It’s dead over there. There are a few people maintaining the grounds and the building, but it’s sad how quiet the science building is.
The spiders are loving it, though!
It’s a spider abdomen, but not the whole spider, so I hope it’s OK. I just love the muted but intricate pattern — spiders have a lot of style, you know.
Anyway, I threw another volley of spider photos on Patreon and Instagram and iNaturalist, if you want more context.
SpaceX had a planned manned space flight the other day, postponed now until tomorrow, so is it too soon to complain about the whole project? Here’s an article, The Case Against Mars, which asks a really simple question: WHY?
Why are billionaires like Musk and Bezos and Branson eager to take on the complex and expensive task of launching rockets into orbit and eventually to Mars? Why is Mars even a reasonable destination for human colonization? So the author of this article, Byron Williston, does the obvious thing: he looks at SpaceX’s own justifications, which turn out to be astonishingly vapid. Anyone should be able to see right through this crap.
To get a sense of the first attempted justification, by far the most ubiquitous of the three, return to that SpaceX promo-video. Narrated by Musk himself, the “case” for Mars it lays out has been invoked by space expansionists since humans began fantasizing about occupying other celestial bodies—asteroids, moons, and planets—and building rockets powerful enough to take us to them. The simple idea is that expansion is the next step in evolution and that we ought to push it forward. Life has evolved from single-celled organisms, has migrated from the oceans onto land, has exploded into myriad forms of multi-celled organisms, and has somehow produced consciousness. The next step, Musk says, is surely to make life “multiplanetary.”
With characteristic inarticulacy he summarizes the argument this way: “if something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it’s important.” It’s not obvious whether that’s a tautology or a non sequitur, but in either case it is breathtakingly facile. You get the impression that the appeal to evolution is semi-intellectual cover for Musk’s sense of wonder at his own chutzpah. This feeling that they are doing something so big that it defies all attempts at rational comprehension shows up frequently among technology’s high priests.
That’s not how evolution works! Elon Musk doesn’t get to dictate the necessary direction of future human evolution. This is just weird biased progressivism imposed on the pattern of diversity. There isn’t some kind of internal biological need to adapt to live in uninhabitable environments. Can we just openly admit that Mars is not a place where human beings can live, no matter how many potatoes you think you can grow in poop? Manned missions to Mars are suicide missions, something that isn’t going to be favored by evolution.
That’s one justification that is totally bogus. Surely they’ve got better ones?
That brings us, finally, to the other two attempted justifications for space expansion: that the program will safeguard the long-term future of our species and that it will enhance human freedom. The first idea arises from the observation that given the inevitable heat death of the sun a billion or so years from now, our career on this planet is ultimately doomed, so we’d better figure out a way of transporting ourselves out of the solar system as soon as possible. The idea seems to be that discovering the planet’s finitude has somehow massively accelerated the imperative to leave it. In a remark quoted by many space expansionists pushing this line of thought, Tsiolkovsky once said that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.”
This is a stunningly silly argument. It’s a bit like learning you will have to leave the family nest several years down the road, then deciding you had better start packing right away. As Deudney notes, we have a few hundred million years to prepare for the Sun’s death, making that event completely irrelevant to our policy choices in the coming decades and centuries. Perhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two. Just a suggestion.
If you are seriously concerned about the viability of the human species, why are you rushing to ship a handful of people off to their death on an inhospitable rock rather than developing technologies that maintain the health of planet Earth? If you care about “human freedom”, how does moving a subset of humanity into a confined, fragile habitat that requires tight restrictions on the inhabitants’ behavior help that? None of this makes any sense.
It makes sense to send probes to explore other planets — we learn things. It makes sense to put satellites into orbit — we learn things about our planet, and it enables all kinds of useful communications technologies. It does not make sense to launch people off to Mars. It’s rather shocking that SpaceX has no legitimate defense of Musk’s grand goal. But then, what else could we expect from goofball who also can’t defend his idea of boring lots of tunnels under cities?
Oh, happy news: the American Arachnology Society meetings were cancelled this summer, but they’re going ahead with the 2020 AAS Virtual Summer Symposium on 25-29 June. I can gladly do that! I’m an expert at sitting on my butt in my office staring at a screen!
It’s free if you happen to be a member of the AAS. Non-members can attend for the cost of a $10 donation to the American Arachnological Society.
The other daaaay, we’d gone walking around the Pomme de Terre river, and just off the bike trail there is an old gazebo. It’s weathered, lichen-covered, and a bit creaky, but it’s also covered with spectacular orb webs, so we were curious to find out who was living there.
We poked around, and a couple of spiders scurried out, but I was baffled…the ones we caught didn’t look like orb weavers, they seemed to be Theridion, or social cobweb spiders. I guess they’re just lurking, taking advantage of any small prey caught in another spider’s web. The actual weavers of those webs couldn’t be found anywhere. I suspect the reason for that is that smack in the middle of the gazebo is a swallow’s nest, so any reasonably large spider is going to hide during the day an only emerge at night.
We’re tempted to revisit at night, except that another feature of the gazebo is all the hearts and INITIALS+INITIALS carved into the wood. We might interrupt more mammalian activity.
Three boys in Bolivia found a black widow spider.
“Thinking it would give them superhero powers, they prodded it with a stick until it bit each of them in turn,” the official, Virgilio Pietro, said.
The boy’s mom found them crying, so she rushed the siblings to a nearby health center, which transferred them to a nearby hospital, Telemundo said.
They’re fine now. They did not turn into spider-boys.
Note that they had to torture the spider to get it to bite them in the first place. Don’t do that. Don’t blame the spider. The spider knows that with great venom comes great responsibility, and that boys taste yucky.
They really need to get out more, dissect a frog brain or something, if they’re still clinging to that triune brain nonsense. According to Salon, some psychologists still think that’s valid. The author summarizes an article that…
…addresses (and debunks) one of the most commonly-used metaphors in evolutionary psychology, the idea that the human brain evolved from lower life forms and hence has evolutionary remnants from those animals — akin to an onion with layers.
If you’ve ever heard someone speak of you possessing a “lizard brain” or “fish brain” that operates on some subconscious, primal level, you’ve heard this metaphor in action. This is called the triune-brain theory; as the authors write, the basic crux of it is that “as new vertebrate species arose, evolutionarily newer complex brain structures were laid on top of evolutionarily older simpler structures; that is, that an older core dealing with emotions and instinctive behaviors (the ‘reptilian brain’ consisting of the basal ganglia and limbic system) lies within a newer brain capable of language, action planning, and so on.”
Whoa. That’s silly. Of course, I have an edge: my early career in graduate school was spent studying the neuroanatomy and physiology of fish, and yes, they have a hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain — all the pieces are there, they develop to different degrees in different lineages, and there aren’t linear ‘steps’ in evolution where, all of a sudden, there are jumps to whole new brain architectures appearing. Even before that, as an undergraduate taking neuroscience from Johnny Palka, I recall how insistent he was that we had to regard the brain of Drosophila as both existing and capable of sophisticated processing. (It’s true, some people think insects don’t have brains. They’re wrong.)
I wonder if this is another consequence of the belief in Haeckel’s erroneous ideas. I’ve skimmed through Dr Spock’s Baby Book, and was surprised to see how much rekapitulationstheorie saturates that book. The creationists love to claim that introductory biology texts teach it as fact, when my experience is that they explain how it’s wrong; they should look into the child psychology texts if they want better examples of a bad idea being promoted today.
So I had to look into the paper described in the Salon article. It’s titled “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside”, which is excellent. It gets right down to addressing the misconception from the very first words. The abstract is also succinct and clear.
A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.
Then Cesario, Johnson, and Eisthen name names. They show that this misbegotten misconception is a real issue by going through the literature and introductory textbooks.
Within psychology, a broad understanding of the mind contrasts emotional, animalistic drives located in older anatomical structures with rational, more complex psychological processes located in newer anatomical structures. The most widely used introductory textbook in psychology states that
in primitive animals, such as sharks, a not-so-complex brain primarily regulates basic survival functions. . . . In lower mammals, such as rodents, a more complex brain enables emotion and greater memory. . . . In advanced mammals, such as humans, a brain that processes more information enables increased foresight as well. . . . The brain’s increasing complexity arises from new brain systems built on top of the old, much as the Earth’s landscape covers the old with the new. Digging down, one discovers the fossil remnants of the past. (Myers & Dewall, 2018, p. 68) [no relation –pzm]
To investigate the scope of the problem, we sampled 20 introductory psychology textbooks published between 2009 and 2017. Of the 14 that mention brain evolution, 86% contained at least one inaccuracy along the lines described above. Said differently, only 2 of the field’s current introductory textbooks describe brain evolution in a way that represents the consensus shared among comparative neurobiologists. (See https://osf.io/r6jw4/ for details.)
Not to blame only psychologists, they also point out that Carl Sagan popularized the idea further in The Dragons of Eden. I hate to puncture the warm happy glow Sagan’s name brings to many of us, me included, but that was a bad book. Don’t ask an astronomer to explain brain evolution and consciousness, ever. I’m looking at you, Neil.
The authors illustrate the misconception well. It’s a combination of errors: the idea that evolution is linear rather than branching, that humans are the pinnacle of a long process of perfecting the brain, and that we possess unique cerebral substrates to produce human capabilities. It isn’t, we aren’t, we don’t.
Incorrect views (a, b) and correct views (c, d) of human evolution. Incorrect views are based on the belief that earlier species lacked outer, more recent brain structures. Just as species did not evolve linearly (a), neither did neural structures (b). Although psychologists understand that the view shown in (a) is incorrect, the corresponding neural view (b) is still widely endorsed. The evolutionary tree (c) illustrates the correct view that animals do not linearly increase in complexity but evolve from common ancestors. The corresponding view of brain evolution (d) illustrates that all vertebrates possess the same basic brain regions, here divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Coloring is arbitrary but illustrates that the same brain regions evolve in form; large divisions have not been added over the course of vertebrate evolution.
I’m kind of disappointed that this obvious flawed thinking has to be pointed out, but I’m glad someone is explaining it clearly to psychologists. Can we get this garbage removed from the textbooks soon? Or at least relegated to a historical note in a sidebar, where the error is explained?
It doesn’t look like much at the beginning, but this dam failure in Michigan led to thousands of people being evacuated, destruction of bridges and homes downstream, and some houses were flooded to a depth of 9 feet. All it took was a little rain. OK, a lot of rain.
Here’s an analysis of the failure. There was something more going on.
This video is going to be a classic in the teaching of geotechnical failures, but it also clarifies the events that led to the Edenville Dam failure. It would have been simple to ascribe this to a simple overtopping event that occurred when the capacity of the spillway was exceeded. But in reality the events are are more worrying than that – the dam appears to have undergone a slope failure; a failure of its integrity. This should never occur, and to me it suggests that the problems at the Edenville Dam went further than known issues with the spillway.
So not just rain, but also negligence by whoever had responsibility for the dam. It turns out that this dam was privately owned, by absentee landlords with a criminal history who neglected it, refused to do necessary repairs and expansion, and had their federal license to run the dam revoked for their greedy refusal to do what was needed. I guess it is unsurprising that Lee Mueller is a Randian Trumpkin who lives in Las Vegas.
America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t helped by the parasites and rentiers who’ve taken it over.
Deep breaths. It’s another day in America. Take a moment to imagine being somewhere else, like the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Suggestion: the narration is annoying — we don’t need to be told the views are stunning. Just watch with the sound off.
