Category: obituary

Two articles on the Queen: one lionizing her and the other attacking her

September 10, 2022 • 12:45 pm

Because Queen Elizabeth was more or less a cipher, her death has led to people projecting all manner of their own feelings onto her, seeing her ranging from a kind, diligent, and dedicated person to a  representative of an outdated and bloody colonialist regime, as well as of a monarchy past its time. This post will give you one example of each pole. I have no d*g in this fight, so I tend to see the Queen as a decent and hardworking person, but the monarchy as an institution whose time has come and gone.

Reaction to the death of Elizabeth II was at first wholly worshipful, but a backlash is beginning—largely in the U.S. I’ll talk about that in a bit, but first let’s hear the positive assessment of Elizabeth by one of her former “subjects,” Andrew Sullivan. Her legacy is the main object of his column yesterday (click to read, but subscribe if you read frequently).

As a conservative and an ex-Brit, one might expect Sullivan to admire the Queen, and indeed he does.  But he mainly admires her for hanging in there, for choosing a life that is not a human life, because she knew that her lot would be the abandonment of freedom for duty.  I have to say, Sully does say that well:

[When Biden was elected], I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son King Charles III’s views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

Yes, she is to be admired for that self-restraint, though I don’t think it would have sullied her image to do a few more Paddington Bear skits. But, I suppose, Sullivan does come close to the reason for the outburst of grief in Britain at the Queen’s death:

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay.

Well, one could disagree that countries need royalty to keep them stable. Although I’ve heard it argued that America could use a “head of state” for ceremonial purposes, alongside the President for governance, I think we’ve done pretty well (excepting for one four-year period); and many countries thrive without royalty.  I, for one, don’t crave authority and mystery.  Could Sullivan’s emphasis on those qualities have something to do with his Catholicism, which teems with both?

But in contrast to the article below, Sullivan does explain the Elizabeth-worship that so puzzles Americans:

 But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen too followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly reconjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the royal family stayed in London even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before. When I grew up studying the Normans and the Plantagenets and the Tudors, they were not just artifacts of the distant past, but deeply linked to the present by the monarchy’s persistence and the nation’s thousand-year survival as a sovereign state — something no other European country can claim.

She was there, she didn’t screw up, she was one fixed point in a changing world, and she was the latest instantiation of a hereditary monarchy.  The first three points I can understand, the last I can’t. I’d prefer a country that didn’t have a lineage set apart (and considered superior to) all others. The United State is only about 250 years old, but would having a king ensure our persistence? Would a king have prevented Trump from nearly subverting the Republic? I don’t think so.

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I was told that the NYT article below was “pretty good,” but when I read it I discovered a hit job on Queen Elizabeth from a woke-ish perspective.  In other words, though I wasn’t a huge fan of the Queen or the monarchy, I see this article as fundamentally unfair. For it pins on Queen Elizabeth all the horrible crimes and tragedies that went with the creation of the British Empire, even though she had nothing to do with those things. She may have embodied that history as a ruler, but she was a virtually powerless figurehead who had nothing to do with the stuff. Nevertheless, Jasanoff finds a way to pin it on her: colonialism, racism, paternalism—the whole schmear.  Click to read:

 

Jasanoff begins with the obligatory bow to Elizabeth’s fortitude and commitment, but quickly begins tarring her with the crimes of Empire formation:

Tell me if this is not an undeserved slur:

The queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties — her final public act was to appoint her 15th prime minister — and for her unflagging performance of them, she will be rightly mourned. She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world. But we should not romanticize her era. For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.

Seriously? The queen obscured a bloody history? Was it her job to stand up and pronounce about that? Did she deliberately obscure the bad aspects of British colonial history. No, because that’s not her brief. She did not favor or perpetuate or obscure any bloody history; all she did (which Jasanoff emphasizes) is make occasional visits to the “colonies” and have her picture taken with “mostly nonwhite” people in those places.

Here’s more:

In photographs from Commonwealth leaders’ conferences, the white queen sits front and center among dozens of mostly nonwhite premiers, like a matriarch flanked by her offspring. She took her role very seriously, sometimes even clashing with her ministers to support Commonwealth interests over narrower political imperatives, as when she advocated multifaith Commonwealth Day services in the 1960s and encouraged a tougher line on apartheid South Africa.

Note that the queen was against apartheid. But. . . but. . .

What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them.

. . . for which the Queen bears no blame. Jasanoff brings up British violence in Malaya, Ireland (not that the IRA had anything to do with that), and especially in Kenya, where the British engaged in mass slaughter to subdue the populace (read this piece: “The colonization of Kenya” to hear about British malfeasance in all its horror.)  I could add India to Elizabeth’s crimes. Was the Queen to blame for the Jallianwalah Bagh Massacre, or the deaths of millions following the partition in 1947?  She wasn’t even Queen during these times.

Perhaps Elizabeth knew all the bloody details, but knowing is not perpetrating or approving. Yet look at this sly dig: she might have known!

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011.

This is perilously close to the “have you stopped beating your wife?” accusation.  Jasanoff keeps mixing up Elizabeth with the bad actions of others, like the previous Prime Minister, tarring her with the sins not just of her contemporaries, but also of the sins of the past. She is even faulted for “her white face”! Jasanoff just can’t stop mixing up the sins of the Empire with the character of the Queen:

Yet xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with Liz Truss, now the prime minister, as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of “Global Britain” steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.

The queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age to persist. She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that Britain alone saved the world from fascism. She had a personal relationship with Winston Churchill, the first of her 15 prime ministers, whom Mr. Johnson pugnaciously defended against well-founded criticism of his retrograde imperialism. And she was, of course, a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation: From perhaps one person of color in 200 Britons at her accession, the 2011 census counted one in seven.

The second paragraph faults her for having a “personal relationship” with Churchill, for being somehow associated with Boris Johnson’s defense of Churchill, and of course for having a “white face” that’s on all the currency and stamps. I suppose that visage on money and postage harms people. At long last, Dr. Jasanoff, have you no sense of decency?

At the end, Jasanoff calls for an end to the imperial monarchy. I agree. I oppose any hereditary aristocracy, and it’s time to at least ratchet back on the pomp and circumstance. But for Jasanoff, Elizabeth is a screen on which the sweating Harvard Professor projects all her hatred of colonialism and the bad things the British did to secure their empire. And I agree with that assessment of colonialism as well. But I do not agree that Elizabeth, by merely existing, somehow legitimizes the racism and xenophobia of British history.

Matthew tells me that this kind of criticism of Elizabeth is far stronger in America than in Britain. That, of course, is because she was the British Queen, but also because Americans are more Pecksniffian and woke than Brits.  Perhaps it is time for a reckoning of the “British Empire’s violent atrocities,” as the Guardian piece below reports. In that way the Queen is like George Floyd, as the deaths of both of them have unleashed huge amounts of resentment and calls to reassess the past.

When Matthew sent me these tweets about what was going on in the UK, and I read some of the vicious criticism of Jasanoff’s piece by readers commenting on her article, I thought, “Wait, this is surely an overreaction.” Now I’m not so sure. Here are some tweets:

Eizabeth’s death unleashes anger at both her and British history:

h/t: Matthew

Queen Elizabeth dies

September 8, 2022 • 1:00 pm

Here’s the official news:

She was 96, and her last official act was to install Liz Truss as Britain’s new Prime Minister. I trust St. Peter won’t hold that against her.

You can read more about the death at nearly every website and social media site, as well as every television and radio station, so I will leave you to peruse.

Post by Greg Mayer: More thoughts on E.O. Wilson

January 8, 2022 • 1:20 pm

by Greg Mayer

As WEIT readers well know by now, E.O. Wilson died last month at the age of 92. Jerry knew Ed better than I did, but my scientific interests were actually much closer to his than were Jerry’s. I was greatly influenced by Ed and Robert MacArthur‘s theory of island biogeography. The Harvard Gazette just republished an interview with Ed from 2014, and the interviewer asked what he thought his most important contribution was. Ed said there were several, but his work with MacArthur is the first thing he mentioned.

My well-worn copy of MacArthur and Wilson, purchased in 1977, when I was an undergraduate.

I had learned about their ideas–especially the idea that the number of species on an island was the result of a dynamic equilibrium between ongoing colonization and extinction–in my undergraduate classes. I got a copy of their book and began reading it between my sophomore and junior years of college. When I went off to graduate school to work on island lizards with Ernest Williams, I expected that I would wind up applying and exemplifying the principles of the theory.

The title page of my copy, signed by Ed, with an added sketch of an ant; inscribed on 6 October 2007, at the “Island Biogeography at 40” symposium held at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). I had brought my copy with me; Ed and I chatted, and he graciously signed it, adding the ant unbidden. The symposium resulted in a book edited by Jon Losos and Bob Ricklefs (reference below).

Ed’s work in island biogeography included theoretical formulation (though the mathematics was primarily MacArthur’s), analysis of faunal lists and distribution patterns, and, very ambitiously, experimental manipulation of species numbers on mangrove islets in Florida. One of his contributions to island biogeography that has gone largely unremarked, but which I regard as of real significance, are his studies of Cenozoic fossil ant faunas in amber from the Dominican Republic. He found that the ancient amber ant fauna was more characteristic of a continental fauna, rather than that of an oceanic island. I was very impressed by this work; at the time it was, and remains to this day, among the strongest evidence that the Greater Antilles are old continental islands– islands once attached to or closely adjacent to the mainland, from which their fauna derives.  (Several of his papers on the amber ants are open access, and are linked below.)

Ed gave a seminar about his amber fossil work while I was a grad student, and we talked afterwards, and he suggested we continue the discussion. Knowing how busy Ed was, I went to make an appointment to see him with his secretary, rather than rely on us passing in the hallway to set a time (Ed was not often in the hallway). His secretary was very suspicious about who I was and what I wanted, and said I would need to write a letter requesting a meeting. The demand seemed to me beyond the pale, considering that I was a grad student in the MCZ and that Ed wanted the meeting. I never wrote the letter, and that conversation never continued.

A few years later, in 1988, James D. ‘Skip’ Lazell and I wrote that the discovery of bolitoglossine salamanders (a mainland group, with little capacity to cross a salt water barrier) in the Dominican amber would be powerful evidence from the vertebrate fossil record for an old continental origin of the Greater Antillean fauna (Wilson’s work having provided invertebrate evidence). In 2015 George Poinar and Dave Wake reported exactly that– a well-preserved bolitoglossine salamander from the Dominican amber!

Many people (including Ed) have commented on Ed’s rather sour relationship with Dick Lewontin. What is sometimes overlooked in these discussions is that both of them were involved with a group known as the “Marlboro Circle”. This group, which sought to conceptually unify ecology and evolutionary biology, included, among others, Ed’s key collaborator, Robert MacArthur, and also Richard Levins. (Levins was a Marxist who made important contributions to island biogeography, collaborated on publications with MacArthur and Lewontin, and visited Wilson’s experimental mangrove islands.)

I find the activities of this group fascinating– in many ways they set the agenda for ecology and evolutionary biology for the second half of the 20th century. It is one of the most important episodes in the biology of that century–that the group was marked by tragedy (MacArthur’s death at 42) and a falling out among its members lends pathos as well. The episode has, unfortunately, been little studied or remarked upon by historians of science. My last communication with Ed (in 2020) was about some of the sources for the data that went into the origination of his and MacArthur’s formulation of their theory.

I mentioned above that I had expected my studies to apply and exemplify the theory of island biogeography, but as I learned more about reptile distribution and did my own studies in the West Indies, I found that species number on islands was not the result of a dynamic equilibrium between ongoing colonization and extinction. Rather medium (10^4 to 10^5 ka, especially ice age changes in sea level) and long term (10^6 to 10^7 ka; the origin and diversification of major lineages) geological and evolutionary events were much more important in shaping the fauna.

Nonetheless, MacArthur and Wilson, like Darwin in the Origin and Mendel in his seminal paper, had limned many pathways for further progress, and despite failing to find evidence of their equilibrium process, I had, and continue to have, the greatest respect for their work. For my thesis defense, I planned to bring two past members of the Marlboro Circle– Dick Lewontin, my advisor, and Ed Wilson, original island biogeographer– back together, at least briefly.

My thesis defense talk was entitled “A theory of island biogeography, with especial reference to the amphibians and reptiles of the West Indies”. (This was a deliberate mashup of the title of Ed’s book and the title of a monograph from 1914 by Thomas Barbour, an early curator of herpetology at the MCZ, “A contribution to the zoogeography of the West Indies, with especial reference to amphibians and reptiles“.) I gave the talk at Dick’s weekly Population Biology Seminar on the 3rd floor of the MCZ Labs, one floor below Ed’s lab.

I tried to make sure that Ed would attend, despite its location, by placing a copy of my seminar announcement in his mailbox. He did come, and sat at the middle of one side of the great table that sat in the middle of Dick’s lab (Dick was further back in the room). I argued in my talk that the equilibrium theory was a special case of a more general theory, and that the equilibrium theory per se didn’t apply very well to West Indian amphibians and reptiles.

After my talk, among the questions were one or two from Ed. He defended the applicability of his and MacArthur’s theory to broader situations than the ones where it fit best, and, indeed, I concur that they had anticipated modifications, expansions, and refinements that would improve it– that’s why I had said there was a more general theory of which theirs could be a special case. After the questions, Ed left.

Although much of Ed’s public reputation rests, rightly, on Ed’s advocacy for biodiversity, and on the controversy over sociobiology (which accounts for essentially all the negative bits), in remembering Wilson we should not lose sight of his other accomplishments.

Losos, J.B. and R.E. Ricklefs, eds. 2010. The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. publisher

MacArthur, R.H. and E.O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. publisher

Wilson, E.O. 1985. Ants of the Dominican amber (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). 1. Two new myrmicine genera and an aberrant Pheidole. Psyche 92:1-9. pdf

Wilson, E.O. 1985. Ants of the Dominican amber (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). 2. The first fossil army ants. Psyche 92:11-16. pdf

Wilson, E.O. 1985. Ants of the Dominican amber (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). 3. The subfamily Dolichoderinae. Psyche 92:17-37. pdf

Richard Leakey dies at 77

January 2, 2022 • 12:22 pm

This just in: Richard Leakey, well known paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician, has died at 77.  (Two of his team’s finds are H. rudolfensis and “Turkana Boy,” placed in H. ergaster.) A brief bio from the France 24 website:

World-renowned Kenyan conservationist and politician Richard Leakey, who unearthed evidence that helped to prove humankind evolved in Africa, died on Sunday at the age of 77, the country’s president said.

“I have this afternoon… received with deep sorrow the sad news of the passing away of Dr Richard Erskine Frere Leakey, Kenya‘s former Head of Public Service,” said Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in a statement late Sunday.

Leakey, the middle son of famed paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, had no formal archaeological training of his own but led expeditions in the 1970s that made groundbreaking discoveries of early hominid fossils.

His most famous find came in 1984 with the uncovering of an extraordinary, near-complete Homo erectus skeleton during one of his digs in 1984, which was nicknamed Turkana Boy.

In 1989, Leakey was tapped by then President Daniel arap Moi to lead the national Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), where he spearheaded a vigorous campaign to stamp out rampant poaching for elephant ivory.

In 1993, his small Cessna plane crashed in the Rift Valley. He survived but lost both legs.

He also tried his hand at politics, ran civil society institutions, and briefly headed Kenya’s civil service.

In 2015, despite ailing health, he returned to the helm of the KWS for a three year term at the request of Kenyatta.

Here’s Leakey in 2010:

And Turkana boy (1.5-1.6 million years old), the most complete early hominin skeleton found to date:

E. O. Wilson died

December 27, 2021 • 6:06 am

Matthew sent me a tweet this morning saying that Edward O. Wilson, known to all of us as “Ed”, died yesterday at at 92. He died at the same age as my mentor—Ed’s nemesis Dick Lewontin—as both were born in 1929.  There’s a short obituary by Carl Zimmer that you can read at the NYT link below (click on screenshot); there will be a longer one for sure as Carl fleshes it out.

As usual, I’ll leave the details of his career and accomplishments to the formal obituaries and to Wikipedia (look at his list of books!), except to say that Ed was a polymath who was a Harvard professor for 46 years before retiring. And he was working tirelessly up to his death, just like his colleague Ernst Mayr (who died at 100).

Ed’s lab occupied the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) Laboratories at Harvard, while Lewontin’s lab, where I worked, was one floor below. But they might as well have been light years apart, for Lewontin intensely disliked Ed, and the feeling was mutual. (Ed had less rancor, he was more or less blindsided when Lewontin and Steve Gould—who worked in the adjacent main MCZ—began attacking him as a reactionary biological determinist after Ed published his landmark book, Sociobiology.)In fact, Ed originally helped recruit Dick to Harvard from the University of Chicago; but that didn’t make Lewontin temper his reaction when the Great Sociobiology Wars began.

But I did not share Dick’s dislike of Ed. If you knew Ed as a person—and I knew him as an acquaintance—you simply could not dislike him. (Dick and Steve’s animus was based purely on politics.). Ed was mild-mannered, gentle, and helpful: I’ve written before about how he got me into Harvard as a graduate student in a single day, an act of generosity I’ll never forget. I also taught two semesters of Bio 1 (introductory biology) under Ed, and was great friends with some of the people in his lab. The result was that I spent a fair amount of time on the fourth floor, but never in my six years at Harvard did I see Ed on the third floor—our floor.

Only one time I know of was he even near Lewontin. That’s when I was waiting with Dick for the elevator to the third floor, and Ed strode into the building and joined us in the elevator. The tension immediately became thick and palpable. It was a silent and uncomfortable ride up three floors; not a word was exchanged between the two Harvard professors, not even “hello”.

In his later years, Ed became wedded to the idea of group selection, and wrote several books and papers touting it as an explanation for eusociality in insects like ants and bees (communal living with a queen and sterile workers), as well as for many traits in humans. This was unfortunate, as this view was almost surely wrong, but Ed clung to it tenaciously. It was, I think, his only big misstep in a sterling career. Sadly, I had to review one of his books on group selection and panned it.

When I interviewed Dick a few years ago about his own career, he had nothing nice to say about Wilson; in fact, that was the one time he made me turn the tape off, and you can imagine what he said during the hiatus, though I’m not at liberty to divulge it. But Dick also mourned the loss of the great evolutionary biologists who reigned when he was a student: people like Ernst Mayr, Al Roemer, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Dick said, “There are no great ones left. Where are the great ones?”

He was wrong. Ed was one of the great ones. Evolutionary biology, ant biology, and conservation biology will be poorer for his absence. And he was a terrific guy—rare for someone who was so famous. Just ask people who knew him.

Here are two photos I took of Ed at a lunch at Naomi Pierce’s and Andrew Berry’s house in Cambridge on October 5, 2007.  This was during was a symposium at Harvard, though I don’t remember what it was about.

Talking to Patty Gowaty.

A eulogy for Hitchens by Douglas Murray

December 17, 2021 • 1:00 pm

Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011—ten years from last Wednesday.  There have been a lot of pieces about Hitchens since then, as well as postmortem collections of his own writing, but I haven’t read any eulogy for Hitchens as eloquent and touching as the one below (h/t Chris). It’s from conservative Douglas Murray in the 2011 Spectator, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot (it’s a very short piece). If the link on the screenshot is paywalled, this one is archived and free. (By the way, I did read and like Murray’s anti-woke book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity).

It’s a testimony to the expansiveness of Hitchens’s character that he and a pretty right-wing guy were friends—and according to Murray, they were pretty tight. At any rate, I’ll let you read this lovely piece for yourself—it’s ten years old and was clearly written in the moment right after Hitchens had died. I’ll give a few excerpts.

This is an excellent beginning:

Just one of Christopher Hitchens’ talents would have been enough for most people. In him those talents — like his passions — all melded into each other: as speaker, writer and thinker. Yet he was more than the sum even of these considerable parts, for he possessed another talent that was even rarer — a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.

Murray describes Hitchens’s well-known capacity to travel and work at a pace that would drive others to a frazzle, and to drink Mr. Walker’s amber restorative copiously all the while. And even then, tired and besotted, Hitchens could turn out the most wonderful and thoughtful prose. Do read Murray’s account of how, after a bibulous day, Hitchens went home and wrote a brilliant piece.

One nice bit:

He was a master on the page. But on stage he perhaps excelled even further. As a mutual friend observed some years ago: ‘There is only one real rule in public speaking: never speak to an audience with, before or after Christopher Hitchens.’

That’s for sure!  And Murray has a touching ending that rings very true:

A couple of days before Christopher’s diagnosis we spent a day together at Hay. I was reading the memoir that he was promoting, Hitch-22, the opening chapters of which are among the most moving ever written. At the end of a long day he dropped me at my hotel. In the morning he would fly to the US. His schedule was always extreme but for the first time it seemed to be taking a physical toll. If we will keep on wishing that we had had another couple of decades of him, we will also have to concede that he lived his life exactly how he wished, burning bright and burning hard. That included working himself right up until the end for the things he believed in, the things he wished to fight for and — which was the same — the things he loved. As I waved him off that night I remember registering the thought that the day would come when we would have to live without Christopher. Now that day has arrived. It will be hardest of all for his wife, Carol, and for his brilliant children of whom he was so very — and justifiably — proud. But it is also something that, in an incomparably smaller way, the rest of us will have to manage too.

We have lost our sharpest wit, one of our finest writers and one of our best minds. There are no false consolations to be had. Only the truth that from now on, instead of knowing what Christopher thinks, we will have to consider what he would have thought. We will, in other words, have to think for ourselves. If we manage it then, in large part, it will be thanks to Christopher and the incomparable example — in life and work — that he provided.

There’s more, so go read the whole thing. Yes, he did live the life he wished, and I doubt that he spent much time doing things he didn’t love.  Even so, many of us wish he were here now, for the follies happening in America would surely provide ample fodder for his scathing wit. As Murray says, we’ll never know what he would have thought about things like cultural appropriation, transgender activism, pronoun usage, and the racial tension that’s permeating society. But we do know three things: he would have something to say, what he’d say would be interesting and thought-provoking (and perhaps contrarian), and the prose would get us hooked.

As for thinking for ourselves, that was the point of Hitchens’s last public speech, when he received the Richard Dawkins Award less than two months before he died. While he was clearly ill, Hitchens’s words are loud and clear (his bit starts at 12:10, and if you haven’t seen this video, watch the whole thing):

Dick Lewontin’s colleagues remember him

November 30, 2021 • 11:30 am

My beloved Ph.D. advisor and role model, Dick Lewontin, died on July 4 of this year at age 92, three days after his wife had passed away. I was glad that he lived so long, for he influenced many people (see below), but of course you miss someone like that no matter how long they lived.  Shortly after his death I wrote a memorial  on this website; it was too personal to be put in a journal, and I’ve refused offers to write any further obituaries. That would be like writing an obituary for one’s parent, and the last thing I wanted to do was give a canned summary of his accomplishments.

As I said, Dick’s intelligence and work had a huge influence—not just on evolution and genetics, but on the philosophy of science. When I was in his lab, there was always a philosopher or two visiting or in residence, for Dick appreciated philosophy and was willing to host science-friendly philosophers and historians.  Now a number of them, along with a couple of scientists, have written memorials to Dick in an issue of the journal Biological Theory, and it’s free. Click on the screenshot below, or find the pdf here.

Below we have two scientists (Newman and Hartl), two historians of science (Beatty and Paul) and the rest philosophers of science, some of whom have made contributions to pure science (e.g., Kitcher and Sarkar). All of them harbored a deep appreciation and respect for Dick. What I learned from this piece was a great deal about Lewontin’s contributions to the philosophy of science, so this was a valuable read for me. And if you want to know more about Dick, read on:

I’ll give just one anecdote from Dick’s colleague Dan Hartl; it’s about Lewontin’s involvement at the onset of the government’s using forensic DNA in criminal cases, something that I was independently caught up in. Like Dick, I felt that the government often played fast and loose with the data to obtain convictions at any price. (Most of the problems have since been recitified.) Godfrey-Smith:

For some years after our meeting in Minnesota, Dick tilted at his windmills and me at mine, and we seemingly went our separate ways. But then, one day early in 1991, he called me to suggest that we should write a paper together on shortcomings of DNA typing as it was then being practiced. The story is told in detail in the New York Times of December 20, 1991 (Kolata 1991). In brief, the story is that Lewontin and I had written and submitted an article to Science disputing the notion that DNA fingerprinting could identify a suspect with only a negligible chance of error. Shortly thereafter I got a call from a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice, who told me that he felt that publication of the paper would be a disservice to the system of justice in the United States. I told Lewontin about this call, and he sent off a scathing letter to the prosecutor saying, “When someone who is an official in the Department of Justice Criminal Division Strike Force telephones a private citizen to request an action the citizen would not ordinarily take, then a form of intimidation has been used.”

The prosecutor then called me, wanting to know whether I had recorded his previous call. (I had not, as a matter of principle.) He then asked if I had felt intimidated by his earlier call. I told him that his call had stunned and chilled me, and that he certainly did make me feel intimidated.

While all this was unfolding, the Science paper had been reviewed and accepted. But then the editor interjected himself. He said he wanted us to soften our conclusions or withdraw the paper and resubmit it as a short opinion piece. Lewontin flatly refused. He later told his interviewer: “We finally did make some changes, against my better judgment” (Kolata 1991).

The man had no fear.

Here’s a picture of Dick carrying in the birthday cake at my 60th birthday celebration in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts—a suburb of Boston. It was a festive and bibulous occasion, and my cake was shaped like a cat.

Colin Powell died today

October 18, 2021 • 7:26 am

Colin Powell, America’s first black Secretary of State, who also served as a four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Advisor, died this morning at age 84.  The cause: complications of Covid, even though he was fully vaccinated.

The NYT report is below, promising a full obituary later, probably because nobody prepared a draft in advance because Powell was not expected to die.  RIP, General.

Click on screenshot:

The full report from the NYT:

Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life served as the nation’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84.

He died of complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement. He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.

h/t: Ken