What good are virgins in a developmental biology lab?

I’m back! I survived my trek to the lab! It wasn’t as bad as I made it sound — the wind is biting, and the snow is coming down sideways, but it’s fairly light so far — so, except for the wolves and the yeti that tried to block my path, it was a reasonably easy trip.

There were reasons I was eager to go in. I’ve been getting anxious, because I’ve got all these new generation spiders, and they’re all virgins because of the shortage of males. I need them to lay eggs! I’ve got new students who want to work with me this semester, and it’s hard to do developmental biology with a bunch of virginal female spiders not producing embryos for us.* That one pair mated yesterday was a promising start, so there were a few things I wanted to do.

  • See if Yara had produced an egg sac. She hadn’t, but there were signs that she was nesting, with some debris pulled up into her favorite corner (which makes me think she might be Parasteatoda tabulata, too.)
  • Make sure her current partner, Chad, hadn’t been eaten. He was fine.
  • Feed her some more, both to make her less likely to eat the male, but also to fuel a little more egg production. Mission accomplished.

Does she look plump to you? She does to me, a little bit. Also her abdomen is paler than it was yesterday, I think. Come on, mama!

*There are some behavioral experiments we could do, but really, development is where my brain is at. We’ll see what interests the students.

The madness is setting in

I keep looking outside and thinking, “It’s not too bad yet, I can probably make it to the lab and back”, so I may just make one quick trip outside of my shelter. Before I’m snowed in. To check on the spiders. It’s only about 150 meters. I could make it.

If you don’t hear from me again later this morning, send a search party.

Why Jonathan Chait always makes me twitch

I don’t read Chait enough to diagnose why I don’t care for him — his vaguely liberal views always make me too queasy to think hard enough about what he’s saying, which is a good warning sign. But Alex Pareene does read him carefully and gets specific about what’s annoying. It’s not just that he’s always complaining about “free speech” on campus and how colleges are starting to wise up to the conservative scam of booking controversial assholes, it’s that he always favors avoiding calling out the bad guys.

In the course of defending his piece on Twitter, he has effectively made it clear that he thinks it’s inappropriate to label any person or cause “white supremacist” unless the targets of the label have openly embraced it. He has suggested that a political tendency can’t be “white supremacist” without vocal anti-Semitism, which is silly in the American context—as Ali Gharib points out, Judah P. Benjamin, perhaps the most prominent Jewish politician in the country at that time, served in Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s cabinet. Chait has argued that Rep. Steve King, who has explicitly argued that “somebody else’s babies” pose a “demographic” threat to “our civilization,” is merely “edging closer” to white supremacy.

So I’m safe from criticism by Chait if I make Nazi salutes, advocate putting brown people into camps, sloganeer about white genocide, and quote The Bell Curve to say that some races are inferior, as long as I don’t say, “I’m a white supremacist”? Good to know. I wouldn’t want to get on Chait’s bad side.

Something that is well-known to people who’ve read Chait for years, but may not be apparent to those who just think of him as a standard-issue center-left pundit who is sort of clueless about race, is that he is engaged in a pretty specific political project: Ensuring that you and people like you don’t gain control of his party.

I say “you” because his conception of the left almost certainly includes you. He is not merely against Jill Stein voters and unreconstructed Trotskyites and Quaker pacifists. He means basically anyone to the left of Bill Clinton in 1996. If you support a less militaristic foreign policy, if you believe the Democratic Party should do more to dismantle structural racism and create a more equitable distribution of wealth, if you think Steve fucking King is a white supremacist, Chait is opposed to you nearly as staunchly as he is opposed to Paul Ryan.

I’m not one of those people who has read Chait for years, so it’s good to have that flaw pinned down in the dissecting tray for me. But is Pareene right? I want to see Chait’s own words. So he quotes him defending Joe Lieberman in 2006. Joe Lieberman! Jesus.

In the end, though, I can’t quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What’s holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

This is Chaitism distilled: They may be right—about Joe Lieberman, about the Iraq War, about the racism of the conservative movement—but they are right for the wrong reasons, and we cannot let them gain a foothold.

Yeesh. At least now I can go back to not reading Jonathan Chait with a clear conscience.

Isolation, madness, death

The wind has begun to howl, and promises to rise. The temperatures are frigidly bitter. The first snowflakes are falling, and soon I’ll be trapped alone in my home. Alone…my wife is a thousand miles away, I’m the sole guardian of this lonely old wreck. She promises to return next week, but can you trust the airlines? I may be here forever, abandoned. Did I say alone? Not quite. There is a sullen black cat here, watching me. There is madness in her eyes. We shall be howling at each other before this is over.

Then I think, am I in a Robert Eggers film?

So I decided to watch The Lighthouse to find out. Yep, definitely. My situation could be the premise for Eggers’ next film. Fortunately, I loved it, so bring it on — one of the best films of the year.

It felt much like The Witch, moody and atmospheric, with a growing sense of dread. You know no one is getting out alive, and it’s going to be their own paranoia and fear that destroys them. Every character is flawed, and those flaws just expand in the vacuum of their isolation until they all crumble under the weight of madness. Everyone is saturated by their environment — in the case of The Lighthouse, everyone is wet and cold, and you can almost smell the sea salt coming off the screen. There is a hint of the supernatural, but you can never quite be sure whether it’s real, or if it’s insanity, the best kind of spooky.

Well, I’ve got to get back to staring down the cat, and the liquor is already running low. The movie also has great tips for dealing with that situation…turpentine & honey, hmmm? We’ll have to try that, just before one of us staggers off into the blizzard to meet…check back later to find out.

Hatches battened

It’s -22°C out there, and I decided to take a brisk walk to the grocery store to stock up on essential staples, since there’s a major winter storm on the way, hitting us around 8am tomorrow and escalating to a blizzard on Saturday. I grabbed some red beans and brown rice and garlic and coffee, so I can survive the weekend with all the essentials. I will not be leaving my house for any reason from this point on until Sunday: the cat and I will be hunkered down with the shutters and blinds closed and some warm blankets and hot beverages, and we are prepared for anything. I’ve got bread and cheese in case the power goes out, even.

I’m so prepared that I’m going to be disappointed if this one fizzles out.

Mainly, though, since classes start up again on Tuesday I’m going to use this time-out to get a leg up on Genetics and Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, the two courses that will probably eat me alive this semester.

A major award!

It’s indescribably beautiful!

It was a stunning prize notification to arrive in my email this morning. There’s even a press release!

Pharyngula has been selected for the 2020 Best of Morris Award in the Business Services category by the Morris Award Program.

Each year, the Morris Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community. These exceptional companies help make the Morris area a great place to live, work and play.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2020 Morris Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Morris Award Program and data provided by third parties.

Look at that! Finally appreciated by my local community…except there’s this little voice in my head wondering what “marketing” I’ve done, or how, as a “small business”, I have contributed to community service. What information did they gather? Aww, what the hell, it’s a Major Award! I should put it in my front window!

So I was going to claim my award, but there’s a little comment in my notice.

As an Award recipient, there is no membership requirement. We simply ask each award recipient to pay for the cost of their awards. The revenue generated by the Morris Award Program helps to pay for operational support, marketing and partnership programs in support of local businesses. Congratulations on your selection.

Oh. I can get a nice plaque for $150, or a crystal award for $200, or both for $229.

Gosh. My pride is slightly deflated.

Ferda! Also, Yara ♥ Chad

You’ve missed the spiders, haven’t you? I was away for a week, and only today had time to spend a long morning working with them. They’ve been growing; I fed them a lot before I left, and when I came back I found that almost all of them had molted.

I gave them all a lot of flies today, because we’ve got another of those blizzards coming in tomorrow, and I may not be able to make it into the lab for a few days.

One big problem is that I’m down to only two Parasteatoda males, and no males for Steatoda triangulosa. This happened last year, too — the males are so much more fragile and they die off more rapidly. I resolved to invest more effort in raising da boys so this wouldn’t happen, and I didn’t do enough, obviously. Next year! I’ll do better! Or if I get a nice clutch of eggs to hatch soon, I’ll segregate the males and females as early as possible and make sure they’re well fed and protected.

Which may happen…

This is Chad, the biggest male I’ve got. Look at those bulging palps at the front of his head!

Chad got his chance. I put him in the cage with Yara, and they hit it off immediately. Yara scuttled over to him, and there was a bout of touchy-feeling probing, legs everywhere, and then she presented her epigyne to him, and he scurried right in there with those masculine palps. No fighting! No running away! I have high hopes for this encounter.

Aww, isn’t that sweet? I’m leaving them together for the next few days to make sure, then Chad is going to be introduced to some other ladies around the lab.

The comprehensive summary of the implosion of RWA

I am impressed with this detailed dissection of the recent collapse of the Romance Writers of America. Not only does it cover all the bases, it reveals a lot of the blatant racism in this country. One thing that surprised me is that the RWA was founded by a black woman, yet there were all these policies put in place that made sure black authors were handicapped in the struggle to succeed. Like this:

This discovery grew into a widespread Twitter discussion about the important institutional role that Grimshaw had played as the romance buyer for Borders, at a time when Borders commonly shelved all African American authors in a separate section together, away from specific genres, like romance. It raised questions about how she’d made her decisions in such an important gatekeeping role, and whether she had given African American writers a fair shot at prominent placement. (Though, to be clear, the policy was the case across Borders—not just in romance.) Milan weighed in, but she was far from the only participant.

Wait, what? Black authors were segregated in bookstores? This is very white of me to admit, but I didn’t have the slightest idea, yet for years they had this discriminatory policy in place. Were they afraid some delicate white lady might accidentally buy a novel that had two black people falling in love? Let’s not even discuss the possibility that she might pick up something with queer characters in it.

These are practices that I would have thought a writer’s organization would have been at the forefront of challenging, but no, they just simmered for decades because they had an unwritten policy of only saying nice things about romance books. They refused to recognize the conflicts, suppressed all complaints, kept everything tightly bound up, until there was no other option but a messy, damaging cataclysm that has all but destroyed the organization.

There’s a lesson there for all of us, even if you aren’t a romance novel fan.

When will the criticisms of evolutionary psychology sink in?

I’ve been complaining for years, as have others. The defenders of evolutionary psychology just carry on, doing more and more garbage science built on ignorance of evolutionary biology, publishing the same ol’ crap to pollute the scientific literature. It’s embarrassing.

Now Subrena Smith tries valiantly to penetrate their crania. It’s a familiar explanation. She sees it as a matching problem between their claims about the structure of the brain and behavioral history.

The architecture of the modern mind might resemble that of early humans without this architecture having being selected for and genetically transmitted through the generations. Evolutionary psychological claims, therefore, fail unless practitioners can show that mental structures underpinning present-day behaviors are structures that evolved in prehistory for the performance of adaptive tasks that it is still their function to perform. This is the matching problem.

In a little more detail…

Ancestral and present-day psychological structures have to match in the way that is needed for evolutionary psychological inferences to succeed. For this, three conditions must be met. First, determine that the function of some contemporary mechanism is the one that an ancestral mechanism was selected for performing. Next, determine that the contemporary mechanism has the same function as the ancestral one because of its being descended from the ancestral mechanism. Finally, determine which ancestral mechanisms are related to which contemporary ones in this way.

It’s not sufficient to assume that the required identities are obvious. They need to be demonstrated. Solving the matching problem requires knowing about the psychological architecture of our prehistoric ancestors. But it is difficult to see how this knowledge can possibly be acquired. We do not, and very probably cannot, know much about the prehistoric human mind. Some evolutionary psychologists dispute this. They argue that although we do not have access to these individuals’ minds, we can “read off” ancestral mechanisms from the adaptive challenges that they faced. For example, because predator-evasion was an adaptive challenge, natural selection must have installed a predator-evasion mechanism. This inferential strategy works only if all mental structures are adaptations, if adaptationist explanations are difficult to come by, and if adaptations are easily characterized. There is no reason to assume that all mental structures are adaptations, just as there is no reason to assume that all traits are adaptations. We also know that adaptationist hypotheses are easy to come by. And finally, there is the problem of how to characterize traits. Any adaptive problem characterized in a coarse-grained way (for example, “predator evasion”) can equally be characterized as an aggregate of finer-grained problems. And these can, in turn, be characterized as an aggregate for even finer-grained problems. This introduces indeterminacy and arbitrariness into how adaptive challenges are to be characterized, and therefore, what mental structures are hypothesized to be responses to those challenges. This difficulty raises an additional obstacle for resolving the matching problem. If there is no fact of the matter about how psychological mechanisms are to be individuated, then there is no fact of the matter about how they are to be matched.

One problem is that evolutionary psychologists all seem to think that their assumptions are obvious — and if you don’t agree, why, you must truly hate Charles Darwin and be little better than a creationist. Man, it’s weird when the intelligent design creationists are all calling you a dogmatic Darwinist, and the evolutionary psychologists are accusing you of being an intelligent design creationist. They’re both wrong.