Ivanka the Vacant

I don’t like reading articles where the story is entirely buried between the lines — if you’re a journalist, plain-spoken brevity is a virtue. That’s why this article in The Atlantic about Ivanka Trump is agonizing. It’s long, and all you’re going to glean from it is that Ivanka is a cipher who takes great pains in maintaining a poised appearance, and is careful to avoid any conflict with her asshole father. The author is equally careful to avoid criticizing Ivanka, who, characteristically, refuses to go on the record anywhere in the story, and clearly got the access to write the story by a history of pandering to the Trump family. Like the first time she met Ivanka:

Ivanka was hard to miss—taller and prettier than everyone else. I was a fan, as were most girls I knew. We thought she had it all—her own company, a pretty family, a pretty apartment. When I saw an opening, I told her as much. She thanked me and told me she liked my dress. We took a photo together, which I posted on Instagram.

Wait. A “fan” of Ivanka, along with most of her friends? Until she got elevated to an unearned position of power, I and most of the people I know had no idea who this pampered rich girl was. What kind of person did you have to be to be aware of Ivanka Trump?

Then, even as the author is trying to be inoffensive, she succeeds in revealing through what she doesn’t say how empty Ivanka is.

It’s a great boring slog of an article, but I did run across one interesting comment. It’s Donald Trump once again attributing a virtue to … fucking genetics.

The president went on: “She’s got a great calmness … I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.” He added: “She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”

Calmness is usually a genetic thing? Then how did Ivanka inherit it, since her father is a temperamental histrionic toad?

I’m complaining about evolutionary psychology again

It’s kind of an irresistible target.

A few things that I mention:
The evolutionary psychology FAQ at UCSB
(Warning: it’s a sad, ugly, long document, but worth perusing if you want ammunition against evolutionary psychology.)

Chapter 7 of Darwin’s Descent of Man
(Warning: it’ll be a shock if you haven’t read 19th century literature in scientific racism before. Darwin held all the biases of his time.)

The critical points:

Evolution is more than just selection, and includes mutation, recombination, and drift.

Natural selection has a cost; it puts an upper bound on the number of elements subject to selection.

Populations have a substantial amount of genetic variation.

Most of that variation is neutral, or nearly neutral.

Mutations that have a small effect are invisible to selection.

Thomas Massie isn’t a scientist, either

I almost gave Thomas Massie a little credit. I won’t make that mistake ever again.

In his grilling of John Kerry, he first asks Isn’t it true you have a science degree from Yale? Kerry explains that it’s a bachelor of arts degree in political science. Then Massie asks, How do you get a bachelor of arts in a science?

If he’d been asking that as a sincere question, I’d be sympathetic. Incoming students always ask about the difference between a BA and a BS degree, and it’s a legitimate source of confusion. Basically, there is no difference. It isn’t as if one is for Artists and the other is for Scientists, and to the surprise of many, it’s not as if a BA is easier than a BS. It usually reflects how many credits outside your major you took, and what the tradition at the university is. The University of Minnesota Morris offers a BA in biology only, because we’re a liberal arts college and we require a fairly broad education for everyone. It’s still a science degree. At Temple University, we offered both the BA or the BS — they had exactly the same core requirements, the only difference being that the BA required that you take more foreign language courses, so it was actually harder to earn a BA.

But the bottom line is that there is no substantial difference between a BA and a BS, and nothing that will affect your future employment or career choices. Unless you encounter a dope like Thomas Massie, who goes on to say that a BA degree is not really science. Kerry does clearly state that he has a BA in political science from a liberal arts college, but Massie leaps on that with this ridiculous bilge:

I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree is here pushing pseudoscience

No. Neither a political science degree nor a bachelor of arts degree is pseudoscience. Any sympathy with his initial expression of confusion is now thoroughly dissipated. This guy is a fool.

He has since followed through with this claim:

Everybody knows that political science is a specialty that focuses on a certain body of knowledge. “Science” is not a magic word. You can’t define the validity of a discipline by picking over the etymology of the words in the label. It’s simply idiotic.

Other Republicans, like Gosar and Steube, made similarly ignorant contributions to the conversation. As Kerry pointed out, this was not a serious discussion. It can’t be, as long as Republican dimwits are involved.

By the way, Massie has a degree in engineering…not science. I guess he is disqualified from the conversation. Or would he rather push his climate-change-denying pseudoscience on everyone?

The usual predictable BS about women in science

Katie Bouman was one of the primary team leaders on the project to image a black hole. She’s gotten a flurry of media attention lately, which she always seems to handle with grace and takes care to acknowledge all of her teammates, but you can imagine what’s going on in the cesspools of the internet, Twitter and Reddit and the chans. A woman is being respected for her contributions to science? We can’t have that. So the trolls went hunting for a different member of the team, one with a penis, so they could declare that he did all the work, and she stole all the credit.

Except they picked the wrong guy, one who wasn’t full of sexist BS and who understood the roles of the various people involved in the project. Actually, one could argue that it would be hard to find a productive, functional member of a scientific team who wouldn’t appreciate the cooperative work required. But they picked Andrew Chael.

You know, the trolls (and you can find a few in that thread) are not astrophysicists with solid knowledge of the inner workings of the project. Their only qualification is that they’re contemptible assholes who are irate that their stereotypes don’t hold up to the evidence.

Who wants to live forever?

Jennifer Raff has written an informative summary of what you can actually learn about ancient ancestors from those DNA tests.

  1. Your DNA is not a good snapshot of your whole family tree more than a few generations back. You have many more genealogical ancestors than you have genetic ancestors.
  2. Any given individual in the past (including all of the ancient people referenced in the Primeval DNA test) is extremely unlikely to have passed along their DNA to anyone, including you.
  3. Any person in the distant past—be they anonymous peasant or famous monarch—who passed on their DNA into present times might be your ancestor, but he or she will also likely be the ancestor of everyone else in the world. In other words, as geneticist Dr. Adam Rutherford explained in his post on the subject for The Guardian, “we are all special, which means none of us are.”

I like to turn all that around, and consider our descendants. 1) You’re going to be genetically disintegrated and your bits scattered among your descendants, if any; 2) most of us will not have our specific DNA represented in any distant descendants; and 3) if you do leave descendants, your genes will be dispersed among huge numbers of individuals. Sorry, everyone, there really isn’t any such thing as genetic immortality. I blame sex.

Enjoy your life now.

I think I could use an evening of frogs

We’re in the midst of a blizzard, the UMM campus is closed, but the show must go on. An evening of frogs and films by Katie Garrett is still taking place tonight, so if you’re nearby, do try to make it. If you’re not nearby, you’d be crazy to travel in this weather, so don’t.

Frogs would be a denial of our current weather situation, so I think I’ll be going.

There can be only one?

This image illustrates hominin history over 4 million years, highlighting a recent discovery in the Philippines. Is anyone else as horrified by it as I am?

It illustrates 8 species of Homo in the last million years. The fossil record is spotty, so there are probably more…and the record prior to a million years ago is going to be even weaker, and the number of species is going to be even less representative of reality. Our family was a wonderful flowering bush of diversity, and now its been pared down to a single twig, us.

That’s an illustration of failure. We should be worried, especially since we’re actively exterminating even our distant cousins, taking an axe to the whole family tree. We’re working towards only supporting one primate type on the entire planet, which seems a little selfish and short-sighted.

Julian Assange: evidence that a man can be a journalist and an asshole at the same time

Not that that proposition was ever seriously in question.

Assange’s Ecuadorian asylum has been withdrawn, and he has been arrested by London police.

Video of the arrest showed a gray-bearded Assange being pulled by British police officers down the steps of the embassy and shoved into a waiting police van. Assange appeared to be physically resisting. His hands were bound in front of him.

Ecuador, which took Assange in when he was facing a Swedish rape investigation in 2012, said it was rescinding asylum because he of his “discourteous and aggressive behavior” and for violating the terms of his asylum.

My feelings are complicated on this one.

Should he be extradited to the US for crimes against the state? Hell no. You can still argue that he was working as a journalist in Wikileaks, and you may not like that he was revealing state secrets, but I think government should be transparent. It’s fair to say he has an anti-US bias, but it shouldn’t be criminal to dislike a government.

But at the same time, he’s been accused of rape, not just doing journalism. He should be extradited to Sweden and face a court for that. But apparently Sweden has let the investigation lapse; they could reopen it.

The UK should arrest him for skipping bail. That’s also clear cut, he did. I guess he faces potentially a year in prison for that.

By all accounts, he was an unpleasant guest at the Ecuadorian embassy, so I can’t blame them for getting fed up.

My preferred scenario: Sweden gets him to try him for rape. He is found guilty or exonerated by a fair trial. Assange is done, we can forget him at that point.

Worst case scenario: The US gets him, and tries him for espionage, which apparently carries a potential death sentence (which is barbaric in itself). Once again, the US expresses its contempt for journalism, and an alleged rapist is a martyr.

Please don’t extradite him to the US. I don’t trust our courts.