Fly Time was a bust

That was agonizing. My students have projects ongoing, so I leave the lab open so they can get in and work with their flies. I go in early in the morning specifically to unlock it.

Someone locked it back up again after I left!

Students were backed up, trying to get in, and were frantically phoning and messaging me!

While I was trying to teach my other class!

It was agonizing: non-stop ringing and beeping while I’m trying to deliver a lecture, and it wasn’t so much that the noise bothered me, but that I couldn’t just ditch one class to help another, and so I couldn’t answer or do anything about it. I finally broke down and ran into the other room to ask my long-suffering wife to take my keys and unlock it for them. I’ve now posted prominent signs telling people not to lock it during class hours.

I guess I should be grateful for diligent staff who maintain our security, and for eager, ambitious students, but wow was that a stressful class hour.

(For that matter, this pandemic has already pushed my stress levels off the charts.)

We’re on fly time now, boys and girls

My new regime begins today, and it’s one of the awkwardnesses of teaching a fly genetics lab. Mere human schedules don’t work; I informed the students from the very beginning that we’re going to be at the mercy of the flies’ schedule, and they have a roughly 9 day generation time, which doesn’t align well with our 7 day class cycle.

So what do we do? The class becomes more of an exercise in independent study. We have the regularly scheduled lab time, which I use to explain where we should be at and what to do in the next week, and then I open up the lab early every morning so they can come in whenever they want. I’m also posting my personal cell phone number on the door so they can call me at any time to come over (it’s not at all far, fortunately) — I’ll be requesting no calls after midnight, though. So starting now, I am on Fly Time and Student Time.

Which means I have to zip over to the lab right now.

Man, it would be handy to have one of those Time Tacos.

Some of us have known that almost half of Americans are conspiracy theorists all along

I hate to say I told you so, but many of us have been aghast at the idiocy promoted by shady weird organizations for decades. Snopes has a good summary of creationism as a classic conspiracy theory.

Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.

In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.

This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.

Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International.

Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.

There is something about the United States that is very good at fostering wacky obsessions. We’ve been afflicted with a succession of “Great Awakenings” (I hate the name — “Dreadful Paroxysms of Cultishness” would be more appropriate), so the recent unpleasantness of QAnon & Trumpism & militias are just ripples of chaos from enduring poison in our population. We’ve been running a fever for a few centuries that occasionally flares up into a wave of horrid stupidity, and we’ve been in one of those for the last few years.

Just sayin’ — if you’d been paying attention to those of us who’ve been disgusted with the way we treat religious inanity (I know many of my readers have been quite aware), you wouldn’t be surprised at the recent eruption. There’s not much difference between Answers in Genesis and QAnon. Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity is just the worst.

How much did that insurrection cost?

There’s a guy I follow on Facebook — regrettably, he’s an old, old friend, but he’s gone off the cliff edge with conservative BS — who was recently outraged that the government spends $40 million a year on the retirement pensions for politicians. I don’t know where he got that number, but it’s not scary at all, since there are probably a few thousand retired politicians who had contracts for a retirement package. Numbers add up!

But here’s what he isn’t complaining about, the conservative estimate of the cost of Trump’s lies.

Those are only the expenses since he lost the election and started vomiting up lies to throw the nation into chaos — he had 4 years before that where he bled us dry with nonsense, and we still have to deal with the legacy of all the garbage he littered on our government.

So yeah, $40 million in retirement expenses sounds cheap to me. I wouldn’t squeak if we were coughing up $400 million in legit retirement costs. I wonder if my poor deluded old friend has retired, and whether he thinks he is entitled to social security and a pension or a 401K, and how he’d feel if we declared him old and useless so we can take that money away?

1 in 475

As usual, the oppressed and neglected populations are suffering the most.

Covid is killing Native Americans at a faster rate than any other community in the United States, shocking new figures reveal.

American Indians and Alaskan Natives are dying at almost twice the rate of white Americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Nationwide one in every 475 Native Americans has died from Covid since the start of the pandemic, compared with one in every 825 white Americans and one in every 645 Black Americans. Native Americans have suffered 211 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 121 white Americans per 100,000.

This is one of those facts that make white Harvard professors arguing that the pandemic helps their theory particularly repugnant.

Someone let the panspermists out of their cages again

I’m rather astonished that Salon chose to publish this article, Why some scientists believe life may have started on Mars. The operative words in that title are some – we’re talking about a tiny fringe minority – and believe, because they sure don’t have any evidence for their ideas. I guess Salon is desperate for news, so they’re letting writers invent some.

They don’t provide any evidence for their claim, only a weak chain of rationalizations.

  • Some Mars rocks have been found on Earth. True enough. Meteor collisions with Mars can splash rocks into space, and they occasionally fall to Earth.
  • Maybe early Martian life was adapted to survive meteor impacts, and was so hardy it could have survived the accidental launch and long journey? I had to laugh. Nothing evolves to survive meteor impacts.
  • Maybe early life was fine with harsh environments? Early life would have been adapted to aqueous environments; “harsh” is floating away from food sources and warmth and a predictable pH, not drying out completely and surviving a vacuum.
  • Life on Earth evolved “quickly”, too quickly. Yeah, we think replicators evolved shortly after the planet cooled enough to have liquid water. We’re talking within…200 million years. That’s not enough time? How do you know?
  • Mars cooled before Earth, therefore life could have evolved there first. Wait, you think 200 million years is inadequate for life to evolve on Earth, but there was time enough for it to evolve on Mars?

The real reason this fact-free idea is getting promoted is because a couple of crackpots from Harvard, Gary Ruvkun and Avi Loeb (remember him? The Oumuamua guy?) said it, and “Harvard” is a magical incantation to the rubes. They don’t have a speck of evidence, though. It all sounds like something someone would have babbled about over lunch, and then the speculation went critical, and because they’re Harvard guys, they think it’s worth announcing to the news agencies. That’s it. That’s all this is.

They’re not even particularly clever Harvard guys.

“To me the idea that it all started on Earth, and every single solar system has their own little evolution of life happening, and they’re all independent — it just seems kind of dumb,” Ruvkun said. “It’s so much more explanatory to say ‘no, it’s spreading, it’s spreading all across the universe, and we caught it too, it didn’t start here,” he added. “And in this moment during the pandemic — what a great moment to pitch the idea. Maybe people will finally believe it.”

“Seems kind of dumb” is not an argument. It seems kind of dumb to me to suggest that the first life on earth, which would have been fragile and relatively simple, happened to be so robust and stable that it could have survived a massive shock that threw it into space, where it drifted for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, in a vacuum, bathing in radiation, to survive a super-heated re-entry to an alien atmosphere, crashing to Earth to resume where it left off on a Martian ocean. And that this was a more significant contribution to early life than countless chemical reactions churning out organic molecules at the bottom of Earth’s oceans.

These people are fine with reciting silly arguments about the great improbability of chemicals coming together to form a self-perpetuating metabolism, but hey, chance survivors on rare random rocks flung into an immensely empty space happening to coincidentally hit a dot of a world a hundred million kilometers away, or even hundreds of light years away, no problem.

And they think a pandemic will help them? Aside from the tastelessness of that notion, we can’t even convince millions of people to wear a mask, yet they think this will convince them that we’re all descendants of Martians? At best it means these guys think people are gullible enough to fall for their crackpot ideas now.

I also suspect cartoonists are trying to torture me

This one lured me in with the title “Cave of the Mega-Spider”, and the first shot is of a big toothy dinosaur. OK, this is acceptable. Then said dinosaur tears open a spider silk blob…and there’s a dead, dessicated hominid inside? What the heck? Anachronism! Then the giant fanged mega-spider makes an appearance, and it’s kind of awesome, until it opens it’s mouth, vertebrate-style with mandibles, and starts hosing the dinosaur down with silk from the spinneret — in its throat. I cannot enjoy this anymore. I am offended.