The intellectual pick-pocket

Imagine I were invited to join a lab, and was given access to their data. I frequently talk with lab members, and I help them with writing up their results. Then, suddenly, I publish a grand paper summarizing their work, claiming that any novel insights were entirely my own, and didn’t give any credit to that generous lab.

Would you accept my claim to full credit?

That’s precisely what Anthropic has done!

When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

I don’t understand how they can claim that they didn’t suck evidence and arguments from a human science lab — that’s their whole business model! What’s not good for their business, though, is stealing credit, which has a natural consequence.

Dr. Mestre had become increasingly enthusiastic about using A.I. for his science. Just last month, he began using Claude Science, a new Anthropic A.I. tool tailored to researchers.

But after Anthropic’s announcement last week, he is winding down his projects with Claude and shifting to other models.

“I’m shutting down everything,” he said.

Why would anyone type their hard-earned evidence directly into a machine that will blithely steal it?

Building Better Men

I went through rush, the campaign to enlist new students into a fraternity/sorority, my first year at the University of Washington. They attempted to lure me in with alcohol, which I drank, and gambling, which I rejected as stupid, and with overly friendly women, which I was too addled by the aforementioned alcohol to have a coherent conversation with. I quickly concluded that fraternity life offered me absolutely nothing of interest, and would have just been a wasteful distraction. I’ve never liked the whole fraternity philosophy ever since — they are places for young men to gather and learn terrible lessons about the world.

I was not surprised by the news from Cornell. In short, a young underage woman was given alcohol at a bar. She drank it, and was probably not at all accustomed to it. She drunkenly staggered off to the Chi Phi fraternity, where “friends” gave her ketamine, and she stupidly consumed it. Then they took her to a back room, raped her repeatedly for 7 hours, and even got on snapchat and invited their fellow frat brothers to join in the gang rape. This was not something she chose, or could even choose, being zonked out of her mind on drugs and alcohol.

This was a crime, plain and simple. The 7 rapists should have been arrested and faced severe criminal sentences, greater than mere expulsion. They were not. When the reputable university of Cornell heard about this atrocious, outrageous criminal act, they held an internal investigation, and kicked two of the criminals out of the university, without passing them on to civil authorities. The others were told to write essays.

Essays. I had no idea that writing was such a dreadful punishment.

The university is not supposed to be a bubble where horrific crimes are diminished to the point where you can rape a woman and expiate your crime by writing words. Being a student shouldn’t be a state of privilege, but apparently in this time when being a student is associated with being a child of a rich family, it has become a mark of belonging to an elite who can be excused for criminal actions.

No. I reject that. They must face the consequences. The students should be arrested and tried for rape. The bar that willingly served alcohol to underage women should face severe criminal penalties, their liquor license should be at risk. The Chi Phi fraternity should be shuttered permanently. Or at least that’s what I thought until I read the national headquarters statement on the incident.

The sexual assault allegations involving parties at Cornell University are deeply concerning. Anyone who reports sexual violence deserves to be heard and treated with compassion, dignity, and respect.

Chi Phi unequivocally condemns sexual violence. Our founding principles of Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity, and our mission of Building Better Men, call on every brother to demonstrate character through his actions and respect for the dignity and safety of others. Sexual violence is fundamentally incompatible with those expectations.

Oh god. Platitudes. How is the fraternity system at all about Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity? How does drunkenness and notoriously wild partying Build Better Men? It’s all a lie. Burn every chapter to the ground.

And shame on Cornell. They’ve built a safe space for the rapist sons of wealthy donors. They (and many other universities) need to change the university culture, but they won’t. The system is built with layers of privilege maintained by fat cats on managing boards, and they don’t care.

Am I naive to believe a university should be a place of learning?

Don’t forget these names: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. They’re the ones who drugged and raped a helpless woman. That should be on their CVs, at the very least. I also hope their mothers know what their boys have been accused of.

Revisiting Whalefall

I didn’t believe the hype nonsense about Whalefall, but I’m not a marine biologist. Maybe a marine biologist would see a way that a whale could swallow a man who would survive for an hour? I’m willing to be persuaded.

This sane, sober, well-informed video doesn’t do it for me.

I am interested in the tactics the defenders of the movie take. One event is improbable, unlikely but well, maybe possible; another event could only happen under rare circumstances; yet another event could happen if a confluence of different conditions occurs; add them all up, and presto, declare it could happen. That’s not how things work.

I learned something I hadn’t really thought through. Whales have a complex ruminant stomach that is muscular and crushes and tears food before passing it on to an acid-filled forestomach. I don’t care how many faint “maybes” you stack up, once you hit a single “impossible,” you’re done.

The dumbest man in congress

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.

Tripe.

This movie looks genuinely stupid.

No, a person can’t be swallowed by a sperm whale (strike #1) and no, a person is not going to survive for an hour in the whale’s guts (strike #2). A very large sperm whale is the only whale with a gullet wide enough to swallow an object the size of a person, but not one wearing all the gear involved in scuba diving, and especially not since the whale is adapted to consume soft squishy prey. Furthermore, the gut isn’t just a passive volume — the victim is going to be mashed and squished by the muscular walls.

ScienceNews tries to break the news gently.

But no one has ever observed this process in sperm whales. And researchers aren’t sure sperm whales actually swallow prey whole. When these elusive giants do surface with squid, it’s either with “literal chunks hanging out of their mouths or chunks floating behind them,” Gero says.

Swallowing people is also not in sperm whales’ nature, Reidenberg says. It makes for a thrilling movie night, but “these whales are very gentle when they’re around people who are not bothering them.” So while physiologically possible, their behavior and taste for deep-sea creatures make the events “very, very unlikely.”

You’re also not likely to get hoovered up by a sperm whale by accident. These whales can dive more than two kilometers deep in search of a meal — far deeper than human divers can reach, Gero says.

Popular Science consulted the same whale biologist

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“More than likely, the human drowns the second they get smashed into the mouth of the whale, whether they were drawn in by a squid or accidentally brought into the mouth of a whale,” he says. “My guess is the person dies the second they enter the mouth.”

Gero raises another interesting possibility. Sperm whales usually prey on boneless squid, so consuming a scuba-outfitted human could be a choking hazard, and could choke to death.

This would certainly make for a shorter movie, but Gero notes that the whale’s body could also have a more lively response to an unwanted foreign object in its mouth.

“When I swallow something that I shouldn’t have, it’s like a non-controllable response — your body just starts moving its mouth and coughing,” Gero says. “In that sort of movement, or freakout, it probably is going to do a lot of physical damage to the human.”

Although Gero acknowledges that he is not a whale anatomist, he still believes that it would be highly unlikely for any living creature to make it into the stomach of a sperm whale, let alone set up camp there.

“There are acids and gases,” he says. “The digestive tract of any mammal is not meant to be a livable place for any prey that ends up there.”

So, yeah, it’s a ridiculous movie with a bad premise.

But you know who is thrilled by it? Ken Ham.

Could Jonah have survived three days and three nights inside the belly of a great fish?

Well, I think more people will be asking that question next month after a new survival thriller movie, Whalefall, hits the box office. This movie is based off a 2023 novel of the same name by author Daniel Kraus, and the premise is basically this: A young man diving in the Pacific Ocean is accidentally swallowed by a hunting sperm whale. He only has one hour’s worth of oxygen left and must find a way to escape the belly of the beast.

Of course, such a story immediately reminds viewers of the biblical account of Jonah—and the author apparently intended that. In an interview he said,

The impetus for the book was that I wanted to treat the Biblical Jonah story with scientific and biological accuracy. I talked with whale experts as I developed the plot, and they would listen to my ideas and say, “You know, that is theoretically possible.” So, that’s why it’s believable: We got the science right.

No, he didn’t get the science right. He talked to experts and cherry-picked the most charitable, tentative statements they made, and scurried off to write a stupid story that would sell, being especially attractive to brain-dead Christians, like Ken Ham. And now we’re going to have to deal with apologists who will claim it’s possible because they saw it in a movie.

Ham did say one honest, revealing thing.

Just as there is no fully naturalistic explanation for how Jonah could have survived such an ordeal, there’s no naturalistic explanation for how Jesus could be crucified, die, be buried in a tomb, and then three days later walk out of that tomb alive. It was a miraculous event that was only possible because God is omnipotent and nothing is impossible for Him.

The story makes no sense, there is no naturalistic explanation, but he’s going to believe it because god said so, and it was a miracle. Who needs a reasonable, factual explanation when you’ve got the whims of a god to back you up?

Another sign of America’s anti-science turn

We lived in Philadelphia in the 1990s, and we made fairly frequent day trips to the downtown. Because I was a science nerd, there were three destinations we prioritized over all the history and art museums: the Mütter Museum (because it was kind of gross), the Franklin Institute (great hands-on interactive exhibits for the kids), and my favorite, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. It’s a great working science museum with about 200 years of active research housed behind its doors. They also regularly hosted science meetings, so I’d go there for the regional meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, and Philadelphia science fairs were held there. It’s a real jewel in the center of the city.

It’s a great place. I miss the opportunity to visit it.

But now I learn that it was bought up by Drexel University. This was part of an ugly consolidation of academic institutions that distorted higher learning in the the region — they also bought up the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and Salus University, as part of a pattern of expansion. They slapped their name on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (I will never call it that.) And now, on September 1, they abruptly announced that they were closing the Academy as of September 30. That’s rather short notice for a collection that has been growing since 1812.

At the time I lived there, Drexel had a great reputation as an engineering and computer science school, but apparently they’ve now become a massive do-everything school with a focus on making lots of money, and screw science and history. Drexel has become the bad guy in this story.

Keep up with the news at the Save the Museum page, and sign the petition. What the hell happened to Drexel?

How not to campaign in Minnesota

Here in Minnesota, we’ve got a race for the Senate: Peggy Flanagan vs. Michele Tafoya. I don’t think Tafoya is doing herself any favors by often announcing that she plans to get out of the state. She’d like to live in Florida? Please do.

She’s also anti-trans. Minnesota has a reputation for tolerance, and people here are very proud of their state, so I think these statements by Tafoya ought to follow her everywhere.

I’m voting for Flanagan in November.

The North of England has been blessed with a new invader

She’s beautiful.

Argiope bruennichi

The colloquial name is the wasp spider, and they’re not normally spotted in Cheshire, but one was found in a recent survey. There is some concern when a non-native species shows up — is this a sign of climate change? Also, English northerners are not accustomed to these big honkers.

“You know your big, chunky house spiders – the ones you think are massive and frighten the life out of you in your living room? A female wasp spider is probably a bit bigger than those,” said Scott Wilson, head of field programmes at the zoo.

I’d be thrilled and surprised if I saw a wasp spider — they’re native to Europe and North Africa, and I haven’t seen any here. We instead have two equivalent native species, Argiope aurantia and Argiope trifasciata (we have a lovely A. aurantia living in our backyard right now). Maybe they are a sign of a warming trend in the UK, but they are quite nice animals, inoffensive and helpful in clearing out your grasshoppers and crickets. They just look a little intimidating. Don’t be frightened.