The worst possible way to begin a weekend

Watch Dan Olson explain blockchain, bitcoin, ethereum, NFTs and what feels like hundreds of odd acronyms behind the latest series of scams. It’s 2 hours and 18 minutes of dense descriptions, all to expose the guts of a gigantic grift. It’s information-rich, but good god, how depressing. Keep that crypto away from me!

I learned a lot, but also forgot even more instants after it got machine-gunned into my ears. The gist of the story is that blockchain is bad and inefficient, and cryptocurrency relies on buying intangible assets on the basis of their potential, and that potential is simply the likelihood that later adopters will pay early adopters more for those hypothetical assets, and that NFTs are a gimmick with the sole purpose of selling more crypto. If you want the summary without all the painful background information, just listen to the last 5 minutes. What’s so attractive about crypto?

Buy in now, buy in early, and you could be the high tech future boot. Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect and sabotage, and our leaders seem at best complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on a fractional token sold via micro-auction, that’s not it. A different system does not inherently mean a better system. We replace bad systems with worse ones all the time. We replaced a bad system of work and bosses with a terrible system of apps, gigs, and on-demand labor. So it’s not just that I oppose NFTs because the foremost of them are esthetically vacuous representations of the dead inner lives of the tech and finance bros behind them, it’s that they represent the vanguard of a worse system. The whole thing, from OpenSea fantasies for starving artists to the buy-in for Play to Earn games, it’s the same hollow, exploitive pitch as MLMs. It’s Amway, but everywhere you look, people are wearing ugly-ass ape cartoons.

Yeah, you to can start your weekend with a dystopian vision of the future, where Elon Musk and Peter Thiel increase their wealth at your expense and by marketing your privacy.

Genetics #1

Hooray for me! I got step #4 of my to-do list, and also step #3.

Tomorrow I’ll go back and get #2 (“Record a video summary of the fly culturing procedure”) done, and also #6 (“edit the fly culture video”), and then on to chromosomes, mitosis, and meiosis. I’m trying hard to build up slowly with a solid foundation before we get to the hard stuff.

I really do have a plan

On my to-do list for today is:

  1. Organize all the supplies for the fly lab.
  2. Record a video summary of the fly culturing procedure.
  3. Figure out why my audio recorder did such a crap job on Wednesday, & fix it.
  4. Re-record the audio for Wednesday’s lecture.
  5. My lecture room has been moved to a smaller space, with a different arrangement of screens and whiteboards. Figure out how everything works in there.
  6. Go home, edit the fly culture video.
  7. Start polishing up Monday’s lecture.

So far, I’ve managed to complete #1. That’s it. I’ve been scurrying up and down stairs, hauling microscopes around, sorting out media, laying out materials on bench tops, and basically doing a lot of physical labor. Hey, aren’t I an elderly professor? What’s with all the sweating?

Right now I think the best I can do is go home, take a stab on #4 from my office chair, and start #7. Then I’ll come in bright and early and maybe not so winded to start with #2. There goes the weekend.

Friday Cephalopod: Party conversation

I’m not good at parties. Get a whole bunch of people chattering away at once, and I’m overwhelmed and retreat into the woodwork. But here’s a group of Humboldt squid having an animated conversation.


Instead of producing an auditory cacophony, they instead signal to each other with color patterns. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Next time I attend a party (who am I kidding? No one is ever going to have a party again, and live), I should wire myself up with colored LEDs, with a little control panel in my hand so I can change the pattern depending on my mood.

“But, PZ,” you are about to say, “nobody else would understand your signals.” Exactly. That would be perfect. After all, we don’t understand what the squid are saying, either.

No saints!

Well, this is awkward. Once again personal biases have throttled me for years.

Razib Khan was a colleague on ScienceBlogs. He’s a former student of the geneticist John Postlethwaite, a man I respect a great deal, and who was also on my graduate committee. Razib is a very smart man, and the times we have met he was pleasant and interesting. And for those reasons I’ve been reluctant to repudiate his racist views. Mea culpa, I confess, I am guilty of overlooking a great evil because it was incompatible with a casual friendship, and sometimes I’m a bit tired of burning all my ‘friends’ to the ground in the course of the past decade. At the rate I’m going, no one is going to come to my funeral.

As most of you already know, EO Wilson died recently, and one person has asked me why I didn’t mention it here on the blog. That’s also awkward. There’s a lot I liked about Wilson — funny, isn’t it, that people are complicated and have multiple parts to their self — but there were also things about him that deeply bothered me. I couldn’t just say, “good guy, he’ll be missed” because there was more to it than that. I read his book Sociobiology when it first came out (good grief, I have that very same volume with that paper cover, now I feel old) and loved the entomology, but was bothered by the bits where he tried to interpret human behavior in the light of ants. There were other little things over the years, but by the time of his death, Wilson had become revered and a saint of science, so again, it was hard to write an honest opinion of him, so I chickened out and just didn’t.

The wisdom of my caution was confirmed when Scientific American published an opinion piece titled “The Complicated Legacy of EO Wilson” by Monica McLemore. Uh-oh. As you can guess from the title, she wasn’t just going to buy into the idea that Wilson was a saint, and felt as I did that he was messy mix of good and bad, like most people. And then the usual suspects roared at her and yelled at SciAm and howled in protest. Jerry Coyne hated the article, of course. Michael Shermer made a big stink and complained on Quillette. It was too woke! Even if I had thought the SciAm article was out of line (I don’t), I would have been reluctant to side with those assholes. So I again stayed silent.

Sometimes you get tired of the battles, you know?

Now the conflict has flared up again. Razib Khan (remember him?) wrote an open letter to SciAm to argue that the article was “indecent. It was muddled and uninformed at best, disrespectful and misleading at worst”, and protested that, oh no, how dare you accuse EO Wilson of scientific racism, which was really weird coming from a guy who writes for VDARE and praises Steve Sailer. Maybe it was because relative to his usual associates, Wilson wasn’t racist. He was trying to whitewash Wilson as hard as he could, which is what I really find disrespectful. It’s really betraying his scientific legacy to pretend that his ideas never fueled scientific racism, or that he had no racist views of his own. Khan got a lot of high powered signatories to his letter, but then recently a couple of them, including Hopi Hoekstra (a former student of Coyne’s) had second thoughts and withdrew her name…and now that has got the whitewashers angry at her. How dare you think Wilson’s legacy was complicated? How dare you think Wilson ever contributed to a racist ideology?

Here’s a comment on Khan’s substack from David Sepkoski, a historian of science.

How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?

Specifically, Rushton (if you don’t know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human “races,” ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be “attacked” if he did.

And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton’s university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to “racial” populations).

I knew Wilson and I don’t think he was intentionally racist. But science–and biology, particularly–has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn’t help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it “set the record straight.”

I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a “psychopath,” dismissing all criticism of his ideas as “Marxist,” and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.

Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be “what’s your evidence,” I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don’t pretend that nobody’s offered any substance.

He also posted a follow-up to some criticisms:

Well, in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic–his ideas are a matter of public record and you can make up your own mind. I’m not going to be posting archival documents on discussion boards, but I’m in the process of drafting an essay about Wilson and the larger issue of systemic racism in science that I hope to place in a magazine or journal soon (apparently not Sci Am, though! one thing I agree with in this substack essay is that Sci Am owes it to readers to allow for a back-and-forth, and I don’t like their stated policy). If there’s sufficient interest I’ll come back here with a link to anything that eventually gets published. I’m not trying to be coy–I’ve been working on a book on this topic but it’s still far from complete, and I now see the need to get something shorter out sooner without basically just dumping my research materials on the internet!

One thing you raise that I’ll comment on, though, is the issue of a political agenda among Wilson’s critics. That’s indisputable. What troubles me, though, is the insistence by Wilson and his defenders that he (and they) have no politics or ideology. That’s patently ridiculous, since everyone has a politics and it’s impossible to separate that from everything else we do.

In Wilson’s case (and Dawkins’, and Pinker’s, and Sam Harris’, so on) that politics seems to be the same kind of fairly straightforward neoliberalism that has driven centrist politics from the 1980s onward, and which–while sometimes socially progressive–emphasizes “individual responsibility” at the expense of certain kinds of progressive social welfare programs. I’m not interested in debating the merits of that neoliberalism (which you can find influences of in everyone from Thatcher and Reagan to the Clintons and even Obama), but rather in pointing out that this IS an ideology (or a politics), and it influences views of science just as much as Lewontin’s Marxism, etc.

And here, Wilson’s discussions of ants are totally germane, as the author of the Sci Am essay proposes (though perhaps again without enough specificity), since Wilson frequently interpreted ant behavior though analogy to human social organization, and then turned around and used that interpreted analogy as a basis for understanding human social evolution and organization. It is in the circularity of that argument that Wilson’s politics enter his science (among other places).

Yes. Exactly, although I disagree that SciAm needs to allow for back-and-forth with goddamned racists. I shouldn’t have been shy about saying so earlier.

No one will be coming to my funeral anyway.

Madison Cawthorn was too busy virtue signaling to do his job

This is the first time I learned about the Burn Pits problem.

During the live recorded meeting, which ran close to three hours, politicians listened to veteran advocacy groups discuss how uniformed military personnel have been exposed to dangerous toxins when ordered to stand by burn pits—an ill-conceived method of burning trash at military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That grimy duty usually fell to low-ranking soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, some of whom developed heart, lung, and digestive ailments after hours of standing over smoke from the burning plastics, rubber, and paper envelopes from families back home.

That’s bad on a couple of levels: bad for the environment, bad for the people living there, bad and wasteful of resources. I can see why it’s an important issue, and I didn’t even listen to the testimony, but I hadn’t heard anything about it before. That I now have we can thank Madison Cawthorn for being such a colossal, posturing asshole, so I guess his bad behavior did one good thing. He was on the committee, and instead of paying close attention, he used that time to…play with his gun? I guess he was bored. Other members of the panel noticed how little attention he paid to a life-or-death issue for veterans.

Rosie Lopez Torres, the cofounder of Burn Pits 360, told The Daily Beast that she did not notice that Cawthorn was working on his gun. She only recalled that he seemed distracted at times. But when she saw the picture of what he was doing, she was livid.

“Oh wow,” she said. “That is insane. Total disregard and disrespect to America’s war fighters. He was so bored with the topic. Those that are sick and dying and the widows in his district should see how much he cares about the issue.”

Don’t worry. Cawthorn has an excuse.

The Daily Beast asked Cawthorn’s office if the congressman thought this an appropriate time to clean his firearm. His communications director, Luke Ball, responded: “What could possibly be more patriotic than guns and veterans?”

That’s a problem right there, that anyone thinks guns are “patriotic”.

I kinda think dedicated civil service is more patriotic than guns.

Meat Loaf is dead

We’ve lost an epic heldentenor — Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, has died. He was such a fierce, athletic, passionate performer, and has in the past collapsed on stage a few times, due to dehydration…but really it was because he threw himself into his work so thoroughly and exhausted himself. I’ll consider his actual cause of death to be that he was always going full throttle and couldn’t just slow down and take it easy, ever.

By the way, his obituary unfortunately seems to think his weight was a salient point to make repeatedly. Nah. He was a big man, but that was the least important part of his identity.

Abraham Lincoln, socialist

Today I learned that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx corresponded…and that Lincoln was sympathetic to many of Marx’s ideas (that strange squelching sound you hear in the distance is the sound of generations of zombie Republicans rising up from their TV chairs to slobber and point an accusing finger at me.) The Red Scare of the middle of the last century sure managed to destroy a lot of good ideas and reasonable history with the scorching heat of fanaticism. It’s sad how much we lost in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Lincoln was not, of course, a Communist. And yet some of the ideas he absorbed from Marx’s Tribune writings — many of which would later be adapted for the first volume of Capital — made their way into the Republican Party of the 1850s and 60s. That party, writes Brockell, was “anti-slavery, pro-worker and sometimes overtly socialist,” championing, for example, the redistribution of land in the West. (Marx even considered emigrating to Texas himself at one time.) And at times, Lincoln could sound like a Marxist, as in the closing words of his first annual message (later the State of the Union ) in 1961.

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” the country’s 16th president concluded in the first speech since his inauguration. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” That full, 7,000 word address appeared in newspapers around the country, including the Confederate South. The Chicago Tribune subtitled its closing arguments “Capital vs. Labor.”

Oh my god. Do you remember when the United States had a pro-labor political party? Neither do I.

Here’s how the Democratic party reacted to teachers voting to demand remote teaching options.

When Chicago teachers voted to work remotely last week to protest COVID-19 safety protections in the nation’s third-largest school district, Democratic Party officials leapt into action.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed for a quick end to the job action and helped secure rapid tests to entice teachers back to the classroom. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the teachers “abandoned their posts” in “an illegal walkout.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that students should be in school. The standoff ended with a tentative agreement late Monday.

“Leapt into action”…to get teachers back into the classroom, to continue unsafe pandemic practices, to put more students and their families at risk, all in defiance of what medical experts have been advising. Keeping the schools open is so important to Democrats that they’d oppose the teacher’s union to get the back to work.

At least that’s not as bad as the recommendation of asshole conservative Henry Olsen (why does that guy get published in the Washington Post, our supposedly liberal paper? Maybe because it’s not as liberal as they want you to think.)

Teachers unions are in the wrong on covid-19. Democrats must force them back to work.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s vote to return to remote learning over what it says are unsafe conditions due to covid-19, forcing the city’s schools to close on Wednesday, not only defies reason; it’s also an assault on the well-being of children. City, state and national Democrats should act to bring vaccinated teachers back to work and prevent future unjustified work stoppages.

Let’s hope the Democratic party doesn’t ever listen to Henry Olsen, and why the hell is Henry Olsen trying to advise the Democrats in the first place?

Those are the two poles of the politics of the labor movement in America: on one side, Republicans who would be fine with sending workers into their workplaces at gunpoint, if necessary, and on the other side, Democrats who will more gently pressure unions to obey the dictates of the bosses, exactly the same outcome the Republicans want.

Poor Abraham.

Hospital bed decreases were a precondition to the pandemic

Here’s a chilling statistic.

But there are important questions that are attracting little attention: Why does America not have enough hospital beds to deal with this emergency? Why does an increase in 155,000 patients, about 3,000 additional patients per state, push the system to its breaking point?

The answer is that there are far fewer hospital beds in the United States today than there were just a few decades ago. In 1975, when the United States had 113 million fewer people, there were 1.5 million hospital beds in the United States. Today, there are just over 900,000.

That seems backwards. Why would one of the richest countries in the world start stripping itself of healthcare facilities before the pandemic hit? Read the link, it goes on at length about the processes that led to a reduction in hospital services, in short:

Vertical and horizontal consolidation means there is little competition for hospitals and related services that hospitals also own. By 2016, “90 percent of all metropolitan areas had highly concentrated hospital markets.” The lack of competitors has allowed hospitals to raise prices for outpatient services “four times faster than what doctors charge.”

In other words, hospitals are getting rid of hospital beds because they are making more money diverting patients elsewhere. The focus on the bottom line applies both to for-profit and non-profit hospital networks, which operate nearly identically.

I can be even shorter: because capitalism. The purpose of hospitals is to make money for their owners, don’t you know.