Am I turning into a Midwesterner? Scary.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and nature to me was towering red cedar trees draped with moss, and rocky beaches covered with sea anemones and urchins. These things are not present in Minnesota, and I miss them. Bland fields of corn and soybeans are boring, completely lacking in majesty and complexity. I used to dream of retiring to some battered old seaside town in my old age, escaping the dreary farm fields of the Midwest.

It’s not happening.

But after nearly 25 years of living here, it’s beginning to grow on me. Focusing on native arthropods has helped, and the realization that this place shouldn’t be about corn is also liberating. The prairie is deeply interesting…it’s just that cornfields are not the prairie. They’re the antithesis of prairie. Getting down close and peering into a mess of wild plants while looking for spiders is enlightening.

Also, I’m really liking this guy. The enthusiasm is infectious. We’ve got a vigorous stand of native prairie plants growing right outside my lab window, and it’s got me thinking that, when the fall is a little further along and the pods start to dry out, I might harvest a few seeds and pot a few at home, or scatter them in my yard.

That bit of restored prairie looks so much nicer than the impoverished lawn surrounding my house.

The zeitgeist is white and male, I guess

It’s rather discouraging to wake up every morning to the news that old white men are pieces of shit, since that’s my demographic. I’ve been trying desperately to convince the universe that I belong to an entirely different clade, the spider kind, but so far medical science has failed to provide a mechanism to make my transformation at all convincing.

So, Jann Wenner. That piggy-eyed asshole is looking at me this morning.

He has a new book out, The Masters, a collection of interviews with famous musicians who are all “masters,” however that is defined, and who, coincidentally, are all white men. An interviewer noticed that peculiar distribution and asked about it.

Asked by The Times how he chose the musicians to feature, Wenner replied: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level, he said.

The Times reporter David Marchese, a onetime online editor at Rolling Stone, pushed back on that claim by citing Joni Mitchell.

It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses,” Wenner replied. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.

I appreciate that it was kind of intuitive, not based on reason or evidence, he’s just a racist sexist ass deeply at a gut level. I mean, how can you write about the inspiration and founding figures of rock ‘n’ roll and forget to include black people and women?

I think back to my early years, and who got me excited about music, and it was Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin — who I had a crush on in 8th grade, and would love to meet and talk to, but hey, Jann, she died of a heroin overdose in 1970. I’m pretty sure she’s deeply inarticulate now.

Isn’t the whole thing about rock is the passion? If you’re looking for articulate philosophers you’re going to miss the majority of the people who made the genre work. He disregarded Joplin and Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone and Bob Marley and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Prince because he thought only people like Mick Jagger were smart and philosophical enough to meet his standards. You know, the guy who said this:

You start out playing rock ‘n’ roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock ‘n’ roll and have sex.

Profound, man. A true intellectual.

Empty noise, lazy science

Your disappointingly vapid opinion piece is not going to encourage your book, Benjamin Oldroyd. There’s nothing there. I’m referring to an article titled Epigenetics and evolution: ‘the significant biological puzzle’ of sexual orientation. The author is plugging a new book, Beyond DNA, and is trying to persuade us that maybe he has an answer to why gay people exist by going through a couple of hypotheses.

The first hypothesis is that it is a product of kin selection.

Briefly, the kin selection idea is that a gene that promotes homosexual behaviour can spread in a population if homosexual people contribute significantly to the reproduction of close relatives. Although this idea is plausible, the lack of any genetic marker that is reliably associated with sexual orientation is a strong argument against it.

There is no such thing as a gay gene, though, so you can’t postulate the existence of one and build up an adaptive scenario around it. I agree with Oldroyd. It’s a useless hypothesis.

Another idea is that there are antagonistic alleles.

The “antagonistic alleles” idea is that there are certain genes that are selected in different directions, that is, positively selected in males, but negatively selected in females and vice versa. Hypothetically, because no such gene has been identified, a gene that promotes testosterone production could be at a selective advantage in males if it promoted traits such as muscle development, risk taking, opposite-sex sexual attraction and increased sexual attractiveness to females. But if the same gene were expressed in the same way in females it might be disadvantageous for reciprocal reasons. This means that selection could pull in different directions in males and females, maintaining different gene variants in a population. By that I mean, gene variants that have different selective advantages in males and females can potentially coexist in a population because neither is unambiguously better. If so, sexual orientation may be more fluid than one might expect based on biological sex alone. (Well, “der”, I suspect you are now thinking, but please don’t shoot your even-handed messenger.)

He explains it well, but…”might” and “could be” are not evidence. Again, this hypothesis falls apart because there is an absence of evidence for the existence of such alleles undergoing differential competition in males and females. It’s another adaptive just-so story. It’s a useless hypothesis.

Therefore, if you rule out two hypotheses, the third alternative must be the answer, right? Cue dramatic entrance of Intelligent Design…no wait, not that. Oldroyd knows better than that. But it’s the same rationale: we think we have evidence against the conventional alternatives, therefore that counts as evidence for a different hypothesis.

No, it does not. Now the magical mcguffin we’re all looking for is epigenetics.

The epigenetic hypothesis for the widespread occurrence of human homosexuality is based on the possibility of epigenetic inheritance of adjustments to a foetus’s testosterone sensitivity. Like most other epigenetic marks, sex-specific epigenetic marks are established anew in the early embryo following fertilisation.

Substituting hypothetical “epigenetic marks” for a hypothetical “gay gene” gets us nowhere unless you’ve got something concrete and specific. If you do, that would be very interesting…but epigenetics, by it’s nature, is fuzzy and hard to pin down. That is not to say that epigenetics is non-existent — it’s very real and important — but that you can’t slap a simple causal explanation on many complex phenomena, whether it’s a gene or a epigenetic marker.

My preferred explanation is also a bit fuzzy. We have to get beyond the bogus genetic determinism that appeals so strongly to naive minds, and epigenetic determinism would be just as bad. I think we have to accept that human behavior is sloppy and variable as hell. We are built by a long chain of probabilistic interactions, from molecules bouncing around in a messy cell, to a tangle of cells communicating chaotically with one another, to incompletely specified individuals that are shaped by interactions with a variable, changing environment to end up as people with mostly unpredictable characteristics. Physics and chemistry are biased by biological constraints, but the end result is not rigidly locked in by your genes — there is a messy cascade of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental interactions that is skewed by evolution to produce a generally viable outcome, but is tolerant of variability.

We have to abandon these mechanistic notions of a clockwork biology that spits out adults who were specified at conception by the chemistry of nucleic acids. It just doesn’t work that way. We are all products of stochastic processes.

My personal belief is that evolution has worked to take a population of apes and favor a hierarchy of properties that are all weakly specified, and we’re lucky if the majority of individuals conform to that hierarchy. First in priority is cooperation, building a social environment that promotes mutual aid (we all know how poorly that often works out). The way I look at it is that biology is telling us to love one another…and then it is far less fussy about the details. We don’t need a deterministic explanation for why individuals vary, it’s the nature of how they are built.

Russell Brand finds a way to endear himself to his audience

Russell Brand’s frantic fast-talking comedy never really appealed to me, but he seems to have found a new audience in the past several years as a fast-talking conspiracy theorist on a podcast I’ve never listened to. Braying out loud weird claims just doesn’t appeal, but OK, he’s successfully tapping into a revenue stream that exists.

Except now he’s got criminal charges hanging over his head, being accused of rape and sexual assault. It’s all so predictable: volatile personality gets rich, acquires lots of privilege, uses it to treat other people like things. How will he get out of it? By talking fast, of course.

Brand had already moved to deny what he called “very serious criminal allegations” on Friday night. In a video posted online, he said he had received correspondence from a media company and a newspaper detailing the claims; this is standard practice for journalists preparing to report serious allegations about a named entity.

He issued his denial in a video posted across his accounts on several media platforms, insisting his relationships had always been consensual.

He portrayed the reports as a “litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks” and said they pertained to a period of his career when he was working “in the mainstream … As I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous [at that time].”

Brand continued: “Now, during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.

“To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question: is there another agenda at play?”

Somebody explain to him that promiscuity is one thing, but rape is a completely different other thing. You do not get criminally charged for consensual promiscuity.

At least he knows that “consent” is a useful word to deploy when your behavior is brought to light, but I don’t think he grasps what that is, either.

According to the paper’s report, one of the women said Brand entered into a relationship with her while he was 31 and she was still a 16-year-old schoolgirl. She reportedly said he referred to her as “the child” during an alleged emotionally abusive and controlling three-month relationship.

She told Dispatches the presenter once “forced his penis down her throat”, making her choke, which led her to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.

I think we can reject his version of consent when the words “16-year-old schoolgirl” enter the picture.

He has at least dug up the formula that will keep his gullible audience in thrall: it’s a paranoid conspiracy, they’re all out to get me. It’s true, a lot of people will be out to get you if you commit reprehensible crimes.

You just can’t hide in darkness anymore

I don’t know why, but it’s so satisfying to see a liar exposed. Lauren Boebert was thrown out of a theater for being loud, disruptive, and vaping. She denied it all, of course. But boy, surveillance video tech has gotten scary good, and she was caught on video doing all those things. Bonus: her boyfriend copping a feel and the two of them getting a bit handsy.

Next time I’m in a dark theater, I’m going to be conscious that someone might be watching everything. Not in Morris, though — we’re about 30 years behind the times on everything.

I still need glasses, and my eyes get worse every year

Have you heard about this latest loony claim that you don’t need eyeglasses? It’s all a scam by Big Opthalmology, and with a heavy dose of woo you can see perfectly clearly.

Rebecca Watson digs into it — it turns out this is nothing new, there was something called the Bates Method about a century ago that didn’t work, either.

I don’t know how long I’ve needed glasses. I know I couldn’t see clearly for a good chunk of my childhood, and it was only in my second year of high school that my mother took me in to get my eyes examined (I am very nearsighted) and I walked out with a new pair of glasses. I still remember how astonishing it was to be able to read a big “DRUGSTORE” sign from across the street, and see birds a whole block away. If only I’d known earlier that I could have fixed the whole problem by flexing my chakras and sniffing aromatic oils.