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.
I got zero hours of sleep last night. Zero. That’s twice in four days, so you can well imagine that my neurons are somewhat gummed up. Let’s have a discussion while I recover (and feed the ducks).
With all the indictments against him pending, Trump still looks unbeatable. My question is this: readers have already prognosticated that there’s no way Trump could see jail time. And even if he’s multiply indicted, I don’t see anybody in the lineup moving ahead of him. This is above my pay grade, but can Trump still be elected President, and serve as President, if he’s convicted of a felony?
Also, do you think any of the candidates above can overtake him? If not, will he beat Biden?
Here’s the second part of a batch of photos sent by Texas reader Rik Gern (part 1 is here). The introduction was this:
n mid-March I visited a friend on a ranch in Luling, Texas, a small town about 50 miles south of Austin and 60 miles east of San Antonio. Originally a railroad town, and once known as “the toughest town in Texas”, Luling is now a minor oil town. [JAC: It’s also the home of the City Market, one of the finest BBQ joints in Texas.]
The landscape is typical of much of central Texas; it can look monotonous on the surface, but it’s full of interesting life when you look up close. The woods, which the locals refer to as scrub brush, consists largely of Spanish Oak, Mesquite, and Elm:
You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them; Rik’s text is indented.
This looks like some kind of floating spiked orb, but it is an overhead view of a Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum).
Here is a view of the flower in bloom. If this was all there was to it and it wasn’t covered in spikes, you’d want them as ground cover all over the place!
Here are several of the plants in different stages of blooming. Still beautiful, but a little more menacing.
Bitterweed (Helenium amarum) may have been the most common flower in this field. It’s a member of the daisy family and also goes by the names of yellow sneezeweed and bitter sneezeweed. I guess I got lucky because they didn’t make me sneeze!
This pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa) makes for an interesting optical illusion; the light is coming from the upper right and of course the petals form a concave shape, but if you imagine the light source coming from the lower left, all of a sudden it appears to be billowing outward in a convex fashion. These are often referred to as buttercups, but are not part of that family.
As I was photographing this Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata) I noticed some movement and was surprised to get photobombed by a little spider. I didn’t realize spiders could be pollinators.
You’d think this flower would be easy to identify, but iNaturalist’s Seek app couldn’t identify it, and a web search for “yellow Texas wildflowers” didn’t help either. It’s mighty pretty though, and this picture is also photobombed, this time by two tiny critters with long antennae.
This is called a pinwheel or Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella) and has been photobombed by the same type of critter that found its way into the previous picture.
The sun sets on Luling; a beautiful end to a beautiful day!
To give you an idea of the richness of the landscape, all of these pictures, minus the sunset were taken within an approximately fifteen foot radius of one another. One other life form that played a major role (the villain, as it were) in these pictures was the pesky chigger (genus Eutrombicula). City boy that I am, I waded deep into the fields and got down on my hands and knees to take pictures, entranced by the beauty of the plants and neglectful of the precautions I should have taken against these little pests. Not only did I fail to tuck my pants into my boots, but I neglected to shower at the end of the day, so when I returned to my home in Austin I had bright red itchy dots all around the area covered by my sox and grundies. That was about ten weeks ago and I still have marks on my ankles. I won’t make that mistake again, but it was still worth it to see so many pretty sights!
Welcome to the last day of July: Monday, July 31, 2023, and National Cotton Candy Day, a day to eat unadulterated spun sucrose. You can buy the stuff from vending machines in Japan. This one seems to cost about 100 yen, which is 71¢ in U.S. currency:
Ukraine brought the war far from the front line into the heart of Russia again Sunday in drone penetrations that Russian authorities said damaged two office buildings a few miles (kilometers) from the Kremlin and a pig breeding complex on the countries’ border.
The attacks, which Ukraine didn’t acknowledge in keeping with its security policy, reflected a pattern of more frequent and deeper cross-border strikes the Kyiv government has launched since starting a counteroffensive against Russian forces in June. A precursor and the most dramatic of the strikes happenned in May on the Kremlin itself, the seat of power in the capital, Moscow.
Sunday’s was the fourth such strike on the capital region this month and the third this week, showing Moscow’s vulnerability as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its 18th month.
The Russian Defense Ministry said three drones targeted the city in an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime.” Air defenses shot down one drone in Odintsovo in the surrounding Moscow region, while two others were jammed and crashed into the Moscow City business district.
. . .Ukrainian officials didn’t acknowledge the attacks but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address: “Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
A Ukrainian air force spokesman also didn’t claim responsibility but said the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“All of the people who think the war ‘doesn’t concern them’ — it’s already touching them,” spokesperson Yurii Ihnat told journalists Sunday.
Pig breeding farms? And are they going after civilian targets? That again is a war crime, and if Ukraine is actually doing this, they’ll lose international support.
You can see a dramatic video of a drone attack on a Moscow building on CNN.
*Both the NYT and the Washington Post have pieces about a neglected aspect of the movie “Oppenheimer,” and about the Trinity test in particular: the spate of diseases that afflicted people near the test explostion in 1945. From the Post:
What happened here in the aftermath, surviving “downwinders” and their relatives say, is a legacy of serious health consequences that have gone unacknowledged for 78 years. Their struggles continue to be pushed aside; the new blockbuster film “Oppenheimer,” which spotlights the scientist most credited for the bomb, ignores completely the people who lived in the shadow of his test site.
Yet for all their ambivalence about the movie’s fanfare — the northern New Mexico city of Los Alamos, where J. Robert Oppenheimer located the Manhattan Project, just threw a 10-day festival to celebrate its place in history — locals also have hope that the Hollywood glow may elevate their long quest to be added to a federal program that compensates people sickened by presumed exposure to radiation from aboveground nuclear tests.
. . . The Trinity site, about 60 miles northwest of tiny Tularosa, was chosen in part for its supposed isolation. Nearly half a million people lived within a 150-mile radius, though. Manhattan Project leaders knew a nuclear test would put them at risk, but with the nation at war, secrecy was the priority. Evacuation plans were never acted upon. The military concocted a cover story: The boom was an explosion of an ammunitions magazine.
. . . TheJuly 16, 1945,blast was more massive than Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists expected, equivalent to nearly 25,000 tons of TNT, according to recent estimates. Witnesses said the plutonium ash fell for days, on areas where people grew their own food, drank rainwater collected in cisterns and cooled off in irrigation canals that made the arid region fertile.
According to a new study, the fallout floated to 46 states, Mexico and Canada within 10 days. In 28 of 33 New Mexico counties, it estimates the accumulation of radioactive material was higher than required under the federal compensation program.
And the injuries?
. . . Proving that radiation caused the cancers that have afflicted New Mexico’s downwinders is extremely difficult. A major study published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute concluded that Trinity fallout may contribute to as many as 1,000 cancers by 2034, most in people who lived very near the test. There is “no evidence to suggest” cases among subsequent generations were related, the study noted.
But RECA does not require claimants to establish causation, only to show that they or a relative had a qualifying disease after working or living in certain locations during specific time frames.
They could have tested elsewhere, like an island, and they couldn’t have warned local inhabitants in New Mexico, as that would be revealing a big secret. The only fair thing to do is compensate those who were injured according to the rule limned above
At a time when the mighty woolly mammoth roamed the Earth, some 46,000 years ago, a minuscule pair of roundworms became encased in the Siberian permafrost.
Millennia later, the worms, thawed out of the ice, would wriggle again, and demonstrate to scientists that life could be paused — almost indefinitely.
The discovery, published this week in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Genetics, offers new insight into how the worms, also known as nematodes, can survive in extreme conditions for extraordinarily long periods of time, in this case tens of thousands of years.
In 2018, Anastasia Shatilovich, a scientist from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science RAS in Russia, thawed two female worms from a fossilized burrow dug by gophers in the Arctic.
The worms, which were buried approximately 130 feet in the permafrost, were revived simply by putting them in water, according to a news release from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany.
Called Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, after the Kolyma River in Russia, where they were found, the worms were sent to Germany for further study. The creatures, which have a life span measured in days, died after reproducing several generations in the lab, researchers said.
Using radiocarbon dating, researchers determined the specimens were frozen between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago, during the late Pleistocene.
The roughly millimeter-long worms were able to resist extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis, a process researchers at the institute have been trying to understand.
The females were triploid and parthenogenic, and so produced offspring asexually. This means that one can’t test them or their descendants against living species to see if they’re still cross-fertile, implying that 46,000 years of time (temporal isolation) would be sufficient to produce reproductive barriers. But in theory, were this species cross-fertile with others, one could do this kind of test. But they at least know, from DNA analysis of the descendants, that these worms are more closely related to some nematodes than to others.
This also raises a philosophical problem: were those worms dead or alive while they were frozen? Clearly no metabolic processes could have been going on during cryptobiosis: the systems shut down and then restarted. Dead or alive?
*Time to pay attention to the Women’s World Cup, where, in a stunning upset, Colombia beat Germany 2-1. Here are the results from today (the tournament is in New Zealand), which include the host team being eliminated (click to read at the NYT):
The most remarkable game of the World Cup was won and then it wasn’t, until it was won again in the last minute. It was a game so good that what may have been the goal of the tournament was not even the most important goal of the night. It was a result so stunning that one needs to go back almost three decades to find another one like it.
The simple summary is this: Colombia defeated Germany, 2-1, in Sydney to take a surprising but fully deserved lead in Group H. The fuller, richer version contains so much more flavor than that.
There’s the opening goal, a stunning bit of control and footwork by the Colombian teenager Linda Caicedo that is already being called the goal of the tournament.
See that goal at 1:19 in the video below.
How stunning was it all? The defeat was the first time Germany had lost a game in the group stage of a World Cup since 1995. To put that loss, a 3-2 defeat to host Sweden in Helsingborg, in perspective, consider that Pia Sundhage, the 63-year-old coach of Brazil in this World Cup, scored in the match.
Sundhage may not remember that day. But the Germans probably do, and they will definitely remember Sunday, a night, and a win, the Colombians will never forget.
Yesterday’s results:
Here are the highlights from the Germany-Colombia match. Germany got one point on a penalty kick, but the two Colombia goals were great, especially the first at 1:21 (the second was a header).
And the luckless kiwis:
New Zealand never scores much, and it never scored again at the World Cup, eliminated quietly on Sunday in Dunedin after a 0-0 tie with Switzerland that was the home team’s ninth goalless outing in 12 games this year.
A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.
. . . Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.
. . .Ms. Rogers was hired in August 2021 and given the job title of “Recruiter, Internal Mobility Team.”
Her responsibilities included the processing of internal promotions, which encompassed posting job listings, reviewing applications, conducting interviews, writing and sending offer letters, carrying out background checks, ordering drug tests, initiating and reviewing onboarding, and ensuring that personnel updates were reflected in the system.
Compass created a program it called “Operation Equity” in March 2022, a purported diversity program that offered qualified employees special training and mentorship and the promise of a promotion upon graduation, according to the legal complaint that was filed in Rogers v. Compass Group USA Inc.
The lawsuit was filed on July 24 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California under the auspices of the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm headquartered in Chicago that organized the legal action.
But participation in the program was restricted to “women and people of color.” White men were not allowed to participate and receive the associated benefits of training, mentorship, and guaranteed promotion.
By calling it “Operation Equity,” the company “used a euphemistic and false title to hide the program’s true nature.” The program would more accurately be called the “White-Men-Need-Not-Apply” program because it is an example of “‘outright racial balancing,’ which is patently unlawful,” and is the kind of program “promoted by people … who harbor racial animus against white men,” according to the legal complaint.
Ms. Rogers claims she informed management that high-level employees said of the program, “This is the direction the world is going, jump on the train or get run over,” and “We are not here to appease the old white man.”
Ms. Rogers claims she also informed management that the program was illegal and requested that she be allowed an accommodation because the program “violated her ethical beliefs.” Management assured her she would be exempted from participating in it and that she would not be retaliated against for sharing her concerns with management.
Then they fired her. “Operation Equity” was clearly illegal, violating nondiscrimination acts, and I hope Rogers gets a big pot of money from the company. I predict a hushed-up settlement
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a rare admission of error:
From Masih, another small but telling act of rebellion against the Iranian government by activists.
The Islamic Republic spends millions of dollars to glorify Qasem Soleimani, mastermind of Syrian civil war. Iranians burn the image of this war criminal. #WomanLifeFreedompic.twitter.com/Cu40Luhe3j
I've now got a basement absolutely crammed full of wine and Crunchy Marmite Peanut Butter. Global Warming, War, Pandemic, bring it on …couldn't give a fuck. Have a great weekend 🥂
From the Auschwitz Memorial: it’s the birthday of a survivor:
It's Primo Levi's birthday. He survived the Auschwitz, and wrote one of the best books about the camp experience, "If This is a Man." https://t.co/9lSjMMOFHX
I’m not aware of any university that explicitly allows students to use “bots” (AI generators such as ChatGPT) to prepare their applications, but it was only a matter of time. This announcement from the law school of Arizona State University explicitly allows students to use AI in their applications, most likely in their application essays. Click to read, but I’ve reproduced the meat of the announcement below:
Most of what they say:
The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, ranked the nation’s most innovative university since 2016, announces that applicants to its degree programs are permitted to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the preparation of their application and certify that the information they submit is accurate, beginning in August 2023.
The use of large language model (LLM) tools such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and others has accelerated in the past year. Its use is also prevalent in the legal field. In our mission to educate and prepare the next generation of lawyers and leaders, law schools also need to embrace the use of technology such as AI with a comprehensive approach.
“Our law school is driven by an innovative mindset. By embracing emerging technologies, and teaching students the ethical responsibilities associated with technology, we will enhance legal education and break down barriers that may exist for prospective students. By incorporating generative AI into our curriculum, we prepare students for their future careers across all disciplines,” says Willard H. Pedrick Dean and Regents Professor of Law Stacy Leeds.
. . . Our Center for Law, Science, and Innovation (LSI) has been leading the field in the understanding and expansion of technology in law since its establishment 30 years ago. Nearly every field within the law now involves interactions with technology that is rapidly changing and evolving. Lawyers comfortable dealing with the scientific and technological aspects underlying many legal issues are in high demand worldwide. Artificial intelligence, along with its related technologies, has quickly emerged as one of the most fundamental technologies affecting all aspects of our lives and the law today, one that LSI has been examining closely for many years.
We are embracing this technology because we see the benefits it may bring to students and future lawyers. Generative AI is a tool available to nearly everyone, regardless of their economic situation, that can help them submit a strong application when used responsibly.
Now why are they doing this? They give a couple of reasons, the most unconvincing being that the law school has always embraced “the expansion of technology in law”, and this is a new form of technology; familiarity with it can help the students. (That doesn’t mean, however, that you have to use it in an application essay!) Also, they argue that using AI can help students “submit a strong application when used responsibly.” I have a sneaking suspicion that this is being done as a DEI initiative, as it says that “Generative AI is a tool available to nearly everyone, regardless of their economic situation.”
But that makes it counterproductive, because it takes away from the admissions committee any judgment about whether a student is able to write. Isn’t that part of judging an application—seeing whether a student can write a coherent essay? Now everyone can write a coherent essay because the bot will do it for them! The result of using bots is that the differential writing abilities of the students will be minimized, and I can’t imagine what answer the school would have to that except that “we WANT everybody to write on a level playing field.”
. . . . . quality and grading patterns of undergraduate institutions, previous graduate education, demonstrated commitment to public service, work and leadership experience, extracurricular or community activities, history of overcoming economic or other disadvantages, uniqueness of experience and background, maturity, ability to communicate, foreign language proficiency, honors and awards, service in the armed forces, and publications.
Note the “history of overcoming economic or other disadvantages,” which surely comes straight from the recent Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action. But note as well that you’re supposed to have a good “ability to communicate”. How can you show that if you’re using a bot?
From Matthew Yglesias’s Substack site Slow Boring comes a frightening article by Maya Bodnick describing what’s happened to high-school debating in America. It’s turning into an exercise in “critical theory”, with judges telling contestants in advance what kind of politics they favor, the debaters ignoring the assigned topic, and debaters speaking so fast you can’t understand them. Further, many of the debaters advocate a dismantling of America, no matter what system they’re talking about.
It’s a far cry from the kind of debates we see at Oxford or Cambridge, or that Hitchens and others have engaged in. And because Bodnick tells us that many famous current politicians (e.g. Lyndon Johnson, Nancy Pelosi, and John F. Kennedy) honed their skills in high-school debating, this change bodes ill for the future politics of America.
Click to read:
Here’s Bodnick’s take on what’s happened:
In a traditional debate round, students argue over a topic assigned by the tournament — for example, “The U.S. should adopt universal healthcare.” One side is expected to argue in favor of the motion (the affirmation side), and one against (the negation side). However, in recent years, many debaters have decided to flat-out ignore the assigned topic and instead hijack the round by proposing brand new (i.e., wholly unrelated to the original topic), debater-created resolutions that advocate complex social criticisms based on various theories — Marxism, anti-militarism, feminist international relations theory, neocolonialism, securitization, anthropocentrism, orientalism, racial positionality, Afro-Pessimism, disablism, queer ecology, and transfeminism. (To be clear, traditional feminism is out of fashion and seen as too essentialist.)
These critical theory arguments, known as kritiks, are usually wielded by the negation side to criticize the fundamental assumptions of their affirmation side opponents. Kritik advocates argue that the world is so systematically broken that discussing public policy proposals and reforms misses what really matters: the need to fundamentally revolutionize society in some way. For example, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage,” the affirmation side might provide some arguments supporting this policy. But then the negation side, instead of arguing that the government shouldn’t raise the minimum wage, might reject spending any time on the original resolution and counter-propose a Marxist kritik.
Here’s an example of how the negation might introduce this kritik:
Revolutionary theory is a prior question — the aff [proposal about raising the minimum wage] is irrelevant in the grand scheme of capitalism… [You as a judge should] evaluate the debate as a dialectical materialist — you are a historian inquiring into the determinant factors behind the PMC [first affirmation speech] — The role of the ballot is to endorse the historical outlook of the topic with the most explanatory power… Vote negative to endorse Marxist labor theory of value.
Or, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase troops in the Korean DMZ,” the negation might choose not to argue against the resolution and propose a securitization kritik:
Securitization is a political decision that discursively constructs certain phenomena as threats to justify their management and extermination. The practice of security erases alternate perspectives through the dominance of Western rationalism, permitting unchecked violence against alterity. We should use this round to create space for an epistemological multiplicity that breaks down dominant discourses of North Korea.
These are two examples of negation kritiks. Additionally, sometimes the affirmation side kicks off the debate by proposing a kritik — they don’t even bother advocating for the original resolution! For example, let’s say the original topic was “The U.S. should impose a carbon tax.” The affirmation side could decide to throw the resolution out the window and instead argue for an Afro-Pessimism kritik:
Western societies are structured on Enlightenment-era philosophy that fundamentally does not value Black people as people, and defines them as slaves. Even though documents like the Constitution have been amended to end slavery, it created a society that is rotten to the core, and the only way to fix it is to burn down civil society.
These kinds of kritiks are starting to dominate the two main platforms for high-school debates, “Policy” (now 67% kritik) and “Lincoln-Douglas (now 45% kritik).
In response, people started two new and more traditional debate forums: Public Forum and Parliamentary. But critical theory is starting to invade both of these, too. And they’re self-reinforcing, for as debaters age and become coaches and judges, “kritik” debates became more common.
What’s scary is how the judges publish in advance the kind of arguments they favor. Here’s a list of judges’ preferences from the 2023 “Tournament of Champions” debate (the winning debate from that contest is in the video below):
“Love the K, this is where i spent more of the time in my debate and now coaching career, I think I have an understanding of generally every K, in college, I mostly read Afro-Pessimism/Gillespie, but other areas of literature I am familiar with cap, cybernetics, baudrillard, psychoanalysis, Moten/Afro-Optimism, Afro-Futurism, arguments in queer and gender studies, whatever the K is I should have somewhat a basic understanding of it.”
“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist… I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging… I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments… Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
“…I’ve almost exclusively read variations of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism… I find these arguments to be a valuable and fun tool in debate and am happy to evaluate these debates to the best of my ability.”
Kritik vs. kritik debates are “currently my favorite type of debate to judge. My literature knowledge is primarily concentrated in Marxism, Maoism, and proletarian feminism, and I have a baseline familiarity with postcolonial theory, queer theory, and feminist standpoint theory, but I’m down to evaluate anything as long as it’s explained well.”
“Ks I have written files on/answering/into the lit for – spanos, psycho, cap, communist horizon, security, fem, mao, death cult, berlant, scranton, queerness, set col…”
This, of course, completely ruins the way that, I think, debates should be to run: winners aren’t supposed to cater to judges’ tastes, but to make the best argument that they’re assigned. And they’re supposed to stick to their topic! In the end, Bodnick tells us why we should fear this trend:
This is what concerns me so deeply about this seismic shift in the debate landscape—and why I would hate to see the Public Forum and Parliamentary formats follow the trajectory of Policy and Lincoln-Douglas. Kritiks promote a worldview with pernicious implications for American politics among a group of people who are likely to end up in positions to have a serious impact on American politics.
When debaters reject the topic and advocate for these critical theories, they choose not to engage in pragmatic policy discussions. Instead, they condemn American institutions and society as rotten to the core. They conclude that reform is hopeless and the only solution is to burn it all down. Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles.
High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds. It’s the type of logic that leads young people to label both parties as equally bad and to disengage from electoral politics. What most normal people think debate is about — advocating either side of a plausible public-policy topic — is no longer the focus. With kritiks taking a larger share, debate is increasingly societally rejectionist. Too often the activity is no longer a forum for true discussion, but a site of radicalization.
Now surely you’re going to want to see an example of the new style of “kritik” debate. A championship debate is below, and note how fast the debaters talk. This is very common now, and I don’t know how either listeners or the judges can even make out what’s being said. As Bodnick notes:
These formats were started as a response not only to critical theory, but also to speed debate — often a related phenomenon. If you watch any of the examples of kritiks that I’ve linked to, it’s likely you will not be able to understand what the debaters are saying because they’re talking so fast. I abhor this trend, but it’s not the focus of this article.
So I give you a good example in the video below:
This was the championship debate at the 2023 Tournament of Champions Lincoln-Douglas Debate Tournament between Muzzi Khan and Karan Shah. The decision is a 2-1 for the affirmative (Dombcik, Kiihnl, *Schwerdtfeger). The 2NR goes for the Kant NC.
At the University of Kentucky’s 2023 Tournament of Champions, held earlier this month, senior Muzzi Khan won the national championship in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. The topic was “Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration.” After an excellent preliminary record, Khan went on to win five single elimination rounds.
You don’t have to listen to the whole hour, but do sample both debaters. Good luck understanding them! The second debater starts at 17:53. They sound as if they’re speaking in a foreign language!
We’ve already learned that, with respect to some indigenous “scientific” theories, the New Zealand government is willing to commit the “Concorde” or “sunk cost” fallacy, continuing to fund lines of inquiry even though those projects have already been proven wrong or unproductive. A particularly egregious example, which I’ve documented before (see here, here and here) is the NZ government’s handing out $660,000 (NZ) to Priscilla Wehi of the University of Otago to pursue claims that the Polynesians (ancestors of the Māori) had discovered Antarctica in the early seventh century. That claim was debunked by Māori scholars themselves, who discovered it was based on a mistranslation of an oral legend. The real discoverers of Antarctica were members of a Russian expedition in 1820. But Wehi was still given a big chunk of money to pursue a palpably stupid idea—only because it was based on an faulty indigenous legend.
The same thing is about to happen again, but this time involving more money. Now $2.7 million (NZ) has been given out to Māori workers to test (not really a “test”, as there’s no control) their notion that the phases of the moon affect plants to the extent that you can improve crop yield by planting and harvesting during certain propitious lunar phases.
This idea had already been debunked decades ago, but once again the Kiwis who hand out grants don’t care; they just want to proffer money to Māori, presumably as some form of affirmation of indigenous “ways of knowing”.
But read on about the government’s funding of Māori “tests” of the effects of lunar phases on planting. Is there a control that ignores Moon phases? Not that I see. Further, the data already exists in the literature to show that this endeavor is useless. It’s not a “test,” but a complete waste of taxpayers money.
This article is from a section of New Zealand’s most widely read newspaper, the New Zealand Herald. Note that “maramataka” is the Māori lunar calendar
Note that throughout the article there are reference to “positive results” of relying on the Moon’s phases for planting and harvesting, but no data have been published, and none are given. This is an exercise in confirmation bias, in giving money based on what people want to be true.
Using ancient Māori knowledge of moon phases has shown positive results on pasture growth and riparian planting resilience for Bay of Plenty farmers Miru Young and Mohi Beckham.
The farmers were among those who spent two days on historic Te Kūiti Pā being guided through the Māori lunar calendar at a first-of-its-kind workshop.
They were shown why moon phases can influence aspects of plant growth, seed-sowing effectiveness and the potency of healing properties in native plants that Māori farmers have used to counter illnesses in farm animals for decades.
“We’re not here to preach maramataka (lunar calendar) but encourage farmers to observe so they can utilise the tools around us,” said Erina Wehi-Barton.
“Using maramataka and traditional plant knowledge is about working smarter not harder.
. . .Erina is a mātauranga practitioner and project specialist/kairangahau Māori for the trial Rere ki uta rere ki tai.
Note the implication below that this is a controlled study: mātauranga, characterized as “Māori science” is to be tested alongside “Western science”. But that’s the only time you hear anything about a control, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. My bolding:
The Government-funded trial explores mātauranga — Māori science —alongside Western science and farmer knowledge to improve soil health.
It is one of three place-based projects awarded funding as part of the Revitalise Te Taiao research programme. Paeroa-based Rere ki uta rere ki tai has been allocated $2.7 million to test farming methods that aim to “enhance the mana and mauri of the soil” across 10 farms.
“Mana” refers roughly to “spiritual power”, while “mauri” means “life principle/vital essence”. Both are teleological words that have no place in science. But there’s more:
Erina said farmers already spent their days observing differences in pasture and forest growth through the seasons and were uniquely placed to gain insights over a lunar cycle. [JAC: where are the data?]
. . . The workshop came about after Erina visited Miru’s 80ha dairy farm in Pukehina, and had a conversation about maramataka.
Miru’s father Patrick and late granddad Steve had shared what they knew about maramataka, but the workshop allowed Young to learn more about each individual moon phase and how it might influence his farm.
“I grew up with maramataka from Dad and Koro (grandad), and Dad used it for gardening, hunting, fishing and diving. Now I do it for all of those, but I never thought about doing it for farming,” he says.
“What I do with fishing and diving is I write down what I get when I go out and what the moon phase is, then I know where to go back at what time. I saw patterns, more seasonal than anything.
“But with farming, I didn’t know how it might work because we use a contractor for planting, and he comes down when he’s ready, not when I’m ready.
“After I’d spent two years writing down my planting and the moon phases, I’d built a better relationship with my contractor, and I picked a better time to plant on, and now he’ll come then.”
Miru has recorded his observations that pasture was slower to get going at certain moon phases.
During the workshop on the marae, he talked with Wehi-Barton’s “ngahere parents” — who have taught her their knowledge of the forest — and related this to his experience hunting by the moon phase.
“I could see the patterns with hunting and diving.”
What patterns? Where are the data?
Fellow Bay of Plenty farmer Mohi Beckham grew up in a big family and learned from his mother who incorporated traditional Māori knowledge into her garden that helped sustain the whānau [extended family].
He has employed contractors who use the lunar cycle to guide riparian planting times on his brother’s Scylla Farm in Pukehina, a 208ha mixed dairy farm and orchard that he manages in the Bay of Plenty.
“We’re already doing maramataka on our farm through our planting of riparian plants, and the results they’ve had are amazing,” he says.
“The contractors only work in the high energy days of the lunar cycle, which is anywhere between 12 and 20 days compared to five days a week for conventional planting contractors. But the productivity is higher in the maramataka boys.
“A lot of our stuff has been under water this year and there’s a 93 per cent survival rate for their [maramataka] plantings. Usually, you are lucky when the survival rate is at 80 per cent.”
That’s about all the data we get, and it’s not only anecdotal, but not precise. They didn’t even record the observations! (my bolding)
Mohi says he hasn’t kept a diary to properly record observations, but had experimented with sowing pasture on different moon phases that are resting and dormant phases or high-energy phases for plant growth.
“Two years ago we planted some according to the best phase of maramataka and some a week before that high-energy period. The maramataka outgrew the first area sown, even though it was planted seven to 10 days later.”
Taranaki farmer Nick Collins, the farm engagement adviser for Rere ki uta rere ki tai, has used moon phases during his 18 years as an organic dairy farmer.
“With hay, we found it cures better on the new moon, or after the full moon, because there’s lower moisture levels in the pasture,” he says.
“Leading up to the full moon is the active phase, which was a good time for silage because we weren’t worried about drying the plant. But we found that with hay, it seemed to dry better when the plant has lower moisture levels, and that’s a waning moon.”
Note: the hay “seems to dry better”. When you hear stuff like that, remember Feynman’s remarks about the nature of science:
“The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
What we see above is simply an exercise in reinforcing self-foolery. And of course the newspaper doesn’t dare raise any questions about it.
But there’s really no need to waste this $2.7 million, because there are already many, many published studies examining whether the phases of the moon influence crop physiology or yield. They’re summarized in the paper below from journal Agronomy, published by MDPI. And the answer is that the lunar phases have no palpable effect on crop growth or yield, mainly because the influence of the Moon’s phases is simply too miniscule to affect plants. In other words, we already know that the studies above won’t show a positive effect, because similar work has already been tried.
Click the screenshot to read.
The authors did an extensive survey of the influence of lunar phases on plant physiology and, looking at all published studies, found no effect.
Here’s the abstract, which pulls no punches, noting that popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have “no scientific backing.” Did that stop the NZ government from handing out millions to farmers using indigenous “ways of knowing” based on those phases? Nope.
All bolding is mine.
Abstract
This paper reviews the beliefs which drive some agricultural sectors to consider the lunar influence as either a stress or a beneficial factor when it comes to organizing their tasks. To address the link between lunar phases and agriculture from a scientific perspective, we conducted a review of textbooks and monographs used to teach agronomy, botany, horticulture and plant physiology; we also consider the physics that address the effects of the Moon on our planet. Finally, we review the scientific literature on plant development, specifically searching for any direct or indirect reference to the influence of the Moon on plant physiology. We found that there is no reliable, science-based evidence for any relationship between lunar phases and plant physiology in any plant–science related textbooks or peer-reviewed journal articles justifying agricultural practices conditioned by the Moon. Nor does evidence from the field of physics support a causal relationship between lunar forces and plant responses. Therefore, popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have no scientific backing. We strongly encourage teachers involved in plant sciences education to objectively address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.
And the conclusion:
Conclusions
Science has widely established different evidences: (i) the Moon’s gravity on the Earth cannot have any effect on the life cycle of plants due to the fact that it is 3.3 × 10−5 ms−2, almost 300,000 times lower that the Earth’s gravity; (ii) since all the oceans are communicated and we can consider their size being the size of the Earth, the Moon’s influence on the tides is 10−6 ms−2, but for a 2 m height plant such value is 3 × 10−13 ms−2 and, therefore, completely imperceptible; (iii) the Moon’s illuminance cannot have any effect on plant life since it is, at best, 128,000 times lower than the minimum of sunlight on an average day; (iv) the rest of possible effects of the Moon on the Earth (e.g., magnetic field, polarization of light) are non-existent.
The logical consequence of such evidence is that none of these effects appear in physics and biology reference handbooks. However, many of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in both agricultural traditions and collective imagery. This shows that more research should be undertaken on the possible effects observed on plants and assigned to the Moon by the popular belief, addressing their causes, if any. It would also be interesting to address these issues in both compulsory education and formal higher agricultural education in order to address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.
Well, the “research” being undertaken above is not scientific, as there’s no control—but perhaps “control studies” are an invidious artifact of “Western science”. Because of this, it doesn’t count as the “more research on possible” effects called for by Mayoral et al.
If this was a proposal submitted to the U.S.’s National Science Foundation, it would never be funded for two reasons: it flies in the face of what’s already established knowledge in agronomy, and preliminary studies haven’t been done to show that there’s a likely effect of lunar phases on crop yield.
Mayoral et al. also warn that studies like the one above border on “pseudoscience” and can pollute science teaching. I’d leave out the words “border on” and say “are pseudoscience.” From the Agronomy paper:
We are concerned about the insidious spread of pseudo-scientific ideas, not only in the field of plant science (which determines many of the behaviours, habits and techniques of many farmers in rural areas) but into the broader population through both formal and informal education. As science educators, we are especially concerned about the widespread belief in pseudo-science throughout the general populace and especially in science teachers. Solbes et al. showed that 64.9% of a sample of 131 future science teachers agree or partially agree with the expression “The phase of the Moon can affect, to some extent, several factors such as health, the birth of children or certain agricultural tasks”. [If they surveyed the Māori, the proportion would be higher than 65%.]
Given this worrying scenario, teachers must promote critical thinking as an essential part of citizenship development. . .
Is that going to happen in New Zealand? Again, not a chance. It’s considered “racist” to denigrate Māori practices or Māori “ways of knowing”. Yes, there are some empirical trial and error bits of knowledge in MM, but none of them are based on the kind of hypothesis-testing used by modern science. This study is just another bit of unscientific work. Further, it has the potential to damage Kiwi agriculture, basing it on traditional lore rather than hard scientific tests. And, as the authors note, it has the potential to damage the scientific education of New Zealand’s youth as well, for the government under PM Chris Hipkins is determined to teach mātauranga Māori in science classes as equivalent to modern (“Western”) science. (Note that science isn’t “Western”; it’s the purview of workers throughout the world.)
I was sent the Herald article by three separate New Zealand scientists who found it wrongheaded and foolish. One of them sent me a thoughtful take on it, which I reproduce with permission:
“If the proponents of this lunar phase proposal had a commitment to using both science and mātauranga Māori they would have done some homework on the relevant scientific literature beforehand. Rather, it appears that either they were happy to ignore existing scientific data that challenges their claims, or they believed the scientific data didn’t count because it wasn’t done from a mātauranga Māori perspective. It is currently unclear in epistemological terms what would constitute a legitimate test in mātauranga Māori. Another important question is whether there is a commitment to publishing negative results of the proposed work
Framing this as “Western science” versus mātauranga Māori thus opens the door to ignoring previous work. This will lead in many cases to wasteful duplication of previous research, some of which should disqualify proposals based on discredited ideas. This is the point that Jonathan Rauch makes in “The Constitution of Knowledge” about the importance of societies having to agree on a common set of facts. Once we abandon that, as we must if we buy into postmodernist cultural relativism, we’re condemned to some form of process argument based on political power. This would inevitably involve direct comparisons between mātauranga Māori and science that would benefit no one. Much better to treat each as distinct and of value for different reasons. Many proponents of mātauranga Māori agree that it is distinct from science, but if that is the case why is it being taught and funded as science?
One obvious difference between the two is the epistemological commitment to testing hypotheses that is inherent in science. Both mātauranga Māori and science involve careful observation. Science generally also involves some form of test or experiment. Proponents of mātauranga Māori may argue that trial and error counts as this, at least to some extent. What science seeks that mātauranga Māori does not is an additional layer of understanding: causal explanations based on theories of mechanism. This is the difference between science and technology. The latter just needs to work. We don’t necessarily need to know why. However, distinguishing between cause and effect is a key component in science, and this involves distinguishing between causal factors and correlation. Maramataka is a very detailed body of knowledge based on seasonal and lunar correlations, but it doesn’t explain why things happen at certain times, only that certain events coincide. The flowering of the pohutukawa tree doesn’t cause the gonads of sea urchins to ripen and thus become good to eat: the two events are both driven independently by environmental temperature. Inductive reasoning can be effective at making predictions under constant conditions, but when things change, as they are under climate change, such patterns are likely to become increasingly unreliable.”
It’s time for New Zealand’s scientists, both Māori and non-Māori, to stop this nonsense. Indigenous knowledge has its place, but it’s not equivalent to modern science. And the taxpayers of New Zealand continue to throw millions of dollars away on worthless studies funded only to propitiate the indigenous culture. Is that worth destroying science in New Zealand? After all, this $2.7 million could have gone for real science or medical research instead of trying to prop up a confirmation bias based on spirituality and tradition.
It’s Sunday, and we have a themed bird post by John Avise, this time on the runner-up to the “Most photogenic bird” competition. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them,
Runner-up to Most Photogenic Songbird?
Last week I showcased the Northern Mockingbird as the most photogenic North American songbird, in my experience. This week showcases my personal runner-up for this honor: the White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys). This species is attractive, relatively tame and very common here in Southern California during the winter months.
