A fly’s fate

I was upstairs a moment ago, checking on the fly lab. The students’ first fly cultures are looking good, we’ve got swarms of flies in bottles thriving, and soon we’ll be able to go on to the next phase of the experiment. I got to thinking, though, about flies and destiny. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a fruit fly.

You live in a thriving fly metropolis, surrounded by a mass of your peers buzzing and jostling each other, with your children frolicking under foot, burrowing through the tasty medium. Although it’s somewhat crowded, there’s plenty of food, and no predators. It’s a pleasant enough environment.

Then one day, a giant comes along and turns your city upside down, shaking all of the residents into a barren, empty bottle, nothing to eat, no offspring, just sterile glass all around. Your confusion is only brief, fortunately, because there’s a sickly sweet smell in the air, and everyone loses consciousness. One of three outcomes await you.

A. You awaken in a pristine paradise on a nice smooth bed. There’s plenty of food, and no overcrowding. You’re not alone, but it’s only a few of your peers around you. There’s room to dance and court and have sex! Your conditions are vastly improved. Bless you, kind giant.

B. You never wake up. Shortly after losing consciousness, your body slides into a vat of nearly pure alcohol, and you simultaneously drown and are poisoned, completely oblivious to your fate.

C. You stir back into consciousness to find yourself in a cluttered cavern, empty of food, but all around you are the dead husks of your fellow flies. You are tangled in a bit of silk, and you begin to struggle and flap your wings to escape. Little do you know, but the monster in the cave was ignoring you when you were motionless, but now your exertions have caught her attention, and you see eight eyes approaching and two needle-sharp fangs…you are paralyzed. You can feel your organs liquifying. Death is a relief.

Very, very few flies end up in A, and even there, the respite is temporary — they’ll meet their end in a few weeks. Right now, as the fly production ramps up, most are going to C, but later as populations get really large, most will go to B, since even now I’m getting as many flies as the spiders can eat.

It’s also almost entirely about luck. Flies that have obvious abnormalities or developmental issues or injuries don’t get picked for paradise, usually, but among the swarming majority of normies, it’s pure chance whether you get the reprieve — the overwhelming majority get either the poison bath or the chelicerae. It’s not fair. The universe is not fair. I imagine the flies in A consider themselves deserving of their good fortune, but they’re not — they just got lucky. For a little while.

Filthy dirty disease-carrying rat rampaging through New York!

Sarah Palin is suing the New York Times for libel, so she was in New York City for a court visit…which was postponed because she was diagnosed with COVID-19. Now you and I, if we found ourselves infectious with an unpleasant disease, would probably isolate ourselves at home to avoid passing it on to strangers or loved ones; I even have contingency plans for alternative methods of teaching if I should come down with it. But not Palin! She took that opportunity to go out to nice restaurants with people, all maskless, of course. It’s not as if anyone would expect her to be at all responsible.

It gets even worse than that, though. Her thuggish companions would rough up people who questioned the wisdom of her behavior.

A half dozen NYPD officers were called to Elio’s restaurant on Second Avenue Wednesday night after a man dining with the former Alaska Governor on the Upper East Side roughed up a news photographer filming them dining outdoors.

“Are any of you guys concerned she tested positive for covid?” he asked. The moment the words came out of the Upper East Site photographer’s mouth, the man put his napkin down, stands up and takes a beeline for him— menacingly asking “are you looking for trouble” over and over.

The unidentified, large man dining with Palin grabbed the victim’s fingers with both hands, wrenching and twisting them down, slamming the camera to the concrete, the photographer told Upper East Site

There’s video of the event. It’s a clear case of assault. The assailant (now identified as Ron Duguay) has not been arrested. Why not? Is this perfectly normal, that a celebrity dingbat can wander around New York, spewing viruses unchecked, and having anyone who questions the propriety of her behavior beaten up? Is this what “going rogue” means?

Sleep however you feel like

A while back, there was an idea that swept through social media that there is this thing called biphasic sleep. People naturally tend to wake up in the middle of the night, that historically there was a thing called “first sleep”, and then people would wake up around 2am and putter about and use their bedpans or pick up a quill pen and write a sonnet or whatever, and then go back to bed for “second sleep” before rising at cock-crow. I found this reassuring, because as I got older I was shifting from continuous night-time sleep to an interrupted sleep that fit that pattern. It’s OK! It’s not just age and stress, this is how humans are supposed to sleep, I could tell myself.

Hold it right there, not so fast: it’s probably not true. There isn’t one way you’re supposed to sleep.

But humans have never had a universal method of slumber. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.

Even within preindustrial Europe, sleep contained multitudes. Reviewing the diaries of European writers such as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Ekirch found several allusions to unified sleep. Summarizing this complicated literature, he told me that “patterns of sleep in non-Western cultures appear to have been much more diverse” than those in Europe, but that they were truly diverse everywhere.

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that biphasic sleep is like anarchical foraging: Both might have well served some ancient populations some of the time, but neither of them offers a clear solution to modern problems.

I find that even more reassuring. Don’t hold people to the one true way they’re supposed to do something, everyone is different, different cultures lead to different behaviors, and there’s nothing wrong with being a bi or a mono-sleeper. Individuals can even change! The only norm is that we have diverse patterns of activity.

Although “like a baby” is a pretty good ideal.

Friday Cephalopod: quite possibly non-Euclidean

You might be tempted to stare deeply into this image, trying to puzzle out what it is you’re looking at, but that’s how they get you.

That’s Haliphron, the 7-armed octopus, holding a jellyfish it’s been nibbling on. Now that I’ve told you, I hope that has broken the spell, and you’ll be able to escape. If not, well, a cephalopod has got to eat, and it’s next victim will by baffled by the way those twisting arms surround your face.

A time to talk & think about something other than genetics

I’m going to be pumping out these genetics videos three times a week (!), but they’re really not intended to be popular fodder that will generate hordes of clicks and views. I’ve intentionally put title screens on them that are horribly bland, because they’re really intended for my students. I’m also so tired from keeping up with my classes every day — in part because I decided to restructure and rewrite the entire semester — that I’ve had trouble planning anything outside of class. So, just to keep my channel alive, I’m going to try something structureless and informal — I’ll just ramble for an hour or so on Friday night and see if anything interesting dribbles out of my mouth. Tomorrow, then, I’ll turn a webcam on my homely face and talk for a while, without much preparation.

As you can see, I want to kick Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson a bit more, but also there’s this new paper on the evolution of the inner ear in bats, so I intend to say a few things about it off the cuff. Or about whatever else springs into my tired brain.

Will this finally kill Jordan Peterson’s career? No, it will not.

That’s quite a list of critics of the Rogan/Peterson circle jerk. All these people with relevant, advanced degrees in climatology are explaining that Peterson is childishly inaccurate and foolish, as if maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that he is a lying incompetent.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick:

“He seems to think we model the future climate the same way we do the weather. He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.

“He has no frickin’ idea,” she said.

Dr Gavin Schmidt:

“Guys, for the love of everything holy, please, please, have somebody on who knows what the heck a climate model is!!!”

Schmidt told the Guardian he was reminded of a quote from the famous British statistician George Box.

“Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’,” Schmidt said.

Prof Steve Sherwood:

Peterson was “making the ancient climate sceptic error of mixing up weather and climate”.

“Anyone who has taken an introductory course in climate or atmospheric science would spot this problem,” he said. “Errors in a weather forecast indeed accumulate such that after a couple of weeks the forecast is useless.”

But with climate, Sherwood said, the models work differently to project how the climate will respond to different factors, such as higher levels of CO2.

“[Peterson’s] argument is like saying we can’t predict whether a pot of water on a flame will boil, because we decide in advance what variables to put in our model, and can’t predict each bubble.”

Prof Christian Jakob:

Peterson’s comments were “ill-informed” and that he’d “mixed up weather prediction with climate projections.

“People are entitled to their opinions, but science and climate modelling isn’t about opinion. If you’re not well informed about how something is done then it’s not right to make comments about it on a large platform.”

Prof Michael Mann:

Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s facilitation of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Peterson’s claim that the climate was too complicated showed “a total lack of understanding of how science works” and could be used to dismiss physics, chemistry, biology, “and every other field of science where one formulates conceptual models”, according to Mann.

“Every great discovery in science – including the physics that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast their ridiculous conversation – has arisen through that process,” he said.

Prof John Abraham:

the episode was “a word salad of nonsense spoken by people who have no sense when it comes to climate.”

“To say that climate model errors increase like compound interest is laughable. Jordan Peterson displays a near complete misunderstanding of climate change, and the tools climate scientists use to understand what is happening to our planet.

“It’s as if someone, with zero expertise and knowledge, made comments about something he knows little about.”

You know, people have been blasting this message since he first squelched his way into the public consciousness with his wrong interpretations of an anti-discrimination law, his wrong explanations of gender, his wrong ideas about evolution and neuroscience, his wrong notions of epidemiology and disease, all undergirded by his wrong opinions about religion and supernatural phenomena, and his foundation in the wrong ideas about psychology (his profession!) built on a bizarre Jungian framework. His audience doesn’t seem to care. They just seem to like that he’s blissfully confident about his wrongness, and that’s what they love about him.

Disappeared

Worker Hammering Square Peg into Round Hole — Image by ©Images.com/Corbis

So this is how the gender-critical fascists are going to handle trans men and women: by simply denying that they exist, insisting that their identity and perspectives and history must be consumed by the ravenous Gender Binary.

I know how this will go. Humans are binary. If you don’t fit our definition of the gender binary, you must not be human. Therefore, we can do with you what we will. It’s eliminationist logic through and through.

And seriously, Ms Dansky, if you’re asked to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, and are getting the approval of Carlson, Fox News, and his audience, you ought to be questioning your life choices.

This is too true.

The cats are running the show

You should be outraged at Tennessee schools banning Maus. I know I am.

A school district in Tennessee banned the use of “Maus,” a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, in its middle school classes, citing the work’s profanity and nudity in a 10-to-0 vote.

As leaders in conservative areas across the country push for more control over the way history is taught, the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in “Maus” were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper.

How do you show the horror of the Holocaust in a “proper” way? You just have to sanitize out the “horror” part? That’s the whole point of educating kids about this event — you have to make it clear that this wasn’t a trivial, fun, amusing event. You can’t clean it up. It’s why Spiegelman has refused to turn it into a movie.

The school board’s objections are ludicrous. It’s got expletives in it — have they ever listened to eighth-graders? As a kid, I didn’t learn dirty words from a book, or my family, I got them from my peers. The naughty words in Maus are relatively tame against the magnitude of the nightmare going on around the characters. Nudity? Hah. People being forced to line up for mandatory showers (does the school district have communal showers in their PE building?) or piles of naked corpses are not images that will make the kids think of forbidden sexy times.

The most chilling part of the article, though, is the mention of the “10-to-0 vote”. No one on that school board was principled enough to speak out against the banning, the whole board was depressingly uniform in their views. That speaks to the effectiveness of the deranged Right in infiltrating our civic life to take control and further poison our communities with their oppressive ideas. We have seen the same phenomenon in the teaching of creationism — the teachers are dead set against it, many of the citizens don’t want it, the institutions of higher learning all reject it and say teaching it is a waste of time, but all you need is a bloc of churches voting to pack the board, and they can dominate.

Good luck, people of McMinn County, Tennessee. You’ve been fucked over.

Long day ahead

I keep telling my students about what I call Fly Time — the idea that these genetic experiments we’re doing require that we carry out the steps on the fly’s schedule, which may sometimes be inconvenient for the human experimenter. We’ll be flexible, but the work does require doing things outside the formally scheduled class time. That’s about to bite me in the butt.

We had this minor fire yesterday that canceled labs for the day. But we’re on Fly Time! They don’t care about our lab schedule! I’ve got a big plan that requires starting on time, and if we don’t begin the experiment this week it won’t culminate before spring break. I can’t compel students to stay and do lab work over their break, so if it runs over…I’m the guy who has to do all the final fly counts in the experiment. The students need to start the cross this week!

To accommodate our students’ busy schedules, I get to spend today in the fly lab helping a string of students coming in on Student Time to learn fly husbandry. All day long. Parked in a lab as students dribble in. Except for the time I get to spend lecturing them in class. And then I come home and put the recording of the lecture together and upload it. I also have to assemble a new problem set and post it on Canvas. Maybe if there’s a gap in the stream of students I can do that during the day?

Ha ha. The flexibility I’m trying to build into the course is coming out of my hide. There better not be any more fires this semester.