Too many spiders?

I admit, I might have a small problem. I came in to work this morning and found another egg sac had spewed out a bunch of adorable baby spiderlings. (This is a very low resolution shot, I hope the arachnophobes here can bear it.)

This is nothing new or surprising. I’ve had four egg sacs bear fruit since last week, so I’m getting used to it. I sit down and sort out all the spiderlings into separate vials, and tuck them away near the incubators. Not in the incubators — they’re all full of spiders already. They seem to do fine at room temperature.

Well, I think the future of the colony is more than assured at this point. If I raise 150 spiderlings to adulthood, I’d have to take over the neighboring lab spaces and maybe occupy the science building atrium, and I have about 15 more egg sacs waiting in various containers already. I’m going to have to draw a terrible, wicked line.

Future babies will not be coddled and given living quarters and free food. Instead, we have some experiments in microscopy and staining in mind, and they will be killed, quickly and humanely, thrown into fixative, and their bodies treated with various exotic chemical compounds before being mounted on a confocal microscope.

Oh jeez, I sound like a Republican.

Why would Tim White and UC Berkeley hoard old bones?

I organize spiders better than this

Berkeley has a bit of an unsavory reputation as the premiere grave-robbing institution in the US. They’ve got an impressive collection of looted remains.

More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

Tim White, the esteemed anthropologist, was in charge of repatriation decisions for many years, and basically stonewalled the process.

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.

I’m looking at this as someone who is sympathetic to both educational and research needs, and I have to ask: why do you want these old bones anyway, Berkeley? They’re used to teach anthropology students, and I can understand why you want variations represented — one old mounted skeleton is not enough — but why do you need thousands of specimens for teaching the basics, and why do you need Native American skeletons shoveled out of their graves by the thousands? This makes no sense. It’s more like maintaining a dragon’s hoard then an actual, useful teaching collection. That’s especially clear when the collection is described.

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.

What use is an old bone if you know nothing of its provenance? What can you learn from a bucket of teeth?

For a moment I assumed that this would have been a massive, well-curated collection, where scientists can do research on comparative anatomy and variation. But no? This collection is just a pile of bones that professors have been letting students play with for decades. This is particularly appalling when various cultures have been begging to have the bones returned, and when the law is telling UC Berkeley to return them.

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.

White is admitting that they don’t know whose bones they have…then what use are they? His excuse for keeping them is that they might not be Polynesian, but could be from shipwreck victims. That is not a defense. That’s an admission that they have a hodge-podge, a confusing grab-bag of bones scooped up off of Pacific islands, and they don’t know what they’ve got…except that they’re going to keep them.

I’m trying hard to view this mess from the perspective of a college professor, but I’m not seeing it, and Tim White’s arguments for hanging on to these bones reads like a confession that Berkeley has been careless and sloppy. And White keeps stuffing his foot in his mouth!

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.

“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.

It’s just the weirdest defense: our bookkeeping is so bad and ignorance is so great that we have no idea whose remains these are, therefore we ought to be allowed to keep them. To me, this is an argument that the whole collection ought to be shoveled out and given to people who would treat the bones with real respect. Berkeley seems to have a history of disgraceful disrespect and exploitation, and doesn’t deserve to be custodians of those dead people.

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.

Disappointed, and relieved

This was supposed to be a heavy research morning — we’ve started a new experiment in the lab and spiders need to be assayed, and we were going to do some scanning of egg sacs with our confocal, and I was figuring I’d be neck deep in spider work until at least noon. But then my student called in sick, which was exactly the right thing to do (COVID is going around the student body again), and I had to postpone everything until Monday. I wouldn’t want to deprive her of the fun part of science!

Instead, I did the drudgery part of science, feeding all the animals. They didn’t really need it, they had mealworms earlier this week, and look like little brown beach balls right now. I wouldn’t want them to wake up feeling peckish and discover the larder was empty this weekend.

I found two new egg sacs. Two others look very close to emergence, so I sorted those out into new small containers. The confinement makes it easier to remove newly scampering spiderlings.

Now I’m staring at a stack of lab reports and exams and senior thesis drafts that I’m going to have to get done this weekend. I also have to compose a genetics exam to mail out this evening. First, though, I have to deliver another lecture to my other class. There will be no joy in Morris today.

This was supposed to be my light semester.

Science apologizes

We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.

Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.

Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.

Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.

Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.

That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.

Heed the octopuses’ warning!

Here’s a story that has sex, octopuses, population genetics, and climate change, all at once.

What should catch your eye, after the octopus sex, is the shift that enabled those populations to meet across the vast (currently) frozen mass of ice of the Antarctic: a 2°C increase in temperature relative to the modern day. Just 2°C will cause an ice sheet collapse, dramatic rises in sea level, and an increase in the frequency of extreme weather.

Earth scientists continually emphasize that humanity isn’t inescapably doomed by the coming, inevitable disruptions to the climate. It’s just the opposite. Society still has an extraordinary amount of influence in the matter: The more warming, the worse the impacts. But Earth’s inhabitants should be aware that a 2 C world has extreme effects. It’s all the more reason to avoid any warming above 2 C.

The Earth has been there before. It’s not a world we’d enjoy living on.

Stereotypical liberal college professor

Today I’m handing out the first exam of the semester in genetics, and some of the students are a bit anxious. I’ve been getting all these email questions about how to prepare for this exam, do I have to complete it in a set amount of time, am I allowed to talk to other people when I’m working on it, are there security things I have to do (man, high schools are warping students’ minds), etc., etc., etc. They seem discombobulated by the fact I don’t run the class like a drill sergeant, and that the exams are all open book, open notes, all this slackness you ought to expect from a liberal college professor.

So this morning I had to post a note to the class explaining that yes, it’s true, I have some rather loose and tolerant policies in my teaching. It’s OK if you work with other students on the exam, it’s not cheating, it’s called learning. What a weird thing to have to spell out!

[Read more…]

Big win for the University of Minnesota Morris

My colleagues here have earned a major award from HHMI.

The University of Minnesota Morris is one of 104 colleges and universities from throughout the U.S. that will receive a six-year grant through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence (IE3) initiative.

This grant challenges US colleges and universities to substantially and sustainably build capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences. The IE3 grants total more than $60 million over six years and are a part of HHMI’s national portfolio of experiments aimed at improving the introductory undergraduate science experience.

…

Associate Professor of Biology Heather Waye is leading the IE3 efforts at Morris, along with colleagues Rachel Johnson, Shaina Philpot, Barry McQuarrie, and Kerri Barnstuble.

“Our goal is to find the barriers that STEM students are facing and figure out how to tackle them,” Waye said. “This is an opportunity for us to change the system, not the student, so that the benefit of the grant will last beyond the scope of the grant.”

One of the first goals is to establish a Quantitative Learning Center (QLC) on campus, a dedicated space where students can build their quantitative skills with technologies used in their STEM classes. Waye stressed that student input is a key part of planning for this. In addition to providing practical help, the QLC would help students feel supported, valued and confident in their STEM abilities.

This is excellent news! All of my classes are heavy in the quantitative skills department, so having a campus initiative to get incoming students up to speed on math and stats will make my life easier, and I’m all about the easy life.

A patchwork dodo is not a dodo

Somebody has been watching too much Jurassic Park. They should read the original novel, which was a badly written Luddite pot-boiler with a bad take on genetic technology that emphasized the horrible ways technology would inevitably go wrong (that was a tiresome theme in practically all Michael Crichton novels), while the movies just highlighted the glorious resurrection of really cool animals. I guess the latest movie has hordes of perfectly healthy, vigorous dinosaurs swarming across the American West, as if that could happen.

In yet another George Church production, his company, Colossal Biosciences, proposes to resurrect the dodo, just as he said he was going to bring back the mammoth and thylacine. He hasn’t accomplished any of it. I’ll go out on a very thick limb and say he’s never going to succeed. The procedure, using CRISPR to incrementally patch dodo genes into an extant bird species, is fundamentally flawed.

To create a dodo from such genetic information, the company plans to try to modify the bird’s closest living relative, the brightly colored Nicobar pigeon, turning it step by step into a dodo and possibly “re-wilding” the animal in its native habitat.

Colossal has not yet created any kind of animal. It’s still working on developing the necessary processes. And making a dodo might not even be possible. That’s because it is hard to predict how many DNA changes will be needed to transform the Nicobar pigeon into a big-beaked, three-foot-tall dodo.

The dodo had a full, functioning, integrated genome that evolved gradually under a regime of continual selection — every intermediate was viable. Colossal’s approach is to splice a few dodo genes into a pigeon, raise it up, splice in a few more genes, etc. Those dodo genes evolved in a dodo genome. Gene A was in a cooperative relationship with gene B in the dodo, but you’ve just popped gene A into a genome that has a very different version of pigeon gene B. The gene you want to insert might be seriously deleterious in a pigeon context, and you don’t know what the relationship is. The dodo genes might also be optimized for a completely different environment, yet you’re trying to make them viable in lab-bred animals.

It’s insane. They’re going to plunk a few ancient genes into some poor pigeon and declare victory, but all they’re going to do is produce a sad fat flightless bird that is totally maladapted for everywhere, not a dodo at all, but a weirdly warped mutant pigeon. Good luck getting Chris Pratt to herd the flock around the landscape.

At least the dodo is only three feet tall…I can’t imagine what kind of botchwork monstrosity they’re going to build out of elephant stock. And they’re talking about “rewilding” these animals! The world they were adapted to no longer exists, these mutant freaks will not be able to thrive anywhere, and it’s pure fantasy to imagine they can let some loose in some environment that doesn’t want them, where the forces that drove the original extinction still exist, and get a supportable natural population. These are not serious ideas.

But they’ve got serious money.

The two-year-old startup also said today that it had raised a further $150 million in funding (bringing the total it’s raised to $225 million)—some of which will go to a new effort around bird genomics.

How do they do that? Easy. It’s all hype. They’re building on the flashy, fictional pseudoscience plotted by Jurassic Park, with an audience of stupid rich people who are impressed by CGI and confuse it with reality. Hey, if you can sell Bitcoin, you can sell fantasy animals that don’t exist to people with too much money. They even admit it.

Colossal’s investors include the billionaire Thomas Tull, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and the prominent biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen. Nelsen invested in the company because de-extinction “is just really cool,” he said in an email. “Mammoths and direwolves are cool.”

Oh god. Billionaires are so fucking stupid. All this money, pouring into an absurd project, and what are they going to do with it? It’s all about profit in the minds of the people throwing cash at it.

Because there isn’t much money to be made in conservation, how Colossal will ever turn a profit is another evolving question. One Colossal executive told MIT Technology Review that the company could sell tickets to see its animals, and Lamm believes the technologies needed to create the mammoth or the dodo will have other commercial uses.

Conservation isn’t profitable, but you know what is? A $225 million freak show, with dismal mutant animals in cages. Pleistocene Park! Yeah, that’s the ticket! The concept made money in that movie and book written by a guy who hated science, so let’s try that!

I knew that venture capitalists were evil and stupid, but it’s disappointing that so many highly trained molecular biologists are being sucked into this futile endeavor by all the hypetrain money flowing into it. And George Church — he used to be a well-regarded Smart Guy, but now his reputation is going to be as an ethically-challenged PT Barnum.