The lies will kill us all

Don’t you know? RFK jr is not anti-vax. He supports safe vaccines.

News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety, Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccines play a critical role in health care.

He lies! Those two words need to be written on his tombstone, preferably sooner than later.

We know he lies because he just slashed half a billion dollars from the budget of the department specifically tasked with developing and testing new vaccines.

The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.

He basically wants to kill mRNA vaccine development, the technology that saved millions of lives in the recent pandemic. His excuse? In addition to his usual claim that the vaccines contain fetal tissue and DNA fragments — all false, and even if it were true, what does he think is present in the roadkill he eats? — he claims that mRNA vaccines are ineffective against viruses that affect the upper respiratory tract.

Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.

“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.

COVID was an upper respiratory infection, and the mRNA vaccines seem to have helped protect millions of people against that, but RatFucker Jr is going to just ignore that. He lies, and is wrong.

KENNEDY: “As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

THE FACTS: His claim is contradicted by scientific evidence. Countless studies show that vaccinated individuals fare far better against COVID-19 infections than those who are unvaccinated, while others have estimated that COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of deaths during the global pandemic. The mRNA vaccines do not prevent respiratory diseases entirely, experts say. Rather, they can prevent more serious illness that leads to complications and death. For example, an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 may prevent an infection in the upper respiratory tract that feels like a bad cold from spreading to the lower respiratory tract, where it could affect one’s ability to breathe.

While he’s cutting the budget for specious reasons, he’s also telling the scientists he doesn’t want to pay to pursue a new/old line of research.

He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.

There is no link between vaccines and autism. There is a link between mRNA vaccines and preventing death.

He lies.

Abby Hafer has died

Sad news: we’ve lost an important scientist and atheist, Abby Hafer, professor and American Humanist board member. Also, the Discovery Institute hated her, which is a tremendous accolade.

The enmity arose when she published an article titled No Data Required: Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science, in which she pointed out that the ID movement was barren of data and hypothesis testing, and was essentially a club for debate-bros who would masticate observations until they were a gooey pulp that they could sculpt to fit their conclusion.

Intelligent Design (ID) proposes that biological species were created by an intelligent Designer, and not by evolution. ID’s proponents insist that it is as valid a theory of how biological organisms and species came into existence as evolution by natural selection. They insist, therefore, that ID be taught as science in public schools. These claims were defeated in the Kitzmiller case. However, ID’s proponents are still influential and cannot be considered a spent force. The question addressed here is whether ID’s claim of scientific legitimacy is reinforced by quantified results. That is, do they have any data, or do they just argue? The ID articles that I analyzed claimed to present real science, but they rarely referred to data and never tested a hypothesis. Argumentation, however, was frequent. By contrast, peer-reviewed articles by evolutionary biologists rarely argued but referred frequently to data. The results were statistically significant. These findings negate claims by ID proponents that their articles report rigorous scientific research. Teachers will find this article helpful in defending evolution, distinguishing science from non-science, and discussing the weaknesses of ID.

She was sharp. She will be missed.

Spider mommies are the best mommies

How nice. The mother of these spiderlings lies back and lets her babies eat her.

Not so nice: the spiderlings then gang up and cannibalize all the other adult spiders in the colony. Hooligans! These kids, always getting into trouble.

Which reminds me…I have to go into the lab this morning and sort out a couple of egg sacs I expect to see hatching out. The species I work with don’t practice matriphagy, but I do like to set up the young’uns with a lot of flies early on.

They have to be desperate to resurrect boomer technology

This generation…they claim to have reinvented the bus, the train, the bodega, and now, the 45 rpm record?

On Monday (Aug. 4), a small but mighty new physical music format arrived: Tiny Vinyl. Measuring at just four inches in size, Tiny Vinyl is a playable record that can hold four minutes of audio per side.

The disc, according to a press release, aims to “[bridge] the gap between modern and traditional to offer a new collectible for artists to share with fans that easily fits in your pocket.”

OK, there are differences. This thing is played at 33rpm, not 45rpm, and is smaller than the old format, which was a 7 inch disk, but I don’t see any advantage. It doesn’t matter that it fits in your pocket — in order to listen to it you also need a turntable and a set of speakers. They also cost $15 each. It’s a gimmicky promotional toy, not a serious means of distributing music. People are used to loading up thousands of MP3s on their phones and being able to play them through ear buds, you’d have to be a serious hipster to think that unlimbering a turntable and a pair of portable speakers so you can listen to singles at the coffeeshop is “cool”.

Sex is a spectrum

Agustín Fuentes has published a new book, Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. I just started reading it last night — and it’s very good so far — so don’t expect a full review just yet, but El Pais has published an interview with Fuentes in which he discusses the main themes. As you might guess from the title, he’s rejecting the idea that sex is a binary, and further, that the general implications of sex are not reducible. He’s an anti-Coyne. He’s also strongly advocating for a view of organisms that incorporates environmental factors beyond naked genetics.

Q. You assert that sex is a biocultural issue… but many of the people reading this interview will think that sex is about biology, not culture.

A. That depends on how you define “sex.” If you’re speaking only about gametes, everyone understands that [an] egg isn’t a woman and [a] sperm isn’t a man. We have to rethink a little about what we’re talking about. Just think about our feet, which are biological traits. But at the same time, look at your foot and look at the foot of a person who has never worn shoes. The two are almost distinct: the structure of the bones, the muscles and the skin changes. When I discuss sociocultural contexts, we’re talking not only about the embodiment of culture, but the mutual exchanges between experience, perception, bones, muscles, digestive systems, vascular systems… there’s a lot of interconnection between our physical body and the world and the experiences we have. There’s always more intermingling and a bit more complexity.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the Mendelian revelation is that we’ve swung way too far the other way, treating the individual as nothing more than the combinatorial action of a set of genes. Development is a critical and complicated input in generating the information that makes up the individual!

Then he gets into a point I’ve made multiple times before: there are so many distinct criteria that are used to identify a human’s sex, so just the fact that there are multiple independent measures refutes the claim that there is one pure definitive definition.

Q. You write about how the concept of “sex at birth” isn’t very rigorous, because it can mean many different things. You talk about the “three Gs.”

A. In the biological context, we’re talking about typical categorizations based on three factors: genes, gonads and genitals: the three Gs. A 3G woman would be one who has ovaries, clitoris/vagina/labia, and XX chromosomes. And a 3G man would be one who has testicles, penis/scrotum and XY chromosomes.

The importance of using 3G is the range of variation: it’s a spectrum that has standard groupings. We assume that, by looking at the genitals, you’re sure to have the other two Gs. And it’s true that they’re highly correlated, but not absolutely correlated, not 100%. We must understand, biologically, that these categories don’t contain all the variation in human beings; there’s variation beyond that. And, among the 3Gs, there are people – more than we think – in whom one of those Gs is a little different. If we use only the genitals at birth, or the chromosomes or the genes, we’re leaving out a lot of extremely relevant information.

I agree, except I’d suggest that there are more than three factors used. Some people claim that behavior is a factor in defining sex — true women, as we all know, are submissive, while men are dominant and aggressive. We can pile up all sorts of stereotypes and associations and none of them are going to be universal.

Q. This 3G explanation doesn’t reflect the biological reality of 1% of humanity, as you state in the book, which is at least 80 million people. But if it reflects that of the 99%, so isn’t it natural for many people to say, “Well, 99% is almost binary, isn’t it?”

A. But what is binary? I’m not saying there aren’t things that are binary in human beings. Gametes are binary: sperm and eggs. But saying that human beings are binary is a failure. It limits us too much when we’re thinking about the full range of variation between human beings. A binary relationship is that of one and zero. They’re completely distinct. This concept is used in computer science, because there’s no overlap in any element: either you have a one, or you have a zero. But human beings – our bodies, our ways of being – aren’t like that. There’s nothing between men and women that makes them totally different, like one and zero, because they come from biological materials that overlap on that spectrum of variation in our bodies.

To say that we’re binary is philosophy. It’s not biology. It’s declaring oneself essentialist: there are [men and women], two types of humans. But our biology doesn’t validate that position. Yes, there are binary things in our biology, but to say that human beings come in two different types is false. And we can prove it. Genitals, hormones, brains, organs… when you understand the range of variation between our bodies, it becomes very clear that human beings don’t come in binary, but in typical sets.

“Almost binary” — how can anyone say that with a straight face? The word “almost” refutes the claim.

Q. Is this an attempt to invoke science to justify a model for people? A model for society and a model for women?

A. Trump isn’t using science; all of his executive orders are a total scientific failure. Science – by pointing out the range of biological variation in human beings – shows us that there are indeed several ways to be human. And that’s the important thing. In any country, in any culture, there’s a range in bodies and sexualities, but our cultures, our governments, diminish the possibilities of expressing [ourselves] and living within that range. We’re always on an average; we’re bits and pieces of the full range of human beings. And the main thing is to at least know what the possibilities of that range are… to understand that this is what being human is all about: variation, not a standard.

Our culture is always controlling where we can express ourselves. We’re biocultural organisms: there’s always a greater range of variation than what’s culturally accepted. And that’s the difficult part. Because many people are certain that “this is a woman and this is a man.” But if they start thinking, “My cousin has a slightly different body,” they then realize that there’s greater variation. We all know people who are outside the typical categorization, be it behaviorally or biologically, of what we think women and men are.

Wait — he didn’t answer the question! Should we have a different model for society, men, and women? I’d say yes, and I can see how Fuentes is addressing an implied point, by bringing up Trump’s anti-scientific attempts to impose a rigid binary structure on America. It is the scientist’s role to explain how our preconceptions about the universe are contradicted by nature, and the narrow perspective of conservatives is flatly wrong, and therefore is a bad foundation for building social policy.

Fuentes for president! He’s American-born, so he qualifies, but he “wants to regain Spanish citizenship for fear of the political degradation in the United States,” so I’d worry that he’s going to be part of the flight of intellectuals from the US.

I expect I’ll see her at CPAC next

I wasn’t mad at Sydney Sweeney before — she was just a dumbass ignorant of genetics and making a commercial for money — but now she has lost all benefit of the doubt. She is a registered Republican.

Richard Hanania, who wrote for white supremacist news outlets under a pseudonym before becoming an above-board conservative columnist, took credit for Sweeney’s affiliation.

“It’s been revealed that Sydney Sweeney has been a registered Republican since June 2024, just a few months after I set off the discourse about her being the end of woke,” he wrote on X. “It looks like I memed into reality the biggest Republican celebrity recruit in years.”

I can’t say she was much of a draw for me before, but now I’ll be even more unenthused about her work. I’ll just visualize Jon Voight in her roles.

Three boys

Don and me as toddlers, from this video

By luck, my mother and my aunts gave birth to three boys of roughly the same age: me and my cousins, Kelly and Don. Furthermore, they had second children who were all boys, my brother Jim to run with me, Matt to go with Kelly, and Tim with Don. When we got together as a family, that meant we had a built-in gang of 6 boys, and the adults could get us out of their hair by telling us to run off and do boy things. Catch garter snakes and frogs. Curl up and read a ragged box full of comic books. Go for a hike. Gather sticks to use as swords. Climb trees. Boys are predictable and controllable, to a point, and we were happy to run wild.

We weren’t all the same, though. I was the weakest of the bunch, a nerd who preferred the comic book option. Kelly was the wild child, the one who always had a pocket knife, who wanted to set things on fire, who sneered at the wimpy egghead, and who’d usually end up wrestling me to the ground to prove that he was the most macho. He was a piece of barbed wire with a leather handle. Don, on the other hand, was the actual big guy among us — Kelly didn’t pick fights with him — and was solid, secure, and reliably peaceable, an oak tree supporting his friends and family.

An anecdote told to me by my Uncle Ed:

Ed: “One of the cousins carved your name into the furniture in my room.”

Me: “It wasn’t me!”

Ed: “I know. You aren’t dumb enough to sign your vandalism, and Don would never try to get someone in trouble that way, so I know exactly who was responsible.”

Later, when I actually saw the carving, I discovered that they had misspelled my first name. It’s only four letters long!

Only ten years old, and we already had the personalities that would shape the rest of our lives. As you know, I grew up to be a teacher and biologist. Sadly, Kelly became even more of a trouble-maker, had a few run-ins with the law, and ended up dying of a heart attack, alone in an isolated house in Eastern Washington. Don became a Mormon, married a good Mormon woman, raised a family on a farm in Oregon, and was a pillar of his church and his community. He retired to Arizona, and lately was working to move his elderly mother to live near him so he could better take care of her. All of that was typical Don.

Yesterday I got a phone call to let me know that Don had abruptly died of a heart attack.

Now I don’t know what his mother, my Aunt Sally, is going to do. The reliable anchor of his family is no more. I’m waiting for a phone call with more news.

The gang of 6 boys is over (two of our brothers have also died), not that we were getting together regularly to cause trouble. It was reassuring to know that Don was was still solid and reliable, and now that is gone.

An almost day

I hobbled into the lab this morning, anticipating a lot of spiderlings that would need to be sorted out. I’ve got several egg sacs dancing on the edge of maturity, and I’d noticed on Friday that one of the Steatoda borealis sacs was really close — maturing spiders were darkening and moving about just below the surface of the sac, so I expected to come in today and find an explosion of spiderlings scurrying about looking for something to kill.

I was disappointed. They haven’t quite emerged.

See the dark mottled blob on the top left? The dark things are spiderlings clinging together in a ball, with the bounds of the disintegrating sphere of the sac. The white things are the final molt, that leaves behind a crumpled bit of cuticle. But they aren’t out yet!

Also in view is a second egg sac which isn’t quite as far along. I can tell by the somewhat granular appearance of the contents that the embryos are developing just fine, maybe a week or two behind their older siblings.

Mom is also there, a bit out of focus. These spiders are very good mothers, hovering over the egg sac and fighting anything that comes along to disturb her babies. Also, they do the greatest kindest action — they do not eat their own children when they emerge, no matter how juicy and tasty they look. I expect there has to be a swarm either tomorrow or Tuesday.

Also I got a little treat: my tarantula, Blue, usually hunkers down in her hidey hole, but every once in a while she emerges to explore her big cage. Here she is, just before I rewarded her with a mealworm.