg freezing, and talking about egg freezing, should very much be normalized because: “We are not taught about our bodies, we are not prepared for our own lives, whether that is in puberty, whether that is in pregnancy, whether that is in perimenopause, menopause.”
Fifty years ago that was certainly true, but today we’re living in an information glut that has sandblasted any trace of mystery and manners from our lives. A few minutes on TikTok and you can learn how to deliver your own baby, naturally or by C-section. AOC is by no means the first woman to bring her followers along on her egg-freezing “journey.” And yet, she speaks of freezing eggs as taking radical action: “We’re going to take our power back and we’re going to talk about it.” That power lay in an array of medications on a coffee table, the ones that can increase the number of eggs a woman produces in a single cycle. Freezing your eggs is a strike against “an administration that is dedicated to politicizing women’s bodies and taking our choices away from us and punishing us around decisions to be pregnant or not be pregnant.”
. . .The legacy media has always been pro–egg freezing, and it was quick to repeat AOC’s message. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sharing her personal decision to preserve her ability to get pregnant later in life,” said an anchor on CBS New York, introducing a segment in which a fertility specialist named Jaime Knopman explained the meaning of the powerful “message” that AOC is giving women: “You can play multiple roles in your life. You can be [successful] professionally and be a mother. And if those times are not aligning because your career is advancing forward and you want to maintain the ability to have a genetic child”—what?—“then egg freezing is an excellent way to do that.”
No, it’s not. The truth is that many, many times, egg freezing can lead to heartbreak because it’s hardly foolproof, or even a likely way to get pregnant.
Women tend to have an optimistic view of egg freezing because at the time in a woman’s life when it first comes into view as a possibility, they’re not knee-deep—or even ankle-deep—in the research that suggests it’s actually a last best hope, not any kind of guarantee. We’ve known this for a long time, but it’s such a dream-buster that the media tends to steer clear of it until some event forces them to report on it. Egg freezing as a highly reliable way to preserve your fertility is something a lot of women want to be true. It would be a more equitable world if it were true. But as The New York Times reported in 2022, there was “sobering” news about egg freezing. A study conducted at the New York University Langone Fertility Center found that the overall success rate for a “live birth” using thawed eggs was 38 percent. As with almost everything with women’s fertility, youth is the most critical factor. Women who were younger than 38 when they froze their eggs had a 51 percent success rate. AOC is 36, young enough to be in that 51 percent. But it’s still only 51 percent.
Besides, these numbers may be moot: The vast majority of women who freeze their eggs never come back to the clinic to have them thawed and fertilized. Perhaps they have become pregnant in the interim; perhaps their desire wasn’t so much to have a baby as it was to put off the decision. Either way, if we are to start talking more about egg freezing, we should probably do the truly feminist act of sharing the full news of everything we know about it, so women can take power back from the industry that sells it.
The harsh truth is that a 36-year-old who wants a baby should probably start trying to get pregnant now, not freeze her eggs. The terrible, irreducible fact of the matter is that by the time you need to thaw those eggs, it will probably be very hard to get pregnant naturally. When you put off childbearing, even with your eggs on ice, you are more likely to find motherhood is out of reach. This, too, is a decision. There are three things I know about having a baby. The first is that it’s the most important thing you can ever do; the second is that nothing will ever come close to giving you as much joy as a baby; and the third is that it’s a young woman’s game.
I suppose there is always surrogate motherhood, which can be done by implanting a frozen, thawed, and then inseminated egg into a non-donor mother. Flanagan doesn’t mention that possibility, though it results in a fetus just as genetically related to AOC as one she carried herself. Perhaps that’s what AOC had in mind.
Here is a longish Free Press video (55 min.) in which some interviewer whose name I don’t know interviews Dr. Debra Soh about, among other things, AOC and her announcement. The AOC part starts at 18:37.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to the Jason Arday affair:
Hili: I’m noticing more and more plagiarism in sociologists’ publications.
Andrzej: Yes, it’s an interesting social phenomenon worth investigating.
In Polish:
Hili: Zauważam coraz więcej plagiatów w publikacjach socjologów.
Ja: Tak, to ciekawe zjawisko społeczne, warte zbadania.
From Bryan, who adds, “I just about fell out of my chair (so to speak) when I caught this assertion in the following video clip of an interview.” The purported explanation is in the tweet below the first one, but that one’s really talking about “Islamism”, not “Islam.” Islam has started off as a religion and is still a religion.
From Malcolm, with plenty of notes adding that this is surely AI-generated, and it must be. But I’ve seen a cat-shaped cake being cut before, and it still freaks me out:
Notice for cat owners: Your cat will expect breakfast to be served as soon as the eclipse is over. Note that in London time, the eclipse started at 6:17 p.m. and ended at 8:06 p.m.
One from my feed. Note that some of the executed writers were accused of “Zionism”. Read the whole thing:
On This Day — August 12–13, 1952
Night of the Murdered Poets: Stalin massacres the greatest living Yiddish writers in a prison basement.
Thirteen leading Soviet Jewish intellectuals, including poets, novelists, and cultural figures, were taken to Moscow’s Lubyanka prison and… pic.twitter.com/FiBjzT8Vr0
Father Kolbe died after volunteering to take the place of a prisoner condemned to starve to death as a reprisal for an escape. After a period of starvation in the basement of the infamous Block 11 of Auschwitz, he was pulled out and killed with an injection of phenol in the… https://t.co/MlyTDGeY9x
A new species of “axolotl” juvenile barred tiger salamanders. The classic axolotl is a species of “mole salamander”, Ambystoma mexicanum, which is threatened in the wild.
Someone from Montana was telling me they had axolotls in Montana and it seemed odd so I finally googled it. Apparently they have alpine lakes with barred tiger salamanders that stay in a larval state and thus look like axolotls?
