Snuggly spiders

The spiders were all fed this morning, and I continued my efforts to get breeding to happen. Maybe it did; I’d left the female New Arya (it’s a cursed name, we’ve gone through three Aryas so far, although this one seems to be lasting) with a male over the weekend, and initially I wasn’t certain what was going on. New Arya is slightly peculiar, having built a nest of debris in one corner of her cage, rarely leaving it. When last I left our two lovebirds, the male was hovering about the nest, plucking forlornly at the web, and New Arya was just waving a tootsie at him.

This morning, though, New Arya was outside (she’s on the left) near the male (on the right), and the two were just resting…in post-coital bliss, perhaps? I hope? I didn’t have the heart to break up the peaceful pair today, so I left them alone, for now. That male has more copulatory duties with other females, though, so I’m going to have to break them up this week.

See? Female spiders aren’t necessarily cannibalistic widow-makers.

Speaking of nesting, I found Mary Jane huddled in a corner with a dome built over her head. It looks cozy.

She seems quite content to have a home of her own. I suppose I’m going to have to introduce a male at some point, though, and wreck her maleless paradise.

Santa came early, and left Steve Pinker a lump of coal

I woke up at 5am this morning, grumble grumble grumble, and trudged off to the kitchen to make the coffee, like usual. Then as usual I fired up the iPad and browsed while waiting for the water to boil and the coffee to steep, when…

That song had been running through my head since the Watchmen finale the other night, but it erupted into full symphonic orchestral sound in my head when I found Jessica Riskin’s article in the LA Review of Books, Pinker’s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics. Oh god yes. It’s so good to see that fraud exposed. I have been irritated by Pinker for years — he’s constantly going on about “progress” and “liberal ideals”, but what he really means is “crush our enemies in the East” and a pattern of conservative thought that would make Ben Shapiro comfortable. His books are propaganda for the Right, to allow them to pretend that they are the True Progressives.

You need to read the review for yourself. It’s delightful.

“INTELLECTUALS HATE REASON,” “Progressives hate progress,” “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery.” No, wait, those last two are from a different book, but it’s easy to get mixed up. Steven Pinker begins his latest — a manifesto inspirationally entitled Enlightenment Now — with a contrast between “the West,” which he says is critical of its own traditions and values, and “the Islamic State,” which “knows exactly what it stands for.” Given the book’s title, one expects Pinker to be celebrating a core Enlightenment ideal: critical skepticism, which demands the questioning of established traditions and values (such as easy oppositions between “the West” and “the bad guys”). But no, in a surprise twist, Pinker apparently wants us over here in “the West” to adopt an Islamic State–level commitment to our “values,” which he then equates with “classical liberalism” (about which more presently). You begin to see, reader, why this review — which I promised to write last spring — took me all summer and much of the fall to finish. Just a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions.

Enlightenment Now purports to demonstrate by way of “data” that “the Enlightenment has worked.” What are we to make of this? A toaster oven can work or not by toasting or failing to toast your bagel. My laser printer often works by printing what I’ve asked it to print, and sometimes doesn’t by getting the paper all jammed up inside. These machines were designed and built to do particular, well-defined jobs. There is no uncertainty, no debate, no tradition of critical reflection, no voluminous writings regarding what toaster ovens or laser printers should do, or which guiding principles or ideals should govern them.

On the other hand, uncertainty, debate, and critical reflection were the warp and woof of the Enlightenment, which was no discrete, engineered device with a well-defined purpose, but an intellectual and cultural movement spanning several countries and evolving over about a century and a half. If one could identify any single value as definitive of this long and diverse movement, it must surely be the one mentioned above, the value of critical skepticism. To say it “worked” vitiates its very essence. But now the Enlightenment’s best-selling PR guy takes “skepticism” as a dirty word; if that’s any indication, then I guess the Enlightenment didn’t work, or at any rate, it’s not working now. Maybe it came unplugged? Is there a paper jam?

Riskin goes through Pinker’s evocation of major thinkers of Enlightenment philosophy and shows that he gets them all wrong. Kant, Hume, Diderot — somehow, Pinker distorts them all into cheerleaders for a version of the Enlightenment in which all we have to do is think hard and do science, and like Mr Spock, we will all get the right answer, and it will be the same answer for everyone. It’s weird. The only book by Kant that I ever struggled through was his Critique of Pure Reason, and, I don’t know, isn’t just the title a great big hint?

In fact, every one of Pinker’s boosters of reason and science was a skeptical analyst of these. It’s not that they were anti-reason or anti-science. Rather, it was the twinning of reason and skepticism that most definitively characterized Enlightenment thought and writing. In particular, Enlightenment authors were keenly aware that knowledge is inseparable from the knower, composed not only of the thing known, but of the knower’s perspective, passions, experience, interpretation, and instinct. Skepticism was the means by which they acknowledged this truth and put it to work. By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense.

And then there’s Pinker’s worship of data. Every scientist knows that data is only part of the story; interpretation shapes that data, but even more, methods and sources select what data you see, and no amount of data can describe the totality of the phenomenon you’re attempting to describe. We are all peeking at the universe through pinholes, and attempting to summarize its nature with theories and models. Pinker, though, is trying to convince the reader that his graphs and charts and tables are comprehensive and tell a uniform message of a perfectable and perfecting world, which is really just a way of belittling real problems to tell us that everything’s all right.

Then there are the graphs that do not appear in the book: graphs showing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the resulting natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, mass shootings, and the list could go on. Indeed, it should set off alarm bells that every single graph in the book points in the same direction: every day in every way, better and better. My point is not that things are getting worse rather than better, but that history is not a straight line up or down, and that presenting “data” as though it produces and speaks for itself is worse than useless: it is profoundly dishonest. What we need in this time of political, environmental, and cultural crisis is precisely the value Pinker rejects but that his Enlightenment heroes embraced, whatever their differences of opinion on other matters: skepticism, and an attendant spirit of informed criticism. Skepticism is kryptonite to the sort of demagogue who brandishes something — a cross, a flag, a MAGA hat … or a graph — and calls anyone who questions it a delusional know-nothing. Pinker’s story is Manichaean, good versus evil, and the bad guys are intellectuals, progressives, and the misleading news media. Any of this sounding familiar? With friends like these, the Enlightenment doesn’t need enemies.

I am looking forward to the squawks of indignation from the usual crowd of neo-conservatives masquerading as neo-liberals masquerading as honest seekers of the truth. The apologists for Pinker will be loud…and wrong, as usual.

Not a spider

I get complaints all the time about my spider photos. No matter how gorgeous they are, there are always a bunch of people who dislike seeing them. They’re not cats, you know? Everyone wants cats. Nothing but cats. Adorable little kittens frolicking about.

Well, PZ don’t do that. I’m willing to compromise, though, so here…a non-spider. It’s kind of the antithesis of a spider, which makes it more like a kitty cat. Enjoy your penis worms.

Here’s a big bucket full of penis worms.

And a beach covered with penis worms.

You like that, huh? You want more? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!? Are you going to continue criticizing my spiders?

Work, work, work, work

I played hooky last year, taking two semesters off (at half-pay, ouch) for this thing called a sabbatical. As it turns out, my university expects me to justify and explain myself and tell them what I did with my lazy time off, and I guess it’s not enough to fire off a quick note saying that I was playing with spiders. So now today I’m late for the division holiday party because I had to hammer out a longer rationalization. OK, sure, so I include it here, too, as well as mailing it off to my dean and division chair.

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That’s one beautiful spider

Latrodectus umbukwane is a breath-takingly gorgeous spider from South Africa. Look at those colors!

As you might guess from the genus, it’s related to black widows, which means of course everyone gets worked up about its potential venomous nature. It hasn’t bitten anyone that we know of! Get over it! It seems to be, if anything, unusually shy.

Also, you want to see some sexual dimorphism? Take a look at this.

I am not impressed with your anti-spider bigotry, Science Times

Well, this is a stupid sensationalist headline: New Species of Spider Found in Mexico Able to Rot Human Flesh. Yeah, so? This is a common property of many venoms, such as those in some wasps and snakes, and it makes sense that a spider, which relies on injecting toxins and enzymes that break down cells and tissues, would do so. How else would they slurp out the digested guts of their prey? These spiders have no interest in eating people, or “rotting human flesh”, so it’s an obnoxious way to distort the story.

I can just imagine spider tabloids running stories title “New Species of Primate Found With Large Fleshy Butts Capable of Crushing Innocent Spiders”. It completely misses the story.

Here’s a pic of the lovely beast in question.

It’s called Loxosceles tenochtitlan, and it’s distinguishing characteristic is not that it has a remarkable venom, but that males and females have unique genitals in a lock-and-key arrangement, which is also common in invertebrates.

In a statement released by the university, Valdez-Mondragon explained the difference: “As L.tenochtitlan is morphologically similar to L.misteca, it was initially thought that it had been introduced to this region by the shipping of ornamental plants. But when doing molecular biology studies of both species, we realized that they are different.” Valdez-Mondragon described the species and noted the difference between L.tenochtitlan and L.misteca lies in the male spider’s palp or the organ that enables touch in arachnids. It is also noted that the female L.tenochtitlan has a distinct looking sexual organ compared to L.misteca. Valdez-Mondragon explains that at first glance, the two species of spiders can look identical, but L.tenochtitlan can be identified because of its dark brown color which is dull compared to the other species and on its back is a very visible violin pattern.

The story goes on to claim that “humans are naturally repulsed at the sight of “creepy crawlies” like spiders.”

The Science Times is not one of my approved popular science sites. Too much trash written by people who have only the most passing acquaintance with science.

This man is not a racist

You know he’s not because he says he’s not.

That’s how racism works, you know: if you think a nation founded on black slavery, and another nation that carried out brutal ethnic cleansing, are just peachy, saying the magic words “I am not a racist” absolves you of all blame. You can support policies that promote white supremacy, you can put up Nazi flags like they’re Christmas decorations, you can intentionally put up pallets painted with Confederate symbols and point them at a minority-majority school, but as long as you deny that you’re a racist, you’re safe.

For bonus points, you can get really irate if someone accuses you of being a racist as long as you insist you’re not a racist, and then you can turn it around and accuse them of being racist against white people. What’s really neat-o is that if they then say “I am not racist!” you can smirk knowingly, because you know that everyone who says that is lying.

Words are magic!

But I thought they were the law-and-order party?

Matt Bevin lost the election to the governorship of Kentucky, so in his last few weeks in power he has decided to throw a petty tantrum and release hordes of violent criminals from the prisons. That’ll teach those voters!

Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.

Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.

He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.

You know, Kentucky has very strict laws against possession of marijuana, so there are certainly a great many people in the prisons for that crime. Couldn’t he have released them, instead? I would think 428 potheads having parties at home would be far less of a threat to the citizenry than child rapists and murderers.

It’s become quite clear that when a Republican says they’re a law and order candidate they’re lying, just as much as when they claim to be True Christians™. The actual truth of the matter is that they’re just sadists who love the power to torment others.