Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 27, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning to you on The Cruelest Day, Tuesday June 27, 2023, and it’s National Orange Blossom Day. This refers to the flowers, whose aesthetic beauty we are supposed to admire today, but it also refers to a drink made with orange juice, gin, grenadine, orange liqueur, and vermouth. It’s a healthy cocktail:

Source and recipe

It’s also National Bingo Day, Helen Keller Day (she was born on this day in 1880), National Ice Cream Cake Day, National HIV Testing Day, National PTSD Awareness Day, National Indian Pudding Day (America’s best indigenous dessert, though some people don’t like it), Industrial Workers of the World Day, and Seven Sleepers’ Day or Siebenschläfertag in Germany.

Wikipedia says this about that:

In the Islamic and Christian traditions, the Seven Sleepers (Greek: επτά κοιμώμενοι, romanized: hepta koimōmenoi,Latin: Septem dormientes), otherwise known as Aṣḥāb al-kahf, Sleepers of Ephesus and Companions of the Cave, is a medieval legend about a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus (modern-day Selçuk, Turkey) around AD 250 to escape one of the Roman persecutions of Christians and emerged some 300 years later. Another version of the story appears in the Quran (18:9–26). It was also translated into Persian, Kyrgyz, and Tatar.

And an “Illustration from the Menologion of Basil II“:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary Wagner group, explains that in his March on Moscow he wasn’t trying to overthrow Putin, and he’ll now be operating from Belarus:

Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin resurfaced Monday for the first time since his Saturday mutiny, and declared that his motive was to save the private militia from being subsumed into the Russian military — not to topple President Vladimir Putin.

. . . Speaking in an 11-minute audio address posted on Telegram on Monday, Prigozhin said Wagner fighters were strongly opposed to signing a contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry — as they had been ordered to do by July 1 — because it would have effectively dismantled the group. Wagner had decided to hand back its equipment to the Defense Ministry when the missile strike occurred, he claimed.

He boasted that Wagner was perhaps the “most experienced and combat-ready unit in Russia, and possibly in the world” and had performed a huge number of tasks in the interests of the Russian state, in Africa, the Middle East “and around the world.”

“Recently, this unit has achieved good results in Ukraine,” he said, adding that Wagner had received an outpouring of support from Russians in Saturday’s revolt, which he called a “march for justice.”

While Prigozhin issued his defiant statement, Russia’s embattled leadership tried to demonstrate control on Monday after the bruising, chaotic mutiny by airing a video of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visiting a command post. The Kremlin released video of a recorded address by President Vladimir Putin to young engineers.

Finally, there’s still rancor between Putin and Prigozhin:

State-owned media, meanwhile, reported Monday that the insurrection charges against Prigozhin had not yet been rescinded. The Kremlin on Saturday had announced that the charges would be dropped as part of the deal in which Prigozhin agreed to halt his military advance on Moscow and leave Russia for Belarus.

Key questions about the deal remained unanswered, and messaging from Russian officials about Wagner’s future appeared confused, amid signs that the militia would be allowed to continue to function, despite calls for it to be curbed.

And who, exactly, is going to curb Wagner save Prigozhin? Not Belarus, for sure, and not Russia? It’s a militia, Jake, and they make money. I can’t imagine it not functioning in some capacity.

*The NYT implies that Wagner may now be dissolving as a fighting force, but at least no longer shares a war partnership with Russia.

To some Ukrainian forces, soldiers from the Wagner Group were the best-equipped fighters they had seen since Russia invaded last year. To others, it was their training that distinguished them: Ukrainian soldiers recalled battlefield stories of aggressive tactics or a sniper downing a drone with a single shot.

But after the short-lived mutiny led by the head of the group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, it is not clear whether Wagner will still be a fighting force on the battlefield with its fate now in question.

For now, the uncertain status of Wagner is bound to be a relief for Ukrainian soldiers. Though the front lines in Ukraine are likely to remain unchanged in the short term, depending on how events unfold in Russia, the Ukrainian military may be able to capitalize on the chaos and weakening morale to try to make some gains, according to independent analysts and American officials.

Still, it is too soon to determine the long-term implications of the feud between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian military establishment, American officials said. In Bakhmut, Wagner played an outsize role in the campaign to take the eastern city, Moscow’s one major battlefield victory this year, and solidified an uneasy alliance with the Russian military — only to see the partnership break once the city was captured.

“The previous relationship between Wagner and the Russian government is likely over,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Even had this not happened, it was unclear if Wagner would have played the same role in this war as it had in the battle for Bakhmut.”

. . .After seizing Bakhmut, the Russian Defense Ministry took steps to integrate Wagner into the broader military, which would have reduced Mr. Prigozhin’s power. When Russia forced all volunteers fighting in Ukraine to sign contracts with the ministry, it meant that Mr. Prigozhin would have had to put his forces under the control of the military, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“This is one of the reasons Prigozhin went mad,” Ms. Stanovaya said, “because he realized now he is out of Ukraine.”

And here’s the bit suggesting how Wagner may disappear:

The Kremlin announced that Wagner troops who did not participate in the revolt would be allowed to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry. Those that had joined the convoy would not be prosecuted. The statement suggested that Wagner in its current form would no longer exist.

Though part of Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary cadre is likely to continue under Russian Army control, how many Wagner soldiers would be willing to fight under the ministry’s umbrella is an open question.

My guess: not very many. But what do I know?

*The Supreme Court is now adjudicating a case that could bestow millions of dollars of tax bonuses on corporations and rich individuals.

The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear arguments in a tax law case that could yield billions of dollars for large corporations, block Democrats’ proposals to tax wealthy Americans and upend longstanding chunks of the tax code.

The court, in an unsigned order, said it would decide a case that asks whether people and companies have to receive, or realize, income for it to be taxed under the 16th Amendment. Arguments will happen in the court term that starts in October.

The case stems from a one-time tax on accumulated foreign profits that Congress created in 2017 in the tax law signed by then-President Donald Trump. That tax applied to 30 years of profits that U.S.-based companies held overseas and hadn’t repatriated. It also applied to individuals who owned at least 10% of foreign companies.

The tax, projected to raise $339 billion to help pay for rate cuts and other business-tax changes, was designed to smooth the transition to new tax rules that no longer allow companies to defer U.S. taxes on their foreign income.

Charles and Kathleen Moore, a Washington state couple, challenged the tax and sought a $14,729 refund. They argued they hadn’t realized any income on their investment in an India-based company and thus couldn’t be taxed.

Here are the implications if the Moore’s win, which is by no means a sure thing (the law and precedents are unclear on this point):

. . . if the court rules in favor of the Moores, it could have widespread implications, depending on what the justices say.

First, if the court sided with the Moores, it could mean that companies that have been paying the one-time tax may be able to seek refunds totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.

Second, it could affect existing pieces of the tax code that impose taxes without realization of income. That includes taxes on individual shareholders in foreign companies with passive income, investors who buy certain discounted bonds, and wealthy people who renounce their citizenship.

. . . And, looking forward, a realization requirement could block some of Democrats’ most ambitious tax proposals. President Biden has called for an annual minimum tax on wealthy Americans, based in part on their unrealized capital gains. And some Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), want an annual tax on the net worth of the richest households.

*The Associated Press summarizes all the important cases that the Supreme Court is about to rule on. A brief summary

Affirmative action.  The survival of affirmative action in higher education is the subject of two related cases, one involving Harvard and the other the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court has previously approved of the use of affirmative action in higher education in decisions reaching back to 1978. But the justices’ decision to take the cases suggested a willingness to revisit those rulings. And when the high court heard arguments in the cases in late October, all six conservative justices on the court expressed doubts about the practice.

Student loans [$10,000 relief for those who make less than $100,000 per year.]  The justices will also decide the fate of President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe away or reduce student loans held by millions of Americans. When the court heard arguments in the case in February, the plan didn’t seem likely to survive, though it’s possible the justices could decide the challengers lacked the right to sue and the plan can still go forward.

Gay rights. A clash of gay rights and religious rights is also yet to be decided by the court. The case involves a Christian graphic artist from Colorado who wants to begin designing wedding websites but objects to making wedding websites for same-sex couples.

State law requires businesses that are open to the public to provide services to all customers, but the designer, Lorie Smith, says the law violates her free speech rights. She says ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their beliefs. Her opponents, meanwhile, say that if she wins, a range of businesses will be able to discriminate, refusing to serve Black, Jewish or Muslim customers, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants.

This will be a tough one, involving two clashes of well established rights: freedom of religion and laws against discrimination. This next one I didn’t know about:

Religious rights. Another case that could end as a victory for religious rights is the case of a Christian mail carrier who refused to work on Sundays when he was required to deliver Amazon packages.

The question for the high court has to do with when businesses have to accommodate religious employees. The case is somewhat unusual in that both sides agree on a number of things, and when the court heard arguments in April both liberal and conservative justices seemed in broad agreement that businesses like the Postal Service can’t cite minor costs or hardships to reject requests to accommodate religious practices. That could mean a ruling joined by both liberals and conservatives.

Voting. As election season accelerates, the Supreme Court has still not said what it will do in a case about the power of state legislatures to make rules for congressional and presidential elections without being checked by state courts.

In a case out of North Carolina the justices were asked to essentially eliminate the power of state courts to strike down congressional districts drawn by legislatures on the grounds that they violate state constitutions.

However, the state Supreme Court threw out that law, and the Big Supremes could throw out this case on that basis. But there’s a similar case waiting from another state.

*If you want to understand why biological sex is defined by the reproductive system one has for producing gametes, and not by chromosome type, have a look at Zach Elliot’s recent piece on “Reality’s Last Stand”  Substack site, “Sex isn’t all about chromosomes.” In many animal species, including ours, biological sex is highly correlated with chromosome constitution, but genes affecting biological sex can move around on those chromosomes, making them less than ideal for defining sex. Further, sex is defined by gametes not arbitrarily so there is a true sex binary (which there is), but because this binary is ubiquitous in animals regardless of how sex is determined (social environment, chromosomes, haploidy or diploidy, temperature, and other factors Elliot mentions), and, most important, the gametic definition explains a lot about animal evolution, most notably sexual dimorphism that arises via sexual selection that comes ineluctably from the difference between males and females in the investment they put into their gametes.

This is worth reading if you’ve followed the kerfuffles about sex:

There are two primary reasons why the chromosomal definition of sex is flawed, which I will outline below.

First, many species do not have the X-Y chromosomal system, and yet males and females are still produced. Across the plant and animal kingdom, nature has evolved many mechanisms for developing individual organisms into males or females.

For instance, birds use Z and W chromosomes, where the females develop with ZW and the males develop with ZZ.⁶ Reptiles, however, don’t have sex chromosomes and rely instead on environmental factors such as temperature for sex determination. A specific temperature range triggers male development, whereas a different range promotes female development.

Second, genetic disorders can result in a sex opposite of what one would expect from the chromosomes. Three case studies help illustrate this fact:

These cases involve XX males, SSR Y-negative females, and XY CBX2 negative females. I won’t summarize the rest of the article, but it does show that the common assertion that “sex is determined by chromosomes” is generally correct, but it’s not the same as saying “sex is defined by chromosomes,” which is wrong, even for humans. This is what’s correct: “the sexes are defined by their structure and function: the reproductive anatomy that produces sperm or eggs. Biological sex is highly correlated with chromosome type, though, but the chromosomal constitution is not involved in the definition of sex in any organism.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili is chilling:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m lying and digesting.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Leżę i trawię.

********************

From Bad Cat Clothing. For some reason I find this hilarious:

From Ant:

Convergent evolution from Jesus of the Day:

Masih retweeted this from former chess champion and anti-Russian activist Garry Kasparov:

 

Titiana has started posting again, but I’ve missed it. Here’s are two recent ones:

Reader Simon has no idea if this is true, but he’s willing to give it some credence for the time being:

From Ken, who dubs this, “The Donald sampling HUAC and Joe McCarthy”.  I guess all the Marxist professors here will have to be deported if Trump wins. . .

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a young woman who died at just 21:

From Matthew Cobb. No, the cat is in the right place:

Apparently the quote comes from Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

 

Two Duck Leaps Into the Unknown. Translation of the second one:

A baby duck that is afraid of steps and can’t get off… At that time, the mother’s perseverance gave courage to the chicks  youtu.be/K1sDWF0reqU?t=

Skeptical Inquirer discussion on our ideology in science paper

June 26, 2023 • 12:45 pm

A week from this coming Thursday, Luana Maroja and I will appear on a Skeptical Inquirer podcast for about an hour to discuss our “ideology in biology” paper and to answer questions. We’re lucky to have Robyn Blumner, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry (publisher of the magazine) as our interlocutor. (She’s also executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which is connected with CFI.)

You can click the screenshot to get more information and to register. I’ve put some relevant information from CFI below, and registration, which is free, is here.  I understand that readers can submit questions during the podcast.

Fom the site:

In “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” the cover feature of the July/August 2023 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja deliver a powerful and provocative warning about the dangers of trying to make scientific reality conform to the political winds. It’s an absolute must-read for anyone who agrees that science must be objective and empirical—not ideological.

Join us on Thursday, July 6, at 7:00 p.m. ET for a special Skeptical Inquirer Presents livestream with Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja, hosted by Robyn E. Blumner, CEO and president of the Center for Inquiry. They’ll discuss how the field of evolutionary and organismal biology has been “impeded or misrepresented by ideology,” how the erosion of free inquiry in science due to progressive ideology is damaging both intellectually and materially, and, most importantly, what can be done about it. If things don’t change, they warn, “in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.”

Free registration is required to take part in this live Zoom event, so sign up right now.

David French of the NYT on Title IX and women’s sports

June 26, 2023 • 11:00 am

One touchstone to determine if someone is an extreme gender activist (and by “extreme” I mean “unreasonable”) is to ask them if trans women, born as biological males, should be allowed to compete against biological females in women’s sports. To me, a “yes” answer means that somebody is not only ignoring the palpable data on the physical advantages of transwomen due to having gone through male puberty, but is also okay with the obvious unfairness this physical difference can impose on women athletes.  As the number of transgender people is increasing exponentially, this issue is not going to go away.

Of course there should be some accommodation to allow transgender women to compete in sports (we’re talking about trans women here as the problem doesn’t arise in the other direction). People who want to compete should not be stifled in their desire. The problem is how to allow trans women to compete without being unfair to biological women athletes. Various solutions have been suggested, including allowing a “women’s” league and a “men’s” league, with the latter allowing all trans people to compete.  None of the solutions are completely satisfactory, but they are fairer to biological women and do allow trans individuals to engage in sports competition.

This article by NYT op-ed writer David French goes over the problem, recognizing that the participation of trans women in women’s athletics is both unjust and, under present regulations, illegal.

Click to read:

French first goes over Title IX, what it stipulates (i.e., no denial of educational opportunities to either sex), and explains why sex is different from race when it comes to athletics, where separate competitions are of course not allowed (within a sex):

Let’s go back to the language of the statute itself, which speaks in terms of both “participation” and “benefits.” If you treat people of different races the same, people of all races can both participate and receive the benefits of participation in athletics. If you treat people of different sexes the same, the reality is very different.

The evidence is overwhelming that there is a significant average difference between male and female athletic performance, including at the most elite levels and even when female athletes receive funding, training and nutrition comparable to that of the best male athletes. In a 2020 article in The Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, the authors, Doriane Lambelet Coleman, Michael J. Joyner and Donna Lopiano, observed that “depending on the sport and event, the gap between the best male and female performances remains somewhere between 7 to 25 percent; and even the best female is consistently surpassed by many elite and nonelite males, including both boys and men.”

The authors walk through a number of examples of disparate performance, but here’s one: Vashti Cunningham is one of the best female high jumpers in the world. Her best jump places her in the world’s top 10 among females. But in 2019 alone, 760 American high school boys jumped higher than she did when she was in high school.

It’s easy to find similar statistics in professional sports. Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who’s been heroic in speaking out for women’s rights to compete against only other biological women, notes that both Venus and Serena Williams, beacons of excellence in women’s tennis, were beaten by the #203 ranked male tennis player. That of course is not to denigrate their remarkable abilities. It’s just that biological men and women differ in so many aspects of musculature, physiology, and bone density that this kind of result is inevitable.

Connecticut is one of the states that have a misguided law allowing trans women to compete against biological women in athletics. In that state there’s now a case in which four women, former track athletes in high school, have brought a suit against the law in federal court. After an initial rejection of their claim on specious grounds of plaintiff’s “lack of standing”, the full Connecticut appellate court took up the case and is deciding it now.  This is something that’s probably destined in the end for the U.S. Supreme Court. And, sadly, the ACLU is on the side of the state.

French:

To be clear, the question was not whether the transgender girls did anything wrong — casting any aspersions on their participation in the races would be profoundly unjust. They ran the race in accordance with the rules of the race. The question was whether the rules were wrong.

The transgender athletes intervened in the case, with the aid of the A.C.L.U., and argued that “Title IX does not require sex-separated teams or an equal number of trophies for male and female athletes.” They emphasized that the plaintiffs “repeatedly outperformed” the transgender athletes “in direct competition.”

But the argument is not that transgender athletes will always win, but rather that if schools replace sex with gender identity as the relevant criterion for participation, then the statutory sex-based promises of participation and benefits in educational programs will be undermined. (Gender identity, as the A.C.L.U. defined it, is a “medical term for a person’s ‘deeply felt, inherent sense’ of belonging to a particular sex.”)

The Biden administration, unfortunately, is on the side of Connecticut, and is indeed trying to replace sex with gender identity as “the relevant criterion for participation.” An NPR article from April notes that the administration wants to alter Title IX so that “sex” becomes “gender”:

On Thursday, the U.S. Education Department announced a proposed change to Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs. The proposal would make it illegal for schools to broadly ban transgender students from sports teams that align with their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth.

The department says the move comes after two years of outreach to stakeholders across the country, and the changes still give schools some flexibility to ban transgender athletes depending on age and sport.

“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Being on a sports team is an important part of the school experience for students of all ages.”

It also notes this:

The proposed Title IX changes will be published to the Federal Register in the next few weeks, after which it will open for 30 days of public comment. Those are just the first steps in a long process to alter the law. Assuming the proposal survives that process, schools and students will not see the rule changed or enacted for months if not years.

The commenting time is over, but changing the law may be superfluous if the Supreme Court rules on the matter in the meantime.

French ends his piece this way, though I think he fails to realize that “a small number of trans women” may become much larger. And, at any rate, it’s not the number of trans women athletes that matters, but the principle of fairness to biological women athletes.

I’m not a catastrophist. I hate rhetoric that declares that women’s sports will be “destroyed” by the inclusion of a small number of trans women in athletic competition. I hate even more any demonization or disparagement of the trans athletes themselves. When they compete according to the rules of the sport, they are doing nothing wrong. But legal definitions do matter, especially when they are rooted in hard facts, such as the systematic, documented performance gap between the sexes.

All people are created equal, and possess equal moral worth, but we are not all created the same. To protect equal opportunity, there are times when the law should recognize differences. And in the realm of athletics, if we want to both secure and continue the remarkable advances women have made in the 51 years since Congress passed Title IX, it’s important to remember that sex still matters, and sex distinctions in the law should remain.

French may be called a “transphobe” for taking this stand, as I have been, but I reject this characterization. Trans women should have equal rights and treatment in nearly all areas, except for those few places where the difference between biological and trans women really matter.  Those include, beyond athletics, rape counseling, shelters for abused women, and women’s prisons.  After all, every claimed right has to be balanced against potential harm if it’s abused, and that also goes for First-Amendment free speech, which has a number of exceptions.

If you want to keep up with developments in this area, and are on the side of French, you can follow the organization “Sex Matters” or, on Twitter, its vocal exponent Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist and a colleague of Matthew Cobb at the University of Manchester. In the U.S., you can follow Riley Gaines (see video below) or  #SaveWomensSports on Twitter.

Here’s Riley Gaines testifying a few days ago before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She also deals, at the end, with the question of whether her views are transphobic.

Finally, most Americans agree with Gaines, according to a poll conducted in May and reported in the Washington Post:

The poll, conducted May 4 through 17 among 1,503 people across the United States, finds 55 percent of Americans opposed to allowing transgender women and girls to compete with other women and girls in high school sports and 58 percent opposed to it for college and professional sports. About 3 in 10 Americans said transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete at each of those levels, whilean additional 15 percent have no opinion.

Have we reached peak woke?

June 26, 2023 • 9:30 am

This article from The Liberal Patriot Substack has been making the rounds, perhaps because it argues, using data, that—regardless of efforts from both the Right and Left to quash free speech and academic freedom— higher education “seems to have turned a corner” on wokeness. (If you don’t like the word, suggest another.) The university culture, says Musa Al-Gharbi, is getting less woke.

Click to read:

As for whether it’s “too late”—that is, have universities and their bureaucracies established wokeness so entrenched that it can’t be reversed, Al-Gharbi thinks not: it’s “not too little, not too late.” (He is, by the way, a graduate student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University.) Note that he blames both the GOP and Democrats (or leftists) for the problem, but also worries that if it’s fixed from within, the GOP will get unearned credit.

First, some of the unwelcome developments Al-Gharbi limns:

Rather than serving as bastions of free exchange of ideas or rollicking debate, most campuses remain significantly more inhibited expressive environments than most other places in society—and have only grown less free in recent decades.

Aspirants who decline to color within the lines can still get admitted to grad school or hired and promoted as faculty (case in point!), but there is evidence that they often face discrimination in committees and as a result often get placed lower on the prestige totem-pole than their comparably qualified peers.

Work that diverges from institutionally-dominant views can be published. It often faces bigger hurdles with respect to institutional review boards, peer review, and garnering citations from other academics, while work that is useful for advancing the preferred narrative often faces insufficient scrutiny. What’s more, there are sometimes politicized calls for retraction when inconvenient findings are published. Meanwhile, there are demonstrable systematic biases published social scientific research analyzing the types of people who are less present in colleges and universities—i.e., the poor and working class, devoutly religious people, rural folks, and Trump voters, among others.

These are very real problems. They undermine the quality and impact of teaching and research. However, they are also longstanding structural issues. The kinds of policies advocated by Republicans today—such as slashing university budgets or banning Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, and DEI programming—would do precisely nothing to address any of the problems described above. Proposed bids to eliminate or weaken tenure protections would probably make many of these problems worse.

. . .It wasn’t just students who grew more radical, though. Faculty and administrators got in on the action, too.

Alongside the student unrest came significant changes in institutional structure and culture. There was a rapid growth in university administrators who often sought to justify their roles by meddling in research and teaching, imposing and enforcing myriad new restrictions on what people could do and say on campus, and significantly undermining academic freedom and faculty governance in the process.

Sex bureaucracies surveilling and policing sexual relations between consenting adults proliferated, often punishing people with little evidence or due process. Bias Response Teams sprouted up, allowing people to anonymously spur investigations against anyone without any substantiation at all. Faculty and students began hijacking these apparatuses to sink competitors, punish exes, settle personal vendettas, and much else besides.

So what are the data showing that wokeness has peaking and is heading down? Here are a few graphs.

However, a range of empirical data suggest that the post-2010 “Great Awokening” may be winding down. For instance, Heterodox Academy recently released the results of its 2022 Campus Expression Survey. It shows that students today feel more comfortable sharing their perspectives across a range of topics than they did in previous years.

But look at the data above (there are no error bars or indications of statistical significance. Between 2021 and 2022, reluctance to discuss has dropped only 0.8% for gender (and is higher than in 2019), has risen 1.2% for politics, dropped 4.9% for race, dropped 3.2% for religion, dropped 1.4% for sexual orientation, and dropped 1.6% for “non-controversial topics”.  These are small changes, though they may reflect the beginning of a trend. But beyond the one year, no general trend is evident over time except that general reluctance to discuss controversial topics is higher since 2019. There is a general trend to be more willing to discuss “non-controversial topics,” so any decreases in the other areas might reflect a more general trend, perhaps a willingness to discuss anything.

Nevertheless, the chilling of speech is obvious, as the bars are much higher for the five topics on the left than for “non-controversial topics.” This reflects a general reluctance to speak freely on touchy subjects, something that we should surely be worried about.  It will take a few more years, though, to see if this reluctance is really dropping rather than the 2021-2022 data being a fluke.

The data below on sanctions imposed on academics is a bit more convincing, as several forms of professorial sanctions have dropped over the last two years, and all dropped in between 2021 and 2022. But they’re still a LOT higher than in 2000.

It may be that contemporary students feel less need to self-censor because the objective conditions have changed at colleges and universities. You can see this, for instance, in data on “cancel culture” events. Incident trackers compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) show marked declines in attempts to punish scholars for their speech or views across all measures (the drop in “targeting incidents” is particularly large—over 30%.

Below are data from three sources on cancel culture incidents. The sources differ considerably in what they count as such an incident, but two of the three sources show a fairly large drop over the two years (2020-2022), though the National Association of Scholars (NAS) show a drop lasting only one year, with incidents rising between 2020 and 2021.

FIRE’s data is not an outlier. We see apparent declines in attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus across a range of datasets.

Finally “woke scholarship” is shown below.

And professors, too, seem like they’ve calmed down a bit. The intense scholarly focus on identity-based bias and discrimination seems to have cooled, for instance.

The drop, however, has only occurred over a year in two of the four areas. Again, we see something that is suggestive, but the data aren’t taken over a long enough period to see if we’re on a long-term downhill (i.e. ideologically “uphill”) slide.

Al-Gharbi concludes first that there’s a big ideological gulf between academics and “the rest of America”:

The sociological and ideological distance between academics and the rest of America has always been wide. Since 2010, however, the gulf between highly-educated Americans and everyone else grew much larger—primarily due to asymmetric polarization within the educated class itself. These differences also grew more salient as radicalized professors, students, and college-educated Americans aggressively sought to impose their values and priorities on everyone else and confront, denigrate, marginalize, or sanction those who refused to get with the program.

One core consequence of this radicalization has been reduced public trust in higher ed. Most Republicans today believe that universities, on balance, do more harm than good. A majority of Americans across partisan lines believe higher ed is moving in the wrong direction, and most believe that what they get from attending colleges and universities may not be worth the cost. This is not idle sentiment: enrollment in colleges and universities dropped precipitously during COVID and has not recovered.

Thus the authoritarian Left has, says Al-Gharbi, given Republicans some big impetus to raise funding and win elections (e.g. the governorship of Virginia) by summoning the specter of rising wokeness”.  And even if academic is reforming itself, as Al-Gharbi thinks we are (I don’t really see it), Republicans will take credit for any changes like those described above. This worries him (he seems to be a Leftist), but the first thing to do is admit that a problem exists. Those of us who call attention to it, however, are described as “alt-righters”, racists, or other unsavory names. There are reasons why academics keep their heads down about this. Al-Gharbi:

Colleges and universities are not just capable of reforming themselves; they are already reforming themselves. Positive trends should be recognized, and ongoing efforts should be encouraged and supported.

But doing so would require more in academia and on the left to explicitly admit that there are real problems of bias and parochialism in institutions of higher learning. It undermines our own credibility to dismiss concerns about the culture and operations of educational institutions as an empty moral panic. Ordinary people can see with their own eyes that that’s not the case, and no one will trust us to effectively fix a problem if we won’t even acknowledge it exists. We can’t talk about progress while insisting there’s nothing wrong.

“Nothing to see here” is a non-starter. “There’s something to see here, and it’s a positive trend” is much more promising. Let’s run with that.

Yes, I see the “this is an empty moral panic” stuff constantly coming from those who are woke, but if you look at what’s happened in the last 20 years, and if you value free expression and academic freedom, it’s not in the least “empty”. Something bad has happened to the atmosphere in colleges and universities, something inimical to the very purpose of those institutions.

All it will take to reverse any trends that do exist, however, is one triggering incident—something like the murder of George Floyd. Right now, I’m not that optimistic that we’ve reached “peak woke”, but I generally go by the principle, “a pessimist is never disappointed.” Stay tuned.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 26, 2023 • 8:15 am

Send in your photos, folks: I have about two days’ worth left.

Today we have a combination story-and-photo piece about pollination from reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnion.  His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Reluctant givers and industrious takers

For bees, pollen is an indispensable source of protein for egg production and larval development. So if they had it their way, bees would scoop up every pollen grain from a flower. And they are good at it, taking 95 to 99% of the powdery stuff back to their nests. The ‘wasted’ 1 to 5% of pollen that bees accidentally drop off or is left clinging to the bees’ hairs, is all a plant has for pollination.

Bees such as honey bees (Apis spp.) and bumble bees (Bombus spp.) carry almost all the pollen they gather in their corbiculae, or pollen baskets. From the Latin diminutive of corbis (basket), the corbicula is a shallow leg cavity surrounded by a fringe of elongated setae (‘hairs’). These bees, unsurprisingly called corbiculate bees, moisten the pollen with regurgitated nectar and saliva, so that it can be bundled up nicely for transport and easily unloaded once bees are back at their nests.

A European honey bee’s pollen basket © Gilles San Martin, Wikimedia Commons:

A corbiculate bee grooms herself regularly to remove stray pollen grains stuck to her body: most of them will be scooped up and stored securely © Ragesoss, Wikimedia Commons:

Other bees carry pollen attached to their scopa (Latin for ‘broom’), an area of dense, stiff hairs on the hind legs (typically in the families Halictidae and Andrenidae) or on the underside of the abdomen (mostly in the family Megachilidae). These non-corbiculate bees are not as tidy as their corbiculate counterparts: they do not wet and compress the pollen, but instead take it away just like dust particles clinging to the bristles of a brush or a broom.

The scopa of a megachilid or leaf-cutter bee © Pollinator, Wikimedia Commons:

Transporting pollen on the corbiculae or scopa makes a world of difference for pollination. Pollen tightly packed in the corbiculae is not easily stripped off by floral structures when the bee visits another plant, and it quickly loses its reproductive viability because it has been wet. Pollen on a scopa is kept dry and loosely attached to the bee, so it has a greater probability of being dislodged and resulting in plant fertilisation.

A load of pollen in a bumble bee’s pollen basket © Tony Wills, Wikimedia Commons:

A chocolate mining bee (Andrena scotica) with pollen loosely attached to its legs:

Regardless of how pollen is hauled away, bees’ efficiency puts plants in a jam. They need flower visitors for sexual reproduction, but the greedy blighters want it all for themselves. Pollen is metabolically expensive, so a plant can’t afford to produce lots of it and then lose most to palynivores (pollen eaters). But if it produces too little, bees may not be interested in dropping by.

To deal with this dilemma, plants have evolved strategies to keep visitors coming and at the same time not making it easy for them, thus minimising pollen profligacy. One cunning way to do this is to interfere with bees’ ability to groom themselves, so that more pollen grains are likely to be missed and end up on a receptive flower. To do this, there’s nothing better than nototribic flowers, which are built with an elaborate lever mechanism that makes stamens and style touch the dorsal surface of a visiting insect. This device is common in sage, mint and rosemary plants (family Lamiaceae), and in figworts (family Scrophulariaceae).

When a male Anthophora dufourii probes a Salvia hierosolymitana flower for nectar, its stamens are lowered to deposit pollen on the bee’s back © Gideon Pisanty, Wikimedia Commons:

Bees use their front legs to wipe their heads and antenna, and their middle and hind legs to clean their thoraxes and abdomens – you may have watched a bee or other insect doing these cleaning manoeuvres. But the space between their wings is a blind spot: think about an itch right between your shoulder blades, and you will understand the bee’s pickle. The pollen grains deposited on this hard-to-reach area are likely to escape grooming efforts and be taken to another flower.

Pollen of meadow clary (Salvia pratensis) seen under UV light on the back of B. terrestris © Koch et al., 2017:

Some flowers hide pollen at the bottom of their corollas, and visitors such as the fork-tailed flower bee (Anthophora furcata) must creep into these narrow, tubular structures that don’t allow much moving about. The bee vibrates her flight muscles to release the pollen, which gets attached to her head. She pulls out of the flower and scoops up the pollen with her front legs, but not all of it. Some grains become stuck to the thick, curved hairs sticking out between her antennae; these grains could end up on another flower.

A fork-tailed flower bee has to use her head – literally – to pollinate © Dick Belgers, Wikimedia Commons:

The common hollyhock (Alcea rosea) and other mallows (family Malvaceae) use a different tactic: they induce some bees to be less efficient gatherers thanks to their echinate pollen. Besides being prickly (echinate: covered with spines or bristles), these pollen grains are relatively large, thus difficult to handle and to mould into neat pellets. These features constitute a headache for corbiculate bees, the proficient packers, but are less of a problem for sloppy pollen harvesters such as solitary bees. As a result, more pollen grains are likely to be dislodged from bees who bother visiting these plants, increasing their chances of pollination.

Echinate pollen grains from three Malvaceae species © Konzmann et al. 2019:

Plants have developed other adaptations to minimise pollen harvesting, such as complex flower structures or progressive pollen release to force pollinators to make repeated visits. Some species hide pollen inside poricidal anthers, others produce indigestible or even toxic pollen so that only a few specialised pollinators can get to it; the palynivore hoi polloi is kept at bay. Many plants such as orchids are downright cheats: they lure pollinators with scent or visual mimicry but do not give away any nectar or pollen in return.

All these adaptations demonstrate that pollination is a negotiation between parties with conflicting interests. There is nothing altruistic here, bees and flowers are taking advantage of each other in an evolutionary give and take. Granted, this mutual exploitation has been fine-tuned in order to avoid disastrous imbalances. Plants can’t afford giving away too much pollen but can’t risk being too stingy; bees would take all the pollen they could handle, but settle for what’s available as long it’s worth their time and energy. Overly parsimonious plants and overly rapacious bees would collapse the relationship. Every plant-pollinator combination is an example of a mutually beneficial compromise; it’s natural selection as its best.

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 26, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning at the start of the work week: June 26, 2023, and National Chocolate Pudding Day (for me this will always conjure up the tarnished image of Bill Cosby, who advertised the Jell-o brand).

It’s also National Canoe Day (in Canada), Tropical Cocktails Day, International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, World Refrigeration Day, and Ratcatcher’s Day inHamelin, Germany.  The latter, of course, refers to the famous story “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (read the summary on Wikipedia; it’s pretty grim, like many early children’s stories).

From Wikipedia: “Postcard ‘Gruss aus Hameln’ featuring the Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1902″

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*First, the WaPo explains, “Just what happened in Russia? The Wagner crisis explained.”

For the moment, things appear to be calming down, as the forces answering to Prigozhin, the Wagner Group chief, have halted their march toward Moscow and turned around. The development came after an agreement between Prigozhin and Putin was brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Criminal charges previously started against Prigozhin will be dropped, and the Wagner boss will go to Belarus, Peskov said.

Still, the dispute represents a significant challenge to Putin’s leadership, the potential loss of one of Putin’s most successful field commanders, and a possible shift in the course of the war in Ukraine.

How did the dispute start? Internal tensions between Prigozhin and Russian military leaders have been simmering for months over what Prigozhin believed were leadership failures within the military. Prigozhin accused Russian generals of stonewalling his ammunition requests and, as a result, blamed them for his fighters dying “in heaps” in Ukraine.

What exactly did Prigozhin do? Prigozhin said he had taken control of the main Russian military command base in the southern region of Rostov and told two Russian military commanders that he would blockade Rostov and send his forces to Moscow unless he could confront his enemies: Shoigu and Gerasimov.

What deal was brokered? Many analysts predicted that Prigozhin would be killed or arrested as Wagner forces moved toward Moscow. But the sudden about-face of Prigozhin’s troops appeared to have eased the crisis for now.

The agreement for Prigozhin’s forces to turn around was brokered by the Belarusian president, who spoke with Putin before negotiating with Prigozhin, according to the Belarusian state-owned news agency Belta and the Kremlin. With security guarantees for Wagner on the table, Prigozhin reportedly agreed to stop his dash to Moscow.

How is Ukraine responding? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address Saturday that the events inside Russia show “that the bosses of Russia do not control anything.”

“Nothing at all. Complete chaos,” Zelensky said. “And it is happening on Russian territory, which is fully loaded with weapons.”

The Ukrainian military continued pressing its offensive Saturday, though there were no immediate signs that the rebellion next door had eased the Ukrainian path to victory.

That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Except I want to know what the deuce Wagner is going to do futzing around in Belarus. Are they going to become that country’s private army. Are they going back to attacking Ukraine. We’ll know soon.

*The news is full of speculations about what the short “revolt” of the Wagner group means for Putin’s authority in Russia. Here’s one such article from the NYT:

A day after an armed rebellion by Wagner mercenaries against Vladimir V. Putin’s government was defused at the last minute, neither Mr. Putin nor the mercenary leader made a public appearance, adding to the sense of uncertainty and confusion pervading Russia.

. . . But in many ways, the 24-hour uprising punctured Mr. Putin’s strongman authority. The ability of Mr. Prigozhin to stage an armed mutiny that threatened to reach Moscow raised uncomfortable questions inside Russia: What did Mr. Putin’s failure to prevent the revolt mean for the country’s security — and his staying power? Even Russians with ties to the Kremlin who expressed relief that the uprising did not spark a civil war agreed that Mr. Putin had come off looking weak in a way that could be lasting.

A day after Mr. Putin gave a short national address condemning Mr. Prigozhin’s actions as “treason,” the Russian president maintained a low profile. Mr. Prigozhin’s location also remained unknown.

This weekend, Russian stability was nowhere to be found, and neither was Mr. Putin, who after making a brief statement on Saturday morning vanished from sight during the most dramatic challenge to his authority in his 23-year reign.

In his absence, he left stunned Russians wondering how the leader of a paramilitary group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, could stage an armed mutiny on Saturday that threatened to reach Moscow. And it raised uncomfortable questions about the Russian president’s future: What did his failure to prevent the revolt mean for their security — and his staying power?

Russians with ties to the Kremlin expressed relief on Sunday that Mr. Prigozhin’s uprising did not spark a civil war. But at the same time, they agreed that Mr. Putin had come off looking weak in a way that could be lasting.

Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin connections, said in a telephone interview that what once seemed unthinkable was now possible: that people close to Mr. Putin could seek to persuade him not to stand for re-election in Russia’s presidential vote next spring. With Saturday’s events, he said, Mr. Putin had conclusively lost his status as the guarantor of the elite’s wealth and security.

*Finally, the Wall Street Journal speculates about what is the fate of Wagner.

A day after Wagner’s mutiny showed the unexpected fragility of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, all the main players in Russia’s worst political crisis in decades stayed out of sight—leaving Russians, and the world, to wonder whether the drama was really over.

Key unanswered questions include the future of Wagner’s 25,000 heavily armed troops, of the paramilitary group’s owner Yevgeny Prigozhin and of Russia’s military leadership, which failed to stop his rapid advance toward Moscow. The details of agreements brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to halt looming bloodshed have yet to be made public.

The whereabouts of Prigozhin, who according to the Kremlin had agreed to relocate to Belarus, were also unknown on Sunday. His company told a Russian TV network that he “will answer questions when he will have access to proper communications.” Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway—away from the capital and away from Belarus.

Prigozhin, who showed Wagner’s strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner.

I’m wondering what would have happened if the Wagner forces kept going. Could they actually have deposed Putin? Now that would have been something! And the mystery deepens because Prigozhin has disappeared. I’m going to make a prediction: Prigozhin, and the Wagner forces will not resume fighting against Ukraine. What is in it for them except wrecked territory and more loss of lives. They don’t have a country any more, and they’re not fighting for Russia; but will Prigozhin be satisfied cooling his heels in Belarus?

*According to the AP, the House of Representatives, controlled now by Republicans, is quietly trying to make laws to further restrict women’s access to abortion. Just what we need: more religiously inspired restriction of women’s freedom.

In a flurry of little-noticed legislative action, GOP lawmakers are pushing abortion policy changes, trying to build on the work of activists whose strategy successfully elevated their fight to the nation’s highest court.

In one government funding bill after another, Republicans are incorporating unrelated policy provisions, known as riders, to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Democrats say the proposals will never become law.

“This is not just about an attack on women’s health,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said Friday. “I view it as an attempt to derail the entire process of funding the federal government by injecting these riders into the appropriations process.”

Rep. Kay Granger, the Texas Republican who heads the committee, said during a hearings this past week that the riders that were included continue “long-standing pro-life protections that are important to our side of the aisle.”

And look at this!

Nearly a dozen anti-abortion measures have been included so far in budget bills. In the agricultural one, for example, Republicans are looking to reverse a recent move by the Food and Drug Administration that would allow the contraception pill mifepristone to be dispensed in certified pharmacies, as opposed to only in hospitals and clinics.

Anti-abortion proposals have found their way into the defense bill, where GOP lawmakers are aiming to ban paid leave and travel for military service members and their family members who are seeking reproductive health care services. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he warned Defense Secretary Llyod Austin about it.

But Republicans, knowing that national sentiment isn’t exactly on the side of the stringent restrictions that many states are putting on abortion, are still wary about this, and must surely realize that any bills affection the country will have to pass the Democratic Senate (not a chance), and even if they did they’d be vetoed by Biden and require a two-thirds vote of both House and Senate to override that veto. There’s simply no chance of this happening, so I’m not all that worried. Where we should be worried is about the state legislatures.

*Here are some of Richard Dawkins’s thoughts from a recent visit to New Zealand. They’re on his Substack site in a post called “There’s only one ‘Way of Knowing’: Science“. The topic, of course, is the New Zealand push to bundld indigenous “ways of knowing”, which include not only practical knowledge, but also legend, religion, morality, and superstition, in with science.

To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt. Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.

My speeches in Auckland and Wellington were warmly applauded, though one woman yelled a protest. She was politely invited to participate, but she chose to walk out instead. I truthfully said that, when asked my favourite country, I invariably choose New Zealand. Citing the legacy of Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday, I begged my audiences to reach out to their MPs in support of New Zealand science. The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world. Science reads the billion-word DNA book of life itself. Science eradicates smallpox and polio. Science navigates to Pluto or a tiny comet. Science almost certainly saved your life. Science works.

I feel completely in synch with those sentiments. I love New Zealand, but I hate how the government is truckling to anti-science forces, and how cowed the populace is. I don’t want Kiwi science to go down the drain, but the anti-colonizers seem more interested in grabbing power than in promoting scientific advances.

Richard appended a PS:

Postscript on the flight out: Air New Zealand think it is a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora!

Air New Zealand has some great safety videos online, but they’re really becoming “decolonized” now. I’m suspecting that the one Richard watched was this one:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Her Highness makes a necessity into a profundity.

Hili: Everything depends on the point of view.
A: And that means…
Hili: It means that the heart of the matter may hide in the grass.
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystko zależy od punktu widzenia.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: To znaczy, że istota rzeczy może ukrywać się w trawie.

. . . and a photo of Baby Kulka:

********************

Here’s a strange but also heartening video sent by reader Jez.   As the BBC noted: “Following the withdrawal of a team-mate Belgian shot putter Jolien Boumkwo competes in the 100m women’s hurdles to gain important points for her nation at the European Athletics Team Championships in Poland.” (You may be able to watch the video at the BBC link—if you live in the UK.

Jez added this after finding a Tik Tok video:

Shot putters aren’t really built for the hurdles and the poor woman finished a l-o-n-g way behind everyone else (the winner finished in 13.21 seconds, the shot putter in about 32!) She had to virtually stop and step over each of the hurdles, but she was clearly enjoying herself. The Belgian team would have been disadvantaged if they hadn’t entered a competitor at all, but I’d have thought they would have had a better contender than the shot putter.

@sports.illustrated

Jolien Maliga Boumkwo helped her team earn two points by participating 👏 (via @TopatletiekLive | Twitter) #hurdles #belgium #europeanchampionship #shotput #run

♬ original sound – Sports Illustrated

From Jesus of the Day: what a clever (but nasty) trick!

From the Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Masih. The Google translation of Masih’s Farsi caption is:

The statement of the students of the University of Arts who said to the persecutors: “We have nothing to say to you, except one word: #نه ” [“#No] is the words of a wounded but resistant Iranian heart and addressed to a corrupt government. And this is not only the voice of the brave students and their protest against the mandatory hijab, but also the big “no” of the Iranian people to forty-four years of destruction of the Islamic Republic. “No” to the workers whose tables have been emptied, the teachers who have been imprisoned and the people who have been oppressed because of their religion, language and beliefs. The complete crystallization of this big “no” was the revolution #زن_زندگى_آزادی  [#Woman_Life_Freedom], We all continue this path together and do not back down from our dreams and ideals for a moment.

From Malcolm, who said he knew I’d like this one. Of course I do, but that’s a very loud purr for a kitten!

From Simon, a tweet from Bill Kristol. Trump would be SO popular in Belarus!

I found this one:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a 7-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one I retweeted from Matthew. Notice how closely Russel’s style resemble that of Anne Elk (whose theory was hers):

 

When I see something like this, I always think of natural selection acting on tiny, incipient mutations that make it go just a bit deeper into the soil:

The quote is apparently from Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

Should we cite the scientific work of colleagues who were sexual harassers?

June 25, 2023 • 12:00 pm

There’s a new movement afoot for “citation justice” a form of affirmative action in which we should cite scientists who are marginalized as a way of boosting their careers.  I’m referring to citations in scientific papers, and here’s one example: “maps of chromosomes can be constructed by the pattern of recombination shown by alleles producing visible mutations (Morgan and Bridges, 1919)”.

While I still think affirmative action should be practiced in some realms, like college admissions and hiring, I don’t favor practicing it in scientific papers as a form of reparations.  My philosophy (which I may not always have acted on!) is that when presenting other people’s ideas, facts, or results, you should give the most relevant citations: those that best demonstrate the phenomenon discussed. And you should be parsimonious: avoid overcitation and don’t put in too many different citations that show the same thing. In other words, I use citations based on their value to their paper—their merit, as you will.

Others feel differently, and I’m not going to argue with them except to say that if you leave out citations that are more relevant or important in favor of citations by marginalized scientists, you’re lowering the bar for citation, which could result in a poorer paper.  (This of course implies that I think that science papers should function to build up the edifice of science, not effect social justice, which is better done other ways.)

However, the authors of this paper from the American Astronomical Society note that some groups are undercited:

. . . . it has also been found that when researchers cite others, they are less likely to cite women and scholars of color at rates that match their respective contributions to the field. Many reasons for these unequal citation practices have been suggested, ranging from implicit or unconscious bias to careless citation practices (such as not seeking out the original reference) to consciously choosing to exclude certain researchers and/or groups when citing others.

If it is indeed the case that women and scholars of color aren’t cited as frequently as they should be given the relevance of their work to the paper, then that should be rectified.  Remember, a citation is there to document a statement or fact, not to laud somebody’s accomplishments, so what’s important here is not “respective contributions to the field” but “relevance of their work to the statement requiring documentation.”  If there is under-citation in this sense, then scientists should indeed do something about it when they write papers.

But the topic of the article below is this question:

 This leads to the crux of many recent discussions: is it ever acceptable to intentionally choose not to cite someone(s)?

Their answer seems to be “yes, it could be acceptable to deliberately omit a relevant citation, though there’s no cut-and-dried rule”.

Click screenshot to read:

The authors first lay out, in a good summary, why scientists use citations:

Currently, the relevant portion of the AAS Code of Ethics is found in the Publications and Authorship section of the Ethics Statement:

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others should always be given. Deliberate, wanton omission of a pertinent author or reference is unacceptable. Authors have an obligation to their colleagues and the scientific community to include a set of references that communicates the precedents, sources, and context of the reported work. Data provided by others must be cited appropriately, even if obtained from a public database.

The statement reminds us that there are several reasons why we are expected to cite others in our publications.  These include citations as an acknowledgment of the contributions of others to the ideas in our work, as well as to avoid plagiarism, and we cite others to justify our methods, assumptions, and research practices. Citations are also important for maintaining the integrity of the academic record and tracing the development of ideas over time, both for the historical record as well as for a proper understanding of how a research field has evolved.

To me, this alone implies that you cite based on relevance, not as a way to effect social justice. And even if authors have done some bad things, if their research is solid and relevant to the point being made, you should cite them. Not doing so violates all the reasons given above.

But moral considerations then creep into the article of Hughes et al.:

In the case of unethical research practices, we can look to other fields outside of astronomy for some guidance. The AMA (American Medical Association) Code of Medical Ethics suggests that when researchers engage with results that were obtained in a clearly unethical way, such as Nazi experimentation on humans during WWII or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, they should first seek to cite studies that used ethical methods and obtained the same results. If that is not possible, then the harm involved in obtaining the results should be disclosed and acknowledged, the reason for needing to cite the study justified, and the authors should pay respect to the victims of the behavior.

I’m not sure that there are any results of Nazi medical experiments that are even worth citing; I remember reading one scholar’s conclusion that these experiments were so slipshod that they never produced anything of value, even given their aims—to save German soldiers (or, in Mengele’s case, to satisfy a sadistic curiosity). And nearly everyone now knows of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and about its unethicality. I don’t know if it generated any useful data, but to have to stop in the middle of the paper and recite a screed in honor of the victims seems to me a bit much. I’d rather just say “see X”, where “X” is a discussion of the harms produced by that study. Moral genuflection (“I will now show that I realize this work was unethical”) is somewhat demeaning in a case like the Nazis and Tuskeegee. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of having to cite any study that requires that kind of qualification and explanation.

But the authors do find one case where citations may be properly left out without any qualification: when the scientist cited is a sexual harasser. As they say:

But the guidance becomes less clear when it comes to dealing with citations of documented sexual and serial harassers. While there have been several recent high-profile cases in astronomy, many other fields are currently struggling with this same issue. The arguments of whether we should cite these individuals boil down to two main positions:

Note that the links go to two sides of the argument, the “Yes” from my law-school colleague Brian Leiter.

This is the starting point from which the AAS Code of Ethics Committee, the AAS Publications Committee, and the Ethics Working Group are confronting the issue. There are several related questions to grapple with:

Here are the questions that, according to Hughes et al. must be answered before you can decide whether or not to cite a harasser:

  1. Is the research unethical, or is the person’s behavior unethical, and does it matter?
  2. Is sexual harassment a form of research misconduct? The American Geophysical Union says yes, and the NSF has instituted policies that require institutions to report sexual harassment findings which can lead to the revocation of grant funding. While the AAS code of ethics does not currently address this issue directly, the Astro2020 Decadal Report recommends that identity-based discrimination and harassment be recognized as causing the same level of harm to the integrity of research as is caused by research misconduct.
  3. How do we identify bad actors in our community? What is the threshold? By which temporal and cultural standards do we judge? Who ensures that the punishment fits the crime, and can there be a path to restoration?
  4. Who is harmed? What is the collateral damage? How do we limit future harm to the survivors of sexual harassment? Should we protect the junior colleagues and collaborators of bad actors from secondhand punishment, and if so, how? And when does the integrity of the scientific record take precedence?

The authors do admit that making a decision not to cite someone who’s a sexual harasser (and yes, the conclusion is that it may well be justified) is an “ethical gray area.”

But none of this stuff, to me, justifies not citing someone as a form of punishment because they engaged in documented sexual harassment.

Of course I abhor sexual harassment, and it should be dealt with promptly and properly.  But why is sexual harassment the only bad act that can be punished by canceling a citation? (And yes, canceling a citation means canceling the scientific community’s knowledge of relevant science.)  What about any felony: robbery, murder, or other bad acts like simple non-sexual harassment or bullying of students or colleagues? (It may be because the three authors, all women referred to as “she” or “her” on their professional webpages are more attuned to this form of bad behavior than are men.)

By all means punish those who engaged in misconduct—and apparently it doesn’t have to be “research misconduct” to make someone a “bad actor”. But remove their contributions from science? That’s a no-no to me.

I may be an outlier, but in my view there’s no good reason to not cite the scientific work of “bad actors” or harassers if the work itself is sound and relevant.  Even murderers should be cited if their work is relevant. There’s no “research misconduct” worse than killing one of your students, but to me even that’s not bad enough to expunge someone’s relevant work from science.

Punishment and ostracism  should be inflicted on people, not on science itself, for leaving out relevant citations because the person who did the work was bad is indeed hurting science, and scholarship in general.  Being fired or punished is enough; it’s not necessary (and is indeed harmful to science) to “punish” someone further by simply refusing to cite their work. If we did that, we wouldn’t cite great literature, for many famous authors were pretty bad people, including being sexual harassers.

In the end, I agree with Brian Leiter, whose “Yes” vote for not removing citations is explained in the 2018 Chronicle of Higher Education article linked to above: “Academic ethics: should scholars avoid citing the work of awful people?” (the three people cited in his first paragraph below were accused of sexual misconduct):

Certainly, scholars should condemn Frege, Searle, Ronell, and the like. But to excise from the canon of relevant knowledge those who are appalling people is simply a further betrayal of what justifies the existence of institutions devoted to scholarship.

. . . You should not — under any circumstances — adjust your citation practices to punish scholars for bad behavior. You betray both your discipline and the justification for your academic freedom by excising from your teaching and research the work of authors who have behaved unethically. Universities would, in principle, be justified in disciplining you for scholarly malfeasance, subject to appropriate peer assessment.

Such academic misconduct is unlikely to constitute a firing offense — unlike, say, serious plagiarism or fabrication of data. But researchers or teachers who let moral indignation interfere with scholarly judgment do betray the core purposes of the university and so open themselves to professional repercussions. The foundations of academic freedom demand nothing less.

h/t: Thanks to a scientist who does astronomy for alerting me to this piece.