A note to my friends, family, colleagues and readers of color

Joan Walsh doesn’t speak for me.

I mean, I get her. I get the fear, the desire not to be lumped in with those bad other people who do the bad things. I get the desire to continue to enjoy the privilege of not having to think about my race day to day. I’ve been a straight person in the group of LGBT folks, the man in the group of feminist women, the cis guy talking to transfolk. Hell, I’ve been the only white person at the dinner table more often than I can count. I get that desire to start out each interaction with a pat on the back to assure me that I’m “one of the good ones.”

Don’t do me that favor.

I’ve been exceedingly fortunate in this life to have met people who have been willing to school me when I get something wrong, when I make assumptions about people’s lives based on my own experience. I’ve been fortunate to have people willing to instruct me out of my ignorance about the world outside my skin, and to do so mostly patiently, but not always. Sometimes that instruction came with justifiable peeve, or even anger.

And like Walsh, I’ve occasionally wanted to wave my lefty bonafides in front of my critic of the moment to defuse the topic, to make it more academic and a bit less uncomfortably about me. I’ve protested that just because I’m white doesn’t mean I’m conservative, or rich, or racist — and if I am racist, it’s at least not the kind that prompts me to drag people behind my truck. Like Walsh does somewhat academically in her essay, I have protested that far from being a racist, I am in fact a Nice White Guy.

But I’m learning that that criticism, as has been said here before in other contexts, is a gift. That the person taking the time to engage with me is, to appropriate a phrase from this important 2007 essay by the blogger Nanette, giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Like I said, I get Walsh’s desire to protest that we’re not all bad. I suppose I’m kind of doing it myself with this post, making my views distinct from her seeming ignorance of race privilege. Except that my goal here isn’t to separate myself from Walsh the way she wants you to separate her from the Klan. She and I are basically the same, after all, with our defensivenesses and privileges worn slightly differently.

Rather, my intent here is to thank you for the hard work you’ve put in to change the whole conversation, which you continue despite prominent people like Walsh telling you you’re doing it wrong. In ways incremental and massive; whether you were a one-time commenter on my blog with a sharp word or, well, my ex-wife who offered me two decades of private instruction in precisely where my white privilege lay; whether we’ve spoken directly at all or you’ve dissected a post of mine on your Tumblr or I’ve read something you wrote about something else and didn’t weigh in…

Well, I’m weighing in now. Thank you. You’re making the world a better place by speaking your mind candidly. Eventually, more of us will listen more of the time.

And don’t be too unnerved by Walsh’s admonition that whites need to be insulated from the scorn of people of color because “Democrats still need white support.” It’s an ugly threat on her part, but it’s an idle threat. Some of us don’t change our basic sense of ethics just because someone called us a name. I’m pretty sure Walsh is one of us, deep down. Yesterday’s essay just wasn’t some of her best work.

Skepchick is a little late on this one

Skepchick has a quickie up about Dr Ben Carson’s commencement speech at Emory University, and specifically about the vocal opposition to bringing a creationist like Carson to speak. Only thing is, that was the 2012 commencement address — it’s a done deal. Carson did speak last spring, and the good news is…he’s a terrible boring speaker. I really, really hope the Republicans continue to try and make him a nominee.

Here’s his speech. Good if you’re suffering from insomnia, or some terrible medical condition that can only be cured with supplemental platitudes.

As someone who has sat through many commencement speeches, I am unsurprised. Most are entirely forgettable. It’s going to be interesting to see how UMM’s commencement speaker fares next month: it’s Al Franken.

How I spent the last few days

I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on “Moving Atheism Beyond Science”. I argued that modern atheism is built on the twin pillars of anti-religion and science, and not that there’s anything wrong with either of those, but that we have to have a wider foundation. In particular, I defied the recent trend to broaden science to encompass morality — I see that more as a conservative effort to refuse to step out of our comfort zone of science to consider philosophy and ethics — and most of the talk was a review of the ways science has failed to support a moral standard. Science has a definite place of importance, but let’s stop using it as our sole hammer.

Then I attended Norwescon, a science-fiction convention. People give me weird looks when I say I’m going to a con as a scientist/educator — but really, this is another example of stepping out of our comfort zones and reaching out to a different population of people…and SF people are a very receptive audience for science talks. So here are the sessions I was up-front and talking (there were others where I just sat back with the audience, of course).

Evo-Devo: More than a cool band name. This one was cool and right on my interests. I shared the panel with Annie Morton, a local ecologist, Jim Kling, a science journalist, and Dr Ricky, a scientist and also author of a food blog, Science-Based Cuisine. I started off by giving a definition I’d been asked to give on Twitter: Evodevo: Primacy of regulatory mutations in the evolution of form in multicellular organisms. I know, it’s much narrower than the standard definition which emphasizes comparative molecular genetics, but I was trying to summarize the current focus. And then we went back and forth on the details.

The Anthropogenic Extinction event. Somehow, I ended up on a series of depressing panels. I shared this desk with Annie Morton again, and Kurt Cagle. Short summary: we’re doomed. My final statement was that one basic rule is that you don’t shit in your own nest, and now that we’re a global species, we apparently have forgotten it.

Bullies Still Suck: Why We Don’t Just Get Over It. Oh, jeez. The most depressing panel ever. I was on it with Mickey Schulz (Geek Girls Rule!) and Maida “Mac” Cain. I think I was there to represent targets of online bullying, but here’s the deal: it was attended by a large number of SF con nerds and geeks who could give us all lessons on what real bullying is like. I didn’t have to say much at all: the audience spoke out with testimonials about their lives as four-eyed nerds, gay people, trans women, Asperger kids, “sluts” so-called, and rape victims. I think my main job here should have just been to shut up and listen.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It, with Gregory Gadow, Peter Blanton, Russell Campbell, and Dr Ricky. We were supposed to talk about our favorite doomsday scenarios. I don’t have one. I did say I thought all the emphasis in the popular press on big explosions and cosmic collisions and such was egocentrism, that that’s not how most extinctions occur. I gave the example of the Heath Hen, a chicken-like bird that was common on the eastern seaboard at the time of the European colonization, and that gradually was reduced to a single isolated population on Martha’s Vineyard by habitat destruction and hunting, and when it was down to the last few hundred animals in the 19th century, efforts were made to give it a sheltered sanctuary. The population briefly rose to a few thousand individuals before a fire killed many, then a storm killed more, and then a disease spread from turkey farms to kill even more, reducing them to 7 individuals, mostly male, and the last lonely bird died in 1932. That’s what we should expect. No grand spectacular drama, we’re most likely to flicker out with a dismal whimper.

Blinded by Pseudoscience. I wasn’t suppose to be on this one, but Dr. Ricky asked me to get on the stage with Janet Freeman-Daily, Gregory Gadow, and Ro Yoon. We talked a lot about cancer quackery, especially the Burzynski fraud, and tried to deliver some suggestions about how to detect when you’re being lied to: too good to be true promises, demands for money up front, lack of scientific evidence, etc.

Designer Genes. Gregory Gadow was the moderator, and it was largely a discussion between me and Edward Tenner…and we pretty much agreed on everything. I think the theme was unintended consequences: sure, we can and will be able to do amazing things with somatic and germ line gene therapy, but trying to do this with complex systems is likely to have all kinds of unexpected side effects. Correcting single gene defects is one thing, but ‘improving’ the human race is a far more complex problem that isn’t going to be easily accomplished.

Remedial Exobiology, with Annie Morton and Dame Ruth. This one was very well attended and less depressing! At a science fiction convention, there were a lot of authors in the audience who are very interested in the topic of implementing good biology in their stories (sorry, but I said that there were almost no science fiction stories that addressed biology competently, and we also snickered at James Cameron a bit). I tried to be fair and give shortcuts: I said imagination is good, you don’t have to master all of biology, but instead of just starting with bipedal anthropoids and building a new alien on that body plan, at least browse through the available and highly diverse morphologies present in other lineages on this planet, and build on that. One person in the audience also recommended this book, Eighth Day Genesis: A Worldbuilding Codex for Writers and Creatives, as a tool for inspiring science-based creativity.

And now I’m winding down and getting ready to fly home and resume teaching biology in Minnesota again. I encourage all science educators to stretch out and try talking about their favorite topics in different venues: it’s how we expand the relevance of science!

What I taught today: O Cruel Taskmaster!

I’m out of town! Class is canceled today! But still, my cold grip extends across the Cascades, over the Palouse, the Rockies, the Dakota badlands, the old homeland of the American bison, the the great farms of the midwestern heartland, to a small town in western Minnesota, where I crack the whip over a tiny group of hardworking students. They’ve been mastering the basics of timelapse video microscopy in the lab this week, I hope, and will be showing me the fruits of their labors on Monday. I’m also inflicting yet another exam on them over the weekend. Here are the questions they are expected to address.

Developmental Biology Exam #2

This is a take-home exam. You are free and even encouraged to discuss these questions with your fellow students, but please write your answers independently — I want to hear your voice in your essays. Also note that you are UMM students, and so I have the highest expectations for the quality of your writing, and I will be grading you on grammar and spelling and clarity of expression as well as the content of your essays and your understanding of the concepts.

Answer two of the following three questions, 500-1000 words each. Do not retype the questions into your essay; if I can’t tell which one you’re answering from the story you’re telling, you’re doing it wrong. Include a word count in the top right corner of each of the two essays, and your name in the top left corner of each page. This assignment is due in class on Monday, and there will be a penalty for late submissions.

Question 1: One of the claims of evo devo is that mutations in the regulatory regions of genes are more important in the evolution of form in multicellular organisms than mutations in the coding regions of genes. We’ve discussed examples of both kinds of mutations, but that’s a quantitative claim that won’t be settled by dueling anecdotes. Pretend you’ve been given a huge budget by NSF to test the idea, and design an evodevo research program that would resolve the issue for some specific set of species.

Question 2: Every generation seems to describe the role of genes with a metaphor comparing it to some other technology: it’s a factory for making proteins, or it’s a blueprint, or it’s a recipe. Carroll’s book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, describes the toolbox genes in terms of “genetic circuitry”, “boolean logic”, “switches and logic gates” — he’s clearly using modern computer technology as his metaphor of choice. Summarize how the genome works using this metaphor, as he does. However, also be aware that it is a metaphor, and no metaphor is perfect: tell me how it might mislead us, too.

Question 3: We went over the experiment to test the role of enhancers of the Prx1 locus which showed their role in regulating limb length in bats and mice. Explain it again, going over the details of the experiment, the results, and the interpretation…but without using any scientific jargon. If you do use any jargon (like “locus”, “regulation”, “enhancer”), you must also define it in simple English. Make the story comprehensible to a non-biologist!

Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I’m evil.

It’s Not Just the Internet. It Never Has Been.

What Emily Finke says:

“Oh, the anonymity of the internet makes people behave badly!”

“If we just used real names, there people wouldn’t be as vicious.”

“Oh, that’s just 20-something guys in internet chatrooms. That’s how they all are.”

On the contrary, the viciousness we see, isn’t just a side effect of the internet. It’s a side effect of our culture.

No, I would go beyond that. It isn’t a side effect of our culture. It *is* our culture.

Why would I ever say this? I mean, everyone knows that those anonymous trolls on reddit would *never* act like that in the real world. It’s the structure of the internet that allows them to be assholes. Everyone knows that if we just avoid the problematic sites, like reddit, or the skeptics movement, or, well, anywhere else online, we wouldn’t have to deal with this.

Bullshit.

People do act like that in the real world.

 

(If you don’t know Emily’s blog, you ought to. She doesn’t post often, but what she does post is really good. This one from last year still gets me.)

Here I Stand; I Can Do No Other

I weigh in on Google Glass at KCET.

The gist:

Some of us come out to the desert to escape the Panopticon that life in the city already is, increasingly. In Los Angeles, Google Glass might be just one more increment of invasion in a landscape already thoroughly colonized by surveillance cameras, red light cameras, random private webcams, smart phone videographers and other such prying eyes. But there are places out here that don’t even have 4G yet. In fact — and you might want to sit down here and swallow that mouthful of coffee — there are some places out here where even the 3G coverage is spotty. We are in the back of beyond here in much of Eastern California.

And we like it that way, mostly.

So by all means, come on out and visit the desert. Bring your recording equipment, whether it’s a shoulder-mounted Steadicam or this latest bit of geek lust from Google sitting on your face. Document your hike. Record that coyote begging for sandwiches. Take video of that gorgeous desert bloom backlit by sunrise. The desert needs all the documentation it can get.

But if you’re talking to me, take that Google Glass off and put it away. If I’m speaking in public — which I do from time to time, offering lectures and poetry readings and such — and see you’re in my audience wearing Google Glass and you haven’t cleared it with me first, I will stop what I’m doing and ask you to put it away or leave. If you’re at an adjacent cafe table facing me and recording in my direction, I will write something derogatory in Sharpie on a sheet of paper and hold it up. I may escalate from there. And I’m not alone.

Read the whole thing.

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