Metabolism First! And the origin of life

Two and a half weeks until classes resume, so I’m shifting brain gears to get excited about cell biology again. One of the tools I use to get into the right mindset is reading more biochemistry, and lately that means reading more Nick Lane, who is one of those biochemists who is obsessed with evolution and does a marvelous job of integrating the finicky little details electrons and protons and small molecules and chemistry with the big picture of where all this comes from and how it has shaped life.

I’ve read and reread Lane’s latest book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and recommend it highly. I’ve been struggling with how to explain it’s contents, and it’s not easy — in my class, I spend weeks just gradually building up the background needed to understand the chemistry of the cell, which makes it hard to dump on a blog or a single video as anything but a huge indigestible bolus. And of course it took Lane 400 pages in a densely packed book to cover it all.

I should have known I could just let Nick Lane do all the hard work.

“KREBS CYCLE” is not a phrase that usually gets students excited — I know from experience — but this is juicy stuff. The talk itself covers a huge amount of ground, giving the basics of metabolic cycles and going into the origins of life and the great leap forward provided by mitochondria in endosymbiosis, and the diverse ways various organisms have taken the basic toolkit of the Krebs cycle and used it in novel ways. That’s all good solid science, and I don’t understand how anyone can have any doubts about the general chemistry that leads to life (well, I sorta do — they don’t know any biochemistry. All the YouTube debates about the origin of life are a waste of time, given that creationists are disgracefully ignorant of even the most rudimentary understanding of biochemistry).

Near the end, he gets farther out into weeds with speculation about aging, cancer, and consciousness. It’s interesting and he could very well be right — he’s a smarter man than I am — but the ideas range from very likely (metabolic shifts as agents of senescence and cancer), to potentially revolutionary but still on the fringe (the role of calcium and membrane potentials in Alzheimers), to some that, well, sound like how a biochemist would view neuroscience, for instance claiming that consciousness is a product of the electrical potential across the membrane of a cell, which is rather too reductionist for me.

Watch the video, though. If there are bits that you find heavy slogging, or just too out there to grasp, let me know in the comments. That’s information I can use to present these ideas to a class of second year students. And if you find it really deeply enlightening, go out and read Transformer. It contains a lot of the ideas about cellular metabolism I’d like to get across to my students.

It would make my life a whole lot easier if I could just show a one hour video that explains everything, then say, “Well, that’s all done then. We spend the rest of the semester reading poetry and dancing and playing video games! Yay!” I suspect I should probably fill in a lot more background and talk about the details, but maybe the video would be a nice dessert for the end of the semester. I’ll have done my job if all the students can watch it and say they already knew all that, but that Lane did a fine job of tying it all together.

ALL the trigger warnings

Well, this is one horrific story of child abuse.

The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home — a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert — was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP.

Paul’s wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear.

He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. “He just had this explosive personality,” said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizza’s best friend. “He had a horrible temper.”

Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had “the perfect lifestyle” because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and “doesn’t care.”

How can someone get away with that? The one cunning trick: he’s a Mormon. He confessed all to a Mormon bishop, who tossed the information into a confidential Mormon network, where everyone was more concerned with protecting the ‘good name’ of the Church of Latter Day Saints (and their own asses) and let it go on and on for seven years. The little girl is finally out of that house, and three of the kids are suing their father and the Mormon church. The church lawyers are something else.

MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent.

William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams’ six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse.

“These bishops did nothing wrong. They didn’t violate the law, and therefore they can’t be held liable,” he said. Maledon referred to the suit as “a money grab.”

They did nothing wrong? Sheltering a pedophile and rapist isn’t wrong? Allowing children to suffer for years isn’t wrong? I guess the Mormon church doesn’t care much for that morality stuff.

At least MJ has emerged from his horrible experience with the right attitude.

“‘I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks,” said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. “They are just the worst type of people, from what I’ve experienced and what other people have also experienced.”

Yeah. Give ’em hell, young lady.

A dirt road leads to what was once the home of Paul Adams and his family on the outskirts of Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. Adams, a Mormon and U.S. Border Patrol agent living with his wife and six children, admitted he had posted videos on the dark web of him molesting two of his children, a 9-year-old girl and a younger daughter he began raping when she was only 6 months old. Adams killed himself after his arrest. The revelation that Mormon officials directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County attorney and a civil lawsuit by three of the Adams’ children. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

I guess it was a joke?

You know, bro humor, so not actually funny.

The responses are “hilarious”.

He probably wanted to smoke a big cigar next to the proof of his potency.

You gotta feel sorry for Matt Walsh. He doesn’t understand what a woman is, so how can you expect him to empathize with one?

I was right there by my wife’s side during all three births, and I find it hard to laugh about all the pain and the sweat and the blood she went through. Maybe if I were a bro I could get through those jokes. Maybe if it were their wives, rather than a bunch of smarmy men, making the jokes, I’d be able to see the laughter through the pain.

The only kind of humor conservatives like, though, is punching down.

I wouldn’t mind if Marvel movies became a small niche

A few years ago, I was lining up for the superhero blockbusters, too (metaphorically — we don’t have long lines or big crowds at our theater). But since then, I’ve grown tired of them, and this summer when some monster Marvel movie is playing, I say “meh” and skip it. I don’t miss them at all. Watching CGI gets old fast. So this news sounds good to me!

The share of adults who enjoy superhero movies ticked down slightly compared to a year ago, according to a Morning Consult survey released Thursday, a worrisome trend for Disney’s Marvel franchise as its movies experience a rare relative slump at the box office and among critics – and Disney expands its investment in the properties.

The poll found 36% of all respondents enjoy superhero movies, down from 41% last November.

Perhaps most worrisome is the share of self-identified Marvel fans who enjoy the movies also fell, dropping from 87% to 82%.

That’s still a hefty percentage of those polled, so I wouldn’t be worried about Disney’s financial health right now. I also wouldn’t want those things to completely disappear, since some people still enjoy them — I think I’d enjoy them more, too, if I weren’t drowning in a glut of them. I also have to point out that the MCU oppresses workers and is a tyrannical overlord. They’ve pumped out 29 movies since 2008? How? By abusing special effects houses.

To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.

Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself — just the sheer number of movies it has. It sets dates, and it’s very inflexible on those dates; yet it’s quite willing to do reshoots and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down. This is not a new dynamic.

Maybe if they slowed down a bit and paid more attention to quality and thought about good stories that don’t end with muscle-bound thugs getting into a fist fight? You know, that creativity and imagination thing? We’d all benefit.

You know, last night I went to the movies to see Where the Crawdads Sing, and I enjoyed it thoroughly in spite of the patent tear-jerking and some minor implausibilities. One good thing about comic book movies is that they’ve trained us to overlook the screaming impossibilities in a fantasy story to pay attention to the story, which is usually a bit threadbare in those kinds of movies. I’d like to see more movies that don’t OD on the lycra and the kayfabe and resolving problems with fists.

That said, I’m still planning to binge out on The Sandman later this afternoon, once I get some duties done. (Also, I’ll be working on my syllabus while I’m at it.)

All cops are agents of chaos

Every line of this story is a horror.

A mob of cops
   [always a bad sign]
gathered at a library
   [on duty cops? please stay away from the public]
during working hours
   [so when, like, other people were there]
to get trained in
   [don’t they have isolated places for training?]
whacking civilians with a baton.
   [oh. so appropriate. our tax dollars at work]
He showed off his quickdraw
   [cowboy. rugged individualism. frontier justice]
with a loaded pistol
   [wait, what? what about safety?]
and accidentally shot
   [oops. should be passive voice. coptalk. “a gun was discharged”]
a fellow cop, killing her.
   [could have been worse.]

The actual news story, so you don’t think I’m exaggerating.

A woman shot Thursday afternoon during a Special Police training session at a Washington, D.C. library has succumbed to her injuries, police said.

First responders were were called to the Anacostia Neighborhood Library at 1800 Good Hope Road SE shortly before 3:45 p.m. for the report of a shooting.

Police say the special officer who was shot was “unconscious and not breathing” when first responders arrived.

The D.C. Public Library system confirmed the woman was shot in a downstairs meeting room during a Special Police training session. A retired D.C. police lieutenant conducted the training on how to use an extended baton, Chief Robert Contee said.

Sources familiar with the investigation told News4 that when the trainer drew a pistol to illustrate how quickly it could be done, he fired one shot, striking an officer in the chest.

Homicide detectives were called to the scene to investigate. They are looking into why the trainer had live ammunition.

Arming cops is like giving a troop of baboons access to an armory.

A glimmer of hope?

This is one of the outcomes of Skepticon.

Optimism? Am I ready to be optimistic again?

If you’ve been out of touch with the secular movement for a while, you may not be aware that we—the politically correct, SJWs, Outrage Brigade, the wokist scolds, or whatever other term of derision you might have heard for those of us wanting a more inclusive movement—won the secular culture wars. Movement humanism is working on being actively humanist. Secular activism recognizes issues far beyond public crosses and prayers. New leadership is clear that they’re shaking things up.

I am not sure. What I see is an incoming tide of hateful religious scumbuggery, and atheism managed to splinter itself between the people who oppose that, and the people who see an opportunity for grift and are willing to align themselves with fundamentalism in the name of hating LGBTQ people and Muslims and anyone with a different color skin or a vagina. They’re all atheists. Some of them are just more interested in pretending they’re superior and sneering at foolish people while promoting a regressive agenda.

It drove me away, and I think it alienated the good people in that photo. Maybe they’re more resilient than I am, because sheesh, I feel burned. But then, as Nathan Robinson explains, we still NEED atheism to counter the villainy of evangelical fundamentalism.

And yet: even though I have spent much less of my time arguing about God in the last ten years, and I think that is healthy, I increasingly feel as if—and I am not alone in this—atheism needs to make a comeback. The religious right in the United States was not, in fact, defeated. In fact, religious conservatives now dominate the Supreme Court, and have recently successfully revoked one of women’s core constitutional rights. Their movement is on the march, and they have a very clear, terrifying agenda that Democrats have proven themselves totally incapable of effectively countering. As journalist Elle Hardy has documented, while young Americans may not be especially religiously faithful, around the world, evangelical Pentecostalism is attracting astonishing numbers of converts, and with it pushing a toxic and often apocalyptic brand of hard-right politics.

Maybe, just maybe, I can stoke up the ol’ fire in my belly for a more positive, humanist atheism. I’ll have to try, but somebody pissed on the coals and has hidden my matches, so it might be a bit of a struggle. But yeah, let’s bring back a positive atheism, and I’m ready to at least follow other people’s inspiration.

Goon University shot their wad

Would you believe that a two week course in a rented building led by a team of conservative wankers was the majestic peak of intellectual achievement this summer? Bari Weiss thinks so.

They’ve reached their peak so soon. It’s all downhill from here.