Tell her she did a good job!

The man whose brain barely functions is in charge of all the science enterprises in this country, and he is fucking it up so bad.

Just look at the frets on this guy’s bass. It took a while for my nervous system to rewire itself to recognize this as music, but then I couldn’t listen to anything else for a while.

Oh look, a trans person!

The other day, while I was browsing, I was interrupted by an ad for PragerU. I despise PragerU, the totally fake university that specializes in fake history and fake science, led by that smarmy old fraud, Dennis Prager. What caught my ear, though, is that this ad featured Gad Saad desperately pushing his new book, Suicidal Empathy.

I have not read the book. I will never read the book. Gad Saad is a pathetic figure, a pick-me guy for the right wing, who is a professor of marketing who rides the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I’ve written about him a few times before, in particular his efforts to deny the existence of toxic masculinity while simultaneously exemplifying the attitudes and stereotypes that represent toxicity. Like any good evo psych wanker, he justifies treating women poorly by mentioning animals with aggressive, violent mating strategies, as if they apply to us.

Even Larry Moran, who doesn’t normally dip into culture war issues, ripped Gad Saad a new one. Saad is just a sad embarrassment of a man who desperately wants to be legitimized by more successful evo-psych grifters, but doesn’t quite have the smarts to assemble a coherent, logical argument.

I got the gist of his thesis from the ad. He’s trying to thread a needle here: he can’t quite say that empathy is bad, because he wants you to empathize with him, but at the same time he wants you to know that the empathy practiced by Leftists is undeniably evil and wicked. Empathy that leads you to regard Muslims as human beings is “suicidal,” after all. And don’t get him started on women and “effeminate” men!

The book is reviewed in Jacobin, and the review confirms everything I’d expect of Saad.

For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Uh-oh–when an evolutionary psychologist loses the affection of Quillette, you know he’s on the way out. He relies on caricatures of left wing perspectives that he exaggerates into absurdity, so it’s no surprise that his arguments fall apart, even if you sympathize with his views. He has to distort everything to make his case.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

He’s playing a simple-minded game. If you don’t think black people should be discriminated against for the color of the skin, well, that must mean you hate and are ashamed of white people. If you think we should protect ecologies from raging industrialism, by golly, you really hate capitalism. And if you like socialism, you’re a woman, you pussy.

Now you can understand why I won’t read his book. The banality is exhausting. I’ve seen a few of his videos and read a few of his articles, and know that he’s simply a knee-jerk bigot. Hard pass.

To be fair, though, I should at least quote some of Gad Saad’s own words.

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Does that sound like a man anyone, especially any woman, would want to spend 5 minutes in conversation with? Does he even sound like he’s aware of the bigotry implicit in his words?

I’ve been in many departmental meetings, and yes, the safety and well-being of our students comes up fairly often — because it matters. If you were a student, would you want a professor who rolls his eyes at the thought of trying to understand you?

On the Democratic side, we’ll have Amy Klobuchar, the current senator. I can’t get excited about her — she’s your standard inoffensive middle-of-the-road Democrat, a reliable candidate with lots of money behind her. I’ll almost certainly vote for her, with no enthusiasm.

The Republican side is trying to be exciting, but just comes off as weird. Of course Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was nattering around the edges, talking a big game, but no way were our Republicans going to get that weird — he lost the nomination, but don’t worry, you know he’s going to continue to flush his money away in a quixotic campaign.

The actual Republican nominee is…Kendall Qualls. You’ve never heard of him. He pops up here now and then, runs for an office, fails, and then we all forget him until the next election. His claim to fame is that he is a healthcare executive. They might as well have nominated Satan for all the popularity he’d have.

Satan might have been a better choice, since the Republicans also announced their commitment to outright evil.

The convention day began at 9 a.m. with a prayer from Father Richard Kunst of Duluth that the adopted platform of the party “promotes true, good, conservative values, fiscally and socially,” followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

A delegate then called for a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020 and is in prison. State Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, led a 10-second moment of silence after taking an informal vote.

Monday was the sixth anniversary of Floyd’s death.

And then after hailing Derek Chauvin, they all met their Grindr dates and went off to a black mass, where they drank the blood of poor children.

Last month, this happened:

McCreight said they had been advertising the event with flyers across the city that included their photo and had also appeared in the local LGBTQ+ publication, Windy City Times. They assume the event’s publicity is how the attacker recognized them.

“I’m telling this story now because I’m finally in a place where I can talk about it without really freaking out badly,” McCreight said, explaining that there are still a lot of gaps in their memory of that night, but they think they were walking home alone from getting food.

The attacker asked if they were McCreight, and McCreight cheerfully confirmed, assuming it might be someone who appreciated their work.

“He very quickly pushed me to the ground and started repeatedly punching me in the eye,” McCreight said. “Afterward, I thought he had maybe hit me with a brick or something because it was so painful. I had never been beat up before in my life.”

McCreight said the attacker also used a pocket knife to cut them all over their body, but not deep enough to leave permanent damage.

“It was very scary. He even tried to strangle me briefly with something that thankfully didn’t work well and just kind of left an abrasion on my neck.”

McCreight said they don’t remember how they got away or if the person eventually just let them go. But somehow, they got home. It took them over a day to realize they needed an ambulance because they were in such a daze.

But on May 1, McCreight recounted, they realized they needed help. An ambulance took them to Chicago’s Advocate Health Center, where they said they received excellent care, which included emergency surgery on their eye. After that, it took weeks for their vision to return to normal.

“I think it’s really important for people to know that this is the reality of being trans in the United States,” they said. “I’m a non-violent nerdy cat guy who likes talking about science and wants to be the next Bill Nye, and because of that, someone basically tried to kill me or at least beat me up bad enough to scare me into silence.”

They said for a little bit, they considered giving up their public-facing activism in the wake of the attack. But then, hospital staff of all kinds – from doctors to nurses to the people bringing them meals – all learned about McCreight’s work and told them to keep going.

“They all told me not to give up on my dream.”

Horrifying. That some guy would just turn and attack a friendly, nerdy fellow walking down the street because they are trans is appalling. Listen to them telling their own story, and support BeyondXandY.

It would be a bit much for me to hand her my Canon D8 with the 100mm macro lens, so instead I gave her a clip-on magnifying lens for her iPhone, which she was already comfortable using, and she went off into No Man’s Land and got a bunch of very nice photos of these tiny (less than 3mm) guys, and left me feeling useless.

Anyway , what she had found was a lot of meshweavers, small spiders that put down sheet webs, which they use to catch smaller prey, like aphids and leafhoppers. Meshweavers are a gardener’s friend, so it’s good to see them hard at work protecting our raspberries. This is a dwarf spider, also called a money spider:

And this is a pair of dimorphic meshweavers. One species, but males and females look dramatically different.

Clearly, it’s time for me to hang up my pretense of being an arachnologist and teach Mary how to use the D8. I’ll just park myself in a rocking chair on the deck and watch her have all the fun.

Oh no. I have been asked for dietary advice.

I am not qualified. I’ve never taken a nutrition course, I have no degree in the field, you should not take nutrition advice from me. That’s the simple answer.

On the other hand, I’m aware of the problem: there are unholy swarms of people and ‘influencers’ who have less knowledge of basic biology than I do who are flooding the zone with all kinds of cockamamie ideas based primarily on ideology. Sometimes the people who pretend to have the most knowledge about the human body give the very worst advice, so how do you figure out what is good advice? I mean, you’ve got total wackaloons who have driven themselves into induced comas and neurotic breakdowns telling you to eat nothing but beef; you’ve got other nerds insisting that everyone must avoid meat, eggs, and gluten (which is necessary for some people); and then you’ve got breatharians and other insane people who believe in living on diet Coke and Big Macs.

On the third hand, human beings have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without TikTok, eating what was available and tasted good, and cultivating wonderful cuisines without relying on bizarre notions of what some wild-eyed skinny fanatic said. That’s the thing about nutrition: traditions are good guides because they’re the product of people who survived their diet. OK, French sauces and hakarl might be extreme and bad for you in the long run, but human experimentation also gave us curries and bread. We haven’t died of anything like that unless consumed in excess.

My general guide to eating is simple: moderation in everything. Avoid heavily processed foods. Try a variety of things, a ‘balanced’ diet. Beans, rice, and potatoes can be the solid foundation for your diet, and have the additional virtue in these tight economic times of being cheap. Build on them with spices — I feel like one of the cardinal sins of the American diet is the spice deficiency. Spices make mundane, boring, but reliable staples interesting and allow you to get flavor without feeling like you have to indulge in buying exotic, expensive, heavily processed foods.

Add stuff you can find in season. I like to add a piece of fish to a meal for a bit of richness…or use an egg, or some broccoli, or a side of peas. Avoid uniformity.

Learn how to make a paella, or a curry, or a stew. Just the process of assembling all the elements of these kinds of foods guarantees that you’ll get a dietary variety, and it will taste good. I trust tradition far more than I do the latest influencer fad. Your best bet is to ignore people like me and just spend more time in the produce section of your grocery store, gathering up tomatoes and turnips and cabbage and mushrooms and carrots and peppers and onions and cauliflower and green beans and garlic, and then figure out how to cook them and make a delicious meal. Pick up a variety of fruits for dessert.

It takes a bit more effort than picking up a box of premade something-or-other, but it would be better for you.

A little bit of good news: Trump’s name might get chiseled off of his attempts at immortality soon. A judge has ruled that the Kennedy Center should have its good name restored.

US district judge Christopher Cooper, Trump noted, had ruled that his handpicked board members, who “unanimously voted to add the name ‘TRUMP’ onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, ‘TRUMP,’ must be removed”.

He mad. He has to know that once he is inevitably out of power (preferably by being hauled out on a stretcher), all his vainglorious attempts to scribble his name all over everything will be eradicated.

So we can also hope that eventually his mad rulings about vaccines, at the behest of his brain-worm infected buddy, RFK jr, will be erased in time. So look at this executive order to strip children of protections with a grim sense of happiness deferred.

An executive order signed by Donald Trump with little fanfare on Friday could have a huge impact on the health of US children, as it instructs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines almost in half.

The vague language of the order, which refers to “a scientific assessment that compared United States childhood immunization recommendations with those of peer nations” published in January by anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy’s health and human services department, does not explicitly state that the new recommendation removes vaccines against seven diseases from the schedule.

The assessment, co-authored by the subsequently fired vaccine skeptic Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, concluded that the CDC director should update the childhood immunization schedule “to keep vaccines for 10 diseases – measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), pneumococcal disease, and human papillomavirus (HPV) – for which peer, developed nations share international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox) … in the category of vaccines recommended for all children”.

Implementing that recommendation would mean removing vaccines for these diseases from the recommended schedule:

hepatitis A
hepatitis B
meningitis
rotavirus
influenza
Covid-19

The assessment also recommended cutting the number of doses of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine from two or three (depending on the child’s age) to one.

Someday the proper medically-informed schedule will be restored, and we can celebrate that. Someday. For now, we just have to deal with the suffering and death of a few babies. We just have to wait until the light is restored.

(I’m actually not going to celebrate until RFK jr is prosecuted for crimes against humanity, or his mangy rotting corpse is buried deep in the ground, whichever comes first.)

I’ve been a distracted mess lately, with all this PT stuff as well as a week of administrative malarkey, but I did notice a a provocative comment that I feel compelled to respond to.

Upon accepting the risk of dispensing an unpopular remark: One day, we shall have to set nature in order using genetical engineering.

No creature should devour any other.

Wow. That makes no sense. We humans are obligate heterotrophs — we must obtain certain vital molecules by consuming other organisms. For example, we cannot synthesize valine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, threonine, histidine, or lysine, so we have to consume other organisms that contain those substances, or we die. I guess we can define “creature” to escape the problem, which is the vegetarian solution. We don’t eat meat from animals by making the decision that plants don’t count. It’s very convenient to say that killing carrots or yeast or lettuce is ethically OK, but if you think about it all deeply, even a carrot is a product of processes that kill insects with pesticides. Do insects count? What about protists? The lines are all arbitrary and we each draw our own lines.

Is our solution to genetically modify humans so they can synthesize every molecule we need? Or are we going to build factories to create all these essential substances as supplements?

But deeper still, the planetary biome is built on dependencies contingent on death and consumption, in every food web that exists. For example, sea otters eat sea urchins; sea urchins eat kelp; when sea otters are eliminated, the kelp forests die. How do we genetically engineer “devouring” out of the system without necessarily deleting entire ecologies? The only way any of this can happen is by magic.

Nature is already in order, reordering it to your preferences is silly.

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

I had two students from Oman this past semester. One of the things I, a mere college professor, do is look up my students’ backgrounds to avoid saying something stupid and insensitive, like “we should blow up your home”. If only our president were a tenth as aware.

SHUT THE FUCK UP, DONNY.

I see a lot of online commentary anticipating that Democrats will flip the house and maybe the senate. They’ve been encouraged by the nomination of Ken Paxton, a totally repulsive corrupt sleazeball, to run against James Talarico — the idea is that that is going to weaken the Republican vote in Texas, along with other visible factors.

Over the last several days, I traveled 550 miles through trump country in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. I have reliable information that this route was once replete with Trump shrines, but on this trip, there was one (and it was a doozy, near Effigy Mounds, Iowa). All the others had vanished some time over the winter. This isn’t Texas, but it is a very MAGA landscape, and thus a good an indicator. In at least one case, the former Trump Shrine had over the years displayed anti-abortion and various jingoistic symbology. All that stuff was still up, but the name Trump had been taken down. The point is: right wingers, even hard MAGA level right wingers, are erasing Trump from their rhetoric. Assuming that this is a national phenomenon, it matters in Texas.

And now, with the odious Paxton being put in place of the more mainstream Republcian Cornyn to run for Senate in Texas, owing to Trump loyalists following his endorsement, most observers who know Texas are saying that this seat is in play. According to The Hill, “The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the Texas Senate race toward Democrats on Tuesday from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” after state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the marquee race’s GOP runoff.” Read that carefully. They are not projecting a Democratic win, but they are saying the race is in play.

I’ve seen fewer Trump signs in my area, too, but I can’t help but note that a majority of those Texas Republicans voted for the Trump-endorsed candidate anyway. I have seen predictions of the ‘blue wave’ for years, and every time, I’ve been disappointed. I refuse to fall for it anymore. I predict minimal change as a consequence of the midterms.

Greg Laden is only slightly more optimistic than I am.

There are strong indications that many Republican-held House seats are likely to flip over to the D column. There are reasons to hope for a slim Democratic majority in the Senate. The chances that Republicans will hold trifecta power after the new crop of electeds is planted in January is about zero. Will Texas be part of that important, historic, and civilization changing moment?

To answer that question, I refer to fashion and style guru, Melania Trump. I’d love Texas to get on board, but we don’t really need texas, and Texas always disappoints. For mere self preservation,

I could be totally wrong, and I hope I am, but I expect the Republican party of Evil will cling to their death grip on American politics for a few more years, simply because the electorate have convinced me that they’re morons.

They were hungry, devoured their super-sized hot dogs immediately.

I am deeply humbled and grateful to learn that my H-index has now reached 140. I was also honored to see that I am currently ranked among the two most-cited researchers worldwide in the fields of Urologic Oncology and Urology on Google Scholar.

In addition, my i10-index has reached 1060; that is, one thousand and sixty publications each cited at least ten times. I was told that this may represent a world record – what an extraordinary honor!

Nonetheless, these numbers are far less important than the people, mentorship, friendships, and collaborations behind them. This milestone is truly a triumph of team science. I owe immense gratitude to my mentors, colleagues, collaborators, residents, fellows, medical students, and friends who have inspired and supported me throughout this journey over the past two decades.

Academic medicine is never an individual accomplishment. It is ultimately about advancing science and medicine, educating future generations, and improving patient care. If our work has contributed even in a small way toward those goals, then I feel extraordinarily fortunate and grateful.

Thank you for being part of this journey. The best is yet to come!

I hate to be the one to tear him down, but no one cares about your H-index and i10-index except, maybe and importantly, administrators and fellow H-index chasers. Anyone else remember that scene in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman and several of his cronies are comparing business cards, noting the quality of the stock and the embossing and the inks? Yeah, that’s what it’s like seeing someone brag about their indexes. Don’t care.

It’s also because those numbers are thoroughly gamed. I looked him up on PubMed, and it’s true, his name is on a lot of papers: papers that have 10 or 20 or more authors, and there he is, somewhere in the middle of a sea of names, rarely first or last. He really does owe a lot to his “mentors, colleagues, collaborators, residents, fellows, medical students, and friends” who have been tacking his name unto their papers! And further, his publication rate, that is, the rate at which his name gets plugged in to a long list, is approximately a paper every two days, which is insane. This is authorship by rubber stamp.

I think it is valid that many research endeavors nowadays require a large team, and he may have been an indispensable member of such a team, but then to use that cooperation to brag that he is #1 or #2 in his field is unseemly. It’s also dangerous, Dr Tall Poppy. He was spamming his ‘accomplishment’ on every social media site he could find, and on Xitter, Michael Eisen noticed.

The author’s Google scholar profile falsely lists multiple papers that he didn’t author, and therefore the citation count and h-index are inaccurate.

Whooops.

I do enjoy seeing a braggart taken down a peg, but Liang Cheng is a symptom of a greater problem: we’re drowning in artificial metrics, amplified by AI slop.

Over the last few decades, science has undergone a “citation revolution.” Scientific life used to be structured by personal reputation and mutual acquaintance; now it is defined by quantitative assessments derived from citations.

And this reward system has warped scientific life in dramatic ways. It has resulted in the obvious and widespread gaming of citation metrics; but, more insidiously, it has pushed scientists toward risk-averse, incremental, and above all unambitious research. The logic of institutional science has become increasingly divorced from actual knowledge and discovery. In a system governed by these perverse incentives, the inevitable endpoint is simply AI-generated slop at scale.

Now, with AI, we’ve built a remarkable new technology that opens up dramatic new horizons for scientific work. But we’re deploying that technology within an institutional structure that incentivizes, above all else, the maximization of metrics that don’t have much to do with real science. The underlying problem is not with AI, but with the institutions and incentives that define modern science.

That is an excellent article, everyone should read it. It actually ends on a promising note, regarding AI as a tool that could break us out of the dead-end, grasping competition for a magic ranking number, as exemplified by the case of Liang Cheng.

The citation index was designed in the 1950s and ‘60s as a solution to the information crisis engulfing scientific life. It ended up becoming much more than that: a regime that reshaped what science was, how it was rewarded, and what kind of science got done. Now that regime is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity to build something better.

It’s historic, don’t you know. Bulbous sweaty men kicking each other in the face is considered a dignified way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States…and it’s not political, it just happens to be held on the president’s 80th birthday.

The president promises us it won’t cost the American taxpayer a thing (I’ve heard that somewhere before). It’s all paid for by special ticket prices — this is not a public event — and sponsorships from Paramount and a crypto company. I’ve never watched UFC, is it all scripted kayfabe bullshit? If so, that would be perfect.

Canadians, Europeans, everyone living in the civilized world outside our borders: are you laughing at us? Because I feel like hiding in shame for some reason.

The end result: I’m told I’m healing up very well, the recommendation is that I just do one more PT session and continue exercises at home, but so far I’m ahead of the game. I also managed to walk the 3½ blocks between my house and the hospital without much difficulty.

I look forward to returning to my hobby of Cossack-style dancing next week.

It’s been afloat for about 10 years. When the notion was first proposed in a gambit to get state tax subsidies, Ken Ham & Co. said it would bring in 1.6 million tourists in the first year, and that that number would go up by about 4% each following years, with occasional surges by 10% as new planned exhibits were opened. By those 2015 estimates, they should be bringing in 2.5 million visitors this year. Are they?

• Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)
• Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)
• Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)
• Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)
  Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021
• Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)
• Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)
• Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)
• Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)
• Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)

For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.

They made the invalid assumption that, after the novelty had worn off in the first year, they would get sustained growth for some reason. I’ve been there. I feel no desire to repeat my visit, especially after the ridiculous parking and admission fees. There is nothing there in the big wooden box! Once you’ve read the numerous silly and static infographics pasted on the walls, what would be the point?

I am amused that they only got about half their projected numbers in the first year, and it’s been declining ever since. They’re probably not suffering much, though, since the costs to maintain a big empty wooden box are probably relatively low.

Tom Gauld

I’ve taken up spidermaxxing lately.

Follow me for more breaking updates on future trends!

Zebra Jumping Spider

And a wall jumper:

Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider

I didn’t fall down even once, although I was pushing it a bit.

You can see it in the art of our culture.

I thought about this when I read this article, Humanity’s ancient bond with biodiversity is visible in rock art.

Across continents and cultures, one of the most striking features of ancient rock art is how often it places the natural world at its center. Whether etched into sandstone cliffs in the Sahara, painted in hidden shelters in Southern Africa, or drawn on stone faces deep in the Amazon, the recurring subject is not architecture, warfare or abstract political power.

It is animals, forests, rivers, spirits of the land and the intimate relationship between people and the living world around them. I have seen rock art in remote regions of the Amazon, left by ancient San communities in Angola, across the Ennedi Plateau in Chad, and in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, I have come to believe that these works reveal something profound: long before the language of “biodiversity” existed, many human societies understood that their survival, identity and spirituality were inseparable from the ecosystems that sustained them.

Modern conservation discourse often treats biodiversity as a scientific concept — a measurable index of species richness, ecological resilience and genetic variation. This framing is useful, but it can obscure an older and deeper truth. For much of human history, biodiversity was not an abstraction. It was immediate, sacred and embedded in daily life. The extraordinary prevalence of animal and ecological imagery in rock art across the world suggests that early human societies recognized, at minimum intuitively, the centrality of the natural world to both material survival and cultural meaning.

I do not think my father regarded cars as “sacred”, although he’d agree that the diversity was not an abstraction. It was real! He was an auto mechanic. That was his business. I would not be surprised to learn that he believed that automotive diversity was central to both material survival and cultural meaning. He also admired the beauty of certain cars and expressed aesthetic preferences in addition to appreciating the practical mechanical differences.I am certain that we can find people who have attached a kind of spiritual reverence for certain models of cars. But so what? Humans categorize and classify and add value arguments to everything we see; it is not at all surprising or informative to retroactively paint spiritual interpretations on top of the work of survival, and it is especially specious to then deplore how the current generation has lost their proper understanding of how the world works.

Of course, it would be simplistic and romantic to suggest that ancient peoples were conservationists in the modern sense. They hunted, altered landscapes, and undoubtedly contributed to local ecological pressures at times. But what the rock art strongly implies is that many societies understood themselves as existing within ecological systems, not above them. Nature was not viewed merely instrumentally. It was spiritually, socially and existentially central.

This matters because modern industrial societies have, in many respects, lost that orientation.

Yes. Let’s recognize the pragmatic pressures that drive a culture’s artistic focus. Show me societies that did not understand that they exist within ecological systems, while being dependent on those same ecological systems. Of course ancient artists were fascinated with the living world around them, and drew it and probably dreamed about it. I would agree that modern industrial societies have shifted their focus from natural ecosystems to technological ecosystems, and it would be a good idea for us to be more conscious of the broader biological implications of our way of life, it is not surprising that human beings dwell on the subjects that most interest them and have difficulty expanding their sphere of analysis.

I am sure that many of those ancient cultures also had interpretations of the world that were rooted in magic and gods and invalid spiritual ideas, and that we’ve abandoned. Most of that is invisible and unexpressed in the catalog of rock art that we have, because it’s easier to draw a gazelle than a cosmic spiritual connection. We have to make up the spiritual element now and impose it on the art, which makes trying to draw conclusions and interpret our interpretations a masturbatory act.

I can sympathize with many of the conclusion this author reaches while being skeptical of how they reached them.

Ancient rock art is therefore more than archaeological evidence or aesthetic achievement. It is testimony. It bears witness to the fact that human societies across vast stretches of time and geography saw themselves in a relationship with a biologically rich world and considered that relationship important enough to record in an enduring form.

In this sense, rock art offers a quiet but powerful rebuke to modern ecological indifference. It reminds us that our ancestors often lived with a deeper awareness of ecological dependence than many contemporary societies do. They may not have had the vocabulary of biodiversity science, but they understood that the fate of humans and the fate of the living world were intertwined.

We would be wise to recover some of that understanding.

OK, yes, we should have a deeper appreciation of biodiversity and work to preserve it. But is the way to do that by invoking the inferred spirituality of our ancestors, and suggesting that they had the right answer, while we do not? I know we don’t have the right answer, but we also have this new layer of technology that complicates our understanding of the world that must be incorporated into our answer, and pretending that solutions that worked in Chad ten thousand years ago will work again is dodging the problem. I suppose we could just simplify the world, jettison all the technology, and go back to living in small villages, and then we’d appreciate nature much more.

My dad, who has been dead for 34 years, could also work himself up into a good rant about those goddamn fuel injection systems and unrepairable computer chips in modern cars. We’ve lost our understanding of the elegance of a simple V8 engine. Bring back the beauty of the Fords of the 1950s.

I thought, no way, that isn’t in the Bible. But it is! It’s all wrapped in prudish anti-sex nonsense, but if you just read Proverbs 7:10-20, it’s kind of a hot porn story. Unfortunately, it turns into a kind of horror story after Proverbs 7:21. The narrator is a sour old killjoy.

7 My son, keep my words
and store up my commands within you.
2 Keep my commands and you will live;
guard my teachings as the apple of your eye.
3 Bind them on your fingers;
write them on the tablet of your heart.
4 Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,”
and to insight, “You are my relative.”
5 They will keep you from the adulterous woman,
from the wayward woman with her seductive words.

6 At the window of my house
I looked down through the lattice.
7 I saw among the simple,
I noticed among the young men,
a youth who had no sense.
8 He was going down the street near her corner,
walking along in the direction of her house
9 at twilight, as the day was fading,
as the dark of night set in.

10 Then out came a woman to meet him,
dressed like a prostitute and with crafty intent.
11 (She is unruly and defiant,
her feet never stay at home;
12 now in the street, now in the squares,
at every corner she lurks.)
13 She took hold of him and kissed him
and with a brazen face she said:

14 “Today I fulfilled my vows,
and I have food from my fellowship offering at home.
15 So I came out to meet you;
I looked for you and have found you!
16 I have covered my bed
with colored linens from Egypt.
17 I have perfumed my bed
with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon.
18 Come, let’s drink deeply of love till morning;
let’s enjoy ourselves with love!
19 My husband is not at home;
he has gone on a long journey.
20 He took his purse filled with money
and will not be home till full moon.”

21 With persuasive words she led him astray;
she seduced him with her smooth talk.
22 All at once he followed her
like an ox going to the slaughter,
like a deer[a] stepping into a noose[b]
23 till an arrow pierces his liver,
like a bird darting into a snare,
little knowing it will cost him his life.

24 Now then, my sons, listen to me;
pay attention to what I say.
25 Do not let your heart turn to her ways
or stray into her paths.
26 Many are the victims she has brought down;
her slain are a mighty throng.
27 Her house is a highway to the grave,
leading down to the chambers of death.

Other than the grim ending, that sounds like a very good outline for a porn video. Thanks, Bible!

Now I’m wondering if perfuming the sheets with a hint of cinnamon wouldn’t be a bad idea.

That earthshaking question is What is the meaning of life?

Oh no. Are you questioning your beliefs about god now? I know I’m not.

My answer to that question is simple: there is no meaning to life. We just are. We exist, and then we try to rationalize our existence, and everyone comes up with a different explanation because our brains will happily spin their wheels in the absence of anything of substance to grapple with.

Maybe you disagree, and maybe you have the one true meaning of life. That’s fine, go ahead and tell me what it is, but if you could, please also tell me what objective evidence you have to support your proposed purpose. Also tell me what makes this purpose a property of life — is it shared with spiders and clams and sugar gliders and ants? After all, they live, too.

I’m pretty sure the Tridentine Mass isn’t the meaning of life.

Let’s just down all the prestigious institutions of American science, shall we?

The White House signaled interest early this month in investigating whether the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine should be suspended or debarred from federal funding, in response to a letter from 11 Republican lawmakers criticizing NASEM, particularly the climate science chapter of its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows posted an article about the letter on X, adding, “The National Academies have weaponized tax dollars against President Trump for far too long. It’s time to end their contracts.” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought responded, “On it.”

Russ Vought ranks up there with Stephen Miller as one of the greatest villains of this era, a ranting ideologue with no qualifications who has been given power and influence well above his capacity. His reason for shutting down climate science?

The letter argues that the climate science chapter of the reference manual “violates Gold Standard Science” because the peer review process did not include scientists with differing views on climate science and because its authors and funders had conflicts of interest. It heavily echoes letters sent in January and March by 27 Republican state attorneys general who successfully campaigned to remove the chapter from an online version of the manual.

There are some conclusions of science that are inarguable. The only people who argue against global climate change are crackpots, and the rules have been rigged to give irrational denialists a seat at the table. Do we also have to include flat-earthers and creationists in the ranks of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine? Membership in that institution is an acknowledgement of a long career and an investment in research that has earned the appreciation of the community. People who reflexively deny central aspects of science do not belong.

Yeah, they planned to explode on landing. It’s a feature of the SpaceX launches–they guarantee a spectacular and photogenic explosion with every launch. Stay tuned for more fireworks!