Whatever happened to ID?

Mano Singham has a few thoughts on the Intelligent Design creationism movement.

ID seems to have disappeared from view. One no longer hears from its most prominent advocates. There is not doubt that the 2005 Dover trial where the judge ruled that ID was essentially a religious belief structure and thus had no place in public school science curricula was a serious blow, exposing their entire stealth strategy of pretending that there was no underlying religious basis for their beliefs. In my 2009 book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that was a historical review of the fights against evolution from the Scopes trial in 1925 up to the Dover trial, I said that it looked like ID had run out of steam and had nothing more to offer, something that one of their leading theories, the late Philip Johnson, agreed with.

During the period when I was engaged with ID, I was invited by them to many debates and panel discussions so I met many of the key players (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, J. P Moreland) and we had friendly exchanges. I never encountered William Dembski or David Klinghoffer though. After the Dover trial, Dembski washed his hands of the whole ID movement, especially expressing bitterness towards two religious groups whom he accused of undermining ID. One was the ‘theistic evolutionists’ (people who believe that evolution and belief in a god can be reconciled) who he said attacked ID because they felt that it was bad science and bad religion. The other was Young-Earth Creationists whom he accused of turning against ID when they realized that ID was not going to serve as a stalking horse for their literal interpretation of the biblical Genesis story of creation.

The tension between the intellectual approach taken by the ID movement and the YEC group was always apparent to those following the issue. When I spoke at ID-sponsored debates, it was quite something to see the people on the panel talk in sophisticated terms about science and religion and then later mingle with the audience and discover that they were biblical literalists to the core, right down to Adam and Eve, the serpent, heaven and hell. With one or two exceptions, they were nice to me even though they knew that I was not at all sympathetic to their ideas. They seemed to feel sorry for me that I would eventually be stewing in hell.

He’s right, you know. ID hasn’t literally disappeared, but it’s lost all the PR oomph it briefly held in the early 2000s — you can visit sites like Uncommon Descent and still find the zealots yammering ineffectually about it, but they’re all simply repeating the same tired pseudo-arguments over and over. When Stephen Meyer is your leading intellectual light, you’re in big trouble, because goddamn he is a tedious pompous bore with no substance to his arguments. ID is the same repetitive, ridiculous nonsense as young earth creationism, but with all the religious appeal cored out. And yes, it was exposed as a poor defense against scientific arguments in the Dover trial, and people realized it was a tissue paper shield, so why bother?

A lot of the ID proponents were motivated entirely by their religious ideology, trying desperately to hide it behind that pretentious pseudoscientific veneer. It didn’t work. Everyone saw right through it.

Nowadays, look where the money is going to see who won the ID vs. Open Creationism battle: it’s not the Discovery Institute, which has been branching into culture war nonsense instead (hi, Chris Rufo, I see you, you lying asshole). The winner is…Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, the brain-dead religious approach that doesn’t even try to make good scientific arguments. No wonder Dembski is pissed off at them. Kent Hovind is making cult leader money and getting attention on YouTube and that’s about it. Young Earth Literalism turned corporate is the one successful strategy the creationists have cultivated.

So what happened to ID? Science and philosophy made it irrelevant, and then the religious creationists murdered it.

Republicans defining “woman”

Our own American version of upper class twits

After making such a big deal about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s deferral after being asked, “What is a woman?”, you’d think they’d be prepared with a good answer to the question themselves. They aren’t.

“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”

That is not a workable definition. It’s actually kind of amazing that anyone in the 21st century would still believe that that old fable is literally true.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define woman, and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

Poor slow Josh. He said it didn’t seem complicated, was immediately confronted with a complication. And didn’t know how to answer it. I wonder if there are any women in his district who will notice he just turned them all into “men”?

Some Republicans punted.

“I don’t have anything for you on that,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“I’m not going to indulge you,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) dodged the question three times in a row, citing her policy of not talking to reporters in Senate hallways ― even though it was Blackburn who made this an issue with Jackson in the first place.

I think there must have been some panicky emails swapped around after that so they would get their story straight, because Blackburn hurried back with an answer.

In a follow-up email to HuffPost, a spokesperson for Blackburn said her definition of a woman is “Two X chromosomes.”

Except not all women have two X chromosomes, and relatively few people have actually had their chromosomes directly examined. It’s not a good criterion, you know? You can’t claim that it’s always been obvious what men and women are, and then base that distinction on a cellular property that was completely unknown until about 120 years ago, and is completely invisible now without a microscopic examination. What were the Victorians doing, just stumbling around guessing who men and women were, bumbling about and accidentally impregnating or getting impregnated?

Here come the parrots (sorry, parrots, you don’t deserve that comparison).

In a written statement, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered the same definition as Blackburn: “A woman is born with two X-chromosomes.”

Of course, Ted Cruz had to bungle it.

Cruz, when asked, immediately answered that a woman is “an adult female human.”

He denied that he had recently looked it up in a dictionary.

“I just happen to speak English,” Cruz said, adding: “A Homo sapien with two X chromosomes.”

It’s Homo sapiens, you doltish imitation of a human made from a sack full of cockroaches. I’m not surprised that you would get that wrong.

Cue more circular definitions.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) shouted his definition of a woman before slipping into a Senate elevator: “An adult female of the human species.”

Define “female”.

Some people didn’t get the memo.

“I have more of a traditional view of what a woman is,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

What is that?

“My wife.”

It’s always nice to give the Ralph Wiggums a chance to speak up.

The prize for the most confused Republican answer has to go to Lindsey Graham, though.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said a woman is simply someone who is “biologically a woman,” adding that he thinks most Americans can figure out who’s a woman and who’s a man.

“The birds and the bees stuff ― it’s been a while, but I think I remember the general gist of the differences,” Graham said. “To have a hard time answering that question is kind of odd to me.”

A woman is someone who is biologically a woman. Got it. That’s helpful. Well, except that word “biologically”, which he just threw in to sound sciencey, inadvertently revealing that he’s got no scientific understanding at all, just like Cruz.

It’s also revealing that he has forgotten the details of that “birds and the bees stuff” and just remembers “the general gist of the differences”. Is it any wonder he doesn’t have any children?

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said when a reporter asked him if a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman.

My terrible awful horrible no good day

I give up. I’m going home early.

To start the day, we had more soggy wet snow come down overnight. Come on, Nature, I want my spiders to emerge!

I went to teach my class. This involves setting up a little camera to record the lecture for the students who are taking it asynchronously, and then connecting my computer to the video projector, two routine tasks that take only a few minutes.

I couldn’t get the camera to work. It crashed, and crashed hard, and wouldn’t restart. Yikes. I’ve got the in-person students waiting! So I charged ahead sans camera, figuring this means I just have to record a voice-over at home. More work, but I can do it.

Then the evil idiot classroom projection system gets flaky on me. I log in to the class software, which involves firing up the projector and entering a code into the software on my laptop, which then displays my video. Worked fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. I do so, works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code.

You get the idea. I was getting nowhere. I finally told the students this wasn’t going to work, go home and we’ll try again Monday. There was much weeping and wailing and tearful moans about really, really wanting to learn about maternal effect inheritance and imprinting today, but I was strong…no, I’m lying. It was all laughter and smiles. I should do this every day.

Except we’re just starting to get into the really fun stuff in genetics! I need to get past this so I can talk about developmental genetics! And signaling! And cancer genetics! Maybe a little bioethics, too!

Oh well. I’m gonna go home and dismantle a camera. Or maybe swap in the backup camera I’ve got. And finish grading. It’s not like canceling class means I get any free time.

Tigger-ized!

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, skateboarding was the radical, edgy sport that had the old men shaking their fists and talking about “kids these days”, and then also sired even edgier programming like Jackass. I never got into it. Even then I was too stodgy for such extreme sports.

Put your wheels away, the new up-and-coming street activity is extreme pogoing.

Awesome, dude. I think I’ll pass on the hobby, but more power to all the xpogoers out there. Except, well, I do have a few reservations…

But as rubbery as they may be, they aren’t immune to injury. To that end, when Smith was 13, he went to his first world championship in Salt Lake City. “I qualified for the finals, which I was shocked to make at such a young age,” he tells me. As a result of that shock and excitement, he decided to attempt a double backflip dismount at the end of his final run. “It all built up to that moment; the hype got me buzzed up, and I was ready to fly. I sent the double!” Smith recalls. But he opened up his body too early. “I basically belly-flopped, knees first, into the concrete,” he says.

He would spend the next four months in a wheelchair after shattering both of his kneecaps, all the toes on each of his feet and his nose. (He suffered a major concussion, too.) It hasn’t exactly paid either — at least in terms of dollars and cents. “Most jumpers have another job to supplement like Uber or Grubhub, odd jobs or other service industry stuff,” says Smith. “I make roughly 25-30k a year and live in a converted sprinter van.”

I’m not going to tell anyone not to do it, though — after all, I went into academia, which likewise isn’t going to get you rich, and while you’re probably not going to break bones at it, your mental health won’t be sheltered well. Boing boing away!

How to destroy a prestigious career in less than a year

I made a prediction last summer.

The fall from grace was precipitous, but it should have happened long ago. The molecular biologist David M. Sabatini has been outright fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Whitehead Institute, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also loses his tenured position at MIT soon enough. Can you guess what prompted his ouster?

Sabatini was the unpleasant combination of arrogance and entitlement that led him to think he could fake data and sexually harass his students. He lost all of his affiliated positions at various prestigious institutions, but kept his tenure at MIT.

Until now.

David Sabatini, the high-profile biologist who was forced out of the Whitehead Institute in summer 2021 after a probe found he violated its sexual harassment policies, has resigned his tenured professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His move came after three senior MIT officials recommended revoking his tenure.

“Professor Sabatini has stepped down from his tenured faculty position at MIT … without exercising his policy right to request that a faculty committee … review the recommendation to revoke tenure,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to faculty members this afternoon.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I do wonder where Sabatini is going to end up, since he’s managed to flush his entire career down the toilet. There’s a lesson to be learned there.

I think this comment from Nancy Hopkins is also an important message for everyone considering careers in science:

Nancy Hopkins, an emeritus professor of biology who helped lead a landmark push for gender equality on the MIT faculty in the 1990s, called the Sabatini resignation “a milestone,” noting in an email, “First, MIT had rules in place that forbid the faculty behavior in question. Second, a young woman had the courage to demand that the rules be enforced. And third, she was heard.”

She added: “It is noteworthy—and another sign of progress—that the heads of HHMI and the Whitehead Institute and MIT’s Dean of Science are all women—two of them the first women to hold these positions.”

Ha! The dude-bros were right to fear the feminists!

Creepy ghouls squared

When anti-abortion zealot Lauren Handy’s house was raided, they found five fetuses, and Handy made a promise.

Handy declined to speak on camera Wednesday, but told WUSA9 she expected the raid to happen “sooner or later.” She also declined to say what was in the coolers, saying only that “people would freak out when they heard.”

Well, the shoe has dropped. She claims they buried 110 fetuses.

“During the five days they were under my stewardship, the 115 victims of abortion violence were given funeral mass for upbaptized children and 110… were given a proper burial in a private cemetery,” said Handy, the director of activism at the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.

Handy claimed that on March 25, she and Terrisa Bukovinac, her group’s founder and executive director, had gone to Washington Surgi-Clinic to protest abortions. There, they said, they found a medical waste truck driver and asked him if they could take one of the boxes he was loading outside, arguing that they were filled with “dead babies” and promising to give them a “proper burial.”

The driver denies that story. Apparently, though, Handy’s group is in the business of stealing medical waste.

Ick. Just ick. You should feel disgust when contemplating Lauren Handy, the garbage person.

Why am I here?

How odd. This video of my lecture on extrachromosomal inheritance is blowing up on YouTube — I guess The Algorithm hiccupped and is serving it to random people. That in itself isn’t very interesting, but I am amused by all the comments. It’s very existential, with people wondering “why am I here?” and just generally baffled at how this particularly video ended up in their recommendations. I wonder at this question too.

Of course, the answer to the question is easy: because a program told you to be here.

This is a blip that will quickly fade, especially since today’s topic will be maternal inheritance.

Cancel Culture! Yargleargleblarlgle! Justice!

Y’all know Louis CK was awarded a Grammy the other night, right? Boy, he sure was canceled. He won’t be whipping out his tallywacker in front of unsuspecting women from now on, will he? They might punish him with a Netflix special or something horrible like that.

But here’s something even worse: He Jiankui has been set free. He Jiankui is the guy I called a self-aggrandizing mad scientist for his reckless, selfish experiment in which he modified human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9 and brought them to term. He claimed he was trying to prevent HIV/AIDS by deleting an immune system protein that the virus uses to bind to cells, but we know nothing about potential side effects or new susceptibilities it might confer, nor do we know how safe the procedure is, or even how effective this deletion would be. He charged ahead and ignored all ethical guidelines to make genetically modified babies, and then announced it as a big surprise at a conference. I bet he was surprised when the Chinese police arrested him and put him in prison for a few years.

But that’s all! And now he’s out.

The daring Chinese biophysicist who created the world’s first gene-edited children has been set free after three years in a Chinese prison.

Wait, wait, wait. “Daring”? You went with “daring”? What’s wrong with the editors at the MIT Technology Review? I would have suggested “unethical” or “criminal” or “incompetent”, and “biophysicist” sounds too complementary: “hack” would have been more accurate.

Then it goes on with this tripe:

It’s unclear whether He has plans to return to scientific research in China or another country. People who know him have described the biophysicist, who was trained at Rice University and Stanford, as idealistic, naïve, and ambitious.

Why are they flattering this guy? Why are there any doubts about his return to scientific research? There ought to be no question that He Jiankui should never be permitted to participate in any biomedical research ever again.

Unfortunately, he’s apparently part of a “network” of evil mad scientists who haven’t been hampered by the arrest of just one capo and are set to get back to work.

The researcher spent around three years in China’s prison system, including a period spent in detention as he awaited trial. Since his release, he has been in contact with members of his scientific network in China and abroad.

While responsibility for the experiment fell on He and other Chinese team members, many other scientists knew of the project and encouraged it. These include Michael Deem, a former professor at Rice University who participated in the experiment, and John Zhang, head of a large IVF clinic in New York who had plans to commercialize the technology.

Deem left his post at Rice in 2020, but the university has never released any findings or explanation about its involvement in the creation of the babies. Deem’s LinkedIn profile now lists employment with an energy consulting company he started.

“It is extraordinary and unusual that [He Jiankui] and some of his colleagues were imprisoned for this experiment,” says Eben Kirksey, an associate professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute, in Australia, and the author of The Mutant Project, a book about He’s experiment that includes interviews with some of the participants. “At the same time many of [his] international collaborators—like Michael Deem and John Zhang—were never sanctioned or formally censured for involvement.”

“In many ways justice has not been served,” says Kirksey.

I’m getting a little tired of “justice has not been served” stories, but that seems to be all we get anymore. Hey, how’s Donald Trump’s presidential campaign going?