Colossal Biosciences predictably scams again

Colossal Biosciences is one big flashy scam. They have not and will not be resurrecting the woolly mammoth, they have not brought dire wolves back from extinction, their whole pious schtick of working to prevent extinction is a lie. Now they have a new scam, one that will find favor with the department of defense war: they want to genetically engineer WARHOUNDS.

Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Andruil’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. That idea, on Thursday, announced its emergence from stealth as Warhound, armed with $200 million in funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC. The round values the company at $1.2 billion.

That’s a lot of money to fund a glorified puppy mill. I have no idea what they hope to do, other than putting a glossy high-tech label on dog breeding. They are aware of the dangers, but at the same time, not aware.

Lamm told TechCrunch he met Luckey about a year ago at a conference, where the Anduril co-founder brought up doing more for working dogs in the U.S. military. The two kept in touch, and Lamm did more research, learning about the breeding issues. Many dogs do not make it through training because of genetic dispositions for issues like poor eyesight or the high possibilities of cancer, hip dysplasia, or muscle atrophy.

How do you simultaneously breed for specific traits in a small population while avoiding the side-effects of unexpected pleiotropies? They have a fantasy of being able to target and modify specific genes in such a way that you do not generate effects that you haven’t planned for? And what do the biotechnology techniques they plan to use do that is more effective than the low-tech strategies that we’ve been using for centuries? What is your cure for hip dysplasia? That would be nice to have, given that people keep producing dogs that are prone to those problems.

Lamm believed dogs could be enhanced for health, longevity and “for things like speed and agility or enhance olfactory sensors for bomb sniffing and whatnot,” he said. His team looked at the top-performing working dog breeds — the Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd — taking the cell lines from them and putting them in a biobank. From there, they will edit the genes, adding the ones that will make the dogs perform better while taking out the ones that won’t, to create “a new type of dog.”

Tell me what you plan to modify, specifically. Given Colossal Biosciences habit of doing minor cosmetic changes and trumpeting it as a revolution — they did not make dire wolves, they modified pigment genes to make white dogs — I would not expect much of an enhancement of German Shepherds. They will make a few tweaks via some expensive biotech and tout it as a WARHOUND to sell it to Pete Hegseth and “earn” their $1.2 billion valuation.

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

.

“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?

Quantificosis

We need a name for this disease, and it may already have one, because it’s been rampant for decades. It is the need to attach a specific number to a phenomenon that is not a single parameter, that encompasses a diversity of causes and consequences, and then treat the phenomenon as something that can be ranked, or min-maxed, or just generally be reduced to one number. And then it gets treated competitively! The most familiar example is IQ, taking a complex multivariate property like intelligence, and reducing it to this one single number, and then regarding the highest score as the best, without even considering the best…what? The best mathematician, the best musician, the best conversationalist, the best humanitarian, the best poet? It’s a sickness. We spend way too much time obsessing over the quantification of our existence.

Another example is sports and athletic performance. How much do you bench? How fast do you run 100 meters? What’s your freethrow percentage, your RBI, your golf handicap? These are all valid contributions to your performance at a game, but they don’t capture the totality of that performance, despite being easy to print on the back of a collectible sports card. In particular, they don’t come close to representing the value of that human being’s life.

It’s disturbing when someone focuses so much on the statistics of their existence that they miss the broader view of what that life is about. Case in point: Bryan Johnson, the weird millionaire who is obsessed with fine tuning every aspect of his physiology to maximize his longevity. His life is a constant whirl of pill-popping, exercise regimes, blood testing, and pointless measurement, all to a goal that he won’t get any closer to with his endless tweaking. Watching Johnson on his ridiculous hamster wheel of a life is entertaining, in a sad kind of way.

The latest news is that Johnson has a girlfriend, and he has immediately started scoring her.

Bryan Johnson, the world’s most dedicated oversharer, is in love. The 48-year-old got famous for documenting his strict diet and elaborate regimen of supplements—many of which he also sells—as well as exotic therapies including an injection of “young Swedish” stem cells, all in the pursuit of not dying, ever. And after he got a girlfriend, he told his public more than they’d ever want to know. “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone,” he tweeted this spring. Alas, there was more: “This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas.”

What followed was a report from a vaginal microbiome test, confirming the elite status of Kate Tolo’s. This, Johnson claimed, was a critical marker of Tolo’s overall health. (He soon began referring to his girlfriend’s genitals as “Kate’s 1%.”) Tolo then leapt into the comments, reassuring followers that she was totally fine with the world knowing that the bugs in her vagina are the very best bugs.

Wait. My first thought was about how you score a microbiome. Is this a thing? It turns out that it is.

In the simplest terms, a microbiome score is a metric designed to summarize the state of the microbial ecosystem living in your gut. It is a data-reduction tool. Instead of listing the relative proportions of hundreds of different bacterial species, a testing company uses a single number or a small set of numbers to represent the overall health and balance of your gut flora. This is analogous to a Body Mass Index (BMI) score: it condenses complex data into a single, comparable figure.

These scores are not universally standardized across the industry. Each testing company uses its own proprietary algorithm to calculate them. A “score” is meant to be a starting point, a way for you to quickly gauge whether your gut ecosystem appears healthy (often called “high diversity” or “good balance”) or potentially imbalanced (sometimes termed “dysbiosis”). However, you must distinguish between a summary score and the raw data. The raw data—the specific bacteria found and their levels—provides the most detailed and actionable information for a healthcare professional.

So it’s a scheme for reducing hundreds of numbers to one number, and different companies (that’s telling — it’s a profit-making tool) have different schemes, and it’s just as valid as BMI…which we already know is seriously flawed.

How was the sex, Bryan? What do you love about your girlfriend? He replies with a simplistic calculation of the distribution of bacteria on her body. I think you’re missing the point, Bryan.

I hope for Kate’s sake that she can keep her bacteria in tip-top shape. Would Bryan shame her if she were only in the top 5%? A yeast infection would be a devastating crisis in their relationship.

Anyone else remember Brian Wansink?

About 9 years ago, I posted a series of articles about the Wansink scandal — he was a well-known food researcher at Cornell who built a profitable reputation out of fudging data, p-hacking, and creating phony food myths that would “go viral”. All of his training was in marketing, not science. If you read any of those ghastly commercial web sites that have a long series of cheesy click-bait ads at the end, you can find that some his dishonest claims still live on. His career doesn’t — he abruptly announced his retirement as the investigations were heating up, and to this day suffered no other consequences, other than early retirement, for poisoning the scientific literature on the psychology of food with garbage.

I just ran into a good summary of his career. It’s been a good long while, I’d almost forgotten him.

The lesson I take away from this is that marketing is not a legitimate discipline — it’s a framework for more effecting lying, and we ought not to be encouraging people to study it, and we should mistrust any conclusions drawn from their work.

For example, Gad Saad hasn’t been run out of town on a rail yet, but he should be. He’s a marketing professor who has put up an evolutionary psychology facade. Don’t trust anything he says.

Nothing is correct in this illustration

I know a little bit about development, so this abomination made me want to punch an anti-choicer.

The mother’s abdomen doesn’t change size over 9 months, the fetal proportions are all wrong up until about 6 months, the embryo is not a blastula at 1 month, I don’t know what that bean is doing in there at 2 months, then suddenly it becomes a literal newborn at 3 months, the embryo is not located somewhere in the midbody, the fetus is not co-localized with the vertebral column, and its feet do not protrude from the abdomen, and its head does not displace the heart. It’s a disgraceful mass of misinformation.

This is what happens when you combine profound ignorance with AI slop, all motivated by an irrational ideology. You can find them on YouTube (40,000 followers) and Instagram (110,000 followers), where anyone can be an expert in science and medicine.

Axial Twist Theory

A reader has asked me to explain Axial Twist Theory. I don’t wanna.

OK, I dug into it a little bit. It’s a crank hypothesis promoted by a tiny number of people; it reminds me of Vortex theory and Lifecode, a couple of comprehensive theories of development proposed by obsessive individuals on the basis of biased interpretations of poor or even bogus observations. Coincidentally, my criticisms of those ideas led to serious threats of lawsuits, which is another strike against them (scientific hypotheses are not defended by lawsuits), and makes me wonder if I’m going to get sued again. No worries, those were not credible threats.

So what is it? There is a web page titled “Axial Twist Theory Explained”, and a Wikipedia page. They’re both terribly written, difficult to wade through, and I suspect both were written by the same person. The theory attempts to explain a phenomenon that doesn’t exist and doesn’t need explanation.

In short, the theory claims that the face and rostral nervous system were rotated during embryonic development and evolution, which they propose to explain the existence of decussations, like the way eyes project to contralateral regions of the central nervous system.

Schema of the proposed development of the axial twist. Developmental phases are (from top to bottom): (1) the embryo turns on its left side; (2) the anterior head grows in the same direction, but the rest of the body grows oppositely into a twist. So that ultimately (3) external bilateral symmetry is regained. Note that there is no evolutionary pressure for internal symmetry so the heart (and other organs) remain asymmetric.

We have no need of this hypothesis, and they have no evidence to support it. It’s that simple.

I’m pretty familiar with the concept of decussations in the nervous system. That’s what I studied in a previous life: my graduate work was on how the spinal cord gets wired up, and there are crossing fibers all up and down the cord. The lab I was in was focused on hindbrain neurons that crossed the midline to innervate contralateral motor outputs. If we needed to twist the whole axis to get them to cross, the whole nervous system would have to be twisted like the rubber band in a model airplane. It makes no sense.

As a post-doc I studied the development of commissural neurons in the grasshopper embryo. Axial Twist Theory confines itself to vertebrate development, so one might argue that grasshoppers are irrelevant, except that insects contain lots of crossing fibers that don’t require whole body twists to explain. It’s simply a functional consequence of needing to integrate both sides of the animal, and the mechanisms for generating it is straightforward molecular signaling that has existed since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates.

But to be fair, let’s look at the research literature. Next problem: it’s negligible. Pubmed turns up one article: Opposite asymmetries of face and trunk and of kissing and hugging, as predicted by the axial twist hypothesis by Marc H.E. de Lussanet​. It’s incredibly silly. For instance, bilateral symmetry is imperfect, so they interpret biases as the product of incomplete rotation of the face relative to the back of the head.

Exaggerated schema of the aurofacial asymmetry as predicted by the axial twist theory. During embryology and development, the face elements (red) are predicted to move toward the center from the left, with respect to the mid-plane between the ears.

It gets sillier. Part of the data in that paper was an analysis of photographs on the internet, and an experiment in which people were photographed hugging dolls and were observed in airports. Did I say silly? This is getting creepy.

Examples of left kissing (A) and right hugging (B).
The two schemas show a top view of the opposite behavioral asymmetries.

Apparently, the asymmetry during kissing is different than the asymmetry during hugging, which suggests that there is a twist between face and body. But even that is an ambiguous mess!

The kissing results also confirm the hypothesis and reproduces the findings of airport observations, experiments with dolls, as well as with couples and questionnaires. Earlier studies have revealed clear regional cultural influences: for example in some French cities, as well as in native Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, the kissing bias is reversed, whereas in a conservative muslim country (Bangladesh) the kissing bias is as in the other studies. Also, the bias in kissing and hugging behavior is strongly reduced by emotional contexts. For example, no bias was found in a public kiss between strangers. Thirdly, the kissing bias can be influenced by a lateral head tilt. For example, when kissing a doll head that is either 5° tilted to the right or 15° to the left resulted in a bias of almost 100% to the left and right side of the face respectively. Finally, both the kissing and hugging bias seem to be reduced in left handers

How do you draw conclusions about an embryonic transition that had to have occurred in the Precambrian from a wildly variable behavior in modern humans? The author treats this noise as a solid demonstration of the Axial Twist Hypothesis.

We thus showed that humans also behave as twisted creatures, as predicted by the ATH. Asking people why they kiss or hug this way, or to try it the other way leads to responses such as “it somehow feels better, more natural like this.” We thus tend to kiss as if the ventral side of the face has not quite arrived in the centre, but is still located to the left. Correspondingly, we tend to hug as if the ventral trunk is located to the right of the sagittal plane.

The final strike for me is their gross misinterpretation of zebrafish development. They claim that there is a rotation of the two eyes that fits their model, and they show a single short timelapse.

I spent years staring in a microscope at early, developing zebrafish embryos. No, the eyes don’t rotate around the body axis. In that video, they’re showing a slightly askew perspective on the head and drawing red and blue overlays on the eyes to emphasize an asymmetry inherent in the angle.

I don’t have to explain the Axial Twist Theory because it’s an imaginary phenomenon with no good evidence for it, used to explain poor observations that don’t need a deep evolutionary/embryological foundation.

It was still a little bit entertaining to dive into some bad science.

Why is their evidence always nothing but assertions and cartoons?

It’s in the New York Post, so you know it must be true. They’ve extracted alien corpses from multiple crashed flying saucers, and they’ve been able to taxonomically classify the four different kinds of ET. Conveniently, they all look like they’d be able to be cast for the low-quality make-up capabilities of a TV series on a budget. They’re straight from Dr Who or Star Trek.

Stop laughing.

The Post did their research and found a former Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program advisor and CIA-funded researcher and quantum physicist to back them up. Unfortunately, their source Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is an electrical engineer (synonymous with quantum physicist, apparently) and Scientologist who is best known for the infamous Puthoff & Targ “research” on Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute. He has since moved on to promote remote viewing and zero point energy. He’s a notorious kook, so it’s not surprising that he’d happily vouch for those goofy aliens.