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Chiffchaffs are the first summer visitors to arrive, around here at least, and their distinctive song is hard to miss, and one day near the vernal equinox suddenly there they are. I have written down the date in my diary most years since 1990. Last night I went back through the diaries and collated the data. It's hardly scientific, but notice there is absolutely no sign of a drift towards earlier arrival: if anything the reverse.

Yet here is whatThe Telegraph says:

Woke to find the newspapers all claiming a new "species" of human being discovered in central Asia. Here's the Guardian:

"The finding suggests an undocumented human species lived alongside Neanderthals and early modern humans in parts of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago."

Leave aside the fact that it's just a bone from a little finger, leave aside the fact that they have only sequenced some mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. Assume, for the sake of argument, that they have ruled out contamination. Applaud - as we should - the achievement of recovering DNA from the fossil and sequencing it.

So Man flu is not a myth, because testosterone inhibits the immune response.

This has been known to biologists for ages. In The Red Queen, I challenged readers to explain why bodies should be designed that way: why set up an immune system in such a way that it gets hindered by normal hormonal action? I still find it baffling. Over the years readers took up my challenge and wrote to me. They still do. Their answers nearly always boil down to a version of this: to weed out weedy males. That is to say, if males cannot both keep their testosterone levels up and resist disease they don't deserve to contribute to posterity's genes.

Trouble is, like all group selectionist arguments, it's vulnerable to the evolutionary free rider. Along comes a mutant animal that breaks the link between testosterone and illness and hey presto it can breed away to its gonads' content, propagating its subprime genes as if they were triple A.

Very nice piece ofrational optimism

My Times column on skilled versus unskilled migration and Brexit:

Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea of not being able to travel and work freely in Europe is unthinkable to me.” He has been misled — not by Leavers but by Remainers.

It’s not just that the overseas press have consistently portrayed Brexit as a nativist retreat, despite Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Daniel Hannan consistently saying the very opposite. Throughout the referendum campaign — and, shamefully, since — academics have been told by their lobby groups (such as Universities UK) that Brexit probably means losing access to European research funds, European scientific collaborations and European talent.

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