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 another “work” week: it’s Monday, October 26, 2026, and National Pumpkin Day.
Pumpkins are not all of one species, though they’re all in the winter squash genus Cucurbita. This photo from Wikipedia shows two species: it’s labeled, “A variety of pumpkin cultivars. The central and rightmost orange fruits are Cucurbita pepo, all others are Cucurbita maxima.”
Election Day is a public holiday in Israel, with schools, government offices and many public services closed. In most of the country, polls are scheduled to open at 7 a.m. local time and close at 10 p.m., with hours slightly reduced in some small communities, hospitals and prisons.
Voters are assigned to a polling station near their registered residence and may vote only at that location. There are exceptions for soldiers, people with limited mobility and prisoners, among others.
All Israeli citizens 18 or older who are registered to vote may do so with a valid identification, such as a passport, driver’s license or Israeli identification card. Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population, could play a significant role in the vote, depending on turnout.
What’s on the ballot?
Israel’s electoral system uses nationwide proportional representation. Elections to the Knesset, Israel’s 120-seat Parliament, are held at least every four years, though they can happen more often. In 2022, Israeli elections were held for the fifth time in three years after the Knesset dissolved itself.
Israelis cast a single ballot for a list of candidates affiliated with aparty. A party receives a number of seats proportional to the national vote it got. To gain a place in Parliament, however, a party or must receive at least 3.25 percent of the valid votes. About 10 parties are expected to clear that electoral threshold.
How is a government formed?
No single party has ever won a majority of votes, which means parties must form factions and party leaders try to forge a governing coalition of at least 61 lawmakers.
Within seven days of the official election results being announced, Israel’s president, who plays a mostly symbolic role, meets with elected representatives of the parliamentary factions.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will assign a member of the Knesset — usually the leader of the party or faction that has won the most seats — to form a government. That candidate then has 28 days to negotiate with other factions and forge alliances to form a government, which must be approved by the Knesset in a vote of confidence. That person can request a 14-day extension to the deadline.
If this fails, they keep trying, and if failure continues, they have new elections. More:
Who are the top contenders?
Different polls in the week ahead of the election have suggested different outcomes, which is “very problematic for political scientists,” said Assaf Shapira, who heads political research at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Israel.
Many Israelis consider this election to be a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership. Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party, and their hard-right allies, are in a close race with Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff who heads the opposition coalition led by the Yashar party and has emerged as Mr. Netanyahu’s top challenger.
I have no predictions here, as I don’t follow Israel’s internal politics that closely. My only prediction is that whoever becomes Prime Minister, it won’t reduce the world’s hatred of Israel. Israel-dissing based on Netanyahu is, in my view, largely bogus: a mask for antisemitism (= anti-Zionism). Netanyahu despite his flaws, is simply an excuse.
The U.S.-Iran conflict has been going on for so long that it sometimes seems stuck on replay. But the chapter that began in February changed the Middle East battlespace, likely forever. Deterrence failed. U.S. military bases in the region were ravaged. So were Gulf nations that had relied on American power. The old regime in Tehran was decapitated, but it was replaced by cocky hard-liners who seem convinced they can outlast a war-weary superpower.
What’s next? For now, the region is holding its breath, awaiting the outcome of Israel’s election Tuesday and the U.S. midterms a week later. But U.S. forces are surging into the region, and commanders are said to be preparing military options for President Donald Trump. One ominous sign is that the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh ordered some employees to leave, and other U.S. embassies in the region are reportedly making similar moves.
. . . Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still wants regime change. “There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all: overthrow the regime in Iran,” he said Wednesday. Trump hasn’t gone that far, but he said Sunday that “we will soon finish the job” if Iran’s leaders don’t “change their ways, rapidly.”
. . . After that failure [the “memorandum of understandibng], Trump settled on a policy that combined armed escorts of Western oil tankers through the strait with economic strangulation of Iran. That combination, to me, has been the president’s most successful approach to date. But it hasn’t guaranteed his red line: Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. So, after nearly eight months of war, Trump is weighing whether to resume combat.
. , .If America goes back to war, how will it organize its forces? That’s the second question planners need to assess.
. . . “This is the moment to rethink the shape of the American military presence in the Middle East,” argued Richard Fontaine, who heads the Center for a New American Security. “The archipelago of U.S. military bases has been shown to be vulnerable.”
For now, with the bases damaged and vulnerable to drones and missiles, Centcom will have to rely on stand-off forces at sea and distant air bases. That may be a better architecture for the future, too. These forces can be surged into the Middle East when there’s a crisis, and they can spend most of their time in Asia, to which successive administrations have tried to “pivot.”
But H.R. McMaster, a veteran of two decades of war in the Middle East and former national security adviser, cautions that “you can’t accomplish political goals with stand-off forces.” To reassure local partners, Centcom will need layered air defenses and some hardened underground military bases. The Middle East isn’t about to disappear, and the long-term need to contain Iran will probably continue.
The Iran war is unpopular because it lacks a coherent endgame. Rolling the dice once again on regime change, as Netanyahu urges, isn’t a wise bet.
n the eight years since [she was elected to the House], Ocasio-Cortez has been the one to shift tactics—in ways that would have once seemed unthinkable for the firebrand leftist. The result is a political transformation reflecting real-world lessons about how to win in Washington.
The 37-year-old lawmaker has tempered her combative style, cozied up to establishment Democrats and distanced herself from some extreme positions pushed by other Democratic socialists—such as abolishing prisons and the police.
Whether or not Ocasio-Cortez decides to run for president in 2028—a much-talked-about possibility she says she is considering—she has tried to broaden the progressive base to include voters whose views don’t traditionally align with the far left, including Black voters and segments of MAHA.
. . .Yet her evolving strategy risks alienating progressive and far-left voters she needs in any bid for higher office, whether the Senate or the White House.
Ocasio-Cortez’s more inclusive approach, viewed skeptically by colleagues wary of her Democratic socialist credentials, coincides with a growing embrace of a populist economic agenda among Americans in both parties, according to a Wall Street Journal poll in September.
“I personally don’t think that we need to water down on our policy and our agenda and our principles,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview. “But I do think that we can expand and evolve in the way that we talk to people, and the way that we include people and shift away from a culture of exclusion.”
To that end, Ocasio-Cortez has sought to become a team player. In the past, she backed primary challenges to Democratic incumbents. She now contributes to the party committee that boosts campaigns of vulnerable lawmakers, including those who in the past have criticized her far-left ideas. Ahead of the midterm election, she has so far brought in more than $37 million, making her a top Democratic fundraiser, Federal Election Commission filings show.
I am wary of any candidate who changes their philosophy just to get elected: it’s as if they’re duping the public and have a real agenda that is secret. In addition, although she is savvy, particularly with respect to social media, I don’t think AOC is particularly smart, accomplished in terms of having done much in Congress, or, especially, experienced. She attracts media attention, and that’s what she’s good at. In my book, that’s not enough to be a Senator, much less President.
If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?
I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.
. . .But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.
The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I’m not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism — there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through institutions rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate.
And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth. Here’s one from the ACLU of Nebraska:
. . . Once the logic of land acknowledgements and “decolonization” is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.
And in practice, any attempt to create such a world would inevitably lead to violent resistance by the groups in danger of being “decolonized”. The orderly world of nation-states would dissolve into a chaotic free-for-all of competing irredentist claims, backed by genocides and expulsions. Ten thousand October 7th-style attacks would be followed by ten thousand Gaza-style wars.
I do not want that, and you should not want it either. The American people certainly don’t want it, and the insistence of progressives on intoning land acknowledgements has probably tanked the movement’s cachet in wider society. I agree with Wayne Burkett when he says that land acknowledgements have probably hurt the Democratic party:
There’s a lot more to the longish piece, but I think most readers already want little to do with land acknowledgments.
I spoke to George Will, one of this country’s most prominent columnists, who simply “rejects the premise” that AI will ever write better than the best human prose stylists. “If you want AI to mimic Hemingway, that’s easy. To mimic George Eliot is not easy,” Will said.
Other writers and editors I’ve spoken with over the past month aren’t as sure. What they’re quietly asking one another is whether they’ve already written their last essay, the way you may have watched your last DVD or mailed your last letter without knowing it. Why would anyone pay to read them when a machine can mimic their voice, faster and cheaper?
. . .Most people initially reject this premise because they think they can tell whether an essay was written by a human. Enough data and anecdotes are pouring in to show this confidence is an illusion. In a study published in August by Villanova University researchers, 1,682 adults read short fiction written either by AI or human beings. They not only preferred the stories written by AI, but in follow-up experiments, they did no better than a coin flip in determining authenticity.
The educated literary elite performed no better—in a separate study, researchers at Columbia, Michigan, and Stony Brook universities had readers with MFAs try to distinguish between passages written by AI and passages written by writers with MFAs. When the models were trained on a writer’s body of work, the MFA readers preferred the AI-generated passages to MFA-generated passages, and the best detection tools only flagged the AI text 3 percent of the time.
You can take your own test in the article (if you can access it), Raskin then asks that what follows if we admit that AI can write better than humans. After all, computers can beat all human chess players, but chess hasn’t disappeared. Will writers? There’s a way to say “no”:
Take two of the most famous political writers of the 20th century: William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal. It is impossible to think of them just as writers. They had distinct public personas that they cultivated through television, public appearances, and profiles. We are still watching documentaries about them. Their writing was always going to be secondary to developing and promoting their personas. Even if a machine is able to generate prose as well as Buckley or Vidal, it can’t replace the social capital they accumulated to get them to where they were. They traded favors with friends, schmoozed opinion makers, and knocked their tribe’s enemies. Would anyone really have cared if someone found out they had a team of ghostwriters working for them?
. . .So what matters for publishing houses is not so much how the writing got done; it is the social or political capital writers have earned. Writers write stories that flatter their friends, advance their ideals, and attack their enemies. And fiction does not escape these considerations. As for the news business, it has always involved commercial decisions. Reporters aren’t going away—newsmakers don’t want to trade their valuable scoops with robots. But as for columnists, part of that commercial calculation is that tribal affiliation and status matter. We like our favorite writers and probably won’t feel the same way about our favorite robots. A perfect case is chess. Everyone knows that Magnus Carlsen can be beat by the processing power in an old iPhone. That doesn’t stop people from both playing and watching him.
Readers will still want a face to a name: George Will isn’t going anywhere. The writer of the future, much like the writer of today, will be much more a persona and brand than a craftsman or laborer.
I’m not sure I buy this argument, but it does have some force. What do you think?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a question:
Hili: Do you know the answer to my question? Andrzej: Probably not, but we can try.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy znasz odpowiedź na moje pytanie?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie nie, ale możemy spróbować.
This woman, who’s in Poland with Masih, had a hard row to hoe, but she’s brave. Look at the story of the monster she was married to in Iran:
She was born in Iran and built her life in Afghanistan a woman’s rights activist with a voice that frightened the men around her.
So her ex-husband threw acid on her face.
In the hospital, after the surgeries, she sat with her head shaved doctors had taken skin from her scalp to rebuild her face. She was still bandaged, still bleeding, still healing.
But her son was not by her side. He was living with his father. And his father set the condition: if you want to talk to your son, you will do it on a video call so I can see what you’ve become.
She accepted. She needed to hear her child’s voice.
On that call, her ex-husband looked at her destroyed face and smiled. He said: “Look at you. You’ve become like a monster. You’ll never dare go out in public again people will be terrified when they see you. I dare you. I dare you to go out and talk about women’s rights.”
He thought he had broken her. He thought that face was the end of her.
He was wrong.
Every scar on her face became a sentence in her speech. They took her beauty so she took his fear and turned it into courage. Today she walks in public with her head high, and she speaks about women’s rights louder than ever.
He wanted to bury her in shame. Instead, he gave the world a witness.
That is why I invited her to our Freedom gala in Poland to dedicate to her the Medal of Freedom I received. Because she is the symbol of resilience itself: the symbol of every woman whose face was burned but whose voice could not be silenced.
Thank you, Poland for opening your doors, for giving visas to my delegation of women from Iran, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.
We are about to start a global women’s rights movement and we will go together, all of us, to the German Parliament very soon.
This time, I invited 10 women. In Berlin, we will invite more dissidents.
@FahimaSarfaraz
From Luana; “women are the first victims of immigration”:
French women are speaking up 🔥
“It’s an immigration crisis. They come to France only for economic advantage. They don’t want to become French. They are not French in their spirits.
For women it is very complicated.
There is a lot of sexual harassment by migrants, a lot of rapes by migrants. And it’s not only in Paris, it’s in all the big cities of France. Where you have migrants, you have problems.
Women are the first victims. And the government don’t want to speak about that. It’s taboo.
It’s very difficult to get migrants to go back to their country, because their country don’t want them. We have a lot of left-wing liberals. For them migrants are victims all the time.
So it’s very unjust, because there are a lot of poor French people too.
You’re a racist if you just say the truth. Open your eyes and you can see what we say. This is the truth.”
Refreshing and necessary. This pattern is repeated across Western Europe.
A musical tribute to performative hatred, shared properly:
🎶 “I Think I Just Freed Palestine” 🎶
A heartfelt musical tribute to performative activism, where the slogans are loud, the Jew-hate is palpable, knowledge is optional, and the results are nonexistent.
Please support my original work by sharing directly from my post. https://t.co/MSZ403OLOe
And one from Doctor Cobb: look at the size of this behemoth!
This footage shot by a tourist aboard Jacksonville Boat Charters near Amelia Island, Florida shows a leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea).At 2000 lbs (900 kg) & 7 ft long (2.1 m) they're the largest turtles & indeed one of the heaviest extant reptiles on Earth.Here There Be Monsters!
I think any politician who notably changes their position on a topic, especially during a campaign, should be expected to explain why they changed their position, and why they consider their previous position to be incorrect. People like Ocasio-Cortes, El-Sayed, and Talarico clearly have not had a change of heart over previous positions.
I think any politician who notably changes their position on a topic, especially during a campaign, should be expected to explain why they changed their position, and why they consider their previous position to be incorrect. People like Ocasio-Cortes, El-Sayed, and Talarico clearly have not had a change of heart over previous positions.