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.
Today’s bird photos come from Damon Williford of Bay City, Texas (there will be a second batch). Damon’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
I took these photos at Brazos Bend State Park on June 23 of this year. Brazos Bend State Park is located about 45 miles south of central Houston and 45 miles north of Bay City where I live. The park contains a variety of habitats, including prairie, woodlands, marshes, swamps, and lakes. The Brazos River forms the eastern boundary of the park.
A family of Common Gallinules (Gallinula galeata). This is one of the most common bird species in the park:
Common Gallinule chick, another member of the brood from the photo above:
Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day, and it’s July 2, 2024, and it’s National Anisette Day, celebrating Italy’s version of the licorice (anise)-flavored cordial. Many countries have a version of it: in my time I’ve had plenty in Greece, where it’s called ouzo. Here’s a brand I’ve had plenty of, though it loses its appeal as soon as you return to America. It can only be drunk at a taverna in Greece with mezedes on the side:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Big News, of course, is that the Supreme Court has said that Trump (and any President) is immune from prosecution for crimes committed while performing “official acts” as President, but not crimes committed as personal, non-official acts. There are lots of analyses, but the lessons are obvious. Aaron Blake, a political reporter, gives four at the WaPo. Three we already know: “It’s a clear victory for Trump,” “It’s likely to delay Trump’s case beyond the 2024 election,” and “The hits keep coming for panicky Democrats.” But one deserves a bit more unpacking: “Liberal justices warned of dire consequences, ‘a king above the law.'” Blake:
Perhaps the most striking arguments in the case revolved around hypotheticals about just what a grant of immunity could mean in the future. Would a president be immune from prosecution for ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate a rival? Could he order the military to conduct a coup and not be charged?
The court’s liberals say that’s now on the table. Justice Sonia Sotomayor went the furthest in her dissent.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune,” Sotomayor wrote. “Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Sotomayor added: “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was more measured, warning only that a president could now be immune from such charges.
“Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics … or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup … has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model,” Jackson wrote.
The decision lands as Trump appears to be an increasing favorite to reclaim the White House in the 2024 election after President Biden’s poor debate performance Thursday, and Trump has at the very least demonstrated a tendency to push the limits of the law and presidential power.
The decision could provide Trump a road map for exploiting those powers, and the liberal justices clearly fear what he might do with that.
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Sotomayor concluded.
And she’s not the only one who’s afraid! The Court seems to constitute the biggest impediment to moral progress among the three branches of government. Who is going to sort out what official acts are okay and which are not?
*Biden and his family are sequestered at Camp David, trying to figure out how to save his Presidency. Elsewhere, his Democratic compadres are fanning out, trying to spread the news that Biden is fine, and the best Democrat to run for office. His entire family is urging him to stay on:
President Biden’s family is urging him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite last week’s disastrous debate performance, even as some members of his clan privately expressed exasperation at how he was prepared for the event by his staff, people close to the situation said on Sunday.
Mr. Biden huddled with his wife, children and grandchildren at Camp David while he tried to figure out how to tamp down Democratic anxiety. While his relatives were acutely aware of how poorly he did against former President Donald J. Trump, they argued that he could still show the country that he remains capable of serving for another four years.
Mr. Biden has been soliciting ideas from advisers about how to proceed, and his staff has been discussing whether he should hold a news conference or sit for interviews to defend himself and change the narrative, but nothing has been decided yet. The campaign scheduled what could be a critical call with its national finance committee for Monday to calm nerves and take temperatures.
One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice, said one of the people informed about the discussions, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. Hunter Biden wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows — scrappy and in command of the facts — rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.
Other family members were trying to figure out how they could be helpful. At least one of the president’s grandchildren has expressed interest in getting more involved with the campaign, perhaps by talking with influencers on social media, according to the informed person.
Jill Biden doesn’t hold an actual job whose description includes advising the president on the most sensitive matters and painful choices. She wasn’t elected to do that. She wasn’t elected, period. So how is it her obligation — and not the task of one of his many paid aides or one of the political operatives who have been counseling him for decades — to make everything right? She’s a spouse, not a sorcerer.
And yesterday’s Free Press daily email said this:
The Biden campaign sent a fundraising email that included a chart showing that Biden leads other Democrats in head-to-head matchups against Trump. (The extraordinary thing about this is not that it shows Biden outperforming various untested Democrats, but that Biden’s team decided to include it in a fundraising email at all.)
Note that many of these possible Democratic candidates are only a few percent behind Trump—and they’re not even campaigning!
*At Erasmus University in Rotterdam (much of the hatred of Jews and Israel is concentrated in the Netherlands), people are now required to dip their hands in red paint—a sign of solidarity with Palestine and Hamas—before entering parts of the campus. At Erasmus University! (h/t Malgorzata).
An anti-Israel protester approached this reporter while narrowly avoiding the guidelines of the 20-odd tents that dotted Erasmus University campus’s main square. Wearing a keffiyeh over her face, she asked about the purpose of my visit.
About 30 of her comrades watched while eating dinner: a rice and lentil dish served from a large pot atop a portable gas stove.
“It’s a Zionist,” she called out, upon learning the name of this publication, prompting the group to cover their faces with their keffiyehs and surgical masks. They encircled, screaming, “Intifada!” as they placed a Palestinian flag over the camera to prevent any filming of the events taking place at one of Europe’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.
The protesters had a tray with red paint at the ready, which they use during blockages. Only those students or faculty who agree to dip a palm in the paint to show solidarity with Palestinians are let through to various campus facilities.
A man who sounded like a native Arabic speaker began drumming on a bucket. The other activists started chanting “From the river to the sea,” and the man shouted: “Falastin arabiyeh,” Arabic for “an Arab Palestine.”
Parts of the encampment were moved to a nearby park earlier in June, but sporadic unauthorized blockages and protest actions persist in what has become a part of campus life in Erasmus, an institution with tens of thousands of students, including hundreds of Jews.
. . .The blockages at the University of Amsterdam and Erasmus are part of an ongoing cat-and-mouse campaign by anti-Israel activists on campuses across the Western world. Protesters typically occupy campus grounds demanding the university cut ties with Israel or dismiss Zionist faculty. If they are removed or agree to disperse, they often renew the blockage within a few days.
Also last month, protesters beat up and chased away a man in Erasmus because he flew an Israeli flag on campus. Across campus, walls feature posters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing demon’s horns, which Lisa and Nathan regard as echoing antisemitic imagery.
What do you expect? It’s the Netherlands, Jake, the place where three of us were deplatformed for wanting to discuss a paper on ideology and evolutionary biology. But because two of us had sympathies for Israel, they canceled our discussion at the University of Amsterdam. Here’s a photo from the Times of Israel of some of the Erasmus students playing at being Hamas, but are too coeardly to show their faces:
(from ToI): Anti-Israel protesters conceal themselves from a photographer’s lens on the campus of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on June 5, 2024. (Canaan Lidor/ Times of Israel)
*You might be aware that New York City planned an experiment in “congestion pricing”: you’d have to pay $15 to drive into midtown Manhattan. (London. Stockholm, and Singapore have plans in place.) Sounds good, right—reduced traffic and money for the city? Except it was, according to the WSJ, a miserable failure. It’s been deep-sixed by the governor.
Patrons at the Comfort Diner in Midtown Manhattan recently encountered an unexpected person working the tables: Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Rather than take orders, she went booth to booth seeking opinions about the city’s first-in-the-nation plans for congestion pricing—a $15 toll on vehicles entering the core of Manhattan.
Nobody realized at the time that the Democratic governor was heading toward a blockbuster announcement: she was about to scrap the program after years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. In one of the most consequential decisions in decades for America’s most prominent city, Hochul soon said she was indefinitely pausing congestion pricing—less than a month before it was set to take effect on Sunday, June 30.
The abrupt reversal, which some attribute to Hochul’s reluctance to impose a new fee in an election year, leaves metro New York grappling with a historic missed opportunity and fiscal mess. There is no relief in sight for the city’s traffic congestion, which is the worst in the world, according to data published last week.
The epic collapse in New York shows how a fear of dramatic change can give the status quo stubborn power over those trying to solve some of America’s most intractable challenges. That leaves policymakers nibbling at the edges of deeply rooted problems, even after investing huge sums of money and political capital.
Blown up in a New York minute were plans for around $15 billion of planned improvements to the city’s ailing mass-transit system, the largest transportation network in North America. The reversal cast aside around $700 million in meticulous prep work, including a $555-million contract to install tolling cameras—which are already up and ready to go—and $33 million for a customer-service center with 100 employees who have already been brought on, officials said. Planners invested thousands of hours, including going to London and Stockholm to research their congestion-pricing programs, according to people familiar with the travel.
What was supposed to be a transformative moment when New York led the way and boldly tackled traffic congestion, air pollution and transit funding, has instead turned into a surprising loss for a broad coalition that includes major employers, real-estate developers and subway riders.
It was killed by lawsuits and complaints, despite it working in the other cities. And now the $700 million it took to plan for this change is down the drain, and Manhattan still has some of the worst traffic in the world.
A stingray that got pregnant at a North Carolina aquarium this winter despite not having shared a tank with a male of her species for many years has died.
The Aquarium and Shark Lab in Hendersonville said on Facebook late Sunday that the stingray, Charlotte, died after getting a rare reproductive disease. It didn’t go into further detail.
The aquarium, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, announced in February that Charlotte had gotten pregnant despite not having shared a tank with a male stingray in at least eight years. But it said in late May that she was suffering from a rare reproductive disease and announced in early June that she hadn’t given birth and was no longer pregnant.
The pregnancy was thought to be the result of a type of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis, in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not in mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.
Okay, it’s time to clear this up. THE. STINGRAY. WAS. NOT. PREGNANT. And the owners are miscreants.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming antiwoke. But I think she means white-throated sparrows, not starlings. (This story, distorted by ideologues to say that sparrows have four sexes, is bonkers.)
Hili: What the hell?
A: What happened?
Hili: Starlings have become infected with gender ideology.
Lagniappe: Here’s part of the application to attend the 2024 SACNAS conference (Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science). Look at all those pronouns!
Masih is ticked off by Mohammad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran. “Niac” (not “Nayak”) is the National Iranian American Council, which apparently takes stands like those of the theocratic regime. Is it any wonder that Iran keeps trying to kill or kidnap Masih, who appears to be in hiding, constantly moving from place to place.
Google translation:
Zarif, the greatest trowel, should kick Christ! See how Masih shouts when Nayak was against sanctioning Zarif that he is an accomplice of criminals and should be sanctioned!
From Malgorzata: I’m always amazed at the degree of Jew and Israel hatred by the Irish (of course, not all of them are like this, but still. . . ). They’re a heterodox people, and when I put this on Twitter, saying that it baffled me, I got a variety of explanations, the most cogent of which is that the Irish have a history of being oppressed by the British, and they analogize this to Palestinians being oppressed by Israelis, though the analogy is completely bogus.
🚨 Cork, Ireland 📍
Little Kids calling for violence against Jews
Calling for “Intifada revolution”
Don’t give me that BS out of context “definition” of the word – when it comes to Israel/Palestine:
Rachavi finds memes that are STEM in nature. A “PI” is a “principal investigator,” the head of a lab. Simon, who sent this, asked, “Is this you in party mode?” The answer is “Yep.”
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 28, 2024
From David; the thread after this tweet gives more crazy assertions and some evidence that this is a real course:
NEW: UCLA medical school’s mandatory health equity class teaches students that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor” and that “ob*sity” is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people.”
The full syllabus has shocked prominent doctors—the former dean of Harvard Medical School.🧵
There’s a trigger warning on ZeFrank’s recent video: “True Facts is not appropriate for children, nor for adults who don’t act like children.” But in fact this 11+ minute video is perfectly appropriate for kids. (There’s a commercial from 3:15 to 4:22).
It’s about plants that disperse their seeds, spores, or pollen explosively, including liverworts, dogwoods, mosses, witch hazel, oats, and sundry others.
Not only do the explosions disperse the seeds (clearly an adaptive trait; you want your genes to be away from your plot, where they compete with you), but in some cases the explosion has evolved to give the dispersing seeds an orientation that makes them go further. And some of the spores, as in horsetails, have little arms that curl with changes in humidity that allow them to “walk” along the ground! (Oat seeds can do the same thing, hopping with their “awns” and then twisting themselves into the ground.) As usual, the photography is amazing, so don’t miss this one. The extensive research is documented by a list of references at the end.
In this video ZeFrank doesn’t mention evolution or natural selection, but of course it’s implicit in these amazing and diverse adaptations for dispersal. I, for one, hardly knew anything about these features, and was delighted to see all these complicated results of natural selection, which of course is cleverer than you are. Seeds that plant themselves by screwing themselves into the dirt!
This I didn’t expect, and it’s a decision by a 6-3 vote, with Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor dissenting. Trump is now apparently shielded from prosecution for official acts, but not private ones. That’s going to cause great confusion, but it’s also going to delay his trials, making it easier for him to win November’s election.
From the NYT; click the headlines to read (archived here, but the feed changes):
An excerpt as things unroll in real time:
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that former President Donald J. Trump is entitled to some level of immunity from prosecution, a decision that will almost surely delay the trial of the case against him on charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election past the coming election in November. The vote was 6 to 3, dividing along partisan lines.
Mr. Trump contended that he was entitled to absolute immunity from the charges, relying on a broad understanding of the separation of powers and a 1982 Supreme Court precedent that recognized such immunity in civil cases for actions taken by presidents within the “outer perimeter” of their official responsibilities. Lower courts rejected Mr. Trump’s claim, but the Supreme Court’s ruling may delay the case enough that Mr. Trump would be able to make it go away entirely if he prevails in November.
Here’s what to know:
The ruling: The justices said that Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts taken during his presidency but that there was a crucial distinction between official and private conduct. The case returns to the lower court, which will decide whether the actions Mr. Trump took were in an official or private capacity.
The charges: The former president faces three charges of conspiracy and one count of obstructing an official proceeding, all related to his efforts to cling to the presidency after his 2020 loss. He was indicted last August by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in one of two federal criminal cases against him; the other relates to the F.B.I. raid on his private club, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022 that recovered missing government documents.
The trial timing: The prospects for a trial in the 2020 election interference case before the election seem increasingly remote. If Mr. Trump prevails at the polls, he could order the Justice Department to drop the charges. The bottom-line effect of the court’s ruling appears to be that the trial judge in Washington, Tanya S. Chutkan, is going to have to hold an evidentiary hearing on many, if not most, of the allegations in the special counsel’s indictment of Mr. Trump. The fact-finding process the court has ordered could take a while not only to conduct, but also to prepare for.
Lower courts ruled against Trump: Judge Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington denied Mr. Trump’s immunity request in December. “Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass,” she wrote. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed in February.
Apparently the January 6 case will go back to an appellate court for further consideration, and that means that a lot of time will pass (way past the election) before this case is decided.
Click to read the ruling as a pdf that you can download:
We are well and truly screwed: the President can commit as many crimes as he wants so long as they are “official acts”, and he has nothing to lose by doing that. And if he gets elected in November, a prospect that seems increasingly likely, he could simply order the Justice Department to drop the whole case against him.
If you’re a lawyer or legal eagle, weigh in below.
Yes, I fell for a recent NYT article (June 3) by Alina Chan, a piece dismantled in the article below by infectious disease specialist Paul Offit. Chan’s piece was called “Why the pandemic probably started in a lab, in 5 key points,” and it was a long and animated op-ed. Being ignorant of the data, I took her bait and said that Chan’s article buttressed my own view that a lab-leak theory was becoming increasingly credible. (She’s a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute.)
But since I consider Offit the most credible source of information about Covid, I’ve now let go of the bait, and agree with his arguments, in the Substack article below, that a wet-market origin of the Covid virus is the best hypothesis by far.
I guess a lot of other people fell for Chan’s article, too, but I’m especially culpable because I already knew Offfit’s arguments, for last March I’d posted his defense of the “wet market theory” for the origin of Covid. I simply forgot!
From the new piece, here’s Offit dismissing the lab-leak theory once again:
On June 3, 2024, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.” The article was written by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Boston. Chan had also written a book titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which also supported the notion that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Wuhan laboratory. Chan’s book has been roundly criticized by scientists who investigated the events in Wuhan. Nonetheless, two thirds of the American public, independent of political affiliation, believe that SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
Click below if you want to see Offit defending the wet-market theory, and, along the way, making Chan and the NYT—which should have had an expert vet her assertions—look sloppy and ignorant.
First, Offit isn’t alone in his opinion; in fact, a wet-market origin seems to be the consensus of Those Who Know:
In her op-ed, Chan wrote, “Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.” Chan was wrong to claim the existence of a “growing body of evidence.” On the contrary, her op-ed contained only conspiracies, innuendos, and blatantly false claims. Although several scientists have stepped forward to counter Chan’s claims, the best single take-down was by Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a virologist who hosts a popular podcast called This Week in Virology (TWiV).
In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.
Chan’s arguments about a lab leak are already cast into doubt by Worobey et al.’s paper described in the second paragraph above (I haven’t heard the TWiV podcast, but readers say it’s very good.) The epidemiology alone is almost dispositive.
But Offit goes on to dismantle each of Chan’s five arguments. I’ll put them in bold and give a very brief summary of his refutation.
1.) “Bat corona spillover events in humans are rare.” Not true: many people who live near bats show antibodies indicating exposure to coronaviruses from bats. Further, the potential for spillover events is high given the frequency of contact between humans and carriers like civets.
2.) The Wuhan lab was researching how to make bat coronaviruses more infectious. Although the Wuhan lab studied coronaviruses, there’s not the slightest evidence that those viruses could be precursors to those causing covid.
3.) The Wuhan lab worked under insufficiently strict biohazard conditions. Offit says that the conditions were “Biosafety Laboratory-2”, which, even if the Chinese viriologists were working with SARS-CoV-2, are considered “adequate”. But they weren’t working with that virus!
4.) Chan says that there was “no way to distinguish between the market [origin] and a [human] superspreader.” Further, she said, “not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” Here Offit destroys her, and I’ll have to quote him.
Re distinguishing origins:
It is at this point that Chan’s op-ed defies common sense. Two different lineages of SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected early in the outbreak. Chan would have us believe that two different SARS-CoV-2 viruses were created in the laboratory and then taken directly by human superspreaders to the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market exactly where you would have expected an animal-to-human spillover event to occur. Why didn’t one or both superspreaders go to any of the 10,000 other places in Wuhan to begin a pandemic.
And re the lack of infected animals:
Chan wrote, “Not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” When the outbreak began, Chinese authorities shut down the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, disinfected the area, and killed the animals likely to have served as intermediates between bats and humans. In other words, no animals were available to test. This was in direct contrast to SARS-1, another animal-to-human spillover event that originated in a Foshan, China, wet market. In that case, the market continued to operate. For that reason, animals that were the likely source of SARS-1 were available for testing. This is perhaps Chan’s most disingenuous comment. You can’t go back in time and test animals that no longer exist.
This relates to Chan’s fifth point:
5.) “Chinese authorities have not done an intense search for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2.” Again I’ll quote Offit:
True. Mostly because all the animals in the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market were immediately slaughtered. Researchers did, however, find genetic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in carts, drains, a feather-and-hair remover, a metal cage, and machines that process animals after they’ve been slaughtered in wet market stalls that were at the epicenter of the outbreak. In the same specimens, they found mammalian DNA consistent with raccoon dogs, bamboo rats, and palm civets, all likely intermediate hosts as bat coronaviruses spilled into the human population.
Given Offit’s credentials and accomplishments, and his strong defense of the wet-market theory above, I agree with his conclusion that the evidence for a wet-market origin is “overwhelming.” And yes, given that he knows his onions, I’ll apologize for having been so credible with respect to Chan’s NYT article. The first thing to correct is Chan’s piece, but I don’t expect that the NYT, who could have had her piece looked at by people like Offit, went with it. And that despite the fact that in 2021 the paper had already reported controversies about Chan’s theories, which included the lab-leak hypothesis.
But let’s put aside the paper’s lack of due diligence, for it’s really important to pinpoint the origin of this virus. If we want to prevent future pandemics, we need to know whether wet markets can give rise to them, for in that case we can do something tangible to prevent them. On the other hand, if foreign scientists were manipulating coronaviruses and an infectious one escaped the lab, there’s not much we can do.
Fortunately, the first hypothesis seems to be the case, and Offit suggests several fixes: hold the Chinese government accountable for not supervising wet markets, including those that sell illegal animals prone to carrying bat-derived viruses (Offit says that 31 of 38 species in the market were animals protected under Chinese law). Further, he argues that once there’s evidence of a pandemic starting, the Chinese government must allow international teams of scientists into the country, which they didn’t at first dp in Wuhan. Offit ends by saying, “It’s time we put aside the fruitless, dead-end hypothesis of a lab leak and do the work that is necessary to prevent the next pandemic.”
I’ll keep an eye out for further developments, and again I’m sorry for being credulous about Chan’s paper. She may be craving the limelight, or may really passionately believe she’s right (or both), but given that the evidence against her theory was already known when she published her op-ed, she’s not acting like a good scientist. And in this case,sloppy science can put people in severe danger.
Quite a few readers answered my pathetic plea for photos, so we have a comfortable backlog for at least a week. Thanks to all.
These include Rik Gern of Austin, Texas, who sent in some plant photos. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here’s a split batch of pictures reflecting Central Texas in the Winter and Spring. The first half were taken on a walk thru Austin on a grey January day. There wasn’t much color except for a few berries that had managed to hang on through the Winter:
The trees seem much more dramatic without their leaves. I also like how they can look like river tributaries, or veins, or nerve cells. I apologize for not identifying the trees by genus and species, but I didn’t think about it when I took them, and now I’m smack dab in the middle of the busiest part of my year, working ‘round the clock, and out of time and energy to look them up. (I also feel like a bit of an idiot since I should probably know them by sight!)
The remaining pictures are all signs of Spring from around my yard. This slow growing Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) shoots forth a new branch. Give it a few years and it’ll be covered in ball moss instead of spider webs!
Seek by iNaturalist identifies this vine as a Carolina Snailseed (Cocculus carolinus), but I wonder about that because online image searches for Cocculus carolinus show a plant with red berries, and I’ve seen these around for years but haven’t seen any berries. At any rate, here it is sporting a brand new spiral tip.
Common Sunflowers (Helianthus annus) have been visiting the back yard for years, and this year I’ve got two healthy patches of them. The flower is nice, but the buds are also beautiful in their own right.
This wouldn’t be Texas if I didn’t include a cactus, so here’s a Spineless Prickly Pear (Opuntia ellisiana). The plant had a lot of new growth this year, but only produced this solitary flower. It’s a good one though!
It’s July already: welcome in the month, for it’s July 1, 2024, and National Gingersnap Day. celebrating the most popular biscuit in New Zealand, where they’re called “ginger nuts.” And so they are in Europe, where they make a thinner variety like these:
And it’s a banner day for evolutionary biology! (h/t Matthew). In reality, neither Darwin nor Wallace was at the Linnean Society to give their papers: the articles were presented by others and later published back to back in the Journal of the Linnean Society.
I suppose I have to tell a joke since it’s International Joke Day. Here’s a nerd joke, which may in fact be true:
France’s greatest lexicographer, Emile Littré, was once found by his wife in flagrante delicto, and in the conjugal bedroom at that, with their housemaid. “Emile,” cried Mrs Littré, “I am surprised!” “No, my dear,” replied the adulterous lexicographer calmly. “You are astonished. It is WE who are surprised.”
Add your own joke in the comments.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
The Arab League no longer defines Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist group, an official said on Saturday.
Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Shiite militia and a proxy of the Islamic regime in Iran, boasts the world’s largest rocket arsenal of any non-state actor. It is animated by the antisemitic ideology of jihad and is committed to the destruction of Israel.
“In earlier Arab League decisions, Hezbollah was designated as a terrorist organization, and this designation was reflected in the resolutions,” Hossam Zaki, the assistant secretary-general of the Arab League, was quoted in Arab media as saying.
“The League’s member states concurred that the labeling of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization should no longer be employed,” Zaki said, adding that the regional body “does not maintain terrorist lists and does not actively seek to designate entities in such a manner.”
Hezbollah has unleashed numerous rockets, mortars and drones on northern Israel in the past eight months starting on October 8, a day after the Jewish state suffered the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust at the hands of the Palestinian jihadists of Hamas.
Hezbollah and its subgroups have been designated as a terrorist country by the following organizations (from Wikipedia):
“Hezbollah (Military Wing)” is an invention: there is one Hezbollah, and it has a political and military side. The idea that there’s a separate political wing is a fiction invented by those who don’t want to describe the whole group as terrorists. The same false distinction holds for Hamas. Believe me, the head of Hamas’s “political wing,” Ismail Haniyeh, who is conveniently living high on the hog in Qatar, has plenty to say about Hamas’s military activities.
I’m curious about why the Arab League has done this, but I’m guessing it’s in preparation to support Hezbollah if it should get into a war with Israel.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was leading in the first round of parliamentary elections across France on Sunday, according to early projections that showed her far-right party one step closer to its goal of winning control of the National Assembly and taking the reins of government.
A projection by polling firm Harris Interactive said National Rally and its allies won 34% of first-round votes while the New Popular Front, a coalition of leftist parties, garnered 30% of ballots. President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business party and its allies were heading for a third-place finish with 22% of the vote, Harris Interactive said.
National Rally is now on track to score an unprecedented haul of parliamentary seats when voters return to the ballot box for the July 7 runoff, marking a stunning reversal of fortune for Macron. If National Rally wins a majority in the National Assembly, Macron would face the possibility of sharing power with the first far-right government since Vichy France. Macron’s presidential term ends in 2027, and he said he won’t resign.
Macron placed a massive bet when he called the snap elections, expecting to edge out leftist parties in the first round and force their voters to rally around his party for the runoff as they had in previous national elections. The opportunity to defeat Le Pen’s National Rally in races across the country, Macron said, would provide France with a moment of “clarification” after her forces trounced his in European elections at the start of June.
Now Macron’s calculation risks backfiring. His party’s third-place finish on Sunday means many of his candidates might miss runoff races around the country. Candidates need to win support from 12.5% of registered voters on Sunday to qualify for the final round. Those who qualify will face pressure to drop out of the runoff, so that votes against National Rally aren’t divided between two parties.
Le Pen and her allies, meanwhile, are within striking distance of a 289-seat majority in the National Assembly that would compel Macron to select a prime minister from her ranks.
Here’s Matthew’s comment on what’s going to happen:
If Rally (RN for Rassemblement National) has a majority after the second round (next Sunday), the Prime Minister will be the parliamentary leader of the Rally Party (Bardella, not Le Pen). Leading Jewish intellectuals have called for a vote for the RN because they think that the RN supports Israel and the left is anti-semitic. I have no idea what will happen but it is crap.
*The WaPo describes the extensive labor that Biden’s aides went through to prepare him for the debate. Apparently, even in the prep sessions he was halting and not that eloquent. But then things fell apart a lot more when he got on stage:
In the sessions, the president still spoke haltingly. He sometimes confused facts and figures. He tripped over words and meandered. Debate prep would not fix his stutter or make him appear any younger, aides knew.
But as Biden boarded Marine One to leave the rustic Camp David presidential retreat for Atlanta, they sought to reassure anxious allies. The president, they said, was prepared and would perform well. Some said the debate might even be boring.
This story is based on conversations with eight individuals involved in or briefed on the president’s debate preparation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. The Biden campaign declined to comment.
For a full week, the president sequestered himself at Camp David with more than a dozen aides to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump. He rehearsed answers, met with policy aides and participated in mock debates, with his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, playing the part of Trump.
Every topic he was asked about Thursday, he had practiced answers for — including the final one about his age.
So aides were bewildered by his performance. Many felt they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of numerous debates — as a senator, vice-presidential nominee and presidential candidate. And they did not understand why he gave an entirely different answer on the age question than the one they spent more than a week perfecting.
The president did not just stumble over words. He appeared to lose his focus and often was unable to finish sentences. His voice was raspy and thin, and when the debate concluded, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.
His performance sent shock waves through the Democratic Party, resulting in calls from some Democrats for him to step aside. In the 48 hours after the debate, Biden campaign officials sought to reassure supporters and donors, blaming the debate on “just a bad night” and vowing that the president would remain in the race. The president should be judged by his 3½ years in office, they argued, not 90 minutes onstage.
But with another debate scheduled for September — a Biden campaign spokesman said the president would not withdraw from it — aides and allies are scrutinizing the president’s preparation for last week’s debate to figure out if they missed signs of what would unfold in CNN’s Atlanta studio.
Indeed, there was a ton of preparation, and the article describes it in detail, but their only explanation of why Biden blew it is “overpreparation”: too many opinions from too many aides confused him. I don’t quite buy that.
*Lydia Polgreen, a progressive and absolutely predictable columnist for the NYT, has an op-ed called, “Kamala Harris could win this election. Let her.” The answer to the first sentence is “No, she couldn’t.” As for the second, if Biden steps down, he doesn’t get to name a successor. It would be free-for-all. But he won’t step down, as he doesn’t want to give up that second term. I’ll quote Polgreen only briefly:
I know, I know. You think I just fell out of a coconut tree. Didn’t Harris flame out in the last Democratic presidential primary, leaving just in time to avoid an embarrassing loss in her home state, California? Yes. But to win a primary you must thread the needle of introducing yourself to the base of the party while burnishing the case for your ideas and dissing the talents of your rivals, all while keeping your options open, because your opponents are also your future surrogates and allies. For women — and for Black women in particular — the gender and racial dynamics of a presidential primary race seem especially difficult to navigate.
Those dynamics would play out very differently on a national stage shared with Donald Trump. There, Harris would not be hectoring a fellow Democrat over relatively small differences in policy or attempting to polish her own record in comparison with that of a governor or fellow lawmaker. She can use her true superpower: She will be a relentless prosecutor of the very clear political case against Donald John Trump, a felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, an inveterate liar, a demagogue, a threat to our democracy and to our Constitution.
I think I speak for a lot of women, probably the most decisive voting bloc in this election, when I say that I would love to see Harris cut Trump down to size. And unlike the blow she landed on Biden during the 2020 primary debate — “That little girl was me,” in response to Biden’s terrible answer about school busing policy — she would be in a ring with an actual bully who will be unable to help himself and will treat her with menacing disrespect. Unlike Trump’s previous female debate rival, Hillary Clinton, nary a whiff of scandal has besmirched Harris. All Trump would have is personal attacks, which would only further reinforce his image as a bully. That could play especially poorly with moderate voters when directed at a mature Black woman.
Harris is more Indian than she is African-American, and, really, it’s time to stop emphasizing race when we pick candidates. Let’s go for one who’s the best choice to run America. And that isn’t Harris.
*I wrote a quick and short eulogy for Frederick Crews the other day, a friend, a scholar of English, adebunker of Freud, a hilarious mocker of literary theory, a wonderful writer and critic, and a wickedly smart polymath. But my piece was written quickly, and Michael Shermer has done a much better job at Skeptic with his eulogy: “‘But I thought I had tenure!’ RIP Frederick Crews, 1933-2024.”
At Skeptic we were saddened to learn this week of the death of our long-time friend, contributor, and skeptical icon Frederick Crews, an admired professor of literature and the author of 14 books, many of which were widely read, discussed, and criticized for their satirical or argumentative import, and for their debunking of pretentious nonsense—from Freud, postmodernism, and repressed memories to creationism, theosophy, and UFOs. Fred died peacefully in the hospital at age 91 after a brief illness. His daughter, Gretchen Detre, provided details of Crews’s life and career to us, along with these photographs, for which we are grateful. In addition to being a professor and public intellectual, Crews was a lifelong outdoorsman who ran in road races until age 72, remained a skier, swimmer, bodysurfer, and mountain hiker into his mid-80s, and rode his motorcycle until age 87, a true bon viviant.
Photo by Gretchen Detre (see para above)
In 2017 Crews published a lengthy biographical study Freud: The Making of an Illusion, the aim of which was to trace the steps by which the founder of psychoanalysis gradually abandoned the empirical ethos. Writing in The New Yorker, Louis Menand characterized the book as having driven a stake “into its subject’s cold, cold heart.”
Hisorian of science and Freud scholar Frank Sulloway (Freud: Biologist of the Mind), a colleague of Crews at UC Berkeley, sent us this assessment of his work and influence:
What most impressed me about Fred Crews was the degree to which he systematically retooled himself by reading and carefully studying the modern scientific literature in neurology and psychology that had increasingly upended Freud’s most fundamental psychoanalytic assumptions. The same level of dedication was also true of Crews’s immersion in the history of science, which, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, provided a critical reassessment not only of the intellectual sources of Freud’s thinking, but, more importantly, a far deeper understanding of the many fundamentally flawed biological theories that Freud carried over into his psychoanalytic model of human development.
Crews not only drew very effectively on this prior literature, but he also did the whole field of scholarship a considerable service by reprinting some of the most important publications from this literature in his 1998 edited volume Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (Viking).
Fred Crews was a national treasure who will be dearly missed in the skeptical community and the wider society. He is survived by Elizabeth (Betty) Crews, his wife of almost 65 years; his children Gretchen Detre and Ingrid Crews; his grandchildren, Alejandro and Rebeca Márquez and Isabel and Aaron Detre; his great-granddaughter Yael Medrano Márquez; his sister, Frances James; and his nieces, Sigrid Bonner, Helen James, and Avis James.
Long ago, Fred Crews chose the sardonic text for his tombstone: “But I thought I had tenure!” We chose that for the title of this tribute. RIP Fred Crews.
I didn’t know about that epitaph, but it’s absolutely in character.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn: Hili is being silly:
A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m considering starting a vegan diet.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Rozważam, czy przejść na wegańską dietę.
And a photo of the loving Szaron (isn’t he handsome?)
From Masih, who applauds the Iranian people for boycotting the Presidential election (read the whole tweet):
Iranian People Deliver a Resounding No to Islamic Republic
I extend my heartfelt congratulations to the people of Iran for their monumental display of unity and courage in saying a resounding “No” to the Islamic Republic. This verdict was delivered by a massive boycott of…
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 29, 2024
I may have posted this before, but I’ve heard that she’s on leave at Vanderbilt until this issue is resolved:
Perspective @VanderbiltU students and parents were shocked to see undergraduate admissions counselor Briana Grimes sport a keffiyeh during an information session yesterday.
Grimes oversees admissions for numerous states, including NY, for Vanderbilt.
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is a real color photo (touched up) of a woman who had a sad life:
A piercing gaze across the centuries – I’ve cleaned-up this striking autochrome portrait of a young lady, taken 109 years ago, during the Great War. It’s an autochrome study by American photographer Alfred Stieglitz of his 17-year-old daughter Kitty in 1915.
It was taken in… pic.twitter.com/AhE2rbtjQ5
Matthew says of this one, “Someone left the handbrake off.”
Wow. This is apparently what was supposed to be a STATIC FIRE TEST today of a Tianlong-3 first stage by China’s Space Pioneer. That’s catastrophic, not static. Firm was targeting an orbital launch in the coming months. https://t.co/BY9MgJeE7Apic.twitter.com/L6ronwLW1N
The remaining pictures are all signs of Spring from around my yard. This slow growing 
