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.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “create”, came with this caption:
In which the boys return to the devilishly tricky P of E.
I assume the artist means “problem of evil”, which of course clever theologians have found a way to rationalize (there’s nothing these people can’t explain). But Mo is unable to come up with his own theodicy.
Welcome to a hump day (“வாரத்தின் நடுநாள்” in Tamil): Wednesday, April 8, 2026, and National Empanada Day. Here’s one I bought on the street in Santiago, Chile in 2019, right before my first trip to the Antarctic:
It’s also Dog Farting Awareness Day (?), National Dog Fighting Awareness Day. and Zoo Lovers Day. I am not a fan of zoos or public aquariums, and recommend that you read H. L. Mencken’s 1918 essay “The Zoo“. It’s splenetic, of course, as is all Mencken, but there is some truth in it, like this:
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump’s deadline for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz expired at 8 p.m. yesterday. But instead of destroying Iranian civilization, he announced a two-week ceasefire that apparently will open the Strait of Hormuz. Now both Iran and the U.S. are proclaiming victory.
The United States and Iran announced a two-week cease-fire and plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday evening, hours before President Trump had threatened that Iran would see its “whole civilization” destroyed if it did not allow free transit through the vital waterway.
The agreement that was brokered by Pakistan was hailed as a victory by both countries. Mr. Trump said a 10-point plan from Iran was a “workable basis on which to negotiate” a lasting end to the war after demanding Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” for weeks. Iranian officials were triumphant, with Mohammad Reza Aref, the country’s first vice president, saying on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun after Trump failed to destroy the Islamic republic’s government. Iran also said it would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and natural gas shipments, while negotiations take place to secure a permanent deal.
In Lebanon, the Israeli military said that the cease-fire did not cover its offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon. It was also unclear whether word of the nascent deal had reached Iranian local commanders, as fresh Iranian attacks were reported in some Persian Gulf countries early Wednesday morning.
Investors welcomed the cease-fire after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran caused an energy crisis and weeks of turmoil for global markets. The price of oil tumbled, with Brent Crude, the international benchmark, down almost 15 percent to trade at about $95 a barrel, and global stock markets soaring.
Global relief at the pause in fighting was tempered by confusion over what comes next. Many challenges remain if the United States and Iran are to achieve a permanent deal to end the war, especially given that both seem to be claiming to have achieved their goals. Shipping companies also signaled that they were cautious about resuming transit through the Strait of Hormuz immediately. And restarting operations at refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields that have been damaged in the war will take time.
So if this cease-fire holds, will anything have changed? Do we expect Iran to stop trying to produce nuclear weapons, stop exporting terrorism, and to give freedom to its people? I don’t think so. And if these things don’t change, what is the difference from before the war? All the U.S. gets is the Strait of Hormuz open again, which it was before we attacked iran.
*Yesterday’s war news from It’s Noon in Israel.
It’s Tuesday, April 7, and the thirty-ninth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up 1 percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments that occurred while you were asleep:
- As Trump’s ultimatum enters its final hours, unconfirmed reports have emerged of multiple explosions on Kharg Island, Iran’s critical oil export terminal. The strikes appear to be American, but it remains unclear if they are intended as a warning shot or the opening salvo of an invasion.
- The New York Times published Iran’s 10 conditions for ending the conflict: a permanent end to the war—not a temporary ceasefire—with a guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again by the U.S. or its allies; cessation of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon; a halt to fighting against all Iranian-backed forces in the region; the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran; and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under new rules of safe passage. Iran is also demanding that each vessel transiting the strait pay a toll of approximately $2 million, with revenues shared with Oman and used in part to fund reconstruction of war-damaged infrastructure.
- An exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate in Istanbul this morning left three people dead, two of whom were reportedly the assailants. According to the Turkish government, one of the attackers had ties to ISIS. The consulate itself is almost always closed due to the currently tense state of Israeli-Turkish relations, hence no Israelis were injured.
- Yesterday, the Israeli Air Force struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, at the South Pars gas field. Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strike, combined with last week’s hit on a second major facility, has eliminated the capacity to process roughly 85 percent of Iran’s petrochemical exports, inflicting what he called tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Katz said the petrochemical industry is a key financier of the IRGC and warned that continued aggression against Israel would lead to the “collapse” of Iran’s capabilities.
- The Gaza Board of Peace has given Hamas until the end of the week to accept a new disarmament proposal. High Representative Nickolay Mladenov is set to meet Hamas officials in Cairo on Friday, and a follow-up meeting is scheduled for Tuesday.
- The IDF has completed its deployment along the “anti-tank line” in southern Lebanon this morning—Israeli forces now control the line of commanding ridges from which they can prevent anti-tank fire toward Israel’s northern towns.
Note the penultimate item about Hamas disarming. The chances of that happening by the end of the week are about zero, and if they don’t disarm, what will the Board of Peace do about it? As far as I know, they have no enforcement powers.
*In an editorial board op-ed in the WSJ, that conservative paper takes Trump to task for threatening to punish the Iranian people in pursuing his war aims.
This directs all eyes to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to reopen Hormuz. He could always delay it again, but at his news conference he laid out what he’d need to see. “We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” Mr. Trump said, “and part of the deal’s going to be we want free traffic of oil and everything else.”
If not, “we have a plan,” the President said, “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business.”
We will soon find out who’s calling whose bluff, but don’t expect Iran’s regime to care much about what strikes like those would do to its people. Taken literally, Mr. Trump is proposing to hit many targets that would harm Iranian civilians, which could spark a refugee crisis.
Striking indiscriminately at critical infrastructure would be wrong as well as unwise, punishing the Iranian people we need on our side. “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” Mr. Trump said. Regime mismanagement has already left Iran’s grid in a permanent state of crisis, but such an attack could give Iranians all the suffering with none of the freedom. It could also erode support for the war at home and abroad.
The obvious solution is to discriminate between types of infrastructure. Bridges can be legitimate targets, but it depends if they have any military use of note. Otherwise, why punish the people?
Energy sources can also be legitimate targets if they have a particularly notable military nexus, such as providing fuel for missile launchers. But not every energy target will meet that standard, and the military benefit doesn’t justify plunging 90 million people into darkness.
One yardstick by which to judge any U.S. escalation is this: In addition to increasing “pressure,” which may never be enough to sway Iran’s regime, will it help prepare an operation to reopen Hormuz? The U.S. has a strong interest in causing chaos for Iran’s military, and targeting can allow it to do so without bombing every power plant in the country.
This is all good advice. And of course bombing civilian targets, which is a war crime, will turn most people except for diehard MAGA-ites against the war. My own priorities are regime change that frees Iranian citizens, and a guarantee (effected through complete dismantling of sites and surrending enriched uranium to the U.S.) that Iran will not pursue nuclear weapons.
*Jonathan Kay at Quillette reports on some mendacity in Canada: “The IOC is protecting female athletics. Canada’s Secretary of State for Sport isn’t happy about it.”
On 26 March, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced a new policy that ensures female Olympic sports categories will be reserved for actual female athletes, as opposed to trans-identified men. Under the new policy, women will be required to prove their eligibility with a cheek swab or blood test—a simple one-time procedure that’s less intrusive than the drug-testing regimens that Olympians have submitted to for decades.
The new policy will be warmly greeted by the substantial majority of ordinary people—on both sides of the political spectrum—who embrace the common-sense view that men should not be allowed to steal roster and podium spots from women. As the IOC notes in its new policy document, at high levels of competition,
there is a 10–12 percent male performance advantage in most running and swimming events… a 20+ percent male performance advantage in most throwing and jumping events, [and a] male performance advantage [that] can be greater than 100 percent in events that involve explosive power, e.g. in collision, lifting and punching sports.
Unfortunately, this common-sense majority view isn’t the fashionable one—at least not in Canada, where former prime minister Justin Trudeau turned the slogan “trans women are women” into state policy. Even now that Trudeau’s gone, his social-justice postures are still embraced by Canadian activists and academics; many of whom went apoplectic in recent months, following the decision of Alberta’s provincial government to finally step in and protect female sports categories—something Ottawa has refused to do.
Numerous researchers have tried to argue that the male competitive advantage in sports is a “myth.” Egale, a state-funded group mandated to support what Canada now calls “2SLGBTQI people,” suggested that excluding trans-identified men from female sports is really just a “grotesque” (and possibly even prurient) pretext to scrutinise young women’s bodies. Meanwhile, the CBC, Canada’s state-funded national broadcaster, has spent years instructing Canadians that the whole idea of separating humans into male and female categories is fuzzy to begin with—juxtaposing discussion of a “hermaphroditic ginger plant” and “sex-changing clownfish” with social-justice lectures from (human) “trans historians.”
. . .On Facebook, the Secretary of State for Sport went on something of a rant, accusing the IOC’s defenders of succumbing to the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”—an idea that he called “a stupid conservative pseudo fantasy.”
Van Koeverden also claimed that efforts to protect female sports categories are actually misogynistic, because they are about “policing women’s bodies.” And lest readers accuse him of mansplaining this whole issue, he said that he constantly meets female athletes who say they agree with him.
To quote the national anthem, O Canada!
*NASA has a gallery of images and videeos from Artemis 2. Here are a couple of shots (there’s also a flyby gallery).
A setting Earth.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili takes Andrzej’s words to heart:
Hili: What does life teach us?
Andrzej: That nothing is ever certain.
Hili: I’m not sure about that.
In Polish:
Hili: Czego uczy nas życie?
Ja: Że nic nie jest pewne.
Hili: Nie jestem tego pewna.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From: Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From Things With Faces, a most excellent catch:
Masih tells Trump not to destroy the civilization of Iran, which he threatened to do.
To President @realDonaldTrump,
Don’t do their job for them in one night. For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has tried, and failed, to destroy Iran’s civilization.
Tonight, millions are living in #DigitalBlackoutInIran, cut off from the world, not even knowing if our families… pic.twitter.com/3GbdhXxpil
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 7, 2026
A post from Maarten Boudry about a Jewish professor at Antwerp who is quitting because of antisemitism in her university. Read the whole thing:
I received this heartbreaking message from a Jewish professor at @UAntwerpen, who is leaving both the city and the university after four decades. I can hardly express how deeply this saddens and enrages me—especially in light of last week’s craven and disgraceful charade…
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) April 7, 2026
From Colin Wright, a new paper showing that you should teach biology, even if it’s misguided, so long as it makes the students happy (you can find the original BioScience paper, which exemplifies the meaning of “tendentious,” here).
🚨NEW: A recent paper claims that an “accurate approach to teaching about the diversity of biological sex” makes “LGBTQIA+” students feel more included and enjoy their course more.
The only problem is that their supposedly “accurate approach” is actually sex pseudoscience.
The… pic.twitter.com/6l6XAgN6PH
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 7, 2026
From Luana, a result that will rile up progressives:
Biggest medical scandal of the 21st century – and Australia is still participating in it https://t.co/wU52PUljnV
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 6, 2026
One from my feed; Science girl asks the inevitable question:
Just how does this species survive in the wild😜 pic.twitter.com/ZHU7Bm6Ejx
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 6, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was nine years old. https://t.co/14aRepVkj2
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 8, 2026
Two from Matthew, both involving “Astro Christina”, Christina Koch, who’s still in space aboard Artemis 1. She’s a Wikipedia editor and corrected her own article!
this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.411Z
a few years ago she corrected a few details about her own spacewalk! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:As…
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.412Z
Paul McCartney was—and I use the past tense—one of the two greatest songwriters of the era that comprised the apogee of pop music. (The other was John Lennon; I’m excluding Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as were folkier). Sadly, he’s still making music, and, save for George Harrison, each of the Beatles immediately lost their touch after they went solo.
Here’s a McCartney song touted in the NYT as the “What’s New” in music we should pay attention to. It’s from a new album he’s releasing in May. Their blurb:
Paul McCartney, ‘Days We Left Behind”
“The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” to be released May 29, will be Paul McCartney’s first solo album since 2020; it’s named after a Liverpool street in the neighborhood where he grew up. In “Days We Left Behind,” a cozy ballad carried by acoustic guitar and piano, he sings about places and memories as both fragile and lasting; he mentions Forthlin Road, the street where he lived and wrote early songs with John Lennon. “Nothing stays the same,” he muses, but he also insists, “No one can erase the days we left behind.” His voice is shakier than it once was, only making things more poignant.
Listen for yourself. Yes, his voice is shaky, a mere shadow of his voice from the Sixties. Worse, the song is lame in both melody and lyrics, though the melody is worse than the lyrics, which are at least tolerable (I give them below).
I realize that Macca was made to create music, and probably can’t stop doing it. And this song is still better than a lot of the dreck that passes for pop/rock music these days, but compared to the earlier McCartney, well, it’s sad. If you leave the video on, you’ll see a horrific AI-generated video in which all four Beatles are stuck in.
Lyrics:
Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to lastNothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behindSee the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for moreAnd nothing stays the same
No one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behindWe met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be brokenNothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
And no one can erase
The days we left behindIn the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they’d stay
With me for evermore’Cause nothing stays the same
And no one needs to cry
And no one is to blame
For the days we left behind
The days we left behind
I would have missed this video had reader Doug not called my attention to it. It’s a very good half-hour discussion by evolutionary biologist Zach B. Hancock, a professor at Augusta University, in which he recommends the the top ten most influential books in evolutionary biology. Since Hancock is a population geneticist, the books deal largely with evolutionary genetics, but not all of them.
I slipped in at #10 with my book on Speciation with Allen Orr, but I won’t be too humble to claim our book wasn’t influential, for, as Hancock notes, it’s the only comprehensive book on the origin of species around. (Darwin’s big 1859 book was about the origin of adaptations, and had little that was useful about the origin of species.) Hancock regrets that Allen and I aren’t going to do a second edition, but Allen refuses to, and I don’t have the spoons (I do have 200 pages of notes on relevant papers that appeared after our book came out, but that will go nowhere.)
The rest of the list is stellar, and shows a keen judgement about the field. I’m not sure I would have put Lack’s book on the Galápagos finches in there, as it’s pretty much out of date. It should be replaced by a very important book by Ernst Mayr, his Systematics and the Origin of Species or the updated version in 1963, Animal Species and Evolution. It was Mayr who codified the Biological Species Concept and paved the way for experimental and observational studies of speciation, and hence my book with Orr.
I’d expect every graduate student in evolutionary genetics to have read most of these books by the time they get their Ph.D. In fact, when I was on prelim hearings, judging whether students could be admitted to candidacy after a year or two, I and my colleague Doug Schemske made a habit of asking students to name the major accomplishments of several of the authors listed below. My impression is that the history of the field is not given so much weight now, so I wonder if students could still explain the major accomplishments of say, Theodosius Dobzhansky or Ronald Fisher. The books are of more than historical interest, for they raise questions that are still relevant. (I spent a lot of my career trying to understand the phenomenon of “Haldane’s Rule,” explained by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922. The paper was completely neglected until I read it in the early eighties and started a cottage industry of explanations [my own was largely wrong]).
Hancock’s explication of each book is excellent. If you’re an academic teaching evolutionary biology, you might see how many of these books your students have read.
One commenter on YouTube gave the list and the time points in the video where each is discussed (the links go to those time point).
2:26 #10 Speciation – Jerry Coyne & Allen Orr
4:50 #9 Darwin’s Finches – David Lack
6:59#8 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – Julian Huxley
9:15 #7 The Origins Of Genome Architecture – Michael Lynch
11:23 #6 Chance & Necessity – Jacques Monod
13:26 #5 The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
16:54 #4 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution – Motoo Kimura
19:34 #3 Genetics and the Origin of Species – Theodosius Dobzhansky
22:20 #2 The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection – Ronald Fisher
26:35 #1 On The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin
Reader Simon called my attention to a new obituary in the Times of London of Robert Trivers, a giant in evolutionary biology (and a notorious eccentric) who died on March 12. Because his death wasn’t announced immediately after he expired, this was bit late, but better late than never—especially given Trivers’s importance in the field. It’s a good obituary but the gold standard was Steve Pinker’s “in memoriam” article about Trivers published in Quillette on March 25.
Click the screenshot below to read, and if that doesn’t work,the article is archived here.
An excerpt:
In a burst of creativity in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers published a series of scientific papers that earned him a claim to being among the most important evolutionary theorists since Darwin. He was the first to fully appreciate how a gene-centric view of natural selection could explain some of the most puzzling and fundamental patterns in social life: the function of altruism, why males and females differ so much, the underpinnings of sibling rivalry and the delicate dynamic of conflict and co-operation that exists between parent and child.
Brilliantly original, Trivers was also an academic misfit: a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking individualist with a notable tendency to get into violent scrapes and an ungovernable character that eventually strained his relationship with the academy to breaking point.
Why do we ever behave altruistically? That is, why would an organism ever promote the reproductive success of another at some cost to its own? Since the work of the great evolutionist WD Hamilton, it had been appreciated that “kin selection” could explain why close relatives help one another out: doing so promotes an organism’s “inclusive fitness”, a measure accounting not only for an organism’s own genes but for copies of the same genes likely to be present in relatives. But why help non-kin? To Trivers, it was an obvious fact of life that we sometimes give priority to friends, and even strangers, over direct relatives.
Persuaded of the misguidedness of “group selectionist” theories that were fashionable at the time — according to which organisms sometimes sacrifice themselves for the “good of the species” — Trivers gave the central explanatory role to the gene. In his landmark 1971 paper, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, Trivers argued that altruism depended on the possibility of reciprocity. As long as helping a non-relative is not too costly, and there is sufficient probability that the favour would one day be returned, genes coding for altruistic dispositions spread.
. . . Frustrated by the Harvard biology faculty’s delay in granting his tenure application in the late 1970s, he abruptly left with his young family to take up a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a decision he came to regard as a “once in a lifetime” mistake. There, he befriended Huey Newton, co-founder of the paramilitary Black Panther political party, who was a doctoral student at the university. They co-authored a paper on self-deception, and Trivers made Newton his daughter’s godfather. He joined the Panthers for a period and later confessed to doing “an illegal thing or two”, before Newton removed him from the group for his own safety.
In fact, what I recall in 1977 is that Harvard’s biology department recommended tenure for Trivers, but that recommendation was overturned by President Derek Bok. I was there at the time and can vouch for that. Others say that Trivers asked for early tenure and was denied that, and then decided to leave Harvard. I also heard, and I can’t vouch for this, that Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) and Dick Levins, both Marxists who despised sociobiology, went to President Bok to lobby him to deny Trivers tenure. What we do know is that Trivers then moved to Santa Cruz, and later to Rutgers, where his academic turmoil continued:
. . . In 2015 he was suspended by Rutgers University for refusing to teach a course on human aggression, a field he claimed he was not expert in (despite its being a personal forte of his). He quit university life for good shortly after. Later, he was among the set of high-profile intellectuals pilloried for maintaining financial and social links to Jeffrey Epstein, even after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Far from apologetic, Trivers, who accepted funding from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability, vouched for his integrity; in Trivers’s view, Epstein’s imprisonment was punishment enough and his crimes less “heinous” than they were made out to be.
It is testament to the depth and generality of Trivers’s discoveries that they could be applied so readily, as he unsparingly conceded, to his own case. As he understood, natural selection has built us, and it is to natural selection we must return “to understand the many roots of our suffering”.
Compared to Pinker’s piece, the Times obituary is light on Trivers’s scientific accomplishments, but all in all it’s pretty good.
Below is a NYT obituary, also delayed, that appeared on March 27 (click to read or find it archived here):
An excerpt (David Haig, who’s quoted, has written his own remembrance of Trivers, as the two were good friends; but I don’t think it’s yet been published):
“Robert Trivers was unlike any other academic I have known,” David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, wrote in a remembrance of Professor Trivers for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “In another life, he might have been a hoodlum.”
Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)
In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.
“I was an intellectual opportunist,” he wrote in “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” (2002). “The inability of biologists to think clearly on matters of social behavior and evolution for over a hundred years had left a series of important problems untackled.”
The paper does a decent job in outlining Trivers’s contributions, the most important of which was his evolutionary explanation of “reciprocal altruism”, but again, see Pinker for a fuller explication. A bit more about the situation at Harvard:
During this creative burst, Professor Trivers struggled with mental health issues and was hospitalized at least once for bipolar disorder. He applied for early tenure at Harvard, but the decision was postponed because of concerns about his mental health.
“He could be a brilliant and wonderful colleague,” Professor Haig said. “In a different mood, he could be unnecessarily hostile to those around him.”
That’s enough for now, save one I just found in Skeptic, a remembrance by Trivers’s only graduate student ever, Robert Lynch. Click below to read:
It ends this way:
One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.” That seems just about right to me.
His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him.
I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.
Today we have a potpourri of photos from several readers. Their captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
From Robert Lang:
Every few days I drive up to Altadena to check on the progress of our rebuild. Now, 14 months after the fires of January 2025, the neighborhoods are starting to come back to life again with the sounds of hammering and sawing, but the animals that had come down from the hills still consider the area to be their own. This bobcat (Lynx rufus) wandered into the empty lot next door while I was checking on our own home’s progress:
Although our metal mailbox survived the fire, we’ve redirected all mail to our temporary home for the time being. Nevertheless, people occasionally stuff their own junk flyers into the mailbox. To help dissuade them from their paper spam, this Western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) has taken up residence on the front of the mailbox. When disturbed, she retreats to her cozy cubbyhole under the handle, which is right where you’d put your fingers if you were going to open the mailbox to stuff something inside:
Seeing eye to eye: this California Ground Squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi) and Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) are trying to decide who gets the top of the rock. Photograph by Merrilee Fellows.
From Todd Martin; a photo taken in, I believe, the Yucatan:
We encountered the ocellated turkey, (Meleagris ocellata), appropriately enough, on Thanksgiving day, I had no idea what it was though and took it for a brightly colored pheasant. It wasn’t posing as nicely, but this picture gives a better sense of the iridescent feathers:
And from Keira McKenzie in Perth, Australia, we have three shots of the willie wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys):
The first is taken at a neighbour’s place. She feeds him so he comes every morning:
The other two are taken at Hyde Park.
They are called Djiji Djiji in Nhe Noongar language, which is much like the chittering it makes when cross or wary. The Latin name is Rhipidura leucophrys/
Despite being known for their chittering, they are also incredibly melodic. They wag their tails from side to side, but are actually the largest of the fantails.
They are known for their outrageous courage and will take on anything – cats, eagles, hawks, people – and win! Every time 😀
They are an utter delight and common all over Australia (though the ones in my neighbourhood have gone along with the trees – the increasing heat has caused them to stop nesting in my front yard).
And they are tiny. Tiny and mighty 🙂
They are very cute. And fierce with their white eyebrows over their bright black eyes 🙂
From Mark Gregor-Pearse in Texas:
This Great Egret (Ardea alba) was photographed on March 9, 2026, at the Puente Río Cuale in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with an iPhone 17 Pro. These large wading birds hunt by remaining perfectly still before striking with lightning speed to spear fish, frogs, and other small aquatic prey. Males and females look nearly identical, so it is difficult to determine the sex from a photo. In the early 1900s, Great Egrets were nearly driven to extinction because their delicate breeding plumes were prized for women’s hats. Public outrage over the slaughter helped launch the modern bird conservation movement:
And a cat from Pratyaydipta Rudra:
I am hoping to send some photos for readers’ wildlife when I get some time. Meanwhile I thought you may enjoy this photo of a stray cat from India (a friend sent it to me). It really wants to experience the “magic”, but alas! It’s too expensive.
All I can say is “WTF,” or rather the words it stands for. If you’ll recall, when Trump announced the American attack on Iran, he implied that our intervention would lead to regime change and freedom for the oppressed Iranian people: He said to those people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” Since then he’s been canny about regime change, never explicitly saying that it’s one of the goals of the war.
Nevertheless, Trump’s repeated assertions that there has already been regime change implies further that this was a goal. But his statement is mendacious, for he simply means that by assassinating the Ayatollah and his son, there’s new leadership in Iran. That’s true, but the new leader of Iran is a hard-liner who clearly wants to carry on with the theocracy.
Perhaps because I read Masih Alinejad’s X feed every day, and have been doing so for years, I am desperate to see her aspirations met: democracy in Iran and an end to religious control of the government and violent oppression of dissidents and protestors.
Now, however, Trump is not only canny about that goal, but seems to have repudiated it. If he bombs all of Iran’s infrastructure, as he’s threatened to do, that is an attack on the people of Iran. It also won’t endear us to the people, most of whom previously wanted U.S. intervention to promote freedom. The lates report from the WSJ says this:
Here’s an excerpt bit from the WSJ, followed by Trump’s proclamation on Truth Social:
President Trump escalated his aggressive rhetoric toward Iran, threatening to wipe out the entirety of the country’s civilization if Tehran doesn’t cede to his demands by 8 p.m. Tuesday. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Note his bogus claim that “we have Complete and total Regime Change”, with “less radicalized” people in charge. That’s a baldfaced lie.
More from the WSJ:
Trump’s message marks an escalation of his aggressive rhetoric toward Tehran. He has threatened to strike all of Tehran’s power plants and bridges. Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.
Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.
This could of course simply be posturing: Trump’s unused strategy of blustering and making threats he has no intention to carry out—a way to force Iran to sign on to a ceasefire. We don’t know. But if the “extortion, corruption, and death” will finally end, so will the hopes of the Iranian people and those of us who want to see them living free.
We’ll see what happens this evening.
