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.
Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.
Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously. And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand. Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:
Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:
Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.
Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.
But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.
I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.
a.) There is something rather than nothing.
b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation.
I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)
c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die.
In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God Daseler adds further evidence:
Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.
d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray
This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer. But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.
e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.
Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior. Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt). Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:
There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.
And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?
Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.
Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:
Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”
The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”
In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:
I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.
I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it? Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.
If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better. But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”
But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.
Over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, they dragged out a groggy groundhog (Marmota monax), Punxsutawney Phil, from his wooden-box den, and determined whether he could see his shadow.
He did, and that means that we have six more weeks of winter weather to come. Is that any surprise?
Below is a short video in which Phil is forced to look at a piece of paper. Who knows if he actually saw his shadown, but the top-hatted flacks, members of the so-called “Inner Circle” who interpret Phil’s predictions, did.
The Inner Circle claims a 100% accuracy rate, and an approximately 80% accuracy rate in recorded predictions. If a prediction is wrong, they claim that the person in charge of translating the message must have made a mistake in their interpretation. Empirical estimates place the groundhog’s accuracy between 35% and 41%.
So it goes. It’s a groundhog, for crying out loud, not a weatherman. And the Inner Circle is a religion. . . .
Well, this is the last batch of submitted photos, but I hope for me. Don’t dash my hope!
Today we have a lovely text-and-photo post by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, featuring a bizarre and mimetic beetle. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Fabulous pretenders
Termites, cockroaches’ sophisticated cousins (Order Blattodea), live in intricate, organized societies with division of labour and a caste system. The mound-building species are also skilled engineers, constructing temperature-controlled, ventilated nests that protect their inhabitants from the harsh conditions of the outside world. Colonies may comprise millions of individuals, including eggs, larvae and workers. Just like other social insects, termites have to be on guard against many an envious enemy: their cosy nests are tempting to would-be squatters, with the even more tempting bonus of being packed with energy-rich morsels.
Damage to a nest of Formosan subterranean termites brings hoards of workers and soldiers with dark, oval shaped heads scrambling to repair the hole. Termites shown about 4 times actual size. USDA photo by Scott Bauer.
Termites are mostly successful in keeping invaders at bay, but a sizable group of outsiders has evolved skills that allow them to breach those defences. These are the termitophiles: macro-organisms that live in association with termite colonies. Termitophiles, ranging from harmless inquilines to predators and parasites, rely on chemical mimicry and numerous morphological and behavioural adaptations to avoid detection and mingle with their hosts.
Among the many impostors, rove beetles from the subfamily Aleocharinae are particularly noteworthy. This is a huge group (~16,000 species) within the humongous Staphylinidae family, which comprises some 66,000 species, one of the largest families of organisms. Many aleocharines are myrmecophilous (associated with ants); some 670 species are termitophilous.
Aleocharines have reached extraordinary levels of deception, but two termitophilous species of the genus Austrospirachtha from northern Australia – the only known species so far – take their art to a new level. On first seeing their images, one may think they are AI-generated. Or pranks devised by putting together bits of different insects, entomological versions of the Piltdown Man hoax.
The termite puppets on their backs, complete with dangling pseudo-appendages that resemble antennae and legs, fool their hosts into accepting them as nestmates. You may see these beetles as rough simulacrums of the real thing, but in the pitch-dark confines of a termite nest, mimicry is based on palpation rather than vision (Watson, 1973). The mouthparts of A. carrijoi are very small, which suggest it dupes termite workers to feed it, a process known as trophallaxis (Zilberman & Pires Silva, 2023). Presumably, the same happens with A. mimetes.
We know very little about these beetles or any other symbiotic aleocharines. But the rare insights into their outlandish appearances are glimpses of the marvellous workings of natural selection.
References
Pires Silva, C.M. 2024. Cladistic analysis, taxonomic revision & biological notes of the termitophilous genus Xenogaster Wasmann, 1891 (Staphylinidae, Aleocharinae, Corotocini). Master’s Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Watson, J.A.L. 1973. Austrospirachtha mimetes, a new termitophilous corotocine from Northern Australia (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae). Journal of the Australian Entomological Society 12: 307-310.
Zilberman, B. et al. 2019. Viviparity in Staphylinidae and reproductive behavior of Corotoca Schiødte, 1853. Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia 59: e20195919.
Zilberman, B. & Pires Silva, C.M. 2023. A new species and morphological notes on the remarkable termitophilous genus Austrospirachtha Watson from Australia (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Aleocharinae). Zootaxa. 5336: 424-432.
Welcome to the first Monday in February: February 2, 2026, and it’s National Tater Tot Day, celebrating the commerical nubs of grated and deep-fried potato. They’re good, though I almost never have them. Some of the history:
Tater tots were developed in 1953 when American frozen food company Ore-Ida founders F. Nephi Grigg, Golden Grigg, and Ross Erin Butler Sr. were trying to devise a recipe to use leftover slivers of cut potatoes that would otherwise be thrown away. They chopped up the slivers, added flour and seasoning, then pushed the mash through holes and sliced off pieces of the extruded mixture.
The product was first offered commercially in stores in 1956. Originally, sales were slow; the family speculated the product was priced too low, so it had no perceived value. When the price was raised, people began buying it. By 1960 Ore-Ida captured 25% of the frozen potato market.
The Tots can also be made into a casserole with ground beef and other stuff; I’ve always wanted to try it but haven’t (it’s popular in the Midwest). Here’s what it looks like, and you can find a recipe here. It uses just a few common ingredients, and takes only 5 minutes to prepare (and 40 minutes to cook). Somebody make one!
Here’s the best song I know that incorporates a ukulele. The song was, of course written by George Harrison, who loved the ukulele, and here Macca plays an instrument that belonged to the late Harrison. One of the YouTube comments says this:
Paul is playing a 1920’s Gibson Tenor Ukulele that was gifted to him by George. George Harrison had a very impressive ukulele collection, including two of George Formby’s banjo ukuleles.
Look at all the great musicians! This is a live performance from the Concert for George, performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002: the first anniversary of Harrison’s death.
The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to arrest and detain as many people as possible during its immigration crackdown. But in recent weeks, a deluge of court cases has led federal judges to release hundreds of immigrant detainees back into the country, and threatens to overwhelm the court system.
In case after case, federal judges have found that the Trump administration has been ignoring longstanding legal interpretations that mandate the release of many people who are taken into immigration custody if they post a bond.
The surge in such cases has dominated the court dockets in some districts, overwhelming government lawyers who have to defend the detentions. And the wave of people who have been set free has upended the Trump administration’s effort to keep detained immigrants locked up indefinitely, even if they do not pose a public safety threat.
Lawyers representing detainees have been filing rafts of what are known as habeas corpus petitions — court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. In the vast majority of cases, judges are siding with the detainees and ordering their immediate release, or ordering immigration judges to hold bond hearings, according to 10 lawyers interviewed by The New York Times, who said their practices had filed dozens of habeas petitions over the last couple of months.
Jessie Calmes, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said that she had filed at least 40 petitions since November. Every one had been granted, she said.
“A lot of these people have been here more than 10 years and have U.S.-citizen kids,” she said. “They’re people who were picked up on the way to work, at their job site or for a traffic violation.”
The surge in habeas petitions has strained federal courts in some states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, with hundreds of new cases a month in some court districts, according to a person with knowledge of the
And the explanation:
The wave of habeas petitions traces to a key change the Trump administration made in how immigration detention decisions are made.
For decades, immigration judges — who are separate from the federal courts and overseen by the Justice Department rather than the judiciary — granted bond to immigrants in detention who were not public safety threats or flight risks, allowing them to live and work in the community while pursuing their cases.
But last year the Trump administration moved to make virtually everyone who is in the country unlawfully subject to mandatory detention. When the policy change was affirmed by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, it took discretion away from immigration judges.
Well, I’m glad that everyone gets adjudicated now instead of just snatched up and deported. But what puzzles me is that immigration justices are said to be overseen by the Department of Justice, but Trump’s policy change has been affirmed by that very department. So why are the judges taking precedence here when, one would think, they should be judging cases by the policy created by the DOJ. Regardless, it’s clear people want deportation policy applied most strongly to undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes beyond entering the U.S. illegally.
*I’m still betting on (and still ambivalent about) the likelihood that the U.S. will attacck Iran in a week. But remember—I am not pundit. The NYT’s Bret Stephens is, however, and in his latest column he ponders the question, “Can we let Iran get away with mass murder?”
So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times of having seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”
ran could always become more pliant, if only to play for time. But the odds are growing that the president will order some sort of attack once sufficient U.S. forces are in the region, which could happen as early as this week. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Israel will become involved — either because it will respond to Iranian retaliatory missile strikes or because it will seek to pre-empt them by hitting first. Whichever way, this will not be a Venezuela-style sub-three-hour war.
Is the military option wise? The argument against it is that it’s unlikely to achieve much.
. . .And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?
I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.
But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?
I think Stephens’s answer to his title question is “no.”
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a destransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.’
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
The idea of her 16-year-old daughter receiving a mastectomy made her “physically ill,” Deacon said. But Deacon was led to believe by Einhorn that Varian would be unhappy unless she was affirmed in her gender dysphoria. It was the “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.
Defendants Einhorn and plastic surgeon Simon Chin implied that Varian wanted the medical procedure, and was even at risk of suicide should she not receive a mastectomy. Chin’s attorney called Deacon’s consent a “critical fact” of the case, and asked jurors what might have happened to a potentially suicidal Varian had Chin refused the surgery.
Varian’s legal team argued that the matter in question was not if the surgery should have been performed on her because she was a minor, but if the doctors correctly assumed Varian had gender dysphoria. Defendants did not notify Varian of “the risks, hazards, and alternatives” before surgery, her legal team claimed.
We will see a lot more of these cases, since “affirmative care” is not “objective care”, but a form of rah-rah pushing of those with gender dysphoria to get hormones and then surgery. Especially when this is performed on kids under 18 or so, one can persuasively argue that such children cannot make rational decisions; nor do doctors always apprise patients of the risks of transitioning. This verdict alone is going to put a big chill on the “affirmative care” movement for children with gender dysphoria: $2 million is a lot of dosh.
I spoke about the trial with three prominent pediatric gender-care psychologists who have beencritical ofthe field: Amy Tishelman, Laura Edwards-Leeper, and Erica Anderson, the latter of whom served as an expert witness for the plaintiff. All three said that pediatric gender medicine is facing a long-overdue legal reckoning.
Varian’s case, Edwards-Leeper said, “should be a wake-up call to American medical and mental health organizations to stop ignoring the growing body of research showing how the patient population has changed and revealing serious flaws in current practices. If we do not course correct immediately, I predict we will see either continued lawsuits and detransition tragedies or increasing bans on care, both of which will hurt the gender-distressed youth the field is trying to help.”
“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say not yet, to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch said during his closing argument of Einhorn and Chin’s care of Varian. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails, and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”
Promoted by President Donald Trump as “a must watch,” the Melania Trump documentary “Melania” debuted with a better-than-expected $7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The release of “Melania” was unlike any seen before. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights, plus some $35 million to market it, making it the most expensive documentary ever. Directed by Brett Ratner, who had been exiled from Hollywood since 2017, the film about the first lady debuted in 1,778 theaters in the midst of Trump’s turbulent second term.
While the result would be a flop for most films with such high costs, “Melania” was a success by documentary standards. It’s the best opening weekend for a documentary, outside of concert films, in 14 years. Going into the weekend, estimates ranged from $3 million to $5 million.
But there was little to compare “Melania” to, given that presidential families typically eschew in-office memoir or documentary releases to avoid the appearance of capitalizing on the White House. The film chronicles Melania Trump over 20 days last January, leading up to Trump’s second inauguration.
The No. 1 movie of the weekend was Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” a critically acclaimed survival thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The Walt Disney Co. release debuted with $20 million. The film, with a $40 million budget, was an in-between kind of release for Raimi, whose hits have typically ranged from low-budget cult (“Army of Darkness”) to big-budget blockbuster (2002’s “Spider-Man”).
. . .But most of the curiosity was on how “Melania” would perform. A week earlier, the White House hosted a black-tie preview attended by Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Apple chief executive Tim Cook and former boxer Mike Tyson.
. . . . “Melania” didn’t screen in advance for critics, but reviews that rolled out Friday, once the film was in theaters, weren’t good. Xan Brooks of The Guardian compared the film to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a “cheese ball informercial of staggering inertia.” Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To say that ‘Melania’ is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.”
But among those who bought tickets over the weekend, the response was far more positive. “Melania” landed an “A” CinemaScore. Audiences were overwhelmingly 55 and older (72% of ticket buyers), female (72%) and white (75%). As expected, the movie played best in the South, with top states including Florida and Texas.
Here are the critics’ and public’s ratings of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. I have never seen such a huge disparity, nor a critics’ rating that low! The Popcornmeter must reflect a dogpiling of Republicans on the site, as well as those “old, white females”:
I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.
Since then there have been Congressional hearings involving, not tinfoil-hat-wearing kooks, but — for example — former Navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves and government intelligence employees Luis Elizondo and David Grusch, who told Congress and millions of online viewers that the U.S. government was covering up evidence of alien visitation. The UAP acronym, gradually adopted by the Pentagon around 2020, signifies the subject’s transformation into the official conversation.
All of this was packaged into a documentary released last year by the noted filmmaker Dan Farah, “The Age of Disclosure,” which has been widely reviewed in mainstream media and discussed not only on popular podcasts with UFO enthusiasts but at the highest levels of government, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
. . .In my own classification system, I put reported UFO and UAP [“unidentified anomalous phenomena”] sightings in three categories: 1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) and 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).
I strongly suspect that all UAP sightings fall into the first category, but other commentators suggest the second, noting that they could represent Russian or Chinese assets using technology as yet unknown to American scientists, capable of speeds and turns that seemingly defy all their physics and aerodynamics.
That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies. It would be as if the United States were flying biplanes while the Russians or Chinese were flying Stealth fighter jets, or we were still experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets while they were testing SpaceX-level rocketry. Impossible. We would know about all the steps leading to such technological wizardry.
Finally, could UAPs really be space aliens? It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.
What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).
From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.
It’s a religion, Jake! That’s what I concluded a while back from the fervor of adherents, who refuse to listen to any evidence against their faith. Where are the crashed spacecraft and pickled bodies that the adherents claim are somewhere in the U.S.?
*The Wall Street Journal has a list and description of “20 songs that defined America“: basically a song for each decade since the 1840s. I’ll list the last 8 (songs that arose since 1956), and make a few comments:
First, the criteria:
In the 19th century, a song that sold 2,000-5,000 copies of sheet music could be considered a hit; a blockbuster moved 10,000-20,000. By the 1890s, the industry’s scale exploded, with top songs selling more than 100,000 copies, and rare megahits supposedly reaching the million mark (their publishers at the time may have been inflating numbers, according to the Library of Congress).
When radio—then record players, then TV, then MTV, then streaming services—emerged, tallies were taken differently, and success was measured accordingly. But almost since its founding, America has had hit songs that often defined an era.
Here’s a look at 20 such songs, the artist that made them famous, and what they reveal about their times.
12.) Hound Dog (Elvis Presley, 1956)
13.) I Want to Hold your Hand (The Beatles, 1963)
14.) Stayin’ Alive (The Bee Gees, 1977)
15.) Billie Jean (Michael Jackson, 1983)
16.) Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks 1990)
17.) Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, 1991)
18.) Porcelain (Moby, 1999)
19.) Hey Ya! (Outcast 2003)
20.) Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars, 2014)
It’s not a bad list, though I’d put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (released 1954) in place of “Hound Dog,” since I think the Haley song was really the first popular rock and roll song. I still remember the first time I heard it, when I was a kid in Greece, and I recognized that something new had arrived. Songs after the Nirvana record I can’t comment, as that’s where my experience stops. As for why “I Want to Hold Your Hand” defines the era, the paper says this:
What it says about America: Amid protest and upheaval, America embraced catharsis and connection in its pop music. “You can make the case that the same girls who were flocking to these stadiums, 10 years later were marching in the streets for women’s liberation,” says Fink. With Beatlemania, argues Fink, “huge masses of women got used to smashing through police barricades.”
Well, I don’t agree that the song is a harbinger of feminism—that’s stretching it. It was simply the first really popular song of the best rock group that ever existed. And there’s a good argument for adding to the list Sam Cooke’s “A change is gonna come“, as there are really no soul songs, much less songs that limn the civil rights movement of the Sixties, an epochal change in America. Pity that the song came out in 1964, in the same decade as the Beatles’ song. Here it is anyway, because I love it:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili casts a cold eye on postmodernism:
Hili: What is this postmodernism?
Andrzej: It’s a synonym for post-rationality.’
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest ta ponowoczesność?
Ja: To synonim postracjonalności.
From Masih. This protestor was killed by the Iranian regime not long after being arrested:
Do not stop talking about Iran.
This is what is happening right now.
Taha Soleimani, a 19-year-old young man, disappeared on Friday, January 9.
Twenty days later on January 29, his body was returned to his family from Kahrizak, bearing clear signs of torture.
Taha was buried in… pic.twitter.com/KUO26BsTJK
We don’t talk enough about the student protests at Wellesley College in Feb 2014 against an outdoor public sculpture called “Sleepwalker” which students claimed was “harming” them. https://t.co/PE4bFFo1cJpic.twitter.com/lJDt1yppxI
The Brooklyn-based artist had installed the piece outside of the college’s Davis Museum, which was hosting a concurrent exhibition of his work. Sleepwalker was immobilized in the frosty landscape, but students saw a threat and created a petition for its removal from the lawn. Their claims that the sculpture produced apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts about sexual assault on the all-women’s campus—well-founded or not—in many ways presaged the debates still raging today about free speech and abuse.
From Simon. The public doesn’t agree with this tweet, though:
Two from Matthew. There are a lot more images and manuscript pages at this remarkable site documenting sixteenth-century Mexico:
One of the most extraordinary documents ever created by humans. The 12 volume manuscript "General History of the Things of New Spain", created in 1577 by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists, it describes the culture of indigenous Mexico.
Although the view that sex is a spectrum, and that there are more than two biological sexes in humans and other species, is still prevalent among the woke, others are realizing that sex in humans (and nearly every other species of plant and animal) is indeed a binary, with a tiny fraction of exceptions in humans. These include individuals with “differences in sex determination” (DSD) and almost nonexistent hermaphrodites. Estimates of exceptions in our species range from 0.02% to 0.005%.
The rise of the “sex is a spectrum” notion is due solely to the rise of gender activism and to people who identify as nonbinary or transgender. But gender is not the same thing as biological sex: the former is a subjective way of feeling, while the latter is an objective fact of biology based on a binary of gamete types.
I personally don’t care if someone identifies as a member of a nonstandard gender, but I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”
It’s a shame that many of those who claim that sex is a spectrum are biologists who recognize the sex binary and its many consequences, like sexual selection. The misguided folks include the three main scientific societies studying evolution, who issued a statement that biological sex was a spectrum, and further that this was a consensus view. (Their original statement is archived here.) The societies then took down their claim when other biologists pointed out its inanity (see here, here, and here). And it’s not only biologists who recognize the ideology behind the claim that sex is a spectrum; the public does, too. NBC News reported this in 2023 (note the conflation of sex and gender):
A new national poll from PRRI finds Americans’ views on gender identity, pronoun use and teaching about same-sex relationships in school deeply divided by party affiliation, age and religion.
Overall, 65% of all Americans believe there are only two gender identities, while 34% disagree and say there are many gender identities.
But inside those numbers are sharp differences. Fully 90% of Republicans say there are just two genders, versus 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats who believe the same
Sadly, if you’re on the side of truth in this debate, at least as far as the number of sexes go, you’re on the side of Republicans. So it goes. Further, Americans and sports organizations themselves are increasingly adopting the views that trans-identified men (“transwomen,” as they’re sometimes called) should not compete in sports against biological women. This is from a 2025 Gallup poll.
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and 66% of Americans say a person’s birth sex rather than gender identity should be listed on government documents such as passports or driver’s licenses.
Thus, although wokeness is like a barbed porcupine quill: easy to go inside you but hard to remove, I’m pretty confident that the claim of a biological sex spectrum will eventually decline even more. But there are still some ideologues who twist and misrepresent the facts to argue that there are more than two sexes. (The argument centers on humans, of course.) One of these is Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, who has written several papers and a recent book arguing for the human sex spectrum. I’ve pushed back on his arguments many times (see here), and wrote a short review of his book Sex is a Spectrum, a book that should be read with a beaker of Pepto-Bismol by your side. There’s another and better critical review of Fuentes’s book by Tomas Bogardus, here, which Bogardus has turned into his own new book, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.
This post is just to highlight another critical review of Fuentes’s book and his views on sex, one written by Alexander Riley and appearing at Compact. You can get to a paywalled version by clicking on the title below, but a reader sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote briefly from that below.
A few quotes (indented). I don’t know how readers can access the whole review without subscribing:
Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.
But the reality is that species like this one most definitely are weird, not only in the animal kingdom, but even among fish, who are among the most sexually fluid animals. Among fish, the number of species that are sexually fluid in this way is perhaps around 500 … unless you know that there are approximately 34,000 known fish species. In other words, even in the most sexually fluid animals, transition between male and female by one individual can happen in only 1.5 percent of the total species. What Fuentes describes as “not that weird” is certainly highly unusual. [JAC: note that switching from male to female or vice versa does not negate the sex binary.]
This sleight of hand is typical of Fuentes’s handling of evidence. He attacks a classic argument in evolutionary biology that differences in male and female gametes (sperm an eggs, respectively) explain many other differences between the two sexes. In short, because eggs are much costlier to make than sperm, females have evolved to invest more energy in the reproductive chances of each gamete compared to males. This bare fact of the gamete difference means, according to the Bateman-Trivers principle, males and females typically develop different mating strategies and have different physical and behavioral profiles.
The distortion below is typical of ideologues who promote Fausto-Sterling’s data even when they know it’s incorrect:
Fuentes notes that what he calls “3G human males and females,” that is, those individuals who are unambiguously male or female in their genitalia, their gonads (the gland/organ that produces either male or female gametes), and genes, do not make up 100 percent of human individuals. He goes on to suggest that at least 1 percent of humans, and perhaps more, do not fit the 3G categories. This is a claim unsupported by the facts. The citation he links to this claim is an article by biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. The claim made by Fausto-Sterling about the percentage of those who are intersex has been thoroughlydebunked. She includes a number of conditions in her category of intersex (or non-3G) that are widely recognized as not legitimately so classified. One such condition (Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, or LOCAH, a hormonal disorder) makes up fully 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s “intersex” category. Individuals with LOCAH are easily classed as either male or female according to Fuentes’ 3Gs, and nearly all of them are able to participate in reproduction as normal for their sex. The percentage of those who are actually outside 3G male or female classes is likely around 0.02% percent, which means that 9,998 out of every 10,000 humans are in those two groups.
What’s below shows that trans-identified men do not become equivalent to biological women when they undergo medical transition:
Transwomen are much more likely to exhibit behaviors of sexual violence and aggression than women. A 2011 study showed clearly that even male-to-female transsexuals who had undergone full surgical transition, and who therefore had undergone hormone therapy to try to approximate female hormonal biology, still showed rates of violent crime and sexual aggression comparable to biological males. They were almost twenty times more likely to be convicted of a violent offense than the typical female subject. This is reason enough to keep individuals who have male hormonal biology out of spaces in which they interact closely with semi-clad girls and women.
And Riley’s conclusion:
The fact that Fuentes can make such ill-founded claims without fearing serious pushback is an indication of how captured academic culture is by the ideology behind this book. A healthy academic culture would not so easily acquiesce to political rhetoric masquerading as science.
Yes, anthropology has been captured—especially cultural anthropology—and, as I said, even some biologists have gone to the Dark Side. I have nothing but contempt and pity for those who know that there are two sexes but twist and mangle the facts to conform to the woke contention that the sexes can be made interchangeable. But I should add the usual caveat that, except for a few exceptions like sports and prisons, transgender people whould be given the same rights as everyone else.
Another sign of people rejecting the “sex is a spectrum” claim is that Fuentes’s book didn’t sell well. Despite coming out less than a year ago. it’s now #301,447 on Amazon’s sales list, and has only 25 customer ratings, totaling 3.8 out of 5 stars. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.
Here are two Amazon reviews by savvy readers (note: none of the reviews on Amazon are by me):
I never would have selected this book on my own, but fortunately a reader suggested it, and I’m very glad. The book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne III, is a history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains extending from about 1830 to the beginning of the 20th century. This is the period when all the tribes (the book calls them “Indians”, not “Native Americans”)—and there were many tribes and sub-tribes—came into conflict with Mexicans and with Americans moving West, and we know how that ends.
The history centers on the Comanches, the dominant tribe on the plains, though there was never one hierarchical tribe but a series of sub-tribes that were loosely affiliated as a “nation” and would sometimes join forces or fragment. Gwynne did a great deal of historical research using primary documents, and the result is a informative but mesmerizing tale, one that is hard to put down.
The Comanches were nomads, ranging widely over the Great Plains from Colorado to Texas. Their “villages” were only temporary, and would be moved (by women, who did the heavy lifting) from place to place during wars or buffalo hunts. And those were really their two primary activities: killing members of other tribes and killing buffalo, which were then so numerous then that their herds could extend to the horizon. An important part of Comanche culture was the horse; Comanches were nearly always mounted in war or on the hunt, with horses descended from those brought to the Americas by the Spanish. As you can see from the photo of a Comanche warrior below, the horses were small, descended from wild mustangs caught and “broken” with great skill. Comanches also specialized in stealing horses from other tribes and from settlers and the American military. Horses were their riches.
Comanche horsemanship was superb, largely accounting for their success against other tribes and against settlers. They were able, for instance, to ride sideways on the horse’s flank, not visible to enemies on the other side, and shoot arrows (with tremendous accuracy) from below the horse’s neck. Until they managed to get firearms from the settlers and soldiers, they used arrows and lances, and that is how they brought down buffalo. (The butchering, of course, was done by the women.)
I won’t go into detail about the lives and wars of the Comanche, except to say that the book imparts three lessons about Native Americans on the plains:
First, they did not “own” land or even occupy it. As I said, they were nomadic, and many other Native American tribes, including Apaches, Cherokees, Kickapoos, and Arapaho, roamed the same territory. This bears on the present-day conflict about repatriating artifacts and human remains to tribes that claim them. For artifacts or bones found on the Great Plains (and elsewhere, of course) cannot be ascribed to a given tribe without DNA analysis, which is almost never done, or if there are distinctive signs from the artifacts identifying them as belonging to a given group. Since this is rarely possible, it becomes a crapshoot about what to do about repatriating Native American artifacts, most of which now have to be returned to a tribe that claims them before scientists or anthropologists get to study them. Read the books and writings of Elizabeth Weiss to learn more about this conflict.
Second, war was a way of life for the Comanche; they were always at war with one tribe or another—even well before white settlers moved West. The view that all was peaceful among Native Americans until white settlers invaded “Indian” land and displaced the residents is grossly mistaken. Young men were trained for war beginning at five or six, and the youths were skillful with the horse and the bow. Comanche life without war was unthinkable, and the men prided themselves, and rose in rank in their groups, largely through skill in warfare. In the end, the Comanches were diminished not because of lack of skill in fighting, but because they were outnumbered by settlers and the Army, because the Army had superior weapons, especially cannons, and because the settlers killed off their main means of subsistence: the buffalo. The number of Comanche is estimated to have fallen from about 40,000 in 1832 to only 1,171 in 1910. The book describes many treaties between the Comanche and the U.S. government or its agents, but these treaties were almost always broken by one side or another—or both.
Third, their life was very hard. They subsisted almost entirely on buffalo, had to weather the brutal cold of the Plains in tipis or on horseback, often went without food or water, and of course almost never bathed. (This was tough on the women, who became covered with blood and guts when skinning buffalo.) But they prided themselves on their toughness and bravery. (women often fought alongside the men). These features were mixed with an almost unimaginable degree of cruelty towards their enemies. Enemies who were not killed outright were tortured, and in horrible ways: scalping, cutting, and roasting to death slowly. These acts were considered normal and not immoral, though the white settlers (who were often tortured as captives) saw them as brutal and primitive. But the Comanche were capable of great kindness as well, especially towards other members of their tribe and occasionally towards white women and children who survived battle with the tribes and were “kidnapped’ by them, many becoming, in effect, Comanches themselves.
This brings us to the centerpiece of the story: the abduction of an American woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, in a battle in 1836. She was eight years old. Parker became integrated into the tribe, learned their language (eventually forgetting much of her English) and married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Among their three children was Quanah Parker, who showed tremendous skill, wisdom, and courage as a warrior, and rose through the ranks (despite being half white) to become a chief himself. The story of Quanah is the story of the decline and fall of the Comanches, limned with many battles and culminating in their surrender to American soldiers and sedentary occupation of land on a reservation, where of course they were unhappy. Quanah demonstrated his leadership skills even on the reservation and, through judicious rental of reservation land to settlers for grazing cattle, became wealthy and renowned among both whites and Native Americans. Here’s a photo of Quanah in his native clothing:
Daniel P. Sink of Vernon Texas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Gwynne skillfully weaves together the story of Quanah and greater historical events, so in the end you understand not just the history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but the life of Comanches and the personalities of Quanah and his mother, Cynthia Parker. Parker herself was captured by the Texas Rangers when she was 33 and lived the rest of her life with settlers, including members of her extended family. She was never happy, and tried to escape back to the Comanches several times, but never succeeded. She had several children, including Quanah, but was separated from her sons and left with only one daughter, Topsannah (“Prairie Flower”). Cynthia died at 40, heartbroken. Here’s a photo of her with Topsannah. Despite arduous efforts of settlers to assimilate Cynthia back as an American, she was always a Comanche at heart. The expression on her face tells the tale.
Here’s Quanah in 1889. As you see, he adopted many of the settlers’ ways, including their clothing, But he never cut his braids:
Charles Milton Bell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve run on too long, but I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation and thank the reader who recommended it. Although it may strike you as something you might not like, do give it a try. (Click on the picture below to go to the publisher.) You may know about the sad history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but this book tells you, more than anything I’ve read, how at least some of them lived their lives as free men and women.
Today we have part 2 of Paul Handford’s hummingbird photos (part 1 is here). Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
The Rufous hummer, Selasphorus rufus, was a common frequenter of our yard, boldly visiting the feeders. It has the distinction of being the northernmost breeding species of any member of the family (61°N, in southern Alaska). Given that they winter on the Gulf Coast and the southern Pacific slopes of Mexico, this means that, in terms of body-length, at least some Rufous hummers make the longest of all avian migrations!
The females closely resemble those of the congeneric Calliope hummer, differing in having longer tails and rufous, rather than buff flanks:
The males are mainly strongly rufous, and with a brilliant ‘metallic’ scarlet throat. Again, this is a colour produced by interference produced by the structural characteristics of the feathers rather than by pigment. As such, the brilliance shows when it is viewed directly; from the side, it appears dark, even black:
