An attempt, using skeletons and grave goods, to see if gender was “nonbinary” in ancient European cultures

May 28, 2023 • 9:30 am

This new article, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (click on title screenshot below), floats an idea that in principle is interesting, but in practice breaks down in both theory and practice.   And that idea is this:  one can determine the degree of “non-binary” genders in ancient societies by examining their graves.

One can, with a fair (but not complete) degree of accuracy, determine the sex of a skeleton, using either its pelvis, its head, or a combination of features. You then look at a bunch of European graves from the Early Neolithic  through the Late Bronze Age (ca 7500 to 3200 years ago), and see if the sex of the skeleton comports with the “grave goods” buried along with it. Some grave goods—especially weapons—suggest that the individual buried was of male gender, while others, like hair ornaments, beads, or needles, suggest that the associated skeleton was of female gender.  You then correlated the biological sex of the individuals with the individuals’ “gender” as indicated by the grave goods. The proportion of “mismatches” among total graves is said to show the degree of “non-binary” people in the local society.

Pape and Ialongo’s “binary” hypothesis is that gender will match sex nearly all of the time, while the alternative is that there will be an appreciable number of mismatches. Of course, for most graves we lack both types of information or one type of information: either the identified biological sex or grave-good gender.

This hypothesis got a lot of attention a while back with reports of sex-determined female skeletons associated with weapons, in particular the publication in 2017 of a 1000-year-old Viking grave whose occupant was a female (determined by bone DNA and therefore accurate). But she was named the “Birka female Viking warrior” because her body was associated with  “a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion”. A female skeleton with male “grave-goods”!

Here’s the grave (sketch from Wikipedia):

This gave rise to speculations that women were often warriors in Viking times, like Xena, Wonder Woman, or the women in Wakanda; and heartened feminists and those who appreciate women behaving out of their “gender roles”. Some have even suggested that the Birka warrior was a trans man.

Unfortunately, as both Wikipedia and Science noted (see other criticisms here), we can’t at all be sure of this conclusion, and there are now enough doubts from scholars to cast the “woman Viking warrior” hypothesis in doubt. Perhaps she was not a warrior but was buried like one—she might have been a leader. Or she could have been a very rare exception, a Viking “tomboy” who, like Joan of Arc, liked to fight. We’ll probably never know the answer, but given that the skeleton was definitely XX, the woman-warrior theory can’t be definitively be ruled out—nor can it be ruled in.

At any rate, click to read the article, and note the first three words of the title:

The authors do accept a biological definition of sex and a “social-construct” definition of “gender,” though they admit that some of their colleagues also regard sex as a social construct, in which case this study would have no meaning,

The authors attempted sex and gender matching in 1252 individuals taken from 7 European sites. (The study was based on previously published data, not the authors’ own measurements or observations.)  Because of the difficulties of identifying sex in young skeletons, and the imperfect accuracy of knowing sex from skeletal morphology—that was judged from different studies matching DNA with bones—they got data on 297-299 individuals, or about 24% of the skeletons.  Before we look at the results, let’s note a few problems with this analysis (to be sure, the authors are aware of these):

a.) The errors in determining sex from skeletons.  The authors note that, from other studies, a pelvis can diagnose sex with 85%-99% accuracy, while a skull with mandibles gives a 70-90% accuracy. Thus some of the data may be polluted by inaccurate sex determination.

b.) Some grave goods may not indicate sex. Weapons, the authors argue, are always indicators of a male skeleton (as are animal teeth or boar tusks), but what about ceramic vessels, beads, and wire? Those are always taken to indicate females, but we have no strong assurance of this, though items like hair spirals and needles are likely to indicate women. But what if a buried male didn’t have a weapon? Would they put one in the grave anyway?

c.) Grave goods may have gotten mixed up among burial sites.

d.) Even if a weapon in a female grave indicates that she was some kind of warrior, does that mean she was “nonbinary”? That term has various meanings, today usually a person who identifies as both male and female, sometimes fluctuating over time. Does a woman who carried a weapon fit this description because “fighting” is a man’s role? Does that mean that Joan of Arc, or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird were “nonbinary”? Did they identify as such? (I doubt it.) I’m not so sure about using that term (as we’ll see below, there’s some ideology lurking in this analysis).  Are tomboys or effeminate men considered “nonbinary”?  I haven’t seen them described that way.

But of course the biggest problem above is a): misidentification of the sex of skeletons, as the earlier publications didn’t use DNA. If the proportion of mismatches is close to the proportion of misidentified skeletons (as it seems to be), then the “nonbinary” individuals could simply be identification errors.

So let’s see what the authors found (they used old versus “new” data differing in re-analysis of “bone sex”):

Match of sex and gender:  26.5% or 27.2% of the total sample

Mismatch of sex and gender (“non-binary”): 2.9% or 2.2% of the total sample

The rest of the data had either no determination of both sex or gender, or determination of only one.

Thus, of all the doubly-identified individuals, between 8% and 10% of them were “non-binary”.  Given the error rates for misidentifying sex using bones, this is within the error range, and so the “discordant” identifications could simply represent misidentifications of sex. The authors do recognize this:

The general results of our analysis seem to support traditional models: if one singles out the cases for which we have both sex and gender determinations (based roughly on one-third of the total sample, mostly adults: Fig. 5), the association pattern appears overwhelmingly binary, with 90.0 per cent (or 92.6 per cent considering the new data) of burials showing matching sex and gender indicators (Fig. 6). Finally, we can also observe that for 10.0 per cent (or c. 7.4 per cent based on the new osteological data) of this portion of deceased individuals the osteological and archaeological determinations contradict each other.

But they still hold out for a possible “non-binary” explanation (my emphasis):

There are two possible ways to interpret this portion: a minimalist approach—in line with the usual procedures—would suggest interpreting it as a product of the error margins of determination methods; as an alternative, one could acknowledge that non-binary minorities were systematically represented in the burial rite of prehistoric Europe. . .

. . . We conclude that available data—despite potential biases—support the hypothesis that some degree of gender variance was formally accepted in the burial rite of prehistoric Central European societies. However, the error margins of traditional methods of sex determination cannot be accurately quantified, hence the actual size of the ‘non-binary minority’ is still largely uncertain.

The authors are tenacious in saying that there was “gender variance” in these early societies, despite the fact that there’s no good basis for that conclusion. And yes, there possibly were a few nonbinary individuals in these populations, though I don’t think you can judge them from this kind of analysis. To be “non-binary”, at least in the modern sense, you have to identify yourself as being both male and female, or fluctuating between them; you can’t just be recognized by your society as “man-like” if you’re a woman or vice versa.

To be conservative, I’d say that it’s most likely that the exceptions were errors in determination, though of course we do have examples of non-binary people from many modern societies. But we can’t go back to the Bronze Age and figure out what was going on. Perhaps historians know something about this.

But there’s one aspect of this paper suggesting that the research was motivated at least in part by ideology. And that’s the authors’ determination of whether the mismatches were “exceptions” or “minorities”: to me a distinction without a difference. Here’s how they define them early in the paper:

The question is what these exceptional cases actually represent: are they exceptions or minorities? The difference is crucial, as it defines the very possibility that we will ever be able to understand what these cases actually mean. From an archaeological point of view, we will never be able to understand exceptions: by definition, an exception is something that occurs so rarely that it does not provide enough statistical evidence. By the same token, as far as the perception of a certain social phenomenon is concerned, exceptions escape classification, hence they are difficult to frame within one’s world view. Minorities, on the other hand, are recurrent. No matter how small, a minority will always provide enough data to be singled out from the statistical norm and modelled consequently. Similarly, in the social domain a minority can be acknowledged by laws and explicitly assigned rights and duties.

Clearly, if you find one just mismatch (and it’s real) then it is an “exception”. But what about three, five, ten, or twenty? Are they “exceptions” or “minorities”? (Their claim that “exceptions are so rare that they do not provide enough statistical evidence”. But evidence for what?)

The authors consider the distinction between “exceptions” and “minorities” very important because while exceptions don’t have “rights and duties”, or are protected by law, “minorities” have those features.  But there is no cutoff given between “minorities” and “exceptions”!   This is very weird but it gives you a sense of the ideology lurking behind this research.

In point of fact, in modern society there’s no difference between “minorities” and “exceptions”: those whose gender doesn’t comport with their biological sex deserve exactly the same rights and protections as others—with a few exceptions like sports, prison occupancy, etc.—regardless of how common or uncommon they are.

The mask slips when the authors put this paragraph near the end of the paper:

Framing this divergence from the statistical norm as minority rather than exception helps understand its potential relevance. While an exception would be limited to a single person that is different from others—someone that is not included, and in a way unpredictable—a minority can be formally acknowledged, protected and even revered.

Revered? And can’t you acknowledge those who don’t conform to the norm no matter how rare they are?

Note that in the first paragraph above they say “exceptions” may not be one-offs but simply “sufficiently rare”, while right above they say they are “single persons”. The authors can’t seem to make up their minds.

At any rate, the last paragraph suggests—and here I’m guessing—that the authors thought that if they found an appreciably high number of discrepancies between skeletal sex and grave-good gender, that would somehow validate and revere transgender people in society. (Note that homosexuals are neither “trangender” nor “non-binary”.) But the connection between frequency and rights is nonexistent.  If murderers constituted 10% rather than a much smaller fraction of Americans, that would not give them any more rights, even if you think (as I do as a determinist) that murderers never have a choice about whether they kill someone.

At any rate, this is the kind of mishigass you can get yourself into when you try to use archeological data to justify modern social norms.  Again, I’m just guessing, for the ideology is well hidden in this paper, but I think this is the basis for the whole analysis.  And it also depends on the reader accepting that a person whose biological sex didn’t match their grave goods must have been “non-binary”.

h/t: Gavin

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 28, 2023 • 8:15 am

If you have good wildlife photos, please send them in!

Today is Sunday, ergo we have a themed set of bird photos by John Avise. John’s narrative and IDs are indented, and click on the photos to enlarge them.

Great, Greater, and Magnificent

Several avian species in North America have the words Great, Greater, or Magnificent in their official common names.  These are the subjects of this week’s post.  Usually, the use of such descriptive epithets is to distinguish these birds from closely related species with the words Little, Lesser, or Least in their common names.  But sometimes, the designations are used simply because the birds are — well — magnificent! The state where each photo was taken is indicated in parentheses.

Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias (Texas):

Great Blue Heron flying (California):

Great Blue Heron landing (California):

Great Egret, Ardea alba (California):

Great Egret flying (California):

Great Blue Heron with Great Egret (California):

Great Black-backed Gull, Larus marinus (Florida):

Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus (California):

Greater Yellowlegs, Tringa melanoleuca (California):

Greater Yellowlegs flying (California):

Greater White-fronted Goose, Anser albifrons (California):

Magnificent (Rivoli’s) Hummingbird, Eugenes fulgens (Arizona):

Magnificent Hummingbird flying (Arizona):

Magnificent Frigatebird, Fregata magnificens (Florida):

Magnificent Frigatebird juvenile (Florida):

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, May 28, 2023, and it’s National Tapioca Day.  Did you know that tapioca, including that used to make the pearls in your bubble tea, all comes from starch extracted from the cassava root, a South American shrub (Manihot esculenta)? But it can also be made into bread and cassava chips? It’s also used to starch your shirts. The roots:

It’s also the day that the Indianapolis 500 is run, International Hamburger Day, Downfall of the Derg (Ethiopia), Downfall of the Derg (Ethiopia), International Hamburger Day, Menstrual Hygiene Day, and National Brisket Day.  Texas beef brisket is America’s best barbecue. Here’s a plate of sausage, brisket, and all the trimmings from Black’s in Lockhart, Texas (sweet tea, potato salad, beans, pickles, white bread, and the obligatory banana pudding for dessert):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

BREAKING NEWS: DEMS AND REPUBLICANS STRIKE A DEAL OVER THE DEBT LIMIT! Well, it’s not finalized yet, and we don’t have all the details. But, as I predicted, they’re going to freeze federal spending:

President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Saturday reached an agreement in principle to lift the debt limit for two years while cutting and capping some government spending over the same period, a breakthrough after a marathon set of crisis talks that has brought the nation within days of its first default in history.

Congressional passage of the plan before June 5, when the Treasury is projected to exhaust its ability to pay its obligations, is not assured, particularly in the House, which plans to consider it on Wednesday. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the chamber, and right-wing lawmakers who had demanded significantly larger budget cuts in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit were already in revolt.

But the compromise, which would effectively freeze federal spending that had been on track to grow, had the blessing of both the Democratic president and the Republican speaker, raising hopes that it could break the fiscal stalemate that has gripped Washington and the nation for weeks, threatening an economic crisis.

And as I also predicted, there will be some spending cuts to satisfy the GOP (bolding is mine)

. . . In a nighttime news conference outside his Capitol office that lasted just one minute, Mr. McCarthy said the deal contained “historic reductions in spending, consequential reforms that will lift people out of poverty into the work force, rein in government overreach” and would add no new taxes. He declined to answer questions or provide specifics, but said he planned to release legislative text on Sunday.

What the bold part probably means is that they’re not going to give social benefits to the poor unless they get a job, something the GOP insisted on.

*According to the NYT, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had urged Democrats to raise the debt limit ceiling after November’s elections but before the change of House seats, when it was clear that the GOP would hold the House in January but the Dems were still in the majority and could pass legislation. (The Senate was and still is majority Democratic, but spending bills have to go through the House of Representatives.)

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda. Talks between the White House and congressional Republicans on a potential deal to raise the debt ceiling were continuing on Saturday.

Democrats don’t fricking listen! No contingency plans have been broached as the gubmint doesn’t want to scare the bejeezus out of seniors, poor people, or anyone with a 401K plan. Here’s some buzz:

Most market watchers expect that the Treasury Department would opt to make interest and principal payments to bondholders before paying other bills, yet Ms. Yellen would say only that she would face “very tough choices.”

*But of course there’s still no bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling, though the default deadline has now been pushed back to June 5..  Meanwhile, the Democrats are starting to blame Biden for being too generous to the GOP, even though none of us really knows what kind of deals are being broached.

As White House negotiators got closer to a debt-ceiling deal with House Republicans, the griping from congressional Democrats got louder.

For days, Democratic lawmakers have been openly questioning the White House’s approach to a deal that needs some of their votes to pass, given that many Republicans will also oppose it, to head off a default. Among their complaints: that President Biden was giving away too much in the deal, that the White House’s messaging was muddled and that Biden was publicly silent while House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) was chatting to the press around the clock.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists globally. Why are we going to negotiate with the economic terrorists here?” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), referring to Republicans’ apparent willingness to default rather than pass a clean debt-ceiling increase. When asked if he was worried that Democrats were giving away too much in the negotiations, he said he was very concerned.

Yeah, that’s good bipartisanship: call your opponents “economic terrorists”.

White House aides say that they are fighting for Democratic priorities, such as preserving the climate and healthcare legislation passed last year. People close to the White House said Biden opted to largely stay quiet to give negotiators room to do their jobs.

McCarthy faces his own intraparty puzzle: The final deal will certainly be opposed by some conservative Republicans, who have complained that he has given too much away to Democrats, so he needs to ensure those opponents aren’t so frustrated that they move to oust him from the speakership.

My prediction again: a raise in the debt limit that must be frozen for two years, and enough cuts to satisfy most Democrats and a few Republicans. (But what do I know?) Medicare and Social Security will stay.

*Henry Kissinger turned 100 yesterday, proving that only the good die young. In the WaPo, hiss son David gives his dad’s “guide to longevity”.  I would have thought it would be “always support dictators,” but excuse my snark.

Even the pandemic did not slow him down: Since 2020, he has completed two books and begun work on a third. He returned from the Bilderberg Conference in Lisbon earlier this week just in time to embark on a series of centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.

My father’s longevity is especially miraculous when one considers the health regimen he has followed throughout his adult life, which includes a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant.

His secrets?

How then to account for his enduring mental and physical vitality? He has an unquenchable curiosity that keeps him dynamically engaged with the world. His mind is a heat-seeking weapon that identifies and grapples with the existential challenges of the day. In the 1950s, the issue was the rise of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity. About five years ago, as a promising young man of 95, my father became obsessed with the philosophical and practical implications of artificial intelligence.

. . .The other secret to my father’s endurance is his sense of mission. Although he has been caricatured as a cold realist, he is anything but dispassionate. He believes deeply in such arcane concepts as patriotism, loyalty and bipartisanship. It pains him to see the nastiness in today’s public discourse and the seeming collapse of the art of diplomacy.

As a child, I remember the warmth of his friendships with people whose politics might have been different from his, such as Kay Graham, Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy loved to play practical jokes that my father thoroughly enjoyed (including inviting Dad to his home office and claiming to have a mongoose hidden in a closet).

These are all post facto rationalizations, of course. I suspect he just had good genes.

Here’s a photo I took of the old git being interviewed onstage by Lesley Stahl; this was at the Kent Presents conference in August of 2018:

*Grifter Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison in two days, beginning an 11+ year prison sentence for wire fraud. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the Theranos scandal years ago, chews over her past in a piece called “As Elizabeth Holmes heads to jail for fraud, many puzzle over her motives.”

The 11-year sentence represents a comeuppance for the wide-eyed woman who broke through “tech bro” culture to become one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, only to be exposed as a fraud. Along the way, Holmes became a symbol of the shameless hyperbole that often saturates startup culture.

But questions still linger about her true intentions — so many that even the federal judge who presided over her trial seemed mystified. And Holmes’ defenders continue to ask whether the punishment fits the crime.

Is this such a puzzle. She wanted to be rich and famous, the female equivalent of Steve Jobs. And who cares what her defenders think?

Her motives are still somewhat mysterious, and some supporters say federal prosecutors targeted her unfairly in their zeal to bring down one of the most prominent practitioners of fake-it-til-you-make-it — the tech sector’s brand of self-promotion that sometimes veers into exaggeration and blatant lies to raise money.

Her many detractors contend she deserves to be in prison for peddling a technology that she repeatedly boasted would quickly scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.

. . .Holmes’ supporters still contend she always had good intentions and was unfairly scapegoated by the Justice Department. They insist she simply deployed the same over-the-top promotion tactics as many other tech executives, including Elon Musk, who has repeatedly made misleading statements about the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving cars.

That’s not what the jury thought, nor did John Carreyrou, the erstwhile WSJ reporter who broke the scandal and then wrote the definitive book about it.

According to those supporters, Holmes was singled out because she was a woman who briefly eclipsed the men who customarily bask in Silicon Valley’s spotlight, and the trial turned her into a latter-day version of Hester Prynne — the protagonist in the 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.”

No, she was probably given a lighter sentence because she was a woman with two kids; her partner in crime, Sunny Balwani, was sentenced to 13 years. Whether or not she has two X chromosomes, if she does the crime, she does the time.

*Anyone who has a cat has, watching it twitch and move its paws around while sleeping, suspected that the cat is dreaming. Now we have even more solid evidence that another animal may dream: the octopus.  A new paper in bioRΧiv, described in the NYT, suggests that Costello, one octopus observed in his tank at Rockefeller University, might have dreams. The data?

Costello the octopus was napping while stuck to the glass of his tank at the Rockefeller University in New York. He snoozed quietly for half an hour, and then entered a more active sleep stage, his skin cycling through colors and textures used for camouflage — typical behavior for a cephalopod.

But soon things became strange.

A minute later, Costello scuttled along the glass toward his tank’s sandy bottom, curling his arms over his body. Then he spun like a writhing cyclone. Finally, Costello swooped down and clouded half of his tank with ink. As the tank’s filtration system cleared the ink, Eric Angel Ramos, a marine scientist, noticed that Costello was grasping a pipe with unusual intensity, “looking like he was trying to kill it,” he said.

“This was not a normal octopus behavior,” said Dr. Ramos, who is now at the University of Vermont. It’s not clear when or if Costello woke up during the episode, Dr. Ramos said. But afterward, Costello returned to normal, eating and later playing with his toys.

“We were completely dumbfounded,” said Marcelo O. Magnasco, a biophysicist at Rockefeller. Perhaps Costello was having a nightmare, he and a team of researchers speculated. They shared this idea and other possible explanations in a study uploaded this month to the bioRxiv website. It has yet to be formally reviewed by other scientists.

Remember, it’s one octopus and one video. I don’t doubt that they’re capable of dreaming, but how do we find out? Put electrodes by their brain while they’re sleeping? And the article does come with a caveat:

There are other explanations for the behavior, such as a seizure or neurological problems, which could be related to Costello having lost parts of two limbs before he was caught. But Dr. Magnasco said he hoped that, by reporting the incident, other scientists would watch out for the behavior, which his group observed by mere chance.

PTSD! (Post tentacle severance disorder!)

Here’s a video (partly animated at the beginning, I think):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expects doom:

Hili: Sodom and Gomorrah.
A: What happened?
Hili: A rainbow over the church.
In Polish
Hili: Sodoma i Gomora.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Tęcza nad kościołem.

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

From Stash Krod, a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon:

From The Atheist Daily:

From the same site (subscribe; there are only 8,000 subscribers):

From Masih, another Iranian protestor, this one killed by being shot with a teargas canister:

From Malcolm:  refrigerator bandit. How could you be mad at a cat as smart as this?

From Barry. I’ll agree hes living his best life—if he does it again!

A long groaner that I found on Twitter. But bear through the joke to the end:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, an 11-year-old gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a stupendous round of doubles badminton—Japan vs. Malaysia.

Not unusual for a cat! But I think this one loses the pens under the rug.

I lecture on this but didn’t know there were color photos. I believe Scott’s team found Glossopteris fossils on the Beardmore Glacier in the second photo—evidence that Antarctica had not only been green, but that the continents had all been joined at one time. The fossils, hauled in a sledge on the return journey, were found with the explorers’ bodies when they died returning from the Pole.

My conversation with Coleman Hughes

May 27, 2023 • 12:00 pm

UPDATE: I’m told the video will be out next Tuesday, so if you want audio and visuals (recommended), I’ll put the YouTube conversation up then

__________

 

Not long ago I did a podcast (which I think will eventually become a video) with the young writer, musician, and podcasthost Coleman Hughes, who has a Substack page, a YouTube page, a homepage that lists his video podcasts, a list of all his audio podcasts, and, on top of all that, he’s a rapper and plays jazz trombone. His political views seem to be of the McWhorterian/Lourian stripe: heterodox from a minority point of view, which of course draws flak.  I found him a delightful interviewer, wanting to talk about evolution along with everything else—and he came well prepared to discuss it.

We talked for a bit over an hour, and you can hear our conversation by clicking on the screenshots below. As always, I can’t listen to myself talk, so I heard about two minutes before I had to turn it off. Perhaps you’ll be able to stand more of it, so I’ll put it up here.

Here’s Coleman’s summary of the interview:

My guest today is Jerry Coyne. Jerry is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1978, after which he served as a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution for over two decades. His seminal work is on the speciation of fruit flies. Jerry is also the author of two books, including “Why Evolution Is True”, which is also the name of his blog, and “Faith Versus Fact”.

In this episode, we talk about the tension between evolution and the biblical origin story. Jerry goes over the basics of the theory of evolution by natural selection. We talk about sexual selection. We talk about the teaching of intelligent design in schools and how that compares to the battle over CRT in schools today. We dicuss the attack on evolutionary psychology from the political left. We discuss epi genetics and the concept of intergenerational trauma. We talk about how humanity has evolved genetically in recent history and the consequences of birth rate differences between different groups of people. We talk about gender dysphoria and gender ideology. Finally, we go on to talk about the unanswered questions that remain in the field of evolutionary biology.

When you click on the screenshot, you’ll be taken to a site where you can access the conversation:

Caturday felid trifecta: Why cats are revered in Japan; why cats seem to be psychopaths; cat dies defending human family from venomous snake; and lagniappe

May 27, 2023 • 10:00 am

Yes! An article about cats in the New York Times, which has at last found a theme to unite all good people. This one is about why the Japanese revere cats, as we all know they do. Japan is the home of Miss Kitty, there are dozens of cat-themed retail objects, and Japan has several “cat islands” that you can visit to see gazillions of felines.  The article in fact begins with the author’s planned trip to Aoshima, a cat island, a trip that was sadly aborted by severe currents, making the author, Hanya Yanagihara, distraught. Click to read:

Some excerpts:

“You don’t need to see those cats,” Mihoko [Yanagihara’s companion] said. “Aoshima isn’t the only place in the country that has a lot of cats.” We were eating dinner by that point: My despair had lasted from brunch at an American-style coffee shop, the kind that no longer exists in America but became popular here after occupation; through a visit to Matsuyama Castle (built in 1627), one of Japan’s dozen or so extant castles; a stop at an orange juice bar (where you could order juice squeezed from different local varietals, some sweet, some tart); and, finally, dinner at a restaurant where we both ordered gyu, thin slices of grilled marinated beef, served rare over rice with grilled burdock and leeks. Throughout the day, as I sulked and broke into intermittent rants at the gods, the weather and the harbor master, Mihoko patiently pointed out cats — here was one licking itself near a makeshift shrine; there was another, staring at us through slit eyes — and fed me cat trivia: Natsume Soseki, perhaps Japan’s greatest modern writer and the author of “I Am a Cat” (1906), a satire of early 20th-century society narrated by a cat, had once taught English to middle schoolers in Matsuyama; earlier, at a gift store, we’d seen cookies stamped with an image of his face.

My desperation was, I could sense, beginning to perplex Mihoko. To her, Japan itself was cat obsessed. After all, cats were so elemental to the country that it had popularized the cat cafe, where you can pay to have a coffee and hang out with cats. So who needed Aoshima when you could get your fix right here in Tokyo? Who needed to travel to an island full of cats when you were already on an island of cats? To be in Japan is to be surrounded by cats: All you had to do was realize that.

(from the NYT): Naoko Kamimoto, Aoshima’s youngest resident, who’s in her 70s, tends to one of the cats.Credit…Kyoko Hamada

Here are two cat icons you surely know:

The country’s two most enduring feline icons were born centuries apart. Hello Kitty, created as a cartoon figure in 1974, became the ambassador of first-wave kawaii culture, her image printed on erasers, aprons and sanitary pads and shipped around the world (according to her official origin story, Hello Kitty doesn’t even live in Japan but in a London suburb and, according to her creator, is a human, not a cat). But long before her, or her cartoon predecessor, Doraemon, a blue, earless, grinning cat-robot, there was the maneki neko, or “welcoming cat.”

The maneki neko is a blank-eyed cat figurine — usually white, often ceramic, its expression inscrutable but benign — with a bell around its neck and one paw raised near its ear as if in greeting. You’ve probably encountered one in your local Japanese restaurant; in Japan, they’re so ubiquitous that the eye stops registering them after a while. A few days after returning from Matsuyama, I met Mihoko for a trip out to Setagaya, a district in western Tokyo, where there was an Edo-era temple, Gotokuji, dedicated to the maneki neko.

Here is a maneki neko that I keep in my office:

A maneki neko store I photographed in Hong Kong (the Chinese go for them, too). Of course I bought a few:

And Hello Kitty:

More:

Anyone who’s been to Japan knows that virtually every neighborhood in every town has at least one Buddhist temple and one Shinto shrine. Most of these places are humble: a clean-swept yard and a darkened main building, opened only on New Year’s Day. But some are rich: their gardens well maintained, their trees trimmed, their bamboo fences fresh and green. Gotokuji is a rich temple; in the middle of the central walkway, we encountered a large, spectacular iron incense brazier with Ii’s mon, or family crest, an orange blossom, stamped in gold on its base. It’s rich because cat-loving pilgrims have come here for decades to make donations and ask for good fortune, and because (like many other savvy temples) it sells irresistible merchandise, in the form of ceramic maneki neko, which were offered in five different sizes. The largest was about a foot high; the smallest, just an inch.

The temple maintains a series of shelving units to hold the thousands of maneki neko that visitors have bought, scribbled their names and wishes on and left behind for luck. . . . There were, I noticed, no actual cats at the temple, presumably because they would have knocked over the maneki neko.

A photo of the temple:

Shintoism is no doubt also one of the reasons places like Aoshima exist. In Japan, there aren’t just (11) cat islands: There’s a monkey island. There’s a rabbit island. There’s a deer island (and deer cities, too, most notably Nara, Japan’s eighth-century capital and home to more than a thousand sika deer, who dominate the main park and occasionally try to butt visitors, who are warned by signs not to antagonize them). The Nara deer are exciting to encounter until they begin chasing you but, in general, the attitude in Japan seems to be that the animals are there to stay and, despite some annual culling, it’s our job to accommodate them.

Yanagihara never made it to the Cat Island, but there are plenty of pictures, including some of the five humans who inhabit the mile-long island and feed the cats:

(From the NYT) Aoshima has a designated area where tourists can give cats food. Credit: Kyoko Hamada

There’s a lot of cat history I’ve omitted (it’s a long piece), including the ambivalent relationship of Buddhism and of Shintoism to cats.

(from the NYT): A resident of Aoshima eats tangerines as cats snack on niboshi (small, dried fish).

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Here’s a piece from The Atlantic (archived) in which Sarah Zhang explains why people think cats are psychopaths, even though they aren’t. They’re just “aloof little jerks”.

An excerpt:

Cats, she pointed out, simply don’t have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that’s just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable—and even nonexistent—until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.

D*gs, on the other hand, have “learned to mimic humans”, imitating smiling, expressions of guilt, and appealing raises of the brow.  Feh: they’re sycophants! And their independence is one reason people think they’re “psychopaths.” But they’re not: they’re just CATS!

A common charge against cats is that they do not care about their owners as anything more than a source of wet food. In studies of pet-owner relationships, scientists have found that dogs are more “attached” to owners. These studies frequently rely on protocol called the Ainsworth Strange Situation, in which the pet explores an unfamiliar environment alone, with its owner, or with a stranger. Dogs are more at ease with their owners rather than with strangers. Cats can’t seem to care less about the human there.

Maybe this says something about pet-owner attachment, but Delgado noted that dogs are used to their owners taking them to new places. Cats are territorial, and they might only leave the house to go to the vet, so what looks like indifference to their owners might just be overwhelming anxiety about a new, strange environment. Plus, the Ainsworth Strange Situation was developed by Mary Ainsworth to study parents and infants—another example of us judging cats on human rather than cat terms.

And the closing:

Talk to experienced cat owners, of course, and you’ll quickly find that psychopathy, or something that looks like it, is hardly a dealbreaker. When the subject came up in the office, my colleague Rachel Gutman launched into a tribute to her childhood cat K.C., who terrorized everyone but her immediate family members and, for some reason, Carmine the electrician. He’d bite anyone who dared to pet him. He’d attack her grandfather’s ankles. He’d pee in her grandmother’s bed when she came to visit. “In conclusion,” she said, “he was the best cat, and I miss him every day.”

A (non-psychopathic) cat from the article.

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This is a very sad story of an Australian hero cat who saved his human family by attacking a venomous snake. I’ve put the end of the story below the picture, or you can access the Facebook entry directly by clicking here.

killing the snake. Unfortunately, in the process, Arthur received a fatal envenomation snake bite. In the chaos of getting the children out of the yard, no-one saw the actual bite, but Arthur collapsed and quickly recovered like nothing was wrong not long after. Collapse events like this is a common symptom of snake bites, although not a well-known symptom amongst pet owners.
The next morning Arthur’s hoomans found him collapsed again and unable to get up. They rushed him to our Tanawha hospital. Unfortunately, Arthur’s symptoms were too severe to recover. It was with the heaviest of hearts his owners had to leave Arthur after he gained his angel wings.
His family, understandably devastated, remember him fondly and are forever grateful he saved the children’s lives. Arthur was always getting into mischief; he had previously visited us before having been in accidents and was very much loved by our team.
Rest in peace Arthur, our little hero.
Love from the Animal Emergency Service Tanawha Team ♥️
You can read about the Eastern Brown Snake (Pseudonaja textilis) here; it’s the world’s second most venomous land snake.

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Lagniappe: A cool cat DNA tee shirt is for sale, and it’s not expensive ($17 from Quertee, item here). It appears to come only in blue, but there are both men’s and women’s sizes, and it’s a nice logo. (They also have a few different non-cat shirts on sale daily for $12).  This is a must for those who love genetics and cats.

Matthew, who fits that bill, tells me, however, that the DNA helix is twisted in the wrong direction! (It’s in the Z form—a left-handed spiral—as opposed to the more common B form described by Watson and Crick).

h/t: Karl, Barry, Malcolm

Reader’s wildlife photos

May 27, 2023 • 8:30 am

Please send in your good wildlife photos to replenish the tank. Thanks!

Today we have a photo-and-text special on brambles from reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Thorny issues

Once upon a time, so Charles Perrault (1628-1703) told us, a prince was out enjoying nature by merrily killing animals in the woods, when he spotted a hidden castle deep in the forest. The prince’s myrmidons explained that the castle housed a beautiful princess who had been cursed by an evil fairy; the young lady was to lay in a comatose state until awakened by a handsome prince. His Highness, who obviously had a high opinion of his looks, decided he was the person destined to break the spell. But getting to Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t be easy; the castle was surrounded by trees and a formidable obstacle that would have stopped a less determined hobbledehoy: a wall of brambles.

Having princely clothes ruined by brambles. The Sleeping Beauty, art by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), Wikimedia Commons.’

Brambles or blackberries comprise many species that are difficult to tell apart; over 300 of them have been recognized in the UK. These related species are known as micro-species, and for practical reasons they are treated collectively as a species complex or as an aggregate group (abbreviated as agg.). So we usually refer to brambles as Rubus fruticosus agg.

Natives to much of Europe, brambles are valued fruit crops when grown as blackberry varieties, but they are also invasive in some circumstances. Their dense thickets are barriers to amorous princes and roaming livestock, and their thorns hurt animals and contaminate wool. Thanks to their vigorous growth (watch their shoots thrusting ahead), brambles can outcompete other wild plants and curtail the development of tree saplings; if left unchecked, brambles can quickly alter the species composition and physical structure of some habitats. For those reasons they are considered invasive weeds in Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

But as we have learned from many a definitive self-help book, problems are opportunities with thorns on them: several birds and small mammals nest or take shelter in bramble scrub. And their berries are food for sundry animals such as badgers, field mice, foxes, moths and voles: watch some of them having a nutritious fruit breakfast. Bramble berries are quite handy when other sources begin to dwindle in late summer and autumn.

A bramble thicket: barrier and shelter © Richard Humphrey, Wikimedia Commons:

But brambles have much more to offer; their open, bowl-shaped flowers, typical of the Rosaceae family, are easily accessible and produce large amounts of pollen and nectar, which are available during most of the season – usually from May to September in the UK. So a range of pollinators and other insects take advantage of these abundant and reliable food sources, from the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which is one of the most enthusiastic visitors, to scarce species such as the brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis) (Wignall et al., 2020).

A welcoming bramble flower © Rosser1954, Wikimedia Common:

Brambles have a flexible approach to reproduction. They commonly propagate vegetatively (no seeds are involved) by deploying ‘runners’, shoots that take root when they are touching the ground; they can resort to apomixis, which is the production of seeds without fertilisation; or less frequently, they can use the familiar sexual mechanism of pollen deposition. This diversified strategy helps explains brambles’ complex taxonomy. Plants generated by vegetative growth or apomixis are clones, genetically identical to the parent plant. When they do occasionally outcross and produce seeds from fertilized ovules, the resulting offspring will have genetic profiles slightly different from the parent plant. Given time, these variants become species marginally different from each other, which spread out as clones and readily hybridise (Clark & Jasieniuk, 2012). Untangling these species is a job for a small tribe of patient, dogged taxonomists dedicated to batology (from the Ancient Greek báton, ‘blackberry’): the scientific study of plants in the genus Rubus.

Although infrequent, sexual reproduction is important for maintaining brambles’ genetic diversity, and here insects play their part by cross-pollinating plants. Among brambles’ many flower visitors, several bees and flies have been considered candidates for the job. But this list is biased because it leaves out insects we don’t normally see collecting pollen or nectar – the nocturnal visitors, i.e., moths. And they should not be neglected. Like many other plants, brambles produce nectar with variable concentrations of sugars during the day, and their highest output happens to be from late afternoon into the evening. Such sugary bounty wasn’t likely to go unnoticed by the night shift wanderers. Anderson et al. (2023) reported a range of visitors to brambles flowers during the day (flies and bees, mostly); but at night, moths were almost alone in dropping by for a sip of nectar. But there was more; moths visited fewer flowers per hour than diurnal visitors, but they deposited more pollen grains on stigmas. That’s an important finding. Flower visitation is often – and incorrectly – assumed to be pollination. In fact, many visitors avoid pollen altogether, or manage to remove the pesky yellow grains from their bodies. Pollen deposition is a well-tested method to evaluate who is pollinating what.

A tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) depositing pollen on a Colorado Springs evening primrose flower (Oenothera harringtonii) © Smith et al., 2022:

So here we are. Blackberry lovers notwithstanding, brambles are generally despised components of our flora, even though they play an important part in supporting pollinators and other animals. These brambles’ customers in turn may depend on secretive moths for the sexual reproduction of their hosts. As is often the case in nature, the plot is considerably thicker than it looks.

Among the brambles, by Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904), enjoying luscious berries © Stephen Craven, Wikimedia Commons: