Dang, he did it again

Ouch. Why is Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this to himself?

No, that’s not right, for multiple reasons.

  1. Celibacy is a behavior that almost certainly isn’t genetic in the first place. It’s more of a choice, strongly shaped by culture.

  2. Traits that are deleterious to reproduction can get transmitted easily if they’re recessive.

  3. You can get pregnant even if you don’t enjoy sex, and even if you are firmly committed to never having sex. Has he never heard of rape?

But really, the biggest problem here is that he’s echoing a pernicious fallacy that’s used to demonize all kinds of behavior. Haven’t you ever heard a wingnut complain that homosexuality is unnatural and can’t possibly have a genetic basis, because gays can’t reproduce? It’s the same argument. And it’s wrong.

Jeremy Yoder has torn that one apart in depth.

It’s getting weird. Tyson just keeps throwing out science canards — which is something a science popularizer shouldn’t do.

See? This is why we can’t have heroes

Neil deGrasse Tyson stuck his foot in it yesterday.

Ouch. Astronomers talking about biology is probably about as painful as biologists talking astronomy. But at least it inspired the #BiologistSpaceFacts hashtag, which is amusing, and Emily Willingham put together a good summary of cases where sex hurts.

But what I find interesting is the assumption, and it is a common one, that if some phenomenon exists, it must be part of a purposeful good, and that evolution in particular produces only beneficial outcomes. We’d be extinct if it didn’t, is the way the thinking goes.

There are problems with thinking that way, though.

One: natural selection isn’t the whole of evolution. Some features simply have not become fixed in a population because they’re good for it; detrimental novelties exist and can become ubiquitous because they aren’t severe enough to be seen by selection.

Two: In cases where selection applies, advantageous does not necessarily equate to “good”, whatever that means. It is possibly advantageous to male cats to have barbed penises that rake out sperm from other males; it does not make mating more fun. Many species of salmon exert themselves so strenuously to produce and fertilize eggs that they die, and presumably fish that conserved their resources to permit multiple breeding seasons were outbred by their frantically semelparous competitors. Would we say that an explosively fecund death is “good”?

Three: Selection doesn’t demand that an organism achieve an absolute “good”. It only needs to be slightly better than other individuals. So if pain is a negative criterion for sexual success, all you have to do is hurt less than the competition to win.

Four: A twist on my second point is that we often define “good” from a subjectively human view point, and even from a narrow cultural position. We assume that sex should be fun because it is for us, mostly, but from the broader perspective of biological success, “fun” is a concept that’s orthogonal to actually getting the job done.

Tyson’s perspective as an astronomer gave him no information at all on what evolution is all about, so he lapsed into his perspective as a human being, and gave a parochial guess. It takes a major effort to think outside the box of Homo sapiens for us, and the default is always going to be far narrower than reality.

Gaming the rankings

Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.

UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.

Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.

“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”

KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.

Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?

Praising the dead, forgetting the living

Hillary Clinton made some remarks about Nancy Reagan.

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s, and because of both President and Mrs Reagan, in particular Mrs Reagan, we started a national conversation…

It may be hard for your viewers to remember? Apparently, it’s really hard for Hillary Clinton to remember. I remember the 1980s; I remember our national nightmare of incompetence under the Reagans; and I most vividly remember their dismissal of AIDS, their neglect of the disease, the open ridicule that inflicted on the people suffering from it. Nancy Reagan was not an advocate for empathy or support or research into HIV. Quite the opposite.

Dan Savage remembers, too.

Hillary Clinton needs to walk this back immediately or she risks losing the votes of millions of queer Americans who survived the plague. We watched our friends and lovers die by the tens of thousands while Nancy and Ronnie sat silently in the White House. More than 20,000 Americans died before Ronald Reagan said the word “AIDS” in public—because it was a “gay plague” and Nancy and Ronald Reagan didn’t give a fuck about sick and dying faggots. I’m literally shaking as I try to write this. There are no words for the pain Clinton’s remarks have dredged up. I’m supposed to be writing a column—it’s way overdue—but all I can think about right now are all of my dead friends, lovely guys who might still be with us if Nancy and Ronald Reagan had started a national conversation about HIV/AIDS. Or done something about it.

You want to say something nice about Dead Nancy Fucking Reagan on the teevee? Compliment her taste in china. Don’t go on television and lie about her and her husband’s homophobic, hateful, appalling, murderous record on HIV/AIDS. Just don’t.

He includes a video of the Washington press corps laughing at people dying of the gay plague, and making jokes about each other not being gay, and therefore not having to worry about it.

This isn’t just a lie by Clinton. It’s demeaning a lot of people who watched the inactivity and obstruction of the Reagans in fury.

It’s also the kind of pandering remark to poisonous conservative ahistoricity that could cost her the election. We don’t need Democrats in office who look back fondly on the Reagan years — they were a horror.

The Old Guard at Science is quelling modernization, I fear

Last month, Michael Balter published a story in Science about sexual misconduct in anthropology (I also mentioned it). A research assistant reported that Brian Richmond had assaulted her at a conference.

In late September 2014, less than 2 months after Richmond had begun at AMNH, he and the research assistant attended a meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) in Florence. The research assistant says that on the last night of the meeting, she, Richmond, and several young European researchers were out on the town, visiting bars and drinking red wine and shots of limoncello, an Italian liqueur. She recalls “walking around Florence and realizing that I was way too drunk.” The next thing she remembers, she says, is waking up on the bed in Richmond’s hotel room in the wee hours of the morning with him on top of her, kissing her and groping under her skirt.

This incident led to an investigation that found multiple women had been the target of Richmond’s advances. It’s the usual story: big name has a history of inappropriate behavior that is ignored for years, until it can’t be ignored any more…usually after some number of women have had their careers derailed.

Now there’s another twist: the reporter who broke the story has been abruptly fired. He admits to fighting hard to get the story published, and apparently annoyed some of the higher level management to the point that someone on high decided to just get rid of him.

Some commentators have pointed out in the past, and reminded social media followers yesterday, that Science and the AAAS have had a poor track record on sexual harassment issues. The Brian Richmond story was a chance for the magazine to redeem itself, and indeed it was already on the way to doing so with fine stories by my colleague Jeff Mervis, who broke the Christian Ott Caltech story. My own perception is that the magazine was caught between its desire to take credit for the Richmond story and its fear of a lawsuit. In prior comments to people about this, and on discussion lists, I have tried to give my editors credit for doing the right thing and publishing a hard-hitting story despite their fears; but in the end they have decided to shoot the messenger.

I’ve already talked above about the culture at AAAS that allowed four colleagues to be fired precipitously in 2014, and will not elaborate on that here–except to say that just as I was beginning the Brian Richmond investigation, one of my editors asked me to delete a key blog post about that episode in which I criticized our Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt for parroting the party line put out by former AAAS CEO Alan Leshner. I declined to engage in this sanitizing of the historical record, not least because I consider that episode to be one of the proudest moments of my life. It’s not often that one gets to put one’s career on the line for something one believes in, and I have no regrets.

He’s been a troublemaker before, when he publicly criticized AAAS management for their abrupt firing of four women on the staff. Apparently, Science is making it a habit to treat women employed there rather shabbily, and to swiftly terminate anyone who complains about it.

But what about McNutt, you might ask? I’ve never been particularly impressed with her — she seems to be a lackey to the powers-that-be.

Swirling, twirling, birling, and going around and around again

fleuryskull

I haven’t been following Vincent Fleury’s escapades for some time. You may recall Fleury — he’s a woozily litigious crackpot who tries to explain all of development and evolution with swirling fluid vortices and claims that he has a hydrodynamic explanation of transiton from apes to humans, and threatened to sue me for criticizing his ludicrous scientific claims. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he’s also threatened to sue other people for pointing and laughing at his ideas, but he really has no grounds for a claim since he’s still employed at Paris-Diderot University, and doesn’t seem to have any problems getting his work out there.

He’s presenting at a conference today, in fact: La vie au fil de l’eau, Life Over Water, on Embryonic morphogenesis and dynamics of fluids. Some things never change.

If anybody is in Lille, France, and planning to go, let me know about it. It sounds very entertaining. Also on the program is Marc Henry, a quantum chemist, who’s going to talk about the physics of how water can retain a homeopathic memory, and Bernard Poitevin, a student of Bienveniste, who will explain the role of water in the process of realization of the homeopathic remedy, and Etienne Krencker, an anthroposophist. Those still exist? Wow.

Nope, no one’s ever going to suggest Fleury is part of a community of kooks, no sir.

I anticipate some more bluster and threats of lawsuits over pointing out his associations. He really doesn’t like me very much.

#TheTriggering lies limp and unable to perform

It probably doesn’t help when the targets of all your aggressive thrusting are laughing at you. This recent impotent effort by loud man-babies to be as offensive as possible on Twitter fizzled feebly, and here’s one good elegy for the fucked up mess.

I had a great deal of fun with #TheTriggering today, as did many of my most adamantly and bullishly feminist friends. It was a chance to point and laugh at an idea that could not have backfired any more spectacularly. But I think it’s also important to remember that while the planning and execution were pathetically bad, this was a plan born of genuine hatred and fear of women, people read as women, and anyone who supports their liberation and fair treatment.

The people behind #TheTriggering weren’t dauntless free speech advocates—just sad and spiteful little gremlins who genuinely think that trans people should die and women need to talk less.

Don’t get me wrong : that should definitely not stop you from mocking them. Mock early, mock often. Mock loudly and proudly and get all your friends to join in. Sometimes, the best cure for hatefulness is abject derision. Something to smile about: almost all of the top tweets in the hashtag are either people mocking the creators, or the creators getting mad at the people mocking them. It’s kinda beautiful, really. This really could not have gone any more wrong in any more predictable a way.

Just remember that in reality, safety and freedom from harassment and violence are no joke. It’s sad that there are people so devoted to a quixotic crusade against the perceived tyranny of “cultural Marxism” that they can’t see that.

Please, no more blogger submissions for a while

I put out a call for applications for new FtB bloggers a while back, the response was a bit overwhelming — we got scores of applicants. Every minute of my free time today was spent organizing and reviewing and making short summaries for other FtBians to help them get through the pile, and I’m feeling a bit bleary-eyed now. So stop applying! No more for this round!

If you’re one of the applicants, we’re going to have the big evaluative review over the weekend and make some decisions then. We’ll contact people yes or no early next week.

Note that if we turn you down this time, it’s not necessarily an absolute rejection — we’ve got so many applicants that the field is particularly competitive, and some applicants will be deferred simply because we can’t cope with suddenly adding 40 blogs to the network. Don’t be discouraged, it may be that we’re just trying to get our first few bites down, and we’ll get around to gobbling you up eventually.

We’ll have a whole bunch of changes appearing next week, so stay tuned.