A new law that risks criminalising parents who question whether their children are trans must be scrapped, MPs, peers and experts have demanded. ‘Gender’, as opposed to sex, is an anti-scientific myth. If a child with a penis announces that he is really a girl, parents and teachers have a positive duty to educate him in the scientific truth that he is a boy. Of course no parent should use physical or psychological abuse for any reason. But if anyone should be prosecuted it is those who abuse their duty of care by encouraging children in the anti-scientific delusion that they can choose their own sex.

#42TalesFromLife# A witty and insightful menagerie of animal tales from the eminent writer @RichardDawkins. Each tale is richly illustrated with artwork by Ernst Haeckel. Pre-order now:

Jerry Coyne and Douglas Futuyma are right. The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis grows in strength and stature as more and more data arrive to fill in the details. Cries for a major revolution are a vanity trip..

The glorious spectacle of Timothy Miller wearing a burka Brendan O'Neill, Spectator 16th Oct Crack open the warm bitter. Dust down the bunting. Put Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ on repeat. For at last we have something to make every true English heart swell with pride. It’s the stirring sight of that 76-year-old geezer who was arrested for wearing a burka attending court yesterday in… a burka. Oh, this blessed plot! His name is Timothy Miller. He’s from Southampton. On 12 September he was arrested at an anti-immigration protest for parading about in an entombing niqab. The cops accused him of using the Islamic veil to conceal his identity. Not so, he replied: I really am an ageing student of Allah. He repeated this defence at Portsmouth magistrates’ court yesterday. He lifted his veil – I’m cracking up – to confirm his name, address and date of birth. He then said he is ‘studying’ Islam and he wears the burqa to gain a ‘greater understanding’ of the faith. His draping veil was flawlessly accessorised with a fetching black handbag. . . The sourpusses of the Islamo-left will wail ‘Islamophobia!’. They’ll accuse him of ridiculing Islamic dress. But the burqa is ridiculous. We didn’t need a pensioner from Southampton to tell us that. It is cruel, brutish, backward, sexist and profoundly anti-social to make women drape themselves in public like this. If you’re alarmed when a white male pensioner pulls on a sackcloth but cool when a brown-skinned woman is forced to do so, you might want to have a word with yourself. It’s possible this case will force some serious head-scratching in public life. Like, why is it potentially a crime for a British pensioner to cover his face but fine for a Muslim woman? Is it because she believes Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse and that women must wholly surrender the self to divine decree? If I embrace such truthless dogmas, can I also wear a mask on the street? . . .

I applaud @ComAcFreedom for commissioning a genuinely independent investigation into Cambridge’s appointment of Jason Arday and the university’s subsequent handling of concerns about his scholarship, qualifications, and the direction of its own inquiry. Cambridge’s process appears to have been narrowed away from the core questions of academic merit, due diligence, and the possible role of EDI considerations. That is precisely why an external review is needed. The panel’s calibre is exceptional. Particular credit to @ProfAliceS (UCL), whose rigorous work on sex-based data and evidence has itself been a stand against ideology over reality. She is joined by @sapinker, Robert Tombs, Maurice Glasman, and chair Swaran Preet Singh (Lord Singh of Solihull), with @nickwallis, whose reporting exposed the Post Office scandal, leading the evidence-gathering. This is a serious highly qualified group committed to objective analysis rather than institutional self-protection. Truth-seeking and clarity matter. @Cambridge_Uni’s reputation has been damaged; only a full, evidence-based examination can help it begin to recover. It also sets a necessary precedent: other universities should not be able to prioritise narrative over standards and then limit scrutiny when questions arise. The involvement of people prepared to defend material reality (including on sex) against ideological pressure is welcome in both this and related fights for academic integrity. This weekend @acadofideas #BattleFest# is taking up these issues directly, with sessions on Saturday including “The corruption of the university?” (Hoare Memorial Hall, 10:15) and “After Arday: is Sociology worth saving?” (Temple Room). I am looking forward to the debates @Fox_Claire. Universities exist to pursue knowledge, not to manage reputations or enforce DEI, ideology or orthodoxy. Engaging in debate about it and an independent investigation are welcome steps toward restoring that principle.

"Academics launch rival inquiry Committee for Academic Freedom will examine [whether Jason Arday’s] employment at Cambridge met expected standards" (Times) I’ll submit my own assessment of Arday's illiterate thesis. It failed to meet expected standards for PhD, let alone a Cambridge professorship.

In a free country, you are entitled to believe you are a woman with a penis. But not to take it into a female changing room, nor to cheat your way into a female athletic competition, nor in any way to impose your private delusion on the rest of us.

The real reason children no longer enjoy reading.” Mary Wakefield has a theory in the latest Spectator.  Instead of screen addiction, she blames school curricula which teach “to the test” rather than reading for enjoyment. Children are so busy analysing brief extracts, they can’t enjoy the book as a whole. I read incessantly as a child, including illicitly when I was supposed to be sleeping. Not “great literature”, it was Dr Dolittle, Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Just William, Arthur Ransome, Percy F Westerman. It would certainly have included Harry Potter if he’d been around then. I don’t believe I ever had my “comprehension” tested. I just loved reading. Is Mary Wakefield right?

"Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do." Donald Trump appealing for mid-term votes.

If you're an academic (and can prove it with an ORCID), consider signing a petition protesting the University of Ghent's suspension of a postdoc for exposing academic misconduct, a blatant violation of academic freedom (as always, regardless of your agreement with all of the whistleblower's views).

Cambridge asst professor Farah Ahmed wrote that Muslims should study computers to produce "weaponry for jihad." Here are scans of the Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet chapter (co-written with Nazreen Nawaz) in which she said this. The jihad quote is on page 10.

The University of Cambridge can boast 126 Nobel Prizes. That’s more than any other university in the world except Harvard, and it does it on an endowment that is one twentieth the endowment of Harvard. In the Nobel ranking, Cambridge beats MIT, Chicago, Columbia, Oxford, and Yale (in that order). Cambridge, the university of Newton, Hawking, Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore, Keynes, Crick, Sanger, Kendrew, Perutz, Rutherford, Chadwick, Turing, Maxwell, Brenner, the list goes on and on, Cambridge is beyond question one of the very greatest universities in the world. The list of immense distinction continues to the present day. It is tragic, and deeply unfair, that the reputation of this truly great university should suffer at the hands one unfortunate anomaly, the Department of Education.

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism. As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill: Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. . . This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal. And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation. And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it. . . . The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing. . . . The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it. I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race. Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.

Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan: An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution. At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.” It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday. The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir.. IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” . . . The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.” On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they have Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.” But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country. Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research. But it does.

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan: After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University. We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday. Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’ Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’. She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’ Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’ Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.