This TED talk by A.J. Jacobs inspires me.
I'm posting it especially for all the Dividers out there, including those on the political Left and Right. I hope it doesn't piss them off too much that every person on this planet is biologically related to every other person, regardless of what we look like.
I'm speaking up for the much-maligned Neanderthals today on this Father's Day, but not merely because many of us have a bit (1 to 2%) of Neanderthal DNA in our chromosomes and not merely because this population lasted until only 25,000 years ago. It's mostly because I just now stumbled upon this pretty cool Neanderthal reconstruction by Tom Bjorklundart of what a Neanderthal parent and child might have looked like.
Happy father's day!
This Neanderthal reconstruction by Tom Björklund seems fitting for the occasion. pic.twitter.com/T33pEMdAfO
— Inquisitive Bird (@Scientific_Bird) June 21, 2020
I've been struggling to understand the contours of the recent dispute involving J.K.Rowling's tweets regarding transgendered persons. This issue caught my interest in that I know several people who transitioned and one who is transitioning as a 30 year old adult after being in a marriage. In the process of trying to understand the issues, I've read about a dozen articles from varying perspectives plus hundreds of tweets, many of them claiming to be authored by transgendered persons.
Interestingly, those postings claiming to be authored by transgendered persons seem to be much more sympathetic to J.K. Rowling. Many of the postings on social media are intense reads, leading me to wonder whether there is any way to satisfy all of the sides to the dispute. I doubt it and I think I now better understand why after watching the attached video featuring two evolutionary biologists, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. I found their comments on gender ideology and biology quite helpful to understanding these issues. I especially appreciate that their comments are well founded on biology, but also sensitive to the need to treat transgendered persons with kindness. I also appreciate that they both deal head-on with the political aspects of this issue, including the need to recognize over-stepping by the authoritarian left.
Good food for thought when Bret Weinstein sits down with Joe Rogan to discuss the protests and the civil unrest. I haven't been buying the standard line that these sustained protests are driven completely by the homicide of George Floyd. That horrific incident is certainly what triggered the demonstrations. However, the duration and intensity of the unrest , the organic "leaderless" groundswell, the unfocused attacks on virtually every American institution (including universities and STEM) and the unhinged demands (e.g., where "defund the police" doesn't actually mean defund the police) have convinced me this unrest is about far more than police abuses. Weinstein believes that many Occupy Wall Street demonstrators (he supported this movement) turned to anarchy and have now combined with the many demonstrators who fall under the Black Lives Matter umbrella, as well as other participants.
Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist living in exile from Evergreen State with his wife, Heather Heying, also an evolutionary biologist. These two biologists somehow survived intact the abysmal failure of Evergreen to deal with its own unrest in 2016, an incident that gives Weinstein a unique perspective on the ongoing crisis. In the first 30 minutes of this podcast, Weinstein and Rogan focus on the failures of BOTH political parties to represent the interests of the American working class. Ever since Bill Clinton, both parties have catered almost exclusively to the needs of their "clients," large corporations, which have rigged the game to screw small business and working people. This trend of catering to big corporations and screwing workers has continued under the current administration. One result of this: Widespread joblessness and hopelessness in both big cities and small that is now exploding on the streets. This economic misery has hurt minorities living in urban areas especially hard, exacerbating their many concerns about institutional racism. Weinstein sees no short term or long term solution to this mess given the complete lack of political leadership, especially from the White House.
What is the relationship between the numbers of police on the street and rate of violent crime? In a recent Vox article, "The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing," Matthew Yglesias offers some real numbers to counter rampant speculation we are hearing from the many people who are understandably upset with police misconduct. His conclusion: "One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in 
criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.” Therefore, if you want to increase violent crime in rich and poor neighborhoods alike, simply remove police officers. Here are some specific cases summarized by Yglesias:
"Klick, John MacDonald, and Ben Grunwald looked at an episode when the University of Pennsylvania had its campus police increase patrols within its defined zone of Philadelphia, and used a regression discontinuity design to discover that crime fell about 60 percent (this time with a larger decline for violent crime) where the extra officers went.
Stephen Mello looked at a huge surge in federal funding for local police staffing associated with the 2009 stimulus bill. Exploiting quasi-random variation in which cities got grants, Mello showed that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower — again with a larger drop in violent crime.
John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller looked at a program in New York called Operation Impact that would surge additional officers into high-crime neighborhoods and found that a wide range of crime — assaults, robberies, burglaries, violent felonies, violent property crimes, and misdemeanor offenses — fell in response to the surge.
Richard Rosenfeld’s field experiments show that “hot spot” policing, where extra officers go to specific high-crime locations, not only reduces crime in the hot spots but reduces crime (in this case, specifically gun assaults) citywide.
Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the defunding movement, writes in a Washington Post piece arguing for a greater role for local leaders and communities in containing violence that “those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence."