The anti-PC police are in the wrong

I’m really fed up with all the op-eds emerging now, decrying those wimpy college students and political correctness and trigger warnings and safe spaces. They’re all from obnoxious ignoramuses who are really trying to defend their sheltered privilege from criticism, so they’re all playing a game of IKYABWAI. So here are a couple of strong rebuttals.

  • “PC Culture” isn’t Killing Higher Ed (But Your Crappy Op-Eds Might Be).

    The last thing higher education needs is one more old white guy bleating about “political correctness run amok,” when it’s just a slightly more genteel phrase for “people not like me getting all uppity.” If you’re upset about other people winning in the marketplace of ideas, maybe it’s because your ideas suck. If you think today’s students are coddled, and don’t have “grit,” you either don’t teach or aren’t paying attention. To see students calling out power inequalities and inequitable behaviors is not some sort of failure, but a triumph of critical thinking and intellectual agency. If you think students calling institutions, their administrations, or other authorities out on bad thinking, institutional inequities, or general bullshit is “silly,” or “killing higher education,” maybe you’re the delicate little flower who can’t abide an intellectual challenge.

  • Straw Freshmen: Why the War on Campus PC Culture is Bullshit.

    Take the “trigger warning” as an example. There are still no colleges or universities that mandate trigger warnings as a practice in any field of study. Most cases of them being used have been in teaching sensitive issues of rape, abuse, or assault to classes with young women. The overarching point in “Coddling,” that trigger warnings actually can’t improve mental health, misses the point of the reality of these women. A new study from the Association of American Universities finds that over a fifth of all college women are sexually assaulted at some time in their enrollment. Another 47% have experienced sexual harassment and another 12% have experienced intimate partner violence. This means that any given classroom with any significant amount of women could be composed of up to a third or more of women who are processing rapes, assaults, harassment, or violence. Given the absolutely horrendous state of affairs within colleges (and largely, the country) in handling rape cases and pursuing justice and health for these women, it is likely that most of these survivors have not received or are not receiving the proper therapy and healing in order to be able to process triggering images and words without suffering further damage.

  • ‘Coddled’ students and their ‘safe spaces’ aren’t the problem, college official says. Bigots are.

    Therefore, whether one is suspicious of the merits of college as a whole or cynical about the existence of “safe spaces,” the truth of the matter is that “coddled” college students aren’t the problem.

    The real culprits — on campuses and in the real world — are the persistent effects of homophobia, income inequality, misogyny, poverty, racism, sexism, white supremacy and xenophobia.

    When students refuse to accept discrimination on college campuses, they’re learning important lessons about how to fight it everywhere.

That last one makes an excellent point: the anti-PC language does the opposite of what its obnoxious proponents claim. It’s not about advocating for free speech. It’s about using accusations of “PC” and mocking efforts to give minorities a voice to silence critics of the status quo.

Would you rather be a good poet or an incompetent scientist?

One of those wacky Islamists took to pestering me on Twitter with a flurry of standard Allah-pologetics. They were embarrassingly stupid, and I finally had to block him. But I thought I’d share one example of his bad reasoning.

quranidiocy

This is a standard approach they take. Here’s some remark made by Mohammed, usually something short and lacking in detail; now here’s some modern scientific discovery that superficially agrees with Mohammed’s vague comment; therefore, Mohammed had some deep scientific insight of divine origin, proving that he was a true prophet.

So let’s look at the quote from the Qur’an.

Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts may thus learn wisdom. 22:46

Does that sound like a scientific declaration to anyone? It’s a poetic metaphor, is all. It might also be a warmed-over vestige of Greek philosophy, although it has become such a common colloquialism that I wouldn’t use it to claim that Mohammed was a serious scholar of Greek thought (especially since that is another prong of Islamic ignorance: Mohammed was really badly educated and ignorant, they say, so anything he got right had to have been introduced into his head by magic). But yes, the Greeks had complex ideas about souls, with an appetitive soul situated in your gut, a rational soul in your head (but probably not your brain), and an emotional, spiritual soul in your heart. And now people will say “bless your heart” or say that someone is “kind-hearted” or talk about a kind and generous person as “big hearted”.

It is not and is never intended as a scientific claim, that such people have a large cognitive center in their chests that is advising their brain to be charitable or friendly or loving. That would be silly. It’s an expression not intended to be taken literally. I think it’s safe to assume that Mohammed is similarly using an expression in a colloquial way.

But not our Islamist kook! No, Mohammed is literally arguing that there is a brain located in your heart. It has to be true, because Mohammed never lied and knows everything. So he’s going to take this simple phrase and mangle science to make it support his belief.

Scientists discovered that the heart thinks, learns wisdom, and contains neurological centers that save data. Heart contains 40000 nerve cells that form a “real brain”!!

Nope.

There is nervous tissue throughout your body; it’s how you sense the world, know the position of your body parts, and regulate the activity of your organs. Your enteric nervous system contains about half a billion neurons lacing through your guts, and you’ve also got a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These do not mediate conscious thought. They do not “think” as we recognize it, and they don’t necessarily learn, especially not in a way that we’d call wisdom. The heart contains nervous tissue that generates a rhythm, and that responds to electrical and hormonal signals to modulate the heart rate. It does not sit there composing Valentine’s Day greetings or responding to scenery during traveling with passionate odes to lovely landscapes. It is not a brain. No one calls it a brain. This guy is just making it all up.

One clue about that is the phrase contains neurological centers that save data. Oh, bullshit. He’s just stringing together sciencey-sounding words to sound clever, when anyone who knows anything can read that and tell instantly that he’s pompously confabulating.

He’s doing something the fundamentalist Christians also do: making their prophets look like idiots by insisting on imposing narrow modern interpretations on their words. Mohammed is making a pleasant enough comment about how travel broadens the mind and increases our understanding, and that’s a sensible thing to say — it may be commonplace, but I’d have to agree that in the ordinary meaning of the phrases, Mohammed is saying something that is trivially true and reasonable. And then along comes @ahmdabdallah17, insisting that what Mohammed is doing is talking in a pretentious way about the anatomy and physiology of the heart, in which case he’s making Mohammed sound as ignorant and stupid as he is.

Ken Ham does the same thing when he requires a ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible — it completely strips it of any literary quality, where the authors chose their language for poetry’s sake and for its emotional resonance, and turns it into a badly written, grossly erroneous engineering manual.

Why do these people despise their supposedly revered forebears so much?

Strangely enough, it all turns out well

Fruit-fly

Speaking of genetics, this is the week the results from our big triple point cross (it’s a kind of mapping cross where we determine the distances between three different genes) come rolling in. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking for me, because this is the first time these students have worked with flies, it involves a series of crosses with multiple points where they can screw up, and if they all messed up, we don’t have enough time in the semester to repeat it. So every week I go into the lab, and there are students who are staring confusedly at their bottles, and wondering if they did something wrong, and telling me they are are afraid they might have added males of the wrong phenotype, or they have confused which generation is which, or things are just addling their brain and they can no longer understand what they are doing.

And my job is to puzzle it all out, or figure out how we can test and make sure they’ve got the right flies, or to explain everything to ease their addlement. This is a simple experiment, but with a mob of novice Drosophila geneticists the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Every time. I feel a bit like Philip Henslow in this clip from Shakespeare in Love all semester long.

And he’s right! It does turn out well in the end, for mysterious reasons that always puzzle me. They’ve started turning in the numbers from the first few groups who are ready, and they’re pretty much what I expected, and there are no major anomalies, and everyone did every single one of the crosses correctly (major errors would lead to obviously and sharply different results, so I can tell). I think we can just trust the students to try hard to do everything right.

Now they just have to analyze the data and write up a formal lab report. Where is the report? Oh, it’s coming. It’s coming.

Andrew “Boo Hoo” Wakefield complains

His fraudulent anti-vax film got kicked out of the Tribeca film festival, and rightly so. He’s unhappy about that.

To our dismay, we learned today about the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to reverse the official selection of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, opened a March 26th statement from the film’s Director Andrew Wakefield and Producer Del Bigtree.

Kavin Senapathy succinctly describes him.

Disgraced former gastroenterologist and researcher Andrew Wakefield, known for a fraudulent 1998 paper linking the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism, directs the movie which aims to reveal an alarming deception that has contributed to the skyrocketing increase of autism and potentially the most catastrophic epidemic of our lifetime.

I have to remember that line. I think Wakefield ought to have his name legally changed to Disgraced Former Gastroenterologist And Researcher Andrew Wakefield, Known For A Fraudulent 1998 Paper Linking The Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) Vaccine With Autism. I know, it’s kind of long, but we could just call him Disgraced for short.

How not to teach genetics

adaptordie

Robert Dillon teaches genetics at the College of Charleston…or rather, he is officially assigned the job of teaching genetics, but one might question whether his students are actually learning anything. He’s tenured, but is currently suspended from teaching over a dispute about his syllabus that has snowballed into a mess of a case.

I started reading this article with some sympathy for Dillon. I teach genetics, too, and I’ve been teaching it almost as long as he has. I’m a little bit demanding in the classroom — this is conceptually difficult material for many students, and you can’t lead them by the hand through every step of figuring out every problem, and at some point the students have to figure out for themselves how to do the work, or they haven’t succeeded in being independent thinkers. I also get annoyed at some of the dictates from on high, where we are told to fit our work to a template designed by people who don’t teach our classes. I can feel for his resentment.

But we also have a job to do. It looks like he’s not doing it.

[Read more…]

Who is to blame for the current chaos in the Republican party?

I love it when Charles Pierce cuts loose.

For four decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980, hitching his party to the snake-oil of supply-side economics and to the sad remnants of white supremacy, often as expressed through an extremist splinter of American Protestantism, the Republican Party has been afflicted with the prion disease that now has blossomed into utter public madness. That’s the story everyone was too blind, stupid, or afraid to tell. You know who in the media really created He, Trump? Anyone who laughed at Ronald Reagan’s casual relationship with the truth and with empirical reality. Anyone who blew off Iran-Contra. Anyone who draped C-Plus Augustus in a toga after 9/11. Anyone who cast Newt Gingrich as a serious man of ideas. Anyone who cast Paul Ryan as an economic savant, that’s who. Anyone who wrote admiring profiles of how shrewd Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were. Anyone who put Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck on the cover of national magazines based simply on their ratings. Anyone who put Matt Drudge on a public-affairs program. Anyone who watched the conservative movement, the only animating force the Republican party has, drive the party further and deeper into madness, they are the ones who share the blame. He, Trump merely has taken the bark off ideas that were treated as legitimate for far too long by far too many people, most of whom don’t really give a damn about the plight of the vanishing middle class except for its use as fuel for rage-based, self-destructive politics.

I could not believe it when that dopey clown Reagan got elected — that bozo should have been slapped down before he became governor of California. I was even more appalled when the dopier, clownier W got elected, and once again, I was wondering why the media just peddled it as a great way to sell advertising minutes on the news. And now…

Limbaugh and Beck and Drudge and Breitbart continue to be treated as oracles into the guts of the American psyche, and have become the American psyche.

I can’t even bear to watch the network pundits any more. When David Brooks is treated as if he’s the serious, sane one, we’re done.

Speaking of bad science, never trust the American College of Pediatricians

American-College-of-Pediatricians

I know! It sounds so official and sciencey! It’s got “college” in it, which is formal and academic, and “pediatricians”, which are a kind of doctor, and you can never go wrong slapping “American” on your brand label. But they are a lie.

It’s also because the ACP is not a legitimate medical organization; its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members. The ACP, by contrast, is estimated to have no more than 200 members, and it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT positions.

“The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement reads. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” The “facts” that follow actually reflect a social conservative ideology that rejects the very reality of what transgender children experience.

They’ve issued a statement that transgender kids are being harmed, based on claims that believing you are of a gender other than the one you were born with is a mental disorder (psychologists disagree), that it’s just a phase kids go through (nope, again — that’s based on some bad studies), and that sex reassignment surgery, rather than discrimination and hatred, triggers suicide at a high rate (you can figure that one out).

I’m all in favor of facts. Unfortunately, painting the word “fact” on a lie does not make it true.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Rorqual!

This is a Minke Whale, in life.

Unfortunately, it’s going to be a little harder to see them in life. The Japanese whaling fleet has just returned to base with a lot of carcasses that will be destined for cans and pet food.

Japan’s whaling fleet has returned to base with the carcasses of 333 minke whales, in apparent violation of a ruling by the International Court of Justice.

Reuters quoted a statement by Japan’s Fisheries Agency that said 103 male and 230 female whales were caught during the fleet’s summer expedition to Antarctic waters. Ninety percent of the mature females were pregnant.

Did you know that Japanese whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission, with one little loophole left for scientific research? They’ve been abusing that loophole for years.

The court said the research program had generated only two peer-reviewed papers that together refer to nine whales.

‘In light of the fact that [Japan’s program] has been going on since 2005 and has involved the killing of about 3,600 minke whales, the scientific output to date appears limited,’ the court wrote in its judgment.

By a 12-4 vote, the court based in The Hague decided Japan must ‘revoke any extant authorization, permit or license granted in relation to’ its whaling program, ‘and refrain from granting any further permits’ related to it.

You had me at your contempt for mowing lawns

The Roaming Ecologist has a few words about lawns.

Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage. And there’s the unbearable ubiquitousness of mowing associated with such a useless cultural practice, which creates a ridiculous amount of noise pollution, air and water pollution, and a bustling busyness that destroys many peaceful Saturday mornings. The American lawn is the epitome of unsustainability.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, and attend your weekly meetings protesting grass, rather than mow my lawn. That season is soon upon us.

But then he also shares this excellent illustration of native prairie plants. They’re all roots! Unlike that scrubby shallow Kentucky bluegrass film on the left, that just forms a superficial mat of roots.

Illustration by Heidi Natura, 1995, of Living Habitats. Click on image to see larger version. 80% of a prairie’s biomass is below ground, which is a part of the reason why prairies are the greatest soil carbon factories in the world. Those roots break up compacted soil, and as a portion of those roots die each year, they add organic matter and decompose into carbon, further enriching the soil; all of this is done without deadly pesticides or equally deadly petrochemical fertilizers.

Illustration by Heidi Natura, 1995, of Living Habitats. Click on image to see larger version. 80% of a prairie’s biomass is below ground, which is a part of the reason why prairies are the greatest soil carbon factories in the world. Those roots break up compacted soil, and as a portion of those roots die each year, they add organic matter and decompose into carbon, further enriching the soil; all of this is done without deadly pesticides or equally deadly petrochemical fertilizers.

OK, now what can I do to kill the ground hugging parasites covering my yard and replace them with cool plants like that?