Vertebrate paleontology just won’t be the same

Science has lost two great ones: Jenny Clack and Robert L. Carroll. Clack was an expert on the evolution of tetrapods, as was Carroll, who also studied reptile evolution. Normally, I’d be sitting my office right now and would be able to lift my eyes to my bookshelf and see Gaining Ground: The Origin and Evolution of Tetrapods and Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, and re-reading them would be the best way to honor these influential scientists, but I’m stuck at home like many of us, so I’ll have to wait until I can fetch them.

Nothin’ but bad news today

Bernie Sanders is dropping out of the race.

Meanwhile, Paul Broun is running for the senate.

This country is so fucked.

I am impressed with their thorough analysis of butts & poop

I really thought it had to be a joke, a paper describing an automated method for analyzing various aspect of defecation. But it’s real, and published in Nature, no less. It’s well summarized in Vice, and Dr Jenny Morber put up a substantial Twitter thread about it. The level of detail and thought put into the paper on something I would rather not think about is amazing.

My one disappointment is that I failed at a prediction. When I first heard about it, I thought to myself that this has to be coming out of a German lab. But no! It’s from Stanford, the lead author has a Korean name, and the long list of authors looks like a genuinely international team. I guess the whole world can come together in their common interest in poop.

I resisted the temptation to include a figure from the paper, because they all make me slightly uncomfortable. Don’t worry, there are lots at the links I gave.

Even better than hydroxychloroquine!

I can cure the common cold. You may not believe it, but it’s true, and I have followed an established scientific protocol, the same as this study.

Two weeks ago, French doctors published a provocative observation in a microbiology journal. In the absence of a known treatment for COVID-19, the doctors had taken to experimentation with a potent drug known as hydroxychloroquine. For decades, the drug has been used to treat malaria—which is caused by a parasite, not a virus. In six patients with COVID-19, the doctors combined hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin (known to many as “Z-Pak,” an antibiotic that kills bacteria, not viruses) and reported that after six days of this regimen, all six people tested negative for the virus.

My protocol is easy. If you come down with the sniffles and watery eyes and stuffy nose of a cold, you just let spiders run around on your face, wait a few days, and your symptoms will fade away. You may argue that my n is very small and that I lack a control, but look — I’m just following the French model.

Unfortunately, I lack the endorsement of Dr Oz (so far — I expect he’ll jump on my bandwagon any day now, it’s what he does). I also haven’t hidden away any complications.

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

I rather expect that a few people might have a bad reaction to my spider protocol, too, but at least I can say that no one has died of my treatment. I wouldn’t expect them to, since spiders are far more benign than hydroxychloroquine.

Even in people without the disease, hydroxychloroquine’s potentially harmful effects range from vomiting and headaches to instances of psychosis, loss of vision, and even sudden cardiac death. The drug is to be used with caution in people with heart conditions and liver dysfunction—both of which the coronavirus can itself cause.

Who knows? Maybe my spider protocol will also cure another viral disease, COVID-19. I’ve been handling spiders for a couple of years now, and note that I don’t have the disease. It could be a preventative. Extrapolating from these observations, maybe I have a true panacea scampering over my hands and nesting in my beard. What have you got to lose? Try it.

I’m just asking for $10 million to expand my colony (we’re going to need a lot of spiders) and that we take a couple of biomedical research labs offline to dedicate themselves to carrying out clinical trials of my cure. That’s all.

Hey! I just noticed that I don’t have cancer, or psoriasis, or guinea worm, or ebola. Spiders must cure everything! I’m gonna have to ask for more money. A dedicated research building? A few hundred assistants?

What have you got to lose?

Credit where credit is due

A billionaire is giving away a significant fraction of his money to coronavirus relief. Jack Dorsey has said he’s donating $1 billion to the cause. This is a good start — he says it’s over 25% of his net worth — with a couple of reservations: he has only said he’s going to do this, and rich people have a reputation for not following through; distributing that much money is a huge, difficult task and Dorsey is not an expert on funding biomedical institutions; and damn, he shouldn’t have that much money in the first place.

He also still has a couple of billion dollars more in his pocket. He’s not going to be hurting.

Spider search…accomplished!

I went all around my house, looking high and low for spiders. The good news is that my house is covered with spider food. Gnats, flies, skeeters, bugs of all sort clinging to the fences and walls and window screens. The predators can’t be far behind!

If I were a spider, I’d want to be here, pigging out on the deliciousness.

And the spiders are here! The first spiders I’ve seen outdoors this spring!

I found a half dozen Salticus scenicus scampering about, looking fit and healthy — maybe too healthy, because they were zooming around at high speed, making it difficult to take pictures of them. I took a few, anyway, and posted them on my Patreon page and Instagram.

The game is afoot! Spider season is upon us!

Can I quarantine myself in Queensland?

They’ve got spectacular spiders there. The Queensland Museum is closed to visitors now, but they’ve started this program called #couchcurators where the people make videos about what they’re doing. This one features Caitlin Henderson and her spider expertise.

I am so jealous. It’s not quite hammock weather here in Minnesota yet, but it is gradually warming up. We also have almost no spiders yet, except for the pholcid swarm that is scheming down in the basement. I am planning to do a spider walk around the house and yard today, though, not that I expect to find much, too cold. It’s even in my daily to-do list: “12:00 — search for spiders.”

By the way, that’s my new thing, getting up and making a list for the day. Everything has become so structureless that I’ve decided to create my own structure, so I get up in the morning and make a schedule for the day, and then I stick to it. Sadly, today my list is mostly repetitive.

1:00 grade
2:00 grade
3:00 grade
4:00 grade
…

You get the idea. There is a 5:00 student seminar to attend online, and mealtimes (I lay out the menus ahead of time and do not deviate — it’s all too easy to sit here eating all day long), and my 9:50 class, and most importantly, that noon hour dedicated to spiders.

Spirals. It’s always spirals.

Whoa. This is a siphonophore colony, 15 meters in diameter, just floating in the ocean with tentacles dangling down to catch prey.

I read the whole thread and didn’t see an answer to the question that immediately popped into my head. This is a colonial aggregate of multiple siphonophore bodies linked together into a long string, but it has an overall form of a spiral. How? Is there local signaling going on to regulate the distance between the strands so that it spontaneously forms that structure, or is it an accident of currents? I’m going to guess the former, which would be most interesting, because it implies the existence of factors that lead to large scale form and is therefore the kind of process that would lead to more elaborate patterns of development.

Also, it’s so planar. Is this something the animal regulates, or is it just layers in the ocean maintaining it?

It’s the 15th Annual Paul Nelson Day celebration!

That’s right, it’s 7 April, which is Paul Nelson Day! I figure I’l have an appropriately wild and festive celebration today by sitting home alone and grading papers. I’m planning to have an orange for lunch — I hope I’m not being too exuberant.

I thought I’d look and see what Nelson is up to nowadays. He’s still writing for the Discovery Institute, he’s working on another book, On Common Descent, which I doubt that I’ll bother to read, and no, he’s never come up with an adequate justification for the concept of “ontological depth”, which he claimed to have been studying empirically.

Just yesterday, though, he posted an essay expressing his gratitude to an atheist philosophy professor, Adolf Grünbaum, in which he is thankful for the methodological rigor of his training. That’s nice. I don’t think it took, though.

He gives an example of what he considers a flawed argument by Grünbaum.

An example: one day in class, Grünbaum was arguing that religious opinions followed geography and ancestry. One was much likelier to believe in the existence of Brahma and Vishnu, for instance, if one were born on the Indian subcontinent, and raised by Hindu parents, than, say, being born in Lincoln, Nebraska — which is true.

That fact is also irrelevant, however, to the entirely separate question “Do Brahma and Vishnu exist?” Moreover, as I explained to Grünbaum, my Jewish brother-in-law Avner, a theist, was raised in Montreal by atheistic, Stalinist parents who intended that Avner should also be an atheist who adored the USSR. But he didn’t adore the USSR. And he most certainly believed in God.

The statistical religious-belief-follows-geography-and-parentage argument Grünbaum was making, however, allowed for occasional outliers such as Avner — meaning that Grünbaum’s position possessed no predictive strength. The holes in his net of social statistics let any human counterexample swim right on through. Thus, Grünbaum’s argument said nothing definitive in any particular case, and since every human being is a particular case — that’s you, me, Avner, Grünbaum (who celebrated his bar mitzvah in a conservative Cologne synagogue), Stalin (raised as a believer who sang in church choirs and was educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis) — the argument just wasn’t very good, by Grünbaum’s own standards. One will believe in the God of one’s hometown and parents, except when one doesn’t. And therefore we’re back to square zero. Does God exist or not? Birthplace and parentage are irrelevant.

But Grünbaum was correct! He wasn’t making a deterministic argument that everyone born in India is somehow compelled by geography to believe in Brahma — obviously absurd because there are Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and atheist Indians — and I doubt that he was trying to directly demonstrate God’s nonexistence, if he was as brilliant as Nelson makes him out to be. It’s also clearly not an absolute, fixed rule, so that Nelson can list a few exceptions is irrelevant.

This is an argument about epistemology: how do human beings know anything about the nature of the god they worship? What Grünbaum was pointing out is that our concept of god isn’t produced by an objective analysis of observable facts about nature, but is the result of influences from culture, community, family, personal subjective experience. Contrary to the beliefs of the Discovery Institute cultists, there is no god who left a distinctive and unambiguous signature on every living thing, and the basis of their belief in an Intelligent Designer is built entirely on bias, ignorance, misinformation, and superstition. Grünbaum was asking his students to question how they know what they think they know about deities, and to recognize that it’s mostly a product of local tradition, not divine revelation or measurable data.

I can believe that Nelson’s brother-in-law Avner was raised as an atheist and later became a believer, but that fact says nothing about how he came to believe, and trotting it out as if it somehow refutes Grünbaum is the real lazy thinking here. I rather doubt that Avner was floating all of his life in a total atheist void when suddenly, in a flash of insight, the entirety of Judaism manifested itself in his mind, and he woke from his godless dream in which the faith came to him to find, to his surprise, that an entire worldwide community of Jewish folk had independently come to all the same conclusions.

Oh, well. It’s part of the tradition of Paul Nelson Day that Paul Nelson will pop his head out of his burrow and make a nonsensical declaration that he cannot possibly defend. Yay.

Dang. I just realized that I don’t have any waffles in the house for the traditional Paul Nelson Day meal, and I’m supposed to stay-in-place and shouldn’t run off to the grocery store to get some.