Not zombies themselves, which are still physiologically impossible, but the way characters deal with them in zombie movies. Horror movies in general are often driven by characters doing absurdly stupid things, and we all say to ourselves “Don’t split up! Don’t go in the basement! Don’t have sex at camp!” and we think the citizenry would never be that idiotic, but nope, they would be.
I get email, still, and I get tired of it all. This is what I got last night.
Modern people are descended from their ancestors (surprising, I know), and we have scientific tools to trace lineages. The Bible has a story about modern people being descended from 8 ancestors who survived a global flood. You can’t wedge the myth into the scientific evidence, and no, that science has demonstrated lines of descent does not validate your petty, simplistic fantasy.
I blurred out their name because they were polite about it all, and stopped when I told them to. If only every Bible-thumper behaved that way.
Now they’re thinking a very silly and unbelievable Nicolas Cage movie (sorry, guys, you can’t do near-instant transfers of faces from one skull to another) and imagining a Perpetual Trump.
I say we should lean into it. Yeah, Joe Biden is possessed by the malignant spirit of Donald Trump, so stand down, Proud Boys. Your president won. Put the guns away, accept everything the Democrats do and say, and start worshipping Biden the same way you did the petty tyrant of the last four years.
One problem: the original Trump is going to be running around screaming at the same time. That corpus is going to have to be…liquidated. Maybe we can just lock him up in some institution somewhere?
They’re monsters, I tell you. They team up with publishers and become real horrors. My colleague here at UMM, Josh Johnson, has written a book I’ve been looking forward to for a while, The Forever Sea, and I get the alert this morning that it has been automatically downloaded into my Kindle app. Today! 19 January! The first day of spring semester classes! So now it’s going to be sitting there, taunting me, and I’m not going to be able to get to it for a while.
Did he do this intentionally, knowing what our academic calendar looks like? Does DAW books routinely torment their academic clients with this kind of scheduling? Temptation is unkind.
The first book in a new environmental epic fantasy series set in a world where ships kept afloat by magical hearthfires sail an endless grass sea.
Hah. The first book in a series. We’ll get even — he’s going to have to write more books while holding down a teaching load!
Since I haven’t read it yet, you’ll have to get by with the testimonials of those who have.
“I can rarely remember being this excited for a debut novel. This was everything I wanted it to be. Wind-swept prairie seas, pirates, magic, and found families.” —Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning author of the Lady Astronaut series
“Richly imagined and beautifully written, with a highly original and very creepy magic system—The Forever Sea is wonderful.” —R. F. Kuang, Astounding Award-winning author of The Poppy War
“Loved The Forever Sea. Loved it. Sheer joy.” —Joanne Harris, internationally bestselling author of Chocolat
“A beautifully imagined dive into the unknown.” —G.V. Anderson, World Fantasy Award winning author of “Das Steingeschöpf”
“Beautifully lyrical and imaginative, Johnson’s debut sings a twisting tale of adventure full of diverse characters and a lush world ripe to fall in love with. With a heart that will haunt you, this ecopunk story is unlike any you’ve seen before.” —Linden A. Lewis, author of The First Sister
“Lush descriptions of plant life abound… When combined with the exceptional protagonist and themes of embracing the unknown, [The Forever Sea] calls to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. With a good balance of grit and tenderness, this entertaining story makes a nice addition to the growing hopepunk subgenre.” —Publishers Weekly
“Hopepunk”? Is that a thing now?
Wouldn’t you know it, this thread would lapse just before Trump was kicked out of office. I wonder if the new thread will be as lively without the Orange Cheeto around to focus our anger? I think Joe might provide some prompting, at least.
Lynna is your curator. Type furiously!
Oh yes, Josh Hawley lost his big book deal when he advocated insurrection, but he didn’t have to worry — there’s a publishing house that’s always ready to endorse the very worst in American politics. Now it’s going to be published by Regnery.
If I may quote myself…
Regnery Publishing has been on my radar for a long, long time. They’re the go-to publishing house for far-right-wing cranks everywhere: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, every angry loon who mainlines AM talk radio, or babbles on AM talk radio, can turn to Regnery to take the fevered hash festering in their brains and turn it into ink on paper. I’ve been tracking their poison for so long because another collection of kooks using their services are the creationists. The Discovery Institute loves them some Regnery. Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design was published with them, as was Icons of Evolution. If you want to lie about science, history, or politics, Regnery will publish it.
The Regnery family seems to have been born of spawning slime monsters, but even they couldn’t deal with William H. Regnery II, who was squeezed out of control years ago. He has since been using his undeserved wealth to support all kinds of terrible projects.
By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States. He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.
Who was supporting the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer? William H. Regnery II, via the National Policy Institute, which he founded. It seems to have been his hobby, creating racist organization and funneling money into it.
…Regnery founded a nonprofit dedicated to providing “a cultural home for our children’s children,” as he wrote in a founder’s statement. It was called the Charles Martel Society, commemorating an 8th-century Frankish king who turned back an Arab invasion—and thus, in the view of white supremacists, saved European civilization almost before it began. Regnery packed the society’s board with men who shared his racial concerns. They included the late Sam Francis, a former Washington Times columnist who suggested that white people could solve racial problems by “imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.”
The Martel Society still exists, and even has its own magazine, The Occidental Quarterly, an excellent source for online racism. It’s edited by Kevin MacDonald, a prominent “race realist”, and also a vocal evolutionary psychologist (how surprising).
The whole dang family is rotten to the core.
The Regnery family’s political story starts with his grandfather and namesake, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile magnate. He was a New Deal Democrat, but in 1940 he helped found the right-wing America First Committee, which sought to stop the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany. The committee, which attracted Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, disbanded when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The America First name, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance as one of Trump’s leading mottos for his presidency.
White couples weren’t having enough babies, Regnery declared, and the government was allowing in hordes of nonwhite immigrants “as if to hasten our demise.”
After World War II, Regnery’s uncle, Henry Regnery, made the family a power in GOP politics through his publishing house, which was subsidized by inherited wealth. He printed the works of writers whom he called “giants of American conservatism:” William F. Buckley Jr. (“God and Man at Yale”), Russell Kirk (“The Conservative Mind”), and Robert Welch, co-founder of the John Birch Society. Regnery books—anti-communist, anti-big-government and pro-business—helped define what it meant to be a Republican in postwar America. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized as “the godfather of modern conservatism.”William Regnery II’s cousin, Alfred Regnery, was an official in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department and then became president of Regnery Publishing. The imprint still exists, under new ownership: Among its recent best-selling authors are Ann Coulter (Adios, America!) and Trump (Time to Get Tough). Regnery himself plunged into conservative politics at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Left Behind, he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit set up to recruit Republican activists on college campuses. His family helped endow the institute, and Regnery remained involved for more than 40 years. On the institute’s board, he associated with GOP stalwarts, including former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and Buckley, founder of the National Review.
So now Regnery is publishing Josh Hawley’s book. Is Hawley even aware of the chains he is forging here?
Probably. He probably thinks they’re awesome.
When I hammered out my reservations about Eric Lander as science advisor, I knew exactly what source to track down: this memorable assessment by Sharon Begley. With perfect clarity, she crystallized my concerns about the guy.
Now I learned that Sharon Begley has died. Dammit. We needed her.
Another conversation about evo-devo! On Wednesday at 3pm Central (note change in time: I’m teaching again, so had to work my schedule around genetics lectures and labs).
This week, we’re talking again about a paper from the Patel lab, Evolving specialization of the arthropod nervous system, published in PNAS in 2012. If you’ve read the paper and want to help me explain it, drop me a line and maybe I’ll send you a link.
Classes start tomorrow, so I’ve got a great big calendar filling the screen on my second monitor. This is causing me some anxiety — as of Tuesday, it turns into a solid wad of appointments until May. The one bright spot is that I arranged my schedule so that I have no classes on Friday. Three day weekends every week! Except of course that free day is going to be used to catch up on everything that I’m falling behind on.
Today is Martin Luther King Day with no obligations, except I’m going in to do some preliminary work for next week’s genetics lab. There will be no rest for a while.
We got some wonderful news from Joe Biden last week.
President-elect Joe Biden announced Friday that he has chosen a pioneer in mapping the human genome — the so-called “book of life” — to be his chief science adviser and is elevating the top science job to a Cabinet position.
It’s about time! It’s astonishing that we’ve gotten by without a science advisor to the president or congress, or when we do have one, they’re ignored, but that’s Republicans for you.
Then, this being Joe Biden, he just has to screw it up. He has nominated Eric Lander for the position. If I had to name anyone who is the personification of Big Science, of Corporate Science, of $cience, I’d immediately say Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute in Boston. I can see why he was chosen: he’s a successful player, a brilliant man, a knowledgeable molecular biologist, a fantastic organizer — he knows how to run a big lab and a big institute, and is going to fit comfortably into an even bigger position. The man is a machine, and is good at running other machines. One thing Lander has in buckets is ambition.
But…
(You knew that was coming, right?)
First, let’s get a minor issue out of the way. Lander had a brief, tangential association with Jeffrey Epstein. He was photographed attending a meeting at Martin Nowak’s office (Nowak was a significant recipient of Epstein’s largesse and should be looked at more critically), but I’m saying, “So what?” I’m sure Lander gets dragged into all kinds of meetings he’d rather not participate in, as the head of the Broad Institute. There’s no evidence of any other association with Epstein other than that a well-known Harvard professor invited him to meet, and Lander seems to have been uninterested in Epstein.
“Martin invited me to an informal sandwich lunch at his institute to talk science with various people,” Lander told BuzzFeed News by email. “I was glad to do it. Martin didn’t mention who’d be attending. I had not met Epstein before, didn’t know much about him, and learned that he was a major donor to Martin’s institute.
“I later learned about his more sordid history,” Lander added. “I’ve had no relationship with Epstein.”
I think it’s fair to say that Epstein went out of his way to brush shoulders with every big name scientist he could find, Lander is one of the biggest, so he tainted him along with a lot of others.
Far more concerning to me is his attitude towards other scientists who were not under his thumb. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2020 for their work on CRISPR/Cas gene editing, and only Doudna and Charpentier. Eric Lander was behind a massive campaign, using all his clout with science publishers and corporations, to promote Feng Zhang, who had also done work on CRISPR, but most importantly, was an employee of the Broad Institute. Lander really wanted the Broad to get the credit for such an important discovery.
So Lander wrote a paper titled “The Heroes of CRISPR” (I was already cringing at just the title) which downplayed the role of Doudna and Charpentier — barely mentioned them at all — and played up the role of others. Like Zhang. Like the Broad Institute. It was bad science and bad history, but it would have been great propaganda if it wasn’t so blatant that everyone caught on to what he was doing.
This controversy does not mean that the work on CRISPR-Cas9 was not initially motivated by a desire to advance scientific knowledge, as Lander asserts in his review. Prizes and patents pollute the story and increase what is at stake, but do not, it is to be hoped, prevent curiosity from being one of the wellsprings of scientific discovery and innovation.
What is new and remarkable is the form that Eric Lander gave to his participation in the debate: the writing of a comprehensive history. Many readers have already pinpointed some problems with this historical record, in particular factual errors. The emphasis Lander places on those involved varies: Zhang’s work from his institute receives a full-page description, whereas the contributions of Doudna and Charpentier are much more briefly described. Rhetorical strategies, such as positioning in paragraphs, were also used to emphasize the value of some contributions over others. For example, Doudna is first mentioned in the middle of a paragraph, as the direct object rather than the subject of the sentence. Charpentier’s name appears at the bottom of a paragraph.
Oh, and he was neck-deep in a patent dispute over CRISPR, a significant fact that he did not mention.
What that all means is that Lander’s reputation among scientists isn’t exactly glowing.
Current and former colleagues contacted by STAT described Lander as brilliant, prickly, and brash, as having “an ego without end,” as “a visionary” who “doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” and as “an authentic genius” who “sees things the rest of us don’t.” Lander won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1987 at age 30. Since 2009, he has co-chaired President Obama’s scientific advisory council.
In case you’re wondering why Biden picked him, there’s a hint in the above sentence.
Lander was not present at the creation of the $3 billion project in 1990 [the human genome project], but the sequencing center he oversaw at the Whitehead Institute became a powerhouse in the race to complete it. Much of that work was done by robots and involved little creativity (once scientists figured out how to do the sequencing). Some individual investigators felt they couldn’t compete against peers at the sequencing centers in the race for grants.
“He became a symbol of plowing lots of resources into industrialized, mindless science that could be run by machines and technicians and so wasn’t real biology,” said one scholar of that period. “Eric came to embody Big Science in that way.”
More than that, Lander played an outsized role in the project relative to his background and experience. A mathematician by training, after he graduated from Princeton in 1978 and earned a PhD in math in 1981 at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, he taught managerial economics at Harvard Business School from 1981 to 1990. He slowly became bored by the MBA world and enchanted with biology, however, and in 1990 founded the genome center at the Whitehead. It was hardly the pay-your-dues, do your molecular biology PhD and postdoctoral fellowship route to a leading position in the white-hot field of genomics.
Maybe Lander is the future of Big Science, where the Little Scientists get replaced by armies of technicians marching through protocols with the goal of getting a patent and corporate sponsorship, but I don’t have to like it.
