A casual conversation about science

Hey, friends! How about if I try another shot at this YouTube thing? I’m going to try to go live tomorrow, Saturday 7 December, at 2pm Central for what I’m calling A Casual Conversation About Science. I figure I’ll just start talking about what I’ve been reading about lately, or at least what I’ve been reading that maybe you’d find interesting.

There is no homework — this is casual, informal, all that stuff — but here’s a reading list. I figure I’ll just start at the top and work my way down, without an expectation that I’ll get to everything within an hour or so. I’ll take questions, and if there’s a lot of clamor for something, I can change up the order or talk about something completely different. I’m going in with an intent for some structure, but I can ramble if necessary. The reading list is mostly about genes and evolution.

Can new species evolve from cancers?

How Many Genes Do Cells Need? Maybe Almost All of Them

Light-regulated collective contractility in a multicellular choanoflagellate

The Early Ediacaran Caveasphaera Foreshadows the Evolutionary Origin of Animal-like Embryology

Developing an integrated understanding of the evolution of arthropod segmentation using fossils and evo-devo

I put the stuff I’m sure everyone can read first, but then the paywalls start going up in the last three. If you haven’t read it, don’t feel frustrated, we can still talk about it and I’ll try to explain it.

Note also: no spiders. OK, maybe a tiny bit about arachnid evolution in the last paper, but otherwise, this is mostly a spider-free session. Maybe we can have a spider conversation some other time.

A work of prophecy

They don’t realize it’s coming. The rich think that, because they’ve succeeded so well so far, they never need to worry that it can all come crashing down. They think we’re just talking a good game.

Rousseau’s most enduring contribution to the current revolutionary discourse, though, came via a 1789 speech. As writer Talia Lavin noted in a recent piece on the phrase’s origins, his pithy warning — “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich” — has become a rallying cry on social media and at contemporary political protests, where the people’s great and terrible anger at the economic predation of the 1% has helped propel a resurgent anti-capitalist movement. The phrase is all over Twitter, TikTok, and various other social media platforms. It has long been immortalized in song thanks to British heavy metal legends Motörhead (who provided the soundtrack for a bloody 1987 movie also named Eat the Rich about a restaurant that serves the meat of its former wealthy patrons), Swiss hard rockers Krokus, and, bizarrely, Aerosmith, whose vocalist Steven Tyler is currently estimated to be worth about $130 million. (Full disclosure: I have eat the rich tattooed on my stomach, which doubles as a tribute to Motörhead and my own political inclinations.)

I don’t think tattooing a phrase on your belly is a precursor to revolution, and I think that right now we have a complacent middle class (how else could Joe Biden be doing so well in the polls?). One real crisis is what it will take, and crises are on the way. Climate change is going to cause all kinds of disruption, the country is being managed so badly that new conflicts are going to arise, domestic unrest is going to be fomented by a militarized police and splintered right wing terrorist groups. Even minor things could be the tipping point — remember the gas shortages of the 1970s? Something like that could be the spark that wakes up a pissed-off majority.

I’m just saying the 1% need to recognize that they aren’t as well sheltered as they think they are. Buying off an election or hiring lobbyists isn’t going to turn them into good guys in the eyes of the people.

How Quillete packages itself for so-called liberals

Make no bones about it, Quillette is an outrageously racist site. Here’s an article that compiles numerous examples of its biases.

Lehmann has said she started Quillette to counter what she calls “blank slate fundamentalism,” or the proposition that educational outcomes, career success, capacity for ethics, and economic class are determined more by environmental factors than genetic ones. That is to say, she believes that social status, morality or immorality, and, yes, income itself are all genetically based.

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

The real question, though, is why so-called liberals support the site, or even read it. The answer to that is that it exploits the same cracks that were exploited by the right wing to fracture the atheist movement: anti-feminism, anti-Islam, anti-trans bigotry. The people who are otherwise horrified by racism will cheerfully overlook the glaringly illiberal perspective of the site to join in #metoo-, Islam-, or trans-bashing.

Perhaps the most important weapon Quillette uses is applying pressure on a few specific fault lines that divide liberal audiences, such as the MeToo movement. Quillette has recruited liberal men accused of sexual harassment or assault, like Elliott, and empowered them as experts on feminism. In his first Quillette piece, Elliott blasted the desire to “believe women,” and blamed one accuser for his poor book sales and his television agent’s not returning his calls. Elliott has since written three more pieces for the magazine and become one of its strongest partisans on Twitter, joking about a “Quillette Hot American Summer” and frequently retweeting the magazine’s diatribes against feminism. “Wow, Quillette has been killing it recently,” he said in one tweet.

Despite his public defense of the magazine, Elliott told me, “People say, ‘Oh they published this or that,’ and I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t read most of the articles in Quillette.” Asked about the magazine’s repeated promotion of racist pseudoscience, Elliott said, “I don’t agree with that, obviously. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.… The articles you’re talking about, I haven’t read. Maybe if I read one, it would be so offensive that I would say I can’t write for them anymore.”

You can’t be a “dyed-in-the-wool liberal” if you’re willing to smear women, Muslims, and trans persons. You’re just another bigot who only likes white Christian cis men.

Wait! The end of the semester isn’t all that bad!

There are a few good things going on right now — they’re all extra work, but it’s the kind of work I don’t mind.

We’re in the midst of a job search — we’re hoping to hire an ecologist. Last night, and twice next week, we get to experience the dreaded Job Seminar, where some poor candidate gets to suffer through a long day of meetings and then present their work in an intense environment where we’re going to judge them and possibly reward them with employment, or not. It’s utterly miserable for them, as I recall from the long ago days when I was in the hot seat, but it means I get to sit back and listen to cool, interesting stuff from a candidate who has worked long and hard on their presentation. Also, I’m not on this search committee, so I don’t have as many responsibilities. So I got to ‘work’ a bit late and be entertained by a fine seminar on prairie ecology and diversity.

Then, today, I volunteered to teach a course for a colleague who has a lot on their plate right now. This wasn’t just generosity — I’m a developmental biologist who rarely gets to teach developmental biology, because in these small departments we have to be responsible and teach obligatory courses outside our main discipline a lot, and this year and next year I’m all about nothing but cell biology and genetics…which is fine. I usually smuggle in a few lectures on developmental genetics in both. But today I get to talk to first year students about the philosophy and history of embryology! Easy, I can do it in my sleep, but I also hope I can inspire the new students to want to join a lab where they can explore development, too. Which is only my lab here.

Both of these things are additional work on top of a heavy load, but I’d rather do that than make students suffer through the grueling end of semester grind. How about if I just tell all my students to forget studying, I’m handing out free As on the final, and we just have to hang out and talk about cool science for the next week? (I don’t think the university administration would approve, unfortunately, and there’s also the obligation to make sure the students are prepared for the next course in our curriculum.)

I got a suggestion to have a Q&A on YouTube. Would anyone else be interested in just talking about science informally this weekend?

Everyone is on edge

I’m afraid this one doesn’t quite hit the mark for me.

This close to the end of the term, stress levels are sky high, but I always manage to avoid blowing up at the students, so politeness is a flat line.

This is Minnesota, so the students also maintain their equanimity pretty well, but I can see a few gritted teeth and beads of sweat out there as they struggle to retain the required Minnesota Nice. I imagine they have some angry words erupting back in the dorms and on phone calls to their parents.

Next week: last week of classes! Finals the week after that! Then sweet freedom for all until late January.

The perfect social medium

An interesting idea: what if using social media didn’t leave you buck-naked and exposed?

What would “internet realists” want from their media streams? The opposite of what we have now. Today, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to make users easy to contact. That was the novelty of social media — we could get in touch with people in new and previously unimaginable ways.

It also meant, by default, that any government or advertiser could do the same. Mr. Scalzi thinks we should turn the whole system on its head with “an intense emphasis on the value of curation.” It would be up to you to curate what you want to see. Your online profiles would begin with everything and everyone blocked by default.

Think of it as a more robust, comprehensive version of privacy settings, where news and entertainment would reach you only after you opted into them. This would be the first line of defense against viral falsehoods, as well as mobs of strangers or bots attacking someone they disagree with.

Right now, the system is set up so bad social media can sell your information if they want. That’s all they’re in it for, is monetizing you. I would be so there for a site where you weren’t public by default, where you could control what bits and pieces of your life that you want to share, and where the hosting service didn’t assume that they owned everything you published.

Of course, you’d need a different model for funding it, unless it was nationalized somehow.

Here’s another idea that appeals:

Trying to keep up with this torrent, media companies have used algorithms to stop the spread of abusive or misleading information. But so far, they haven’t helped much. Instead of deploying algorithms to curate content at superhuman speeds, what if future public platforms simply set limits on how quickly content circulates?

It would be a much different media experience. “Maybe you’ll submit something and it won’t show up the next minute,” Ms. Noble said. “That might be positive. Maybe we’ll upload things and come back in a week and see if it’s there.”

Yes, throttling would be good, as long as it were fairly applied. I could imagine a system at Freethoughtblogs, for instance, where all the bloggers would submit their posts to a system-wide queue, and the software would post for you when a slot opened up say, once an hour, and publishing would be prioritized for who entered the queue first and for people who hadn’t posted in a while. It might also lead to longer and more substantial posts from us kneejerk fire-hose wielders if we knew our stuff was likely to be delayed to give less prolific bloggers the next available publication slot.

Not going to happen, though. Blogs here are independent and autonomous, so that’s a scheme that probably wouldn’t be favored. We’d also have to implement it, which would take considerable tinkering with the guts of WordPress.

Wheeeee!

Imagine this hurtling across the sand at you:

Unfortunately, there’s a limit.

The move doubles the spider’s speed, to 6.6 feet per second from 3.3. But since it uses so much energy, the maneuver is a last resort, called on only to escape predators.

“I can’t see any other reason,” Dr. Jäger said, adding: “It is a costly move. If it performs this five to 10 times within one day, then it dies.”

Don’t die, speedy spider! Slow down and take it easy! That’s what I tell myself every day.

Shy and nesting

A while back, I told you I had a slight problem: I probably had two nearly indistinguishable Parasteatoda species in my colony, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata. The way to tell them apart is by close examination of their genitals, or by dissection, and a) I don’t have the skill to do that, and b) I’m trying to maintain a live, breeding colony, so taking individuals apart to figure out their sex is off the table.

I did hatch a cunning plan, however, to get a provisional identification. P. tabulata is known to build nests from scraps of debris and wind-blown litter, so I thought maybe I could get a tentative guess at their taxonomy by cluttering their cages with scraps and seeing who built homes for themselves. It’s not at all definitive, especially since they’re all living in a sheltered environment right now and even P. tabulata might find nesting superfluous, but I raided the department’s paper shredder and hole punch for little bits, and scattered them in all the tanks.

Most of the spiders ignored them. They couldn’t eat them, after all. But a few have slowly dragged bits and pieces of paper towards their roost and built little hidey-holes. Here’s Melisandre:

So maybe I can put together a rough behavioral test to estimate who is who? I don’t think a real taxonomist would be satisfied with it at all, but it’ll be useful for me, making it less likely that I send a P. tepidariorum male off to mate with a P. tabulata female, which probably wouldn’t go well.

By the way, P. tepidariorum is thought to be native to the Americas, that is, it hitch-hiked here with the first humans to move here; it colonized Europe when the human colonizers boats sailed back home. P. tabulata is probably native to Asia, and emigrated to the Americas and Europe much more recently. Both are thriving almost everywhere humans live now, but the timing would suggest that the two species diverged at least 15,000 years ago…or about 15,000 generations ago. It’s kind of neat how their morphology hasn’t drifted apart much, but their distinct genitalia make an uncrossable reproductive barrier.

I can’t abide Biden

Please wipe that smirk off his face.

Especially not a Biden who is getting cocky. He thinks he has this whole thing in the bag. But it’s this failure of the system that really annoys me:

Biden’s confidence also rests on his position in South Carolina and a raft of Southern Super Tuesday states that include more diverse populations and more conservative Democrats. To that end, Biden said Monday, if he faltered in Iowa, he could still win the nomination. But if he won Iowa, Biden argued he’d be almost unstoppable.

And Biden said he doesn’t see anyone even close to him in South Carolina polling who could surge even if they won Iowa.

Iowa. South Carolina. Because of the screwy way our primaries are set up, these unrepresentative states early in the game have undue weight in determining who the rest of the country gets to vote on. Biden is relying on pandering to a few conservative states to game the system, and then the media will follow along and use the horserace model to let the early front-runner run away with it. Then, like Trump, he’ll rely on the aberration of the electoral college to give him a win. It’s no way to elect a president.

It’s a national office, have a day for national primaries. Then elect someone to the office on the basis of the popular vote with a national election. We have the last bit, but the rest…nope. It’s a disgrace.

That said, if he gets the nomination, even if it’s due to our broken, corrupt system, I’ll vote for him on election day. He’ll at least slow the country’s downward slide into fascism, but I don’t think he’ll do more than maintain the status quo.