Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to Friday, April 24, 2026. Today I fly back to Chicago. Normally I would look forward with joy to returning, ready to help Vashti rear her brook of seven ducklings to maturity. This is not to be, however, and I am heartbroken to know that I’ll face an empty pond.
To some it may sound stupid that I’m mourning the loss of our brood of ducklings, but, as the old Jewish saying goes, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” What that means is that if you save the life of any creature, you have saved the world for that creature, who now gets to experience a world it would otherwise lose. That is our situation—seven times over.
Truth be told, I am not energized to write today, and it may be a while before I am. As always, I do my best.
Here, in memoriam to our brood, are three photos taken by Peggy Mason and one by another student. They were sent to me as I didn’t see the brood myself. Whatever happened to them, I hope they found safe harbor.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 24 Wikipedia page.
The 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, due to expire Sunday, will be extended for three weeks, President Donald Trump said Thursday during the second round of peace talks at the White House.
The announcement of an extension, which had been requested by Lebanon, came as Trump and Vice President JD Vance joined participants of the talks in the Oval Office. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and State Department Counselor Michael Needham, Israel and Lebanon were represented by their ambassadors to the U.S. The U.S. ambassadors to Lebanon and Israel also participated.
Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the extension of “an additional three weeks of, I guess no firing, ceasefire, no more firing. And we’re going to be working with Lebanon to get things straightened out in that country. I really believe it’s something we can do pretty easily,” Trump told reporters admitted to the Oval Office where participants were seated on sofas.
The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire has been only tenuously observed, with reduced but continued attacks by Israel and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has not officially recognized the pause in hostilities and on Thursday launched its first missile attack on northern Israel since the ceasefire went into effect April 16. The Israel Defense Forces said the missiles had been intercepted.
Israel has continued sporadic bombing attacks in what it says is “self defense” permitted under the ceasefire, and tens of thousands IDF troops occupying southern Lebanon have continued attacks against alleged militants and their infrastructure.
Each side has accused the other of violating the ceasefire.
Note that the talks are with Lebanon, not Hezbollah. The Lebanese government cannot stop the terrorism of Hezbollah, which is why Iran wants these negotations to be part of its own cease-fire settlement. The negotiations will not be successful because Hezbollah’s aim is to destroy Israel, and, Hezbollah has ignored the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1701 from 2006, ordering the group to cease hostilities and disarm. What is Trump thinking? Until Lebanon gets control of Hezbollah—a very slim possibility—there will be no peace between the two countries.
For the first time in the history of the IDF, a part of the defense budget had to be devoted to buying a statue of Jesus. But it was the right thing to do.
The first point is the most obvious: it is a blatant moral failure to desecrate another faith’s holy items. As a matter of history Jews should know how that feels. The conduct of an IDF soldier destroying a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon is entirely unacceptable, particularly for a military operating as an occupying force.
But if morality didn’t stop this soldier’s actions, I should think practicality would.
If you were to ask any Jew to identify the single most lethal antisemitic trope in history, the answer would undoubtedly be the accusation of being “Christ killers.” Knowing that history, how any Jewish soldier could think that taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus—and filming it—was in any way a good idea simply baffles me.
Thankfully, out of both moral necessity and practical reality, the IDF has taken swift action. The soldier who smashed the statue, along with the soldier who photographed the act, have been dismissed from combat duty and sentenced to jail. Six other troops who were present at the scene and did not act to stop the incident or report it are also under investigation. The IDF has also organized a replacement for the broken statue, which it has returned to the village.
The unfortunate truth is that soldiers will inevitably do destructive, foolish things. That cannot always be prevented. The ultimate measure of an army’s morality is not whether bad actors exist within its ranks—it is how the system holds them accountable.
Here, courtesy of Amit Segal at the site, is an IDF photo of their replacement statue, which has been installed. Although the entire world, including the MSM, has been tarring the whole IDF, and by extension Israel, for breaking the statue, please read the last paragraph above.
And a bit from today’s report, suggesting that Iran’s titular leader may in fact be dead, an ex-ayatollah:
In early April, a joint U.S.-Israeli diplomatic memo, reported by The Times, claimed that Mojtaba is physically incapacitated, completely unconscious, and hidden in a specialized hospital. The memo also noted ongoing preparations for a massive mausoleum in Qom—a subtle hint that the regime is preparing for a funeral.
This week, The New York Times published a detailed investigation based on leaks from “senior Iranian insiders,” claiming the Supreme Leader is sequestered in a highly secure medical hideout. These officials concede he is severely mutilated—awaiting a prosthetic after three leg surgeries and suffering from facial burns that render him largely mute—but insist he remains “mentally sharp.” Conveniently, because all modern electronics are banned around him to prevent Israeli tracking, he is entirely isolated, relying on a slow human chain of motorcycle couriers to communicate with the IRGC generals who are now effectively running the state.
But within Israeli intelligence, a much colder, simpler theory is taking root: Mojtaba is already dead. All that fantastic, detailed intel—even the candid admissions of severe injury in The New York Times—is carefully calibrated Iranian disinformation.
*Over at Quillette, Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry writes about his awakening on October 7, 2023 in a piece called “What do you think decolonization meant?” (article is archived here).
I was terribly wrong to be so insouciant, as I discovered when 7 October happened. I’m not Jewish and don’t have a personal connection to Israel, so initially I didn’t follow the news very closely. I had relegated the attack to the—regrettably vast—mental category of jihadist terrorist attacks across the globe, failing to grasp that this was, in fact, a full-blown invasion. In my naivety, I assumed that after the massacres in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and countless other Western cities, everyone had finally woken up to the true nature of jihadism. When a bunch of Allahu Akbar-chanting fanatics slaughtered innocent young people at a music festival, just as they had done at the Bataclan in Paris, it seemed inconceivable to me that any of my colleagues and friends would condone, rationalise, or even celebrate such acts. And yet that is precisely what happened.
To my horror, within days—even hours—of the attack, when the Israeli army was still fighting off the invaders, I started seeing reactions of excitement and gleeful jubilation on social media. Not from the usual religious maniacs praising Allah, but from left-wing activists at prestigious universities. Academics started breathlessly applying the same framework of decolonisation that I had foolishly brushed aside as amusing but harmless virtue signalling. As the writer Najma Sharif famously posted on X that day, racking up tens of thousands of likes and reposts: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
It was as though she was talking about me. I was one of those “losers” who had been foolish enough to think that decolonisation amounted to little more than papers and essays, along with some harmless but well-intentioned proposals to diversify the philosophy curriculum. If only. What I came to see in the wake of 7 October was something far less benign. Decolonisation operates as a rigid, almost Manichaean ideology that neatly divides the world into evil perpetrators (Western colonisers) and innocent victims (the colonised, indigenous peoples). In this worldview, there is no room for moral ambiguity. Those on the wrong side of the divide are irredeemably rotten and deserve everything that’s coming to them, while those on the side of the angels are completely absolved of any wrongdoing. If they appear to commit atrocities, these are reframed as understandable—perhaps even inevitable—responses to prior injustice. In fact, the more extreme the violence, the greater the wrongs they must have endured.
At one point, many on the Left considered Israel an admirable success story of decolonisation—of an indigenous people driving out the Western colonisers and achieving self-determination in their historical homeland. For a variety of complex historical reasons, however, the Jewish state is now firmly relegated to the side of the oppressors. In fact, Israel is regarded as the settler-colonialist enterprise par excellence, and Palestinians as paragons of victimhood. And that is all the latter-day activists need to know to reach their moral verdicts—which explains why those verdicts came rushing in mere hours into the unfolding event.
That mindset was on full display in a joint open letter at my own Ghent University, published just three days after 7 October. It pointedly refused to condemn Hamas, shifted all blame for the massacre onto “Zionists,” and praised Palestinians for their “tenacity and fierce resistance to racism and settler colonialism,” which the signatories found immensely “inspiring.” The ideological rationale is right there in the letter: “Decolonization is not a metaphor, nor is it only a theory to be used for intellectual clout. It is about supporting the right for self-determination of Palestinians to live freely and with dignity.” It was signed by two thousand academics and students.
An even more revolting open letter at the University of Amsterdam, again with hundreds of signatories, rejoiced that 2023 “will no doubt be the year admired, recorded and studied for the way in which Palestinians steadfastly resisted colonialism, occupation and survived genocide.” The text echoes the same jargon and turns of phrase, as if its authors’ minds had been hijacked by the same zombie virus: “We must stress that decolonisation is not an abstract theory, it is an action, it is a way of being. […] Decolonisation is not a metaphor. […] It is the UvA’s ethical duty to support decolonial endeavors that aim to end colonialism.”
Every one of these academics would describe themselves as “progressive” or “left-wing.” And yet here they were, rallying to the defence of a reactionary death cult that had just committed the largest antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, livestreaming their atrocities with GoPro cameras, sadistically calling family members on the victims’ cellphones, ecstatically calling home in triumph to boast of how many Jews they had killed with their bare hands.
If there are two words that describe this species of “progressive”, they are “anti-Enlightenment” and “Manichean”.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a gene therapy that can cure a rare, inherited form of deafness. The treatment is the first to restore normal hearing in children who were born deaf.
The maker of the therapy, Regeneron, plans to provide it free to any child who needs it. “We wanted to make a statement,” Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s chief scientific officer said on Thursday morning.
The therapy called Otarmeni, is intended for children with otoferlin deafness, a rare form of hearing loss caused by a mutation in a single gene. The mutation destroys a protein in the inner ear that is needed to transmit sound to the brain.
. . . Although otoferlin deafness accounts for just 2 percent to 8 percent of congenital hearing loss, the new treatment “is groundbreaking,” Dr. Dylan Chan, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said.
He added, “This is the first time in history that there has been a medical therapy that has enabled deaf children to hear.”
. . .Researchers chose to focus on otoferlin deafness because its cause was straightforward. The otoferlin gene is expressed only in the hair cells of the inner ear. The inner ear structures, including the hair cells, are intact. So to allow patients to hear, doctors simply needed to deliver a working copy of the otoferlin gene.
Otolaryngologists had long thought that injecting a medicine into the inner ear would inevitably damage the delicate cells and membranes of the cochlea.
But children with otoferlin deafness are already unable to hear. Even if an attempt at gene therapy damaged their inner ears, they could still receive cochlear implants.
. . .Kerri M., whose baby, Miles, had otoferlin deafness, said gene therapy “completely changed our lives.” She spoke on condition of anonymity because she wanted to protect her son’s diagnosis from appearing on the internet.
Dr. Shearer said Miles’s hearing loss was so profound that he could not hear a jet engine if it were next to him.
Miles was given the Regeneron therapy on May 19, 2025, when he was 13 months old. At his last visit, his hearing was normal.
. . .Most children who received the gene therapy have had hearing restored, but not all have been as fortunate as Miles. So far, Dr. Chan said, about 80 percent of the patients who have been treated successfully in clinical trials were able to hear well without needing cochlear implants.
Most still needed a hearing aid, but about 30 percent of those who could hear after the treatment were like Miles — their hearing was in the normal range.
The next target for the scientists working on gene therapies to correct deafness is mutations in the GJB2 gene. It causes the most common form of congenital hearing loss in children and accounts for about 20 percent of cases.
This is remarkable, and heartening that the company that created the cure is supplying it for free. Of course most genetically-based diseases are not this easy to remedy, but we are on a thresh0ld of successful gene therapy.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: We live in the world we’re in.” The first story about bannng tobacco sales in the UK is true:
→ New job opportunity for Americans: The United Kingdom passed a bill this week to ban the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008. The goal is to create a “smoke-free generation.” Anyone born after 2008 will never be able to buy cigarettes or vapes or any tobacco product in the United Kingdom. Ever. Might as well call them the loser generation. Taking cigs away from Brits is like grabbing spaghetti out of an Italian’s mouth. If there’s no cigarette, what are young Brits meant to do with their hands after making a wry and devastating observation? Wave? That’s for the Yanks.
For a kid from the UK, coming to New York and trying a vape is going to be the equivalent of an American going to Amsterdam to try crack and prostitutes. Me, I’m going to travel to London with strawberry vapes sewn into my Levi’s, like an American hero. They said artificial intelligence would take all our jobs, but they didn’t consider that cigarette smuggling would employ 15,000 Americans each year. British teens: Call me!
→ What’s going on with Ilhan Omar’s net worth?: Rep. Ilhan Omar has revised her net worth. Earlier, she filed paperwork reporting her and her husband’s net worth at between $6 million and $30 million. Now, she’s filed new paperwork reporting their net worth to be between $18,004 to $95,000. An easy enough mistake to make! Zeros are confusing. Responding to a letter from the Office of Congressional Conduct, her lawyer said: “As the busiest of people, it is very common for members and their spouses to rely on learned professionals like accountants to make calculations and determinations that appear on public filings. While the error is, of course, unfortunate, there is nothing untoward, and nothing illegal has occurred.” The busiest of people. So busy, somewhere between the personal training and CAIR meetings, they forgot how many more millions they made. Apparently the confusion comes from her husband being involved in so many businesses. All you need to know is that there was some backlash and the husband is worth nothing now. As a scholar of LLCs, my wild guess, if there is a noncriminal explanation, is that the money was put into a new trust or something. So it’s not hers anymore, per se, not exactly.
→ Carrying knives “for a good reason”:
A Kuwaiti man, on trial for allegedly trying to break into the Israeli embassy in London while armed with two knives, regaled the court with tales of his treacherous boat crossings in which he put his “life on the line.” As noted by the BBC: “His defense case is likely to be that he was not trying to enter the embassy for a terrorist purpose, and that he was carrying the knives ‘for a good reason’ unrelated to his activities that day, jurors have been told.” Unless there’s a fish market inside that embassy, I got a few questions about what constitutes a “good reason” in the UK.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej sounds a familiar note:
Hili: We have to work again?
Andrzej: That’s our lot.
From Masih, with the President mis-sexed in the English translation (there are subtitles):
The President of the German Bundestag [Julia Klöckner] declared with clarity and courage: [S]He does not recognize a regime that blinds women and pierces the bodies of protesters with buckshot. And he made this statement from the podium of the President of the German Bundestag. These remarks were made in tribute to the efforts of Masih Alinejad, for raising global public awareness of the fully armed governmental violence, through which she has become the extension of the voice of millions of Iranians who do not recognize this regime.
The original:
رئیس مجلس آلمان، با صراحت و شجاعت اعلام کرد:
او رژیمی را که زنان را نابینا میکند و بدن معترضان را با ساچمه میدرد، به رسمیت نمیشناسد.
و این حرف را از جایگاه رییس مجلس آلمان زد.
این سخنان در تقدیر از تلاشهای مسیح علینژاد بیان شد، برای آگاهسازی افکار عمومی جهان از خشونتهای… pic.twitter.com/kPQyKTzCHE
— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) April 23, 2026
From Luana, though the community notes say the quote was mistranslated. The apparently correct translation, which you can see here, is even better.
The first recorded appearance of a cat in Japan is described arriving as an imperial gift, written down on March 11, 889 AD by 22-year-old Emperor Uda on his diary: pic.twitter.com/fw1MsR4PSY
And a turkey named JERRY who loves and protects ducks:
The turkey you see here is Jerry. He never seemed to like living with other turkeys but LOVES the ducks, so we let him move in with them a few years ago. They all get along, in fact Jerry puffs up to protect them whenever a raptor is in the neighborhood. Sometimes found family is the best family! ❤️
It breaks my heart to have to report this, but somehow Vashti and her brood of seven ducklings vanished from Botany Pond sometime after Tuesday morning, and have not been seen since.
I have no idea what happened. They were last seen at the pond during Tuesday’s morning rain showers, with the brood warmly tucked under Vashti’s belly. Now: no ducks—not a trace. The only one left is Armon, who swims disconsolately around the pond and refuses food. He has lost his family.
It was probably not predators: no bodies were found. I’ve ascertained that no workpeople were in the pond during the week. Either someone scared them away or they walked away, something that hasn’t happened before.
Whatever is the case, the ducklings will probably perish, as the nearest body of water is too far away for little ones to walk.
The members of Team Duck and I are devastates. The seven ducklings were healthy, Vashti was being a great mother, and even Armon stepped up to protect the brood. The invading undocumented drakes left the brood alone. Everything promised a great duck season, and I was looking forward to helping the little ones grow up into adult mallards.
That, it seems, is not to be. This portends to be The Year Without Ducklings.
Unbeknownst to me, the powers that be in our department decided to celebrate my creation of the Jerry Coyne/Honey the Duck Graduate Fellowship (a grad-student fellowship for studying organismal evolutionary biology) by putting pictures and captions on the wall of our seminar room, which features other photos of research activities of department members. Here are two photos related to the JCHDGF over the blackboard:
And enlargement of the photos:
And the two captions that go with the photos (first one for the left photo, second for the right).
I was delighted to see this, for the photos and fellowship will be the only real form of immortality I have. Like all scientists, I realize that whatever research I produced will eventually be outmoded or replaced. And Honey will live at most a dozen years; in fact, she’s probably already crossed the Rainbow Bridge. But my fellowship is forever.
Kudos to the office staff for getting this made and installed.
And two other photos of Honey, just for old times’ sake:
Unbeknownst to me, one member of Team Duck has been religiously walking to the pond every day, hoping to see a mallard. Since Esther and her babies left, though, we haven’t seen one. This morning our Team Duck member called me excitedly and reported that there was a hen mallard on the pond! I immediately grabbed my bag of duck food (still at the ready) and ran downstairs to the pond.
Sure enough, a lone hen was swimming in the middle of the pond. (They’ve also taken the plants out of the cages and distributed them throughout the pond, so it looks much nicer.) The bird, being wild, was skittish, and when I tossed it food (and whistled), it was a bit scared. But soon enough it discovered that what I was throwing was good stuff, and she began eating. I whistled all along to get her used to an association between my whistle and food, which is how I always call our broods. It’s pretty clear that this duck is not one of “ours”, i.e. one of Esther’s brood or Esther herself (her beak is also different from that of Esther).
She won’t come close to us—yet, but it’s amazing how much difference a single duck makes in the appearance and attraction of Botany Pond. Three people showed up, and all of them looked at our visitor (one took a photo). I’m hoping that this is the beginning of many ducks who will stop by the pond for a drink and a nosh during the Fall migration.
Here she is. I’ll check later this afternoon to see if she’s still there, and, if so, I’ll give her another snack.
Today I’m assembling photos from readers who sent in a small number. Their captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. I’m assuming all ducks are mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).
DUCKS from Peter Fisher:
I came across this family of ducks in a rather lovely setting in Rydal Water in the English Lake District. Mum is clearly keeping watch. There were six ducklings, (one must have escaped the frame).
From Christopher Moss:
Some more for your stash. I received the 2x teleconverter today, so these were taken with the full frame equivalent of a 1200mm lens! I need to practice some more with it, as it is prone to camera shake, but there is promise there.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife writes (click here)
“Adult American bullfrogs have voracious appetites and will eat anything they can fit into their mouths, including invertebrates, birds, bats, rodents, frogs, newts, lizards, snakes, and turtles. Bullfrog tadpoles mainly eat algae, aquatic plant material, and invertebrates, but they will also eat the tadpoles of other frog species. As a result of these feeding behaviors, all life stages of bullfrogs prey upon and are able to out-compete native frogs and other aquatic species. Additionally, bullfrogs are a known carrier of chytrid fungus, which causes the potentially fatal skin disease in frogs called chytridiomycosis. Chytridomycosis is believed to be a leading cause of the decline of native amphibian populations all over the world and responsible for the extinction of over 100 species since the 1970s.”.
Apparently, the American bullfrog will, or will try to, eat anything that won’t eat it first. My extended family member, Eleanor, knew that bullfrogs had exterminated her singing chorus frogs, (genus Pseudacris, multiple species) and was not terribly surprised when she came upon this bullfrog attempting to swallow a pre-deceased adult bird, one that ultimately proved to be too large for consumption – but the frog came very close to swallowing something nearly as large as itself!
From Sharon Diehl:
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) pair atop Transform Tower #199, Wally Toevs Pond, Walden Wildlife Habitat, Boulder, Colorado. I have photographed this mated pair for years at Walden Wildlife Habitat, where they hang out atop the transform towers that overlook Wally Toevs Pond. They aren’t always successful breeders, but they keep at it, together year after year.
Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) hunting at my backyard bird feeders–where, alas, it caught a bird–at least it was a Starling. I know the raptors have to eat, too:
Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens), on the Hornbeam tree I believe, waiting for the flicker to leave the suet feeder–my backyard, Boulder, Colorado.
Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) in a tree, overlooking a lake in East Boulder Community Park, Boulder Colorado.
. . . and more DUCKS from reader A. C. Harper:
Two ducks making the most of pondweed on water at Fairhaven near the Norfolk Broads. Pictures taken on holiday at South Walsham July 2025.
First, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! Ducks, particularly very young ones, should not be fed bread, except as a very occasional treat. This was one of those occasions.
Yesterday I was down at the lake with a friend, Alice Dreger, attempting to go swimming off Promontory Point, one of the most beautiful locations in Chicago. (You may have read Alice’s books, including Galileo’s Middle Finger.)
But the water was too cold for us (about 60°F; see the penultimate paragraph of Alice’s bio), so we had a picnic instead. After we’d finished eating, a family of MALLARDS swam by. There was a mother and five of her offspring, identifiable to generation by size and feather color. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a mallard—not a single one has even stopped by Botany Pond—and I was delighted.
I was even more delighted when the group climbed up on the rocks where we were sitting. I had called and whistled to them, but it was too much to hope that this was Esther and her brood. Still, they were very tame.
Then I realized that I still had some bread left: half a baguette. Although Facilities and I prevent visitors to Botany Pond from feeding bread to ducks, as it can cause abnormal development of the wings of ducklings, I also knew that an occasional bit of bread won’t hurt them, and these wild mallards surely weren’t given much bread. So I fed them, and they were HUNGRY.
Alice took some photos. Here’s one on its tippy-toes reaching for a morsel of baguette.
I was SO happy (and so were the mallards)!
Alice took a short video of the feeding (seagulls tried to intrude, but the ducks drove them away). After the bread was gone, the mallards lay down at our feet for a rest. They were remarkably tame, and it was soothing to relax while the duck family relaxed a few feet away. All I can say is that it was a great afternoon and, as lagniappe, I slept like a log last night–for the first time in at least two months. I think this calls for a new form of therapy: CDT-I: Cognitive Duck Therapy for Insomnia. Who isn’t delighted and calmed by ducks?
