Friday Cephalopod: All we’re missing is the spinach

I was reading this account of an encounter between three cuttlefish — a consort male escorting a female, who is challenged by an intruder — and the story was weirdly familiar.

The intruder’s pupil dilation and arm extension began the first of three brief bouts over the course of about four minutes, each with escalating levels of aggression. The consort male met the initial insult with his own arm extension and — as only color-changing animals like cuttlefish can do — a darkening of his face. Then both males flashed brightly contrasting zebra-like bands on their skin, heightening the war of displays further.

Bout number one would go to the intruder as the consort became alarmed, darkened his whole body, squirted a cloud of ink in the intruder’s face and jetted away.

For more than a minute, the intruder male tried to guard and cozy up to the female, but the consort male returned to try to reclaim his position with a newly darkened face and zebra banding. He inked and jetted around the pair to find an angle to intervene, but the intruder fended him off with more aggressive gestures including swiping at him with that fourth arm. Bout number two again went to the intruder.

Then the intruder crossed a line.

He grabbed the female and tried to position her body to engage in head-to-head mating, but she didn’t exhibit much interest, Allen said.

The intruder’s act brought the consort male charging back into the fray with the greatest aggression yet. He grabbed the intruder and twisted him around in a barrel roll three times, the most aggressive gesture in the cuttlefish arsenal. He also bit the other male. The female, meanwhile, swam out of the fracas.

The intruder fled, chased off by the victorious consort male. Study co-author Roger Hanlon, Brown University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., moments later observed and filmed the consort swimming with the female. Allen was affiliated with the Brown-MBL Joint Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences while Akkaynak was studying in a joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institute graduate program.

“Male 1 wins the whole thing because we saw him with the female later, and that’s really what matters,” Allen said. “It’s who ends up with her in the end.”

OMG, I thought, that is the plot of every Popeye cartoon ever. Popeye is strolling along with his goyl, Olive Oyl, when Brutus comes along and snatches her away, battering Popeye a few times in the process. Then Popeye makes a spinach-fueled comeback and beats up Brutus.

Read it again with that trope in mind. It’s uncanny.

How much have we lost to sexual assault and discrimination?

Read Holly Dunsworth’s history of being treated like a thing in anthropology; sexual assault, bland avoidance of the topic by her colleagues, and yet she persevered. This stuff is everywhere.

Once again, there is a whisper network, or in this case, the lack of one in 2003, on which we rely to get the word out about these kinds of men, because academic communities tacitly support such oppressive behavior. We’re past due for some kind of reliable, readily available network of disclosure about these predators — maybe someone should set one up.

Here’s an interesting example, only it’s for science-fiction conventions rather than science conventions: Midwestern Convention Predators, an online list, with evidence, of creeps. I’d like to see similar accounts publicized everywhere. This isn’t a problem if you’re not ashamed of your behavior, is it?

Once again, Charles Pierce expresses what I was thinking

The Republicans are having a fucking party to celebrate disemboweling health care in the country, to the profit of the rich.

Goddamn them all. Goddamn the political movement that spawned them and goddamn the political party in which that movement found a home, and goddamn the infrastructure in which their pus-bag of an ideology was allowed to fester until it splattered the plague all over the government. Goddamn anyone who believes that blind, genetic luck is a demonstration of divine design. Goddamn anyone who believes in a god who hands out disease as punishment. Goddamn anyone who stays behind the walls and dances while the plague comes back again.

And if the Democratic Party can’t reduce these idiots to smoking ash through the stunning visuals that greeted this atrocious vote, then goddamn the Democratic Party, too.

Everyone who voted for this crime must pay a heavy price. The Republican party must be destroyed.

Finally! A perspective on AI I can agree with!

This Kevin Kelly dude has written a summary that I find fully compatible with the biology. Read the whole thing — — it’s long, but it starts with a short summary that is easily digested.

Here are the orthodox, and flawed, premises of a lot of AI speculation.

  1. Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate.
  2. We’ll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.
  3. We can make human intelligence in silicon.
  4. Intelligence can be expanded without limit.
  5. Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems.

That’s an accurate summary of the typical tech dudebro. Read a Ray Kurzweil book; check out the YouTube chatter about AI; look at where venture capital money is going; read some SF or watch a movie about AI. These really are the default assumptions that allow people to think AI is a terrible threat that is simultaneously going to lead to the Singularity and SkyNet. I think (hope) that most real AI researchers aren’t sunk into this nonsense, and are probably more aware of the genuine concerns and limitations of the field, just as most biologists roll their eyes at the magic molecular biology we see portrayed on TV.

And here are Kelly’s summary rebuttals:

  1. Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.
  2. Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.
  3. Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.
  4. Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.
  5. Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

My own comments:

  1. The whole concept of IQ is a crime against humanity. It may have once been an interesting, tentative hypothesis (although even in the beginning it was a tool to demean people who weren’t exactly like English/American psychometricians), but it has long outlived its utility and now is only a blunt instrument to hammer people into a simple linear mold. It’s also even more popular with racists nowadays.

  2. The funny thing about this point is that the same people who think IQ is the bee’s knees also think that a huge inventory of attitudes and abilities and potential is hard-coded into us. Their idea of humanity is inflexible and the opposite of general purpose.

  3. Yeah, why? Why would we want a computer that can fall in love, get angry, crave chocolate donuts, have hobbies? We’d have to intentionally shape the computer mind to have similar predilections to the minds of apes with sloppy chemistry. This might be an interesting but entirely non-trivial exercise for computer scientists, but how are you going to get it to pay for itself?

  4. One species on earth has human-like intelligence, and it took 4 billion years (or 500 million, if you’d rather start the clock at the emergence of complex multicellular life) of evolution to get here. Even in our lineage the increase hasn’t been linear, but in short, infrequent steps. Either intelligence beyond a certain point confers no particular advantage, or increasing intelligence is more difficult and has a lot of tradeoffs.

  5. Ah, the ideal of the Vulcan Spock. A lot of people — including a painfully large fraction of the atheist population — have this idea that the best role model is someone emotionless and robot-like, with a calculator-like intelligence. If only we could all weigh all the variables, we’d all come up with the same answer, because values and emotions are never part of the equation.

It’s a longish article at 5,000 words, but in comparison to that 40,000 word abomination on AI from WaitButWhy it’s a reasonable read and most importantly and in contrast, it’s actually right.

Done but for all the grading

Scattered throughout this semester, I’ve been discussing my EcoDevo course, Biol 4182, Ecological Development. It’s done now, so I’m just going to make note of a few things that I’d do differently next time around.

  • Fix the squishiness. I envisioned this as more like a graduate level course — a 15 week conversation on ecological development, with a textbook that kept us centered. Assessment was largely subjective, based on students demonstrating their understanding in discussion. I had an oral exam, for instance, where we just talked one on one. I think that went well, but in the end, I’ve only got a few specific metrics to use to assign a grade, and much of it will be built around how well they engaged with the material.

    I don’t mind that, but students are a bit bewildered by the absence of hard grades throughout the term. I’ll have to incorporate more detailed assignments next time around, something where they go home with a number that they can work on improving, artificial as all that is.

  • Personally, I greatly enjoyed the student presentations, and I want to do more to have students bring their interests to the course. I might include a student poster session next time — a different medium, and if in a public place, bringing in new perspectives.

    The oral exam was also valuable in getting to know where their interests were. I think I’d schedule it earlier in the term, when I do it again.

  • No way will I ever offer this course at 8am again. It was stuff that required interaction and attentiveness, and somedays it was tough to wake everyone up. These were really smart students, too, so the fault isn’t in them, but in timing.

    Maybe I’d do it at 8am if the college provided a big pot of coffee with donuts every day for the students in compensation. Hah, right.

  • One of the most dramatic effects on student participation was making it mandatory that they ask at least one question a day. Late in the course I added that requirement, and it worked surprisingly well — I could tell they were paying attention to try and find something to pursue further. They also asked good questions, so it wasn’t just pro forma noise. I’ll do that from day one in the future.

    It would be nice if that provided one of those non-squishy metrics I need to add, but it worked too well — they all met that minimal requirement easily. Guess I’ll just have to give them all As.

  • I was bad. I got summoned to Washington DC for important grant-related meetings twice during the semester, which rather gutted two weeks out of 15. That was unavoidable, but while I managed to cover the material in my syllabus, my hope that we could go a bit further and get into the evolution and development side of the textbook was thwarted. But then I never get as deeply into the subjects of any of my courses as I’d like.

    Next time, if I have planned absences, I’ll try to bring in colleagues from ecology or environmental science to cover for me, and keep the momentum going. I was really reluctant to do that this term because…8 goddamn am. I wasn’t going to ask that of anyone.

What I really got out of the course was getting to go in twice a week, even at an ungodly hour, and getting to think about more than just basic, familiar stuff. The core courses I teach in cell biology and genetics are fine, but fairly routine — I know those subjects inside and out, and the challenge is in improving the pedagogy, not in getting exposed to new science. +1, would do again.

Also, one of the best things about small upper-level classes like this is that I can get to know the students a little better, and they reaffirm my faith in humanity because they actually are smart and thoughtful and likeable (I can say that now, I’m not sucking up, because they’ve already done the course evaluation and turned it into the office). Maybe I should just give everyone an A+, with gold stars and smiley face stickers.

May the Fourth

Y’all remember the true meaning of this date, right?

The National Guard fire tear gas to disperse the crowd of students gathered on the commons, May 4, 1970.

Slate

Don’t let the Star Wars jokes distract you from the fact that this is a day to remember the horrors of the police state.

Also note that the guardsmen who murdered four students got away with it. No surprise there.

You British and your fondness for understatement

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, has announced his retirement at the age of 95. I don’t quite see the point of retiring from a job as a figurehead, but I guess even Walmart greeters can expect to see some time off, so good for him. The BBC did report on it, and made this statement that made me laugh:

He is famed for off-the-cuff remarks he has made at royal engagements around the world over the years.

Yes, I suppose you could say that.

One down. So when are y’all getting rid of the rest of the royal family?

Today is the last day of teaching until August for me

I ought to sit back, laugh, and drink champagne, except, unfortunately, that tomorrow the deluge of term papers and lab reports washes up to my door and inundates my office with work. Then there’s the small matter of a final exam next week.

I’m thinking I may actually be done done next Wednesday.

But I’ll still find time to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie tomorrow!

The horrible two-headed rat

I’m not impressed with this recent exercise in microsurgical technique to allow researchers to transplant the head of one rat to another rat’s body. In all honesty, I don’t see the point.

I’m going to put the discussion of this paper below the fold because it seems more an exercise in animal cruelty than anything else; I’ve included one figure illustrating the surgery, but it will be at thumbnail size and you’ll have to click on it to see it in all its gory vulgarity.

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