Two dark backgrounds

Steve Schwartzman

May 1

In yesterday's post you saw a Mexican hat flower head (Ratibida columnifera) in Great Hills Park on April 22nd. Near by I noticed the slender minimalist remains of a Mexican hat seed head, presumably left over from last year's crop because none of this year's had even finished its flowering stage yet, much less advanced to a seed head. Don't you think the remains might pass for some sort of lance from hundreds of years ago?

While in that area I also experimented with pictures of a greenthread bud (Thelesperma filifolium) lined up against the back of a fully open flower head beyond it. In both photographs flash led to dark backgrounds.

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A group of scholars recently wrote an article titled "In Defense of Merit in Science." As Bari Weiss explained in the Free Press on April 28th:

This paper's authors—hardly a group of unknowns—say they first tried to publish the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But the journal's editors reportedly advised them to remove the word "merit" from the title of the paper, which is simply titled: In Defense of Merit in Science. According to the journal's editorial board, "This concept of merit... has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow."

The authors ended up turning to the Journal of Controversial Ideas to get their article published. It's a sorry commentary on the degree to which identitarian ideology has now permeated even science that anyone would find the notion of merit controversial.

Here's the article's abstract:

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

You're welcome to read the full article.