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.
My tech expert has worked on the subscriber issue, and I’ve received notifications from several people that they are once again receiving emails notifying them of new posts on this site. It may be fixed, but I won’t know until I hear from readers. You should have received this post, and perhaps the one before that.
If you’re still shut out, let me know, either below or in an email, and I can try removing your name from the subscription list and then putting it back in. I’m not sure that will fix anything, but a reader suggested it. If you’re still getting bupkes, put your email address below or email it to me and I’ll take you off the list. You’ll then have to resubscribe. But again, I’m not sure that is a fix, so I’d wait another day before contacting me.
But if your problems have been solved, let me know below.
Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience,
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus)
About half a dozen readers have reported that since yesterday they haven’t received their emails of posts on this site. (I think they’re all Gmail users.) I have no idea what’s going on, and have called the problem to the attention of my web tech person. I’m not sure if anything can be done about this, but I’m trying.
To judge the nature of the problem, simply put a comment below if you’ve stopped getting emails rather than emailing me about it.
In the meantime, if you have another email account I would suggest using that one, or, as in the good old days, just look at the site itself online once a day (there are rarely any posts after 2 pm Chicago time, and each day begins with a Hili Dialogue post).
I hope this is a temporary inconvenience, and I’m doing my best to get it fixed. Thanks.
Here’s a dilemma I face constantly. A lot of material on this site is devoted to opposing “progressive liberal” (i.e., “woke”) initiatives, particularly in science. And I’m pretty much of an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech on campus, which isn’t exactly an attitude that’s au courant or ubiquitous among progressives.
Whenever another site links to a post on WEIT, which is fairly often, I get a “pingback” that lets me know that someplace has put up a link. Very often I go to see how my posts are being used, and very often—in fact at least 90% of the time—it’s a right-wing site like The College Fix, or The American Conservative, or someone like that, all of them decrying wokeness. Likewise, you’ll never see my criticisms of the incursion of wokeness into science appear in science journals—or in any left-wing media. In other words, my words are being uses to attack the Left, which happens to be the end of the political spectrum I’m on.
Now I could look at this situation in two ways.
1.) Since I go after what I see as irrational or harmful behaviors of “progressives”—and I do that to try to show that even liberals can call out their own, as well as to help purge the authoritarian and reflexively irrational elements on my own side of the aisle—I could regard these pingbacks as helping me in those efforts.
BUT
2.) The audience for these right-wing websites isn’t just interested in getting rid of “progressivism” or authoritarianism in the Left: they want to get rid of the entire Left. To the extent that my words are being construed as tarring the entire Left, I could be seen as hurting my own cause. Or even as helping the most dire Republicans around—the people like Trump who call out wokeness to go after Democrats in general.
Each time I see a pingback from one of these conservative sites, then, I am ambivalent. Am I helping or hurting my own cause? Like all people who take my point of view, I have of course been called “alt-right,” “racist”, and even a white supremacist. I brush off those names because they’re just slurs that progressives who lack arguments use to tar their opponents.
Now I’ve already my decision: I’m going to keep doing what I do (alternative 1) for several reasons. My motivations in calling out woke craziness is not to go after the Left as a whole, and thus I may, as someone with Leftist beliefs and a fairly activist track record, have more credibility than the right-wing sites who call out the same stuff. Further, I cannot bear it when the Left is associated with performative nonsense and general insanity. It’s like when someone in your family is acting badly: you call them out before others do, because, after all, they’re family. Finally, I still think that purging progressives from the Democratic side, or at least letting others know that we recognize the Follies of the Woke, will keep centrists from moving toward the Right. So long as people think all Leftists are “progressive”, they will shy away from the Left, and that would not be good.
I just wanted to air these thoughts. Readers are welcome to react, and you can tell me to dial down my criticisms of “progressivism,” but I’m not going to do it. Oh, and please don’t lecture me about using the word “woke”. I have not found a good substitute and I’ve gotten plenty of blowback about that, which I’ve also rejected.
I accidentally goofed up this morning and published “Once again America is touted as a Christian nation” before I’d written the post. (I had only the title and pressed “publish” instead of “save”.) I’ve since realized that many people got the email when the post with only the title was out, and didn’t get an email with the final post. (I got emails. . .)
So I’m putting up this post with the link so you can read the final version. The link is in the first line above, and if you’re one of those who miscreants who reads posts on your phone, click on that link to read this one.
It’s time for the end-of-the-year summing up. As of January, this website will have been going 14 years. In that period I’ve put up 26,803 posts (including this one), and there have been 1,252,059 comments. That was 46.7 comments per post, and a few years ago I vowed to discontinue the site if comments dropped below 50 per post. Well, as you see, I’ve violated my vow, but am not sure why. Maybe, like the Twitter addicts I just denigrated, I need the love.
Below is what my dashboard tells me are the top posts in terms of views (I’m not sure whether this is just for the year or for all time; I suspect it’s the latter, simply because the audience has grown). I can’t take a lot of pride in this because the two top posts had very little intellectual input from me. #1, which was posted recently, just points to a good website harboring informative videos about sex and gender. The second one I saw as a “throwaway post”—one of those pieces where I rant in Andy Rooney style—this time about the shrinkage of ice-cream quantities with no corresponding reduction in price. How did I know that so many people shared the anger against Big Food?
Looking them all over, I can see no real pattern in them. It may be that when a Big Fish like Dawkins or Pinker tweets about one of my posts, it gets a lot more views. But I can’t be arsed to look.
At any rate, if you missed any of these, here’s your chance to see what got the clicks.
Just for grins, here’s the list of the top internet searches that brought people to this site in the last couple of days:
The Russian one translates as “atheist Mark Tegmark”. I have no comment on #4 save that if I were a Catholic priest, I’d respond, “It depends where you touch.”
Well, the readers’ wildlife post I worked long and hard on seems to have disappeared, along with all 1,700+ draft posts, a bunch of ready-to-go Hili posts, and the beginnings of tomorrow’s Hili post. Until this is fixed, posting may be light. Bear with me.
You’ll get no braining out of me today, as my neurons are clogged. As always, I do my best.
Every day, my website dashboard tells me what searches on the Internet have led people to this site. They’ve been pretty constant for a while, and here’s today’s:
I have no idea where the Arab thieves and police officer stuff comes from, and someone can’t spell “gobbledygook”.
1). If you’re a first-time poster, read “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar, or here. They give useful hints for commenting on this site. Entirely too many comments lately have uncivil or rude, and many of them you won’t see. It’s okay to disagree, but pretend you’re having a drink in the living room with the person you’re disagreeing with. This includes me. Obtuseness, arrogance, and untruths asserted as truths may also be binned. If you’re a creationist, you’re on shaky ground!
2.) Be sure to watch the DART spacecraft try to hit the asteroid tonight. The collision is supposed to occur at 7:14 EDT as recounted here. Don’t miss it! The link has a YouTube site where you can watch the action live (well, 45 seconds after it happens/does not happen.)
I prematurely published the article about my interactions with Scientific American (insomnia) and so unpublished it and put it up when it was finished. That made the original link go nowhere. But when it was reposted, apparently no email went out. This post will generate an email, so click on this title to go to the article (this is for people who read the articles in their email.