What is a woman?

I got this question in email. Oh god.

I was wondering if you are, or were willing to comment on Matt Walsh’s movie, ‘What is a Woman?’?

While I did see your post on the question being asked to Ketanji Brown Jackson, I did find your response a little unsatisfying. Yes, coming up with an inclusive, biology specific definition is problematic; but Matt and others are just asking for a basic dictionary or functional definition. If you can define a cat, as for example, a member of the Family Felidae, or a carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, or a common family pet that purrs, then you should be able to provide a definition of a woman.

Most of the people asked in Matt’s movie either refuse to provide a definition, or give a circular definition. This is problematic in a couple of ways. Words have meaning. If you are unwilling, or unable, to provide a definition of a word that you use, then that word is meaningless. If you can define what cat, dog, or bird means, but can’t, or won’t, define man or woman, then there is a problem. If you are unwilling to define what a woman is because you are worried about the personal consequences of doing that publicly, such as public backlash, losing your job, etc. then you have a perfect example of cancel culture.

No, I didn’t see that movie, nor will I be seeing it in the future. It’s a stupid gotcha question.

You know, not everything fits into a tidy category that can be encapsulated in a brief dictionary entry. This bizarre need to make everything sharp-edged, black-and-white, rigidly and scrupulous defined is a you problem, not a me problem. I’m fine with ambiguity and complexity, and “woman” is an extremely complex category. If you’re going to complain about circular definitions, the Merriam-Webster definition fits the bill: “an adult female person”. Sure, go with that. “Adult” is ill-defined, “person” is the subject of many arguments, and “female”…well, here’s another dictionary definition: “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs”. “Typically,” huh. So not necessarily? Or how about this alternative, “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”? That implies a simple binary, which is false, and worse, suggests males and females are opposites of each other, rather than positions on a continuum.

Oh, here’s another alternative: “characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex”. See “woman”.

You want a nice clean dictionary definition? Sorry, guy, that’s just a whole ‘nother ball of worms. The desire for a reductive simplification is a fallacious goal that is just going to fuck you up. It is not “cancel culture” if people give you the side-eye and think you’re an ass if you provide a simple-minded definition that excludes a large number of women who know they are women, who have a history of womanhood, who interact with society as women, who present as women, who live as women, because you want an inadequate 5 word definition that makes you feel like you’ve mastered the concept of “woman” while not actually understanding anything. That approach always leads to slotting all women into a narrow restrictive box that makes no one happy or satisfied. It also damages men, because then, since we’re “opposites”, we’re expected to shun anything that might overlap with femininity.

Here’s something else that’s problematic: that you think a theocratic fascist like Matt Walsh is making a good point by insisting that everyone must provide a narrow range of criteria for womanhood. Nope, not going to do it. I’ve met many women, and they are diverse. They’re not Barbie dolls, mass produced for your pleasure. Stop trying to find a single mold to define them, and accept them as people. If you face public backlash because they reject your expectations of how a woman should be, that’s not “cancel culture”. That’s just someone recognizing you are an asshole. And if lots of people think the same way, consider the possibility that it’s not their failure to define a word to meet your simplistic views, it’s that maybe you are an asshole.

You know who else liked Walsh’s awful movie? JK Rowling.

If you find yourself agreeing with either Walsh or Rowling, you’ve accepted a conservative view that dehumanizes women, reducing them to a cartoon.

Also, please don’t try to pretend the authority of biology supports your expectation of sharp, precise boundaries to everything. Biologists know that biology is fuzzy about everything.

He’s such a good Republican

An empty football helmet. Perfect!

Herschel Walker personifies all those good ol’ Republican ideals: stupidity, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty.

He might be the next Senator from Georgia. You can hear all the chucklefucks in the audience clucking approvingly over his ‘science’, and you can hear the gears grinding. Why should we do something that benefits us if it also benefits the rest of the world? They’re all thinking about modifying their trucks so they can roll coal now and teach China a lesson.

Now I wonder if he’s actually lying, or his brain is so rotten that he doesn’t know he’s lying.

Doesn’t matter, the deader the brain and the more corrupt the morals, the better the Republican candidate.

For those who missed it yesterday

Here’s that image from the NASA press release yesterday.

That’s spectacular, even as reduced for the blog. You can see the whole full sized image at NASA.

What’s amazing about it is that the gravitational lensing is so obvious that even a biologist can see it. Notice those stretched and curved galaxies that form a kind of whorl around the center of the image? That’s not a camera artifact, it’s caused by a galaxy in the foreground bending light making the 4 billion light-year trek from the source to the telescope. This is beautiful stuff. Phil Plait explains it far better than I can, even if in that article he’s using a blurry image from Hubble. Blurry compared to this one, that is.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn that from the press conference. I picked it up from all the astronomers and physicists talking about it on Twitter. The press conference was incompetence personified.

After 45 minutes of waiting with the most irritating hold music NASA could produce, the screen opened on a group of people with a poorly resolved black square in the background, the image above. You couldn’t see much of anything, because most of the screen space was dedicated to making sure you could see the old people talking about it. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden said some platitudes that mainly amounted to being so proud that the speckled black square in the distance was the product of American ingenuity, while NASA Administrator Bill Nelson talked about how very far away those lights were. It was soul-deadening stuff that told me nothing about what I was looking at. See that short paragraph about lensing that I scribbled out above? Pitiful as it is, that says far more about the image than anything in the press conference.

I watched a little bit of NASA TV before they put me on ear-grating hold, and one thing I learned is that a bunch of engineers, politicians, and administrators are terrible at putting on a show. I’ve seen better production values from amateurs (not me, of course, I suck) putting home-produced videos on YouTube. They also seem to think that crackly fuzzy flattened audio on everything makes them sound authentic.

A suggestion to NASA: next time you advertise a dramatic reveal of some gorgeous discovery, tell all the bureaucrats to stay home. Don’t book any of the politicians, who won’t know what they’re looking at, and will think it’s reasonable to delay the whole event for some other issue of statecraft (they should do that, and shut up about science). Instead, bring on a small team of scientists who will express their blissful joy at what they see, and will help us understand why this is so cool.

That’s Science Communication 101. NASA doesn’t get it. It’s a bit embarrassing how bad they are at it.

This invasive species hasn’t invaded my neighborhood

This is rather interesting: an article from the National Museum of Ireland describing the appearance of the noble false widow (Steatoda nobilis) in that country, in the late 1990s. I haven’t seen any of that specific species in my neighborhood, but apparently they are a significantly invasive species. We have lots of Steatoda and Parasteatoda here, though!

Most of us in Ireland have heard about this recent arrival, but few would know its scientific name, Steatoda nobilis. This spider is more commonly known as the noble false widow.

Interestingly, in an article published at the time (Nolan 1999), Myles Nolan tells the reader that a couple of weeks prior to the aforementioned Bray discovery, another person had found a great number of these spiders on their own property, approximately 250m away from the Bray residence. The author observed at the time that these spiders have a high reproductive rate, and that the spiderlings are inclined to disperse widely from the egg sac, perhaps accounting for this species’ ability to colonise easily.

The Museum specimen detailed in our acquisition register is, however, the first valid Irish record as an identified specimen was lodged with the Museum. That specimen (called a ‘voucher specimen’) is now stored safely in the Museum and is available for study and research.

As Ireland currently houses relatively few animals who pose a risk to human health, this new arachnid is now of great curiosity to the public. The reports, however, are over emphasised, and there is little for humans to fear from the noble false widow.

A recent report from the Irish scientific community however, showed that a common lizard had been preyed upon by this diminutive spider (Dunbar et al. 2018). The young lizard was discovered wrapped in spider webbing, with the noble false widow crouched over its head, presumed to have been feeding on it – a potential worry for Ireland’s only native terrestrial reptile.
The noble false widow can now be found in at least 17 Irish counties, all year round, both indoors and out (although more so the latter). They have a strong tendency to live on manmade structures and materials, such as steel, concrete and timber. Sheds, outhouses and boundary railings provide the perfect habitat for our new arrival.

Part of the reason for the relatively sudden appearance of Steatoda nobilis in the scientific eye, though, is the British tabloids, which had an absolute freakout over big spiders, playing up the nearly non-existent dangers and clutching their pearls over the observation of a few spiders near one of the Queen’s estates. It was ridiculous.

Increase in Spider Recording Scheme records for Steatoda nobilis in Britain parallels intensified
press coverage in the local newspapers (dark blue bars = spider records, light blue line = number of press
articles). The sudden massive increase in records seen in the last decade coincides with the first appearance
of the species in various other countries far from the native range in the Macaronesian islands.

I can vouch for Steatoda‘s eagerness to disperse — when I found the newly emerged clutch of spiderlings yesterday evening, they had nicely spread out equidistant from each other in their container, and when I opened it up, the race was on, with all the spiderlings on the edge of the mass rushing to get out into the larger lab. I think they don’t much care for their brothers and sisters.

The “high reproductive rate”, though, is a relative thing. My impression of Steatoda triangulosa and Steatoda borealis, the local species in the genus, is that they were sluggards compared to Parasteatoda. They take a month to develop from egg to spiderling, compared to Parasteatoda‘s week and a half, and they have much smaller clutch sizes than Parasteatoda. I’ve been sitting here feeling like the Steatodas take forever to get to the point I can work with them.

On the other hand, at the end of that month I am finding myself drowning in baby spiders…

Back from our adventure

We visited Minneapolis-St Paul this past weekend so we could watch Iliana and Skatje walk on Mars…


…and Iliana and Grandma going undersea.

I am reminded that little kids are exhausting. We thoroughly enjoyed our weekend with an energetic 3 year old, but it was necessary to get home to recover. Except…yikes, things are heating up in the lab.

I had one egg sac open up 12 days ago, and another this weekend. A third is imminent — I dread going into the lab today to see even more spiderlings. Then there are two more that will open up in a week. I got home last night and had to sort out and move a cloud of adorable baby spiders into separate containers. I’ve got two small incubators in my lab, and they’ll be full today; I’m running out of the small plastic containers I keep the small ones in. Then I’ve got a Parasteatoda egg sac that is threatening to hatch out any day now.

I am beginning to realize it may be possible to have too many spiders.

Looking forward to seeing stuff from the [PLACEHOLDER] Space Telescope today

This afternoon (2pm PT, 5pm ET) NASA will reveal the first images from their new space telescope. You can see them on their live stream (this is a continuous stream, and you could start watching right now for six hours before you’ll see the expected stunning images).

Now I don’t know what to call the Giant Space Widget. It’s been officially named after an administrator and homophobe, rather than a scientist, and I’d rather not use that name at all. To see why, maybe you could fill some of the time you’re waiting by watching this video:

I’m looking forward to the images, but I’m going to have to refer to it as the [PLACEHOLDER] Space Telescope, unless someone has a better name. Why is it named after a homophobic bureaucrat anyway?

An atheist response…and an invitation to a livestream

I was bored and trawled through a Christian site to address some silly questions.

Hey! Next week I’m planning to do a livestream to talk about Lucy Cooke’s Bitch, an excellent book about biology’s long history of bad science whenever the subject of women comes up, and going through many examples of the complexity of sex in zoology, and also talking about the short shrift women get in science. If you have any interests along those lines, or have read the book, or are, like, a woman who’d like to make sure the man talking about this subject stays in line, send me an email and let me know what times work for you, and maybe we’ll talk.