Chew more gum, for posterity

Behold, a discarded lump of chewed birch pitch from Denmark:

Awesome, I know. Heating up birch bark produces this dark, sticky substance that can be used as an adhesive, and also can be chewed like chewing gum. It apparently has some antiseptic properties. No one has told me yet what it tastes like, I guess I’ll have to try it for myself sometime.

That lump was thrown away 5700 years ago, after someone had been chewing on it for a while. What’s cool is that lots of DNA was extracted from it, and we know a bit about the person who’d been using it.

We successfully extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from a 5700-year-old piece of chewed birch pitch from southern Denmark. In addition to a complete ancient human genome (2.3×) and mitogenome (91×), we recovered plant and animal DNA, as well as microbial DNA from several oral taxa. Analysis of the human reads revealed that the individual whose genome we recovered was female and that she likely had dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes. This combination of physical traits has been previously noted in other European hunter-gatherers, suggesting that this phenotype was widespread in Mesolithic Europe and that the adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation in European populations only occurred later in prehistory. We also find that she had the alleles associated with lactase non-persistence, which fits with the notion that lactase persistence in adults only evolved fairly recently in Europe, after the introduction of dairy farming with the Neolithic revolution.

We also know that she had duck for dinner and had been snacking on hazelnuts. She carried the Epstein-Barr virus, so she’d probably had mononucleosis at some time in her life. She probably wasn’t a farmer, but was a member of a known hunter-gatherer population in central Europe, which fits with her diet of wild game and foraged nuts. Her descendants would eventually migrate north to colonize central Scandinavia, and intermingle with other hunter-gatherers migrating from the east.

Oddly, most of the popular press reports I’m seeing on this story call the gum-chewer a girl. I don’t know why, maybe it’s based on this reconstruction, but I don’t see any evidence in the paper to characterize her age — she could have been the Svyltholm Old Lady, for all we know.

I don’t chew gum, but maybe I should start, just to leave some trace of me to be found in 7000 AD. Now I just have to figure out where to leave my wads of gum to maximize their odds of being found…

Jensen, T.Z.T., Niemann, J., Iversen, K.H. et al. A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch. Nat Commun 10, 5520 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13549-9

But I don’t want to go play in the snow!

Here in frigid Minnesota, there are only brief windows of time where the weather is suitable for making snowcreatures — most of the time, it’s so cold the snow doesn’t pack well, and it only takes a few minutes of exposure to get frostbite. Lately, though, the comics are all telling me the wonders of playing outside.

This has to be taking place in some warmer, neo-tropical place, like Iowa.

There’s something wrong with UNC’s business school

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a Confederate monument called “Silent Sam”. It needed to go. They needed a solution to allow “the University to focus on its core educational mission”. So they came up with an amazing plan.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of those groups that idolizes past treachery, wanted the statue. It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to simply sell it to a private organization like that so that they would haul it away and take on the guilt and obligation. The UNC Board of Governors does not think that way, and had an alternative plan.

They would pay the SCV millions of dollars to take possession of the statue that they wanted.

The state’s monuments law prevents the removal of a public statue but there is an exemption for private ownership. The SCV arranged to acquire all property rights of the monument from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). We reached an agreement with the SCV to settle the threatened litigation with the following terms:

  • The SCV owns the monument;
  • The monument will be transferred to the SCV;
  • The UNC System and the Board of Governors will fund a separate charitable trust administered by a neutral, independent trustee in the amount of $2.5 million; the funds will come from interest on the university endowment fund, not tax dollars or tuition and fees.
  • The separate charitable trust is to be used only for the preservation of the monument, as determined by the trustee; and
  • The monument cannot be located in any of the 14 counties currently containing a UNC System constituent institution.

We also agreed that the SCV would sign a separate agreement limiting its ability to display flags and banners on university campuses, in exchange for a payment of $74,999. This agreement addressed the possibility that the consent order might not be approved, in which case the SCV agreed that it would not sponsor events on any of our campuses for five years.

Wow. That’s an interesting way to get rid of something. I have an alternative: pay me half that amount, $1.25 million, to take it on. Since I am in a Yankee state, we could call it spoils of war. I’d install it in my front yard and spit on it every day as I walked to and from work, which is all it deserves.

Or it could just be melted down and recast in a more appropriate form.

Or you could do as Greg Doucette has done, and sue the SCV for $2.5 million, to be turned into a scholarship fund for African-American students.

Man. I wish I was at a university that was so rich they could afford to pay off white nationalists to protect their “educational mission”, so we could jump down their throats and instead force them to pay for, you know, education instead. UNC just has funny priorities.

Snuggly spiders

The spiders were all fed this morning, and I continued my efforts to get breeding to happen. Maybe it did; I’d left the female New Arya (it’s a cursed name, we’ve gone through three Aryas so far, although this one seems to be lasting) with a male over the weekend, and initially I wasn’t certain what was going on. New Arya is slightly peculiar, having built a nest of debris in one corner of her cage, rarely leaving it. When last I left our two lovebirds, the male was hovering about the nest, plucking forlornly at the web, and New Arya was just waving a tootsie at him.

This morning, though, New Arya was outside (she’s on the left) near the male (on the right), and the two were just resting…in post-coital bliss, perhaps? I hope? I didn’t have the heart to break up the peaceful pair today, so I left them alone, for now. That male has more copulatory duties with other females, though, so I’m going to have to break them up this week.

See? Female spiders aren’t necessarily cannibalistic widow-makers.

Speaking of nesting, I found Mary Jane huddled in a corner with a dome built over her head. It looks cozy.

She seems quite content to have a home of her own. I suppose I’m going to have to introduce a male at some point, though, and wreck her maleless paradise.

Santa came early, and left Steve Pinker a lump of coal

I woke up at 5am this morning, grumble grumble grumble, and trudged off to the kitchen to make the coffee, like usual. Then as usual I fired up the iPad and browsed while waiting for the water to boil and the coffee to steep, when…

That song had been running through my head since the Watchmen finale the other night, but it erupted into full symphonic orchestral sound in my head when I found Jessica Riskin’s article in the LA Review of Books, Pinker’s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics. Oh god yes. It’s so good to see that fraud exposed. I have been irritated by Pinker for years — he’s constantly going on about “progress” and “liberal ideals”, but what he really means is “crush our enemies in the East” and a pattern of conservative thought that would make Ben Shapiro comfortable. His books are propaganda for the Right, to allow them to pretend that they are the True Progressives.

You need to read the review for yourself. It’s delightful.

“INTELLECTUALS HATE REASON,” “Progressives hate progress,” “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery.” No, wait, those last two are from a different book, but it’s easy to get mixed up. Steven Pinker begins his latest — a manifesto inspirationally entitled Enlightenment Now — with a contrast between “the West,” which he says is critical of its own traditions and values, and “the Islamic State,” which “knows exactly what it stands for.” Given the book’s title, one expects Pinker to be celebrating a core Enlightenment ideal: critical skepticism, which demands the questioning of established traditions and values (such as easy oppositions between “the West” and “the bad guys”). But no, in a surprise twist, Pinker apparently wants us over here in “the West” to adopt an Islamic State–level commitment to our “values,” which he then equates with “classical liberalism” (about which more presently). You begin to see, reader, why this review — which I promised to write last spring — took me all summer and much of the fall to finish. Just a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions.

Enlightenment Now purports to demonstrate by way of “data” that “the Enlightenment has worked.” What are we to make of this? A toaster oven can work or not by toasting or failing to toast your bagel. My laser printer often works by printing what I’ve asked it to print, and sometimes doesn’t by getting the paper all jammed up inside. These machines were designed and built to do particular, well-defined jobs. There is no uncertainty, no debate, no tradition of critical reflection, no voluminous writings regarding what toaster ovens or laser printers should do, or which guiding principles or ideals should govern them.

On the other hand, uncertainty, debate, and critical reflection were the warp and woof of the Enlightenment, which was no discrete, engineered device with a well-defined purpose, but an intellectual and cultural movement spanning several countries and evolving over about a century and a half. If one could identify any single value as definitive of this long and diverse movement, it must surely be the one mentioned above, the value of critical skepticism. To say it “worked” vitiates its very essence. But now the Enlightenment’s best-selling PR guy takes “skepticism” as a dirty word; if that’s any indication, then I guess the Enlightenment didn’t work, or at any rate, it’s not working now. Maybe it came unplugged? Is there a paper jam?

Riskin goes through Pinker’s evocation of major thinkers of Enlightenment philosophy and shows that he gets them all wrong. Kant, Hume, Diderot — somehow, Pinker distorts them all into cheerleaders for a version of the Enlightenment in which all we have to do is think hard and do science, and like Mr Spock, we will all get the right answer, and it will be the same answer for everyone. It’s weird. The only book by Kant that I ever struggled through was his Critique of Pure Reason, and, I don’t know, isn’t just the title a great big hint?

In fact, every one of Pinker’s boosters of reason and science was a skeptical analyst of these. It’s not that they were anti-reason or anti-science. Rather, it was the twinning of reason and skepticism that most definitively characterized Enlightenment thought and writing. In particular, Enlightenment authors were keenly aware that knowledge is inseparable from the knower, composed not only of the thing known, but of the knower’s perspective, passions, experience, interpretation, and instinct. Skepticism was the means by which they acknowledged this truth and put it to work. By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense.

And then there’s Pinker’s worship of data. Every scientist knows that data is only part of the story; interpretation shapes that data, but even more, methods and sources select what data you see, and no amount of data can describe the totality of the phenomenon you’re attempting to describe. We are all peeking at the universe through pinholes, and attempting to summarize its nature with theories and models. Pinker, though, is trying to convince the reader that his graphs and charts and tables are comprehensive and tell a uniform message of a perfectable and perfecting world, which is really just a way of belittling real problems to tell us that everything’s all right.

Then there are the graphs that do not appear in the book: graphs showing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the resulting natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, mass shootings, and the list could go on. Indeed, it should set off alarm bells that every single graph in the book points in the same direction: every day in every way, better and better. My point is not that things are getting worse rather than better, but that history is not a straight line up or down, and that presenting “data” as though it produces and speaks for itself is worse than useless: it is profoundly dishonest. What we need in this time of political, environmental, and cultural crisis is precisely the value Pinker rejects but that his Enlightenment heroes embraced, whatever their differences of opinion on other matters: skepticism, and an attendant spirit of informed criticism. Skepticism is kryptonite to the sort of demagogue who brandishes something — a cross, a flag, a MAGA hat … or a graph — and calls anyone who questions it a delusional know-nothing. Pinker’s story is Manichaean, good versus evil, and the bad guys are intellectuals, progressives, and the misleading news media. Any of this sounding familiar? With friends like these, the Enlightenment doesn’t need enemies.

I am looking forward to the squawks of indignation from the usual crowd of neo-conservatives masquerading as neo-liberals masquerading as honest seekers of the truth. The apologists for Pinker will be loud…and wrong, as usual.

Not a spider

I get complaints all the time about my spider photos. No matter how gorgeous they are, there are always a bunch of people who dislike seeing them. They’re not cats, you know? Everyone wants cats. Nothing but cats. Adorable little kittens frolicking about.

Well, PZ don’t do that. I’m willing to compromise, though, so here…a non-spider. It’s kind of the antithesis of a spider, which makes it more like a kitty cat. Enjoy your penis worms.

Here’s a big bucket full of penis worms.

And a beach covered with penis worms.

You like that, huh? You want more? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!? Are you going to continue criticizing my spiders?