Book review: “Left is Not Woke”

May 18, 2023 • 11:30 am

The title of this new and short book (160 pages; click screenshot to go to the Amazon site) lured me to ask our library to buy it, for I thought it should be available to University folk.  And of course being a Leftist and generally “antiwoke,” I wanted to see what arguments were on offer about why being on the Left is incompatible with being woke.

I hadn’t heard of the author, but Wikipedia has an entry for Susan Neiman and this is part of it:

Susan Neiman (/ˈnaɪmən/; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Sadly, I was disappointed in her book.  The first problem is that she doesn’t deal much with what “wokeness” really is, nor give examples of it to buttress her thesis. And Neiman’s thesis is this: she’s a big fan of the Enlightenment, and thinks that Leftism (unlike Liberalism, which is wedded to capitalism) is the political instantiation of her admired Enlightenment values.

Wokeness, Neiman argues, violates three Enlightenment values in ways I describe below:

a. Wokeism is tribalistic.  The overweening aspect of the Enlightenment, argues Neiman (and here I agree), is its emphasis on UNIVERSALISM.  Moral stands should not be taken based on nationality, ethnicity, or any other generalizable trait of a person.  It is this universalist attitude that led to the fight against slavery, child labor, and segregation. All that’s required is the ability to put yourself into the shoes of another person, conferring a moral stand that effaces nationalism, racism, sexism, and so on.  Wokeism, as Neiman argues, and as we all know, is tribalistic. It is based on identity politics and sees one’s race, gender, or similar traits as the most important aspect of a person, and something that can validate or invalidate their views. Identity politics is the antithesis of the Enlightenment. It’s not that Neiman has no sympathy for the oppressed. She has plenty, and in fact goes overboard praising some aspects of identitarianism (she’s a huge fan of Black Lives Matter, for instance). But yes, true Leftism sees humanity as a community with common interests, and, as the saying goes, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”. So I’m on board with her here.

b. Wokeism places power over justice.  Drawing from postmodernism, argues Neiman, Wokeism sees the conflict between groups as a battle for power, not a fight for justice. Her argument, based on the philosophy of Michel Foucault et al., is that the Woke aren’t really looking for justice, but seeking power. And a fight for power never ends, while a fight for justice can.  I think this is also true, and is in conflict with Enlightenment values, which were far more concerned with justice than power. In fact, the two “values”, as we know, are inimical to each other. One example is the fight by gender activists to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. Justice would say no, they shouldn’t, but many gender activists favor this, and that is a drive for power. (This is my example; one of Neiman’s flaws is, as I said, her lack of examples of Wokeism to buttress her thesis.)

c.) Wokeism doesn’t really believe in progress.  Again, I agree with Neiman. The Enlightenment, as we know from Steve Pinker’s two big books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), always rested on beliefs that progress was possible, even if not always achieved.  One example I can adduce is civil rights.  The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow.  Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence.

One issue that strongly mars Neiman’s book is that she sees evolutionary psychology as deeply inimical to Leftism and to progress. She argues that evolutionary psychology, in the end, attributes selfish motivations to everything that people do, and that not only hinders moral progress (for everyone’s out for themselves), but gets rid of progress made possible by appealing to the interests of humanity as a whole instead of just your personal well being.

But Neiman’s not a biologist, and her view of evolutionary psychology is shallow and misguided. Evolutionary psychology does not predict that people will act in their own self-interest in every case: the “selfish” gene is “selfish” simply because natural selection can be seen metaphorically as genes trying to be “selfish” by outreproducing other genes.  Dawkins, frustrated by this misunderstanding (much of it coming from Mary Midgley, whom Neiman cites often), says that if he wrote The Selfish Gene now, he may have called it The Cooperative Gene.  There is far too much ignorant dissing of evolutionary psychology in this book, and it’s a serious flaw. Social rogress has clearly been made despite the fact that we’re products of natural selection, and no evolutionary psychologist I know holds the naive view that Neiman presents as characteristic of the field. We all know, for example, that culture can override evolution, and we also understand ways that natural selection itself can favor cooperation.

So if I agree with Neiman’s thesis, why am I not a big fan of her book? As I said, one reason is her lack of examples of Wokeism, which would not only support her thesis but also liven up what is a pretty scholarly and unexciting tome. Further, she dwells far too much on the Enlightenment (her academic speciality) at the expense of Wokeism, so you learn a lot more about the Englightenment (and there’s some good stuff there) but not so much about Wokeism. In other words, the book doesn’t fulfill the promise of its title.

Finally, there’s the annoying and—there’s no other word to use—ignorant attacks on evolutionary psychology presented as setting almost complete limits on our behavior and on human progress.

In the end, you might want to read this book to learn about the Enlightenment, and if you do you will. If you’ve heard the criticisms that the Enlightenment was a “Western” project, Neiman shows you how Enlightenment thinkers deliberately adopted the viewpoint of people from other cultures as a way of criticizing the problems with their own cultures without getting into trouble. But you won’t get a lot of buttressing if, like me,  you’re a Leftist seeking to understand why Wokeism is incompatible with your politics.

Once again, ideology distorts science: the editor-in-chief of Scientific American flubs big time, wrongly asserting that sparrows have four sexes.

May 18, 2023 • 8:39 am

This is a sad story: sad for biology, sad for science communication, and perhaps saddest for Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. Over the past few years, Helmuth has injected a hefty dose of authoritarian progressive ideology into her magazine (see here for some of my posts on the issue). It’s gotten worse and worse, even though the readers, and her followers on Twitter, have repeatedly urged her to back off the ideology and restore the magazine to its former glory as the nation’s premier venue for popular science.  But Helmuth is woke, and, being religious in that sense, simply can’t keep the ideology out of the science, just as an evangelist can’t help asking you if you’ve heard the good news about Jesus.

The tweet Helmuth put up this week (shown below) is a prime example, and it’s pretty dire because it distorts biology—in particular the work of scientists who spent years studying the genetics and mating behavior of white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis).  This is an interesting bird because both males and females show two forms (this is a “polymorphism”), with one form having a tan crown stripe and the other a white crown stripe.  Here is a picture of the two forms from a PNAS paper.

The forms also differ in their parental behavior and courtship.  I think you can get the differences by looking at the abstract of a paper by Elaina Tuttle, given below. Tuttle was an accomplished ornithological behaviorist who did part of her postdoc in Steve Pruett-Jones’s lab upstairs from me. It was her work that called attention to the involvement of inversions in the mating system of white-throated sparrows. Sadly, Tuttle died at only 52 of breast cancer.

Here’s a 2003 paper by Elaina on the species (found in North America) and its mating system (click to go to screenshot, and you can find the pdf here).

Her summary is below, showing that the two forms (“morphs’) mate disassortatively—that is, tan males prefer to mate with white females and vice versa.  There is also a difference in their behavior, with white males and females being more aggressive during the mating and breeding season:

Organisms exhibiting genetic polymorphism often also exhibit true alternative life-history strategies in which behavioral tactics are genetically fixed. Such systems are ideal for the study of the evolution of life histories because the consequences of selective episodes can be more easily identified. Here I report an interesting and classic example of a species exhibiting true alternative strategies. Due to a chromosomal inversion, male and female white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) occur as two distinct morphs, tan or white. Tan and white morphs mate disassortatively, and this mating pattern maintains the polymorphism in relatively equal proportions within the population. In comparison with tan males, white males are more aggressive, frequently intrude into neighboring territories, spend less time guarding their mates, occasionally attempt polygyny, and provide less parental care. White females are also more aggressive and solicit copulation from their mates twice as often as tan females.

Note that they mention just two sexes: males and females, each characterized by their color. Just two sexes!  The genetics of this system is complicated because, the genes causing the different colors and behaviors almost surely reside within a chromosomal inversion (a part of the chromosome that gets broken, turned around, and then reattached).  This makes it hard to do genetic analysis. Tuttle explains this:

. . . . . almost all white birds are heterozygous for the inversion (i.e., 2m/2, where 2m represents the inverted chromosome and 2 represents the noninverted form), whereas tan birds are homozygous noncarriers (i.e., 2/2). . .

The disassortative mating and different behavioral strategies have combined to make this variation remain fairly stable in the population, though I’m not sure there’s a population-genetic model showing how this actually. works. (That would be hard, as it would require knowing a number of parameters that are difficult to estimate but are required for a good model.)

Further, the tan and white morphs occasionally mate with their own color (about 4% of the time, probably an underestimate because of sneaky mating). This kind of mating is called assortative—like mates with like. Because of this, the two forms are not reproductively isolated. That’s why they’re not called different species.

Note that there are just two sexes here, as virtually all scientific papers describing this phenomenon realize: males make sperm; females make eggs. Here are two quotes from the Tuttle paper:

This species is polymorphic, and both sexes can be separated into tan and white morphs based on the color of the median crown stripe (Lowther, 1961).

and

White-throated sparrows may be an exception to this rule because, regardless of fitness effects, the genetic alternatives are present in both sexes, there is likely to be evolutionary mechanisms maintaining multiple strategies. . .

Just two sexes, and every ornithologist knows this. Even if each morph mated only with its own kind, so that there was total reproductive isolation between the forms and they would, in effect, be two species, there would still be just two species, with each having two sexes.

Now the popular press has mistaken this system for the phenomenon of “four sexes”, which is just flat wrong. The biological definition of sex involves what kind of gamete you make, and here there are only two.  Females make and lay eggs, males make sperm. For descriptions of this system showing “four sexes”, see here (Nature!), here, and here, among others.

That’s a distortion of the truth, and a misleading one that gender activists co-opt to say that “yes, animal sex is not binary”.  They are wrong. But in fact Laura Helmuth did just that in her tweet, citing a paper from Ken Kaufman’s Notebook in the Audubon News.  Kaufman says this (see more later):

It’s almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes. That may sound like a joke, but it’s actually a good description of what’s going on.

. . . Many different genes here are tightly linked to form a “supergene,” so that birds of one color morph also inherit a whole range of behaviors. The resulting effect is that the White-throat really does operate as a bird with four sexes. For anyone curious about the scientific background, you can read all the technical details here.

The Current Biology paper that the last link goes to does indeed say that the bird “operates as if it has four sexes”.  And I found a 2020 paper by Maney et al. in Hormones and Behavior called “Inside the supergene of the bird with four sexes.” But while the paper uses “four sexes” in the title, it also notes that that is merely a “nickname” for the species. Maney et al. then correctly refer to “both sexes” throughout.

But if there are four sexes, what are those sexes?  All you could say is “tan male”, :”white male”, “tan female,” and “white female.” But those are not sexes, as they don’t produce four different kinds of gametes. Nor is reproductive isolation between the tan and white morphs complete, so it’s not as if a “white male cannot mate with a white female”, which would be the case if these were four sexes. As I said, assortative (like-type) matings occur at least 4% of the time. Further, the offspring of some of those matings must, by virtue of the chromosomally-based system of mating, be fertile (i.e., if tan birds mate assortatively with tan birds, their offspring will be equivalent to the normal “tan” morph in behavior, appearance, and mating propensity).

If you’re a sane biologist and use the biological definition of sex, we have a species with two sexes, with each sex having two morphs. And the morphs mate disassortatively, but not completely so. It’s surely an interesting system, but deeply misleading to use it as an exception to the sex binary. It makes me angry when people like Helmuth do this, for on some level they must know they’re wrong.

Nevertheless, Helmuth wants to go with the popular press and with woke ideology rather than with science, and declares in the tweet below that the species has “four chromosomally distinct sexes.” (Even that isn’t true, as each morph has the same inversion type.) She underlines her ideology by adding her P.P.S.: “Sex is not binary,” as if this example disproves it.  My P.P.S. is “Yes, sex is binary and you know it.”

Two points here: Helmuth is dead wrong, as biologists working on this system realize. There are not four sexes.

Second, she is being deliberately obtuse because she wants to buttress her view, expressed elsewhere, that “sex is a spectrum.” This, of course, is a trope meant to go along with the view that gender is a spectrum, which gender activists somehow want to read into nature itself, seeing the same spectrum in nature that they see in society. But as Richard Feynman said, “Mother Nature can’t be fooled,” and all animals and vascular plants obstinately show just two sexes.

What is amusing about Helmuth’s tweet is that she was SO wrong that the deluge of critical comments eventually prompted Twitter’s “community notes” program to correct what she said (remember, this is the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American), and append an “added context” note saying she’s wrong—with the “context” noting that there just two sexes, and each sex comes in two colors.

I don’t know about other scientists or science editors, but if I was publicly spanked on Twitter like Helmuth was below, I’d be hideously embarrassed, and either correct myself (she won’t), or delete the tweet, which conveys scientific misinformation. (Update: She’s cut off the comments on her post, clearly perturbed that there were so many, with the vast majority being critical._

This is what started the Twitter fracas. Note the “added context”, which readers can upvote.

And here’s what they call the “ratio” of comments to “likes” on her Tweet. This reflects the fact that the vast majority of people commenting on her tweet were critical. She has been, as the kids say, “ratioed”:

Scientists and informed laypeople immediately began going after this tweet, some polite and correcting it, others calling for Helmuth’s firing (I can understand that sentiment but I would never argue that anyone should be fired). One of the scientists, who had already debunked the sparrows as a violation of the sex binary, was Colin Wright, who wrote this on his website:

The second case study claims to investigate “the evolutionary consequences of more than two sexes.” Perhaps here we will finally be told what these new sexes are! But the first sentence moves the goalpost from “sexes” to “operative sexes,” which they never define.

The example they give of a species “with more than two sexes” is the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). This species has two color morphs, males and females with either white or tan stripes. The more aggressive white stripe morph has a large inversion on chromosome 2, and the species mates disassortatively by color morph, meaning that white stripe morphs tend to mate with tan striped morphs. This chromosome inversion coupled with the disassortative mating by morph has led to a situation where chromosome 2 “behaves like” another sex chromosome.

He adds to that that in a tweet below issued as a comment on Helmuth’s tweet:

What happened? Helmuth blocked Wright (that’s what it means in the red rectangle below):

Wright then clarifies the story and calls attention to his being blocked. He’s right: Helmuth couldn’t abide the truth:

Emma Hilton also replied to Helmuth:

 

And Emma got blocked, too:

However, Carole Hooven, another critic of the “non-binary” view of sex, doesn’t seem to have been blocked. Perhaps I’ll be too, but I haven’t been yet.

Finally, Agustín Fuentes, the cultural anthropologist from Princeton whom we’ve met before, retweeted Helmuth’s post, for he’s denied the sex binary too, and in Scientific American!). But being thin-skinned, he puts in an addendum saying that the quote he gives is not his own. But he still apparently embraces the idea that there is no sex binary in humans.

 

To sum up, Helmuth is tweeting wrong things about biology in the service of her ideology, an ideology that she doesn’t just embrace, but has infused into the magazine she runs. Perhaps Scientific American wants to become Ideological American, but I’m hoping things will turn around. They would if Helmuth could simply adopt the idea that she shouldn’t use the magazine as a mouthpiece for her politics, but she won’t do that. Also, she refuses to engage with scientific criticism, not a good look for an editor. This exchange exemplifies that:

And if I were friends with Helmuth, I’d tell her this.

h/t: Steve, Colin

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 18, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Thursday, May 18, 2023: National Cheese Soufflé Day.

Photo and recipe here

It’s also Ascension, Hummus Day, International Museum Day, National Visit Your Relatives Day, World AIDS Vaccine Day, Independence Day (Somaliland) (unrecognized; click the link to see why), and National Speech Pathologist Day, and Ascension Day, the day Jesus is supposed to have gone up to Heaven after 40 days of appearing to his disciples (Easter) after he was crucified and resurrected.  He then took his disciples up to the Mount of Olives and. . .  . .zoomed up to meet his Father/alternative morph.

Reader Steve shows one reconstruction of the event:

 

There will be no “readers’ wildlife photos” today as I am running out of photos, none are coming in, and I have to ration them. Sorry!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It’s not yet clear whether anything will happen to keep the U.S. from reaching its debt limit on June 1, at which point most of the government will shut down. According to the NYT, the House Democrats (in the minority, of course) are contemplating their own maneuver, one that seems unlikely to work.

House Democrats pushed forward on Wednesday with a procedural move that could force a vote to increase the debt limit should negotiations between President Biden and Republicans collapse, moving despite signs of progress in the bipartisan talks to advance a long-shot Plan B to avert a default.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, wrote to his colleagues urging them to quickly sign a discharge petition, which can automatically force a House vote on legislation if a majority of 218 members sign it.

There are only 213 Democrats in the House, so they’d have to pull in some Republicans.  Still, things haven’t reached a standstill vis-à-vis negotiations:

Though Mr. Jeffries noted there were signs after Tuesday’s White House meeting hosted by Mr. Biden that a “real pathway exists to find an acceptable, bipartisan resolution that prevents a default,” he said Democrats must take all possible steps to avert a crisis.

At the same time, the president has indicated openness to considering adding new work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other federal aid, a Republican demand opposed by Democrats in the House and Senate. Mr. Biden, before he left for Japan on Wednesday for a meeting of the Group of 7 nations, sought to downplay whatever concessions he might give, characterizing the potential changes to benefit requirements as “not anything of any consequence.”

The Republican stand here reminds me of the old GOP “welfare queen” trope. A single mother with kids, for example, has to work to get food stamps?  But Biden has clearly moved, as previously he said he would accept no Republican conditions on his demand that the debt ceiling be raised.

*Well, the Supreme Court has surprisingly accepted some new restrictions on guns.  Recently my state of Illinois enacted a ban on both AR-15 style rifles and large ammunition magazines. It was appealed, but the Supreme Court swatted away the appeal and left the ban in place.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday left in place for now Illinois’ new ban on the purchase and sale of AR-15-style rifles and large ammunition magazines, in the court’s first consideration of gun-control legislation since its conservative majority made it more difficult for governments to justify such restrictions.

The court without comment turned down a request from a gun shop owner from Naperville and a national gun rights organization to keep both the state law and a local measure passed by Naperville from being implemented while legal battles continue. The order comes as the nation has recently weathered dozens of mass killings, many of them involving the kinds of weapons Illinois and the city seek to ban.

It is not unusual in emergency requests for the court not to provide its reasoning. There were no noted dissents to the order.

The Supreme Court’s action follows a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit to allow the laws to take effect while courts consider constitutional challenges. Gun shop owners and other organizations have said the laws violate the Supreme Court’s decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen that extended Second Amendment protections.

Now this is an emergency ruling, and the paper notes that the Seventh Circuit appellate court will hear the case later, as different judges below that level have ruled in different ways. It’s still possible that in the end, the case will go back to the Supreme Court and the Illinois law overturned on the case’s “merits.”

*In a speech for Nakba Day at the UN yesterday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a number of completely ridiculous statements and was given a standing ovation for them. (Yes, it’s the UN, Jake!)

Here are some things that Abbas said at the UN:

 “Britain and the United States, in particular, bear direct moral and political responsibility for the Nakba of the Palestinian people. These two countries participated in turning our people in victims, when they decided to plant a foreign entity in our historical homeland, for their own colonialist purposes.

“The truth is that these countries, the Western countries, wanted to get rid of the Jews and to benefit from them in Palestine. They wanted to kill two birds with one stone.

“The false Zionist and Israeli Claims continue… They cannot avoid lying… They lie And lie, like Goebbels [Said]: ‘lie And lie, until people believe it'”

“Israel has been digging [underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque] for 30 years, in an attempt to find anything that would prove its [past] existence there, but they did not find anything. It is not me saying this. The Israeli historians and archeologists said this. They said: ‘We could not find anything. We have nothing here.’ So why lie? They dug underneath Al-Aqsa and above [sic] it… They dug everywhere but did not find anything.

This is Jew hatred, plain and simple. It is not criticism of the present Israeli government, but simple anti-Zionism, which of course is anti-Semitism. As Newsweek wrote:

In a statement ahead of yesterday’s event, the UN said it aimed to “highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.”

If the UN was so concerned with “recognizing the reality of history,” it would have recalled that in 1947, the local Jewish leadership voted in favor of the UN Partition Plan for the creation of two states, whereas the Arabs rejected it and launched a merciless war of annihilation against the Jewish State the day after its establishment.

*As I noted yesterday, a court ruled that Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes could not remain free while she appealed her 11+ year sentence for wire fraud. Now she’s been ordered to report to federal prison in just two weeks.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison by May 30, a judge said Wednesday, after a court denied her request to stay out pending appeal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday denied her request to stay out on bail, saying Holmes’s appeal doesn’t raise a substantial question of law and that even if it did, it is unlikely that it would be enough to overturn her fraud conviction.

Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud against the company’s investors in January 2022. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

Later Tuesday, Holmes and her former second-in-command Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was also convicted of fraud at Theranos, were jointly ordered by a lower court to pay $452 million in restitution to investors, including $125 million to Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal. The federal government had previously asked for more than $800 million in restitution, according to court filings.

. . . The district court recommended that Ms. Holmes serve her time at a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that allows for family visitation.

This link shows how family visitation (which is not “conjugal visitation”) works in federal prisons.

Holmes doesn’t have any money left, though her husband seems pretty well off. Does that mean that they can take some of his salary to repay the investors? Calling all lawyers!

*The NYT reports on a new study in Nature (I haven’t read it yet) showing a somewhat complex origin of modern Homo sapiens.

Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time.

By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature.

“There is no single birthplace,” said Eleanor Scerri, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoarchaeology in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the new study. “It really puts a nail in the coffin of that idea.”

Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have found evidence pointing to Africa as the origin of our species. The oldest fossils that may belong to modern humans, dating back as far as 300,000 years, have been unearthed there. So were the oldest stone tools used by our ancestors.

. . . The researchers analyzed DNA from a range of African groups, including the Mende, farmers who live in Sierra Leone in West Africa; the Gumuz, a group descended from hunter-gatherers in Ethiopia; the Amhara, a group of Ethiopian farmers; and the Nama, a group of hunter-gatherers in South Africa.

. . .The researchers concluded that as far back as a million years ago, the ancestors of our species existed in two distinct populations. Dr. Henn and her colleagues call them Stem1 and Stem2.

About 600,000 years ago, a small group of humans budded off from Stem1 and went on to become the Neanderthals. But Stem1 endured in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years after that, as did Stem2.

If Stem1 and Stem2 had been entirely separate from each other, they would have accumulated a large number of distinct mutations in their DNA. Instead, Dr. Henn and her colleagues found that they had remained only moderately different — about as distinct as living Europeans and West Africans are today. The scientists concluded that people had moved between Stem1 and Stem2, pairing off to have children and mixing their DNA.

The two Stem populations then merged twice (each about 120,000 years ago), with one merger giving rise to populations in southern Africa and the other giving rise to eastern and western African populations who were the ancestors of H. sapiens that eventually left Africa and populated the world.

This part is questionable:

Dr. Scerri speculated that living in a network of mingling populations across Africa might have allowed modern humans to survive while Neanderthals became extinct. In that arrangement, our ancestors could hold onto more genetic diversity, which in turn might have helped them endure shifts in the climate, or even evolve new adaptations.

“This diversity at the root of our species may have been ultimately the key to our success,” Dr. Scerri said.

I don’t know if this is some kind of nod to DEI, but even a moderately small population of animals contains a large proportion of the heritable diversity, though not necessarily very rare alleles. The postulation about genetic diversity being important presupposes that the Stem populations were quite small, and I don’t think we have evidence for that.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is haughty:

Szaron: Do you have a moment?
Hili: No.
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy masz chwilę czasu?
Hili: Nie.
And a picture of Baby Kulka with the caption, “The third ‘tot’ in Paulina’s picture” (in Polish: “I to trzecie ‘maleństwo’ sfotografowane przez Paulinę”).

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Divy:

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

From Masih: 200 days in solitary in Iran for rapping about. . . freedom!

Two Barry. Why did a python swallow a beach towel?

In this one, he says, “At one point you can see the cat thinking, ‘What is your problem?'”

From Malcolm: Evil cat faces!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, today we have some survivors:

Tweets from Matthew. First, one he calls “natural selection gone mad”.  I have no idea why this pattern evolved.

Cat benefactor!

Look at this legless lizard! (NOT A SNAKE!). Greg thinks that this is the species shown below:

The Leisure Fascists take over the American Physical Society, recommend no more booze at physics meetings

May 17, 2023 • 1:00 pm

The Pecksniffs aren’t satisfied with policing the language of science, but now want to regulate our behavior, too. And, by god, they’ve gone too far this time, for they want to put the kibosh on our BEVERAGES.

In the latest American Physical Society News (click on screenshots below), one author urges people to not drink alcohol at physics meetings. Not just that, but she seems to want alcohol banned at scientific meetings.  In this she’s bucking the tide, for, as the author notes, a Nature report last year showed that over two thirds of scientists think that alcohol should not be banned at scientific meetings.

Nearly 1,500 scientists participated in the online poll, which began on 20 December as part of a Nature story about reconsidering the role of alcohol in the scientific workplace (Nature 600, S86–S88; 2021). When asked whether alcohol should be banned at scientific conferences, 68% of those who responded to the self-selecting poll said no, 26% said yes and 6% were not sure.

That is, for every scientist who wants alcohol banned at scientific conferences, 2.6 scientists want it to stay. The democracy has spoken.

You can probably guess the reasons why Dr. Vriend wants it banned. First guess, then read the APS News article by clicking below:

Yes, you were right. I’m sure you guessed because “alcohol promotes bad behavior and harassment”, but did you know it also makes meetings less inclusive?

Here are the author’s reasons:

Many years ago, when I was a young graduate student in mechanical engineering and geophysics, I presented my first poster at an important conference. I was stationed at my poster, excited for discussion, when a colleague approached me with a beer in hand. I could smell alcohol on his breath, and he had clearly had too much to drink. For an hour, he loitered at my poster, asking inappropriate questions — and blocking my ability to talk to others, including potential collaborators or future postdoctoral advisors. I was deeply uncomfortable and uncertain what to do.

My story might feel familiar to many young scientists, and data confirms the relationship between alcohol and inappropriate behavior. Alcohol is linked to loss of inhibition, and research indicates that alcohol increases the risks of harassment, including in professional settings. A 2007 study found a significant association between the number of heavy-drinking male employees and a culture of gender harassment against women in a workplace. Of course, alcohol does not cause bad behavior on its own — any perpetrator is solely responsible for their actions — but its role as a risk factor is clear.

I’m prepared to believe all that, which is offensive behavior, and of course no woman (or person) should be subject to such harassment. But a simple conference statement that “harassment is prohibited and will be punished if it’s persistent and unwanted” (all conferences have these now), should suffice. Then someone could have gotten the guy off the scene.

Scientists are adults, adults drink, and people should be prepared to deal with drinkers.  In fact, science meetings are much safer than bars, for scientists are almost universally against harassment and there are plenty of people around to stop it, as well as ubiquitous conference policies to intervene and, if need be, show the harasser to the door.

Remember that scientific meetings are places not just to learn science, but to meet old friends and colleagues, schmooze, socialize after hours, converse and relax. Alcohol facilitates that, and not in a trivial way. It’s much easier to schmooze with someone you want to talk to by inviting them for a drink than just walking up to them. And alcohol might even facilitate scientific conversations since it lessens inhibition (people might, for example,  lose their fear of asking stupid questions!)

And, most important, you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.

In the poll above scientists have clearly weighed the risks of drinking versus the benefits—and have voted for booze. I vote with them. (Remember, too, that many meetings are in hotels and you simply cannot stop people from drinking there. If there’s no hotel, people will repair to the bar.)  I have no beef with people who have personal reasons not to drink, nor would I stop them from trying, like Dr. Vriend, to persuade others not to drink. But taking the booze out of meetings is taking a lot of fun, as well as social lubrication, out of meetings, and it takes some chutzpah to do that.

It helps, though, if you can claim, as the author does, that banning booze helps promote diversity and a welcoming environment!

As scientists, though, it is not only our responsibility to do good research and advance our field, but to support the next generation of scientists. Science is more diverse now — in age, gender, sexual orientation, race, cultural background — than it was for millennia; we are moving away from the cliché of the cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking clique of mostly white male scientists. I am not the only person not drinking alcohol — more than a third of US adults don’t, perhaps for religious or cultural reasons, or perhaps simply because science has shown that alcohol is not healthy. Still others may be uncomfortable drinking in work settings because they are struggling with alcohol abuse; after all, nearly half of US adults who drink, drink too much, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse.

Alcohol in professional events can stymie efforts to create a welcoming community, and scientists and students of all generations deserve better. In academia, as well as in the business and nonprofit spheres, we senior scientists are responsible for inviting young, diverse people into the field and making them feel comfortable and confident. We are responsible for upholding professional conduct and setting the right example for the younger generation.

I respectfully disagree, especially about associating booze with “cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking clique of mostly white male scientists”.  (It’s always open season on white males, but of course cigars are banned at meetings and what’s on tap is usually beer and wine, not whiskey).  I know few scientists that fit that bill, and, in fact, Vriend is creating a sexist stereotype, but one that seems okay to most people, though it’s not.  The dragging in of white males here is a gratuitous slur, and has absolutely nothing to do with her argument, except that drunken males harass women more than the other way around. And what does being “white” have to do with it? Alcohol use and abuse is not a monopoly of white people.

There’s also the sly implication that “young diverse people” (read: blacks and Hispanics) won’t feel as welcome if there is booze afoot.  What evidence is there for that?

In the end, I guess, the only way to be welcoming and inclusive is to make everyone conform to a strict code of straitlaced behavior. Is that diversity? This article demonstrates, more than anything, that the woke are puritanical. Remember H. L. Mencken’s famous definition of “puritanism”: “the haunting fear that some one, somewhere, may be happy”.

And I’m curious why the APS would publish this.

h/t: Luana

Nature falls for one discredited aspect of autism: “facilitated communication”

May 17, 2023 • 10:30 am

As you know, autism runs the gamut between people who functional pretty normally to those who can barely function, require round-the-clock care, and cannot read, write, or speak.  It’s often assumed that this is a “spectrum”: that is, a disorder with a unitary developmental/genetic cause that has various degrees of expression.  Thus some groups that hope to ameliorate autism assume that the near-normal end of the spectrum require treatments similar in kind but not degree to those who show “profound” autism. Others think that the treatments needed are very different.  The high-functioning people with autism can express what they want or need, but what about those who can’t express themselves?

This is the subject of the new Nature article shown in the second screenshot below. It’s also the subject of a critique of one part of the Nature article—a critique that appeared in Skeptical Inquirer (SI). SI is the well known magazine from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), itself an offshoot of The Center for Inquiry.

SI and SCICOP have devoted themselves to debunking woo, and their SI piece, written by psychologist Stuart Vyse, takes issue with one brand of woo historically involved with autism research: facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication was a method that, people thought, could allow profoundly autistic people who couldn’t read, write, or talk to communicate with others. The assumption was that with some assistance, the hidden verbal and mental abilities of profoundly autistic people could be revealed.  This involved people helping the severely autistic people to “write” by using various devices.  And lo, a trove of hidden thoughts were revealed. Sadly, it was eventually found that the “helpers” were actually prompting the autistic to communicate, and it was pretty much a scam, although perhaps an unwitting one. (It’s the equivalent of a Ouija board, where people think that they are not guiding the pointer but really are.) Here, let Wikipedia describe the method:

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique that attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal. The facilitator guides the disabled person’s arm or hand and attempts to help them type on a keyboard or other device.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board.  Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).  In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

Facilitated communication has been called “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities”.  Some promoters of the technique have claimed that FC cannot be clearly disproven because a testing environment might cause the subject to lose confidence.  However, there is a scientific consensus that facilitated communication is not a valid communication technique, and its use is strongly discouraged by most speech and language disability professional organizations.  There have been a large number of false abuse allegations made through facilitated communication.

The article is remarkably strong for Wikipedia, and has a long section on documenting the flaws of facilitated communication.

At present, though, the method is still used, and is an important part of the Nature paper. Now it’s often done with the “facilitator” holding up an alphabet board and having the autistic person point to letters that, they say, give a message. The thing is that the boards are always held up by a facilitator, who can move them around, and the autistic person can look at the “facilitator” for approval.  They never do it with the alphabet board flat on a table and the facilitator out of view of the subject. Look at this video using the kind of facilitated communication touted in the Nature article, and you’ll see the issues. The facilitator moves the board around, and the subject looks at times at the facilitator, seemingly seeking approval.  And it’s hardly credible that someone who cannot either write, read, or speak could nevertheless convey complex messages this way. But you don’t have to guess: experiments have debunked the whole method.

In the article below (click to read), psychologist Stuart Vyse calls out Nature not for its whole article (for parts of it are enlightening and reasonable), but for buying into facilitated communication. Here’s the premise of the Nature article involving facilitated communication, as stated by Vyse:

This renewed controversy over communication methods has emerged in the context of a larger political fight within the autism community. The Nature story was about efforts on the part of some autism advocates to have people with autism more involved in the planning and execution of autism research. In theory this sounds like a good idea, but this effort has been largely dominated by verbal advocates on the higher functioning end of the autism spectrum. As it is now defined, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has a remarkably wide range that can include both highly verbal Harvard graduates and nonspeaking people who engage in repetitive and self-injurious behaviors. It includes both people who will be fine and may even thrive living independently and people who will never be able to live independently without substantial support.

Parents of children on the severe end of the spectrum argue that the needs of their children are substantially different than those of the verbal self-advocates on the other end of the spectrum. Furthermore, if the research agenda is driven by people on the less severe end of the spectrum, the approximately thirty percent of children with autism who will never develop speech will be left behind.

That’s why Nature is touting facilitated communication as a way of finding out how the severely autistic want to give input into their worldviews, their problems, and their therapy.

SI article:

The quote given in the Nature piece below (click to read) is taken from a severely autistic person pointing at a letterboard. And the entire quote, from Rachel Kripke-Ludwig, “a non-speaking autistic advocate and student based in Menlo Park, California” is even more complex (I’ve put the “communication” in bold below):

In the conventional approach, several researchers “are mostly working off the wrong set of assumptions”, writes Rachel Kripke-Ludwig, a non-speaking autistic advocate and student based in Menlo Park, California. “The best way to get it right is to listen to us.” 

Here’s a photo of Kripke-Ludwig from Nature shown using the letter board:

(from Nature): Rachel Kripke-Ludwig helps to ensure that autism research is relevant to autistic people.

Why does somebody always hold the letter board? It would be dead easy to see if people like Rachel could communicate without the help of a facilitator, but they won’t let scientists test that hypothesis, which would be dead simple to do. As Vyse says,

The new variants of facilitated communication involve the nonspeaking person pointing at a letter board with a finger or a pencil; however, rather than simply placing the letter board on a table, a “communication partner” holds the letter board in the air. It is not clear why this is necessary, but it is clear that the involvement of another person muddies the question of who is authoring the communication. Does the finger touch the letter board, or does the letter board touch the finger? Publicly available videos often show the letter boards bobbing around in the air while the nonspeaking person looks somewhere else. Furthermore, perhaps having learned a lesson from the 1990s, the purveyors of these letter board techniques have assiduously avoided participating in research that would definitively show who the author of the messages is.

Now testing this hypothesis is not a James Randi “million-dollar-challenge” issue—a simple debunking of woo. It is vitally important to know if profoundly autistic people can really communicate on their own. If they can, then it would overturn both the theories and treatment of autism, and also enable us to take advantage of their own ideas of what they need, which is the point Nature is trying to make. That is why this ability to communicate needs to be tested.

Nature takes it for granted that this is real communication. Click to read.

Not only does the article neglect the decades of work showing that facilitated communication is bogus, but presents statements by people like Kripke-Ludwig as if they really come from the subject and not the facilitator, and endorses the method (my emphasis):

Many autistic people see that as a step back to labels that they have rejected. “I am profoundly gifted, not profoundly low-functioning,” writes Payam, a non-speaking autistic advocate who is based in Atlanta, Georgia. Payam is not an exception, says his mother, Parisa Khosravi. “We need to presume competence and listen to our non-speakers,” she explains, “rather than assume intellectual disability.”

Many other autistic people who are non-speaking or have intellectual disabilities have found ways to speak up for themselves, says Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in Washington DC. “It is completely inaccurate to say that as a group, autistic people with intellectual disabilities, or nonspeaking autistic people, can’t advocate for themselves,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Not all autistic people have access to a communication method that works for them, and for some people, the currently available communication methods may just not work.”

If they could write for themselves, or even point at a static letterboard without guidance, we might accept these statements, which could lead to profound advances in treating autism. But, since the facilitated communicators won’t let their method be tested, we’ll never know. This is one example of what is likely to be woo, or a quasi-scam, impeding science. Nature is not behaving scientifically here, and in fact may be impeding the treatment of people with severe autism.  Will different “facilitators” give different answers? How do we know they’re not in cahoots, making stuff up? They might mean well, or even believe that they are bringing out hidden words to help people, but we won’t know that without scientific testing of the methodology. As I said, such tests are not rocket science, and, when used on other means of facilitated communication, invariably show it’s a sham.

As Vyse notes:

Finally, in an odd alliance, some parents of nonspeaking individuals who believe in facilitated communication or one of its variants have been recruited to this fight by the advocates on the higher functioning end of the spectrum. Thus, you have the peculiar situation of an article in the scientific journal Nature, whose title is drawn from a quote that the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association says “should not be assumed to be the communication of the person with a disability.” We have no evidence that the person being quoted said those words, and yet she is being put forth as the poster child for a highly politicized movement. In my view, this is the real travesty. This person has achieved remarkable visibility, including quotes and a photograph in a widely read science journal, yet the available scientific evidence suggests that rather than speaking out for herself she has been silenced and someone else has substituted their voice for hers. All of this may have happened with the best of intentions, but if I am right, it is a substantial injustice nonetheless. And the journal Nature, which ought to know better, is complicit in making it happen.

To learn more about the perils of facilitated communication, visit facilitatedcommunication.org.

Frankly, this is a serious misstep on the part of Nature. Even if facilitated communication eventually did prove to work in some cases, Nature should, at the least, point out the serious issues with it.

UPDATE:  This Frontline Video, “Prisoners of Silence”, was noted by a reader in the comments; it shows how the method works (it’s always “facilitated”) and how it was debunked. The power of confirmation bias was strong; in fact, there was no evidence that facilitated communication worked. My one question is this: if the facilitators were sending the messages unconsciously through the subjects, why did so many of them produce messages that the subject was sexually abused?

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 17, 2023 • 8:15 am

We’re running quite low again, so if you want this feature to continue, please send me your good wildlife photos. Thanks!

Today’s batch are local Davis photos taken by Susan Harrison, UC Davis ecologist. Her narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

 

Random animals of north-central California, spring 2023

Here are some sightings from the past couple of months in the area surrounding Davis.   It’s been especially fun to watch all the nesting activity.

The first five were taken at UC Davis’s Putah Creek Riparian Reserve, a local birding hotspot that’s a 5-minute bike ride from my home.

Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) mom and owlet:

Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana):

Tree Swallow (Tachycineta biocolor):

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana):

Red-Eared Sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans, non-native, left) and Western Pond Turtles (Actinemys marmorata, native, right) at the UC Davis Arboretum:

Indian Peacock (Pavo cristatus, non-native) at Lake Solano County Park:

Bushtit (Psaltriparis minimus) near Lake Solano:

Beaver (Castor canadensis) at UC Davis’s McLaughlin Natural Reserve:

Northern Rough-Winged Swallow (Stelgidopteryx ruficollis) along Cache Creek:

Cliff Swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) along Butte Slough:

 

Cliff Swallow apartment complex, a.k.a. an abandoned bridge:

American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) at Gray Lodge National Wildlife Refuge:

Sutter Buttes, “the world’s smallest mountain range,” seen from Gray Lodge NWR: