Photograph by Todd Shannon.

Not to detract from Mr. Shannon's photograph, but I rummaged around in my old files and found a snapshot I had taken of an adult lacewing, which I shall display below the fold.

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If I had not been familiar with Sinai and Synapses,* I might have dismissed this special issue of an obscure journal as yet another attempt to use science to rationalize religious beliefs. It is nothing of the kind. The entire issue consists of essays by Fellows who have been supported over the years by the Sinai and Synapses organization, about which I have said a few words below, in an Endnote. The Fellows are experts in their fields and mostly faculty at secular universities. All of them, I am certain, know what they are talking about.

The front matter contains helpful synopses of all the papers. Sometimes, I admit, the synopsis was all I wanted. I learned, however, that a second-century CE rabbi, Judah ha-Nasi, had noted that “pestilence” often transferred from pigs to humans, so Rabbi Judah recommended fasting whenever pigs suffered pestilence. I wondered why on earth such an influential rabbi would care one whit about pigs, so I naturally turned first to the article, “Zoonotic pandemics and Judaism’s early-modern turn to science,” by Jonathan Crane of Emory University. I was relieved to find that Rabbi Judah did not raise pigs, but he had nevertheless noted the similarity between pigs’ organs and humans’. More strikingly, he recognized that diseases could be contagious and could be transferred from pigs to humans. Rabbi Crane introduces us to later Talmudic scholars who, in addition to citing earlier scholars and relying on their expertise, adduced their own evidence and required confirmation. Specifically, medieval Jewish scholars such as Maimonides accepted the scientific knowledge of their day, and the early modern period found Jews embracing “exogenous knowledge as well as the emerging means to discover and develop it.” Rabbi Crane continues, “To be precise, scientific method and evidence matter when it comes to physical issues like medicine and public health.”

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I was looking at a post today at Uncommon Descent, wondering what strange interpretation they were going to make of this palaeoanthropology report from Smithsonian Magazine. On my browser, in the middle of the post there was an ad. I know that the UD site is not responsible for which ad gets put onto the page when I view it. In this case a bot seems to be responding to the word “footprint”.

The advertising bot appears to have decided that Graecopithecus needed relief for sore feet. It does not realize that 6 million years ago hominids did not have Amazon accounts.

I recently caught an interview with Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The interview, originally broadcast on KERA in Dallas, was moderated by Krys Boyd. Part of the purpose of the interview, obviously, was to sell his latest book, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation.

To get immediately to the point, Dr. Offit argues convincingly that there are no risk-free choices. If you choose not to be vaccinated, then you are choosing between the risk of contracting a deadly widespread disease (and, I might add, of infecting others) and the risk of suffering from a rare side effect. Why do people choose the common disease over the rare side effect? One reason, Dr. Offit claims, is that a sin of commission may be seen as a greater risk than a sin of omission, even if statistically it is not. Thus, you may feel guilt over a sin of commission but not over a sin of omission. Further, and equally regrettably, people see themselves and their children as invulnerable – “I am strong and healthy; it won’t happen to me” – and Dr. Offit attributes this kind of denialism to the unfortunate fact that the emotional centers evolved early, before what I shall call the thinking centers. He did not, according to my notes, discuss the political implications of refusing vaccination.

How safe are the Covid vaccines?

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