We really are deficient in development education

This figure, used by ScienceDaily, is totally irrelevant to the topic and has a caption that doubles-down on the nonsensical part of the article: “The human brain may actually be two ancient nervous systems fused into one, a discovery that could transform how scientists study brain development and devastating neurological diseases.”

I guess I should address this, since so many people are emailing me about it. There is an article titled “Stanford scientists discover the human brain may actually be two separate organs”, which takes a basic reality of developmental biology and blows it up with a ridiculous conclusion. No, your brain is not two separate organs, any more than your liver is multiple organs because it contains multiple tissue types — that, for instance, there are different lineages of hepatic progenitor cells in liver differentiation that produce hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. We take this for granted; development is a hierarchical, branching process, and so yeah, we see sequential separation of developmental lineages. It’s to be expected! We don’t promote the work by claiming various organs are in fact multiple organs.

The sensationalist spin is being placed on competent work that traces markers that distinguish regions of a single organ, markers that have a deep history in both development and evolution. Calm down. This is a routine observation that does have some practical uses.

The weird twist was put on it by the Stanford press office and ScienceDaily. The actual paper (which is fine) it is based on is titled “Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain”, a much more sensible and accurate title, although it also claims that the brain is a “composite organ”, which is a little bit silly. Every organ is a composite organ in some sense. We are a multicellular gemisch with some regional organization.

Development is hierarchical and sequential. It’s disappointing that this isn’t taught in grade school.

WHY?

A recent article in Science has been deleted and a curious editorial comment added to it. The article title is Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information, and the editor’s note is:

Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.

The attributed author was Caroline Williams. The real Caroline Williams has written elsewhere:

Fake Caroline update:

The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.

Link to the retraction / editor’s comment here: https://lnkd.in/eSQ2XEAJ

The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.

I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.

On the plus side, I now have some very nice contacts at Science and Nature and plan to write something better for them as soon as possible. And the fact that payment was made opens up the possibility of tracking down who is behind this. Watch this space…

It’s weird. Fake Caroline got nothing out of this but a paycheck, which does make me wonder how much one gets paid for a news article in Science. It can’t be much, given that scientists who publish there get nothing, and are in fact expected to pay the journal for the privilege.

There is a great deal of gain to one’s reputation, but not if you publish under someone else’s name, obviously. You can’t list it on your CV.

It can hurt the real writer’s reputation — now editors might be on the alert that submissions by “Caroline Williams” could be fraudulent. But this is a lot of effort to go to for a weak effect on someone. I can’t believe this elaborate fraud was a devious hit piece.

So now I’m left wondering why anyone would do this. Is there some subtle scam at play?

The belated and well-deserved decline of Steven Pinker

If you ever thought Steven Pinker was a member of the liberal intelligentsia, think again. That was his carefully maintained facade, an illusion built on his politeness and careful speech, but underneath it all, he really is a kind of troglodyte with regressive views. Like so many right-wing podcasters, he’s been hiding behind free speech absolutism; whenever some horrid troll says something that ought to get them slapped down hard, here comes little Stevie, the Harvard professor, to defend them with a shout of “Free Speech!”

He’s had a long history of playing this gambit, and it’s starting to catch up with him. Virginia Heffernan lays out all the evidence, prompted by yet another book from the man. It must be hard on him to see his legacy dissolve.

But something’s not right. Pinker’s off his cognitive game. He’s admittedly had a hard stretch over the past few years, during which his reputation has sustained slow-rolling but significant damage. His glory days – from The Language Instinct in 1994 to his selection by Time magazine as a top evo-psych influencer in 2004 – may simply be behind him now. And though Bill Gates, Joe Rogan, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and other masters of the manosphere continue to look up to him, Pinker’s also at the centre of a cyclone of academic catastrophes.

For one, he’s still smarting from a six-year-old petition that tried in vain to get him removed from a linguistics association for alleged racist statements. “In the old days,” he said of cancellation culture on a recent podcast, “there were public hangings, public crucifixions, burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures.”

There’s the weak point of all those “free speech” claims. It’s really ‘free speech for me, not for thee’ if, when someone exercises their free speech to accuse him of racism, why, that’s comparable to a public crucifixion in his mind. These days he’s remarkably busy, since so many of his friends have done so many odious things, and he has to race around defending them all while trying not to muss his hair.

In his hard-won role as a public intellectual, Pinker has taken it upon himself to defend the freedom of anti-woke darlings to say and do whatever they want. These include the British philosopher and alleged sex pest Colin McGinn, the American academic fraud Marc Hauser, and the American “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who ignited the media campaign against Professor Jason Arday.

Notably, too, Pinker worked with his friend Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer, on the legal defence of their associate, the eugenicist and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

And now his intellectual child, evolutionary psychology, is in trouble.

And if stumping for the outlaw brotherhood weren’t taxing enough, Pinker’s domain of study has quietly collapsed. Evolutionary psychology, which he pioneered, came under a cloud after the exposure of its iffy methodology (in which its claims can’t be disproven), and controversies over race science (in which racial hierarchies are biological) and rape apologetics (in which rape is a reproductive strategy). Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED, yes, PED), where Pinker was a regular, closed ignominiously in 2021.

News of the death of evolutionary psychology may be premature — that collection of ugly misinterpretations of science is remarkably resilient, drawing as it does on the never-ending wellspring of racism and sexism. I wouldn’t count it out just yet, even if I do wish it would truly go away. I don’t think Pinker is the knight in shining armor who will rescue it. His reputation is finally being tarnished.

In 2019, Pinker’s reputation took its biggest hit when his clandestine ties to Epstein surfaced. It seemed that Epstein had hosted Pinker on his jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, and the men appeared in friendly photos together. Part of their relationship was Pinker’s starring role at Edge, a masculinist network of billionaires and academics that Epstein bankrolled and used to advance his plans for a master race. (I was a lesser light in Edge; that story is told here.)

Then there’s something darker: the evidence that Pinker helped Dershowitz with Epstein’s legal defence in 2007 – and did so knowingly, as was recently reported by the anthropologist Cathryn Townsend in Liberal Currents. (Pinker says he didn’t know which of Dershowitz’s clients he was helping.) Then in 2015 he tweeted out Dershowitz’s defence of Epstein and the former Prince Andrew.

Follow that link to the story of Edge — I was also a lesser light in that community, and wasn’t involved long enough to perceive how dark and evil that group was. But wow, did I ever dodge a bullet there.

He can’t help himself. He tends to ally himself with the worst people who are eventually exposed, and he’s left holding a bag of excuses.

Pinker, who never met an anti-woke campaign he didn’t like, recently joined the crusade of “race realist” Cofnas against Arday, the onetime Cambridge sociologist and suspected plagiarist who died last month. On X, Pinker grieved not over Arday’s presumed suicide but the fact that he and Cofnas had been been “tarred” with charges of racism for their attacks on him.

Metaphors that turn speech acts into medieval torture have become Pinker’s stock-in trade. For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies (a devastating 2015 study found that more than half of psychology studies could not be replicated) to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection, but Lord knows if those studies hold up.

Heffernan does not recommend Pinker’s latest book.

Skip the new book. The once-sharp Pinker has trouble landing a point these days, and it’s even a little worrying to see a don of his stature reduced this way. Pinker already blocks me on X for pointing out his ties to Epstein, so I’m sure he won’t see this piece and fear me as a hangman. (See “Free Speech Crusader Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties.”) But if he does, I will be careful not to say something violent. You read this piece, Professor? Perhaps you felt your blood pressure rise…

Thanks for the suggestion, but reading anything by Pinker has not been on my to-do list for many years. I will skip it. I’m not at all interested in anything by an Epstein apologist.

A discussion with Aron Ra

Aron Ra has been battling a particularly pretentious creationist who insist that he has evidence for creationism. Here’s the short list of his arguments:

  1. Taxonomically Restricted Essential Genes (orphan genes)
  2. pervasive molecular convergence
  3. upstream development gene regulatory networks cannot be mutated without lethal disturbance

Aron sent me a more thorough summary of his claims that I’ll include below the fold, but it was really a lot of pompous noise from a guy who had been gleaning scientific terms from the creationist literature, which he presented as evidence that refuted evolution and therefore, in creationist illogic, proved creation.

So we had a little dialogue about these claims. It could have been a debate, but the creationist ran away and refused to join the conversation.

[Read more…]

Nathan Cofnas needs to be discarded from the discourse

I have not said anything about the tragic story of Jason Arday, who was accused of plagiarism and after being hounded over it, was found dead later. I have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but an official Cambridge panel cleared his PhD thesis of claims of deliberate plagiarism, so it should have been over then (unintentional plagiarism is still an issue, but ask Doris Kearns Godwin or Stephen Ambrose about that).

What the Kearns and Ambrose cases didn’t have was a thick overlay of racism. Arday had been aggressively harrassed for a long time by a guy named Nathan Cofnas, before the accusations had filtered into British journalism, which treated them much much more seriously and marshaled the public to question the legitimacy of Arday’s work. I don’t know enough about Arday’s discipline to say whether more investigation was necessary, but I am familiar with Cofnas, that fine specimen of Caucasian superiority shown on the right, and I can tell you that if anyone should have been exiled from academe, it was that fucking Nazi.

Cofnas calls himself a “race realist” and promotes “scientific racism”. He got a PhD in philosophy from Oxford in 2020 for a thesis that sounds like evo-psych muddled up with naive philosophy, arguing that morality is rooted in biological predispositions. I’ve got a copy, but haven’t been able to get through the whole thing, and am unfortunately incapable of throwing a pdf against the wall. He promptly got a job at Emmanuel College, and was promptly fired for grossly racist remarks disparaging black people, generically. He was picked up by Ghent University, why I don’t know, racism shouldn’t be a trait on one’s CV that makes them readily hireable. He’s currently suspended from Ghent because he chose to use his academic freedom to launch his campaign against Arday, because he’s black, and Cofnas does not believe black people should be able to do anything outside of sports and entertainment.

He’s now doing the rounds of racist and right-wing podcasts, and recently appeared with Glenn Loury (a black man) and John McWhorter (a black man) to babble about how he’s not really a racist, but because he’s also a spectacularly stupid person, he couldn’t help but fumble his story.

There’s this bit where he’s talking about a science paper about the evidence for directional selection in West Asian peoples, and he let’s slip a few bad beliefs that he desperately tries to talk himself out of the hole he dug.

The Nazis are saying, look, we were right all along. Now they aren’t right, they…they were…they were right that there are…well, they don’t, they say there are like essential fundamental differences between races, which is not true, but there…they said that the left wing establishment that said that all races are exactly the same, uhh, now it’s obvious that the establishment was lying and the establishment has no credibility, which means the Nazis have much more credibility to many people.

No, the left wing establishment, whatever that is, does not argue that all races are exactly the same; which he calls race communism. How could they, when we acknowledge that all individuals are different? And when there are obvious differences in the distribution of physical traits in different populations? Yet somehow this jumped up racist philbro with no comprehension of what population geneticists actually say is happy to claim that now Nazis are more credible.

Let’s hope that Ghent University makes the sensible decision to give this bigoted clown the boot.

Shenanigans afoot!

AiG is losing their tax incentives, so they’re going through various arcane legal maneuvers right now to…it’s not clear. They’re trying to convince the city of Williamstown to build a fire station on a peculiar piece of property, surrounded by AiG land? They want to build a Tower of Babel attraction to get new tax incentives? They’re meeting behind closed doors with city officials? Nobody knows, except the overpaid officals at Answers in Genesis.

Seeing all the convoluted nonsense they can squeeze out of the Bible, wait until they’re done twisting the law.

A movie I’d like to see

This looks like a relevant and interesting documentary: The Last Picture Shows. It’s about all those small town movie houses that still exist, even as Hollywood tries to strangle us all.

Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving. Between the stops along the way, Rustin poetically intersperses excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film The Last Picture Show, as well as reflections on past and present hardships facing the film exhibition industry. The Last Picture Shows is not only a timely portrait of an industry in crisis, one facing the headwinds of consolidation, streaming, and the diminishing theatrical experience, but it also reminds viewers that even in vast cinema deserts, there are oases of community and gathering that remain, where the movie house continues to be a place of wonder, contemplation, and connection.

There were actually two centers of small-town life in Morris, the railroad station and the theater. The railroad station is a wreck right now, with no passenger rail service to our town. The theater probably fits into the category of “struggling to hold on,” but we are currently in the black, just barely. We’ve got costly plans to revitalize the theater right now, mostly mundane stuff like a $30,000 expense to repair the roof, and further down the road we plan to remodel the run-down restrooms, and update the marquee. These are daunting costs, especially for an institution only this year boasted a net profit of about $5000. We figure if we keep plugging away, pennies at a time, we’ll eventually get there.

Meanwhile, the next closest theater in the small town of Benson, the DeMarce Theater, has a “For Sale” sign posted. I don’t know if they’re failing, or if the owners are just aware of how much work it takes to keep these businesses afloat.

Double-feature at the bijou

My wife, Mary, is from a family with two sisters, and they taught me the meaning of sisterhood. Back in the 80s and 90s when we’d occasionally have family get-togethers that I dreaded: three sisters in one place with their mother, and they’d talk nonstop from the instant they walked through the door. Imagine four women chattering non-stop — I was shocked to discover that they didn’t take turns talking, they over-talked one another incessantly, and all I could hear was a high-pitched excited babble that never ended or resolved into actual comprehensible conversation. To me. They seemed to know exactly what everyone was saying.

I was not alone. Mary’s father, who was a veteran US Marine who’d fought in all the major Pacific battles in WWII, would sit quietly, slowly sinking into our chairs as the sonic assault continued. He had the advantage of years of training and intense combat experience, and also more years with these four women than I ever had. Me, I was the fresh meat, the raw recruit who could only learn by suffering through the engagement. We came out of it alive, together.

I bring this up as background because I did a double-shift at theater last night, and the first movie I saw was Practical Magic 2, a movie I’d never heard of, nor had I heard of Practical Magic 1, but it must have been popular, since it featured A-list stars, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, etc. It’s all about sisterhood among a family of cursed witches, cursed to never fall in love. The waves of estrogen were gushing off the screen, but my training at family gatherings helped me persevere. The cast was almost exclusively women.

There was one earnest, caring boy at the beginning, but the daughter he was dating made the mistake of saying “I love you” to him, triggering the family curse and sending him out on a bicycle to be run over by a truck, so that he spent the rest of the movie in a coma, conveniently. I was thinking that they’d never have this problem if they lived in the Midwest, rather than New England, because here we’re all emotionally repressed and never communicate our feelings.

The rest of the movie is a trio of family witches stumbling about crumbling ruins in the English countryside, looking for a cure for the curse. There is magic involved, and many whispered conversations where they overtalk one another. They do find one possibly helpful man, but they take him out with a frying pan to the back of the head and a sleeping potion, so he’s not cluttering up the climax of the movie. There is a third man, but he’s the villain, naturally.

There’s a battle where the three witches join psychic hands and use the power of love and sisterhood against a screaming, ranting man. I’ll let you guess how it ends up.

Was the movie any good? I don’t know. The magic was nonsense and was only conjured up when the plot needed it, the story was pure schmaltz, but from the outside looking in, I can empathize and comprehend how a story of sisters working together could appeal. My wife wants to go see it now, so I might be seeing it again.

The second movie was more my style: Resident Evil. One man, battling a series of indescribable horrors, alone, with virtually no conversation the entire movie. He’s on a solo mission to deliver a vital component to the Umbrella Corporation in Raccoon City, and that’s absolutely all you need to know about the plot. I just nailed it. Do I need to go on?

OK, a little more explanation. Umbrella Corp has ‘accidentally’ released a horrific virus that has spread through the population. This virus doesn’t exactly zombify everyone (I’m tired of zombie movies), but is instead a kind of infectious body horror disease. People fuse into these disgusting masses of limbs and heads that try to snarl everyone into a gooey corrupted form by biting or spewing bloody filaments or ropes of intestinal glop.

The best part of the movie to me was the protagonist, who was doggedly running this mission while maintaining a constant mumbling running monolog of profanity, consisting of mainly repeated variants of the word “fuck”. It was beautiful. I identified perfectly with his character — that’s exactly what I would do if I had to run through a city full of slimy predatory body parts. I wouldn’t be an action hero, I wouldn’t know how to use the guns he picks up, just like the protagonist, but I would be angrily railing against the situation under my breath.

The bottom line: not a great movie, lacking any depth at all, but just about a perfect capture of a standard video game scenario.

It was an interesting pairing of two movies that are more or less the antithesis of each other. What I’d like to see now is a synthesis — it’s going to take a lot of slime and blood and horrific gore, but if there were a fusion of a sisterhood power movie with that guy constantly snarling “fuck” as he tried to figure out what was going on, I’d watch it.

I’m going to have to give up on modern medicine

I’m a bit of a mess right now. My voice is an ugly croak, and I’m also experiencing some gastrointestinal issues, so like a good boy I made an appointment to see a doctor and get checked out. I went in yesterday.

The doctor didn’t talk about any of my concerns.

But the doctor did talk at length about my psychological survey, which I had filled out under the impression it was confidential. My wife was with me.

So now I’m home with none of my medical issues resolved, but with my wife convinced that I’m utterly nuts.

I should have stayed home, and next time I’m asked to fill out a psych questionnaire I’m going to lie.