This year’s physics Nobel goes to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi for “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warmings” and “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales” and for giving us something more to talk about in our Saturday podcast.

And yet, there are still people — Republicans, mainly, who I will grudgingly admit are still “people” — who deny the science.

Let’s be fair, though. There are also a lot of Democrats who are dragging their heels and refusing to do anything but the bare minimum they can get away with.

The Nobel in medicine this year goes to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their work in identifying the receptors that transduce heat and touch into signals in the nervous system.

So now you know the proximal sensors that are activated when you hug someone, or when you nibble on some ghost pepper. It’s TRPV and PIEZO channels!

Now they just have to figure out what’s going on in the central nervous system when those channels are triggered.

I knew it. For years I’ve seen the “dinosauroid” trotted out as an illustration of how dinosaurs could have evolved, if only that little space rock hadn’t messed up their progression. To me, it was symptomatic of a deplorable strain of teleological thinking in biology, and I thought it was totally bogus from the first glance.

Why would anyone think a coelurosaur would gradually converge on an anthropoid form? So much of our morphology is a consequence of variations in our ancestors — ancestors that would not have been shared with dinosaurs. Yet here is this imaginary beast with ape-like details. How would it have acquired those?

Darren Naish has tracked down the history of this bizarre mannequin, and I am totally not surprised: we can blame Teilhard de Chardin, who had a pernicious influence on Dale Russell, the scientist who built it.

I’m confident that another factor contributed to the construction of the dinosauroid, but it’s something more controversial than everything discussed so far and is also harder to establish with any degree of certainty. I think that Dale Russell’s specific personal views on the nature of the universe and the position of humans within it played a role in everything that happened.

We know from the recollections of his colleagues that Dale Russell was religious, with an active spiritual life committed to Catholicism. We also know from statements made by Robert Bakker and others who discussed religion with him that Russell was fond of the ideas of Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin (Campagna 2001, p. 7, Noble 2016, p. 41). Chardin (1959) argued for a directionality in evolution, that humans represent a point close to (but not at) the pinnacle of evolution, and that a humanoid stage was inevitable for those organisms approaching evolution’s final stage. Add to this the fact that Russell stated in correspondence his idea that “the human form might be a natural target for selective pressures” (as Russell wrote to anthropologist Noel Boaz in August 1984), and his implication – made several times in interview – that humans (and, by extension, other humanoids) are not simply additional animals (Russell 1987, p. 130, Psihoyos & Knoebber 1994, p. 252). We’re talking here about what’s been called the ‘inevitable humanoid proposition’, a concept often linked both to religiosity and to an anthropocentric view of the universe.

My personal opinion is that the dinosauroid was not, then, the honest experiment in speculative evolution that some authors have implied (e.g., Losos 2017; reviewed here at TetZoo). Instead, Russell had already decided that he wanted to showcase the possibility that human-shaped non-humans were ‘inevitable’, and that they might have a special place in the design of the universe.

Do not, under any circumstances, ever try to read Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man. I did, and it was the closest real-world experience to the horror movie trope of reading the Necronomicon aloud in a cabin in the woods. It contains damnable prose and arcane leaps of logic that defy rational thought. It is infuriatingly stupid.

You’re all going to try and read it now, aren’t you?

Before you throw yourself into that pit of madness, at least read Peter Medawar’s review. Be forewarned. Make sure you have a chainsaw and a shotgun near at hand.

What’s weird, though, is how so many discussions of this idea are gentle, almost apologetic in addressing Teilhard de Chardin’s and Dale Russell’s strange religious bias. Don’t take this stuff seriously — it’s Time Cube level of wrong, pure garbage in defiance of the scientific consensus with no evidence to support their interpretation. Worse, that delicacy in treating the teleological imperative has had some embarrassing influence — Carl Sagan’s worst book, The Dragons of Eden, was rife with it.

Also infected with the Teilhard de Chardin disease: Simon Conway Morris. The tentacles of that mad Frenchman extend everywhere, bringing insanity to all who view them.

Behold, my nascent spider army:

Don’t worry, I do have a bigger incubator, a refrigerator-sized box upstairs where we usually rear our flies. We can keep their predators in the same box, right? It’ll keep the flies in line.

They’re old. The reason that they’re not as craggy and tall as the Rockies or the Himalayas or even the Cascades is because they’ve been eroding for 480 million years. Follow this Twitter thread for an entertaining geology lesson.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains?
The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. 🧵

— Alex (he/him) is fighting for trans kids ⚧🏳️‍⚧️ (@AlexPetrovnia) July 15, 2021

If only the rest of Twitter could be that informative!

While all the headlines have been about the ego-trips of a trio of billionaires, it seems I failed to notice the substantive plans of an international coalition of space agencies. They have some ambitious goals for the coming decade.

Among the different initiatives:

• The first launch of the SLS is slated for this year, with a human landing on the moon earmarked for 2024. NASA has christened this new wave of lunar exploration its Artemis program.
• Russia and China have recently announced a similar collaborative effort. They plan to build the International Lunar Research Station somewhere on the moon. The hope is to have human visitors by the mid-2030s.
• The European Space Agency (ESA) has started Project Moonlight, an effort to build a constellation of satellites around the moon for navigation and communications.

Some observers have spoken of a “second space race” pitting the United States against China and Russia.

“I think that’s alarmist rhetoric; it has a lot of baggage,” says Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “The previous space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was an outright competition about being first. Now, it’s … about who’s going to have the best coalition of countries.”

The Artemis program seeks to lay down guiding principles for the civil exploration and use of space, starting with the moon but extending to Mars, asteroids, and comets. To date, 12 countries have embraced the Artemis Accords.

Russia and China, meanwhile, are inviting international partners to join them in their moon-base project.

Let the rich boys play with their toys — or rather, don’t, tax the space dilettantes and make them stop their stupid efforts at putting their stupid dicks into brief spurts of parabolic flight. This is the real deal: taking the effort to build scientific infrastructure in space, which could be a useful foundation for more science. Cooperative efforts by multiple nations to do science? Yes, please. I could support that. I think in the long run Space Socialism will be better and more productive than the current Space Capitalism. I will also be impressed if humans return to the Moon in — checks calendar — just two years? For real? Make it so.

Unfortunately, I do have some reservations, ala Gil Scott-Heron.

I have to temper that concern with the statement that all of science is a kind of luxury, an investment in long-term thinking, and you can always make a legitimate argument that we have more pressing problems to spend our money on. However, I also believe that it’s a worthy goal if it is done equitably, if all people have the opportunity to participate, and if the benefits are spread far and wide, rather than being a big funnel to drain more money into the pockets of the already wealthy, or an excuse for billionaires to mug for the camera.