It’s happened

My voice is totally gone, except as a raspy whisper that frequently cracks and can only make shushing noises. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that none of my students have stopped by to ask questions! I guess I have taught them superbly well, or possibly they are terrified of the old man who keeps pushing more facts and formulas at them.

I’ll hang out in my office a while longer, just in case. I am drinking lots of honey lemon ginseng tea with big spoonfuls of honey. Also, tomorrow I’m just giving this exam and teaching a lab which should give me another day to recover.

A Cambrian chelicerate!

I’ll have to show my spiders this reconstruction of their great-great-many-times-great grandmama. She’s adorable.

Megachelicerax cousteaui

It’s all in the chelicerae.

In a study published in Nature, Research Scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Associate Professor Javier Ortega-Hernández, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, describe Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500-million-year-old sea predator discovered in Utah’s West Desert. It is the oldest known chelicerate, the arthropod group that includes spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders. The discovery pushes the evolutionary history of chelicerates back by 20 million years.

Hey, I’ve visited the West Desert of Utah — but all I found were fossilized trilobites. Lots of trilobites. Megachelicerax food. But I never found a predator like this one.

The key feature identifying it as a chelicerate are those big clawed appendages on the front of its face, which is also a prominent feature of modern spiders, much modified. The appendage is now a crushing/chewing anvil, and the thumb of the claw has evolved into a wicked needle.

Its most extraordinary feature, however, is its unmistakable chelicera — the pincer-like feeding appendages that define the subphylum Chelicerata and distinguish spiders from insects. While insects possess sensory antenna as their foremost appendages, chelicerates have grasping, often venomous tools. Despite a rich Cambrian fossil record, no unambiguous chelicera-bearing arthropod from that time had ever been found – until now.

The thing about modern spiders is that they’re mostly defenseless — no sting, no pointy legs, no claws — except for that one extraordinarily useful weapon, the chelicerae. Well, they also have silk, making them a kind of retiarius of the arthropod world. You’re probably not afraid of their webs, but you worry about their big chompers and the venom they carry.

I don’t think the retiarii would have poisoned their tridents, though.

It’s a mask day

The timing is terrible. I developed a nasty sore throat last night that kept me up half the night — I’m going to be gulping down tea with honey all day long. I’m giving the first big exam of the semester tomorrow, so I’m giving extended office hours this morning and afternoon, which means I’m going to be dealing one-on-one with students while suffering from this croaky voice.

Mask on. More tea. Don’t ask me to sing.

Have we all forgotten Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones?

I hope my terrible confession doesn’t drive away my readers, but…

I can’t stand Star Trek anymore.

I don’t want to watch it. I see an ad for a new Trek series, or Trek memorabilia, or a Trek convention, and I immediately set course for a new destination far far away. This is the year of the 60th anniversary of the series, and my mild disinterest has evolved into strong revulsion.

I have happy memories. When I was 9 or 10 years old, it was an obsession — I looked forward to Thursday evenings (I think that was the day it was on) and staying up to watch it on our old black & white TV. I was even enthused when they made movies based on it. But by the time Star Trek: the Next Generation was a thing my interest was cooling, and I was thinking it would be nice to have some more creative science fiction approaches in my entertainment. The Federation was stale.

And now, my reaction is nothing but boredom or disgust. Star Trek is oversaturated. Let’s all move on.

Remember all those 1950s SF serials that I saw in reruns? Shall we bring them back, too? Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers got some attention, but it didn’t last. I kind of wish Star Trek got the same flash of transient revitalization, before fading away as the entertainment industry found novelty more interesting.

Next: I’m waiting for Star Wars to die. Disney is helping by driving it into the ground with new series that I can’t even be troubled to look up.

Biology don’t care

Stumbling across an online conversation between AI advocates is so weird, because they are using the language and concepts of evolutionary biology, but in such a crude, mangled, ignorant way that ultimately, they’ve stripped away the biology to replace it with a religious eschatology. There is a whole fantastic mythology they’ve developed in which they are battling for a paradisial end goal in which they become gods, fused with their technology of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) which doesn’t actually exist, but hey, we can measure our progress by looking at NVIDIA’s profit growth.

All they really care about is capitalism’s march into the future, and they’ll ignore all the little details. Build more data centers! If we don’t, we’ll stop all our evolutionary progress. I just want to yell at them that there is no such thing as evolutionary “progress,” and that you can’t change it, you can only vary environmental conditions such that you get a different outcome, and it won’t be the one you expect. They have a belief that they can control how they “evolve,” while not really understanding how evolution works.

So right now they are banging on about human extinction, and how AI can be either a boon or a bane to humanity, and how they need power to shape its direction Of course, that’s what it’s really about: power. They’ve got no idea what they’re doing except that getting legal and financial power over their technology is necessary to keep them rich and happy. It’s all a massive misdirection to whimper about the threat of AI while clutching at the power they want, which is mainly a childish illusion taken from science fiction (see Elon Musk for the premiere example of that.)

Dr. Émile P. Torres is one of the people opposing the nonsense, and I mostly agree with his take on it, but sometimes I feel like he’s so deep into it that he is losing track of how silly these people are. He’s expecting people to recognize how profoundly stupid the debate AI proponents are by attempting to explain their terminology, but then it ends up being an effort to define their terms.

With all this talk about human extinction right now, I am BEGGING people to understand the difference between TERMINAL and FINAL extinction. TESCREALists *only* care about final extinction, but nearly the entire public *misinterprets* them as warning about terminal extinction.

Oy. I always have to look up what stands for — it’s not a very intuitive acronym.

TESCREAL is a neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres. An acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalism (denoting the ideology of the rationalist community), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an “interconnected and overlapping” group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.

It’s a garbage pail word used to hold a lot of garbage, in other words, making it not particularly memorable. It’s also always disappointing because none of the letters stand for “Eugenics,” which is actually what it means, with all the argle-bargle nonsense philosophy assembled to hide that reality.

Torres goes on to explain the distinction between terminal and final extinction.

Terminal extinction is the disappearance of our species, full stop. Final extinction is the disappearance of our species such that we don’t leave behind any (worthy) posthuman successors. Since TESCREALists want a cosmic utopia/posthuman paradise through “aligned” ASI, what
they really mean when they say, “We must avoid human extinction” is: “We must avoid final human extinction.” Once posthumanity arrives, most don’t give a SHIT whether OUR SPECIES persists. Indeed, as I have documented in tremendous detail, many WANT terminal extinction to happen
once posthumanity arrives via “aligned” ASI. If what you care about is our species’ survival — i.e., avoiding terminal extinction — then these people are literal *pro-extinctionists*. DO NOT BE FOOLED by their rhetoric; by the sneaky language games they play!! They are NOT on
Team Human. They are on Team Posthuman. They care about our species surviving long enough to create “aligned” ASI. Once that happens, our species SHOULD die out. These people are not your friends–they are your enemies, insofar as you value humanity. All the quotes can be found
here. Read it and be very terrified that TESCREALists are running the AI companies and monopolizing the conversation. This is so deeply fucked up.

This handy diagram helps explain what he means. It’s a cartoon sketch of a cartoon concept held by a bunch of clowns.

What bugs me about the diagram is that it treats extinction and the branch point as two moments, sharp and discrete, in the history of the species, and ignores the fact that each line is actually a cloud of human variation bumbling its way into the future, and that what happens in extinction is actually a slow sad decline in the face of multiple environmental threats, and the branch point is just the gradual separation of the cloud. With some members of each cloud continuing to interbreed. There would be lots of exchange of genetic material.

In fact, in this longish essay on all these philosophies, the TESCREALists scarcely acknowledge the existence of genes, and seem to think their goal is to shed their genetics and abandon biology altogether.

Pro-extinctionist views go back to the very origins of the TESCREAL movement. In a 1989 article, published around the time Extropianism was taking shape, roboticist Hans Moravec describes himself as “an author who cheerfully concludes that the human race is in its last century, and goes on to suggest how to help the process along.” He claims that we’re developing “intelligent” machines that will soon “be able to manage their own design and construction, freeing them from the last vestiges of their biological scaffolding, the society of flesh and blood humans that gave them their birth.” He then proclaims that “this is the end,” as “our genes, engaged for four billion theirs in a relentless, spiraling arms race with one another, have finally outsmarted themselves”—by enabling the rise of world-dominating digital posthumans. But we shouldn’t fear this transition, he insists, because “post-biological life” in the form of advanced AIS, which he describes as “the children of our minds,” will prosper and flourish.

I hate to tell Moravec the troubling reality that there, beneath the shadow of his crystalline silicon post-human digital paradise, people will go on rutting in the earthy foundation, and that apparently his reality is going to rely on that biological foundation to hold it all up. The genes will go on, since they aren’t going to depend on venture capitalists and vast amounts of energy, water, and rare minerals to keep on going.

To me, it sounds like the AI weirdos are clinging to an outmoded model of orthogenesis, where evolution is linear and progressive, and wouldn’t even recognize the terms anagenesis (the gradual accumulation of variation in a single lineage) and cladogenesis (the splitting of a lineage into two). They’re too busy inventing nonsensical terminologies that aren’t contingent on understanding the reality of the process.

It’s all very silly, except for the fact that these bozos are trying to take over our government and economy.

I may be wrong. I didn’t wait for the STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) person to weigh in on the matter.

Oh no! I’ve been erased from history!

I’ve been on TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist since 2016, and I was quite proud to be mentioned on Charlie Kirk’s hate list. All the best people are on it, you know.

Kirk created the Professor Watchlist 10 years ago on Turning Point USA’s website. Users were able to search college professors based on themes including “racial ideology,” “LGBTQ” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

According to a video on the website describing the watchlist, “The Professor Watchlist uncovers the most radical left wing professors from universities that are known to suppress the conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

Sadly, it has been taken down.

But this month, the News4 I-Team found the Professor Watchlist had been taken down. Why is unclear, as no one from Turning Point USA is saying.

Also unfortunately, I never bothered to make a copy of my entry, so I don’t remember exactly what it said. It never really had any impact on me, but some people described the annoyance of the harassment they received.

For 10 years, the watchlist remained online, and the News4 I-Team spoke with local professors who said they were greatly impacted once their names were added to it.

Earlier this year, the I-Team spoke to Professor Bethany Letiecq with George Mason University, who said she received harassing and threatening messages on social media after she appearing on the list.

Letiecq recalled when it began: “It was shortly after I published a piece in March, February, March of 2024, and it got picked up by the alt-right media, and it was distorted in sort of a rage bait-y kind of way.”

Letiecq said the harassment she faced moved offline into her everyday life.

“That started just this bombardment of, you know, social media hits that were incredibly vitriolic and quite gross. I started getting emails to my work, voicemails to my work phone, calls for my firing […] and then I received several death threats,” she said.

I got a few nasty emails, which I still get anyway, but that was about it. A few student TPUSA members at UMM accused me of stealing their terrible student paper, which didn’t happen and for which there wasn’t and couldn’t be any evidence, and that prompted a bored campus police officer to ask me questions. There was no concern expressed by my colleagues or administrators.

The whole list was stupid, petty, and ineffective. Maybe TPUSA took it down because it was a reminder that Charlie Kirk was also stupid, petty, and ineffective.

Rebound from the storm

We had a big storm blow through and move on last night. I was volunteering at the Morris Theater, where we had a sadly small audience, when the power went out about an hour into the show — I gave out free tickets to the few people there and shooed them out into the storm. It was an impressive storm, too. Sheets of rain crashing down, non-stop lightning, gusting winds, the usual midwestern chaos. I gave a couple of our volunteer concessionaires a drive home, which was more intense than I expected. The streetlights were out, the rain was so heavy that I had less than a car’s length of visibility, so I was doing about 10mph, and had to periodically stick my head out the window (and get drenched) to see where I was going.

It was so bad that when I got home, a panicky young Hispanic gentleman ran up to me from his car and asked where there was a place of safety for his family. I steered him to the hospital emergency room, about 2 blocks away, and recommended the well-lit waiting room with functioning internal lights. My house was pitch black inside.

So this morning we got up to inspect the damage. There wasn’t much. The tall weeds in our backyard were flattened, but surprisingly, the tall Mexican sunflowers Mary had planted were doing fine. Mary had told me that I had to participate in the Urban Butterfly Initiative’s Big Day by photographing butterflies. Yesterday, that would have been easy, we had swarms of butterflies everywhere.

Today, I think they’d either been blown away or were in shock. I found one.

I also found a sad looking drone fly hiding under a leaf.

I checked out our resident Argiope. She was fine, although the tall stems she usually used for her web were bedraggled and crushed down low.

Maybe the butterflies will be back tomorrow, or maybe the butterfly season is over.

A very polite inquiry

I received an email asking about eye evolution.

hi dear myers, im a turkish student. i study EEE but i have a deep profound curiousity towards evolution. i know that you mastered in evo devo. even though i didnt read any of your books since i live in turkey and could not find them.. i wrote an article in my own way concerning evolution and tried to express my feelings. im learning english by myself, i didnt want to use translator so you can see my sincerity and effort. to be honest i just wanted to express my feelings and get some advices and opinions from you, im just confused..

Here is the article i have written:

That’s perfectly acceptable English, so he shouldn’t be shy. However, as you’ll quickly see, he seems to think “article” is a synonym for “paragraph”. It’s not much of an article. I agree, he’s confused.

One thing about evolutionary biology that concerns me and feels unable to perceive is cells and organisms acting like as though they know what to do when constructing an organ.

That’s a common and fundamental misconception, the reading of intent and purpose into a series of events. Cells don’t “know” what they are doing — their genes are responding in a mechanical way to the environment. So error #1: trying to impose teleology on the system.

although it happens through blindwatchmaker situation, i still cannot grasp. for instance, an eye is a complex system and it feels like even though some may say it is a trial and error state throughout the evolutionary process it seems it happened with permission of a creator..

“Complexity”…that always comes up, and it’s irrelevant. Chance processes can easily produce complexity, and trial and error is an effective (if wasteful) way to build an eye. Natural selection and drift don’t need permission. They happen whether you like it or not.

it is still unclear to me a system like an eye whether it can build itself in such a short amount of time. cells behave as if they know which part they contribute whenever building an immense and flawless eye.

What is a “short amount of time”? Developmentally, an eye assembles itself in hours, days, weeks, or months, depending on the species, using nothing but physics and chemistry, and no one has seen the finger of a deity coming down to nudge cells into place. Again, it’s not about the cells “knowing”.

Oh, wait, he means such a short amount of time on an evolutionary scale? Silly. I’ve seen a zebrafish eye assemble in less than 24 hours, so I’m not that impressed with an eye organizing over hundreds of thousands of generation. It’s pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, and there’s much to learn about the process taking place from the pre-Cambrian to 400 thousand years ago, but it’s not an intimidatingly difficult thing to accomplish. It’s well within the power of evolution, and we have examples of the intermediate steps.

some may say there are genes such as HOX which responsible for the case i mentioned, its still unclear to me ,since i approach the problems as a philosophical problem..by saying “approaching as a philo problem” i meant digging deeper the origins of it..

i hope i could transfered my inquiries…

Oh god. Everyone babbles about Hox genes even if they know nothing about them — this is a shortcut the writer is using to pretend to knowing something about molecular genetics. He doesn’t. You know, you could at least say Pax genes instead of Hox, since Pax is more directly relevant to eye development. Hox genes are patterning genes that define segment identity along the body (or limb) axis, while Pax genes are involved in tissue differentiation and organogenesis.

It’s especially bad to trot out the sciencey word “Hox” just before telling me you approach eye evolution as a “philosopphical problem.” I don’t care about your philosophy, I want to know about the material process, with evidence. Philosophy in this case is simply his efforts to make post-hoc rationalizations for his preconceptions — he’s giving philosophy a bad name.