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.
In light of Gordon Lightfoot‘s death on May 1, musician, music analyst, and producer Rick Beato discusses Lightfoot, his music, and his musical legacy. This 28-minute video by Beato clearly shows that he worships the man and loved his music.
My only beef is that Beato doesn’t spend a lot of time on Lightfoot’s early songs, particularly those on his first album, “Lightfoot!” To my mind, those represented his best work: simple (a bass and two guitars) but beautiful in their simplicity and honesty. In fact, Beato gives no time at all to that work, which surely deserves as much time as the later music Beato favors.
Here’s a video Beato mentions: Bob Dylan inducting Lightfoot into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986:
Once again we see the familiar pattern: Palestinian terrorists attack Israel (either attacking an individual Israeli or firing rockets at civilians), Israel then retaliates with targeted strikes on terrorists, and finally the mainstream media reports it as if it was an Israel-initiated strike. This article below, which appeared the other day at the Associated Press, is a good example. I’ll first give the headline, then below a bit of the actual report. Click this headline to read the story:
Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip killed a 58-year-old man and wounded five others on Wednesday, Palestinian health officials said, even as the latest spasm of violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in the enclave appeared to ebb.
Israeli fighter jets struck targets in Gaza in response to salvos of rockets launched by Palestinian militants at Israeli territory on Tuesday. But after sunrise, the violence seemed to subside as both sides signaled they wanted to avoid a wider conflict.
The exchange erupted when a prominent Palestinian detainee died in Israeli custody after an 87-day hunger strike. The death of Khader Adnan, 45, a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group credited with popularizing hunger strikes as an effective form of activism, reverberated across the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where he is revered as a national hero.
Note how the AP leads with the death of a 58-year-old man, as if he were surely a civilian at that age. But as I wrote at the first link above, Israeli attacks are targeted at terrorists, and their rate of killing civilians is far, far lower than the rate of Palestinian terrorists, who deliberately target civilians.
Finally, note that the Israeli army has the lowest rate of civilian deaths during military operations in the world:92.5% of Palestinians killed by Israel this year were members of terror groups or were actively involved in terror attacks (74/80 in 2023). Contrast this with the rate of Israeli civilian deaths killed by Palestinians. The 92.5% is the lowest rate of civilian casualties in the history of urban warfare, and shows the care Israel uses when retaliating. (In contrast, the proportion of U.S. civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were much higher, and more than 50% of Irish killed by the British in the 1969-2007 Operation Banner during the Troubles in Northern Ireland were civilians.)
These headlines are a way of implicating Israel as initiating violence when in fact that is vanishingly rare: Israel responds to violence by attacking terrorist targets. (Look at the eight headlines I posted a while back.) This is the way that the mainstream media produces a narrative of Israeli aggressiveness; how many people read beyond the headlines? Once you recognize this pattern, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a tacit agreement among the media to demonize Israel. Why do they do this? You tell me.
The affect heuristic is a heuristic, a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently, in which current emotion—fear, pleasure, surprise, etc.—influences decisions. In other words, it is a type of heuristic in which emotional response, or “affect” in psychological terms, plays a lead role.[1] It is a subconscious process that shortens the decision-making process and allows people to function without having to complete an extensive search for information. It is shorter in duration than a mood, occurring rapidly and involuntarily in response to a stimulus. Reading the words “lung cancer” usually generates an affect of dread, while reading the words “mother’s love” usually generates a feeling of affection and comfort. The affect heuristic is typically used while judging the risks and benefits of something, depending on the positive or negative feelings that people associate with a stimulus. It is the equivalent of “going with your gut”. If their feelings towards an activity are positive, then people are more likely to judge the risks as low and the benefits high. On the other hand, if their feelings towards an activity are negative, they are more likely to perceive the risks as high and benefits low
Go here if you want to read a bunch of quote favoring “gut thinking.”
And le strip, which, as usual, shows the boys denigrating something of which they themselves are guilty.
I’m going to put a link to our “In Defense of Merit” paper here again in case you missed it, but also because it’s the topic of Pamela Paul‘s column in today’s New York Times. I’ve written favorably several times about Paul’s pieces, as she’s an independent thinker, going her own heterodox way against the Progressive Authoritarianism of most NYT columnists. (She used to be head of the paper’s Sunday Book Review). But imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find an email from her site (I subscribe) that was entirely about our merit paper. It’s the second screenshot below:
Click on the link below to see it, and if it’s paywalled I found it archived on another site (I didn’t do it!)
UPDATE: As of 11:30 Chicago time, Paul’s paper has a new title but the same link. Voilà:
I’ll give a few quotes from her piece, which is favorable, unlike many comments on social media (see below).
Note that her first sentence below actually expresses the viewpoint of many ideologues: that the gender/ethnicity of a scientist brings different, ethnic/gender-specific viewpoints to a field, and so “diversifying” science will make it better by incorporating these views. I’ve found little merit in that argument, which I also see as patronizing because it assumes that different identity groups are homogeneous in having ways of approaching science that, on average, differ on average from those of existing scientists. Of course if you expand the number of people having the opportunity to do science, which I favor, you’re going to get new and valuable views simply because of the increase in the pool of scientists. But to say, for example, that Hispanics will improve physics because of a particularly Hispanic way of approaching the field is not only patronizing, but unevidenced.
But I digress. Here’s Paul’s beginning:
Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?
For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous, it’s offensive.
Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentallyracist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.
This sounds entirely reasonable.
Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”
Instead, the paper has been published in a new journal called — you can’t make this up — The Journal of Controversial Ideas.
Below Paul echoes what I said above.
Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.
Consider the increasingly widespread practice of appending a “positionality statement” to one’s research. This is an explicit acknowledgment by the author of an academic paper of his or her identity (e.g., “nondisabled,” “continuing generation”). Positionality statements were first popular in the social sciences and are now spreading to the hard sciences and medicine. The idea is that one’s race, sex, relative privilege and “experiences of oppression” inherently inform one’s research, especially in ways that perpetuate or alleviate bias.
But whatever validity “alternative ways of knowing,” “multiple narratives” and “lived experience” may have in the humanities, they are of questionable utility when it comes to the sciences. Some defenders of positionality statements maintain that these acknowledgments promote objectivity by drawing attention to a researcher’s potential blind spots, but in practice they can have the opposite effect, implying that scientific research isn’t universally valid or applicable — that there are different kinds of knowledge for different groups of people.
Note that the ultimate in positionality statements is putting your “iwi” (tribe) in a paper touting indigenous Māori science, like this one I discussed the other day. The words in parentheses after each author’s name gives the iwi to which they belong.
This is like putting “(atheist Ashkenazi Jew)” after my name when I write a paper. Or perhaps it establishes the authors’ credibility as Māori because it gives their iwi. Regardless, this kind of stuff is embarrassing; it’s pure virtue flaunting. Do you really have to name your iwi when arguing for the compatibility of Māori ways of knowing and modern science? Shouldn’t the arguments be what’s important, rather than the position of the author. (Indeed, in this paper the authors argue that judging Māori “ways of knowing” cannot be done except for Māori themselves!)
Beyond positionality statements, Paul also finds worrying oft-required DEI statements for jobs as well as “citation justice” (the drive to cite more underrepresented people’s work as a form of scientific reparations). And she does add our own caveat. Do look at the link in the second paragraph below:
It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots.
Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity. (A major study published last week shows that despite decades of sexism, claims of gender bias in academic science are now grossly overstated.) The focus, the authors write, should be on improving meritocratic systems rather than dismantling them.
At a time when faith in institutions is plummeting and scientific challenges such as climate change remain enduringly large, the last thing we want is to give the public reason to lose faith in science. A study published last month, “Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions,” shows that what we need is more impartiality, not less.
Paul’s ending, which I’ll talk more about in a second:
If you believe bias is crucial to evaluating scientific work, you may object to the fact that several of the authors of the study are politically conservative, as are some of the researchers they cite. One author, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago and a critic of some affirmative action and diversity programs, inspired outcry in 2021 when he was invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But to deny the validity of this paper on that basis would mean succumbing to the very fallacies the authors so persuasively dismantle.
One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.
As expected, objections to our paper, which you can find on the Internet (there are also plaudits!), often rest not on our arguments, but on the names of the authors. I’m sure that almost anyone can find in this list an author they’re not keen on, and of course all of us disagree on some things. But to dismiss our paper, as some have done, because there’s an author or two they don’t like is pure nonsense. It’s a deflection strategy: a way to attack the paper without having to attack its arguments. I’m getting plenty fed up with these “guilt by association” arguments, because they’re not really arguments but simply rhetorical strategies—even a form of defamation by smearing.
But of course there are those who attack our thesis as well, denigrating “merit” as a criterion for judging science or scientists, and even, along with the two editors we quoted, saying that there’s really no such thing as merit. I wonder if those people care whether, when they get on a plane, whether their pilot has gone any evaluation of merit in the form of being able to fly a plane. For many—perhaps most—jobs in society, merit should be the primary characteristic for hiring. (I of course recognize that judging “merit” is often slippery, and, being in favor of some forms of affirmative action, realize that sometimes it’s salubrious to sacrifice a bit—but not a lot—of merit as a form of reparations to an oppressed group. Not all the authors agree on this, of course.)
Finally, let me note that articles on our paper have appeared in two non-English newspapers of repute: Le Figaro (French) and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German). The screenshots of the articles are below, and I’ll be glad to send pdfs them to any reader who asks. (I also have an English translation of the German article.)
Today’s batch of photos comes from regular reader and photo-provider Mark Sturtevant, who notes, “This batch is unusual in that it includes a vertebrate.” Mark’s notes and IDs are indented (the links are also his), and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here are more wildlife pictures that were taken a couple summers ago, all in the general vicinity of where I live in Michigan.
One of the locally unique kinds of insects that can be found in what I call the Magic Field is the oil blister beetle (Meloe sp.). I don’t think it a stretch to say that they have one of the strangest reproductive biologies in the animal kingdom, as summarized here. The individual shown below is a male, and I have just learned at this writing that their specialized antennae are used to clasp the female antennae during mating. The second picture was taken with my wide-angle macro lens.
Next up are a couple staged pictures of a brown lacewing, possibly Micromus posticus, which came to the porch light one evening. A trick well known in the hobby is that membranous wings can give a nice iridescent effect if you photograph them against a dark background.
Here is a thread-legged bug, Emesaya brevipennis, which also came to the porch light. These large-ish walking stick-like predatory Hemipterans have incredibly long rear legs, as can be seen in the linked picture. When sitting still, they eventually take on this pose where their mantis-like fore-legs are positioned as shown.
Next up is a staged photograph of a helmeted treehopper, Glossonotus acuminatus. I don’t see this species in my immediate area, but they are common a couple hours south of me.
The next picture is another treehopper, Entylia carinata, photographed in my backyard. It was being tended by what look to be false honeypot ants, Prenolepis imparis. These ants seek the sugary secretions from fallen fruits and also from plant feeding Hemipterans, and their abdomens can become quite engorged as a result. There were actually so many ants that it was hard to see the treehopper. But this picture was made as a composite of several pictures, pieced together with layer masks to remove most of the ants and to show more of the treehopper.
Next up is a monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, sleeping in a cherry tree at a local park. Taken very late in the season, this one was perhaps on its southward migration.
Lastly, I have a cherry tree in the yard, and here is an Eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus),having a nibble from some of the old fruits as fall and winter began to set in. It was definitely suspicious of me.
I decided to have the AI art generator Dall-E 2 produce some different interpretations of that last picture, and here are some results. All I did was drop the picture in, and these came out. I don’t know how it seems to know what it’s looking at.
Good morning on Thursday, May 4, 2023. Is it summer yet? No, but it is National Hoagie Day, celebrating the overstuffed sandwich also known as a “hero” or a “sub” (“hoagie” is the New Jersey and Philadelphia-area name). There are at least three different versions of the etymology of this comestible’s name, and you can read them at the link. Here’s a big ‘un (compare this to the British “sandwich” with 1 mm of filling):
Russia on Wednesday accused Ukraine of staging a drone attack intended to kill President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, an incendiary allegation that was forcefully denied by Ukrainian officials, some of whom warned it could be a pretext for Russia to escalate its war.
Russia said that it thwarted the attack and that Putin was not in the building at the time.
Among the mysteries surrounding Wednesday’s alleged attack was how two drones could have successfully reached one of the most protected buildings in Moscow’s fortified city center. While some analysts said the incident might have been a false flag attack staged by Russia, others suggested it could be a performative gesture by Ukraine, striking at a preeminent symbol of Russian state power.
The allegation of an assassination attempt — which could not be independently confirmed and was broadly rejected by military experts — was made in a statement shared by the Kremlin press service with Russian state news agencies on Wednesday afternoon.
In the overnight hours early Wednesday, “the Kyiv regime attempted a drone strike on the Kremlin residence of the President of the Russian Federation,” the statement said. “Two drones were aimed at the Kremlin.”
“We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the president of the Russian Federation, carried out on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 parade,” the Kremlin said, referring to the annual commemoration of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II.
Well, I’m not sure what to think. It could be performative by Russia, and “allegations of an assassination attempt” have been rejected by experts, but is it possible that it wasn’t an assassination attempt but just a demonstration by Ukraine of what it could do? Can a drone even reach the Kremlin from Ukraine? In my heart, I think the Ukrainians did it.
*The WaPo lists five possible outcomes of the debt ceiling crises, where furious maneuvering is going on involving Biden and both houses of Congress. A government shutdown, which could occur on June 1, would be disastrous. Here they are with my patented (and untrustworthy) assessments:
a.) Biden and McCarthy make a deal. It would stave off disaster but the problem would eventually reappear.
b.) An end run in Congress. (The Dems would team up with a handful of Republicans to effect a discharge petition.) They won’t be able to get enough Republicans to join the Democrats.
c.) A bill to buy more time. They could suspend the ceiling by Congressional vote. The downside is, again, this only postpones the problem. The Post considers this unlikely.
d.) The White House acts on its own. There are three ways this could happen, one of which is interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment as not requiring a debt ceiling. After pondering this, I think this is what Biden will try to do. Whether or not it’s a valid interpretation will then be up to the courts.
e.) The U.S. defaults. This is the worst possible outcome: it would shut down the government and likely cause a recession not just in the U.S. but possibly worldwide. A big disaster, but it might spur some action in Congress.
In a study released Wednesday in Nature, a team at MIT, Harvard University, Caltech and other institutions reported that they observed a planet, likely a hot Jupiter-size world, spiraling close to a dying star that was 1,000 times its size, until it was finally ingested into the star’s core. The scientists say the star grew bigger and more than 100 times brighter in just 10 days, quickly faded and then eventually turned to normal as if it finished digesting the planet.
The novel observation helps us understand more about Earth’s own final bow. Many astronomers believe Earth will suffer a similar fate billions of years down the line, when our own evolving Sun will run out of fuel, balloon and consume its closest planetary neighbors. Humans likely won’t be around for this event, however, as our growing Sun will probably fry Earth first, makingit inhospitable for life.
. . . Co-author Mansi Kasliwal said planet engulfments are fairly common but are also dim and “wimpy,” which make them hard to find. The infrared data helped illuminate these processes hidden against much brighter stellar eruptions.
. . .There’s still a few billion years before the Sun is expected to grow large enough to encompass Earth. MacLeod said, our host star would first swallow Mercury and Venus before eventually getting to Earth. But he estimates it would still take tens of thousands of years for the aged Sun to expand from Mercury to Earth. The Sun’s radius will likely not expand so far as to reach the outer, larger planets in our solar system though.
Astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, who was not involved in the study, called the study’s findings a “groundbreaking result” but thinks it’s probably not relevant to understanding Earth’s fate and whether it would be ultimately engulfed by our Sun.
The Washington Post has a cool 32-second video of the engulfment, but I can’t embed it. Click the screenshot below to go to the site and watch:
(From the Post): Animation shows a gas giant planet spiraling around a star until it is completely engulfed. This event occurred in May 2020, 12,000 light years away from Earth. (Video: John Farrell/The Washington Post)
*Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San Jose State, is one of the anthrophology researchers whose work has been impeded by indigenous claims on human remains. These claims have prevented her from studying bones 500-3,000 years old found in California (it’s now required to immediately surrender remains to the indigenous people who claim the land on which remains were found). Her attempts to study paleoanthropology, and examine skeletons before they’re given back, led to her being removed as the curator of the collection of bones at her school, and then to retaliation by her school. She’s not only forbidden from studying the bones themselves, but studying X-rays of them or even photographing a box containing bones. She’s now suing her school for retaliation. (As I’ve said, my own view is “first let the scientists study the remains, then return them—so long as an existing group has a valid and demonstrable claim on the remains, which is not easy to do!)
She’s let some of us know this:
. . . I have been locked out of my Twitter account because of my profile picture — the same one that I have been using for over two years since I started on Twitter.
I got two emails from Twitter, one calling the image one of “graphic violence” and the other saying that it displayed “hateful conduct”. I am attaching the photo below. It’s obviously neither of these things. I’m holding a 500-year-old Peruvian skull that had undergone cranial modification — an image I chose because people will ask me about it and I then explain why it has that shape, dispel myths about aliens, and spark interest in understanding the past and bone biology.
This is the photo showing “hateful conduct.” Elizabeth’s blocked (for now) Twitter account is here.
*Go have a look at the AP article, and especially the accompanying 13 pictures, of a new exhibit in Rome on ancient civilizations with an emphasis on Pompeii. The star of the show, which I’ll let you see for yourself (access is free) is a Roman bridal chariot from Pompeii that managed to escape looters.
A meticulously reconstructed Pompeii bridal chariot that eluded the ancient city’s modern-day looters is a star of an ambitious new exhibition in Rome, which invites viewers to reflect on today’s connections with classical Roman and Greek civilizations.
Shown for the first time to the public since it was discovered in 2021 under four meters (13 feet) of volcanic ash, the four-wheeled chariot features silver and bronze decorations, including of erotic scenes.
The chariot was found under the ruins of a villa just outside Pompeii, an excavation prompted by the discovery that artifact thieves were tunneling through the area in hopes of finding saleable ancient loot.
Wooden parts of the chariot, like the sideboards, didn’t survive the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius that ended Pompeii’s run as a thriving, enterprising Roman city. But to reconstruct what didn’t survive of the chariot, experts used same the pioneering technique that have been employed for decades now to make casts of human victims of the eruption, by filling in the space left in the ash by the vanished organic matter.
There’s also a photo of this, which I’ve put below:
In a sobering reminder how life can vanish in an instant, as reflected in the show’s title “The instant and eternity, between us and the ancients,” the casts of two male victims — one of the pair is believed to have been the enslaved person of the other man — were transported to Rome from Pompeii’s archaeological park to greet visitors at the exhibition’s entrance.
But the chariot is just one of many stellar pieces in the exhibition, which opens on Thursday for a three-month run in the towering, cavernous halls of the Baths of Diocletian, a structure in central Rome that dates to about A.D. 300 and now is home to the National Roman Museum just across from Rome’s bustling main train station.
There are several pictures of the chariot from different angles; the photo below is presumably the two males: slave and enslaver. I don’t know how they made that judgment.
(From the AP) A view of the exhibition ‘Between us and the ancients. The instant and eternity’ in Rome’s Diocletian Baths, Wednesday, May 3, 2023. The exhibition will open to the public from May 4 through July 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili pretends she’s leaving home (bye, bye). Paulina took a great photo of The Princess.
Paulina: Where are you running to?
Hili: To a better future.
(Photo: Paulina)
In Polish:
Paulina: Dokąd biegniesz?
Hili: Do lepszej przyszłości.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina)
********************
A meme from Nicole: Amazon drive scared off by ducks and geese!
From Masih: a hijab-wearing woman harasses two women without a headscarf, and she gets pwned:
Google translation:
This is Arak, and a harassing woman wearing a hijab drove a car in the street to disturb two women who did not wear a hijab. The sender of the video wrote that in Arak, women have been walking around the city for some time and they are getting stuck on the hijab of women. In this scene, this harassing woman in hijab gets a response befitting her behavior and is forced to leave the scene. Khamenei and Radan Nadan should know that Iranian women are not afraid of you today. Nosy in other people’s life and taste and style of dressing is called bullying, and stone is the reward for slanderers.
#Turn around to spin
#Our_camera_is_our_weapon
#civil_struggle
اینجا اراک است و یک زن آزارگر حجاب با خودرو در خیابان برای دو زن که حجاب نداشتند مزاحمت ایجاد کرده است. فرستند ویدئو نوشته است که در اراک مدتیست زنانی در سطح شهر میچرخند و به پوشش و وضع حجاب زنان گیر میدهند. این زن آزارگر حجاب در این صحنه پاسخی در خور رفتارش میگیرد و مجبور به… pic.twitter.com/ZYxlv76b3n
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 4, 2023
Tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, clearly the inspiration for “Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite” on the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album. I’d never seen this before:
Somehow, despite a long friendship with @seanonolennon, I had no idea this existed as the inspiration for his dad’s lyrics.
Is this well known? I had *zero* idea it was a real event in Feb 1843.
Matthew swears that this is a genuine and near-instantaneous form of color change:
There is a video going around social media at the moment that has many people scratching their heads in disbelief. It’s a video of a Flashing Tilefish, Hoplolatilus chlupatyi, rapidly changing colours in the blink of an eye. https://t.co/tbeCPC0NZCpic.twitter.com/rCrHjR06Ye
21 years ago today, people gave a real keyboard to real monkeys to test the infinite monkey theorem. The monkeys pooped on the keyboard, threw stones at it, and wrote this pic.twitter.com/6OZcCAVoRy
Here’s a lecture (actually, two short lectures separated by a Q&A session) recently given by Colin Wright in Davis, California.
The video is two hours long, but Colin’s first talk on sex is only 38 minutes long and his second talk on gender is 23 minutes long. Given the topics, the expected protestors showed up, but, as Colin recounts in his Substack article below, they stayed outside and didn’t disrupt the talk (of course, they didn’t get to listen to it, either). The YouTube notes are these:
Colin Wright’s presentation “Sex is not a Spectrum”, The Biology of Sex & Gender Curricula in CA Public Schools at the Mary L. Stephens Davis Branch Library, Blanchard Room.
The first talk is a clear explication of what sex is, why it’s “defined” by gametes, and the nature of other characters related to sex that aren’t binary (as sex itself is). What about intersex individuals? Do they negate the binary? Many of the objections to the binary he defuses were mentioned by Agustín Fuentes in his Scientific American op-ed.
Given how Colin is demonized by gender activists (it’s impossible to disseminate the sex binary without being attacked as a transphobe or “hater”), he comes across as calm, rational, and willing to engage. He wanted to engage, and in fact does after the talk ends at 37:26.
But then, starting at 1:13, he does a second (and shorter) talk that takes up a more contentious issue: the nature of gender, how it plays into ideology, and what the issues around gender issues are in Davis itself. Surprisingly, the town has a three- or fourfold higher number of adolescents who identify as transgender than in California or the nation as a whole. (Wright gives several possible explanations for this discrepancy.) That talk ends at 1:36, and then there’s a bunch more questions. People who aren’t ranting ideologues really are curious about all this stuff, and we need more give-and-take discussions like this.
Here’s his own take on the talk from his website (click to read):
An excerpt and a photo (note that one person has misspelled “evolution”, which I’ve indicated with an arrow).
I arrived at the event early, an hour and a half before my scheduled speaking time. The event organizers had hired two security guards with the explicit instruction to remove any person who attempted to disrupt the proceedings. Everyone was welcome to attend, but attendees were required to display civility and respect.
As showtime approached, protesters began accumulating. They brandished signs declaring that my speech “kills kids” and urging me to keep my “phobias + prejudices” to myself. I find it difficult to comprehend how a discussion on the connection between sex and gametes could result in fatalities, but perhaps my imagination is lacking. The protesters also launched an attack on my credentials by insisting my PhD in “bugs” (rather than gender studies) disqualified me from speaking competently about the biology of sex in humans.
