A very polite inquiry

I received an email asking about eye evolution.

hi dear myers, im a turkish student. i study EEE but i have a deep profound curiousity towards evolution. i know that you mastered in evo devo. even though i didnt read any of your books since i live in turkey and could not find them.. i wrote an article in my own way concerning evolution and tried to express my feelings. im learning english by myself, i didnt want to use translator so you can see my sincerity and effort. to be honest i just wanted to express my feelings and get some advices and opinions from you, im just confused..

Here is the article i have written:

That’s perfectly acceptable English, so he shouldn’t be shy. However, as you’ll quickly see, he seems to think “article” is a synonym for “paragraph”. It’s not much of an article. I agree, he’s confused.

One thing about evolutionary biology that concerns me and feels unable to perceive is cells and organisms acting like as though they know what to do when constructing an organ.

That’s a common and fundamental misconception, the reading of intent and purpose into a series of events. Cells don’t “know” what they are doing — their genes are responding in a mechanical way to the environment. So error #1: trying to impose teleology on the system.

although it happens through blindwatchmaker situation, i still cannot grasp. for instance, an eye is a complex system and it feels like even though some may say it is a trial and error state throughout the evolutionary process it seems it happened with permission of a creator..

“Complexity”…that always comes up, and it’s irrelevant. Chance processes can easily produce complexity, and trial and error is an effective (if wasteful) way to build an eye. Natural selection and drift don’t need permission. They happen whether you like it or not.

it is still unclear to me a system like an eye whether it can build itself in such a short amount of time. cells behave as if they know which part they contribute whenever building an immense and flawless eye.

What is a “short amount of time”? Developmentally, an eye assembles itself in hours, days, weeks, or months, depending on the species, using nothing but physics and chemistry, and no one has seen the finger of a deity coming down to nudge cells into place. Again, it’s not about the cells “knowing”.

Oh, wait, he means such a short amount of time on an evolutionary scale? Silly. I’ve seen a zebrafish eye assemble in less than 24 hours, so I’m not that impressed with an eye organizing over hundreds of thousands of generation. It’s pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, and there’s much to learn about the process taking place from the pre-Cambrian to 400 thousand years ago, but it’s not an intimidatingly difficult thing to accomplish. It’s well within the power of evolution, and we have examples of the intermediate steps.

some may say there are genes such as HOX which responsible for the case i mentioned, its still unclear to me ,since i approach the problems as a philosophical problem..by saying “approaching as a philo problem” i meant digging deeper the origins of it..

i hope i could transfered my inquiries…

Oh god. Everyone babbles about Hox genes even if they know nothing about them — this is a shortcut the writer is using to pretend to knowing something about molecular genetics. He doesn’t. You know, you could at least say Pax genes instead of Hox, since Pax is more directly relevant to eye development. Hox genes are patterning genes that define segment identity along the body (or limb) axis, while Pax genes are involved in tissue differentiation and organogenesis.

It’s especially bad to trot out the sciencey word “Hox” just before telling me you approach eye evolution as a “philosopphical problem.” I don’t care about your philosophy, I want to know about the material process, with evidence. Philosophy in this case is simply his efforts to make post-hoc rationalizations for his preconceptions — he’s giving philosophy a bad name.

Anyone else remember Brian Wansink?

About 9 years ago, I posted a series of articles about the Wansink scandal — he was a well-known food researcher at Cornell who built a profitable reputation out of fudging data, p-hacking, and creating phony food myths that would “go viral”. All of his training was in marketing, not science. If you read any of those ghastly commercial web sites that have a long series of cheesy click-bait ads at the end, you can find that some his dishonest claims still live on. His career doesn’t — he abruptly announced his retirement as the investigations were heating up, and to this day suffered no other consequences, other than early retirement, for poisoning the scientific literature on the psychology of food with garbage.

I just ran into a good summary of his career. It’s been a good long while, I’d almost forgotten him.

The lesson I take away from this is that marketing is not a legitimate discipline — it’s a framework for more effecting lying, and we ought not to be encouraging people to study it, and we should mistrust any conclusions drawn from their work.

For example, Gad Saad hasn’t been run out of town on a rail yet, but he should be. He’s a marketing professor who has put up an evolutionary psychology facade. Don’t trust anything he says.

Please clap

The president asked people to pledge allegiance to him, personally, begged them to cheat in the elections, and told them to go to hell if they don’t vote.

I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way—I don’t care if I’m registered or not—I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.

This is what happens when the cult leader fears that his followers are beginning to peel away.

November is not going to be a fun month.

A suggestion for commenters

I’ve warned Morales about this, but it applies to everyone: if you find your comments are dominating the conversation, if there is a whole series of comments one after the other by you, if the comment section is nothing but you talking, STOP. Slow down. Think before commenting. Try to assemble something coherent and substantial before clicking on “post”.

I gave Morales the guideline that his comments shouldn’t make up more than 20% of a thread (and he seems to be following the suggestion). That’s a good guideline for everyone — the goal is to have some healthy back and forth in the discussion.

How dare you use variables in your math!

Tucker Carlson interviewed some random guy who builds kilns for a living — that could be interesting, except it turns out this Jess Elofson guy doesn’t talk about art or potter, but instead whines about algebra. He doesn’t get it. He thinks it’s a stupid, nonsensical procedure where you pointlessly mix letters with numbers. He’s an idiot, and so is Tucker.

“Why does algebra put letters into numbers?” Carlson asked.

“I think just to f**k with you,” Elofson said.

“So you deal with math in your job every day. You’ve already, I think, demonstrated your grasp of math is high”

“I mean, functional math. Yeah, yeah, for sure.”

“Well, if you can build a wood-fired kiln, you understand math,” Carlson said. “But you didn’t add letters to numbers in the process of doing that?”

“That’s the weirdest thing,” Elofson replied. “Nowhere did I find any letters in my math to calculate the size and structural integrity of a catenary arch. Isn’t that weird? Oh, that was weird. Because every math teacher was always like, you need to know some algebra. I’ve yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra.”

“Actually?” Carlson asked.

“Have you?”

“Yeah, but I mean, I live in a fake world,” the former Fox News host said.

“That’s why you use fake math with letters. Congratulations to everybody out there in the matrix. Good job. You’re good little goy slaves,” Elofson said.

“That’s amazing.”

I use algebra automatically all the time, and even teach people how to use it. You can’t do physics or chemistry or biology or cooking or art or construction without it. How does he calculate how much brick he needs given a certain size of kiln he’s building, to use a simple example?

I don’t think Elofson’s grasp of math is at all high. He wouldn’t meet the minimal requirements for admission to my university. But then, I live in the real, physical world that requires some understanding of relationships and numbers and proportions and ratios, unlike these two guys who can get by on elementary anti-semitism.

American education is failing, given the example of these two gomers.

Cat and familiar

Here’s a fairly typical view of what I see when I walk into my office every morning.

The pink thing is a knitted octopus tied to a leather strap, and it’s very, very important. It is the evil cat’s one toy, the one thing she has fixated on since we first adopted her. She often talks to it. It’s weird: she will yowl and babble and have long conversations with it. Some nights I’ll be sleeping in my bed and wake up to hear these eerie noises in the living room or kitchen or wherever she has dragged her little pink pal — they’re more than just “meows,” they have a kind of grammar and structure and contain sounds we don’t hear from her in any other context.

I should probably record it sometime, because I think we’re actually hearing the dark tongue of Hell.

A call to action for the post-Trump era

Blecch.

The latest architectural horrors dictated at us by a man with no taste is the Trump Arch, which is being built real soon now with no authorization from any of the officials in charge or preserving the city and its history.

The proposed arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington, including renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, building a huge new White House ballroom, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on X, “befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.”

Along with the announcement on X, Burgum posted artistic mockups of the planned 250-foot-tall (76-meter) memorial arch, which will stand between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Those capitalization choices were Burgum’s, which should put you on alert. Morons think that capitalizing Crap makes it majestic.

The administration really is just rushing ahead with Trump’s nightmare vision.

Historic preservation experts have long criticized the Trump administration for seeming to rush the arch approval process, including by moving to weaken protections for historic sites altogether. This latest development raises concerns that the White House seeks to sidestep the process, which it denies.

“Work will begin that does not require approval, but rather helps in the process,” the White House told NPR in a statement on Friday. “We will of course continue on our path of seeking final approval from all applicable entities.”

Surprise: they won’t. You know it and they know it.

Our capitol is going to be wrecked and left with cheap glittering gilt garbage, demolished historical sites, and hideous monuments to an asshole’s ego. He is going to die, eventually, and we’re all going to be left with the clean up. What shall we do?

Simple solution: BLOW IT ALL UP.

The author has been touring Germany, and seeing what the German solution to the ugly history of the Third Reich has been. Hitler’s bunker has been paved over and is a parking lot. The site of the Nuremberg rallies has been allowed to crumble and “looked like garbage.” They dynamited the Berghof and “flattened Göring’s house, Bormann’s house and the rest of the Nazi colony, hauled away the rubble and planted trees over the site.” And, of course:

Unfortunately, the latest German elections suggest that there’s more yet to be done.

Blundell has specific recommendations for what the next administration must do. Unfortunately it’s a long list.

Believe in the Directive. Not a review. Not a blue-ribbon commission on the future of the ballroom. A firm belief, stated in the campaign and executed on day one, that a monument built by a President to himself is not a public work and does not get grandfathered in as one. Germany was handed this belief at gunpoint. America has to choose it.

The arch comes down, or never goes up. If it’s excavation, fill the hole. If it’s steel, cut it. If it’s finished, do what the Seventh Army did at Nuremberg and let the cameras roll. It sits between Lincoln and the war dead. It was built for “me.” There is no version of American reconciliation that leaves it standing.

The name comes off everything. The Trump Kennedy Center reverts to the Kennedy Center before lunch on inauguration day. Any ballroom, any coin, any banner, any federal building, any portrait hung by executive fiat. Street signs came down across Germany in 1946. This is the American version, and it takes a pen.

The ballroom is the Eagle’s Nest. Ninety thousand square feet of gold leaf where the East Wing used to be, with a bunker underneath. You can raze it and rebuild the East Wing. Or you can do what Bavaria did and turn it into something so ordinary it can’t be worshipped. A visitor centre. A public cafeteria. A daycare for federal workers. Serve the pretzels in it. Either way, no one is ever allowed to say his name in that room with reverence.

Restore the referees. Reinstate an independent Commission of Fine Arts and a National Capital Planning Commission that doesn’t answer to a staff secretary. Repeal the beauty order. Write into law that no sitting President may initiate a monument to himself, ever, which is a sentence nobody thought America would need.

Preserve the evidence of the victims. The detention records ICE stopped publishing. The names of the people who died in custody. The facilities. The Germans preserved Dachau’s ovens because the alternative was letting grass grow over them. Keep the camps as museums and tear down the arch. That’s the whole formula.

Trump’s people will scream that it’s petty. That it’s revenge. That it’s erasing history. It isn’t. Germany erased Hitler’s monuments and became the country with the best memory in Europe. You erase the shrine so there’s room for the museum. Nobody in Bavaria is confused about what happened on the Obersalzberg because the Berghof is gone. They know precisely because it’s gone, and there’s a documentation centre where a tour bus used to park.

I approve. Let’s elect people who will have the stamina to implement this plan.

Pilfering the NIH for missile-money

It’s been one of those days — long boring meeting that ate up most of my morning, and then off to the dentist. I have a cavity. I’m getting it fixed in November. My patience is a little thin today.

So this news has me shaking mad.

On September 3, Bhattacharya’s NIH signed an “interagency agreement” with Hegseth’s Department of War, transferring Congressionally-mandated NIH patient research funding into Trump’s failing war machine.

That guy doesn’t get enough attention, or hatred: he’s a rotten anti-vax grifter who coasted into a cushy position as head of the NIH on RFK jr’s coattails. He’s despicable in every way possible, and is recognized as an incompetent stooge for the Trump administration. And now, after cheerfully starving American scientists of research funds, this guy is stealing more from the budget to fund the pointless, failed war on Iran.

The U.S. Department of Defense already has a pretty healthy budget compared to the National Institutes of Health. For fiscal year 2027, the Trump administration has requested a $1.5 trillion budget for the DoD—about 36 times the budget that it’s requested for the NIH. Yet, in the first week of August, the Pentagon and the NIH quietly established an agreement that would allow even more funds—potentially billions of dollars worth—to go from the NIH to the Pentagon.

Why would the director of the NIH voluntarily cut his own budget to feed a doomed war in Iran? Because he’s a hack, a tool who only holds his position as long as he is obedient.

I have a long list of people I want to see queued up for the guillotine once Trump is out of power. Trump is first, obviously. RFK jr is second. But Jay Bhattacharya is third in line, and I will be cheering as I dip an handkerchief in his blood for a souvenir. Those three bear the most responsibility for the destruction of American science, although they also have many helpers.

No mercy.

You know Fall is here when…

…the crabapples drop.

This is the path I take to work, which is bracketed by some crabapple trees on either side, and at this time of year it is covered with little red crabapples.

It gets swept occasionally, but those are extraordinarily productive trees, and my walk is through that squishy, slippery mess. I tend to step in the barer spots, so I kind of dance my way across it, but bicyclists go straight through the middle, leaving a trail of flattened apples. What you can’t see in this photo is the sickly-sweet smell of rotting sour apples, or the tremendous swarms of flies and wasps gorging themselves in a gluttonous orgy.

It’s not pleasant, but soon enough it will be replaced sheets of snow over ice. I prefer the rotten apples.