Monthly Archives: April 2025

Eleanor reacts to the dire wolves

This is our dog Eleanor. She’s a Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd mix, just over one year old. We rescued her last September — some heartless jerkbag had dumped her out out of a moving vehicle in a random neighborhood. Fortunately she was unhurt, but she needed a home, and here we are.

I love her more than I love most people, and it’s only by deliberate exercise of will that I’ve waited this long to put any pictures of her up on this blog. But now I have an excuse!

As you’ve probably heard by now, the company Colossal Biosciences is claiming to have brought back the dire wolf by editing a gray wolf genome. The story made the cover of Time, and you can read that popular article here.

I am not above staging cute pics of Eleanor, but in this case it wasn’t necessary: this is a completely un-staged photo of her watching a video about the dire wolves. Which is pretty crazy, because in six-plus months she’s hardly ever shown any interest in anything on a screen.

Do I have thoughts about the de-extinction of the dire wolf, and the looming de-extinctions of woolly mammoths and thylacines and whatnot? In general I’m all for it. I understand that some folks have principled objections, and that’s fine; like any human enterprise, none of this is going to be perfect, not in planning or execution or outcome; but ultimately these critters are extinct because of us, directly or indirectly, and if we can fix that, even approximately and imperfectly, I’m here for it. Also, I probably couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, so if I’m wrong, not much is gonna break.

Parting shot:

For an animal lover I’ve posted surprisingly little about pets — our box turtle Easty has made it in a couple of times, and our kitty Moe made a cameo appearance in this pig-head post. We’ll see if that holds now that I’m cohabitating with the very photogenic Mademoiselle Floueffeur de Floueff.

The Royal Society is dead

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand.

Two months ago, Stephen Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct. That letter has been co-signed by 3494 other UK academics, but has not to my knowledge received even the courtesy of a reply.

A few days later, a second fellow, Andrew Millar, also resigned his Fellowship.

Around the same time, I also sent my own letter to the Royal Society, which has also not recieved a reply.

A month ago, the Society met to discuss “the principles around public pronouncements and behaviour of fellows”, but the only outcome was an anaemic statement that didn’t even mention Musk. As a result, Kit Yates, associate editor at the Royal Society’s journal Open Science, resigned his post.

Fiona Fox, a fellow of the Royal Society and chief executive of the Science Media Centre was quoted as worrying that “ejecting Musk from the Royal Society would be seen as a political move.” This strikes me as incredibly naive. At a time when the USA is gleefully destroying its own scientific infrastructure, with Musk at the head of the charge, doing nothing is a political move.

It simply isn’t possible for a society to both “recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity” (as its mission statement claims) and enjoy the patronage of someone who is doing the exact opposite.

And that was going to be the final line of this post, until a few days ago, when I saw this: Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk. The Guardian quotes a cowardly letter from society president Sir Adrian Smith:

The view of council is that making judgments on the acceptability of the views and actions of fellows, particularly those that might be regarded as political, could do more harm than good to the society and the cause of science in general.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. The point is not, and has never been, that Musk is unpleasant or personally disliked. As the careful letters of Bishop, Curry and others have all pointed out, Musk is flagrantly and unambiguously in contravention of the society’s own Code of Conduct.

And it seems quite clear that “do more harm than good to the society” means that the society is scared of not getting any of that delicious Musk money.

So the Society has made its choice. It prefers the fellowship of Musk — who in the last few months has possibly done more to impede the progress of science worldwide than literally any other person in history — over that of actual scientists.

Unsurprisingly, I will not submit any of my papers to Royal Society journals, as I have done in the past, and I urge others to take the same step. Similarly I will no longer be providing peer reviews for Royal Society journals, and I urge every other scientist also to withhold voluntary professional labour. And I will no longer contribute to their conferences, and urge others to join me in this.

I want to be clear: this is not a protest or a boycott. I’m under no illusion that withdrawing my very minor contributions will make the slightest bit of difference to Society policy when the resignation of actual fellows hasn’t affected anything. It’s simply that I’ve given up on the society — I’m not throwing good effort after bad. The Royal Society of 2025 is simply not an organization that I want to have anything to do with in any capacity.

In short, the Royal Society is dead. Three hundred and sixty-five years of history, and it’s ended it as a beard for a fascist. What an utterly utterly shameful end for a once-great society.

 

doi:10.59350/ndeyh-vq64