The premise is false

Marc Andreessen, a world class boob whose existence demonstrates that intelligence is not a prerequisite to great wealth, wants to destroy universities. Why? Because they do a bad job.

no way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? 1t fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out. We have built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system.

That’s baffling. I know I’m in the middle of a university, but judging by the quality of the students in my classes, their success on graduation (even without the social advantage of hanging out with spoiled scions of the rich at an ivy), and the reputation of American universities abroad, it is bizarre to say that our universities fail at their job. Given how starved they are by conservative legislatures, we’re doing a great job!

Andreessen himself has only an undergraduate degree in computer science from UIUC…he spent hardly any time in the university system before toddling off to get rich off the world-wide web. He’s not qualified to opine on the quality of our universities, especially since he turned a bachelors degree into a billion dollars. I think he was taught quite well, although having the ego of a conservative billionaire he probably imagines that his fortune and skills sprang fully-formed from his pointy, egg-shaped cranium.

He is not allowed to make an argument by analogy with evolution. He’s a techbro who probably never took a single class in biology.

He’s going to have to spell out what abuse of the tenure system he’s talking about. Tenure is not a problem. Most of us professors don’t make a billion dollars from our careers, and giving us a tiny bit of job security as a sop to excuse a middle class salary after a demanding and disruptive decade or more of post-grad training doesn’t “ossify” universities. It definitely isn’t corrupt, except in the sense that some administrators, coaches, and regents get paid excessive sums.

What can I say? Andreessen is a very stupid man who might have benefited from more exposure to learning.

MAHA by turning the country into a toxic wasteland

RFK jr is a distraction. His role is to make a lot of noise, undermine confidence in modern medicine, and pretend to be doing great things for Americans, even as he is promoting placebos and useless treatments. But why, you might ask? Who profits from that, besides the supplement industry? Watch the man capering on the stage with his brain worm, while the oil industry disembowels all environmental protections.

Here’s a short summary of what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin did just last week, via the New York Times—and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg:

In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday, the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. …

Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind [31] protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

In addition, Zeldin said the mission of the EPA would fundamentally change. No longer would the agency’s purpose be “to protect human health and the environment,” as its been since Richard Nixon established the EPA in 1970. Instead, Zeldin said the EPA’s purpose would be to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”

Where’s the protection in the Environmental Protection Agency’s name going to go? Maybe we should change that word to Profiteering. Zeldin, by the way, is a Republican lawyer and climate change denier with no qualifications in environmental science, whose sole attribute is unflagging loyalty to Donald Jargogle Trump.

Rural America is going to be drowning in floods of swine effluent and rotting poultry, while breathing coal smoke and clouds of pesticides. Hey, nothing megadoses of Vitamin A and lots of ivermectin can’t cure, right?

Oh god…NO, DIRE WOLVES HAVE NOT BEEN BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION!

Jesus. Look at the cover of Time magazine.

They’re not even close. Look! They’ve resurrected unicorns!

It’s ridiculous. They made a few genetic tweaks to a grey wolf, almost entirely cosmetic, to make puppies that kind of look like how they imagine a dire wolf would look like, and now the hype industry has gone insane. And now the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, is using this as an excuse to not worry about protecting species, because we can just call up Colossal to resurrect them.

Many scientists expressed skepticism that the pups could be classified as part of a canine species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the achievement demonstrates that it is not government regulations but innovation that will save species.

“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” Burgum wrote in a post on X. “Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions.”

He has already met with the company about using its animals in federal conservation efforts, as well as for potential species restoration.

“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” he told Interior Department employees during a live-streamed town hall Wednesday. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.”

No one has ever celebrated additions to the endangered list, you ignorant buffoon. Colossal has never brought an extinct species back from the dead. And even if they could, if you’ve strip-mined the land and cut down the forests and polluted the streams, you’re not going to restore a species with a few artificially cultivated individuals. It makes me sick that this man who is supposed to be in charge of conserving our natural resources now imagines that he has carte blanche to take a chainsaw to every small animal because Colossal will bring them back.

Burgum posted these claims on Twitter, where he could expect to get agreeable comments from the usual fawning twits. For example:

@PhilStegem34522 Apr 7
Please look into the plight of PNW salmon and steelhead runs. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is a big part of the problem!!!

You clown. Do you think if we overfish salmon into extinction, followed by the death of orcas and sea lions, that we can then “fix” the problem by having Colossal restore them fish by fish, and mammal by mammal?

@MrsKinder Apr 8
Can we start protecting species by getting rid of wind farms?

No, MrsKinder, you’re an outrageously stupid cultist, and wind farms aren’t causing extinctions. Stop trusting the crap pouring out of Trump’s mouth.

Elon Musk has requested the ‘de-extinction’ company Colossal Biosciences to resurrect another animal after a successful dire wolf cloning feat.
Billionaire Elon Musk may be on the outs with President Donald Trump now but he’s still very much active on social media. With dire wolves seemingly back from dead now that the “de-extinction company” Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered three wolves that resemble the extinct real-life predators, the Tesla boss has shared his new pet wish
…
In a follow-up post, Elon Musk finally put forth his wish. He requested Colossal to “Please make a miniature pet wooly mammoth.” Notably, Ben Lamm and George Church’s Texas-based biotech company’s founding agenda was to bring back the woolly mammoth and “rapidly advance the field of species de-extinction.” Although the woolly mammoth’s cloned resurrection has yet to make it to the de-extinction success map, the company revealed last month that they’d made significant progress on that front, having bred woolly mice.

Holy fuck. No, making an existing mouse genetic variant does not mean that you’ve made significant progress. You have not. I thought that was a stupid exaggeration, but now they’ve topped it with a species de-extinction claim.

But if you want to see genuine idiocy, look at Musk’s request for a miniature pet wooly mammoth. If it’s miniature and a pet, it is not a wooly mammoth. It is a toy for rich people.

Who does he think he is, that creepy JF Sebastian dude from Bladerunner?

Yeah, Musk probably thought that guy was awesome.

You aren’t bad, neither is your phone…but the capitalists who abuse it are evil

I get all kinds of awful advice from the internet. Just now, on my work email account, I got a message from the Star Tribune telling me how to Make your smartphone dumb, and other tips to break social media addiction. Maybe the first thing I need to do is tell the Star Tribune to stop sending me this crap.

You could switch to a flip phone. You could quit social media. But there are also ways to make your smartphone dumber, with apps and hacks and old-fashioned mindfulness.

First, you have to understand why social media is sucking you in. Studies show that engaging with social media can produce oxytocin and trigger tiny releases of dopamine, said Kit Breshears, an instructor with the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. Apps feature a pulldown refresh mechanism that functions a lot like a slot machine.

No, I can’t do that. My phone has gradually become an essential tool for working with teaching and administrative materials — I can’t shut it off, since I have to deal with push notifications in order to log in to official university web pages, and because my students contact me through the phone (yes, I gave out my personal phone number to my students) to tell me if they need help at the genetics lab, any time of day. I can’t make my smartphone dumber, without compromising my work!

I’m also prejudiced that this advice is coming from the Center for Spirituality and Healing. Here’s an idea: shut down that palace of quackery.

But also, I have a problem with placing the blame for the problem on the user, and making it our responsibility to police the corporations that are sending out the addictive poison. I would love to be able to get a little dose of oxytocin and dopamine at will. What’s wrong with that? Taking a break and looking at cat photos (or in my case, spider photos) might be beneficial to our emotional well-being. The problem isn’t that we can self-administer mild pleasure with a click of a button, it’s that that mechanism has been hijacked by capitalism. You want a little relaxation, and it’s always accompanied by companies using it to sell you something, or make you feel bad for what you are doing, so that you have to buy the cure they are selling. This one article mentions a $59 device to block signals in your home, and an app you can download to reduce your phone to a “minimalist phone”. Fine. But the problem isn’t that I have a device that can access the internet at any time, it’s that the internet has been shittified to such a remarkable degree that it’s painful to use it.

You know, I was just noticing something recently: my habit is to charge up my phone when I get home from work, and then put it by my bedside overnight, in case there’s an emergency. I’ve felt like I’ve got infinite battery, because it almost never drops below 90% charge, unless I’m away on a long trip. Apparently, I’m not addicted to endless doom-scrolling. It’s possible to be a hopeless nerd who loves his fancy gadgets and not be the kind of fool who follows the advice of a quack from CSH.

Mainly, though, stop blaming your phone for your own problems with technology and capitalism.

First hint this wasn’t going to work out: he’s a pastor

Despite my enduring fondness for the great state of Oregon, I hadn’t been following the politics there, so I missed an amazing turn of good news from the 2025 elections in Oregon.

November’s election told the Oregon Republican Party it needed a fresh start. While voters nationally returned President Donald Trump to the White House, it was a different story in Oregon, where Republicans lost the 5th Congressional District seat; lost all statewide contests; and lost a seat in each legislative chamber, returning the Democrats to supermajorities in both.

Wow. We have to do that in the next election for all 50 states.

As the article points out, the Republicans have had to do some soul-searching and fix what’s wrong with them. I don’t think they can, but it’s good that they’re at least trying. The first step was to find new chairman for the Oregon GOP. They found a guy.

In a Feb. 16 YouTube interview with a GOP political consultant, the eventual winner, Gerald “Jerry” Cummings, 51, a pastor and insurance agent from Columbia County, sketched out a path to success for his party in Oregon, saying Republicans should spend less time “tangled up in social issues” and focus on building the party rather than on angry rhetoric and internecine warfare.

I guess that’s a promising start, but “pastor and insurance agent”? Yuck. I’d put a big red flag on him. But too late, they did more digging and found a few little problems, like his poor relationship with creditors. And his wife.

Court records provide details from a long-running divorce and custody case, which stretched across three counties and lasted nearly a decade, that raise questions about Cummings’ ability to set the tone his party desires. More recently, lawsuits filed by Cummings’ creditors undercut his suitability for a role that requires managerial acumen and financial skills.

Bob Tiernan, a former lawmaker, GOP party chair and the runner-up in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, says he’s disappointed that Cummings is leading the party. “We need the strongest possible people there,” Tiernan says. “We need somebody that doesn’t have damaging accusations against them—whether they are true or not.”

It was an acrimonious divorce. Cummings is a sicko.

In court records, which have never been previously reported, Cummings’ ex-wife, a pastor’s daughter, said the couple met in the Portland area when she was 16 and he was 26 and an associate pastor. “On occasion, he would visit [her] when her parents were out of town and take her to hotels,” a trial memo filed by her attorney says. “He persuaded her that her parents did not truly love her as only he did, and that having sex with him at such a young age was appropriate.”

The couple married in 2003, when she was 19. “From the beginning of and throughout their marriage, [Cummings] would tell [his then-wife] about his sexual fantasies with young girls while they were having sexual intercourse,” the trial memo says. “He promised not to act on those fantasies so long as [his then-wife] allowed him to do whatever he wanted in their sexual relationship.”

But in a handwritten application for a restraining order coinciding with the divorce filing, the woman said her husband’s behavior spun out of control.

“I was handcuffed and hit with hangers,” she wrote. “Early in the marriage, he had a whip he hit me with.”

She added other allegations, including spousal rape. “He forced me to have sex with him and caused injury,” Cummings’ ex-wife wrote. “He has threatened if I don’t perform sexual activities, he will perform sexual activities on minors and he mentions them by name.” (OJP is not naming Cummings’ ex-wife because of her allegations of sexual violence.)

He denies all the allegations, except, of course, that he committed statutory rape on a 16 year old, and he does admit that he was a terrible husband, and [she] and I, both victims of early sexual assault, had a very unhealthy marriage.

It’s good that he claims he never acted on his pedophilic/hebephilic desires, except of course the fact that he had sex with a 16 year old when he was 26, but still…what is it with conservative authoritarians and their fantasies of having sex with children? Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt that — if anything I’m repelled at the idea — but I guess if you’re Republican, it’s just normal.

Anyway, it’s telling that when the Oregon Republicans decided to dive back into the pool of candidates and find someone new and fresh and full of healthy ideas to reinvigorate the party, all they came up with is another rotten apple. I guess if all you’ve got is a big barrel of rotting fruit, you’re not going to find a shiny clean unblemished representative by rummaging through it.

This goes for the Democrats, too — we’re less likely to come up with a pedo, but instead will find a shriveled, nearly mummified old gomer who will persist in pushing the failed ideas of the past.

A wall looms before me

I’m a little bit panicky — the semester is almost over. There’s three weeks left, but two of those are committed to an exam and student presentations, so I’ve only got ONE WEEK to cover mitochondrial inheritance and epigenetics. I’m resigned to the fact that I can only give an introduction to those topics, but otherwise, sure, would all the students like to sign up for another year of genetics so I can cover everything adequately? No? You plan to graduate instead? OK.

It hurts to shut up and stop lecturing for two weeks, but I consider it essential to give students a voice. I think this quote from a terrible movie about genetics to be relevant:

You were so preoccupied with the fact that you could that you never stopped to think if you should

So all my students are going to be discussing cool things that modern science can do with genetics, and answering the question of whether we should.

And then we stop. Last day of classes is 2 May. Then I’ve got the summer free to work in the lab, and big bonus, I get a fall sabbatical (to be spent working in the lab) and don’t come back to teaching until January 2026.

I have to get through these next few weeks, though.

Support real wolves, not genetic abuse

Many years ago, we took our young daughter to Wolf Haven, a sanctuary near Olympia, Washington. She loved it. She got called up to the stage to do a wolf call, and she nailed it — the entire place was echoing with wolf howls as the animals responded. They are spectacularly beautiful — and fierce — animals.

Bad news today, though: wolves are not thriving in Washington.

Washington’s overall wolf population in 2024 decreased by at least 9.44% and the number of successful breeding pairs declined by 25%, according to figures released today by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Today’s report indicates that at the end of 2024, the state had 230 wolves in 43 packs, 18 of which had successful breeding pairs. This marks a decrease from the end of 2023, when the state had 254 wolves in 42 packs, 24 of which had successful breeding pairs.

In case you’re wondering what is causing the decline…it’s people. You probably already guessed it. People suck.

Today’s report shows that at least 37 wolves died in 2024, 31 of which were human-caused. Of all 37 reported deaths, five were killed for livestock conflicts — four by the department and one by a livestock owner. Nineteen died from Tribal hunting by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, which retain tribal treaty rights for hunting on their reservation and on ceded lands, and by the Spokane Tribe.

Two died of natural causes (one was killed by a cougar and the other was killed by other wolves), one died from ingesting plastic, which perforated its intestine, two died from capture-related trauma while the department was capturing wolves to collar them, and one was shot in an alleged self-defense and likely died, though its body was never found and no charges were filed.

In addition, there were seven known illegal killings, which remain under investigation. Scientific research has shown that that for every illegally slain wolf that’s found, another one to two wolves have been killed and remain undiscovered.

I think it’s ironic that today, the media are all fired up about three fake “dire wolves” ginned up by pointless and expensive genetic manipulation, when what we ought to be caring about is maintaining a natural population.

I made a small donation to Wolf Haven. I’m not a billionaire, I don’t have a coven of silicon valley tech bros following my every move, but I am a biologist who feels some shame about those capitalist mad scientists at Colossal who need their priorities straightened out.

Dire puppies

My genetics students are working on presentations that they’ll give at the end of the semester. One group was very enthusiastic about discussing the idea of Pleistocene rewilding, the idea that we should resurrect extinct species and turn them loose on the Dakotas, and the most dramatic species to de-extinctify was the Wooly Mammoth. Colossal Biosciences is claiming to work on exactly that, although, honestly, I think Colossal is nothing but a hype factory.

Now, though, Colossal has announced that they have successfully resurrected on extinct species, the dire wolf. But have they, really? I don’t think so.

Modern gray wolves are not descended from dire wolves, but that’s the stock they started from. They made a piddling 20 gene edits to a mere 14 genes (that’s a bit unfair, that really is a good technical accomplishment), which is not sufficient to turn a wolf into a completely different species. What they’ve really done is made a mutant wolf and claimed it is a dire wolf.

That’s just as well, because there is no modern habitat to support a dire wolf population — if they had successfully reconstructed the full dire wolf genome, and successfully inserted that into a wolf surrogate, George Church wouldn’t be snuggling up with a cute puppy, and they wouldn’t have a place to release them, and since even modern wolves struggle to survive in the modern world, it would be a population doomed to rapid extinction. I don’t think even Canadians would be nice enough to not take them out with a hunting rifle or a trap.

Further to my argument that it’s all hype, they had to sequence more of the dire wolf genome, since what was known was inadequate, and they’re in the process of publishing that sequence. George R.R. Martin is one of the authors. You know he had nothing to do with the work, so that is just a PR stunt. The wolf puppies are spectacularly white, which was probably not true of the ancient dire wolf…they specifically deleted two pigmentation genes, a trait not present in the dire wolf genome, to get that cosmetic feature.

I asked my students who are researching the idea of Pleistocene rewilding exactly what they would do with woolly mammoths if they could resurrect them. Their answers: build a kind of glorified zoo, like Jurassic Park, but this would have to be a zoo without any ecological/environmental purpose, and I doubt that zoos have the kind of profitability that would allow them to spend tens of millions of dollars to get a single animal that would also have unknown induced genetic disorders. The fall back position was a safari game park, where billionaires could get their jollies gunning down hulking great mammoths to get a unique trophy.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that after the revolution, the billionaires will be extinct, too.