Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
. . . in Brooklyn, of all places! The only decent flight from Midway (my closest airport) to LaGuardia in NYC (close to the venue) left at 6 a.m. To get it, I decided to get a 4 am Uber to Midway, arriving at 4:30. I set my alarm for 3 a.m.
But I woke up spontaneously at 2 a.m., groggy as hell, and decided to check the news about the U.S. strike on Iran. I didn’t learn much that I didn’t know last night, and of course we don’t know how much damage the bunker busters caused. As expected, Iran threatens retaliation, and I worry that, though U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East are prepared, terrorism will be enacted by Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S.—like the several (failed) assassination attempts on Masih Alinejad.
Back to the trip. I had a religious Uber driver who blasted Jesus music all the way to the airport, but I didn’t have the heart to ask him to turn it down. One thing I learned was that “pop Christian music” uses the word “Jesus” over and over and over again, often drawing it out for many seconds. It is Jesus and not God who is the theme of this music (of course they are said to be identical), but it struck me that a whole genre of music is based on a fictional person.
Midway was extraordinarily crowded at 4:30 in the morning, but I remembered it was Sunday and people were going home. I did manage to find a Dunkin Donuts open in the airport terminal, which was a great relief, providing me with a huge coffee and two donuts. The flight to New York on Southwest Airlines (now much more expensive) was uneventful: I slept during the entire 105-minute flight, and I’m still knackered.
This is boring but I have no brain cells to bloviate about world affairs. Brooklyn is rainy, gray, and not very hot (79º at present, 92º predicted). When I recover from the way-too-early flight, I’ll explore a bit and prepare for the Heterodox Academy Meeting, the reason I’m here. I’m on the panel below with several bigwigs (Wednesday, 12:30-1:50), which is of course intimidating. I’ll do my best:
I have to see the Brooklyn Bridge, which is nearby, as it’s the world’s most beautiful bridge. (I lived in NYC in 1972-1973 when I started grad school at Rockefeller University and then did 13 months of alternative service as a conscientious objector.)
In the meantime, I invite readers to discuss the main topic of the day: the war between Iran and Israel/U.S. I gather from the news that nearly every country has condemned the American attack on Iran, though I think that many secretly approve it. Many Democrats excoriate the action while most Republicans approve of it. I’ve already given my opinion, and now it’s time for readers to express theirs. Feel free to do so in the comments below.
I probably mentioned that I’m doing an Arctic cruise in about a month, and the last stop is Reykjavik, Iceland. (Since I’ve been to Antarctica four times, this trip will make me officially bipolar.)
Rather than fly home immediately, I decided to spend an extra five days in Iceland because the country sounds so interesting and beautiful. I will be free there from the morning of July 19 until the afternoon of the 24th, and I have my guidebook. If you’re a reader (or learn about this somehow) and want to say hello, I’d be glad to meet you. If you want to say hi, have a beer, or give me advice, please either contact me by email or leave a note in the comments. I find that my travels are vastly enriched when I spend some time with the locals.
I’m going to the Arctic for 12 days in early July: Svalbard (formerly called “Spitzbergen”) Jan Mayen, and Iceland. This is a cruise, and it’s on my own dime as I guess I’m getting to old to be asked to lecture for Hurtigruten (this is a Quark trip). I fly from Chicago to Helsinki, from where we fly the next day to the world’s northernmost town having more than a thousand people, Longyearbyen in Svalbard, an archipelago owned by Norway. Here are some unique aspects of the town from Wikipedia (bolding is mine):
Due to its remoteness, Longyearbyen has laws that are found in few, if any, other places in the world. Notable examples of such laws include a ban on cats, a restriction on the amount of alcohol an individual can purchase each month, and a requirement that any individuals venturing outside carry a rifle for protection against polar bears. While it is popularly claimed that it is illegal to die in Longyearbyen, the wording of this claim is misleading. While it is not actually illegal to die in the town, there are no options for burial of bodies there (ashes can be buried with permission from the government) and residents considered terminally ill are typically required to move to the mainland. The decision to disallow burials came in 1950, when it was discovered that the bodies of residents who had died as a result of the 1918 flu pandemic had not begun to decompose. Today, scientists are concerned that these corpses, preserved by permafrost may still harbor live strains of the virus responsible for killing between 1% and 6% of the world’s population during the early 20th century.
No cats!!!!
At any rate, then we go cruising, looking at the scenery at Jan Mayen and hoping to see polar bears, whales, and other Arctic marine life. After ten days or so we land in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland. I believe most of my fellow passengers will be flying home the day after we dock there, but, given that I’m unlikely to make it back to Iceland before I croak, I wanted to stay a few extra days to see a country that’s supposed to be spectacular.
If you have been to Iceland, I’d appreciate any tips you have for me. I was planning on staying four or five extra days because I can’t linger indefinitely. Is that long enough? What things are good to see? Any recommendtions for food or lodging (I don’t like fish)? Please put advice in the comments. Thanks!
Here’s Longyearbyen (pop. 2,295) with the caption, “These are all the buildings of this kind (“spisshusene”) left standing after the avalanche disaster in 2015.”
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Longyearbyen and the location of Svalbard. Greenland and iceland are visible to the west and southwest:
Location of Jan Mayen. Some info from Wikipedia:
Jan Mayen Island has one exploitable natural resource, gravel, from a site located at Trongskaret. Other than this, economic activity is limited to providing services for employees of Norway’s radio communications and meteorological stations located on the island. Jan Mayen has one unpaved airstrip, Jan Mayensfield, which is about 1,585 m (5,200 ft) long. The 124.1 km (77.1 mi) coast has no ports or harbors, only offshore anchorages.
. . . . The only inhabitants on the island are personnel working for the Norwegian Armed Forces and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Eighteen people spend the winter on the island, but the population may roughly double (35) during the summer, when heavy maintenance is performed. Personnel serve either six months or one year and are exchanged twice a year in April and October.
Today we have a text-and-photo essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, which is really a tour of the signs of Britain. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
This here Britain
Not all is well in King Charles’ British realm. Thousands of people, children included, have been found guilty of ‘non-crime hate incidents‘ (it is as dystopian as it sounds), you can go to jail for posting the wrong opinion on X, the government is considering making ‘Islamophobia’ illegal, our health system is crumbling, J.K. Rowling and Dr Hilary Cass can’t walk freely in the streets, our children are taught that British history is shameful, our rivers are choked with poo, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer (chief financial minister) is counting on China, that paragon of democracy, to resuscitate our economy. Yet, you still can rely on someone from these islands to bring a smile to your face.
Police Constable Rob wasn’t happy about the anatomical exposure:
Kill markings on a Land Rover:
Theological epiphanies come from unexpected places:
Hot and juicy cheese toasties on the coast at Broughty Ferry, Scotland. Unfortunately this van is no longer there:
How can you not do business with them?:
Bishops Finger ale takes its name from the finger-shaped wayside signposts in Kent (where it’s brewed) that guided pilgrims to the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Archbishop Becket, a figurative and literal hairshirt wearer, wouldn’t be too pleased with this ad:
An anti-litter appeal in Arbroath harbour, Scotland. If you let you guard down there, seagulls will pilfer your food:
I am awake early, but since I also retired early, I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. It’s a good thing, too, as my panel is this afternoon: the penultimate event before Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, talks about “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise.” (You can see the full meeting schedule here: the meeting itself is called “Censorship in the sciences: Interdisciplinary perspective.”)
Our own panel, livestreamed between 3 and 4 pm California time, is small, but involves two awesome women: moderator Julia Schaletzky, who worked for some years in the biotechnology sector before moving to UC Berkeley, where she is Executive Director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center. Her expertise is in life sciences entrepreneurship and innovation, so she knows a lot about science funding as well as the various incursions of “progressive” ideology into science. I was delighted to discover that Julia is a jazz singer on the side, and you can see a sample of her work here.
Our panel is called “Censorship and pseudoscience in the life sciences,” and will use as a launching pad the paper that Luana Maroja and I wrote in 2023 for Skeptical Inquirer on “The ideological subversion in biology“, examining six areas of evolutionary biology where ideology has led to misleading statements: sex and gender, the evolutionary differences between men and women, the genetic differences between individuals of a group, the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, the claim that indigenous knowledge has coequal status with modern science, and the biggest hot potato: race.
Luana, who appears often in these pages for giving talks or helping me with posts (she is THE expert on woke intrusions into science), is a professor of evolutionary biology at Williams College and works on, among other things, speciation. She is an avid gardener and has a black belt in karate.
It will be the first true discussion I know of at the meeting, as none of us have prepared speeches and will just start talking to each other and see how it goes.
Highlights of yesterday’s meetings included Steven Ceci summarizing his and the entire corpus of research on sex equity in science (most of his work was done in collaboration with his partner Wendy Williams). Ceci, presenting on Zoom, showed seven papers investigating whether women were discriminated against in being evaluated, hired, promoted, funded, or given tenure in science. The data (now summarized in a paper cited below) are unequivocal: there is no sex discrimination in any of these areas save some weak (and he says, now nonexistent) evidence that women professors get worse teaching evaluations than do men, as well as a very small salary differential in favor of men. In all other studies, women and men were equal in achievement—or women getting higher ratings—save for a very early paper with the lowest sample size (I believe it was 238, compared to 500-1000 individuals in the other six studies).
The paper summarizing all this, Ceci et al., involved collaborating not only with Williams, but with one of their adversaries, Shulamit Kahn, can be found HERE. Because they were adversaries trying to reach agreement about the data, the paper took five years to write. The upshot: the widespread claims that science is rife with structural sexism are simply not true, yet people still cite only the single early paper with a small sample size showing discrimination while ignoring the other six papers (including meta-analyses) showing that this is not the case. This is one example how an ideologically favored narrative gains traction while substantive refutations of that narrative are ignored. But read the paper for yourself.
But I run on too long describing all the talks. More about disagreements now:
I particularly enjoy clashes of opinion, which of course are bound to occur, especially at a heterodox conference like this.
One person, whose name I can’t recall, stood up and rebuked us all for talking about ideology, DEI statements, censorship in science, and other seemingly trivial matters, while not paying attention to what he says are the BIG problems: China’s development of a hypersonic plane that can bomb the world, climate change, plastics in the ocean, and so on. This was a prime example of “whataboutery”, and although the problems he mentioned are indeed important, they were not the subject of this conference, and most of us are academic scientists concerned with keeping our own disciplines free from ideology. And that was the response he got from the attendees. I get the same kind of comment often about things on this website (e.g. “Why don’t you criticize Trump more?”), and my response to the whataboutery is similar.
There was another kerfuffle in the panel on DEI statements, “Is compelled speech a form of censorship?” moderated by Bob Maranto with discussants (each gave a short speech) Michael Shermer, Abigail Thompson, and John K. Wilson. (Michael and Abbie have appeared in these pages, with Abbie often contributing invertebrate photos.)
Wilson was heterodox at a heterodox meeting, arguing, against the views of other panelists, that DEI statements could be a good thing so long as they came from the faculty itself and were not imposed upon universities by the administration or government.
Well, that got people’s dander up, especially Gregg Lukianoff, who was sitting in the front row and, as President of FIRE, has often vehemently opposed DEI statements (see here, for instance). He rebuked out Wilson for giving distorted data and pointed out that at least half of university professors oppose these statements. Abbie, too, took issue with this. As you may know, she herself was demonized for writing about DEI statements as unacceptable and compelled loyalty oaths (see her WSJ op-ed here), with mathematicians and scholars, offended, calling for her firing and even her own chancellor denouncing her views as not representative of UC Davis’s views. But Abbie soldiers on.
Lots of people in the audience also objected to Wilson’s views, and I’m afraid that he came off the worse in this discussion. DEI statements are indeed loyalty oaths in practice, and you’d better espouse a preferred viewpoint if you want to get hired or promoted. They are likely illegal as well, leading to racial discrimination in favor of minorities. Better to adhere to the University of Chicago’s Shils Report:
The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
Research
Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
Contribution to intellectual community
Service
None of this involves DEI, in case you think that DEI statements count as “service,” and DEI statements aren’t permitted at the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, some departments get sneaky and try to find ways around them for hiring new faculty. I think this duplicity is widespread in American colleges.
Today’s talks feature Wilfred Reilly talking about academic taboos, Sally Satel running a panel on “Censorship around gender research and medicine”, featuring my friend Carole Hooven, Jesse Singal speaking on “soft censorship” in media and academia, our panel, and the last talk, Greg Lukianoff speaking on cancel culture (see above).
The only journalist I know of at this meeting is Singal, and I hope he writes about it. The NYT’s Pamela Paul was scheduled to come, but had to cancel. That’s sad because she could have written an awesome column about “heterodox” views of science
*Trump’s economic advisor is proposing BAD THINGS:
To serve as an economic adviser to Trump, it helps to share his belief that tariffs make the U.S. richer. Not many economists meet that criterion.
Stephen Miran has made just that case. Miran, nominated to chair Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, has written that the U.S. could be better off with average tariffs of around 20% and as high as 50%, compared with the current 2%.
*And in California, a man gave raw milk to two of his cats, killing them since raw milk can be–and was in this case–infected with the bird flu virus. DO NOT GIVE RAW MILK TO YOUR CATS.
I’m trying to keep up this site despite being at meetings most of the day, so let’s have some tweets and memes.
From Things With Faces: someone’s pigeon with clown face markings on its body:
From Stacy:
And a very good one from Stash Krod:
From Nicole:
Screenshot
Masih is back showing the brave women of Iran defying their odious theocracy:
Although the Islamic Republic has criminalized sending videos to me, threatening 10 years in prison, this brave student risked it to ensure the courage of these schoolgirls reaches Khamenei, the morality police, and the world.
From the Auschwitz Memorial: a Dutch family extirpated at Auschwitz:
12 January 1894 | A Dutch Jew, Levi van Thijn, was born in Alkmaar.In August 1943 he was deported to #Auschwitz together with his wife Leentje and their son Marcus. None of them survived.
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, where we get our outer ears:
The outer ear is a mammalian innovation but where did it come from? In our study in Nature, Mathi Thiruppathy and colleagues find that the outer ear arose from modification of an ancestral gill program first originating in marine invertebrates. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41… 1/n
Of this object from antiquity, Matthew says, “Yes, it’s a d*g, but. . .
Something lovely for the weekend! A very good boy! 🐾🐕😍 An amazing c. 3,400 year-old ancient Egyptian dog carved from ivory. This leaping hunting dog opens and closes its mouth, as if barking, by using a lever below its chest. 📷 by me#Archaeology
Those were the words with which Christopher Hitchens began his best speech on video, but it also applies to the three fires raging around Los Angeles. They aren’t bad enough to endanger USC or our conference, but people are cancelling anyway. The sky is hazy and there’s a slight whiff of burning wood at USC, but no sign of smoke.
However, Luana flew into Burbank yesterday, which is closer to the conflagrations, and she took this photo, which she let me put up.
It’s very sad: 100,000 people have evacuated, and many people have lost their homes and everything in them. My heart goes out to them.
The wildfire that raced across the Hollywood Hills early Thursday, threatening a wealthy area indelibly tied to the American film industry, put additional strain on millions of Los Angeles residents already stressed by catastrophic blazes that have erased entire neighborhoods and streaked the sky with smoke and embers.
The fires have killed at least five people and burned more than 27,000 acres, equivalent to nearly 20,000 football fields. The largest ones, the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed at least 2,000 structures and are already the two most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles.
Tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents were under mandatory evacuation orders or warnings on Thursday. Overnight, there was a palpable sense of anxiety as firefighting helicopters swept across a dark sky where orange embers were floating like lightning bugs.
There were traffic jams after a wildfire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near streets — Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard — whose names evoke the grandeur of Hollywood movies. An evacuation order for that area was mostly lifted just before midnight.
A fire also reared up in the nearby Studio City neighborhood, burning several homes and prompting warnings of a potential evacuation. But it was quickly extinguished and no injuries were reported.
Residents feel vulnerable partly because strong desert winds and dangerously dry conditions — it hasn’t rained much in Los Angeles for months — are making it easier for more fires to start and spread. A shortage of water in local reservoirs makes it harder for crews to put fires out.
More than 16 million people in Southern California, from Malibu down to San Diego County, were under a red flag warning early Thursday morning. Forecasters warned that extreme fire danger would continue for at least another day.
There are three big ones.
From the Free Press newsletter:
Southern California is burning. Thousands have been forced to evacuate as wildfires rip through the area. There are five so far and not enough firefighters to deal with them, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said yesterday, telling reporters his department was “prepared for one or two major fires… This is not a normal red flag alert.”
So far, five people have been killed. Over 130,000 residents have been told to evacuate. Hundreds of schools have been closed, as tens of thousands of acres go up in smoke. Not even the rich and famous have been spared. Actor James Woods lost his home. The Malibu mansion of hotel heiress Paris Hilton went up in flames. Palisades Charter High School, among the most iconic public secondary schools in America and which educated J.J. Abrams, will.i.am, and Katey Sagal, has turned to ash.
Late yesterday morning, on Truth Social, our president-elect railed against California’s “Governor Gavin Newscum,” blaming him for the wildfires currently ravaging the state. According to Donald Trump, Newsom blocked a water restoration project because “he wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” and that’s why California is burning. It’s not entirely clear what Trump’s trying to claim here—and believe me, I spent some time trying to figure it out. But the basic elements seem to be fire=bad, water=good, fish=tangentially related and controversial.
I am told that my conference, at the University of Southern California, is out of the fire zone and will go on. But I am also told that one friend whom I was going to visit has lost his home and everything in the fire. That is ineffably sad; the person was an artist and lost his studio as well. I cannot imagine losing everything you own, all at once.
I will report on the meeting and post when I can (I do my best). I am off to Midway Airport, where I hope to procure a giant coffee and a couple of sinkers at Dunkin Donuts.
