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The Supreme Court is Back in Session. Here’s What to Expect.

by Ian MacDougall

“This story was originally published by ProPublica.” ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

As a new Supreme Court term began this week, many Americans are still feeling the aftershocks of the last one. In its first full term with a conservative supermajority, the high court overruled Roe v. Wade, substantially expanded the scope of the Second Amendment and scaled back the barrier between church and state. Abortion access, following the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has become a legal, political and medical issue to an extent not known in decades. Lawmakers and law enforcement officials in states with restrictive concealed-carry laws are still working out how to adjust their firearms regulations in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

So far, the justices have agreed to hear about half the number of cases they ordinarily decide in a term, with more to be added in the coming weeks. But already the court’s docket includes major cases concerning voting rights, election law, environmental protections and the constitutionality of affirmative action. As conservatives look for cases that can continue to shift the law in their direction, liberals look with trepidation to what the court’s right wing may do next.

To get a better sense of the term to come, I spoke with Will Baude and Dan Epps, law professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University, respectively. In addition to their scholarly and teaching duties, Baude and Epps host “Divided Argument,” a podcast about the Supreme Court, which is now in its third season. What makes “Divided Argument” stand out in the crowded field of popular legal commentary is its avoidance of a preaching-to-the-choir sensibility. Baude and Epps disagree on much, and often quite vigorously — Baude’s views tend to run conservative with a libertarian bent while Epps’ lean liberal — but they disagree in good faith and for intellectually honest reasons. These exchanges often illuminate the deeper set of beliefs and ideological tensions that shape how we see the law.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This term marks the first time in nearly 30 years that the court will be without Justice Stephen Breyer, and it’s Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first term. That doesn’t change the court’s ideological makeup, but are there subtler ways in which this change in personnel might affect the workings of the court?

Dan Epps: Justice Breyer is a justice from the last era, where the court was divided along some lines but reached consensus in other areas and wasn’t ideologically predictable. He was somebody who got along with the rest of the justices. Justice Jackson is joining the court at a very different time, where the court is much more ideologically riven. I don’t know what that’s going to feel like for her. But I could imagine, as you see the justices from the previous era drop off, that you’re going to see a court that’s more sharply divided and less “Oh, let’s all be buddy-buddy and get along” — and not just on the law but also how the justices relate to one another. I have no reason to think that she personally is going to contribute to this. It’s more about the timing and the circumstances.

Will Baude: Even when a justice who’s routinely in dissent leaves the court — so we don’t think of it as changing the balance of power — they still have decades and decades of both institutional memory and personal friendships that affect the way the court talks about the cases, thinks about things, goes about its business. So, I think that will change in lots of little ways how the justices relate to one another. Then you never know whether there’s going to be some set of issues where Justice Jackson has slightly heterodox views that might produce a new majority. You see Justice Gorsuch and Justice Sotomayor sometimes voting together in ways people might not have predicted.

This will be Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s second full term on the Court. How have you seen her jurisprudence or her role on the court evolve since she joined? What implications does that have for this coming term?

Epps: There’s been some weird stuff. Just a few days ago, there was the Alabama death penalty thing where she was actually in dissent with the liberal justices. That was interesting, though it’s an unsigned order without reasoning, so it’s hard to know exactly what to make of it.

Baude: At her confirmation hearing, there was this concern about a law review article she wrote about Catholic judges and the death penalty and whether it implied she was going to be to anti-death penalty. Maybe that’s actually true.

Among the cases the court has taken so far, do you see any themes emerging? How do those build on or depart from the court’s areas of focus in recent terms?

Epps: It’s too early to say. But if you frame it at a high level — the law in flux, the court turning more conservative — it seems like this term is likely to be a continuation of that. Still, every time there’s a change in personnel, it’s basically a new court. The configuration changes. The dynamics change. And we’re still figuring that out.

Baude: The center of the court has changed a little bit. That means there’s a lot of cases that suddenly a lot of people don’t want to take to the court, and there are other issues where other people suddenly do want to go to the court. So, you see action on voting rights and Indian law, and of course the affirmative action cases.

One area of public focus so far is voting and election matters before the court this coming term. In Merrill v. Milligan, critics fear the justices will make it harder for plaintiffs to show that a redistricting plan dilutes the votes of racial minorities, and in Moore v. Harper, they fear the court will limit how much state constitutions and courts can check state legislatures when they enact laws that govern federal elections. Do you have a sense for where the court is heading here?

Epps: With a lot of what the court is doing, there is a pretty wide range of possible outcomes. There are some justices who seem to be interested in doing fairly consequential things in the voting rights — or lack thereof — space. But that’s also not guaranteed, so it’s very unclear.

Baude: I see these cases as a microcosm of the pattern at the court more generally. As for Merrill, we have a well-established doctrine for interpreting the Voting Rights Act, but it’s not particularly consistent with some methodological principles of this court, which is more skeptical of legislative history, more skeptical of race-conscious laws and so on. So, it’s a little unsurprising they’re going to reconsider that, and maybe dramatically. As for Moore, there’s an incredibly long, well-established practice of state legislatures being subject to their state constitutions. But that’s in tension with the constitutional text, which refers specifically to a state’s “legislature” regulating congressional elections. It’s very possible the court is going to upset that practice — either a little bit or a lot. So, we’re seeing the same willingness here as in lots of other areas of law to reconsider long-established doctrines. But the additional problem is that these are going to put the court’s legitimacy and appearance of neutrality to the test, because there’s a good chance these cases will be seen — not necessarily fairly — as part of a right-wing plot to steal America. That’s obviously a tough spot for the court to be in.

Speaking of appearances, the last term was a controversial one to say the least. Decisions like Dobbs and Bruen generated a lot of criticism, and the public approval of the court is lower than it’s been in decades — though, of course, those same rulings were cheered by many conservatives. You both clerked on the court. In your experience, to what extent do public reaction and concerns about appearances affect the justices?

Epps: Some of them definitely don’t care at all. The question is, how many — five or fewer? I don’t hear a lot of stories about, and I didn’t experience, justices saying, “Oh, gosh, this is going to make us look so bad.” But you’ve got to think that they’re all aware of it to some degree. There’s certainly good reason to think that historically the broad parameters of public opinion have imposed some restraints on what the court felt comfortable doing.

Baude: The justices are human beings in the world, so I suspect they can’t help but be influenced by these things. But I tend to think they’re influenced by them gradually and at the macro level. In any event, my prediction is regression to the mean, because not every term can have an above-average number of big, polarizing cases. After every June, it’s tempting to draw big conclusions about the direction of the court on the basis of two or five or 10 big decisions, and, of course, we all do that. But it’s easy to over-predict.

What cases that the court has agreed to hear this term have received less attention than they deserve?

Baude: It’s surprising there hasn’t been more attention to the court’s case about the Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law on how state family law treats Native American children. The case has three or four major constitutional questions about the fundamental structure of federal Indian law. It raises federalism questions about the source of Congress’ power over Indian tribes and the ability to force states to implement federal policies. It also raises questions that go to the fabric of the whole field, such as whether regulations of Indians or Indian tribes are a form of race discrimination. Those are obviously important in their own right and also important for what they tell us about the court’s approach to big constitutional law cases more generally.

Epps: I’ll rest on Will’s submission.

What cases that the court hasn’t yet agreed to hear are you keeping an eye on?

Baude: I certainly think the court is about to wade into the constitutionality of the Texas and Florida social media laws, which impose limits on content moderation. The Florida law was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but the Texas law was upheld by another federal appeals court, the 5th Circuit. The court has already shown some interest in these cases.

Epps: I’m sure people are wondering whether there’s going to be something new related to the ongoing investigation of President Donald Trump that will work its way to the court. I’m not sure that the special master issue is going to. It seems like the 11th Circuit smacked that down, but potentially other things like that could pop up.

Baude: If the case proceeds to the point of criminal charges against a former president, it’s easy to imagine the court feeling it has to be the one to settle it, even if the issues aren’t that thorny. It’s an unusual enough thing, and the court is still one of our more legitimate institutions.

Much remains unknown about the leak of the draft majority opinion in Dobbs. But how do you foresee it affecting the workings of the court?

Epps: You’ve got to think there are going to be some changes to internal procedures. I don’t know what those are going to look like — whether they’re going to involve physical searches when people leave the building or they’re just going to involve individual justices telling their clerks to be more secretive. Related to that, you’ve got to think there’s going to be a little bit more of a culture of distrust and anxiety in the building. I’ve got to think that’s going to change the atmosphere and the day-to-day of what it’s like to work there.

Baude: It’s also possible that this will pass. After Bush v. Gore, quite a few law clerks breached confidences and talked to the press. A few years later, everybody recognized that was a once-in-a-generation case, and what happened there wasn’t going to become the new normal for everything. It could be that Dobbs was a once-in-a-generation case.

You were both involved in President Joe Biden’s commission on Supreme Court reform, which was prompted by calls from the political left to expand the number of justices. Professor Baude, you were a commissioner; Professor Epps, you testified before the commission. The commission issued a nearly 300-page report late last year, and you all dedicated a fascinating episode of “Divided Argument” to broader reflections on the commission. Looking forward, where do you see the debate over court reform going?

Epps: It’s not going away, and I think decisions like Dobbs are going to ensure that it doesn’t go away. There was a poll that came out about five days ago — and it’s just one poll — but it said 51% of respondents favored increasing the size of the court, which is a lot more than in prior polls. That’s coupled with significantly reduced public approval for the court. In that environment — if you get to a point where a majority of Americans favor court expansion, court packing — the conversation changes dramatically. We are far from the fringes at that point, and it’s something that you’re going to see even more politicians thinking about.

Baude: One funny thing is that you don’t see a huge amount more confidence in Congress and the presidency than you do in the court. When court reform is most likely is when you have an incredibly popular Congress with a huge mandate and a court with much less of a mandate getting in Congress’ way. We’re closer to a point where none of our institutions are popular or have a mandate, which doesn’t mean court reform is not possible or maybe even good. But it’s a very different environment.

pins on iran map

Iranian women have been rebelling against restrictions since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 – with renewed hope that protests this time will end differently

Pardis Mahdavi, The University of Montana

Shouts of “death to the dictator” and “woman, life, freedom” are reverberating throughout the streets of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, while in custody of the “morality police” in Tehran.

These protests have echoes from past resistance movements. For the past two decades I have been studying gender and sexual politics in post-revolutionary Iran through on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork. For some 40 years following the Feb. 11, 1979, Iranian Revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and overthrew the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, people have been rising up against the brutality of the regime in both urban and rural areas.

Today, these protests have been gaining increased momentum and international attention, giving many Iranians inside and outside of Iran some glimmers of hope.

Islamists’ resistance to westernization

Support for the Revolution grew out of many Iranians’ desire to bring equality and democracy to Iran. They criticized the monarchy as being overly deferential to the United States and were frustrated with increasing gaps between rich and poor.

The Islamists were most critical of westernization, which they saw as violating Islamic tenets and leading Iranians morally astray. They vowed to return Iran to Iranians and to re-center Iranian culture.

To do so, the Islamist regime juxtaposed its rule with everything that it believed to be wrong about “the West.” At the top of the list of critiques was what the regime viewed as loose morals. These loose morals were exemplified in the consumption of alcohol and women’s wearing miniskirts and heavy makeup and flaunting their hair and curves of their bodies in public.

As Khomeini ushered in the Islamists to power, a new era of austerity was born. Khomeini replaced the shah’s brutal police squad, SAVAK, with an equally if not more brutal Revolutionary Guard and created a new unit referred to as the “morality police.”

This era is perhaps best exemplified in the Khomeini quote that was painted across buildings and billboards in Tehran: “The Islamic Republic is not about fun, it is about morality. There is no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Controlling women’s fertility

Alongside the changes at home, Khomeini also engaged the country in a decadelong war with its neighbor Iraq.

Worried about the rising death toll coming out of the Iranian Revolution, combined with increasing numbers of soldiers needed for the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamists realized that they would need to increase their population quickly, according to demographic researchers. Thus, in the 1980s Khomeini instituted a series of policies in Iran to encourage families to have more children.

As a result, the birth rate in Iran in the 1980s swelled to an average of 3.5 children per family, up 30% from the prior decade.

A decade later, the Islamists realized that the population boom would need government support. Infrastructure would have to be strengthened and jobs created. The government did a complete turnaround and replaced its policy with family planning messages broadcast on the radio and television encouraging families to have fewer children. Sex education courses and free family planning resources were required for all couples who wished to be married. By 1994 the number of women using family planning was up 30% from 1989.

When the new millennium was ushered in, fully two-thirds of the country’s population was under the age of 21. These young people were born into the Islamic Republic of Iran that Khomeini and the Islamists had created: Women were told to wear long black cloaks from head to toe, covering every inch and curve of their bodies; the most brutal people were members of the morality police, watching every move and any strands of hair that escaped covering. If young people were found holding hands, attending a party or reading a book, they were deemed immoral by the whims of a mercurial regime.

This generation had never known the supposed opulence of the monarchy. And as its members became more frustrated and more educated, the critiques of Iran’s past drilled into them by the Islamists made less sense.

Challenging the morality police

Mohammad Khatami, who took over as president in August 1997, sought to harmonize Islamic rule with the needs of a changing population and a modernizing world.

Young people, who formed the majority of the population, had found their voice. They began challenging the morality police by pushing their headscarves back millimeter by millimeter, holding hands in public and organizing spontaneous street gatherings.

Between 2000 and 2007, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan and Mashad, following what young people referred to as Iran’s Sexual Revolution. The resisters demanded a more democratic regime focused on solving issues like unemployment and infrastructure challenges rather than on policing their bodies. During my research in Iran on sexual and social movements, I also had several run-ins with the morality police and experienced their brutality firsthand.

These young people’s revolution was fought through the language of morality using their bodies, their choices in outerwear, makeup and hairstyles. They defied the morality police by sliding their headscarves back, wearing layers of makeup and eye-catching outerwear, dancing in the streets and holding hands or kissing in public.

The government responded by cracking down and tightening its grip on the moral behavior of young people. Increased raids and public floggings were meant to send a strong message. But young people persisted in their resistance.

In 2005, when conservative candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, the sexual revolution came under heightened threat.

Unlike his predecessor, Ahmadinejad had no interest in finding ways to work with the growing youth population of Iran or in more progressive interpretations of Islam. He ordered the morality police to crack down on young people, raiding homes and parties and arresting women on the streets who dared to violate Islamist rules. Public floggings increased, as did arrests of scholars, feminists and journalists. The conservatives wanted to send a message.

The emboldened young revolutionaries continued pushing for change. These movements came to a head in 2009 when, despite not receiving the popular vote, Ahmadinejad was reelected as president.

Led by the same young people who resisted the morality police during the sexual revolution, a new movement was born in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 elections. This was called the “Sabze,” or Green Movement. People took to the streets of Iran chanting “where is my vote?” and “not my president.”

A catalyzing moment for this movement was the chilling murder of Neda Agha-Soltan. She was killed in June 2009 simply for being at one of demonstrations where one of the bloodiest clashes between protesters, the Revolutionary Guard and the morality police took place. Her death was captured on film and shared with the world.

On the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution in 2019, the streets of Iran were once again filled with resisters, many of whom had participated in street protests since the early 2000s. These same children of the revolution and Iran-Iraq war organized efforts such as #MyStealthyFreedom that featured women photographing themselves without headscarves in public in Iran and joining the global #MeToo movement.

Demanding accountability

By 2019 disenchantment with the regime had spread from the highly educated young people in the urban centers to even many of the most religiously devout families in some rural areas who had been previous supporters of the regime.

Iranians of all backgrounds facing rising oil prices and unemployment as a result of years of sanctions were increasingly losing faith in their government. Many no longer subscribed to the rhetoric about restoring moral order.

Today’s street protests are taking place in more than 50 cities throughout the country and have drawn the attention and support of the international community. These protests are both a refrain of past protests as well as a renewal of courage and hope.

As in the past, since Sept. 16, 2022, activists are taking to the streets to challenge a regime steeped in a rhetoric of harshly interpreted morality rather than governing with the best intentions of the people. And as in the protests of 2009 and 2019, they are calling for accountability of the government’s shortcomings, as well as highlighting the poverty that rages throughout the country – along with the pain of the people.

^^^

Pardis Mahdavi, Provost and Executive Vice President, The University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

black and white whale jumping on water

The evolution of whales from land to sea

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By Amber Dance

9.16.2022

Around 400 million years ago, the ancestor of all four-limbed creatures took its first steps onto dry land. Fast-forward about 350 million years, and a descendant of these early landlubbers did an about-face: It waded back into the water. With time, the back-to-the sea creatures would give rise to animals vastly different from their land-trotting kin: They became the magnificent whales, dolphins and porpoises that glide through the oceans today.

Going back to being aquatic was a drastic move that would change the animals inside and out, in the space of about 10 million years — an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. Members of this group, now called cetaceans, dropped their hind limbs for powerful flukes and lost nearly all their hair. For decades, their bizarre body plans perplexed paleontologists, who speculated they might have arisen from creatures as varied as marine reptiles, seals, marsupials like kangaroos and even a now-extinct group of wolf-like carnivores. 

“The cetaceans are on the whole the most peculiar and aberrant of mammals,” one scientist wrote in 1945.

Then, in the late 1990s, genetic data confirmed that whales were part of the same evolutionary line that spawned cows, pigs and camels — a branch called Artiodactyla. Fossils from modern-day India and Pakistan later fleshed out that family tree, identifying the closest ancient relatives of cetaceans as small, wading deer-like creatures.

But their body plans are just the start of cetaceans’ weirdness. To survive in the sea, they also had to make internal modifications, altering their blood, saliva, lungs and skin. Many of those changes aren’t obvious in fossils, and cetaceans aren’t easily studied in the lab. Instead it was, once again, genetics that brought them to light.

With an increasing availability of cetacean genomes, geneticists can now look for the molecular changes that accompanied the back-to-water transition. While it’s impossible to be certain about the influence of any particular mutation, scientists suspect that many of the ones they see correspond to adaptations that allow cetaceans to dive and thrive in the deep blue sea.

Diving into the depths

The first cetaceans lost a lot more than legs when they went back to the water: Entire genes became nonfunctional. In the vast of book of genetic letters that make up a genome, these defunct genes are among the easiest changes to detect. They stand out like a garbled or fragmented sentence, and no longer encode a full protein.

Such a loss could happen in two ways. Perhaps having a particular gene was somehow detrimental for cetaceans, so animals that lost it gained a survival edge. Or it could be a “use it or lose it” situation, says genomicist Michael Hiller of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. If the gene had no purpose in the water, it would randomly accumulate mutations and the animals would be no worse off when it didn’t function anymore.

Hiller and colleagues dove into the back-to-water transition by comparing the genomes of four cetaceans — dolphin, orca, sperm whale and minke whale — with those of 55 terrestrial mammals plus a manatee, a walrus and the Weddell seal. Some 85 genes became nonfunctional when cetaceans’ ancestors adapted to the sea, the team reported in Science Advances in 2019. In many cases, Hiller says, they could guess why those genes became defunct.

For example, cetaceans no longer possess a particular gene — SLC4A9 — involved in making saliva. That makes sense: What good is spit when your mouth is already full of water?

Cetaceans also lost four genes involved in the synthesis of and response to melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep. The ancestors of whales probably discovered pretty quickly that they couldn’t surface to breathe if they shut off their brains for hours at a time. Modern cetaceans sleep one brain hemisphere at a time, with the other hemisphere staying alert. “If you don’t have the regular sleep as we know it anymore, then you probably do not need melatonin,” says Hiller.

The long periods of time that whales must hold their breath to dive and hunt also seem to have spurred genetic changes. Diving deep, as scuba divers know, means little bubbles of nitrogen can form in the blood and seed clots — something that was probably detrimental to early cetaceans. As it happens, two genes (F12 and KLKB1) that normally help kick off blood clotting are no longer functional in cetaceans, presumably lowering this risk. The rest of the clotting machinery remains intact so whales and dolphins can still seal up injuries.

Another lost gene — and this one surprised Hiller — encodes an enzyme that repairs damaged DNA. He thinks this change has to do with deep dives as well. When cetaceans come up for a breath, oxygen suddenly floods their bloodstreams, and as a result, so do reactive oxygen molecules that can break DNA apart. The missing enzyme — DNA polymerase mu — normally repairs this kind of damage, but it does so sloppily, often leaving mutations in its wake. Other enzymes are more accurate. Perhaps, Hiller thinks, mu was just too sloppy for the cetacean lifestyle, unable to handle the volume of reactive oxygen molecules produced by the constant diving and resurfacing. Dropping the inaccurate enzyme and leaving the repair job to more accurate ones that cetaceans also possess may have boosted the chances that oxygen damage was repaired correctly.

Cetaceans aren’t the only mammals that returned to the water, and the genetic losses in other aquatic mammals often parallel those in whales and dolphins. For example, both cetaceans and manatees have deactivated a gene called MMP12, which normally degrades the stretchy lung protein called elastin. Maybe that deactivation helped both groups of animals develop highly elastic lungs, allowing them to quickly exhale and inhale some 90 percent of their lungs’ volume when they surface.

Deep-diving adaptations aren’t all about loss, though. One conspicuous gain is in the gene that carries instructions for myoglobin, a protein that supplies oxygen to muscles. Scientists have examined myoglobin genes in diving animals from tiny water shrews all the way up to giant whales, and discovered a pattern: In many divers, the surface of the protein has a more positive charge. That would make the myoglobin molecules repel each other like two north magnets. This, researchers suspect, allows diving mammals to maintain high concentrations of myoglobin without the proteins glomming together, and thus high concentrations of muscle oxygen when they dive.

Pathogen pressure

Early cetaceans faced another challenge when they started swimming: billions of tiny germs. Compared with air, aquatic habitats are a funky stew of viruses, bacteria and other pathogens that try to sneak into whales’ bodies through their skin and lungs. “It’s a living environment,” says Nathan Clark, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “Everything facing the external environment is getting hit harder by pathogens.” He thinks those sea-germs spurred genetic changes affecting the skin and lungs of mammals that returned to the sea.

Clark and colleagues found these skin and lung alterations when they examined the DNA of cetaceans, sirens (manatees and dugongs), and pinnipeds (seals, walruses and sea lions). They looked for cases where, in all the aquatic mammals, a certain gene seemed to have accumulated DNA changes more rapidly, or more slowly, than the same gene in terrestrial mammals. That pattern would tell them that a gene was under strong evolutionary pressure as the aquatic creatures adapted to the ocean.

The researchers reported in 2016 that they found hundreds of genes that showed just this pattern in members of these three different aquatic groups. Genes under such dialed-up evolutionary pressure included ones that code for proteins in the skin, and a gene encoding the liquid surfactant that coats the inside of the lungs. It’s difficult to know exactly how those genetic changes altered the animals’ physiology for the better, but protection from germs is Clark’s best guess.

Not surprisingly, then, genes of the immune system also changed when cetaceans went back underwater. In fact, that’s a common evolutionary pattern, says Andrea Cabrera, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen who coauthored a 2021 perspective on genetics and cetacean evolution in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “Every time you change environment, you have to adapt to the new composition of pathogens and microbes,” Cabrera says. Scientists in China even discovered that the dolphin version of a particular sensor for bacteria is less efficient at responding to land-based germs than its counterpart protein from cows.

When Clark screened specifically for genes that were lost when cetaceans, sirenians and pinnipeds went back to the water, his No. 1 hit was a gene called PON1. The function of the protein it encodes isn’t entirely understood, but Clark suspects that deactivating it protected cetaceans from inflammation that would otherwise occur when they held their breaths for a long time.

Deactivating the PON1  gene was all well and good when cetaceans first slipped back into the sea. But today, a functional PON1  gene might come in handy. In mammals, it encodes the primary enzyme that can degrade toxic organophosphate pesticides. Insects lack  PON1, so they’re susceptible; we humans and other land mammals are somewhat protected. “If these marine mammals are missing it, if they’re hanging out near agricultural runoff and canals like manatees do, it could be a concern,” Clark says.

Sensory systems

Clark and other scientists have also observed a big reduction in functional cetacean genes for smell — by nearly 80 percent among toothed whales, in one study — and for taste. Terrestrial mammals have hundreds of olfactory receptors that allow them to distinguish a panoply of odors, but the receptors work in air, not water. (They’re different from the underwater sensory systems that fish such as sharks use.)

Presumably, cetaceans weren’t getting any benefit from the receptors, so they lost them. This squares with changes in anatomy. Baleen whales such as humpbacks have very reduced olfactory structures, and toothed whales such as orcas have none at all. And it seems that taste isn’t so useful, either, if you’re swallowing dinner whole. Cetaceans no longer possess the genes to sense sour, sweet, umami or most bitter tastes.

They aren’t the only ones with such a bland experience of seafood. Other marine mammals, and even non-mammals, that returned to water experienced similar genetic losses. Penguins have fewer intact olfactory receptor genes than other water birds, and their taste receptor genes suggest they’ve lost the ability to sense sweet, bitter and umami, leaving them with nothing but sour and salty. Takushi Kishida, an evolutionary geneticist at the Museum of Natural and Environmental History in Shizuoka, Japan, has even found that sea snakes lost several olfactory receptor genes when they wriggled back into the water.

Not only is there no way to smell in the deep, but it’s dark. So it’s no surprise that cetaceans changed some genes for vision, too. Most mammal eyes have light sensors called rods for low-light, colorless vision, plus two kinds of cones, one for green light and one for blue light. (Humans have a bonus cone for red.) As cetaceans evolved, the gene for the rod sensors morphed to be more sensitive to blue light — perfect for the inky blue deep. Then there were several instances when the animals lost one or both cones. Some cetaceans, like belugas and orcas, still retain the blue cones. Others, such as sperm whales, have neither cone and, thus, fully monochromatic vision.

Scientists know they are only just beginning to plumb the genetic depths of cetacean evolution. Now, with dozens of cetacean genomes available to study, and with new analytic techniques under development, they are poised to further probe the aquatic transition, along with other exciting moments in cetacean evolutionary history. Dolphins alone offer a wealth of questions: How did they diversify into so many types? They make up nearly half of cetacean species today. How did they and other toothed whales pick up the skill of echolocation, navigating the ocean via sound? And how did dolphin brains get so large, with a brain-to-body-size ratio to rival that of great apes?

“Most of the important problems,” says Kishida, “are still unsolved.”

10.1146/knowable-091522-1

Amber Dance, a contributing writer to Knowable Magazine, enjoys snorkeling but has no desire to become any more aquatic than that.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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brown hamster eating a green leaf

The Trouble With Guinea Pigs: Council Sitting on Bill to Ban Sales of Fluffy Rodent as Pets

Katie Honan, The City

This article was originally published on Sep 13 5:00am EDT by THE CITY

The City Council is dragging its paws on a bill that would ban the sale of guinea pigs, as local shelters have been inundated with the four-legged pets in the pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter.

The city’s pet shelters have been overrun with the rodents, with the number being surrendered by owners more than doubling since 2019, according to Animal Care Centers of NYC data. 

Some 600 guinea pigs have been brought to city-funded animal shelters so far this year. Just 282 were brought during the same time period in 2019.

Last year, 481 piggies were surrendered between Jan. 1 and Sept. 12, data shows. 

“We’re really, really struggling,” Katy Hansen, a spokeswoman for ACC, told THE CITY.

She added that the organization hoped a hearing on the bill would happen swiftly so it could eventually get a vote — and offer some relief to shelters.

“We can’t wait much longer,” she said. 

So far, 34 out of the 51 members of the Council have signed on to the bill introduced in February by Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Manhattan/Bronx) — the number that qualifies as a supermajority. A hearing is required within 60 days after reaching a supermajority in Council, but that has not been scheduled, officials said.

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The delay is partially related to Speaker Adrienne Adams’ skittishness around any animal-related hearing as activists continue to push for a ban on horse-drawn carriages, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. 

A spokesperson for the speaker said the bill is going through the legislative process and declined to comment on the holdup.

Ayala told THE CITY there’s been a backlog of bills because more than 1,000 pieces of legislation needed new chief sponsors when their previous ones left City Council. Staff shortages at Council also created a delay.

Ayala expects a hearing to be held in the fall, however. “It’s an important bill,” she said.  

‘So Many Pregnant Piggies’

Guinea pigs are often sold by national chain stores like Petco and PetSmart for less than $50 —- and are often impulse buys, according to Hansen and other animal rescuers. 

It’s difficult to determine the sex of a guinea pig — the domestic version of the South American cavia — without a sonogram, so oblivious owners often pair a male and female thinking they’re single-sex, they said.

ACC and others noted there are just two known veterinarians in New York City who have the skills to spay and neuter guinea pigs. Each surgery can cost between $400 and $515.

“We see so many pregnant piggies, it’s not even funny,” said Juli Cialone, who runs Rock n’ Rescue in Westchester.

Her group works closely with ACC on rescuing and fostering guinea pigs, needs that were amplified by the pandemic, Cialone said.

“COVID came and everybody was like, ‘Let’s get a guinea pig because we’re inside and we don’t want to go outside,’” she said. 

“People just think they’re cute and fluffy, [but] they scoot and they don’t want to be touched,” Cialone added. “The challenge is people end up getting bored with them.”

Guinea pigs are sometimes left abandoned in parks or on the streets, left to fend for themselves, she said. 

“When you dump a guinea pig at a park, you’re setting them up to die,” Allie Taylor, the president of Voters for Animal Rights, a Bushwick-based advocacy nonprofit, told THE CITY.

Her organization worked with ACC to drum up support within Council for the bill.

“They’re not going to be able to survive on their own, they’re going to get eaten by predators,” she added. 

If passed, the bill could take some of the pressure off of the city’s animal shelters, which would still be able to make guinea pigs available to adopt.

There, the animals are always spayed or neutered, and ACC provides help and information on how to best raise them, according to Hansen. 

Representatives for the large chain pet stores did not respond to emails seeking comment. 

Unwelcome Critters

Earlier this year, the state legislature passed the “Puppy Mill Pipeline” bill, which would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits from stores. It is still awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature.

The city already banned the sale of rabbits from shops in 2014.

In 1999, New York City made the possession of ferrets illegal after the health department declared them carriers of rabies and prone to committing “vicious, unprovoked attacks.” 

There haven’t been any reports of guinea pig attacks, but these wanted, then unwanted rodents are multiplying rapidly.

“It’s just a matter of getting a hearing,” said Taylor. “This is something that’s fixable.” 

^^^

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth II: a moderniser who steered the British monarchy into the 21st century

Sean Lang, Anglia Ruskin University

When the late historian Sir Ben Pimlott embarked on his 1996 biography, his colleagues expressed surprise that he should consider Queen Elizabeth II worthy of serious study at all. Yet Pimlott’s judgement proved sound and, if few academics have followed his lead, the political role of the monarchy has received thoughtful treatment in the creative arts.

Stephen Frears’s 2006 film, The Queen, showed her dilemma after the death of Princess Diana; Peter Morgan’s stage play The Audience showed the monarch’s weekly meetings with her prime ministers. And she has been shown in a generally positive and sympathetic light by both Netflix’s acclaimed drama series The Crown and even in Mike Bartlett’s speculative play King Charles III, about the difficulty her heir would have in filling her shoes.

Elizabeth’s reign was a delayed result of the abdication crisis of 1936, the defining royal event of the 20th century. Edward VIII’s unexpected abdication thrust his shy, stammering younger brother Albert onto the throne as King George VI. Shortly thereafter he was thrust into the role of figurehead for the nation through the second world war.

The war was the most important formative experience for his elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Her experience as a car mechanic with the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s army service) meant that she could legitimately claim to have participated in what has been called “the people’s war”.

The experience gave her a more naturally common touch than any of her predecessors had displayed. When, in 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten – who became Duke of Edinburgh (and died in April 2021 at the age of 99) – her wedding was seized on as an opportunity to brighten a national life still in the grip of post-war austerity and rationing.

Elizabeth II inherited a monarchy whose political power had been steadily ebbing away since the 18th century but whose role in the public life of the nation seemed, if anything, to have grown ever more important. Monarchs in the 20th century were expected both to perform ceremonial duties with appropriate gravity and to lighten up enough to share and enjoy the tastes and interests of ordinary people.

The Queen’s elaborate coronation in 1953 achieved a balance of both these roles. The ancient ceremony could be traced to the monarchy’s Saxon origins, while her decision to allow it to be televised brought it into the living rooms of ordinary people with the latest modern technology. Royal ceremonial was henceforth to be democratically visible, ironically becoming much better choreographed and more formal than it had ever been before.

The Queen went on to revolutionise public perceptions of the monarchy when, at the urging of Lord Mountbatten and his son-in-law, the television producer Lord Brabourne, she consented to the 1969 BBC film Royal Family. It was a remarkably intimate portrayal of her home life, showing her at breakfast, having a barbecue at Balmoral and popping down to the local shops.

Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales the same year, another royal television event, was followed in 1970 by the Queen’s decision during a visit to Australia and New Zealand to break with protocol and mix directly with the crowds who had come out to see her. These “walkabouts” soon became a central part of any royal visit.

The highpoint of the Queen’s mid-reign popularity came with the 1977 Silver Jubilee celebrations, which saw the country festooned in red, white and blue at VE Day-style street parties. It was followed in 1981 by the enormous popularity of the wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.

Testing times

The following decades proved much more testing. Controversy in the early 1990s about the Queen’s exemption from income tax forced the Crown to change its financial arrangements so it paid like everyone else. Gossip and scandal surrounding the younger royals turned into divorces for Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and – most damagingly of all – Prince Charles. The Queen referred to 1992 – the height of the scandals – as her “annus horribilis”.

The revelations about the misery Princess Diana had endured in her marriage presented the public with a much harder, less sympathetic image of the royal family, which seemed vindicated when the Queen uncharacteristically miscalculated the public mood after Diana’s death in 1997. Her instinct was to follow protocol and precedent, staying at Balmoral and keeping her grandchildren with her.

This seemed hard and uncaring to a public hungry for open displays of emotion that would have been unthinkable in the Queen’s younger days. “Where is our Queen?” demanded The Sun, while the Daily Express called on her to “Show us you care!” insisting that she break with protocol and fly the Union Jack at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Never since the abdication had the popularity of the monarchy sunk so low.

Caught briefly on the back foot by this remarkable change in British public behaviour, the Queen soon regained the initiative, addressing the nation on television and bowing her head to Diana’s funeral cortege during a cleverly conceived and choreographed televised service. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5w0U_igM_hE?wmode=transparent&start=0

The extent to which she quickly regained public support was shown by the enormous, if unexpected, success of her 2002 Golden Jubilee, which was ushered in by the extraordinary sight of Brian May performing a guitar solo on the roof of Buckingham Palace. By the time London hosted the Olympics in 2012 she was sufficiently confident of her position to agree to appear in a memorable tongue-in-cheek cameo in the opening ceremony, when she appeared to parachute down into the arena from a helicopter in the company of James Bond. https://www.youtube.com/embed/1AS-dCdYZbo?wmode=transparent&start=0

Political sphere

Queen Elizabeth kept the crown above party politics, but she was always fully engaged with the political world. A firm believer in the Commonwealth, even when her own prime ministers had long lost faith in it, as its head she mediated in disputes between member states and provided support and guidance even to Commonwealth leaders who were strongly opposed to her own UK government.

Her prime ministers often paid tribute to her political wisdom and knowledge. These were the result both of her years of experience and of her diligence in reading state papers. Harold Wilson remarked that to attend the weekly audience unprepared was like being caught at school not having done your homework. It was widely believed that she found relations with Margaret Thatcher difficult.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh sometimes objected to the political use to which governments put them. In 1978 they were unhappy to be forced by the then foreign secretary, David Owen, to receive the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife as guests at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen could act to very positive effect in international relations, often providing the ceremonial and public affirmation of the work of her ministers. She established a good rapport with a string of American presidents, particularly Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, and her successful 2011 state visit to the Republic of Ireland, in which she astonished her hosts by addressing them in Gaelic, remains a model of the positive impact a state visit can have.

She was even able to put aside her personal feelings about the 1979 murder of Lord Mountbatten to offer a cordial welcome to the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, when he took office in 2007 as deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.

Only very occasionally and briefly did the Queen allow her own political views to surface. On a visit to the London Stock Exchange after the 2008 financial crash she asked sharply why nobody had seen it coming.

In 2014, her carefully worded appeal to Scots to think carefully about their vote in the Independence Referendum was widely – and clearly rightly – interpreted as an intervention on behalf of the Union. And in the run-up to the 2021 UN COP26 conference in Glasgow, from which she had to pull out on medical advice, she was overheard expressing irritation at the lack of political action on the climate change emergency.

Final years

As she approached her tenth decade, she finally began to slow down, delegating more of her official duties to other members of the royal family – even the annual laying of her wreath at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, while in May 2022 she delegated her most important ceremonial duty, the reading of the Speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament, to Prince Charles.

She retained her ability to rise to a crisis, however. In 2020, as the COVID pandemic descended, the Queen, in sharp contrast to her prime minister, addressed the nation from lockdown at Windsor in a calm, well-judged message. Her short address combined solidarity with her people with the reassurance that, in a conscious reference to Vera Lynn’s wartime hit, “We will meet again.” https://www.youtube.com/embed/2klmuggOElE?wmode=transparent&start=0

The decade also brought sadness. Her grandson, Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan Markle withdrew completely from royal duties, causing deep hurt to the royal family. This hurt was compounded when the Sussexes accused the royal family, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey which was watched around the world, of treating them with cruelty, disdain and even racism.

The shock of the interview was followed quickly by the death of Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years, a few months short of his 100th birthday. At his funeral, which was reduced in scale to meet the requirements of COVID regulations, the Queen cut an unusually lonely figure, small, masked and sitting alone. As her health declined in the months following his death, the deep impact of his loss became all too apparent.

The pain of the Sussexes’ estrangement from the royal family was heavily compounded by the disgrace soon afterwards of Prince Andrew, her second and, it was often suggested, her favourite son. His close involvement with the convicted American paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, led to the unedifying spectacle of a senior member of the royal family being accused in an American court of underage sex; he made his own position immeasurably worse by agreeing to a disastrous interview on the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight.

The Queen responded to the scandal with remarkable decisiveness: she stripped her son of all his royal and military titles, including the cherished “HRH”, and reduced him, in effect, to the status of a private citizen. Even her closest family were not to be allowed to undermine all she had done to protect and preserve the monarchy.

The remarkable success of her 2022 Platinum Jubilee was a sign of just how much she had retained the affections of her people; a particularly well-received highlight was a charming cameo performance showing her having tea with the children’s television character, Paddington Bear.

Apart from in dreams, in which she was often popularly supposed to appear, the Queen’s most regular contact with her subjects was in her annual Christmas message on television and radio. This not only reflected her work and engagements over the previous year, but it reaffirmed, with greater frankness and clarity than many of her ministers seemed able to summon, her deeply held Christian faith.

As head of the Church of England she was herself a Christian leader and she never forgot it. The Christmas message adapted over the years to new technology, but it was unchanging in style and content, reflecting the monarchy as she shaped it.

Under Elizabeth II, the British monarchy survived by changing its outward appearance without changing its public role. Republican critics of monarchy had long given up demanding its immediate abolition and accepted that the Queen’s personal popularity rendered their aim impracticable while she was still alive.

Elizabeth II, whose 70-year reign makes her the longest reigning monarch in British history, leaves her successor with a sort of British monarchical republic, in which the proportions of its ingredients of mystique, ceremony, populism and openness have been constantly changed in order to keep it essentially the same. It has long been acknowledged by political leaders and commentators all over the world that the Queen handled her often difficult and delicate constitutional role with grace and remarkable, even formidable, political skill.

Her wisdom and unceasing sense of duty meant she was widely viewed with a combination of respect, esteem, awe and affection, which transcended nations, classes and generations. She was immensely proud of Britain and its people, yet in the end she belonged to the world, and the world will mourn her passing.

^^^

Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image by Pixel2013/Pixabay.

an eagle flying in the sky

This July 4, Love America … in Spite of Everything

,

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, paved the way for more guns in the streets and ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the authority to … protect the environment. 

Inflation is spiraling out of control. 

America is powerless to stop the massacre of civilians in Ukraine. 

Texas is preparing a referendum to secede from the United States.

And new evidence shows that our last president is probably guilty of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government. 

This weekend, meanwhile, is July 4, and you are expected to celebrate being an American. 

Think about what all this catastrophe means. Take the EPA ruling: It means that if you care about the environment, the government of the United States of America doesn’t really have your back. The Second Amendment rights ruling: It means that more people will be carrying guns around in public, making it more likely that you or someone you love will be shot. The Hobby Lobby decision: It means that your boss can dictate what kind of health care you’re allowed to have. The decision on Roe? It tells us that our government believes that women’s reproductive rights are not a right after all. 

And all of these decisions were made by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court — a court that was only possible because Republicans took an unprecedented step and denied President Obama’s nominee to fill a vacancy an entire year before the election, insisting that the seat remain vacant until after voters had their say. 

In short: The government is not looking out for you. In fact, it seems like they’re doing everything they can to make your life harder. So why would you want to celebrate America this July 4?

America is still … Great-ish. Great-esque. Great-adjacent.

Now, here’s the thing: you can’t just not celebrate America on the Fourth of July. That’s un-American. But you can protest. You can use your voice and your vote to make it clear that this is not the America you want to live in. That’s what patriotism looks like in 2022. It’s not waving a flag; it’s fighting for the country you believe in. 

And if you’re not feeling very patriotic or proud of America this July 4, you’re not alone. In fact, you might be more American than ever.

It’s perfectly natural to feel disappointed and even angry when your country isn’t living up to its ideals. Patriotism doesn’t mean blindly supporting your country no matter what it does. True patriotism is holding your country accountable and demanding that it live up to its principles. 

But what are those principles? Does America really have any? 

Can we even agree on what they are? 

The answer is yes, we can. And that’s what makes us truly American.

American Ideals

Our country was founded on the idea that all people are created equal and deserve certain inalienable rights. These include the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

We also believe in freedom of speech, religion and the press; the right to a fair trial; and equality under the law. 

These are the principles that make America great. And it is patriotic to fight for these principles, even when our country isn’t living up to them.

What you can do

Here are some things you can do:

1. Remember that America is a work in progress. We’ve always been imperfect, and we always will be. But we’re also constantly striving to be better. So don’t give up on us just yet.

2. Focus on the good. Yes, there’s a lot of bad news out there. But there’s also a lot of good. There are people working hard every day to make America a better place. Find them and support them however you can.

3. Get involved yourself. Don’t just sit around complaining about how terrible everything is; you could be part of the solution. Volunteer for a local charity, run for office, join a protest. Whatever you do, make your voice heard.

4. Be thankful for what we do have. We may not have perfect health care or gun control or environmental protections, but we do have a lot of freedoms and rights that other countries don’t have. So be grateful for what we do have — and fight to make it even better.

5. Celebrate America’s diversity. One of the things that makes America great is our diversity. We’re a country of immigrants, of different races and religions and backgrounds. Embrace that diversity and use it to make America even stronger.

6. Use your Fourth of July barbecue as an opportunity to express the positive, to tell people what you love about America in spite of its flaws. And don’t forget the fireworks! Even in the darkest of times, they remind us that there’s always hope for a brighter tomorrow.

7. Finally, don’t give up. America has been through a lot in its two-plus centuries, and we’ve always come out stronger in the end. So keep fighting for the country you believe in — because it’s worth it.

What about … you know.

What about the Americans who don’t even seem to understand what America means? Those “Americans” make up around forty percent of the country. Are they really Americans?

The answer is that they are. Just like you can’t pick your family, you can’t pick your fellow Americans. You don’t have to love them. You can even hate them. You need to understand them, though. Because they are part of America, too.

So this Fourth of July, if you’re not feeling very patriotic, don’t worry. You’re still an American. You should celebrate America by fighting for her, for the America you believe in. Because that’s what true patriotism looks like. Fight for the principles that make her great. Never give up hope that one day she will live up to them, and use that to inspire you to make America even better. 

^^^

Content by Audere. Image by Pexels. 

people woman street new york

Supreme Court overturns Roe, upends 50 years of abortion rights: 5 essential reads on what happens next

Matt Williams, The Conversation

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion had been indicated via a leaked draft opinion some weeks ago, but that doesn’t diminish the impact it will have.

The ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, upends 50 years of reproductive rights in the U.S. but comes after a prolonged period in which those rights have been eroded at the state level.

It will have far-reaching implications for the social and political future of the states as well as for millions of American women. Here are five articles to help explain the importance of this decision and what to expect next.

1. The long history of debating abortion in the US

Despite the magnitude of this ruling, it is unlikely to end the debate on abortion. Indeed, as Treva B. Lindsey at The Ohio State University writes, the battle over the right to abortion predates 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling by more than a century.

She writes that in the early 1800s, “pre-quickening abortions” – those performed before a pregnant person feels fetal movement – were fairly common, and even advertised. But in the mid- to late 19th century, states began to pass laws banning abortion. Those bans were motivated, at first, by concerns over the high risk of injury or death to women who got an abortion.

But there was also a racist reason.

“A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated Black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion,” Lindsey writes. By the beginning of the 20th century, abortion was illegal in every state. But the women’s liberation movement and sexual revolution of the 1960s sparked renewed discussion about reproductive rights. Some states legalized abortion under specific circumstances. Then in 1973 came the Roe ruling.

2. 50 states, 50 different abortion laws

That long history of the states deciding whether to ban or legalize abortion is set to resume again after 50 years of women in the U.S. having a constitutional right to abortion guaranteed under Roe. Thirteen states, including Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, have so-called “trigger laws” that aim to restrict abortion as soon as Roe was overturned. But in others, the future of abortion rights is less clear and could take some time to work out.

Katherine Drabiak at the University of South Florida surveyed state abortion laws for The Conversation. With Roe now overturned, it appears that 20 states will ban or restrict abortions, while 20 states and the District of Columbia will protect – or even expand – a person’s ability to get a safe abortion. This leaves 10 states in which the picture is less clear. Load More