It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, September 25, 2021
This haunting vision of climate change could concentrate minds at Cop26
Jonathan C Slaght’s nature writing has much greater impact than Boris Johnson’s speech at the UN
Jonathan C Slaght describes trying to find the largest living species of owl in remote Russian forests. Photograph: Amur-Ussuri Centre for Avian Biodiversity
I’ve been reading Jonathan C Slaght’s wonderful book Owls of the Eastern Ice, his account of four seasons trying to locate and protect the largest living species of owl in the remote Russian forests of Primorye, bordering North Korea. The Blakiston’s fish owl is a creature that seems entirely made of mythology. The threats to its continued existence include radioactive rivers and deforestation as well as the by-products of climate change: increasing floods, wildfires, typhoons.
Slaght’s extraordinary adventures on its behalf are like scenes from the end of the world. Rather than rely on the prime minister’s prep school arguments for a revolution in how the planet is managed at the forthcoming Cop26 gathering in Glasgow, organisers might be better advised to leave a copy of Slaght’s book at every world leader’s bedside. If they picked it up in the jet-lagged early hours they might find their dreams haunted, as mine have been, by huge, endangered owls swooping low through their subconscious, reminding them what survival might mean.
Saskatchewan KEEPING ALBERTA COMPANY
COVID-19 in Sask.: Record-breaking hospitalizations reported every day for a week
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Almost a third of 492 new cases reported Saturday are in the 20 to 39 age group
COVID-19 testing at Evraz Place in Regina. The seven-day average of daily new cases has now risen to 477, or 39.6 new cases per 100,000 people. (Matthew Howard/CBC)
The number of active COVID-19 cases in Saskatchewan continued to rise on Saturday, with 492 new cases reported.
Four more people have died from the illness, according to the latest update on the province's online COVID-19 dashboard. There have now been 667 COVID-19 deaths in Saskatchewan since the pandemic began.
Almost a third of the new cases (31 per cent) are in the 20 to 39 age group, the update said.
Premier Jason Kenney was roundly criticized by public health experts in June when he declared victory over the coronavirus and made Alberta the first province to largely lift pandemic restrictions. Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta, in his office in Calgary
.Credit...Amber Bracken for The New York Times
“We finally have the upper hand on this virus and can safely open up our province,” Mr. Kenney said at a podium with a sign declaring the province was “open for summer.” Over at his United Conservative Party’s website, supporters could buy caps embroidered with the slogan: “Best Summer Ever, Alberta 2021.”
Last week, Mr. Kenney was back with a less triumphal message: the declaration of a public health emergency, while reimposing more restrictions for the second time this month, and appointing a new health minister.
As of Thursday, Alberta had 20,180 active Covid cases, nearly half of all cases in Canada, straining intensive care units at hospitals to the point that the provincial government has asked for military assistance to fly patients thousand of miles to be treated in other provinces. Since Mr. Kenney lifted restrictions on Canada Day, Covid has killed 308 people in Alberta.
“I know that we had all hoped this summer that we could put Covid behind us once and for all; that was certainly my hope,” Mr. Kenney said on Sept. 16. “It is now clear that we were wrong, and for that I apologize.”
Many members of Alberta’s medical community bluntly dismissed Mr. Kenney’s comments for coming, in their view, weeks too late to stem the crisis, and said that his new public health measures were far short of what was needed.
“We’re already at the point where our health care system has functionally collapsed,” Dr. Ilan Schwartz, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta, told me on Friday. “Yet we have a society continuing as if nothing is awry.”
Those opposed to Covid-19-related public health measures protested this month at the Foothills Medical Center in Calgary.
Credit...Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
Dr. Schwartz is among many in the province’s medical community who began raising the alarm during the summer, as the Delta variant combined with Alberta’s comparatively low vaccination rates prompted a rise in infections and hospital admissions. (With just 61.9 percent of Albertans fully vaccinated compared with the national rate of 69.7 percent, the province is second only to Saskatchewan for having the lowest rate of vaccine take-up.)
At the beginning of September, Alberta introduced some pandemic control measures. But Dr. Schwartz said that they were inadequate and often ineffective.
“As if an alcohol curfew of 10 p.m. could ward off the virus,” he said. Rather than keeping crowds from packing nightclubs, Dr. Schwartz added, the measure only meant that “people were just going out to party earlier.”
On the day of Mr. Kenney’s apology, his government announced a variety of renewed restrictions and rules, including those involving masks. But given the level of severity of the situation, Dr. Schwartz said that the new safety measures would not be nearly enough to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. Alberta, in his view, needed to introduce a “hard lockdown” where most things other than essential retail and services would be closed.
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He particularly noted, with disapproval, the plans to allow N.H.L. games to take place in front of tens of thousands of fans in Calgary and Edmonton. While fans will need proof of vaccination or a recent negative test result to enter, several news outlets have reported that Alberta’s vaccine document, like Ontario’s, can be easily edited or faked using only minimal computer skills.
“We really have no option but to go into a hard lockdown, what we’re calling a firebreak,” he said. “Basically, we have a raging forest fire — Albertans are familiar with the imagery. We’re calling for removing some of the combustible elements, in this case people, out of the way.”
Instead, Mr. Kenney’s government has mostly promised to give more resources to hospitals. However, Dr. Schwartz said that such extra resources were impossible to provide because of shortages of trained medical staff.
He did not foresee Alberta’s situation improving until the government shut the province down.
“I never would have imagined that this could happen in Canada,” Dr. Schwartz said. “We’re at such a desperate point. It’s extremely demoralizing to health care workers. It’s terrifying to patients and to individuals who are chronically ill. That the government hasn’t implemented a meaningful hard lockdown at this point, while perhaps politically unpopular, it boggles my mind.”
Where We Left Off
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with his wife Sophie Grégoire and their children Ella-Grace and Xavier, on election night in Montreal.
Credit...Christinne Muschi/Reuters
In an election that somehow seemed both interminable and yet over in a flash, Canada now finds itself with a Liberal minority government in a Parliament that looks pretty much like the one that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had dissolved to allow a vote.
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, leaving her home in Vancouver on Friday.
Credit...Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press, via Associated Press
After more than 1,000 days, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the two Canadians jailed by China in apparent retaliation for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the Chinese telecom executive, were on their way home Friday night after a day of developments. First Ms. Meng, the chief financial officer at Huawei, appeared virtually in an American court to settle a fraud case against her by admitting some wrongdoing. She then went to a court in Vancouver, where it was announced that the United States had dropped its extradition request related to those fraud charges, which had led to her arrest at that city’s airport in 2018. Ms. Meng left Vancouver for China at about the same time that Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor were released by the Chinese authorities and boarded a flight for Canada.
Manohla Dargis, a New York Times film critic, wrote that after attending the Toronto International Film Festival, where screenings were held in largely empty cinemas because of the pandemic, “I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove.”
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
Burnaby Trans Mountain worker 'knocked unconscious' amid tree-sit protest: police
RCMP in Burnaby are using a lift bucket to reach Trans Mountain protesters.PPSTMX/Twitter
Two people were arrested and one worker was injured Friday as Burnaby RCMP attempted to clear more protesters from a Trans Mountain site, said police.
The first demonstrator was arrested around 9:30 a.m. after trespassing into a fenced area on private property owned by BNSF Railway, in violation of a court ordered injunction stating they could not obstruct, impede, or otherwise prevent access to Trans Mountain work sites.
Around noon, Burnaby RCMP officers returned to the area, located west of North Road and south of Highway 1, responding to reports that a Trans Mountain worker had been injured after being struck on the head by a branch near an occupied tree-sit.
“The worker was knocked unconscious and has been taken to hospital for treatment of his injuries, including a possible concussion,” said police in a news release. “It appears the branch fell on the worker while the protester was repelling between tree-sits.”
RCMP officers trained in high-angle rescue were called to the area. The demonstrator from the tree-sit safely came down on his own around 3:20 p.m.
The demonstrator was arrested at the scene. The incident remains under investigation, police said.
Protesters have been occupied trees in this forested area along the Brunette River for more than a year as Trans Mountain looks to cut more than 1,300 trees.
Zain Haq, 20, who was arrested, said in a news release: “The future of life on this planet is at stake. We must put a moratorium on all new fossil fuel infrastructure … This twinned pipeline poses tremendous risk locally, and globally once the product is burned. The consequences of inaction are catastrophic. As a young person, I am motivated to do whatever I can to dampen the horrors of the not-so-distant future: mass starvation, breakdown of ecosystems, mass extinction, etc.”
Two arrested in separate incidents at Trans Mountain protest in Burnaby Friday
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Trans Mountain worker struck by branch during tree-sit, sent to hospital with possible concussion
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A protester climbs a tree at Lost Creek in Burnaby on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)
Two demonstrators were arrested in Burnaby on Friday during separate incidents at a Trans Mountain work site, one of which sent a Trans Mountain worker to hospital.
According to Burnaby RCMP, the first person was arrested at 9:30 a.m., after trespassing onto private property owned by BNSF Railway. This was in violation of a court-ordered injunction stating demonstrators could not obstruct or impede access to Trans Mountain work sites.
RCMP were called back to the area at noon, after receiving reports that a Trans Mountain worker had been struck on the head by a branch near an occupied tree-sit. The worker had been knocked unconscious and was taken to hospital to be treated for a possible concussion.
Police say the branch fell on the worker while a protester was rapelling between tree-sits.
Officers trained in high-angle rescue were called to the area, and the protester came down on his own at 3:20 p.m.
The protester was then arrested. Police are still investigating.
Protesters have been engaged in a tree-sit in a conservation area along the Brunette River since Aug. 3, 2020, with the goal of blocking construction on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The blockade remains as of today, and several nearby tree-sits have been established.
Chris Campbell / Burnaby Now - Sep 24, 2021 | Story: 346714
Photo: Twitter/PPSTMX
Another person was arrested Thursday as police continue to clear out people occupying trees in Burnaby to protest the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.
The demonstrator had trespassed into a fenced area on private property owned by BNSF Railway, in violation of a court injunction stating they could not obstruct, impede, or otherwise prevent access to Trans Mountain work sites.
Video showed one person being carried away by police on Thursday.
“The demonstrator was given the opportunity to leave the area voluntarily, but chose not to,” said police. She was safely arrested just before 10 a.m.
“Burnaby RCMP would like to take this moment to remind those who are involved in ongoing demonstrations that police are an impartial party and are there to ensure the safety of everyone involved,” said a police news release.
Earlier in the week, a person occupying one of the trees in Burnaby was arrested. Police in tactical gear are using a lift bucket machine to reach protesters in the trees.
On Friday morning, the group Protect the Planet – Stop TMX said two people had “locked themselves down to the ground” at the tree-occupation site, located west of North Road and south of Highway 1 in Burnaby.
“This is a tactic also used at Fairy Creek, known as a soft block,” said a news release from the group, adding that they expect more people to be arrested today.
The aim is to prevent Trans Mountain workers from cutting the trees. The project will see more than 1,300 trees cut down in the area.
SFU Burnaby students to launch Trans Mountain protest march as arrests continue
An RCMP officer lifted up to arrest a person occupying a Burnaby tree.Cornelia Naylor
A group of SFU students and faculty have pledged to march from the Burnaby Mountain campus down the hill to protest the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.
People are invited to gather at 4:30 p.m. at the UniverCity Town Square to hear speakers, followed by the march at 5 p.m. that will end up at the intersection of Gaglardi Way and University Drive.
As organizer and SFU student Hanieh Shakeri explained, “We are organizing this march to bring attention to the dangers of the TMX pipeline, and especially the unsafe situation that SFU students have been placed in by the presence of the tank farm so close to our campus. We hope that SFU will show their commitment to student safety by putting pressure on the government to halt the TMX pipeline project.”
After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”
Carlson was speaking to the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Sirius XM. He made the comments in question on his show on Wednesday, which averages more than 3 million viewers a night.
Claiming the Biden administration was trying “to change the racial mix of the country”, Carlson said: “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.
“They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”
The “great replacement theory” originated on the far right. Perpetrators of recent mass shootings have cited iterations of the theory in “manifestos” attempting to justify their actions.
Carlson raised the theory in April, claiming it was not racist but a matter of hardball politics. The ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, called for Carlson to be fired.
Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, wrote back: “Mr Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory. As Mr Carlson himself stated … ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.’”
This week, Greenblatt repeated his call.
“For Tucker Carlson to spread the toxic, antisemitic and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.
“If it somehow wasn’t clear enough before to the executives at Fox News that Carlson was openly embracing white nationalist talking points, let last night’s episode be case and point.”
Kelly asked Carlson how he felt when “sure enough the ADL comes after you”.
“The ADL?” Carlson said, laughing. “Fuck them.”
The ADL, he said, “was a noble organisation that had a very specific goal, which was to fight antisemitism, and that’s a virtuous goal. They were pretty successful over the years. Now it’s operated by a guy who’s just an apparatchik of the Democratic party.
“It’s very corrosive for someone to take the residual moral weight of an organisation that he inherited and use it for party.
“So the great replacement theory is, in fact, not a theory. It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president.
“And in one sentence, it’s this: ‘Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that. We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us.’ So there isn’t actually inherently a racial component to it, and it’s nothing to do with antisemitism.”
Kelly also played a clip of Joe Biden speaking in 2015, which Carlson used on Wednesday.
In the clip, the then vice-president says: “An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who were Caucasian, of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s as a source of our strength.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson tells interviewer: ‘I lie’
On Wednesday, Carlson said: “An unrelenting stream of immigration. But why? Well, Joe Biden just said it, to change the racial mix of the country … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World … This is the language of eugenics, it’s horrifying.”
Analysts have shown that the clip is edited misleadingly.
As the Washington Post pointed out, Biden made the remarks as part of “about six minutes of commentary, beginning with the fact that the city of Boston came together as a community after the bombing during the Boston marathon.
“‘I’m not suggesting … that I think America has all the answers here,’ Biden said. ‘We just have a lot more expe
NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETLY DIFFERENT
Frank Zappa's Surrealistic Documentary and Soundtrack 200 Motels Gets Multi-Format 50th Anniversary Treatment
Here's the press release: Los Angeles – September 24, 2021 – Released in October 1971, Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels” was a miraculous feat, a cinematic collision of the venerated musician and composer’s kaleidoscopic musical and visual worlds that brought together Zappa and his band, The Mothers, Ringo Starr as Zappa – as “a large dwarf” – Keith Moon as a perverted nun, Pamela Des Barres in her acting debut, noted thespian Theodore Bikel, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and an incredible assortment of characters (both on screen and off) for a “surrealistic documentary” about the bizarre life of a touring musician. A heady, psychedelic stew of low and high brow art forms, the film, written by Zappa and co-directed by him and Tony Palmer, mixed together irreverent comedic skits, madcap satire, eye-popping animation and virtuosic on-screen musical performances from both The Mothers and the RPO for a fascinating and free-wheeling multimedia extravaganza. Shot in just 10 days with a budget of around $650,000 from distributor United Artists, “200 Motels” was one of the first movies to be filmed entirely on videotape and Zappa and crew pushed the envelope of the burgeoning new medium’s possibilities, mostly notably through its use of spectacular – and at the time – state-of-the-art visual effects. Described by Zappa as “at once a reportage of real events and an extrapolation of them… other elements include ‘conceptual by-products’ of the extrapolated ‘real event’ … In some ways the contents of the film are autobiographical,” “200 Motels” was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “a stunning achievement” with “just the right touch of insanity,” and the “Zaniest piece of filmusical fantasy-comedy since The Beatles' ‘A Hard Day's Night’” by Daily Variety.
The music, and its corresponding soundtrack, was equally diverse, a wild pastiche of avant garde rock and orchestral compositions interspersed with dialog from the film. Up until that time, compositions like the finale piece, “Strictly Genteel,” were some of the most ambitious material ever written and recorded by Zappa. The band in the film and on the soundtrack consisted of Frank Zappa (guitar & bass), Mark Volman (vocals & special material), Howard Kaylan (vocals & special material), Ian Underwood (keyboards & winds), Aynsley Dunbar (drums), George Duke (keyboards & trombone), Martin Lickert (bass), Jimmy Carl Black (vocals), and Ruth Underwood (orchestra drum set), not to mention the aforementioned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In true Zappa fashion as he wrote in the album’s original liner notes, “This music is not in the same order as in the movie. Some of this music is in the movie. Some of this music is not in the movie. Some of the music that’s in the movie is not in the album. Some of the music that was written for the movie is not in the movie or the album. All of this music was written for the movie, over a period of 4 years. Most of it (60%) was written in motels while touring.”
In celebration of “200 Motels” golden anniversary, Zappa Records, UMe and MGM have assembled a definitive Super Deluxe six-disc box set of the beloved, yet hard to find, soundtrack for release on November 19. Fully authorized by the Zappa Trust and produced by Ahmet Zappa and Zappa Vaultmeister Joe Travers, the monstrous 200 Motels 50th Anniversary Edition brings together the original soundtrack, newly remastered by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Mastering, along with a staggering amount of unreleased and rare material unearthed from FZ’s Vault, including original demos, studio outtakes, work mixes, interviews and movie ads, along with newly discovered dialog reels, revealing an early audio edit of the film. Also included is a wealth of never-before-heard audio documentary material surrounding the project.
Discs 1 and 2 feature the remastered soundtrack with the second half of the second disc consisting of demos and demo outtakes; two of the many highlights from these sessions include unreleased alt mixes and alt takes of the Chunga’s Revenge tunes, “Road Ladies” and “Tell Me You Love Me.” Discs 3 and 4 contain the “Dialog Protection Reels,” which reveal an early version of the movie, while Disc 5 and 6 present unreleased outtakes, alternates and historical nuggets sequenced in the order of the original shooting script, the way Zappa originally envisioned before he ran into time and budget constraints. These illuminating discs reveal Zappa’s original intent for the film for the first time.
The six-disc set will be housed in a 64-page hardcover book in a handsome 12” x 12” slipcase. The packaging replicates the original booklet updated with revealing new liner notes from Pamela Des Barres, Ruth Underwood and Joe Travers, as well as Patrick Pending’s essay from the 1997 reissue, and is chock full of motion picture artwork, stills and images, from the film and its making, many which have never been seen before. This must-have collector’s release will also include a custom “200 Motels” keychain and Do-No-Disturb motel door hanger and a full-size replica of the original movie poster. Years in the making, all the audio was meticulously identified and transferred over several years as Travers dug through the Vault to create a new high resolution 96K/24B digital patchwork stereo master from the original analog tapes. The Vault material was mastered by John Polito in 2021.
The remastered 200 Motels soundtrack will also be reissued on vinyl as a 2LP pressed on 180-gram black vinyl and also as a limited edition red vinyl pressing on 180-gram vinyl, which will only be available exclusively through Zappa.com,uDiscoverMusic.com or SoundofVinyl.com. Both will be pressed by Optimal Media in Germany and be the first time the album has been available on vinyl in decades. The soundtrack will also be released on 2CD and all formats will include a smaller version of the movie poster. Additionally, the entire Super Deluxe Edition box set will be available digitally for streaming and download, marking the soundtrack’s digital debut, in both standard and hi-res audio. Pre-order for all configurations is available now.
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century review – self-help laced with pseudoscience
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein attempt to show how human nature is at odds with modern society, but their science, and style, grates
Heying and Weinstein provide evolutionary self-help advice to address the mismatch between stone-age brains and high-tech society.
THE GUARDIAN Fri 24 Sep 2021 Imagine discovering a fence in the middle of a desert. Not immediately seeing its purpose, you might think: “Let’s get rid of this useless fence!” But are you sure about that? Maybe you’re at the edge of a field of angry wildebeest, and by removing the fence you’ll leave yourself vulnerable to be crushed, Mufasa-style, in a stampede. Better to first find out why the fence is there before attempting to tear it down.
So goes the argument made by GK Chesterton in 1929: you should try to understand things before changing them. The evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein – whom some readers might remember from 2017, when they resigned from Evergreen College in Washington State after a dramatic culture-war flareup – have written a book that takes Chesterton’s fence as its central metaphor. By disregarding the facts of evolved human nature, they argue, the modern world in all its novelty has destroyed the proverbial fence, leaving us unhealthy, miserable and heading for societal collapse.
We eat the wrong food. We prescribe too many drugs. We raise and educate our children badly. Heying and Weinstein provide evolutionary self-help advice to address the mismatch between stone-age brains and hi-tech society. More respect for the evolved aspects of humanity will, apparently, cure what ails us.
Let’s accept for the sake of argument that modern society really is terribly bad for us (although, given vast increases in life expectancy, we shouldn’t). How do we know which parts of human nature are the ones we should take better account of? Heying and Weinstein’s answer is essentially everything. If it is something complex, costly (in terms of energy or materials), and has been around for a long time in evolutionary or cultural history, it’s probably an adaptation – there for a reason, and not a mere accident.
This does readers a disservice. The debate over “adaptationism” in biology is long-running, and is not going to be solved by glib reasoning like this. Heying and Weinstein lunge clumsily at evolution’s Gordian knot, fail even to nick it with their blade, yet still smugly tell their audience that they have sliced it right in half.
Still, if everything is an adaptation, there is a lot of advice to give. Some of it – offered in bullet points closing each chapter – is boilerplate (get more exercise; get more sleep); some is oddly specific (go barefoot more often); some is plain weird (don’t let markets get involved in music or comedy). Little of it appears to be based on actual research; the science is really, as the kids these days say, just a vibe.
Ancient Native American rock carvings depict deers being hunted.
Photograph: Hal Beral/Getty Images
Not that the authors do much better when they engage with studies. They make alarming pronouncements based on flimsy data, such as when they say that water fluoridation is “neurotoxic” to children based on one reference to a “pilot study”. They lazily repeat false information from other pop-science books, such as the “fact” that all known species sleep (some, including certain amphibians, don’t!). The final chapter, in which they embrace the bonkers “degrowth” movement, contains what might be the single stupidest paragraph on economics ever written (claiming, bizarrely, that the invention of more efficient versions of products such as fridges would bring the economy to its knees).
Above all, Heying and Weinstein are really annoying. Their seen-it-all, know-it-all attitude is grating from around page five, and becomes increasingly irksome as they pontificate their way through each chapter. If only you knew as much about evolution as they do, you would know how to organise society. You would know to “steer clear” of genetically modified food (the millions of lives saved by such food apparently don’t warrant a mention). You’d know not to have casual sex. You’d know not to look at your smartphone so much. And so on.
And they haven’t merely solved the central questions of biology. They are also, apparently, the best teachers imaginable. Without embarrassment, they quote a student describing their classroom as “an ancestral mode for which I was primed, but didn’t even know existed”. Their towering self-regard gives them the false belief that all their arguments – including the book’s premise, which is just a repackaging of 18th-century Burkean conservatism with a faux-Darwinian paint job – are staggeringly innovative.
Where has all this evolutionary reasoning, this respect for Chesterton’s fences, led Heying and Weinstein? In the past months they have distinguished themselves as some of the most credulous proponents of Covid pseudoscience. Not only has Weinstein spread dangerous misinformation about mRNA vaccine safety, but both authors have enthusiastically joined the movement of internet cranks obsessing about the drug ivermectin and its “near-perfect” (Weinstein’s words) properties in preventing coronavirus infection (in reality, on ivermectin the jury is very much still out).
These Covid positions, along with Heying and Weinstein’s advocacy of the still-unproven lab-leak hypothesis, gel nicely with the “don’t-play-God”, “mind-the-unforeseen-consequences”, “stick-to-the-traditional” worldview that the book promotes. But they are also that worldview’s best refutation. If respecting those metaphorical fences could get people killed during a pandemic, maybe our instinct to smash them down was right after all.
Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science is out in paperback (Bodley Head). A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein is published by Swift.
