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.
We’re not going to have a political discussion today, which can apparently lead to a website version of a fractious Thanksgiving dinner involving a family with sharply different political views. Instead, marvel here at the courage of two aged Japanese ladies, whose job is to catch deadly sea snakes—to make soup. It’s shown in the four-minute BBC video below.
Now all banded sea snakes are highly toxic, and are the kraits (genus Bungarus). Although bitten victims can be treated with antivenom, mortality from some species can be as high as 80% in untreated victims (age of victim and time until treatment begins are crucial). The venoms are neurotoxic and the symptoms are dire.
The snakes being hunted in this video, are probably the black-banded sea krait (Laticauda semifasciata), and they’re caught for food. From Wikipedia:
Black-banded sea krait venom is reportedly ten times stronger than that of a cobra; however, as with the vast majority of venomous snake species, the black-banded sea krait generally does not aggressively strike at humans unless it is cornered or threatened (or otherwise maliciously provoked), preferring to conserve its energy and venom supplies for hunting purposes, reacting defensively only as a very last resort.
Despite its potent venom, which is concentrated in the snake’s venom glands (behind the eyes), the meat of the erabu snake is a winter staple food in southern Japan, where it is believed to replenish a female’s womanhood or increase fertility. Irabu soup, or irabu-jiru (ja:イラブー汁), is said to taste like miso and a bit like tuna. This dish was a favorite of the royal court of the Ryukyu Kingdom; it is thought to have analeptic properties.
During certain warm years, the sea snakes are drawn en masse to the sea caves and tide pools of the coastal Ryukyu cliffs, in search of fresh water to drink and possibly to mate. It is in these cryptic spots where, by cover of darkness (and usually guided only by lantern light), elderly women—who are the most experienced at preparing irabu-jiru—explore the dangerous caverns in pursuit of black-banded sea kraits, which the ladies catch with their bare hands. Some areas may contain hundreds of the snakes, some engaged in active breeding balls, yet the women hike through the caves barefoot or with minimal protective gear. As with the handling of any venomous snake species, the sea snakes are grabbed quickly behind the head, as to avoid any potential envenomation. They are placed in a cloth bag, alive, and later quickly dispatched and prepared in a simple broth with kombu or other edible kelp, and possibly a bit of pork.
Look how they handle these snakes! Bare-handed, and no real protection. Would you do this?
Fortunately, some kind readers have come through with a few batches of photos. But the tank is still low.
Today’s photos of birds (and one flower) come from Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.
It’s bitter cold outside as the winter storm is here in Oklahoma. So, I decided to share some more photos from the warmer days – A series of backyard bird images from the fall. While we mostly have native plants on our property, most of the images here involve some non-natives that we already had around our property when we moved in. But they do show some nice colors in the fall. We have a raised deck in the backyard which results in some nice eye-level views of the birds.
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) in light drizzle. It always makes me smile when these little guys show up every fall:
Another Yellow-rumped Warbler from the same day:
Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) on our pecan tree with some seed that it grabbed from the bird feeder. Titmice and Chickadees don’t spend too much time on the feeder. They like to grab a seed and take it to a nice perch on a tree where they can break it and enjoy it at its own pace:
Our yard has some larger birds too! This Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) has been a regular visitor for a while, and by now we kind of know some of its unique personalities:
Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus). At this time of the year, these woodpeckers are usually busy hiding seeds with the goal of storing them for the winter. I don’t know how many they actually find again:
This is not a bird image, but it has a connection with birds. These low maintenance native Maximilian Sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) put on an amazing show every fall, albeit for a short duration. However, during this time, they attract a huge number of pollinators including all kinds of butterflies, moths, and bees. We keep the dried plants after they are done blooming since the seed-loving birds have a feast on them:
House Finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) are one of them. Here is a male and a female House Finch on the dry sunflowers:
American Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) also enjoy the seeds. They are usually much duller by this time compared to their bright breeding plumage:
Couple of goldfinches from the same scene – a wider view:
One more goldfinch from a warm day:
A male Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) on the sunflower stalks:
Welcome to Sunday, the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s January 25, 2026, and we have cold and snow. Here’s the forecast: we won’t get above freezing this week (temperatures are in Fahrenheit, and the highs and lows are given for each day):
A view on my walk to work. We’re advised to stay inside, but really, 11°F (-11° C) feels balmy and I was invigorated by being outside. Here’s a photo on my walk to work, I think there are 2-3 inches of snow. Right after I took the photo, a car came by in the opposite direction, towing a skier on a rope, who happily waved at me and said “hi!”. It’s winter in Chicago!
Appropriately, it’s National Irish Coffee Day. The problem with this drink is that you should be having it in the afternoon, but the caffeine would keep me up at night (I have one cup of coffee per day, at about 6 a.m., and that’s it). The delicious and warming drink is made with coffee, a bit of sugar, whisky (Jameson, please) and heavy cream, added as a floating layer by running it over a spoon, comme ça:
Anke Klitzing, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s also National Fish Taco Day and Burns Supper (the poet was born on this day in 1759, and the supper consists of soup, haggis, mashed potatoes, and mashed “neeps,” or turnips). Here it is with the traditional glass of whiskey. There is often bagpiping when the haggis is served:
Evelyn Hollow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 25 Wikipedia page.
Federal officials sought to portray a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday as a domestic terrorist, saying he wanted to “massacre” law enforcement, even as videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account.
The man, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Federal officials said he was armed, but there is no sign in videos analyzed by The New York Times that he pulled his weapon, or that agents even knew he had one until he was already pinned on the sidewalk.
An agent had already removed Mr. Pretti’s gun when two other agents opened fire, shooting him in the back and as he lay on the ground. At least 10 shots were fired, killing him. Mr. Pretti had a legal permit to carry a firearm, said the police chief, Brian O’Hara.
The shooting on a frigid morning in Minneapolis’s Whittier neighborhood renewed protests and clashes with law enforcement in a city where tensions have reached a breaking point after weeks of aggressive federal immigration action. Federal agents deployed tear gas and flash bangs to drive demonstrators away from the shooting scene as they demanded that local police officers arrest the agents who killed Mr. Pretti.
Officials said protests in Minneapolis had remained mostly peaceful, with a few exceptions. But as dusk fell, officials deployed the National Guard to ensure that demonstrations did not turn violent. At least 1,000 people turned out for a vigil for Mr. Pretti in Whittier Park on Saturday night, despite subzero temperatures.
A colleague of Mr. Pretti, Dimitri Drekonja, said he had worked as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. “He was a really great colleague and a really great friend,” Mr. Drekonja said. “The default look on his face was a smile.”
Here’s what we’re covering:
Video analysis: Video footage posted to social media and verified by The Times shows Mr. Pretti stepping between a woman and an agent who is pepper spraying her. Other agents then pepper spray Mr. Pretti, who is holding a phone in one hand and nothing in the other. His weapon remains concealed until federal agents find and take it from him. Concealed or open carry is legal for permit holders in Minnesota. Read more ›
Federal claims: President Trump and administration officials declared without evidence that Mr. Pretti intended to attack federal agents. Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of the president’s Border Patrol operations, said that Mr. Pretti was intent on a “massacre.” Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said, “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage.” Their accounts directly contradict video evidence of the encounter. Read more ›
Investigators blocked: Drew Evans, who heads the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said federal agents had initially barred state investigators from the scene of Saturday’s shooting. Mr. Evans said his agency took the rare step of obtaining a search warrant for access to a public sidewalk, but were still stymied. Federal officials eventually left the scene after clashing with protesters, but the demonstrations had grown large enough by that point to prevent state agents from investigating.
Self-investigation: Federal authorities said the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE and Border Patrol, would lead the federal shooting investigation, with assistance from the F.B.I. But senior Homeland Security and Justice Department officials said it was already clear that Mr. Pretti and local officials were to blame.
Minneapolis outrage: Mayor Jacob Frey accused the Trump administration of terrorizing his city. “How many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” he asked. At least two other people have been shot there by federal agents this month, including Renee Good, 37, who was killed on Jan. 7. Read more ›
“Force of good”: Accolades poured in for Mr. Pretti from those who knew him. Ruth Anway, another nurse who worked with him, described Mr. Pretti as a passionate colleague and kind friend with a sharp sense of humor. “He wanted to be helpful, to help humanity, and have a career that was a force of good in the world,” she said. Read more ›
The upshot: all signs so far are that Pretti was killed by ICE agents, and though he had a weapon, he was not brandishing it in a way that would justify killing him (there are police protocols on how to deal with armed people, and these were violated). This has all the signs of a murder, with the administration blaming the victim. I do not trust the government accounts, nor do I trust DHS to conduct an objective investigation of the killing. I think it’s time for ICE to get out of Minnesota, as what they are doing is not only ripping the country apart, but seems palpably illegal, like the armed response of a dictatorial regime. I do not know how immigrants with criminal records should be apprehended, as local law enforcement won’t help ICE, but right now it’s more important to stop the violence than continue ICE operations. The treatment of Pretti by federal agents is both thuggish and incomprehensible. He seems to have been a good guy, doing a valuable job, and his death is a tragedy.
All this turmoil in America now has, as I’ve said, got me quite depressed, and the turmoil is spilling over onto this website. For the time being, I ask readers not to use threads, including this one, to further comment on what’s happened in Minnesota. If for no other reason, I make this request for my own well-being. Readers had their say in yesterday’s thread, and please do not use this one to continue the discussion. I gave me opinion above, and for the time being I think that should be the last of this discussion. Please honor this request. After the snow settles and more facts emerge, we may continue the discussion later.
Offering a startlingly candid view into the philosophy guiding vaccine recommendations under the Trump administration, the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles — and perhaps all diseases — should be optional, offered only in consultation with a clinician.
Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who is chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that he did have “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,” adding, “Freedom of choice and bad health outcomes.”
In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said.
“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”
The polio and measles vaccines are widely acknowledged as staggering successes in public health, credited with preventing disability and millions of deaths worldwide. The polio vaccine in particular has strong bipartisan support, including from President Trump and some Republican lawmakers, who have invoked the horrific time before the vaccine was available.
But Dr. Milhoan said that making the vaccines optional, rather than requiring them for entry into public schools nationwide, as is now the case, would ultimately restore trust in public health.
Outside experts had sharp words for Dr. Milhoan, saying the changes in vaccine policy he was suggesting would result in unnecessary deaths among children.
This is very troubling. There are situations—and this is one of them—in which government coercion should override personal consent. No, people should not be allowed to be exempt from vaccination, as the toll to the country as a whole is much more important than the violation of an individual’s “right” not to be vaccinated or the very small possibility of bad side effects from a vaccination. I don’t think there should be any exemptions from immunizations deemed crucial (and that includes measles and polio)—not religious excemptions, not philosophical exemptions. Only medical exemptions, as when an indi =vidual is immunocompromised, should be allowed, and for that doctors should be consulted. It was bad enough for RFK, Jr. to okay delaying measles vaccination, but what Milhoan is suggesting is far more dangerous. I remember the aftereffects of polio epidemics when I was a small child, with people living for years in iron lungs, and I would not want to see a polio outbreak happen again.
*Philosopher and now self-anointed biologist Colin McGinn (he says several times that he has two degreees and psychology but also claims he’s a biologist) has responded to my critique of his views about the evolution of “knowledge”. His piece is on his website and is called “Coyne on McGinn” (he doesn’t link to my piece). I am not impressed. He touts his credentials a lot, and apparently you can’t really apprehend his argument without having read his entire oeuvre. A few quotes:
I am not just a philosopher of mind but have written on many philosophical subjects. I was also trained as a scientist and have two degrees in psychology.
. . . . Coyne is wrong to say that biologists (scientists generally) are more cautious than philosophers; the opposite is true. I am both.
. . . The person out of his lane here is Jerry Coyne. I can guarantee that I have studied a lot more science than he has studied philosophy to judge from these comments (I do have a first-class degree in the science of psychology and used to teach experimental psychology).
After that credential-mongering, he denies what is clearly apparent from his piece.
. . . . This was an opportunity for constructive dialogue between disciplines, but it came out as tetchy incomprehension. All I can suggest is to read a philosophy book on epistemology: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy would be a good place to start. Coyne never sent me his comments to get my response.
. . . . I was expecting my readers to be philosophers, so I didn’t spell out everything for the non-philosophical reader. This is true of everything on my website; it is not for beginners and I keep it concise. [It’s apparently not for evolutionary biologists, either.
. . . Pain is important because it is highly motivating and very widespread. There can be other theories, such as tactile knowledge, which would deliver different results for later knowledge. See the articles footnoted. I was simply presupposing earlier work in the present article instead of repeating it.
I see, although his article concentrated on pain as the “primal knowledge”.
. . . Pain is more than adaptive reflexes; it is a sensation.
How does he know that other species feel pain as a sensation? If they don’t, where in evolution did it become a sensation? I stand by what I said, and you can read both articles and judge for yourself. However, apparently you have to have read McGinn’s other works, as well as a lot of other books, as well as being a philosopher, to be able to read his article. But nowhere does he say: “Warning, for philosophers only.” I’m not going to write a long response to McGinn because it’s not worth it. The evolutionary scenario he proposes, as well as his understanding of “knowledge” are misguided.
*Ryan Wedding, a erstwhile snowboarder who competed in the Olympics for the U.S., has been arrested in Mexico for big-time drug smuggling and murder, as well as other crimes. There was a fifteen million dollar bounty for information leading to his arrest, but the government hasn’t revealed if anyone claimed it. This is one of those weird stories that makes you wonder how it all happened:
A former Olympic snowboarder from Canada who the F.B.I. says is one of North America’s most notorious drug smugglers was arrested on murder and drug trafficking charges, the agency announced Friday, ending a yearslong search.
The former Olympian, Ryan Wedding, 44, who was arrested in Mexico City on Thursday night, the F.B.I. said, was charged with smuggling cocaine and other narcotics into the United States and Canada. Among the accusations he faces from the authorities: ordering the brazen daytime assassination of a Canadian informant in Medellín, Colombia.
Mr. Wedding had been on the F.B.I.’s list of its 10 most wanted fugitives. Kash Patel, the F.B.I.’s director, said of Mr. Wedding on Friday, “Just to tell you how bad of a guy Ryan Wedding is, he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the largest narco-trafficker in modern times.”
A statement from the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Mexico said Mr. Wedding had surrendered.
Mexico’s security minister, Omar García Harfuch, said in a post on social media that he and Mr. Patel had met in Mexico City and that Mr. Patel had left the country with “a Canadian citizen who voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the U.S. Embassy.”
Hours after the announcement, on Friday evening, the F.B.I., shared two videos of Mr. Wedding in handcuffs being escorted off a plane at the Ontario International Airport, in Ontario, Calif. At 6 feet 3 inches tall and with a sculpted build, he towered over the F.B.I. agents. He wore running shoes, a black baseball cap, light wash jeans, and a dark puffer vest over a long sleeve white shirt.
The F.B.I. said Mr. Wedding had collaborated with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, where the authorities said he had been hiding. They did not provide any details about his links to the cartel.
Since the Mexican cartels seem to have the ability to hide people almost indefinitely, I’m wondering why Wedding turned himself in. Here’s a 3-minute CBC video:
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan, in a piece called “The Abyss,” continues his plaint about what Trump is doing, even suggesting that we’re lapsing into a monarchy (that will have to end, though, in three years). He also says that most Americans don’t care about Trump’s depredations, which isn’t really true, but his approval rating still hovers around 40%. Sully doesn’t spare the invective:
An abyss is being in mid-air in this rupture in our civilization.
It is where lies and truth are entirely interchangeable; where the rule of law has already been replaced by the rule of one man; where the Congress has abdicated its core responsibilities and become a Greek chorus; where national policy is merely the sum of the whims and delusions of one man; and where every constitutional check on arbitrary power, especially the Supreme Court, is AWOL. In that abyss, even an attempt to explain events through the usual rubric of covering a liberal democracy is absurd. Because that rubric is irrelevant.
And so the wheels spin.
The only honest way to describe what is in front of our noses is that we now live in an elected monarchy with a manic king whose mental faculties are slipping fast. After 250 years, we appear to have elected the modern equivalent of King George III, and are busy dismantling the constitution Americans built to constrain him.
The situation is not irrecoverable — the forms of democracy remain even if they are functionally dead. We have centuries of democratic practice to fall back on. But every moment the logic of the abyss holds, the possibility of returning to democracy attenuates. Tyranny corrupts everything and everyone — fast.
. . .How does one even respond to such an obscenity? As a proudly pro-American European by birth, maybe I feel this more acutely. But for this draft-dodging pig to erase the sacrifice of 1,160 men and women from America’s allies in the post-9/11 war on terror is a disgrace. And for what? NATO is all but destroyed for just the momentary, sick pleasure of mockery.
And, yes, all of this is now infused with a triumphant, delusional, and hyperactive mania that will only get worse. Trump’s hubris extends to his speeches, where the mood is essentially sing-songy boredom — as if to say: “Why do I even have to explain myself to these morons when my glories are so self-evident?” And so there is no preparation, no coherence — just a stream of addled, entitled, demented consciousness.
. . . .All of this is devastating enough. More devastating is how Americans are responding. They aren’t. They don’t really care. The president can violate two of the most cherished and basic tenets of Western civilization — that might does not mean right, and that citizens have inalienable rights the government cannot infringe upon — and most Americans just shrug. Almost every person who was outraged by the senile blather of Biden hails Trump’s senile blather as greatness, four-dimensional chess, the art of the deal, etc. The honesty required for any real democratic deliberation is completely absent. We live in a totalitarian culture of lies everywhere — but primarily from the very top. The White House doctors photos to humiliate American citizens. The lies are the point.
The world sees this too. The menace and malaise can longer be attributed merely to Trump, but to America as a whole. A critical mass of the people of this country want to tear up the Constitution in order to seek revenge and retribution on their domestic opponents and end our alliances for the shits and giggles of pissing on the entire world.
That’s strong stuff, perhaps stuff that could be written only by a naturalized Brit who became an American out of love for this country. I don’t fear the waning of democracy, but yes, to see Trump’s perfidy portrayed as Mencken might portray it is sobering. Sullivan ends by saying what little we, as distressed citizens, can do: “All we can do now — as this abyss engulfs us — is to tell the truth about it.” That’s not very much. We can vote, of course, and write our representatives (that won’t do me much good as my Representative and both of my Senators, as well as the governor, are Democrats), but only through the vote can we have a real effect. One can demonstrate, of course, but I don’t that will do much good right now.
*In physics news, Nature reports that it’s not just single atoms or electrons that can be in a state of superposition—a condition in which particles can exist in several states simultaneously (e.g. Schrödingers cat in the box), but large groups of atoms can as well. (h/t Andrew).
Schrödinger’s cat just got a little bit fatter. Physicists have created the largest ever ‘superposition’ — a quantum state in which an object exists in a haze of possible locations at once.
A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition of spatially distinct paths and then interfering to form a pattern researchers could detect.
“It’s a fantastic result,” says Sandra Eibenberger-Arias, a physicist at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin.
Quantum theory doesn’t put a limit on how big a superposition can be, but everyday objects clearly do not behave in a quantum way, she explains. This experiment — which puts an object as massive as a protein or small virus particle into a superposition — is helping to answer the “big, almost philosophical question of ‘is there a transition between the quantum and classical?’,” she says. The authors “show that, at least for clusters of this size, quantum mechanics is still valid”.
The experiment, described in Nature on 21 January1, is of practical importance, too, says Giulia Rubino, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol, UK. Quantum computers will ultimately need to maintain perhaps millions of objects in a large quantum state to perform useful calculations. If nature were to make systems collapse past a certain point, and that scale was smaller than what is needed to make a quantum computer, “then that’s problematic”, she says.
I though we already knew that everyday objects do obey quantum theory, and classical mechanics is simply quantum mechanics write large, and obeys with high precision the “laws” of classical physics. But if you want to read the article, click on the title below (warning! You must be a physicist!)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej discuss mortality:
Hili: Death spares you the stress.
Andrzej: That’s the gospel truth, but some people believe in eternal life without stress.
Hili: I read a fairy tale once about happy hunting grounds.
In Polish:
Hili: Śmierć oszczędza stresów.
Ja: To święta prawda, ale niektórzy wierzą w życie wieczne bez stresu.
Hili: Gdzieś czytałam taką bajkę o szczęśliwych łowach.
*******************
From Stephen, an obviously fake but hilarious photo. Trump gets yet another trophy!
From Luana: the head of the Liberal Democrats in the UK is not so liberal when it comes to free speech:
We in the Liberal Democrats are firmly against “freedom of speech”, which has a long history of being misused by fascists and climate deniers. https://t.co/Fs7H2zYJOF
— Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@ClimateWarrior7) January 15, 2026
From reader Bryan, very inventive performance art:
Shoji Yamasakı is a pertormance artist behind the ongoing project Littered Mvmnts. He studies trash caught in the wind, and translates their erratic movement into precise, choreographed performances. pic.twitter.com/y7IpjgT2pC
This Jewish boy from the Netherlands was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old, and would be 91 today had he lived. https://t.co/zjE5UzXUFG
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, can you find all 12 mistakes?:
An observation test for your inner 8-year-old. You’ll be doing well to spot 12 deliberate mistakes.From Treasure magazine, 1963Official answers coming soon(Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)
As I’m occupied with another writing assignment, and because I’m trying to take a wee break from writing about news, as it’s so depressing, I’ll proffer this post to readers who want to weigh in on Minnesota.
As I’ve said before, I haven’t formed firm opinions about a lot of aspects of the ICE/military presence there and the clashes with protestors, and that’s because it’s hard to do so when you’re not on the ground seeing what happens in the street. Each side has its own videos and own interpretations, and it’s hard to figure out what is real and what is propaganda. It is clear that ICE has acted in a heavy-handed manner, that Trump is trying to punish that blue state, but it’s also hard to judge whether some ICE actions are defensible. Further, it’s clear that some of the protestors are, like Martin Luther King, Jr.in the Sixties, trying to provoke violence by the authorities as it helps their cause. That is civil disobedience, but for ICE the morality of the protestors’ cause is (to me) not nearly as clear as it was for the civil rights protests. I do not favor open borders, but it seems like many of the protestors—like many Democrats in general—do.
At any rate, that’s all the opinions I have now, and they are subject to change. (I haven’t weighed in on what happened to Renée Good, except that there needs to be an objective and thorough investigation by both the federal government and Minnesota, with sharing of information by both). If ICE officers look like they committed crimes, they should go through the judicial process.
So, here are some questions to discuss, but feel free to say what you think about the situation in general. Remember, be civil and don’t jump down my throat for raising this issue.
a.) How heavy-handed is ICE acting relative to how they should be acting? Should they even be there?
b.) It’s likely that the National Guard and the U.S. military will be employed if the protests continue. Is this justifiable? If so, is it proper for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act?
c.) Is the violence being exacerbated by the protestors, or is it solely the result of ICE?
d.) Do you think the protestors really want no enforcement of immigration laws, i.e., open borders? Would that apply to every immigrant, including the criminals so loudly touted by Kristi Noem?
e.) Are governor Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey exacerbating the situation? Are they correct in calling for ICE to leave Minnesota?
f.) If you were President, how would you handle the situation?
Today Friend of the Website Greg Mayer contributes some photos from Britain.
by Greg Mayer
Since we’re awaiting a recharge of the tank of Readers’ Wildlife Photos, I thought I’d add a few wildlife photos from a recent trip to England. I did not bring my good camera with a telephoto lens, since the visit was focused on museums in London, and the photos reflect this constraint.
We spent the first full day in the countryside of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, so we’ll start there, with a large tree at Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic burial barrow.
I thought it was a European Beech (Fagus sylvatica), because there were all these beech seed pods on the ground,
. . . . but looking at the photo now, I should think that a beech would have smoother bark. Perhaps a British botanist amongst our readers could clarify the issue. In and around the tree were some introduced Eastern Gray Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis); we saw no native squirrels during our trip.
Still in the countryside, we stopped at Great Coxwell Barn, where a Western Jackdaw (Corvus monedula) sat atop the peak of the barn, which was built in 1292. For an American naturalist, one of the interesting things about Britain is that there are several species of crows, while in most of the NE quadrant of the USA there is just one species. You can tell this is a Jackdaw by its short, conical bill, almost finch-like in profile.
Near the Barn was a slightly frozen wetland,
While in the Barn we found an egg fallen from a nest above. I don’t think nesting was going on at the time, though the egg was in remarkably good shape. Perhaps a Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica)? Maybe a bird-savvy reader could help with an ID.
The only mammal we saw in London was the introduced Gray Squirrel, but in Oxfordshire we saw molehills (made by the European Mole, Talpa europea) in and near the churchyard of St. Margaret of Antioch in Binsey. American moles most prominently make much less elevated runs or tracks, not distinct hillocks like these, so the phrase “making a mountain out of a molehill” makes more sense to me now.
Part of Oxford University, Wytham Woods (a famed area for ecological studies) had some Sheep (Ovis aries) in an enclosure. These are domesticated, and the species was brought to Britain thousands of years ago.
In London, we encountered two more corvids. The Carrion Crow (Corvus corone corone) is the most like what is, to an American, a “normal” crow. (During a brief stop in Copenhagen on the way to England, we also saw a Hooded Crow, Corvus corone cornix, which has a gray body, and has a long hybrid zone with the Carrion Crow, )
The other corvid was the Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica), which is much more “crow-y” looking than the jays in America (which are also corvids). We also saw Rooks (Corvus fragileus) on the trip, but got no photos.
Note the blue on the wings of this Magpie.
Like the Carrion Crow above, also on the Victoria Embankment was a Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ribundus); this is an adult in winter plumage. We saw quite a few gulls all around London. Most were larger than this (Larus sp. or spp.), but we could not ID them.
On the way to Greenwich by boat on the Thames, we saw Mute Swans (Cygnus olor), which I include here to show the great tidal range of the Thames, ca. 7 m, evident from the algal growth on the bulkhead behind the pair of swans.
Also on the Thames we saw Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo), including a pale-bellied juvenile.
We were struck by how the apartments along the south bank of the Thames resembled scenes from movies, for example A Fish Called Wanda, and sure enough, the building at the left of the photo above is indeed where the Cleese-Curtis “canoodling” rendezvous took place!
The bird we saw more of than any other in England was the pigeon. Not the Common Wood Pigeon (Columba palumbus), like this one in Greenwich, which we saw a fair number of. . .
. . . but the Feral Pigeon or “rock dove” (Columba livia), which was everywhere, both city and country. There were many of the highly variable domestic color forms, such as this one
. . . . and some of the “wild type”, which is the color pattern of the ancestral wild Rock Doves.
Wild Rock Doves persist in Scotland and western Ireland; all the pigeons we saw in London and Oxfordshire were feral.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, January 24. 2026, and we’re in for a cold week. Here’s the temperatures for today (the number of the top was for 5 AM), and the next week—all in degrees Fahrenheit. Right now, with the wind, it feels like -13°F (-25°C) and my face froze on the way to work. Each day gives the high and low temperatures:
The earliest references to peanut butter can be traced to Aztec and Inca civilizations, who ground roasted peanuts into a paste. The Bainbridge Post-Searchlight reports that 16th-century Aztecs used peanut paste for aching gums.
Several people can be credited with the invention of modern peanut butter and the processes involved in making it. The U.S. National Peanut Board credits three modern inventors with the earliest patents related to the production of modern peanut butter. Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, obtained the first patent for a method of producing peanut butter from roasted peanuts using heated surfaces in 1884. Edson’s cooled product had “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment” according to his patent application which described a process of milling roasted peanuts until the peanuts reached “a fluid or semi-fluid state”. He mixed sugar into the paste to harden its consistency.
Here’s the TRUTH about how peanut butter is made:
It’s also Macintosh Computer Day (the only computer I’ve ever used), National Edy’s Pie Patent Day, celebrating the patent of this chocolate-covered ice cream bar on this day in 1922 (these were formerly known as “Eskimo Pies,” but the name was, according to Wikipedia, changed to “Edy’s Pies” after the George Floyd riots; George Edy co-invented the treat). Finally, it’s National Lobster Thermidor Day and National Compliment Day (tell someone they look MAHHVELOUS).
There will be no Caturday felid post today as I am not cheerful enough to make one. If readers come upon cat-related items, please send them to me. We will, however, have three cat memes below.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*In a column at the NYT called “The coming Trump crackup” (archived here), David Brooks predicts that Trump is cracking up mentally, something that’s been obvious for some time. Or maybe his latent narcissism has simply been given an opportunity to show itself:
We are in the middle of at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order. The unraveling of domestic tranquillity wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the democratic order, with attacks on Fed independence and — excuse the pun — trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of President Trump’s mind.
Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.
Every president I’ve ever covered gets more full of himself the longer he remains in office, and when you start out with Trump-level self-regard, the effect is grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy and ferocious overreaction to perceived slights.
Furthermore, over the past year, Trump has been quicker and quicker to resort to violence. In 2025 the U.S. carried out or contributed to 622 overseas bombing missions, killing people in places ranging from Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — not to mention Minneapolis.
The arc of tyranny bends toward degradation. Tyrants generally get drunk on their own power, which progressively reduces restraint, increases entitlement and self-focus and amps up risk taking and overconfidence while escalating social isolation, corruption and defensive paranoia.
. . . . And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.
But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate. On the contrary, the normal course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.
And I do understand why America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus “the first writer in the world, without a single exception.” They understood that the lust for power is a primal human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution are no match for this lust when it is not restrained ethically from within.
Well there’s no chance of that happening. On the whole, I don’t think Brooks is saying much new here, for those like me who see Trump as mentally ill already believe it, while Trump supporters will never be convinced that the man is nuts. If The Great Greenland Bullying Incident didn’t do it, nothing will. One could say that this was just a ruse, but in truth Trump could have gotten all the bases he wanted without having to do more than ask. His narcissism simply required him to flex.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s snark/news column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Bored of Peace.”
→ DSA and CCP: The Democratic Socialists of America are taking their marching orders from the Chinese Communist Party. We already knew that they were, emotionally, vibes-wise. But now it looks like they really are coordinating with the CCP. Here’s Newsweek: “The minutes of the DSA meetings show participants discussing contacts with officials from China’s ruling party in the name of ‘anti-imperialism,’ with some members saying the organization should avoid topics that are sensitive for Beijing, such as China’s threats to invade Taiwan, its security crackdown in Hong Kong, and abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority. They also discuss visits to China.” All’s fair in love and war, so China now has their American footsoldiers. My main complaint is why don’t we do this to China’s wacky political fringe? Why aren’t we cultivating young Chinese soldiers for America? All we have are some random Mandarin-language CIA recruitment videos? Pathetic. We export American culture, yes, but it’s all made by those same DSA members. Why are they so good at making things! Socialists make the best pizza, the best lattes, the best adorable street festivals with sidewalk chalk art. My life is produced by people who report directly to Xi Jinping.
→ Requiem for Iran: The Iranians didn’t attend the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, a shame to miss them on the slopes. They could’ve at least joined for an aprés ski Hugo spritz. Here’s how the WEF explained it:
The tragic loss of lives? Like there was a flood. What terrible natural disaster ended in the tragic loss of lives? Oh, it was the wanton slaughter of protesters by the Iranian regime. It was them marching into hospitals and shooting people. Iran has some strong defenders. Tragic.
Here’s our trusty Tucker Carlson arguing that it could be good for Iran to get a nuke: “Could the Iranians obtaining The Bomb wind up being a good thing? Whether anyone in the foreign policy establishment admits it, North Korea’s nuclearization has undeniably stabilized the Korean Peninsula.” Why not. What’s the worst that can happen. North Korea is a beautiful success story and that is just the cold, hard truth. At least Tuck is brave enough to say it. Here’s Roger Waters, who for some reason gets invited on news shows to spout on about politics: “We know they don’t want the Shah’s son back. . . . We know the Iranians do not want regime change. . . . The government sent the police out to protect those grocers.” Yes, the argument from those on the pro–Iranian regime side is that Iran should have nukes, and also quelling these protesters was just about, I don’t know, protecting local grocers. How sweet. Have a clementine, prisoner.
→ Vendôme antisemite party: This past weekend a group of America’s preeminent Jew-haters got together to flex their muscles (unless you’re Fuentes) and show that the water is warm for racists who also hate women. They gathered to livestream and dance to Ye’s song “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub. All dressed up in their Sunday best:
This photo smells like Dior Sauvage and a chloroform rag. It takes a serious bunch of freaks to make Andrew Tate look like the most responsible man in the room. It’s almost impressive how this group—which includes a Mexican incel, a few Muslim dudes, and a kid who does meth to keep his cheekbones up—has become the modern face of white supremacist eugenics. These roided-up streamers in tight pants are in no way what the architects of the “master race” envisioned as their offspring. Dress for the job you want, I guess.
*The White House shared a doctored image of a person arrested after this week’s church protest/disruption in Minneapolis. It looks as if someone in the administration doctored the photo.
The White House on Thursday posted an altered photo of an attorney arrested after a Minnesota church protest, edited to make it look like she was crying, sparking concern among some forensic-image experts about the administration’s distortion of real-world imagery.
In a photo posted to X on Thursday morning by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, the attorney, Nekima Levy Armstrong, appears in handcuffs with a blank expression on her face.
But in an edited version of the photo posted a half-hour later by the White House, Levy Armstrong appears to be openly weeping, with tears streaming down her face. The post did not disclose that the image had been changed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that Levy Armstrong was arrested on charges she had helped coordinate a protest inside a Minnesota church. The protest, which opposed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has become a flash point in the national debate over the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants, with the White House accusing her of being a “far-left agitator” who had orchestrated “church riots.”
The manipulated image of Levy Armstrong on X had been seen roughly 2.5 million times by Thursday afternoon. It was unclear whether the image was altered using artificial intelligence or more traditional photo-editing tools.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Kaelan Dorr, a deputy communications director who has coordinated the White House’s digital strategy, referenced the image in an X post: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
. . .Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, mocked people questioning the image with an X post that said: “uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!”
At a news conference Thursday, Levy Armstrong’s husband, Marques Armstrong, told supporters gathered at the St. Paul courthouse that the social media post about her arrest told a false story, including because she had stood tall and walked without crying.
“We have the videos to prove that, to dispel the lies and the twisting of the truth that this administration constantly does,” he said.
. . . . Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of the digital-forensics company GetReal Security, overlaid the two images and determined that the image shared by the White House had been manipulated.
Trump and the White House have frequently used edited or AI-generated imagery to win attention and score political points. Some have been clear satire or memes, including a video Trump posted last year showing him dumping feces on protesters from a fighter jet. But others have appeared more realistic, including a video Trump posted last summer supposedly showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by the FBI.
At the same time, Trump has criticized his political enemies for purportedly distributing fake images. During the 2024 campaign, he accused Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris of using a fake photo from a rally stop.
Here’s the original photo:
Homeland Security Investigators and FBI agents arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong who played a key role in orchestrating the Church Riots in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She is being charged with a federal crime under 18 USC 241.
I presume they edited it to make Armstrong look sad and miserable after her arrest. I don’t know why they did that, unless they’re trying to deter people from making similar protests (the church interruption was illegal). But what a petty thing to do!
TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in the U.S., the company said Thursday, resolving a yearslong fight to address Washington’s national-security concerns.
Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video-sharing app will be operated by a new U.S. entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to the U.S. Its data-management and algorithm-training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud-computing giant that has safeguarded its U.S. data for years and has close ties to the Trump administration.
The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday.
“I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok!” Trump said in a social-media post Thursday night. He thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping “for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal. He could have gone the other way, but didn’t, and is appreciated for his decision.”
Trump and TikTok’s investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok parent ByteDance, which owns almost 20% of it.
As you may recall, the U.S. wanted to get rid of TikTok because the Chinese ownership might enable China to get hold of American user data, as well as controlling content to somehow convince our youth to love China and Communism, and hate America. I have no idea how realistic the first idea is (the second seems wonky), but neither is a threat any longer. To phrase it properly, “I couldn’t care less.”
*On Thursday the Oscar nominations were announced. The awards ceremony, hosted by Conan O’Brian, will take place on March 15. Here from Variety are the most important awards:
“Sinners,” a bold and bloody vampire saga set in the American South, earned a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations. It was followed closely by “One Battle After Another,” a searing examination of radical politics, which picked up 13 nods. Both films were nominated for best picture at the 2026 Academy Awards, along with “Frankenstein,” “Bugonia,” “Hamnet,” “Marty Supreme,” “Sentimental Value,” “Train Dreams,” “F1” and “The Secret Agent.”
Chloé Zhao, a previous best director winner for her work on “Nomadland,” was nominated for “Hamnet.” The other nominees include Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another), Joachim Trier (“Sentimental Value”) and Josh Safdie (“Marty Supreme”).
Best actor will be a contest between Timothée Chalamet, whose promotional antics helped turn “Marty Supreme” into A24’s biggest ticket seller, and “One Battle After Another’s” Leonardo DiCaprio, one of Hollywood’s few consistent box office draws. Other nominees include Michael B. Jordan (“Sinners”), Ethan Hawke (“Blue Moon”) and Wagner Moura, who recently won a Golden Globe for “The Secret Agent.”
“Hamnet’s” Jessie Buckley and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s” Rose Byrne, who have dominated the early awards conversation for their portraits of mothers struggling with unimaginable challenges, earned best actress nominations. They will face off against two-time winner Emma Stone (“Bugonia”), as well as Kate Hudson (“Song Sung Blue”) and Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”).
Best supporting actor contenders include two performers from “One Battle After Another,” Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn. Both men are prior acting award winners, with del Toro earning a prize for “Traffic” and Penn picking up statues for “Milk” and “Mystic River.” They will compete against Delroy Lindo (“Sinners”), Stellan Skarsgard (“Sentimental Value”) and Jacob Elordi (“Frankenstein”).
Best supporting actress includes two nominees from “Sentimental Value,” Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Their fellow nominees include Amy Madigan (“Weapons”), Wunmi Mosaku (“Sinners”) and Teyana Taylor (“One Battle After Another”).
. . . There were some notable snubs and surprises. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, who earned nominations for “Wicked,” were passed over for reprising their roles in “Wicked: For Good,” while Paul Mescal, who earned raves for his performance as William Shakespeare in “Hamnet,” was also overlooked. At the same time, “F1,” an action film set in the world of car racing, scored an upset best picture nomination.
You can see the rest of the list at the Variety link above. I’ve seen only one movie nominated, and that was “Hamnet”, so I can make no prognostications save that Jessie Buckley should win best actress for that, regardless of the other female acting roles. But I’m surprised that “The Testament of Ann Lee“, a musical about the Shakers (!), as well as Amanda Seyfriend’s leading role in it, weren’t even nominated. Both her performance and the movie got very high ratings.
If you want to guess all six winners in the category above, go ahead and try below. The first person (if any) to get them all right will win a copy of either of my two trade books, autographed as you wish and with a cat of your choice drawn in it.
Here are the nominations as announced by “Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman, including ASL interpreters”.:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili uses astronomy to wheedle for food:
Hili: The Earth goes around the Sun.
Andrzej: What does that imply?
Hili: Every now and then on the journey, we get very hungry.
In Polish:
Hili: Ziemia krąży wokół Słońca.
Ja: Jaki z tego wniosek.
Hili: Co jakiś kawałek drogi jesteśmy bardzo głodni.
From Masih; I can’t embed this post of an Iranian woman getting beaten up for protesting, but if you click on the screenshot you’ll go to the tweet with the video:
A related tweet about misogyny in Afghanistan, reposted by J. K. Rowling:
To everyone who is here —thank you.😍🙏
Your decision to follow, read, and stay means that the voices of Afghan women have not been silenced. At a time when our rights and voices have been erased, you have chosen to listen and to stand with us.
This space is about the resistance… pic.twitter.com/EpFgY7BrAt
I’ll put this post by Matthew here, as it’s related to the one below it:
Death toll in Afghanistan when NATO answered the US’s call:- 453 Britons- 158 Canadians- 89 French- 59 Germans- 53 Italians- 44 Danes- 17 Spaniards “Stayed a little back, off the front lines “!No one in the media will call him out over this lie or any of the others he spouts.
Trump is a coward who repeatedly dodged military service. He is not worthy of uttering the names of the brave men and women who were killed in Afghanistan after the US invoked article 5, requesting their assistance. pic.twitter.com/ciLxjQJyfx
Ricky Gervais reprises a clip from his great show “After Life,” which I loved—apparently more than some other folks. In the show, he was tired of living and suicidal because his beloved wife died of cancer.
Has this AfterLife clip really had 36 million views on Youtube? That’s mental. https://t.co/5LnYZlTfPT
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was one year old and would be 83 today had she lived. https://t.co/rywP0aFeGG
Colin McGinn is a well-known philosopher of mind who has written a short piece on the “history of knowledge” on his personal website. He takes an evolutionary view of the topic, which is what he means by “history”. But I found the piece, despite McGinn’s reputation and his authorship of nearly 30 books (many of them on consciousness), confusing and probably misleading. You can read it yourself by clicking on the link below
No doubt McGinn will take issue with my criticisms, for I am but a poor evolutionary biologist trying to understand this the best way I can. However, I do know some biology. I will put what I see as McGinn’s two main misconceptions under my own bold headings, with McGinn’s quotes indented and my own comments flush left.
McGinn conflates “knowledge” with “consciousness”. In general, knowledge, which most people define as “justified true belief” is acquired, and does not evolve. Since it involves belief, it does require a mind that is conscious. (I’ll take consciousness as McGinn does. meaning “having subjective awareness” or “being able to experience qualia: sense perceptions like the feeling of pain and pleasure, the apprehension of color and touch, and so on”.)
The problem is that what evolves is consciousness, not “knowledge”. We do not know whether consciousness is a direct, adaptive product of natural selection, or is a byproduct of evolution, but it is certainly a result of our neuronal wiring. I’ll leave aside the problem of which animals are conscious. Based on parallel behavior, I think that many vertebrates and all mammals are conscious, but of course I can’t even say if other people are conscious. (Remember Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is it like to be a bat?” We don’t know.) So consciousness has evolved, perhaps via selection, and it’s likely that the consciousness of many vertebrates had a common evolutionary origin based on neuronal wiring, though again it may have evolved independently in different lineages.
But regardless of these unknowns, since “knowledge” is largely acquired rather than inherited (remember its definition), it’s difficult to see how knowledge can evolve genetically, rather than being learned or passed on culturally. Monkeys and apes peel bananas differently from how we do it: starting from the flower (bottom) end rather than the stem end (try it–it’s easier), but surely that knowledge is not evolved. Anything acquired through experience is not knowledge bequeathed by evolution, even though the capacity to acquire certain knowledge (like learning language) can be evolved.
Now in some cases “knowledge” seemingly can be inherited, so the conflation is not total. Male birds of paradise, for example, “know” how to do specific displays to lure females of their species, and that is an instinct (does that count as “knowledge”?) which is inborn, not learned. But different birds of paradise have different displays or songs, and those displays surely evolved independently based on evolved differences in female preferences. We cannot say with any assurance that the genes or neuronal wiring for one species evolved from homologous genes and wiring in another species. Is one songbird’s knowledge of how to find edible berries evolutionarily related to another the ability of another species of songbird to find food? Both may be learned or both may be evolved, but there’s no reason to think that “knowledge” of different species forms an evolutionary tree the way that their genes do.
You can see this conflation in McGinn’s opening paragraph, which assumes that there was a primordial “knowledge” that gave rise to descendant knowledge:
This is a big subject—a long story—but I will keep it short, brevity being the soul of wisdom. We all know those books about the history of this or that area of human knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, psychology (not so much biology). They are quite engaging, partly because they show the progress of knowledge—obstacles overcome, discoveries made. But they only cover the most recent chapters of the whole history of knowledge—human recorded history. Before that, there stretches a vast history of knowledge, human and animal. Knowledge has evolved over eons, from the primitive to the sophisticated. It would be nice to have a story of the origins and phases of knowledge, analogous to the evolutionary history of other animal traits: when it first appeared and to whom, how it evolved over time, what the mechanisms were, what its phenotypes are. It would be good to have an evolutionary epistemic science. This would be like cognitive science—a mixture of psychology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the various branches of knowledge. It need not focus on human knowledge but could take in the knowledge possessed by other species; there could be an epistemic science of the squirrel, for example. One of the tasks of this nascent science would be the ordering of the various types of knowledge in time—what preceded what. In particular, what was the nature of the very first form of knowledge—the most primitive type of knowledge. For that is likely to shape all later elaborations. We will approach these questions in a Darwinian spirit, regarding animal knowledge as a biological adaptation descended from earlier adaptations. As species and traits of species evolve from earlier species and traits, so knowledge evolves from earlier knowledge, forming a more or less smooth progression (no saltation). Yet we must respect differences—the classic problem of all evolutionary science. We can’t suppose that all knowledge was created simultaneously, or that each type of knowledge arose independently. And we must be prepared to accept that the origins of later knowledge lie in humble beginnings quite far removed from their eventual forms (like bacteria and butterflies). The following question therefore assumes fundamental importance: what was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth?
Note that he implicitly envisages an evolutionary tree of knowledge. It would be clearer if he used “consciousness” for “knowledge”, and defined both of them, which he doesn’t. But even if you think that, well, McGinn may be onto something here, that “something” comes crashing down when he starts talking about what “knowledge” was the ancestral knowledge. This brings us to the second problem:
McGinn is dead certain that the first “knowledge” that evolved, by which he really means the first quale, or subjective sensation, is the experience of pain. There is no evidence , or even a convincing scenario, for this proposition. Here’s where he proposes this, and not with much doubt, either:
I believe that pain was the first form of consciousness to exist.[1] I won’t repeat my reasons for saying this; I take it that it is prima facie plausible, given the function of pain, namely to warn of damage and danger. Pain is a marvelous aid to survival (the “survival of the painiest”). Then it is a short step to the thesis that the most primitive form of knowledge involves pain, either intrinsically or as a consequence. We can either suppose that pain itself is a type of knowledge (of harm to the body or impending harm) or that the organism will necessarily know it is in pain when it is (how could it not know?). Actually, I think the first claim is quite compelling: pain is a way of knowing relevant facts about the body without looking or otherwise sensing them—to feel pain is to have this kind of primordial knowledge. To experience pain is to apprehend a bodily condition—and in a highly motivating way. In feeling pain your body knows it is in trouble. It is perceiving bodily harm. Somehow the organism then came to have an extra piece of knowledge, namely that it has the first piece, the sensation itself. It knows a mode of knowing. Pain is thus inherently epistemic—though not at this early stage in the way later knowledge came to exist. Call it proto-knowledge if you feel queasy about applying the modern concept. We can leave the niceties aside; the point is that the first knowledge was inextricably bound up with the sensation of pain, which itself no doubt evolved further refinements and types. Assuming this, we have an important clue to the history of knowledge as a biological phenomenon: knowledge in all its forms grew from pain knowledge; it has pain knowledge in its DNA, literally. Pain is the most basic way that organisms know the world—it is known as painful. Later, we may suppose, pleasure came on the scene, perhaps as a modification of pain, so that knowledge now had some pleasure mixed in with it; knowledge came to have a pain-pleasure axis. Both pain and pleasure are associated with knowledge, it having evolved from these primitive sensations. This is long ago, but the evolutionary past has a way of clinging on over time. Bacterial Adam and Eve knew pain and pleasure (in that order), and we still sense the connection. Knowledge can hurt, but it can also produce pleasure.
When you poke an earthworm, it recoils. Does it do so because it feels pain? I doubt it, as it seems to me unlikely that an earthworm is conscious. Perhaps it just has an evolved neuronal network and morphology that retracts the body when it senses (not consciously) that it’s been touched. It could simply be like our kneejerk reaction: a reflex that evolved, but is not perceived consciously (remember, we take our hand off a hot stove before we are even conscious of feeling pain). But even if you think earthworms are conscious, certainly single-celled animals are not, yet they exhibit adaptive behavior as well. One-celled animals can move toward or away from light, are attracted to chemical gradients that denote the proximity of food, move away when disturbed by a touch, seek out other individuals for reproduction, and so on. All animals, whether you think they’re conscious or not, have some kind of evolved instinct to find individuals of the opposite sex when it’s time to have offspring. And surely that “knowledge” (if you will) is the most evolutionarily important of all.
Why, then, is awareness of pain supposed to be the very first “knowledge” to evolve? Why not responses to touch, to chemical gradients, to a drive for reproduction, or all the qualia that involve senses: touch, taste, sight, hearing, hunger and thirst, and so on? All of those can be seen as adaptive as a sense of pain, whether it be conscious or not.
Seeing various behavioral responses as constituting “knowledge”, then, adds nothing to our understanding of either evolution or consciousness. It muddles one’s thinking. The problem is instantiated by sentences like this one:
The organism knows how to get about without banging into things and making a mess. We could call this “substance knowledge”.
Well, simple organisms like rotifers also avoid obstacles. They are almost certainly not conscious, and you can’t have knowledge without consciousness. Do they “know” how to get about without banging into things, or is it an evolved trait based on cues associated with “being touched”. What “knowledge” is being shown here?
McGinn then proposes, with near certainty, an evolutionary progression of “knowledge”:
So, let’s declare the age of sense perception the second great phase in the development of knowledge on planet Earth. The two types of knowledge will be connected, because sensed objects are sources of pain and pleasure: it’s good to know about external objects because they are the things that occasion pain or pleasure, and hence aid survival.
I will now speed up the narrative, as promised. Next on the scene we will have knowledge of motion (hence space and time), knowledge of other organisms and their behavior (hence their psychology), followed by knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, scientific knowledge of various kinds, social and political knowledge, and philosophical knowledge. Eventually we will have the technology of knowledge: books, libraries, education, computers, artificial intelligence. All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain.
The “knowledge” of right and wrong is a learned and cultural phenomenon, completely unlike our “knowledge” of pain, whether it be conscious or a simple reflex reaction to harmful stimuli. What bothers me about all this is not just the mere conflation of “knowledge” with “consciousness”, or the idea that pain was the first “knowledge”; it is the sheer certainty McGinn displays in his essay. Perhaps that comes from his being a philosopher rather than a biologist, as biologists are surely more cautious than philosophers. A quote:
It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth).
I could say with just as much evidence that the perception of touch (either conscious or as an evolved reflex) “got the ball rolling”. And a response to touch in simple organisms cannot be construed as “knowledge” in any respect.
There is more in this article, but I find the whole thing confusing. We don’t even know whether consciousness evolved as an adaptive phenomenon. We don’t know whether our consciousness is a post facto construct for perceiving qualia that the body has already detected (remember, you pull your hand off a hot stove before you feel pain). Above all, we don’t know the neuronal basis of consciousness, much less which animals are conscious and which are not. In Matthew Cobb’s biography of Francis Crick, you can see his subject struggling with this issue in the last part of his life, and admitting that we know little about it. Crick laid out a program for sussing out the neuronal basis of consciousness, but, as Matthew noted in these pages, scientists haven’t gotten far with this problem.
I have no idea why McGinn is so certain about evolution and qualia. I don’t know any evolutionist who would agree with his thesis. I even broached it to a neurobiologist who knows evolution, and that person found the whole concept totally misguided.
As I said, McGinn is no slouch; he is a highly respected philosopher whose work I’ve read and respected. But I get the feeling that he’s driven out of his lane here.
