The price of ignorance

Houston is paying it today. Whose city will pay for it next?

The Republican administration is going to make everything worse for everybody. Trump rolled back regulations intended to support better standards for infrastructure projects — he apparently thinks the way to encourage investment in infrastructure is to allow it to be half-assed infrastructure.

An executive order issued by Trump earlier this month revoked an Obama-era directive that had established flood-risk standards for federally funded infrastructure projects built in areas prone to flooding or subject to the effects of sea-level rise – like many of those now sinking in Texas.

Houston already has some of the laxest building regulations for structures in potential flood zones and the president wants to spread that policy across the US.

“It makes no sense,” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said. “Taxpayers deserve to have the assurance that if they provide assistance to a community to build or rebuild, it’s done in a way that isn’t going to cost taxpayers money in the future.”

Setting better flood-risk standards wouldn’t have helped Houston — Texas has been busy doing things half-assedly for generations, for short term gain — but they would help build for the future. If we have one.

Friday Cephalopod: Undead Squid Penis

First, a little background:

When squid mate, a male transfers its sperm to a female enclosed in complex structures called spermatophores. These are accumulated in the spermatophoric sac, a storage organ inside the mantle cavity, before ejaculation through the penis. Squid that spawn in shelf waters and epipelagic waters of the open ocean usually have short penes hidden completely inside the mantle. Males pick the ejaculated spermatophores from inside their mantle with a specially modified arm called the hectocotylus, to transfer them to the female. Females spawning in shallow water have special places for spermatophore attachment on the body, both externally (skin ring around the mouth, and back of the head) and internally (oviducal gland openings near gills) (Nesis, 1995). As female squid lack a vagina, the use of a highly articulated arm (hectocotylus) for transfer and placement of spermatophores is more precise than by means of the comparatively poorly articulated penis.

So male squid have penises deep in their mantle. Many species have short penises, and they also have a specialized arm, the hectocotylus, that they use to reach in to their own mantle to scoop up ejaculate and then place it in the appropriate place in a female.

Other species lack the hectocotylus, but instead have a long penis, as some investicators discovered. They are also capable of erections, which was a surprise.

A mature moribund male of the greater hooked squid Onykia ingens (Smith, 1881) (38.5 cm mantle length, 1180 g body mass) was caught on the Patagonian slope south of the Falkland Islands (July 2006, 53°20′S, 59°31′W, 1050 m depth). When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment during processing of the catch onboard, the penis of the squid, which previously had extended only slightly beyond the mantle margin, suddenly started to erect. It became rigid and quickly elongated to 67 cm total length, almost the same length as the whole body of the animal (mantle, head and arms; Fig. 1). Immediately after elongation, several spermatophores were ejaculated from the penis tip.

So not only do they have penises capable of erection, they can get erections when dead and partially dissected, which means I can now show you a zombie squid dick pic.

Mature males of deep-water squid Onykia ingens with cut-open mantles showing non-erect (A) and fully erect (B) penes.

(blame Tommy Leung)


Arkhipkin AI, Laptikhovsky VV (2010) Observation of penis elongation in Onykia ingens: implications for spermatophore transfer in deep-water squid, Journal of Molluscan Studies 76(3):299–300.

I think xkcd made a comic just for Mano!

Mano Singham is unenthused about the eclipse. Same here. It’s neat, would be an interesting phenomenon to observe, but I’m not going to travel out of my way to witness a few minutes of darkness. I also wouldn’t be seeing it as a scientist, but as a tourist, nothing more.

Fortunately, xkcd seems to share our views.

So if you’re going to make an effort to see the eclipse, have fun! Take pictures!

If you’re not going to see the eclipse, have fun! Enjoy a nice August day!

Where’s my magical truth detector? I’m sure it’s somewhere in my lab.

Last week, Mary Beard was getting sneered at because she agreed that the Roman Empire was ethnically diverse, and that — gasp, shock horror — there were brown people living in ancient Britain. She’s still getting sneered at, of course, because one thing racists really hate is being told their prejudices aren’t empirical facts. But at least the silly contretemps stirred up some excellent responses.

Jennifer Raff summarizes the complexities of ancient DNA analysis, and also makes an important point: it takes a village. There isn’t one unambiguous perfect path to the Truth™.

Framing this issue as a debate between hard science and fuzzy humanities is simply nonsense. Reconstructing the past is a multidisciplinary effort, and I can’t think of a single geneticist who wouldn’t candidly admit to many limitations in our approaches. To get around these limitations, and to improve the collection and interpretation of our data, we work closely with collaborators in other disciplines: archaeologists, linguists, osteologists, specialists in stable isotope analysis, and yes, even historians. Perhaps instead of fussing about whether cartoon characters conform to our beliefs about how the ancient world should have been, our energies would be better spent in learning more about how it actually was.

Yes. One of the hallmarks of the current round of Nazi pseudoscience is their claim of far more certainty than we actually have, and insistence that genetics and molecular biology, which they don’t understand, offer perfect clarity on race. The only perfect clarity we have is that it’s a complicated muddle.

Massimo Pigliucci goes after the philosophy behind these biases, and offers a good explanation of scientism.

It’s a good thing Mr. Taleb was being polite, I hate to imagine what he’s like when he’s not. Of course, so far as I know, he is no rocket scientist either, and he also operates under a “structural bias.” We all do, there is plenty of empirical evidence (not to mention good philosophy of science, but of course that’s just part of the humanities, which lack intellectual rigor anyway) that everyone is affected by personal cognitive biases. Moreover, any organized enterprise — not just the academic study of history, but also the practice of statistics, or population genetics, or whatever — is affected by structural constraints and biases. That’s just another way of saying that no human being, or organized group of human beings, has access to a god’s eye view of the world. All we have is a number of perspectives to compare. Which is a major reason, as articulated by philosopher Helen Longino, to work toward increasing diversity in the sciences: many individually biased points of view enter into dialogue with each other, yielding a less (but still) biased outcome.

The mistake of scientism is to elevate scientific knowledge and data crunching to a level of certainty and competence they most definitely do not have, while at the same time dismissing every other approach as obsolete nonsense. But human knowledge and understanding are not zero sum games. On the contrary, they work best when we expand, rather than artificially or ideologically limit, our methods and sources of evidence. The scientistic game is foolish not just because it is incoherent (what statistical, empirical evidence do we have that scientism works? What does that even mean??), but because it is dangerously self-serving. It makes a promise on behalf of science that science cannot possibly maintain. And this in the midst of an already strongly anti-intellectual climate where half of the American public, for instance, rejects the very notion of global warming and does not believe in the theory of evolution.

It really bugs me to see prominent people spreading a cartoon version of what science is — whether it’s Pinker to now, Taleb — and continued progress in science demands that we explore multiple perspectives on the evidence, and try our best to shake ourselves out of our comfortable biases.