Alabama doesn’t hate all science

The Alabama Supreme Court has decreed that human life begins at conception and that terminating a blastocyst is a crime. This decision came about because three people, rightfully upset at the accidental loss of some frozen embryos (a property crime) decided to escalate the loss into an immoral act of murder in order to get retribution…and now look what they’ve done. They took advantage of a technology that involves excess production of embryos, making those embryos themselves, and then turned around and took legal action to make sure no one else could use those reproductive technologies themselves. Thanks, guys.

Then, of course, one of the most backward states in the union has ignorant religious zealots on their court (whoa, can’t hold that against Alabama, since the federal court has the same problem) who then decided that a small collection of undifferentiated cells is a “child”. Alabama ranks 47th in the nation on overall child well-being, but now they can claim to be first in the nation for overall “child”/tissue/zygote well-being.

The Alabama ruling is the first to attribute human rights to a developing organism at such an early stage following conception. The ruling states that “unborn children are ‘children,’” and that frozen embryos should be afforded the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, a national antiabortion organization, heralded the court for showing “moral clarity” in ruling that the unborn deserve the same rights as children.

“You have children being created in petri dishes at will and then destroyed at will and used for experimentation,” Rose said. “It’s not acceptable to leave human beings on ice. It’s not acceptable to destroy them. These are not commodities.”

You know who creates these “children” in petri dishes? Hopeful parents who can’t conceive otherwise. I guess people who want children under those circumstances are going to have to flee Alabama, if they can afford it. IVF is a fairly expensive procedure so it’s mostly well-off people who can afford it, so this is another of those laws that will selectively hurt the poor and middle class — the rich will be unaffected. That’s why it’s safe for the sanctimonious Christians to applaud this decision, since it won’t hurt their priesthood, yet.

Jennifer Lincoln, a board certified OB/GYN who practices in Portland, Ore., said she doesn’t think people understand how “scary” the Alabama ruling is. She raised a common scenario: A patient undergoing IVF has an egg retrieval that leads to the creation of multiple embryos, with the hope that at least one turns into a live birth. If successful, the remaining embryos remain frozen for possible future use — but not all may be used.

“If someone has five embryos left and they decide not to have any more kids and want those embryos destroyed — and someone in that physician’s office hears that, could [the doctor] be criminalized for being an accomplice in a crime?” Lincoln asked.

I said “yet” because every Xian fanatic is cheering this decision as another avenue to attack women’s reproductive rights. The anti-choicers are gearing up to use that precedent as a tool to oppose abortion rights in Florida. Declaring that a “child” exists the instant sperm meets egg is a nice bit of sophistry to justifying outlawing abortion…and also, eventually, contraception. Oh, look, a nice example of a “slippery slope”!

Now that Alabama’s supreme court on Friday took the remarkable step of declaring that frozen embryos are “children,” a conservative group is trying to derail an expected 2024 ballot initiative in Florida that would enshrine abortion rights in that Sunshine State’s constitution.

On Monday, a religious civil rights law firm alerted the Florida Supreme Court to the neighboring state’s recent ruling in an attempt to have the high court block the amendment from reaching voters as it currently stands.

Earlier this month, the conservative-leaning Florida court heard arguments on the proposed constitutional amendment. It will decide by April 1 whether to approve the language in the measure, which states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Please note that these same black-robed dingbats who are wallowing in their self-righteous, superficial pretense of respect for human life are the same people who approve of the state experimenting with novel methods for executing prisoners. It did not go well.

Kenneth Smith, who survived an attempt by the state to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, was put to death Thursday evening in Atmore, the rural home to Alabama’s execution chamber near the Florida state line, Governor Kay Ivey’s office confirmed.

Smith, 58, was executed at 8:25 p.m. local time, according to a press release issued by the state Department of Corrections.

The execution took roughly 22 minutes, the Associated Press reported. He appeared to stay conscious for “several minutes” after the gas began to flow, shaking and writhing and sometimes pulling against the restraints of his gurney for more than two minutes, the wire service added.

See? Alabama does not oppose all technological advances. They just have to be technologies that kill the right people.

How much do you hate the gays?

You have to hate them an awful lot to be compelled to move from Canada to Russia, as this one family did. When asked why, the only reason the family patriarch gives is that there were just too many gay & trans people in Canada.

A Canadian family of eight sold their farm and moved to Russia. Why? They wanted to raise their kids in Russia’s morally superior environment.

“Well, Canada is not the same country it used to be,” said daddy in a video interview, “and we didn’t feel safe for our children there in the future anymore. There’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with that they teach there now, and we wanted to get away from that for our children.”

But it didn’t take long for the immigrants to regret their decision. Their Russian bank accounts were frozen, and since the family doesn’t speak a lick of Russian, they have had trouble asking the morally superior Russian authorities to release their funds.

Wait. They don’t say specifically where he’s from, but he’s a Canadian farmer. He was raising his family on a vast empty plot of land raising wheat or sugar beets or something, in a community of fellow conservative Canadians. He probably never saw a gay or trans person in his daily life, so this is a problem that didn’t really affect him — he was just seething in his grand isolation, worrying that one of his many kids might turn out gay, so he packed up and moved to a country where it might be more socially acceptable to murder them?

Wow, he must really hate gay people. I’m sort of perversely impressed with his passion and commitment and self-destructive stupidity.

I also think more people with that attitude out to feel free to emigrate to Russia. Tucker Carlson, I choose you.

It’s symbiosis week!

Yesterday’s lecture began with a dilemma. The topic this week is all about symbiosis, so of course I had to talk about Lynn Margulis, a very complicated person. I have a lot of respect for her contributions to the field, but also had to mention some of her wrong ideas, like that 9/11 was a false flag operation, and that AIDS was caused by a spirochete. It was also a dilemma back in 2007, when Margulis was a guest on this blog and also on our IRC channel. Whew, that was awkward. There might be a few old timers here who remember that.

Also awkward: most of the students had never heard of Margulis until now (they also had no idea what IRC was). At least I got to expose them to a little significant scientific history, which is my job, even when Margulis expressed the opinion that “I believe at all zoologists are intrinsically poorly educated in biology and that medical people are misinformed.” Ouch. There’s a grain of truth there, but mainly my students got to learn that some famous scientists can be colossal dicks. I did tell my students that if she were alive today she’d be a popular guest on Joe Rogan’s awful show.

Anyway, duty done, I lectured on mycorrhizae and gut microbiomes and a lot on Wolbachia. The paper of the week that the students will be telling me all about on Friday is “Eco-Evo-Devo: developmental symbiosis and developmental plasticity as evolutionary agents” by Gilbert, Bosch, and Ledón-Rettig, which you can read if you want to catch up on the course.

A death in a high school restroom

I did not know that Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind Libs of TikTok, had an official position in Oklahoma schools. But she did. She was on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, placed there by the far-right extremist, Ryan Walters, who runs things in that state, unfortunately.

Raichik specifically targeted one school district for her hate campaign.

One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats.

She deleted a bunch of those posts? Why? Has she learned some shame?

No, that’s not it.

This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that “one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a murder mystery, even though the MSN headline is “16-year-old Owasso student who died unexpectedly was laid to rest”. Died unexpectedly? They were brutally beaten to the point they couldn’t walk, and died in the hospital the next day. They were killed by those three students, who had been incited to the act by Chaya Raichik. That’s 4 people, at least, who need to be arrested for manslaughter, for a start.

Maybe Ryan Walters should be fired, too.

CripDyke has a thoughtful post on this crime. Go read that.

So that’s how things work at Frontiers journals, eh?

That ghastly article with the AI-generated rat testicles has been fully and completely retracted.

Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the nature of its AI-generated figures. The article does not meet the standards of editorial and scientific rigor for Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology; therefore, the article has been retracted.

This retraction was approved by the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers. Frontiers would like to thank the concerned readers who contacted us regarding the published article.

I would like to know where those “standards of editorial and scientific rigor” were when the article was reviewed and accepted by the editors, because that paper was so blatantly, glaringly, obviously bad that it’s clear that no one actually read the damned thing before stamping it with an “approved” label. I think we’ve just gotten a peek at the process at Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology, and it’s cheap and lazy.

Notice also that no responsibility was taken.

Now I have to worry about the Netherlands as well as Australia?

Actually, I can’t blame other countries for the fact that the USA is a magnet for far-right religious loonies. Of course their evangelists are going to come there — they know they’ll get some success here!

So I suspect this evangelical outreach organization from the Netherland — their statement of purpose is Convinced of God’s love for everyone, we tell stories about God and following Jesus. Stories that change lives, touch people and move them to live in love with each other — figured that not only would they go to the USA, but that they’d go to Texas, where they’d be welcomed with open arms, and get some great video footage they could use for fundraising back home. They optimistically marched a film crew into Central High School in Keller, Texas to interview students for god knows what purpose and started recording. They picked a day when the principal was not around, but they had been encouraged by a couple of school board members. We all know how little knowledge of education that politically and religiously active school boards have.

They did not get the response they expected.

Sandi Walker, a school board trustee brought an Evangelical-based film crew into the high school to conduct interviews with her. Multiple students and parents told WFAA children were filmed and interviewed by the production crew without their consent. Trustee Micah Young was also involved in the filming.

Evangelische Omroep (EO), a Netherlands-based Evangelical broadcast television network previously produced the documentary: ‘God, Jesus, Trump.’

“We don’t want politics in our kids schools,” Hawes said. “If kids wanna bring God into schools, beautiful, but it cannot be the administration. There is a separation of church and state.”

Elliot Mullaney, a freshman at Central High School said he witnessed the filming take place during his lunch hour.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” said Mullaney. “I think that it’ll be used to spread hate and spread untrue opinions.”

Parents were pissed. These Dutch evangelists didn’t realize that while many Texans are receptive to Christianity, they are also ferociously independent and don’t take kindly to foreigners. Sandi Walker has already resigned, people are calling for the head of Micah Young, and evangelical interference in the schools has taken a small setback. That’s good — this is a school that recently voted to allow unlicensed religious chaplains free reign in public schools after a Christian Conservative PAC had spent half a million dollars to elect horrible people, like Walker and Young, to the school board.

Let’s not blame all the Dutch, though. The Netherlands has its own Bible Belt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Evangelische Omroep was based in that.

Martyn Iles clarifies a few things

Answers in Genesis is evolving: the Ken Ham era is coming to an end, and it’s becoming the age of Martyn Iles (although I bet Ham has kept some hooks in place to yank Iles off the stage if he does anything contrary). Their new front man is another Australian with a checkered history — he became a lightning rod in Australia with a rapid rise in popularity, but was not so successful at getting anything done. “Martyn was a fine preacher, but a poor lobbyist,” said a fellow Christian conservative, and then he was kicked out of the Australian Christian Lobby.

Now he’s back!

The fundamentalist Christian organisation Answers in Genesis (AiG), which got its start in Queensland, is closely associated with the new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Led by the former Queensland schoolteacher Ken Ham, AiG is part of a movement called “young Earth creationism” that preaches a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Iles’ ascent to “executive CEO” of AiG was a swift one. He spoke at an AiG event in late 2022. Then in May 2023 he was announced as chief ministry officer of the organisation, as well as leader of its Australian office.

By November he had been promoted to executive CEO – with Ham in an “oversight role” as “founder CEO” – and was being groomed to take over one of the world’s largest creationist organisations. In 2022 AiG brought in about US$62m and held US$112m in assets, according to US tax documents. The ACL, by comparison, had revenue of about A$10m in 2022.

Let us all hope he repeats his Australian performance here in America, and flames out quickly. For now, though, he has nailed his colors to the mast with an article on the Answers in Genesis website. He is loudly anti-woke. He shares this position with some prominent conservative scientists, you know.

The person who understands and believes Genesis 1–11 is woke-proof.

Such is the enduring relevance of Genesis. It has the blueprints every generation needs.

Consider the focal points of woke ideologies—race, LGBTQ, identity, environmentalism, marriage, gender, abortion, truth, power—time and time again, the answers are in Genesis.

This is because “woke” culture is an attack on the way God ordered and designed creation.

It’s nice that he’s so clear. “Wokeness” is for racial equality, LGBTQ rights, respect for an individual’s identity, pro-environment, thinks marriage is a choice, regards gender is a continuum, favors abortion rights to protect the rights of women, wants to promote truth through education, and thinks power should be shared. Anti-woke Christians are against all those things. Being in favor of LGBTQ rights and science education and the environment, to name just a few examples, is an attack on the way God ordered and designed creation..

Great. We know where we stand. God is against everything the “woke” stand for. I guess I’ll just have to be against God.

The opposite of inspire

Oh no. That hideous AI-generated scientific illustration is churning out hordes of copy cats. I do not like this.

I teach cell biology, I am familiar with illustrations of cells, and this abomination is just garbage, through and through. It’s an educational experience, though — now I’m appreciating how bad AI art is. It all lacks that thing called “content”. It makes a mockery of the work of professional medical and scientific illustrators, who work for years to acquire the artistic skill and the biological knowledge to create useful diagrams. There’s no intelligence in these stupid pictures.

No wonder I didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year

I thought maybe it had gotten lost in the mail, but no, that wasn’t it: the organizers of this science-fiction award had apparently gone nuts, disqualifying authors for stupid reasons. Also it probably helped that I didn’t write a science fiction novel last year, but that seems to have been a lesser problem than being at all critical of the Chinese government, or being supportive of gay people. The organizers were a combination of being incompetent, being bigoted, and trying to pander to an oppressive regime.

When the Hugos took place in Chengdu last October, it wasn’t immediately clear that the something was amiss. Shit hit the fan months later, when the awards committee finally released its long-awaited nominating statistics. The volunteer body typically releases the numbers the same evening as the ceremony, or within days of the event, but for this year, the stats didn’t arrive until 91 days after the event, per Esquire. Finally released on January 20, 2024, the reports showed that Kuang’s Babel, an episode of Gaiman’s The Sandman, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer all received more than enough preliminary votes to be finalists for awards, yet an asterisk denoted each of their works as “ineligible” for award consideration.

McCarty antagonized critics in multiple Facebook comments that day amid a fan uproar over the artists’ apparent disqualification. He first shared last year’s nominating statistics to the public and derisively attempted to shield the Hugos from criticism. “Are you slow?” he responded to a comment asking him why certain works were deemed ineligible based on the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution. “Clearly you can’t understand plain English in our constitution,” he wrote to another, per Esquire.

Speculation that the Chinese government played a role in censoring the votes grew. Comic-book writer Gaiman has previously voiced criticisms of the government for incarcerating writers. Both Kuang and Zhao were born in China and now live in the West, and their books tackle social issues in allegorical fantasy worlds. However, McCarty denied the notion in a Facebook post in the days following the release of the nominating-statistics release. “Nobody has ordered me to do anything …” he wrote per the Guardian on January 24. “There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”

After reading much of this stuff, I don’t think anybody should believe anything this Dave McCarty says — he’s a liar and all-around nasty person.

There are lots of specific examples and quotes from the organizers’ internal emails on BlueSky. The arrogance of these guys was appalling.

These Hugo dossiers are disgusting.
“Author openly describes themselves as queer, nonbibary, trans… I don’t know how that will play in China (I suspect less than well)”
They wrote that in writing.
…
The gaslighting the Hugos organizers did, telling everyone they were stupid for not getting that the works were i eligible due to “the rules” and it turns out the authors criticized a human right violation once, or ate Tibetan food, or said a Taiwanese Batman hotel looked cool.

Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford wrote a detailed dissection of the whole mess. Not recommended unless you enjoy lengthy discussions of bad behavior.

So what will they do to untangle this clusterfuck? I’d recommend firing everyone involved and burning their precious constitution to the ground, and rewrite the whole thing. I have no connection to any of it, so ignore me, let’s see what they’re actually doing.

Worldcon Intellectual Property, the nonprofit that runs the World Science Fiction Society, announced resignations in the immediate aftermath to the scandal on January 30, Publishers Weekly reported. Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee resigned from their respective positions, with the former censured for his public Facebook comments. Chengdu Worldcon administration member Ben Yalow, who co-chaired the 2023 event and was set to work on this year’s event in Glasgow, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow staff page. He and his fellow co-chair Chen Shi were censured for their actions.

“I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress,” the current chair of Glasgow 2024, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, said in a statement on February 14. She added that the committee would be taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the awards.” While the upcoming Worldcon has apologized for the failings of the previous year’s convention, the 2023 iteration of the event has not directly apologized for its handling of the awards. Vulture reached out to the Hugos for comment.

Maybe also never hold the event in a country with an ugly repressive government, too? (Never again in the US if Trump gets elected…maybe not even if he isn’t.) I hope this is all fixed by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.