The first day of classes!

It’s that time again — I have to put on my big boy pants and a clean shirt and stand up in front of a bunch of eager students and pretend to know everything. I’m teaching our introductory course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and also our core Cell Biology course. So I prepared by going to the movies at the Morris Theater. This week, they were playing Guardians of the Galaxy and Lucy.

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Incidentally, racist

I don’t approve of homeschooling. I understand how sometimes, the local school is in a state of intellectual collapse and it becomes necessary (although I’d rather the state realized it has an obligation to maintain school quality in all districts), but too often it’s because parents demand a bizarre ideological purity — in particular, because they don’t want their kids exposed to liberal ideas like diversity and tolerance.

Which leads to…

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There are such things as stupid questions

There are questions which do nothing but reveal the depth of misconceptions and breadth of ignorance of the questioner. I suppose that’s useful; it tells you the dimensions of the hole you need to fill in. Unfortunately, sometimes that hole is also filled with malice, and the questions will tell you that, too.

Aron Ra got challenged to answer 7 questions about feminism. From my opening paragraph, you can tell these are probably going to be really stupid questions, and they are. These are painfully bad. You can also tell from the way they are set up that the person has a huge load of prejudice against feminists, and what he’s really looking for is a set of excuses to dismiss feminism altogether, because he already knows he doesn’t like it.

And of course, he asks his stupid questions in the form of a youtube video, because that’s where you can find prime idiots to feed him his desired responses. Only he got Aron Ra.

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Crusaders against GMOs

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on Vandana Shiva, a crusader against GMO crops. I’d never heard of her before, but apparently she has charisma and cult-like followers who hang on her every word, and her word is a rather religious opposition to scientific agriculture. Weirdly, I can agree with some of it.

At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive.

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