There’s a flaw in his argument

Ken Ham has declared that he cannot respect other people’s pronouns. The reason: that would be lying.

As believers, we cannot in good conscience use transgendered pronouns—no matter our intentions—because, in doing so, we are lying. When we use she/her (or Miss or Mrs.) for a man or he/him (or Mr.) for a female, we are participating in the lie that sex/gender is on a spectrum or that a man can be a woman and a woman a man. Or if we use “they/them” (or Mx., etc.) or the myriad of other “pronoun” options today, we are participating in the lie that humans are not innately sexed as either male or female. We’re participating in the lie that humans can choose to be or are naturally androgenous or ambiguous, when that is not true because God has created us either male or female.

One problem with his excuse is that Ken Ham has never been reluctant about lying, whether it’s to get tax breaks on his con game or his claims about science. He’s also lying here: it’s not about preserving his honesty at all, or he’d just come out and plainly state that it’s because he thinks gay and trans people should burn in hell.

Headhunters

They are a savage breed of subhumans, roaming the globe in search of victims. They dig up graves, they lurk about hospitals, all for an opportunity to snatch up a skull or two to mount in their collections, where other members of the tribe meet to admire each other’s stolen heads. One of the kings of the headhunters was Samuel George Morton, who collected vast numbers of ghoulish remains.

The trafficking of remains belonging to other people’s ancestors dominated Morton’s correspondence. On February 3, 1837, Bostonian Dr. John Collins Warren, an early leader in surgical education in the United States and the first dean of Harvard’s Medical School, wrote to his Philadelphia colleague, Morton, asking, “Have you the Guanche? If not, I can let you have a head.” A couple months later, Warren sent Morton the “head,” along with a brief anecdote about how his friend found and stole it for him.

Today that skull of an Indigenous person from the Canary Islands, Dr. Warren’s gift to Dr. Morton, sits on a wooden shelf in an old cabinet in the basement of the Penn Museum. On those same shelves, in those same cabinets, sit crania of people from other parts of the world.

To be fair, this wasn’t just about frivolously turning a museum into a Hallowe’en haunted house. They had a higher purpose.

Warren and Morton are just two examples of the depraved history of trafficking in the skulls of our ancestors as part of the larger racial science project of the European Enlightenment to “prove” the superiority of the white race. This laid the groundwork for the way that race operates in the present.

Hmmm. Somehow, introducing “science” into the phenomenon just makes it worse.

This wasn’t just an archaic 19th century hobby, either. More recent remains have been collected.

The presence of Black Philadelphians in the Morton Cranial Collection—the same individuals who Penn now seeks to bury—was surfaced by a report written by a Penn graduate student in February 2021. In late April 2021, one of the authors reported that the remains of Black children who were their neighbors, who were murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing, were sitting in a box in the same museum basement. These remains were used as teaching material for an online course.

I wonder what they learned from those bones? Morton’s own science has been thoroughly discredited — he believed that the different races of humans had all been created independently by god, no dark-skinned progenitors in his ancestry, for sure! — and I don’t know what anyone learned by throwing the bones of children killed in a crime into a box.

I’m fine with and see the utility of research and training on cadavers, but they have to be willingly donated, not looted from a grave site. They also have to be treated with respect. The University of Pennsylvania is currently trying to get rid of the skeletons in their closets by rushing to bury them, without doing the appropriate research to identify the bodies they snatched.

I’m left with one question, though. I know where Morton’s grave is — it’s in Laurel Hill cemetery in Philadelphia.

Has anyone got a shovel or pickaxe I can borrow?

What the heck is sociogenomics?

I was asked recently about “sociogenomics,” and I had to stop and think because I was unfamiliar with the word. At a guess, I thought it would about looking for correlations between genes and socioeconomic groups, ethnicities, and races using tools like genome wide association studies and polygenic scores — you know, Bell Curve shit. To me, it sounded ominous and catastrophically bad, something that would shift into plain old eugenics and evolve into Nazi shit. But what do I know? I had to go look it up. I was just guessing.

Guess what? I guessed right.

Sociogenome is the comprehensive study of the role of genes and gene-environment (GxE) interaction on reproductive behaviour. Until now, social science research has focussed on socio-environmental explanations, largely neglecting the role of genes.

Drawing from recent unprecedented advances in molecular genetics we examine whether there is a genetic component to reproductive outcomes, including age at first birth, number of children and infertility and their interaction with the social environment.

Uh-oh. They’re just going to take modern genetic techniques and apply them to sociology. But these techniques will not give them the answers they want! They’ll reveal rough correlations, but they won’t untangle genetics and environmental factors — they can’t. This is a problem that has been pointed out to behavioral genetics researchers for years, and they just go sailing on ahead.

In the past decade and a half, sociologists and demographers have sought to integrate genetic data into their empirical analyses. To do so, they have drawn on recently developed high-throughput sequencing and genotyping technologies, which allow the entire genome to be mapped. They also follow in the line of a research specialty, behavioural genetics, which rose to prominence in the 1970s. This area, which focused notably on the genetic determination of intelligence, attracted severe criticisms, including among demographers (Jacquard, 1978; Vetta and Courgeau, 2003; Courgeau, 2017). However, these criticisms do not always seem to have been heard, and the emergence of new data and techniques has given rise to new problems, as indicated by calls for caution from learned societies in human genetics (Société française de génétique humaine, 2010; Risch, 2016; Société française de génétique humaine, 2018).

Let’s look at an example of a sociogenomics study that was summarized in Wired. It does not reassure me.

The UK BioBank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world, with samples of the genetic blueprints of half a million Brits standing by for scientific study. But when David Hill, a statistical geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, went poring through that data, he wasn’t looking for a cure for cancer or deeper insights into the biology of aging. Nothing like that. He was trying to figure out why some people make more money than others.

I hadn’t thought of that. They’re going to tap into modern behavioral databases, like all that information Facebook has about you, in addition to biological databases, and they’re going to try to weave the two of them into some kind of story. I’ve never been impressed by that.

Along with a team of European collaborators, Hill sifted through the UK Biobank data to find about 286,000 participants who had answered a survey question about household income. Using that information they conducted something called a Genome Wide Association Study, where they looked at 18 million places in the genome to see which ones matched up with higher paychecks. They uncovered about 30, which account for 7.4 percent of household income variation across the United Kingdom. (For some context, another way of viewing the results is to say that 92.6 percent of a person’s income is explained by factors other than genetics.) Hill noticed that many of the genetic differences overlapped with areas known to be associated with intelligence, based on some of his prior work, and when he mapped them out they were largely expressed in the brain.

His team then used these regions to compute a polygenic score, a genetic calculation that predicts a person’s odds of reaching a certain outcome—of, say, developing diabetes or earning six figures. It didn’t perform particularly well, correctly forecasting only 2.5 percent of the differences in income in an independent sample of Scots. “Your DNA will not print you money,” says Hill. But he’s relieved to have found some small effect. “If you’re born with a predisposi­tion for certain traits or abilities, and none of them counted in any way, shape, or form towards your income, then you’d have a profoundly unfair society, in my opinion,” he says.

Thanks, I hate it. So he started with the information about a quarter of a million people, went fishing for any correlation at all, and found a tiny percentage of the genetic variation might account for a tiny fraction of the variation in income, because of course they’re zeroing in on money. It looks like noise to me; I’d want to know haw they accounted for the fact that a great deal of wealth is inherited, so you’d expect to see some common traits threaded through lines of wealth. Trust fund babies are going to share genes with mommy and daddy, even if they have nothing to do with the source of their money.

Further, even their weak correlation hasn’t found a genetic basis for wealth. Genes aren’t pure entities that can be isolated in this way and tied to phenotype — everything is polygenic and pleiotropic, and absolutely dependent on the environment for their expression. No wonder I didn’t know what sociogenomics is — if I encountered it in a science journal, I’d glance at the abstract, gag, and turn the page.

Then I figured it out: sociogenomics is nothing but the new label slapped on Kathryn Paige Harden’s behavioral genetics, which I figured out a long time ago was garbage science. Here’s a solid critique of Harden’s ideas.

In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Sociogenomics, like behavior genetics, studies the possible role of genes in explaining complex human social behaviors. Critics have charged this area of study with fueling biological determinist theories of human social inequality.

Harden purports to offer a refreshing take on this old debate because she claims that such critics are blind to the role that genetics play in the very thing they aim to secure: social equality. She argues that, in fact, we must use genetic information to promote truly egalitarian social policy. Styling herself after 20th century anti-racist geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Harden offers the new sociogenomics as an explicitly anti-eugenic synthesis of genetics and equality.

Harden is right that the legacies of eugenics haunt behavior genetics. The field’s findings have been used to argue that biological differences between social groups explain social inequality and to undermine the possibility of egalitarian interventions. Human behavior genetics and its successor, sociogenomics, have thrived on controversy about the alleged biological relationship between race and IQ and the alleged futility of educational interventions in closing achievement gaps. Harden’s particular focus—the notion that biology can explain population differences in educational attainment and cognitive performance—has been a pillar of eugenic discourse and white supremacist ideology. But Harden believes that it is possible to “[reclaim] genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, realigning it with egalitarian aims.” Harden’s “new synthesis,” she argues, is not only different from eugenics, but self-consciously anti-eugenic.

Harden draws an analogy between her critics’ “genome blindness” (her term for the failure to “see” genetic causes) and color blindness (the failure to “see” race). Just as color blindness undermines antiracism because it fails to grapple with the effects of racism, Harden argues that genome-blindness threatens egalitarian aims because it fails to grapple with genetic causes of inequality. But this analogy breaks down when the entanglement of behavior genetics with eugenics is taken seriously. Resisting eugenics depends on an understanding not of how genes work, but of how eugenics works. Anti-eugenic science demands an expansive and nuanced understanding of how eugenic thought developed. In this essay, we show that Harden’s account of eugenics seriously undermines her claim to rescue behavior genetics from its clutches.

Yeah. Harden is really unconvincing. Somehow, while claiming to be an anti-eugenicist, she embraces the modern genetic determinists and spurns the people who have been showing for decades that genes and environment are inseparable.

Harden’s failure to engage with critics of behavioral genetics, often from the political left, veers between simple omissions and outright misrepresentation. This treatment is in stark contrast to how she treats biological determinists on the political right. The work of Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, which claimed that differences in IQ scores between the rich and poor were genetic, and whose research aligns neatly with Harden’s, is described as mostly true and his political implications are lightly challenged. The most prominent critic of behavioral genetics, Richard Lewontin, gets much rougher treatment.

In one of the three cases in which Harden bothers to mention Lewontin’s decades-long engagement with behavioral genetics, she gets it wrong, claiming that Lewontin merely said that heritability is useless because it is specific to a particular population at a particular time. In reality, Lewontin showed why the statistical foundation of heritability analyses means it is unable to truly separate genetic and environmental effects. Contra Harden’s characterization of her opponents, Lewontin recognized genetic factors as a cause of phenotypes; however, he stressed their effects cannot be independent of environmental factors and the dynamics of development.

Called it. Told you this was going to be some Bell Curve shit.

What really clinches for me that this is something more than a few fringe scholars coming up with fancy titles for the junk science they are doing, though, is this surprise. Purdue is making a massive investment in creating a sociogenomics department from scratch.

Together the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Science at Purdue University seek applications for multiple scholars in Sociogenomics, including existing groups of investigators, to assemble a new world-leading cohort of approximately 15 faculty. The positions include tenure-track Assistant, Associate, and Professor ranks.

A relatively new field, Sociogenomics encompasses theoretical and methodological approaches across the social, behavioral, and genetic sciences including those with an emphasis on computation. It explores the roles of genetics in social and behavior outcomes, as well as how genetics interact with the environment and social forces. Purdue is strongly committed to establishing a pre-eminent center in this emerging area including hiring a substantive cohort of scholars. We are especially interested in fostering collaborative linkages across the core fields of this discipline, here at Purdue and more broadly. This search is open to leading scholars in any area relevant to the advancement of Sociogenomics, and we are especially interested in candidates who draw from and contribute to research in the social science disciplines, biological sciences, the computational and data sciences, statistics, or other related disciplines. We anticipate joint appointments across departments where appropriate, with tenure homes flexible and negotiated at the time of hire.

That is remarkable. Right now, universities everywhere are struggling, thanks to the pressures of the pandemic and political neglect, yet somehow, Purdue has magically come up with the money and the will to create 15 faculty positions in this “relatively new field.” This is not how it works. You start with a small team of qualified people in the area, see how successful they are at grants and papers, and how well the students respond to their courses. Then you build around that solid core and grow the department. Also, you typically start with some well-established discipline that you know has a good track record.

Just flash, boom, creating a substantial department out of whole cloth, hiring new people and assembling them into some kind of framework, is what you do when you’ve got some wealthy sugar daddy, a billionaire or two or some corporation that thinks there are profits to be made. And doing it with some vague discipline that is only a few years old — unthinkable. In the absence of a need, this has to be the product of someone with an agenda, probably an unsavory agenda, pushing buckets of money at a university that will happily accept it.

The thing is, ideas that promote the belief that the very rich have earned their money by virtue of their superior biology are ridiculously popular with the people who have an excess of money to donate.

No, I honestly don’t think further research is warranted

You might not want to follow Holly Dunsworth on Twitter — she might sometimes spring an ugly surprise on you. Like this paper from the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. Here’s the entirety of the content of the paper.

Many accounts refer to insertion of finger into anus mostly for gratification from stimulation of prostate gland, but index case Mr. M. continued doing this to get rid of constipation that eventually led to feelings of guilt, stinky fingers, not able to defecate normally, and dysphoric emotions. Further research is needed to find out the phenomenology of this condition.

Key words: Depression, smelly finger, stinky finger

INTRODUCTION
Many of us might have once tried to push finger from our rear end, but experiences vary from feeling pleasurable to disgust. Well many times, habit of same can lead to shame-ridden heart with all dysphoric emotions.

CASE REPORT
Index patient Mr. M. 13 years of age, male, and belonging to middle socioeconomic status visited clinical psychologist with the complaints of sad mood, extreme guilt feelings, and anxiety. Above all, these symptoms seem to be secondary to his repeated act of inserting finger into his anus. The patient reported that he used to have constipation and that resulted in spending more time in toilet. Once he accidently put his finger inside his anus and found that it helped him easy defecating. Subsequently, it became his habit and he knew this was easy way out. However, soon this act started intruding his life. First, he started spending more time in washroom doing same. Second, his fingers would stink like shit even if he washes hands repeatedly with soap or apply mustard oil on hands. Many people including his family members commented on him that he was stinking and the patient used to cover his hands in front of others. Third, repeated insertion of finger led to bleeding heavily. He would feel sad and anxious most of the time along with the extreme feelings of guilt associated with the act. The duration of the condition was reported to be 3 months. Depression and anxiety symptoms were found to be subsyndromal rather waxing and waning around the thoughts of the act and guilt-ridden thoughts such as “why am I indulging into such act?” and “Is it that I can’t defecate normally now?.” Many times, the patient tried to stop this act, but he was not able to defecate and thus continued despite his sad mood and guilt feelings.

DISCUSSION
Index case could not be explained on obsessions and compulsions or habit and impulse disorder as no intrusion of thoughts or compulsions or impulse to action was present.[1] Neither could this be explained by olfactory reference syndrome where only patient has sense that he or she is producing a foul smell (and not necessarily smell of feces) which is not the case in objective reality here.[2,3] Discussion regarding anal expulsive character described by Sigmund Freud from fixation at anal stage might be quite possible here. Research speaks about pleasure by touching one’s prostate.[4] Apparently, the act does not seem to be the stimulation of prostate gland as patient was getting pleasure from not by inserting finger but when he defecates profusely till he would not pass any stool but only mucus and blood. He does it, so that he can defecate easily and pleasure is felt by defecation. However, still pleasurable feelings by touching prostate gland cannot be discounted and is a close differential. Searching the internet, we could not find anything related to this condition except one case that is very much like the index case.[5] That self-reported case also describes experiencing of symptoms such as shame, putting finger to defecate, sense of pleasure after defecation, smelly fingers, and disturbance in sociooccupational functioning. While history taking, index patient revealed that many times he found same foul smell from his first cousin who is just 9 years of age but he could not enquire her/him. The statement, if speaks about the same condition, increases the possibility of role of genetics in the condition. However, this would be just speculation and premature conclusion thus needs further exploration. More research is warranted to explore the phenomenology of the condition.

That actually got published in a real, if rather minor, journal, and indexed on PubMed.

That’s a rather impressive reach to assign a potential genetic cause to the behavior, but not worse than what’s routinely said on Quillette.

CAM and credulity

I was asked by a friend to take a look at this paper which he was surprised to see in a science journal. It’s a weird and unconvincing paper, a Case report of instantaneous resolution of juvenile macular degeneration blindness after proximal intercessory prayer. It’s actually a case of rummaging around in old medical files in order to report a “miracle” in 1972.

Here’s the story: an 18 year old girl lost her vision in 1959 over the course of a few months, with no identified cause. She was diagnosed with 7/200 vision, attended a school for the blind, and lived as a blind person for 12 years. Then, even more suddenly, her vision recovered fully after her husband prayed for her.

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: “Oh, God! You can restore […] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight.” At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

An examination in 2001 revealed that she had 20/40 vision, and that her retinas looked normal.

I can’t debunk this account, if that’s what you’re looking for. I could speculate about possible ways the story is misleading us, but we know nothing about the causes of the blindness or its cure, we don’t even know that there was a physical basis for the blindness, and I’m not going to diagnose an old medical condition — that’s what the authors of the paper are doing. All we’ve got are old records, and modern evidence that she can see, and no way to trace the actual history of her vision. It’s an anecdote. Maybe she was actually cured by a miracle! Unfortunately, there’s no way to analyze what actually happened.

I’m skeptical that prayer is actually effective, though. This woman was devout, came from a very religious family and community, and you’re telling me that the onset of blindness did not trigger a flurry of intense prayers from the woman, her family, and her church? Was that the first time her husband begged his god to restore her sight? It’s awfully hard to believe that something that was certainly done to no effect for years can be assigned a causal role in her abrupt recovery. But OK, I just have to shrug and say that’s some story.

How did it get published in a science journal? Well, it’s not a science journal, for one thing. It got published in Explore.

EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing addresses the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine. It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.

It’s one of those alternative journals with standards so wide open the editors’ brains have fallen out. I’ll also note that the paper concludes with an empty statement.

The PIP [proximal intercessory prayer] may have been associated with a response in the ANS [autonomic nervous system] of the patient. However, research on the potential for PIP to affect the ANS and/or reverse vision loss associated with JMD is limited. Findings from this report and others like it warrant investment in future research to ascertain whether and how PIP experiences may play a role in apparent spontaneous resolution of lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery.

“warrant investment in future research”…how? You’ve got one poorly understood, anecdotal observation, so how do you propose to do “research”? By gathering more anecdotal self-reports from believers in this phenomenon, and looking at more half-century old medical records? I’m also concerned that the authors now want to find people with “lifelong conditions having otherwise no prognosis of recovery” and tell them to pray for a cure. Most of those people will say they’ve already been praying for years, so…pray harder? Pray to the right god? Pray with the right magic words? It’s not as if they’ve identified a repeatable treatment or specific mechanism that they can test and refine.

I do note one admission that they authors make.

Prayer is one of the most common complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies.

That’s a confession that most of CAM is useless.

Always tell Steve Kirsch “NO”

What an interesting dilemma: if I were seated next to this smug asshole, would I take the money? How about you?

On the one hand, that would be a nice sum for my retirement, and the odds of getting COVID from one exposure are low…and the odds of dying from the disease are even lower. On the other hand, gambling my health and life against what this guy considers chump change is a fool’s game.

The deciding factor for me is that Mr Kirsch is an obnoxious jerk who’d use my acceptance as propaganda to do greater harm to other people. His seatmate turned him down, as did several other people he offered $10,000 to. So yeah, I’d tell him no, and probably tell him to fuck off.

As it turns out, Steve Kirsch is a notable liar and quack with a lot of money.

Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice (Mouse Systems), document processing (FrameMaker), search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), or e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest startup, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks. He has made millions from these projects, even if they have not turned him into a household name.

“You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think that reflects their intelligence,” Richman told me. “He considers himself an expert in something that he doesn’t have training or experience in, and he’s not following scientific methods to assess data.”

Man, we sure have a lot of examples of that phenomenon.

His current obsession is with promoting crank COVID cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. He’s funding clinical trials, which is good, but then he tends to ignore or even contradict the results when they don’t go in the direction he wants, which is antithetical to doing good science.

His peers and the beneficiaries of his wealth are beginning to realize that.

Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck.

“It’s really, really common for a small effect, something that looks exciting, to be a statistical fluke when you look at a larger population. It’s sad, but it’s true,” he told me. “With covid, 80% of your patient population does just peachy with no treatment at all, just a little bed rest and fluid. It’s actually much harder to parse out a signal than if you’re treating diabetes or cancer.”

In addition to the issues with fluvoxamine, advisors grew increasingly uncomfortable with Kirsch’s posts about ivermectin, which he has repeatedly claimed in blog posts and appearances in alternative media can be used together with fluvoxamine to prevent 100% of covid-19 deaths. (“The ivermectin data are trash,” Feinberg told me. “There’s nothing there.”)

Things took a final and dramatic turn once Kirsch started claiming the government was covering up vaccine deaths.

An obnoxious crank with money. That’s all he is.

What do others think of Evolutionary Psychology?

Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. It’s a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the community’s feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

  • Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. It’s also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate we’re trying to cultivate.
  • Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isn’t necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the “problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food.” There is some polite agreement with the statement (I’m not saying anything, because I’d only provide loud impolite agreement) and some polite disagreement. The disagreeable all seem to be quoting Tooby & Cosmides, which to me is just another sign that it’s a cult. EP has existed for decades, and all you’ve got to show for it is a pair of aging, founding authorities and a swarm of lunatics and bad publications? Cut your losses. Treat EP as crackpottery.

As far as I’m concerned, the statement is fair and judicious.

FREEEEEDOOOOMMM! For a few days, anyway

Today is my last day of classes before Spring break, and it’s going to be a busy one. After I finish up lab today, I’m free! Except for grading an exam and lab reports, and having to tend the students’ flies until they get back, and feeding my own monstrous swarm of arachnids every day. Other than that, I get to sit back and take it easy.

So let’s do a live stream tomorrow! I’ve got some rage bottled up in me about idiots denying evolution and climate change, plus maybe I’ll reveal some spider breeding tricks. Live! On air!

I do have to get through the rest of this day, though.