The real meat of the debate starts at 36 minutes into the recording. You can safely skip to that point without missing anything. This is an interesting debate because Massimo is one of the few critics of Fodor (Lewontin might be the only other) who seems to get Fodor’s fundamental criticism. More on my view on Fodor’s criticism later.

Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died in the last, bloody months of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the International Crisis Group said in an investigative report to be released Monday, most of them as a result of government shelling of areas that were supposed to be safe zones.

The decision to bar him from entering the West Bank to speak at Birzeit, a Palestinian university, “is a foolish act in a frequent series of recent follies,” remarked Boaz Okun, the legal commentator of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, in his Monday column. “Put together, they may mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.”

Just to be clear, this is Yediot Aharanot, not the mildly left-leaning Haaretz.