Cobb and Comfort on Rosalind Franklin’s contributions to solving the structure of DNA

April 25, 2023 • 10:30 am

Today, as I’ve said, is the 70th anniversary of the publication of the structure of DNA, which began a scientific revolution via three papers published in Nature‘s April 25, 1953 issue:  one by Watson and Crick, one by Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson, and the third by Franklin and Gosling. As you know, Watson and Crick, who worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 along with Wilkins, who had worked with Franklin at King’s College London. (I’ve always been amazed that it took them 9 years to make the award.)

As Matthew has mentioned on this site before, Rosalind Franklin certainly deserved a Prize as well (probably sharing the Chemistry Prize with Wilkins since only three awards can be given in one category). Sadly, though, Franklin died in 1958 of ovarian cancer before the Prizes were awarded. She was only 37. Here are two photos of her:

Left: Rosalind Franklin by Elliott & Fry, half-plate film negative, 11 June 1946, NPG x76929 © National Portrait Gallery, London. Right: © Henry Grant Collection/Museum of London.

Due largely to the hyperbole of Watson’s bestseller The Double Helix, a legend arose that Franklin had been cheated of the credit that was due her. As the story goes, Watson and Crick were shown one of her X-ray crystallography photos of DNA, the famous “photo 51”, which gave them key data needed to construct their double-helix model.  Franklin, many say, was robbed by the duplicity of Watson and Crick.

This story is false, as Matthew Cobb from Manchester and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins,  reveal in a long piece in today’s Nature (click on screenshot below). In fact, Crick never even saw photograph 51 before it was published, and although there was some rivalry between the King’s and Cavendish teams, there was also a lot of cooperation.  The key to Watson and Crick’s successful model-building didn’t come from their snitching photograph 51, but in fact from a report by Max Perutz (who got the Nobel for Chemistry in 1962). As head of the Cambridge Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit, he participated, along with other MRC heads, in a scientific inspection of King’s College as a kind of informal analysis of the science going on there.

Perutz got the final report because he was on the inspection committee. And that report included details, with data, of what King’s was doing vis-à-vis DNA work  Further, Franklin knew that Perutz—at Cambridge (where Watson and Crick were working)—had access to all the data in the report, and she more or less invited Crick to have a look at Perutz’s report. It was that report that gave Watson and Crick the critical data that put them on the right track to build their double-helical model of DNA, with the struts of the helix running in opposite direction and with Gs pairing with Cs and As with Ts. The article below paints a very different picture of Franklin and her relations with Watson and Crick than the one that has become lore due to what Cobb and Comfort call Watson’s “semi-fictional” portrayal in The Double Helix.. Yes, the teams were in some sense competing, but they also were collaborating, and kept track of each other’s work.

The piece was jointly written by Matthew, who’s writing a biography of Crick, and Nathaniel Comfort, who’s writing a bio of Watson. Together they ransacked the scientific archives and reached the conclusion that Franklin was in every sense a crucial collaborator in the DNA work, not somebody spurned and sidelined as “the dark lady of DNA.” Indeed, Franklin became friends with both Watson and Crick after she left King’s for Birkbeck College, and even recuperated at the Cricks’ home after her cancer operation. Here’s a bit of the Nature paper that sums up Cobb’s and Comfort’s take:

In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”. They also noted that the King’s researchers “suggest that the sugar-phosphate backbone forms the outside of the helix and that each chain repeats itself after one revolution in 34 Å”.

This clear acknowledgement of both the nature and the source of the information Watson and Crick had used has been overlooked in previous accounts of the discovery of the structure of DNA. As well as showing the Cambridge duo finally trying to do the right thing, It strengthens our case that Franklin was an equal member in a group of four scientists working on the structure of DNA. She was recognized by her colleagues as such, although that acknowledgement was both belated and understated. All this helps to explain one of the lasting enigmas of the affair — why neither Franklin nor Wilkins ever questioned how the structure had been discovered. They knew the answer, because they expected that Perutz would share his knowledge and because they had read Watson and Crick’s 1954 article.

Click below to read the article (it’s free):

I asked Matthew to write me a few lines about how this piece came to be, and he was more than generous: he wrote the following.

I’m writing a biography of Crick, Nathaniel Comfort is writing a biography of Watson. We first met in March 2022 and got on well together – we have been sharing information and insights ever since. This is a terrific experience as it enables us to chat about minor details and also explore interpretations. In August 2022, Nathaniel came to the UK. I encouraged him to visit Cambridge, to try and get the feel of what Watson must have felt when he went there in 1951. I decided to go down to meet him, and we agreed we would go to the Churchill College archives to see Franklin’s papers. All that material is available online (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ka25u4ft), and we didn’t expect to find anything new. We both had our understanding of what happened in 1953, and we didn;t expect to change this. Our visit was more a kind of homage or pilgrimage – the fetishistic fun of actually touching the documents!

To our surprise, we made two discoveries, going through the material together, discussing what they meant.

– We realised why Franklin was so keen on the A form of DNA which she was studying. Not only did it provide very sharp images, it also represented the *crystalline* form of DNA – she wasn’t interested in the paracrystalline B form, which was found at higher humidity, because it seemed to her to represent the loss of order – “the stuff just dissolves” she wrote in her notes.

– We also came across a draft article for Time magazine about the discovery, which had been sent to Franklin by the journalist Joan Bruce. This was known to have existed – it was the article for which the famous photos of Watson, Crick and the DNA model were taken – but it was never published and had never been noticed, as far as we are aware. The science content of the article is confused, but it strikingly presented the discovery as the joint work of King’s and Cambridge, which, of course, it was. This was very different to the Watson and Crick centred view you get from reading Watson’s semi-fictional account in The Double Helix.

We also came across a draft article for Time magazine about the discovery, which had been sent to Franklin by the journalist Joan Bruce. This was known to have existed – it was the article for which the famous photos of Watson, Crick and the DNA model were taken – but it was never published and had never been noticed, as far as we are aware. The science content of the article is confused, but it strikingly presented the discovery as the joint work of King’s and Cambridge, which, of course, it was. This was very different to the Watson and Crick centred view you get from reading Watson’s semi-fictional account in The Double Helix.On the basis of these two discoveries, we decided to write an article for Nature, to be published on the 70th anniversary of the publication of the three articles. Our aim was to introduce these new elements and to argue (again) that the story in Watson’s account of him seeing Photograph 51 and gaining a decisive insight into the structure was hokum (this point has been made several times, with no consequence on what the general public believes!) – much more significant was a report written in December 1952, which contained data from Franklin and Wilkins and had been given to Max Perutz, the head of the Cambridge research group.After the article had been edited and was at the proof stage, we made two more discoveries:

– We found a letter from a PhD student at King’s to Crick which suggests that Franklin knew that Perutz had the relevant information and that she almost invited Crick to ask Perutz about it. This letter is very different from the competitive race that Watson portrays the discovery as. It also fits in with Franklin’s later friendship and collaboration with both Watson and Crick. We have found no evidence she felt robbed (nor was she).

– We noticed that at the Royal Society Conversazione (a kind of science fair) held in June 1953, Franklin presented the double helix as a collective work – exactly as the draft Time article suggested – with all seven authors of the Nature papers given credit.

We had to add these findings, which reinforced our argument, as best we could. Had we stumbled upon these facts earlier the article might have been a bit different, but there was only so much rewriting we could do.

We did not set out to discover anything new about an affair we thought was done and dusted, nor were we looking to exculpate Watson and Crick (nor have we done so). It has been quite a ride, but I for one will be glad to move on from 1953!

Thanks to Matthew for that. He also wrote a 23-part Twitter thread, beginning here, summarizing their views and giving lots of cool pictures. Here’s the first tweet, and just follow it down:

 

A few photos. First, the infamous “photo 51”, taken by Raymond Gosling under Frankin’s supervision:

Here’s the cover of the report given to Perutz that served as a prime impetus for Watson and Crick’s construction of the DNA model:

Crick’s acknowledgment (in his lecture notes) of the importance of the MRC report in giving the dimensions of DNA (my box). Caption is Matthew’s. Note Crick’s sentence (I’ve put it in a red box), “MRC mimeographed report gave unit cell dimensions. A, B forms.”  These were crucial for the model.

A letter implying that Franklin knew that Watson and Crick would see the King’s data, and wasn’t worried about it (Caption by Matthew):

We found a 1953 letter to Crick from a student at King’s, implying that Franklin knew her MRC report data would be shared with Watson and Crick, and was relaxed about this. We found no evidence that she felt robbed—and this letter suggests that she did not feel this way.

Crick lauds Franklin when he was n0minated for the Nobel (and she was dead). Caption is from Matthew:

Franklin was a brilliant scientist. Her work was an essential part of the discovery of the double helix. She did not discover the structure, but did come very close. As Crick explained when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Below: Rosalind Franklin’s gravestone (she was Jewish). Note that it mentions her work on viruses but not on DNA. The grave is at “The Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery, usually known as Willesden Jewish Cemetery. . .  at Beaconsfield Road, Willesden, in the London Borough of Brent, England.” Note the stones placed on the marker, a sign of respect in Jewish culture.

Finally, Matthew produced an AI-generated photo (using the My Heritage website). of Franklin showing how she might have looked and moved in real life.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 25, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: it’s April 25, 2023 and National Zucchini Bread Day: the most odious pastry in existence. It exists because zucchini grows like wildfire, people always have more than they want (which isn’t much as the vegetable is basically inedible), and so they make zucchini breads to give to unlucky friends.

I’m still quite ill, hoarse as the dickens and coughing. Fortunately, I tested a second time for covid and was still negative. I’ll do one more test tomorrow. It’s almost surely a dreadful cold picked up from the crowds on the airplane or the Paris Métro, and I’m taking Robitussin with codeine at night and benzonatate (a non drowsy cough supressant) during the day. But be warned: posting may be light until I’m better, which may take a few days. There will be no readers’ wildlife until that happens, but by all means keep sending your contributions, which I save in a special folder. As always, I do my best, like dragging my tuchas into work at 5 a.m.

It’s also Anzac Day, National Crayola Day, National Plumber’s Day (but which plumber is being fêted?), World Malaria Day, National Telephone Day, and World Penguin Day. Here’s a smudged chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus) I photographed in 2019. Sadly, it looks as if I’m not going back this year, and maybe never again.

Finally, it’s DNA Day, the day in 1953 when Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins published their epochal papers in Nature elucidating the structure of DNA. We’re having a very special feature on today’s 70th anniversary, but I can’t put it up till 11 a.m. Chicago time. Come back then!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the April 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Tucker Carlson, who makes me cringe every time I see him feign concern with his furrowed brow, is leaving Fox News. While he was Fox’s most popular host, the network had to pay big bucks in an election-related defamation lawsuit against him, and what credibility he had is even less.

The network made the announcement less than a week after it agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Mr. Carlson’s show, one of the highest rated on Fox, figured prominently for its role in spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.

In making its announcement, Fox offered a terse statement of gratitude. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” it said.

His last program was on Friday, Fox said.

Mr. Carlson is also facing a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg, who claims that he presided over a misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture. Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit, which was filed in March, that on her first day working for Mr. Carlson, she discovered the work space was decorated with large pictures of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a swimsuit.

WHAT? Did Carlson put that up? If so, why? Well, I can’t say I’ll miss the old miscreant, but somehow I think he’ll land on his feet. As for letting him go, well, Fox could hardly keep him on after his antics cost them so much money, and even Fox has to worry a bit about its credibility.

*Soon after Carlson was given his pink slip, CNN also firedthe veteran host Don Lemon, although the reasons are obscure.

CNN on Monday fired veteran host and anchor Don Lemon, he said, in a surprise move announced only minutes after Fox News parted ways with its star host, Tucker Carlson.

Lemon announced his departure from CNN in a tweet. “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN,” he wrote. “I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at work.”

Lemon didn’t spell out what “larger issues” may have been involved, but the longtime host was chastised in February for on-air comments about the “prime” age of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and other women.

If you want a dramatization of how toxic Fox was not long ago, watch the 2019 movie  “Bombshell,” recounting how Fox boss Roger Ailes was brought down by the toxic and misogynistic environment he created. It stars Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, and Margo Robbie as a fictitious and beleaguered wannabee anchor.  It gets a decent but not outstanding rating at Rotten Tomatoes; I watched it on the plane coming back from Paris (the choice was pretty limited!)

Here’s the trailer:

*Ukraine is apparently preparing for a spring offensive, despite the Discord documents that seem to show that the country is not as well buttressed by the U.S. as we thought.  As the AP reports, they launched a (failed ) drone strike on Crimea, but also one that made it to Moscow—a long way from Ukraine:

Russian-appointed authorities in Crimea said the military fended off a Ukrainian strike on a main naval base on Monday, while an exploding drone was also reportedly found in a forest near Moscow — attacks that come as Ukraine is believed to be preparing for a major counteroffensive.

The Moscow-appointed head of the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said the military destroyed a Ukrainian sea drone that attempted to attack the harbor in the early hours and another one blew up. He said the powerful explosions shattered windows in several apartment buildings but didn’t inflict any other damage.

The attack was the latest in a series of attempted strikes on Sevastopol, the main naval base in Crimea that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

. . . Russian news reports also claimed Monday that a Ukrainian exploding drone was found in a forest in a forest about 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) east of the Russian capital.

While it didn’t explode, the incident again underscored Ukraine’s capability to reach deep inside Russia as the Ukrainian military is thought to be preparing for a spring counteroffensive to reclaim occupied areas.

Observers believe that the counteroffensive’s most likely target would be the Russian-held parts of the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. If the push is successful, it would allow Ukraine to cut the land corridor between Russia and Crimea.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if Ukraine got Crimea back? After all, that was also stolen land. None of us know what’s going to happen (my first guess was that Russia would win quickly, which was also Putin’s idea), but the plucky Ukrainians have held off a huge (if incompetent) army for a year. Meanwhile, there’s Bakhmut, more of propagandistic than strategic value:

The Russian forces, meanwhile, have continued their nearly nine-month effort to capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region.

Zelenskyy emphasized the importance of defending Bakhmut in last month’s interview with The Associated Press. saying that its fall could allow Russia to rally international support for a deal that might require Kyiv to make unacceptable compromises.

Ukraine and Russia both have described the fighting for Bakhmut, the war’s longest battle, as key to exhausting enemy forces and preventing them from pressing attacks elsewhere along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line.

Fingers crossed for Zelensky, his soldiers, and his people!

*The WSJ recounts the story of how Mayer Richard J. Daley decided that charging a dime to use the toilet stalls at Chicago’s airports was an imposition to visitors and residents. As a man with absolute power, he nixed that fee, and within three weeks all the toilets in Chicago’s public places were free.

The existence of pay toilets nationwide had seldom been seriously questioned. In 1970 four Dayton, Ohio, high-school students had founded a semi-whimsical organization called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. The group was met mostly with smiles.

Daley, the most powerful mayor in the U.S., heard about the group and understood immediately that the Ohio kids were right. Charge people money to go to the bathroom—something everyone needed to do multiple times each day? What kind of welcome was that to visitors to Chicago? What kind of send-off was that to Chicagoans on their way out of town? Every dime dropped into every toilet-stall slot was lousy public relations for the city.

So, as a man holding all but absolute power locally, he decreed that the pay toilets in the airports would henceforth be free. He even managed to make it a women’s-rights issue: Because men weren’t charged to use the urinals, the pay toilets were an example of sex discrimination. Daley, never known as a feminist, nonetheless announced: “I did it for women’s lib.”

The company that manufactured and installed the lock mechanisms—Nik-O-Lok, of Indianapolis—was understandably displeased. Daley didn’t care. He ordered Nik-O-Lok to remove those locks: “Do it at once, if not sooner.” Within three weeks, the locks were gone. Chicago’s City Council, on Daley’s command, soon expanded the no-pay-toilet edict to all “places which serve and accommodate the public.”

Around the country, it was if a lightbulb had switched on above the heads of mayors and governors. Of course—why anger citizens by constantly charging them for something as personal and necessary as using a bathroom? Other municipalities from coast to coast began to follow the Daley example. Reporters and editorial writers couldn’t help themselves: They described the victorious no-pay-toilet proponents as “flushed with triumph.”

An inconsequential issue? Daley was smart enough to understand that it’s never a good idea for a city to make its residents and visitors resentful. A dime was only a dime, but it felt like a constant and intrusive tax. Cities, then and now, always need income. But even in 2023’s America, where public restrooms can seem hard to find, a savvy mayor knows better than to pick the pockets of people in a hurry to get behind a certain door.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades, many times I have availed myself of Chicago’s free public restrooms. Besides, who has a dime these days?

*Also the WSJ notes that, according to the American Library Association, in 2022 there were 1,269 attempts to ban books in the U.S., almost twice the number for the previous year.

More than 2,500 individual titles fell under scrutiny in 2022, the majority of which focused on or were written by LGBT individuals and people of color.

The efforts have reached communities across the U.S. Voters in a rural western Michigan town defunded a library over a dispute related to LGBT content. A Texas county considered closing its public libraries after a federal judge ordered more than a dozen recently removed books to be returned to shelves.

Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada, president of the American Library Association, said creating a list of the most-challenged books in 2022 could help identify the communities, stories and subjects most often targeted by book-banning campaigns. The group said common reasons for attempting to censor these books included allegations they were sexually explicit or included LGBT content and profanity.

These, I suspect, are coming mostly from the Right. Here is the ALA’s list of the 13 most-challenged books last year:

1. “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe

2. “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” by George M. Johnson

3. “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison

4. “Flamer,” by Mike Curato

5. (tie) “Looking for Alaska,” by John Green

5. (tie) “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky

7. “Lawn Boy,” by Jonathan Evison

8. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie

9. “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez

10. (tie) “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah J. Maas

10. (tie) “Crank,” by Ellen Hopkins

10. (tie) “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” by Jesse Andrews

10. (tie) “This Book is Gay,” by Juno Dawson

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka goes after Hili! OMG!

Kulka:  Got you.
Hili:     This will end badly.

(Photo: Paulina)

In Polish:
Kulka: Mam cię.
Hili: To się źle skończy.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina)

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

From Stephen via America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. What a pair of loons! When they starting thinking about doing it, they mist themselves or eat a raw potato!

Here’s one of a big batch of misspelled signs that reader David sent me. There will be a lot more to come! (Maybe they used air freshener. . . )

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih: the expulsion of a hijab Pecksniff:

Titania tweeted again!

 

From Luana: Colin Wright, whose work I discussed yesterday, gave a talk in Davis, CA on sex and gender, and here’s who came out to greet him. The second para reads, in full,

“But bugs are designated male and female for the same exact reasons humans are designated male or female. They would have learned this if they actually came inside and listened to my talk!

His speech, they aver is killing kids!

Speaker of gender, here’s a Twitter exchange from JKL herself:

And now The Amazing Atheist (whoever he is) has added this to his Twitter handle:

From Barry. My explanation, which is mine: there’s no lead duck, and each duck has to follow one in front of it (these are runner ducks).

From the Auschwitz Memorial. a French girl who died at seventeen:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a faceplant penguin appropriate for World Penguin Day:

The deepest fish yet (two tweets):

The National Academies of Science, which issues reports on opioid use, took $31 million from the Sackler family, pharmaceutical gazillionaires who largely created the opioid crisis

April 24, 2023 • 11:30 am

The book below (click on the cover to go to it) is one of the best piecces of nonfiction I’ve read in a year. It details the story of the Sackler family, in which three Jewish brothers, the sons of immigrants, worked together to push opioids for pain relief, and not in an ethical way. They eventually devised Oxycontin and Oxycodone, marketing them (via the company Purdue Pharma) to doctors as a kind of safe cure-all for pain, in the meantime completely ignoring reports of widespread addiction and deaths. (They also covered their tracks but not going public about what they really did and by becoming philanthropists, always insisting that the name “Sackler” be prominently associated with their buildings and galleries.)

The lawsuits eventually began, detailed by Wikipedia;

By 2017, a series of articles linking the Sacklers to Oxycodone as well as a public campaign by photographer Nan Goldin to link the Sacklers to the opioid crisis, led to stigmatization of the Sackler name with many museums and universities refusing financial gifts from the Sacklers.

While the family was eventually sued, the Sacklers used their company to declare bankruptcy, link their personal finances to the fortunes of Purdue Frederick, and ultimately managed to escape any financial consequences at all. The family continued to maintain that they knew nothing about the abusive and deceptive marketing practices of the company and maintained the lie that their opioids were not addictive and that the few people who abused their drugs were already addicts to begin with.

Eventually, the Justice Department settled with Purdue Pharma for an $8 billion criminal and civil settlement and another $225 million from the Sacklers themselves.  Nobody in the family has faced criminal charges, and they’re still living like kings.

The book is a page turner, and well worth reading, but it doesn’t paint a flattering portrait of the Sacklers, who come across as an affable but nefarious family determined to get as rich as possible no matter how much damage they did to humans in pain.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see this long article in yesterday’s New York Times. It details how the National Academies of Science (NAS), a private organization (but partly funded by the government) took millions from the Sacklers at the same time it was producing reports on opioid policy in America. The NAS exists as a body of elite elected scientists and doctors whose job is to produce definitive reports to help steer U.S. government policy.  Even if the NAS said it wasn’t swayed by the donations to come up with favorable takes on opioids, this is one of the most arrant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in science. The NAS didn’t even divulge in its reports that there was a “potential conflict of interest.”  This has really made me depressed about the NAS, which is supposed to be free of commercial taint.

Click to read the article. And remember, even if the Sacklers didn’t influence policies recommended by the NAS, scientists are still required to disclose potential conflicts of interest no matter what. And why, I wonder, did the Sacklers give so much money to the NAS?

Some excerpts:

For the past decade, the White House and Congress have relied on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a renowned advisory group, to help shape the federal response to the opioid crisis, whether by convening expert panels or delivering policy recommendations and reports.

Yet officials with the National Academies have kept quiet about one thing: their decision to accept roughly $19 million in donations from members of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin that is notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic.

The opioid crisis has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, spawned lawsuits and forced other institutions to publicly distance themselves from Sackler money or to acknowledge potential conflicts of interest from ties to Purdue Pharma. The National Academies has largely avoided such scrutiny as it continues to advise the government on painkillers.

“I didn’t know they were taking private money,” Michael Von Korff, a prominent pain care researcher, said. “It sounds like insanity to take money from principals of drug companies and then do reports related to opioids. I am really shocked.”

Unlike the World Health Organization, which was accused of being manipulated by Purdue and later retracted two opioid policy reports, the National Academies has not conducted a public review to determine if the Sackler donations influenced its policymaking, despite issuing two major reports that influenced national opioid policy.

One of those reports, released in 2011 and now largely discredited, claimed that 100 million Americans suffered from chronic pain — an estimate that proved to be highly inflated. Still, it gave drugmakers another talking point for aggressive sales campaigns, primed doctors to prescribe opioids at an accelerating rate and influenced the Food and Drug Administration to approve at least one highly potent opioid.

Another problem arose in 2016, months after the National Academies received a $10 million Sackler family donation. The F.D.A. had tapped the institution to form a committee to issue new recommendations on opioids. But one senator took exception to some of the members selected by the Academies, complaining they had “substantial ties” to opioid makers, including Purdue. Before work began, four people were removed from the panel.

It’s a total disaster, and the NAS hasn’t even investigated whether there may have been a real conflict of interest, even though the organization took at least $31 million from the opioid-pushers and issued two reports about opioids, one of which has already been discredited.

A wee bit more from Lisa Bero, “chief scientist at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities”:

Accepting millions of dollars from the Sackler family while advising the federal government on pain policy “would be considered a conflict of interest under almost any conflict-of-interest policy I’ve ever seen,” Dr. Bero said.

Indeed. So what does the NAS say when caught with its pants down? They simply equivocate. This is NOT the NAS I know of:

Megan Lowry, a spokeswoman for the National Academies, said in a statement that the Sackler donations “were never used to support any advisory activities on the use of opioids or on efforts to counter the opioid crisis.” Ms. Lowry added that the organization had been prevented from returning the Sackler money because of legal restrictions and “donor unwillingness to accept returned funds.” The Academies declined to make senior officials available for interviews.

And there’s more:

Soon after the National Academies report was issued, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, emailed the institution and asked whether it would disclose that Ms. Christopher’s organization [Myra Christopher was an NAS panelist whose own group took Purdue money] had received funds from Purdue.

This is another conflict of interest, for panelists have to disclose their own conflicts.

“No, sorry, can’t do that,” Clyde Behney, an official with the Academies, replied in an email in August 2011 reviewed by The New York Times. “Keep in mind that the report is done and released, so the future is more important than the past.”

Seriously?? What kind of bullshit answer is that?

In its reports, some involving panelists who took money from Purdue, the NAS never disclosed any potential conflicts of interest.

In the end, the NAS now has millions of Pharma/Sackler money that it can’t use. As the paper suggests, perhaps the NAS should emulate Brown and Tufts, who used their Sackler money to help alleviate drug addiction:

Given the devastation of the opioid crisis, Michael West, senior vice president of the New York Council of Nonprofits, said that it would be worth the effort for the Academies to follow their lead.

“This would be a way,” he said, “of trying to make it right.”

Never in my life would I have expected the august NAS to be so sleazy. It’s not just that they took the money and didn’t disclose it, but also that they’re now pretending they didn’t do anything wrong.

The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute changes its name

April 24, 2023 • 10:10 am

104 years after its founding, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is no longer going to be called that; it’s changed its name to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Africa & North Africa (ISAC).  Founded in 1919 with the approval (and funding) of John D. Rockefeller, it has a venerable history of research, and its museum, which I pass every day on my way home, is well worth visiting if you come here. (It’s “donate what you want” to get in.) Here are a few photos I took in 2018, especially of ducks and cats.

This is my favorite: it’s a “Human-Headed Winged Bull (lamassu), Palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE), Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), excavated by ISAC’s Iraq Expedition (A7369). One of approximately 350,000 objects available in the collections search.” It’s HUGE, going from floor to ceiling (this photo is not mine but from the ISAC site). Imagine moving this from Iraq to Chicago (I hope the acquisition was kosher):

It’s a great place, no matter what it’s called, but, as Wikipedia notes, beginning with Edward Said the noun and adjective “Oriental” began to be seen as pejorative: reducing Asians to some exotic, mysterious aspect of their character—in other words, stereotyping them. As Wikipedia notes,

In the 2010s, multiple organizations within the U.S. began reconsidering the use of the word “Oriental,” as some scholars felt the word was alienating and that it had changed in popular meaning. In March 2023, University of Chicago administrators announced they would be changing the name of the Oriental Institute. Interim director Theo van den Hout said, “Our current name has caused confusion, often contributing to the perception that our work is focused on East Asia, rather than West Asia and North Africa. Additionally, the word “oriental” has developed a pejorative connotation in modern English.” In April 2023, the organization’s name changed to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa, abbreviated as ISAC. The institute’s new logo features a lotus flower, which is found in ancient Assyrian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian art, as well as being a decorative motif on the ISAC building.

Well, I guess the confusion lasted over a hundred years, but we all know that the name was changed because “Oriental” began to be seen as either racist or “othering”.  In reality, I think, the Institute was named simply because “Oriental” meant “east of the Mediterranean”, which pretty much reflected the work going on there. It surely did NOT refer to people, but to an area.  So I’m a bit sad to see that concise and venerable name changed to something that’s a big mouthful. On the other hand, I can’t get too worked up about it because the connotation of words changes. I’ll just refer you to three articles on the Museum, and recommend that you come see it if you’re on campus. It’s well worth it, and right across the street from the main Quad.

From the University of Chicago News site:

From the Hyde Park Herald (local paper):

 

The Chicago Maroon (student paper):

Here’s the new lotus-flower symbol that the institution has adopted, and they’re busy now effacing “Oriental institute” from the building and its signs.

Loury and McWhorter on Diversity

April 24, 2023 • 8:30 am

Here’s a short segment from Glenn Loury’s Substack site showing him and John McWhorter discussing the claim that minorities are made uncomfortable by going to institutions, like colleges, where people “don’t look like them.” (This refers, of course, to superficial traits associated with race, though those traits are often taken to be tightly associated with ideological and political views.) If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to Loury’s site, which has a transcript, but you can also listen to the 13-minute video embedded below the title. The YouTube notes say this:

In this excerpt from a live event in New York sponsored by the University of Austin’s Mill Institute and moderated by Ilana Redstone, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss why seeking out “people who look like you” undermines what college—and indeed the world—has to offer.

Redstone, as expected for someone who encourages this kind of discussion, does have heterodox credentials:

Ilana Redstone is a visiting fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange.Dr. Redstone is also an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting and a co-founder of The Mill Center. She is the co-author of “Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education” and the creator of the “Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes” video series. She is also a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy

Voilà: the meat of the discussion. Here’s the question posed by Redstone:

One of the questions around affirmative action or one of the arguments has to do with this idea of, well, I guess two things. One is diversity being a good on its own and having a value on its own. And the other idea with representation is that there’s a benefit to people seeing other people in positions of power and authority that look like they do.

And so I’m wondering if you can speak to that idea that people need to see people who look like them in order to feel inspired or accepted or motivated or whatever. How do you think about that?

Loury first takes up the question of “what does ‘looks like me’ really mean?”  He suggests several answers: people of your ethnicity, privileged college students, Americans, and so on. But he gets what the question really means: it’s about race.  Both he and McWhorter are, frankly, baffled at the notion that to be comfortable you must be among people of your own race, or see people of your own race.  I’m baffled that they’re baffled, as this notion is so common, and later Loury tries to take it apart and explain it. But in the end both men agree that he notion is harmful to students and harmful even to racial progress.

A few excerpts:

Loury: And I think the reflexive answer [is], it’s a bean count. “I’ve seen enough black lesbian women that I know, as a black lesbian woman, that I’m in a place of belonging” trivializes the great questions of, who are we? Which is what you come to a university to learn how to explore.

McWhorter: I never understood that line. I never got it. That you need to see teachers who look like you, you need to have other students who look like you. I had to be taught that that was the way I was supposed to feel. I know what I look like. I can look in the mirror. I had parents. They were black, too. Had a family, had friends, mostly when I was a kid, black friends. I didn’t need to see black people in my books. You looked at TV and by the 70s there were enough black people. Probably not as many as now. Definitely not. But I didn’t miss it, because if I look somewhere, I don’t wanna see me. I wanna see the world. I wanna see something else. I don’t go on a walk in the woods in order to see blackness. I go in order to see a squirrel or a creek or something. I don’t look at TV thinking I want to see people doing things that I’ve seen my relatives do it. You want to see something else.

. . .Of course, it’s better to have the representation that we have now. But that idea that you’re being deprived by not seeing yourself in your education, in your popular culture.

I’m reading a book right now where there’s this wonderful chapter on Du Bois. He would’ve been horrified. He’s learning German, he’s talking about Kant, et cetera. Nobody told him that he wasn’t black enough. That didn’t come up. The only people who said that to him, frankly, were white people. And yet here in our post-1966 age, you have that line.

. . . Or if we’re that afraid of white people, we can’t be comfortable until we see one of our own? Again, nobody was told to think that way until 1966. Here, Glenn, I think it’s a pose that we’re encouraged to take. “White people make me nervous. I need to see black people.” No white people don’t make you that nervous. In 2023, you’re told that you’re supposed to say that they do, because it gives you a sense of identity. But it’s an act, and it’s a dangerous one because it stanches curiosity, and curiosity is what makes a human being human.

Loury gives one explanation for the “look like me” trope: if you’ve been a victim of mistreatment at the hands of other groups, then seeing people who belong to your group (he uses black lesbian as his example), makes you relax more, makes you more comfortable and able to enjoy college. That can’t, of course, be rejected out of hand.

McWhorter doesn’t pull any punches in his response: if you’re that freaked out by those “who don’t look like you,” , he says, you need “compassionate help”, i.e., therapy of the cognitive behavioral sort:

McWhorter: But if you really are balling up your fist, if you’re really that uncomfortable when you don’t see people like you around you—in our times, as opposed to a distant day—if you’re that uncomfortable, then there’s something dysfunctional going on, and you need to find some kind of compassionate help.

Now these days, we’re supposed to feel that when it comes to race and identity issues, I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not supposed to say that you need to be trained out of that reflexive crouch. But no, I see no exception at all in the twenty-first century, given the sorts of things that you are likely to face, or I should really say not face, I don’t see that you need to be that nervous about not seeing yourself in this setting. And given that you’re going to go out into the world and find that people like you are rare in many settings that you’re going to go into, I think you should be prepared. Life is not always comfortable, and that’s part of what college is for.

So with all compassion, I say, if you’re that nervous, then you need cognitive behavioral therapy that will make you happier. Because you’re not always gonna be surrounded by people like you.

I can imagine how well that will go down with the nervous people! “Upset by not seeing enough people of your ethnicity? You need therapy.”  But, you know, he might be right, at least in extreme cases where a person’s function is inhibited by feeling left out. This is the claim, which I most often reject, that people are “harmed” by not seeing enough people who look like them.

And Loury distills the issue to this:

In other words, bottom line, suppose your goal is to advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you. You inhibit yourself from realizing fully your potential to advance that goal by restricting your attention to the doings of people who look like you.

But they both agree that restricting yourself to associating with those of your race, or concentrating on reading or studying only works by those of your race, is a form of intellectual constriction. Yes, that activity might reduce your ability to “advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you,” but is that the main point? This kind of constriction prevents you from apprehending the whole of the human condition, reducing that experience only to the “condition” encountered by people who look like you. Even if advancing your race is your goal, don’t you want to know your enemy—your presumed enemy?

McWhorter give his distillation:

McWhorter: And so a modern black person is supposed to only read Alice Walker and Walter Mosley, even though they read Tolstoy. They were old fashioned.

That doesn’t cohere. That doesn’t make sense. The only way that would make sense is if racism is worse. Now, what is it that we know now that Ralph Ellison didn’t? I think only a serious partisan would deny racism is not as bad now as it was in 1950, so we can afford even more than them to read Joyce Carol Oates as well as Gayl Jones, et cetera, not less. And so if W.E.B. Du Bois read all over the place, we can even more. Lynching was legal in the prime of his life. We live in very different times. So we can’t reject those people because the photos are black and white. It’s better now. We have a widened opportunity.

There are those like Kendi who claim that racism now is worse than it’s ever been, but I don’t think you can find any metric showing that.

By all means we should ensure equal opportunity for all Americans, a hard task that will take decades—if it can be done at all—but in the meantime the claim that you’re “harmed” if there aren’t enough people who look like you in your environment doesn’t sit well with most, for it’s an unconvincing claim of victimhood. The harm is not palpable, and is said to be psychological—which is why McWhorter recommends therapy for those crippled by this syndrome.

And of course, the statement can also be taken to mean that you want to be around people who think like you, for people of a given group are supposed to share a homogeneous set of ideas. (McWhorter and Loury are often criticized for not thinking is the way black people are supposed to think.) But how can you learn, or grow as a person, if you surround yourself or seek out only those people who think like you?

One issue that neither man addresses, but I’d love to see addressed, is that of historically black universities (HBUs) like Howard or Spelman College.  Back in the old days, they existed because black students simply couldn’t get into white colleges. Now, however, there’s a land rush in nearly all colleges to snap up qualified minorities, and the rationale for HBUs must now be that these entities are self-segregating because they increase the comfort level of students, as nearly everyone “looks like them,” (I’m just guessing here.) But isn’t that exactly the attitude that McWhorter and Loury find harmful?

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 24, 2023 • 6:45 am

Top o’ the week to you: it’s Monday, April 24, 2023, and National Pigs in a Blanket Day. If you’re not American, you may not know what this Fifties-style snack is, so here are some.

In Chicago, you would not offer the alternative of catsup with the PiBs.

I’m quite under the weather today as I got a very bad cold during my travels (don’t worry, I did an antigen test and I’m covid negative), but have a wicked sore throat, coughs, and malaise. It’s the first cold I’ve had since the pandemic started; I attribute that to my scrupulous handwashing. I suspect I got my cold crowded in the Métro or in airplanes.  All of which is to say that you shouldn’t expect much posting today. I even lack the energy to put up a readers’ wildlife post. As always, I do my best.

It’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (someone tell Cenk Uygur), World Meningitis Day, Fashion Revolution Day, and World Day for Laboratory Animals. Here’s a statue at the University in St. Petersburg in honor of all the cats used in laboratory experiments at the school. It’s actually kind of sad, and I shouldn’t be smiling. (This was at a scientific meeting in 2011, and a colleague took the picture with my camera.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the April 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I’m not sure if this is a glitch by a Chinese official, but it’s caused a lot of consternation in Europe.

France, Ukraine and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania expressed dismay after China’s ambassador in Paris questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet countries like Ukraine.

Asked about his position on whether Crimea is part of Ukraine or not, Chinese ambassador Lu Shaye said in an interview aired on French television on Friday that historically it was part of Russia and had been offered to Ukraine by former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

“These ex-USSR countries don’t have actual status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their sovereign status,” Shaye added.

France responded on Sunday by stating its “full solidarity” with all the allied countries affected, which it said had acquired their independence “after decades of oppression”.

“On Ukraine specifically, it was internationally recognized within borders including Crimea in 1991 by the entire international community, including China,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that China will have to clarify whether these comments reflect its position or not.

The three Baltic states and Ukraine, all formerly part of the Soviet Union, reacted along the same lines as France.

Unless China claims that its ambassador to France misspoke, there will be big trouble, for China will have to claim that Russia is actually fighting against Russia instead of Ukraeine.

*In the face of Congressional inaction on immigration reform, Biden has taken it upon himself to greatly expand the number of legal immigrants into the U.S. He’s done this through executive order:

Amid a protracted stalemate in Congress over immigration, President Biden has opened a back door to allow hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into the country, significantly expanding the use of humanitarian parole programs for people escaping war and political turmoil around the world.

The measures, introduced over the past year to offer refuge to people fleeing Ukraine, Haiti and Latin America, offer immigrants the opportunity to fly to the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.

As of mid-April, some 300,000 Ukrainians had arrived in the United States under various programs — a number greater than all the people from around the world admitted through the official U.S. refugee program in the last five years.

By the end of 2023, about 360,000 Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians are expected to gain admission through a similar private sponsorship initiative introduced in January to stem unauthorized crossings at the southern border — more people than were issued immigrant visas from these countries in the last 15 years combined.

The Biden administration has also greatly expanded the number of people who are in the United States with what is known as temporary protected status, a program former President Donald J. Trump had sought to terminate. About 670,000 people from 16 countries have had their protections extended or become newly eligible since Mr. Biden took office, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

All told, these temporary humanitarian programs could become the largest expansion of legal immigration in decades.

While this is better than willy-nilly immigration, much of it people seeking economic benefits rather than fleeing persecution, ,we’re talking millions of people here. And these orders can be overturned by the courts. I suppose Biden acted because Congress won’t, and in my view that’s largely due to Democrats who can’t bear restrictions, and want in effect open borders. Best that this be done by the legislature than by Presidential fiat.

*As a lifelong feeder, I couldn’t resist reading this NYT piece: “The secret to ordering the best thing on the menu“.  “Oh boy!” I said. “What are these big secrets? The main one is “eat out of the box”, and don’t necessarily go for the restaurant’s specialities:

This. . . order is an example of how I like to approach restaurants: Live life on the edge of the menu. Take a flier on the oatmeal cream pie at a crab shack, the vegan risotto at a steakhouse, the quesadillas at an underground Champagne bar. Just because a restaurant is known for one thing doesn’t mean you can’t order something else. If it looks good to you, get it. Often you’ll be rewarded for your transgression.

When I was a graduate student, before big exam days, I would hole up in my apartment subsisting on Frosted Flakes and Cheez-Its, then emerge from the shadows to treat myself to what I called Brain Dinner at my local brick-oven pizzeria, Buca, which has since closed. But I wouldn’t go for a pepperoni pie or even a Hawaiian. My order would be a salmon dish: a gently salted center-cut fillet, roasted until crisp at the edges but pink and tender on the inside. It came with a relish of red onion, olives and capers and a trio of summer vegetables: eggplant, zucchini and squash. The blazing heat of a brick oven, it turned out, meant great pizza but even better salmon and vegetables. You can’t really recreate that kind of flavor at home, what the Koreans might call bulmat, or fire taste.

. . . Sometimes the oddity on a menu might be the chef’s passion project, which is reason enough to order it. Newcomers to the New Orleans favorite Pêche Seafood Grill might not know that the restaurant goes heavy on the vegetables, but you have to know to order them. When I visited the city for a friend’s wedding in January, my eyes gravitated toward the citrus-glazed turnips. They seemed so unassuming, maybe even out of place, on the otherwise flashy menu of raw-bar staples like oysters varying in plumpness and brininess; a nutty, almost creamy royal red Gulf shrimp dish that stains your fingers with a crab roe sauce; and the beloved steak tartare with smoked-oyster aioli on toast, which landed on nearly every table in the dining room. Who knew that the star of my seafood lunch would be a side dish of turnips?

. . . .and that’s about it. Not all that useful advice. I’ve tried it, and it sometimes works, but when a restaurant is known for something, the odds are that it’s something good. 

*A prognostication by the Wall Street Journal is that the 2024 Presidential election will feature the same leads as 2020’s: Biden vs. Trump (it’s likely that Harris will remain as Biden’s VP candidate, but Pence is surely toast). This is not a choice most Democrats want, but voting for Trump is out of the question:

President Biden is expected to announce his re-election campaign this week, putting to rest questions of whether he will seek a second term as the nation’s first octogenarian president. At the same time, polls show former President Donald Trump with a substantial lead in the Republican presidential field despite facing criminal charges in New York and the potential for more legal problems on the horizon.

While the race for the White House remains in an early stage and presidential campaigns can shift quickly, the start of the 2024 cycle shows that a rematch between Messrs. Biden and Trump is a distinct possibility, one that would play out before a divided nation as the two parties uneasily share control of the levers of power in Washington.

. . .Mr. Biden is expected to open his re-election bid with a video announcement. Advisers are considering a Tuesday launch to coincide with the fourth anniversary of his entry into the Democratic primaries in 2019. Mr. Biden is scheduled to address the North America’s Building Trades Unions that day, allowing him to highlight his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law before an audience of union members who have backed both Democrats and Republicans in the past.

Mr. Trump is planning a response to the announcement, aides said, and he has said the president is vulnerable on a range of issues, from immigration to inflation.

. . .A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found Mr. Biden at 48% and Mr. Trump at 45% in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, a lead within the poll’s margin of error. In testing a potential field of 12 competitors for the Republican presidential nomination, the poll found that Mr. Trump had the support of 48% of GOP primary voters, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 24%. No other Republican candidate was in double digits.

While Mr. Biden faces minor opposition in the Democratic primaries, polls show that the public holds deep reservations about his presidency. In the six Wall Street Journal surveys dating to late 2021, an average of 43% of voters have said they approve of Mr. Biden’s job performance, while an average of 48% said they approved of how Mr. Trump handled the job when he was president.

I’m not sure if Trump has officially announced his candidacy, but he’s been acting as if he has since, well, since he lost. And the poll showing 48% for Biden and 45% for Trump in a head-to-head contest scares the bejeesus out of me, not only because it makes me doubt the sanity of half of America, but because Trump could even win. The world would think we were insane! All we can hope for is that Trump somehow gets disqualified between now and then by some kind of criminal conviction, but, barring that, the man and his supporters seem completely impervious to the three investigations that Trump is undergoing. The only operative word is “OY!”

*If you’re French or a wine lover, you’ll know that the term “Champaagne” is reserved by French (and now EU) law only for wines produced in the right part of France and in the right way. (That’s why you won’t find any U.S. sparkling wines, no matter how pricey, described as “champagne.”

This puts the EU in conflict with the Molson Coors Brewing Company of America, which markets Miller High Life beer, described in “the champagne of bottle beers” and the “champagne of beers” since 1969.

That won’t fly in Europe, and so, when a shipment of 2,352 cans of Miller High Life arrived in Belgium destined for Germany (why would Germans want this stuff?), the cans were immediately crushed by customs.

Charles Goemaere, the managing director of the Comité Champagne, said the destruction of the beers “confirms the importance that the European Union attaches to designations of origin and rewards the determination of the Champagne producers to protect their designation.”

Molson Coors Beverage Co. said it “respects local restrictions” around the word Champagne.

“But we remain proud of Miller High Life, its nickname and its Milwaukee, Wisconsin provenance,” the company said. “We invite our friends in Europe to the U.S. any time to toast the High Life together.”

Belgian customs said the destruction of the cans was paid for by the Comité Champagne. According to their joint statement, it was carried out “with the utmost respect for environmental concerns by ensuring that the entire batch, both contents and container, was recycled in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Don’t try ordering a Millers anywhere in the EU. But why on earth would you want to?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dong srs cat bzns:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m sorting bank statements.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Segreguję wyciągi z banku.
********************

From Nicole:

A Gary Larson Far Side cartoon:

And a cartoon on consciousness, sent by smipowell and created by Zach Weinersmith.  It’s homunculi all the way down!

Two tweets Masih showing more brutality towards peaceful Iranian protestors. The first physical, the second verbal.

Titania tweeted; the occasion is the death of Barry Humphries (aka “Dame Edna”).

From Barry: a dog rights a duckling:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a 13-year-old boy gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a newly-hatched duckling conks out to catch some Zs:

A happy squirrel:

Way before “civilizations” started, there was art, and the urge to reproduce what you saw in nature. Here’s a good one:

Colin Wright debunks a dreadful paper claiming that sex is “multimodal”

April 23, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Colin Wright has made one of his missions the explanation of biological sex and why those who claim it’s a spectrum—or simply bimodal rather than binary—are misguided. This is important because the “no-binary” crowd is infecting biology with ideology that confuses people. Wright also deals with gender issues, and hosts guest posts on his Substack site, “Reality’s Last Stand”

Colin writes well and clearly, and although I’ve referred you to a number of papers on biological sex in humans and other animals in the last few weeks, this is one of the best. It originated when Wright came across the paper below on bioarχiv—a paper written (largely from ideological motives) to show that sex isn’t binary, nor even bimodal, but multimodal.  What that means is that if you look at different characteristics of organisms instead of just gamete size, you can come up with any number of sexes.

Click to read it, if you must:

Wright found the paper abysmal, because it is. It’s dire and apparently hasn’t yet been accepted for publication anywhere.  In the piece below, which is long but comprehensive, Wright simply dismantles the authors’ claims one by one, leaving them with. . . well, no thesis at all. Their main issue is that the authors apparently don’t understand the biological definition of sex, and so try to pretend that other characteristics associated with sex, including both morphology and behavior, are variable, in turn implying that there are many dimensions of biological sex. In fact there’s only one: gamete size, and if you read their paper and Wright’s refutation, you’ll see that the authors are deeply muddled. The alternative view is that they’re scientifically duplicitous, motivated by ideology to muddle biology. But I’ll be charitable and say that they’re muddled thinkers rather than sneaky ones.

As one example, McLaughlin et al (henceforth “MEA”) think they make a huge dent in the definition of sex by stating that female hyenas have pseudopenises through which they give birth.  The response is easy: “How do you know they’re female hyenas?” Because they make eggs, Jake! Many of the examples in the McLaughlin paper are of this nature, conflating sex with sex-related characteristics.

Click below to read Wright’s critique:

I can’t begin to summarize all the many points of this paper, but let me give a few quotes. (Colin’s own words are indented, except where he quotes MEA, when it gets doubly indented. My own words are flush left.)

The ideological motivation for McLaughlin et al.

Because the sex binary has been deemed “oppressive” and invalidating of transgender identities and experiences—cardinal sins of our age—this has started an arms race among activist scientists to come up with a model of sex that is the least binary thing imaginable. Since the “bimodal spectrum” concept still entails two of something, this must be abandoned as it may be seen as problematically implying a fundamentally binary underlying property that’s producing the bimodal distribution of sex-related traits—and they’d be right!

In pursuit of this goal, a “Multimodal Sex literature survey team” composed of researchers from UC Berkeley and Loyola University Chicago has been assembled to “re-imagine a more inclusive framework for biological sex.” On January 27, 2023, the team produced their first pre-print titled “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution.” The paper argues that sex is best viewed as “a constructed category operating at multiple biological levels” (C) rather than binary (A) or bimodal (B).

At the end Colin’s paper notes even more ideological impetus:

The paper ends with a discussion about “the interplay of science and society” that reveal the authors’ true motivations. They assert that “uncritically applying a simple binary without considering the mechanisms shaping sex-specific effects can confound inferences and completely erases the biological realities of TGNC and intersex people.” Further, the authors state:

The historical legacies of sexism, racism, queerphobia, and ableism have deeply influenced the frameworks we use to study nature. Challenging these foundations is difficult but vital to both increasing inclusion in biology and dismantling assumptions that interfere with our ability to observe the natural world on its own terms.

It is undoubtedly true that sexism and racism has historically interfered with producing good science, but we cannot allow new passions and political ideologies to do the same.

The authors make their political motivations explicit:

There is pressure for scientists to avoid making the politics of our work explicit, especially those of us who do not directly study social issues. However, especially in the United States, legislation targeting TGNC people is increasingly undergirded with simplistic binary language purportedly rooted in biology.

Because they believe “binary language” is fueling “legislation targeting [transgender and gender nonconforming] people,” all binary language must be abandoned. As scientists, the authors say we are “best situated to communicate how nature is a rich tapestry of diversity that affirms, rather than invalidates, human experience.”

As biologists we should not be engaged in erasing, invalidating, or affirming people’s identities or experiences. Our job is simple: describe and explain the natural world as accurately as possible.

Those last two sentences are about as clear as you can get.

I haven’t read a single paper claiming that sex isn’t binary in animals (and most plants) that isn’t at bottom motivated by ideology. You might like the ideology, which is often to validate people who feel that their sex isn’t “male” or “female”, but what you want to see in nature needn’t correspond to what we do see in nature. And that’s a sex binary.

Why do I go on about this? Because this is one example of a trend in which people impose onto nature the ideologies they hold, often distorting biology in the process and confusing lay readers. It’s an offense to science, and one that’s the subject of the paper I’ve written with a co-author that will be out in two months. Stay tuned.

But I digress and self aggrandize. Let’s proceed:

Why hermaphrodites are not a third sex. 

The authors [of MEA] then go on to present supposed challenges to the “common assumption” of two sexes. The first challenge they posit is the existence of hermaphroditic species, which they believe violates the binary sex model because individuals produce both sperm and ova and “do not have separate sexes.”

However, the binary classification of gametic sex breaks down when we consider the broader diversity of gametic phenotypes. For instance, hermaphroditic species possess both gamete types required for reproduction, and do not have separate sexes (Jarne and Auld 2006).

The sex binary, however, does not require that the two sexes exist in separate bodies. The authors are simply conflating the sex binary with a phenomenon called gonochorism or dioecy, which is “the condition of individual organisms within a species existing as one of two possible sexes, specifically male or female.” The existence of hermaphroditic and gonochoric species just represent different ways a species can utilize male and female reproductive strategies. Regardless of whether an organism is only male, only female, or both male and female, there are still only two fundamental functions—the production of sperm and/or ova.

I’ll add here that I’ve looked at the literature on human hermaphrodites, and found only two cases in which fertile gametes are produced: one had viable sperm and the other viable eggs. No hermaphrodite has both viable sperm and eggs, as some animal hermaphrodites do. But there are still only two sexes.

The sex binary involves gamete size and the reproductive systems that produce sperm vs. eggs, not other traits.  This is one of the biggest errors that people make when debunking the sex binary; you can see it, for instance frequently espoused by P. Z. Myers and his acolytes. Wright:

To make their strawman argument even more explicit, the authors quote the biologist Joan Roughgarden saying that “the biggest error in biology today is uncritically assuming that the gamete size binary implies a corresponding binary in body type, behavior, and life history.”

Now let me make my point more explicit: biologists do not claim that “the gamete size binary implies a corresponding binary in body type, behavior, and life history,” because such a claim is absurd, unnecessary, and easily refuted by the most cursory glance at reality. [Emphasis is Wright’s, and Myers badly needs to absorb this.]

The final strawman the authors construct is to incorrectly assert that “sex” is a term “used to encompass a broad collection of gametic, genetic, hormonal, anatomic, and behavioral traits.” They claim that semantically flattening all of these traits into “a binary model, for which individuals are classified as either ‘female’ or ‘male’” is “an oversimplification, since ‘sex’ comprises multiple traits, with variable distributions.”

While this portrayal of sex as a combination of many traits is a common belief among those who lack a fundamental understanding of what it means to be male or female, this does not track reality. Rather, these traits are upstream mechanisms that guide sex development and downstream consequences of one’s sex. They do not describe sex itself which, again, refers only to the function of producing a certain type of gamete.

As I’ve mentioned before, the recognition of the gamete size binary—the so-called “flattening”, has in fact been enormously productive in biology, for it’s given us not only an explanatory basis for sexual selection (which itself explains a ton of biological phenomena), but also enables us to make predictions about how parental investment affects behavior (e.g., why female seahorsea rather than males are members of the sex with colorful adornments).

The authors of the MEA paper actually recognize that sex is binary when making arguments against it. For example, they mention the damn penis in the female hyena without realizing how they know she’s a female, and somehow think that variation within a sex effaces the sex binary. I’ll give just one example:

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 more, 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.

But having more than two sex chromosomes is not the same as having more than two sexes. While this species may be an interesting case study for how sex chromosomes have have evolved, it certainly isn’t an example of a species with “four sexes,” which would require four distinct gamete types.

Any competent reviewer of this paper would see immediately that this is a case of sex-related variation in coloration that causes assortative mating, but in the end a male sparrow still produces sperm and a female produces ova, regardless of their color. This interesting case of evolution doesn’t do jack about dispelling the sex binary.

Finally, Wright doesn’t pull any punches about the scientific value of the MEA paper:

In the end, the authors have failed to demonstrate anything other than the existence of two sexes. In fact, their language throughout reveals the fundamentally binary nature at the root of every phenomena they claim debunks it. They have done nothing but demonstrate their complete ignorance of a field they are claiming to be advancing, and have made their political motivations for doing so explicit.

Because this paper is currently a pre-print, that means it has not yet completed peer review. It may be under review somewhere right now. Let me be clear: this paper does not deserve a review; it deserves an immediate rejection without comment. However, given current political trends, I do not trust the review process to filter out papers of such poor quality drenched fashionable DEI rhetoric.

Yes, the paper is dire and full of errors, and surely shouldn’t be published in this form. But regardless, in the course of taking it apart, Wright demonstrates many of the fallacies that plague the “no-sex-binary” crowd, and does so clearly. If you’re interested in this topic, you should have a look at his article. Among those people who keep their eyes on the prize, Colin Wright and Emma Hilton are, in my view, the people most worth following.