Cranks congregate to demonstrate that they’re cranks

This weekend, Peter Thiel and various right-wing think tanks backed something called the Academic Freedom Conference. You can guess what this was all about.

Academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech are under threat as they have not been for decades. Visibly, academics are “canceled,” fired, or subject to lengthy disciplinary proceedings in response to academic writing or public engagement. Less visibly, funding agencies, university bureaucracies, hiring procedures, promotion committees, professional organizations, and journals censor some kinds of research or demand adherence to political causes. Many parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge their orthodoxy. Younger researchers are afraid to speak and write and don’t investigate promising ideas that they fear will endanger their careers.

The two-day Academic Freedom Conference, arranged by the organizing committee, aims to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture and restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish. The conference will focus on the organizational structures leading to censorship and stifling debate and how to repair them.

All you have to do is look at the list of speakers and see that it’s a conference of far-right kooks and their enablers. Oh, look: there’s Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, Niall Ferguson, Bjorn Lomborg, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, and a horde of disgraced academics, bigots, Quillette authors, misogynists, vaccine deniers, and cranks. Several of the people there have publicly professed their support for good science (usually to defend garbage science), but then the keynote by Peter Thiel is an embarrassing anti-science rant. Also mostly rambling and incoherent.

So you you have the string theory people telling us how wonderful string theory people are and how everybody else just has bad math genes and can’t talk about it. We have the uh the cancer researchers promising us they will cure cancer in five years which they’ve been doing for the last 50. We have um and on and on in all these sort of hyper hyper specialized areas and um and then the question is, you know how much how much progress is actually happening?

The um, these sort of indirect intuitions I have on where it seems very very slowed, are things like, umm, if you if you if you look at things like um, the the economy, the the standards of living among younger people.

Except that cancer researchers say no such thing — the most common idea I see expressed by cancer researchers is that cancer is a thousand different diseases with hundreds of alternative pathways, and that there will be no magic bullet. All he’s got to go on is “indirect intuitions”. He’s an idiot. Then he makes similarly stupid statements about education.

Um and that’s probably the political intuition we should have about the sciences versus uh versus the humanities. The, the, the, the polemical version of it that I, I had once was that you know I I think um I think that uh it’s better for undergraduates to meh meh to major in the humanities rather than the sciences. Set computer sciences, aside, as the one thing that sort of works, but everything else. Because um in the humanities you at least know you’re not going to get a job, you’ll be unemployable, whereas in the sciences you have people who are so deluded as to believe that we’ll be taken care of by the natural goodness of the universe. And it’s just it is just a Malthusian competition.

You hear that? The only topic that matters is computer science, because that’s the only one that will land you a job — which isn’t true, and also isn’t the one reason to get education. Scientists don’t have this illusion that the universe has “natural goodness”.

I’m trying to imagine how any of the scientists in the audience could listen to that drivel without rising up and walking out. But don’t worry, there was no drama: the kinds of people who would attend such a conference are pre-selected for being gullible conservative loons. Even more, I can’t imagine anyone accepting an invitation to an even packed so heavily with horrible people like Thiel or Peterson or that roster of denialists and bigots, as summarized in this list or this one. Yet there sat marginally respectable people like Steve Pinker and Jon Haidt and Jerry Coyne, who have often fucked up and are now confirming their deplorable status by enthusiastically attending. Ick.

Coyne predicted ahead of time that he’d be labeled with guilt by association. He’s right.

I predict that the mainstream media and many on social media will deem the entire conference a conclave of bigots, racists, and transphobes because a few people on the schedule have been called those names. Indeed, Steve Pinker himself has been the object of criticism, and has been called a racist; and I (deemed “someone with a solid reputation who speaks his mind and is honest in his arguments”) have also been called a transphobe and a racist. Hardly anybody is immune!

Correct. If you hob-nob with transphobes, racists, and bigots, and you applaud their words, and trumpet how much you agree with the sentiments they express, then surprise! People will draw the reasonable conclusion that you are a fellow traveler. That’s how it works.

By the way, I was briefly mentioned (negatively, I’m proud to say) at the conference. Coyne condemned me for being “ideological” that he neglected to do for all the flamingly ideological speakers at the event.

He has done this multiple times in the past, and never pays any attention to corrections. Every time, he pretends that my beef is with the idea that our brains, as well as our body, show traces of our ancestry over the past 6 million years. That’s a lie, just an outright lie. It doesn’t matter that I’ve repeatedly said that I’m a hardcore materialist who accepts the idea of humanity evolving entirely by natural mechanisms, he has decided, as a rhetorical strategy, that since he can’t address my actual criticisms, he’s going to misrepresent my position. Every time. It’s pretty damned disgraceful. As I’ve written before:

The brain is a material product of evolution, and behavior is a product of the brain. There are natural causes for everything all the way down. And further, I have great respect for psychology, evolutionary biology, ethology, physiology, anthropology, anatomy, comparative biology — and I consider all of those disciplines to have strong integrative ties to evolutionary biology. Does Coyne really believe that I am critiquing the evolved nature of the human brain? Because otherwise, this is a completely irrelevant statement.

Evolutionary psychology has its own special methodology and logic, and that’s what I criticize — not anthropology or evolutionary biology or whatever. Somehow these unique properties get conveniently jettisoned whenever a critic wanders by, only to be re-adopted without reservation within the exercise of the discipline. And that’s really annoying.

What I object to in evolutionary psychology is that their stock in trade is to make observations of behavior in a single species, often in a single population, and then to infer an evolutionary history from that data point. You don’t get to do that. It’s not that the observations are invalid (they’re often interesting in their own right), or that it’s not possible that human behaviors carry a strong genetic component — it’s that you simply can’t draw an evolutionary conclusion from the simple existence of a trait in a population. Yet evolutionary psychologists do, all the time.

His only approach is to poison the well. So now I’m a blank slater and a Marxist, neither accusation being true.

It’s again, comes out of the ideology that we’re blank slates. I think that comes from Marxism, where people are seen as infinitely malleable by the social environment. Whereas evolutionary psychology tells us that we’re not blank slates that we’re born with a little bit of writing on those blank slates, that can be changed a bit, but can only be changed within certain limits.

Did you know that there are negligibly few biologists who believe we have no genetic predispositions? This whole blank slate nonsense is Pinker’s conceit, his default straw man, and it’s transparently bogus. It’s always fun to encounter someone who attacks you by announcing that you hold a ridiculous opinion that you’ve never held and are happy to agree that it’s wrong.

I do wonder how his audience received that claim that it’s blank slaters who think people are infinitely malleable by the social environment when there are a bunch of transphobes there who think that everyone’s sexual identity is so easily corrupted by the social environment, believing in garbage like rapid onset gender dysphoria. Is gender fluid in some people or not?

He also claims that evolutionary psychology has produced many valuable insights, such as differences in sexual behavior between men and women. What are those insights? That women are better at spotting pink berries or something? He doesn’t say.

Again, my gripe with EP is methodological: you can’t make “valuable insights” about human evolution with surveys and experiments on modern American undergraduates.

Sleepy little town is awake

I was going to vote on Tuesday morning, but my wife persuaded me to get it done early and submit our ballots today. Usually the polling places are quiet and empty, even during a presidential election, since this is a very small town…but maybe my wife knows something I don’t. I dropped the ballots off at 2pm on a Friday, and…

There was a line at the county courthouse of people doing the same thing.

I haven’t had to wait in line to vote in 20 years. OK, sometimes I’m second in line, but waiting times are negligible. Still, this is the longest delay ever. I’m going to have to complain to someone.

This is a red county, so don’t assume this means the DFL is going to triumph — in fact, one little group of women in line were members of the apostolic cult in town (easy to spot, long hair in a bun, long skirts) and I’d be surprised if they were voting for anything other than conservative theocracy. But I could be surprised, it’s a secret ballot after all, maybe there is a revolution brewing.

Over 35 million votes have already been submitted, mostly from registered Democrats. The MAGA crowd is going to be complaining again.

Future! Evolution! Predicted!

Back in the day when I was a naive young man, the news would occasionally run stories about the Future of Humanity, and predict where evolution was going to take us. It was usually a destiny of feeble, shriveled bodies and gigantic domed heads, but there were recent variants. Wall-E instead suggested humans were all going to become obese, trapped in motorized wheelchairs. Or look to Idiocracy, which instead predicts we’re going to be selecting for crass stupidity. You should realize that these are not scientific predictions at all, they are merely cautionary tales conjured up by creators who are telling us about themselves — that they find eggheads and fat people and stupid people repellent, for instance. It’s both ugly and unscientific, because no, evolutionary biologists are not going to make long term predictions about the trajectory of evolution, because selection is a short term and local process.

Are you ready for the next generation of inane predictions? Oh boy, they are at least going in a different direction. Behold Mindy, our destiny, if we continue to do things the artist doesn’t like very much.

You might be wondering how they came up with this remarkable portrait. “Researchers” were commissioned to create a model.

Researchers worked with a 3D designer to create images of a “future human” that accounts for all of the problems long-term tech use may cause.

That does not explain who these “researchers” are. I read through the original source, and it seems to have been Professor Google. They rummaged around through various sites that complain about modern ills — I found some New Age sources, some crank medical sites, and some legit medical sources that talk about the perils of poor posture — and stitched them all together into a rationale for what evolution would favor, an invalid line of reasoning. It’s all entirely driven by contempt for people who use cell phones and do office work. As usual, it’s all about airing the creator’s ill-informed biases. So, if you look at your phone, you are warping the morphology of any progeny you might have! Stop it!

Researchers predict that office work and craning the neck to look at smartphones will lead to humans having a hunched back in the future. Currently, many people consistently adjust their position to look down at their phones, or to look up at their office screens.

If you sit in front of your computer, your grandchildren will grow up to be hunchbacks! At least, according to a holistic medicine guy.

Sitting in front of the computer at the office for hours on end also means that your torso is pulled out in front of your hips rather than being stacked straight and aligned,” says Caleb Backe, a health and wellness expert at Maple Holistics.

Using this logic, I guess if they’d hired “researchers” a hundred and fifty years ago to draw what humans would look like if we continued to employ chimney sweeps, they’d have predicted small thin people with armored skin and flexible joints and extra eyelids…oh, look, these guys also predicted extra eyelids to filter out blue light that disrupts sleep patterns, because of course evolution is all about conveniently delivering exactly what you need.

Are you ready for the disclosure of who actually commissioned this work? It’s a company called “Toll Free Forwarding” which is using it to promote their cell phone service with sensationalist bullshit.

Technology has revolutionized the way we do business. Whether it’s the instant access to infinite knowledge through a device in our pocket, or the ability for businesses to expand into new markets all over the world (like Canada, Australia, and Ireland) with a virtual phone number, the scope of technology’s impact is limitless, and this trend shows no sign of letting up.

I’m not linking to them, because that’s what they want, but you can probably find them if you wanted. I don’t know why you would, because the people running this company are dishonest idiots.

JD Vance & Tucker Carlson: a match made in Cloud Cuckoo Land

It’d be funny if it weren’t so malignantly and maliciously evil. JD Vance has figured out what his Democratic opponent’s grand plan is, and it’s flooding America with illegal aliens and then using American tax dollars to fund gender reassignment surgeries for those aliens. I’m not making this up, he actually said it.

He doesn’t explain why Tim Ryan would do that, or how the Democrats would think that would profit their party, or why immigrants would accept surgeries in return for a green card, but I can sort of see his logic. His base hates foreigners, and also hates trans people, so combining the two into some hateful amalgam will win him votes, he thinks. Also, his base consists of some of the dumbest, most gullible people in the country, so maybe they’ll believe him.

Tucker Carlson has what he thinks is his serious face on, so he’s not going to question what his guest is saying. Sadly, this is par for the course for television journalism — Vance could be spewing this stuff to any of the supposedly more liberal Sunday news roundup hosts, and they might stammer out a few concerned questions, but the wouldn’t do what they all should do, which is to bring out the hook and drag the yammering idiot off the set.

It’s as if a HOA has taken over the town

A business in Rush City, MN had a mural painted on one wall of their building. I love these — a few places in downtown Morris have commissioned artwork for their buildings, too, and I think they help liven up the place. It’s a nice painting in Rush City, too.

And then the city slapped the business with a zoning violation and gave them ten days to paint over it. The rationale of Mayor Dan Dahlberg: anything that is not explicitly permitted is considered prohibited. That is absurd. It’s such an authoritarian interpretation of the law.

Mayor Dan is currently running for county commissioner. Smart move to plop out a stupid idea like that a few days before the election, Mayor Dan! The whole state is looking at you and wondering what kind of stupid rube gets elected to political position in that town.

Why are right-wingers so damn weird?

Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug? Seriously? Here’s a whole excessively long article about Yarvin, which name-drops a whole army of deplorables like JD Vance and Blake Masters and Peter Thiel.

Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story), Yarvin has had a decade-long association with billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year, he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.” Fox host Tucker Carlson is another fan, interviewing Yarvin with some fascination for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin was the first to popularize the analogy from The Matrix of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to politics.

I’ll be shorter than the article: Yarvin’s schtick is to advocate for the dissolution of the American republic so that it can be replaced by a theocratic capitalist monarchy by writing long-winded pretentious articles that are both incoherent and much beloved by Silicon Valley tech-dudes, because their bottom line is always rationalized by Yarvin, who wants to make them the rulers of everything.

Hey, this is the morning I got slammed with a couple of painfully wordy media about fascist dorks. Here’s an hour-long video about Peter Thiel, which also mentions Yarvin. Sorry.

These are all good and thorough dissections which need to be done, but I’m feeling a bit squeamish. If I were to walk into a public toilet and see someone has left a multi-colored turd with strange filamentous spines and twitching blisters containing squirming invertebrates, I would hope that there’s a doctor somewhere who would do a careful inspection and a biomedical analysis of that person’s fecal output, but for me, I’m just going to flush it without asking a lot of questions.

It shouldn’t take that much inspection to figure out that JD Vance, Blake Masters, Trump, and all those creepy Thiel-supported nerds ought to be flushed.

When (and how) does individual variation arise?

As anyone who has ever raised aquarium fish knows, they’re all different. Maybe you think a fish is just a fish, not very different from one another and all rather stupid, but I spent years sitting next to tanks of zebrafish, and I can tell you you’re wrong. I’d watch them gamboling about, and you’d quickly realize that oh, that one is aggressive, that one likes to hid, that one gets the zoomies and darts about the tank. You can learn to recognize individual fish by their behavior.

I always wondered about that. These were highly inbred animals, with only slight genetic differences between them, but could those little genetic variations account for strong differences in behavior? Then I acquired a new line of zebrafish, one that was the product of hybridization between our inbred lines and wild-caught native stocks, and oh boy, their behavior was radically different, instantly distinguishable. Maybe it is genetic. Maybe? I never did a formal, rigorous behavioral experiment, so I don’t know for sure.

But now a new study comes along that does what I would have been excited to know about 20 years ago (and I still am!). This is an analysis of The emergence and development of behavioral individuality in clonal fish, and it’s a bit surprising. Laskowski and others are working with the Amazon Molly, a small tropical fish that reproduces clonally, producing clutches of babies that are all genetically identical to each other — so even better than my old zebrafish — that can then be separated and raised apart from their mothers and siblings. This rules out the possibility of genetic differences causing individual differences, and leaves us to consider alternative sources of variation.

To determine the causes and mechanisms that can generate behavioral individuality in the absence of genetic and environmental differences, it is essential to first pinpoint when behavioral individuality emerges and how it continues to unfold after emergence. Birth marks a critical time point: if individuality is present at birth, this points to pre-birth influences––such as epigenetics, maternal effects, and/or pre-birth developmental stochasticity––as being key drivers of individuality. Alternatively, it could be that individuality primarily emerges after birth. This emergence could happen both gradually throughout early life, which would suggest that individuality is driven by positive feedbacks between behavior and the internal and/or external environment, or abruptly at particular points early in life, if it is linked to critical sensitive windows.

So if cloned fish are behaviorally identical to one another at Day One, but become different later on, that suggests the differences are generated by varying experiences over time. If, on the other hand, the genetically identical fish are different on Day One, that suggests that pre-birth factors (I’d lean towards favoring developmental stochasticity, just random variations at the cell and molecular level) generated the variation.

To cut to the conclusion, Amazon mollies differ on Day One, with all that implies.

I think their chosen behavior is a bit simple, they’re just looking at mean swimming speed — does a fish have the zoomies, or is it a calm quiet little guy? — which is fine, since they do get an early difference. They also used motion analysis software, so I presume they could go back and reanalyze the data for more subtle differences, but they got their answer with just one parameter. They also looked for other possible correlations.

Individuality is present at day one after birth and is not explained by differences in maternal identity or body size.

Repeatability of median swimming speed at hourly intervals on the first day after birth (A); each line represents one individual (N = 26). Maternal identity (B) did not explain variation in swimming speeds among individuals. Small and large points indicate the hourly (i.e. 11 data points per individual) and daily median swimming speeds, respectively, of individuals from each mother on day one after birth; see also Table 1. Behavior on day one after birth (C) was not related to an individual’s total length on their first day of life; see also Supplementary Table 3. Small and large points indicate hourly and daily median swimming speeds for each individual respectively; gray lines indicate posterior estimates for the effects of body size on behavior. Throughout, lines and points are colored according to the individual’s behavior in hour one on day one (yellow represents higher swimming speeds; purple indicates lower swimming speeds).

In panel A you can see that there was a huge amount of individual variation in swimming speed. In B, different mothers all produce progeny with a wide range of behaviors. That one has me wondering, though: Mama a’s babies were all a bit on the sluggish side. If they raise a second clutch from Mama a, does the second set exhibit a range of behaviors similar to that of the first set? Is there any genetic bias at all in this behavior?

Panel C shows that there was also variation in body length on Day One, which doesn’t surprise me at all — developmental stochasticity again. Body length is not a predictor of swimming speed, though, these seem to be unlinked variables.

Another feature of the study is that they observed the fish longitudinally, over 10 weeks of development. Variation increased, which would surprise no one, and it was correlated with Day One behavior. Zoomy fish stayed zoomy and became even more zoomy, while slow fish generally stayed slow for their life.

Individuality increases gradually throughout the first 70 days of development.

The predicted values of median individual swimming speed diverge over time (A) leading to gradual increases in the among-individual variance and hence repeatability (B, not shown here) of behavior. These models included only the 26 individuals on which we had complete data for the first 10 weeks of life to ensure that absolute levels of variation would remain comparable over time. Individual lines in (A) are colored according to their predicted behavior in week 1 with yellow indicating greater swimming speeds and purple indicating lower swimming speeds.

What have we learned?

Evidence is accumulating that even genetically identical animals reared under near identical conditions develop behavioral individuality, yet little is known about when exactly these differences emerge during ontogeny and how they continue to change during early life development. We show that genetically identical individuals already exhibit substantial behavioral individuality on their first day of life, highlighting pre-birth influences as being of critical importance to initializing durable behavioral differences among individuals. Epigenetic and maternal effects mediated through mechanisms such as changes to DNA methylation patterns or differential resource or hormone allocation, could influence the phenotype of offspring.

I’m still intrigued by the role of chance in development and evolution.

Another non-mutually exclusive hypothesis is that the behavioral variation we observed is the result of developmental stochasticity, that is, stochastic variation in any molecular, neurological or physiological markers that occur over ontogeny. An intriguing possibility is that the phenotypic variation we observed here––whether arising from epigenetic, maternal, and/or developmental stochasticity effects––might itself be adaptive, for example, as a potential bet-hedging strategy. Generating phenotypic variation among one’s offspring by such non-genetic means might be especially relevant in clonal organisms such as the Amazon molly. There is, for example, evidence in clonal fish, and poecilid fish specifically, that DNA methylation mechanisms and developmental plasticity more generally might be especially sensitive to environmental influences, offering a mechanism through which mothers can generate variation among their otherwise genetically identical offspring.

Developmental stochasticity as part of an evolutionary bet-hedging strategy sounds like an interesting model, and probably important in species like fish (and spiders!) that pump out huge numbers of offspring with concommitant high likelihood of death.

This kind of behavioral analysis of organisms with limited genetic variation is one motivation for what I’m doing in the lab — taking the offspring of one spider parent and then inbreeding them over multiple generations to reduce genetic variability in one lab population. A couple more generations, and then it’ll be time to work out some behavioral assays to identify differences that we can select for. Swimming speed won’t be one of our parameters, though. Not even speed in general, they tend to all be quiet lurkers. Web configuration, aggression, pigment patterns, though, those are all candidates for analysis down the line.

Fox News reaches new levels of shrieking idiocy

Fox News shows have gotten creepier and more demented and more histrionic over the years. They’ve also gotten more openly anti-education. Here are a couple of Fox News women working hard to find something to find something to hate about college students — like that they might like cats, which tells us that students are weak.

They think students should just toughen up, they can’t possibly be stressed. And if they’re stressed, they shouldn’t be able to find the energy to protest injustice. They really are serving up a heaping bowl of bullshit in this segment. If you like cats, you’re a snowflake! If you can’t make it in college, then just drop out, said in a pitying tone of voice, because spending four years in advanced and difficult studies of complex topics is soooo easy, and they’re there just to take advantage of the freebies.

What freebies? College is expensive (it shouldn’t be) and it’s mainly a lot of hard work and stress, genuine stress.

Then they invent stupid problems, like that students are man-handling the cats. They think the appropriate way to help students learn is to take the George C. Scott approach, and slap them. Nope. Colleges are staffed with trained professional educators who know better, and are aware that physically assaulting people is not a good way to motivate them.

Who are these appallingly stupid people on this panel? I don’t want to know. I also don’t understand how this is going to appeal to their base. Where I live, that base is a population of farmers with barn cats and a good ol’ dog on the front porch and kids who are in 4H and love their farm animals to bits, who will watch movies like Old Yeller and Dog and struggle to hold back a tear at the end. This is just desperate reaching for something to despise about young people getting educated, and being smarter than every hateful dolt on that network.

On a more pleasant note, here is Archie, UMM’s campus therapy dog.

He’s a sweet, friendly pup who is often seen around campus and loves to be petted. He’s a good dog.

Fox News wants to slap him and make him homeless and shoot him.