Exam grading done!

That was fairly quick and unexpectedly mostly painless, because I did something I haven’t done before, and that now I’m going to have to do every year. These are all first year students who generally have that deer-in-the-headlights look in class, and I have to coax them to participate. So this year I dedicated one class hour to how to answer an essay question. I told them that grammar and spelling matter, and that one simple recipe for a coherent answer is to describe a few facts and details, and then synthesize in a concluding statement. Facts without synthesis doesn’t mean much, and synthesis without outlining the basic things you’re explaining makes it sound like you haven’t been paying attention in class. We went through a bunch of examples in groups, and I’d evaluate and give them a likely score on the spot.

It worked! The quality of the answers went up — knowing that I had reasonably high expectations meant they took the questions very seriously and answered carefully. It made them much more pleasant to read.

The catch is that it’s expensive. This class only meets twice a week, and dedicating a class hour to something so basic meant that there were other things I didn’t have time to cover. I hope this is a skill they remember, though, so I don’t have to do it again in every class they’re in.

Sonic and Star Trek

Well, I was so fried yesterday that I went to see this new Sonic Hedgehog movie. Boy, was I disappointed. There was absolutely nothing about cell signaling, or the patched receptor, or midline development. It was all about the adventures of Baby Karl Urban and some electrically charged blue mammal battling a guy with five Ph.D.s, which made no sense at all. Why would you have five degrees? And none of them were in developmental biology or molecular genetics. He seemed to be some kind of robotics expert, although being a perpetual student who can’t land a credible job are not credible qualifications for much of anything.

You’re better off watching this balanced summary of Star Trek history from Mikey Neuman. I learned a few things, although this, too, is seriously lacking in the departments of developmental biology and molecular genetics.

Is my brain still fried? Yes, but it’s OK. I’m about to go lock myself in a coffee shop and grade first-year biology exams. After that, I’ll probably need to go drink.

If you thought eugenics was only an abstract notion…

You might want to look up Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist and general bigot, who wrote a piece for John Brockman’s Edge site on Chinese eugenics in which he’s practically drooling at the prospect of manipulating the human germ plasm. No, really, the West is doomed if we allow the Chinese to race ahead of us in practical eugenics!

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world’s most populous country depends upon it.

Oh god. The high-decoupling.

First, sequencing DNA is not eugenics. Telling me how many genomes they sequence per year is not the same as telling me they have a eugenics program in operation. The Chinese government’s crackdown on He Jiankui suggests that they are a bit more hesitant than Miller imagines.

Second, the whole idea that they can get a 5-15 IQ point per generation increase is ludicrous. He’s postulating that a) the observed variation is entirely genetic, and b) that a ruthless pattern of selection is desirable and would have no unforeseen consequences. You can get equal, more equitable, and less disruptive effects by investing in better education. Note that IQ scores have been going upwards for the last century without the state choosing to cull the undesirables.

Third, the idea that IQ scores are a proxy for “competitiveness”, rather than the ability to do well on IQ tests, is a fallacious leap.

Fourth, why would you think eugenics would increase welfare and happiness? It would do the opposite for the majority of the population that lacks the arbitrary genetic markers they use for selection.

Fifth, he is an evolutionary psychologist, which means his understanding of “evolutionary behavior genetics” is feeble at best.

But he does imagine a country that tightly regulates its families on the basis of poorly understood DNA sequences is a “utopian ethno-state” that will increase the welfare and happiness of its citizens, which makes him a kind of third-rate villain in a dystopian SF novel.

If DNA data were as powerful as he imagines it is, though, don’t worry about the Chinese supermen overwhelming us. Comrade Geoffrey has done his part to sabotage the program by donating his DNA, corrupting the database with his genome rich mainly in ignorance and arrogance.

Patreon posts will be trickling onto this site, too

As promised, I’m making my Patreon posts freely available, after a bit less than a week. Subscribe if you want them right away, or just want to support me a little bit! There will be another Patreon post going up maybe tonight…if I get all this genetics stuff done soon enough.

We’re up to 121 patrons today! I’ll be able to contribute to our lawyer’s payments early next month, I hope.

Also, don’t forget the online celebration of our victory over a litigious sex pest Sunday night at 6! You can also make one-time donations to our GoFundMe!

The fall of the mayfly empire?

I’m only a 21st century Minnesotan, by which I mean I grew up on the West coast, lived on the East coast, and only made the trek to the Midwest when I was in my 40s, in the summer of 2000. One feature of the trip across Ohio and Illinois, up through Wisconsin along Lake Michigan, and across to Minnesota and the Mississippi that grossed out my kids was the bugs — the windshield splatter, and worst of all, the black cake of insect carcasses matting the grille of our truck at the end. In the years after we arrived, there were many times our car imitated a filter feeder on summer drives, sucking in a pathetic mass of dead mosquitos and mayflies, requiring a thorough hosing out to be presentable once again. We’d also see the weather radar on the TV, showing vast clouds of insect hatches rising from the rivers and lakes.

In recent years, though, almost imperceptibly, the population of insects has declined to the point where it’s unusual and noticeable when we splatter a few bugs on a drive across the state. Apparently, we also missed the genuinely remarkable swarms that sporadically blanketed the Midwest in the 1950s.

Through the middle of the 20th century, enormous summertime swarms of Hexagenia mayflies were a common sight across many of North America’s largest waterways. The immense scale of mayfly emergences made them a natural spectacle, and reports of the aquatic insects blanketing waterfront cities regularly filled newspaper headlines. Deep drifts of mayflies rendered streets impassable until snowplows could clear and grit roadways, and the dense swarms reduced visibility and inhibited water navigation, temporarily halting river transportation.

I regret not ever seeing that spectacle, although the locals don’t seem to — while I’ve heard many stories of fierce blizzards and massive snowfalls in the “old days”, no one has regaled me with tales of deep deposits of mayfly corpses. It’s a shame, I’d like to hear about it.

These stories do at least make an anecdotal impression that there has been a steep decline in the aquatic insect population. From a time when insect swarms could shut down travel in the mid-century, to my personal experience of running into major bug densities when I first arrived in Minnesota, to now only rarely hearing about scattered clouds of mayflies rising off the lakes, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have a problem here. The problem is…us.

…by 1970, these mass emergences had largely disappeared. The combination of increasing eutrophication from agricultural runoff, chronic hypoxia, hydrologic engineering, and environmental toxicity resulted in the disappearance of Hexagenia from many prominent midwestern waterways, with complete extirpation from the Western Lake Erie Basin and large segments of the Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. After two decades of absence, targeted efforts in conservation and environmental protection led to the eventual recovery of Hexagenia populations and recolonization of major habitats in the early 1990s.

So there was a window of time where the numbers were even lower, and what I saw in 2000 was a resurgence? I’d say, from my subjective observations, that they’re in decline again, and what we need is more hard data on insect numbers over time. That’s what we’re getting from Stepanian and others, who recently published quantitative data on the emergence of mayflies across Lake Erie and the Upper Mississippi river, making calibrated measurements using weather radar. For instance, here’s a single emergence event smothering the entire western end of Lake Erie in a single night in June of 2018.

Macroscale phenomenology of a mayfly emergence over Lake Erie on the night of June 27, 2018 as observed by weather surveillance radar. (A) Radar snapshot at 01:56 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) depicting the initial ascent of mayflies from the lake surface surrounding the shorelines of Point Pelee, Pelee Island, and Kelleys Island. At this time, a total of 2.1 million mayflies are detected in the airspace. (B) Radar snapshot at 02:50 UTC showing the continuing ascent and downwind drift of mayflies across the lake to the southeast. Additional emerging mayfly plumes develop surrounding North, Middle, and South Bass Islands. Mayflies reaching the southern lakeshore rapidly descend out of the airspace. At this time, a total of 394 million mayflies are detected in the airspace. (C) Radar snapshot at 03:32 UTC. Emergence and ascent have largely terminated as mayflies continue to fly downwind toward the southern lakeshore. At this time, the aerial abundance reaches a maximum, with a total of 2.0 billion mayflies detected in the airspace. (D) Radar snapshot at 04:32 UTC. Most mayflies have already descended from the airspace as the trailing edge of the mayfly plume approaches the southern lakeshore. At this time, a total of 81 million mayflies are detected in the airspace. (Lower) The time series of aerial mayfly abundance during the emergence event. The mayfly numbers given in A–D are annotated as well as the time of local sunset.

Over two billion insects surging out of the water over the span of a few hours! That isn’t even the most impressive event: they report that a single event in Lake Erie can spawn 88 billion mayflies with a mass of over 3,000 tons; the upper reaches of the Mississippi might produce 3.25 billion insects weighing a total of 114 tons. These events represent a huge transfer of organic matter from the bottoms of lakes and streams to terrestrial environments. That’s a significant transfer of nutrients like phosphorus and sulfur to the land, and is clearly an important food source for many animals. The authors do an entertaining calculation of how many calories are in flux here.

Starting with the 104.49 calories contained in a single Hexagenia limbata, we multiply by the Lake Erie emergence (115 billion individuals) to get annual caloric content (12.016 trillion calories). We took the tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) as a model aerial insectivore that has been shown to rely on aquatic insect emergence for feeding fledglings during the nesting season. Dividing the total annual caloric content of the emergence (12.016 billion kcal) by the required 224 kcal to raise a nestling over the 15-d development period, we arrive at the total number of nestlings that can be supported by this food resource (53.6 million birds).

That matters! While I vaguely had the impression that mayfly numbers have declined in the 20 years I’ve lived here, that kind of loss has effects that ripple upwards through the populations of animals that live here. It’s too easy to obliviously trundle along, relieved that I’m not having to go to the car wash as often, and then at some point we notice that we’re not hearing as many songbirds, and the bats seem to be dying off, and the fishing isn’t quite as good anymore, and we finally wonder what’s going on…and it’s too late, because we didn’t stop to think that maybe life in the Midwest has been missing the tons of flying biomass that had been periodically deluging the environment with manna.

That’s one of the messages of this paper — that we have lost about half the mayfly biomass in recent decades, lost to poor management of fertilizers and excessive toxic chemicals in our most productive agricultural lands and just general neglect of wetlands. They’re measuring the disappearance of billions of insects.

Ongoing declines in Hexagenia mayfly abundance (individuals ×109) and biomass (tons ×103) on the Upper Mississippi River. Surveys of Hexagenia abundance over the Upper Mississippi River (black) as well as contributions from the northern (La Crosse, WI; red) and southern (Davenport, IA; blue) subdomains as measured by benthic sampling (crosses) and radar surveillance (circles).

It’s a slow, quiet catastrophe. We’re in the depths of winter right now, no mayflies in sight, but just yesterday I was out by our local river, the Pomme de Terre, where this is a typical view. It’s frozen over, with a foot or two of ice frosted with snow, but beneath all that is a busy ecosystem, with fish feeding on the aquatic insect larvae, and billions of mayfly larvae consuming algae and detritus, growing strong for the spring thaw and the summer breeding season, when they should leap into the air in eager swarms, filling the air with life.

But will they?

The Pomme de Terre river, near Morris, Minnesota, on 15 February 2020. There are mayflies there, you just can’t see them…yet.

Stepanian PM, Entrekin SA, Wainwright CE, Mirkovic D, Tank JL, Kelly JF (2020) Declines in an abundant aquatic insect, the burrowing mayfly, across major North American waterways. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Feb 11;117(6):2987-2992. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1913598117.

“High-decoupling” is a synonym for “short-sighted neglect of the variables”

The latest burst of inane apologetics to enthrall the poobahs of atheism because it allows them to make excuses for Richard Dawkins and others is this piece from Tom Chivers, “‘Eugenics is possible’ is not the same as ‘eugenics is good’”. In it, he invents a label for people who say thoughtless things about science: they are “high-decouplers”, who are good at isolating ideas from all those troublesome things like implications and consequences and even meaning. They can take a complex sociological phenomenon, for instance, and reduce it to “A → B” without fussing about over the messy antecedents that produce A, or that the relationship also produces C, D, E, F…Z and a few letters beyond that. And this is a good thing?

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”
…
So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

How useful! Sam Harris wasn’t propping up racist ideas, he’s just a “high-decoupler” capable of postulating a subset of a network of interactions is simple and predictable. Don’t hold him accountable for his supposedly commendable ability to ignore everything except the one tiny relationship he is holding in laser-like focus! It’s those low-decouplers who keep distracting him with messy realities that interfere with his beautiful vision of reducing everything to a series of simple, manageable problems. Eugenics all by itself is simple and doable! If we postulate that racial differences are all due to invisible, untestable genes, all inequities are trivial and explainable!

Back in the day, I would have called such an approach short-sighted, implausible, damaging, and stupid, but now we have this useful term, “high-decoupler”, instead. Instead of saying that Dawkins and Harris are oblivious to reality, narrow-minded, and obtuse, I’ll just say they’re good at decoupling. All the atheist-bros and skeptic-bros will nod along happily, as if I’d just given them high praise.

I think Chivers might have hit on a key trigger for many of the schisms in rationalist organizations, though.

I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

For shameful low-decouplers like myself, though, I am also able to hear the obvious implication that Y is an unimportant complication that they don’t want you to think about, and when Y is something that leads to misery and suffering for large numbers of people, I tend to want to say “But you can’t dream about X while ignoring the inevitable disaster of Y that it will bring about!” It’s like saying that lighting this fuse will lead to some pretty sparks for a few minutes, but I’m not endorsing the horrific explosion when it reaches the dynamite. And this, apparently, is supposed to be a scientific virtue.

Also, falling back on the excuse that there is a magic ritual that can make such context-less, narrow speculation acceptable is not the useful metaphor that Chivers thinks it is. That high-decouplers consider incantations significant kind of undermines the rationality of high-decoupling. I think I’ll stick with the community for whom the ritual lacks magic power.

Kavin Senapathy fired by CFI

Unbelievable. Kavin is a super-star skeptic — one of those people who gave me hope that the Center for Inquiry wasn’t totally hopeless. Now, after being dismissed, she tells all.

Last October, however, I received a letter from CFI suggesting that “we part ways” and dismissing me from my role as co-host of Point of Inquiry. I believe the dismissal was a response to my outspoken views on CFI’s negligence toward matters of race and diversity — issues that the organization has often sidestepped in the past. If that is indeed the case, it sends a discouraging message. At a moment when racist pseudoscience is making a disturbing comeback, skeptics shouldn’t shy away from talking about race — and we can’t afford to overlook the white privilege among our own ranks.

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

CFI’s 2016 merger with a charitable foundation led by Richard Dawkins, an author and biologist who has repeatedly come under fire for Islamophobic and misogynistic remarks, did little to burnish its reputation. (Recently, Dawkins has been widely criticized for suggesting that eugenics would “work in practice” in humans.) As author Sikivu Hutchinson put it in 2016, “CFI’s all-white board looks right at home with [the Dawkins Foundation’s] lily white board and staff.” (Y. Sherry Sheng, who was born in China, was appointed to CFI’s board later that year.)

Then, there was this embarrassment:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

Seriously, fuck Ben Radford. That guy should have been fired years ago, and instead they put him in charge of an issue on racism?

Dawkins’ appointee to run the organization didn’t help, either.

It wasn’t just that CFI’s leadership stumbled on matters of race; it often seemed to discourage any discussion of the topic at all. In an anonymous 2019 letter addressed to CFI’s Board of Directors, nine CFI staff members and associates expressed concerns about the conduct and views of CEO Robyn Blumner, including what they saw as her unwillingness to substantively address race and the lack of diversity within the organization itself. “[Blumner] declares loudly and regularly that issues surrounding harmful inequalities of race, gender, and class in our country’s premier scientific institutions should not be discussed on any platform or in any forum in which CFI is involved,” the letter read, adding that “in the absence of authority to meaningfully contribute to these important conversations … CFI staff are experiencing escalating difficulty in building rapport and trust with potential supporters, which undermines our ability to advance CFI’s mission.” (I provided input into the drafting of the letter, at the authors’ request.)

I see why Kavin was dismissed — she was pushing hard to move CFI to address real issues. Easier to kick her out than actually address the failures of the institution.

Last September, CFI announced that the newest member of its board would be yet another white person, actor and Saturday Night Live alumna Julia Sweeney. Disappointed, I reached out to board member Leonard Tramiel, whom I’d regularly interacted with. “You elected another white person to the board? Really?” I wrote. “Yup,” Tramiel replied. “Finding people that want to serve on the board and have the appropriate qualifications isn’t easy.”

“Easy.” That explains a lot. Bigfoot is easy. Haunted houses are easy. Psychic mediums are easy. Faced with the prospect of addressing a hard problem, CFI collapses with a loud farting noise, like a punctured bladder, and throws away the talent that might have made them relevant.

Jesus. All the old skeptic and atheist organizations I was associated with and supported have just rotted away. I wish I’d gotten out earlier.

Is it surprising that dissecting human cadavers is the ethical thing to do?

For prospective pre-med students looking for an undergrad institution: the UMM biology discipline just approved a change to our anatomy class. No more cats to dissect, no more mink, no more fetal pigs. Instead, we’re going to have two human cadavers for all anatomy instruction. I know, that sounds strange, but it means we won’t be killing a large number of small mammals to teach the course anymore, and instead will use voluntary donations of individual large mammals that died of natural causes. So it’s actually more ethical, and it means our pre-health profession students will get a more thorough grounding in human anatomy.

I’m mentioning this because I’m predicting it might increase our pre-med enrollment, so I’m trying to influence the outcome. No, I don’t have any money riding on it. I wish we could teach more comparative anatomy, but at least with this approach we won’t be killing any animals in this course.

The Boy Scouts of America have been ethically bankrupt for years

I have mixed feelings about it — my son Connlann was active in Boy Scouts for years, and I think he had great experiences there. I was on a couple of camping trips with him and the other boys, and I think they benefitted from a good scout leader who was tolerant and undogmatic…but you couldn’t trust that every scout leader was that way, and higher-ups were all conservative jackholes who believed that antiquated rules and judgments were a necessary part of being a boy growing up.

So now the organization is declaring itself financially bankrupt, admitting the reality. I’m not going to shed any tears over it, since they wallowed in religious and paramilitary bullshit for so long and refused to change. Let them die and better organizations rise.