Category: Books

Pasteur Saw That “Germs Were Everywhere in the Air”

The passages quoted below show how Pasteur respected his audience by finding a clear and compelling way to communicate that “germs” float in the air. The essay quoted below is adapted from Zimmer’s recently released Air-Borne book.

In other parts of Air-Borne, Zimmer discusses how the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. ignored the implications of the findings of Pasteur and others, relevant to the air-borne (aerosol) spread of diseases such as Covid-19.

(p. D8) On the evening of April 7, 1864, in an amphitheater filled with Parisian elites, Pasteur stood surrounded by lab equipment and a lamp to project images on a screen. He told the audience it would not leave the soiree without recognizing that the air was rife with invisible germs. “We can’t see them now, for the same reason that, in broad daylight, we can’t see the stars,” he said.

At Pasteur’s command, the lights went out, save for a cone of light that revealed floating motes of dust. Pasteur asked the audience to picture a rain of dust falling on every surface in the amphitheater. That dust, he said, was alive.

Pasteur then used a pump to drive air through a sterile piece of cotton. After soaking the cotton in water, he put a drop under a microscope. He projected its image on a screen for the audience to see. Alongside soot and bits of plaster, they could make out squirming corpuscles. “These, gentlemen, are the germs of microscopic beings,” Pasteur said.

Germs were everywhere in the air, he said — kicked up in dust, taking flights of unknown distances and then settling back to the ground, where they worked their magic of fermentation. Germs broke down “everything on the surface of this globe which once had life, in the general economy of creation,” Pasteur said.

“This role is immense, marvelous, positively moving,” he added.

The lecture ended with a standing ovation. Pasteur’s hunt for floating germs elevated him to the highest ranks of French science.

For the full essay see:

Zimmer, Carl. “He Showed That Germs Floated in Air.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 18, 2025): D8.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay was updated Feb. 18, 2025, and has the title “Louis Pasteur’s Relentless Hunt for Germs Floating in the Air.”)

Zimmer’s essay, quoted above, is adapted from his book:

Zimmer, Carl. Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. New York: Dutton, 2025.

“Effort Means That You Care About Something”

In my Openness book, I argue that we should allow each other the freedom to choose intensity over work-life balance. David Brooks is sometimes thought-provoking and eloquent, for instance in the passages quoted below where he defends intensity.

One question that Brooks discusses elsewhere in his essay is: how do you find your “passion,” your “misery,” your “vocation”? He tries but after reading his answers, I think the mystery mostly remains. The best answer to this question that I have found is in a book by John Chisholm called Unleash Your Inner Company. Chishom suggests that you should apply yourself to something worth doing, and work to do it better. If you do that, he suggests, you are likely to eventually find you increasingly care about what you are doing.

(p. 9) My own chosen form of misery is writing. Of course, this is now how I make a living, so I’m earning extrinsic rewards by writing. But I wrote before money was involved, and I’m sure I’ll write after, and the money itself isn’t sufficient motivation.

Every morning, seven days a week, I wake up and trudge immediately to my office and churn out my 1,200 words — the same daily routine for over 40 years. I don’t enjoy writing. It’s hard and anxiety-filled most of the time. Just figuring out the right structure for a piece is incredibly difficult and gets no easier with experience.

I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it.

We sometimes think humans operate by a hedonic or utilitarian logic. We seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We seek activities with low costs and high rewards. Effort is hard, so we try to reduce the amount of effort we have to put into things — including, often enough, the effort of thinking things through.

And I think we do operate by that kind of logic a lot of the time — just not when it comes to the most important things in our lives. When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.

. . .

. . . I have found that paradoxically life goes more smoothly when you take on difficulties rather than try to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid quests more stress often leads to more satisfaction, at least until you get to the highest levels. The psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

All this toil is not really about a marathon or a newspaper article or a well-stocked shelf at the grocery store. It’s about slowly molding yourself into the strong person you want to be. It’s to expand yourself through challenge, steel yourself through discipline and grow in understanding, capacity and grace. The greatest achievement is the person you become via the ardor of the journey.

. . .

So, sure, on a shallow level we lead our lives on the axis of pleasure and pain. But at the deeper level, we live on the axis between intensity and drift. Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.

For the full commentary see:

David Brooks. “A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sun., March 30, 2025): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 27, 2025, and has the same title as the print version. The first couple of paragraphs quoted above appear in the longer online version, but not in the shorter print version, of the commentary. In the third quoted paragraph, the words “like” and “want” are italicized.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The book by Chisholm that I praise in my initial comments is:

Chisholm, John. Unleash Your Inner Company: Use Passion and Perseverance to Build Your Ideal Business. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2015.

Animals Consume Effective Medicines Without Spending Billions on Phase 3 Clinical Trials

Animals are free to self-medicate and apparently often do so effectively. Isn’t it ironic that our government F.D.A. restricts the freedom of humans to self-medicate?

(p. A13) . . . as Jaap de Roode reveals in “Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves,” many animals seek out substances to relieve illnesses or battle parasites that drag their health down: . . .

Mr. de Roode, a biology professor at Emory University, chronicles animal self-medication in everything from caterpillars and bees to pigs and dolphins. The drugs take the form of minerals, fungi and especially plants. Often, the drug is ingested for therapeutic reasons, as when chimps eat Velcro-like leaves to scour parasitic worms from their intestines. Many creatures also take drugs prophylactically, to prevent disease. The feline love of catnip, Mr. de Roode suggests, is probably an evolutionary adaptation: The plant deters disease-carrying mosquitoes, so cats with a taste for it ended up more equipped for survival.

. . .

Many plants produce chemicals called alkaloids that taste foul and cause other unpleasant sensations, but can also fight off parasites. After noticing that woolly bear caterpillars infested with fly maggots tend to seek out alkaloid-rich plants, scientists documented—by threading tiny wires into the caterpillars’ mouths—that the infected critters’ taste buds fired far more often when eating these plants than did the taste buds of the uninfected. The bugs’ sensory perception changed to make drugs more attractive. If the consumption of some irregular substance leads to a drop in infection load and alleviates negative symptoms, then, Mr. de Roode convincingly argues, animals are indeed using medicine. Caterpillar, heal thyself.

. . .

Humans can benefit from studying animal medicine, too. Most of our drugs are either plant compounds or derived from plant compounds. But researchers have systematically studied only a few hundred of the earth’s estimated tens of thousands of plant species. To guide researchers’ studies, scientists could note which ones animals consume and concentrate on those. Let Mother Nature do the research and development for us.

For the full review see:

Sam Kean. “Bookshelf; Medicinal Kingdom.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 28, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 27, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Doctors by Nature’: Medicinal Kingdom.”)

The book under review is:

Roode, Jaap de. Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

90% of Biomedical Articles Are “Either Misleading, Wrong or Completely Fabricated”

The right to health freedom is primarily an ethical issue. But the uncertainty and unreliability of much medical “knowledge” (as argued in the book reviewed in the passages quoted below) seems to strengthen the case for patient self-determination.

(p. A15) The largest repositories of biomedical research in the U.S. and Europe, PubMed and Europe PMC, contain 84 million articles between them, and add a million more each year. According to recent estimates, up to 90% of those papers—75 million total—contain information that’s either misleading, wrong or completely fabricated.

Over the past 20 years, certain branches of science have endured a so-called reproducibility crisis, in which countless papers have been exposed as shoddy if not bogus. Sometimes these revelations are merely embarrassing, but in biomedical research, incorrect publications can cost lives as doctors and drugmakers rely on them to treat patients.

In “Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research,” Csaba Szabo—a physician with doctorates in physiology and pharmacology—dissects the ways he’s seen research go wrong in his 30 years in academia and industry: data manipulation, poor experimental design, statistical errors and more.

. . .

The biggest problem, however, lies with scientists who strive to do good work but feel pressured to cut corners. Scientists cannot work without grant money, but of the 70,000 applications the National Institutes of Health receive each year, only 20% get funded. Leading journals reject up to 99% of papers submitted, and only one in 200 doctoral graduates ever becomes a full professor. Even with tenure, professors can suffer salary cuts or have their labs handed to higher-performing colleagues if they don’t keep pulling in cash. Some sadistic research professors even pit their graduate students against each other in “dogfights”—they run the same experiment, but only the first to get results publishes. No wonder researchers massage data or fudge images: Forget “publish or perish.” It’s “fib or forgo your career.”

. . .

Given this tsunami of mistakes, the author points out that cynical types have suggested we treat all biomedical research as fraudulent unless proved otherwise. The cost is staggering: The U.S. wastes tens of billions of dollars annually on useless research, shortening or even costing patient lives. Most scientists can’t even reproduce their own data half the time, and the number of papers retracted rose to 10,000 in 2023 from 500 in 2010.

. . .

Most importantly, Dr. Szabo calls for systematic changes in how science gets done.

. . .

Above all, he despises the broken status quo, where “everybody acts politely . . . keeps their mouths shut, and acts like the whole process is functioning perfectly well.”

For the full review see:

Sam Kean. “Bookshelf; Reaching For Results.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 24, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis internal to paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated March 24, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Unreliable’: Reaching for Results.”)

The book under review is:

Szabo, Csaba. Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research. New York: Columbia University Press, 2025.

Both Homocysteine and Cholesterol Are Actionable Causes of Atherosclerosis

Alan Donagan taught a thought-provoking graduate course on Action Theory when I was a philosophy student at the University of Chicago in the mid to late 1970s. Some of the course related to how we think about causes in the social sciences and in policy debates.

Often we seek THE cause of what we want (or what we want to avoid). But most results have multiple causes. Which cause is most important, and so to some appears to be THE cause, depends largely on which cause is most easily actionable, which can change based on our knowledge or our constraints.

The obituary passages quoted below tell the sad story of how Kilmer McCully found that an amino acid called homocysteine was one cause of atherosclerosis, a cause that was actionable (could be countered) by eating foods containing various of the B vitamins. Kilmer’s career was canceled by powerful academics committed to the dominant view that cholesterol was THE cause of atherosclerosis.

McCully’s Harvard lab was moved to the basement, and eventually he was pressured out of Harvard.

Later studies, including the large, influential, and continuing Framingham study, eventually vindicated McCully’s claim.

We know the wrongly-cancelled pay a price for deviating from the dominant view. But how often do the cancellers pay a price for wrongly cancelling?

(p. B6) Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 [2025] at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.

. . .

Dr. McCully didn’t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was malpractice to disregard the significance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his lab below ground; then they told him to leave. He struggled to find work for years.

. . .

Presenting the case of homocystinuria in a 9-year-old girl, doctors mentioned that her uncle had died from a stroke in the 1930s, when he was 8 and had the same disease. “How could an eight-year-old have died the way old people do?” Dr. McCully wrote, with his daughter, in “The Heart Revolution” (1999).

When Dr. McCully tracked down the autopsy report and tissue samples, he was astounded: The boy had hardened arteries, but there was no cholesterol or fat in the plaque buildup. A few months later, he learned about a baby boy with homocystinuria who had recently died. He also had hardened arteries.

“I barely slept for two weeks,” he wrote.

In 1969, Dr. McCully published a paper about the cases in The American Journal of Pathology. The next year, in the same journal, he described what happened after he injected rabbits with high doses of homocysteine. “The aortas of all 13 of the animals injected with homocysteine were moderately thickened,” he wrote, “compared to the controls.”

. . .

The medical profession responded with “stony silence,” Dr. McCully told The Times.  . . .

. . .

“I felt for him, and I admired him,” J. David Spence, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario who studies homocysteine, said in an interview. “He was neglected more than he ought to have been. It was sad.”

That began to change in the early 1990s, when large-scale, long-term studies of the risks for heart disease revealed that Dr. McCully had, in fact, been heading down the right path when Harvard relegated him to the basement.

. . .

As a teenager, Kilmer was enthralled by “Microbe Hunters,” Paul de Kruif’s 1926 book about Pasteur, Walter Reed, Robert Koch and others who investigated infectious diseases. He knew almost immediately that he wanted to become a scientist.

. . .

At a medical school reunion in 1999, his classmates presented him with a silver platter.

It was inscribed, “To Kim McCully, who saw the truth before the rest of us, indeed before the rest of medicine, and who would not be turned aside.”

For the full obituary see:

Michael S. Rosenwald. “Kilmer S. McCully Is Dead at 91; Fueled Debate on Heart Disease.” The New York Times (Monday, March 24, 2025): B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 21, 2025, and has the title “Kilmer McCully, 91, Dies; Pathologist Vindicated on Heart Disease Theory.”)

The book by McCully and his daughter, mentioned above, is:

McCully, Kilmer, and Martha McCully. Heart Revolution: The Vitamin B Breakthrough That Lowers Homocysteine Levels, Cuts Your Risk of Heart Disease, and Protects Your Health. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

The book that inspired a teenage McCully to become a scientist is:

Kruif, Paul de. Microbe Hunters. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926.

Extinct Homo Erectus Could Adapt to Global Warming and “Thrived in a Harsh Desert Landscape”

In my Openness book I argue that environmentalists often exaggerate the harm from global warming because they fail to consider the extent of human adaptability. Recent evidence (see below) suggests that even our extinct ancestor, Homo erectus, was already more adaptable to climate change than other advanced primates such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

(p. D3) Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home.

Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains had evolved. But a new study hints that maybe we aren’t so special.

A million years ago, researchers have found, an extinct species of human relatives known as Homo erectus thrived in a harsh desert landscape once considered off limits before Homo sapiens came along.

“It’s a significant shift in the narrative of adaptability, expanding it beyond Homo sapiens to include their earlier relatives,” said Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and an author of the study, which was published Thursday [Jan. 2?, 2025] in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

. . .

For hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers determined, Engaji Nanyori had been a comfortable open woodland. But around a million years ago, the climate dried up and the trees vanished. The landscape turned to a Mojave-like desert shrub land — an extremely arid place that seemed inhospitable for early hominins.

“The data led us to a pivotal question: How did Homo erectus manage to survive and even thrive under such challenging conditions?” Dr. Mercader said.

Instead of fleeing, the hominins figured out how survive in their changing home. “Their greatest asset was their adaptability,” Dr. Mercader said.

They changed the way they searched for animal carcasses to scavenge, for example. The hominins found the ponds and streams that sprang into existence after storms. They didn’t just drink at these fleeting watering holes. They hunted the animals that also showed up there, butchering their carcasses by the thousands.

The hominins also adapted by upgrading their tools. They took more care when chipping flakes from stones to give them a sharper edge. Rather than just pick up rocks wherever they were, they preferred material from particular places. And once they made a tool, they carried it with them.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Early Human Relatives Thrived in Harsh Desert.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 28, 2025): D3.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 20, 2025, and has the title “Extinct Human Species Lived in a Brutal Desert, Study Finds.”)

The academic paper in Communications Earth and Environment, mentioned above, is:

Mercader, Julio, Pamela Akuku, Nicole Boivin, Alfredo Camacho, Tristan Carter, Siobhán Clarke, Arturo Cueva Temprana, Julien Favreau, Jennifer Galloway, Raquel Hernando, Haiping Huang, Stephen Hubbard, Jed O. Kaplan, Steve Larter, Stephen Magohe, Abdallah Mohamed, Aloyce Mwambwiga, Ayoola Oladele, Michael Petraglia, Patrick Roberts, Palmira Saladié, Abel Shikoni, Renzo Silva, María Soto, Dominica Stricklin, Degsew Z. Mekonnen, Wenran Zhao, and Paul Durkin. “Homo Erectus Adapted to Steppe-Desert Climate Extremes One Million Years Ago.” Communications Earth & Environment 6, no. 1 (2025): 1-13.

My book, mentioned in my initial comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Ed Leamer Doubted the Robustness of Many Econometric Studies

Ed Leamer showed that a lot of econometric studies in economics amounted to economists searching among the plethora of plausible specifications of variables and functional forms, until they found one that yielded the sign and statistical significance of the variable they cared about. So, for example, an economist who thought capital punishment deterred murder, could produce that result, and an economist who thought capital punishment did strong>not deter murder, could also produce that result.

Leamer suggested that economists should show whether their results varied under a variety of specifications, in order to show the robustness of the claimed main result.

(p. C6) One day in elementary school, Edward Leamer noticed that his teacher had written the wrong answer to a math problem on the blackboard, so he stood up and told her so. His teacher took another look and assured him that it was correct. Again he protested, so she asked him to take his seat.

“He refused to sit down,” his brother, the author Laurence Leamer, said in a gathering on Zoom to celebrate his brother last month. “His whole life, he’s refused to sit down.”

Leamer, an economist who died Feb. 25 at the age of 80 from complications stemming from ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease), was best known for standing up and telling economists that they were doing it wrong. In influential papers like 1983’s “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics” and his seminal book, “Specification Searches” (1978), Leamer warned economists that the methods they were using to analyze data produced weak findings that couldn’t hold up to scrutiny. He said economists often had a bias toward the results they wanted or that were the kinds of firm conclusions that led to press coverage, funding and policy positions they supported.

What’s more, Leamer warned economists that they weren’t being honest about the strength of their conclusions or transparent about the fact that they had run other tests that showed different results.

For the full obituary, see:

Chris Kornelis. “The Economist Who Called Out Other Economists.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 15, 2025): C6.

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 14, 2025, and has the title “Edward Leamer, Economist Who Said Economists Were Doing It Wrong, Dies at 80 [sic].” Where the wording is different between the versions, the last three sentences quoted above follow the online version.)

Leamer’s wonderful paper, mentioned above, is:

Leamer, Edward E. “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics.” American Economic Review 73, no. 1 (March 1983): 31-43.

Leamer’s book, mentioned above, is:

Leamer, Edward E. Specification Searches: Ad Hoc Inference with Nonexperimental Data, Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1978.

Public Health “Experts” Rebuffed Renegades Who Saw Covid Spread in Aerosols

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map shows how rigid adherence to the miasma theory of disease shut out alternatives. And an alternative was indeed needed to explain the spread of cholera. But the defeat of the miasma theory for cholera may have been too complete, prejudicing scientists to oppose theories of disease-spread through the air, which turn out to be important for some diseases, such as Covid-19.

(p. C9) In early 2020, as word spread of a frightening new respiratory outbreak in China, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were pressed for advice. Both initially counseled social distancing, guided by the assumption that the disease was spread by large, boggy droplets that fell rapidly to the ground after being expelled by coughing or sneezing.

By avoiding such projectiles and keeping surfaces clean, the reasoning went, infection could be avoided. Yet this advice ignored—with tragic consequences—nearly a century of science suggesting that many respiratory diseases can spread via microdrops that are exhaled during normal breathing and can remain suspended in the air for hours.

In “Air-Borne,” the New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer seeks to explain how public-health officials could have overlooked such an important mechanism of the Covid-19 contagion. He begins his meticulous history with the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who taught that illness could be caused by “an invisible corruption of the air,” which he termed a “miasma.”

. . .

While the field of aerobiology may have entered the new millennium stuck on a “stagnant plateau,” as one journal article lamented, hope was starting to emerge. Advances in technology led to a more complete characterization of the aerobiome. A range of scientists from around the world, meanwhile, re-examined the possibility of airborne transmission and discovered the evidence against it wanting.

Following the emergence of Covid-19, many of these researchers were appalled by the seemingly reflexive—“mind-boggling,” in the words of one scientist—rejection of airborne transmission by public-health agencies. At first, these renegades individually struggled to have their work published but were largely rebuffed.

After an early Covid-19 outbreak among a choir in Washington state was initially attributed to large-droplet spread, a more detailed analysis by a unified group of skeptical researchers suggested that airborne transmission was far more likely. On Dec. 23, 2021—nearly 21 months after tweeting “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne”—the WHO “finally issued a clear public statement that the virus was airborne,” Mr. Zimmer writes. A triumph for persistent scientists, perhaps, but also a pointed reminder of the complexity, fragility and deeply human dependencies of evolving science.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Microbes in the Mist.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 15, 2025): C9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2025, and has the title “‘Air-Borne’: The Microbes in the Mist.”)

The book under review is:

Zimmer, Carl. Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. New York: Dutton, 2025.

Global Warming Allows German Wine Entrepreneurs to Grow a “Superb” Chardonnay

In my Openness book, I argue that the costs of global warming have been exaggerated, partly because environmentalists forget that entrepreneurs can adapt, either lessening the costs, or sometimes even creating benefits. A case of creating benefits is apparently now the growing of “superb” chardonnay wine in Germany:

(p. D4) What accounts for the arrival of . . . German chardonnays? Certain wine regions like Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Obermosel have limestone soils, which chardonnay has a special affinity for, but the warming climate has made it possible to ripen chardonnay sufficiently to make superb wines.

Climate change influenced decisions to plant chardonnay in other ways as well.

“Climate change for us does not just mean it’s getting warmer and warmer, it means everything is getting more extreme — frost risk, weeks without rain, hailstorms,” said Klaus Peter Keller, . . . . “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago. Rather than 100 percent riesling we have now 70 percent riesling, 15 percent pinot noir, 10 percent chardonnay and 4 percent others, and we think that will be the structure for the coming 30 or 40 years.”

Mr. Keller said he had wanted to plant pinot blanc rather than chardonnay but that their son Felix had pushed for chardonnay.

“Felix was right,” he said. “Chardonnay is much better adapted to climate change, with thicker skins, and it transmits the soil much better than pinot blanc.”

Felix Keller said by email that his grandfather had tried planting chardonnay in 1988, but that the timing had been wrong.

“Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” he said. “It took us until 2018 to try again. We believe chardonnay has a bright future in Germany because we now have the climate that used to be in Burgundy in the early ’90s.”

For the full commentary see:

Eric Asimov. “The Pour; A Surprise From Germany: Chardonnay.” The New York Times (Weds., March 5, 2025): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated March 4, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Innovative Entrepreneur Bill Gates Believes He Is “on the Autism Spectrum”

In my “Openness” book I argue and present some evidence that toleration for those who think different, including those on the Autism spectrum, will allow more innovative entrepreneurs to flourish, bringing benefits to us all. In the first volume of his autobiography, innovative entrepreneur Bill Gates speculates that he is on the Autism spectrum.

(p. A17) Mr. Gates was, he says, a “happy boy,” according to family lore. He had a wide grin, excess energy and a tendency to rock his body when he was deep in thought. Mr. Gates speculates that today he “probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Bookshelf; A Life of DOS And Don’ts.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025): A17.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 3, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Source Code’: A Life of DOS and Don’ts.”)

The first volume of Bill Gates’s autobiography is:

Gates, Bill. Source Code: My Beginnings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

My book, that I mention in my opening comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Songbirds Adapt to Global Warming by Shrinking in Size

In my Openness book I argue that global warming is not as much of a threat as many claim. One part of my argument is that humans, and non-human life too, is much more adaptable than the environmentalists realize. Songbirds discussed below exemplify the point.

(p. A3) North American songbirds have been shrinking steadily in size over the past 40 years, according to scientists who measured tens of thousands of the feathered creatures from dozens of different species and attributed the changes to rising temperatures.

As the birds’ bodies got smaller, their wings gradually got longer, the scientists said in a paper published Wednesday [Dec. 4, 2019] in the journal Ecology Letters. The longer wings, the researchers said, may help offset the loss of body mass so the birds can fly efficiently on their long migrations.

. . .

Warm-blooded animals are generally larger in cold climates and smaller in warm climates because more compact creatures usually release heat more quickly, according to biologists and ecologists.

Given the well-established link, many scientists had predicted in recent years that global warming would affect the size of many animals. Yet until recently, there wasn’t much evidence of the effect at work during modern warming trends.

The new findings are the latest in a series of technical reports this year that link changes in body size among birds to warmer temperatures around the world.

Last month, researchers in Australia who studied physical changes in 82 songbird species, including honeyeaters, fairy-wrens and thornbills, reported in the Royal Society B journal that birds there have grown smaller due to warming over the last half-century, as the annual mean temperature increased regionally by about 0.012 degrees Celsius. They based their conclusions on an analysis of 12,000 museum specimens.

In March [2019], researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who tracked the weight of a long-tailed songbird common across Africa called the mountain wagtail found the species gradually became lighter between 1976 and 1999, as regional temperatures increased by 0.18 degrees Celsius. They published their findings in the journal Oecologia.

For the full story see:

Robert Lee Hotz. “Songbirds Shrink in Size, Study Finds.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 5, 2019 [sic]): A3.

(Note: bracketed date and year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Songbirds Are Shrinking in Size, Study Finds.”)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The academic paper in Ecology Letters, mentioned above, is:

Weeks, Brian C., David E. Willard, Marketa Zimova, Aspen A. Ellis, Max L. Witynski, Mary Hennen, and Benjamin M. Winger. “Shared Morphological Consequences of Global Warming in North American Migratory Birds.” Ecology Letters (2019).

The academic paper in the Royal Society B journal, mentioned above, is:

Gardner, Janet L., Tatsuya Amano, Anne Peters, William J. Sutherland, Brendan Mackey, Leo Joseph, John Stein, Karen Ikin, Roellen Little, Jesse Smith, and Matthew R. E. Symonds. “Australian Songbird Body Size Tracks Climate Variation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286, no. 1916 (2019).

The academic paper in the Oecologia journal, mentioned above, is:

Prokosch, Jorinde, Zephne Bernitz, Herman Bernitz, Birgit Erni, and Res Altwegg. “Are Animals Shrinking Due to Climate Change? Temperature-Mediated Selection on Body Mass in Mountain Wagtails.” Oecologia 189, no. 3 (2019): 841-49.