Mutual harm at Middlebury

Tristero strikes exactly the right note in this letter to the professor who was injured in the protests against Charles Murray at Middlebury. There is no excusing the harm done to Professor Stanger, but there is also no excusing the harm done by Murray.

I have, in fact, read The Bell Curve, the book Charles Murray co-authored with Richard Herrnstein (who died before publication).As I recall, the book appeared to me to be little more than a spectacularly pathetic attempt to boost the low self-esteem of the authors by claiming that blacks in general had inherently lower IQs than their own ethnic groups. My heart went out to Murray and I hoped he would find a good therapist that would instill some some self-confidence in him.

But even more so, my heart went out to the people who would be surely harmed by his terrible book. I knew that The Bell Curve would be mistaken as being super-serious intellectual research (it’s got charts and things!) when it was nothing of the sort.

Here’s where you come in.

Murray is a hero to racists with pretensions to intellectuality, like college-age right-wingers. But having regular access to the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed pages (I’ve also read many of Murray’s op-eds and they’re as unserious as The Bell Curve) makes it difficult for Murray to complain that someone’s trying to suppress his freedom of speech. For that, he needs useful idiots who are prepared to invite him not to fawning right wing think tanks or Klan meetings, but to places where the people who his writings actually harm can confront him.

Make no mistake about it: the racism that Murray empowers is as inexcusable and irresponsible as the injuries you suffered. I’m extremely sorry that you were hurt, but I’m also extremely sorry that Murray was provided an excuse to claim the high road. Both are utterly disgraceful outcomes of this unfortunate set of circumstances.

I too read The Bell Curve way back when it first came out, although, thankfully, the details of that pile of shit have faded from my memory, leaving only the recollection of a sensation of disgust. Murray relies on baffling his audiences with the arcana of statistical analysis which neither he nor most of his readers understand, but which earns him the love and appreciation of racists who don’t really care how he gets to his conclusions, as long as those conclusions support their prejudices.

I’m only competent enough in those arcana to see the flaws in his arguments, but not to explain them well. For that, I recommend the invaluable Cosma Shalizi, who made the case against g:

To summarize what follows below (“shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

And also argued against misinterpretations of heritability:

To summarize: Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions. If, despite this, one does want to find out the heritability of IQ for some human population, the fact that the simplifying assumptions I mentioned are clearly false in this case means that existing estimates are unreliable, and probably too high, maybe much too high.

Once you knock those two props out from under Murray’s claims, he flops down into a disreputable heap.

But he keeps getting invited to speak at universities. I don’t know why. Stanger claims that the protest was a result of people not reading Murray’s book, but I think the real problem is people who read Murray’s book and don’t understand what a pile of garbage it is.

Australia reassures me that it isn’t just my country full of idiots

Senator Malcolm Roberts must be Australia’s version of Louie Gohmert.

He does make a good case that he is a waste of carbon, but you know, atmospheric CO2 is the problem, not carbon bound up in proteins and carbohydrates.

The Bible also says the Earth is flat and is orbited by the sun. Next?

I am so sad that Ken Ham blocked me on Twitter — I miss out on the most hilarious crapola from one of the more cracked brains on the internet, and must rely on the kindness of strangers to relay his tirades to me. The latest thing to pop his wig: The Pope. How dare the Catholic church dismiss his literalist interpretation of the Bible? NOT TRUE CHRISTIANS. SAD.

Of course, this is not news. Historically, American protestants have been hatefully anti-Catholic, in part prodded by the nativist bigotry that was stirred up by immigration from Ireland and those Mediterranean countries. It’s not surprising that an Australian protestant shares the same views.

However, I do appreciate that Ken Ham admits this:



If Pope said ‘Big Bang is real’–then Pope’s wrong. Bible states earth came before sun–not other way round

Remember that next time you get in an argument with a literalist. I don’t care much for either popery or the lutherite heresy, but at least one side isn’t demanding that we ignore physics and astronomy.

(h/t Caine)

Here come the apologists for Steve King

Kathleen Parker tries hard to reframe King’s remarks as an expression of reasonable concern.

King’s comment came in the form of a tweet, apparently in support of Geert Wilders, the Dutch nationalist politician hoping to become prime minister of the Netherlands following Wednesday’s election.

Both Wilders — who once called Moroccans “scum” — and King do seem cut from the same cloth. Both men are apparently concerned that immigrant encroachment is posing a danger to civilization as we know it, especially among certain recurring arrivals, including: (1) Muslims, whose faith is sometimes used by certain fanatics to justify murdering the rest of us; (2) people from a variety of nations who, importantly, do not have white skin, or, inferentially, Western values coursing through their veins.

To the Kings and Wilderses (and Trumps?), the problems are obvious and undeniable. Even to the less knee-jerk, the fast-changing demographic landscape has created at least some level of discomfort and uncertainty. Suddenly, the majority has to ponder the imponderable: Who, me, a minority?

She goes on to explain that he’s stupid and careless, but gosh, he’s not an extremist. He is literally and explicitly reciting far-right racist RaHoWa rhetoric, but he’s just being rude — we have to remember that the real problem is that our white majority is currently experiencing discomfort and uncertainty. Steve King’s were repugnantly stated, but what we need is someone who can express those sentiments more craftily.

What is needed are new voices to articulate these fundamental concerns, recognize them with respect and work toward solutions that don’t require that our neighbors be marginalized. This would seem especially compelling to those now considering what it might be like to become a minority in their “own” country.

Oh, fuck that noise.

In a few years, people of European descent will no longer be a majority in this country. That should mean nothing — demographic shifts like that happen all the time, and they don’t necessarily disrupt the political continuity of a country. The USA does not have the same demographic makeup that it did at its founding; there was a dearth of Italians and Swedes and Irish signing the Declaration of Independence, you know, and even worse, no black Americans were asked to join the revolutionary committee.

What’s making some white people uncomfortable is that they’re used to shitting on minorities, and they’re thinking that minority status equals being treated like dirt, from their own example. And they, and columnists like Parker, are trying to normalize that feeling as being perfectly normal. It isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

You don’t need someone capable of gently and wittily articulating your racist backbrain as something justifiable. You need to grow the fuck up and recognize brown and black Americans as your brothers and sisters, and slap down these racist assholes who can’t recognize this true, instead of making excuses for them.

No debate freebies!

I just had to mention to someone who is trying to arrange a Darwin Day debate for 2019 (I am favorably impressed that they’re planning way ahead), that I actually have specific requirements for creationist debates nowadays. Usually that scares them away, but we’ll see this time.

Much of that is negotiable, depending on who’s doing the asking. I was just getting a little tired of being the talking monkey dragged into church to face a hostile audience of bussed-in parishioners who were always unsatisfied when my opponent failed to draw blood.

Born 150 million years too late

I’m reading a few papers on cephalopod evolution, and one helped me pinpoint my happy time.

Coleoid cephalopod molluscs comprise squid, cuttlefish and octopuses, and represent nearly the entire diversity of modern cephalopods. Sophisticated adaptations such as the use of colour for camouflage and communication, jet propulsion and the ink sac highlight the unique nature of the group. Despite these striking adaptations, there are clear parallels in ecology between coleoids and bony fishes. The coleoid fossil record is limited, however, hindering confident analysis of the tempo and pattern of their evolution. Here we use a molecular dataset (180 genes, approx. 36 000 amino acids) of 26 cephalopod species to explore the phylogeny and timing of cephalopod evolution. We show that crown cephalopods diverged in the Silurian–Devonian, while crown coleoids had origins in the latest Palaeozoic. While the deep-sea vampire squid and dumbo octopuses have ancient origins extending to the Early Mesozoic Era, 242 ± 38 Ma, incirrate octopuses and the decabrachian coleoids (10-armed squid) diversified in the Jurassic Period. These divergence estimates highlight the modern diversity of coleoid cephalopods emerging in the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, a period that also witnessed the radiation of most ray-finned fish groups in addition to several other marine vertebrates. This suggests that that the origin of modern cephalopod biodiversity was contingent on ecological competition with marine vertebrates.

There are lots of details, but the summary is this: they’ve used the molecular data to calibrate a tree of cephalopod phylogeny to place the major diversifications of the group in context, and they’ve also looked at degrees of diversity over time. And the answer is summarized in this one diagram:

Chronogram of cephalopods, plus 26 bivalve and gastropod molluscs, one scaphopod and four annelids as outgroups and calibration nodes; 36 156 amino acid positions analysed under CAT-GTR substitution model, CIR clock model, Yule birth–death process, soft bound of 0.05, and a root prior of 565 Ma with a standard deviation of ±10 Ma. Bars at nodes represent 95% confidence intervals (recent nodes not labelled with bars to aid clarity). Red dots indicated calibrated nodes; red dotted lines represent extent of calibration minima. Environmental conditions and sea-level curve simplified from Miller et al. Curves for belemnite, actinopterygian, chondrichthyan and Palaeozoic fish diversity are based on fossil observations on diversity, data from Palaeobiology Database (pbdb.org), electronic supplementary material, table S5. Red vertical lines represent major extinction events. Aqua-blue vertical bar signifies the extent of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution.

Chronogram of cephalopods, plus 26 bivalve and gastropod molluscs, one scaphopod and four annelids as outgroups and calibration nodes; 36 156 amino acid positions analysed under CAT-GTR substitution model, CIR clock model, Yule birth–death process, soft bound of 0.05, and a root prior of 565 Ma with a standard deviation of ±10 Ma. Bars at nodes represent 95% confidence intervals (recent nodes not labelled with bars to aid clarity). Red dots indicated calibrated nodes; red dotted lines represent extent of calibration minima. Environmental conditions and sea-level curve simplified from Miller et al. Curves for belemnite, actinopterygian, chondrichthyan and Palaeozoic fish diversity are based on fossil observations on diversity, data from Palaeobiology Database (pbdb.org), electronic supplementary material, table S5. Red vertical lines represent major extinction events. Aqua-blue vertical bar signifies the extent of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution.

They’ve got a good story behind it, too. What drove the concurrent evolution of both cephalopods and bony fish was a competition to occupy the nektonic space. That is, before the Devonian, animals were primarily benthic — the lowest level of the aquatic environment than includes the floor of the body of water — and that the hot new space to occupy was the nekton, the upper levels of the water. This required new strategies, fish evolved jaws, cephalopods evolved beaks, that opened up new predator/prey relationships. Further, as these groups evolved in the nekton, there was a switch in defensive strategies from making heavy armor to stripping down and becoming more agile. Those trends are conspicuous in both groups.

Taken together, molecular divergence times and the cephalopod fossil record are consistent with a scenario in which predator–prey arms races shaped the coleoid body plan, biodiversity and ecology. The coincidence with the evolution of jawed vertebrates and teleost fishes during the Devonian Nekton Revolution and the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, suggests that nektonic marine vertebrates have been key antagonists towards cephalopods throughout most of their evolution.

So it all started with the Devonian Nekton Revolution, and reached completion in the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, which they call “the final stage in the shift from Palaeozoic ecologies into the modern structure of marine ecosystems”. What you can also see in the diagram is that there has been a shift in the diversity of the phyla occupying that nektonic niche, with cephalopods owning the Mesozoic seas, and teleosts taking over in the Cenezoic.

Which tells me that when I retire, I need to set the dials on my time machine to the late Jurassic/early Cretaceous, and settle down to start fishing/squidding. I was just checking my maps and I see that there was a big inland sea stretching from British Columbia and Calgary, down to most of North Dakota and the western part of South Dakota, so I would only have to move a few hundred miles west.

And 150 million years back.

Tanner AR, Fuchs D, Winkelmann IE, Gilbert MT, Pankey MS, Ribeiro ÂM, Kocot KM, Halanych KM, Oakley TH, da Fonseca RR, Pisani D, Vinther J. (2017) Molecular clocks indicate turnover and diversification of modern coleoid cephalopods during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. Proc Biol Sci. 284(1850). pii: 20162818. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.2818.