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Joe Biden sends a clear message to the watching world – America’s back
Scott Lucas, University of BirminghamPolitics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path
Two weeks after the storming of the US Capitol by the followers of his predecessor, in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 Americans, Joe Biden — the 46th president of the US — tried to contain the blaze in his inaugural address.
As aspiration, the speech was pitch perfect. Biden rightly took on the present of America’s most serious domestic crisis since the Civil War. Coronavirus, the Capitol attack, economic loss, immigration, climate change and social injustice were confronted:
We’ll press forward with speed and urgency for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibility. Much to do, much to heal, much to restore, much to build and much to gain.
But what distinguished the speech beyond the essential was the sincerity with which it was delivered. Since the election, there has been a commingling of Biden’s personal narrative of loss with the damage that America has suffered. When he spoke of the “empty chair” and relatives who have died, it was from the heart and not just the script.
So, as he said in front of the Capitol: “My whole soul is in this”, there was no doubt — in contrast to the statements of his predecessor — that it is.
Complementing Biden’s rhetoric are the executive orders and legislation set out in the days before the inauguration. Immigration reform will be accompanied by protection of almost 800,000 young Dreamers from deportation. There is a mandate to reunite children separated from parents and a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.
The US has rejoined the Paris Accords on climate change. The “Muslim Ban” is rescinded, Donald Trump’s wall with Mexico suspended. And coronavirus will finally be confronted with coordination between the federal, state and local governments and a US$1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan”.
Words to a waiting world
But where is America in the world in all this? In Biden’s attention to domestic crises, there was little beyond his intention to re-engage with the world on climate and reverse the previous administration’s myopic immigration measures. Even the invocations of American greatness, with one exception, stayed within its borders:
Through a crucible for the ages, America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge.
There is historical precedent for the exclusive focus on home. In 1933, as the Great Depression raged, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also made no reference to the world as he said at his first inauguration:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Perhaps even more pertinently, in 1865, Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, a month before his assassination and two months before the end of the Civil War:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.
Beyond the inaugural, there are clues in Biden’s appointment of Obama-era pragmatists: Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security advisor, John Kerry in a special post for climate change. There will be no sweeping “Biden Doctrine”, nor a grand speech such as Barack Obama’s in Cairo or Ankara in 2009.
Instead, the pragmatists will try to restore alliances, reestablish the “rules of the game” with countries such as China, Russia and North Korea — and work case-by-case on immediate issues such as the Iran nuclear deal.
Read more: Who’s who in Joe Biden’s cabinet
But for this day, and for the weeks and months to come, the foreign challenges will primarily be an extension of the domestic issues that Biden set out on “America’s day … democracy’s day”.
Recovery of America’s damaged standing will come from success in putting out the fires that are not just in the US: saving lives and vanquishing a virus, committing to a secure environment, tackling the inequities and divisions in the way of justice for all.
For as the world watched, Biden’s exceptional reference to an aspiration beyond the US came in his penultimate paragraph about the “American story” to be written:
That America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forebears, one another, and generations to follow.
Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Starfish: rare fossil helps answer the mystery of how they evolved arms

A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and palaeontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
Starfish are one of the most recognisable animals on our planet. Most people probably associate them with trips to the beach, walking in rock pools or swimming in the sea. They might appear simple creatures, but the way these animals’ distinctive biology evolved was, until recently, unknown.
Our new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, sheds light on how the starfish developed its distinctive shape.
The mystery of starfish
Starfish, and their close relatives the brittle stars, belong to a group called the echinoderms. These are animals with spiny skins, including sea urchins, sea lilies and sea cucumbers, with bizarre biological traits. They have no head or a brain, and have a unique circulatory system called a water vascular system, which uses seawater instead of blood. They even possess the power to regenerate over 75% of their body mass if it is lost.
Starfish have almost always had the same five-armed body shape. This has not changed for almost 480 million years, throughout the five great mass extinctions they survived.
Other echinoderms use their arms to filter feed or catch food from the water and, unlike starfish, face upwards with their arms spreading outward to feed. But starfish do not, and their distinctive body shape appeared in the fossil record fully formed. So for years scientists have been perplexed by how it evolved and how starfish are related to their close relatives, the brittle stars.
The Pompeii of palaeontology
The Fezouata formations are sedimentary rock deposits in Morocco dating back to the early Ordovician period, a critical stage in the evolution of life, which ended around 460 million years ago. Palaeontologists think life rapidly diversified during this time, in an episode call the great Ordovician biodiversification event, when animals we might recognise today first appeared.
The Fezouata formations are a bit like the Pompeii of palaeontology. The conditions on the seabed meant even soft tissue, which would normally be destroyed over time, could be preserved. Because of this, the formations provide a window into what happened at a key moment in the history of life on Earth.

Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.
The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.
The oldest starfish
Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.
What makes Cantabrigiaster unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.
Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before Cantabrigiaster we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan palaeontologist Mohamed Ben Moula and his local team was instrumental in discovering these amazing fossils near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.
The breakthrough
Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of Cantabrigiaster with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.
The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.

Our results demonstrate Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of Cantabrigiaster, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.
Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Palaeontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.
Aaron W Hunter, Science Guide & Tutor, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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