The Dutch Give Citizen Scientists Property Rights to the Fossils They Find

Holland has significant claim, along with England, to being a strong and early bastion of freedom. So it is fitting that today Holland’s institutions provide a sanctuary for the practice of citizen science. The article below notes that Dutch law gives citizen scientists property rights in the fossils they find. This gives them an incentive to seek fossils AND it gives them an incentive to share information about what they find. (If they did not have such property rights, they would have an incentive to hide the fossils so they would not be seized.)

Dick Moll is an entrepreneur, using some of his fossils as part of a Historyland theme park. His doing good through creative funding, reminds me of Martin Couney, who financed baby incubators for poor families, by displaying the incubators at theme park exhibits.

If academic scientists, instead of hiding behind their credentials, sought clever ways to recruit the eyes of curious citizen scientists, we could learn much more and learn it much more quickly. This would be easier if the values and methods of science were more empirical, more true to Galileo. Let everyone have a look in the telescope.

(p. C1) After scouring a beach in the harbor all morning in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a retired Dutch engineer, Cock van den Berg, had finally found something interesting: a polished black stone about the size of an acorn with two punctures, like finger holes in a bowling ball.

He held it out in the palm of his hand to show Dick Mol, an expert on ice age fossils.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Is it a mammoth tooth?”

Mol examined it for about 30 seconds and decided it was not. It was a molar from a prehistoric rhinoceros, he said.

. . .

(p. C6) Under Dutch law, beach combers who find fossils on Maasvlakte 2 are not required to report or submit them. They can take their finds home if they like, but they are encouraged to promote scientific research by voluntarily registering them with the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a national natural history museum and research center in the city of Leiden.

Using a website built by the port of Rotterdam authority and managed by Naturalis, amateur paleontologists can submit a photo and the GPS location of the find so that experts can help them identify it.

“In other countries, like Germany, fossils or anything related to paleontology are protected by the state, but that’s not the case in the Netherlands,” explained Isaak Eijkelboom, a Ph.D. student in paleontology at Naturalis who studies fossils found at Maasvlakte 2 and other locations.

But since trophy hunters don’t have to worry about losing their finds, he thinks they’re more likely to share their discoveries with the museum and collaborate with scientists.

“It allows us to practice citizen science,” Eijkelboom said.

For more than a decade, Naturalis has been using volunteers to gather information for its fossil database, which now lists more than 23,000 finds, he said.

“This is only possible because it’s so open, and so free,” Eijkelboom said. “In other places, when people find fossils, they end up in their closets and the knowledge is hidden away.”

Van den Berg, who discovered the rhinoceros molar, said he was excited to share it with Naturalis. A few years ago, he found a jaw part from a macaque monkey at Maasvlakte 2 and donated it to the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. The rare specimen, which scientists dated to 125,000 years ago, was described in three scientific papers, Mol said.

. . .

Mol joked that the “biggest mistake of van den Berg’s life” was donating the monkey jaw to the museum and not to Mol’s “Mammoth Lab” at Historyland, a museum and theme park that he helped establish in the town of Hellevoetsluis, about a 15-minute drive from the beach.

There, Mol, a retired airport customs official, has his own impressive collection of 55,000 ice age fossils. An autodidact who never attended university, Mol is nonetheless widely recognized as an international expert; in 2000, he was knighted in the Netherlands for his significant contributions to paleontology, and he was featured in Discovery Channel documentaries such as “Raising the Mammoth” and “Land of the Mammoth.”

. . .

In spite of a steady stream of beachcombers, Eijkelboom said there will still be plenty more fossils to find for a long time to come.

“In general, in paleontology, a lot of people say we’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Rising sea levels will require continued fortifications of the Dutch coastline, using North Sea sand deposits for quite some time to come, he added.

Although it is unfortunate that such action is needed to prevent humans from going extinct like the mammoth, he said, “at least there will be more and more beaches where we can hunt for ice age fossils.”

For the full story see:

Nina Siegal and Ilvy Njiokiktjien. “On the Hunt for Mammoths.” The New York Times (Weds., November 19, 2025): C1 & C6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 17, 2025, and has the title “A Day at the Beach Hunting Mammoths.”)

FDA Worked Better and Much Cheaper Before 1962 Expansion

Before 1962, the FDA regulated for drug safety, but not for drug efficacy. If the FDA returned to regulating only for safety, that would imply that Phase 3 randomized clinical trials would no longer be mandated. Phase 3 trials are usually more expensive than the Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials combined. They cost a lot more, and usually take a lot longer. If the FDA no longer mandate Phase 3 trials we will have more drug innovation, more quickly, and have much lower costs. And we will have more freedom.

(p. A13) From 1938 through 1962, the Food and Drug Administration required proof of safety before drug approval but not proof of efficacy. The approach was abandoned due to a significant misunderstanding of the thalidomide tragedy—when thousands of babies outside the U.S. were born with severe birth defects.

The issue with thalidomide was a failure of safety, not efficacy. But under pressure to react, Congress required, through the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962, proof of efficacy before granting marketing approval. The new rule addressed a problem that didn’t exist and, in doing so, imposed a substantial new cost burden.

Before 1962, developing a drug took about two years. Now it takes 12 to 14 years. Since 1975 real development costs have risen about 7.5% a year, roughly doubling every decade. Today, we estimate that bringing one successful drug to market costs about $9 billion on average.

For the full commentary, see:

Charles L. Hooper and Solomon S. Steiner. “Deregulation Can Make Medications Cheaper.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 18, 2025): A13.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 17, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Attia Makes Case for Optimism That Rapamycin Can Extend Human Lifespans

Dr. Peter Attia gives a clear summary of the state of knowledge about the promising supplement rapamycin. (The YouTube clip above, posted by 60 Minutes, is from the CBS 60 Minutes episode that first aired on Sun., Oct. 26, 2025.)

New Hampshire Unbinds Electric Entrepreneurs

The energy sector of the economy is both heavily regulated and much in need of innovation and expansion. Unfortunately the heavy regulation often blocks the innovation and expansion. Travis Fisher and Glen Lyons describe New Hampshire’s solution–a new law that greatly reduces regulations for electricity suppliers who do not connect to the broad “public” grid. Unbinding energy entrepreneurs should bring more innovation and greater competition–more electricity at lower prices.

Fisher and Lyons’s commentary is:

Travis Fisher and Glen Lyons. “New Hampshire Sparks a Revolution in Electricity Supply.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 27, 2025): A11.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 26, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Large Randomized Controlled Trial Finds Little Benefit in Free Money to Poor, Undermining Case for Universal Basic Income (UBI)

A variety of arguments have been made in support of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). I am most interested in the argument that says that technology will destroy the jobs of the worst off, and so for them to survive society would be justified in giving them a basic income. I do not believe that in a free society technological progress will on balance destroy the jobs of the worst off. If innovative entrepreneurs are free to innovate, especially in labor markets, they will find ways to employ the worst off.

Others have argued that giving a basic income to the worst off will make them better parents, measurable by better child outcomes in terms of language skills and better behavior and cognition. Several years ago these advocates setup a big, expensive randomized controlled trial to test their argument. The results? None of their hypotheses were supported. The passages quoted below are from a front page New York Times article in which they express their surprise, and for some, their incredulity.

(p. A1) If the government wants poor children to thrive, it should give their parents money. That simple idea has propelled an avid movement to send low-income families regular payments with no strings attached.

Significant but indirect evidence has suggested that unconditional cash aid would help children flourish. But now a rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being, a result that defied researchers’ predictions and could weaken the case for income guarantees.

After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development.

“I was very surprised — we were all very surprised,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine and one of six researchers who led the study, called Baby’s First Years. “The money did not (p. A15) make a difference.”

The findings could weaken the case for turning the child tax credit into an income guarantee, as the Democrats did briefly four years ago in a pandemic-era effort to fight child poverty.

. . .

Though an earlier paper showed promising activity on a related neurological measure in the high-cash infants, that trend did not endure. The new study detected “some evidence” of other differences in neurological activity between the two groups of children, but its significance was unclear.

While researchers publicized the earlier, more promising results, the follow-up study was released quietly and has received little attention. Several co-authors declined to comment on the results, saying that it was unclear why the payments had no effect and that the pattern could change as the children age.

For the full story see:

Jason DeParle. “Cash Stipends Did Not Benefit Needy Children.” The New York Times (Weds., July 30, 2025): A1 & A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 28, 2025, and has the title “Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development.”)

The academic presentation of the research discussed above, can be found in:

Noble, Kimberly, Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, Lisa A. Gennetian, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Nathan A. Fox, Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Sonya Troller-Renfree, Sangdo Han, Shannon Egan-Dailey, Timothy D. Nelson, Jennifer Mize Nelson, Sarah Black, Michael Georgieff, and Debra Karhson. “The Effect of a Monthly Unconditional Cash Transfer on Children’s Development at Four Years of Age: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the U.S.” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 33844, May 2025.

AI Cannot Know What People Think “At the Very Edge of Their Experience”

The passages quoted below mention “the advent of generative A.I.” From previous reading, I had the impression that “generative A.I” meant A.I. that had reached human level cognition. But when I looked up the meaning of the phrase, I found that it means A.I. that can generate new content. Then I smiled. I was at Wabash College as an undergraduate from 1971-1974 (I graduated in three years). Sometime during those years, Wabash acquired its first minicomputer, and I took a course in BASIC computer programming. I distinctly remember programming a template for a brief poem where at key locations I inserted a random word variable. Where the random word variable occurred, the program randomly selected from one of a number of rhyming words. So each time the program was run, a new rhyming poem would be “generated.” That was new content, and sometimes it was even amusing. But it wasn’t any good, and it did not have deep meaning, and if what it generated was true, it was only by accident. So I guess “the advent of generative A.I.” goes back at least to the early 1970s when Art Diamond messed around with a DEC.

This is not the main point of the passages quoted below. The main point is that the frontiers of human thought are not on the internet, and so cannot be part of the training of A.I. So whatever A.I. can do, it can’t think at the human “edge.”

(p. B3) Dan Shipper, the founder of the media start-up Every, says he gets asked a lot whether he thinks robots will replace writers. He swears they won’t, at least not at his company.

. . .

Mr. Shipper argues that the advent of generative A.I. is merely the latest step in a centuries-long technological march that has brought writers closer to their own ideas. Along the way, most typesetters and scriveners have been erased. But the part of writing that most requires humans remains intact: a perspective and taste, and A.I. can help form both even though it doesn’t have either on its own, he said.

“One example of a thing that journalists do that language models cannot is come and have this conversation with me,” Mr. Shipper said. “You’re going out and talking to people every day at the very edge of their experience. That’s always changing. And language models just don’t have access to that, because it’s not on the internet.”

For the full story see:

Benjamin Mullin. “Will Writing Survive A.I.? A Start-Up Is Betting on It.” The New York Times (Mon., May 26, 2025): B3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2025, and has the title “Will Writing Survive A.I.? This Media Company Is Betting on It.”)

If AI Takes Some Jobs, New Human Jobs Will Be Created

In the passage quoted below, Atkinson makes a sound general case for optimism on the effects of AI on the labor market. I would add to that case that many are currently overestimating the potential cognitive effectiveness of AI. Humans have a vast reservoir of unarticulated common sense knowledge that is not accessible to AI training. In addition AI cannot innovate at the frontiers of knowledge, not yet posted to the internet.

(p. A15) AI doomsayers frequently succumb to what economists call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the idea that there is a limited amount of work to be done, and if a job is eliminated, it’s gone for good. This fails to account for second-order effects, whereby the saving from increased productivity is recycled back into the economy in the form of higher wages, higher profits and reduced prices. This creates new demand that in turn creates new jobs. Some of these are entirely new occupations, such as “content creator assistant,” but others are existing jobs that are in higher demand now that people have more money to spend—for example, personal trainers.

Suppose an insurance firm uses AI to handle many of the customer-service functions that humans used to perform. Assume the technology allows the firm to do the same amount of work with 50% less labor. Some workers would lose their jobs, but lower labor costs would decrease insurance premiums. Customers would then be able to spend less money on insurance and more on other things, such as vacations, restaurants or gym memberships.

In other words, the savings don’t get stuffed under a mattress; they get spent, thereby creating more jobs.

For the full commentary, see:

Robert D. Atkinson. “No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 6, 2025): A15.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 5, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

When Portugal Is Too Hot, Move to England

When their current waters warm sea creatures often migrate to cooler waters. So just noticing the fewer creatures in the warmer waters will overestimate the harm done by the warming. In the article quoted below, when Mediterranean waters warm, Octopuses migrate to English waters. Mediterranean fishermen lose, English fishermen gain, but there is no clear net loss or gain to the Octopuses or to humanity in general.

This example supports my claim that we too often ignore the benefits of global warming.

(p. A4) Expecting his normal catch of plaice, turbot and Dover sole, Arthur Dewhirst was surprised when his nets spilled their contents onto his ship’s deck earlier this year. Instead of shiny, flapping fish, hundreds of octopuses wriggled and writhed.

His first thought? “Dollar signs! Dollar signs! Dollar signs!” he recalled with a laugh, sitting in his trawler last month in the harbor at Brixham in Devon, England.

Across England’s southern coast, fishing crews reported an extraordinary boom in octopus catches this summer. Sold for around 7 pounds a kilo, it was sometimes worth an extra £10,000 ($13,475) a week to Mr. Dewhirst, he said.

. . .

There are several theories about the causes of this puzzling phenomenon, but scientists say that warming water temperatures make the region more hospitable to this species of octopus, which is normally found off the Mediterranean coast.

According to Steve Simpson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Bristol, “climate change is a likely driver” of the population boom. “We are right on the northern limit of the octopus species range, but our waters are getting warmer, so our little island of Great Britain is becoming increasingly favorable for octopus populations,” he said.

For the full story see:

Stephen Castle. “Octopuses Bring Windfalls and Anxieties to England’s Southern Coast.” The New York Times (Tues., September 30, 2025): A4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2025, and has the title “Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’.”)

Do Not Ridicule Those Who Know How to Sew

15 years ago I ran a blog entry quoting Brian Fagan’s theory that we Homo sapiens (aka Cro-Magnons) outlasted the Neanderthals because we developed the sewing needle technology that allowed us to sew tighter fitting garments against the cold. Now added evidence elaborates and supports Fagan’s theory. Near the time when Neanderthals became extinct, the magnetic poles of the earth shifted over a few hundred years, allowing substantially more ultraviolet radiation to hit the earth than usual. With better-filling garments, due to sewing needles, Homo sapiens were better protected against that radiation.

The WSJ article summarizing the new research is:

Aylin Woodward. “New Light Shed on the Demise of Neanderthals.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Aug. 7, 2025): A3.

(Note: the online version of the NYT article has the date August 6, 2025, and has the title “Did UV Rays Doom Neanderthals?”)

The published academic paper summarized in The Wall Street Journal article mentioned and cited above is:

Mukhopadhyay, Agnit, Sanja Panovska, Raven Garvey, Michael W. Liemohn, Natalia Ganjushkina, Austin Brenner, Ilya Usoskin, Mikhail Balikhin, and Daniel T. Welling. “Wandering of the Auroral Oval 41,000 Years Ago.” Science Advances 11, no. 16 (April 16, 2025): eadq7275.