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.
It’s CaturSaturday, May 13, 2023, shabbos for Jewish cats as well as National Apple Pie Day. This is not one of my favorite pies, or even favorite fruit pie (cherry or blueberry are better), but it’s certainly edible, and even toothsome when made well. Plus it is the one dessert that is used as archetypal American: things are “as American as apple pie.”
Here’s what’s widely seen as the best hummus in the world (it’s in a dive in Tel Aviv):
Da Nooz:
*According to the Washington Post, CNN is in trouble because of the “disastrous” Town Hall meeting they broadcast with Kaitlyn Collins. The bits I saw of it didn’t seem disastrous, but ludicrous: Trump was being his usual nasty, arrogant, and lying self. But others, like CNN< seem to think he engineered a television victory:
The former president repeatedly dodged or sneered at questions from CNN’s moderator, Kaitlan Collins, during the live, 70-minute forum at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on Wednesday night. He doubled down on false claims that “a rigged election” led to his 2020 ouster and referred to writer E. Jean Carroll, who just prevailed in her lawsuit against him for defamation and battery, as a “whack job,” to cheers and laughter from the audience, made up of local Republican voters.
And when Collins pressed him on why he removed classified documents from the White House, he replied: “You are a nasty person.”
“Predictably disastrous,” wrote former network TV news executive Mark Lukasiewicz, part of a chorus of media critics and political observers who bemoaned the on-air spectacle. “Live lying works. A friendly MAGA crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punchlines … and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”
At a time when CNN has been struggling to turn around viewership decline, the telecast proved to be a ratings disappointment, with Nielsen reporting just 3.1 million viewers overall. That was a big boost over CNN’s typical 8 p.m. telecast, but a smaller audience than CNN’s town hall with President Biden last summer (3.7 million) and six previous Trump town halls carried by Fox News — calling into question both CNN and Trump’s drawing power.
The more profound impact, however, may be the damage done to the reputation of the network that has long promoted itself as “the most trusted name in news.” It also raised questions about the future prospects of chief executive Chris Licht, who replaced Trump-friend-turned critic Jeff Zucker last year and is charged with striking a more neutral tone at a cable channel that exploded with impassioned commentary during the Trump years.
Journalists at CNN and others outside the organization called the town hall a “debacle,” a “disaster” and “CNN’s lowest moment.” On Twitter, the hashtags and phrases BoycottCNN, DoneWithCNN and ByeCNN trended late Wednesday.
Come ON! Collins kept pushing back, Trump talked over her and insulted her, and the audience, mostly MAGA-heads, ate it up. But it’s only a victory if it either boosts or doesn’t affect Trump’s popularity. My problem is that I think that anybody with neurons would have to be appalled at Trump’s performance, coming off his civil sexual assault/defamation conviction. People don’t seem to be appalled, except for Democrats. Draw your own conclusions.
*But over at the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan argues that “CNN has done us a favor“. How can that be, since he thought Trump turned in a good performance?
The reason so many are freaking out about CNN’s astonishing ad for the Trump re-election campaign this week is that he was on tip-top form. Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful. He may be one of the most effective and pathological demagogues I’ve ever encountered: capable of lying with staggering sincerity, of making up stories with panache: shameless, and indefatigable.
Now think of Joe Biden, peace be upon him. He can barely get a sentence out without a mumble, a slur, or a confused expression. He seems frail and distant. In a direct contrast between the two old men, there will surely be some voters — and maybe many — who simply back the man who seems capable of doing the job vigorously for four more years. There hasn’t been this kind of contrast since Clinton-Dole (and Dole in 1996 was sharp AF) and Reagan-Mondale (it took Reagan’s debate genius to destroy the concern). Trump, in stark contrast, bulldozed the host Kaitlan Collins, who was far more in charge of facts and details than Biden will ever be.
Apparently the “favor” CNN has done us is to remind us that Trump’s still a very viable candidate for President.
I say the emergency is still here; that Trump is more likely than not returning to the White House as of now; and the interlude of these few precious years when this monster wasn’t daily assaulting our constitution, sanity, and our sense of decency is over.
Get used to it; and strap yourselves in.
Some favor!
*From the Substack site The Liberal Patriot, a piece called “The Democrats’ Merit Problem“. by Roy Teixiera, says that it’s not just science that’s down on the idea of merit. It’s the Left in general. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
The Democrats have a merit problem. The traditional Democratic theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Rewards—job opportunities, promotions, commissions, appointments, publications, school slots, and much else—would then be allocated on the basis of which person or persons deserved these rewards on the basis of merit. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be.
But Democrats have lost interest in the last part of their case, which undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to “social justice.” Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in parlance of our times.
Yet most Americans, including blacks, favor merit-based measures rather than race as a criterion for college admissions. We get a shout-out, too:
The people had spoken but Democrats were not inclined to listen. Instead, the last several years have seen an intensification of the drive to disregard meritocratic criteria in favor of identity-based characteristics. It has spread to countless workplaces and institutions and to an ever-wider variety of decisions within them. It is more or less the official orientation of the Biden administration. To insist on the centrality of merit, despite this being the dominant view among ordinary voters, is to invite accusations of racism in Democratic circles.
And once merit is disregarded in one area, it becomes easy to disregard it in others. Most perniciously, it invades the realm of ideas. Where once it would have been unthinkable to screen candidates for faculty positions—in everything from economics to theoretical physics—on whether and how much they adhere to a particular ideological project on promoting “diversity,” it is now commonplace. Where once it would have been unthinkable to judge a scientific project or analysis on anything other than its intrinsic merits and truth value, that too is now commonplace. Indeed, a recent paper, “In Defense of Merit in Science” by 29 distinguished co-authors, including two Nobel laureates, literally could not get published by a mainstream journal because the paper was “hurtful” and because the concept of merit “has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow”.
. . . Will Democrats pull themselves back from the brink? We shall see. But they should know this: the voters they aspire to lead are not with them. On the bedrock question of merit and outcomes, Americans still believe—and will continue to believe—that “equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not”.
More people agree with this statement than not, including Democrats.
*Nellie Bowles has returned with her patented and snarky take on the weekly news, with Friday’s version called “TGIF: Writers of the world, unite!” As usual, I’ll put up three of her items:
→ My hometown Nordstrom: In the ongoing fall of San Francisco’s downtown, the city’s two iconic downtown Nordstroms have closed. That’s 357,500 square feet of retail space, empty. More importantly, it’s the place I used to shop for every major life occasion and where I got my first bra. The owner of the mall where that beloved Nordstrom sat had this to say: “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees” and that the Nordstrom closures “underscores the deteriorating situation in Downtown San Francisco.”
In Chicago, the police are recommending that shop owners simply install Riot Glass. No big deal, just pay for bulletproof windows.
And at Temple University in Philadelphia, parents of students living off-campus have banded together to hire their own security guards.
→ Racially segregated math classes: In the wealthy suburb of Evanston, Illinois, segregation is back, baby. Evanston Township High School is segregating math classes by race. The Spectator, which is always fabulous, brings us the scoop this week, with images:
→ Britons should accept that they are poor, says chief economist: They may have the Stone of Scone, but they do not have enough good business to sustain all their social services. Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, had some tough talk (a bitter pill from Mr. Pill, if you will) for his people this week: “So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers. . . . And what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share.”
The British may be poor in money, but do you know what they are rich in? Restraint. Which brings us to our next item.
After the Spectator story, the school updated their language to be a little more vague, about certain classes simply “intending to support” certain races but technically being open to others. There’s a long-standing joke that the ultra-woke and the racist actually agree on everything. But it’s supposed to be a joke. Now we have, in real life, an algebra class for “black male students” and, unspoken but implied, algebra for white students. My jaw is dropped as I write this; it seems vaguely racist even to type these things.
It started as an unremarkable flicker in the night sky. But closer observations revealed that astronomers had captured the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, an event thought to have been triggered by a giant cloud of gas being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole.
The flare-up, traced to 8bn light years away, is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and has so far lasted more than three years, making it the most energetic explosion on record.
“It went unnoticed for a year as it gradually got brighter,” said Dr Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at Southampton University who led the observations. It was only when follow-up observations revealed how distant it was that astronomers appreciated the event’s almost unimaginable scale.
“We’ve estimated it’s a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2tn times the sun’s,” Wiseman said. “In three years, this event has released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its 10bn-year lifetime.”
Scientists believe that the explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is the result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, plunging into the inescapable mouth of a supermassive black hole. The cloud of gas may have originated from the large dusty “doughnut” that typically surrounds black holes – although it is not clear what may have knocked it off course from its orbit and down the cosmic sinkhole.
Long Boi, the grand old duck of York, is presumed dead after going missing for several weeks, leaving behind grieving students at his favourite university watering holes.
The 70cm-tall drake was celebrated at the University of York for his unusual height and gregarious nature, delighting students with his appearances around campus for several years.
The university – where alumni include the former Times editor John Witherow and the comedian Harry Enfield – described the duck as “a much-loved character” but said that after two months without a confirmed sighting it had been “forced to conclude” that Long Boi had passed away.
Here’s a video of Longboi, a “Indian runner duck” (also called “pencil ducks” because they stand upright:
I’m so sad he’s gone. . ..
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is perturbed:
Hili: You took Szaron’s place.
Kulka: He gave me his permission.
The Secretary-General of the U.N @antonioguterres should listen to one of the Iranian protesters who was blinded by the Islamic Republic and answer her question.
How can the representative of the regime that kills the innocent protesters and blinds them be elected as the Chair… pic.twitter.com/mvKaIlHQxy
This travesty happened just 4 days ago, and shows how morally depauperate the U.N. is these days:
BREAKING: The Islamic Republic of Iran was today appointed Chair of the U.N. Human Rights Council Social Forum. This year's theme is technology and promotion of human rights; Iran just hanged Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare for using social media to criticize religion. pic.twitter.com/8phYEdmRUS
Straddling the mid-Atlantic rift in Iceland, stepping from the North American plate to the Eurasian one! The two plates are rifting apart at about 2.5 cm/year.. pic.twitter.com/0mBAWwSJkp
I was watching a one-hour episode of “The Glenn Show” the other day titled “Tucker Carlson and the Dysfunction of Black America” (full video now here), when all of a sudden Loury got really exercised about dysfunctionality in the black community and started raising his voice. He even said “fuck!” with great vigor—something I’ve never heard come out of his mouth before. His pal John McWhorter listened patiently, and seemed to agree with Loury, but in a low-key way. (Loury does allude to the fact that he “was a little bit on edge these days”.)
Then, on Loury’s Substack site yesterday, he posted that bit of his rant™, which lasts only about 5 minutes. He put it up because McWhorter told him to (see below). Here’s Loury’s short introduction to his rant™, which you can read by clicking below. You don’t really have to click, though, as I’ve posted the short intro below.
Loury’s intro:
Sometimes, when trying to articulate my views on the show, I go into rant mode. This one, from a discussion of the social dysfunction plaguing black America, got away from me a little. I had to admit in the end: I overdid it a bit.
Still, I stand by the substance of my remarks. I see in the crime statistics and in the rioting and looting perpetrated by black American youth a failure to raise our kids properly. Regardless of the complex historical reasons that led to this failure, we urgently need to do something about it instead of finding new ways to excuse it. History may have gotten us here, but we can no longer afford to let it define us.
My friend John McWhorter has enough patience to listen to me rant, and agrees with me enough to say in conclusion: “To be honest, if a clip of exactly that gets out there and gets re-run over and over, it needs to be.” So be it. I asked my team to make this clip, and I offer it to you here.
And The Rant™. At the end of the tirade, Loury does raise the Big Problem: how can we actually provide equal opportunity for marginalized people? And that question, regardless of “violent and antisocial behaviors”, needs an answer. And this is the question that the DEI initiatives don’t seem to address.
In the second part of his Substack column this week, Andrew Sullivan discusses the reason for one aspect of this dysfunctionality: high homicide rates and quotes Loury’s expletive:
. . . On the most serious violent crime, murder, the stats are also staggering: in 2021, of all murderers in America whose race was known, a full 60.4 percent were black — overwhelmingly male and young. So if you narrow it down to young black men, around 3 percent of the population is responsible for well over half the murders in America. In Minnesota, African-American males make up 3.2 percent of the population and commit 76 percent of the homicides and 87 percent of the burglaries. That’s a ratio that is resilient and persistent.
. . . Biden’s woke Department of Justice actually wants to bar law enforcement from using any of these racially specific crime statistics in “making decisions about where and how to focus their activities.” The aim is deliberately to ignore the 3 percent committing over half the murders in the country, and focus randomly on the 97 percent (including the vast majority of African-Americans) who don’t. It’s insane — the kind of racial equity for criminals that leads to grotesque racial inequity for victims. African-Americans are 13 percent of the population and make up more murder victims than every other race combined. In Chicago, for example, 79 percent of murder victims are black.
Why exactly are young black men uniquely responsible for this level of violence? The whole Twitter debate — and elsewhere, of course — is dedicated to changing the subject. (The old blogosphere was far better at debating such topics.) The answer is obviously, like many social phenomena, multi-determined: class, region, a collapse of religion, a lack of inherited wealth, predatory lenders, a subculture within black culture that celebrates violence and adultery, the glorification of guns in hip-hop, an aversion to “acting white” in school; unstable family structure; absent fathers; some racist cops — and, yes, a horrific history of white supremacy — are all surely implicated. It would take a grueling long national discussion to come to some agreement on this, and then to grapple with some way forward to tackle it.
But we’d rather accuse each other of crude racism, suggest distractions, offer yet more largely irrelevant context, blather about abstractions like “structural racism” 60 years after Jim Crow, blame all cops, or promote denial, than do any of this. “I don’t give a fuck whose fault it is,” Glenn Loury fumes. “We’re going to have to deal with the reality that this is a social dysfunction.”
I’m acquainted with Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, because my colleague Luana Maroja debated him and then wrote about it afterwards (you can see the debate video here and Luana’s post-debate interview with a National Association of Scholars person here). Thorp, like every other big-time journal editor, is woke. You can see that in the magazine, but also in the debate with Luana. Writing about the debate at the Heterodox STEM site, Luana said this:
What Thorp does not seem to realize is how offensive it is when it is argued that inclusiveness requires special accommodations, such as lowering the expectations for people who “look like me.” I described my experience of participating in a training session for a hiring committee at the college where I now teach. During this session, we were told that “we cannot expect as much from Latina women [as from white men], because they have more obligations towards family,” something I found incredibly insulting, as if I don’t have the agency to decide how to balance my own time just like anyone else. Other initiatives in the name of inclusiveness, such as chasing microaggressions, are even more negative and damaging to the individuals who internalize this concept – imagine that you adopt the microaggression mindset and live your life thinking that the world is turned against you. Consider this not-that-hypothetical scenario: you walk and wave to a student and the student does not wave back to you. You have two choices: you might decide that this was a personal microaggression due to who you are, or alternatively, you might conclude that the student simply did not see you. Only one of these two views can lead to a good life and mental health.
In many instances during the conversation and in his writings, it is clear that Thorp subscribes to a Woke worldview. He believes in the value of diversity, but assumes that the diversity can be attained only by lowering the bar for women and minorities, and that “inclusion” can be achieved by excluding white males. Ironically, at least twice during the conversation his comments revealed that he does not consistently apply this logic. Prior to the conversation, when we all showed up on time, he commented that we did so “because we are all scientists” – this ignores the fact that my culture (Latina Brazilian) does not respect punctuality, and that I had to learn to do so for my own benefit. He then pointed out that, “as scientists we were the first to run with our complete AP calculus tests to our teachers in high school.” Well, in Brazil I had a third-world education… I did not have the opportunity to take calculus until I was in a PhD program at Cornell. I certainly did not study AP calculus in school, and if I had dared run waving a completed exam to the teacher, I would be sure to never to have friends again… It is a pity that the topic of culture was not discussed more in this conversation – I imagine Thorp’s view would be that “all cultures are equal in their outcomes”, when they clearly are not.
In the end, I was unsure if Thorp is a true believer in the need to lower standards in the name of inclusion, or if he plays a game, where he is a white savior. It is hard for me to understand why some people, with all good intentions, fail to see the obviously damaging effects of their ideologies and actions. Lowering standards and expectations hurts the most vulnerable of us; it does not help science or the people that such actions are intended to help — and I hope we can start pushing back hard against this damaging ideology.
Well, Thorp is still riding this horse, as we can see in his “editor’s blog” that went up at Science yesterday. There he created a special post to go after our paper “In defense of merit in science“, as well as after Pamela Paul’s NYT column describing the paper. In fact, these are the only two links he gives in his piece. Click to read:
His point, which could be expressed much more succinctly, is the claim that a more diverse group of people can do better science than a less diverse group. In fact, it’s more than that: he argues implicitly that a more diverse group of people can do better science without having to lower the bar for judging science or scientists.
It’s clear that by “diversity” Thorp means “racial diversity”—as that’s the one example he gives—but he may mean gender diversity as well. He gives a nod to “viewpoint diversity,” but it’s clear that he doesn’t mean, “let’s get more conservatives and poor ‘first generation’ students into science.”
But first, for reasons best known to Thorp, he makes The Argument from Humanity”: he thinks that people like the 29 of us who wrote the merit paper don’t recognize that scientists are human beings, and that this somehow blinds us to the virtues of diversity:
It has somehow become a controversial idea to acknowledge that scientists are actual people. For some, the notion that scientists are subject to human error and frailty weakens science in the public eye. But scientists shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge their humanity. Individual scientists are always going to make a mistake eventually, and the objective truth that they claim to be espousing is always going to be revised. When this happens, the public understandably loses trust. The solution to this problem is doing the hard work of explaining how scientific consensus is reached—and that this process corrects for the human errors in the long run.
The relevance of this to his point is obscure, but it gives him a chance to diss our paper and also drag Charles Darwin in as a racist and sexist, even though an accomplished one. Note that the link he gives below is to our merit paper, which he mischaracterizes as making the claim that science is “not subject to human influences”. He appears to be making an argument that judging science and scientists on merit is at odds with the view that scientists are human and flawed. This is a false dichotomy that makes no sense. Then he goes after Darwin and brings in race:
A raging debate has set in over whether the backgrounds and identities of scientists change the outcomes of research. One view is that objective truth is absolute and therefore not subject to human influences. “The science speaks for itself” is usually the mantra in this camp. But the history and philosophy of science argue strongly to the contrary. For example, Charles Darwin made major contributions to the most important idea in biology, but his book The Descent of Man contained many incorrect assertions about race and gender that reflected his adherence to prevalent social ideas of his time. [JAC: I’m curious about the “gender misconceptions”.] Thankfully, evolution didn’t become knowledge the day Darwin proposed it, and it was refined over the decades by many points of view. More recently, pulse oximeters that measure blood oxygen levels were found to be ineffective for dark skin because they were initially developed for white patients. These examples—and countless more in between—reveal how much work needs to be done to strengthen the scientific community and the public understanding of the process.
Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species also contains many errors not based on race and gender misconceptions. Of course Darwin was flawed, a man of his time who, by the way, happened to be more liberal on issues of race than most of his peers (he was an abolitionist). But that’s not even relevant to our claim that science should be judged on merit. We surely do not subscribe to the view that everything Darwin said was right because he was a good scientist: we judge what he accomplished on its merits. For a counterexample, he got genetics wrong, though it didn’t matter for most of his views. Only the last sentence above gives Thorp’s real claim: that better science can be done by diversifying the scientific community.
He expands on that in the next paragraph by ignoring a question that’s bloody obvious: if we are to diversify science by lowering the bar to entry (as Thorp apparently admitted during the debate), and downgrading merit to bring in more “diverse” people, then it’s obvious that our conventional ideas of “merit” must be given lower priority. Luana notes this above. Thorp’s question, “How is diversity a threat to scientific rigor and the merit of discoveries? is in fact discussed in our paper. Our argument is not that diversity per se is a threat to merit, but that the drastic lowering of standards needed to attain full equity in science is a threat to merit. And we all recognize this. That is why, for example, grad schools are abandoning SATs as requirements for application, and why med schools do the same thing with MCAT tests.
What is likely is that diversity is promoted in science by people like Thorp primarily not primarily to improve science itself, but to make up for past wrongs done to members of minority communities (a form of reparations), to create better role models for underrepresented groups, to make scientists “look more like America,” or because diversity itself will create better science. In fact, the last point is what he maintains in the next paragraph:
A monolithic group of scientists will bring many of the same preconceived notions to their work. But a group of many backgrounds will bring different points of view that decrease the chance that one prevailing set of views will bias the outcome. This means that scientific consensus can be reached faster and with greater reliability. It also means that the applications and implications will be more just for all. How is this a threat to scientific rigor and the merit of discoveries? Unfortunately, we’re nowhere close to achieving these goals. Science has had enormous trouble building a workforce that reflects the public it serves. And now, numerous state governments are trying to make it more difficult, if not impossible, at the public universities in their states, and even within the scientific community, there are efforts to derail the idea that it matters who does science.
Talk about monoliths: the huge majority of scientists already share one viewpoint: the liberal democratic one. In academia as a whole, surveys show that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans varies between five to one and fourteen to one! This is, of course, makes academia completely unrepresentative of America as a whole politically. Should Thorp be calling for this kind of diversity, too? No, because it’s not the right kind of diversity.
But the main flaw of this paper is threefold. First, Thorp gives no evidence that more diverse groups produce better science. My brief review of the data shows that there is some evidence that diverse groups can produce better results, but also that there is evidence in the other direction as well. (I am ignoring the very real possibility of ideologically-based publication bias here). But Thorp’s claim above is not that, it is that you can have the same criteria of merit and also increase diversity. It’s the “you can have your cake and eat it too” argument. And this would hold if the increase in scientific progress accompanying a more diverse group of scientists more than compensates for the decrease in standards necessary to attain that diversity. And there is simply no evidence at all to support this. It’s telling that Thorp cites our paper and Paul’s column, but simply asserts that “different backgrounds. . . increase “scientific consensus”. If we really had good confidence that diversity actually increased the quality of science being done, then nobody would have a problem with boosting diversity!
Further, Thorp’s near-explicit claim that racial diversity will boost scientific quality is somewhat patronizing, as it assumes that Hispanics as a group, or blacks as a group, have an outlook on the world that will improve science more than other kinds of diversity: political diversity, viewpoint diversity, diversity in upbringing, whether one’s parents went to college or not, and so on. Looking at individual viewpoints and merit seems to me a better way than simply diversifying science to “look more like America.” If you want diverse viewpoints, find people with out-of-the-box viewpoints and hire them, but don’t assume that pigmentation or ethnicity automatically confers diverse scientific views that will push the field forward. The best way to push science forward is to give everyone equal opportunity and judge science and scientists on their merit. We haven’t yet accomplished the former, which is Task #1, but we can hold onto our standards of merit.
There is an empirically-based argument to be had about whether more diverse scientific groups produce better science. But we have no data to support that, and Thorp cites none. I can cite data on both sides, which means that there is no real consensus (some of the “pro-diversity” results, for instance, are based on mathematical simulations rather than real humans, while others are based on short-term problem-solving tasks in psychology laboratories). If the first claim proves to be true, then there’s another discussion to be had: what types of diversity produce the best science? Do we need more Republicans? More people on the autism spectrum? Is it not possible that conservatives or people who are slightly autistic could ask questions just as different from mainstream scientists as, say, scientists of color? Why is ethnicity or gender the form of diversity claimed to best improve science? The answer, of course, is that we don’t know that, and the question itself is a diversion. Diversity is really being promoted for the same reasons it’s promoted in every field: as a form of reparations or to increase equality or equity.
Finally, even if diversity of one type or another advances science, we need to show that the erosion of the meritocracy required to make the field more diverse is more than compensated for by the net increase of scientific progress produced by having more diverse scientists. We aren’t even close to knowing that, and I doubt, given the kind of data we’d need to show it, that we ever will.
So Thorp is just blowing smoke, and also bringing in an irrelevant claim that somehow our failure to see scientists as humans has drastically hurt science. That, in fact, is how he ends his post:
Scientists should embrace their humanity rather than pretending that they are a bunch of automatons who instantly reach perfectly objective conclusions. That will be more work both in terms of ensuring that science represents that humanity and in explaining how it all works to the public. But in return, society will get better and more just science, and it will allow scientists to immerse themselves in the glorious, messy process of always striving for a greater understanding of the truth.
Here he’s arguing against something that no scientist maintains. Maybe the layperson thinks that scientists are a bunch of automatons, but we scientists know better. But most important, Thorp never explains how our recognizing that we are fallible humans (which we already know!) will suddenly boost the progress of science.
What bothers me most is that the editor who controls what may be the most powerful and important science journal in the world is incapable of making a coherent argument, or laying out what data would be needed to support his claims. He is very big on assertions and very short on facts. Is that the kind of science editor we want?
Today we have a long and edifying photo-and-story contribution from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.
Americana
Together,for better or worse
In 1844, Captain John C. Frémont of the US Army Corps of Engineers, later a US Senator and Governor, was crossing the Mojave Desert when he came across a Joshua tree (Yuccabrevifolia), hitherto unknown to white settlers. In his report, the captain offered a harsh appraisal of his findings: “Associated with the idea of barren sands, their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom”. But Frémont was moderate when compared to Joseph Smeaton Chase, author of California Desert Trails (1919): “It is a weird menacing object more like some conception of Poe’s or Doré’s than any work of wholesome Mother Nature. One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant. A misshapen pirate with belt boots hands and teeth stuck full of daggers is as near as I can come to a human analogy. The wood is a harsh, rasping fibre; knife blades long hard and keen fill the place of leaves; the flower is greenish white and ill smelling; and the fruit a cluster of nubbly pods, bitter and useless. A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal”.
Frémont’s and Smeaton Chase’s unfavourable aesthetic appraisals are not widely shared: many gardeners and landscapers like the peculiar shapes and looks of yuccas or palm lilies (Yucca spp.), so several species are grown around the world as ornamentals. Most of the ~40 known species grow as shrubs or trees with spiky, sword-shaped leaves; they produce large clusters (panicles) of bell-shaped, creamy-white flowers on stalks rising from the centre of the plant. Yuccas are symbolic of their places of origin, the great open spaces of the American and Mexican deserts. They definitely appealed to German-American physician and botanist George Engelmann (1809-1884), who became the world’s authority on the genus.
From his observations, Engelmann suspected that yucca flowers did not self-fertilize because of their morphology. Their anthers are orientated away and at a different level from the stigma, making it difficult for pollen grains to move from the former to the latter. To make the task even more challenging, yucca pollen is viscous, forming dollops not easily broken apart. Because yuccas tend to bloom at night, Engelmann reasoned that moths must be involved in pollen transport. In 1872, he collected some small, nondescript, whitish moths seen gallivanting around yucca flowers and gave them to British-American entomologist Charles Riley (1843-1895). Geographical serendipity helped Engelmann’s generous act of scientific collaboration: both men lived in St. Louis (Missouri).
Flower of a Spanish bayonet (Y. aloifolia). From The Yucca Moth and Yucca Pollination, by C.V. Riley, 1892. Wikimedia Commons.
Riley took up the challenge, and his discoveries about the role of those obscure white moths in yuccas reproduction were nothing short of spectacular; in a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1874, Darwin described Riley’s findings as ‘the most wonderful case of fertilisation ever published’.
Riley identified and named the yucca moth as Tegeticula yuccasella, from the family Prodoxidae (subsequently, several species from the genera Tegeticula and Parategeticula have been recognised as yucca moths; they are difficult to tell apart, but all more or less follow the T. yuccasella pattern). After mating on a flower of soapweed yucca (Y. glauca) or a related species, the female scrapes pollen from the anthers with a pair of specialised, spiky tentacles: these structures, which are found in no other group of insects, replace the long ‘tongue’ (proboscis) characteristic of most moths and butterflies. Without a tongue, the yucca moth can’t feed. But that’s not a problem, since the moth’s life is very short. The female uses her tentacles and sometimes forelegs to compress the glutinous mass into a ball containing up to 10,000 pollen grains, and holds it under her ‘chin’.
Done with pollen gathering, the moth takes flight in search of another flowering yucca – not an easy job, as the pollen load may weigh up to 10% of her body mass. On arrival, she walks to the base of a flower to find its ovary, opens a small hole in it and lays her eggs inside. Things then become truly interesting. By using the tips of her tentacles, the moth removes a small portion of her pollen load, walks to a stigma and places the pollen on it. You can watch these steps unfolding.
Before leaving the flower, the moth marks it with a pheromone to prompt latecomers to look somewhere else for their own egg-laying. The eggs hatch and the larvae feed on some of the developing seeds. At the end of their development, the larvae leave the fruits resulting from the seeds, fall to the ground, bury themselves in the soil, build their cocoons, and start a new cycle in the following spring.
The yucca moth’s actions deserve pause for thought. When we say that an insect has pollinated a flower, we may assume it’s a deliberate act: almost invariably, that’s not the case. A pollinator would eat or take all pollen back to its nest if it could. Pollination happens by accident, when the flower visitor drops off a few pollen grains in the right spot, or has pollen brushed off by touching some part of the flower. Bees may carry away 95 to 99% of all pollen gathered, leaving the remainder – unintentionally – for pollination. But it is tit for tat in these liaisons: plants have developed adaptations to minimise pollen harvesting, such as inconspicuous anthers, narrow floral tubes, difficult flower structures, or progressive pollen release to force pollinators to make repeated visits. Some plants like orchids also cheat by attracting pollinators with scent but not giving any nectar or pollen in return. Rather than collaborating, then, insects and flowers are taking advantage of each other. Granted, this mutualistic exploitation has been fine-tuned by natural selection to avoid disastrous imbalances: overly rapacious insects and pollen-stingy plants would collapse their dealings. But unusually for these give-and-take relationships, the yucca moth deliberately pollinates yucca flowers. This process guarantees the yucca a faithful and efficient pollinator for the price of a few seeds, while the moth is compensated for its troubles with a safe and nutritious site for its offspring.
Riley, an early evolutionist, understood immediately the implications of this exchanged back-scratching. “These peculiarities are (…) mutually and reciprocally beneficial, so that the plant and the animal are each influenced and modified by the other, and the same laws which produced the beneficial specialization of parts would maintain them by the elimination of all forms tending to depart from them” (Riley, 1873. Transactions of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis 3: 55-64). Darwinian references didn’t go well with evolution-hesitant Engelmann, who mumbled that “such theories would lead us astray” – see Sheppard & Oliver (2004) for a detailed account of Riley and Engelmann’s professional relationship.
It’s not surprising, then, that Riley’s findings thrilled Darwin, who briefly mentioned reciprocally beneficial flower and pollinator traits in the Origin (1859), and developed the idea – which he called co-adaptation – in his book on orchid pollination (1862). Darwin famously predicted that a Madagascan orchid with a very long spur (a tubular projection where nectar is stored), known today as the Darwin orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale), had co-adapted with a then unknown hawkmoth with an exceptionally long tongue. And his prediction turned out to be right.
The concept of co-adaptation was renamed ‘coevolution’ by Ehrlich & Raven (1964) in their celebrated paper on butterflies and their host plants, and it is today understood as a reciprocal evolutionary change resulting from the interactions between species. The extent of coevolution as a force behind pollination has been a matter of debate, since there isn’t much one-to-one specialization involved: insects usually pollinate many flowers, and plants in general are pollinated by more than one flower visitor. Moreover, pollination is mostly a passive byproduct of a visitation for the purposes of gathering pollen, nectar, oils, or other flower resources; see for example Johnson & Anderson (2010) for a discussion. But in the case of yuccas and their moths, it would be difficult to refute coevolution; plants and insects couldn’t survive without the intricate idiosyncrasies that favour each other.
Darwin had a reason to be pleased to learn about the contrivances of some strange plants and their cryptic pollinators from the vast North American deserts. And if Captain Frémont and Smeaton Chase knew about the delicate balance between the Joshua tree and yucca moths, they may have been bestowed a more sympathetic judgement.
Yucca moths on a yucca flower. Photo by Alan Cressler, U.S. Department of Agriculture:
A manly job
When early European colonialists arrived to the Americas, they were puzzled by a farming practice widespread among native peoples: the planting of squash (Cucurbita pepo), beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and maize (Zea mays) simultaneously in the same field. Such a seemingly cluttered planting system happens to provide a well-balanced, nutritious combination of essential amino acids, complex carbohydrates, fatty acids, proteins and vitamin A to farmers and their families. This intercropping method, known as the Three Sisters, made a fundamental contribution to the flourishing of the Aztec, the Maya, and other American cultures. To this day, the Three Sisters are a common sight in the Central and South American countryside.
One of the Sisters in this fortuitous arrangement, Cucurbita pepo, comprises summer squash, acorn squash, pumpkin, marrow, and courgette – the classification of these plants is complex and far from settled. Squash flowers are either male or female, and open in the morning only, never to reopen. Not only that, their pollen quickly loses its viability, especially in hot or very cold weather. So to reproduce, squash plants need quick and efficient pollen transfer from male to female flowers. Their pollen grains are heavy and sticky, so the wind will not do. This is a job for a group of solitary bees aptly named squash bees from the genera Peponapis (13 species) and Xenoglossa (seven species), which occur throughout the Americas.
The success of the Three Sisters intercropping system was possible thanks to squash bees. Among them, the Eastern cucurbit bee or hoary squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa) is the most abundant and widespread species. This bee takes pollen exclusively from cucurbits (family Cucurbitaceae), and is the only known case of a pollinator following the range expansion of crops: as cucurbits spread throughout North America, the Eastern cucurbit bee was right on their heels.
Honey bees, bumble bees and other insects do pollinate cucurbits: in fact, they are the main pollinators of the various Cucurbita species cultivated worldwide. But these alternative pollinators are not as reliable and efficient as the Eastern cucurbit bee. Squash produce more pollen and nectar per flower than any other bee-pollinated crop, but honey bees and bumble bees will divert their attention to other plants nearby because they don’t digest squash pollen well.
Eastern cucurbit bees crack on with flower visiting at daybreak, when it’s still too cold for honey bees and other potential pollinators. Male visits are shorter than the females’ because they don’t spend any time gathering pollen: they are looking for mates. If none is available, they skedaddle to another flower, having a break now and then for a sip of nectar to keep up their energy levels. As the morning comes to an end, the flowers close and the females divert their attention to nest building on the ground. In fields planted repeatedly with squash or pumpkin, the number of nests will increase steadily to hundreds strong. For males, the afternoon is siesta time. With no females around, they huddle together in a closed flower for a long nap, coming out covered in pollen at dawn and again ready for romance.
Males don’t have scopa (pollen-collecting hairs) on their hind legs as females do, so they are poor pollen carriers. But they practically live on and around flowers, so the few pollen grains attached to them have a good chance of ending up on a female flower. Males are also more abundant than females, which further compensates their morphological shortcomings. It takes six to ten visits to fully pollinate a female flower: a male Eastern cucurbit bee can do that within the first hour of a flower opening. So, in all likelihood, males do most of squash pollination (Cane et al., 2011).
The case of the Eastern cucurbit bee highlights an often overlooked aspect of pollination ecology. Traditionally, males are seen as lazy freeloaders with little to contribute to society (we are still talking about bees here). But drones, or male honey bees, produce body heat that helps maintain the temperature of the hive. And male bumble bees appear to help care for the immature forms, including by incubating pupae. Males of many bee species are poor pollinators, but that’s not the case for the Eastern cucurbit bee, and certainly for many other species yet to be investigated. Three cheers then for the unsung male bees.
On the U.S. of A. theme. Many years ago, I was drifting through the streets of New Orleans at the crack of dawn, as one does, when I was attracted to the sound of blues coming from the riverside. There was no other soul around besides a musician, me, and an uncurious cat: the melody cut through the crisp morning and seemed to diffuse across the city and over the river. After listening for a while, it was to find a McDonald’s. I left the man to his homage to the mighty Mississippi.
Deep South Blues:
On a return visit to the city, someone broke into my barge (a Ford Torino) and pilfered my camera & lenses. It was the end of my paparazzo career.
We’ve reached the end of the “work” week: it’s Friday, May 12, 2023, and National Nutty Fudge Day. I prefer my fudge sans nuts, as every nut takes up a space where fudge could be.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I didn’t watch Trump’s town-hall with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins the other night, as I had little interest, and, sure enough, watching these two clips before I posted them, I had that sick feeling in my stomach to see the man ranting again.
Here’s a CNN fact-check of Trump’s remarks:
Here he is lying his butt off about the classified documents found in his house. And the audience sounds like they’re on his side. Note his claim that he has the magical power to declassify documents by merely taking them.
Some people say that CNN shouldn’t have given Trump a platform. I don’t agree: people want to know how he’s reacting to current events. It’s free speech, even if it’s odious and lying speech. It helps people see who they are voting for or against should he run again.
Here’s another clip in which he refuses to say which side he’s on in the Ukraine/Russia conflict but says that within one day of becoming President, he’d have that war over and done with. I tell you, though, Kaitlin Collins has moxie! I haven’t seen many interviewers call out Trump like she does.
Trump won’t let go of his lies about 2020 or Jan. 6
The G.O.P. audience stacked the deck, but revealed where the base is
Republicans cheered, but so did Democrats looking to the general election
Trump aggressively dodged taking a stance on a federal abortion ban
He deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigations.
If he gets re-elected next year, I’ll have to go on big-time antianxiety drugs!
* The Title 42 regulation that severely curbed illegal immigration into the US, expired at midnight last night. The NYT describes the chaos at the border that already began before the regulation was lifted.
All along the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico, U.S. border agents, soldiers and local officials were striving to maintain order on Thursday as migrants waded across the Rio Grande, lined up at international bridges, filled federal immigration processing centers and huddled on the sidewalks of American border towns.
The tension was prompted by the imminent lifting of a Covid-era policy, known as Title 42, that for more than three years has allowed the government to swiftly expel many people who crossed the border before they could apply for asylum. The order was set to expire along with the national Covid health emergency at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.
But pressure at the border has already been building in the days leading up to the end of Title 42, which has been used to turn back hundreds of thousands of people seeking to enter the United States since 2020. Many migrants said they were fearful that the situation could become even more chaotic and uncertain in the coming days.
In some places along the border barrier in Arizona and Texas, hundreds of people from a range of distant countries, including Peru, Brazil, Ghana and Thailand, waited in orderly lines to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents and request asylum. Elsewhere, Texas National Guard troops laid out concertina wire and guarded it, preventing migrants from entering the country.
Over the past two days, more than 11,000 migrants a day have crossed the southern border illegally, according to internal agency data obtained by The New York Times. The Border Patrol is already over capacity by about 10,000 people at its holding facilities.
11,000 per day is a lot, and that’s only the illegal crossings, not to mention that in the near future the figure will be 13,000 per day. Even using the present rate, that means over four million per year if the rate keeps up. Really, it’s time for Congress to reach across the aisle and do something. Kamala, of course, hasn’t done squat, though this was her bailiwick touted when she was elected VP
Humanitarian parole, limited to 30,000 people per month, applies only to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Ukraine and Afghanistan may also be exceptions.
Asylum “appointments’ (#2 above) are limited to 1,000 per day, and require using a glitchy app, which means you need the Internet:
Migrants can use the app to make an appointment with border officials at a port of entry, who then can decide whether to allow them into the United States with a notice to appear in immigration court down the line.
It sounds relatively easy, except that the app has been glitchy, and the likelihood of getting an appointment has been compared to winning a lottery ticket.
Then there’s option #3: crossing illegally.
If migrants did that when Title 42 was in place, U.S. officials could send them back to Mexico within minutes, which will no longer be an option. Now, people who enter the country without proper documentation will either be put into formal deportation proceedings, which is a years-long, drawn-out process, or an expedited removal process that is intended to process and deport people much faster.
Families and children will mostly be put on the first, slower track, which means they will be given a date to appear before an immigration judge, but will be allowed to wait inside the country, living and working legally until their case is decided.
Most single adults will be turned away, but families will all be allowed in and enter the system. The process could take years, and many immigrants disappear before their case comes up. This will, I think, be the most problematic part of the process given the huge time delays involved. Further, the Biden administration planned to release many families without court dates—a recipe for more disaster. But, according to the WaPo, a judge stopped that:
With Border Patrol stations and processing centers maxed out, officials authorized the release of migrants without court dates at locations where facilities exceeded 125 percent of their holding capacity or other thresholds were surpassed. But a federal judge stepped in late Thursday to block the release plan, granting a temporary restraining order sought by Florida’s attorney general
The ruling cuts off a potential pressure valve for the Biden administration after senior officials have repeatedly assured they are prepared for the strains and have a broader strategy that will reduce illegal crossings.
*And the WaPo describes Texas, as you’d expect, using “aggressive tactics,” going the extra mile to crack down on immigration.
As Texas leaders prepare for the end of the Title 42border policy — the pandemic-era public health rule that resulted in automatic expulsions for most migrants — Kinney County offers a lens into the more aggressive tactics some border sheriffs have adopted even before the expected surge in the weeks ahead. The Biden administration plans to lift the order Thursday, and already, growing numbers of migrants are arriving at the Southwest border.
“We can’t stop it,” said Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, who oversees a border community adjacent to Kinney County. “We really aren’t prepared for what’s coming.”
Kinney County officials were the first to declare a local “border crisis” emergency two years ago, allowing authorities to act with the same executive powers they often utilize after a major storm. Here, deputies act as a de facto U.S. Border Patrol extension, spending much of their time capturing migrants. Sheriff’s deputies have arrested nearly twice as many migrants in the past two years as there are residents in the remote ranching community.
The county has become the showpiece of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial border initiative, Operation Lone Star, which directs troopers to arrest migrant men and charge them with state crimes. Proponents say the $4 billion program is needed in the absence of a stronger federal response. In recent weeks, at least one other county sheriff’s office has joined the operation, bringing the total to nearly 50, roughly a fifth of all Texas counties. Some border sheriffs are preparing to devote more officers to detaining suspected smugglers and border crossers.
Local residents say this is going too far, and it looks like it. One could argue that this really is a state of emergency, or perhaps it’s an attempt at retribution against the Biden administration. But this is just one more reason that we need Congress to work together to pass sensible but humanitarian immigration reform.
*According to Wisconsin Public Radio, the University of Wisconsin system has just announced it will eliminate all required DEI statements for job applicants. That’s the good news. The bad news, which isn’t that bad, is that they did this under the threat from the GOP-controlled state legislature to cut university funding if the statements stayed. (They should have eliminated the statements because they involve viewpoint discrimination and compelled speech.) h/t David:
The University of Wisconsin will no longer require diversity, equity and inclusion statements from job applicants, UW System President Jay Rothman announced Thursday.
The move comes after Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has threatened to cut state funding to Wisconsin’s public universities. Specifically, Vos has criticized DEI programming at UW as an attempt to “indoctrinate” students with taxpayer dollars.
It’s common for universities to ask potential faculty to submit statements describing how they’ve used their work to further diversity, equity and inclusion. Rothman did not provide an estimate of how many UW positions have previously required such statements, but described the number as “limited.”
“We remain absolutely committed to the principles of DEI,” Rothman told reporters Thursday. “But when some people believe mandatory diversity statement in employment applications are political litmus tests, then we are not being inclusive.”
Sometimes applicants use such statements to discuss what they could offer as member of group that’s underrepresented in academia. Critics have charged that such statements are being used to pressure applicants into affirming liberal viewpoints.
But they don’t say whether such statements could be mentioned in job applications as an option (I doubt that would fly). Here’s the way UW will get around it:
UW officials have no plans to back budget cuts for positions or programming dedicated to DEI, Rothman told reporters Thursday. He also said the elimination of DEI statements would not preclude university officials from asking about the promotion of diversity and inclusion during job interviews. And, he said, that definition of diversity should be broad.
This kind of legislative sword of Damocles is underway in many states. I’d prefer that DEI statements be eliminated because they’re wrong and also illegal (nobody’s filed a lawsuit yet, and it would be hard to find a volunteer).
Legislation has been proposed in at least 20 states that would curtail such initiatives in some form, according to a tracker from the Chronicle of Higher of Education. That includes banning mandatory DEI statements, prohibiting DEI offices or staff and prohibiting institutions from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in admissions or employment.
It’s hard to believe that DEI offices will be closed. Although they’re the ones promoting such statements, they are well ensconced in many schools and they wouldn’t have any work to do if discrimination like that mentioned above were banned. We shall see how schools react to the Supreme Court’s upcoming banning of racial preferences in school admissions.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is keeping a weather eye on the weather:
You’ve surely heard the argument that Cleopatra (“Cleopatra VII Philopator“, the Queen of Egypt, 70/69 BC – 10 August 30 BC) was “black”, an argument that has long turned on her genetics and genealogy. It’s generally been made to fold her into the group of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, especially when the argument is made in the U.S., where Cleopatra is appropriated by descendants of black African slaves. In other words, the “black Cleopatra” argument maintains that she was pigmented like modern Africans, with a dark skin, and, if we could see her DNA, it would group her with sub-Saharan Africans.
The “was-Cleopatra-black” argument, as you can see by reading the very long article about it in Wikipedia, has been persistent, but the consensus of scholars, based on historical analysis (and to a lesser extent from depictions in painting and statuary) is that Cleopatra was Macedonian Greek, the last ruler of the Ptolomeic dynasty going back for nearly three centuries. Her father, Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, was of that ancestry, and although her mother was not absolutely identified, she may have been the Queen Cleopatra VI Tryphaena. There is no evidence that Cleopatra’s mother was black, ergo that Cleopatra herself would be half black. Genetically, I suspect she would probably group with ancient Greeks and Persians, not with sub-Saharan Africans. (No mummy is available, so we can’t know for sure.) But as Wikipedia notes, the dispute about Cleopatra’s race takes place among the populace in general, not among scholars:
The race and skin color of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, has caused some debate, although generally not in scholarly sources.
Further, as many scholars have pointed out, the ancients, including Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, didn’t even have the same concept of “race” as we do. Rather, although they were xenophobic, they considered “outgroups” based on other factors, mainly that they belonged to populations that were ethnically, culturally, and geographically different from the three main groups above, and were therefore inferior. Greeks and Romans, for example, enslaved conquered peoples and their descendants, and those were generally not sub-Saharan Africans.
Having no time to look this up, I doubt that the these three civilizations even had a concept of “race” that bears any resemblance to the concept people have today, which is generally based on genetic composition and geographical origin. (I’m using the old usage of race; I actually prefer “ethnicity” because we know now that the human species comprises groups within groups, and one could, on the basis of genetics and geography, demarcate any number of “races”.)
The irrelevance of the modern “race” concept to Cleopatra is also what Gwen Nally and Mary Gilbert, the two authors of the NYT op-ed below, argue: they say that it’s futile to bicker about the phenotype and genetics of Cleopatra because we simply don’t know enough about her and that the idea of “race” was irrelevant to ancient Egyptians (though most scholars, again, think she was Macedonian/Greek, which would be counted as “white” in the old definition of race).
The reason this controversy has resurfaced is, as Nally and Gilbert (henceforth “N&G”) note, is that there’s a new Netflix docudrama called “Queen Cleopatra”, produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, who is black. In the film, Cleopatra is played by the British actor and screenwriter Adele James, who is also black. Here’s one of James’s tweets:
This has led to considerable controversy, particularly among modern Egyptians who claim Cleopatra was “one of ours” and not black. CBS News, for example, says this:
In the latest official response to the controversy, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a long statement at the end of April stressing that “Queen Cleopatra had light skin and Hellenistic (Greek) features.”
The statement criticized Netflix for casting James, whom the ministry said has “African features and dark skin,” to play Cleopatra.
Well, is it important? Even if Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans didn’t have a conception of race similar to ours, why can’t a black woman play Cleopatra? Racially mixed casting has been going on for a while now, and I don’t really see anything wrong with it.
But N&G do care: for in this op-ed they claim that Cleopatra is really “culturally black”, and thus can be claimed by blacks as a member of their group. But she can also be claimed by modern Greeks and Egyptians as members of their group, too! (Are you confused yet? Read on.) I’m not sure why N&G make this claim, which seems to be deeply muddled given that they don’t even outline what “black culture” is. Somehow it involves oppression and exploitation, but also “triumph and survival”—but that’s as far as it goes. Under their view, we’re all culturally black.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Click to read (someone also archived the piece here).
Below is N&G’s note that ancient conceptions of race don’t even come close to ours. (I would maintain that even the very idea of “race” isn’t to be seen in these cultures, at least as their way of hierarchically ordering human groups. Rather, they had an idea of “groups” that were based on geography and culture.)
What debates like this miss is that current notions of race are relatively recent inventions and do not necessarily speak to how people of Cleopatra’s day saw the world or themselves. Classicists tell us that although the Greeks and Romans did notice skin color, they did not regard it as the primary marker of racial difference. Other concepts — environment, geography, ancestral origin, language, religion, custom and culture — played bigger roles in delineating groups and identities. So regardless of the material a sculptor may have chosen to use to summon Cleopatra’s powerful visage, there is no meaningful sense in which she — or anyone else of her era — would have identified as white.
The question that follows is: How, then, can anyone, including a Netflix dramatization, claim that Cleopatra was Black?
Good question, indeed! My answer would be that scholars say Cleopatra was probably Macedonian/Greek, which would make her “white” in today’s parlance. But really, who cares what actress portrays her? This would seem to be a sensible view that would end the controversy, but N&G don’t agree: the main point of their piece is that Cleopatra was indeed black, but “culturally black”:
Dr. Haley has said that she was struck by the experience, early in her life and career, of encountering Black American communities that seemed to view Cleopatra as one of their own. Building on that experience, Dr. Haley’s academic work on Cleopatra adopts a more complex criterion for racial identification than skin color alone. “When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black,” Dr. Haley wrote, “we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival.”
Why was Cleopatra oppressed? She doesn’t seem to have been, so were her ancestors oppressed? It doesn’t look like it: they were Pharaohs and Queens! So where can you find oppression in Cleopatra’s persona? You can’t really, though N&G dig hard looking for it:
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, was a member of the family that conquered Egypt over 200 years earlier. He was routinely referred to as an illegitimate child. His mother is unknown, as is the identity of Cleopatra’s mother, though several clues suggest she may have been Egyptian, including Plutarch’s claim that Cleopatra was likely the first Ptolemaic ruler to speak that language.
When the Roman poet Propertius famously called Cleopatra a whore queen (meretrix regina), he laced his misogynist tirade with allusions to Egypt, such as the “noxious” city of Alexandria and the “yapping” Egyptian god Anubis. The intersection of Cleopatra’s race and gender resulted in a form of oppression that cast her heritage and sexuality as particularly dangerous. Regardless of her lineage or appearance, it’s clear that Cleopatra’s actions were not perceived as the typical behavior of a Greek or Roman woman.
Note the “intersectionality” here, as well as the term “gender” instead of “sex.” But one poet’s slur does not oppression make; remember that Cleopatra was QUEEN OF EGYPT. Yes, she had life and love troubles, but so do we all. Here’s more of N&G’s unconvincing argument that Cleopatra was oppressed:
Throughout her reign, Cleopatra was also careful not to depict herself as a wife or consort but rather as Isis, the great Egyptian goddess who raised her son alone, without her slain husband, Osiris. Cleopatra was a pragmatist, doing what it took to survive, aligning herself first with Caesar, then with Mark Antony, before fleeing Actium when the tides turned. Finally, when it became clear to her that Octavian would let her live only in order to march her through Rome as a war captive, she took her own life by poison.
But that doesn’t say anything about oppression, at least of the type the authors are discussing. They further argue that modern Egyptians and Greeks can also claim Cleopatra as part of their culture:
Dr. Haley argues that Cleopatra’s experience was part of a history of oppression of Black women. Reclaiming Cleopatra as Black and choosing to portray her now as a Black woman highlights this history — and is consistent with contemporary Egyptians or Greeks identifying with Cleopatra on the grounds of their own shared culture. Unlike racial assignments based on physical characteristics, which seek to distill people into rigid and recognizable categories, shared cultural claims can easily coexist.
But Cleopatra wasn’t black. So N&G have to argue that she, like black women today, had a history of oppression but also “a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival”. If these are the criteria that make Cleopatra “culturally black,” and also make Egyptians and Greeks culturally black, then they also make the Irish, modern Hispanics, and Jews “culturally black.” Indeed, every group on Earth, whether it be demarcated by genes or culture, has had its moments of oppression and of triumph. If everybody is culturally black, then nobody is.
This makes the whole “culturally black” argument into complete nonsense. Cleopatra was, if anything, privileged, though her life was tough at times.
Why, then, was this article written? The only reason I can think of was to somehow enable American blacks to still claim Cleopatra as one of their own. (If her portrayal by a black actress wasn’t intended to do that, then why are the Egyptians objecting so vehemently?) But why can’t we adopt the more sensible view that all humans can find something of Cleopatra in themselves: she was part of humanity and shared human emotions, love. and experiences (granted, not experiences that largely coincide with mine)? In an attempt to shoehorn Cleopatra into an ethnic group in order to boost group esteem, N&G fail miserably. The NYT should have put this piece in the circular file.
But there’s a lesson here: regardless of what color Cleopatra was, she was part of the confluence of humanity, not to be claimed by any living group as “one of theirs”—any more than I can claim George Washington as “one of mine”.
In the end, was Cleopatra not a woman and a sister? And isn’t that enough to end these stupid and divisive arguments about her “race”, at least among the public?
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Supplementary material: If you want to see what Cleopatra may have looked like, this page has lots of pictures of the “Berlin Cleopatra,” a sculpted portrait made when she was alive. Wikipedia describes it as “a Roman sculpture of Cleopatra wearing a royal diadem, mid-1st century BC (around the time of her visits to Rome in 46–44 BC), discovered in an Italian villa along the Via Appia and now located in the Altes Museum in Germany.” Here’s a face-on view:
I’m still surprised that the paper we published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In defense of merit in science,” got so much attention. Not that it was all good attention: given today’s climate in which “merit” is almost a dirty word, a fair amount of the reaction was negative. But there was enough positive comment that I’m pretty heartened, especially because those who agreed with our thesis—that the quality of science and of scientists should be judged on merit rather than ideology—may well be afraid to offer public support (see below).
At any rate, I’ll post a brief summary of the reactions so far. First, the press release of the paper has been updated, and you can see it by clicking on the screenshot below.
This site includes a summary of the paper, why it was written, who the 29 authors were, and why it appeared in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What’s new are the two sections “Reactions” and “What they are saying about the paper.” The reactions include Twitter threads, newspaper articles (notably Pamela Paul’s recent piece in the NYT (below), which has of this writing an erroneous link in the press release), YouTube videos, and blog posts. The “what they are saying” bit includes quotes taken from various sites. You’ll notice that all the material in both sections is positive; that’s because this is a press release, not a summary of all the reactions on the Internet. I’ll give some of the negative reactions in a second.
Below is Pamela Paul’s op-ed in case you haven’t read it. What I wanted to point out is that the number of readers’ comments (1785) is HUGE: as far as I can see, it exceeds by several hundred the maximum number of comments that Paul got in any of her previous columns.
Second, it seems to me that there is a big disparity in the nature of the “all” comments (every comment posted by a reader) and the “reader picks” comments—those upvoted by the readers. My quick take is that while the total comments tend to be positive, there is quite a large proportion that criticizes our paper. In contrast, a higher proportion of the “reader picks” comments (again, those that were upvoted) seem to be positive. I haven’t done a count, so I may be wrong. But if my impression is correct, it means that there are many people who liked our thesis but expressed their approbation not by commenting but by upvoting other people’s comments. This would suggest something that I already think: that there are many who agree with us but are afraid to say so publicly for fear of being criticized, ostracized or branded a bigot (or other words).
Click to read:
On to some of the criticism, which I got by asking Anna Krylov, the driving force behind the paper.
First, I want to dispel one criticism that was common: that our paper was rejected from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (as it was) because it wasn’t a paper about science, so it was dumb of us to even submit it there. In fact, it was submitted to PNAS as a Commentary, and they do publish these. To submit a commentary, you have to clear your piece with the editors in advance, showing that it fits the definition of a Commentary, including length. We did do that, and the editors said, in effect, “Okay, submit.” We submitted it and got one positive and two critical reviews, so it was rejected.
That is what we expected, but we wanted to try, for PNAS had already published least three commentaries on similar issues, but all pro-ideology or pro-diversity. The “antiwoke” flavor of advocating merit, we realized, would make our paper hard to publish. But I wanted to quash the claim that we were crazy to send the paper to PNAS because it wasn’t suitable for a scientific journal. Perhaps it wasn’t suitable ideologically, but it was certainly the type of “Perspective” that the journal publishes.
Oh, and none of us ever said that rejection of our paper constituted a violation of our “free speech,” although some of the critics, like Scott Lemieux below, make that claim. We are not stupid, and know that we don’t have a right to publish our views anywhere. So I don’t think you’ll see any of us claiming that our free speech was violated by the paper’s rejection. But many of us will argue that our paper got disapprobation largely because it contravenes the quotidian ideology.
That said, here are four website posts that are very critical of our paper: those of Scott Lemieux, Dave Karpf, Joseph Shieber at 3 Quarks Daily and William Briggs. I’m not going to summarize or take issue with them; you can read and judge for yourself. Do note, though, that Briggs tends to agree with our thesis, but simply thinks that “the paper won’t change anybody’s mind.”
And here are two critical tweets from “big noises” in the science community. Jake Yeston is an editor at Science. Curiously, he objected to the paper because Anna Krylov had a peer-reviewed paper on science and ideology several years ago, “The Peril of Politicizing Science.” It has a similar theme but is much shorter than the JCI paper. Apparently you’re allowed to write only one paper on a given non-scientific topic in your life. Your “platform”, I guess, is limited to one speech per lifetime!
And here’s a NYT comment (and two followups by readers) from geophysicist Marcia McNutt, commenting using her professional affiliation: she is in fact President of the National Academy of Sciences). This was a comment on Pamela Paul’s paper, and although not a “readers selection” comment, it did appear very soon after Paul’s piece was published.
McNutt maintains that we are wrong in implying that ethnicity isn’t an important characteristic of advancing science, citing a single instance of an idea adumbrated by a black woman that raised a question that, perhaps, a women of another race might not have raised. In response, two readers pointed out that this is but one example and doesn’t support the general thesis that more equity in science would advance it faster or that the question wouldn’t have been raised by a woman who wasn’t black; in fact, McNutt notes that the question likely would have been raised by someone else. (Indeed, many assertions and research projects involving underprivileged groups are made and promoted by those of other races.)
For less anecdotal and more critical takes, see the four website posts above. Despite the criticism, I stand by the thesis advanced in the paper, though of course many of the authors disagree to various extents about sub-assertions in the paper (I, for one, still favor a form of affirmative action in judging grants and hires in the sciences.) But one thing is for sure: there are many people who take issue with the idea that merit should be the main— if not the only—criterion in judging science and scientists, and it is to the good to discuss in the open this view and its opposition. Our paper. and Anna’s earlier one. were intended to begin this discussion.
