Some of you probably recall the legendarily terrible debate I had with Jerry Bergman years ago. You’re in luck! Bergman is a glutton for punishment, and is going to be debating Gutsick Gibbon tonight.
He won’t know what hit him. Literally. He’ll be oblivious.
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.
The 2025 graduating class in biology at the University of Minnesota Morris:
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.
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.
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.
Great! Except…
I reject “Darwinism”. I didn’t ooze out of a Darwinian slurry. No priest of mine can be a devotee of a 175 year old dogma? He sounds an awful lot like Herbert Spencer.
Never mind. No cults allowed.
I guess I’ll try revive my long-neglected YouTube channel.
Transcript below the fold.
I saw the rising tide of belligerent white nationalism coming, and knew I had to revise how I teach genetics. I’ve seen the kids who come out of public schools thinking that every feature is the product of simple Mendelian genetics, I’ve witnessed a president who declares that he’s got “good genes”, meaning white and German ancestry, I’ve read Quillette. There’s so much misinformation and bad science out there driving hateful ideologies, and my genetics teaching has been slowly adapting to combat it. I guess I’m going to have to accelerate my instruction, now that Nature has told me I must: Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand.
I agree.
One of the things that made last semester rough is that I revised a big chunk of the class. I decided I had to abort a unit on developmental genetics — which hurt, I love developmental genetics, and it’s important — and we instead spent several weeks on ethical genetics. Throughout the term I brought up examples of the misappropriation of genetical ideas to prop up ugly ideologies, but then, damn it, we elected a know-nothing racist bigot to the presidency, and he immediately started flooding scientific agencies with bullshit.
At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.
Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology.
Meanwhile, although Trump stated at his inaugural address that his administration “will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based”, an executive order he signed in March condemns as “corrosive ideology” the Smithsonian Institution’s promotion in its museums and research centres of the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct.
Yeah, I’ve got to start playing hardball here, and get explicit about rebutting specific racist ideas. I’ve been general about coaching students in ethical behavior and allowing them to bring up problematic topics, but I think next year I’m going to incorporate a few case studies of bad genetics, I’m not sure what I can pare out to make time, but there are definitely things I must expand.
Education is key to inoculating future generations against unscientific ideas and correcting currently held beliefs. Research into education at secondary-school and university levels has shown that particular teaching approaches, including those that focus on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry, can help to guard against scientific racism and genetic essentialism.
These conversations must extend to researchers’ engagement with the public to both educate and advocate for science more broadly. Grass-roots efforts could help, such as Science Homecoming, an effort to encourage scientists to write opinion pieces in their local newspapers.
Yes! More about multifactorial inheritance! I think that will come at the expense of cutting back on Mendel. His ideas are fundamental, but I can cover them more succinctly. This stuff matters more than a limited set of experiments on pea plants, which were great in the 1860s, but are perhaps misleadingly simplified.
It’s also an important part of this goal:
Those in leadership positions must protect marginalized faculty members, staff and trainees, who will continue to be targeted in the coming years. Although many funding programmes focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) are no longer available, the ideals of DEIA — which are core to scientific progress — must be upheld.
Will do! Fortunately, I’m at a good progressive liberal university, and the students will be receptive to it all. The people who oppose DEIA are the freaky weird fringe.
Pete Hegseth says transgender people “lack warrior ethos, are liars, lack integrity, are not humble, are selfish and can’t meet physical mental fitness requirements.”
Their priorities are all wrong. But then, I had no idea that so many military men lacked virility and needed chemical assistance.
The judge overseeing the case against the Defense Department’s firing of transgender service members revealed that the military spends eight times more on erectile dysfunction medication than on gender affirming care.
While discussing military spending with the Defense Department (DoD) attorney for the ongoing Talbott v Trump case, Judge Ana Reyes said the DoD spends approximately $5.2 million annually on medical care for service members with gender dysphoria.
Comparatively, the DoD spends $42 million a year on medication for service members with erectile dysfunction.
Also, right-wing lawyers don’t read.
At one point, attorneys had to admit to Reyes that they had never read articles which were included as evidence. Reyes then said they had “cherry picked” and “egregiously misquoted” studies put forward by the Pentagon on transgender people decreasing the lethality of the military.
That sounds like legal malpractice to me. But then, ignorance is the lubrication that keeps the Trump train rolling.
And it tolled for 9 days!
Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start of a 9-day-long, global 10.88-millihertz (92-second) monochromatic very-long-period (VLP) seismic signal, originating from East Greenland. In this study, we demonstrate how this event started with a glacial thinning–induced rock-ice avalanche of 25 × 106 cubic meters plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high tsunami. Simulations show that the tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter-high long-duration seiche with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow amplitude decay that were nearly identical to the seismic signal. An oscillating, fjord-transverse single force with a maximum amplitude of 5 × 1011 newtons reproduced the seismic amplitudes and their radiation pattern relative to the fjord, demonstrating how a seiche directly caused the 9-day-long seismic signal. Our findings highlight how climate change is causing cascading, hazardous feedbacks between the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.
Shorter summary: a glacier in Greenland collapsed catastrophically in a fjord, setting the water sloshing back and forth with enough force that seismologists all around the world could detect the clock-like movement.
Better summary: Someone who knows the geology explains the event and all the terms on Bluesky.
The thinning ice sheets in Greenland led to oscillating waves, 100 meters tall, bouncing between the rock walls of a fjord. Fortunately, no one was there to witness it. Or if they were, they didn’t survive it.
Recreational boating not recommended here. Surfing is right out.
Isn’t it exciting, just waiting for another unexpected side effect of our slow destruction of the planet? As if the predictable disasters aren’t enough!
