You can ask my wife what it’s like being married to a biologist, and she’ll tell you.
There is zero roadkill in our house. I like my captured organisms alive and breeding.
I was interviewed by Michael Beverly last week. It’s a two-parter, and I appear only at the end of this first video, which is mainly Dan Stern Cardinale and Jay Bundy talking about the problem of creationism. It’s good. You can bail out when they introduce me, because they were much too generous in their praise and I was cringing the whole time.
I contribute more in the second half…wait, that’s worse. Why am I recommending these videos in the first place? My appearance isn’t a good addition.
At least Michael Beverly is a good interviewer, and it’s always worthwhile to listen to Jay and Dan.
UMM is hosting the SCOPES conference (Small Campus Observatories as Promoters of Education in Science) today through Saturday, so 43 astronomers are going to be roaming the campus and talking about telescopes and education.
There is a public lecture tonight, too. Check out the program!
It’s that time of year when we start spending more time outdoors, and when the mosquitos are on the prowl for your blood. Colin Purrington bought these simple devices that are non-toxic but promise to kill mosquitos around your yard — not that I’m at all interested, I like having spider food living around my home — but I can understand not wanting biting, flying insects disturbing your parties. It also seems ecologically safe, since all it is is a tube containing a yeast solution (to produce CO2, a mosquito attractant) and boric acid, to kill insects that drink from it.
Only problem is that they don’t work. They produce very little CO2, mosquitos don’t take the bait, and if they crawl inside the tube, they don’t drink, they just fly out again. And it’ll cost you $50 for a box of 4 tubes! They really shouldn’t have let these devices fall into the hands of a scientist who can think quantitatively and who can devise easy tests of their efficacy.
Oh, another little problem with Spartan Pro: if you write a negative review of their product, they will sue you. It’s a stupid SLAPP suit that was eventually defeated, at a cost of $90,000 to Purrington. No, he didn’t get his legal costs back.
SLAPP suits are evil, and anyone or any compony that deploys them is evil, too.
I’m amazed at all the people leaving comments on Purrington’s site to claim that they actually do work. I don’t know whether they’re gullible, or Spartan Mosquito is paying puppets to leave phony testimonials, or my most charitable interpretation, they’re seeing the effects of general insect decline and attributing it to the magic cylinder they hung from a tree. I’m seeing fewer insects year by year in my area, so this might be a good time to be selling ineffective insect traps and letting your reputation thrive on ecological decline.
I’ve posted a new video, but I’m making it complicated to see.
OK, I’ve put it on my Patreon account. If you’re a sponsor, you can watch it there right now, ad-free. I’m going to be doing that from now on, I think. Join and you get it before everyone else!
It’s going to go live on YouTube at 6pm Central time today, so if you’re patient, you can get it for free there. YouTube will stick a few ads in it, I’m sorry to say.
Or if you don’t want to wade through this video nonsense, I’ll post a transcript right here at 6pm, so you can just read the damned thing. That’s especially good if you don’t think my amateurish video abilities are worth a half hour of your time
The video is a dissection of Bret Weinstein’s conversation with Joe Rogan about Tucker Carlson’s idiotic denial of evolutionary biology, so it’s not as if this is essential stuff. I try to explain why Weinstein’s vague handwaving about mysterious “layers” of genetic information that no one knows about except him. Here’s some news: we do. We don’t know everything about information in the genome, but we know enough to be aware that it isn’t magic.
Anyway, check back in about 6 hours for my explanation.
I saw the rising tide of belligerent white nationalism coming, and knew I had to revise how I teach genetics. I’ve seen the kids who come out of public schools thinking that every feature is the product of simple Mendelian genetics, I’ve witnessed a president who declares that he’s got “good genes”, meaning white and German ancestry, I’ve read Quillette. There’s so much misinformation and bad science out there driving hateful ideologies, and my genetics teaching has been slowly adapting to combat it. I guess I’m going to have to accelerate my instruction, now that Nature has told me I must: Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand.
I agree.
One of the things that made last semester rough is that I revised a big chunk of the class. I decided I had to abort a unit on developmental genetics — which hurt, I love developmental genetics, and it’s important — and we instead spent several weeks on ethical genetics. Throughout the term I brought up examples of the misappropriation of genetical ideas to prop up ugly ideologies, but then, damn it, we elected a know-nothing racist bigot to the presidency, and he immediately started flooding scientific agencies with bullshit.
At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.
Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology.
Meanwhile, although Trump stated at his inaugural address that his administration “will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based”, an executive order he signed in March condemns as “corrosive ideology” the Smithsonian Institution’s promotion in its museums and research centres of the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct.
Yeah, I’ve got to start playing hardball here, and get explicit about rebutting specific racist ideas. I’ve been general about coaching students in ethical behavior and allowing them to bring up problematic topics, but I think next year I’m going to incorporate a few case studies of bad genetics, I’m not sure what I can pare out to make time, but there are definitely things I must expand.
Education is key to inoculating future generations against unscientific ideas and correcting currently held beliefs. Research into education at secondary-school and university levels has shown that particular teaching approaches, including those that focus on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry, can help to guard against scientific racism and genetic essentialism.
These conversations must extend to researchers’ engagement with the public to both educate and advocate for science more broadly. Grass-roots efforts could help, such as Science Homecoming, an effort to encourage scientists to write opinion pieces in their local newspapers.
Yes! More about multifactorial inheritance! I think that will come at the expense of cutting back on Mendel. His ideas are fundamental, but I can cover them more succinctly. This stuff matters more than a limited set of experiments on pea plants, which were great in the 1860s, but are perhaps misleadingly simplified.
It’s also an important part of this goal:
Those in leadership positions must protect marginalized faculty members, staff and trainees, who will continue to be targeted in the coming years. Although many funding programmes focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) are no longer available, the ideals of DEIA — which are core to scientific progress — must be upheld.
Will do! Fortunately, I’m at a good progressive liberal university, and the students will be receptive to it all. The people who oppose DEIA are the freaky weird fringe.
It’s been a heavy grading day, but at least I can say I’ve got one of my three classes done, and it was the largest one. Can I get the other two done tomorrow? Before I go to the local humane society fundraiser in the evening? Yes, I will. It shall be done.
The NIH is headquartered on this sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s home to the largest clinical research hospital in the world, and 27 research institutes and centers.
The “leaked” budget draft includes a plan to consolidate those 27 institutes and centers into eight and eliminate four, including the Institutes on Nursing Research and Minority Health.
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But Collins says the bulk of that budget, more than 80%, goes to researchers off campus.Dr. Francis Collins: Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.
Some of those researchers’ work lines America’s medicine cabinets, such as statins, antidepressants, and new forms of insulin.
A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.
Dr. Francis Collins: Every dollar that NIH gave out in 2024 to a grant is estimated to have returned $2.46 just in a year. That’s a pretty darn good return on investment.
I was careful to use the past tense up there, because right now it’s being rapidly dismembered, dismantled, and disemboweled, in a savage act of intentional vandalism. This is like Egypt blowing up the pyramids, or Italy bulldozing the Vatican, or France deciding the Louvre would be a great storage facility for outflow from a sewage treatment plant. If America were to be remembered by history for one great accomplishment, it would be the scientific productivity established here, and an institution modeled by other countries around the world. And it’s being willfully destroyed by a gang of incompetent know-nothings.
NIH insider: I’ve never seen the morale of an institution or any place change so abruptly to where we feel fear.
It began, he says, in February, when more than a thousand probationary employees were placed on leave.
Sharyn Alfonsi: When that happened, that first hit, what was the reaction, like immediately and in the office the next Monday?
NIH insider: Tears. Everybody trying to assess damage, who’s been fired, who hasn’t been fired, what do we do? And then an immediate sort of assessment– in the clinical center: “Okay, can we still take care of patients and our research participants? Is it still safe?”
Sharyn Alfonsi: No one thought before they fired the people that dealt with the patients that maybe they shouldn’t be fired?
NIH insider: This didn’t come from within NIH, it came from outside, they don’t know what these people do.
As DOGE dismantled parts of the agency, employees told us work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.
Imagine the burning of the library of Alexandria — we will look back on this moment as something entirely equivalent. This is not something you can rebuild in a few years with a supportive congress and a bunch of money. Those people are leaving. They’re emigrating or looking for career alternatives. They’re knee-capping universities.
NIH insider: This doesn’t feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when a company has layoffs they talk about restructuring. There’ll be a new structure and this is how it’s gonna work. Is there a structure in place right now for the NIH?
NIH insider: Not that anybody’s shared. We have no idea. You know making the organization better, everybody is for that . There is no question. But again– this is not more efficient. It is infinitely less efficient right now because you can’t get anything done.
The confusion in Bethesda has also paralyzed many of the 2,500 universities and institutes that rely on the NIH to help fund their research.
So far, nearly 800 grants have been terminated- some on HIV and AIDS, trans health and COVID-19 after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority.
And last week, the NIH signaled that more cuts could be coming. It announced that any university with a DEI program or that boycotts an Israeli company might not be awarded new NIH grants for medical research and that existing grants could be terminated.
It’s catastrophic. And what’s amazing is that we can pin it directly on one man, Donald Trump, who has put vandals and morons in charge of what should be America’s pride. In particular, he’s put Rat FucKer jr in charge of HHS, which oversees the NIH. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and what he thinks he knows is all wrong.
If you need a little humor (I don’t, I think it’s time to seriously charge forward and battle these assholes) to stomach the bad news, here’s John Oliver. The best bit in this segment where RatFucker jr just confidently and stupidly makes up figures, claiming, for instance, that 50% of the people in China are diabetic. Nothing the RatFucker says can be trusted — he’s a liar, a con man, and a snake oil salesman.
The conclusion is also good.
Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.
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RFK needs to go and by impeachment if necessary.
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This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.
Yeah. But by impeachment? Congress approved RFK jr’s appointment, despite knowing everything that Oliver pointed out, so who believes we can trust them to act responsibly now?
Good question.
Does your cat’s butthole really touch all the surfaces in your home?
I’m impressed. It’s an original idea, executed simply, and that’s what I like to see in a science fair question. It’s simple but a little bit icky: he put lipstick on a cat’s butthole and had it sit down on various substrates and asked if it left a mark. I hate to call it “elegant,” but yeah, that’s elegant.
I know you all want to know the answer:
His results and general findings: Long and medium haired cat’s buttholes made NO contact with soft or hard surfaces at all. Short haired cats made NO contact on hard surfaces. But we did see evidence of a slight smear on the soft bedding surface. Conclusion, if you have a short haired cat and they may be lying on a pile of laundry, an unmade bed, or other soft uneven surface, then their butthole MAY touch those surfaces!
Our evil cat is a shorthair, wouldn’t you know it.
I don’t care, because most people’s understanding of IQ is ill-founded and wrong.
All the belligerent guys online who insist they have a high IQ? I suspect many of them haven’t actually taken an IQ test at all.
Not a proper one, anyway. Official IQ tests, whatever their limitations, are highly-refined scientific tools. They take a lot of time, and cost a fair amount of money.
Basically, I would be beyond amazed if actual IQ tests, and all they involve, have become so widely accessible that @BigNutzz32998762 on Twitter/X and his countless peers who brag about their 178 IQ have been genuinely, properly assessed.
Also, given how IQ actually works, if countless random people were scoring ridiculously high on real IQ tests, wouldn’t they have to recalibrate the underlying assumptions, to keep the average as 100?
Point is, if so many people were scoring extremely high on official IQ tests, their scores would be reduced, to conform to the bell-curve. Because it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be ‘above average’.
I haven’t taken a full, proper IQ test myself — I’ve had my IQ extrapolated from my scores on long, complex standardized tests, like the SAT and GRE. I’m not going to say what it was, because I know the limitations and fallacies of these kinds of tests, and because it was forty or fifty years ago, and my brain has been constantly changing.
The one thing I know is that people who brag about their IQ are never very intelligent.
You know what else is silly? People who declare that the conformation of your chromosomes determines your identity, your behavior, and your role in society. I know for a fact that almost no one has had their karyotype done — the exceptions are cases where there is evidence of a serious heritable anomaly — so the knowledge about chromosomes is practically negligible among the general public.
Even worse: people who have opinions on the contributions of genetics on IQ.
Forget IQ. As we all know, the proper way to score intelligence is by birthdate.
I can verify this by personal experience. I was born on 9 March, my wife was born on 10 September.
