You know, alcohol is not good for children and other growing things

A few weeks ago, I had an absolutely delicious stout at a brew pub in Alexandria. I’m going to have to remember it, because it may have been the last time I let alcohol pass these lips. Why? Because I’m slowly turning into one of those snooty teetotalers who tut-tut over every tiny sin. It started with vegetarianism, now it’s giving up alcohol, where will it end? Refusing caffeine, turning down the enticements of naked women, refusing to dance? The bluenose in me is emerging as I get older. I shall become a withered, juiceless old Puritan with no joy left in me.

It didn’t help that last week I was lecturing on alcohol teratogenesis in my eco devo course, and it was reminding me of what a pernicious, sneaky molecule it is. I’ve known a lot of this stuff for years, but there’s a kind of blindness brought on by familiarity that led me to dismiss many of the problems. You know the phenomenon: “it won’t affect me, I only drink in moderation” and other excuses. Yeah, no. There are known mechanisms for how alcohol affects you, besides the obvious ones of inebriation.

  1. It induces cell death.
  2. It affects neural crest cell migration.
  3. It downregulates sonic hedgehog, essential for midline differentiation.
  4. It downregulates Sox5 and Ngn1, genes responsible for neuron growth and maturation.
  5. It weakens L1-modulated cell adhesion.

I already knew all about those first four — I’ve done experiments in zebrafish like these done in mice.

Take a normal, healthy embryo like the one in A, expose it to alcohol, and stain the brain for cell death with any of a number of indicator dyes, like Nile Blue sulfate in this example B (I’ve used acridine orange, it works the same way). That brain is speckled with dead cells, killed by alcohol. If you do it just right, you can also see selective cell death in neural crest cell populations, so you’re specifically killing cells involved in the formation of the face and the neurons that innervate it. In C, you can see the rescuing effects of superoxide dismutase, a free radical scavenger, and that tells you that one of the mechanisms behind the cell death is the cell-killing consequences of free radicals. I could get a similar reduction in the effects with megadoses of vitamin C, but that doesn’t mean a big glass of orange juice will save you from your whisky bender.

I was routinely generating one-eyed jawless fish, a consequence of the double-whammy of knocking out sonic hedgehog and cell death in the cells that make branchial arches.

You can wave away these results by pointing out those huge concentrations of alcohol we use to get those observable effects, but we only do that because we don’t have the proper sensitivity to detect subtle variations in the faces of mice or fish. So we crank up the dosage to get a big, undeniable effect.

I only just learned about the L1 effects, and that’s a case where we have a sensitive assay for alcohol’s effects. L1 is a cell surface adhesion molecule — it helps appropriate populations of cells stick together in the nervous system. It also facilitates neurite growth. It’s good for happy growing brains.

It also makes for a relatively easy and quantitative assay. Put neuronal progenitors that express L1 in a dish, and they clump together, as they should in normal development. Add a little alcohol to the medium, and they become less sticky, and the clumps disperse.

What’s troubling about this is the dosage. Adhesion is significantly reduced at concentration of 7mM, which is what the human blood alcohol level reaches after a single drink. The fetal brain may not be forming as robustly when Mom does a little social drinking that doesn’t leave her impaired at all, not even a slight buzz.

Maybe you console yourself by telling yourself a little bit does no harm, your liver soaks up most of the damage (and livers are self-repairing!), that it’s only binge drinkers who have to worry about fetal alcohol syndrome, etc., etc., etc. We have lots of excuses handy. Humans are actually surprisingly sensitive to environmental insults, we have mechanisms to compensate, but there’s no denying that we’re modifying our biochemistry and physiology in subtle ways by exposure to simple molecules.

Now maybe you also tell yourself that you’re a grown-up, I’m talking about fetal tissues, and you also don’t intend to get pregnant in the near future or ever. I’m also a great big fully adult person who is definitely not ever going to get pregnant, but development is a life-long process, and we’re all fragile creatures who nonetheless soak up all kinds of interesting and dangerous chemicals during our existence. We know alcohol will kill adult brain cells, but what else does it do? Do you want to be a guinea pig? I think that, as I age, I am becoming increasingly aware of all the bad stuff I did to myself in my heedless youth, and am starting to think that maybe I need to be a little more careful, belatedly.

Oh, you want some reassuring information? Next week we’re discussing endocrine disruptors in my class — DDT, DES, BPA, PCB, etc. — all these wonderful products of plastics and petrochemical technology. You’re soaking in them right now. They never go away. How’s your sperm count looking? Any weird glandular dysplasias? Ethanol looks pretty good compared to chlorinated and brominated biphenyls.

People are good at producing vomit all on their own

The last couple of posts were all about blaming AI for the decay of the internet. I must be fair and impartial, though: humans are also to blame.

For instance, Andrew Tate is in and out of jail and facing extradition from Romania. The only reason we know of that scumbag’s existence is thanks to the internet.

Tate and his brother are dual US-British nationals. Tate is a former kickboxer who has built up a massive social media following — 8.9 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter — by sharing misogynistic views about the role of women and masculinity.

He was previously banned from various prominent social media platforms for those views, but has been reinstated on X.

As far as I know, he had no assistance from AI — he built that empire with his own personal human hate-mongering.

It goes without saying that he “has been reinstated on X,” because Elon Musk is another human who is enabling more poisonous speech.

At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest

Here’s a blatant example of AI polluting the scientific literature:

I, too, would like to know “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

OK, typesetters are forgiven, it’s their job to print exactly what they are given, but the others? No sympathy. I think the answer is that there is so much trash poured out on their desks that their eyes glaze over and they end up rubber-stamping everything, because the alternative is madness. They’d have to read this junk.

The AI apocalypse is already here

I’m not alone in seeing how the internet has been degenerating over the years. The first poison was capitalism: once money became the focus of content, a content that was rewarded for volume rather than quality, the flood of noise started to rise. Then it was the “algorithm”, initially a good idea to manage the flow of information that was quickly corrupted to game the rules. SEO became a career where people engineered that flow to their benefit. And Google smiled on it all, because they could profit as well.

The latest evil is AI, which is nothing but a tool to generate profitable noise with which to flood the internet, an internet that is already choking on garbage. Now AI is beginning to eat itself.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls “Habsburg AI,” where “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.” In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.

After all, the whole point of AI is to create slop that will be consumed because it looks sorta like the slop that people already consumed. So make more of it! We’re in competition with the machines that are making slop, so we can outcompete them by just making more of it. It’s what biology would look like if there were no natural selection, and if energetic costs were nearly zero — we’d be swimming in a soup of goo. As Amazon has discovered.

Amazon’s Kindle eBook platform has been flooded with AI-generated content that briefly dominated bestseller lists, forcing Amazon to limit authors to publishing three books a day. This hasn’t stopped spammers from publishing awkward rewrites and summaries of other people’s books, and because Amazon’s policies don’t outright ban AI-generated content, ChatGPT has become an inoperable cancer on the body of the publishing industry.

That’s a joke. Limiting authors to three books a day? How about limiting it to one book a month, which is more in line with the human capacity to write? You know that anyone churning out multiple books per day is not investing any thought into them, or doing any real research, or even aspiring to quality. Amazon doesn’t care, they exist only to skim off a few pennies of profit off each submission, so sure, they’ll take every bit of hackwork you can throw at them. Take a look at the Kindle search page sometime — it’s nothing but every publisher’s slush pile amplified ten thousand fold.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that magazines are now inundated with AI-generated pitches for articles, and renowned sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld was forced to close submissions after receiving an overwhelming amount of AI-generated stories. Help A Reporter Out used to be a way for journalists to find potential sources and quotes, except requests are now met with a deluge of AI-generated spam.

These stories are, of course, all manifestations of a singular problem: that generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.

The only algorithm I want anymore is “Did PZ Myers subscribe to this creator? Then show the latest from them.” I don’t want “X is vaguely similar to Z that PZ Myers subscribed to” and I sure as hell don’t want “Y paid money to be fed to everyone who liked Z”, but that is what we do get.

One hope is that all the AI-based companies will eventually start cannibalizing each other. That may have already begun: two AI image companies, Midjourney and Stability AI, are fighting because Stability skulked into the Midjourney database to snatch up as much of their data as they could.

Here’s a prompt for you: two puking dogs eating each other’s sick and vomiting it back up again, over and over.

Yet another example of our disappointing winter

You may have heard of the Upper Midwestern tradition in some towns* of rolling an old car out onto the surface of a frozen lake, and then taking bets on the date that it breaks through the ice in the spring. If nothing else, you might have encountered the practice in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods**.

Sadly, we have had such a tepidly warm winter that the practice was discontinued this year. No klunkers this pathetic winter! I don’t know if there’s even been much ice fishing this year — Lake Minnewaska, which usually has a thriving metropolis on its surface every winter, has been strangely barren. Maybe the fish have been enjoying the reprieve?

*Not every town can do this. The lakes in the immediate neighborhood of Morris are rather shallow — we live in the prairie pothole region, where mostly what we’ve got are shallow wetlands. If we did this, the lakes would be dotted with car roofs rising above the water.

**If you’ve read the book, you’d know it’s for the best, since we also don’t have murdered girls in the trunks of the klunkers.

The face has gotten smoother, but it’s the same rot underneath

The Dixiecrat governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, said this in 1962, back when I was an innocent 5 year old who thought all people were good and kind.

There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.

I first learned about this yesterday, in this video about segregation in sports. It would be so nice to roll back in time to my blissful ignorance as a child.

I had no idea we white people were so frail. Of course, he was laboring under the fallacious belief that miscegenation was evil and that the one-drop rule was valid. There’s a curious racist game they play, where the children of a white person and a black person are 100% black, rather than 50% white, and under those counterfactual rules, white people will rapidly go extinct if mixed race marriages are permitted. It’s a weird mindset that calls having children “genocide”.

But this was in 1962! Surely we have grown past this nonsense here in the 21st century. No, we haven’t. This belief is the major guiding principle of the Republican party. Nowadays they tend to avoid the blatant stuff; instead, they whisper about the “great replacement theory”, which is built on the same fundamental ignorance about biology and meiosis and inherited traits, and is therefore fallacious and doesn’t deserve the dignity of being called a “theory”.

Or they draft some brain-washed Christian hick to use her fundie baby voice to whitewash their hatred of immigrants with Jesus and patriotism. It’s all the same thing. America hasn’t changed its core since the civil rights movement made a valiant effort to call these people to account — this is still a deeply racist country.

The infection has been festering for decades, and is ready to erupt again under the banner of Donald Trump. In the name of decency and basic human dignity, we have to sweep every vestige of the Republican party out of power.

It’s officially the first day of spring break!

And that means I have to go into work — a bit later than usual, but that’s my only benefit. I have to go in and feed the animals, autoclave a bunch of fly bottles, and also, because we had a safety audit last week, I have to rearrange some boxes cluttering up the place to provide better access to the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. Today’s the day for doing mundane stuff that I put off because my teaching obligations come first.

The rest of this “vacation” week I plan to use getting one step ahead of lecture prep. It’s not so much a vacation as it is a temporary reprieve.

The photo is not an accurate representation of what spring break looks like in Minnesota. We have no snow, but we do have brisk temperatures and wind. I’ll leave my bikini at home when I walk over to the lab.

The era of beautiful airplanes

When I was a young kiddo, up through high school, I had two passions: biology and airplanes. You can guess which one won out, but I still sometimes dream of flying. In those days, I’d bicycle out to one of the local airports — Boeing towns had no shortage of them — and just hang out at the chain link fence by the end of the runway, or bike around the hangars. It was a treat to take a long bike trip to the Museum of Flight, which at the time was a big hangar where people were reconstructing a biplane, but has since expanded into a magnificent complex with all kinds of planes.

I am suddenly reminiscing about this because YouTube randomly served up a video about one of my favorite old-timey airplanes, the P-26 Peashooter.

That great big radial engine, that lovely post-war color scheme, and it’s wearing pants! Before retractable landing gear became a must-have for any high performance plane, they were outfitted with aerodynamic coverings, which I find irresistibly charming. Planes from the 1930s hit a sweet spot for me, so this random video in which nothing really happens was something I had to watch. It’s an odd trigger that reminds me of being 15 years old again.

So why did I give up my fascination with planes? One factor was that I only learned in high school that I was extremely near-sighted, and needed glasses — that felt like discovering that I was broken, and nature was telling me that certain pathways were closed to me. I was also getting deeper and deeper into that scholarly stuff, reading constantly, which probably contributed to my optical failures. I still sometimes think it would be awesome to take flying lessons, except a) no time, b) no money, and c) age has taught me that there are many things that look easy, but actually require a great deal of skill and discipline to do well. Flying is one of those things that is unforgiving of dilettantes.

But still, those aircraft from the Amelia Earhart era give me a little tingle.