I’m no longer preggers — I’m a papa!

Remember when I said I was preggers, and that I had a little transparent container on my desk I was watching? Yesterday I had noticed that the mama spider was rather agitated, and was fussing about with her egg sac, and I was getting worried that something was going wrong. I shouldn’t have worried! This afternoon while I was watching the AAS talks, I noticed some new tiny little dots near the sac — the babies have emerged! They are very cute. You’ll have to check them out on Instagram!

What is intelligence anyways?

I gave a talk titled “The Biology of Intelligence” on Sunday to the Atheists of Florida. It went OK, I think, with some of the familiar problems of Zoom talks. I sound a bit like a Dalek at times, and early on I had a catastrophic crash — my computer went down hard and I had to restart it all — but we muddled through.

I’m not a fan of the concept of “intelligence” — it’s something we can’t define and can’t even objectively measure, yet we seem to be comfortable saying that one species is more intelligent than another. A lot of the biology research seems to be contrived towards finding morphological correlates that align with our intuition, which is just plain bad science. Maybe I just don’t trust it because nobody ever intuits that spiders are the smartest species on earth.

What you’re missing today

The Tuesday schedule from the American Arachnology Society meeting:

I’m really looking forward to the plenary, and I know there will be lots of good stuff in the contributed talks, but boy, those were fatiguing yesterday. Also one session did not keep very good time, went way overlong, and rode right over the one break. Hey, coordinators, it’s really important to keep everything on time, otherwise when am I going to get to void all the coffee I was drinking through the meeting?

Also, the informal evening sessions are useful for us amateurs. I’m planning to sit in on the spider husbandry happy hour.

Au contraire!

I have to disagree with xkcd a little bit.

The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it

The problem is with not learning enough about biology. Once you know enough, you appreciate that the whole of your existence is wallowing in a cloud of everything and you might as well accept it — we’re all interconnected and part of the whole. Then, once you know too much, you find yourself wondering if your wife would mind if we invited a swarm of spiders to join us for a dinner date.

I made a graph.

You want to post pictures?

I got an offer to see a picture of a scorpion yesterday, which is neat, but we don’t allow pictures in comments because we want to be kind to readers’ bandwidth and because there are trolls who would abuse it. But then I thought…hey, you know that Freethoughtblogs has a Discord server? That would be a perfect place for that sort of thing. I even created a #photos channel within it, awaiting your submissions.

I suppose I could create a spider-free channel if people demand it. But why wouldn’t everyone want to see spider photos? (Don’t bother answering, I know.)

It’s going to be a spider kind of day

This morning I have to go into the lab and do upkeep on the spider colony and then I come back, put a big diet Coke by my side, and settle down to this schedule.

It’s time for the grindy part of the meeting! See that “contributed talks” bit? That’s 5 hours of 15 minute talks, one after the other, with occasional breaks during which, in a normal meeting, you’d mill around and talk to other people, but here in Virtual World I’ll just get up and stretch and walk in circles in my little office, I guess. They have concurrent tracks, so I can’t possibly see all the talks and have to miss half of them, so I think I’ll have to focus on the evo devo stuff, and then behavior, and then ecology & diversity. It’ll be a grueling session, but I’m looking forward to it.

Then we do it all again tomorrow.

Then again on Wednesday morning.

There are conveniences about online meetings, but I’m still hoping to go to the in-person meeting next year at UC Davis.

We still have to address Kent Hovind’s nonsense? Why?

Aron Ra has a new YouTube series on “Supposed Lies in the Textbooks” which addresses some of the many ridiculous claims by Kent Hovind about what is taught in the science classroom. For a guy who claims to have been trained as an educator and to have taught grade school science, ol’ Kent sure has some stupid misconceptions. For instance, Aron slaps down this remarkable claim from Hovind about molecular homology:

The bones develop from different genes in different organisms. Evolutionists cannot explain this and seldom discuss it.

But that’s not at all true! For instance, the evil cat and I used the same, or homologous, genes to develop the hands I use to type with, and the clawed paws she uses to slash me with. All of the diverse limbs illustrated above use a similar set of genes to build their bony cores, modulated by the same Hox genes to establish the pattern, with subtle variation in the regulation of their morphogenetic properties. It’s simply a lie that limb bones develop from different genes in different organisms, which is why biologists don’t discuss it.

Yet there are still people who treat Hovind as a reliable source — I know of several local churches here in West Central Minnesota who are happy to show kids those videos. I guess that’s why some of us are still trapped in the endless morass of having to explain that a liar lies.