The end is nigh!

I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.

I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.

My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.

Then summer arrives. I have big plans.

Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.

Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.

Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.

Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFA

Join us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.

It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.

Grifters get slapped

Remember Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman? It’s been a few years, so you’re forgiven if you’ve completely forgotten them — they were a sleazy pair of not-very-bright Republican weirdos who ginned up various schemes that they hoped would derail elections.

Well, now their careers have been temporarily derailed.

Notorious conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman will pay up to $1.25 million for perpetuating a bogus robocall campaign in the runup to the 2020 presidential election, aimed at scaring Black voters from casting mail-in ballots, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday.

The right-wing hucksters, who have faced numerous other lawsuits and court actions for their MAGA-adjacent activities, were found liable in March 2023 for “transmitting false and threatening messages intended to discourage voting” by Black New Yorkers, James’ announcement said.“[I]n written communications, Defendants referred to the call ‘as the ‘black robo’…and used terms like…‘HIJACK’ the election to refer to their operation,” according to a consent decree filed Monday.

You may now resume ignoring them.

The Republican descent into insanity continues

Would believe they’re afraid that people are filling their lettuce with vaccines? Publish one little paper suggesting that plant tissue could be a source of pharmaceutical mRNA, and some right-wing dingbat immediately assumes that there’s a nefarious plan afoot to inoculate good god-fearing anti-vaxxers with stuff that might make them resistant to disease. We’d never do that! Besides, it would be pointless to use lettuce as a vector, since we all know they only eat red meat. Or, it was red until they cooked it to the texture of shoe leather. (Ooh, sudden thought…maybe we could smuggle mystery chemicals into their food via ketchup.)

Getting into more serious territory, Louisiana, the worst state in the union by nearly all metrics, now wants to criminalize the American Library Association. They must really hate the ALA, because this is what the law proposes.

A. No public official or employee shall appropriate, allocate, reimburse, or otherwise or in any way expend public funds to or with the American Library Association or its successor.
B. No public employee shall request or receive reimbursement or remuneration in any form for continuing education or for attending a conference if the continuing education or conference was sponsored or conducted, in whole or in part, by the American Library Association or its successor.
C. Whoever violates this Section shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or be imprisoned, with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both.

It’s not clear what has pissed off the Republican sponsors so much that they would sentence librarians to hard labor for joining the organization. It’s probably because the ALA opposes book banning and endorses literacy.

The big surprise this week is Arizona. The Republicans have a one seat majority in the Arizona house and senate, and they used it to pass a near-total ban on abortion. They got the assistance of the looney-tunes Arizona Supreme Court.

Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s 1864 law banning all abortions, except to save the life of the mother, is now, enforceably, the law of the land. It is now a felony for a doctor—or anyone else—to assist a woman getting an abortion, punishable by two to five years in prison.

Arizona is a microcosm of what America would look like if the Republicans grab just a few more seats. There’s more that they have accomplished!

For example, the GOP-led legislature recently passed House Bill 2843 that would allow property owners to shoot and kill undocumented immigrants who simply walk across their property. This followed a border property owner’s arrest after he allegedly shot and killed an undocumented migrant walking on his land. Gov. Hobbs vetoed the bill this week.

Also this week, some MAGA legislative extremists were rolling on the Senate floor and speaking in tongues as they prayed for their bills to pass.

Of course, there’s also the usual Biblical shenanigans.

With a one-seat Republican majority in both the House and Senate, the legislature recently passed a bill that will allow teachers in public and charter K-12 schools to post and read the Ten Commandments in class.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Anthony Kern—a candidate for the U.S. Congress, currently under investigation as one of Donald Trump’s “fake electors” that falsely asserted Trump won the state in 2020—now moves to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk, where a veto is expected.

Imagine if the federal government were under the thumb of the holy rollers and racists and know-nothings — they’re close to a perfectly legal take-over.

I hope you’re all planning to vote in November.

I don’t think I’m autistic, but I am feeling demonic

This is the message a school sends to parents. It’s a Christian school, so it’s substandard bad education, and packed with the baggage of a wicked ideology, but that doesn’t excuse it.

The day before Easter, Pastor Matt Baker of the Trinity Christian Academy in Lake Worth, Florida, emailed the school community to inform them that he was canceling Autism Awareness Week because “the teachings and actions of my Jesus are fully able to do all that this program intends to achieve and so much more.”

“Anything that teaches our children to have their identity in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic,” he declared, as first reported by WPTV.

Baker wanted to make sure there was no room for doubt regarding his edict.

“Let me repeat myself just so I am not quoted out of context: any philosophy, teaching, or program that teaches our precious children that their identity is found in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic. Period.”

Go to your hell, Matt Baker. Is my identity as a husband and father also demonic? Is everyone who is not a Christian also demonic? Can you demonstrate the existence of demons at all?

Here’s another example of a Christian pastor in Missouri demonizing autistic kids. At least this one got compelled to resign.

Matt Baker is still poisoning minds.

I don’t know why these “schools” are allowed to exist.

Missed opportunity

Today is the anniversary of that day when people show paintings of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and I ask, “General Grant, why are you shaking hands with that piece of shit?” I also wonder if American generosity to bloody-handed traitors might have something to do with our current habit of appeasement to Nazis, anti-Semites, and insurrectionists.

The surrender, 9 April 1865

I do not like cicadas

I didn’t see much of them while I was growing up near Seattle, but then I spent a year in Indiana, where the cicadas are deafening in the summer. I learned to detest their shrill noisiness then. Now I live in Minnesota where we get the annual cicadas, but they aren’t so numerous as to generate the cacophony people have to live with elsewhere.

It’s going to be bad this summer, because two broods of the 13- and 17-year periodic cicadas are going to be crawling out simultaneously and singing continuously. There’s nothing you can do about it.

See how Minnesota is free of the Magicicada plague? I’ll be staying away from Iowa & Illinois & Indiana, that’s for sure.

Although…I do not dislike the cicadas so much that I would wish a fungal infection on them, especially not a fungus as creepy as this one.

Once the cicadas emerge from the ground, they molt into adults, and within a week to 10 days, the fungus causes the backside of their abdomens open up. A chalky, white plug erupts out, taking over their bodies and making their genitals fall off.

“The cicada continues to participate in normal activities, like it would if it was healthy,” Kasson told CBS News. “Like it tries to mate, it flies around, it walks on plants. Yet, a third of its body has been replaced by fungus. That’s really kind of bizarre.”

Kasson said the reason the cicadas might be able to ignore the fungus is that it produces an amphetamine, which could give them stamina.

“But there’s also something else unusual about it,” he said. “There’s this hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they’ll continue to try and mate with females — unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus. But they’ll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them. And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with.”

What’s really evil about that fungus is that despite all the body horror, it doesn’t shut the cicadas up. In another bizarre twist, it also affects animals around them.

The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat them, Cooley said.

There’s more! Cicadas have another repulsive habit.

Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans. He couldn’t look at the periodical cicadas that mostly feed and pee underground, but he used video to record and measure the flow rate of their Amazon cousins, which topped out around 10 feet per second (3 meters per second).

They have a muscle that pushes the waste through a tiny hole like a jet, Bhamla said. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he happened on a tree the locals called a “weeping tree” because liquid was flowing down, like the plant was crying. It was cicada pee.

“You walk around in a forest where they’re actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it’s raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That’s their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end … It’s called cicada rain.”

I hope the residents of states south and east of me are looking forward to a summer of getting pissed on by shrieking zombie insects while the birds are tripping balls and spacing out.

The Dawkins Apologists crawl out of the woodwork!

I knew my recent criticisms or Richard Dawkins would enrage the usual crowd. I’m used to it and I knew it was coming. Also unsurprisingly, the noise is coming from Jerry Coyne, who is always willing to praise the hierarchy of atheism.

But the main error of both her [Rachel Johnson, Dawkins’ interviewer] queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur? Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

The problem with that complaint is that I haven’t claimed that Christianity and Islam are equally bad. To the contrary, I think that Christianity and Islam are equally complicated; there are people in each faith who use their beliefs to motivate good social behavior, and others who use it to justify horrors, and that the bigotry lies in treating all members of a religion as the same. Here, Coyne is giving Xians the benefit of the doubt, and claiming that most have denied the “bad parts of the Bible,” while implying that most Muslims are accepting every jot and tittle of the Qur’an. Christianity has been defanged! Except, presumably, the ones in the Republican party that want to institute an American theocracy. We’ll just close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist.

Is he even aware that the US is on the edge of a precipice? That our next election could be our last, if a certain madman and his delusional, evangelical followers get their way? I’m not claiming that they are worse than Jihadi terrorists, but that they’re pretty awful, and that the majority of Muslims have no desire to perpetrate the terrors that bigots like to smear all followers of Allah with.

He also conveniently forgets that Dawkins said this:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

I haven’t. I agree with that, actually. I’m not the ones making excuses for Christianity: the god of the Bible has not been re-written, but suddenly some former New Atheists would have us think Jehovah has reformed, and now Christianity is just pretty Christmas bells and cathedrals and lovely parish churches, and they’re making that argument entirely because they want to make sure we don’t compromise in our hatred of those evil Muslim terrorists, who know nothing of beauty and peace and art and science. The bigotry lies in the insane polarization that is being promoted. If only Islam could be defanged, so they could have beautiful cathedrals, too!

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

Except, of course, that I don’t make that claim (which is irrelevant anyway, he says, despite making that the bulk of his argument.) Both religions contain archaic horrors and bad ideas. The reason he and Coyne are bigots are that they pretend that the cherished traditions of their familiar religions are better and more important than the comfortable happy traditions of Muslims, and that Christianity has been “defanged” while Islam is a nest of evil. Remember, Dawkins’ first complaint was that he didn’t want to hear that Ramadan was promoted instead of Easter. What’s wrong with Ramadan? I don’t care. I celebrate neither Easter nor Ramadan, and I don’t worry that Christianity or Islam are using their holidays to cloak heinous, barbaric practices.

He has one final gotcha for me.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?

Oh, that is easy. I’d rather live in a secular country, but since he’s made it a binary choice, I’ll pick the country where my native language, English, is spoken, and where nobody is trying to bomb me into a bloody paste. That narrows my options down to primarily Western countries, which are mostly Christian. I think it would be wise to avoid living in countries that have been wrecked by colonialism, like, say, anything in the Middle East, or that have been crippled by sanctions or brutal, American-led wars.

If we want to identify religions that have had the most pernicious effects on the modern world, we really ought to focus on evangelical Christianity, which dominates in the most powerful nations, and which is now endorsing genocide of Palestinians, and which has dispatched missionaries to various countries in Africa to legislate for death penalties against gay people, or which is striving to demolish American democracy, or which is actively trying to inject anti-scientific nonsense into educational curricula. A Christian sneezing in America has a greater influence in the world than a Muslim preaching jihad in the ruins of Iraq.

Oh, but I forget — I’m supposed to reduce the history and culture and humanity of entire peoples to just their religion, where Christianity gets a pass on any flaws while Islam is a monolithic univocal monster. Sorry, only bigots do that. QED.

This week, we’re talking about the truck

I spend my weekends preparing the lectures for my coming week, and today the Far Side featured the perfect image for my title slide.

The subject? Aging and cancer as developmental diseases.

It is kind of awkward being a 67-year-old geezer talking to 19-21 year olds about aging. If this were a laboratory course I could just flop down on a table and let them dissect me.