"Of course the Little Spotted Kiwi isn’t spotted very much! Otherwise, it would be called the Frequently Spotted Kiwi."

A comment at the Metafilter discussion of the RNZ article "Little spotted kiwi found on New Zealand's mainland for first time in 50 years" ("Knowing kiwi pukupuku have survived this whole time in our takiwā is incredible. We are extremely excited and looking forward to working with DOC to secure the future of kiwi pukupuku").

While I'm on the subject of New Zealand birds, let me link to this from a few days ago: "First the dire wolf, now NZ’s giant moa: why real ‘de-extinction’ is unlikely to fly": "[B]irds are harder to 'de-extinct' than placental mammals. One would need a surrogate egg to bring chicks to term, and for many moa species there are no eggs from living birds big enough to house a developing chick. In this case, artificial eggs would need to be developed.... Genetically engineering a tinamou or any other birds in this group to create a moa hybrid would be... much harder than genetically engineering a grey wolf. And in any case, this would not recreate a moa, but merely something that may look like a moa. As one critic put it, it would not have the mauri (life force) of a moa."

I asked Grok to give me more about "mauri" in this context. From the answer: "As one expert reaction put it, 'Genetic tinkering with the fundamental features of a different life force will not bring moa back,' highlighting that mauri cannot be replicated through science alone; it is an irreplaceable, holistic quality tied to the species' natural history, whakapapa, and place in the ecosystem. This critique underscores broader ethical concerns in de-extinction debates, including cultural heritage, interdependence with nature, and the limits of human intervention in restoring extinct beings."

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

"Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion."

"Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm. 'If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,' [writes Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab]. At another point: 'All people share a harm-based moral mind.' At still another: 'Harm is the master key of morality.'..."

Writes Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today" (The New Yorker).

"Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as 'pseudoscience'..."

"... while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 [the Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children]....  I expect the court to uphold the Tennessee law.... [I]t won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized...."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Just Showed Us What Contempt for Expertise Looks Like" (NYT).

Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong? Obviously, autocrats have their "experts" too, and respecting them has done great harm. I think first of Josef Mengele, who earned a cum laude doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for a thesis dealing with genetics and who conducted genetic research at Auschwitz. That doesn't make genetics a "pseudoscience," but it does show that we'd be fools to think there's a binary choice between deference to experts and marginalizing them.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the Soviets' banning of genetics. I can see that those who did the banning regarded themselves as experts:

"Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves evolve in..."

"... they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in 'stink-fighting,' battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or the other retreats. It feels no madder than current forms of diplomacy. It’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive."

Writes Katherine Rundell, in "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures" (commission earned) quoted in "A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs" (Paris Review).

Hadn't used my "animals are jerks" tag in a long time.

"The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also... not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past."

"For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.... A parenting style that took its cue from those hunter-gatherers would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful underparenting.... [F]ollowing adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity.... An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too...."

Writes the psychologist Darby Saxbe, in "Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often" (NYT).

By the way the most boring long adult conversation about family members they don’t know is the long adult conversation about the health problems of family members they don’t know. Just a child-rearing tip, in case you decide to embrace the let's-be-like-the-cavemen-and-bore-them-out-of-their-skull approach.

"Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession..."

"... until after the publication of Darwin’s 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development. This idea was controversial because convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.... With the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, certain scientists began to worry that slouching among 'civilized' peoples could lead to degeneration, a backward slide in human progress. Posture correction became part of 'race betterment' projects, especially for white Anglo-Saxon men but also for middle-class women and Black people who were trying to gain political rights and equity. Poor posture became stigmatized and defined as a disability. As I show in my book, people with postural 'defects' were regularly discriminated against in the American workplace, educational settings and immigration offices..."

From "Beth Linker Is Turning Good Posture on Its Head/A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the 'posture panic' of the last century. You’ll want to sit down for this" (NYT).

This made me think about the way, back in the 1950s, we girls were encouraged to train ourselves in good posture by walking with a book on one's head. I see there's an entry at TV Tropes, "Book on the Head."

And here's a random poster (from 1946):

"But who knew (other than paleontologists) that there was a time in Earth’s history when it rained for a million years?"

"Or about the forty million years when moss dominated the planet? Or about how plankton, by inventing photosynthesis and thereby giving off oxygen in the course of some two billion years, transformed Earth’s yellow methane-filled atmosphere into blue skies, and the lifeless landscape into forests of green? In William Steig’s book 'Rotten Island,' illustrations show erupting volcanoes and creepy sea creatures and thorny plants and vicious land animals. One day, a jealous battle starts over a new life-form: a flower. Violence, destruction, giant insects, and ice and fire ensue, and lead to a mass extinction. I used to think that 'Rotten Island' was about the disastrous pettiness of human wants and behaviors, and about how much better life might be without us. Now I see it as a reasonably accurate visual history of our planet, with extra polka dots and stripes, in watercolor...."

From "Reinventing the Dinosaur 'Life on Our Planet,' a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors" (The New Yorker).

We watched the first episode of this series last night. I wasn't going to continue, but now that I know that moss and plankton will get their due — that it won't be all lumbering CGI dinosaurs and Morgan Freeman speaking ponderously about who's fighting and winning dominion over Earth — I might give another episode a chance.

"The Montana House of Representatives on Friday approved a total ban on TikTok inside the state..."

"The legislation, which would also bar app stores from carrying TikTok, the wildly popular viral video app, was approved 54 to 43 in the last of two votes in the State House. The State Senate passed it in March.... Montana will be in uncharted territory if it tries to ban the app. A trade group funded by Apple and Google has said the companies cannot stop app downloads in a single state. Critics of the legislation say that TikTok users could disguise their location to maintain access to the app, and that the ban may be hard to enforce in border towns.... The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech groups have said the bill violates the First Amendment rights of Montanans who use the app."

From "Montana Legislature Approves Outright Ban of TikTok/The bill, which would make the state the first to ban the social media app, now goes to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte" (NYT).

Here's the top comment at the Times: "I might suggest that the Montana State House tech gurus contact their counterparts in China. They are far more experienced in throttling apps, prosecuting developers and penalizing users of consumer software offerings."

The ACLU notes the free speech violation, and Apple and Google — saying that they can't stop downloads in a single state — are setting up the argument that it violates the dormant Commerce Clause. 

I think Governor Gianforte has the background to see multiple reasons to veto this bill. Wikipedia:

"Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming..."

"... they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked). Yuval Noah Harari, in his book 'Sapiens,' wrote about a population of early humans who inhabited an island called Flores. Because of a rise in sea level, the island was cut off from other land masses. 'Big people, who need a lot of food, died first,' Mr. Harari wrote. After generations, the people on the island evolved to reach only three and a half feet tall. They could do everything bigger humans could — make tools, hunt — but they could also stay alive when times got tough. When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet...." 

From "There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be Short" by Mara Altman (NYT).

I've curated 5 TikToks for you this evening. Some people love them.

1. "Alexa! Play Rosemary Clooney!"

2. "Don't cry if you don't want me to laugh."

3. A tribute to the "Apparently" kid.

4. Random kid drama becomes a song.

5. The amazing human capacity to run — explained, while running.

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

Colin Wright has drawn the perfect political cartoon.

And he's writing about it — here — in The Wall Street Journal:

Excerpt:

"But hostility to genius has been brewing in our culture for a long time. Almost 100 years ago... the critic Edmund Wilson observed that the almost mystical 'dignity and distinction' traditionally accorded to the figure of the poet was becoming..."

"... 'more and more impossible in our modern democratic society.' The ascendancy of science, Wilson argued, had made human beings less prone to viewing themselves as potentially godlike geniuses and more uncomfortably aware of their kinship with other animals and subjection to biological and physical laws. A democratic society was also less at ease with the idea of a 'natural aristocracy' of artists to match the hereditary aristocracy of landowners and rulers.... The prevalent idea in the 21st century is not that nobody is a genius but that everybody is — at least potentially.... That way of thinking is incompatible with the recognition of genius which requires humility, the awed acknowledgment that somebody is unfathomably better at something than you are. We prefer not to confront this uncomfortable fact, hence the extraordinary cultural premium currently placed on 'relatability.' A literary agent recently remarked to me that this has become one of the most sought after qualities in new novels. Not only do readers like to have their experiences reflected back at them but the gap between talented novelist and untalented reader must seem as flatteringly, reassuringly narrow as possible."

 
From "Without the cult of genius, no one is shining/Relatability has become more prized in creative circles than skill or talent — to all of our loss" by James Marriott (London Times).

"Relatability" — referring to that emotional quality — is a pretty recent word. So is "relatable." Thinking about this is reminding of how common it used to be — when was this? 70s? 60? — to say "I can relate."

Here's a NYT "On Language" column from 2010, "The Origins of ‘Relatable’" by Ben Zimmer. A teacher had written in to say that she'd "noticed among my students a growing use of the word 'relatable,' as in 'I like Sarah Palin. She's relatable' (meaning, 'I can relate to her')." The teacher declared it "odd" and wanted to know where that came from:

"Some people are clearly more altruistic than others. But even these super-cooperators can’t do all the heavy lifting alone."

"Haphazard or individual-level efforts to be helpful are rarely sufficient to keep cooperation going in a larger population. For one thing, a cooperator surrounded by noncooperators will usually stop being helpful—for who wants to be a chump? Yet devolving to an 'every man for himself' dynamic is injurious to all. That’s no way to fight a plague.... We also practice punishment and ostracism, both of which can, in the right circumstances, foster cooperation. Shunning transgressors comes naturally to us precisely because, in our ancestral past, it was useful for our collective survival.... Indeed, President Joe Biden announced a broad series of interventions last month, including requiring all employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination and doing the same for federal workers and others.... We do not need to see these actions in a negative or even authoritarian light. They are not simply the workings of our political system. They are rooted in our ancient past, helping us survive. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, putting our thumb on the scale of the COVID-19 response allows our natural impulse toward goodness to flourish. And such efforts are in keeping with our fundamental instincts to be altruistic and cooperative in the first place. As Albert Camus argued in his novel The Plague, 'What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men and women to rise above themselves.'" 

From "Sometimes Altruism Needs to Be Enforced" by Nicholas A. Christakis (The Atlantic).

"Now a team of scientists in New York say they have pinpointed the genetic mutation that may have erased our tails."

"When the scientists made this genetic tweak in mice, the animals didn’t grow tails, according to a new study that was posted online last week... Darwin shocked his Victorian audiences by claiming that we descended from primates with tails..... 'This question — where’s my tail? — has been in my head since I was a kid,' said Bo Xia, a graduate student in stem cell biology at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. A bad Uber ride in 2019, in which Mr. Xia injured his coccyx, brought it back to his mind with fresh urgency. 'It took me a year to recover, and that really stimulated me to think about the tailbone,' he said.... [H]e compared the DNA of six species of tail-less apes to nine species of tailed monkeys. Eventually, he discovered a mutation shared by apes and humans — but missing in monkeys — in a gene called TBXT.... The mutation that Mr. Xia discovered had not been observed before. It consisted of 300 genetic letters in the middle of the TBXT gene.... Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists. The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches... It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.... 'That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?'"

From "How Humans Lost Their Tails/A new study suggests that a single genetic mutation helps explain why monkeys have tails, while apes and people do not" (NYT).

ADDED: I continued reading the article blogged in the previous post and I ran into this, which I want to put here:

I thought, early on, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. But I realized that, at a certain point, the audience makes a pact. I remember this guy, his name was George Kirby, I saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He did the greatest impersonations of everybody. And one week, on “Ed Sullivan,” he just was going legit. He was just going to sincerely sing. And I’m going, “Is there a sandbag that drops on him at one point? You’re breaking your contract with us.” Lorne Michaels has this thing where he says, “You go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they have a right to be reflective, but if they’re not swinging by their tails and jumping around, we go, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Marty, you’re one of the monkeys.”

"Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to 'keep seeing videos about Primates'..."

"... causing the company to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.... The video... featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates."

The NYT reports. 

News flash: Human beings are primates. Black, white, whatever — we're primates. Notice how the love of science drops out of the picture altogether when there's an accusation of racism to be made. 

Of course, it's wretched of the AI to refer to black people as "primates" when that's not the standard way to refer to all human beings. It's touchy creating AI that can make embarrassing mistakes, and I think the companies have long been on notice that AI does a worse job at facial recognition when the subject is a black person.

"For the young, social media filters that smooth skin and inflate their eyes’ proportions are almost ubiquitous, like a popular 'Pixar' filter on Snapchat..."

"... that made its users look like the cartoons of their youth, or the popular Facetune app. It is a short leap to 'Facetuning' in real life. Patients used to approach surgeons with photos of celebrities; now it is more likely of their own filtered face. 'It’s exceptional now to see a photo on social media without a filter,' [says Dr Olivier Amar, one of London’s leading cosmetic surgeons]. 'Patients are comparing themselves to something that doesn’t exist. And because they may only ever see themselves on a phone, using their phone as a mirror, they may not even recognise themselves in a real mirror. If they get these treatments they feel they can have the life as people seem to have online.' Why, then, has this 'bug-eyed' face emerged ahead of all the other cultural standards of beauty? David Bainbridge, a reproductive biologist at the University of Cambridge, wrote in his book Curvology that females are more evolved than males: humans have smaller teeth, flatter faces, smaller chins and less hair than primates, especially females. Many of these qualities are emphasised in 'Instagram face,' the distinctive narrow-nosed 'heart-shaped' face. 'We do not know why women should be more "modern-looking" than men,' Bainbridge writes, 'but it has been suggested that many of the characteristics men find attractive are the same as those which make them look distinctively human.'"

From "Love Island and how young people fell for cosmetic surgery/A surgeon says women want an ‘alien’ face: sharp cheekbones and big lips. Why?" (London Times). "Love Island" is a British reality TV show. 

The term "alien face" is used in the article. It's a reference back to cheesy 1950s movies and has to do with "diagonally pulled-up eyes... narrow nostrils and a glazed, expressionless stare" or something like "the image on the front of Space Raiders crisps, this kind of overbuilt cheek, overbuilt temple, skeletonised, sharp features that just didn’t look correct."

It's interesting to take that observation and extrapolate a reason why so many people would decide that's the most beautiful look. So Bainbridge offers his theory, that we somehow aspire to more and more evolution and are projecting into the future, trying to look like humans a million years from now. How do you know where evolution will take us? 

It seems as though you take your cliché image of a caveman, imagine what is needed to get from that to standard human being of today, then whatever you just did to the caveman, do it again to the person of today, and that's the ultra-evolved human being. Or — to follow Bainbridge's idea — you accept that a woman of today already has that "more evolved" look, so you plot a straight line from modern man to modern woman and keep going. What do you see? Now, get a plastic surgeon to translate that fanciful vision onto your actual face. 

Won't you look weird? Not if you've been using your phone as a mirror.

"UFO skepticism can sometimes be mistaken for anthropocentrism, a kind of biological arrogance...."

"The believer says to the skeptic, 'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?' An adjunct to this is the assertion that, among intelligent beings in the universe, humans are likely relatively primitive, since we’ve only been around for, what, 100,000 years or so, and the Old Ones out there may be billions of years ahead of us. It would actually be reassuring, at a deep existential level, to know that interstellar space travel is possible. That it’s something we might do someday. Alien visitors by their mere existence would imply that we can overcome our worst instincts (war, hatred, pollution, Twitter) and survive. It would be nice to know that the kind of intelligence humans possess, and which gives rise to technological civilizations like ours, won’t always backfire, that it’s not only a nifty evolutionary adaptation in the short run but something that’s durable. The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. They’re a little bit like angels. What’s more anthropocentric is to assume that human beings are so fascinating that aliens want to visit us and study us. The aliens seem a bit obsessed with us.... Some UFO narratives imagine that we have something the aliens are missing. Like: feelings....."

 
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).

"These are exploitation films to a degree (exploiting the audience’s willingness to view 'surviving' a film as tantamount to a badge of honor as much as exploiting the actors’ willingness to play at debasing themselves)..."

"... but they are also, and more importantly, meditations on the nature of the freak. If there can be said to be some kind of philosophical import to ['Female Trouble'], it is this: [John] Waters executes a dialectical examination of the freak through an immanent analysis of the outsider, following its internal movements toward a negative critique of society (that is, an exposition of the intrinsic contradictions upon which society operates), but ultimately demonstrating that the liminality of the freak is an integral part of the social whole. By marking the perimeters of the acceptable, by opening a threshold onto the chaos of madness and the entropy of unchecked deviance, the freak in Waters’ works performs a social service, thus qualifying its vaunted difference and reflecting society itself in the funhouse-mirror of its own self-obsessions....  [T]he aberration is the engine behind the Darwinian understanding of evolution... Evolution... requires an anomaly that slips the traces of conformity.... The sudden veer that marks the evolutionary leap is the byproduct of the one impacting the many. The 'freak,' when successful, charts the path of the future of the normative."

Writes Chadwick Jenkins, in "THE DIALECTIC OF THE FREAK: ON JOHN WATERS’ ‘FEMALE TROUBLE’/In John Waters' work, poor taste is a manner of refinement that attains a strange air of considered sophistication and knowing advertency" by Chadwick Jenkins (Pop Matters, November 2018). 

I'm reading that because I'm watching "Female Trouble" because I've just recently subscribed to the Criterion Channel, and I'm catching up on various old films. 

Also watched recently: "The Color of Pomegranates"...

 

... and "It's Such a Beautiful Day"....