Jesus would have bombed those boats!

The NY Times did one of those things they’re so fond of: take an unscientific and inadequate sample of a subpopulation of voters, and ask them what they think of a recent policy decision. This time, they asked 6 Republicans what they think of bombing Venezualan boats. I’m not sure what the point is, except to let us know that Republicans are assholes.

Edward Padron, 67, thinks in principle that killing people in boats is OK, but killing survivors is wrong.

“I don’t agree with the second shot,” Mr. Padron said. “I do agree with them being stopped.”

Warning: Mr Padron holds the moral high ground in this group. It’s all downhill from there.

Erwin McKone, 55, has reservations about killing low-level guys in boats.

“If we were serious about the cartels, we would probably try to cut off the head of the snake,” he said, speculating that many of those who have been killed are “poor Venezuelans that see this as an opportunity to feed their families.”

I suspect he’d be fine if we just openly declared war on Venezuela.

Charles Vaughters, 25, favors killing alleged drug traffickers without much evidence.

“Drug traffickers are criminals who rape, murder and kill people, and they are dedicated to getting the product to Americans,” Mr. Vaughters said. “They don’t care if it harms Americans. I don’t think we should be feeling much sympathy.”

Rachel Uecker, 53, has a pragmatic perspective.

“​​If we take them to the courts, we’re going to have to pay for that and support them in prison,” she said. “If they’re bringing drugs into our country, I don’t care who gets rid of them.”

Brian Kozlowski, 41, wants more violence.

Brian D. Kozlowski, who is a strong Trump supporter, said the U.S. military should be used “more proactively to keep Americans safe.” He blamed the Biden administration for what he described as not doing enough to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country.

He’s a lawyer. Let’s get rid of that troubling concept of presumed innocence.

But my very favorite example of twisted moral reasoning comes from Naomi Villalba (no age given), who cites the Bible as justification.

Ms. Villalba said the second strike was also justified, and she does not believe the United States is indiscriminately targeting boats.

“They should have done that strike regardless,” she said. “Every human being does have value, but if you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I think that you should die.”

She compared these strikes to a story in the Bible, when Jesus healed someone on a Sunday, contradicting religious rules that forbid work on that day. Some laws are worth breaking for the betterment of mankind, she said, just like the biblical story was trying to show.

Well, yeah. If Jesus could break one of the ten commandments to heal someone, then Pete Hegseth can also break one of the commandments to murder two people clinging to wreckage in the ocean. Same thing. Every human being does have value, but….

Does being caught up in something detrimental to society also include evangelical Christianity and MAGA?

I take back my disparagement of the NY Times’ methods of taking the pulse of the country. I did learn something after all.

Merry MAGA Xmas

It’s a typical scenario this time of year: Ol’ Grandpa has a festive wreath on his door, delivery driver drops off a package at his door, Ol’ Grandpa emerges to call ICE and 911 because the driver speaks Spanish.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa explains that this is Wyoming, not Colorado, while the driver says “thank you,” and just tries to get in his car and leave, which Ol’ Racist Grandpa doesn’t allow.

I think someone ought to call the police on Ol’ Racist Grandpa.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa needs to be arrested and fined for wasting the time of 911 services.

Ol’ Racist Grandpa needs to be retired to an old folks’ home, before his hatred hurts someone.

I hope Ol’ Racist Grandpa isn’t allowed to have a gun in his home, although this is Wyoming, they probably allow it.

MAGA has really poisoned the country, hasn’t it?

Wanna see a beautiful fossil?

I know that a pile of bones of Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops gets all the attention and popular press, but what gives me a thrill is seeing a well-preserved Cambrian invertebrate, especially if it represents an early developmental stage. Here’s a real beauty, the phosphatized larva of Youti yuanshi, from Yunnan, China.

YKLP 12387. a, External scanning electron microscopy, right side. Damage to posterior epidermis exposes lining of perivisceral cavity, demonstrating blind gut. b, External scanning electron microscopy, left side. c,g–j, Median virtual dissection from X-ray computed tomography (XCT) data (c), showing location of transverse slices intersecting digestive glands (g,i) and transverse membrane (h,j). d, Semi-manual segmentation of internal chambers from XCT data, viewed from the left side. Dorsolateral aspects of the peripheral cavity are omitted for clarity. e,f, Virtual dissection parallel to coronal plane, looking ventrally (e) and dorsally (f), showing digestive glands, pericardial sinus, transverse membranes within perivisceral cavity, and oblique membranes within peripheral cavity. g–j, XCT sections at positions indicated in c at position of digestive glands (g,i) and at position of ventrolateral lacunae and transverse membrane (h,j). g,h, Sections close to the anterior trunk, reflecting segments at late developmental stage. i,j, Sections close to the posterior trunk, showing superior preservation of internal tissue. k, Segmentation of internal chambers from XCT data, viewed from the dorsal perspective at anterior, middle and posterior trunk. Aspects of peripheral cavity are omitted for clarity. a, appendage; cb, central body of brain; db, dorsolateral body of brain; dia, diagenetic grain; dg, digestive gland; dm, dorsal membrane; dp, dorsal projection; dv, dorsal vessel; fb, frontal body of brain; irr, irregular chamber; lig, ligament; om, oblique membrane; pc, pericardial sinus; pph, peripheral cavity; pn, perineural sinus; pv, perivisceral cavity; tm, transverse membrane; vl, ventrolateral sinus; vv, ventral vessel. Scale bars, 200 μm.

Superficially, it looks like a grub you might dig up in your garden, but this was found in marine sediments and was less than 4mm long, so you’d be unlikely to find anything like it today. It’s from a paper titled Organ systems of a Cambrian euarthropod larva by Martin R. Smith, Emma J. Long, Alavya Dhungana, Katherine J. Dobson, Jie Yang & Xiguang Zhang. The specimen is so well preserved that it can be studied at the level of organs and organ systems.

The Cambrian radiation of euarthropods can be attributed to an adaptable body plan. Sophisticated brains and specialized feeding appendages, which are elaborations of serially repeated organ systems and jointed appendages, underpin the dominance of Euarthropoda in a broad suite of ecological settings. The origin of the euarthropod body plan from a grade of vermiform taxa with hydrostatic lobopodous appendages (‘lobopodian worms’) is founded on data from Burgess Shale-type fossils. However, the compaction associated with such preservation obscures internal anatomy. Phosphatized microfossils provide a complementary three-dimensional perspective on early crown group euarthropods, but few lobopodians. Here we describe the internal and external anatomy of a three-dimensionally preserved euarthropod larva with lobopods, midgut glands and a sophisticated head. The architecture of the nervous system informs the early configuration of the euarthropod brain and its associated appendages and sensory organs, clarifying homologies across Panarthropoda. The deep evolutionary position of Youti yuanshi gen. et sp. nov. informs the sequence of character acquisition during arthropod evolution, demonstrating a deep origin of sophisticated haemolymph circulatory systems, and illuminating the internal anatomical changes that propelled the rise and diversification of this enduringly successful group.

Here’s a helpful diagram to help sort out what’s going on inside the worm.

a, Organ system disposition in sagittal view. Dotted lines denote location of sections shown in e,f. b, Organ system disposition in transverse view. c,d, Head, from lateral perspective (c) and as medial transverse section (d). e,f, Transverse sections through trunk at location of digestive glands (e) and transverse membranes (f). g–j, Coronal sections through head, from ventral (g) to dorsal (j) planes. Colour scheme as in Fig. 1.

Most interesting is the comparative analysis with other Cambrian organisms, especially with regards to the organization of the nervous system.

Phylogenetic analysis situates Youti yuanshi within the AOPK clade containing Anomalocaris, Opabinia, Pambdelurion and Kerygmachela. Under our preferred model, the circumoral brain ring of cycloneuralians corresponds to the panarthropod prosocerebrum, which innervates the first appendage pair (onychophoran antennae, tardigrade stylets or euarthropod labrum). We interpret the archicerebrum as a distinct development dorsal to the prosocerebrum, associated with sensory receptors: specifically the eyes, and the dorsal projections (Kerygmachela rostral spines, tardigrade cirri, crustacean frontal filaments or anterior paired projections of stem euarthropods; homology with the anteriormost onychophoran lip papillae is plausible, but may not be parsimonious). The taxa depicted in this figure are selected in order to depict the evolutionary context of Youti; the relationships shown are recovered under all analytical conditions.

Over half a billion years ago, the oceans were filled with diverse wormlike animals that were exploring different arrangements of their squishy bits — it was a complex ecology and every individual discovered should fill us with awe. Each of these forms has a deeper history that we need more fossils to decipher.

‘Tis the season for office holiday parties

The science and math party is on Monday, and I had to figure out what to bring. I don’t want to be the lazy drone who brings a six-pack or beer or some cookies from the store (there’s nothing wrong with my peers who do that, I’m aiming for just one step higher), but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time on something more challenging, so I googled for a traditional, simple, healthy, vegetarian food associated with the holidays. My search returned something called a green bean casserole — it’s common enough that I’ve heard of that as a typical midwestern food, and it really is pretty basic.

One catch: although it’s supposedly traditional, I’ve never had it, let alone made it. I’m a bit like an alien trying to fit in, but I decided to try it out. It’s just green beans in a matrix of canned mushroom soup, with a few little extras. So I whipped up a concoction from a recipe this afternoon to see if I could produce something edible…a test run. Then I put it before my guinea pig test animal wife to see if it was OK.

This is the end result.

She’s never had it before either, but she and I managed to consume it. I have no idea if it tastes like an authentic green bean casserole, but I guess I’ll try it on Monday. Maybe all the native born midwesterners will recoil in horror, but my midwestern ancestors didn’t rise from the graveyard to curse me. Yet.

You need some more spider information

We just struggled to figure out how to put fitted sheets on a split-top bed, so I’m too tired to do it. Here are a few videos to do the job.

This first one is looking at spiders from an evolutionary perspective — it’s at a basic level, since the first thing it has to explain is that spiders aren’t insects.

This second one is more about spider cognition. It has a similar problem, since what it says isn’t really new. I took a grad-level physiology course from Michael Land in 1980 that focused almost entirely on jumping spiders, and we talked about similar things.

That course was the highlight of my first year of grad school. I guess it’s not surprising that I returned to spiders here in my dotage.

Krampus lives here

It’s Krampusnacht!

This is appropriate in my household, for a couple of reasons. OK, one reason.

  • We are having our new fancy adjustable bed moved in!
  • This meant that we had to clear a path from the driveway door to our bedroom. Our house is a bit twisty on the inside, so I had to wonder how we got our current bed in here, almost 25 years ago, when I was the mover.
  • We are a little concerned about our very own Krampus, the evil cat. She’s going to be locked in the basement all morning, because with strangers going in and out, we don’t know what wicked chaos she will unleash.
  • I got a bit distracted, because when we lifted the mattress off our box frame — which was genuinely a box, the interior walled off top, bottom, and on three sides, I discovered the most amazingly elaborate cobweb filling the interior space. I’m impressed. It could not have been a rich hunting ground, but somehow this pholcid, or generations of pholcids, made it a comfortable and fancy home.

The movers are at the door! I’d better show them the way.

Streaming series belong in the upside-down

I tried, despite my misgivings. I tried watching this new season of Stranger Things.

I made it a half hour before giving up.

I have noticed that inevitably these expensive streaming series that suck up your time for 8 or 10 or 12 episodes in their first season decline precipitously if the powers that be decide to give them another year. They’ve already had over 8 hours to tell their story, and they couldn’t do it? So now you give them 40 or 50 hours to stretch out the story? If they couldn’t do it the first time, they’re going to definitely fail the fifth time. If I’m going to watch something, I prefer to search in the movies section, where we have directors and producers who comprehend the economies of narratives. The blight of the streaming series has produced a generation of storytellers who only know how to dither and babble and stretch out profits for as long as possible.

I know I’m old, but that’s how I felt about Stranger Things even before I took a taste. Lowest possible expectations.

But even setting that aside, the show was terrible to a degree that you can only get with a massive budget ($480 million!!!) and the confidence that comes from building on a foundation that has churned out 4 previous years of incoherence. This one has another handicap: a massive, tangled cast of bad actors. They started out as child actors who got by with innocence and fresh approaches, but now they’re all gawky young adults who never had to take their craft seriously, and it shows. They’re in this to milk one more payday out of the franchise before they age out totally.

That’s what killed the first episode for me. I couldn’t stand watching these actors trying to awkwardly reprise a children’s dark fantasy story. It wasn’t much of a story, either: evil monster Vecna is scheming to turn our world into a hellscape, and somehow the same gang of kids have to frustrate him, probably by splitting up and doing magical psychic things.

No thanks. Nope. I’m outta here.

Mission for our next president: institute the damnatio memoriae

In yet another pointless sop to his ego, the president has renamed the Institute of Peace after himself.

The Trump administration has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after President Donald Trump and has planted the president’s name on the organization’s headquarters despite an ongoing fight over the institute’s control.

It’s the latest twist in a seesaw court battle over who controls the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on peace initiatives. It was an early target of the Department of Government Efficiency this year.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it renamed the organization to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” The new name could be seen on its building, which is near the State Department.

This is the first I’ve heard of the US Institute of Peace — apparently it was founded by Reagan, has floundered ineffectively for decades, and was recently gutted by DOGE, so I can’t be too wound up about this renaming. It’s still yet another transparent ploy by Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and I’m disgusted by the game he’s playing.

Our next president had better be motivated to expunge the Trump name from every building and every document, unless it is to damn him to hell. Our national shame is being advertised everywhere, and I hate it.

I see presentiments of my future fate

Sometimes, students earn a failing grade. I hand back essays or exams with zeroes on them, and inform students that they aren’t passing the course…and suggest that we meet so we can work out the problem. At the end of the semester I might log into the Peoplesoft database and put an F in a little square box, and the students are clear about who’s putting the black blot on their transcript — it’s me, not them. So I still worry that they might hate me or take action with the administration to get me in trouble. It’s part of the job.

Sometimes you have to evaluate a student’s performance, and sometimes they fail. And now we have a new generation of entitled and ignorant students that think they can just go over the instructor’s head to demand that their biases get approval.

The University of Oklahoma has placed a trans graduate instructor on administrative leave after a student received a zero on a psychology assignment that described transgender people as “demonic” and asserted that gender roles are “Biblically ordained.” The dispute has quickly escalated into a statewide political flashpoint.

The controversy began when junior Samantha Fulnecky submitted a 650-word reaction paper for a course on how social expectations shape gender. Instead of addressing the assignment’s questions using data, her essay claimed society is “pushing lies” about gender, warned that eliminating strict gender roles would be harmful, and described transgender identities as “demonic,” Them reports.

You can read Fulnecky’s essay for yourself. It’s terrible. It might pass muster in Sunday School, but this was submitted to the University of Oklahoma, which has somewhat higher standards. It contains no data, unless you count quoting the Bible poorly as data (you shouldn’t). The central theme of the essay is that you shouldn’t question conservative interpretations of the the Bible.

I do not think men and women are pressured to be more masculine or feminine. I strongly
disagree with the idea from the article that encouraging acceptance of diverse gender expressions
could improve students’ confidence. Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and
everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I
do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has
their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical
whatsoever. The Bible says that our lives are not our own but that our lives and bodies belong to
the Lord for His glory. I live my life based on this truth and firmly believe that there would be
less gender issues and insecurities in children if they were raised knowing that they do not
belong to themselves, but they belong to the Lord.

The TA’s evaluation was spot on, and Mel Curth should have a bright future in academia, although maybe this experience will sour her on the career.

Graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth, who graded the paper, wrote that the zero was based on academic criteria, not retaliation for the student’s religious views. Curth wrote that the essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” Curth also noted that portraying a marginalized group as “demonic” is “highly offensive,” and urged the student to use empirical sources rather than doctrinal statements when critiquing course material.

Does Fulnecky learn from this instruction? No. She immediately turned to Turning Point USA to advocate for her, filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, and got the governor of Oklahoma to intervene. You’d think he has better things to do with his time.

Fulnecky wasn’t penalized for her beliefs. She was penalized for not doing the assignment and using her biases instead of data.

The university has bent the knee and removed the TA from the class and put a full-time professor in charge (I wouldn’t want to be in their position — imagine taking over a class with cocky students who have learned that they can get rid of instructors who don’t give them the grade they want.)

A state representative is demanding that Curth be fired.

To use academic power to punish or pressure a student simply because she stood firm in her faith and cited real science in her essay is not leadership. It is inappropriate, unacceptable, and should be investigated for discrimination.

The University of Oklahoma must address this. This individual should not be teaching in higher education — period.

Take another look at Fulnecky’s essay. Can you find where she cited any science?

I’m trying to avoid imagining a student in my genetics or evolution class complaining that a known atheist was teaching about stuff that contradicts their religious beliefs. It could happen, it has happened, but so far it’s always been confined to private meetings in my office, with me reassuring them that I don’t care what they do on a Sunday morning, but that the course content is well defined by the textbooks and the evidence.

And afterwards I thank God that I don’t live in Oklahoma.

If you care about getting a good education, don’t go to the University of Oklahoma. Go further north.