Never let your sons join a fraternity

Once upon a time, I was briefly exposed to the university fraternity system. My first year of college, I attended Depauw University in Indiana, which had a fairly conservative policy: your first year were required to live on campus, segregated dorms, and we could only apply to a fraternity or sorority in our second year or later, and I transferred to the University of Washington in my second year. When I arrived in Seattle, I got so many invitations to fraternity parties before classes started, I think because I had a 3.9 GPA and was a National Merit scholar — I had the potential to raise the average house GPA. I was popular, a novel experience! I attended one party, and that was enough.

The party started with beer on the front lawn. They were having a casino night inside, and they also had a giant slingshot on the roof for firing water balloons at people walking down the block…for fun, you know. Their house was adjacent to a sorority, and the two groups were taking turns flashing each other through the windows. As the party started, they started serving rather potent rum-and-cokes, and I was not in any sense a drinker, but I had to down a couple of them. I was totally blitzed early in the evening.

One thing I learned is that I cannot hold my liquor. Another thing I learned is that I am the most boring drunk on the planet. I spent the whole night at the craps table, throwing dice and staring owlishly at the results, estimating probabilities with a brain that no longer worked. Don’t invite me to your party if you expect an antic, table-dancing maniac, sorry.

I did not join any fraternity, was never invited to join one, and never attended another frat party. They were not my thing at all.

But I am not at all surprised at the news that a hazing event at Iowa’s Alpha Delta Phi was raided by the police, who found 56 shirtless young men standing in a basement, wet and covered with thrown food.

The willing victims were stupid sheep, reluctant to speak up about what was going on. The leaders of the fraternity were arrogant, truculent, and trying their best to avoid responsibility. The adults who were supposed to be in charge of managing the house were unavailable and the student leaders pretended to not know how to contact them. It was a beautiful example of what fraternities are actually for, for indoctrinating young people into a hierarchical culture of subservience, and it produces some of the snottiest chickenshit lackeys who will use the hierarchy to diffuse responsibility and allow stupidity to run wild. These are the future leaders of the United States.

I lived in sane, clean, dormitories for four years where we learned to get along in an egalitarian manner, and avoided the more stupid nonsense that the frat cultures demanded of you. They aren’t places for learning, or becoming a better person, or experiencing a good community — they’re for chiseling you into a corporate drone who will reflexively obey. They’re tools for churning out Republicans.

P.S. The fraternity was suspended for four years, and the national chapter is already complaining that that’s not fair.

I suppose I should look deeper for better correlations

Where are the hotbeds of Christian Nationalism? Who is causing all the problems? One approach is to map out the states with the highest density of right-wing Christian weirdos.

That doesn’t suggest any immediate explanations. My first thought was that maybe there is a correlation with poverty.

Nope, that isn’t it.

But then I noticed that Minnesota is always an exception compared to neighboring states. And that Washington, where I was born and grew up, is always on the side of right.

The correlation is clear: I, personally, am a benign influence on any state where I live.

I thought about leasing my presence to any state that wants to join the progressive future, but I had to nix that plan when I realized I might have to move to Arkansas or West Virginia.

Her schemes grow ever more twisted

The evil cat is tormenting me. At night, she crawls around on my work desk, rearranging things. This morning, I came in to edit some student papers, and what do I find? She has flicked the computer mouse to the floor, where it shattered into 3 pieces.

I have managed to piece it back together into a clumsily functional unit, but it’s going to be struggle to click on those papers to put big red marks on them.

The video corporate media doesn’t want you to see

This clip was yanked from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert because Trumpian sycophants did not care at all for James Talarico’s lefty message, criticism of the Christian Right, and opposition to the Republican scumbags of Texas. So I’m doing my small part to disseminate it further.

My opinion: he’s fine, but I’m sick of all the pandering to non-right-wing Christians. Maybe it’s too far for Texas, but I’d rather see a forthrightly secular candidate just dismiss all the imaginary saintliness of the Christian faith. It’s never been this idealized “love your neighbor” belief that they preach.

Why do creationists shy away from gene duplication?

A new review article on Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication has dropped. It’s nothing novel to well-informed biologists, but it’s another nail in the coffin of creationism. Not that they will care; we’ve been explaining that common genetic mechanisms can routinely increase the information content of the genome, and that we can witness how new genes with new functions arise, and it never sinks in.

Gene duplication is the primary mechanism by which new genes emerge. Models and empirical studies have shown that paralogous genes are maintained because of dosage benefits, the partitioning of ancestral functions or the acquisition of new functions. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms and the relative importance of the factors driving evolution towards one fate or another have remained difficult to quantify. Recent advances in experimental and computational methods, such as gene editing, deep mutational scanning and ancestral sequence reconstruction, have enabled molecular analyses of duplicated gene evolution across timescales. Combined, these approaches are revealing how adaptive and non-adaptive evolutionary forces shape the modern fates of gene duplicates.

I imagine some might leap on the phrase “remained difficult to quantify,” but that’s the point of the paper: new techniques have been developed that allow us to quantify those details. The review specifically brings up multiple examples.

Divergence in interaction specificity following duplication has profound consequences on cell biology. For instance, the neofunctionalization of steroid receptors, a family of hormone-activated transcription factors with roles in development and stress responses, evolved following multiple rounds of WGD[whole genome duplication] in vertebrates. Although one paralogue maintained its ancestral interactions, the other acquired mutations, conferring on it the capacity to bind different hormones and DNA motifs. Studies of transcription factors in plants, yeast and other organisms have identified many paralogues that diverged in their specificity for transcription factor binding sites and distal regulatory elements. Such divergence in interaction specificity has enabled multiple species to acquire novel regulatory modules over time.

The conclusion discusses some of those mechanisms.

Evolutionary biologists have long been interested in the fate of duplicated genes. Long-standing questions include which factors promote the fixation or long-term retention of duplicates, and their divergence in terms of sequence, expression, interactions and function. Multiple emerging technologies have enabled directly testing how adaptive and non-adaptive forces drive the evolution of paralogues. For example, fitness functions derived by tuning expression level with synthetic biology tools have enabled testing whether increases in protein abundance due to duplications are beneficial or not. Deep mutational scanning and comparisons between extant and reconstructed pre-duplication ancestral sequences facilitate the identification of mutations that alter a particular function. In particular, comparisons between different paralogues have shown that the fixation of function-altering mutations is often contingent on the presence of other mutations that originally had no effect on fitness. Similarly, other paralogues can become dependent on each other if their heteromers become the only functional unit. Therefore, multiple sources of evidence highlight the role of non-adaptive processes in the evolution of duplicated genes.

Continuing to combine and develop new methodologies will help to address open questions about the fates of paralogues. Although the likelihood of functional divergence between paralogues increases with the age of the duplication, the time required to reach functional divergence might vary depending on the pair of paralogues. In fact, multiple underlying factors may contribute to variation in the rate of functional divergence, such as the type of function performed by the paralogues. In turn, progressive changes in functions such as catalysis and binding specificity are likely to modify the fitness functions of the paralogues, allowing natural selection to distinguish between them. Ultimately, assaying such subtle and progressive mutational effects on gene function will help to better trace the evolutionary history of paralogues and the forces that shaped them.

It’s a nice summary of the problems and potentials for studying evolutionary gene duplications. I’m adding it to my list of papers to study in greater depth.

Creationists will pretend it doesn’t exist.

Angel F. Cisneros, Soham Dibyachintan, Frédéric Bédard, Simon Aubé, Pascale Lemieux & Christian R. Landry (2026) Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication. Nature Reviews Genetics https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-026-00935-5.

Is your community on this map?

ICE is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up industrial warehouses all around the country. These are planned concentration camps.

Among the proposals for these camps is the construction of biohazard incinerators.

The one in Minnesota, in Shakopee, has been blocked so far by community activism. That one was a bit surprising: Shakopee is mainly known for Valleyfair, a seasonal amusement park, and the Minnesota Renaissance Fair. It would have kind of wrecked the family weekend if the kids had to deal with smoke from the crematorium drifting over the celebration.

We’re one short step away from building ICE death camps.

How bad can country-western music be?

I just heard another musical performance from the Toilet Paper USA alternative half-time show, this time by Lee Brice. It’s a perfect caricature of a country-western song.

I just want to catch my fish, drive my truck, drink my beer
And not wake up to all this stuff I don’t want to hear
Like the same kind of gun I hunt with, just killed another man
The only thing mine ever shot was deer from my deer stand
I just want to cut my grass, feed my dogs, and wear my boots
Not turn the TV on, sit and watch the evening news
Be told if I tell my own daughter that little boys ain’t little girls
I’d be up the creek in hot water in this “cancel your ass” world

It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays
The direction, the finger’s pointing when everything goes up in flames
Saying I’m some right-wing devil ’cause I was down South, Jesus raised
It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays

Pathetic whiner. This has got to be a joke — if I were asked to write a mocking satire of a country-western song, I’d churn out something that bad. He already gets to do all the things he listed, except that he doesn’t like to hear anything he might disagree with. This is a song about a world where everyone who has a different opinion than he does has to be silenced, while he whimpers about being persecuted.

I usually try to make excuses for despising the whole country-western genre — there are a few artists who break the boring goddamn conventions — but no, not any more. These people are anti-artistic leeches.