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.
Why is this feature like lox and a schmear? A: Because it’s on a roll. (Sort of.) I now have a total of four sets of photos in the queue, one of which I’ll post today. But please send your good photos, and a warm handshake to those who have done so. I hope people realize that readers who send in good add a unique feature for this website: high-quality and delightful pictures of nature. Do compliment the photographer if you like their photos.
Today we have pictures from Ephraim Heller, documenting his recent trip to Namibia. (More will be coming.) Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Today I begin a series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems.
The Namib Desert is the oldest desert on earth, with conditions that have persisted for 55 – 80 million years. At ~80,950 square km (31,250 sq mi), it is far and away the largest desert I have visited. It stretches ~2,000 km (1,200 mi) along southwest Africa’s Atlantic coast, including the entire length of Namibia. There is essentially no rain at all near the coast (2 mm/year average), but in places there is coastal fog that is the primary source of water for the desert plants. The stable climate over millions of years has resulted in high endemism. Of the ~3,500 documented species in the Namib, more than 1,000 are endemics.1-2. On the drive from the capital, Windhoek, visitors pass through Solitaire. It consists of a fuel station, a bakery and café, a general store, a small lodge, and a yard decorated with old vehicles. The nearest real town is hundreds of kilometers distant. When vehicles broke down, cars and trucks were simply left. Some of the collection includes American classics from the mid-twentieth century:
While having lunch at a picnic table in Solitaire, I observed several yellow mongooses (Cynictis penicillata) playing. Technically, Solitaire is semi-desert, so there are a few shrubs for the mongoose. They often share burrow systems with the local ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), which confused me as I tried to decide if I was seeing mongooses or ground squirrels. This is a mongoose:
Our destination in the Namib desert was Sossusvlei, where the sand dunes are among the highest in the world. “Dune 7” dune, the tallest, is 388 m (1,273 ft) in height. Vlei is the Afrikaans word for “marsh,” while sossus is Nama for “no return” or “dead end”. The area is the drainage basin for the ephemeral Tsauchab river. The Namib Sand Sea, of which the Sossusvlei dune field is a part, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The dunes began forming around five million years ago. Sand from the Orange River was carried west into the Atlantic, swept north by the Benguela Current, then driven back inland by the prevailing south-southwest winds. Over millions of years the sand accumulated into a dune field ~32,000 sq km (12,400 sq mi) in extent. The sand is iron-oxide coated quartz, and younger sand near the base of dunes is paler while older sand higher up is a deeper reddish-orange, due to greater oxidation. The colors in these photos are real, and not simply me going wild with the saturation slider in my photo editing software. For scale, note the full-grown trees at the base of the dune in the first photo.
About a kilometer walk across the sand lies a small clay pan named Deadvlei (meaning “dead marsh”) where reside camelthorn trees (Vachellia erioloba) that have been dead for 600 – 900 years. There has been no water here since the fourteenth century! The combination of extreme dryness and intense heat inhibits microbial activity so thoroughly that the wood is preserved.
Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) and springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) antelope are the primary large mammals of the Namib. Gemsbok can survive for extended periods without drinking free-standing water, meeting their requirements through vegetation. Here is a gemsbok in its habitat:
Here is a herd of springbok in their environment:
Toktokkie beetles (Onymacris unguicularis) are a group of darkling beetles with over 200 species in Namibia, and 20 in the Namib desert. We saw them throughout Namibia. I don’t know the species of this individual, but some species engage in fog-harvesting: when Atlantic fog rolls in, beetles climb to the crests of dunes and orient head-downward, body inclined away from the wind. Water condenses on the elytra, runs along ridges on the beetle’s back, and reaches the mouthparts. A beetle can take in water equivalent to ~40% of its body mass from a single fog event.
The garden locust or tree locust (Acanthacris ruficornis), is widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Tt is technically a grasshopper:
Namaqua doves (Oena capensis) are ubiquitous, but I think they are pretty. They are the smallest doves on the African continent:
The Kalahari tree skink (Trachylepis spilogaster). I had no idea that some skinks are arboreal:
The extreme dryness and very low population density of Namibia make it one of the prime sites for astronomical observatories and night sky photographers:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 23, 2026 and National Detroit Style Pizza Day, celebrating a rectangular pie that has spread to Chicago. Wikipedia says this:
Detroit-style pizza is a rectangular pan pizza with a thick, crisp, chewy crust. It is traditionally topped to the edges with mozzarella or Wisconsin brick cheese, which caramelizes against the high-sided heavyweight rectangular pan. Detroit-style pizza was originally baked in rectangular steel trays designed for use as automotive drip pans or to hold small industrial parts in factories. It was developed during the mid-20th century in Detroit, Michigan, before spreading to other parts of the United States in the 2010s. It is one of Detroit’s most famous local foods.
Here’s supposedly the best Detroit-style pizza in Chicago, but I haven’t tried it though it looks good (there does seem to be a surfeit of crust). But my own preference in Chicago is for stuffed pizza or deep-dish pizza, and it’s not the same anywhere else in the U.S.
Is Lionel Messi the greatest of all time? His latest landmark achievement — breaking the record for most goals scored at the World Cup with his double against Austria — certainly strengthens his case.
Messi, inevitably, was the centre of attention in Dallas, his goals earning Argentina a 2-0 win that booked the reigning champions’ place in the knockout stages.
The Inter Miami forward’s 17th and 18th World Cup goals (and fifth in two matches) took him past Germany’s Miroslav Klose as the all-time leading scorer in football’s biggest tournament.
It came after he missed a penalty earlier in the first half, a wasted opportunity that only delayed the inevitable.
. . . Argentina never force-fed Messi; instead, as usual, chances around the box found him. His fluid movement repeatedly placed him in prime positions, even as Austria did well to box him in as he strolled around the pitch. For a while, Austria reacted quickly when he escaped and blocked two of his close-range chances.
But as half-time approached, the goal felt more inevitable. Argentina’s plays were too pretty, the outbursts too swift for Messi not to capitalize. In the 38th minute, Facundo Medina found Messi trailing, unmarked at the top of the box, and Messi found the back of the net. He had read the play brilliantly, but you can’t leave him open like that.
Fans wept in the stands as Messi and his team-mates huddled in celebration. Now the songs began in earnest.
Here are 15½ minutes of highlights. On the video, the record-setting strike begins at 4:20 and Messi scores at 4:30, and the moment is replayed several times. His second goal is at 13:10. (He misses a penalty kick at 2:36.) In the opinion of many cognoscenti, he’s the greatest soccer player of all time. I’m not soccer expert, but I have never seen better.
It’s Monday, June 22, and Vice President JD Vance is hailing the Geneva talks as “historic,” pointing to the unprecedented level of face-to-face engagement between U.S. and Iranian leaders. Historic indeed—rarely have the two sides been close enough for Iran to spit directly in Washington’s face.
After eighteen hours of “intensive” talks, the second major round of U.S.–Iran negotiations in Geneva this year concluded with Tehran projecting absolute confidence and Washington walking away with little of substance to show for it.
Reports swirled yesterday that negotiations had already been derailed, after Trump warned the Iranians to restrain Hezbollah or be struck again, “harder.” In response, the Iranian delegation walked out, threatening to boycott the talks unless Trump issued an apology and Israel fully withdrew from southern Lebanon. Neither outcome materialized. Instead, mediators circumvented the roadblock by establishing a “High-Level Committee” for overseeing further technical discussions and a joint “de-confliction cell,” involving Lebanon, to monitor and halt military operations.
What does this mean for Israel? Iran’s maximalist posturing is driven by necessity: the regime must signal strength to an increasingly fractured hardline base at home while reassuring Hezbollah that it is not abandoning its most powerful ally and core deterrence asset. But the posturing is also engineered to pay off. Clause 13 of the MoU holds that talks on a final nuclear deal begin only once the U.S. implements clauses 1, 4, 5, 10, and 11—a ceasefire on all fronts including Lebanon, the lifting of the naval blockade, the reopening of Hormuz, oil-sanctions waivers, and the release of frozen assets. By design, then, the longer Tehran can keep Lebanon lodged as a roadblock, the more frozen assets it reclaims and the more oil it exports—all before conceding a thing on its program. Fittingly, Iran’s negotiating team focused solely on implementing these clauses; Iranian media noted that not one member of its “nuclear committee” even made the trip.
So while the optics are ambiguous, we shouldn’t assume the U.S. has abandoned the Israeli position in southern Lebanon. Given what Iran had to gain by making the maximalist demand, it was inevitable. Ultimately, Tehran may settle for a half-victory in Lebanon, halting Hezbollah’s active degradation rather than forcing a full withdrawal, in exchange for a fuller victory in the economic or nuclear arena.
Meanwhile, Trump’s idea of handing the fight against Hezbollah to Syria seems never to have reached the table. In a Fox News interview yesterday, he said he was “disappointed Israel can’t put Hezbollah away.” “They can’t do anything without knocking buildings down,” he added. Praising the Syrians as more “precise,” he went further: “I’m close to giving it over to Syria.”
As usual, it’s depressing, but it’s true. Israel is pretty much on its own, and Trump doesn’t seem to understand urban warfare. I’m not betting that Syria will get rid of Hezbollah.
Vice President JD Vance said Iran agreed to allow international inspections of its nuclear program, which would restore a safeguard from President Barack Obama’s deal with Tehran that President Donald Trump threw out.
“That is a major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” Vance said Monday at a news conference at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland. U.S. and Iranian officials are working with mediators from Qatar and Pakistan to turn last week’s fragile ceasefire into a more comprehensive peace agreement. Vance said he would return home soon as technical talks moved forward.
The Iranians threatened to walk out Sunday after Trump warned the U.S. may “hit Iran very hard again,” Vance said. But the negotiators stayed past 1 a.m. local time, and their team of technical experts was still present, Vance said.
“What we told the Iranians yesterday is when you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record,” Vance said. He denied that Trump’s threat threw “a wrench into the system.”
The ceasefire memorandum that Trump signed at the Palace of Versailles on Wednesday gave the U.S. and Iran 60 days to resolve their hardest disputes, including over the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile and the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend, Israeli attacks in Lebanon tested the deal as Iran threatened to close the strait, a major choke point for global oil and gas shipments.
If you remember, Trump ditched the Obama agreement because he considered it fatally flawed, injurious to American security, the inspection provisions were weak, and Obama’s deal didn’t address Iran’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads. So the question to Trump is obvious, “Why did you go back to making a deal that you once consider fatally flawed?” You can be sure, though, that Israel will be monitoring Iran for compliance along with the International Atomic Energy Agency. We also need to pay attention to whether the agreement has time limits, so that after a given period Iran will again allowed to enrich uranium to the 90% level required for nuclear weapons. Remember that Trump asserted that Iran would never have nuclear weapons.
Andy Burnham has twice run unsuccessfully for the leadership of Britain’s governing Labour Party. Now his decisive victory in a special parliamentary election puts him within reach not just of that goal, but of entering Downing Street as prime minister.
A fluent communicator known for his bonhomie and charisma, Mr. Burnham has for nine years been mayor of Greater Manchester, where he cultivated an image of optimism, activism and the type of authentic plain speaking characteristic of northern England.
With a seat in Parliament representing Makerfield, in northwest England, Mr. Burnham will need the support of 81 fellow Labour lawmakers to mount a leadership challenge to the country’s unpopular prime minister, Keir Starmer.
Supporters see Mr. Burnham — who in Manchester won the nickname “king of the North” for his defense of the area during the Covid-19 pandemic — as Labour’s potential savior against the populist right-wing Reform U.K. party, led by Nigel Farage. Critics portray Mr. Burnham as a political chameleon who would face the same economic constraints that have stymied Mr. Starmer’s lackluster government, and the same restless, impatient electorate.
Either way, he would be a different kind of leader from the one he wants to replace.
“He’s just optimistic and happy and seems to enjoy being a politician,” said John McTernan, an adviser to Tony Blair when he was prime minister and someone who has known Mr. Burnham since his days as a researcher for a lawmaker in south London. “Leaders either inspire you, or they slightly depress you,” Mr. McTernan added, noting that there had been several recent prime ministers “who didn’t really seem to enjoy it” — Mr. Starmer included.
I am not conversant with British politics, but I just looked up Burnham’s record on the Jews since Labour has been accused of being tinged with antisemitism. Fortunately, there’s not a shade of antipathy to Jews in Burnham’s record.
Here’s a video of a new report showing Starmer’s resignation speech. He does appear to be on the verge of tears. (I can’t comment on the editorializing by the journalists.)
*Reader Pyers sent me a link to a cool story in the Times of London about an Australian spider that rigs up a snare that catapults green tree ants into its web for consumption (the original Current Biology paper is here). An excerpt from the Times, which has videos, as does the Current Biology site. Sadly, I couldn’t find any on YouTube that I could embed, but do look at how fast that snare snaps up the ant!
The ballista was an ancient Roman catapult used to hurl bolts and stones. Now, in the rainforests of northern Australia, a newly discovered spider has been seen building a similar contraption from silk.
The nocturnal spider catches green tree ants with a unique spring-loaded snare that flings them into its web, one at a time, with astonishing precision.
The species, found near Cooktown in the north of Queensland, has been nicknamed the ballista spider after the Roman siege weapon. Scientists say that its hunting method is an unprecedented example of specialisation in a spider’s web.
Green tree ants are aggressive, territorial and live in large colonies, which makes them dangerous prey. When threatened, they can summon vast numbers, which is enough to deter most small predators.
However, the ballista spider has found a novel way to feast on them. During the day it hides in foliage above a trail used by the ants. After dark it lowers itself and fixes a tight silk line between a leaf that the ants can reach and a twig above it.
It repeats this for hours, until it has made a fan of between 15 and 60 stretched silk lines, suspended between the leaf and a branch above. On the leaf, the lines all meet at one point, marked with a tiny silk cone.
The result is a loaded spring. The stretched silk stores energy. The cone is the trigger.
After the spider finishes the trap a green tree ant will be drawn to the cone. The researchers suspect that the spider adds a pheromone scent to attract the ant and provoke it into attacking.
The ant will bite into the cone, which springs the snare. The cone breaks free from the leaf and the stretched silk lines snap upwards. The ant, unable to let go of the sticky silk in its jaws, is ripped from the surface of the leaf and hurled upwards into a web the spider has built above.
Once it bites into the silk, spring-loaded cone, the ant is snatched up at an acceleration of 1300 meters/sec²! And there’s a bit more:
Professor Ajay Narendra, of Macquarie University in Sydney, said: “It’s very unusual for a spider to feed on ants, because they’re notoriously dangerous, and even more bizarre to find a spider that eats only one particular ant species.
“The ballista spider’s snare is bioengineered to store elastic energy in the silk and rapidly release it, giving it incredible instantaneous power density, greater than any other specialised silk-based biological catapults.
“The ants it preys on have adhesive pads on their feet, so the contraction of the bundle of tension lines has to overcome a force of many times the ant’s body weight to lift it.”
Here’s a diagram from the Current Biology paper by A. Naredra et al., but it’s no substitute for looking at the video.
*And it’s time for some DUCK NEWS from the “reliable” Associated Press. It turns out that a Pekin duck named Merlin, wearing Mexico’s colors, has become the mascot of that country’s World Cup Bid. Merlin even showed up at Claudia Sheinbaum’s press briefing (you may recall that she’s Mexico’s first woman President and first Jewish President.):
Wearing the green jersey of Mexico’s national soccer team and a FIFA tie, he waddled into the room ahead of President Claudia Sheinbaum, took a seat facing reporters and quickly became the star of her Monday morning news briefing.
Merlín the duck — Mexico’s unofficial World Cup mascot — didn’t take any questions; his owner, Carla Gómez, did that for him.
Gómez, a street vendor who sells water and soft drinks, introduced her family with pride and determination, presenting them as representative of countless other working-class Mexicans. “We are the working part” of Mexico, she said.
Sitting beside the lectern, with Merlín at the center, were her sons, Carlos, 22, and Cristian, 14, who “doesn’t rest after school” and helps her every day by selling goods and carrying packages.
Merlín, he said, is “the boss of our little business. He’s the one who follows behind us, making sure we’re working and doing things the right way.”
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The family takes great care with his diet, feeding him small fish, crickets and, on Sundays, even a meat taco.
Gómez said she was moved by the way Merlín captured the hearts of World Cup fans.
“It has been the best thing that has happened to us in this life,” she said, though she noted that other ducks the family had owned also became local celebrities in Mexico City’s historic center, including Bruna, who wore tennis shoes.
The president eventually had to cut off questions to move the news conference along, but not before trying to pet Merlín and posing for a photo with the family.
Everybody loves ducks! (A chicken just wouldn’t do as a mascot.) I am so glad that they take care of Merlin. They might think of giving him freeze-dried mealworms, too! Here’s a short video of Shinbaum and Merlin:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s getting a treat later:
Hili: No meat for dinner? Andrzej: Don’t worry, I’ve got something delicious for you.
In Polish:
Hili: Bezmięsny obiad?
Ja: Spokojne, mam dla ciebie smakołyk.
(Photo: D.M)
*******************
From Nicole:
From Stacy (Matthew points out that this works only if you mispronounce the painter’s name):
From Masih, a woman in the Morality Police (black burqa) is ejected by young Iranians. This is the regime the U.S. is allowing to stay:
A pro regime morality police tried to bully a group of teenage girls in the Tehran metro. Then something beautiful happened.: Young women and men stood together and kicked the bully out of the arena.
The war against women continues under Islamic Republic, but people inside Iran… pic.twitter.com/QOsSihbnNt
— PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE (@Protect_Wldlife) June 21, 2026
Another heartwarming rescue, this time with no humans involved. Elephants are fricking smart:
A mother elephant and her calf making their way to a pool. As the pair stopped for a drink, the young elephant suddenly lost its footing and slipped into the water. Within seconds, the calm scene transformed into a frantic rescue effort. The distressed calf struggled while its… pic.twitter.com/eM3NGNdPMI
— Beauty of music and nature 🌺🌺 (@Axaxia88) June 21, 2026
TWO I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was about nine years old. https://t.co/eowsTa4C1Q
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has written a new book, whose cover is below (the title translates to The Blue Stone of Sisyphus. Sadly, it’s unlikely to be translated into English). I had an idea that this might be a memoir or autobiography, but I knew that Andrzej, who has had a varied and fascinating life (for example, as a newborn his life was saved by a Nazi doctor), could not limit his writing to autobiographical details. I asked him what it was about and when it would appear, and got this reply:
I still don’t know when the book will be published, probably not until the fall. And what it actually is, I don’t really know myself, because it’s supposedly a memoir, partly literature (but with zero fiction), partly essays, because there’s a lot of politics in it. A troublesome mix for a bookseller.
And I was pleased to see that the cover featured a picture that I took on January 4, 2014, on my first visit to Andrzej and Malgorzata (Andrzej had asked me about the photo before, and I said SURE!)
I remember that we were all walking together, and I dropped behind them. When they walked ahead in a loving pose, I couldn’t resist taking the photo. Andrzej remembered the occasion but got the date slightly wrong:
As I recall, it was the fall of 2013, and we were at the Dobrzyń harbor. We wanted to show you the place where we had scattered Małgorzata’s mother ashes, and the hill where the stronghold had once stood when the Teutonic Order was brought here. You fell behind because you were taking photos of some ducks, and we went ahead, talking about our own concerns.
And while I’m at it, I’ll add my other favorite picture of my surrogate parents, along with the late Cyrus on the porch and Hili at lower left. This was taken on July 24, 2024. Good times.
Since free will is apparently boring, how about some movie recommendations? The other day I called my sister to get film recommendations, knowing that she often goes to the movies with her son Steven (my nephew), an ardent cinemaphile who makes his living writing about movies. I think his taste in cinema is quite impeccable, and so, when he emailed me with some recommendations, I asked if he’d give us a list of his favorite movies. What he sent me is indented below: a list of his 11 “greatest films ever made”, along with seven runners-up. I’ve put an asterisk next to the ones I’ve seen and have added links to each movie.
I’d pay serious attention to this list, for Steven’s recommendations have led me to some terrific films. Here we go (the list is in descending order):
Every ten years, the British magazine Sight and Sound releases two definitive lists of the greatest films ever made, the results of polling hundreds of critics (for list #1) and hundreds of filmmakers (for list #2). Everyone submits their top ten, and the ballots are aggregated. It’s a dream of mine to participate in the critics’ poll. Here, in case I’m ever invited, is my current list of 11 favorite films, presented in roughly descending order. (I’d have to eliminate one, but I can’t do it without rewatching all of them.) The list is more a record of my own subjective tastes (and what’s continued to resonate from childhood into middle age) than a syllabus for a “milestones in cinema” survey course. You’re welcome to use or share it if you think people might find it useful. I think it’s best to present them without explanation, as any buildup or interpretation I provide might color the impressions of first-time viewers.
When I asked where Tokyo Story was (one of my two favorite foreign films, made by Yasujirō Ozu), I got this reply:
Probably the very next runner-up. But Make Way for Tomorrow (roughly my #5) is actually the film that inspired Tokyo Story, and I must say I find it even more affecting. Orson Welles said it could make a stone cry.
I was appalled to discover that I’d seen only ten of the eighteen films, so I do have some watching to do. In general, the ones I’ve seen on the list are great, and I was glad to see that the largely neglected film “The Last Picture Show” was in the top eleven. I still think it’s the best American film ever, but I emphasize that Steven ranks three films I haven’t seen higher than that one.
Below is one of my favorite scenes from that movie: Sam the Lion (played by Ben Johnson) reveals a bit of his history to Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) as they’re fishing. Sam’s son Billy, played by Sam Bottoms (yes, Timothy’s younger brother) is depicted as mentally disabled. For his performance in this movie, Johnson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1971.
To me—and this will rile people up—this scene is the modern-day equivalent of Shakespeare, but spoken in Texas jargon. I find it extremely moving when Sam confesses, in a low-key manner, that he was hugely in love with a married woman that they all know. I was so taken with this movie that when I went to a wedding in Texas, I made a special side trip to Archer City, Texas, where the movie was filmed. It’s the same as in the movie. It’s a great film and you should see it.
Many of the actors in the movie were making their first appearance and then went on to do well in movies, though Ben Johnson was already well known from his previous appearance in western movies (he started off as a real cowboy). This casting by Bogdanovich is sheer genius:
Taste is subjective, but my taste in movies is largely congruent with Steven’s. But please give your reaction to the list, suggest movies that you think should be on it, and note the movies you don’t think should be on it.
Today we have two videos from Tara Tanaka, who has been absent a while due to a drought Florida that dried up much of the wetlands on the family property, creating an absence of wading birds that she used to feature. Fortunately, as she writes below, the drought may be over. In the meantime, we have a kayaking video and a video featuring a BOBCAT.
In 2024 when we had a swamp full of water, we got a sit-on-top kayak that I could use to shoot from and that my husband could use to get out into the swamp to manage exotic plants. I chose this one because it’s incredibly stable, and I wanted an open deck to be able to paddle without having the camera in front of me. This kayak has a seat that swivels 360 degrees, allowing me to mount my tripod with a 500mm lens in the stern, and then just pivot around between paddling and videoing. This was the maiden voyage in our Nucanoe kayak.
I was able to make quite a few trips out during the 2024 nesting season, and after a relatively dry winter and then one good rain, made a few trips out in 2025. I stopped going out not because there wasn’t enough water to float the kayak, but because it was getting so shallow and our alligators that patrol the rookery for raccoons and snakes are so big that I didn’t feel comfortable paddling right over one with just a couple of feet between us. It wasn’t long after that that a couple in a canoe in Lake Kissimmee paddled over an 11’ gator in 2’ of water causing the gator to thrash and overturn the canoe, with a tragic ending.
The swamp has been dry for at least 9 months, with only a few pools of water, and now that it’s really starting to rain I’m hoping that the water level will return to normal and the birds will return to nest next spring.
A 5-minute YouTube video, narrated by Tara, showing the maiden voyage of the canoe (sound up.) You can see there are still birds around. Can you identify them?
And here’s a Vimeo video with an animal encounter. Enlarge this as you can see a lot more detail on full screen.
We had seen one or two coyotes around 9:30 the last two mornings. Hoping they would return for a third day. I got my camera ready in the living room to try to record them. About 9:00 my husband said he saw one, so I made some final adjustments for the lighting and began to search for something moving in the distance. When I finally centered the subject in the viewfinder, I said “I think I’m looking at a bobcat.” Almost immediately the cat stood up and as I panned with it I was shocked when two coyotes ran into the frame, one on each side of the cat. Enjoy the interactions between the two species and between the very bonded pair of coyotes. I believe the female is pregnant.
After I finished filming I just sat in disbelief that I had had the opportunity to record something so unique – and from my living room! I feel like I could have gone to Yellowstone and spent a month in the field and not witnessed an encounter like this. Because of the dramatic temperature difference between the thawing ground and the sun heating the brown grass, the waves of heat shimmer intensified as the sun got higher and you can see them rippling across the screen. Despite the extreme conditions, I was thrilled that I was able to record the interaction so clearly from 1000’ away, and through a double-paned window.
We should have a pond full of water with waders arriving to nest right now, however due to a severe drought that started over a year ago the entire swamp is dry. Without water to allow our large alligators to patrol under the nests and protect them from predators, I’m afraid that our hundreds of waders that nest here every year will not feel safe and will likely nest elsewhere.
Filmed with a Panasonic GH6 + Nikon 500mm f2.8 lens. Since I filmed it from inside the house, I used the audio from a video I shot from the yard last year.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go; after at three-day holiday weekend in America (“Juneteenth”), it’s back to the grind today: Monday, June 22, 2026 and World Rainforest Day. Here’s a flower and a stick insect I photographed in the Parque Amistad in Costa Rica in 2012. I know neither species:
Los Angeles, where the last game was played, is full of Iranian exiles. The crowd booed as the Iranian national anthem was played, but (contrary to FIFA rules), plenty of Iranian flags were displayed: the pre-revolution “lion flag”. Props for the dissidents and exiles.
There was simply no debate over the moment of the match and it is one that Iran will cherish, even more so if they are to progress to the World Cup knockout stages for the first time. Every angle of Alireza Beiranvand’s preposterous save to prevent Belgium taking the lead approaching the hour added to the miraculousness of it all. Perhaps the most ludicrous element was that Beiranvand appeared to have been eliminated from the game when the ball dropped at the feet of Maxim De Cuyper inside the six-yard box, the goal gaping. Yet, while scrambling on the turf after seesawing to his left in an attempt to intercept Kevin De Bruyne’s rolled cross, Beiranvand stuck out a strong left hand to shut the door in the face of De Cuyper, before smothering the ball.
Here are 15 minutes of highlights of the Belgium-Iran game. The “preposterous save” by Beiranvand is at 7:35.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain announced his resignation on Monday, bowing to a mutiny inside his party and a challenge to his leadership of the country.
Mr. Starmer said he would remain as prime minister until a new party leader is selected, by September, rather than fight to remain in the job he won almost two years ago. His decision clears the way for Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, extending a period of political turmoil for the country since it voted to leave the European Union in 2016.
“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Mr. Starmer said in brief remarks in front of No. 10 Downing Street, his voice breaking with emotion at times.
“I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.”
The most likely replacement for Mr. Starmer is Andy Burnham, whose resounding victory last week in a special election energized his bid to oust the prime minister. Mr. Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester and one of Labour’s most popular politicians, received almost 55 percent of the vote in the Makerfield district.
The UK has never recovered from the Brexit referendum. Also:
*As Veep J. D. Vance is in Switzerland trying to lubricate the U.S./Iran talks, it still looks as if Trump is not only desperate to cut a deal (perhaps more desperate than is Iran), but the deal in the offing looks bad for the U.S.:
President Donald Trump’s effort to strike a deal with Iran faced significant headwinds on Sunday, as Tehran flexed its control of the Strait of Hormuz, Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes and the right flank of Trump’s party continued to accuse him of making too many concessions to secure an agreement.
The challenges underscored the difficulty of Trump’s task as he seeks to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting agreement after months of war sent energy prices skyrocketing.
Ending the fighting addressed Trump’s immediate concerns about oil prices and the stock markets, but it left unresolved the question at the heart of the conflict: what limits, if any, Iran will accept on its nuclear program. Vice President JD Vance is meeting Sunday with senior Iranian leadersin hopes of keeping Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief.
Trump may have less leverage than he did during talks in February before the war. Then, Iranian leaders feared a U.S. attack could topple the regime. Now the government has proved it can survive, even after the Feb. 28 killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump has made clear that a halt to oil shipping out of the Persian Gulf is a pressure point. And Tehran has shown that it can send shocks through global energy markets with just the threat of attacks on ships.
Vance and other senior U.S. officials seeking a breakthrough at the bargaining table must haggle over the many issues Trump deferred to halt the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — restoring what amounted to the status quo before the initial U.S. strikes on Feb. 28. The concessions the White House has already offered to get back to the bargaining table havebecome a central line of attack for Trump’s critics.
Trump is no longer demanding regime change, despite promising Iranians that help was on the way. He says he understands why the country needs ballistic missiles, upsetting U.S. allies who feel threatened by those weapons. And he has made clear he wants to avoid anything that would derail the stock market’s upward trajectory.
“There’s not a lot of room now for him to maneuver to go back and punch back at the Iranians,” said Aaron David Miller, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations on Middle East policy.
Well, yes, there is room to go back and punch back; all Trump has to do is say that he didn’t get the deal he wanted (and touted in his announcement of the war), and therefore he had to continue attacking the Iranian military and the country’s oil facilities. He’s gone back and forth so often that I don’t understand how Aaron Miller can say that he’s now stuck in a position and can’t change it. In fact he has, as the next item shows:
*Now that the cease-fire talks are messed up because of Lebanon and other things, Trump has once again threatened to attack Iran. See? He can at least threaten to go back, even if he doesn’t mean it:
President Trump warned the U.S. could strike Iran over its support for Hezbollah, as fighting between the militant group and Israel threatened to upend the preliminary peace deal he signed last week and close the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s comments on social media came as Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland for talks with Iran that had been diverted to focusing on last week’s flare-up in Lebanon instead of the discussion on Iran’s nuclear program that the administration had wanted.
Last week, Trump and Vance aired the administration’s frustration with Israel after what they called a heavy-handed retaliatory strike nearly derailed their deal with Iran. Israel has argued that it will keep fighting as long as Hezbollah does.
Trump’s new comments Sunday focused on Iran instead.
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump said on social media Sunday. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Iranian state media said Trump’s comments violated the preliminary peace deal signed Wednesday, which bars the two sides from attacking or threatening each other.
The deal also opens the Strait of Hormuz, sets up talks on Iran’s nuclear program and calls for an end to the fighting in Lebanon—a key Iranian demand—in its opening paragraph. But fighting over the past two days led Iran to announce Saturday it had closed the strategic waterway and to say it would focus the talks on resolving the situation in Lebanon.
Fox News reported that Trump said in an interview that he had spoken with Iranian officials Saturday night and warned them not to close the strait.
“You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Fox said, quoting Trump. “You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”
Well, it’s not clear to me who started the lastest dust-up between Israel and Hezbollah, but I still can’t understand why the U.S. is demanding that Israel tolerate a terrorist group who will continue to go after northern Israel after the so-called cease-fire. Do note that Israel has discovered a huge Hezbollah base that is in, yes, tunnels in southern Lebanon. Will Hezbollah vacate it voluntarily? Of course not. The ceasefire agreement should actually specify that Hezbollah should disband and disarm itself within a short period of time. Here’s a video:
*It’s been half a century since The Selfish Gene was published by Richard Dawkins, a book that brought the gene-centered view of evolution, and its implications for competition and cooperation, to the public view, but also influenced evolutionary biologists themselves. Now, at the UK’s Freethinker site, evolutionary biologist Jamie C. Weir celebrates this anniversary with an essay called “Crystallizing Darwinism” (access is free).
The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, marks the end, or culmination, of a long scientific revolution that began with Darwin’s own book, On the Origin of Species, more than a century earlier in 1859.
And it did mark the end of reasoning that prevailed throughout the early 20th century, including ideas about the prevalence of group selection, and forms of Lamarckian inheritance (the latter still persists among evolutionary miscreants and overzealous advocates of epigenetics).
Most conspicuously, if evolution selects the fittest individuals, how could we explain the occurrence of unselfish, altruistic behaviour in nature? Why do some animals share resources within a group—like wolves or wild dogs sharing meat with the rest of their pack—when it would make sense for an individual to monopolise a resource for their own benefit? Why should a bee sting a predator in defence of its hive, when that act means certain death?
If natural selection is all about survival, why sacrifice anything that could increase your chances in the high-stakes game of life?
Perhaps, through so-called ‘group selection’, bands of individuals within a species competed against one another, propagating the attributes of successful groups into the future. A co-operating, unselfish group might well defeat a group of treacherous, back-stabbing individuals. The question became one of what natural selection was actually selecting. The individual or the group? Or something else?
Group selectionists were in good company. Even Darwin himself occasionally drifted into group-based reasoning—the subtitle of the Origin talks not about the survival of the fittest individuals, but the ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence’. But even as a group-level framework seemed to solve some evolutionary problems, it raised others.
. . . . The vulnerability of co-operating groups to invasion by cheats posed a major challenge to early group selection explanations. It is not enough to say individuals work ‘for the good of the group’, let alone, as some of the more extreme group selectionists argued, that they regulate their own population size ‘for the good of the species’. There must be something more.
The key to solving the problem of altruism came from looking within individuals, at the genetic information that acts as the recipe for building every organism.
. . .Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, then, acts not at the level of species or groups, nor even, in truth, at the level of individual organisms, but on the invisible genetic units that are the building blocks of all life. Genes work together to build bodies: automata in which they ride, do battle, and engineer their own proliferation. Genes endure—the ‘immortal replicators’—passed down from individual to individual through the generations, and we are merely their ‘survival machines’.
In The Selfish Gene, that vision—the gene-centric view of evolution—is painted in vivid prose, and with such clarity of reasoning that it has become far more than a classic of popular science. Just as evolution did not begin with Darwin, the gene’s-eye view did not begin with Richard Dawkins. One finds it being painfully pieced together throughout the mid-twentieth century, by R. A. Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 1930), W. D. Hamilton (‘The evolution of altruistic behavior’, 1963), G. C. Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966), and many others. Indeed, these names are among those most frequently cited in Dawkins’s oeuvre, particularly in The Selfish Gene.
And yet, more than any other single work, The Selfish Gene crystallises the synthesis of natural selection and genetics, making the most coherent extended explanation of the fundamental, gene-based mechanics underlying evolution. With a gift for crafting a turn of phrase, Dawkins coined expressions and concepts in the book that have since proven highly successful replicators of their own, spreading vigorously in the public imagination. Through clarity of reasoning and metaphor, Dawkins not only popularised evolutionary theory but also solidified a genuine shift in the conceptual paradigm of the field.
Remember that natural selection and genetics were precisely what the “modern synthesis”, begun by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, combined. So, by tying together how behaviors and other organismal traits not discussed in that era, The Selfish Gene didn’t really end the synthesis, but gave it a huge push forward. It’s a pity that this article didn’t mention the beginning of that synthesis, but it does call our attention to how well the gene-centered view of Dawkins’s book has held up in the last half-century. I should add that while that is probably Dawkins’s most influential book, and deservedly so, my favorite Dawkins book—because of its beautiful writing and more popular style (The Selfish Gene is not easy going!)—is The Blind Watchmaker. ˆRichard’s own favorite is The Extended Phenotype, probably because it introduces a point of view that was original with him.
*I’ve mentioned quite a few times how much I fear that Zohran Mamdani’s combination of “democratic socialism,” performative wokeness, and anti-semitism will overtake the Democratic Party, and I’m pretty sure that this Islamist has ambitions beyond being mayor of New York City. Other Democrats fear that, too, as Mamdani, once again neglecting his job as Mayor, is out on the hustings for others like himself.
A year ago this week, Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for mayor upended New York politics.
Now, in the closing days of another primary season, he has thrown himself back onto the campaign trail, this time risking his political capital in a high-stakes bid to catapult fellow leftists to primary victories against the old Democratic guard.
Mr. Mamdani and allies are attempting to unseat two Democratic incumbents, Representatives Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, whom they view as too friendly to corporate donors and Israel. They want to lay claim to a third House seat. And down the ballot, they have designs on expanding the democratic socialist bloc in Albany.
If he prevails on Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani, 34, will go a long way toward establishing socialists as a major faction in New York City politics and himself as a kingmaker capable of vaulting relatively unknown candidates to victory and sidelining erstwhile power brokers.
But a string of losses could be disastrous, weakening the mayor’s political standing just six months into his term, empowering political opponents and creating new ones.
His involvement has already alienated Black and Latino progressives, powerful labor unions and the left-leaning Working Families Party, all of which helped him get to City Hall and partnered with him as mayor. Some, like Representative Nydia Velázquez, have taken the rare step of publicly declaring they have lost trust in him.
“I have a pit in my stomach because of secondhand anxiety,” said Michael Lange, an elections analyst and fellow democratic socialist who rose to prominence chronicling Mr. Mamdani’s ascent.
“This is a way to remake the Democratic Party,” he said. “But if he loses, the knives would be out. They would be really out. The risk is that they’ll say this is more man than movement.”
The mayor’s support goes further than mere endorsements. With his popularity never higher, Mr. Mamdani has personally involved himself in everything from candidate recruitment and fund-raising to ad shoots and private strategy sessions. A pair of his top political aides are helping run two of the campaigns. And the mayor attempted to push labor unions into backing at least one of his candidates.
I have a pit in my stomach, too, and it isn’t from eating cherries. I hope he has that string of losses, as I want to see Mamdani marginalized within the Democratic Party. Note the bit where he’s against candidates that “are too friendly to Israel”. That’s one symptom of his antisemitism, which of course he’d deny.
*The AP has more on the Reflecting Pool kerfuffle. Although people have been arrested for vandalism, which Trump claims is the reason the pool is full of algae and the new coat of blue paint is peeling off, details are sketchy. I think that the algal bloom and other problems are simply the result of lack of expertise and poor planning (there was some nepotism involved in the noncompetitive choice of a contractor), just like the algal bloom in Botany Pond. We’ll see what evidence emerges in court.
President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that federal authorities had made “multiple arrests” of people he said were vandalizing the Reflecting Pool as he struggled to explain why the $14-million-plus rehabilitation project he launched for the nation’s 250th anniversary seemingly backfired.
An algae bloom has turned the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool green days after the completion of President Donald Trump’s renovation project that aimed for the shade “American flag blue.” (AP Video: Nathan Ellgren)
Trump said his predecessors had let the pool turn an algae-stained green and that he’d line it with “American flag blue” so it better reflected the Washington Monument. But after the new pool was unveiled, its blue tinge quickly became a familiar green. Workers treated it with chemicals to kill the algae, but then the painted blue lining on the bottom began to peel.
. . . “We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool,” [Trump] posted on his social media site Friday night. “Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed.”
I suppose it’s possible, given the hatred that many harbor for Trump, that there was vandalism, but I also think that it would have been more obvious given that it involves the whole pool.
He offered no details to substantiate his claim.
Agencies responsible for law enforcement and upkeep on the National Mall — the U.S. Park Police, National Park Service and Interior Department — did not respond to requests for comment. Trump on Saturday followed up by posting that Park Police “have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll,” correcting his spelling to “Pool” later.
He went on: “Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”
Lock ’em up! I find it telling that law-enforcement agencies won’t comment. At least they could tell us how many people were arrested, and for what. I also don’t understand why this issue, which, granted, is distressing, is making such big news, news comparable to that of the cease-fire deal with Iran. At least I’m pretty sure that the Reflecting Pool issue will be resolved, though perhaps not during Trump’s administration.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili beefs that she has been overlooked:
Hili: I don’t want to meddle in your work, but there’s too little about me in that book.
Andrzej: Honey, don’t disturb us right now.
See more about the book later today.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie chcę się wtrącać do waszej pracy, ale w tej książce jest za mało o mnie.Ja: Kochanie, nie przeszkadzaj teraz.
Emma is puzzled by this thing. Go to the thread if you want to learn what it is:
What is this in my two-week old micropond?
It’s a few mm long, and darts around very quickly just under the surface, forward locomotion, short spurts in a zig zag. If you change the surface light, it dives down to the pebbles, then comes back up.
Two from my feed: This first one is so cool; it make me tear up. Translation from the Polish:
While the infertile owl was away from her nest, the caregivers replaced her dead eggs with orphaned chicks… the little owl nearly went mad with happiness…
Podczas gdy bezpłodna sowa była poza swoim gniazdem, opiekunowie zamienili jej martwe jaja na osierocone pisklęta…
“This student brought their cat along to the graduation ceremony as a gesture of gratitude and appreciation, because during exam days, they would stay up all night with it. I believe that people who possess such delicate sentiments are exemplary individuals with their conscience and compassion.”
“Bu öğrenci, mezuniyet törenine kedisini de yanında götürmüş, teşekkür ve minnettarlık olarak, çünkü sınav günlerinde onunla sabaha kadar uyanık kalıyormuş.
Ben bu ince duygulara sahip insanlar vicdan ve merhametleri ile örnek insanlardır.” pic.twitter.com/0qhK0GrY36
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old, and would have been 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/umyYcoo6oC
And two food tweets from Dr. Cobb, now safely ensconced in Old Blighty:
Tonight we ate at the Gueule du Loup in Arles. The best meal we have eaten in ages. Simple entrées (raw veg and anchouiade, polenta and chickpea chips with fromage blanc aioli), exquisite pollock with a subtle ginger sauce, Camargue black rice and a vegetable paté, with champagne and a local red.
Desserts – nougat glacé and millefeuilles – were equally surprising and subtle. Not sweet, full of complex tastes. Delightful and reasonably priced €110 for two, incl drinks. We chatted to the chef, David Prugne, and his équipe. If you are in Arles, go there! http://www.restaurant-lagueuleduloup.fr
I don’t usually respond to attacks on me from the Discovery Institute and its flacks, but I couldn’t resist listening to this 25-minute talk on free will from pediatric neurosurgeon and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Egnor, who’s been going after me for years (read the last link to Wikipedia, and his Discovery Institute biography here).
This talk was given “at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith presented by Discovery Institute’s Center on Science & Culture”. The title of that conference, which featured lots of religionists, was “Endowed By Our Creator: Science,Faith, and the American Idea,” and the conference—and Egnor—made no bones about their a priori belief in God. And if you believe in God the way these people do, there has to be free will: otherwise you cannot freely choose to accept God, to behave according to his/her/its dictates, or, if you’re a Catholic like Egnor, choose Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.
Egnor was once an atheist but then converted to Catholicism in his forties,after he had a “Damascus Road moment” involving hearing a voice. As Grok says, Egnor “has spoken about falling in love with Catholic theology and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Thomism), which he integrates with his scientific and philosophical views on topics like the mind-body problem, dualism, consciousness, and intelligent design.” He’s abandoned the idea of materialism and, as you’ll see in this video, touts the existence a non-materialistic soul that could only have been created by God (who, by the way, has also gotten credit from Egnor for “creating” the Big Bang).
The talk is briefly summarized by David Klinghoffer, another ID advocated, at the Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Today site. Click on the screenshot below to read the DI’s idea of humor:
Who are the atheist scientists? N0ne other than your host, Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (whom Egnor repeatedly misspells and mispronounces as “Saplosky”). You’d think that Egnor could at least get Sapolsky’s name right; it is not a typo. But I am honored to be lumped together with these two smart guys.
And before the video, I want to give an example from Klinghoffer’s piece of Egnor’s quasi-humorous sarcasm, which makes the religious audience roar with laughter:
Regarding Harris, Coyne, Sapolsky and the books they’ve authored, Dr. Egnor says, “The people who deny free will, the authors of these books, if you want to find out out if they believe in morality, and therefore if they believe in free will, all you have to do is tear up their royalty checks from their books. And tell them, ‘Hey, I didn’t have any choice, it’s just an act of nature.’” That’s funny.
He also offers a proposal for a book to be co-authored by the esteemed free will deniers, to be titled, We Can’t Control Our Thoughts and We Don’t Know Where They’re Coming From: Three Scientists Who Didn’t Choose to Write This Book, to be published by The Atheist Press. That made me laugh out loud. Enjoy:
Apparently the idea that we could not do other than what we did is hugely funny to these people: all you have to do is say it and they laugh. But sarcasm is not a determinant of truth.
Well, enough. If you have 25 minutes to listen to a religious argument for free will, with some misguided science thrown in, click below:
I can summarize the talk if you don’t want to listen to it. Egnor’s point is that there are four (actually five) arguments against free will. I’ll summarize them in bold (my take) and then address them in a few words. Those of you who have read my writings on free will (or Sapolsky’s or Harris’s books) should be able to refute these easily. I conceive of “free will”, as does Egnor, in the libertarian sense: if you have it, at a given moment you could have done or thought something other that what you did.
a.) Every human who has lived, is living, and will live believes in free will. Most people believe in God, too.
This is simply the argumentum ad populum: something becomes more true if more people believe it. There is no need to refute this contention; it asserts the truth of a proposition without evidence. However, Egnor goes on to present what he does see as evidence.
b.) Morality supports free will. “We all believe in some kind of morality.” “If you believe in morality, you have to believe in free will, because without free will there is no morality.”
Nope. I can frame “morality” as simply “the tenets that a society or faith considers laudable or deleterious because they facilitate or impede the smooth running of society”. Abrogating these tenets is considered bad, and they can be promoted simply by praising those who abide by the tenets or criticizing and punishing those who violate them. There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.
c.) Denial of free will is self-refuting. Here’s Egnor’s trope: “If you deny free will then you can’t choose to tell the truth, so why would you believe somebody when they say they deny free will.” This is a crazy argument, for the denial of free will is based on evidence—evidence for determinism and the lack of evidence for free will. The data involve a growing body of experiments showing that decisions are made in the brain before we become conscious of them. Other experiments involve psychological manipulation of people so that they think they have acted freely when they didn’t (brain stimulation), or they think they acted without agency when they actually did (e.g., Ouija boards).
d.) There is room for free will in nature. As Egnor maintains, there are some “aspects of nature that aren’t completely determined by the state of physics.” What are they? Quantum physics, of course, and here Egnor cites entanglement. The problem, which he ignores, is that the purely unpredictable aspects of quantum physics involve things on a micro level (movement of electrons, etc.), and those cannot be affected by your “will”. But Egnor, citing quantum physics, says it shows that “At any moment there’s room for will.” But since he sees free will as the product of an immaterial soul, he shouldn’t be using any aspect of physics to support it.
e.) Neuroscience points to the reality of free will. Since Egnor is a neuroscientist, the audience probably buys this the most. Egnor cites two bits of evidence here. First, as he says, during operations that involve stimulating parts of the brain, he says, “Patients asked to raise their arms at some point could tell whether they raised arm voluntarily or due to electrical stimulation.” And they could tell the difference.
But that is not “free will”, for your brain simply lets you know whether something you don’t understand is making you raise your arm, or whether, under orders from the doctor, you have to raise your arm at some point. It’s similar to Libet’s button-pushing experiments, when you push a button at a time your brain determines, and think you did it of your own “free will.” The problem with that, and the reason Libet and his successors have done such provocative studies, is that brain signals (fMRI, etc.) say you’re about to push a button before you become conscious of making that decision. Like Libet’s experiments, being able to distinguish something that comes from your brain’s own workings from something imposed on your brain from the outside is not “free will”. It is not the exercise of agency, but the detection of agency.
For example, sometimes the brain is stimulated and a patient waves his arm or hand. When asked by the surgeon why the patient did that, he may aver that he was waving at a nurse across the room. Egnor completely ignores the various classes of observations and experiments in which stimulation of the brain produces a false illusion of intention or false agency. These need not involve brain stimulation, but can involve psychologically tricking a subject.
I should add that Benjamin Libet (last name mispronounced by Egnor, who uses a long “i”), who became famous for detecting the signals of action before the subject was aware of “deciding” to act, wound up believing, as Egnor says, in “free won’t.” That is, though Libet accepted that decisions to do something were made deterministically in the brain, he concluded later that there was “free won’t”: patients could decide freely to cancel an action that they had already decided to do. Libet says that this veto instantiates free will because there is no neurological signal of the veto! (This is about 14 minutes into the lecture.)
The problem with this—and this must reflect deliberate misrepresentation by Egnor—is that later work involving brain-scanning shows that you can indeed predict whether a patient would veto an action or not from brain activity. Here’s the paper from PLOS One (brought to my attention by Grok) that showed this (click to read):
You can read the abstract and see that these researchers used electrical signals in the brain to show that decision to veto an action are also decided in advance. Here is the authors’ summary:
Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42]. However, the belief that humans have free will is fundamental to human society [43]. This belief has profound top-down effects on cognition [44] and even on brain activity itself [45]. The dualistic view that decisions to inhibit reflect a special “conscious veto” or “free won’t” mechanism [46] is scientifically unwarranted. Instead, conscious decisions to check and delay our actions may themselves be consequences of specific brain mechanisms linked to action preparation and action monitoring [19]. Recent neuroscientific studies have strongly questioned the concept of free will, but have had difficulty addressing the alternative concept of free won’t, largely because of the absence of behavioural markers of inhibition. Our results suggest that an important aspect of “free” decisions to inhibit can be explained without recourse to an endogenous, ”uncaused” process: the cause of our “free decisions” may at least in part, be simply the background stochastic fluctuations of cortical excitability. Our results suggest that free won’t may be no more free than free will.
Unless you think Egnor simply missed a paper that refutes his thesis, because he didn’t have a grasp of the literature, then he must be leaving it out deliberately: a scientific misrepresentation of a field by a neuroscientists who has supposedly studied the data thoroughly. This is why the word “Egnorance” is often used in connection with the man’s writings. But I won’t use it. . .
The rest is religious pilpul: Egnor immediately goes on to cite Aquinas, his hero, and to show this slide:
Where, asks Egnor, does free will come from? God, of course. His lucubrations lead him to conclude that “The Universe is more like a mind than a thing.” Therefore, he says, there must then be free will involved in the foundation of the universe (“we cannot be free if everything around us is not free”). After making the Big Bang, he believes, God created us with the ability to freely choose between right and wrong.
But wait! There’s more! He says that our possession of libertarian free will, which he claims to have proven in this lecture, also has implications for our immortality: for what happens to us after death! His “telling” argument is that since human souls, whatever they may be, are immaterial, they cannot “disintegrate like a body does.” Our souls must live forever! He concludes, to rousing applause, that “Free will is God’s fingerprint in us.”
Here we see that religion, tricked out in the trappings of science, has led Egnor to reject determinism and materialism because they don’t involve his Catholic God. But his arguments can be refuted with either logic or empirical observations and experiments. Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.
