Part the First: We Live in Pluto’s Republic. With apologies to the shade of Walt Disney, this was bound to happen eventually. From Corey Robin, who notes that at Texas A&M a philosophy professor must dispense with Plato in his course because the content will be in violation of this edict:
“No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”
In December, the chair of the philosophy department at Texas A&M reiterated these directives to individual members of the faculty teaching material that might fall afoul of these state rules. One of those faculty, Professor Martin Peterson, submitted his syllabus for Contemporary Moral Problems for review. It included Plato’s Symposium, which features several arguments about sexual love between people of the same sex, including older and younger men; hermaphroditism as the source of heterosexuality; and long disquisitions on the efforts of Alcibiades to seduce Socrates. It’s pretty racy stuff, and a touchstone of any discussion of sexual morality, which has been a concern of moral and political philosophy since, well, the ancients. Peterson’s chair responded that he had a choice: get rid of Plato from the syllabus or teach another course.
CEO? I am just going to assume it has the common definition and refers to the president or equivalent at each unit of the state university system in Texas. No surprise there. The background report is from the philosophy blog DailyNous.
The use of the term “advocate” in the policy is worth noting. It is a label for an inappropriate pedagogical approach (indeed professors should teach students, not lobby them) and it associates this inappropriate pedagogical approach with teaching about race and gender, insinuating that if students are hearing about race or gender in their course, it must be because their professors are doing something illicit.
I never could convince a friend’s literary agent that when I teach graduate students and medical students I don’t feel the need to indoctrinate them with my evil “liberal” disinformation. Trying to explain that I had never been a liberal was also futile. Anyway, first they come for Plato…But this is not the first such rodeo in College Station and it will probably not be the last. I wonder, though. What will happen with this dawn comes up like thunder about a hundred miles to the southwest in Austin? I suppose the philosophy students at the University of Texas can bop on over to the University of Austin for their philosophy, where the truth shall set them free under the leadership of this unbelievably august Board of Trustees. Or just go ponder the bats leaving the innards of the Congress Avenue Bridge to fly along the still waters of Lady Bird Lake (Colorado River of Texas). I have seen this in person several times and highly recommend it! And not a Niall Ferguson or Bari Weiss in sight.
I think Professor Robin is being a bit unfair to Porky’s and its sequels (yes, I watched the first, nearly forty years ago; I remember that my seventh-grade alter ego thought it was funny). But Porky’s as the politics of our time? Yes:
I say “from the very beginning of this latest round of conservative assault,” but the truth is, this has been obvious since forever. Just watch a silly movie like Porky’s II, which came out in 1983, and takes place in the Florida of the 1950s. The movie is about the effort of a high school drama company to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a kissing scene between a white student playing Juliet and a Native American student playing Romeo. The local right is up in arms about the indecency of Shakespeare, and the movie goes from there.
Sometimes, increasingly often these days, I feel like we should stop talking about the right as if we were in some fancy dress-up costume drama of the European past, where we pore over the texts of the latest National Security Strategy as if it were some sort of holy grail, and instead look to idiot movies like Porky’s as our guide. Porky politics, that really is the alpha and omega of the current moment.
In the meantime, protect your precocious teens and college freshmen from Plato. Both Republic and Symposium might give them ideas. Chained up in a cave watching shadows on the wall while thinking of sex would lead to nothing good.
Part the Second: Dietary Guidelines, Again. You knew this was coming, too. Dietary guidelines have been a protean being since the middle of the twentieth century. What is potentially interesting about this is that the banner of the new guidelines is topped by “Eat Real Food” and cut out the added sugar. Does it make more sense to eat real food, including more dairy and meat? Yes. This was the recommendation when I was in elementary school in the 1960s. And that is exactly what we did – before the diabesity epidemic that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, undoubtedly because fat and cholesterol were demonized and replaced in the diet by processed carbohydrates. From the current Secretary of Health and Human Services:
“Today marks a decisive change in federal nutrition policy,” said Kennedy at a press conference Wednesday, adding that the government had previously been “lying to us to protect corporate profit-taking, telling us that these food-like substances” like highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates “were beneficial to public health.”
Actually, the government was not exactly lying but Big Food is most interested in profits. Their only reason for being is to make their shareholders money (thanks again, Milton). Healthy food and food security are not part of their business plan. This is old news covered here many times, most recently last month. The new dietary guidelines are here. The key to a healthy diet is simple: Eat real foods in moderation, plants and animals. But the problem is the Food System does not allow it. Get back to me when the Current Secretary takes on Big Ag and Big Food with the alacrity and effectiveness that DOGE attacked USAID, and the good things it did across the world. And yes, we are all perforce aware that USAID was also a front for the Deep State. That did not matter to the hungry it fed and the sick who were treated courtesy of a soft American power that did work.
No one will be surprised that the scientists (I use the term loosely) responsible for the new guidelines are in the employ, one way or another, of Big Food: Panel behind new dietary guidelines had financial ties to beef, dairy industries. Regulatory capture is a professional sport in the United States and these people are all-stars destined for their hall of fame, which probably exists in a basement on K Street:
Reviewers’ ties to special interests, disclosed in a report published alongside the guidelines, is especially notable considering how administration officials have railed against conflicts of interest in the development of previous dietary guidelines.
“This is rife with conflicts of interest,” Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said after reviewing the list of financial disclosures at STAT’s request. Multiple researchers assigned to work on the guidelines are well known for having strong advocacy positions on matters like meat and sugar, Taillie said.
Even Wednesday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during a news conference that his agency’s streamlined guidelines would replace the “corporate-driven assumptions” of past recommendations.
What matters most in American politics is that the experts are on the politicians’ side, whoever and whatever that may be. Business as usual in the Era of Citizens United (thanks again, Mr. Justice Kennedy). A few of the greatest hits here:
Heather Leidy of the University of Texas at Austin received grant funding from the Beef Checkoff, a marketing program funded by beef producers. She also sat on the scientific advisory board of the Egg Nutrition Center, and consulted for food giants such as Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Hillshire Brands, and Kellogg’s…She, like others on the review panel, is affiliated with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Dairy Council. At least four of the nine panelists had recent financial relationships with beef or dairy groups.
Tom Brenna (also UT-Austin), another expert assigned to the task, consulted for the cattlemen’s beef association, and received a research grant from the group. He also gave a lecture at a meeting of the American Dairy Science Association, and traveled to the conference on the group’s dime… Brenna was also a consultant for Nutricia, a subsidiary of French yogurt giant Danone, and served as a paid expert on a panel for the company. He is also an adviser to the nonprofit Seafood Nutrition Partnership. Brenna also founded a probiotics company called Adepa.
Donald Layman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is co-owner of a protein shake company, Metabolic, while Ohio State professor Jeff Volek is on the science advisory board of Simply Good Foods, the parent company to diet foot companies like Atkins and Quest.
Michael Goran of the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California previously served as a scientific adviser to infant formula companies Else Nutrition and Bobbie Labs, and also for a company that makes “gut health supplements” for infants and toddlers. He receives research funding from the Atkins Foundation, started by the people who created the popular low-carb diet of the same name.
Nothing to see here, move along. And the funny thing about this is that these university scientists, to a person, will deny that being on the payroll of Big Food affects their judgment. Of course, the same is true for physician-scientists who do “research” for Big Pharma. They are tough minded scientists who would never let lucre get in the way of their science. Funny thing about that. Eventually Big Pharma figured out that a 23-cent ballpoint pen and a stack of sticky notes branded on the edge of the stack works just as well as weekends at Pebble Beach when it comes to influencing the prescribing behavior of these people.
Part the Third. The Vaccine Mishegoss Continues. The Secretary of Health and Human Services continues to get his way on the vaccine front, and I do wonder what Senator Bill Cassidy, MD, of Louisiana thinks. From Science-Based Medicine:
As anticipated, RFK Jr. continues to be a wrecking ball on the American healthcare scene as HHS secretary. His latest move to undermine vaccines in any way possible is to reduce the number of vaccines on the routine vaccine schedule from covering 17 illnesses to covering only 11. This will have the predictable result of reducing vaccine compliance and increasing preventable disease.
How he is doing this is as important as what he is doing, so let’s take a closer look. First, the CDC recommendations are now divided into three categories – population-based, risk-based, and shared clinical decision making. The first category is what we already understand as routine vaccines to protect individuals and prevent the spread of infectious disease throughout the population. The second category, risk-based, essentially means that vaccines in this category are only recommended for people in a high risk population. The third category (which I suspect RFK would eventually want all vaccines in) means that there is no specific recommendation, just a discussion between doctors and patients.
Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, rotavirus, meningiococcal disease, influenza, and COVID-19 are all moved to the “shared clinical decision making” category, which effectively removes them from the list of recommended vaccines (although technically still “on the schedule”).
All this has been expected, too. It is outrageous. But what really gives the game away is the use of Denmark in making this very weak case. The Kingdom of Denmark may be about to lose Greenland to Stephen Miller’s perfervid delusions, but they will still have their universal healthcare system, and this makes all the difference in the world:
It is not hard to see, as many have, why Denmark is a horrible analogy to US health care. Denmark has a population of only 33 million, and they have universal health care with centralized tracking. So everyone is in the system and has access to routine preventive care. In such a system, something like shared decision making is much more viable. The US, by contrast, has 330 million people, with 27 million uninsured, no centralized healthcare database, and individuals frequently moving to different providers and insurance. So putting it on individuals to take the initiative to seek out a specific vaccine is likely not to work well.
Keep in mind, it only takes a drop in a few percentage points of vaccine uptake for some infectious diseases to spread much more easily (measles!). Such a drop also leaves millions of people unprotected, and is likely to result in significant morbidity and mortality. Vaccines are a preventative measure. They need to be part of routine care in order to be effective, and since every percentage point counts, they need to be as easy, cheap, and convenient to get as possible in order to maximize effectiveness. RFK’s new schedule will cause death and disease, the only question is how much.
Dr. Novella goes on to note:
RFK is worried (ostensibly) about the known and unknown hazards of vaccines, more so than is justified by the evidence. He is also less worried than he should be about the negative consequences of the diseases that these vaccines can help prevent. This is partly due to his poor understanding of medical science and clinical decision making (he is not an expert), but also due to the fact that he appears to be a full-fledged conspiracy theorist. He does not trust the system and does not trust experts. He thinks this gives him clearance to just substitute his own beliefs for the consensus of expert opinion.
Well, it is not just the Current Secretary of Health and Human Services who “does not trust the system and does not trust experts.” And that, alas, is largely on my tribe, who are still in the thrall of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Unfortunately, very few of the members realize this, basically because they are just too damned smart to see the truth in front of their faces. Collective guilt is no more valid than collective punishment, but until we biomedical scientists as a group get a grip, this same old lethal nonsense will continue to wreak havoc. In the world of deep fakes enabled by algorithmic intelligence, I cannot see a way out of this crack. Suggestions from the best commentariat in the world are welcome!
Part the Fourth: Stone Age Poison Arrows: Another fault of my professional kindred is they think those who came before us were ignorant. This despite, among other things, Roman concrete that is as hard today as it was 2000 years ago (we can be thankful that Brutalism lay 2000 years into the future). As this Nature news article tells us, Oldest known poison arrows show Stone Age humans’ technological talents:
Traces of toxic plant compounds have been found on a handful of 60,000-year-old African arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used poison to bring down prey.
The finding, published on 7 January in Science Advances, adds to the growing picture of how intelligent and technologically advanced people were in this era. Making poisoned arrows is about as hard as following a “complex cooking recipe”, says study co-author Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. “You have to add to it the danger of the poison, and planning to work with it without getting poisoned yourself, then you have to hunt and track the prey animal under difficult and dangerous conditions sometimes for a day or two.”
The paper is here: Direct evidence for poison use on microlithic arrowheads in Southern Africa at 60,000 years ago (open access):
Poisoned weapons are a hallmark of advanced hunter-gatherer technology. Through targeted microchemical and biomolecular analyses, we identified traces of toxic plant alkaloids on backed microliths from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, excavated from a level dated to 60,000 years ago. The alkaloids buphandrine and epibuphanisine only originate from Amaryllidaceae indigenous to southern Africa. The most likely source is Boophone disticha (L.f.) Herb. bulb exudate, also associated with historically documented arrow poisons. To our knowledge, we present the first direct evidence for the application of this plant-based poison on the tips of Pleistocene hunting weapons. The discovery highlights the complexity of subsistence strategies and cognition in southern Africa since the mid-Pleistocene.
Just one more shout out to archaeology! Humans can be ingenious when they are not being obstreperous. And these hunters were active about 50,000 years before the monumental Göbekli Tepe was constructed, for whatever reason. I am reminded of the young student who asked our Anthropology 102 professor this question, “Dr. Hudson, how did those (little people in Africa) kill those great big elephants?” He stared at her for a moment and then turned around and wrote “B-A-L-L-S” on the chalkboard. This might get him defenestrated today, but everyone in the room laughed then, including the student who asked the question. Yes, it was balls, plus a discerning human intelligence that was no different from that of a present-day scientist, farmer, engineer, or architect. But something lacking in a politician or economist or the typical billionaire so often in the news today.
Part the Fifth: Leonardo’s DNA. Sometimes “can implies ought” leads to borderline silliness such as this:
In April 2024, microbial geneticist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe stood over an enigmatic drawing in a private New York City collection. Gently, he rubbed its centuries-old surface, front and back, with a swab like those used in COVID-19 testing. “It’s not every day,” Gonzalez-Juarbe recalls with a laugh, “that one gets to touch a Leonardo.”
Rendered in red chalk on paper, Holy Child shows a young boy’s head inclined slightly to the side, his features sketched with feathery strokes. Light pools softly around his cheeks and brow, dissolving the edges of his pensive face in a haze of sfumato. The late art dealer Fred Kline, who acquired the drawing in the early 2000s, had claimed stylistic features such as left-handed hatching, a trademark of Leonardo da Vinci’s, link Holy Child to the Renaissance master. But its authorship remains in dispute; experts say one of his students could have produced it.
Gonzalez-Juarbe’s swabs may have captured a biological clue. In a remarkable milestone in a decadelong odyssey, he and other members of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project (LDVP), a global scientific collective, report in a paper posted today on bioRxiv (note: not reviewed) that they have recovered DNA from Holy Child and other objects—and some may be from Leonardo himself.
Of course, “may” also means “may not.” I have exceeded my word limit, but one more thing before we go. When these DNA sequences are deposited in the genomic databases as “Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA (H. sapiens, emphasis on the sapiens part in this case),” one of the aforementioned billionaires will hire a group of molecular biologists to pore over them with their most sophisticated bioinformatic tools. When they demonstrate that said billionaire shares a couple of SNPs related to something in the brain with the great man of the Renaissance, he will shout to the heavens and every living thing below, “Aha! I told you so!” And this will have been cheaper than buying this painting and hiding it on a yacht. So, he will have that going for him. Which is nice.
See you next week, God willing and the creek don’t rise.
