What is a wolf, anyway?

Science magazine says The legendary dire wolf may not have been a wolf at all, while the actual article published in Nature says only Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage, and says that grey wolves and dire wolves are not as closely related as previously thought.

Dire wolves are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America1, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Here, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil remains dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization across Canidae, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes. This suggests that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire wolves, while the ancestors of grey wolves, coyotes and dholes evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

OK, then, what is a wolf? If we saw a large canine that hunted in packs nowadays, wouldn’t we call it a wolf, while recognizing that it could be distinguished scientifically as a different species? What does “closely related” even mean?

I looked at the results.

Just to put it into context. if dire wolves and grey wolves diverged less than 6 million years ago, that means their relationship is comparable to that of modern humans and chimpanzees, which diverged about 6 million years ago, too. Meanwhile, the various local house spiders I study diverged 50-100 million years ago. Would we have an article declaring that chimpanzees aren’t apes? I don’t think so.

Dire wolves were wolves. They’re a distinct lineage with an interesting history, but I’m not particularly interested in arguing about whether certain colloquial terms or folk taxonomy are appropriate.

Candace Owens is the right-wing persecution complex on steroids

Candace Owens is suing the “fact checkers” because they keep checking the facts in her videos. How dare they! In the name of free speech, she is therefore suing a couple of news sites to silence them.

Our freedoms are being stripped away. The overlords of Big Tech are determining what Americans can and cannot say, share, like, and post. Support our legal efforts today as we fight back against Facebook’s fact-checkers, confronting those who are suppressing free speech, thought, and expression across our great country.

We have begun pursuing two of Facebook’s fact checkers, Lead Stories & USA Today, for wrongfully “fact checking” posts that I put up earlier this year. Both USA Today & Lead Stories silenced me when I posted a different opinion on Covid – in their minds there is only one opinion: theirs. Censorship of conservatives across the world of social media is rampant and without challenging these alleged “fact checkers” we will all be silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

As a result, we have filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Delaware against Lead Stories LLC, a Colorado company & Gannett Satellite Information Network LLC, d/b/a USA Today for malicious publication of false “fact check” articles, wrongfully leveraging their power as Facebook Third Party Fact-Checking partners for the purpose of redirecting web traffic away from me, abusing Section 230 of the Communications Deceny Act and interfering with the commercial enterprises of Candace Owens LLC. Access the lawsuit HERE.

We will be seeing them in Court in 2021.

She made this announcement on multiple social media outlets. On Instagram, she has 3.1 million followers; on Periscope, the video got 1.2 million views; on Facebook, she has 4.5 million followers; she has 2.6 million followers on Twitter. She uses her social media clout to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and BLM and the election. The announcement video itself is a fancy production shot in a professional studio, with what seems to be multiple camerapersons, slick lighting, and a backdrop with glowing letters spelling out “Candace” — there is clearly a lot of money backing her. Yet she claims she is being silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

Meanwhile, over here in the real world, here’s the status of my last YouTube video.

Maybe you couldn’t hear me over the sad trombone playing loudly in the background, but who do I sue? I’m clearly being oppressed.

Also, I’m putting myself in great danger here. Notice that I did not link anywhere to any of Candace Owens multiple sites, and I’m telling you that she is a dishonest fraud, and that her message is string of lies — she’s an anti-vaxxer, a Trump enabler, an anti-democratic propagandist, and a shill for the rich. Next thing you know, she’s going to sue me. You are not allowed to criticize Candace Owens or expose her mendacity!

According to creationists, every science is false

Remember what right-wing Christians mean when they talk about “academic freedom”. They really mean freedom from standards.

Here’s a letter from a Christian who is still indignant that the Institute for Creation Research was denied the right to hand out science degrees over ten years ago.

It is fitting to reflect and contemplate the future ramifications following events of significance. One such event transpired shortly after this author applied for admission to the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School (ICRGS). The school was established in 1981 with a unique purpose in providing graduate-level education in fields of science that are particularly relevant to the study of biblical apologetics. Its former graduates earned Master of Science degrees in Science Education, Astrophysics/ Geophysics, Biology, Geology, and General Science,1 and many are now teaching or participating in Christian ministries in various communities.

As a Christian educator, I felt that formal education from one of the world’s leading creation science ministries would serve me well as an important augmentation to the graduate degrees already earned from secular universities. However, only four days after my application was submitted, the board of directors of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) voted to close the doors of the ICRGS indefinitely, effective 30 June 2010. The board reached this painful decision after a long legal battle with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that ultimately resulted in a ruling against ICR and the end of this important educational institution.

He makes a long defense of the ICR, but somehow cannot say outright that the organization teaches as a conclusion that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old. This is a telling omission: their fundamental assumptions are so ridiculous that they dare not say them aloud, choosing instead to claim failings by real sciences that are not there. He cannot defend the process by which the ICR reaches their conclusions, and therefore tries to take them off the table. We’re going to play word games, instead.

For the ICRGS, the quality of education was never the issue, but rather the creation content within the curriculum. The THECB declared that the ICR Grad School program could not be called “science” because it was based on the creation model rather than evolution. To keep creation science and intelligent design out of the classroom, it is often argued that they do not qualify as science. Often the definitions used for such purposes are arbitrarily established to exclude other worldviews and frequently too stringent, also inadvertently ruling current or historic inquiry as unscientific.

The “creation model” is false. It doesn’t work. It was invented in the last century to paper over a primitive literalist interpretation of the Bible, and it’s so indefensible that the only thing he can do is claim real science is also false, therefore creationism has equal standing.

In the 1981 case of McLean vs Arkansas, the judgment defined the essential characteristics of science as being guided by natural law; explanatory by natural law; testable; tentative; and falsifiable. Anti-creationists have added additional requirements, such as Michael Ruse and Eugenie Scott who stated that science deals only with what is repeatable and can be subjected to testing. By such definitions archaeology does not qualify as science, since it is instead a search for intelligent agents rather than material causes. In a historical context, the hard sciences like physics or chemistry also cannot be reduced to these definitions. Much of the early developments of science were not guided by or explained by existing laws or known natural processes.

Archaeology is repeatable, testable, and makes hypotheses that can be criticized and evaluated. Ask an archaeologist! They have strong principles for evaluating evidence, and have arguments that are resolved by going back into the field and collecting empirical observations. That they recognized that intelligent agents, that is, human beings, are part of the process of historical change is not a criterion for rejecting the discipline as a science. Humans are real. They can be observed. We can see the consequences of their actions. So, studying them can be done scientifically.

My physics and chemistry friends are going to be surprised to learn that what they do doesn’t count as science, but going to church does.

That early science was built on guesswork and assumptions does not mean they were somehow unscientific. Our understanding was hammered out of chaos — people made hypotheses about nature, tested them, and re-evaluated their ideas until they conformed better and allowed better predictions about the natural world. Yes? That’s not a strike against science. It’s also the case that we don’t know exactly how life arose, so we make hypotheses about chemical possibilities, and go into the lab, or collect organisms from obscure places like deep sea vents, and test those ideas. That’s what science is!

These exclusionary definitions are especially problematic when we consider the many areas of science that attempt to explain one-time historical events, such as the big bang, the origin of life or biological processes. None of these hypothetical scenarios were observed, nor are they repeatable, allowing testing in any adequate manner. All attempts to reproduce the conditions that gave birth to the first cell have failed. In reality, such events fall well outside the statistical realm of possibilities and contrary to the known laws of science (2nd law of thermodynamics). Experiments in these areas of historical science are based on philosophically derived faith in unseen and unobservable processes.

He doesn’t understand the concept of repeatability, does he? No, we can’t fire off another Big Bang in the basement of the physics building. But we can study the properties of matter and energy and try to understand how they could have arisen. We can build colliders and see how tiny bits of matter interact. We can also observe consequences — the Big Bang theory didn’t arise out of some guy reading one sentence of a holy book and inflating it into a textbook worth of glurge. Instead, it was derived from seen and observed astronomical processes.

It’s telling that when their beliefs, based entirely on flawed interpretations of an extremely limited and internally contradictory text, are questioned, they choose to lash out and whine petulantly that physics, chemistry, biology, and archaeology aren’t real sciences, anyway. It’s kind of pathetic.

I’ll tell you what the ICR doesn’t qualify as science, and it’s simple. Are you free to question the accuracy of your source material? Do you get to revise your interpretation of the evidence to conform to the observable facts? Or are you required to hold certain tenets of faith?

All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week described in Genesis 1:1–2:3, and confirmed in Exodus 20:8-11. The creation record is factual, historical, and perspicuous; thus, all theories of origins or development that involve evolution in any form are false. All things that now exist are sustained and ordered by God’s providential care. However, a part of the spiritual creation, Satan and his angels, rebelled against God after the creation and are attempting to thwart His divine purposes in creation.

Case closed. Asserting your conclusion in the absence of evidence, and in defiance of any possible evidence, is anti-science.

Tacky slime all over the place

The list of awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is kind of a mixed bag already — for every Anthony Fauci there’s an Antonin Scalia, for every Toni Morrison an Irving Kristol, for every Jesse Jackson a James Watson. It’s political, it’s by whim and by credible honor, it’s a mess. It’s nice to see someone you favor get the recognition, but it’s never been anything but a too-freely given token that a president liked you.

Now it’s that much more meaningless. Donald Trump is handing one out to Jim Jordan, the cowardly hack who looked the other way as student athletes were sexually molested, the political leech who is one of the far right hard cases who still insists that Trump won the last election, who even now refuses to admit that there was no “steal”, and whose ambition far exceeds his ability. He’s the perfect Trump apparatchik, in other words.

Boy, Trump is determined to leave a thick layer of slime over everything as he exits, isn’t he?

Yay me

I got all my syllabi written, and organized my first week’s lectures. I also created and published the Canvas pages for my students. I still have to revamp the first lab — thanks to COVID-19, I’ve had to do major surgery on how the lab operates, to accommodate social distancing. I’ll probably get that done tomorrow.

Also, I sort of understand why the administration did this, but it’s still kind of annoying. They killed Spring Break — don’t you students scurry off to visit family and bring back the plague! But then they sprinkled one day long breaks throughout the term, rather than just shortening the whole semester. That tends to mess up lab schedules more than the usual big block of lost time.

But they didn’t consult me on the matter, so I guess I can’t complain. I just deal with what they hand me at this point, and hope I don’t die a horrible slow lingering death of the current epidemic.

If Chauncey Gardiner were a malicious, hate-filled bigot…

Maybe nobody else remembers the movie Being There, but I thought of it when I read this account of the president’s day last week. While the Republic was falling into chaos after he had incited a mob to march on the capitol, while his aides and cabinet and senators were desperately trying to get him to respond, what do you think he was doing? He was watching TV.

But as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who — safely ensconced in the West Wing — was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.

“He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”

Even as he did so, Trump did not move to act. And the message from those around him — that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost — was one to which he was not initially receptive.

This is what he does and has been doing for the last 4 years: TV, golf, rallies to feed his ego, and appointing incompetent sycophants to high office. Oh, and tweet. That’s it. That’s all he has done. If only we’d known we could distract him into total paralysis just by running video of him talking 24 hours a day.

They couldn’t get him to mobilize the national guard. They couldn’t get him to do anything, other than send out a reluctant tweet. He didn’t even want to do that!

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

He was persuaded to make a short video, which he poisoned with his own views.

“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video, released shortly after 4 p.m. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”

You can tell his sympathies were entirely with the insurrectionists. He wanted a democratic election overthrown, he is openly pandering to a violent mob.

He mustered the energy for another tweet (how pathetic), and this one was even worse, declaring once again that he was the rightful winner of the presidential election, in a landslide no less, and declaring that he was the victim of an injustice. This was not going to quell the violence.

At 6:01 p.m., Trump blasted out yet another tweet, which Twitter quickly deleted and which many in his orbit were particularly furious about, fearing he was further inflaming the still-tense situation.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so ­unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

This is all so revealing, and it tells you what he is going to do after the 20th: he’s going to go on tour, making more false claims and inciting more violence and rage. He fired up the QAnons and Trumpkins and right-wing militias and religious fanatics, and he’s going to keep on doing the same thing, and because he doesn’t have the authority of the office of the president to prop him up, he’s going to have to make increasingly extreme and inflammatory comments…to get back on TV. Because that’s what he really wants.

All this recent talk of healing and reconciliation is going to accomplish nothing as long as they let this walking talking bomb stroll about in public, and as long as enablers like Cruz and Hawley and Graham are allowed in congress.

That title worried me for a minute

I read Turkey Sex Cult Chief Sentenced to More Than 1,000 Years in Jail and thought at first it was going to be about some ghastly poultry fetishist, but no, it’s something completely different.

A Turkish Islamic televangelist was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail on Monday for running a decades-old cult whose members were accused of crimes ranging from sexual assault to blackmail, money laundering and even espionage.

Adnan Oktar, who wrote books on Islamic creationism under the pseudonym Harun Yahya, was put on trial in Istanbul alongside 236 other alleged members or enablers of his network, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

He became well-known in Turkey over the years, especially for provocative TV shows broadcast on his own channel. On screen, the cult leader surrounded himself with young women he called his “kittens,” who were often dressed in revealing clothing while he uttered opinions on religious and political matters.

Goodbye, Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar! I still have a couple of copies of his Atlas of Creation, a truly silly book.