Category: lunacy

Colossal & Co. at it again, trying to create “War Dogs”

October 26, 2026 • 10:25 am

Dogs are used by first responders and the military for a number of tasks.  Their keen sense of smell, speed, and keen hearing give them advantages over even drones or robots, and, according to Grok, trained dogs are used for a variety of tasks, including detecting explosives, providing security, locating enemies, doing sentry and perimeter work, and performing search and rescue.  Two other duties mentioned by Grok are these.

  • “Special operations support: High-risk missions (e.g., the dog Cairo on the 2011 bin Laden raid), including some aerial insertion (parachute or rappel with specialized gear).”
  • “Israel has used MWDs heavily for detection and assault in Gaza (with high attrition).”

Note the “high attrition”: this means that the dogs die, even though they don’t choose to go into service. This is all I’m using from Grok; the rest of the writing here is mine or comes from the three sources below.

The breeds of dogs used in service are mainly German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and Labradors, and of course undergo a period of intensive training.  But, according to the Fortune article below, there’s a shortage of good “war dogs” (most of the mention of dogs in these articles involves military use):

The Army set up the K-9 Corps in 1942. Today the Department of War’s Military Working Dog Program has more than 2,200 dog teams, according to the company, and more than 80% of U.S. military working dogs are bought from Europe. Lamm cited a Senate Armed Services Committee warning that “due to the finite number of breeders overseas, as well as rising market demand, the cost… to procure whelped military working dogs from Europe is skyrocketing.” He also cited the American Kennel Club’s assessment that “there is now a shortage of even mediocre quality foreign dogs available.”

The U.S. is “competing against other country governments” for the same animals, Lamm said, China and Russia among them.

The losses after purchase are expensive, too. According to the company, fewer than half of the dogs bought are judged fit for service after a roughly three-year acquisition and training pipeline. That means the U.S. has to buy and train about 200 dogs today to field 100 working animals later.

But Mammon to the rescue! In stepped entrepreneurs and geneticists, in the form of Palmer Luckey (“an American entrepreneur and co-founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries“), Ben Lamm, billionaire entrepreneur and founder of our old friend Colossal Biosciences, the “de-extinction company,” and Dave Spirk, who will be the CEO of Warhound Corporation.

Warhound received over $200 million in seed funding, with investors including, according to Fortune, “In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton, 8VC, USIT, Bob Nelsen, Breyer Capital, CAZ Investments, Neogenesis, Builders VC and Lux Capital, among others.” Colossal also benefits: to quote Fortune again:

 Colossal licenses technology to Warhound and has an economic interest in it. Spinning companies out of Colossal’s research is “an intentional part of our model,” Lamm said.

How it’s being done (they’ve already started cloning trained dogs), and what will happen to the puppies, are described in the following three articles, though the archived Fortune article is the most informative. Scientific American is okay, but they still fall for Colossal’s hype. They say this:

Colossal Biosciences, which has a stake in Warhound and is providing much of the science, is no stranger to genetic engineering: last year the firm cloned and edited a gray wolf to create an animal that was genetically similar to the extinct dire wolf. The process for Warhound will look similar, Lamm says, but with modern dogs.

Nope. As I’ve pointed out, the “de-extincted dire wolf” is really a gray wolf with 20 DNA edits in 14 genes, producing an animal that is not “genetically similar to the extinct dire wolf”. [I corrected the earlier figures.] As I wrote on October 5, “Since gray wolves and dire wolves differ by 12 million DNA bases, the edits comprise only 0.0002% of the dire wolf genome. In other words, what Colossal produced, as anyone with neurons knows, is a grey wolf with a few morphological changes.”  I wouldn’t say that .0002% is a great deal of added similarity!

But I digress in my animus towards the crumbling Scientific American. Here are the three articles; click on the screenshot to read any.

From Scientific American:

From Fortune (archived):

From engadget:

The process will involve cloning service dogs that have proven to be great at their jobs, a process that first involves replacing the nucleus of an oocyte with the nucleus from a somatic (b0dy) cell of the chosen service dog. This nucleus-replaced egg cell is then genetically tweaked to make a number of edits; these edits are designed to remove genes causing defects like hip problems and cancer, as well as to add in bits of DNA that make dogs faster or better able to smell. Only a limited number of edits are possible (the faux “dire wolves” used 20), and you better know what the DNA bits you’re adding will do. This is a problem, as we don’t often know what genes are the ones causing problems.

The edited cells—you can make multiple clones by using different body cells from the same service dog—are then artificially fertilized using chemical stimulants, and these “fertilized” eggs are placed in a receptive surrogate mother dog.  The pregnant mom’s embryos are checked genetically to see if they indeed correspond to the cloned service dog, and are usually removed by Caesarian section, as were the faux “dire wolves”. This poses an ethical issue, as it involves making dogs pregnant who never get to see their pups.

Now cloning body cells without editing has been going on for some time as rich people have sought to replace their dead or aging pets with ones that are largely genetically similar. This runs about $50,000 to $100,000 per animal, and has a pretty high failure rate, as things can go wrong at any step. I quote Sci. Am.:

Cloning dogs is not a new science. Research has shown that cloning service dogs produces puppies that have many of the same desirable traits. But the process can be harmful, says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University. The rate of successful live offspring remains low among the cloned dogs, and the process can put the surrogate mother in danger.

Another ethical problem to ponder!  Once the cloned service dogs are removed from the surrogates and raised, they undergo training—after all, training is a behavioral and not a genetic modification—in the hopes that once you have puppies, not many of them will wash out.  In addition, they will be EQUIPPED WITH WAR STUFF. As Fortune says, quoting Lamm:

Anduril is supplying equipment including eye and ear protection, body armor, and integration with its Eagle Eye system, so that “dogs, handlers, and autonomous systems operate as one team.”

Now the first thing I asked myself when I read about this is, “Why not just artifically select service dogs with the desired traits and not breed from ones with defects?”  That’s a good question, as it might, in the end, be cheaper and easier.  On the other hand, if you have a great service dog, cloning will enable you to get many copies of the dog at once via multiple surrogates. But that itself leads to another problem: since the multiple surrogates are pretty much genetically identical (that’s what clones are), perpetuating the line might lead to serious problem with inbreeding.

The upside of cloning is, of course, pecuniary. If you can get great service dogs this way, you could secure a government contract to keep providing dogs to the military, and that could be very profitable. I suspect this, and not scientific advance, is the main motivation for the effort. After all, you could take the aggressive genes out of pit bulls, but that wouldn’t be profitable.

Another problem, which I’ve noted above, is figuring out the limited array of genes you want to edit. Sci Am. quotes another geneticist:

Both scientists and private companies have genetically edited dogs before, and the research can “accelerate really fast because genomics in dog breeds already has a lot of data,” says Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive and Restore, who works on wildlife cloning for conservation. Researchers have edited dogs to tweak genes for hip dysplasia, make them hypoallergenic and treat muscle disease, although the long-term health effects of these changes remain unclear.

But optimizing traits at scale and across service dogs could take time—and leave room for unintended consequences, Novak adds.

“It can be hard to figure out exactly what genetic element is creating a trait,” he says, “and some traits can be the combinations of hundreds or thousands of mutations across genes.”

Traits like smelling ability and running speed are, no doubt, “polygenic,” involving several to many genes, and changing just a couple may not effect much change in the War Dogs.

Finally, I’ve mentioned some ethical problems. Although the project is touted as being “certified by the American Humane Society,” I’m not sure what kind of certification will prevent problems like this (from Sci Am):

“It is by no means a perfect science, and by that, I mean it’s still a fairly inefficient process,” Moses says. “It requires a lot of dogs to have invasive things done to them and to be killed in order to produce one cloned puppy.”

Finally (again from Sci. Am.), cloning can have unintended detrimental effects that aren’t known until later, as Ben Novak notes above.

I don’t know any way this can be done without either producing unwanted dogs, killing or harming the surrogates, or producing genetically defective dogs when the cloning goes wrong. In my view, the Humane Society’s certification is premature.

Will the War Dogs program produce what’s intended? Who knows? It’s more likely to succeed than the ludicrous efforts to “de-exinct” Woolly Mammoths, Thylacines, or Dodos, projects that in the end won’t produce any de-extinction nor make Colossal any money.

Another journal drinks the Kool-Aid

October 13, 2026 • 9:45 am

The American Journal of Biological Anthropology was formerly The American Journal of Physical Anthropology but, according to reader who sent me this link, the name changed, presumably to reflect the changing nature of the field. I quote:

It is the flagship journal of the AABA and it used to be rigorous science only.  The latest special issue is filled with this nonscientific nonsense.  “Queering Biological Anthropology: uses of LGBTQIA+ knowledge and queer feminism in research”. It’s ridiculous and embarrassing.
You can see the table of contents at the last link above. Yes, a compendium of biological anthropology on sex and gender could potentially contribute to human understand of our personas and social interactions, but this one ain’t it.  Here are a few select articles, and I’ll give a quote or two from each (click on the headline to read the free bits; excerpts are indented, and bolding is mine).

Here’s the phenomenon:

Callitrichids are equally notable as chimeras, a term referring to organisms whose cells are derived from two or more distinct zygotic lineages (Anderson et al. 1951). Among mammals, small numbers of chimeric cells (i.e., “microchimerism”) are thought to be present in all placental species (Gammill and Harrington 2017; Nelson 2012). In callitrichids, however, chimerism routinely occurs on a much larger scale. Within this taxon, chimerism occurs in conjunction with the production of fraternal twins and other multiples, which is the typical birth pattern for all but callimicos (Ah-King and Tullberg 2000; Harris et al. 2014).

That’s interesting, but in the hands of an ideologue the finding allows one to go wild with speculation:

This article demonstrates how queer monster theory can illuminate the cultural boundary-work that stabilizes biological categories of sex and reproduction as well as the kinship claims that often follow. Read as monstrous informants, callitrichid chimeras make visible how “monstrosity” is employed to police these categories in human and nonhuman primates alike, as well as what is at stake when that policing is normalized. When primatology defaults to inherited assumptions about sex and reproduction, it risks not only mischaracterizing its study species but lending scientific authority to the broader cultural machinery of queer monsterization and erasure.

The promises of monsters and monkeys therefore carry epistemic and ethical obligations. Meeting them is, in a sense, a monstrous practice; it requires connections and conversations across subfields and sustained attention to the entanglements of science and sociopolitical dynamics. Yet these obligations can also begin with small methodological choices: specifying the traits being measured rather than using “sex” as a silent binary proxy; defining and justifying what counts as “reproduction” and “fitness” within a given analysis; and acknowledging nonbinary sex and nonreproductive individuals without casting them as aberrant or without value. Practiced in these ways, primatology and biological anthropology can begin to unsettle naturalized bias rather than reproduce it.

In fact, the whole issue is permeated with the view that sex is nonbinary. Here’s another example, one of two article that bemoans the fact that “gender” (presumably how one identifies with respect to sex)

A quote:

Intersectional feminism and queer theories may also be used to challenge sexist and cisgenderist biases that can harm sex- and gender-diverse individuals. Striving to de-center patriarchal ideology, feminist history highlights the shared goals of gender equality and equity. Feminist anthropology, specifically, teaches cultural competence and limits patriarchal biases in forensic casework. A rich understanding of intersectional feminism can help forensic practitioners better understand sex and gender variability. A more feminist forensic anthropology could greatly improve the communal impact of medicolegal practitioners across the U.S. Queer theory aims to critique assumptions related to “atypical” bodies by normalizing the spectrum of human sex and gender diversity. Advocating against biological determinism, integrating queer theories in medicolegal investigations can help ensure that documents and datasets are reflective of individuals’ biological and cultural experiences. Discussions on queering bioarchaeology emerged around the start of the century, with scholars such as Sabrina Agarwal, Pamela Geller, Sandra Hollimon, and Julie Wesp outlining the importance and utility of queer theory and methods in skeletal assessments and conceptualizations of the human body (e.g., Geller 2005, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2019; Hollimon 1996, 2001, 2011; Wesp and Agarwal 2017). Failure to recognize both biological and cultural influences on the skeleton risks perpetuating scientism, presentism, and bio-colonialism (Geller 2005, 2009b, 2019; Hollimon 2011). Using queer theory in forensic anthropology can help improve medicolegal case resolution by broadening identification efforts and collaboration with living communities.

Another search for nonbinary sex in skeletons:

This author use sa bogus overestimateion of true intersex individuals, and then, since there are really no data showing what the skeletons of such individuals look like, they simply make predictions. Again, there’s a general denial that there are distinguishable sexes, as well as the usual emphasis on sex-related traits which, of course, we’ve long known are more variable than sex itself. We still have only two types of gametes.

Blackless et al. (2000) have estimated that approx. 1.7%–2.3% of all humans are intersex. Fausto-Sterling (2000a) similarly estimated that intersex people comprise 1.7% of the global population, revised from an earlier estimate of 4% (Fausto-Sterling 1993). If accurate, these estimates indicate that intersex is not rare in population genetics terms (Astorino 2019), since “rare” traits are exhibited by < 1% of individuals in a given population (Hartl et al. 1997; Jobling et al. 2013). Researchers in the social sciences have noted that this frequency estimate is comparable to the global frequency of humans with natural red hair—a trait that is generally not considered “rare” by medical professionals or many cultures (Dreger 1998; Karkazis 2008a; Davis 2015). In other vertebrates, it is unclear how common intersex is; while the frequency of other forms of sex diversity has been more comprehensively studied across higher vertebrate taxa (Ashman et al. 2014; Nemesházi and Bókony 2023), similar data on intersex are not available.

. . . . Given these frequencies, it may be inaccurate to characterize humans as sexually dimorphic (Blackless et al. 2000). Astorino (2019) suggested that humans may be conceptualized not as sexually dimorphic, but as sexually polymorphic. Dunsworth (2020) proposed referring to “sex differences” instead of sexual dimorphism. McLaughlin et al. (2023) argued that sex is multivariate, where many individual traits—each of which may or may not conform to a binary distribution—collectively constitute what is typically considered a single variable. Similarly, Smiley et al. (2024) asserted that individual sex variables each represent different aspects of sex, which may have complex, dynamic relationships with other sex variables, and suggested that researchers operationalize specific, measurable sex variables appropriate for a given study, each of which may be characterized as monomorphic, dimorphic, or multimorphic.

Despite the fact that sex variation has been noted to be complex in humans, sex is still most commonly defined as sexually dimorphic by biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.

Bonobos used to rectify the claimed erasure of lesbian and bisexual relationships:

The title of this paper “Just gal pals!” refers to the heteronormative tendency to erase lesbian and bisexual relationships and is a memeified response by the LGBTQ+ community online to such erasure (Warburton 2021). We believe it also encapsulates the way researchers over the decades have described bonobo GG rubbing: Wow look at those two female bonobos (gal pals) and their strong social bond or just two female bonobos (gal pals) reducing tension. Entrenched biases make the alternative—that two female bonobos are having sex—one of the last available explanations that researchers explicitly acknowledge in the scientific literature. This may be why sexual motivations are omitted from hypotheses for the function of GG rubbing (Hohmann and Fruth 2000; 2009; Waller 2016). Similarly, while GG rubbing in female bonobos has been emphasized, male–male sexual behavior in bonobos and other primates is often overlooked. Media portrayals of female–female sexuality in humans are often framed for consumption by the male gaze and/or imply that the women involved are “testing” or “experimenting” while not invalidating a heterosexual identity (Diamond 2005). Thus, female–female sexuality among humans, particularly for bi/pansexual women, is often not viewed as valid, and sexual relationships among women are viewed more favorably than those among men (Worthen 2013; Bettinsoli et al. 2020). As a result, recognition of female–female sexuality in our closest relatives may also be perceived as less directly threatening to patriarchal hegemony in humans.

Now I haven’t read the whole issue, or any article in great detail, as that would cause severe damage to my alimentary canal. Regardless, this issue, for which papers were solicited, appears to be driven not by a search for truth but by a drive to promote “progressive” ideology. Not only do we see the claim that traditional anthropology has caused great harm (see above about erasing lesbian and bisexual relationships), but that these papers will rectify that harm. The science is mission-driven rather than knowledge-driven.

Other harm appears to come from the claim that sex in humans is binary, with misguided biologists like me recognizing that humans have but two types of reproductive apparatus: those designed to produce eggs or sperm. I’ve defended that position assiduously while recognizing that there is a very low frequency (about 1/5000) of true intersex individuals.

Overall, this shows the growing tendency of biological anthropologists to distort science for ideological ends. The claim that there are more than two sexes, or that sex is a continuum, is of course made to buttress the idea that individuals who feel that they’re not of their natal biological sex will be harmed by the sex binary. It is a way of providing consolation to nonbinary people (I’m talking about gender, not sex.) That idea bogus, of course, but it’s these well-meaning but careerist scientists—those who infuse their “findings” with ideology—who do the real damage.

And of course I make no comment about the other papers in the contents that I haven’t looked at.

h/t: Callum

The folly of the DSA

August 11, 2026 • 8:30 am

If you already think the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are bad, have a gander at this interview.  An article in the Times of Israel (click screenshot below) summarizes a New Yorker interview, also on video (below), with Megan Romer, current co-chair of the DSA. As you know, DSA members or affiliates are winning important Democratic primaries throughout America, and so, especially if you’re a Democrat, you’ll want to know their platform and their leadership. (The platform is summarized here in a post about it.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are the members of the DSA in Congress, but come November there will likely be more. (I do predict that the ambitious AOC will quit the DSA and become a Democrat plain and simple.) Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist but is not a DSA member.  Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is also a card-carrying member.

And remember the follies of their platform, which include abolishing the Senate, replacing the Presidency and the Supreme Court with an organization subservient to a unicameral legislature, and putting all the means of production (including large corporations) into the hands of the public, as well as eliminating bills, providing free and equal housing for all, and, of course, getting rid of Israel.  But the ToI below gives a summary

The ToI article is mostly about the DSA’s damnation of Israel and support of Hamas (!):

The co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has defended rallying in support of Hamas and disputed Israel’s right to self defense during a recent interview.

Megan Romer, the United States’ national co-chair of the DSA, told The New Yorker in an interview published Friday that she “probably would have” joined an anti-Israel rally in New York City the day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, had she lived in the city.

“One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people and taking of over 200 hostages, you would have come and rallied behind Hamas?” New Yorker editor David Remnick asked Romer.

“I think that October 7th was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long,” she said.

If there was ever a Palestinian state, it was Gaza, and any restrictions on travel out of Gaza (also imposed by Egypt) were the results of Hamas, which governed the territory, spent its money building tunnels, and fostered terrorism. In fact, the October 7 attack on Israel did express dissatisfaction, but not with the governance of Gaza (blame those problems on Hamas), but with the existence of Israel, which Hamas has sworn to destroy.  A bit more from the ToI:

At the October 8, 2023, rallies in New York City, anti-Zionist protesters chanted in support of Hamas killings, mocked and threatened Jewish counter-demonstrators, celebrated the taking of Israeli hostages, and called for the destruction of Israel.

Romer is one of two co-chairs of the national DSA, making her a central figure in the ascendant far-left movement, which has made anti-Zionist activism central to its politics.

. . . The DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her congressional primary in New York City in June, attended the rally. Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas or the October 7 attack during her campaign.

Romer told The New Yorker that any defense or economic support for Israel was a “solid red line” for the DSA, and that the movement sought a “free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem,” which she described as a “one-state solution.”

As you’ll see from the 30-minute New Yorker interview with Romer below, she is either ignorant of many things she should know, or she refuses to be specific about what the DSA thinks. But it’s clear that she’s an anti-Zionist (e.g., antisemite) and favors the erasure of Israel. More from the ToI:

Romer was unfamiliar with former US president Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit, during which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposed Palestinian state.

Asked if she would have been “satisfied” with the terms at the Camp David Summit, Romer said, “I don’t know them off the top of my head.”

She also disputed Israel’s right to defend itself, saying, “People, humans, peoples have the right to life in safety. But if that safety means doing genocide to somebody else, then no, that’s not defensible.”

Of course she doesn’t define “genocide”, so it’s not clear what, if anything, Israel could have done after October 7 to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist attack. She simply implies that Israel didn’t defend itself “properly” because it committed “genocide”. Philosopher Maarten Boudry has a much better take on this issue than Romer.

The New Yorker also pressed Romer about supporting both “queer-friendly” politics and the anti-LGBTQ Hamas.

“I would not call Hamas queer-friendly. I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege,” she said.

Again. with the excuses: Hamas has to kill gay people because Gaza was “under seige”, ego they had to throw gay people off buildings. Does that make any sense? No, it’s just an excuse for the excesses of Islamist governance.  Finally, she refuses to condemn Hamas, and a refusal to condemn terrorism doesn’t bode well for DSA’s governance of the U.S.

Romer also defended Hamas in 2024, saying that “no socialist should” condemn the terrorist group.

The ADL has its say.

The Anti-Defamation League said Romer’s rhetoric “puts every Jewish American at risk” due to her justification of violence against the Jewish state.

“The DSA co-chair does not and will not condemn a US-designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and whose charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.

But listen to this half-hour video, which should both appall you and frighten you. Ms. Romer is one of the two heads of the DSA.  She’s questioned by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who does a good job trying to get her to be explicit about her beliefs and the DSA platform.  The ludicrous views she espouses are masked by her genial demeanor, and is further hidden by her claims that much of the DSA’s platform will be enacted at some time in the future (e.g., getting rid of the police)

Now much of what the DSA wants is in principle admirable, like public medical care and and end to the Electoral College. The problem is how to do this. But much of the rest of their platform involves amending the Constitution, which, according to Remnick,  has a chance of “about zero.” As for getting rid of Israel and supporting Hamas, well, you know my position on that, which is that it both instantiates and demonstrates anti-Semitism.

I oppose the DSA for several reasons. It wants to abolish capitalism, which, though the system has some bad effects, can be modified to ameliorate those effects (Social Security and Medicare).  It wants to get rid of America’s balance of power, a crucial aspect of American government that has served us well. It wants to get rid of cops and prisons, and no government in the West had done that or wants to—the effects are predictable, as seen in the 1969 M0ntreal Police Strike.

And it wants to get rid of Israel and, for all I know, the Jews. The DSA is not yet at the stage of camps and gassing, but already Canadians are leaving their country because of antisemitism and repairing to Israel.  If the DSA controlled America, we’d see a similar exodus.

Finally, as a Democrat, I think the DSA will fracture and perhaps destroy the Democratic Party, ushering in Republican governance, something I don’t want. Already prominent centrist Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and J. D. Pritzker, my own governor, are holding their tongues about the DSA and its anti-Israel policies.

Although the DSA doesn’t represent most of the Left, they are loud, promise Pie in the Sky, and above all are performative, talking a good game but not accomplishing much. They are not really “democratic socialists” in the European sense: capitalist democracies with some socialistic aspects. Nope, they are Marxists, pure and simple, and I will not vote for one.

h/t: Bat

Pathbreaking new conclusion: all babies are queer

June 28, 2026 • 8:30 am

Here’s an equation, which is mine:

psychoanalysis + queer theory = lunacy.

And it’s a true equation, at least as demonstrated by the paper below (and others) in a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, brought to my attention by Luana (I don’t know how she finds these things).

I had to read this paper three times to even understand its thesis, but I think I do now. And its thesis is something like this (I may of course be wrong since the paper is not only opaque but dreadful).

  • All babies are queer. But “queer” doesn’t mean the definition below produced by Grok:
In activist and academic circles tied to the LGBTQ movement, it now functions mainly as a broad umbrella label for people who identify as non-heterosexual in orientation or who reject alignment between their self-perception and biological sex. Its meaning remains imprecise by design in many cases.
  • Rather, by “queer”, the author and, I guess, the contributors, apparently mean “a departure from norms”, so that every baby is “non-standard”.  This leads to the question, “How can a baby be non-standard” when all babies are nonstandard?”  This is the conundrum that apparently motivates this issue.
  • The author apparently means, and I quote:

 In our approach, queer babies are neither having gay sex nor are they the babies destined, by the backward logic of cause-effect development, to become gay adults. We are not, in other words, using ‘queer’ as a descriptor of either sex acts or people. Rather, claiming the essential queerness of babies posits that babies are queer on their own terms – which is to say, because we were all babies once, that there is something constitutive about this queerness.

So how were we all queer as babies? To answer this, the author turns to Freud.

Freud provided more than a hint of how to think about the queerness of babies. In his first foray into a theory of sexuality, overtly entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905/1955), Freud introduced the notion of polymorphous perversity, beginning in the first essay with an insistence that what is deemed ‘perverse’ – namely, a deviation from either the normal (reproductive) sexual aim or normal (hetero)sexual object – is so common in sexual life that he is forced to conclude ‘there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions’ (1905/1955, p. 171). That which is deemed non-normal, or perverse, thus sits at ‘the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct’, a claim that Freud further insists is ‘only … demonstrable in children’, specifically in infants. What for Freud is crucial about the early stages of infantile sexuality is that the sexual instinct, which in adults appears to be singular and teleological, is revealed to consist of ‘component instincts’ and partial objects

Okay, so all babies are queer because they all have infant sexuality as construed by Freud, a sexuality instantiated at adulthood when the psychoanalysts get their claws into patients.  But this still doesn’t tell us how babies are “departures from the norms”.

At any rate, this exercise in academic logorrhea combined with discredited Freudian theory can be read by clicking the title below (it’s the introduction to a whole issue on queer babies), or by reading the pdf here.  The author is Misha Kavka at the University of Amsterdam, whose c.v., laden with papers about queerness, is here.

Here is a screenshot of some but not all of the contents so you can see what academics are getting paid to produce:

I will give one extended quote from the paper so you can see how dire it is: full of opaque and just awful writing, wordplay (common in this kind of postmodern piffle), and a questionable thesis that cannot be tested.

For an introduction to the issue of ‘the queerness of babies’, it may be no bad thing to attempt a definition of both terms. First, the easier one: ‘baby’ both is and is not a metaphor, which is why we present it here in the plural. There is no getting away from the fact that the baby, always an overdetermined signifier, slides into a metaphorics of potential on the one hand and helplessness on the other, precisely because the baby in reality is the infans, defined in the psychoanalytic tradition as ‘the one who does not speak, and is therefore not fully inscribed, only partially represented by language as a symbolic system’ (Poulios & Papadaki). This infans who does not yet speak – and who may never speak, as the psychoanalyst Nadine Cordova reminds us – is nonetheless ‘spoken of long before its arrival … and is even inscribed somewhere long before it appears’ (2024, p. 97, my translation). Marked by the trauma of birth, not (yet) in language but already inscribed into and symptomatic of the family, as Bice Benvenuto argues in ‘Oedipus in Pieces’ here, the baby is a psychic enfleshment that arrives both too soon (born prematurely, according to Lacan) and too late (as Diego Semerene posits in this issue, ‘A baby is a commissioned portrait. After someone’). Moreover, as Poulios and Papadaki argue, the infans represents not just an early developmental period but a field of psychic life that remains ‘active during the whole life of the subject, in parallel to and quite independent from the primary and secondary processes of mental function’. In that sense, the baby marks a (prelinguistic) developmental phase as well as a psychic formation which we never leave behind – that is to say, from which we must always depart. Thus, our very attempts to figure, to re-member and/or to analyse the baby make of it a quandary and a question. In that sense, this perfectly standard baby – the infans whom we cannot (yet) make sense of – is also perfectly queer.

Beyond its complicated linguistic history, ‘queer’ in contemporary use tends to circulate between two meanings. As an abstraction, whether philosophical or socio-cultural, it gestures towards that which is non-standard, anti-normative or what Sara Ahmed calls ‘oblique or “off line”’ (2006, p. 161); in Lee Edelman’s psychoanalytically inflected understanding, queerness sits on the edge of the Symbolic, rather like the infans, since it is ‘a matter of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order’ (2004, p. 25). In its more specific uses, on the other hand, the term ‘queer’ is aligned with sexuality, referring to practices, desires and identities that deviate from heterosexual norms, as denoted by the ‘Q’ in LGBTQIA+. As queer theorists of the last three decades have shown, there are many points of crossover between these two meanings, to the degree that the sexual lurks in many a mention of ‘queer’, however abstracted, in often enticingly scandalous ways.

“Infans” in Latin translates to “one who cannot speak”. Yet Kavka also repeatedly talks about “interrogating the baby,” although babies can’t answer questions. That, too, must be postmodern lingo.

Had enough? I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish.  At the end of the paper, Kavka tells us “what we are calling on ourselves, and others who feel beckoned, to do. A quote:

  • to turn our attention to the baby, the infans, as the post-foetal but pre-Symbolic agent provocateur who arrives both too soon and too late;
  • to acknowledge the baby as a primary site of queerness, which describes the as-yet-undetermined formation of the becoming-subject;
  • to separate the sexual from the genital and, by extension, to understand sexuality (infantile and beyond) on the spectrum of polymorphous perversity rather than as a binary;
  • to position the queer baby before identification and hence before the adoption of sexual identity, while acknowledging its necessary connection to the sexual nature of the drive; and
  • to turn our attention to the clinic, where the invitation to question the baby in a different way can, we hope, open up ‘the path to sovereignty amidst inhospitable conditions’ (Poulios & Papadaki).
At any rate, you can see what the authors are called to do, which again includes “questioning the baby,” even though the baby cannot speak.

After reading this paper several times, between swigs of Pepto Bismol, I left both amused and angry. Amused because the author could have given her thesis in one paragraph, but tricks it out with all kinds of allusions to Freud, postmodernist thought, and wordplay like this (bolding is mine):

. . . let us begin by sitting with the notion that the baby is ‘essentially queer’ – which is, no bones about it, both the core contention and the field of play for the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.

. . . Taking an autotheoretical approach to disinterring the personal, political and familial histories that swaddle the baby within the (in)vestments of those who came before, Semerene adopts the word travesti – reclaiming the Latin American term for a not-quite-passing transwoman – to figure the travesti baby as a stand-in for parental lost objects whose hand-me-downs fit only ‘as an act of passing’.

. . . If this polymorphous yet indeterminate baby, swaddled but never quite separate, is a symptom of the family, as Benvenuto reminds us, then the queerness of the baby is also bound, precipitously, to a queerness of relations stretching from the first car(ri)er to the transference between analyst and analysand.

This is just one symptom of bad writing: not only opaque prose (perhaps it’s comprehensible to other contributors, but certainly not to well-read academics like me), but also showing off by making puns.

And why was I angry? Because as a scientist all I see is a bunch of obscurantist theorizing with no way to test it, and the authors are getting both money and professional credit to write this stuff. And either a library or subscribers have to pay to read the stuff. Most of all, because although psychoanalysists and sociologists purport to be engaged in truth-seeking, there is no truth, and no way to find it, within this paper. It is empty theorizing. How appropriate that it draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, founded by perhaps the most famous fraud in academic history. Although throughout his life Freud claimed to be doing science, Fred Crews shows definitively that he was a grifter and a charlatan, making up many of his results and simply lying about many things. And yet Freud is still regarded by many academics as a great thinker, and analysts still use his methods—which will cost you a lot of time and money—to “address” people’s problems.

If you want an example of why the humanities are in trouble, simply read this paper or (God help you) the rest of the issue. I’ve written before about why the art—and by extension much of the humanities—can’t help us find propositional truth, but rather aim at helping us see how other people think and thereby prompting us to reflect on ourselves.  But the only light this paper sheds is on the convoluted thinking of a coterie of postmodern academics.

And for a purgative, read the book below, which is not only immensely revealing (it’s based on a ton of research) but superbly written. We live in a culture that, sadly, is still saturated with Freud’s ideas, and everyone who calls themselves educated needs to read Freud: The Making of an Illusion.

I did not publish this dreck

May 21, 2026 • 8:30 am

A reader sent me this “paper” and asked me if I really wrote it. It is not only garbage, but, in parts, complete gibberish.

I’ll use this space to assert that NO, THIS IS A FAKE.  The “Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation” does not exist. Googling it yields no results, and asking Grok yields this:

No, there is no journal titled Journal of Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation (or any close variant like Journal of Evolutionary Genetics).

Searches across academic databases, journal lists, and publishers turn up zero results for a journal by that exact (or near-exact) name. No ISSN, publisher page, or official record exists for it.

There is an American Journal of Science, mentioned as the place I published this garbage, but it is an earth sciences journal devoted to geology. I’ve never published in it.

Although the content below is opaque, it may be an attempt to say I’ve worked on the developmental genetics of skin color in some bizarre species, which may be a guilt-by association thing with racism. Who knows?

At any rate, I’m making this post only to assert, for the record, that what is below is a complete fabrication. It appears to be the product of an addled mind.

Click on the picture if you want to see some lunacy:

 

Now Colossal proposes to “de-extinct” the moa; Peter Jackson helps

July 9, 2025 • 9:00 am

It’s an hour until.Walrus Call, so I wanted to bring to your attention another insane attempt by Colossal Biosciences to “de-extinct” a species. This time it’s the moa, one of several species of this flightless bird that used to inhabit New Zealand until the Māori killed them all of by bopping them on the heads with jade clubs. Or so I recall.

It is thus just and fitting, and a form of reparations, that these indigenous people will have a big hand in trying to bring back the one unlucky species of moa chosen for “de-extinction.” To see why this endeavor will not happen in our time, have a look at my Boston Globe op-ed explaining why this “experiment” is not only impossible with our present technology, but also unethical. One thing it is, however, is lucrative, with donors ranging from Paris Hilton to wealthy and famous football players. This time, since the moa is a bird from New Zealand, kiwi moviemaker Peter Jackson has kicked in— probably a lot of money.

Apparently Mr. Jackson is unaware of the formidable problems of truly resurrecting a species in its genetic entirety, and doesn’t know that an ostrich with a few genes derived from ancient moa DNA is not a real moa.  It would lack, for one thing, the genes that built the moa brain, affecting its behavior and ability to deal with the environment. And there are no close relatives to serve as surrogates. (I can’t give links here because the internet is so damn slow.)

The NZ website Stuff, along with a tweet by Colossal Bioscience itself (the latter still calls itself “The de-extinction company”) describes the insanity.

Our mainstream media does it again! On 9 July we have more nonsense, presented as science (Burr, 2025). Apparently, Colossal Biosciences believes that it can de-extinct the moa within the next decade and that the moa will be alive and walking by 2035.

Apparently, Colossal Biosciences has teamed up with South Island iwi  [tribe]Ngāi Tahu, Canterbury Museum and Sir Peter Jackson to bring the moa back to life. These groups have signed up to a strategic partnership which aims to de-extinct nine moa sub-species, starting with the South Island giant moa. Burr informs us that this situation leaves the door open to resurrect other extinct species too – such as the huia.

Unfortunately, Colossal Biosciences knows very well that bringing any extinct species to life is completely impossible and in effect it has already admitted so in relation to much publicized attempts to recreate the “dire wolf” (Le Page, 2025).

. . . Professor Jerry Coyne explains the problems in more or less the following terms (Coyne, 2025). Attempts to bring back extinct species are scientifically misguided and mis-reported by the press. He says that the press distorts what has been achieved scientifically, and pretends that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is identical to an extinct species.

Changing a living species by editing a few genes to get something that looks like the extinct creature is not the same thing as re-creating the extinct creature. Professor Coyne tells us that extinct species embodied thousands of genetic differences from related modern species, including genes that affect metabolism and behavior. Control regions of genes, which lie outside protein-coding regions, are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives, but we do not know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

Some unwarranted optimism:

Particularly worrying is an assurance from Canterbury Museum’s senior curator, Paul Scofield, that it will happen.

“This will happen. There’s no doubt about it whatsoever. This is the world’s foremost group of scientists working to this goal now.”

Sorry! It will not happen! The practical challenges are much too great. But the real problem for New Zealand is not only a biased media, but one that is scientifically illiterate, ready to put false ideas into the public domain, and that refuses to publish the considered responses of professional scientists.

Well, it may happen, but not in our lifetime—unless you’re less than ten years old and Colossal stays in business that long.  I will be in the clay before anything close to a moa “de-extinction” occurs, so I won’t have to apologize on this website for raining on Colossal’s ever-changing parade. Remember when the company said they’d “de-extincted” the dire wolf, then admitted that they hadn’t really resurrected the dire wolf but then later did a 180° turn with Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientific officer, arguing that yes, they had brought back the dire wolf? To do this, she had to adopt the Species Concept That Nobody Holds (SCTNH), which is roughly this: “If something resembles in any way another species, then it they are members of the same species.” By those lights, we’re the same species as chimps and bonobos.

I was sent both a tweet from Colossal as well as their latest YouTube video about the project. I can’t see either of them here since the Internet is so bad, but watch and judge for yourself.

All I can say is that to pretend that a few gene edits can bring a species back to life is to be both disingenuous and arrogant.  But of course if Colossal admitted the truth, they’d be out of business. That’s why they pretend that the edited gray wolf they confected is really a “de-extincted dire wolf.”

Misguided branch of British Medical Association rejects UK’s Supreme Court decision that “woman” is defined by biological sex

April 30, 2025 • 10:00 am

As I reported two weeks ago, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom voted unanimously to affirm that the term “woman” under the legal Equality Act refers only to biological women and not trans-identified men. That means that a biological male holding a gender reassignment certificate would not have the same legal status as a biological women.  I added this:

In all the stuff I was able to read this morning, I was unable to find the definition of a “biological woman”, save that it refers to one’s natal sex, though they don’t mention gametes. The ruling does refer to the binary nature of sex (see below). And the ruling implies as well that the word “man” can mean in law only a “biological man”

That would seem to settle things, at least as far as the Equality Act is concerned, and the ruling was celebrated by those who favor the existence of “women’s spaces,” including sports competition, locker rooms, and jails.

But some members of the British Medical Association (BMA), as reported by the Times of London and other venues, have taken issue with the Supreme Court’s decision, implying that rrans-identified men are also women.  The subgroup of the BMA that voted against the Supreme Court Decision was the group of “resident doctors,” previously known as “junior doctors,” and so represent younger physicians. Note that the BMA is a registered trade union and does not regulate doctors; that role is given to the General Medical Council.

Click below to see an archive of the Times report:

A précis:

Doctors at the British Medical Association have voted to condemn the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex as “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.

The union’s wing of resident doctors — formerly known as junior doctors — passed a motion at a conference on Saturday criticising the ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex.

The doctors claimed that a binary divide between sex and gender “has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people”.

The branch of the British Medical Association (BMA) — representing about 50,000 younger doctors — said it “condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country”.

The BMA’s stance is likely to raise concerns that the medical profession may seek to obstruct attempts at implementing new NHS guidance on trans patients, being drawn up after the Supreme Court ruling. It follows the union’s decision last summer to lobby against the Cass Review and to call for an end to the ban on puberty blockers for children identifying as transgender.

Lobbying against the Cass Review—a sensible report that banned the use of puberty blockers on individuals under 18 and dismantled the dysfunctional Tavistock Clinic that hustled gender-dysphoric children into “affirmative therapy”—shows where the ideology of this group lies. Although the Cass Review was widely applauded by doctors, these “resident doctors” are clearly infected with the mantra that anyone can claim to be any sex they want. As the yahoo! article below notes, “Last year, the BMA became the only medical organisation in the UK to reject the findings of the Cass Review into the provision of gender identity services for young people.”

And their ideology is clear:

The BMA motion, responding to the ruling, said: “This meeting condemns the Supreme Court ruling defining the term ‘woman’ with respect to the Equality Act as being based on ‘biological sex’, which they refer to as a person who was at birth of the female sex, as reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical.

“We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.”

It added that the BMA is committed to “affirming the rights of transgender and non-binary individuals to live their lives with dignity, having their identity respected”.

Of course we all respect the rights of transgender individuals–as transgender individuals. But those rights clearly clashed with the rights of other groups, most notably biological women, and the court adjudicated that clash in its definition of “woman”. Nobody of good will wants “erasure” of trans people, but we have to recognize that the claim that “trans women are women” leads to a clash of rights whose solution was taken up by the UK Court.

Note the “sex and gender are complex” assertion often used by ideologues or the benighted to claim that sex is not binary. (Yes, there are a very, very few exceptions., as I mention below, but for all practical purposes biological sex is binary.)  And, of course, it is binary in nearly all transsexual individuals, who even recognize the binary by wanting to adopt the role of their non-natal sex.

A bit more:

Sex Matters, the campaign group, accused the doctors of being an “embarrassment to their profession” and said it is “terrifying” that people who have undergone years of medical training can claim there is “no basis” for biological sex.

Indeed; for the doctors are redefining sex (and gender) as some multifactorial, “multifaceted aspect of the human condition”.  Perhaps gender roles fit that definition, but the Supreme Court was defining sex, not gender, and stayed away from gender, which is not part of the Equality Act.  This clearly shows the ideological nature of the resident doctors’ efforts and their unwarranted conflation of sex and gender.  Sex is a biological issue; gender a social one, also mixed to some degree with biology.  Don’t these doctors know that? Yes, of course they do, but pretend otherwise. If they’re not pretending, they are witless and don’t deserve to be doctors.

Yahoo News! (click below) gives the text of the resident doctors’ resolution:

Here’s the text of the resolution:

“This meeting condemns the Supreme Court ruling defining the term ‘woman’ with respect to the Equality Act as being based on ‘biological sex’, which they refer to as a person who ‘was at birth of the female sex’, as reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical.

“We recognize as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people. As such this meeting:

“i: Reiterates the BMA’s position on affirming the rights of transgender and non-binary individuals to live their lives with dignity, having their identity respected.

“ii. Reminds the Supreme Court of the existence of intersex people and reaffirms their right to exist in the gender identity that matches their sense of self, regardless of whether this matches any identity assigned to them at birth.

“iii. Condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country.

“iv. Commits to strive for better access to necessary health services for trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people.”

The deeming of the Supreme Court’s ruling as “trans and intersex-exclusionary” is confusing.  Most trans people do indeed fit into the Court’s categorization of “man” or “woman.” The exception, the “true” intersex people, range in frequency from 1/5600 to 1/20,000, and so are very rare, making biological sex as binary as you can get. (In contrast, the frequency of people born with extra fingers or toes is about 1/2500 to 1/800, and yet we refer to humans as having “ten fingers and toes”.) It’s clear that this controversy is really not about the rare “true intersex” individuals, but about individuals who fit the biological definition of “man” or “woman” but identify otherwise—as either “nonbinary” or “transsexual”.

h/t: cesar, nick