First they came for the libraries

And then they came for the bookstores. As usual, Texas Republicans lead the way in oppression and ignorance.

A bill has been introduced to the Texas Legislature that could result in bookstores facing fines and legal costs if they place material deemed “obscene” within access of a minor.

House Bill 1375 was proposed by state Representative Nate Schatzline, a Republican, who said it is needed to keep “harmful material” away from children. Critics argue it would force bookshops to self-censor or risk potentially devastating lawsuits.

In recent years, a number of Republican-controlled states have passed laws banning school libraries from holding certain books that they regard as inappropriate.

The Texas Legislature in 2023 passed a bill forbidding school libraries from having any book among its stacks that “describes or portrays sexual conduct” in a “patently offensive way” that are not required by the curriculum.

PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of what it classified as book bans across the U.S. in the 2022-23 academic year, a 33 percent rise from the previous year.

House Bill 1375 would make commercial enterprises, such as bookstores, liable for “damages arising from the distribution, transmission, or display of harmful material to a minor.”

This would include when such material is “readily accessible to minors” or “includes a minor’s visual image, audio voice, or participation in any manner.”

Any business found to have broken this law could have to pay damages and would be liable for associated court costs and legal fees.

The library in my town has a vast collection of paperback cowboy and romance novels. We have a bookstore of sorts that specializes in gaming, D&D, and comic books. Can I deem those as “patently offensive”? Those romance novels feature a lot of heaving bosoms and passionate kisses, definitely a portrayal of “sexual conduct”. Can we shut them all down? (Don’t laugh, I’ve heard that one of our city council members actually wants to close the library).

When I was a kid in the 1970s in Washington state, my local library had copies of Playboy and Playgirl openly displayed in the periodicals section, and they had a good collection of underground comics — it’s where I read R. Crumb. I read them there, for the articles, you know, and look how I turned out. And then look at Ted Cruz. Do you really want to be like Texas?

We’ve made Nathaniel Jeanson cry

Jeanson, the creationist who got a Ph.D. to be better able to pretend to be a real scientist, is whining because he can’t get no respect.

Today, creation scientists like me are prohibited from running academic labs. They are denied government funding for their projects. They are forbidden from publishing in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. In short, creation science is excluded from every stage of the scientific process.

To clarify, scientists who happen to be creationists are allowed to run academic labs, to receive government funding, and to publish in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. But only if they never promote creationist conclusions.

Why? Because mainstream scientists are convinced that creationists don’t do science. The specific, technical manifestation of this view is the claim that creation science doesn’t make testable predictions.1 For creation science to be considered science, creationists would have to put in print predictions that future experiments in the lab and in the field could demonstrate to be true or false. In other words, creation science has to be, in theory, able to be disproven. It’s not that evolutionists are waiting with bated breath for creationists to meet this standard. No, they’ve concluded that creationists have not met this standard and never will.

I know the feeling. I can design bridges, I can draw pictures of bridges, I can make predictions that my bridges will not fall down, but do the engineers regard me as a fellow engineer? No. They refuse to let me build my fabulous trans-atlantic bridge, not matter how beautiful my balsa wood model is.

And then they laugh and show that my calculations are all wrong, and do more calculations that show my design is unstable and will fall down. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you, they’re out to get me.

Jeanson has been making predictions. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make predictions, they also have to be justified and tested multiple times. My balsa wood model of a trans-atlantic model is a “prediction” that could be “tested”, but the fact that it doesn’t fall down when I troop trained mice across it does not mean I am a great engineer. Not even the fact that I dressed them up as clowns matters.

He whines that his mice in clown clothes haven’t been appreciated by the scientific community.

The problem for the evolutionary community? I’ve been publishing, testing, and fulfilling creation science predictions for over 10 years. My early work focused on the origin of species. I made predictions about their genetic rates of change (i.e., mutation rates) and about genetic function.2 I also predicted the genetic mechanisms by which species would form and how fast new species would appear.

That’s nice. I’m sure it impresses the rubes. But when scientists assess his predictions, they all fall apart. Here’s an example from Dan Stern Cardinale:

His books have not been reviewed kindly, either.

Nathaniel Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin could be called pseudoscientific, but arguably this may be unfair. Pseudo comes from the Greek pseudēs for ‘false’ and pseudos for ‘falsehood’. Labeling Replacing Darwin as pseudoscience suggests the participation in a deliberate lie and at the moment I’m unwilling to offer that suggestion. I am happy to grant Jeanson his sincerity. Because the bulk of the errors in Replacing Darwin are errors of omission I lean towards describing it as quasiscientific. Quasi is Latin for ‘as if’ and it is indeed as if what you are reading in Replacing Darwin is science. It is in fact only partially and ostensibly science.

I am also willing to be generous and accept that the majority of these omissions are simply due to an author with no actual expertise in the field he is writing about. The subject of Replacing Darwin is rooted in population genetics, biogeography, ecology, phylogeography, speciation, molecular evolution and systematics, none of which are fields where Jeanson possesses any professional expertise.

I am also unaware of Jeanson ever having someone with any actual expertise in these fields reviewing either his book or any of his articles published on the Answers in Genesis website. As far as I know he’s only had his fellow like-minded creationists chime in on his work or at best someone with some molecular biology background who he has described as a friend and theistic evolutionist. His only attempts at outside reviewers are high-profile popularizers of evolution like Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers. With the exception of Jerry Coyne he apparently never solicited a review from anyone with active research in the fields the book covers, despite the fact there are thousands of working population geneticists and systematists out there.

I am embarrassed to note that Jeanson’s Ph.D. was in the field of developmental biology, just like mine, and just like that Intelligent Design creationism fraud, Jonathan Wells (is there something about this field that attracts cranks and kooks? Don’t say yes). The thing is, as I can testify from personal experience, is that developmental biology does not require in depth training in phylogenetics and population genetics. I look at cells and organisms changing over time, I don’t do the mathematics of allele frequencies! So why is Jeanson publishing all these poorly done, deeply flawed analyses of population genetics?

Now I’m worried that if I actually knew anything about materials science & load capacities & stress distribution & geology of the ocean floor, my trans-atlantic bridge might actually have a few problems.

Scale it up, and New York to London, easy!

Stop letting creationists host your ideas

I sat through the whole debate last night, which was supposed to address the premise that “The hominin fossil record demonstrably supports human evolution”, with Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) on the pro side, Jerry Bergman against. It was half bad. Erika was well-prepared and tightly on-topic, and her part was worth listening to. Bergman, as I predicted, was a sloppy mess with a scattershot collection of slides which were mostly off-topic and irrelevant, and was full of wrong examples that didn’t make his case. Would you believe he talked about Nebraska Man, a hoary old chestnut of tabloid excess that never had the support of the scientific community, presented alongside Piltdown Man as evidence that the fossil record was fake? How about the claim that Australopithecines were just the bones of pygmies?

But I almost gave up in the first few minutes, before either had a chance to speak, when the screen loaded and there across the top in big capital letters was the banner “STANDING FOR TRUTH BIBLICAL MINISTRIES” with the logo for that disgraceful organization popping up throughout. The moderator/host was that smug twit, Donny Budinsky, a hardcore young earth creationist with no education in science, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology, who promotes these inane “debates” between creationists and sane evolutionary biologists. WHY? This was a promotional event for the dumbest collection of ignorant yahoos on YouTube. These are terrible people, and yet so many science educators will voluntarily send traffic their way, and, by the way, platform dogmatic buffoons like Jerry Bergman.

I don’t understand it. Most of the people on our side are educators who know how to deliver a presentation, and have the ability to do it well. It has become easy with tools like StreamYard and Zoom to host a video session with multiple simultaneous contributors. We don’t need grifting yahoos like Donny Budinsky to organize and host these “debates”, and if you ditch mind-numbing parasites like Bergman, you don’t even have to waste time on them — Erika had a robust, informative 45 minutes of science talk imbedded in the superfluous, distracting garbage of the Jerry and Donny Show, with an ad for creationism layered on top.

You know I despise debates, but even worse are debates that donate unwarranted attention and respect to lying apologists for anti-scientific claims. Stop it, everyone.

Mokele-mbembe!

Creationists have been going on and on about a dinosaur living in the Congo, called mokele-mbembe (IFLScience also has articles on it, if you didn’t believe me when I said that site sucks). Answers in Genesis has defended the idea of a dinosaur lurking in the African swamps.

For believers in the prevailing evolutionary view that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, the idea that they might be alive today is hard to accept. This is despite the recent discovery of the living Wollemi pine tree, also believed, from fossils, to have been extinct since the ‘dinosaur age’.

Christians, however, should not be surprised, as the Bible teaches that God created the dinosaurs only thousands of years ago.

It’s bunk. Here’s a good article on the origin of the myth.

Mokele-mbembe is the Congo Basin’s bigfoot. Or that’s what it’s become, anyway — a cryptid. Nobody is sure when the myth originated, but it was born among the basin’s communities, who passed it down as an oral tradition. Locals tell me the myth was spiritual at first — a metaphor, perhaps, for humankind’s delicate relationship with the land. But today, nobody can say with certainty what exactly it meant because foreigners long ago twisted it well beyond recognition.

“Congolese people originally believed mokele-mbembe was a spiritual being, not a real dinosaur,” Oyange told me last year. “But that all changed when the white man came to Africa.” A confluence of European colonial expansion into Africa and the birth of paleontology gave rise to a version of mokele-mbembe that was a literal, flesh-and-blood, swamp-dwelling reptilian beast. Tales passed around by explorers, missionaries and colonial functionaries became warped by notions from Victorian literature and emerging science.

“Everything that we now regard as the mokele-mbembe canon is based on European explorers in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Darren Naish, a British vertebrate paleontologist and author, told me.

It’s simply another example of the corrupting influence of colonialism. It’s origin doesn’t matter — the idea that there is a dinosaur living in the Congo has become a widely held idea. A guy named David Choe made a short “documentary” about searching for it, but it’s mainly self-indulgent babbling.

They don’t find a dinosaur. But it was good enough to get him an interview with Joe Rogan!

But no dinosaurs — no actual dinosaurs, anyway — are found. In fact, the film ends with a dejected Choe, in a lake, saying to the camera, “We might have to come back. We’ll see,” before he submerges himself into the murky water, prompting the credits to roll. If the film is judged on its success in searching for mokele-mbembe, it was a flop. But if it’s regarded as an exercise in grabbing attention, well, then it was a massive hit. It racked up over 1.7 million views on YouTube and even caught podcaster Joe Rogan’s notice. Several years later, in 2020, Choe appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he told of his multiple attempts to find mokele-mbembe. “When I saw your show,” Rogan tells Choe during the podcast episode, “I was like, ‘Look at this dude, this is crazy. He’s looking for a fucking brontosaurus in the middle of the Congo.’”

Yeah, no. An endorsement by Rogan tells you the whole story is garbage. It’s part of a Western/Christian trend of appropriating myths to distort them into support their dogma

. Talk to the locals, though, and you’ll learn otherwise.

Mayor visited the vine-engulfed temple in 2010. She told me her Cambodian guide, a former teacher, considered the carving a joke. “The amazing, overgrown ruins of Angkor Wat offer a perfect setting for outsiders to imagine a lost, primitive civilization that coexisted with prehistoric dinosaurs,” she said. In her view, just as the outside world has hijacked the story of mokele-mbembe, it has done the same with Angkor Wat — imposing interpretations that distort and even disrespect the original cultural significance.

She also pointed out how the dinosaurization of mokele-mbembe as an oral tradition paralleled how ancient petroglyphs and pictographs in the American West have been misinterpreted as dinosaurs, too. Creationists and young-Earthers argue that certain imagery etched into the rock slabs implies that the Indigenous paleo-Indians must have lived alongside dinosaurs.

The most notorious example, Mayor said, is the two rock art panels at Kachina Bridge in Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument. Some — including creationists — claim that the imagery is a depiction of a sauropod and triceratops dinosaur.

“If our story is told to the world by the oppressor,” I remember Veronique telling me as she clucked her tongue, “then whose story really is it? Ours, or theirs?”

The joke is on the creationists, though. Even if they did find some derived saurischian descendant in the Congo, it wouldn’t refute evolution, and biologists would be scampering joyfully to Africa to study it.

Disappointed

I had big plans for today. I was going to make a day trip to do some spider collecting — today is my wife’s day off, so it was a good time to take the car away. I had it all planned out: the route, I’d identified some parks and likely places to stop, and the trip was going to end at a museum I’ve never visited before, an hour away. We’ve had a week of sunny, warm weather (we hit 91°F yesterday!) so I thought there’d be a good chance some spiders would have emerged.

Then Minnesota weather got in the way. I woke up to a massive thunderclap, and the forecast is for thunderstorms and strong winds. Forget about spidering today.

I think instead I get to go into the lab and scrub fly bottles all afternoon. Gotta get the fly lab cleaned up.

This will not be fun.

Mary was not enthused about the trip anyway. She’s in gardening mode.

Do not trust IFLScience

I fucking detest IFLScience. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it started as a Facebook page, “I Fucking Love Science,” that later expanded into an independent web site, and it has always specialized in presenting bright colorful images and gushing enthusiastically over them with little understanding and gives the impression of a kid squealing at a cool picture. It’s Facebook science. It’s awful.

Here’s an example.

That’s a photoshopped image. It’s about a technique for inserting red fluorescent protein in a spider silk gland to make silk that can glow. It has an excitation wavelength of 558nm (so you shine a green light on it) and an emission wavelength of 583 (greenish yellow). You have to use a microscope with excitation and emission filters, and the emission filter has a long tail that lets longer wavelengths through, so what you actually see is a dark background with, in this case, a strand of silk glowing a dark red.

That is obviously not a fluorescent image.

The text is even worse.

One of the reasons why this has never happened before is that spiders themselves are difficult organisms to work with within the laboratory. They are a diverse group, have a complex genome structure, and their cannibalistic nature means that they have to be reared individually, otherwise their cage neighbors would be gobbled up. Despite this, new developments in Parasteatoda tepidariorum have allowed this species to become a research model.

That’s bullshit. I’ve found spiders easier to work with than, for instance, zebrafish, and zebrafish are far easier than mice. The cannibalism is routine. Zebrafish will line up behind a female laying eggs to suck them up as soon as they leave the oviduct; anyone who works with mice know that stressing the mothers can induce them to chow down on their newborn pups. This was written by someone with zero knowledge of actual hands-on biology.

For the record, when a spider egg sac hatches, the spiderlings can scamper around their mama with negligible risk that she’ll eat them. The babies will eat each other, though.

Of course, this summary is made from reading a real paper. It’s a techniques paper, just demonstrating the feasibility of KO (knockout) and KI (knock-in) mutations in Parasteatoda. This is what the real fluorescent images look like:

mRFP fluorescence within the major ampullate gland. a) Red fluorescence could be detected in the offspring of the KO mutant spiders in the major ampullate gland (scale bar: 277 µm). b) The cartoon recreates the major structures of the major ampullate silk gland: tail, sac, and spinning duct. c) The highest fluorescence intensities could be observed between the tail and the sac (scale bar: 140 µm).

That’s not sexy enough for IFLScience, though, so they cobbled up a stock photo of a spider and drew a bright red laser line shining out of its butt. That’s just what IFLScience does.

It’s a shame. They’re summarizing what isn’t a great paper, but a useful one, and making a mess of it.