Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’m reading Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society –it’s my airplane reading for today, as I travel east — and am getting increasingly enlightened. It addresses these terrible myths about men and manliness and sex that afflict us all, and most importantly, knocking down a lot of scientific fables that seem to be readily disseminated and accepted. Here’s an example from chapter two. She quotes a psychologist who describes a common hypothetical scenario, it’s even one that I think I’ve used in the past, the idea that the reproductive capacity of men is vastly greater than that of women, because we produce lots of cheap sperm, while they are limited by all that pregnancy and child-rearing stuff. Beat your chests in pride at your immense potential virility, men! She quotes a psychologist who makes this kind of facile quantitative argument.
Consider that a man can produces as many as 100 offspring by indiscriminately mating with 100 women in a given year, whereas a man who is monogamous will tend to have only one child with his partner during that same time period. In evolutionary currencies, this represents a strong selective pressure—and a potent adaptive problem—for men’t mating strategies to favor at least some desire for sexual variety.
Then — and this is what I love about this book — she takes it seriously and introduces all the factors involved in conception and does a simple calculation, assuming a man seriously goes on a crusade to impregnate 100 random women.
So what’s the likely return on this exhausting investment? For healthy couples, the probability of a woman becoming pregnant from a single randomly timed act of intercourse is about 3 percent, ranging (depending on the time of the month) from a low of 0 to a high of nearly 9 percent. On average, then, a year of competitive courtship would result in only about three of the one hundred women becoming pregnant. (Although a man could increase his chances of conception by having sex with the same woman repeatedly, this would of course disrupt his very tight schedule.) This estimate, by the way, assumes that the man, in contradiction with the principle of “indiscriminately mating,” excludes women under twenty and over forty, who have a greater number of cycles in which no egg is released. It also doesn’t take into account that some women will be chronically infertile (Einon estimates about 8 percent), or that women who are mostly sexually abstinent have long menstrual cycles and ovulate less frequently, making it less likely that a single coital act will result in pregnancy. We’re also kindly overlooking sperm depletion, and discreetly turning a blind eye to the possibility that another man’s sperm might reach the egg first. In these unrealistically ideal condition, a man who sets himself the annual project of producing one hundred children from one hundred one-night stands has a chance of success of about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000363.
(Number of zeroes only approximate — I just estimated from the layout on the page, which is hard to do. If only she’d used exponential notation!)
Let’s make the math even simpler and more stark.
Indeed, a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.
Suddenly, my preferred reproductive strategy, monogamy and paternal investment in offspring, seems to be the best evolutionary strategy. It’s much less exhausting, too, and has given me time to do other things in my life.
Anyway, this is a delightful book that has made me question ‘facts’ I’ve long taken for granted multiple times so far, and I haven’t yet finished it. It really pays to think about one’s assumptions now and then, and it’s making me aware of how badly a lot of gender essentialism has poisoned our culture with lies.
She also takes a lot of swift, sharp pokes at evolutionary psychology, if you find that entertaining. I certainly do!
Tomkins is at it again. He’s a creationist who, for some reason, detests the idea that human chromosome 2 is the production of a fusion of a pair of ancestral ape chromosomes. I don’t understand why; all he’s got to do is invoke The Fall and claim it’s an error of Biblical origin, it’s not as if the Bible has anything at all to say about chromosomes. But he does like to go on and on about searching for evidence of a fusion at the fusion site, like he’s expecting an intact centromere and telomere to be right there, fossilized in the sequence. He’s written another article for Answers in Genesis that is an amazing welter of obfuscation.
In 2013, it was shown that the alleged interstitial telomeric repeat site of the human chromosome 2 fusion corresponding to chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B of a hypothetical common ancestor was actually a second promoter in the DDX11L2 long noncoding RNA gene. Additional ENCODE related data are provided in this report that not only debunk evolutionary criticism and obfuscation in response to this discovery, but solidify the original finding. New data come from epigenetic-modifications, transcription factor binding, and transcription start site information. It is also shown that the alleged cryptic centromere site, which is very short in length compared to a normal centromere, is completely situated inside the actively expressed protein coding gene ANKRD30BL—encoding both exon and intron regions. Other factors refuting this region as a cryptic centromere are also discussed. Taken together, genomic data for both the alleged fusion and cryptic centromere sites refute the concept of fusion in a human-chimpanzee common ancestor.
This is remarkable. His entire ‘evidence’ consists of looking in a region of poorly conserved, non-functional DNA, and failing to find a conserved sequence, as if that’s what is expected. It’s the wrong approach. He has to ignore all the other cytological and sequence data that show that chromosome 2 is similar in structure to two chimpanzee chromosomes. This makes no sense. I explained all this before.
…what they do is focus on just the region of the fusion, and complain that it is a tangled mess and hard to interpret — that it is a degenerate telomeric region, rather than a complete and intact telomere, which is what they demand be present. This is an unrealistic expectation, given that every paper on the structure of the fusion region makes the point that it is degenerate.
An analogy: imagine a red Ford Mustang and a blue BMW X6 are in a head-on collision, and both have totally wrecked front ends, with bumpers and radiators and headlights interlocked and everything about their grilles in tangled confusion, and with bits and pieces torn loose and flung about. You’d be able to look at the crash and still tell by everything in and behind the engine compartment that Car #1 was a Mustang and Car #2 was an X6.
Bergman and Tomkins are the bewildered and incompetent investigators who ignore every other factor in the crash, look at a few particularly mangled bits of the wreckage, and declare that they can’t identify it, therefore…the two vehicles were assembled at the factory in this particular configuration, and no crash occurred. But they use lots of sciencey language to explain this at tendentious length, which is sufficient to convince non-scientists that the interpretation of an obvious historical event has been refuted. And that’s all they need to do to accomplish their goals: fling about unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win over the ignorant.
Tomkins has done it again. He stares fixedly at the debris and fails to pay any attention at all to the intact, functional regions of the human chromosome and ape chromosomes, which are all you need to tell the tale.
I’m watching this video of Ben Carson’s recent speech, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I know everyone is aghast at his trivializing of the slave trade, and that’s the more important example of negligent ignorance to focus on, but good grief, I was trained as a neuroscientist, and his remarks about the brain are appalling.
It remembers everything you’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away. You just have to learn how to recall it. But that’s what your brain is capable of. It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You can’t overload it. Have you ever heard people say, “Don’t do all that, you’ll overload your brain.” You can’t overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.
None of that is true! Not one bit of it! I can’t imagine anyone who learned the slightest bit of neurobiology in the 20th century believing any of that. The brain throws away most of its sensory input. We don’t know what the “storage capacity” (and it’s fundamentally wrong to think of it that way, as if it’s a flash drive) of the brain is, and we don’t know the storage requirement of a “fact”, so that’s just a bullshit estimation.
Do you even need to know anything to be a brain surgeon? Somebody wack him upside the head with a copy of Kandel and tell him to start reading this stuff he pretends to know.
Apparently, he’s been reciting this pseudoscientific claptrap for years, in his books and speeches before religious groups, but we all know that anybody who read or listened to that stuff wasn’t competent to criticize his bad science.
Oooh, beautiful. Starfish larvae are covered with beating cilia that they use to swim, and also to swirl bacteria towards their mouth…and in this video that visualizes the motion generated by the cilia, you can see that they do both at the same time.
We’ve got this great big glass-fronted stadium in the Twin Cities, located near the river and on the migratory flyway for birds. Everyone said before it was built that it was going to kill lots of birds. Now that it’s looming there, people are patrolling around the base and looking for dead birds. And guess what? It’s killing lots of birds. Surprise!
I’m interested in how people respond to the confirmation of this prediction. The comments are predictably depressing.
Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, also according to the National Audubon Society.
Yes! This is a big problem! We need better solutions to prevent bird and bat deaths by turbines, and no one is going to disagree with that. The story here, though, is that we have good solutions to the problem of birds hitting buildings, and they were even proposed during construction. As the article points out:
ird strikes with buildings are avoidable. Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Center, built in 1986, reduced collisions by about 90 percent by replacing reflective glass with a visibly patterned glass three years ago. American Bird Conservancy suggests using window films, decals, netting, screens and awnings to deter bird collisions.
So here’s a situation with a clear solution, which the owners of the stadium dismissed and did not implement, and someone is pointing to a completely different problem that lacks a good solution as an excuse to do nothing? Weird.
Do you really want to destroy what is suppose to be a revenue generator with bad publicity?
Did you know that stadiums don’t profit the communities they’re built in? They line the pockets of sports team owners, for sure, and you could argue that there are lots of intangible values that having an entertainment complex brings in…but please. Don’t argue for a non-existent profit.
Also, most troubling is the idea that we should be silent about bad ideas lest we discourage people from investing in them. That seems precisely backwards to me.
Those are the reasonable (by comparison) criticisms of the article. Are you ready for the unreasonable ones?
These crazy liberal democrat groups are nuts. They care more about 35 birds dying versus millions of human fetuses murdered by Planned Parenthood.
If you look at the statistics, less than a million abortions per year are performed in the US. These are not acts of murder. These are safe, legal operations carried out for the health and benefit of almost a million women per year. I actually do care more about the health and future of women than I do the safety of birds, but that is irrelevant. Putting a film on a stadium to reduce bird collisions will not increase the abortion rate, if that’s what you’re concerned about.
This next one, though, is just plain stupid.
Just put a big ugly Elizabeth Warren face up there with mouth open. That’ll scare crow those birds away if it doesn’t scare’em to death first.
It would actually work. Setting aside the bigotry and misogyny about calling Warren ugly, putting up a great big decal of any kind — you could even use Donald Trump’s lovely face — would disrupt the reflective surface that fools the birds and would solve the problem. A non-reflective film was what was originally proposed, which would probably be simpler and cheaper, but sure, slap a great big American flag across all that glass; an abstract pattern; pictures of bald eagles; whatever. This is not an insoluble problem.
Ed Yong has written about a common assumption that scientists must be ‘objective’: Do Scientists Lose Credibility When They Become Political? (the answer is “NO”, by the way), and ThinkProgress is also concerned about it.
Scientists have historically stayed above the political fray, but now that researchers face regular attacks under the Trump administration, many are planning to fight back.
TP cites the same study to say that it does no harm for scientists to be politically active.
I’m curious, though, where this odd notion that scientists are or should be apolitical comes from, though, because it’s never been true. Never. Not once in the history of science. When scientists have socially relevant information in their field of expertise, they tend to speak out — even when they’re wrong. How do you think eugenics became so popular? It wasn’t because geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor were reluctant to advise the public. How about the battles over the health effects of smoking? Scientists were generally quite clear about how bad it was, except for the minority of paid shills who, again, weren’t shy about advertising their views.
I’d have to say that it’s a nearly universal property of scientists that they are political because they are human. The only time it hurts their credibility is when they use their authority to promote lies.
Way back when I was a grad student, I worked with George Streisinger, the man who put zebrafish on the map. He was also Jewish, born in Hungary, and when he was a child, his family emigrated to the US to escape Nazi persecution. Do you think he was apolitical? He organized to oppose the Vietnam war. He shut down efforts to create a unit for war research on the University of Oregon campus. One time, I was in his office to talk about some routine lab issues, and we somehow got off on a tangent about dose-response curves to toxins and radiation, and we spent an hour talking about testimony he was going to give in a court case for the Downwinders. He was passionate and fierce, and a model for me for how a scientist ought to be.
So when people beat their breasts about whether scientists are too political, I feel like I’m listening to aliens from another culture, another world, one that I have never visited. It’s very strange. I wish George were still alive to instruct them in the folly of their assumptions.
That ThinkProgress also has a remarkable map that shows what happens when scientists aren’t loud enough. This is a map of the proportion of people who have swallowed the lie that scientists are in disagreement about global warming. This is not true, of course: the overwhelming majority of scientists agree with the consensus that global warming is happening, and that it has an anthropogenic cause. So this is simply a Map of Wrong, where all the blue areas represent large numbers of people who hold demonstrably incorrect views about what scientists think.
The proportion of adults who believe that most scientists think that global warming is happening.
That’s stunning. This doesn’t say that scientists should avoid political issues, it’s saying that there are active forces of ignorance lying about the science, and at the same time spreading this destructive idea that a good scientist should be above the fray.
How can you be a good scientist and restrain yourself from pointing out where people are wrong?
I just had a conversation with Adam Ford about the March for Science and miscellaneous other topics, and it has been recorded for posterity.
My greatest accomplishment here is that my lungs were gradually filling with phlegm the whole time, and I managed to avoid doubling over and horking up a lobe for a whole hour. It helped that my ribs are so sore from prior coughing episodes that it’s agony every time I do that.
Also, drugs. Drugs are good.
Today’s exciting game will be played with quotes from Softbank Robotics CEO Masayoshi Son given at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A tech CEO? This will be a target-rich opportunity. You can expect a flurry of ambitious exaggerations from this one!
Players at home, you know what to do: get your buzzers ready, and slap that big red button and be prepared to give a succinct summary of what exactly was wrong with the statement. If you are chosen, you stand a chance to win fabulous prizes.
Are you ready? Brace yourselves, here it comes:
In 30 years, the singularity
Whoa! That was quick! The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with that one. Too easy?
OK, first answer is from Ronald in Ohio, who takes exception to the 30 year claim. No, I’m sorry, Ronald, you do not win a prize. That number is actually correct. As we all know, the singularity is always 30 years away.
Our next caller is Darlene in Seattle, who asks, “What the heck is a singularity?” and — judges, what is your call on that? — the judges say yes! That is a damn good question! Pierces right to the heart of the issues! It’s a quasi-mystical boojum that is invoked in place of the idea of “heaven”, which makes many technocrats uncomfortable because it is too unsciencey.
But poor Son, we didn’t even finish his quote. Here’s the rest:
will happen and artificial intelligence in all the smart devices and robots will exceed human intelligence.
Ouch! Our board lit up so bright that the room lights flickered and dimmed! Let’s take…caller #1274. Vonda in Florida, what’s your criticism?
“Thanks for taking my call, PZ. I’ve been trying to get through for years, and this is my first time on.”
Great, Vonda. And the flaw you spotted is…?
“Well, there’s a couple: one is that he can’t define ‘human intelligence’, and another is that he can’t possibly define it as a single scalar in a range on one axis that you could speak of something exceeding something else.”
Excellent, Vonda! Judges? Yes, the judges agree! Let’s move on with this juicy speech.
Just to give you a hint, Son is about to try to answer Vonda’s question:
Son says that by 2047, a single computer chip will have an IQ of 10,000 — far surpassing the most intelligent people in the world.
Yikes! The responses are pouring in —
Dmitri in Siberia: “…absurd reductionism. You can’t assign intelligence a single number…”
Kim in Korea: “…what kind of IQ test can generate scores that high…”
Jim in Manitoba: “…if you can measure the IQ of a computer, tell me what the IQ of a Dell Windows 10 machine is right now…”
Rudy in New South Wales: “…God won’t let a computer get that smart…”
Andrea in New York: “…IQ tests are designed to test human minds…”
OK! Except for Rudy, you all win!
I’m going to let Son complete his thought. Don’t buzz in on this one, gang, we’re just going to let him finish digging that hole already.
Where the greatest geniuses of the human race have had IQ’s of about 200, Son says, within 30 years, a single computer chip will have an IQ of 10,000. “What should we call it,” he asks. “Superintelligence. That is an intelligence beyond people’s imagination [no matter] how smart they are. But in 30 years I believe this is going to become a reality.”
I know. It’s embarrassing. The man is a CEO and he doesn’t understand what IQ is, and thinks that sticking a “super” prefix on something makes it clever or informative. Maybe he’s just hoping that if he lives another 30 years, he might learn something.
Let’s go on. This one is for scoring:
Son built this prediction by comparing the number of neurons in a brain to the number of transistors.
Uh-oh. The Big Board is on fire. Literally on fire. Hold those calls!
He builds the comparison by pointing out that both systems are binary, and work by turning on and off.
Oh, christ, we’ve got a thousand enraged neuroscientists trying to get through. Watch out! Those cables are shorting out! Get the studio audience out of here!
According to his predictions, the number of transistors in a computer chip will surpass the number of neurons in a human brain by 2018. He is using 30 billion as the number of neurons, which is lower than the 86 billion that is estimated right now, but Son says he isn’t worried about being exactly right on that number.
Oh god. He actually said he isn’t worried about being exactly right on the number? With this audience? Cut the power. Cut the power! Call emergency services!
Wait, what’s that loud rumbling sound I’m hearing from the bowels of the building? The generators? GET OU…
