Highlights from Natural Selections in 2023
A little bit of everything
Science and story, curiosity and discovery, observation and interpretation of the natural world—these are the places that I tend go when I feel free to choose. Often, though, I am grabbed by other things, and focus on failures of modern systems: the “science” that demands to be followed, the medicine that does harm, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity ideology that is both homogenous and exclusionary. I write about all of these things in Natural Selections, and what follows is a meander through some of my—and my readers’—favorite pieces from 20231.
Let’s start in nature.
Sea stars have been disappearing from the West coast of America for many years now. But in early May of this year,
I had the good fortune to be in southeastern Alaska—west of Juneau and south of Icy Strait, in shallow water in a bay of Chichagof island. We were in a double kayak at low tide and the water was clear. In the sky, there were bald eagles and pigeon guillemots, gulls and goldeneyes. In the water, the feathery orange tentacles of red sea cucumbers, and the tall white stalks and fronds of the giant plumose anemone8 fairly glowed. A small run of salmon flashed their silvery scales. Sea otters floated and played on the surface. Clam shells littered the shallow sea floor, open and broken and scattered. But the other organisms that were not just present, but abundant, were sea stars.
From Sea stars lost in the Salish Sea: And found in southeastern Alaska
I also wrote of salmon and their explorations:
Every salmon-bearing stream on the Pacific was founded by fish who made a bad choice. A bad choice that turned out to be a good choice.
From Bad choices in salmon land: Error, exploration, and a hint of romance
And beavers:
Far from being simply a pest species, beavers were the water managers of North America. They were builders and gardeners, whose millions of years of work here helped build resilient ecosystems. Some of our most tenacious environmental problems would be alleviated if we welcomed beavers back.
And about how difficult it is to sleep if you are a mammal who has returned to a life in the sea:
We are fish who walk on land. Some of us fish took a good long look around and went back into the water. We still need our sleep, though, and swimming while sleeping can be rough going, so all of us fish who came onto land and then went back to the sea have solved the problem one way or another, over and over and over again. We swim. We sleep. Evolution finds a way.
From The sleep of seals: and of others who have returned to the sea
In pursuit of understanding evolution more fully, while in my 20s I spent several extended field seasons doing research in Madagascar. I lived in a tent, showered in a waterfall, and was only once attacked by a lemur. One night, I woke up on top of a snake. He was a nice snake, heavy with sleep, incapable of and uninterested in doing me any harm.
That’s Madagascan boas for you. Beautiful, and calm. Their scales shimmer electric blue in the sun, but it was night now, so his scales reflected only the light from my headlamp.
Those not interested need not force enthusiasm for seals or salmon, sea stars or snakes. But everyone should spend time outside. Why? Science can provide some answers today, but those answers will not be complete. We do not know what we do not know, but our hubris would appear to be boundless. Here is some of what is true of the healing power of the sun:
Sunlight is not merely disinfectant, it is an active healer. And some parts of sunlight—the near infrared photons—penetrate clothing, and reflect off leaves. Shortly after sunrise, and before sundown, the availability of near infrared photons is particularly high. Just being outside in the world, even under light cover, earns you many of the health benefits of the sun.
So every day, early and often, get outside.
From: It is dark inside your head: But even there, the sun does shine
Perhaps because I cherish wildness so much, because any day that I find myself somewhere that I have never been before is a good day, I find myself concerned, over and again, with self-imposed imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical.
We accept constraints that we should not, and then find that freedom is far harder to regain than it is to retain.
With regard to 15-minute cities:
To those who would plan our lives for us: You will not domesticate me on your terms. You will not cage me with all the things that you think I should need and want, and tell me how glorious it is, how easy I have it, how lucky I should feel.
After considering it for a while, I came to understand this:
A 15 minute city is one where everyone has a place, the authorities know where it is, and they make sure that you stay there.
From The domestication of city dwellers: Because it’s people’s freedom of movement that’s the problem
I also wrote a bit about modern architecture, which can be gorgeous, but it can also be a pox upon us, designed not for us, but rather literally designed to force us to its will. Informed by Tom Wolfe’s biting From Bauhaus to Our House, I concluded that:
We moderns have moved beyond complexity, and beyond detail. We’re above that sort of thing. We are pure, stylized, and without sin. We may have to be re-educated before coming to love open floor plans, but sometimes re-education is the cost of progress. Why do you want walls if you have nothing to hide?
Speaking of having nothing to hide—in 2023, it was revealed that “sensitivity readers” have literally changed the words in books that still have Roald Dahl’s name on them, and yet there is no indication on those books that they have been changed. That’s the great, prolific, and immensely popular Roald Dahl—author of such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach—a man who was also, of course, just a man, flawed, and of his time. Would I excuse barbarities? No. But when censors erase detail like the observation that tortoises used to be brought from North Africa (because even mentioning Africa is triggering?), or change the word “white” to pale, frail, agog or sweaty (because a color can be racist?), well, we definitely have a problem.
The censors seem to believe that we moderns have perfect insight into what is good and right, and that we now live on a pure spiritual plane. Only people of the past made errors, had secrets, and believed things that weren’t true.
What the censors are revealing is how very many errors it is possible to make at a single moment in time. We are, it seems, a confused and arrogant people.
From The age of censorship: In which we find new ways to mess with children
Similarly, there is a push by some astronomers to rename galaxies because the people for whom they are named aren’t virtuous by modern standards. This was, I think, inevitable.
Hire people with an eye towards their immutable characteristics, and don’t be surprised when they use those immutable characteristics to climb to the top of the very hierarchy that you erected, and then burn down everything around them.
From The “Appeal to the Noble Savage” fallacy: the chickens come home to roost
The crowd favorite this year, by a large margin, was How now cow of brown:
Long ago, we stopped saying “colored people” and replaced it, in the U.S., with African Americans, or black or brown people. Fine, although I’m quite sure we’re not allowed to say yellow people or red people, and we never thought there were any blue people, not really, so it’s not at all clear how this helps anyone. It doesn’t clarify anything. More frequently now, the preferred term is people of color.
This puts the emphasis on “person” rather than on “color.” Because it’s putting adjectives first that is the problem. Modifying a noun in the standard English way is now a kind of hate crime.
Referring to fat people is mean (and obesity isn’t bad for you!2), but referring to individuals as “people of size” somehow solves the problem. Did your doctor advise you to lose weight? Tell him you’re a patient of size, and make sure to file a complaint with the medical ethics board. How dare he try to do his job!
Don’t talk about survivors, either. These are people who have experienced…survival, I guess. Victims: same deal. Best to refer, for instance, to rape victims as people who have experienced rape.
I’m a person experiencing surprise that we could collectively be this dumb.
To all of this madness, I suggest an antidote. As we also discussed in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21stCentury, the campfire is part of what has made us human.
Campfire provided warmth, and energy, and a beacon to those not yet home. But it also provided a time and a place to ponder and share the day’s events. I saw this and you did not. You thought that and I did not. And, in placing those distinct thoughts and observations next to one another at campfire, we began to learn how they might be related. Campfire is a place, too, of the liminal. There is light and there is shadow; there is language and there is music and there is silence. The normal rules of conversation are shifted, or suspended. Come and go as you like, with no obligation to state your purpose, or your conclusion, but please, when you have a thought that enlightens you, when you make a connection that is new—please do share. The campfire is a place to share, and to grow.
I also spent time considering medicine this year, and was often disappointed in what I saw. Over and over again, I was affirmed in my position that, in areas pertaining to our health, and our quest to determine what is true, it is more important to be skeptical of pronouncements from authorities, rather than less.
In this vein, I asked questions of pharma quite unrelated to Covid, specifically the strange but extremely profitable Vascepa, made by Amarin. Vascepa is a poor cousin of fish oil supplements, which itself is a poor cousin of…actually eating fish.
Reasons that the good people at Amarin would have you avoid fish oil supplements include that the FDA remains unconvinced, the American Heart Association isn’t in favor of supplements, and fish, from which fish oil comes, were never intended or approved to treat heart disease. They’re fish, after all, not medicine! You see, the only medicine that could possibly be effective is one that was created by people with a profit motive.
From: Fish, fishy, and fish adjacent: Why eat like an Inuit when you can pop a pill
On the mRNA vaccines that were mandated in many places, that destroyed lives, families, jobs, and livelihoods, about which many were smug in their superiority for having taken them quickly and often…those same mRNA vaccines that fewer than 10% of people are now accepting, quietly rejecting those once mandated jabs while conveniently forgetting about the harm their past positions caused:
We were handed a bill of goods, in which science was coopted. Scientific consensus appeared to arrive fully formed, after a scant few months. The One True Answer was arrived at behind closed doors, by people no doubt bearing the most credentially of credentials. They bestowed on us the One True Answer, they told us to Follow, and so we were blessed.
Ah, mighty Science, hallowed be thy name.
I also asked why none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule are tested against placebo. This was a stunning revelation for me, and for many other people, too. Robert Kennedy Jr. has been lambasted for his position on vaccines, but in truth, his position is this:
He would like to have vaccines safety-tested before injecting them into people, particularly children.
From Childhood vaccines aren’t tested against placebo: Why not?
On a related note:
What if the world isn’t as we think it is—wouldn’t you like to know? I would.
What we believe is sometimes handed to us in the guise of science—here is the answer. Once we all agree on that answer, it can seem crazy, dangerous even, to question what is now understood. Obviously the Spanish Flu of 1918 was unavoidably fatal to young people. Or was it?1 Obviously mRNA vaccines against Covid are safe and effective. Or are they? Obviously HIV causes AIDS. Or does it? What is the evidence, and how thoroughly have the alternative hypotheses been investigated?
From Suspension of curiosity leads to Serious Adverse Events: Analysis of and excerpt from Celia Farber’s book on the history of AIDS
On too many topics, many of us cannot reconcile what we see with what we are being told.
It seems to many that all is lost. How can we possibly recover actual civilization from this trajectory, these battles between enemies both ancient and new. Many people are hiding. What is this? What is the shape of this moment in time?...
All is not lost. We have lost our way, to be sure, but all is not lost.
Holding steady in a storm like this is a kind of winning.
How to teach a new generation to have appropriate skepticism, to stop being so certain about things they are told? Having been an (unlikely) educator for a decade and a half, I have some thoughts there too:
Embracing uncertainty, knowing that you do not know, and that what you think you do know may be wrong—this is foundational to a scientific approach to the world. Over the last decade, and especially since Covid, we have seen an increasing focus on certainty, and on single static solutions to complex problems. Perhaps most alarming of all, those appeals to authority, and to silencing those who disagree, has arrived under the banner of science. #FollowTheScience, we are told, when that has never been how science worked.
Speaking of education, I republished an article that was first published in Academic Questions in 2019, which mostly comprised an analysis of higher ed and college presidents, but included some occasionally snarky detail on the implosion that went public at Evergreen in 2017. The man who was then president of the college, George Bridges, had facilitated the whole disaster behind the scenes. He managed to trick many on the faculty into doing his dirty work for him, behaving in abominable ways.
They had become faculty trolls hiding under Bridges.
From On college presidents: Overseers of orthodoxy and heresy
Sex is a perennial topic, and in Sex & Sociality this year, I wrote or republished pieces on autogynephilia and trans widows; a long exploration of sex and identity and non-binariness, and how sex roles in Malagasy poison frogs are relevant to an understanding of modern human sexuality.
I also wrote about dominance hierarchies in humans, and the insufficiency of ideas like “alpha” in human society:
If I am the best fire starter, and rope maker, and finder of salmon streams, and you are the best finder of kindling, and knot tyer, and fisher of salmon, which of us is alpha? We are both necessary. We are both dominant in some domains, and not in others, but both of our skills are necessary to do the emergent things that need doing.
While we do not have alpha males in the same style as that of many other species, we do most definitely have differences between the sexes. But we have become so confused at a societal level that many have embraced backwards trends as progressive:
We have separate men’s and women’s divisions in sport because until yesterday, everyone understood that men and women are different, and have different capacities and strengths. Different divisions by sex aren’t about how you feel; they’re about what you are: male or female.
From Celebrating the Cheater: How to beat women in the 21st century
And on lessons learned from Barbie (the movie) and RuPaul’s Drag Race (the “Werk the World” live show):
Humans have been folk biologists for a very long time: We know that humans come in two types, male and female. Extremely rare exceptions notwithstanding, absent this truth, there would be no humans. We can play with boundaries, test things, and discard some of the old ways, but men aren’t women, and they can’t become so. This matters because reality matters.
Similarly, it is difficult for men and women to work side by side, to make meaning in the world in shared spaces, and not have those spaces be inherently male, or inherently female. But it’s imperative that we figure this out. And when it works, it really, really works. A “feminist” vision that believes in winner-take-all—men have power, or women have power, but never both at the same time—is a sad vision that will not last.
Pushing social norms is standard human practice. But throwing everything into the blender and hitting liquefy, just because you can, is both juvenile and dangerous.
Some posts are unlike any others. I wrote about my father, on the 10th anniversary of his death. Or rather, I posted what I wrote in 2013, just after he died, in those excruciating first days of life that would never more include him.
My father taught me how to throw, how to bat, how to shoot pool (but not hoops), how to drive fast. He told me explicitly that I was not going to be one of those girls who threw like a girl. He taught me, through modeling the behavior over and over again, how to look both physical and intellectual risk in the eye and say: bring it on.
Finally, this year I began a new kind of post, Things That Caught My Eye, for paying subscribers only. I allow myself a little more leash on these, to be more direct and more obviously riled, as I understand myself to be writing in those posts not to compel those who have not yet seen the madness, but only for those who have already seen it, and are utterly done with it, and are reified in finding that other people see the same things that they do. Here are a few highlights:
On October 10, I wrote of the atrocities in Israel on October 7, concluding:
How could Israel have been this unprepared, especially on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War? How could Hamas have been this successful, even with the aid of Iran? Who or what benefits from this, beyond the players we can easily name?
What of all that we think we know is actually true?
From Things that caught my eye #4: Never again
While discussing the legalization of Narcan, which claims to “safely and effectively” pull fentanyl users from the abyss of death, I wrote:
What is a life worth? Is all human life inherently worth saving at all times? We have palliative care. Do Not Resuscitate orders. Death with Dignity acts. Abortion. We, as a society, have already granted that life comes to an end, and sometimes it is not worth doing everything medically and technologically possible to delay that as long as possible.
From Things that caught my eye #3: Sex, drugs, and a total lack of rock and roll
And if you are a woman looking for a man, consider this advice from the January 1958 issue of McCalls’ Magazine:
Get a job demonstrating fishing tackle in a sporting goods store.
From Things that caught my eye #1: Medical hubris, Barack Obama, and how to find a husband
If that doesn’t do it, I really don’t know how to help you.
Seriously, though.
Let us remind ourselves of
The steam rising from a very hot cup of coffee in a fine stoneware mug….The sound of a wooden spoon in a cocotte….the sound of newspaper, the feel of it—soft and real, a physical thing in ink and words, and oh, what words….The god rays as they break through thick clouds near sunset, geometric and slanted just so….The warmth, not the cold, settling in close for the evening. (From Little things that I love: Musings on a December day)
And
Night falls and we build the fire. The rains begin and we converge. The holidays arrive and we come together. (From Fractal campfire: Right here in Prague)
Happy solstice, happy holidays, and a happy new year to all. Let’s do this.
Natural Selections represents a significant outlet for my writing, but is not the only one. In 2023 I also began writing the Field Notes column for the newly minted County Highway, of which I am utterly delighted to be a part. And I wrote a proposal and sample chapter for a book that I decided I did not want to write only as I was talking to potential publishers about it; I’ve got another one in the works, though, and I am excited for what is to come.
A, as my daughter would call it, cryball formed in my throat with the final three words of this posting, "Let's do this." It is interesting to me the little things that give me hope and comfort in this strange time we're in. It is the first of those three words, "let's" that I hold in my heart knowing there are humans out there...wherever "there" may be, who, "...have already seen it (the madness), and are utterly done with it, and are reified in finding that other people see the same things that they do."
I try real hard to not be a gushing fan of anyone. But I just can't help myself with Heather. Keep it up, and Thank You!