Oh jebus. Lucas Werner is gloating about winning millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Starbucks, because they wrongfully banned him when all he’d done is pass a “nice note” to a young barista he found attractive.

Unfortunately for him, a “nice note” of the kind he passes to people has been revealed.

“Nice” is not the adjective I’d apply to that: “creepy” is more accurate. As a biologist, I’d say “WRONG” would also be good, although I think the barista is more reasonably going to feel that the former is the right word to use.

It’s been a remarkable day for email from idiots.

Prof. Myers, I have 3 questions about the evolution of humans that I have not been able to find the answers to. Could you offer your opinions?

1. If men prefer women who are less intelligent than they are does this mean there could have selection for lower intelligence in women?

2. Why haven’t women evolved to spontaneously shit themselves to deter rapists?

3. Why are women so annoying? Could they have actually evolved to provoke men into giving them a slapping?

Thanks,
Gary.

Happy to help, Gary!

1. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   In case you hadn’t noticed, women are members of the same species as men. You had a mother (she’s probably embarrased by you), and you inherited rougly half your chromosomes from her. It would require a remarkable degree of dimorphism to configure genes responsible for intelligence to be differentially expressed.

   Also, speak for yourself. Men don’t necessarily prefer less intelligent women. I happen to prefer a partner who is my equal. I don’t think it would have been advantageous in our evolutionary history to have half the population deficient in a trait that is responsible for our evolutionary success.

2. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   Why haven’t men evolved to find violent abuse of their partners repugnant? I suspect it’s more of a matter of random variation within the population producing some proportion of individuals who are more stupid and more violent than the mean. That’s you, Gary. You are noise. You are the unpleasant nasty detritus of chance variation.

3. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   As you so well demonstrate, some men are even more annoying.

Sadly, I cannot continue this enlightening conversation with Gary — I’ve blocked his email. If any of you would like to explain things more gently to Gary, you can write him at gary99@rocketship.com. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

Spokane’s most single man is getting a heck of a lot of press. Inquisitr covers him, he made it to Seattle television news…I almost feel sorry for him.

But then I discovered his Tumblr page.

Sympathy…evaporated. Although with this kind of heavy criticism, it might be a good idea for law enforcement to be aware of him in order to protect him. Another side of this kind of toxic masculinity is that some people will feel justified in doing violence to him. Nothing he has done warrants violent action or even legal sanctions — his creepiness is self-defeating.

I do appreciate the fact, though, that he has taken a fairly common ugly sort of behavior and taken it to such an extreme that the media finally noticed.

Watch this video. @LaurenDuca goes up against Tucker Carlson and you get to learn.

It’s amazing. She’s confident. She calls him out on his bullshit. She points out when he’s being patronizing. She clearly explains her points. She dumbfounds him because he can’t understand how she can admire many of Ivanka Trump’s accomplishments while also deploring her actions in “supporting the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time” — which seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable concern to me, but Carlson doesn’t get it.

Ivanka HAS IT ALL, & by that I mean, "a job, family, & sinister complicity in aiding the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time"

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) December 19, 2016

Or, at least, he pretends he doesn’t get it. Most of his rebuttal seems to involve adopting a dull, stupid expression, repeating her words, and acting as if there is some kind of contradiction there, when there isn’t.

And then at the end he tries to fight back by mocking her writing for Teen Vogue — she has an article on thigh-high boots which apparently, to the one-dimensional mind of Tucker Carlson, means she can’t have thoughtful political opinions…and further, there is an implicit belittling of teenaged girls, which Duca confidently rejects.

Here’s hoping a generation of teen-aged girls are growing up aware and angry, preparing to put on their thigh-high boots and do a flying drop-kick to Tucker Carlson’s condescending stupid face. He ought to be worried.

By the way, it also helps that she’s defending a righteous and reasonable position. Confidence is good, responding aggressively is good, but it doesn’t help if your confident aggression is in defense of racist sleaziness, for instance.

Joe Soucheray has a few words on the recent UM football scandal.

No player involved appears to have risen to the moral or ethical clarity required of any man whose instinctive character would have compelled him to say, “Wait a minute. Stop. This isn’t right. This has gotten out of hand. Everybody clear this building.’’

Any man of character — we call football players men — would have not only cleared the building but would have helped the woman, taken her to the hospital, for example. Actually, if there were men of character around that night the bacchanal would never have happened and the woman would not have required a hospital visit.

There was no respect for anybody in that apartment. There does not appear to be any awareness of physical or mental health at stake. There does not appear to be any awareness of safety.

Exactly right. It’s not enough to simply say you’re not going to rape or harass or take advantage; you also have to refuse to turn your back when others do so. Our football team is full of cowards who’d rather avoid conflict than correct an injustice.

Soucheray has a recommendation for the football coach:

But what Claeys should have really said is, “I don’t want any of these players on the team. These players will never set foot in this practice facility again nor will they ever wear a Gopher football uniform as long as I am coach. If you don’t like it you can take your poorly formed idea of due process and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’’

Maybe our overpaid coach should be shown the door, and the next candidates should have their moral compass measured and calibrated before any are hired.

The full EOAA report, and the police report, of the University of Minnesota football team scandal, have been released. It’s 80 horrible pages.

I can see now why the police aren’t pressing charges — the victim would be crucified in court, because she went along with some of the activities that went on in that apartment, out of fear or drunkenness. I can also see why the university is taking action against them, because the football players who participated were awful, ghastly, horrible, rotten young men. I am even less sympathetic with the other team members who are supporting them.

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One bit of good news: the other players have ended their threatened boycott. It’s not clear whether it’s because they read the EOAA report, or because UM just got awarded a bowl game.

They’re all amused that I don’t understand biology, as evidence by my criticisms of Boghossian’s blatant biases. Would you believe Jordan Peterson chimed in, too? Oh, how I tremble in terror and shame. I have roused a loud army of dumbasses (get used to it, Trump generation).

Except…I’m reasonably confident in my knowledge, and my opponents seem to be grossly ignorant and pandering to the twin trickster gods of prejudice and common sense. Never trust those guys. So I’ll keep it simple. They don’t understand that distinction between brute fact and social knowledge.

Here’s a brute fact: John produces sperm. Jennifer produces ova, sometimes. There’s no denying these simple, measurable observations. Further, we’ll stipulate that these are healthy eggs and sperm, and that I can extract these cell types in the lab and combine them in a dish and create a healthy, growing diploid zygote, that I could then implant in an individual who has a uterus and grow to adulthood. In fact, if I wanted to engineer a master race, I could go through the population and segregate out the individuals who make sperm and those who make ova and begin doing all kinds of interesting biological experiments.

Now, here are some social facts: John is a man. Jennifer is a woman. And Racist Twitter is saying, “Of course!” Except that that has taken a simple brute fact, the presence of organs that produce gametes, and extrapolated it into the socially loaded gender terms that carry huge amounts of baggage and imply lots of details in our heads that aren’t necessarily true. For example, you might then imagine John is a bit larger and physically stronger than Jennifer, which, on average, is probably true, but not necessarily so.

Or you might assume John would be a better scientist than Jennifer, which is not at all true.

In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

Having functional testes is not a requirement for a lab manager, yet our society as a whole has this mental shortcut that categorizes the suitability of individuals to particular jobs on the basis of a raft of irrelevant, but usually easily detectable, characters. This is a reality that those who want to reduce people to a definition based on sex are ignoring. Even when a social fact is turned into a brute fact by social scientists like Moss-Racusin, they deny. It’s kind of depressing.

Furthermore, I snuck in another social fact in that paragraph introducing John and Jennifer. Did you notice?

Why is the sperm-producing person named “John”, and the ovum-producing person named “Jennifer”? These are arbitrary signifiers that we associate with a gender, and then to their roles in culture, and to traits like their qualities as lab managers. Imagine if I’d started that paragraph “Jennifer produces sperm. John produces ova, sometimes.” Many people would be confused. They’d think I’d made a mistake. I’d created a conflict between their social assumptions and the brute fact of biology. But there are people named John who have ovaries.

Hmm. I wonder how good they are at lab management?

By the way, allow me to introduce Jessie^*. Jessie doesn’t produce sperm or ova, or maybe they do, but their behavior intentionally prevents reproduction. They do not dress in a socially conventional way for either gender. They do not engage in any of the standard courtship and mating customs of their culture. They ask you to use the non-gendered plural pronouns when addressing them.

But…but…there are only two sexes! We will struggle internally to fit Jessie into one of the two gender boxes convention allows. We must. We need to find some indication to help us accommodate our stereotypes.

Then we learn that Jessie is employed as a lab manager, and we are relieved. Jessie must be a “man”, then. We’ll be polite and continue to use the non-gendered pronouns, though. Or perhaps we’re an asshole like Jordan Peterson, and we’ll insist on forcing them into our biased pigeonholes.

And thus do we close the loop in our stereotypes and maintain the fiction of a binary reality, despite all the complicating evidence otherwise.

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^*Note that I snuck in yet another social fact for you to deal with: I chose what we consider a gender-neutral or ambiguous name for this person. But it can also be that someone named Jane or Joe chooses to defy those gender stereotypes, and then what happens? Everyone assumes Jane is female, of course. Even if Jane has testes hidden away under their school uniform. Because the gender binary must be served.

P.S. I forgot to mention the other criticism they’re shouting at me: “Myers is all ideological!” They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their position is blatantly ideological, too.

I admit to it. My ideology is to consider all of the evidence, even the stuff that makes my understanding of a situation more complicated.

Their ideology is to always make the evidence conform to their prior assumptions.