Men who want to propagate

There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.

Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
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Barack Obama sets off ET controversy

In an interview where guests were expected to give quick responses, Barack Obama said something that sent believers in extraterrestrial into a frenzy.

In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

Later, because of the uproar, he issued a statement clarifying what he meant.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

This is eminently reasonable and is what I also think. He would probably have been better served if he had said “They’re possible” rather than “They’re real” but sometimes when speaking off the cuff, one’s choice of words is not always the best.

But you can expect the tin-foil conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive.

Lead and criminality

I have written before about the possible connection between the presence of lead in the environment and violent crime by young men. Much of the evidence is correlational but nonetheless suggestive. What researchers such as Rick Nevin found was that the amount of lead in things like gasoline and paint was phased out at different times in different parts of the world (and in different states in the US) and that crime started to drop about two decades after the drop in blood lead content.

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985-1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.

Now a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser takes a look at whether exposure to lead in childhood resulted in the creation of serial killers. Fraser notes that notorious serial killers Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway all grew up in the same neighborhood near Tacoma, WA around the same time as her, a location with high lead content, which she uses as a springboard for her support of the lead -crime hypothesis.
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The disparagement of the achievements of indigenous peoples

Some time ago, I discussed a book Sea People that described the incredible navigational feats of the Polynesian people who were able to reach and populate all the tiny but habitable islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Westerners did not think that these ‘primitive’ people could do this and felt that the islands must have been populated by people traveling west from the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the key proponents of this idea and his balsa raft Kon Tiki experiment was aggressively promoted by him as showing that this was the case. That thesis is no longer considered tenable but that wrong idea still persists in the public mind.

This is not the only example of how western archaeologists and anthropologists, faced with what seemed like impressive achievements in countries that they deemed backward, discounted the possibility that indigenous people might have done them and instead created theories that gave the credit to others. In a review of a new book about the giant sculptures of faces known as moai found on the island of Rapa Nui (formerly called Easter Island), Margaret Talbot reviews some of the other examples of this tendency, the most extreme version being that of Erich von Daniken.
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How much drinking of alcohol is safe?

Alcohol is the most widely used legal drug. Its use has been sanctioned by long-standing use and efforts to ban it have been largely unsuccessful, as the Prohibition movement found out during the years 1920-1933 when the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was completely banned in the US, after the 18th Amendment to the US constitution was easily passed in 1919. While private ownership and consumption of alcohol were not made illegal federally, some local jurisdiction did make those illegal too.

The legacy of prohibition is mixed.

The overall effects of Prohibition on society are disputed and hard to pin down. Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition, while other research indicates that Prohibition did not reduce alcohol consumption in the long term. Americans who wanted to continue drinking alcohol found loopholes in Prohibition laws or used illegal methods to obtain alcohol, resulting in the emergence of black markets and crime syndicates dedicated to distributing alcohol. By contrast, rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality declined during Prohibition. Because of the lack of uniform national statistics gathered about crime prior to 1930, it is difficult to draw conclusions about Prohibition’s effect on crime at the national level. Support for Prohibition diminished steadily throughout its duration, including among former supporters of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, ending that experiment.

That drinking alcohol causes or exacerbates problems is clear, with men being the key drivers.
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My talk on “The Death of Free Will”

[Note: Given the controversial nature of this topic and the subtlety of the arguments involved that might require multiple exchanges and clarifications, I am lifting the three comment limit for this post, though the rule against acting like a jerk remains and indeed will always remain.]

On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.

Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.

Enjoy!

The relative decline of research universities in the US

The New York Times had an article that has set off alarms in higher education circles in the US that, according to some global rankings, China’s universities are rapidly advancing the amount and quality of their scientific research output, leaving US universities behind.

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.

Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
…

According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.

The research output of Harvard and other US universities has not declined. It has grown but the Chinese universities are growing faster. This is because China has put great emphasis on scientific research, seeing it as the foundation of its technological base for its growth as a world power.
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The benefits and dangers of online support groups

One of the huge benefits of the internet and social network platforms is their ability to connect people with other people who may share similar interests and needs. This can be especially important for those who suffer from various debilitating symptoms for which there seems to be no clearly identifiable cause and for which their doctors have resorted to just trying to alleviate the symptoms, usually with just partial success. Finding others with similar conditions can be a relief, since sometimes those around them may speak and act like they harbor suspicions that the sufferer does not have any real problems but may be a hypochondriac or merely trying to get attention and sympathy

Siddhant Ritwick and Tomi Koljonen describe some of them.

While diseases such as cancer, AIDS, ALS, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and diabetes often evoke deep fear, sympathy and collective urgency – reflected in dedicated charities, advocacy groups and public awareness campaigns – there exists an under-recognised class of bodily conditions that also wreaks havoc on human lives. These illnesses often receive little social legitimacy and may even be dismissed by medical professionals, family members and society at large as mere tiredness, laziness or psychological fragility. Conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Long COVID and Lyme disease are often dismissed as trivial, yet they can be profoundly disabling. Though not usually life-threatening, these overlooked illnesses can dismantle a person’s social, professional and emotional world, leaving sufferers severely disadvantaged – often without the sympathy or structural support afforded to more widely recognised diseases.

Reflux diseases are among the many conditions that can trap sufferers in a spiral of chronic suffering.
…

These brutal conditions are neither mysterious like Long COVID, whose causes and progression remain uncertain, nor urgent like cancer. Instead, they occupy an uncomfortable middle ground: familiar, longstanding and supposedly manageable.

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Trump’s Greenland obsession and the Mercator map projection

Trump seems obsessed with the idea of the US taking over Greenland, much to the alarm of European countries that support a continuation its current status as an semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. There is little support even from Greenlanders for becoming part of the US. He has even announced tariffs, the weapon that he uses for pretty much everything, to punish any countries that oppose this move, and has already applied it.

Trump said that “Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland have journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown,” a reference to the European countries who have said in recent days that they will send troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity with Denmark, after weeks in which Trump and top allies have renewed demands to take the territory. Most European countries have been vocal in their opposition to Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland.

Calling it a “potentially perilous situation,” Trump said he would impose 10 percent tariffs on imports of all goods starting Feb. 1 from those countries to the U.S., increasing to 25 percent on June 1. He said it would only be removed after a deal is reached for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

“This is a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet. These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable,” Trump said, embracing what amounted to a military threat against some of Washington’s closest and oldest allies.

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The future of big physics

When it comes to research in experimental physics in areas that already exist, the frontiers that are usually explored are those of precision and size.

In the case of the precision frontier, the idea is to measure something more precisely than it has been done before because with greater precision there is a better chance of finding disagreement with theoretical expectations. Such disagreements (or ‘anomalies’), especially if they persist and are recognized as not being due to some errors in experiment or theoretical calculations, are the basis for thinking that there might be something new going on and may lay the foundations for some kind of breakthrough.

The other frontier is to extend the range of the parameters and in the case of high-energy physics, that means going to higher and higher energies. But this is enormously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider that was built at CERN at a cost of billions of dollars reached the existing energy limit and it resulted in the detection of the long-sought Higgs boson.
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