Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today we have a batch of butterfly photos from Mary Rasmussen. Her captions and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
We have many butterflies near our cabin along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. The plentiful Monarch butterflies have been a joy to watch and photograph.
Like all butterflies, Monarchs undergo complete metamorphosis. Below are photos that show the Monarch’s four phases: egg, larva, pupa and adult. This process takes about 4-6 weeks, but is very temperature dependent.
This is a Monarch butterfly egg on a Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)flower petal. The egg is about the size of the head of a pin.
The Monarch larva chews its way out of the egg (left) and then eats the egg (right.)
The larva develops into the familiar striped caterpillar. They feed exclusively on Milkweed. It is an eating machine and will molt five times as it grows.
The caterpillar has attached a silk pad to the underside of a milkweed leaf, grabs the pad with its back prolegs and forms a “J” shape, signaling that it will soon pupate.
This is the caterpillar’s final molt. The skin splits along its back and it wriggles to shed the skin.
The Monarch forms a chrysalis case (left.) When the chrysalis becomes transparent (right) the butterfly will likely emerge within a day, usually in the morning.
The adult Monarch butterfly emerges from its chrysalis. It hangs on while it pumps fluid from its abdomen to expand its wings. The butterfly will hang for a few hours to allow its wings to harden enough to fly. I think this is a great-great-grandchild of the Monarchs that flew to Mexico the previous fall.
It’s easy to tell females from males. The female (left) has thicker black veins. The male (right) has thinner veins and 2 spots that are thought to be scent glands, one on each hind wing.
This is a migrating butterfly on a Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia). The Monarchs love these flowers. They are annuals and I start them from seed as they aren’t usually available at garden stores.
Our cabin is on a peninsula that hangs down into Lake Michigan. Thousands of butterflies are funneled from southern Canada and north Michigan down our peninsula’s shore on their way to Mexico. Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium fistulosum) is also very popular with the Monarchs. Most years it blooms during their migration.
I use a Nikon D500 camera with Nikon VR 105mm f/2.8G macro lens. For the eggs I used a Laowa 25mm f/2.8 2.5-5X Ultra Macro lens with extension tubes.
This book gives practical advice on observing, raising and feeding butterflies. It even explains how to tape a butterfly’s torn wing so that it can still fly and feed on flowers. This was a great beginning resource for me.
It’s Hump Day (“Ημέρα Καμπούρας” in Greek), May 10, 2023, and possibly the worst food day of the year: National Liver and Onions Day!!! Sadly, my father loved this odious dish, so my mother made it upon occasion, stinking up the whole house. Have a plate!
The golden spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory
. . . The golden spike was made of 17.6-karat (73%) copper-alloyed gold, and weighed 14.03 troy ounces (436 g). It was dropped into a pre-drilled hole in the laurel ceremonial last tie, and gently tapped into place with a silver ceremonial spike maul. The spike was engraved on all four sides:
Here’s the original golden spike, now on display at Stanford University:
Here’s a photo of the ceremony, with the caption from Wikipedia:
Photo by A.J. Russell of the celebration following the driving of the “Last Spike” at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869. Because of temperance feelings the liquor bottles held in the center of the picture were removed from some later prints.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Well, of course the Bigget Nooz is that Trump got his first conviction, perhaps the first of several, even though it was in a civil lawsuit. A jury of nine in New York found him more likely than not to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in Bergdorf Goodman’s Department store three decades ago. The formal charges were battery and defamation, and that’s what he’s guilty of. The fine was $5 million: chump change to the man.
The federal jury of six men and three women took only three hours before returning a verdict. They also held Mr. Trump, 76, liable for defaming Ms. Carroll when he posted a statement on his Truth Social website in October, calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”
Although more than a dozen women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct over the years, Ms. Carroll’s case is the first claim to be successfully tested before a jury.
The jury determined that Carroll had proven Mr. Trump sexually abused her, but they rejected the accusation that she had been raped. Sexual abuse is defined in New York as subjecting someone to sexual contact without their consent.
The jury awarded Ms. Carroll, 79, a total of $5 million in damages.
The jury’s unanimous verdict came in Federal District Court in lower Manhattan. Its findings are civil, not criminal, meaning Mr. Trump has not been convicted of any crime and faces no prison time.
Jury also found that Mr. Carroll proved, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Ms.Carroll was injured as a result of Trump’s publication of his denial of her accusations on his Truth Social account in October 2022.
The jury determined that Ms. Carroll had proved, by clear and convincing evidence, that Mr. Trump knew his statement was false when he said her accusation was a hoax, a legal standard known as “actual malice.”
Of course the Orange Man counterattacked:
On Truth Social, Trump continued his attacks, focusing on Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. He wrote: “What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be, speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the U.S. for me to get a fair ‘trial.’”
The jury didn’t find him culpable for rape, but did for sexual abuse. The big question now is whether this will materially affect his chances of being reelected as President next year. Let’s see what the next round of polls say, but remember that he has four other investigations going against him, and in those cases the charges will be criminal. Do they have special cells for Presidents that will also house their Secret Service agents?
*How long will it take before people accept the most sensible and research-inspiring definition of biological sex, one based on differences in gamete size? Over at his Substack site, “Reality’s Last Stand,” Colin Wright takes on several misguided anthropologists and biologists in his piece “Gametes are not an ‘arbitrary definition’ of biological sex.” The denial of this definition (by far the most inclusive and enlightening conception of “the sexes”), is of course ideologically motivated, though it’s detractors never tell us how many sexes there really are, much less give us their own definition of sex.
Wright goes after the Scientific-American op-ed of Agustin Fuentes, a confused NYT editorial by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a tweet from Holly Dunsworth accusing those of us who accept the sexual binary of being “a$$holes”, and, finally, the repeated and confused arguments by P. Z. Myers who argues that a gametic criterion for defining and distinguishing two sexes is made up, wrong, and confected to replace a chromosomal definition.
The cherry on top of all this virtue signaling and intellectual seppuku in the name of appeasing gender ideologues is a post by biologist PZ Myers on his blog Pharyngula titled “Let’s pretend humans are single-celled organisms.” In this post, PZ claims that sex being “defined by the size of your gametes” is “a strange new dogma” that is “stupid” and “arbitrary.” He says that this gametic definition is being used “to replace the Y chromosome excuse but “all the failings of any attempt to reduce a complex biological process to a single phrase.”
To call Myer’s framing “wrong” would be a gross understatement.
For one, the idea that males and females are defined by the size of their gametes is far from new. It dates back to the mid-19th century, when scientists first began to unravel the technical complexities of sexual reproduction involving sperm and ova. Furthermore, the gamete size definition is far from arbitrary; it reflects two fundamentally distinct reproductive strategies with enormous downstream consequences for the evolution of bodies, behavior, and physiology. If, as the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once observed, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” it may also be said that nothing—or at least very little—about animals makes sense except in the light of anisogamy (sexual reproduction involving gametes of two different sizes).
Secondly, PZ’s claim that the focus on gametes represents an abandonment of appealing to chromosomes as a way of rooting sex in something binary is not just incorrect, but underscores PZ’s ignorance about the fundamental and universal definition of males and females.
Lastly, I want to highlight a common fallacy deployed by people like PZ Myers and Agustin Fuentes, which is to falsely equate what people are with who they are. Fuentes, in his essay in Scientific American, argued that “Gametes and gamete production physiology, by themselves, are only a part of the entirety of human lives.” However, no one has ever claimed that gametes represent “the entirety of human lives,” only that they define whether someone is male or female. PZ commits the same fallacy in the title of his blog post, “Let’s pretend humans are single-celled organisms.” Who has ever claimed that? To my knowledge, no one. .
*Look around yourself next time you’re on a bus, subway, or train, and see that more than half the people are fiddling with their phones. What I didn’t know is that kids appear to do it in class, too (we banned them when I taught, but that was 7 years ago.) The WaPo describes the problem in an article called “Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough.”
So this year, schools in Ohio, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California and others banned the devicesin class to curb student obsession, learning disruption, disciplinary incidents and mental health worries.
“We basically said, ‘This has got to stop,’” said Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli. “We’ve got academic issues that are not going to be fixed … if our students continue to sit on their phones.”
Most school systems already had cellphone bans in 2020, according to federal data, but the pandemic brought more urgency to places with lenient rules or lax enforcement. Some invested in ways to lock up phones away during school hours. Others forced students to keep them hidden away — with strict penalties for violations.
Their phone are there, just not in their hands. And of course the teachers have phones! They’re sneaky, some of these students:
“We’re not trying to infringe on anybody’s freedom, but we need to have full attention in the classroom,” said Nancy J. Hines, superintendent in the Penn Hills School District, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
. . . Hoping to switch the focus from scrolling to learning, the district tried a ban last year in its middle school. Homeroom teachers collected phones every morning and locked them in zippered storage cases. Students picked up their cellphones before heading home.
This year, they went a step further, expanding to high school. There, students slip their phones into locking Yondr pouches (about $16 each) that they carry with them all day and that they open by tapping it against a magnetic device as they leave.
The experience has not been perfect. Some students gamed the system by putting an old cellphone in the pouch and hiding their current device. But it generally has gone well, she said. “Do we have 100 percent compliance?” she said. “No, but the majority of our teachers would say that it is much better. There are fewer distractions.
I agree. The very least a student should do in class is to at least pretend to pay attention to what the teacher is saying.
*There’s are two unusual solutions to the looming debt crisis, but at least one sounds plenty weird. (Biden met with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy yesterday, but little came of it.) One of them is the Big Trillion Dollar Coin:
For years, debt limit skeptics have argued that the United States can get around the cap on how much it can borrow by minting a large-denomination coin, depositing it in the government’s account at the Federal Reserve. Officials could then use the resulting money to pay the country’s bills. The maneuver would exploit a quirk in U.S. law, which gives the Treasury secretary wide discretion when it comes to minting platinum coins.
But there have always been challenges with the idea: Treasury has expressed little appetite. It is unclear whether the Fed would take the coin. It just sounds unconventional to the point of absurdity.
lt sure does. A coin that says “One Trillion Dollars” on it? But here’s the other:
. . . some are arguing for a fancier-sounding alternative: premium bonds.
The government typically funds itself by issuing debt in the form of financial securities called bonds and bills. They are worth a set amount after a fixed period of time — for example, $1,000 in 10 years — and they pay “coupons” twice a year in between. Typically, those coupon rates are set near market interest rates.
But in the premium bond idea, the government would renew old, expiring bonds at higher coupon rates. Doing so would not technically add to the nation’s debt — if the government previously had a 10-year bond worth $1,000 outstanding, it would still have a 10-year bond worth $1,000 outstanding. But investors would pay more to hold a bond that pays $7 a year than one that pays $3.50, so promising a higher interest rate would allow Treasury to raise more money.
Now this is above my pay grade, and the NYT says it may not work, either, even though it’s supported by the likes of Matthew Yglesias, Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine, and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman:
But even some proponents of premium bonds acknowledge that it could face legal challenges or damage the United States’ reputation in the eyes of investors. Plus, their design and issuance would have to happen fast.
German police say a 51-year-old man who was left tied up in the woods when a sex game went awry had a lucky escape after a cyclist and a hunter heard his screams for help.
Police said the man was discovered fully dressed but firmly bound with ropes and a pantyhose over his head atop a deer-hunting platform near the town of Bueckburg late Wednesday.
In a statement Friday, police said the man appeared to have been tied up by a woman he met online. After she had done so, the woman received a phone call and fled the woods suddenly, leaving the man behind in a helpless state.
“The 51-year-old told officers that that he had a box cutter on him ‘for such situations’ but seemed to have underestimated the (woman’s) bondage skills because he was unable to reach the knife,” police said.
The man was unharmed and refused to provide information about the woman’s identity. Police have opened an investigation of her on suspicion of failure to render assistance and possible deprivation of liberty.
He had a BOXCUTTER ON HIM FOR “SUCH SITUATIONS”? What kind of fetish is this?
From Masih, the Iranian government pretends that they didn’t shoot protestors in the eyes. This woman demonstrates that yes, she lost an eye:
They shot them in the eyes, and now they mock them. The Islamic Republic shot and blinded many young Iranian protesters. Government officials have now installed billboards in Tehran to say that they are not blind, but lying. Protesters sat in front of the cameras and showed their… pic.twitter.com/FzU0GpCS1y
From cesar: an amazing photo-and-video thread of a turf war between barn owls and jackdaws. Be sure to read all the tweets:
1/5 One for animal behaviourists. About 10 years ago I placed a Barn owl nest box in this barn and almost immediately a pair of jackdaws moved in and made it their home raising numerous broods over the years until 2022. In 2022 a pair of Barn Owls evicted the jackdaws and pic.twitter.com/RUptQgZu82
From Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth, who apparently anticipates the criticism she got (read the comments if you want), but conflates criticism of the magazine’s increasing politicization with “hate” and “conspiracy” (who’s conspiring?):
You may be noticing more conspiratorial & hateful content on here (including in the replies to this tweet, I'm guessing) and less of the interesting stuff you came here for. This is a good time to subscribe to the publications you value. https://t.co/xQu3qoyy8I
Here’s more evidence for evolution from Dorsa Amir (there’s more in her thread), and I didn’t know this one. I apparently don’t have this muscle.
Put your hand flat on a surface and touch your pinky to your thumb. Do you see a raised band in your wrist? That there’s a vestigial muscle called the palmaris longus. It used to help you move around the trees. About 14% of us don't even have this muscle anymore. (2/8) pic.twitter.com/ZF3Ta91IGy
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 10, 2023
Tweets from Professor Cobb, who’s now in Texas, risking his life for science. First a groaner, but you’ll have to read the thread to hear the whole joke:
An Irish friend has sent me a joke:
A Dublin man sees a sign outside a Kerry farmhouse: 'Talking Dog For Sale'… He rings the bell, the owner appears and tells him the dog can be viewed in the back garden
The man sees a nice looking Black Labrador Retriever sitting there
Hot off the presses: the jury in the civil suit by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump found him culpable, meaning that the jury decided that it was more likely than not that Trump raped Carroll (the suit was for both battery and defamation) in a Manhattan department store about 30 years ago.
Trump was ordered to pay $5 million.
This isn’t a criminal case, of course, but now he’s been found by a jury of his peers likely to have committed sexual assault. I’m hoping this will be enough to seriously damage his chances of reelection, but remember that he said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and nothing would happen to him. Let’s hope he was wrong.
Who would have thought that combining Dionne Warwick with Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Gladys Knight would produce one of the best pop songs of the Eighties (a dire decade, to be sure)? One of the reasons the song is so great, besides its upbeat nature, the appealing combination of the voices, and Stevie’s harmonica parts (adding mouth organ was a stroke of genius), is that it came from the brain of Bert Bacharach, the best pop composer of our era. Normally Bacharach’s partner in such a song would be Hal David, but Bacharach’s wife Carole Bayer Sager was the co-writer here.
From Wikipedia:
It was first recorded in 1982 by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of the film Night Shift, but it is better known for the 1985 cover version by Dionne Warwick,[ Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. This recording, billed as being by “Dionne Warwick & Friends”, was released as a charity single for AIDS research and prevention. It was a massive hit, becoming the number-one single of 1986 in the United States, and winning the Grammy Awards for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals and Song of the Year. It raised more than $3 million for its cause.
You can hear Rod Stewart’s version here, but it’s not nearly as good as the Warwick et al. ensemble. His voice is simply not suited to the lyrics.
This may well be a lip synched version, but you can see that simply singing this song makes you happy and friendly: look at the interactions between the singers. I bet you’ll be happy when you hear it, too.
You can’t make this stuff up. Here we have a doctoral student in horticulture at Cornell arguing that people’s penchant for cultivated apples as opposed to their sour wild ancestors reflects a bias against historically excluded communities. (He calls the ancestors “wild-type” apples, but I’ve never heard them called that. “Wild type” is a largely outdated term in genetics referring to the product of the most common variant of a gene. For example, if you’re dealing with the “vestigial” mutant, which shrinks the fruit fly wing down to a nubbin, the alternative gene form that produces the normal wing is called the “wild-type” allele, producing a “wild-type” phenotype with normal-sized wings. Usually we refer to the wild ancestors of a species as just “wild” apples.)
But I digress: here’s the article from Cornell’s research site about how our attitude toward apples reflects bigotry. Click to read about the stuff that you couldn’t make up.
First, a note. DNA work shows that all varieties of eating apples descend from a single species of wild apple, Malus sieversii, found in the mountains of central Asia, though there may be some genes from other Malus species. Most varieties of apples, like my favorite, the Granny Smith (crispy and tart!), have come from selective breeding of mutants arising in M. sieversii descendants, and thus could be said to belong to that species—just as all cat breeds could be said to belong to Felis silvestris lybica, the ancestral subspecies. But in the past, commercial apples have indeed been produced by crossing M. sieversii with other species of Malus, a genius that includes all the species of crabapples. These hybrids are called “applecrabs,” though I don’t think I’ve ever eaten—much less seen—one.
But I digress. The student, Andrew Scheldorf (who is said to identify as queer and uses the pronouns “he/they”), is doing the same thing, trying to produce new apple varieties at Cornell by incorporating genes from crabapples via crossing. It’s not a new method, though the article argues it is. Here’s the article’s description of Scheldorf’s work:
Have you ever tasted a wild apple? Unlike the domesticated apple, there are several species of wild apples, and most are likely to set your teeth on edge. But wild apples have evolved through natural selection over millions of years, and many are better equipped than domesticated varieties to survive in less-than-ideal conditions.
Understanding the desirable traits of wild and domesticated apples is the business of Andrew Scheldorf (he/they), a fifth-year doctoral student in horticulture. They work in the fruit physiology and climate adaptation lab in Geneva, directed by Jason Londo, School of Integrative Plant Science, Horticulture, where they study an apple tree population created by crossing the domesticated apple, Malus × domestica, with a wild species that originated in western Asia, Malus prunifolia. [JAC: that’s a crabapple species.]
The crossbred population displays a wide range of traits, some of which are prized by growers. “I look at a number of different traits in this population, including fruit size, fruit mass, sugar, acidity, tree architecture, phenolic compounds, total tannins, disease resistance, vigor, and storage ability,” Scheldorf says.
Scheldorf noticed that roughly half of the apples harvested from the population held up well during extended storage. But the other half lost soundness, becoming soft and mushy. Intrigued, Scheldorf used genotypic information and the fruit’s storage time to conduct a Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS). Based on the results, they believe they have identified a gene that affects the shelf life of apples.
“This is a prime case in understanding what novel and useful traits can come from wild species.”
Breeders have long thought that crossing wild-type apples with the common domesticated apple would yield small, discolored, unpalatable fruit that would be of no interest to the consumer. Even if the fruit were sturdier and the trees more disease resistant, growers believed the fruit would not be marketable.
Scheldorf’s work upends conventional wisdom. “My population has shown that, with careful selection of the wild species parent—and some patience—you can get commercially viable fruit with some of the genetically and physiologically useful traits from the wild species,” they say. Their findings could be valuable both to geneticists and apple breeders. “This is a prime case in understanding what novel and useful traits can come from wild species,” Scheldorf says.
Well, so far so good, except for the mistaken claim that crossing commercial apples with crabapples is the revival of a discarded idea. It’s been done for a long time (since the 19th century), as you can see by reading about “applecrabs” (see also here), which are already sold and eaten. We already know that hybrids between domesticated and crabapples are commercially viable; you can buy the trees!
Well, I learned something. But then things go downhill as Scheldorf can’t resist analogizing the reluctance to eat sour wild apples with bigotry against marginalized people:
Scheldorf identifies as a member of the queer community. As they have sought to improve domesticated apples by drawing on the genetic diversity in wild apples, they have also felt the lack of diversity in plant science, and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in general. They suggest that the way wild-type apples have been discounted can be seen as emblematic of how people from historically excluded communities have for centuries been shunted aside, forgotten, or disallowed in science, math, and engineering fields.
“I started to see an interesting parallel between wild apple species and historically excluded communities in STEM and academia more broadly. While both offer alternative solutions to major issues and lessons to make things more just and equitable, they both have been largely excluded from the spotlight,” Scheldorf says. “I saw how people were treating me and others in the queer community differently. In STEM we are taught to not insert ourselves into our research, don’t let your personality, your opinions, your standpoints in. Anything that does not fit the idea of a scientist is not allowed. Queer aesthetics, queer personalities—they are not super encouraged.”
No. Just no. People don’t like to eat wild apples because they are sour, not because they’re the fruit equivalent of homosexuals. Once again, things go off the rails when someone tries to claim bogus parallels between nature and human culture. Further, it doesn’t take a gay person to come up with the idea of crossing crabapples with domestic apples to create different fruits: that was done over a century ago—by William Saunders, among others.
The rest of the article is about Scheldorf’s desire to purge biology of non-inclusive language. I won’t go into it except to give one example:
Drawing upon their own experiences and their work with Biodiversify, Scheldorf is writing a paper about the distortions and misconceptions caused by gendered terms in science pedagogy. All sorts of human assumptions are embedded in words like male and female, mother and father, Scheldorf points out. “Nature is more complicated than the stereotypical gender binary,” they say. “Explaining [plant reproduction] in male and female terms makes it more difficult for the general public to understand how the mechanisms actually work.” Instead of male and female, they recommend using terms that describe anatomy: stamen-containing or pistil-containing, seed-bearing parent or pollen-bearing parent. “In all the conversations I had that were referencing this, people walked away feeling like they understood things better,” they say.
This is the same motivation that gave us the term I used in a post earlier today: “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “female”. Does that terminology make us understand things better? Even in the plant example, I disagree.
I’ve been told that my Antarctic cruise employers don’t require lecturers this year, so my fall/winter speaking gig in Antarctica is off, much to my distress. I was also invited to the Netherlands to speak, but then the invitation was rescinded because it was a Dutch meeting and, they said, they didn’t require “an American point of view” (the topic was religion vs. science).
Although I’m doing a alumni lecture tour of the Galápagos in August, which is fantastic, that’s only for nine days. Ergo, I need some places to go for R&R this summer/fall/winter, and am crowdsourcing ideas. Here are places I’ve thought of:
New Zealand. I’ve never properly seen the North Island, but my eagerness to go has been dampened since Heather Hastie died.
South Africa. I need to see the Big Animals before I die, and although South Africa is reputed to be less safe than other African countries, I know people there and the animals are numerous.
Israel. I’ve always wanted to see Israel for myself, and, being small, it’s a good country to visit for a couple of weeks, as one can see a lot.
Antarctica (paying my own way). The problem is that this is quite pricey, but I do need to see the island of South Georgia before I die. It has a huge colony of king penguins and is, of course, the place where Shackleton is buried.
I haven’t thought much about other foreign destinations, and am open to suggestions. I had considered Nepal again (I’ve hiked to the base of Everest twice and to Annapurna once), but I realize now that I’m pretty old to do this (I always carry my own gear and don’t want to hire porters).
And then, of course, there’s the U.S., and there are a lot of places to think about. I love New Mexico, but it’s best in the spring and fall. I’ve always dreamed of renting a car and driving the Blues Trail down through Mississippi down to Louisiana (eating on the way, of course), and I’ve never been Savannah, Georgia, which is supposed to be lovely—a more southern version of Charleston, South Carolina, which I have visited.
The only requirements for foreign travel is that the place be interesting and have good food. Food is also a sine qua non for domestic travel, but there are few places in America where you can’t find a good nosh.
Feel free to suggest places to visit, but remember that they have to be more than places you’ve liked: they have to be places I’d like, too. Tastes differ!
Here’s South Georgia:
Colony of King Penguins. (Photo: Pew Charitable Trust)
Here we have an editorial by the very editor of the British journal The Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals. I agree with many of his sentiments, but the bloke hasn’t realized that he should keep the journal institutionally and politically neutral. If he has personal views on politics, they should be kept out of the journal. By taking strong stands on various issues here and in previous Lancet issues, editor Richard Horton risks polarizing British medicine.
Why do people insist on using their scientific positions to promulgate opinions on issues that are irrelevant to the venue concerned? In this case, Horton opposes “populism” (apparently the views of more conservative Brits) against “progressivism” (apparently the same thing as American “progressive authoritarianism”, and Horton’s own favored stance).
Click to read, though I put the full editorial below. I also found it archived here.
The thing is, I agree with most everything Horton says in this first paragraph, but were I editor I wouldn’t use my bully pulpit in a medical magazine to go after my ideological opponents:
Occasionally, someone says something so appalling, so shocking, and so disheartening that you just stop in disbelief. On April 26, 2023, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman said this: “I think that the people coming here illegally do possess values which are at odds with our country. We are seeing heightened levels of criminality when related to the people who have come on boats related to drug dealing, exploitation, prostitution.” Persistent attacks on migrants escaping war, poverty, and insecurity are now normalised in British politics. Robert Jenrick, Minister of State for Immigration, repeated Braverman’s claims: “Excessive and uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion that marks out the British people. Those crossing [the English Channel] tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK.” These remarks come as migrants crossing the Channel are blamed for a “surge in diphtheria cases”. They come as the UK Government continues to pursue efforts to deport refugees to Rwanda. They come as experts argue that the government’s Illegal Migration Bill will not “stop the boats” crossing from France. Children will be at particular risk—detained until 18 years of age, at which point they will be deported. The government seems content to ignore warnings that its authoritarian asylum policies are eroding the UK’s global reputation. Why is this happening?
What Horton fails to realize is that the opinions he finds appalling are a concern of many in the UK. While I’d never make generalizations like Braverman says, many Brits are concerned about the changes of their society by widespread immigration. Of course most immigrants just want to live a peaceful life as Brits born elsewhere, and many of the changes are salubrious, but to demonize people in this way ignores some very real concerns of British society. You can write them off as nativist idiots, as Horton does, or you can try to understand why they think as they do. But wait—there’s more.
This is the era of culture wars—politicised conflicts over values, identities, and beliefs. Are British institutions systemically racist? Should the monarchy pay reparations for its historical links to slavery? Are activists terrorising the young with climate doom? Has Brexit been a success? What is the definition of a woman? These debates are not confined to the UK. In the US, social conflicts over abortion—from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision overruling Roe v Wade to recent legal disputes over access to mifepristone—have once again radicalised Presidential politics. Meanwhile, American universities have become a new battleground for free speech, triggering academics to mount a defence against the “asymmetric warfare” of cancel culture. Writing in The Boston Globe last month, Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras announced the launch of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard University to protect free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse. The culture wars are not restricted to purely domestic divisions. They extend deep into geopolitics. Perhaps the most consequential area of discord for global health is our relationship with China. As Richard Lester and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in Science recently, a wave of Sinophobia “is clouding the outlook for cross-border academic exchange and collaboration in science and technology”. Racial stereotyping and criminalising academic relations with Chinese scientists and institutions are threats to “the free flow of ideas and people”. In a post-pandemic world, this closing of the public sphere is a danger to our common security and health. But, again, we must ask, why is this happening?
His answer, apparently, is all those pint-swilling, chip-eating British nativist “populists”, afraid of immigrants, are holding back the “progressives”. He also doesn’t seem to realize that he himself is chilling speech by making quasi-official pronouncements in The Lancet, nor does he realize that Pinker and Madras would probably object to this kind of semi-official pronouncement. But wait—there’s more. (Bolding below is mine.)
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was arrested by Mussolini’s police in 1926. Imprisoned, he used his time to fill the pages of 33 notebooks. Gramsci sought to make sense of his experience in the vanguard of Italian politics. One question in particular occupied his thoughts. Why did every effort to bring about revolutionary change in Europe fail? His great insight, one largely forgotten today, was to recognise the way in which the dominant group uses culture to exert its controlling influence. If the ruling power can persuade people to share its social, cultural, and moral values, the motivation for radical political change will wither. The culture wars suggest that it is not the economy, stupid. If populist governments can win over the public to their beliefs, progressives have little chance of electoral success. It was this cultural hegemony, according to Gramsci, that explained the resistance to progressive political change in the aftermath of World War 1. And it is the modern struggle for cultural hegemony that explains today’s bitter disputes over race, sex, and gender. For those who wish to advance a more hopeful, compassionate, and liberal vision of the future, we must recognise that the culture wars are not peripheral matters. They are the ground populists have chosen to fight to protect their power and interests. Gramsci, using the military metaphors of his time, called this struggle a “war of position”. It is a war we must not be afraid to engage in.
So here we have the editor of The Lancet advocating “radical political change” and demonizing “populists” (he’s not specific about who they are, but apparently sees the ruling powers in Britain as members). At the same time, he proclaims his virtue, for he takes pains to assure readers that he is on the side that wants a “more hopeful, compassionate, and liberal vision of the future,” while his populist enemies apparently want the opposite.
As I said, I’m surely more politically aligned with Horton than with the Tories (I wasn’t in favor of Brexit and deplore British xenophobia). But Horton should adhere to the advice Stanley Fish gave academics in his 2012 book, Save the World on Your Own Time. Would people accept it if a conservative editor of The Lancet used its pages to favor Brexit and demonize immigrants? If not, then they’re saying that editors can proselytize in The Lancet, but only if they proselytize the Right Ideas.
The journal’s policy should be “keep your ideological, moral, and political opinions as private pronouncements, not splash them all over your journal.”
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