Category: books

Nathaniel Comfort’s misguided take on The Selfish Gene at 50

October 27, 2026 • 9:51 am

Nathaniel Comfort is identified by Wikipedia as “an American historian specializing in the history of biology. He is an associate professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University”. Comfort has written several books on the history of genetics, including a biography of Barbara McClintock, and I’ve heard he’s nearly finished what is likely to be the definitive biography of J. D. Watson. I have a great deal of respect for him.

Thus I was baffled by Comfort’s new piece in Nature discussing (or rather, dissing) Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Despite that book’s influence and renown, Comfort claims that it’s outdated: indeed, not worth reading at all compared to books that discuss the view of evolution favored by Comfort. And Comfort’s favored view is that of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” (“EES”), which argues that the “neo-Darwinian view of evolution” that fused natural selection and Mendelian genetics, is wrong and needs replacement with a new theory. I’ve discussed this view at length over the years (see my posts collected here), and, along with Doug Futuyma (see his article below), I note that while new discoveries have created add-ons to evolutionary theory (and dispelled some of Darwin’s own tenets, like the widespread inheritance of acquired traits), they don’t call for a new theory of evolution. The Selfish Gene is not outmoded—far from it.

In his essay, Comfort says that Dawkins’s view of evolution by natural selection as a process you can think of as driven by “selfish genes” is wrong: it’s too narrow and best left on the shelf. You can read Comfort’s piece here or by clicking on the title below:

As you may recall, Dawkins’s main point was that the unit of evolution by natural selection was the gene, or “replicator”: a bit of DNA that can reproduce itself from one generation to the next.  The unit is not the individual, the group, or the species, but the replicator, which can be seen as “selfish” because those genes that replicate faster than their alternative forms will be the ones most represented in the the future. Faster replication can, for example, be effected by building bodies (“vehicles”) that last longer and leave more offspring than others. This is the main way we think of evolution by natural selection, but Dawkins’s “gene’s-eye view” is broader than this.  Transposable genetic elements, for example, facilitate their own reproduction and survival by replicating quickly and infesting other parts of the genome.  They spread through a species not by enhancing an organism’s adaptation, survival, or reproduction, but their own reproduction.

Further, as the book points out, a gene can spread by selection even if it reduces the survival or number of offspring of the bearer itself, but enhances the number of copies present in relatives or groupmates—via kin selection or reciprocal altruism.  This view of natural selection can be thought of as the spread of “selfish” genes, but, as Dawkins asserts repeatedly, it need not lead to selfish or aggressive behavior of individuals—one of the most common misunderstandings of the book.

The gene’s-eye view influenced not just the public, but many biologists, including me, and it clarifies a number of points that were murky (e.g., kin selection). But Comfort says it’s narrow and outmoded. Take a look at Comfort’s second paragraph:

Re-reading it now, with decades of scholarship in the history of biology under my belt, it seems less benign. The determinism baked into the “gene’s-eye view” in the book troubles me, as does the passivity of the organism in Dawkins’s telling — a “vehicle”, a mere “replicator”. The implication: that traits such as aggression are hard-wired into people. Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, new tools, fresh models and scholars in many disciplines have begun to embrace the complex reality of biology. Readers in search of an understanding of life on Earth today would do better to reach for books that take a broader view.

Yes, in fact organisms are passive, for although they can influence the spread of replicators via their own behavior, those behavioral features are themselves the product of “selfish genes” (an example is “extended phenotypes”, like the beaver dam—one subject of Dawkins’s eponymous book). This is truly a deterministic, naturalistic process that has no room for “agency,” “will”, or teleology, though I’ve suggested that truly nondeterministic processes like quantum mechanics might influence evolution by producing mutations. Absent quantum effects, evolution is indeed deterministic, and organisms are vehicles that express the products of replicators. (Yes, I know that some physicists think quantum mechanics is deterministic in ways we don’t understand.)

As for the implication that selfish genes imply the evolution of aggression or other such behaviors, Comfort apparently hasn’t got Dawkins’s message.

So what is the “broader” view of biology that, Comfort argues, should replace that of the selfish gene? It is the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” which calls for a wholesale rebuild of neo-Darwinian evolution because of things like epigenetic modification, “niche construction” (e.g., the beaver dam cited above), behavioral and morphological plasticity, and what is called “natural genetic engineering”, a quasi-teleological view, largely touted by James Shapiro, which claims that organisms engineer their own fates by some “intelligent” process that did not evolve in the Dawkinsian way.

As Doug Futuyma explains in his paper below, all the phenomena mentioned above, save “natural genetic engineering,” fit comfortably within the modern synthesis, even though some discoveries, like epigenetic modification of DNA, have been made in recent decades. (I’ll point out here that DNA modified by the environment can cause evolutionary change only insofar as it produces “selfish [modified] DNA that replicates faster than unmodified DNA. And we have almost no cases of epigenetic modification not themselves coded in the DNA forming the basis of evolutionary change.)

I’ll make just two more points; the first involving the “directionality” of evolution. Here’s more from Comfort’s piece:

For instance, neo-Darwinism teaches that evolution is a random walk through changing environments, with selection favouring whatever traits help an organism to survive. Today, many scholars argue that there has to be direction to evolution. In How Life Works (2023), for instance, journalist Philip Ball points out that in a single cell, there is an unfathomably large number of possible interactions between different kinds of molecule — and there are about 37 trillion cells in one human body. “Such a system,” Ball writes, “can only hope to be stable if, out of all this complexity, only a limited number of collective ways of being may emerge”. Living organisms are forced to evolve in those few directions.

And the neo-Darwinian idea of evolution as a random process seems to run counter to the unavoidable observation that life has evolved towards ever-greater complexity. Biochemist Nick Lane has argued that, right back to life’s origin, the main driver of this complexity is the second law of thermodynamics — entropy, the tendency toward disorder. “Energy-releasing chemical reactions are at the core of the living process of all organisms,” wrote he and others (W. F. Martin et al. Science 344, 1092–1093; 2014). The detailed chemistry behind this idea is outlined in depth in Lane’s brilliant 2015 book, The Vital Question. The overall idea is that complex life forms dissipate more heat than do their simpler counterparts. Life on Earth is pushed towards greater complexity and abundance because, given the composition of the planet, it is energetically favourable.

The first paragraph is in fact not a refutation of the selfish gene view.  The only direction to evolution—and one that Dawkins notes—is that replicators get better and better at replicating over time.  This in general leads to an increase in survival and reproduction of the “vehicles”—organisms—but it need not.  The spread of transposable genetic elements, which account for a great deal of “genetic junk” that dominates our own genome, is one example. And nobody I know of thinks that organisms are unconstrained, either by their own nature or by the environment, in the way they can evolve. There are guardrails.

Second, the discussion of why life was once simple but has become more complex is not new. For one thing, life started out simple and thus if it was to go anywhere, it had to become at least a bit more complex. But the view of unidirectional complexity is simply not true. What is true is that life is a cumulative process, with new “adaptations” evolving from old ones, so a great deal of adaptive residue remains in our genome. But you’d be hard pressed to show that “complexity” has increased unidirectionally after we had multicellar organisms inhabiting many of the world’s niches. (By the way, each organism becomes or makes niches for other organisms, so evolution creates new ways of life, but that doesn’t mean that “life is more complex”).

Finally, there are many organisms that have evolved to become less complex, as replicators that “de-evolve” some features may be favored in some environments. Parasites are a common example. Tapeworms, for example, used to be free-living flatworms, but when they invaded the guts of organisms they lost most of their nervous and sensory systems, their digestive system, and their genomes became much simpler.  Cave-dwelling organisms often lose their eyes: a decrease in complexity. Snakes used to be lizard-like organisms but have lost their limbs. Whales also lost their limbs. These examples are rife, and I won’t go on.  The point is that Comfort is either distorting what Dawkins says, distorting what the Modern Synthesis says or implies, or distorting what’s happened in evolution.

Touting the EES, Comfort tells us above that there are better books to reach for than The Selfish Gene if you wish to understand where the theory of evolution stands.  I would simply recommend Doug Futuyma and Mark Kirkpatrick’s high-level evolution textbook, simply called Evolution (Fifth Edition), published in 2022. To deal specifically with claims that the EES dismantles or greatly modifies the view of evolution in that textbook, you should read Doug Futuyma’s article below (click on the link). I’ve put its abstract below the title:

Abstract:

Evolutionary theory has been extended almost continually since the evolutionary synthesis (ES), but except for the much greater importance afforded genetic drift, the principal tenets of the ES have been strongly supported. Adaptations are attributable to the sorting of genetic variation by natural selection, which remains the only known cause of increase in fitness. Mutations are not adaptively directed, but as principal authors of the ES recognized, the material (structural) bases of biochemistry and development affect the variety of phenotypic variations that arise by mutation and recombination. Against this historical background, I analyse major propositions in the movement for an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’. ‘Niche construction’ is a new label for a wide variety of well-known phenomena, many of which have been extensively studied, but (as with every topic in evolutionary biology) some aspects may have been understudied. There is no reason to consider it a neglected ‘process’ of evolution. The proposition that phenotypic plasticity may engender new adaptive phenotypes that are later genetically assimilated or accommodated is theoretically plausible; it may be most likely when the new phenotype is not truly novel, but is instead a slight extension of a reaction norm already shaped by natural selection in similar environments. However, evolution in new environments often compensates for maladaptive plastic phenotypic responses. The union of population genetic theory with mechanistic understanding of developmental processes enables more complete understanding by joining ultimate and proximate causation; but the latter does not replace or invalidate the former. Newly discovered molecular phenomena have been easily accommodated in the past by elaborating orthodox evolutionary theory, and it appears that the same holds today for phenomena such as epigenetic inheritance. In several of these areas, empirical evidence is needed to evaluate enthusiastic speculation. Evolutionary theory will continue to be extended, but there is no sign that it requires emendation.

No, evolution does not need a rebuild, and The Selfish Gene is not outmoded. It remains, for those who haven’t read it, a page-turner.

h/t reader John, who called my attention to Comfort’s article

Another literary scam

October 25, 2026 • 10:15 am

This keeps happening to me and, I suspect, to anyone who’s written a book that’s gotten some notice.  This email that I received last week is about the fifth one of its type I got, all touting a “book club” that authors are invited to participate in. The author is first flattered by a description of the wonders if his/her book, and then invited to find out “details” or participate in an international discussion of the book.

The first time I got one of these I was flattered, sap that I am, and told them to go ahead and read Why Evolution is True as a group. I even volunteered to proffer a list of questions for the readers to ponder. At that point they asked me for $210 to cover “fees and expenses,” and then I realized that I had been hooked into a scam. I wrote back saying I had no intention of paying to help out readers, and I never heard back.  Now I either ignore these hooks or write back and tell them to leave me alone.

Here’s what I got (they always use your first name, I suppose to instill familiarity into the exchange):

Hello Jerry,

I came across Speciation and was drawn to its exploration of how new species arise and how scientists study that process. Discussing these ideas with readers would make a thoughtful conversation.

My name is Elowen, and I’m reaching out from the Australian Literary Network. We would love to invite you to an online author conversation about the book, your writing journey, and your approach to explaining research on evolution and the natural world.

Would you be interested in receiving the session details?

Warm regards,
Elowen Hartley
Australian Literary Network

One key to this being bogus is that they are trying to get general readers to connect with my technical book Speciation rather than my two trade books. I don’t recommend Speciation to readers who don’t have training in organismal or evolutionary biology as it presumes some in-depth knowledge of those fields. The book is aimed largely at graduate students and faculty in evolutionary biology.

The Australian Literary Network has a respectable-looking website, and there is an Elowen Hartley who does “international market expansion,” but no Elowen Hartley connected with the Australian Literary Network.  Did that network hire her to expand their business?

And is the Australian Literary Network even a reputable organization?  I asked Grok, “Australian Literary Network: is it a reputable organization?”, and this is what the bot told me:

No, the Australian Literary Network (australianliterarynetwork.org) is not a reputable organization. It is widely regarded as a scam targeting authors.

Key Evidence

  • Domain age vs. claims: The site claims to have operated for 7+ years (since ~2017) with 12,000+ members, hundreds of events, book clubs, and author spotlights. In reality, the domain was registered on 22 May 2026 via Hostinger (privacy-protected) and is only a few months old. It is hosted on Amazon infrastructure and has a low trust score (~55/100) from reputation checkers due to its newness and limited independent history.
  • Author reports of the same pattern: Multiple authors (on Threads, X, and elsewhere) describe nearly identical outreach: polished emails offering to “feature” or spotlight their book (often with AI-generated flattery calling the work “profound”), followed by a request for a digital copy and a $150 “coordination” or “time” fee. The group does not appear to buy copies, and it pushes for video calls with “members.” Authors who investigated noted mismatched team photos/names and other red flags.
  • Team and legitimacy issues: Named “team” members (e.g., Steven Crandell, Christine Kessides) match real independent authors, but there is no evidence they are affiliated with any Australian literary network of this kind—another common scam tactic of borrowing real names. No ABN, Australian company registration, physical address, or established presence in the Australian literary community (e.g., links to AustLit, the Small Press Network, or other known bodies) appears to exist.
  • Website style: It presents a slick, professional-looking site with generic stats, mission statements, book recommendations (often linking to Amazon), and community claims. This fits the pattern of recent AI-assisted publishing and “literary network” scams that have targeted Australian and other authors.

Legitimate Australian literary infrastructure exists (AustLit for bibliographic data, the Small Press Network for independent publishers, established journals and festivals, etc.), but this entity is not part of it.Recommendation: Treat any unsolicited contact from them as a scam. Do not pay fees, send manuscripts, or engage further. Report it via Australia’s Scamwatch if relevant, and warn other authors. Similar schemes are common in the current wave of AI-assisted literary scams.

That was enough for me. I wrote “Elowen” a somewhat testy response, but of course it’s more productive for me to publicize what they do and what Grok says about them (Google AI. Authors should know about these scams and avoid the baited hooks they dangle before you.

John McWhorter goes back to antiwoke

October 25, 2026 • 8:30 am

The other day I expressed dismay that NYT writer John McWhorter produced a piece heartily endorsing land acknowledgments (“LA”s). That was out of character for a man who got a lot of attention for his “antiprogressive” stands, encapsulated in his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. My objection to the LA piece was not just that LAs are truly woke—in the sense of being a performative act that nearly always accomplishes nothing but signaling virtue—but that McWhorter neglected the problems with them. These problems included determining who should acknowledge whom (and when) as well as the objections that many indigenous object to LAs.  In other words, his column was slanted.

But McWhorter somewhat redeemed himself with a recent column on “lived experience”, also in the NYT.  To read it, click on the headline below or find the piece archived here.

His point is about literature: whether writers should be chastised for adopting points of view that don’t come from their own ethnicity or sex. That is, is it kosher to write about the “lived experience” of people who are Hispanic, black, or Asian if you’re white, or about a woman if you’re a man?

As we know, the “progressive” answer is “no.”  I’ve attacked this viewpoint many times, arguing that one of the purposes of literature is to give the reader other points of view, and there’s no necessity that a writer can do that only by writing from the viewpoint of his sex and ethnicity, much less lived experience.  Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, my favorite novel, describes in detail the emotions of a woman, although of course Tolstoy had a Y chromosome. Likewise, his The Death of Ivan Ilych recounts what it’s like to be dying, though Tolstoy himself died 24 years later. It is so realistic, and so moving, that it was used in medical schools to teach doctors what terminal patients might experience.  You don’t have to be a woman to portray what it’s like to be a woman, nor terminally ill to imagine what it’s like.

The presumption that only members of a group can write from the “group’s viewpoint” is doubly wrong. It assumes not only that “authenticity” requires a writer to write from his own “lived experience”, but also that every member of a group shares a similar viewpoint.  Did all white men share the view of Mark Twain when he wrote the novel Huckleberry Finn, featuring an empathic view of Jim, a black man? Was it improper for Kazuo Ishiguro to write about upper-class British life in Remains of the Day?  The answer to both questions is “of course not!”

In fact, imagination can stand in for lived experience, and imagination comes from the “lived experience” of encountering or studying people not of your type. But that’s not the progressive view, which has led to recent novels being demonized or canceled simply because the writer was of the “wrong” ethnicity.  McWhorter gives some examples, beginning with Allan Gurganus, a white author who wrote about women and blacks.

[Gurganus’s] command of the Black characters was equally authoritative. He especially got behind the eyes of a woman taken to Charleston via the horrific Middle Passage and how she perceived whites on seeing them for the first time, throughout her childhood as a slave, and then living long past the Civil War.

Today, however, a fashion among certain influential people is to dismiss it as “problematic” that someone would approach those characters without having had their “lived experience.” Under this analysis Gurganus was being a kind of puppeteer, speaking for characters he couldn’t hope to portray as accurately and fully as someone of their sex or race.

Accusations of this kind have been standard since the late 2010s. Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel, “American Dirt,” sold over four million copies and was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club amid glowing reviews from many important voices, including the Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros. Suddenly, however, a chorus of detractors dismissed the book as poorly written, especially aggrieved that Cummins was a white woman writing about Mexican immigrants.

The major publishers rejected Rebecca Bruff’s “Trouble the Water” because she is white and wrote from the perspective of a Black Civil War veteran. In 2018 The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee written as a statement from a homeless Black narrator. The poem was written with care and empathy, but the predictable response from certain quarters led The Nation to publish an apology for printing it.

The Own Voices movement in the late 2010s elevated children’s books written by authors sharing the protagonists’ identities. Of late, Rachel Reid has been criticized for writing “Heated Rivalry,” a novel about gay male hockey players, when she is obviously not a gay man and has not specified whether she is a gay woman.

If you have any acquaintance with literature, you’ll be able to come up with similar examples.  My own children’s book, Mr. Das and his Fifty Cats (still unpublished), was received and read with enthusiasm by a British agent and an illustrator, but it was never shown to any publishers? Why? Because, as they told me, I wrote about India and am not Indian but “white”. If you read the book (and if you’re a publisher, please do!), you’ll see how dumb that judgment was.

Now McWhorter makes no points in this article that haven’t been made by others. But the article is valuable because the ludicrous view that authors must write from their experience as a member of the target group is a view still with us. These points must be made over and over again so long as “progressive” attitudes persist, passed on from one generation to the next.  Also, McWhorter is a superb writer himself , having a lot of experience with novels and musicals, and so makes a trenchant and compelling argument:

Broadway musicals, for example, are the product of people who created beyond their lived experiences, as the forthcoming book “Broadway in Black and White,” written by the conductor John Mauceri with interpolations by yours truly, describes. The score of “Show Boat” is a vast, plangent and achingly beautiful surge of musical and lyrical creativity, much of it channeling Black spirituals, blues and ragtime music as well as the Black characters’ speech patterns and perspective on their lives (“Ol’ Man River”). None of this was the “lived experience” of the two white, educated, affluent men who made “Show Boat,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. But they created something so powerful that after the first performance, audience members were so stunned that they at first forgot to applaud.

Kern was of course Jewish, and Hammerstein was of part-Jewish ancestry, but the musical has nary a Jew in it.  A huge portion of Broadway musicals were in fact written by Jews, but none before Fiddler on the Roof starred explicitly Jewish characters. Did anyone object to all those other musicals being “inauthentic”? I don’t think so.

The one original point in the essay is in fact made by Garganus:

Gurganus has said: “It’s extraordinary that it is considered a feat for a male human to actually imagine a female one. Fifty-one percent of human beings on earth are women, right? We’ve all spent nine months riding around in the belly of one, and yet when it comes to writing I and thinking she — impossibility looms.”

Of course I’m not trying to justify the hegemony of whites or men as authors. Far from it. There was a time, though, when members of minority groups were barred from writing nearly anything—a product of bigotry. Those days are thankfully passing, and my view is that anybody can write about anything or any characters, and the product should be judged not by whether the “lived experience” comes from real life, but by whether the writing is engaging, resonating with the viewer, listener, or reader. As I wrote in Quillette:

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Or, as McWhorter says at the end:

. . . But the idea that one should write from only one’s own experience is a willfully narrow-minded attack on creativity, empathy and even reason. It is cherished most by a vocal and generally younger minority, to whom the literary world caters out of fear of being called dirty names on social media, as well as mere expedience. Best not to poke the bear, you know.

The lived experience notion has certainly elicited pushback. This should continue, increase and ultimately render the whole idea an obsolete curiosity. This needlessly Balkanizing fashion, presented as enlightenment, is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are.

Perhaps some day before I die an agent will read Mr. Das and His Fifty Cats and not devalue it because I am “white”.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ spying

October 21, 2026 • 8:30 am

Today’s new Jesus and Mo strip, called “spying”, breaks the wall to bring the artist right into the strip. And the book they’re reading is one I just received (see below):

The “thing” is the artist, of course, who has just produced a new book: Jesus and Mo: The Chosen Ones, a “best of” collection covering the last two decades.  And the cartoons really are a hilarious collection: 151 pages of them. You can buy it here for only $18, and it would make a good present for heathens during the upcoming religious season.

I have my copy:

Anne Carson nabs Nobel for literature

October 8, 2026 • 8:15 am

Just about an hour ago, the Nobel folks gave the 2026 Literature Prize to Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson, and I admit I’d never heard of her.  I should have: as Wikipedia notes,

With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. In 2026, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

She’s produced over twenty books, including translations.

The official award by the Nobel Foundation gives this rationale:

“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

And the Nobel’s “biobibliography” adds this:

Carson once described boredom as her arch-enemy, and it is a state she confronts with drastic humour and wit. The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, published in 2001, tells of a cutting and sardonic row with a deceitful husband, its twenty-nine episodes each opening with lines of verse by the romantic poet John Keats. Keats’s sublime words about beauty being truth are, in brutal yet playful fashion, juxtaposed with this exhausting relationship drama.

An unforgettable work of Carson’s is Nox (2010), written in memory of her brother Michael, who was mysteriously absent prior to his death in Denmark in 2000. Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother. There is moreover a third voice that provides temporal depth in the shape of the Roman poet Catullus, with his famous elegy 101 in honour of his own departed brother, who like Michael died on foreign soil. Present also is Carson’s moving translation of the poem.

Throughout her entire authorship, Carson with a light touch explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her. Bearing witness to this is Float (2016), a work consisting of twenty-two chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order. Another is Wrong Norma from 2024, a diverse combination of texts with a strongly performative aspect in which Carson crosses over into various artistic and academic fields. Her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers and with opera and theatre directors demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems. It is this that lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.

Renée Szostek guessed Carson in our contest, and if there’s no earlier winner for the Peace Prize, awarded tomorrow, Szostak will be the winner.

Here’s an interview with Carson two years ago:

Richard Dawkins on the 20th anniversary of The God Delusion

October 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

The God Delusion came out in 2006, two years after Harris’s The End of Faith, a year before Hitchens’s God is Not Great., and the same year as Harris’s followup book, Letter to a Christian Nation. (Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell also came out in 2006, but I consider that a different kind of book from these.)

The four books together could be considered the foundation of “New Atheism”, which is pretty much like “old atheism” save that it leveled more aggressive attacks on religion, emphasizing its harms, and was more science-oriented than was the atheism of, say, Robert Ingersoll. (Carl Sagan wasn’t quite so aggressive against faith, but did use science to attack religion.). Now I can’t prove that these books helped promote America’s continuing rejection of faith, instantiated in the rise of the “nones,” but a lot of people have told me that this was indeed the case.

What I can say is not the case that “New Atheism” is dead. That’s like saying that “Mendelian genetics is dead”: it was an advance that changed a lot of minds, and it’s been assimilated into the culture as we move on. The blockheads who proclaim that “New Atheism is dead” are simply saying that “the arguments against faith by Dawkins et al. fail to embrace woke-ish social justice”. (This led to the lame movement “Atheism Plus”, which really is dead except in those few people who still insist that arguments against religion and gods must perforce embrace their preferred moral philosophy.)

At any rate, Dawkins has just published in the Torygraph his two-decade retrospective on The God Delusion, and you can read it for free by clicking on the headline below.  He claims no particular expertise in physics, but does show the intellectual vacuity of “scientific” evidence for God I discussed the other day, like the “fine-tuning” and “Big Bang” arguments.

If clicking on the headline doesn’t work, you can find the article archived here.

You can (and should) read the whole thing, but I’ll give a few choice quotes about arguments for God that are being resurrected by the likes of Stephen Meyer and Ross Douthat:

On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”.

We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.

The delusion of God will not lie down. Partly because it serves as a comfort blanket for those whose idea of logic takes the form, “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X must exist”. Then there’s the Great Stalin Syllogism: “Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a horrible man. Therefore God exists.” The variant that begins, “Hitler was an atheist” is equally illogical, and therefore untouched by the fact that he wasn’t.

My guess is that the “life will be intolerable without X” argument is the one underlying the weakness of the media for religion, including places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Free Press. These places are too savvy to tout the “scientific” arguments for God. Instead, they proclaim the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in our minds, ergo there must be a god which fits that hole.

Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?

Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?

But the arguments below still have a puff of stale air in their sails:

If Paley’s relative judgment is now reversed, it is not because the cosmology version of the argument from design has grown any more powerful. Rather it is that the biological version has disappeared altogether. If Paley had lived after Darwin, he would probably have agreed, for his knowledge of biology was deep and detailed.

What, then, of the cosmology version today? Our universe began in a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. The “Let there be light” moment – when conditions cooled enough for electrons to bond with nuclei, forming the first neutral atoms – came about a quarter of a million years later.
There was then a further delay of about nine billion years before the sun (and Earth) came into existence. In a triumph of wishful thinking, this sequence of events is seen by some as a vindication of the Book of Genesis. Seriously!
Nobody knows what came before the universe. A strong school of thought among physicists denies the very word “before”, because time itself began in the Big Bang. Commonsense abhors this paradox, but common sense evolved to think no more deeply than was needed to survive and reproduce.

. . .Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.

Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.

As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.

But of course the argument from design is still with us, albeit in a more sophisticated form. It is “the argument from design of features that could not have arisen in a continuously adaptive step-by-step way.” In other words, say the proponents of this nonsense, now known as “intelligent design” (“ID”), there are adaptive features of organisms that could not have arisen by natural selection itself.  All the examples touted so far, including the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting, now have plausible scenarios of origin by selection. Yet ID hangs on. That is not because its arguments are plausible. I have never seen anybody make “scientific” arguments for God, including ID, who wasn’t a believer themselves. If those arguments were plausible, we’d see a ton of avowed atheists suddenly becoming religious, but that doesn’t happen.

There’s a lot more in the piece, including Richard’s answer to the claim that he’s a cultural Christian, ergo God, but I’ll mention just one more response:

“But Dawkins,” the critics cry. “If you’d only read your theology you’d know that God is not complex at all. It’s just Theology 101. God is profoundly simple.”

Ah yes, so simple that he’s capable of listening to a billion prayers simultaneously. So simple he has the bandwidth to judge each and every sin on its merits. So simple that “the very hairs of your head are numbered” and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. All this on top of knowing exactly how to fine-tune the laws and constants of physics to ensure our eventual existence. Ah me, theology. Is it actually a subject at all?

Well, as Dan Barker said, “Theology is a subject without an object.”

Is New Atheism dead? Nope, not at all. It lives on in the minds of every erstwhile believer who, having read the arguments of Dawkins & Co., realized that there’s no more evidence for God than there is for the Loch Ness Monster.

Richard ends his piece with this sentence, “Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote in The God Delusion.”

If you are reasonably smart, how can you possibly see a rational person’s unwavering belief in God as anything other than a weakness of mind or character? (I am excluding those who were brainwashed into having faith.)

Gerald Posner: news coverage by the New York Times is unbalanced

September 20, 2026 • 9:30 am

Of course newspapers are allowed to have editorial opinions, usually expressed in op-eds written by the editors, but good newspapers are supposed to remain ideologically and politically neutral in their coverage of the news itself.  And in America the supposedly best newspaper, the New York Times (NYT), expresses its philosophy in a famous motto: “All the news that’s fit to print,” put on the masthead 119 years ago by the paper’s founders.

Now you can debate whether the paper includes all the news that is good to know about (the motto), or whether it includes trivial news of little interest (the latter is, formally, within the ambit of the motto). But the “paper of record,” as it’s called, should surely at least be objective about the news, not slanting it one way or thee other.

If you’ve followed the paper as this site has done, you’ll see that I don’t believe in the objectivity of the NYT’s news coverage.  It is strongly anti-Israel—the subject of this article—and also strongly anti-Trump (see below, and remember I’m talking about the news, not the editorials). While I’m no fan at all of our narcissistic President, I do expect objective coverage in terms of both content and balance. I really do believe in my heart that the NYT hopes that Israel will disappear, and that America will lose our war with Iran.

Gerald Posner, a very formidable figure, has arrived at the same conclusion. If you haven’t heard of Posner, you should have. He’s an investigative journalist who has written 13 books, although the list in Wikipedia comprises 14:

  • Mengele: The Complete Story (1986)
  • Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies – The New Mafia (1988)
  • Bio-Assassins (1989)
  • Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Their Fathers and Themselves (1991), ISBN 978-0-394-58299-3
  • Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), ISBN 978-0-679-41825-2
  • Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (1996), Random House, ISBN 978-0-614-05801-7
  • Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), ISBN 978-0-375-50082-4
  • Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (2003), ISBN 978-0-375-50879-0
  • Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (Music of the Great Lakes) (2003), Random House, ISBN 978-0-375-50062-6
  • Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection (2005), ISBN 978-1-4000-6291-1
  • Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power – A Dispatch From the Beach (2009), ISBN 978-1-4165-7656-3
  • The Third Man: Was there another bomber in Oklahoma City?(2013),ISBN 978-0-9891-4210-6
  • God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (2015), Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-7657-0
  • Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (2020), Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-5011-5189-7

I’ve read the last one, Pharma, and found it a very good and thoroughly documented indictment of Big Pharma (don’t mistake it for Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family). At any rate, as Posner himself notes in the tweet below, he’s also written 11 op-eds for the NYT. And lately he’s been disappointed in the paper.

Posner is half Jewish and half Catholic; but, as Grok says, with some links, “Gerald Posner is not a practicing Jew and does not consider himself Jewish. He has said so directly and repeatedly.” That’s relevant because of his indictment of the NYT below.

First, the tweet, which Posner made last Friday:

You can read Posner’s piece at his Substack for free; just click here. The gist of it is in the tweet above, but I’ll quote a bit:

This week gave us a small, almost clinical example of a much larger problem.

Correspondent Isabel Kershner was reporting on NAZA, the wildly controversial Israeli film about IDF conduct in Gaza that received a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the original version of her story, Kershner wrote that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

Not that they were victims. Instead, that they “view themselves” that way—as though there were another serious way to describe the people murdered, raped, wounded and kidnapped in the Hamas-led assault. Would the Times ever write that Americans “still largely view themselves as the victims” of 9/11?

After a furious online backlash, the Times removed the sentence and attached an Editors’ Note. It blamed “an editing error,” saying the language had been intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response but had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”

I have written corrections in my career. I have had editors save me from my own inaccurate or clumsy phrasing. What I know from decades of reporting is that a sentence casting doubt on whether the roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage on October 7 count as victims does not just materialize on the page. A reporter wrote it. Editors read it but it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made enough noise.

That is how a worldview leaks through an editing process.

Now people have lauded the NYT for making that “correction,” but in truth the paper was probably lying: the original wording was not an “editing error”, for the meaning of the original is quite clear. Nor was the correction explanatory: what does it mean to say the phrase was “intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response”? The military response was clearly based on the government and IDF viewing themselves as victims of a Hamas attack.

Posner goes after Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape” piece, too, which was based on anonymous sources:

Then there was Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 opinion column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I have written about its description of serious allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including the claim that dogs had been trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. That extraordinary claim was built largely on anecdotal, Hamas-adjacent sourcing that no other serious outlet had independently corroborated or agreed to publish.

The Times’s Opinion editors said the column had been fact-checked and that they found no errors. Executive editor Joe Kahn later said the news department “wouldn’t have done that exact piece,” while also expressing confidence that his Opinion colleagues had done their due diligence, a process he wasn’t part of. Kahn did not repudiate Kristof’s column but his distinction still exposed something readers are entitled to find troubling. A piece the news side would not have done appeared beneath the same New York Times banner, fortified by the same institutional authority.

Inside the building, News and Opinion may be separate countries. To the public, they share a flag. The paper had given its imprimatur to that flawed claim.

Well, I would cut the paper a little slack here, but it’s telling that an op-ed was really a news piece, and a news piece that would not have run as regular news. For one thing, the sources were anonymous.  I have looked for verification of Kristof’s claims and haven’t found any, but Israel is probably still investigating them, which were made in May.

What is telling to me are the statistics—the number of articles, which is what eventually convinced me that the NYT is biased (see also the headlines below):

The case is no longer merely anecdotal. It now has data behind it and the data needs to be described with some care.

Edieal Pinker, a professor of operations research at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published from October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024. His paper was peer-reviewed and published in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism*—an academic journal, not an advocacy website.

Pinker found that 1,423 of the 1,559 articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after October 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the ensuing war. “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared with 8,499 mentions of “Hamas.” Personal accounts of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared, on average, two out of every three days, while there were nine stretches of at least a week with no mention of Israeli casualties after October 7. During one period, six Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank attacks that wounded Israeli civilians went unmentioned across 25 Times articles about fighting on the northern border.

Those are not merely impressions but countable editorial outcomes.

Pinker himself does not claim that his study proves bias or intent but rather that it documents imbalances that give readers an incomplete picture of the war.

Since the war was between Israel and Hamas, one would expect roughly equal coverage rather than a threefold difference in mentions of Israel versus Hamas. And the lack of mention of Israeli casualties inflicted by Hezbollah is also telling. The view one gets is that Israeli casualties simply aren’t important compared to those of Palestinians, which of course include Hamas terrorists (something that isn’t often mentioned, as they almost invariably are lumped in with “civilians”).

Posner notes this:

The Times responded to Pinker’s newly published study by accusing advocates of “cherry-picking” data and pointing to its own body of work—more than 23,000 articles, photographs and videos since October 7, 2023. It said its reporting had exposed atrocities by Hamas as well as alleged violations of international law by Israel.

That is a defense of volume and range, not a rebuttal of Pinker’s method or findings. The 23,000 figure also covers a longer period and mixes articles with photos and videos, while Pinker studied 1,559 news articles from a defined eight-month window. The two numbers are not competing samples. Invoking the larger one may sound impressive, but it does not answer what Pinker measured inside the smaller one.

But if this was a scientific assertion, reviewers would reject it because it’s trying to refute statistics by simply citing a large mass of articles in which you can find some indictments of Hamas as well as of Israel. And that is cherry picking. The question is how often is one cited versus another. Posner then clarifies his accusation:

I want to be precise about what I am contending. I am not alleging a conspiracy, and I am not saying every Times reporter on this beat acts in bad faith. Still, the imbalance is documented. Whether one labels it “bias” depends partly on the baseline used and partly on a judgment about intent—something a word count cannot establish. My own judgment comes not from one table or one sentence, but from the way the numbers, editorial choices and recurrent lapses fit together.

Israel-Gaza is the sharpest example right now, but it is not the only one. I have seen on other subjects a similar tendency: reporting that lands consistently on one side of a contested question, then treats challenges to its framing as evidence of bad faith rather than legitimate pushback. Israel is simply the case where the evidence this month is hardest to wave away—and where the human stakes are highest.

Posner ends by citing a damning figure about how the public trust in mass media has plummeted:

My own disillusionment is part of a much larger collapse. In 1972, when Gallup began asking Americans whether they trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 68 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence. In Gallup’s 2025 survey, the figure was 28 percent—the first time it had fallen below 30. The Times did not cause that collapse by itself. But the country’s most influential newspaper cannot pretend to be merely a bystander to it.

I still read the Times. I also read and watch outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, from Al Jazeera to Fox News. I learn from the different ways they cover the same issue. The Times is different because it continues to trade on the authority of an institution that is supposed to do more than validate the worldview of its core audience.

Indeed.  Of course the pro-Palestinians will deny his claims, but all I can say is that I was never a defender of Israel until October 7 happened and people started saying that Israel brought the Hamas attacks upon itself—and deserved them.  Then I began noticing that the NYT seemed to come down on that side.

And there is the biggest lie—that of Israeli genocide. That lie is easily refuted by looking at the food Israel sent into Gaza (how many armies give sustenance to their opponents?), the polio vaccines sent to Gaza by Israel during the war, and all the warnings that the IDF gave civilians to get out of the way before an imminent attack. For crying out loud, if Israel wanted to wipe out Palestinians as a whole, why didn’t they attack the West Bank after October 7?

If you want to read a scathing indictment of the Big Genocide Lie, read Maarten Boudry’s piece, “They don’t believe it either.”

But I digress.  To show more biased coverage, here’s a screenshot of the headlines from the Saturday NYT.  This is not at all unusual, and I haven’t edited it:

h/t: Luana