I just had an idea for a movie: SQUIDNADO!

I got email this morning…and so did every member of the science & math division at the University of Minnesota, Morris. This happens every once in a while, since our official email addresses are all publicly accessible, and anyone can grab them and spam the heck out of us all. What was unusual is that this email was directly addressed to me, personally, and the sender decided that he needed to put me in my place and flaunt his erudition to every one of my colleagues.

I am unperturbed by his effort, because in every case, without exception, the loon just ends up exposing his inanity. I mean, you’ve got to realize that trying to harass an entire university division is a poor decision in the first place, right? That thinking that most of the faculty are at all interested in your disagreement with me is somewhat delusional? That you’ve immediately put the wrong foot forward by arbitrarily spamming a whole mob of disinterested people with your long-winded and ultimately pathetic excuses?

You should have known that I’d happily post your email to my blog, where people can opt-in and choose to read the whole thing voluntarily. So yes, I include every word of the thing below.

It’s from Ted Steele, who wrote that very silly article, Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, in which he proposed that squid fell to earth in comets. I laughed at it in my article, Squids from SPAAAAAAAAACE!, and what has irritated him is that my criticisms were picked up by that prestigious newspaper, The Sun, in an article titled ARE YOU SQUIDDING? Are octopuses aliens? Bizarre new theory suggests the sea creatures’ eggs arrived on earth on a comet from outer space. So the real concern is that a bunch of working class blokes are going to be reading their paper down at the pub, looking for topless pics and anti-immigrant rants, and they’re going to stumble across this weird American egghead who thinks Ted Steele is full of crap.

I think he should be more concerned that The Sun finds his work amusing than that I think it’s garbage. But read on. He’s indignant.

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The Science, Space and Technology Committee is run by dull stupid clowns

You must have heard about the gaggle of stupid Republicans who had a meeting to deny climate change and tell a climate scientist their favorite pet hypotheses to excuse humanity from any responsibility, right? It was reported in Science magazine. These rich twits really did that.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said he was bothered that established climate science has not been questioned more by the committee, which has accused federal climate scientists of fraudulently manipulating climate data and subpoenaed their records.

“I’m a little bit disturbed by, No. 1, over and over again, I hear, ‘Don’t ever talk about whether mankind is the main cause of the temperature changing and the climate changing,'” he said. “That’s a little disturbing to hear constantly beaten into our heads in a Science Committee meeting, when basically we should all be open to different points of view.”

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the committee, entered into the record an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that claimed sea levels are not rising because of climate change, a view that rejects thousands of scientific studies. The piece was written by Fred Singer, who is affiliated with the Heartland Institute in Chicago, Illinois, which promotes the rejection of mainstream climate science.

“To solve climate change challenges, we first need to acknowledge the uncertainties that exist,” Smith said in his opening remarks. “Then we can have confidence that innovations and technology will enable us to mitigate any adverse consequences of climate change.”

At one point, Smith showed a slide of two charts that he said demonstrated how the rate of sea-level rise does not equal the sharp spike in the consumption of fossil fuels. When Smith pointed out that rates of sea-level rise have only increased slightly compared with the rate of fossil fuel use, Duffy pointed out that his chart was from a single tide gauge station, near San Francisco, and that sea levels rise at different rates around the world. Smith did not show rising atmospheric CO2 levels or temperatures, both of which have climbed steadily in recent decades as emissions have increased.

The champion, though, was this bozo.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) questioned Duffy on the factors that contribute to sea-level rise, pointing out that land subsidence plays a role, as well as human activity.

Brooks then said that erosion plays a significant role in sea-level rise, which is not an idea embraced by mainstream climate researchers. He said the California coastline and the White Cliffs of Dover tumble into the sea every year, and that contributes to sea-level rise. He also said that silt washing into the ocean from the world’s major rivers, including the Mississippi, the Amazon and the Nile, is contributing to sea-level rise.

“Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up,” Brooks said.

I’m just going to sit back and let Rebecca channel my rage. She does it so well!

The scouring of Lake Sammamish

Most salmon are bold adventurers. They’re born in freshwater streams and lakes, spend a happy childhood frolicking in those relatively safe waters, and then strike out for the rich, salty waters of the sea where there’s far more food, and also far more predators. Orca and sea lions, to name a few, love to welcome the visitors to their maws.

But there always some who decide to stay at home. These are called kokanee salmon, and they stay in their freshwater homes all of their lives. They tend to be smaller than the relatives who go to sea, and they form their own unique population structures and gradually set themselves apart from others. I’ve always pictured them as the hobbits of the salmonid world, the comfortable homebodies.

There’s a price to pay, though, because their bucolic homes are at risk as humans intrude. Lake Sammamish in Washington state is one of those places where a population of kokanee live. It used to be an idyllic lake, surrounded by forests that sheltered it, but even when I was a kid I heard about the tribulations — the trees were cut down, the lake cabins went up, then the expanding suburbs of Seattle started to encroach. It’s just east of Bellevue and south of Redmond. It became surrounded by parking lots and city streets and office buildings, and the runoff from the regular rains was no longer filtered by the forests, but instead carried a toxic soup of engine oil and lawncare products right into the once-pristine habitat of the kokanee.

And now it’s worse. Five years ago, 18,000 kokanee lived in the lake; now it’s down to…twenty. Not 20,000, just 20. What has killed them?

County biologists are now tasked with studying the unexpected problem to determine what is causing the species to disappear. Parasites, bacteria, and other diseases are suspects. But a likely factor is the increase in high temperatures throughout the year. Recent years have been warmer, with hotter streaks. This warms the water and lowers oxygen levels for the fish.

Now the lesson you might take from this is don’t be a stay-at-home, get out there and explore the world and set broader horizons for yourself. Getting trapped in a single habitat is risky, and all those intrepid wanderers of the salmon world have escaped this peril on the high seas.

I would suggest an alternative interpretation, though. The lakes are warming first, but the oceans are also warming, more slowly and more irreversibly. The anadromous fish have a refuge now, but we humans are coming for them, too, and they’ve only delayed the inevitable. The real lesson is that all populations are vulnerable, that what we think of as a tiny, incremental change, like a few degrees of temperature rise, can lead to catastrophic collapse. They can be resilient and bounce back from some changes, but eventually they can no longer compensate and will fall apart with terrifying swiftness. From 18,000 to 20 within a few years — that’s an apocalypse for one special population of salmon.

Science lesson: What you want to be true ain’t necessarily so

How can a criticism of evolutionary psychology come off sounding like apologetics? I found this article annoying because of its lack of awareness.

One of the more intriguing findings in the field of evolutionary psychology over the past two decades has been that ovulating women are more strongly attracted to men with faces that have pronounced masculine characteristics, such as wide jaws and heavy brows, than to men who do not have such traits. Other research suggests men with highly masculinised faces have strong immune systems, a desirable trait in children, but also tend to form weaker long-term bonds with romantic partners, and are thus more likely to desert and leave the mother, both literally and metaphorically, holding the baby. Logic therefore suggests that a woman’s ideal evolutionary strategy is to mate with such men in secrecy, while duping less masculine (but better bonded) males into believing that the resultant offspring are their own—thus garnering reliable help in raising them.

That is not intriguing. That’s actually a fundamental obsession of evolutionary psychology: there are so many tedious studies that try to map women’s sexual preferences onto some aspect of their endocrinology. There is no continuity of thought, they’re just flighty creatures who make decisions based on their menstrual cycle, and their entire life history involves cycling through hormonally dictated associations with men with chins vs. men without chins. And all of that is built on the premise that Natural Selection is so powerful that it oscillates irresistibly on a monthly basis.

There is something wrong with you if you can only think of women as bags containing varying titers of estrogen. Not intriguing, except that it does say something about the men who believe in that crap.

So this article gets into a moderately large study (584 women) that actually controlled for many of the problems that plague other EP studies. They actually measured hormone levels directly, rather than going by self-reporting. They did multiple sessions for each woman. They had a larger sample size to possibly overcome some of the statistical weakness of previous work.

Unfortunately, it still uses the same superficial sorts of criteria other studies have used. They show the subjects pairs of photos of digitally manipulated male faces, some “feminized”, others “masculinized”, and ask the subjects which they’d rather fuck, and which they’d rather marry (they missed an opportunity to include a third option, “kill”). That’s it. It’s a predictably shallow approach to complex life decisions, but hey, bags of estrogen don’t worry their pretty little heads with thoughtful interactions with other human beings.

The only surprise here is that they got a negative result — there was no correlation between the women’s choices and their menstrual cycle — and that it got published. At least that last bit surprised me. These kinds of studies are usually exercises in the file drawer effect, or p value fishing.

But the popular press summary still manages to polish up this turd in an aggravating way.

All told, Dr Jones found that women’s masculinity-preference scores were not related to their reproductive cycle. Specifically, he and his colleagues could not find any statistically significant relationship between the levels of any hormones and preferences for more masculine faces. The idea that evolution encourages women to engage in cyclical cuckoldry was certainly an intriguing one. But, as Benjamin Franklin put it, one of the greatest tragedies in life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.

“Intriguing”. “Beautiful”. No, the premise was a heap of garbage that was sustained by years of sloppy studies and wishful thinking, and there was nothing beautiful about it. I’d like to imagine that some bad science was literally murdered, but I just know it’s going to be resurrected over and over again by evolutionary psychologists whose research is guided more by what they want to be true than any kind of valid understanding of evolution, or psychology, or human beings.

If you have a chronic runny nose, maybe your brain is leaking out of your skull

That sounds like an unkind joke, but sometimes it happens.

Jackson was diagnosed with cerebrospinal fluid leak, as in, brain fluid had been leaking through a hole in her skull into her nose. All day, every day. For three years.

She was losing approximately half a pint per day of the fluid that is supposed to surround the brain and spinal cord, doctors told her. If left untreated, the leak could have led to serious infections, including meningitis, vision changes and hearing loss.

I don’t have a runny nose, so I guess I have no excuse.

We’re in bigger trouble than I thought

I got spammed by Big Think, which tags itself as “your daily microdose of genius”, with a link to a listicle titled 7 myths you learned in biology class that you probably still believe. It annoyed me. Sure, it’s trying to correct misconceptions, but the misconceptions given are generally rather pathetic, and I rather doubt that any of them are taught in any biology class. Or maybe they are, and I’ve got an unrealistic understanding of the quality of biology education.

Here are the 7 false things that are being taught in biology class, according to Big Think:

  1. Humans sit atop the food chain. Yeah, no. I don’t teach the ecology side of biology much, but I can’t imagine such a claim making it into any textbook.

  2. Respiration is synonymous with breathing. OK, I do teach this side of biology, and the vast majority of the organisms that respire don’t “breathe”. Easy and obvious. But then Big Think says this: “respiration is when muscles release glucose during physical activity”. Wha…? Wrong. Don’t try to correct misconceptions with more misconceptions.

  3. Cats and dogs are colorblind. Their answer is flat out wrong: they say dogs and cats aren’t colorblind, because “Shockingly, recent research finds both dogs and cats can see the colors green and blue”. That is not shocking, nor is it recent. Colorblindness is a poor choice of term because individuals with this trait typically have two kinds of cones, rather than three; it would be more accurate to call them dichromats, unlike trichromats, the individuals with full color vision. But dogs and cats are colorblind in the same way that colorblind humans are.

  4. Sugar is as addictive as cocaine. I have never, ever heard this. It turns out that the author got this claim out of a fad diet book. Those things are not synonymous with what you read in biology class, or at least, I hope not.

  5. Daughters inherit traits from their mothers and sons from their fathers. The article says, “Most people carry this misconception from when they learned how we inherit traits,” which might explain some of the test scores on the last exam in my intro course, but I certainly didn’t teach that. Worse, it then goes on: “Another common misconception is that we get half of our characteristics from each parent. The truth, all that matters is which alleles are dominant.” Holy crap, no. I don’t even know what they’re trying to say there.

  6. Sharks can smell one drop of blood in the water from a mile away. Not true, but I find it disturbing that anyone thinks biology class is where you drop anecdotes that can be used in your cheesy thriller novel.

  7. Humans evolved from chimps. This falsehood I know has wide currency — creationists keep making this mistake. But again, it is not taught in biology class, except maybe if your biology class is a homeschooled abomination taught out of books from Answers in Genesis. If the class is teaching any kind of general systematics at all, it’s going to be emphasizing evolutionary trees, not linearity.

I am not at all impressed. The article reads like something written by someone who has virtually no knowledge of biology at all, got a few shreds of factlets off the internet, and then cobbled together some mangled explanations just to make up some clickbait (he succeeded at that!).

I guess the emphasis in “microdose of genius” really belongs on the “micro”. Or maybe they should change it to “homeopathic dose of genius”.

The laziest professor in the world!

That’s me! Today was our last day of classes, and rather than me doing the work of teaching, I invited Ken Miller to do it for me over Google.

I should have thought of this months ago — let’s see, 15 weeks, 3 classes a week, I could probably find 45 friends willing to cover for me for a day each.