I should have Cthulhu teach my classes

Now you too can grasp the great Lovecraftian insights into biology. They’re pretty simple: you’re going to die, and the universe doesn’t care.

By the way, the article is from the makers of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, which happens to be one of only three games that I have on my iPad. It’s grim and bloody and horrible, and I’ve made it through every level except the last one, where the Leng Spiders and Cthulhoids turn my team into a rotting smear of decaying jellied flesh. Which seems fitting.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: a venomous crustacean

I had no idea such things existed, but behold the remipede:

remipede

Yes, it’s a crustacean, although it doesn’t look like any I’ve seen before. You’re not likely to run into them casually; they’re found deep in Central American caves, with one species found in the Canary Islands and another in Western Australia. Besides being weird-looking critters, they’re also the only known venomous crustacean. Take a look at that clawed face!

remipede_close

There are no known instances of humans being bitten by one of these things — they aren’t exactly living underfoot. They have big sacs inside those front claws that contain a cocktail of proteases, chitinases, and a neurotoxin.

remipede_venom_sacs

They poison their prey with an injection of a poisonous mixture that simultaneously paralyzes or kills them, and reduces their guts to a slurry that can be sucked out.

This toxin is represented by two distinct contigs that have the conserved cysteine pattern characteristic of β/δ agatoxins with virtually identical spacing [C-x(6)-C-x(6)-C-C-x(4)-C-x-C-x(6)-C-x-C] (Figure 5). β/δ agatoxins are a recently described type of spider venom neurotoxin (Billen et al. 2010), which causes pre-synaptic voltage-gated sodium channels to open at resting membrane potentials in insects. The resulting neurotransmitter release generates a stream of action potentials in motorneurons, resulting in irreversible spastic paralysis of the victim.

Charming!


von Reumont BM, Blanke A, Richter S, Alvarez F, Bleidorn C, Jenner RA. (2013) The first venomous crustacean revealed by transcriptomics and functional morphology: remipede venom glands express a unique toxin cocktail dominated by enzymes and a neurotoxin. Mol Biol Evol. 2013 Oct 16. [Epub ahead of print]

Don’t you hate those ninnies who abuse biology to defend their sexism?

Listen to Gavin McInnes rant. He makes up statistics, he raves that having women work goes “against 40,000 years of evolution”.

Women are forced to pretend to be men. They’re feigning this toughness. They’re miserable. Study after study has shown that feminism has made women less happy. They’re not happy in the work force, for the most part. I would guess 7 percent [of women] like not having kids, they want to be CEOs, they like staying at the office all night working on a proposal, and all power to them. But by enforcing that as the norm, you’re pulling these women away from what they naturally want to do, and you’re making them miserable.

His gut tells him that women prefer to live domestic lives. He berates others for citing mere ‘anecdotes’ while declaring that his twisted, baseless view of how the world works to be the absolute truth. McInnes really is committed to his unfounded views about sex roles.

Here’s the cold biological truth: (And it’s not based on fear or sexism or anything else you like to argue about in a classroom) Women’s bodies are not as good at making babies after 30. The hourglass turns upside down at that age and the sand keeps coming out until 35 when it is gone. Yes, I know you can still make babies after that. My mother had my brother at 40 and my youngest boy came out when my wife was 39. These are EXCEPTIONS. Liberals seem to think that one piece of anecdotal evidence completely wipes out mountains of evidence to the contrary. When discussing the vast majority of women, they TEND to prefer family to career and they TEND to want to make babies and they TEND to need to create them in their 20s / early 30s. This isn’t my opinion. It’s a general truth and the fact that simply stating it is controversial, shows how far the pendulum has swung into Crazy Town.

Mary Anne Franks did a great job rebutting him. If you watch the video, McInnes comes off as a total emotional bro-ron; Franks is calm and rational. Jennifer Raff has a much more thorough take-down.

Clearly, McInnes is suffering from excessive testosterone. Damn biology and the way it torments us men with these constant high hormonal levels!

What I’d be telling my kids nowadays

I’m one of those people who is hopelessly addicted to babbling on the internet, and even I don’t understand this statistic.

the leading cause of death for teenage drivers is now texting, not drinking, with nearly a dozen teens dying each day in a texting-related car crash.

You cannot type and drive, or read and drive, at the same time. It’s really that simple. So why are people trying?

Missing an opportunity

Given that computer science is one of the majors with the best job prospects, that it’s still a growth industry, how do you account for these proportions?

Computer science is an incredibly promising major, especially for a young woman. That and engineering are among the college degrees that can offer the highest incomes and the most flexibility — attributes widely cited for drawing many women into formerly male-dominated fields like medicine. Writing code and designing networks are also a lot more portable than nursing, teaching and other traditional pink-collar occupations. Yet just 0.4 percent of all female college freshmen say they intend to major in computer science. In fact, the share of women in computer science has actually fallen over the years. In 1990-91, about 29 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer and information sciences went to women; 20 years later, it has plunged to 18 percent. Today, just a quarter of all Americans in computer-related occupations are women.

Something is dissuading women from pursuing careers in computer science. I wonder what it is? Maybe it has something to do with bro culture.

He was supposed to be immortal

Lou Reed, dead.

Lou Reed was subversive. I first encountered his music while reading the school bus in junior high, which is a strange place to listen to the Velvet Underground, I tell you. There I was, bored out of my skull, trapped on those uncomfortable bench seats, on my way to a suburban public school that I detested, and the driver would just turn the radio to the local pop station and turn it up loud to keep us distracted. And so I’d sit there, listening intently to a guy singing about the wild side of New York, wondering if the administrators at school had ever listened to these lyrics, because they made me feel funny inside, and want to get out and go get a cheap Greyhound ticket and end up in a different kind of bus station in a big city on the other side of the continent.

And then, once we arrived at school, they always played some conservative anecdote by that colossal douche, Paul Harvey. My poor brain, whipsawed between Reed and Harvey. I knew which one spoke truth, at least. But still, I think I figured out quickly that no, the principal of the school never listened to the lyrics of the songs we liked. Reed. Cooper. Joplin. Zappa. If he did, that bus would have gone silent.

He’s one of those people who pounded at the conventionality we were supposed to be molded into. I have to thank all the people who have done that over the years.

I approve this message

Although the title is a bit weird: Atheists can’t be Republicans? That’s a bit off. One thing we know is that atheists can be all kinds of things: Republican, Libertarian (oh, jebus, but there are a lot smug Libertarian atheists), Progressive, smart, idiotic, egalitarian, elitist. The message is good, though: it’s not enough to just be an atheist. We have to stand up for something, rather than just being against something, and that means that atheism has to find a conscience.

Individual atheists can, of course, have wildly divergent views, but the atheist movement, if it is to have any political clout at all, must focus on some key issues and make those part of the message. If we are going to claim to have positions based on reason and the intelligent interpretation of the evidence, then the climate change denialists, the sexists, the racists, the narcissistic worshippers of the Holy Market…they cannot be regarded as representative. The ones who think the solution to Islamic theocracy is to bomb Muslim countries or deport brown people should be considered as lunatic and beyond the pale as atheists who advocate nuking the Vatican or ostracizing Catholics.

It’s time for the movement to address bigger and real issues, and the biggest issue of our time is income inequality. Of all the developed nations, the U.S. has the most unequal distribution of income. In the past decade, 95 percent of all economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent. A mere 400 individuals own one-half of the entire nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, median household income keeps falling, and our poverty levels resemble that of the Great Depression era. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being decimated.

Atheists like to talk about building a better world, one that is absent of religiosity in the public square, but where are the atheist groups on helping tackle the single biggest tear in the fabric of our society — wealth disparity? They are nowhere. Its absence on the most pressing moral issue of our time makes it difficult for the movement to establish meaningful partnerships with other moral communities.

To remain white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical will not only serve to alienate atheism from minorities and the poor, but will also ensure it remains a politically impotent movement that is incapable of building a better America. Growing up means less time and money spent on self-righteous billboard campaigns, and, instead, more resources allocated to fighting the political conditions that have caused this nation’s middle class and infrastructure to resemble that of a hyper-religious Third World nation.

I would broaden the mission a bit, though. On economic issues, atheists as a whole ought to be behind reducing the rich-poor divide — it’s the only rational position to take — but I would consider it legitimate to regard human rights as an umbrella topic to be more important, or to make the even bigger issue of environmental degradation the major crisis of our time. We can have a broad tent, but that does not include supporting ideas that conflict with reality.

Atheism is ultimately going to have to be a progressive political force, fighting for inclusion, evidence-based policy, humanist values, and the goal of expanding knowledge and power for all. We’re hampered right now by a rather reluctant leadership that tends to focus on pettier issues in the name of unity.

Western culture does have something to contribute to the world!

Everyone who has read Guns, Germs, and Steel knows that one of the central themes of Diamond’s book was that New Guinea tribesmen were in no way inferior in human ability to Wall Street bankers (ooh, bad choice of an example: it’s pretty easy to argue that Wall Street bankers are some of the lowest examples of humanity.) So here’s a story of New Guinea tribesmen using Facebook. Also, it tells of a documentary that was made that switched stereotypes: instead of sending the Harvard professor to New Guinea to comment on their lives, they brought over a group of New Guinea tribespeople to gawk at us.

The company I worked for didn’t have a good reason why they could not, so we pitched it as an idea and got it commissioned.  That’s when I was brought in.  Worried that their visit might pollute their culture with modern ideas, or perhaps make them terminally envious of a world beyond their reach, I talked to some experts on Papua New Guinean tribes, and at that point exposed myself for the blinkered bigot that I was.  “How dare you,” said one anthropologist, “to imagine, without question, that a Sepik tribesman would be envious of your culture.  That’s one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard.  These people are supremely proud of their own culture.  They have a much more rewarding lifestyle than the majority in the West.  Mark my word, they won’t want anything you can give them.”

Oh, burn. That’ll put us in our place.

Except…we did have an advantage or two.

But the anthropologist was wrong about one thing; they did take something back: the idea of putting feathers on arrows. In the second week of their visit, I took three of the tribe to watch an archery club shoot at targets in a local community center. One of the archers was a fanatic and made his own arrows from willow, spruced with turkey feathers. The tribesmen were fixated on the feathers. “Why these feathers?” they asked. “It makes them fly straight,” said the enthusiast. And after a few practice shots, the tribesmen discovered that it certainly did. Their eyes lit up. Back home (presumably for thousands of years), they had been making arrows that were three times the size and weight of these feathered arrows, because without feathers an arrow needs to be weighty in order to fly true through the air. Just adding feathers would mean that they could carry three times the number of arrows out on hunts, and shoot three times the number of feral pigs. Of all the ideas in England, this was the one that could have an immediate and significant impact on their lives.

So what has the West done for the rest of the world lately? Well, there’s feathered arrows. And…facebook? Maybe we should stop right there.

Leeuwenhoek is drooling in his grave

Ooh, ick, I guess that’s a really disgusting zombie image. But anyway, look at this: a cheap and easy DIY photomicrography setup.

Back in the day, I once built a homely kludge consisting of our very expensive microscope, a nice 35mm SLR, and a bit of cardboard and duct tape to hold it exactly the right distance from the eyepieces that did sort of the same thing. And then we had a lab in cell biology at the start of the semester in which students looked at a variety of cell types and were asked to draw them…and all over the room students were just whipping out their cell phones, aiming them down the eyepieces, and taking photos instead.

Maybe we’re getting to the point where we can save the department a whole lot of money on those low-end student scopes and instead build a bunch of these little frames and ask our students to bring their cell phones to lab.