The vexing problem of “otherkins”

June 21, 2023 • 8:40 am

UPDATE: As the Guardian reports, there is a controversy about what really happened in the “cat incident” reported below.  The school, which initially said this (see below),

The school, which does not dispute that the incident happened, said it was committed to inclusive education, but would be “reviewing our processes to ensure such events do not take place in the future”.

Now, after a kerfuffle in the media, the school has denied that no child identified as a cat:

. . . . within days, and thanks to a media frenzy, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were being asked about the remarks. And by the end of the week, Kemi Badenoch was demanding the school be urgently investigated by Ofsted in case there were safeguarding issues.

All this, despite the school itself saying no children had identified “as a cat or any other animal”.

So an “incident” happened, but the school says that the child in question did not identify as a cat (note that the student said otherwise in his interview with the Torygraph.

This is what Schools Week says:

In a statement to Schools Week, the trust said it wanted to “clarify that no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal”.

During the recording of the argument, the teacher can be heard saying “gender is not linked to the parts you were born with – [it’s] about how you identify”.

They added “if you’re talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you are born with… that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable”.

The member of staff tells the pupil “if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”, before the child says “how can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” at the end of the row.

You can hear the recording for yourself, and I’ll put the cat-identification as “a doubtful claim in the press” until we know what really happened.

Regardless, there are children who identify as animals; a Reuters report describes them as “therians”:

“Therians believe deep down inside that they are trapped in a human body but were meant to be some other species.” said Dr Kathy Gerbasi, a psychologist specializing in studying both.

Psychology professor Elizabeth Fein, who also researches furries and therians, told Reuters: “While therians recognize they have human bodies, they might also feel they have the reincarnated soul of a wolf, or that they have a sense of affinity with cats that is so deep that they are on some level a cat themselves. For some of these folks, it’s enjoyable to do things those animals would do – bark, or growl, or rough-house play in an animalistic way. Many feel a pervasive sense of discomfort with their own human bodies.”

The report says that no therians have disrupted American classrooms or demanded that others respect their identity:

She added: “As part of my research, I’ve interviewed many therians. None of them have ever reported feeling like their teachers or anyone else in their life were expected by society to respect their ‘queer identity’”.

So there do appear to be children who feel that they’re members of a different species trapped in a human body.  And I stand by my report of a conversation with teachers at a southern University, teachers who told me that they were given training about how to deal with such children.

The idea of “trans-speciesism” still raises intriguing philosophical questions about what to do about it, especially if therians begin demanding that others respect their identities. In some ways this is an analogue of “trans-racialism”: people who say they are members of a human ethnic group (“race”) different from their. That ignited a real debate after Rachel Dolezal passed as a black woman, even becoming president of her local chapter of the NAACP.  She was deposed and demonized after she was “outed as a white woman.  Rebecca Tuvel, a philosophy professor at Rhodes College, got into big trouble when she tried to compare trans-racialism with transsexualism and found that they had some philosophical parity. I wrote this six years ago (see included links):

You’ve probably heard of the fracas surrounding the publication of a paper by philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel in the academic organ Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (I discussed it here; see also here). Her paper was called “In defense of transracialism“, and you can get a copy if you’ve downloaded the free and legal application Unpaywall, which you should do. The paper examines the arguments supporting the acceptance of transgender people, and finds them similar to the arguments supporting acceptance of “transracial” people like Rachel Dolezal, who, though of white ancestry, claimed to be black. Tuvel concludes this:

In this article, I argue that considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism. Given this parity, since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races.

They didn’t fire Tuvel, but the journal went through a Reckoning and had to apologize. But all she Tuvel did was examine a philosophical question, an interesting one, and for that she was crucified. I stand with her in her right to discuss these issues. Why was Dolezal demonized if she sincerely felt she was a black person? No question like that should be off limits, or people attacked for asking it. The same holds for people who sincerely identify as animals; how do we deal with them philosophically and personally? I won’t go into that, but leave it to the philosophers. Still, it’s a discussion that shouldn’t be off the table.

______________

When I gave a lecture in the Deep South some years ago, I went to dinner with several of the biology faculty, who told me of the occurrence of “furries”  (actually, better known as “otherkins”) among the students. “Otherkins” are students who dress up and act like nonhuman animals in their day-to-day life. But the group the profs were really concerned with were students who identified as animals,  claiming that they had the spirit of animals, insisting on being addressed as the animal they identified with, and wore animal costumes like ears or tails. These are the true “otherkins”. I saw several of these, including one girl who had a horse tail stuck in the back of her pants.  The professors told me that they had been given special instruction by the university on how to treat and deal with the otherkins.

I haven’t seen any otherkins at my University, but this Torygraph article (click on the screenshot to go to the archived piece) notes that it is an issue in Britain, and schools don’t know how to deal with it. I was sent this article by a Brit who couldn’t believe that the phenomenon was real. I assured my correspondent that yes, this is a reality.

Some quotes:

Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat.

The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.”

 

The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour.

The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the South West is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon.

But it is not difficult to find genuine examples of children in UK schools insisting on being addressed as animals, raising two important questions: why is it happening, and how should teachers respond?

Here’s a cat identity:

One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales told The Telegraph of a fellow pupil who “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they [JAC: note the pronoun] answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”

The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.

Year 11 is not young: the student is 15 or 16 years old. In these cases, the teachers, conditioned by gender activism, are buying into it:

Perhaps tellingly, the incident at Rye College – a Church of England school – happened at the end of a class on “life education” in which children were told by their teacher that there were lots of genders, including “agender – people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.

An argument ensued in which two pupils disagreed with the teacher, saying there was no such thing as agender, because “if you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy – that’s it”.

When the pupils told their classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” the teacher reprimanded them for “questioning [the child’s] identity”.

In this instance, the teacher in charge of the class appears to have bracketed a child’s desire to be treated as a cat with other children’s desire to be treated as another gender, or genderless.

You can clearly see that this is a case of social contagion promulgated by both peers and also by teachers who have been indoctrinated by gender activism to accept any child’s assumed identity. But the school isn’t buying it!:

The school, which does not dispute that the incident happened, said it was committed to inclusive education, but would be “reviewing our processes to ensure such events do not take place in the future”.

The school, then, seems to have accepted that the teacher in question was wrong, but it is hardly surprising if teachers find themselves struggling to make sense of the fast-paced societal changes in which pupils can not only decide to change their preferred pronouns overnight but also their preferred species.

While there are strict protocols for dealing with children or adolescents who identify as having non-standard genders or a non-natal sex, this has bled over into what I call—or someone already called—”trans-speciesism.” And what’s below is an explicit admission that identifying with animals is not an innate feeling that emerges as a child ages, but can be induced by social media or peers—or, perhaps, mental distress or illness.

“The teacher should be asking themselves, what are these children looking at online? What forums are they on? What is going on in the home? What is happening in that child’s life and who else is involved?

. . . The pupil blamed social media, saying students were being influenced by accounts run by people who identify as trees and animals. It started “around Covid”, she says.

“When it first started, it didn’t really go out into real life that much. It stayed confined to social media, but then as it got more popular and more people were finding out about it, people then started bringing it into real life situations.”

Finally, to answer my correspondent’s doubt about whether this is real:

Now this raises a bunch of questions—questions related, of course, to transgender issues.

a.) I have no doubt that while some of this might just be playful behavior, or fantasy, it seems that other children really do think they have the spirits, bodies, and identities of animals.  Is this substantially different in kind from thinking that you have a body and feelings that don’t really fit into those of your natal sex?

b.) It’s clear that some of this transspecies behavior is due to social contagion.  Can that also be true of transgender behavior? Gender activists deny this vehemently, of course, but there’s more than a tiny bit of evidence that social contagion can play a role in promoting transgender or transsexual feelings.

c.) Some teachers have written that “otherkin-ness” may be due to mental illness or at least mental distress in a child, which might be resolved by assuming the identity of an animal. Could this also be true of some students who are pondering becoming transgender or transsexual? If so, then those feelings should not be immediately affirmed—just as one’s feeling that one is a cat should not be affirmed—but EXPLORED.  Exploration instead of immediate affirmation, of course, not part of “affirmative therapy,” whose goal is simply to affirm the child’s feelings. But why affirm that they are in the wrong body when the body is one of the other sex but not the body of a cat?  I am not joking here, for I’m assuming that some of these students’ feelings are sincere.

d.) Connected with the above is the notion, which many have suggested, that gender dysphoria is often a form of childhood distress accompanying puberty, and that if given regular objective, empathic, and non goal-directed therapy rather than “affirmative” therapy, most cases will “resolve” without the need for hormones or surgery. Many “unaffirmed” dysphoric children do turn out to be gay or lesbian, which of course doesn’t require taking hormones or having surgery.

In short, although the “otherkins” may seem humorous at first, I think they raise serious questions that transgender activists should be asking, for tje feeling that one is really a member of the “wrong” species has parallels with the feeling that one is really a member of the wrong gender or sex.

h/t: Jez

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 21, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on a Hump Day (“Dan Grba” in Bosnian), June 21, 2023, and the first day of summer! The summer solstice begins this morning at 10:58 A.M. EDT. There will be a post letting you know when summer begins.

As for a food day, it’s National Peaches and Cream Day, but this will be skimpy this year as a spell of warm weather followed by cold weather damaged much of the peach crop in the U.S., including in Georgia, Alabama, and California.

It’s a big day for holidays, for it’s also Anne and Samantha Day (read the link), World Humanist Day, Atheist Solidarity Day (yay to both!), International Surfing Day, World Music Day, National Selfie Day, World Giraffe Day, National Smoothie Day, Go Skateboarding Day, International Yoga Day, Fête de la Musique, and World Hydrography Day

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 21 Wikipedia page.

And there will be no readers’ wildlife today as I’m running out of pictures, so must save what I have for sporadic posts. . . .

Da Nooz:

*The missing Titanic-seeking submersible is on its last day of air, but there’s a glimmer of hope. They heard noise!

A Canadian surveillance plane “detected underwater noises” in the remote area of the North Atlantic where a submersible with five people aboard disappeared over the weekend, the United States Coast Guard said early Wednesday. Remotely operated vehicles were searching for the origin of the sounds.

*Surprise: Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who gave him too many breaks in the documents case, has now set an early trial for him: as early as August 15!

The federal judge presiding over the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump in the classified documents case set an aggressive schedule on Tuesday, ordering a trial to begin as soon as Aug. 14.

The timeline set by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, is likely to be delayed by extensive pretrial litigation — including over how to handle classified material — and its brisk pace seems in keeping with a schedule set under the Speedy Trial Act. In each of four other criminal trials the judge has overseen that were identified in a New York Times review, she has initially set a relatively quick trial date and later pushed it back.

It looks like the judge is watching the media! And the NYT isn’t going to let her get away with it. But wait—there’s more!

The early moves by Judge Cannon, a relatively inexperienced jurist who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, are being particularly closely watched. She disrupted the documents investigation last year with several rulings favorable to the former president before a conservative appeals court overturned her, saying that she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.

Brandon L. Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on complex criminal matters involving national security, said the trial date was “unlikely to hold” considering that the process of turning over classified evidence to the defense in discovery had not yet begun. Still, he said, Judge Cannon appeared to be showing that she intended to do what she could to push the case to trial quickly.

“It signals that the court is at least trying to do everything it can to move the case along and that it’s important that the case proceed quickly,” Mr. Van Grack said. “Even though it’s unlikely to hold, it’s at least a positive signal — positive in the sense that all parties and the public should want this case to proceed as quickly as possible.”

It’s a neutral signal to me, as I’m a cynic. This is performative action, at least based on what the NYT said above. We’ll see how she rules later down the road.  And Cannon doesn’t have the experience to handle such a case. Wait until he’s found guilty and she sentences him to house arrest in Mar-A-Lago, or even gives him probation. I don’t trust her.

*Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty on both tax and gun charges! This one blindsided me!

President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would probably keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.

The younger Biden’s attorney said the deal means the long-running criminal investigation involving the president’s son “is resolved.” But Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the investigation “is ongoing,” suggesting that matters beyond the tax and gun issues are still under scrutiny.

Papers filed in federal court in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday indicate Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. A court document says that in both those years, Biden was a resident of Washington and received taxable income of more than $1.5 million, for which he owed more than $100,000 in income tax that he did not pay on time. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, according to people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe elements of the case that are not yet public. Biden’s representatives have previously said that he eventually paid the IRS what he owed.

. . . The second court filing is about the gun charge. In that case, the letter says, “the defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.” Handling the gun charge as a diversion case means Biden will not technically be pleading guilty to that crime. Diversion is an option typically applied to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse problems.

In all, prosecutors will recommend two years of probation and diversion conditions, the people familiar with the plea deal said. If Biden successfully meets the conditions of the diversion program, the gun charge will be removed from his record at the end of that period, these people said.

Wait a tick! I thought that your only pleas were not guilty, guilty, no contest, or not guilty by reason of insanity. What is this “diversion” stuff? And what is a “diversion program”? Does it mean that Biden has a substance abuse problem?

*Trump’s newest interview on Fox did not go well.  Although I’m citing Salon here, even Bret Baier, the Fox News interviewer, gave Trump a rough time and low marks. Trump may even have incriminated himself more:

Legal experts questioned Trump’s decision to do a TV interview while facing a 37-count indictment and suggested that he may have given special counsel Jack Smith even more evidence to use against him.

“The defendant seems utterly incapable of exercising his constitutional right to remain silent,” tweeted conservative attorney and frequent Trump critic George Conway.

“Keep confessing,” wrote national security attorney Bradley Moss. “No criminal defense attorney worth their salt would ever advise their indicted client to do a media tour. That helps explain the problems Mr. Trump has had retaining qualified counsel,” he added.

Even George Washington University Law Prof. Jonathan Turley, who previously defended Trump amid his legal woes, warned that “statements of this kind are generally admissible at trial.”

“This is one more inculpatory statement,” former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman told MSNBC. “Every time he opens his mouth, it gets worse.”

Have a listen. The man is bonkers!

Baier throughout the interview repeatedly challenged Trump, including his false claim that he “won in 2020 by a lot.”

“You lost the 2020 election,” Baier pushed back.

During another portion of the interview, Baier read off a list of critical comments from numerous former Trump Cabinet and administration officials.

“Why did you hire all of them in the first place?” Baier asked.

“Because I hired ten to one that were fantastic,” Trump responded, “For every person you named, I can name 20 people that loved the administration.”

“LOL omg” is a perfect response to Trump’s blather.

*Despite its lip service to the Chicago Principles of Free expression, Arizona State University just fired two academic employees for organizing a conference. The author is Ann Atkinson, identified as “executive director of the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at ASU’s Barrett Honors College.”

The university happily complied when FIRE suggested it adopt the Chicago Principles and protect the “free, robust and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the University’s community.” The ASU Barrett Honors College has even been home to heterodox initiatives like the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, where I served as executive director for the last two years.

But beneath ASU’s written commitment to intellectual diversity lies a deep hostility toward divergent views. The latest trouble started in February when the Lewis Center hosted Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk for an event on “Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” This nonpartisan program was part of a popular speaker series focused on connecting students with professionals who can offer career and life advice.

At the names of Messrs. Prager and Kirk, the faculty of ASU’s honors college were outraged. Thirty-nine of its 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are “purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy.” The signers decried ASU “platforming and legitimating” their views, describing Messrs. Prager and Kirk as “white nationalist provocateurs” whose comments would undermine the value of democratic exchange by marginalizing the school’s most vulnerable students.

The faculty protests extended beyond the letter. Professors spent precious class time denouncing the program. On Twitter they lamented the university’s willingness to allow donor input on campus events. Mr. Prager received a death threat, forcing municipal and campus police to enact extensive security measures.

. . . The university administration’s position on the event was no secret. All advertising about “Health, Wealth, and Happiness” was scrubbed from campus walls and digital flyers. Behind closed doors, deans pressured me to postpone the event indefinitely. I was warned that if the speakers made any political statements, it wouldn’t be in the Lewis Center’s “best interests,” which I interpreted as a threat.

. . . Shortly after “Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Lin Blake, the events operations manager at ASU Gammage Theater, was fired by ASU Gammage. Before her firing, Ms. Blake told me that she was “berated by ASU Gammage leadership for coordinating an event that did not align with the values of ASU Gammage.” And as of June 30, ASU will dismantle the Lewis Center and terminate my position as its executive director. Barrett Honors College leadership told me this is purely a business decision, despite my raising more than $500,000 in the last year through the center.

And so it goes.  Of course the two firings had nothing to do with the event, even though Ms. Atkinson was threatened: “Nice job you have here; too bad if anything were to happen to it because you invited people like Dennis Prager to campus.”

*I think this is the first time I’ve cited an article from GQ, but it’s fascinating. I’ve long used Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, inspired by the crazy wording on the label (it’s great soap, too!). Now GQ asks, “Is Dr. Bronner’s the last corporation with a soul?”  A:  Yes, it’s still funky and soulful.

“I’m on the All-One path,” announces David—who uses he/they pronouns—standing before the group, referring to the sweeping ideology coined by their eccentric grandfather, Emanuel Bronner. Emanuel, who possessed no advanced degree but was undeterred in adopting a physician’s title, founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in the late 1940s, in large part because he wanted to broadcast his ideas about unifying the human race, and his All-One dicta are still printed on the brand’s soap-bottle labels. In the early years of the company, Dr. Bronner’s was a genuine grassroots operation—a cult-favorite brand passed, if not directly from the hands of Emanuel himself, among hippies camping out in vans at places like Woodstock. Emanuel would distribute his product by promising a free bottle of soap to anyone who would show up to listen to him proselytize the All-One message.

Two generations later, Dr. Bronner’s has vastly outgrown its quirky, humble origins and become the top-selling natural soap brand in North America. The company now sells not only its liquid soap but highly successful lines of balms, toothpastes, coconut oil, and hand sanitizers, in addition to newly launched chocolates that were immediately hailed by gourmands as a premium product. Today, the iconography of its labels—and Emanuel’s far-out messaging—is imprinted firmly in the psyche of the American consumer. And yet, even as so many Americans have come to possess a fondness for the soap, the raw numbers around the success of Dr. Bronner’s—over $170 million in revenue in 2022—are still kind of staggering. Especially staggering, maybe, to the customers who’ve been affectionately buying its signature minty formula since the days of the natural-product boom of the ’60s and ’70s. Emanuel’s grandsons David and Michael now preside over an empire in which a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap is sold every two seconds or so.

. . . The trip [to Amsterdam] was so mind-blowing that David has since made it their life mission—and eventually the company’s—to drive efforts in the United States to legalize psychedelics, and more broadly, end the drug war. And they have succeeded, in spite of any skepticism and unease that some colleagues might have toward this trippy streak. In 2021 the company spent over $4.4 million on drug and psychedelics policy reform efforts, part of which helped pass a Colorado ballot measure last year to decriminalize certain psychedelics.

. . . Growth is one thing, but Dr. Bronner’s has managed to become a major player in its market while painstakingly encoding its ethics into every step of the production process. In fact, it could be argued that Emanuel Bronner predicted the current era of ethically minded business, and certainly ethically minded marketing. And now the humble soap brand finds itself at the vanguard of every philosophical and logistical question that American entrepreneurs are grappling with right now. All of its good deeds—from rigorously engineered fair trade supply chains to charitable donations and environmentally minded manufacturing—are thoroughly cataloged in the Dr. Bronner’s annual public accountability report card, the All-One! Report.

So keep buying Dr. Bronner’s products, or start if you haven’t. Their liquid soap, which comes in several scents, is fantastic, and just the stuff to wash your paws during the pandemic. All One! All One! Here are David and Michael Bronner, grandsons of the founder. Caption from the article:

The Bronner family offers employees progressive benefits that include free vegan lunches and support for ketamine-assisted mental health treatment.

In this obscenely scam-ridden day and age, it is reasonable to assume that anyone sermonizing like this in the realm of business is one false step away from being exposed as a charlatan. But the Bronners genuinely do seem to, in the parlance of thought-leadership conferences, walk the walk. The combination of Christian clemency and drug-induced ego surrender is potent. The executives, despite ranging from the conservative to the progressive, have all agreed to cap their own executive salaries at five times the lowest-paid fully vested Dr. Bronner’s employees, which means they cannot earn more than about $300,000 per year. It’s a policy that frees up funds for a waterfall of annual charitable donations and, more importantly, an enviable company culture for its over 300 workers. Dr. Bronner’s boasts the sort of employee benefits that would make Bezos shudder, including a health-insurance policy with company-paid premiums, bonuses, free daily vegan lunches prepared by the Foamy Homies, access to therapy, and, as of 2022, coverage of ketamine-assisted mental health treatment.

And a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle label. Click twice to read it. Dilute! Dilute! OK!

h/t: Brad and Mocky

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is thinking (sshhhhhhhhh!):

Hili: A thought is ripening inside me.
A: What thought?
Hili: I don’t know, it’s vague as yet.
In Polish:
Hili: Dojrzewa we mnie pewna myśl.
Ja: Jaka?
Hili: Nie wiem, jeszcze jest mglista.

And a picture of sweet Szaron:

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

From Meanwhile in Canada:

From Beth:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih because, of course, dancing is prohibited in Iran. Look at those customers go!

From Simon. The Trump tweet has to be a fake, but I have heard about his Fox interview last night.

From Barry. Look at the expression on that cat’s face!

From Lyn via Jez. Poor Liz Truss! There’s a big Wikipedia article on “Liz Truss Lettuce“.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a composer murdered in Auschwitz:

Tweets from Matthew. How are these ducklings gonna learn how to duck? Chickens don’t swim!

Well, they’ll learn it (I hope!):

This is a fantastic example of mimicry: a spider mimicking an ant (ants are generally avoided by predators as they’re either toxic, sting, or spray chemicals). The “head” is really the spider’s mandibles and the spider waves its fronts legs as if they are antennae.

The possible model and, below that, the spider even imitates the GAIT of the ant!

Berkeley, DEI, and FIRE

June 20, 2023 • 10:45 am

A while back (I’m too lazy to look this up), I reported on the University of California at Berkeley’s requirement for all job applicants to submit a DEI statement with their application. The statement was to cover three areas: the applicant’s knowledge of about DEI, track record in advancing DEI, and plans to advance DEI at UCB were they hired.  I also recall that the statements were given numerical scores on these areas, and if the total number was below a certain cutoff, the application was ditched without being further considered.

I am opposed to mandatory DEI statements because I think they’re illegal: a form of compelled speech that, at least in state schools like Berkeley, violates the First Amendment. There are other reasons to oppose them, including the possibility that really good candidates might have spent their time doing other non-DEI but useful activities like writing books, giving lectures to the public, and so on. (Or, just doing good science, which doesn’t seem enough these days.)  Further, candidates often have worked so hard during their postdocs and Ph.D.s (jobs are hard to get, and you need a good record), that even if you’re sympathetic to the aims of DEI, you have no time to compile a record. I think it’s sufficient for the university to post a statement that they do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, or other protected characteristics. In other words, they should simply say that there is no discrimination in hiring (or in student applications)

Moreover, there is ample opportunity to game the system: you can copy statements of successful candidates, make stuff up, and even pay someone to write your diversity statement for you! This, perhaps, is why Berkeley didn’t want its scoring system revealed, but, under law, it had to do so. Now all candidates can use it to write high-scoring statements.

Finally, the use of these statements is designed to turn universities into ideological juggernauts, with professors conforming to the preferred narrative of the university (there are many ways to be in favor of diversity and inclusion). The job of a professor is to teach, promote learning, and advance knowledge by doing research. If you want to save the world, that’s fine, but, as Stanley Fish said (it’s a book title), save the world on your own time.

Required statements are particularly invidious when, like the ones used at UC Berkeley (see below), they are given scores, and candidates are rejected right off the bat if their DEI scores are too low.  Think of all the famous and accomplished professors that wouldn’t make the cut today! If you answer, “well, Einstein should have been doing diversity work,” then I don’t know what to say.

While we knew that Berkeley was requiring DEI statements for its science faculty, and that they scored them numerically as the first cutoff for applicants, we didn’t know what the scoring rubric was.  Now we know, thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which filed a request for Berkeley’s records (it’s a public school and must disclose these) and for its scoring rubric.

Berkeley sat on its hands for more than TWO YEARS before complying. And it’s no wonder, because the rubric and scoring system really is embarrassing. It’s also embarrassing because candidates are rejected if their statements aren’t up to snuff, no matter how great their scientific work has been. (These statements will probably also become illegal after the Supreme Court bans affirmative action.) Only a diehard DEI proponent would not cringe at seeing how the three areas are scored.

First, see FIRE’s new report by clicking on this screenshot:

Below: some stuff from FIRE.  Note that the rubric that Berkeley sent is from 2018-2019, but I suspect they’re still using it, as are other UC campuses (though I don’t know whether they use cutoff DEI ratings).

The University of California, Berkeley used diversity statements to weed out candidates for faculty positions, according to public records the university finally released more than two years after FIRE requested them.

Many universities now require or invite current or prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — often through written statements that factor into hiring, research, evaluation, promotion, or tenure decisions.

As FIRE explained in a public statement last year, these diversity statement requirements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and cast a pall of orthodoxy over campuses.

Berkeley is no exception. The university expects all new faculty hires to “be committed to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging[.]” During the 2018-19 academic year, Berkeley’s life sciences departments launched an initiative to advance faculty diversity. As part of the initiative, applicants for full-time faculty positions were required to submit statements on their “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion,” including information about their “understanding of these topics,” “record of activities to date,” and “specific plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion.”

These statements informed the hiring committee’s first round of review: If applicants’ contributions to DEI did not meet a high standard, they were eliminated from consideration.

On Berkeley’s dilatory behavior:

FIRE wanted to know more. So in March 2021, we filed a public records request seeking information related to how, exactly, the university was using and evaluating these diversity statements.

And then we waited. And waited. And waited.

Two years later, Berkeley still hadn’t handed over the records.

California’s Public Records Act requires that public agencies make records “promptly available.” Berkeley finally produced the records in May 2023 after FIRE sent a demand letter threatening legal action. It took Berkeley 795 days to comply with its duty under the act. Hardly prompt.

I have no explanation for a delay of nearly 800 days save that Berkeley was doing everything it could to NOT turn over its records, and, given that it had to under the law, delayed and delayed and delayed.

And now the rubric, which was required for all five life science departments at the University. Click below to see how each of the three areas was scored.

Here’s FIRE’s summary:

According to the rubric the hiring committee used to evaluate the statements, candidates who “discount the importance of diversity,” or who don’t feel personally responsible for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, received lower scores. As would anyone who “[d]efines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race.” The rubric even penalizes candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.”

But read for yourself. Each of the three areas—knowledge, track record, and plans to advance DEI—are scored on a scale from 1 to 5, so the minimum score is 3 and the maximum 15.  No cutoff point is given here.

I’ll quote the rubric from only one of the three areas: the candidate’s track record:

TRACK RECORD FOR ADVANCING DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

These will get you the low scores of 1-2:

• Participated in no specific activities, or only one or two limited activities (limited in terms of time, investment, or role).

• Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement (for example, “I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women.” Mentoring women scientists may be an important part of an established track record but it would be less significant if it were one of the only activities undertaken and it wasn’t clear that the candidate actively conducted outreach to encourage women to join the lab.

• Descriptions of activities are brief, vague, or describe being involved only peripherally. Or the only activities were oriented toward informing oneself (for example, attended a workshop at a conference)

This will get you a bit higher score: a 3

• May have participated extensively in a single activity. Less clear that there is an established track record.

• Limited participation at the periphery in numerous activities, or participation in only one area, such as their
research to the exclusion of teaching and service.

• In describing mentoring of underrepresented students, mentions specific strategies used for effective
mentoring, or awareness of the barriers underrepresented students face and how to incorporate the ideas into
their mentoring,
“
• Membership in a student or professional organization that supports underrepresented individuals

And if you want the highest score, between 4 and 5, you have to have done these things. 


• Describes multiple activities in depth, with detailed information about both their role in the activities and the
outcomes. Activities may span research, teaching and service, and could include applying their research skills or
expertise to investigating diversity, equity and inclusion.

• Consistent track record that spans multiple years (for example, applicants for assistant professor positions can
describe activites undertaken or partcipated in as an undergraduate, graduate student and postdoctoral scholar)

• Roles taken were significant and appropriate for career stage (e.g., a candidate who is already an assistant
professor may have developed and tested pedagogy for an inclusive classroom and learning environment, while a
current graduate student may have volunteered for an extended period of time for an organization or group that
seeks to increase the representation of underrepresented groups in science).

• Organized or spoken at workshops or other events (depending on career stage) aimed at increasing others’
understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion as one aspect of their track record.

• Served as a leader in a student or professional organization that supports underrepresented individuals. 

In other words, to get a high score you must have a record in DEI activity showing that it was a major priority during your doctoral or postdoctoral work, and must have spent a lot of tim—over multiple years— engaged in such activities. Merely saying that you treated all students fairly and equally regardless of their ethnicity, gender, disability status, and so on will get your application rejected.

It’s no surprise that Berkeley wanted to sit on these requirements. If they were proud of them, or even not ashamed of them, why the long delay?

Our new paper in Skeptical Inquirer on the ideological subversion of biology

June 20, 2023 • 9:00 am

The free link to a new paper by Luana Maroja and me in Skeptical Inquirer has now appeared, and you can access it by clicking the screenshot below. It’s the cover story and is about 9300 words long (I am unable to furnish “reading times”!).  It’s also in the paper magazine, where they give the full references since you can’t use the hyperlinks on paper.

The opening photo is subtle, and I like it a lot.

Our purpose was to demonstrate how “progressive” ideology is worming its way into organismal and evolutionary biology, impeding research and promoting misconceptions about science to both the public and scientists themselves.  We do this by discussing six areas: the sex binary, evolutionary psychology, sex differences, individual differences, group differences, and the sacralization of indigenous knowledge. (I believe I’ve discussed all of these topics on this site). I won’t say any more about the piece, but if you read it I hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the summary from the beginning of the paper:

SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

By “too late,” of course, I don’t mean that science will be gone or swallowed by ideology. Rather, I mean that the character and practice of science may have changed permanently—and for the worse.

Our thanks go to the many people from whom we sought advice about our ideas (too many to list!) and especially to Robyn Blumner, who encouraged us to submit the paper to the magazine, and to interim editor Stuart Vyse and managing editor Julia Lavarnway for shepherding the paper to print and e-space while making really useful edits.

Oh, and as Steve Job would say, “There’s one more thing.” This paper grew out of the Stanford Academic Freedom conference panel on “Academic Freedom in STEM,” where both Luana and I talked (you can see our short presentations here). I presented these six topics, but Luana also talked about them in a very different piece she wrote for Bari Weiss’s Free Press. We decided to join forces and write a longer and more comprehensive paper.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 20, 2023 • 8:15 am

We have a new batch of photos from reader Larry Powell.  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some pictures, mainly of amphibians and reptiles, from a trip I took a few years ago to southeastern Arizona to help a friend with some fieldwork. A busman’s holiday for me, as I saw a lot of amphibian and reptile species I’d never encountered in the field, and got to spend some time in beautiful country with good company.

First off, one for the entomologically-inclined – what I believe to be Giant Mesquite Bugs (Thasus neocalifornicus). We found aggregations of these large impressive insects on mesquite bushes (of all places) while looking for lizards on the Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch. Going by the red banding on the legs, these are females. There’s a nice account of this species here.

This Mojave Rattlesnake (Crotalus scutulatus) was waiting outside when we left our field headquarters one morning. It’s apparently quite a dangerous species, with potent venom, but this individual appeared to be fairly phlegmatic.

I believe that this is a Western Patch-Nosed Snake (Salvadora hexalepis), going by the number of upper labials – the large scale on the end of the rostrum identifies it to genus; but there’s more than one species in that corner of Arizona. This one was encountered on the gravel road leading to the highway.

We were in Arizona during what’s called the monsoon season (June – September), and got caught in some spectacular thunderstorms. After one, the dry wash near our field headquarters filled overnight, with standing pools crowded with spadefoot toads, which spend most of their adult lives buried but breed explosively when the rains come. This individual is a Couch’s Spadefoot toad (Scaphiopus couchii) that I removed from the breeding festivities for a portrait.

There are four species of horned lizards (Phrynosoma) found in the SE corner of Arizona, and I’d hoped to see one or more that I’d never seen in the wild. However, the only individual I encountered was this neonate Greater Short-horned Lizard (P. hernandesi), which belongs to the species I’ve been working on in Alberta for years. Still nice to see, though.

From the Sonoita Valley we moved up to the Chiricahua Mountains, and here we encountered this Madrean Alligator Lizard (Elgaria kingii), hidden under some wood litter. This individual is regenerating its tail.

The Chiricahuas constitute a sky island archipelago, high enough in elevation to harbour life zones not typical of the surrounding desert. We spent our time there in the deciduous forest and coniferous forest biomes, which were at just the right temperature from my point of view. Common at higher elevations was Yarrow’s Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus jarrovii); a subadult is shown here. This species is viviparous. They are very quick on their feet.

Another, less conspicuous high-elevation lizard in the Chiricahuas is the Slevin’s Bunchgrass Lizard (Sceloporus sleveni). Despite being mainly found at high elevations, this species is oviparous. Like S. jarrovi, they are exceedingly nimble.