Rhawn Joseph is fishing with worms now

Oh, dear. Rhawn Joseph is at it again.

He has a new, exciting, batshit loony paper to publish in his website-masquerading-as-a-journal, titled “Tube Worms on Mars: More Proof of Life on the Red Planet”. I haven’t seen it. I am capable of judging it by his past work, though, and am confident that it will be a collection of photographs pulled from NASA, selected for the presence of the appearance of holes, and the text will basically be a litany of rationalizations for how they kinda sorta look like earthly tube worm burrows, therefore they are tube worm trace fossils. It’s the rankest nonsense.

So this tweet was put out to warn the worm community (yes, Virginia, scientists who study worms form a fairly tight collaborative community — it’s cool) that Rhawn Joseph has put out a call for reviewers for this paper. Now here’s the deal, though: the paper is going to be published. There is also a tight collaborative community of cranks that I dubbed the Panspermia Mafia, and some among them will readily rise up to give a cursory peer evaluation of the work, and rubber stamp their approval. It is going to appear in the funny pages of the Journal of Astrobiology, and you can’t stop it.

However, the warning is still a good idea, because what Joseph is actually doing is fishing for a) real scientists who might think this kind of thing is amusing and let it pass, legitimizing it or b) new gullible cranks to join his community.

You really don’t want to join the Panspermia Mafia. The initiations are brutal — they pelt you with idiocy until your brain melts.

P.S. I’ll probably read it and laugh at it when good ol’ Rhawn dumps it on to the web, so you’ll probably see it here. I pelt you with idiocy, too!

How many spiders is too many spiders?

My heart says you can’t have too many spiders, but my brain says, “Whoa there, that’s a lot of spiders to sort out and feed.” Then my brain has second thoughts and realizes many of the babies will die, so we better get extras, and then agrees with my heart. So many spiders to to separate into vials…and more to come.

Uh-oh

I collected all these egg sacs yesterday, and this morning I find that two of them are already hatching out.

I know what I’m doing this morning!

I broke up the first batch of babies, and collected a nice round 100 spiderlings (That’s 100 octal, which is the natural base for spiders to use, which is 64 for you ten-fingered creatures). Only two escaped! So there are a couple of little baby spiders toddling around somewhere in my lab, I hope they find enough to eat.

I never met him, but still feel the loss

In the mid-70s, as a young undergraduate at the University of Washington, I got involved in orca watching. It wasn’t a big deal, I had these identification cards for the J, K, and L pods, and on weekends I’d either go to lookouts on the Puget Sound coast, or on a couple of occasions, took thrilling rides on a university oceanographic vessel. It was long, long ago, and it feels like it. How did I end up in the Midwest, I dunno.

Anyway, this makes me sad. The Puget Sound orcas are not doing great, with their stocks of their favorite food, salmon, diminishing. Who’s responsible for that, I dunno. Now one of the charismatic killer whales, K21 Cappuccino, has died.

K21 Cappuccino was a gregarious, curious, and kindly orca. He liked to engage in play behaviors—breaching, spyhopping, slapping his pectoral fins. And he was generally quite fearless about approaching human boaters who were in his waters. He seemed to always be curious about the crazy monkeys.

The 35-year-old male, sadly, has now joined the procession of endangered Southern Resident killer whales who have been dying at precipitous rates over the past five years, reducing the entire population now to 74 whales. He was last seen a week ago in a badly emaciated state, struggling against the tidal currents on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, far behind the rest of his clan; it is presumed that he has since died.

I never even knew this whale — he was born after I’d left the West coast and was living in Utah, of all places. Whole generations of orcas have lived and died (mostly died, it seems) since I abandoned the Pacific shores, and now I’m sad for what never was and will never be.

I’m going to pretend it was my whining that prompted this move

It’s probably good news, if the FDA beats the start of the semester, which is in two weeks, on the 25th. The University of Minnesota will require vaccinations!

Upon formal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of any COVID-19 vaccine (anticipated in the coming weeks), the University will add the COVID-19 vaccine to those immunizations already required for students, with appropriate exemptions. With the comfort associated with FDA approval, we will join a growing list of public colleges and universities across the country that are taking a similar approach, including, but not limited to, Michigan State University, Purdue University, the University of Florida, and many of the nation’s leading private colleges, including many in Minnesota.

Actually, it’s unlikely it was my nagging — much more likely that they noticed all those rival schools were beating us to the punch.

The morning harvest

Never,ever dust or clean, that’s my motto. We looked over our neglected sun room and garage, and look what we found:

That’s a Parasteatoda egg sac, which probably contains between 20 and 100 spider embryos.

But that’s not all. We collected seven egg sacs and 4 fertile mamma spiders, all from two rooms in my house, and now sitting in vials while I anxiously await the Hatchening. Which will probably occur next week.

I’m kind of dreading this — it’s like everything happens all at once, and then I’ve got a gigantic swarm to maintain. I better set up some more fly bottles today, they’re born hungry.

Makes you think…

On my bad days, I wonder whether this might not be a good idea.

Of course, then I consider the down sides. The expense and energy of making all these mulchers, loading up all the tankers with goo, transporting it to New York, and then spraying it all out into Central Park. The shaping is kind of impossible, too, because I’m pretty sure the slime would slump into a mess that would flow into the streets and drip off the edge of the island into the Hudson and East River.

There might be some other minor difficulties.

Anthropologists and archaeologists say trans rights

A Navajo two-spirit couple is seen in this historic photo from the collection of the Museum of New Mexico. Photo by Bosque Redondo, 1866.

Do I need to state the obvious again? Biologists keep telling everyone that sex and gender are a lot more complex and diverse than the binary bill of goods the ideologues try to sell you. Now let’s add another scientific discipline shouting the truth at the public, with Archaeologists for Trans Liberation.

Human biology extends beyond and between “Male” and “Female”

The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.

Identifying and understanding past people’s conceptions and experiences of gender is not straightforward. The further back one goes, the fewer and more fragmented the traces of people’s lives become and the more complicated it is to interpret and understand them. We work from scraps to construct narratives that are messy, ragged and rarely twine together.

It’s a very thorough article, and well referenced. I especially appreciate the bits we mere biologists don’t know as much about.

Our current social organization, based around strict lines delineating gender, primary sex characteristics, and sexuality, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged as part of European hegemonic colonialism and serves to enforce and maintain capitalist norms in the home and wider society (Monaghan 2015). An imposed and rigid gender binary regulates reproduction (a concern of nationalist states), breaks down Indigenous and non-European kin connections and families (perpetuating genocide), and positions the household as a site of capitalist surplus accumulation (through regulated social roles and relations of (re)production) (Morgensen 2010, 2012).

Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies critics such as Deborah Miranda (2010) and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) have documented the ways in which colonial governments engaged in violent projects of gender normalization targeting Indigenous individuals and communities. Daniel Justice (2010) draws on archaeological materials as resources for inspiring queer Cherokee worldviews, politics, and modes of belonging. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, in her academic writing (2018) and public scholarship (Wilber, Small-Rodriguez and Keene 2019), explores the way binary structures colonised bodies and beds, breaking and distorting traditional kin relations.

Such practices seem to have been a regular or even necessary force in sustaining European colonial violence across the globe. Religious strictures against ‘sodomy’ (which often glossed a range of non-heteronormative sex practices) were frequently used by European colonial and religious authorities to punish gender nonconforming individuals in Africa and South America. Epprecht notes that the British South African Company was particularly enthusiastic in prosecuting “homosexual crimes” during its first year of occupation of Zimbabwe, suggesting the commonplace nature of non-heteronormative relationships prior to Colonization, and “[indicating] a reflexive defense of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity by the homophobic representatives of the colonial state” (Epprecht 1998: 217). British colonial sodomy laws, despite no longer being in place in the U.K., remain on the books in many colonised countries, and continue to drive state violence and acts of bigotry against queer and gender diverse people (Sanders 2009; Semugoma 2012).

That does explain why so many of the status quo warriors are vehement in their denial of the science.

Trapped by racial genetics…get out now!

I learned two things from this peculiar article, DNA Testing Forced Me To Rethink My Entire Racial Identity: that there is a terrible undercurrent of self-loathing among some black people, and that there is a pervasive over-emphasis on genes vs. culture. The latter I already knew, the former I guess I should have known.

The story is that the author, whose last name is Garcia, always assumed she was Hispanic, even though her family had no hint of Hispanic culture and didn’t even speak Spanish. Then, they took genetics tests. Shock, horror, they were just…black Americans.

The Garcias are led by a pair of oddball patriarchs who could give Clark Griswold a run for his money: my father, Joe, 71, and his brother, Tony, 68. My dad and uncle identify culturally as African-American — they were raised by a black woman from rural Maryland. But according to the family history, their father was of Mexican-Indian descent, hence the last name.

Note that important point: they identify culturally as African-American. Why would you think a genetic test would trump your lived experience?

Well, last summer, Uncle Tony sent in his DNA sample for my niece’s school project, and what ensued was a chain of existential group texts and conversations involving all the Garcias, former Garcias, and anyone married to a Garcia.

My uncle’s ethnic breakdown identified him as more than 70 percent African and 20 percent European.

“No Spanish! Not one drop!” texted my cousin Tony, an attorney in Baltimore and Uncle Tony’s son, referring to the fact that we apparently had no Mexican roots. As if we’d all missed that part.

What do they think it means to be Mexican? There is no such thing as genetically Mexican: the people of Mexico are incredibly diverse, with no one unique genetic signature. If that 20 percent European didn’t include any Spanish loci, and there were no Native American indications, then yes, it is unlikely (but not impossible) that they have Mexican ancestry. But so what? They are who they are, with their own distinct family history.

They did their own research, non-genetic research. They talked to their family, and found out about the author’s paternal grandfather.

“I once overheard my mom and dad say Uncle Joe was a wanted man,” said another new cousin, Marie Shakoor, 71. “He was wanted under the name Will Worthey, and that’s why we think he changed his name to Joe Garcia.”

My cousin Tony said our grandfather exhibited classic escapist behavior, which supported Shakoor’s theory.

“If you’re trying to change your name and your identity, you’re typically trying to evade law enforcement,” Tony said. “Choosing to be Mexican-Indian may not have been our grandfather’s first choice, but it may have been the better option.”

Now that’s interesting and genuine, maybe a little unsavory, but it’s real. The genetic test was irrelevant. Again, who you are isn’t just an assortment of alleles, it’s the cultural influences that shape you far more. Tracing your genetic lineage is just one component of your identity, and probably not the most important part.

Then the story gets a little disturbing, when we find out why the author thought it was so important.

At first, I was in disbelief. What about all those people who came up to me on the streets of New York City and started speaking Spanish? They never doubted for a moment that I was Hispanic. And I had always killed it in Spanish class, seemingly because I had Latino blood coursing through my veins. Accepting that I wasn’t a Garcia felt dangerously close to abandoning my identity.

Oh god, so many misconceptions…language isn’t transmitted via “Latino blood”. New York is a polyglot city, and culturally Hispanic people might speak their language to you because that’s how they’re comfortable talking. When I visited Iceland, strangers tended to address me in Icelandic — it wasn’t because they had a psychic understanding that I, too, was a native. Genetically, I’m also about 4% Neandertal, but I am culturally 0% Neandertal — I can’t knap a flint worth a darn and don’t have any of the words of their language flowing in my veins.

But to cringe even more…

The more I learned, the less I wanted to know. I had always liked being a Garcia. Growing up in a black community, where surnames like Smith, Brown and Jackson are ubiquitous, being a Garcia set me apart.

Perhaps more significantly, being a Garcia meant I could trace my roots to an ancestral homeland — albeit Mexico, not Africa. This was noteworthy when you consider that many African-Americans lost all ancestral ties as a result of slavery and the slave trade.

Slavers committed a great crime, breaking the chain of cultural transmission for millions of people, and denying human beings knowledge of families and tradition and customs. But why would you want to set yourself apart from your neighbors and friends who had similar family histories?

Maybe one great result of these genetic tests is that the author will stop trying to set herself apart from her community. An additional benefit would be if she’d also see the limitations of genetics, and take pride in who she actually is.