An arachnologist fantasizing about summer in February

I have been daydreaming about doing some collecting trips this summer — I have been seduced by the exotic opportunities of tromping around the southern part of Minnesota, place like Pipestone and maybe even making forays into South Dakota and Iowa. Yeah! Get wild with it!

And then, the American Arachnological Society announces the location of their 2024 meeting. It’s going to be in Chetumal, Mexico.

Chetumal is located in the south of the state of Quintana Roo, on the border with Belize. It’s a small town surrounded by mangrove swamps and forest, lagoons such as Bacalar, home to numerous chelicerates in addition to Mayan remains. It faces a gigantic bay that is a reserve for manatees and is located at the gateway to the Caribbean.

“home to numerous chelicerates” isn’t normal advertising copy for a travel destination, but you’ve got to know your audience. Think of the spiders you could find! Suddenly, the south of Minnesota looks tepid and boring.

I have some trepidations. I have zero confidence in airlines anymore, after that catastrophic collapse of my last trip to AAS (the meeting was in upstate NY, couldn’t even get there because airlines kept canceling flights, ended up sitting in the Minneapolis airport for a couple of days). I don’t know if I can scrape any money out of my university travel budget after that expensive debacle.

On the plus side, I do have some Patreon savings I could use — and of course I’d have to fill my Patreon page with travel photos of beautiful Chetumal. You know, the usual touristy things of closeups of spiders in the mangrove swamps. I’ve never been on the glitzy side of scientific conferences, so this might be my last chance. And it’s Mexico! I love Mexico!

So now I begin a period of indecisive agonizing, to go or not to go. I may end up looking at my budget and deciding it’s not possible, but as long as I haven’t done any accounting, I can dream.

Today is a feeding day

Every Tuesday and Friday, I hang out with the spiders and give them flies and mealworms to eat. I am a good and supportive boss. Unfortunately, the one thing I expect of them is that they produce egg sacs for me, and they haven’t been doing their job. I provide humidifiers, I maintain a strict July-like light schedule, I keep them warm, and what do they give me? Nada. Bupkis.

I’m beginning to think I might need to modify the incentives here.

Except…it would be counterproductive to do that to the females, and most of the male are already dead due to natural causes (which, for spiders, includes cannibalism). It’s a little bit frustrating.

This is not February

According to the official date, it is. This is not what February in Minnesota should look like, though.

That’s what late March might look like, or better yet, April. Fog and naked trees and patches of dirty snow are not at all appropriate for this time of year.

Have I been dislocated to Kansas?

If I were to compare anyone to a parasite, Thomas Friedman would be near the top of my list

Twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman was a standing joke for his conversations with imaginary cab drivers, his ever-retreating predictions of imminent victory in Iraq, his toxic metaphors, his faux sincerity that everyone could see right through…but he had his sinecure at the NY Times, he spent every Sunday doing the rounds of the pundit talk circuit, he was the darling of every saggy-jowled talk show host. He’s been doing this for decades without justice slapping him upside the head. For all I know (he may be writing and talking, but I’m not reading or listening) he could still be talking about achieving an honorable peace in Iraq in just six more months.

Except now he has latched onto a brand new bloody war and is cheerleading for that from the sidelines. This is all we need, more conservative assholes flatulently gassing the body politic with new poisons and new bad ideas and more demands that we treat a sociological/cultural/religious/political conflict with 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs. Here’s his new metaphor, filtered through a column by Ben Burgis, so you don’t have to give any clicks to the NY Times.

According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’

Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.

We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.

Ugh. What the ever-loving fuck? The Times just published an opinion piece calling for the incineration of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and no one stopped to suggest that maybe comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects and calling for their fiery extermination was a bad idea? Of course not. This was the same vicious plan he had decades ago, and no one in the media seems to be able to notice how that turned out.

I have a son who, along with a lot of other soldiers, is going to be doing a tour of duty somewhere in that region (they keep the details from us) in the Spring. I’d like to hope that it is a peace-keeping mission to maintain stability there, and would rather it not become a hostile sweep to exterminate parasitic invertebrates, that is, the native population of human beings in those countries.

This is some real super-villain shit, you know

Neuralink has begun human trials, we think. The problem is that all we know about it is an announcement made by head jackass Musk on Twitter, which isn’t exactly a reputable source. That doesn’t stop Nature from commenting on it. I’m not used to seeing rumors published in that journal, and if you think about it, this is basically a condemnation of the experiment.

…there is frustration about a lack of detailed information. There has been no confirmation that the trial has begun, beyond Musk’s tweet. The main source of public information on the trial is a study brochure inviting people to participate in it. But that lacks details such as where implantations are being done and the exact outcomes that the trial will assess, says Tim Denison, a neuroengineer at the University of Oxford, UK.

The trial is not registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, an online repository curated by the US National Institutes of Health. Many universities require that researchers register a trial and its protocol in a public repository of this type before study participants are enrolled. Additionally, many medical journals make such registration a condition of publication of results, in line with ethical principles designed to protect people who volunteer for clinical trials. Neuralink, which is headquartered in Fremont, California, did not respond to Nature’s request for comment on why it has not registered the trial with the site.

So…no transparency, no summary of the goals or methods of the experiment, and no ethical oversight. All anyone knows is that Elon Musk’s team sawed open someone’s skull and stuck some wires and electronics directly into their brain, for purposes unknown, and with little hope of seeing the outcome published in a reputable journal. OK.

Besides the science shenanigans, I’m also curious to know about what kind of NDAs and agreements to never ever sue Neuralink the patients/victims had to sign. There has got to be some wild legal gyrations going on, too.

Self-assessment time!

We’ve finished the third week of classes, I need to pause and think about my eco-devo class. You know, teachers do this: a class isn’t a set of railroad tracks taking us to a destination, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to reassess.

My goals with the course are clear. We’re studying a fairly new interdisciplinary science, we’ve got a good solid textbook, I’ve got a dozen smart students, let’s explore. I explicitly want to avoid turning it into a lecture course, where I just stand up and tell them what they need to know, so I constrained myself with some serious guardrails. I only lecture once a week, on Monday, and I don’t just tell them the answers, but give them a lot of questions that they have to answer as a group on Wednesday. I also give them a primary research paper to take apart on Friday.

Does it all work? Yes, mostly.

It wrecks my weekend, though. My Monday lectures have to cover some complex material while focusing the students on relevant questions. I can’t sink comfortably into a flurry of detail, as would be easy to do, I have to bring out the broader issues while simultaneously fleshing out examples with an appropriate amount of detail. This week we’re discussing developmental plasticity, for instance, and while the textbook sings a siren song of numerous examples that I could just recite, I have to provide context and ideas and questions that will motivate discussion on Wednesdays. I think this part of the class is going OK.

I think the students are doing the actual learning part of the course on Wednesdays. This is the day I do things like put them into groups, put stuff on the whiteboards, show that they are actually engaging with the material they’re being exposed to. It’s all on the students, and these are all smart students, so I’d really have to be bad at my job to screw this part up. I prime them with a few ideas that they get at the start of the week, and then let them go.

Fridays…I’ve got to work on my Friday class. I’ve got two problems here. One is that I appoint two students to lead the discussion of a research paper, which is fine, except that these danged ambitious students charge in to do all the work. I tell them to split it up, delegate, and put the rest of the class to work figuring out what is going on in the paper, but no, they try to do it all, and then the whole class sits quietly listening along. I may have to change how I organize those days.

The second problem is me. For instance, last week the theme was about the importance of integrating multiple perspectives to answer complex question, going beyond reductionism. And then I picked what I thought was a good paper that did exactly that, trying to identify the ecological factors behind snake evolution. It was too much. It started with a phylogenetic analysis, then applied a principal component analysis to skull morphology (uh-oh, bio students don’t get much experience with PCA here), added a bit of development/heterochrony work, and then tied all of those approaches together in a nice bit of synthesis. Cool, but too much for some undergrads to handle all at once. I am challenging them, at least, but I think I’d better take next week’s paper down a notch. While my goal was to make them read primary research, maybe I’ll have to ease them in with some review papers for a while, and give their brains a chance to release some pressure.

When I say it all mostly works, that’s entirely from my perspective. Maybe the students hate it, but because they’re all polite Midwestern people, they’re too nice to say it. I’m going to have to put together some kind of student evaluation form to hand out next week so I can find out if I’ve gone off the rails.

This is where I’m at on a Saturday morning at the end of the third week of classes, and now it’s time to immerse myself in background reading and lecture prep. One source I’m finding extremely useful for this course is Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, which is a wonderfully rich source of ideas…but also would have undergraduate brains melting out their ears if I tried making this their textbook. One of my aspirations for this course is that they should be able to emerge from it at the end of the semester and be prepared to read West-Eberhard’s book without having a nervous breakdown.

That would be a fun graduate-level class to teach. Also about ten times more work than this one.

Bronze pipework

This big skinny beast is living right over an electrical outlet in my dining room, and I needed to plug something in…I decided not to. I didn’t think it worthwhile to disturb them right away, I’ll give them a chance to move later.

It’s Pholcus, either phalangioides or manueli but they didn’t turn to look at me so I could tell. Maybe I’ll get a look at their face later.

I do like the long lean legs that look like bronze or copper piping, though.

Chris Rufo figured out how to erase part of his history

If nothing else, this is an accomplishment. I know Chris Rufo as a shill for the Discovery Institute — that anti-science, anti-evolution think-tank running on the fumes of rich conservatives’ money, pumping out nonsense about Intelligent Design creationism and fronted by pompous, but ignorant, pseudo-philosophers. If I had that in my background, I’d be deeply ashamed and would want to bury it as deeply as possible. I’d change my name, move to a new city, deny knowing all my old friends, etc. I’d dread someone uncovering my embarrassing past, forcing me to change my name and move again. I’d desperately desire a magic eraser to blot out that past shame.

Chris Rufo has done it! Here’s a prominent article about Chris Rufo that doesn’t even mention the Discovery Institute or creationism! How did he do it?

It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is associate with something even more repulsively stupid than creationism, and Rufo has managed to slather himself with filth so grossly disgusting that there’s no point in even mentioning his relatively minor dabblings in ignorance. He’s buddying up with a site called Aporia.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

Now he’s all tangled up with Bo Winegard.

Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in student media.

In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.

Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).”

As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalist, according to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.

Also, Noah Carl!

Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.

Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.

One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.

Now mix in Emil Kirkegaard.

Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.

These are the writers and pseudo-scientists Rufo recommends to others.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”

Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.

Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.

Aporia is contemptible racist garbage, and Rufo is promoting it. Rufo is a nobody, a hack with no serious background in science (or anything intellectual at all, for that matter) so sure, creationism, racism, they’re both popular ideas among uneducated ideologues, so he’ll push them — he hasn’t get the education to understand how terrible they are.

On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.

“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”

Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.

By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”

Keep in mind that Rufo has been elevated to high advisory positions in the Florida government, and is making decisions about the universities in that state. Nothing in his background has prepared him to make competent decisions on much of any of the institutions he now has his thumb on.

Oh, he does have one qualification that doesn’t bother me at all but might alienate him from his fans. He has a Masters Degree…in Liberal Arts. Work on erasing that from your CV, guy.