There will be a shortish version of Hili today as I’m not feeling that well (yes, the eye, which is ok but focusing makes me nauseated).
Welcome to Thursday, October 8, 2026 and National Pierogi Day. I eat a lot of pierogi in Poland, and here’s some blueberry dessert pierogi I had in a restaurant:
It’s also Alvin C. York Day, honoring the day in 1918 when York killed 25 enemy soldiers and captured 132, earning the Medal of Honor; International Lesbian Day; National Fluffernutter Day; World Octopus Day; and National Salmon Day (best smoked on a bagel with a schmear).
There is a Google Doodle today honoring World Space Week. Click to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.
As I have mentioned several times before, this website seems moribund: comments are few, and the content doesn’t seem to appeal to potential readers. This is depressing, and it can’t continue at the present rate. I am not seeking reassurance here, as I write what I want. This is just a notice. Few people send in readers’ wildlife (it used to be a daily feature), and comments are waning. All the signs are that the website’s life is moving peacefully to its close.
Da Nooz:
*A column in the WaPo, “Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated,” is an extract of author James Marriott’s book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (article archived here). There are lots of data:
But perhaps another reason that people feel this way is that cultural output — not just short-form videos or Instagram posts but films, television, music and books — is becoming simplified, too. The smartphone’s constant distraction and hostility to complex thought is reshaping almost every aspect of culture. Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.
Take the Netflix film “Irish Wish,” which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” He replies, “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”
In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.
According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” The result is the inverse of the traditional creative writing advice “show, don’t tell.” It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly signposted. Not every Netflix film needs to be a masterpiece of insinuation and subtext, and good, challenging films are still being made — but nonetheless, complexity seems to be rapidly draining out of culture.
. . .The same relentless pressures toward simplification are at work in almost every creative industry. A 2024 statistical analysis of more than 350,000 songs between 1970 and 2020 found that lyrics are becoming simpler, more repetitive and less rich in their vocabulary. Another study suggests that melodies are becoming less complex, too.
. . . Equally striking is what is happening in the publishing industry. Books are getting simpler and easier to read. An Economist analysis of New York Times best-selling books from the 1930s to the 2020s found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Long sentences are not easy to grapple with in an age when, according to one estimate, the average American checks his or her smartphone 186 times per day. The audiences for serious nonfiction and literary fiction have declined steeply in recent decades. Sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics have fallen particularly sharply. [JAC: If the average American is awake 17 hours, then the average rate of phone-checking is 11 times an hour, or about once every 5.5 minutes!]
By contrast, best-selling books of the 1960s included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays “The Liberal Imagination” was a bestseller in the United States, with more than 100,000 copies sold.
It is not easy to imagine such books commanding mainstream audiences today.
. . .Getting to grips with a new book, film or song requires a special and sometimes painful effort of concentration.
I think this attention may partly explain why studios opt for remakes, franchises and “extended universes.” Before the turn of the millennium, only about 25 percent of top-grossing films were spin-offs or sequels; by the 2020s the figure had risen to 75 percent.
. . . Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.
The statistics speak for themselves. (Don’t forget the “reading time” put before many printed articles so you can see if they are too long to read!) The good news is that I can read or watch whatever I want, and, fortunately, good books and good movies are still available.
*Matthew sent this video about the sentencing of a military soldier to death by firing squad—the first such sentence since World War II. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, and has been on death row ever since. The sentence, signed by Donald Trump, is to be carried out on December 1. While firing squad is probably among the most humane methods of execution, I oppose it, as does Matthew, who labeled his email, “Barbarians.” He’s right. Life without parole is sufficient.
*The WSJ reports that AI has just solved hundreds of previously intractable mathematical puzzles.
Since you last thought about math, the people who think about math every day have been freaking out.
A month ago, when OpenAI announced that one of its powerful internal models had cracked a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem, it looked like the most spectacular demonstration yet of AI’s progress in mathematics.
Then mathematicians revolted.
The backlash from the math world coincided with a global reckoning about Silicon Valley labs racing to build technology that could spiral beyond their control. On the same day that OpenAI published its landmark proof, a researcher quit Anthropic over safety concerns. Within hours, the AI breakthrough was overshadowed by fears that AI could destroy humanity.
Meanwhile, mathematicians were dealing with existential questions of their own.
But as they publicly debated the future of their ancient field, OpenAI’s model kept churning out new proofs behind closed doors. This left the company with a problem for a bunch of humans to solve: what to do with all that AI-generated math.
On Tuesday night, OpenAI published hundreds of proofs for mathematicians to wrap their minds around.
An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers University distinguished math professor, wrote on X about the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” proof.
The understated rollout of such monumental results marked a shift in OpenAI’s approach to publishing scientific discoveries, part of an effort to win back mathematicians who have become allergic to AI hype in recent months. On late Tuesday and early Wednesday, many of them reported feeling a sense of awe.
As stunned math experts scrolled through the results and began to absorb them, even a researcher inside Anthropic called the release “obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.”
. . . Instead of dripping out findings one by one, OpenAI dropped them all at once. The company released 372 groups of results and said the model attempted roughly 4,000 problems in total. It also provided summaries of the model’s “chain of thought” and estimated the average result required only a fraction of the computing power that went into the Millennium Prize triumph.
Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. Further, they can’t kvetch that AI is stealing their results, because if it’s using published work to get a head start, well, that’s what regular mathematicians have always done when solving hard problems. Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.
*Here are adjacent articles in yesterday’s (Oct. 7) New York Times. This is a pathetic attempt to be objective in their reporting. I’d blame those bodies on Hamas. The NYT has become hopelessly slanted in its coverage of Israel, and not in favor of Isael.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in badinage:
Hili: I’m walking into the future, leaving the present behind.
Andrzej: At my age, I prefer to do that sitting down.
In Polish:
Hili: Idę ku przyszłości i zostawiam za sobą teraźniejszość.
Ja: Jestem już bardzo stary i robię to na siedząco.
*******************
From Stacy:
From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:
From Masih: “Aimless strolling” is now verboten in Iran:
Believe it or not: walking is now a crime in Iran.
A police commander in Isfahan ordered police deployed and destroyed the flowerbeds, green spaces and beautiful benches of Sanai and Iranshahr streets. His justification? Young people were “aimlessly strolling.”
He says: “I went there myself and asked a young man, what are you doing here? And even he didn’t know!”
So let’s write this down. If a street is pleasant and peaceful, we must not walk there. Because if police stop you and ask what you are doing, and you say “Nothing, just walking,” you are a criminal. Your own two feet become instruments of the crime.
In 21st-century Iran, a woman walking unveiled is a crime but hanging people in public is treated as a blessing under Sharia law.
Shame on you. You cannot even stand the sight of people taking a walk. Fine, ban walking too. You are not banning anything. You are only turning yourselves into a joke, in front of everyone.
Although compulsory hijab, is it still a law and you force even seven year-old schoolgirls to cover her head to toe in order to get an education, but you cannot control millions of women who say NO to Islamic republic’s barbaric laws.
#WalkingUnveiled
#StopExecutionsInIran— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 7, 2026
*Here’s the odious NYC Mayor pretending to honor dead Jews when in fact he accuses Israel of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while Hamas gets accused of none of these, but is the subject of 3/4 of the Mayor’s tweet. I detest this man and still can’t believe that New Yorkers—including many Jews—voted for him. But just wait until they get their subsidized grocery stores and free daycare!
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 7, 2026
From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana; the “gender equality paradox for STEM. Fewer women go into STEM fields in nations that have greater equality between men and women. This holds for other counterintuitive indices of “accomplishment”.
Nations with greater gender equality have a *lower* percentage of female STEM graduates.
https://t.co/ESFFLAwU1k https://t.co/07ww4kASvw
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) September 30, 2026
From Jay, a joke from The Babylon Bee:
FBI Assembles Elite Team Of Investigators To See If All These Terrorist Attacks Can Somehow Be Connected To A Single Ideology https://t.co/yzxEjoPXiP
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 6, 2026
From Malcolm; a great collection of hidden moggies:
Normal 🤣 https://t.co/ohAXuE5gFU
— 🅶🅾🆁🅺 (@Raclure03) September 22, 2026
Two from my feed:
The 85-year-old who chose to die to save his family.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists went from house to house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Shlomo Ron, 85, understood what was happening – but he had a plan.He told his wife, two daughters, and grandson to hide in the safe room. They tried to convince him to come inside with them.
He refused.
Shlomo believed that if the terrorists entered and found an old man sitting alone in the living room, they would assume he lived alone, kill him, and move on without searching the rest of the house.
So he sat down in his armchair and waited.
The terrorists entered.
They saw Shlomo alone.
They shot him dead—and moved on without searching the rest of the house.
Exactly as he had hoped.
His wife, daughters, and grandson survived.
Shlomo Ron, one of the founders of Nahal Oz, was 85 years old and unarmed.
His final act was to give his life to protect his family.
#October7Heroes #October7
— Ben 🇮🇱 (@journo_ben) October 7, 2026
A baby goat started pushing a cat, but the cat thought it was just getting cuddles https://t.co/ssmyaUYTME
— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) October 6, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was 9 years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 8, 2026
And one from Doctor Cobb, urging people to read this paper about Rosalind Franklin and”photographs 49 and 51″, and giving his take on the whole issue:
A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T13:23:45.341Z
Today’s music is from a group that readers either have forgotten or are too young to know about: the Kingston Trio (all the members of the original group have expired). This is one of the old folk songs they rearranged: “The Wagoner’s Lad,” first recorded in the 1920s. It’s a sad song about young lovers forced to separate because the lad drives wagons. The first verse is an paean to first-wave feminism.
From the link just preceding:
One of the things that I have always loved about folk music is its capacity to surprise. You can be humming along through all the wonderful chanteys and cowboy songs and ballads and love songs…and then stumble unexpectedly on the surpassingly beautiful (like “Shenandoah” or “The Mountains of Mourne”) or the darkly tragic (like “The Sloop John B”) – or amazingly modern sentiments in a very old song, like “The Wagoner’s Lad.”
The very first verse of the song, which is known in a host of variants including “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” (recorded famously by Peter, Paul and Mary as “Pretty Mary”) and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and which dates to the early nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, tells us that we are not in the standard folk universe in this song, where women are usually the objects of either romantic desire or borderline misogynistic humor or scorn. Instead, “Wagoner’s Lad” opens with a plaint as old as time, one that remains distressingly true for a really unthinkable percentage of the world’s women today – in the Middle East, in most of South Asia and much of East Asia, and in large parts of Africa. Perhaps half of the women in the world today do not choose their husbands freely, making that opening verse perpetually relevant:
The link to the song’s name will take you to several recorded versions, including ones by Joan Baez, Sarah McQuaid, John Denver, and one by Burt Jansch and John Renbourn, which I finally found on YouTube.
I start looking for your letter before it’s ever posted, and I always learn something. A lot of things. I make a point of looking at the faces of the people murdered by the Nazis. I don’t comment because nobody cares what I think but I definitely care what you think! Everybody seems worn down and depressed. Terrifying times, and you help me cope with them.
Me too, Diane.
In other news, never a mathematician around when you need one! Maybe we should ask ai what it thinks of math/ai and potential impacts.
I also read i every day. I don;t always comment, but I do always read.
I read the website every day, and also look at the pictures of the people murdered by the Nazis.
Absolutely . . . .
I ponder the lost every day as well, and how so many of them could still have been alive today.
Same here. Every day. Almost never comment and I bet there are a lot like me. Absolutely the best and the first thing I read every day! Thank you for your hard work, Jerry. It’s greatly appreciated! I read this post yesterday and came back today to let you know.
Phillip Greenspun addressed the current Mayor of New York as “Ayatollah Mamdani”.
I thought that was accurate.
I do not agree with it. It is far too complimentary.
Regarding “Is society getting stupider,” I looking at the subreddit for Movies (r/movies) this week (not worth it). Someone asked for recommendations for movies from the 30s, 40s, or 50s that weren’t “too complicated.” I was stumped because with the possible exception of “The Big Sleep” (which is just hard to follow), I’ve never considered movies of that period to be complicated. Related to that, I saw a story in the last month or so (maybe even here), that talked about the problem they have in film studies classes because students can’t handle two hour films. If I had a child in school, I would definitely keep them away from smart phones.
Not sure why readership and/or comments are down. I read this blog every day and look forward to it. I rarely post after several abrupt, critical comments from JC, but I still read it and enjoy it. I am afraid I have no wildlife comments to post aside from my chihuahua mix Lucy, who is a great pleasure in our lives.
The appeal is becoming more selective :
https://youtu.be/UZ6JxAgmxXg?is=Sc3hImFZcshczEI8
(Clip from This Is Spinal Tap (1984))
HA! A few years ago I snuck in under the wire and got my little doggy and me published at WEIT, Saul.
To wit:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
The old boy finally left us, but I have a puppy now and I post him all the time on Twitter.
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
My best to Lucy, my little guy whom I named after myself is the light of my life also even though he is …. a d*g! 🙂
best,
D.A.
NYC
At least one person is working on a new set of nature pictures.
I think in your moment of doubt (above) you’re underestimating how important WEIT is to a -lot- of people, myself included. Many read and don’t comment.
The comments are pretty good (especially mine! hehe) and assisted by your editing out the crazies – Much better than Twitter, probably because the WEIT readership skews a little older and -much- more educated than the average Twitter person who in turn trumps the Facebook, TikTok or Instagram crowds.
That’s my reading.
This is a difficult period in your life, what with the eye and all… but don’t underestimate how important this site is. You could always scale it back a bit – just for easier production – but try not to abandon us.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Dr Coyne, you have had some assistance from several colleagues with posting. Would it be possible to enlist even more colleagues to lighten your burden and keep the web page as vital as always?
I don’t bother commenting because, comments are usually pointless.
I like the content. Except the cat stuff, sorry, i skip all that. The other stuff is good, though. I check in twice a day or so.
Yours is the one blog I read every day. I appreciate your perspective and will miss it when it’s gone. If I’m not gone first 🙂
I do not characterize the upcoming execution of Hasan as barbaric. I’m told that it’s more expensive to society to conduct an execution than it is to keep the prisoner incarcerated for the rest of his life. That has never sounded plausible to me, but I don’t have the data to contest it rigorously. Douglas Murray’s essay “The Death Penalty Is Cruel. Hamas Terrorists Deserve It” strikes me as somewhat inconsistent in its logic–but he admits that sometimes capital punishment is the most appropriate consequence. Few think abortion is always wrong or always acceptable. Capital punishment’s acceptability should be viewed on a spectrum as well.
For me, killing someone needlessly is always wrong. If you can’t keep society safe from an individual, then and only then, except in war, can society even consider taking a life in cold blood. And then only in cases with a string of caveats. The Ft. Hood killer doesn’t meet that threshold so he shouldn’t killed in revenge for his killings. I don’t want to become him or to be a part of a society that becomes him. And, as Lily Tomlin always said so eloquently, “And that’s the truth, pftttttt.” 🥴
Yes, Doug. No expert but I practiced criminal defense (not at that level) here in NYC for some years.
The expensive part is the mandatory and optional appeals which clog up the court system for decades. And death penalty defendants never ever have any money to pay for their own defense.
The actual execution process is pretty cheap.
D.A.
NYC
The appeals process is less expensive in Iran.
WEIT is so important to me. I don’t feel smart enough to comment after reading the wonderful and informative comments people contribute. I’m also a lousy photographer. But I live to learn so much from the comments and contributions.
I’m also a bit terrified and depressed as someone stated above over the political situation. The antisemitism of these times flaring up so rapidly is quite terrifying to me. I have been a lifelong liberal and Democrat. To see people such as Mamdani and El-Sayed gain so much popularity is very troubling to me.
“The antisemitism of these times flaring up so rapidly is quite terrifying to me. I have been a lifelong liberal and Democrat. To see people such as Mamdani and El-Sayed gain so much popularity is very troubling to me.”
And you say that you’re not smart enough to comment? I read wisdom in what you just wrote.
+1 Debra. Totally.
D.A.
NYC
(sorry – I know the Boss doesn’t like “+1″s)
Enjoyed the lyrics of The Wagoner’s Lad! I wouldn’t have guessed them for the time and culture. Thanks for sharing the new daily music!
I very much like the hidden cat video; we need something like that with all the negative news in the world.
And to the family hero Shlomo, I say: Lechi’im!
“Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. … Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.”
Reminds of Vroomfondel and Majikthise.
Your column is so important to me that I check in twice a day (sometimes more). I really don’t have much to say about most of the posts as some are “beyond my paygrade” and others just don’t require comment.
Thanks to your writings about transgender issues, my ideas about the difference between sex and gender have become much more precise. It is now easy to debate someone who thinks trans females should be allowed in all areas of life.
One of the most important posts recently (imo) is the one today about whether people are generally stupider now than, say 30-40 years ago. My take is, absolutely. During the ’90s and ’00s I occasionally did substitute teaching, both in my field (German) and in other fields, especially English and other languages. Some of the high schools maintained quality German programs, while in others, the content kept getting watered down – to the extent that students in fifth year German in some schools were doing material that students in other schools were doing in late third-year German or in fourth-year German. In English classes, students were reading texts that used to be taught in earlier years.
Even friends with whom I have regularly exchanged emails for a couple of decades seem to have decreased attention spans, as they don’t respond to any topic or questions that are more than a couple of lines down in the email.
I’m afraid both the attention span and the general lack of knowledge will just increase when people think they don’t need long-term knowledge because they can look up everything instantaneously on the internet, then just forget it.
Loved all the cat items today, especially Hili and the hidden cats. Various cats of mine have loved sleeping under the blankets and have reacted in comical ways when I lifted the blankets. They seemed to think they were completely invisible.
On the proliferation of stupid:
Maybe the world is growing stupider. In the olden days—before the Internet—it was not easy to be a public intellectual or even to have a voice. There were gatekeepers. Magazine, newspaper, book, and television producers and editors served as powerful filters. Yes, some of these published bad, incendiary, and even stupid stuff, but it took resources to found a newspaper or magazine. Henry Ford’s “The Dearborn Independent” is a good example of both bad and stupid, but it required Ford’s deep pockets to publish his dreck.
Today, publication is frictionless and free. Anyone can set up a web site or blog, and it takes even less than a web site to post stupid screeds on X and elsewhere. So, it’s easier now than ever for the stupid to have a platform, and for stupid stuff to get out there for public consumption. There’s no way to preempt it.
To fight it, we need to counterattack with smart on the same platforms. Since there’s more stupid than smart—and probably always has been—it’s not a battle easily won. Everyone on this web site is serving the cause of smart, of course. The stupid—on their web sites—think the same thing.
On Nidal Hasan:
Nidal Hasan is a bad guy. But is his execution warranted? If we reject execution as a form of retribution—which I do—we’re left with whether his execution is necessary (1) as a deterrent against others or (2) to prevent Hasan himself from committing more crimes or for actively encouraging others on the outside. Is lifelong confinement sufficient to meet these aims? I don’t know. Executing him could also make him a martyr, which could lead to even more crimes than if he remains alive in custody.
Maybe the decision to execute Hasan is mostly out of revenge. Maybe it’s just that the administration is tired of having to deal with him. These last two are not good reasons for execution, but maybe they are the reasons. Probably they are.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
And speaking of bad guys, Mamdani’s statement regarding the atrocities of October 7, 2023 was a disgrace. He was at the memorial gathering, close to all those who came together to remember the lost—Jews and non-Jews alike. Mamdani was right there among the mourners. He didn’t need to write that statement. He could have just spit on them in person.
“Maybe the decision to execute Hasan is mostly out of revenge. ”
Maybe it’s about a sense of justice.
I notice that people who argue against the death penalty never seem to mention that. Crimes against humanity have always been resolved by death, and if the world can agree about that, then so can a country.
Personally, I see some crimes and criminals as so heinous, that I place real moral value to a commitment by society that such behavior will not be tolerated at all, and that death is the proper judgement.
Death comes for all of us, and the human race is not exactly reverent wrt the sanctity of life – we allow abortion for convenience, consider death in war not to be murder, stomach “collateral damage” in war, and often laud the taking of human life in self-defense.
Frankly, I see opposition to the death penalty akin to “cafeteria Catholicism”.
Speaking of the death penalty, I see that Christa Pike’s lawyers are claiming she was brain dead before waking up, possible to make a future argument that she cannot be executed again. Compare and contrast the case with that of Terri Schiavo.
“Personally, I see some crimes and criminals as so heinous, that I place real moral value to a commitment by society that such behavior will not be tolerated at all, and that death is the proper judgement”
I agree with you, Roger. It may be that I agree with you because, like many young people of my generation, I became fascinated with the phenomenon of serial killers after seeing The Silence of the Lambs for the first time.
So I read, a lot. And I read some details about what some people have done, and enjoyed doing — to other people. Some people, who aren’t psychotic, and aren’t even driven by some idiotic, murderous ideology, torture and kill for fun. And simply locking them behind bars for the rest of their lives seems, to me, incommensurate with the magnitude of the evil done.
But I would reserve the death penalty for the worst of the worst, and that’s where it gets tricky: humans make decisions about which crimes count as among the worst. And human judgement is flawed.
That, and the problem of false convictions, is why I continue to oppose the death penalty. But it’s a practical, not a moral opposition. In some cases I think justice is best served by saying, “This person no longer has any claim on society, and we are all better off without him (or her.)”
Human judgement is most often correct when competent people are involved, and we can devise fail-safe procedures. Which is why science works as well as it does.
It would be interesting to see which crimes could be agreed upon to be chosen for automatic (and expedited) execution. I would imagine it would be a very short list. Personally, in addition to Crimes Against Humanity, I would nominate terrorism (the calculated murder of civilians for political purposes) and the torture or murder of children by adults.
Exhibit A for the latter is the 1993 murder of Polly Klaas. The SOB who committed that crime is STILL on death row. Imagine what that family has been going through for the past 33 years.
Your comment brought this quote to mind from Sir Peter Medawar’s “Pluto’s Republic”, inspired I think, by his scorn for Pierre de Chardin’s book “The Phenomenom Of Man”.
I like the cute animals. Baby goats and cats. Awwww…..
The news (usually depressing) I often read elsewhere. Goes down better with cute animals.
Reading WEIT is an important part of my daily routine,but I rarely comment unless I feel I have some specific specialized knowledge on a topic. I would very much miss it if it disappeared.
Exactly!
Certainly some things have become noticeably worse over the last 20 years, but some have got better.
For example, popular music and novels seem to have gone into pretty steep decline, as have films.
However, non-fiction books and family-friendly boardgames (a.k.a. eurogames) are better than ever.
Certainly some things have become noticeably worse over the last 20 years, but some have got better.
“Back then, everything was good; today, everything is better. It would be better if everything were just good again.” – Heinz Erhardt
I read you every day but rarely comment. There is always something interesting.
I love this website. A wise host and thoughtful commenters—always something new to learn. I’ve been a subscriber since 2016. That year I had a cancer scare (now thankfully in remission) and resolved to deepen my understanding of the science disciplines I had neglected after school. My career background is in economics and finance, but this site has broadened my horizons immeasurably. Thank you, Dr. Coyne. Why Evolution Is True remains on my bedside table.
I read your website every night just before bed. It is my bedtime treat. It often has interesting science and some cats (especially Hili) and some videos and, of course, Da Nooz. The latter is the best summary of news I encounter. The Holocaust children are a memorial to the Dark Side of the human species.
I would be bereft if you decided to quit – it must take a lot of your time. Thank you.
Extremism seems to me to be a form of simpletonism and there seems to be a lot of it now. Extremists see the world in simple binary good vs evil and are uninterested in nuance and unwilling to entertain any information that doesn’t fit their world view.
Properly used smart phones and AI have so much potential for benefit. But misused they shut down thinking making simpletonism and extremism more likely. The problem is that these technologies are so much easier to misuse than to properly use.
American politics is not something I would think international readers would feel up to commenting about… but it is interesting getting the lay of the land as it were.
Parts I skip and as I am not here for the cats say I understand it is part and parcel of Jerry’s website. Animal and human behaviours are what comes naturally here.
I wonder, that since WEIT its not exactly for the young reader whether there is an aged attrition rate LOL! I could be one any day but feel I have some time left save a bus hitting me…
Umm, It could be said that Jerry covers his arguements well and commenting seems superfluous. But he, being a professor (E) expects feedback to his arguments and personal thoughts to make the time spent worth the effort and not looking at a room full of blank staring eh…readers 🤔
I’m not an academic, never been to lectures within a campus, Jerry is my personal professor, the only one I might add… so thanks Jerry. Helping organising peoples thoughts is an under appreciated skill.
As you say there might be a lack of feedback for Jerry(?) but on the other hand there is less dross, like at least some of my input.
So there might not be a ton of comments but most of them are worth reading. And I am not the only one who reads this site and the comments every day.
Yes Dennis.
One of the things that makes the comments here good – apart from the higher IQ skew of the readership – is the fact that the Professor weeds out the crazies and bs so we never have to see them.
This is a big deal.
I write a syndicated column and three of my five editors don’t even take/allow comments anymore because they fill up with crazies. It is this behind the scenes work that helps make WEIT so enjoyable.
D.A.
NYC
I did not know that but it is another instance of taking things for granted. Appreciate WEIT even more. I very much like your site as well.
Yes, I completely agree. Our host maintains a high level of both conversation and civility. Frankly, I am not sure how he does it.
When our leading mathematicians retire–and if few of them are replaced because bright, young, ambitious people will see little point competing with AI–then who will be the mathematicians setting the directions AI takes? Do we simply hand the keys to output, evaluation, and desired future directions to the machines?
Death penalty. I have never been opposed in principle. It is, after all, hard to square opposition to state-sanctioned killing with a career in military uniform; the opposition boils down to timelines, not deaths. But as a matter of practice, I generally oppose the death penalty in civilian cases: the endless litigation, the decades-long delays between offense and penalty, the unreliability of human testimony, the people once on death row who have been exonerated by DNA evidence.
That said, I welcome the firing squad for Mr. Hasan, though I can’t fully explain why. I didn’t know any of the dead; I’ve never even visited Fort Hood. I don’t feel an immediate personal connection at all.
Instead, I think of Dante and the ninth circle. Hasan betrayed his brothers and sisters in arms. He betrayed his country. He killed those who would have entrusted themselves to his protection. He killed those who would have died protecting him. Perhaps it would be better to put him on ice for all of eternity. That opportunity lacking, let the bullets take from him even the possibility of another caring human touch or a misplaced compassion. I’ll own the barbarous tag.
Agreed. I work at a military college and teach Majors all the time, and the idea that one of them would suddenly start shooting everyone is literally unthinkable.
Jerry, it may be that WordPress is no longer a good platform for attracting new readers. It seems that nowadays the “happening” place is Substack. For example, in the last year I’ve subscribed to a couple of dozen Substacks, but no new WordPress blogs that I wasn’t already reading (indeed, WEIT is pretty much the only thing I read on WordPress now, everything else has moved to Substack).
As a first step, you could try duplicating all posts on to Substack and see what happens (I bet that there’s something that could do that automatically, such as Grok Bot).
Dr. Coyne, the amount of effort you put into the site every day is astonishing, and rest assured we all appreciate it – including the vast number of readers who don’t comment regularly or even at all. We who comment often are just the tip of an iceberg of those who love this site. I start every day here in the Land of Oz reading every word you post, as well as the comments. As for wildlife photos, I just returned from a lengthy trip to Yukon and Alaska, where (among other things) I photographed lots of wildlife. Once I get around to going through all 1400 or so photos, I will submit some of the better ones.
Regarding the increasing stupidity of people since the advent of smartphones, this is one reason I retired from academia when I did. After teaching neuroscience for decades without complaint (and often with accolades from students), in recent years students complained to the Dean that my subjects were “too complicated”, so I was encouraged to cut out a lot of the material and simplify the rest. As Trump would say, sad!
This entire thread is a love letter, Dr. Coyne. And perhaps a keeper. Hope your eyes heal soon.
Thank you very much for writing this website every day, Jerry. I read it regularly and am delighted to always learn something new. And the bits that make me laugh are such a great way to start the day!
Please know that this website — and YOU — are an important part of many lives. More than you know, Jerry.
I read the dialogue everyday. I never miss it. What a unique and enjoyable piece for news and entertainment.
I have commented on other articles,but I don’t believe I’ve had a comment on a Hili dialogue.
I would be extremely disappointed and sad if it would be discontinued.
Stay with it!
Jerry, there are quite a few people who read this site and don’t comment, as I hope you know. I know this, because every so often I get an email from a colleague or ex-student saying: “Hey, do you know about this site?”
Or, “that book you recommenced about evolution. Do you know that the author has a website?”
Switch review of the site:
This website, like the living rooms of most interesting intellectuals, is an eclectic place. Aside from the information about evolution and other scientific subjects, the author inserts other subjects that interest and amuse him He writes short bits about history, culture, politics (the politics are liberal and moderate—liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the term), cats, ducks, food—-everything that might come up in conversations in a good dinner party. He demands civility from the participants on the cite, which makes it a pleasant place to be, even if some of us must retain ourselves at times. Full disclosure: I am a regular reader and participant on the site.
The author not require that participants conform to his opinion, though he will sometimes request that a person defends his/her opinion. After all, he spent his life as a professor. People are free to disagree, but not imply. Civility is demanded.
The best thing about the site is that one learns something new just about every day. Quite frankly, I do not see how the author maintains his posting style—new information every day, interesting observations—good conversation starters—like one would expect at a good party. And the Marietta’s is very good, delivered with a fair touch of humor. And, like any good party with several people attending, if one part of the conversation does not interest a reader, he or she can simply go to another part.
It is precisely the type of party that one quirks like to attend in real life.
/end review.
Jerry, I sure hope that you continue giving these parties.
I apologize for the bloody autocorrect, which I did not notice until it was too late.
+++Breaking news+++
Navanethem Pillay – former chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, an enemy of Israel and an anti-Semite – has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2026. In my opinion, this is a grossly misguided decision by the Nobel Committee. All pro-Palestinian supporters—and especially the Palestinian terrorist groups—will celebrate and exploit the decision for their propaganda.
https://www.dw.com/en/nobel-peace-prize-2026-goes-to-navanethem-navi-pillay-for-her-efforts-to-promote-peace-and-international-law/live-79598020
I found you when I let go of god and embraced atheism. I have come to enjoy this blog for all of the reasons stated above. I enjoy learning, but I also enjoy the silly things (loved the goat and cat), I love that you honor holocaust victims, I like to read the comments. Really I like everything about all of the different topics you cover. I don’t like commenting. Either I feel that I have nothing to offer, or it has already been said. I wish you good health, and long may you continue to do this. And when you have had your fill of doing it you will leave behind a wonderful legacy that will be missed with understanding that you deserve a rest.
I came here from PZ’s site many years ago, probably just after WEIT started (so long ago I can’t remember), and have been here every day since then. I didn’t take long to see how superior this site was and is to Pharyngula, and I abandoned that very quickly. Jerry, thank you for all these years of entertainment and education. As you know, I seldom comment, but have been known to contact you by email on any subject I know will interest you. I hope you recover soon from the eye surgery (I’ve been there too, with improved vision but a failed attempt to remove the need for specs). Please keep the website going as long as you feel up to it. I reckon you’d miss it as much as we would if you stopped.