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.
Good morning on the shabbos for cats: it’s CaturSaturday, September 14, 2024, and it’s National Eat a Hoagie Day. (If you’re not American, hoagies are also known as “subs”, “submarine sandwiches,” or, in New England, “grinders.”) Here’s a salami, ham, and cheese hoagie from Wikipedia. The dressing is superfluous.
*For all intents and purposes, the war between Hamas and Israel is over, as the IDF has declared that the Rafah Brigade has been defeated and, importantly, all the tunnels from Egypt into Gaza—tunnels critical for bringing weapons to Hamas—have also been destroyed.
From the first link (I’ll be pedantic in noting the new but faulty usage of the word “decimated”, which originally meant “selecting and killing one out of every ten people”, not the present construal as “destroyed”):
The Hamas terror group’s Rafah Brigade has been decimated, at least 2,308 of its operatives have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, and over 13 kilometers (8 miles) worth of tunnels have been destroyed, military officials told reporters in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city on Thursday.
Now, as the IDF maintains control of the entire city and the border area with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, combat engineers are completing their investigations of a few dozen Hamas tunnels that have not yet been demolished, an operation that will not take longer than a few weeks.
With seemingly no hostage deal with the terror group on the horizon — under which the IDF would likely have to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, including the Philadelphi Corridor — it currently remains unclear what the IDF will do in Rafah once the last tunnel is destroyed.
Senior military officials said they would carry out whatever missions the political echelon eventually orders them to complete.
“The Rafah Brigade has been defeated,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, the general in charge of the offensive in the city, told reporters at the Philadelphi Corridor. “Their four battalions have been destroyed, and we have completed operational control over the entire urban area.”
And from the second, earlier link:
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday revealed a document he said was written by the former commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade in southern Gaza, Rafa’a Salameh, and addressed to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his brother Muhammad, in which the commander described the “difficult situation” in which the terror group had found itself.
Salameh, a mastermind of the terror group’s October 7 massacre, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza in July that also killed senior Hamas commander Muhammad Deif.
In the letter, he wrote: “Please consider the following: We maintain the remaining weapons and equipment, as we have lost 90-95 percent of our rocket capabilities; and we have lost some 60% of our personal weapons; we have lost at least 65-70% of our anti-tank launchers and rockets,” according to excerpts provided and translated by the Defense Ministry.
“Most importantly,” he continued, “we have lost at least 50% of our fighters between those who are martyred and wounded, and now we are left with 25%. The last 25% of our people have reached a situation where the people do not tolerate them anymore, broken on a mental or physical level.”
Gallant said the document showed “a real hardship that affects Hamas and affects the most senior commanders.”
Israel has won the war, or at least achieved its aim of defeating Hamas. But two questions arise. The most important is: “What next?”. Who is going to rule Gaza? I expect that Israel will maintain a military presence there, which of course will not bring harmony between Jews and Arabs, but may be necessary—and for a long time. The real long-term solution rests on creating two states, but I can’t envision that for years to come. There are no Palestinians capable of ruling such a state without promulgating terrorism, and no Israelis want a terror state next door.
The second is “Will this stop the anti-Israel protests?” And the answer is certainly not: the protestors with keffiyehs (once defined as “swastikas for hipsters”) will just be more enraged that Hamas has become defanged, and of course the aim to destroy the state of Israel will remain, even if protests have no effect. In fact, Hamas’s loss may turn world sentiment even further against Israel, because, as Douglas Murray always says, “Israel is the one country in the world that isn’t allowed to win a war.”
*Nellie Bowles is back writing her regular Friday news summaries on The Free Press. Her latest piece is called “TGIF: Concepts of a plan” (remember that phrase from the debate?), and I’ll steal three items from the summary. I won’t repeat her very long take on the debate, which of course is the truth: Trump was demolished. Here are three shorter pieces:
→ Not Laura Loomer: Trump’s entourage is always a rogue’s gallery. But for now I’ll highlight Laura Loomer, a conspiracy-minded conservative influencer, who is traveling with the former president. She says that 9/11 was an inside job, naturally. And here’s what she wrote about Kamala Harris this week. The first item is unbelievable.
Marjorie Taylor Greene—she of “Jewish space lasers” notoriety—said this of Loomer’s tweet: “This is appalling and extremely racist. It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA. This does not represent President Trump. This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”
→ Waymo is a miracle: In other pro-tech takes, three cheers for Waymo, the driverless car company. They just released data on their journeys in Phoenix and San Francisco. How’s it been going? Very, very well. “Waymo vehicles get into injury-causing crashes less than one-third as often, per mile, as human-driven vehicles,” writes Timothy Lee, who has a great newsletter about AI. “Out of the 23 most serious Waymo crashes, 16 involved a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. Three others involved a human-driven car running a red light before hitting a Waymo. There were no serious crashes where a Waymo ran a red light, rear-ended another car, or engaged in other clear-cut misbehavior.” I’ll say it: As a busy mom of two, and as a woman, this thing drives way better than me.
Media coverage obsesses over every error a self-driving car makes. And rightly so, to some extent (we cover the planes that crash). But humans are horrible drivers. Think about the people you see wandering around the streets. Honestly, even think about your various family members. Really think about them. I’m not naming names (Mom) or incidents (parking lot of the drugstore, Exit 32, over Christmas ’98) but really consider it. Should the people you know and love (and appreciate!) helm a two-ton machine screeching through the world at 85 mph? Probably not.
Well, there aren’t many items this week but I extracted this from her account of the debate. I think I posted before about this issue, which shows you that I’m ahead of the curve:
→ One interesting turn is that some of the wackiest progressive policies, policies that Kamala Harris heartily endorsed in a more exciting era, now come across as crazy and bizarre to even ask about. When Trump said that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” he was saying something that is quite literally true (here’s the CNN story on that exact position of hers). But it soundscrazy. And Kamala reacted as if it was crazy (“What is he talking about?” she said, smiling toward the audience). Trans aliens [JAC: immigrants, not Martians] became a meme with BuzzFeed’s headline: “Donald Trump Might Have Said One Of The Most Baffling Things Of His Career In The Debate, And The Internet Is Having A Field Day.” But. . . but. . . she did support that! No, the media says now; no, she did not. Here’s the stately New Yorker with their political analysis of the debate: “His line about how the Vice-President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’ was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about?” We have all been normal moderates all this time, silly goose. What are you even talking about? <Hides the incarcerated and medically transitioned illegal aliens under the bed>
On Tuesday night, Sept. 3, Ilya Bratman—U.S. Army veteran, CUNY English teacher, and Hillel executive director at eight CUNY and SUNY schools—hosted a welcome-back dinner for Hillel students at a kosher restaurant near Baruch College. Soon after their entrance into Mr. Broadway, guests were surrounded by a chanting, braying, mob.
“CUNY, CUNY, You can’t hide. You support genocide!”
“Terrorist! Terrorist! Terrorist!”
“All Zionists are racist!”
They blocked the doorway, preventing students and other diners from leaving, held photos of murdered babies in the students’ faces, and even hit a Hillel staffer. One of the male protesters, his face concealed by a mask, shoulders draped in a kaffiyeh, creepily formed his fingers in the shape of a triangle—Hamas’ symbol for a military target.
Then the slurs got personal. To a clearly Jewish-looking couple walking down the street, “You ugly ass bitch! Go back to Brooklyn!”
And, then, the kicker: “Where’s Hersh?”
For an hour.
When the cops arrived after 30 minutes of the melee, they moved the protesters “5 feet away” from the entrance, according to Bratman, placing them close to the restaurant windows, which they then hammered with their hands. There was nothing they wouldn’t say, from “You ain’t going home tonight,” to “Dogs off campus.”
. . . “What’s new about this round of protests?” I asked Bratman. To propose a story to my editor, I’ll have to say what’s new. Bratman just about lost it. “Protesters stalked, menaced, harassed, and followed Jewish students to a kosher restaurant, like they would have done on Nov. 9, 1938, and blocked the entrance, screamed obscenities, and banged on windows calling for violence against Jews,” he told me. “They not only terrorized students, but also other Jews, random New York Jews having dinner. The cops came, didn’t do anything, even though they heard distinct, specific threats against the lives of the Jews inside.”
What’s going on at CUNY is unbelievable, and I don’t have the space to recount how the administration really does seem hell-bent at driving out the school’s Jews., but the details are in the piece. Here’s one conclusion:
But the more fundamental problem at CUNY, Bratman pointed out, is that the basic job of educating children has been abandoned. “Academia has been lost,” he said. “The essence of academia—open discourse, civil dialogue, and academic excellence—is gone. Academia used to be about growth, research, exploration, discovery, openness. Now it’s about boycotts. Today, the teachers believe their job is indoctrination.”
*Let’s have a look at Andrew Sullivan’s take on the debate in his new column “The things she didn’t say.” First Sullivan gives quotes about Trump’s 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, but substitutes “Harris” for “Clinton”, showing that Trump also lost every debate with Clinton, but nevertheless, well, still won the Presidency. While Sullivan is a never-Trumper, he still criticizes Harris, and the Harris-lovers here will not be happy:
I mention the 2016 debate example not because the debate this week is destined to be as irrelevant as it was eight years ago. Who knows? I mention it because Trump has never been a good debater — that requires logic and evidence, not stream-of-consciousness insanity. And Clinton’s serial devastation of Trump could not overcome her deeper vulnerabilities: her weakness among the white working class, her polarizing decades in public life, and her inability to grasp the salience of mass immigration and free trade.
To my mind, Harris has three bigger policy vulnerabilities as an actual incumbent: she presided over a collapse of the southern border, admitting millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom will never leave; she was in power when we had a spike in inflation worse than anything since the 1970s; and, unlike Clinton or Biden, she has a political record on the far left. On Tuesday, for all her debating chops, she did nothing to dispel public worries about all three.
Yes, she focused on Trump, making him the star of the show in many ways. But was he revealed as something different than we’ve seen in the past? Not so much. This was classic Trump. Exposing him this way has never worked before. Most people responded to some of his cray-cray by bursting out laughing.
And the focus on Trump took attention away from Harris. And she needs that attention. She needed those 90 minutes to rebut the critiques of her past opportunism, to introduce herself clearly, to spell out how she will grow the economy, keep inflation under control and stop illegal immigration. And, by and large, she failed.
She dodged question after question with scant follow-up. On the single area she was pressed, fracking, she had a chance to explain why she had said, in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands” — about as definitive a statement as it is possible to make — only to reverse herself when she became the veep nominee. The honest answer for the change is that Biden forced it. A good answer would be that she learned we didn’t need to ban fracking to control climate change. But she didn’t say that either. She just repeated her view that her “values haven’t changed.” I believe her. Pennsylvanians might too.
Immigration? She touted the Lankford bill that Biden supported after three-and-a-half years of Harris gaslighting us that “the border is secure.” Here’s a question the press should and won’t ask: Why won’t she simply extend the administration’s recent executive order that is now reducing illegal immigration to lower levels than Lankford ever would? (To his credit, Ezra exposed Mayorkas on this today.) That’s because Lankford is designed to expedite the processing of illegal immigration, not stop it.
Sullivan brings up the fact that Harris did, on an ACLU questionnaire, support government-funded gender-change operations for illegal immigrants. That happens to be true, but the MSM acted as if Trump was simply pulling that accusation out of his fundament. (Don’t they read their own reportage?) And so Sullivan concludes:
The MSM, of course, can’t help themselves. They cheered Clinton at every opportunity in 2016; they didn’t criticize her execrable campaign exactly the way they are protecting Harris now. But the fact remains that Harris is still a blank space for many Americans; they want to know more about her and she doesn’t want to tell them — because the more they know about her past positions, the worse she’ll do. Hence a deeply cynical and vague campaign, still based more on vibes and Trump than on Harris’ policies or vision.
. . . Many voters will be picking between the devil they know (Trump) and the devil they don’t (Harris) this fall. She had a chance to fill in the blanks on Tuesday night; and, by and large, she didn’t. We’ll now see if others more competent than Trump and more willing than the MSM can begin to reveal who she really is and what she’d really do in office. And if that’s what the swing voters in Pennsylvania are truly looking for.
I’m still not excited about Harris, and this “joy” stuff simply makes me ill. There is no joy in this Mudville. Will I vote for Trump? Hell, no! The only question I’ll be pondering in November is whether I’ll write in somebody other than Harris. Remember, my vote is irrelevant in Democratic Illinois, and I’m sworn to vote for someone who impresses me. Harris doesn’t–at least not yet, but I’m following her pronouncements. (She really needs to give some interviews and press conferences.) And please don’t tell me that what I’ve just written will help Trump win.
*Finally, from the ever-reliable “Oddities” section of the AP, my favorite news: a cat rescue:
A cat aptly named Drifter is safe at home after sneaking outside and getting trapped in a sewer for nearly eight weeks.
The 3-year-old tabby — an indoor feline who had aspirations of being an outdoor cat — went missing from the home of Clifton Nesseth and Ashley Comstock in the northeastern Minnesota city of Duluth on July 18. His owners presume that he went to check out the construction underway in their neighborhood at some point.
The family, including their 12-year-old daughter, April Dressel, hung up posters and searched across the city without luck. They were beginning to plan a small memorial service for Drifter on Tuesday when neighbor kids came over and said they heard meowing coming from a storm drain at the construction site. The family also heard him meowing as they started digging through the dirt and cutting through the landscape fabric.
“A little paw shot out of a tear in the fabric,” Nesseth said. “It was a tabby cat paw. We tore the fabric more and then his head popped through.”
Here’s a video of Drifter’s rescue. How did he survive there for eight weeks? By drinking sewer water and eating rats?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili (who is now 12) is being a bit lazy:
A: What do you think about a long walk?
Hili: Theoretically it’s an attractive suggestion.
A tweet from Masih, showing the results a horrible lashing of an Iranian man—drinking wine in his home!:
Lashed for drinking wine in Iran!
I received this photo from Isfahan, where the authorities raided his house for holding a mixed party which is illegal under Sharia law.
Meanwhile, the “reformist” president of this same country where a young man was lashed for sipping wine in… pic.twitter.com/tnWgOwgb2I
Mridul Wadhwa is gone from Edinburgh Rape Crisis. He should have been fired the moment he said that survivors who wanted a female-only space were bigots who should ‘reframe their trauma’.
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a six-year-old gassed upon arrival
14 September 1937 | A German Jewish boy, Günther Willi Aron, was born in Essen.
He arrived at #Auschwitz on 5 November 1943 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from ghetto in Riga. He was among 850 of them murdered in gas chambers after the selection. pic.twitter.com/wtgCiEHq9G
A few people have approved of the streamlined and old-style Hili dialogue, without news, tweets, pictures, and so on. I’ll try that for a few days, since that’s what Matthew did and some people liked it. Writing the old, pre-Africa Hili dialogues was a time-consuming operation. Weigh in below if you prefer today’s format, the older, news-laden format, or some intermediate. Thanks! But do send in tweets, as I can’t resist putting up some of them.
A truncated Hili, sans news:
It’s Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, and Botany Pond still isn’t filled. They’ve landscaped it nicely, but found several leaks that were supposed to be fixed earlier. Now the pond is largely drained again, and workmen are beavering away. I’m of course worried that 2025 will not be a duck season again. The pond has been inactive for about two years now, a situation I consider intolerable, and one that returning students and their parents won’t like.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is thinking deeply:
Malgorzata explains (Andrzej creates the dialogues with Polish captions and Malgorzata translates them into English): “There is just one Polish word for ‘limits’ and ‘borders’: ‘granica’. (Well, there is another – ‘ograniczenia”‘ – but it has slightly different meaning and you can’t conclude a treaty about ‘ograniczenia’ which you can about ‘granice’.) Hili is thinking about the danger of being tolerant to intolerants.”
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About a treaty on the borders of tolerance.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Nad traktatem o granicach tolerancji.
Three food-related photos:
One photo, from D. J. Grothe, whose caption was, “I love Chicago.” This is a well-known purveyor of Chicago-style hot dogs downtown; check out its webpage.
From Denny Zara at The 2024 Darwin Awards/Epic Fails: (it’s not really worthy of a Darwin award, but it’s funny, as magpies can be pesky):
And I must add tweets from Masih Alinejad and the Auschwitz Memorial. The first tweet, which was retweeted by Masih, gives this for the translation from Farsi. All the hashtags are identical to the first one that I had translated. This brave woman, like many others, was shot in the eye (and half blinded) for simply protesting the Iranian regime.
The fire of anger that was called #مهسا_امينی [“woman, life freedom”] came to life, ignited and gave life to the revolution #زن_زندگی_آزادی , a revolution that echoes around the world. The story is the story of wounds whose healing is fruitful struggle Wounds that tell the story of crimes against humanity Wounds that stood up to be flag bearers #زن_زندگی_آزادی .
آتش خشمی که با نام #مهسا_امينی جان گرفت ، شعله ور شد و انقلاب #زن_زندگی_آزادی را جان داد ، انقلابی که طنین انداز جهان است.
حکایت ، حکایت زخم هایی است که التیامش مبارزه مثمر ثمر است زخم هایی که راوی جنایت علیه بشریت اند زخم هایی که قد علم کردند پرچمدار #زن_زندگی_آزادی باشند. pic.twitter.com/uiTARQJlAb
Welcome to Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2025, and a Hump Day (“Laa Hump” in Manx).
Having not yet recovered from jet lag, Hilis are now posted by me, but will be truncated for a while until I get back on my feet. Today we’ll have a couple of posts, including my take on the debate, which is pretty much the same as everyone else’s. And we have a readers’ wildlife feature, so please begin sending in your wildlife photos if you have them. There’s 0nly one contribution the tank (today’s), which means that the feature will be sporadic until I begin getting new submissions.
First, today’s Hili dialogue, which began just with the words and one picture.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej share a deep pessimism:
Hili: The world has gone crazy.
A: Not for the first time.
Hili: And not for the last time I’m afraid.
In Polish:
Hili: Świat zwariował.
Ja: Nie pierwszy raz.
Hili: Obawiam się, że nie ostatni.
And a photo of Szaron, who’s just had a cyst drained on his back for the second time, and is on antibiotics (the vet says that there’s no problem: it’s not a tumor). I’ll be visiting my human and cat friends in Dobrzyn in early December before heading to Katowice, Poland, for the Silesian Science Festival in Katowice, Poland (Dec. 7-9), where I’m to give two talks.
A few pictures and tweets:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs, contributed by Kathy Harmon. If your car goes into the water, you may wish that they’d kept these door window-opening handles:
And America’s most famous celebrity tweeted this after last night’s debate:
From Masih, being interviewed by Jonathan Kay. I swear she seems to be wearing cowboy boots!
He promised he’d never comment on a woman’s appearance, but this time, @jonkay just couldn’t help himself. See my reaction. ✌️
To those in the West who say we’re not at war with the Islamic Republic, let me tell you: the Islamic Republic is at war with us.
The world has turned… pic.twitter.com/xZPQkYXa7G
Yes, Brown University is indeed holding a university board vote on divesting from Israel. You can find Edelman’s WSJ letter here, or find it archived here. A quote from Edelman’s letter:
I don’t wish to imply that any real principles informed Brown’s decision to hold a divestment vote: It was made not based on facts or values but based on weakness toward student activists. The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.
Brown’s leadership admits the looming divestment vote is designed to buy good behavior from pro-Hamas activists, many of whom are adherents of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks the destruction of the Jewish state through political and economic warfare. BDS is an attempt to normalize antisemitism in mainstream American institutions. More than a dozen U.S. states have passed laws treating BDS as a form of discrimination.
. . .I don’t wish to imply that any real principles informed Brown’s decision to hold a divestment vote: It was made not based on facts or values but based on weakness toward student activists. The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.
Brown’s leadership admits the looming divestment vote is designed to buy good behavior from pro-Hamas activists, many of whom are adherents of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks the destruction of the Jewish state through political and economic warfare. BDS is an attempt to normalize antisemitism in mainstream American institutions. More than a dozen U.S. states have passed laws treating BDS as a form of discrimination.
Joe Edelman, CEO of Perceptive Advisors, has resigned from the board of Brown University because its leadership has capitulated to protestors and agreed to vote on divestment from Israel.
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Dutch girl apparently gassed to death soon after arrival in Auschwitz. She was 12.
11 September 1930 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Jeanne Woudstra, was born in Leeuwarden.
In November 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz with her parents Esther and Nathan and brothers Albers and Marcus. Probably all of them were murdered in gas chambers after the selection. pic.twitter.com/QE2ifWJfqi
