Anyone can get on a school board

Why, just look at the Brainerd school board. Sue Kern even made president!

During a recent meeting of the board, President Sue Kern asked two educators why evolution is being taught, reported the Brainerd Dispatch.

“Darwin’s theory was done in the mid-1800s and it’s never been proven,” Kern asserted to Director of Teaching and Learning Tim Murtha and Craig Rezac, a high school science teacher. “So I’m wondering why we’re still teaching it.”

To their credit, Murtha and Rezac remained poised and professional, calmly explaining to Kern that evolution has been documented, that it serves as the foundation of modern biology and, furthermore, its instruction is mandated by the state’s science standards.

Kern then went on to ask, “And with regard to Christian students – how do you do that? They’re taught not to agree with that, so.”

Rezac’s reply could not have been better: “This is science, and science deals with facts. It doesn’t deal with belief. It doesn’t have to be a dilemma or a concern for someone to choose between Christianity and evolution – that’s not what this is about. You can actually embrace both. It’s my duty as a teacher to teach science and not teach religion. That’s the separation of church and state.”

I’m sorry, my brain shorted out at the claim that Darwin’s theory was done. Theories are never “done”. Evolution has so much evidence behind it that it is ludicrous to deny it anymore.

How she arrived at that bad idea is clear, at least. She thinks Christians are taught that evolution is false! Some Christians are taught that, unfortunately, and usually they are the vocal, obnoxious ones who run for school board president and represent Christianity badly. I think. Although, realistically, I’ve noticed that most Christians will sit quietly and not object to characterizations of their faith like that by Kerns.

Is there an impeachment process for school boards? And if there is, is it as timidly executed as the one at the federal level?

Oh no! I have roused a Lesser Swarm of Pewdiepie Fanlings!

What should greet my eyes upon looking into the abyss of Twitter this morning but a chittering mob of angry defenders of Pewdiepie, the no-talent vacuous King of YouTube. I’d made some dismissive comment about him, and now the people who love him are all making dismissive comments back. I guess when your hero is a whiny Nazi-friendly twit who does nothing but play video games, you are especially sensitive to criticisms — after all, that calls into question all of your life choices.

But the reality is that he is alt-right. He’s Nazi-adjacent. He panders to whoever will give him on eyeballs on YouTube, which means he whips back and forth in his political stance, because he ultimately lacks one.

In 2017, Disney cut ties with PewDiePie after he posted several videos featuring anti-Semitic images.

These include swastikas drawn by a fan and footage of two Indians he paid to hold up a sign which read “death to all Jews.”

In the wake of the controversy, he said he was simply trying to “show how crazy the modern world is” and that people “would say anything for five dollars” but added that he understood that “these jokes were ultimately offensive”.

He has since distanced himself from the far-right.

He said he was prompted to make a donation after his name was linked to this year’s mass-shooting that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The funny thing is that his fans are not very bright and kind of derivative. Right now I’ve got a mob sending me messages where the most insulting thing they can imagine to call me is “boomer”. It’s about as effective as calling me a Pisces or an INTP or any other meaningless categorization — that they think it’s clever is making me laugh and laugh.

Corden is far too nice to Maher

I find Bill Maher unwatchable, for many reasons, but James Corden managed to get through one of those monologs where the man just opens his mouth and bullshit plops out, which I’d be unable to do, and then, remarkably, manages to courteously shred him.

I can empathize way too much with Corden’s sentiments here. I know the pain.

Refusal to debate…reinforced

After that last post, I realized there is another problem I have with doing debates with creationists. For a proper debate, you have to respect your opponent, and in fact, there should be mutual respect.

I don’t respect creationists at all. Not one bit. Rather than debating, I should be spitting in their face, throwing them out of the lecture hall, and presenting the honest truth to the audience, because creationists won’t.

And now I have to ask my good colleagues who still debate people like Ham, or Hovind, or Comfort, or Craig: Why? Do you respect these liars for Jesus? How can you stand on a stage with them and not throw a lectern? Where the fuck is your self-respect? (I say this as someone who used to debate creationists, too.) How can we continue to dignify these frauds with the right to stand on an equal footing with real scientists?

Ken Ham and the spiders

Ken Ham is writing about spiders and evolution, and my first thought was ha ha, that’s funny, he’s talking about two obsessions of mine, this should be good for a laugh. Creationist ignorance is always a great joke, right? But then I’m reading it, and…

Jesus fucking christ, this man is a lying fraud.

I don’t feel like treating this as a light bit of goofy news. Ken Ham is running a commercial empire in which he rakes in money for explaining that evolution is false, in addition to defrauding the state and his community, and his arguments can be rebutted with obvious logic and trivial examples. You’ll see; no one who reads this blog will have any trouble seeing the flaws in his complaint, and explaining where he’s wrong is like trying to explain basic evolution to a four-year-old child.

I can be patient and gentle and fun with a child, but dear god, this is a grown adult man several years older than I am who claims to have spent a lifetime studying the ideas of biology. He’s able to tie his own shoes, so he ought to have the maturity to comprehend the scientific position, even if he is ideologically opposed to it; I expect him to be honest enough to appreciate what he is criticizing as sincerely held and based on evidence, and present valid counter-evidence. He never does. And what he does say is obviously false.

Here’s what prompted him to dump his idiocy on the net: an observation that populations of spiders in storm-prone areas survive better and produce more offspring if they are aggressive. Sure, fine, I haven’t looked at the original papers so I don’t know how good the study is, but I don’t need to, because, as usual, Ken Ham’s analysis is so superficial and contradictory that there aren’t any nuances to consider. I mean, he doesn’t even understand the terms.

But it’s not evolution. The spiders remain spiders—there’s been no change of spider kind. Some behaviors are simply more beneficial than others under certain circumstances, which may drive a change in the population. This is natural selection, not evolution. Even though news items and scientific journals frequently equivocate the two, they aren’t the same thing.

Right there, from the first sentence, my rage grows. Yes, this is evolution. If the paper has demonstrated differential reproduction is related to a behavior, that is most definitely an example of evolution. This is an internally consistent application of the scientific meaning of evolution to an observation. Deal with it, Mr Ham. You can argue about the importance of this example, or you could, if you were able, try to address any problems in the study, but claiming “it’s not evolution” is just wrong.

Of course the spiders remain spiders. This is an example of an incremental change in a population. No one expects spiders to turn into beetles in one storm season, or even in a million years.

Ham says beneficial behaviors may drive a change in a population…yes. That is natural selection. He’s just admitted that it occurs, and even takes it for granted.

Natural selection is a subset of the mechanisms that drive evolution, so he’s technically correct that they should not be equivocated, but still — natural selection is an evolutionary process. When selection is observed, you are seeing evolution.

Now look. Everyone reading this knows all this. It’s basic. I’m repeating stuff I’ve explained multiple times on this blog and in the classroom for decades. You’re all sitting there, out there in the blogosphere, smug and reassured because Myers is simply re-affirming the stuff you already know. It feels good, doesn’t it? We’re all happy to share our understanding, and there’s a bit of the ol’ mean-spirited “let’s pile on the ignoramus” sentiment uniting us.

But you shouldn’t feel good at all. You should feel sick at heart and angry. Ken Ham is a man who lies to children about the simplest concepts in science, and he was handed hundreds of millions of dollars to build a stupid fake boat in the middle of Kentucky. He’s a liar and a con artist, and he is economically rewarded to a degree most of you are not (definitely more than I am). He gets to mumble inanities that we’d be embarrassed to see in a miseducated child, and then he gets to go count the gate receipts.

I am tired of just laughing at these clowns. Get angry. Get angrier.

You know, he’s not done.

Natural selection works on already existing genetic information, whereas evolution requires the addition of brand-new genetic information to form new features that never previously existed. (Something that has never been observed!) Information always comes from other information and ultimately a mind, and in this case, the Creator’s mind.

Yes, we have observed the addition of new genetic information and the generation of new phenotypes. It’s called mutation. It’s another of those processes, like natural selection, that work together to produce evolutionary change. It’s been seen and measured and recorded over and over again, and Ham can just lie and dismiss it all.

After stumbling through some transparently stupid evolution denial, he moves on to equally stupid arguments against climate change.

Are these storms (such as Hurricane Dorian, the storm that devastated the Bahamas and parts of the United States in recent weeks) really the result of man-made climate change? Well, climates do change—that is observational science. But the cause of climate change isn’t straightforward. Some scientists have suggested that it may be dependent on the sun and cycles of the sun (such as sunspots), with humans only playing a very minor role.

Some scientists and sunspots. Goddamn you to hell, Ken Ham. You’re a liar for Christ, you contemptible, shallow little man.

Of course, then he goes on to plug his upcoming Easter conference with Ray Comfort on climate change that you too can attend for the low price of $149, plus travel and hotel costs. Celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ with four days of shit from a bevy of smirking dishonest assholes. Christians ought to be outraged, but then one lesson I’ve learned is that Christians are really good at excusing the worst behavior from their fellow Christ-fuckers.

Are you angry yet?

Join me and the spiders.

Why PZ Myers is not intrigued by Jeffrey Epstein

Did you know Jeffrey Epstein had a blog? You can still reach it via the wayback machine. It’s an odd thing, a failed exercise in PR — almost every article has the name “Jeffrey Epstein” in the title, and the articles themselves are painfully banal. For instance…

Why Evolutionary Biology Intrigues Jeffrey Epstein
THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY ADMIN ON OCTOBER 25, 2010
POSTED UNDER: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Evolutionary Biology holds promise in advancing our knowledge of the dynamics of infectious diseases and cancer genetics, as well as alternative forms of energy. While some people, who are ignorant of the subject, are perhaps frightened or threatened by it, and therefore oppose it, the potential of evolution, especially microevolution , has been fundamental to many social improvements in this century, and it promises to be profoundly important to biomedical technology in the next generation, specifically in drug development and in biotechnology.

That’s the whole thing. I don’t know any evolutionary biologists who think this way — Epstein is all about applications of microevolution, I guess, to something or other, and he doesn’t specify any of the “social improvements” it has made. I’ve had students who try to bamboozle me with this kind of clumsy, glib summary, and I am never fooled. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Also, the blog header is an animated gallery of photos of scientists Epstein presumably admired. If I were on it, I’d want a way to be removed.

That is not a spider

Grrr. The CBC got me excited with a headline about “the granddaddy of spiders”. It’s not a spider. It’s a Cambrian chelicerate, which ought to be cool news enough without pretending it’s some kind of familiar organism. At least it wasn’t SciTech, which called it a frightening 500-million year old predator” or LiveScience, which called it a “nightmare creature”. C’mon, people. It was a couple of centimeters long. I do not like this pop sci nonsense that has to jack up the significance of a discovery by pretending it was scary. Does this look scary to you?

a–c, Reconstructions. a, Lateral view. b, Dorsal view (the gut has been removed for clarity). c, Isolated trunk exopod. an, anus; lam, lamellae.

At least the article by the discoverers is sensible. This is an early Cambrian chelicerate with those big old feeding appendages at the front of the head (which spiders also have) and with modified limb appendages that resemble book lungs (also a spider trait), but they are most definitely not spiders. They are their own beautiful clade, and cousins of Mollisonia plenovenatrix might have been spider ancestors, but calling them spiders is like excavating an ancient fish and calling it a mammal. Very misleading.

Yes, I’m being pedantic. It matters. Let’s not diminish the diverse chelicerates by calling them spider wanna-bes.

Here’s the abstract for the paper.

The chelicerates are a ubiquitous and speciose group of animals that has a considerable ecological effect on modern terrestrial ecosystems—notably as predators of insects and also, for instance, as decomposers. The fossil record shows that chelicerates diversified early in the marine ecosystems of the Palaeozoic era, by at least the Ordovician period. However, the timing of chelicerate origins and the type of body plan that characterized the earliest members of this group have remained controversial. Although megacheirans have previously been interpreted as chelicerate-like, and habeliidans (including Sanctacaris) have been suggested to belong to their immediate stem lineage, evidence for the specialized feeding appendages (chelicerae) that are diagnostic of the chelicerates has been lacking. Here we use exceptionally well-preserved and abundant fossil material from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (Marble Canyon, British Columbia, Canada) to show that Mollisonia plenovenatrix sp. nov. possessed robust but short chelicerae that were placed very anteriorly, between the eyes. This suggests that chelicerae evolved a specialized feeding function early on, possibly as a modification of short antennules. The head also encompasses a pair of large compound eyes, followed by three pairs of long, uniramous walking legs and three pairs of stout, gnathobasic masticatory appendages; this configuration links habeliidans with euchelicerates (‘true’ chelicerates, excluding the sea spiders). The trunk ends in a four-segmented pygidium and bears eleven pairs of identical limbs, each of which is composed of three broad lamellate exopod flaps, and endopods are either reduced or absent. These overlapping exopod flaps resemble euchelicerate book gills, although they lack the diagnostic operculum. In addition, the eyes of M. plenovenatrix were innervated by three optic neuropils, which strengthens the view that a complex malacostracan-like visual system might have been plesiomorphic for all crown euarthropods. These fossils thus show that chelicerates arose alongside mandibulates as benthic micropredators, at the heart of the Cambrian explosion.

I think this diagram illustrates the relationship of M. plenoventrix to spiders well.

a, Simplified consensus tree of a Bayesian analysis of panarthropod relationships. This tree is based on a matrix of 100 taxa and 267 characters. Extant taxa are in blue; dashed branches represent questionable groupings. Asterisk shows that the radiodontans resolved as paraphyletic. This analysis excludes pycnogonids, but this had little effect on the topology. The letters A to D at the basal panchelicerate nodes refer to boxes on the right, and summarize the appearances of major morpho-anatomical features: (1) extension of cephalic shield, including a seventh tergite; (2) cephalic limbs all co-opted for raptorial and masticatory functions, and reduction of some trunk endopods; (3) dissociation of the exopod from the main limb branch; (4) presence of chelicerae; (5) trunk exopods made of several overlapping lobes; (6) some cephalic limbs differentiated as uniramous walking legs; (7) multi-lobate exopod covered by sclerite (operculum); (8) reduction of seventh cephalic appendage pair; and (9) all post-frontal cephalic limb pairs are uniramous walking legs. b, Life reconstruction. Drawing by J. Liang, copyright Royal Ontario Museum

Not a spider, but still cute and adorable.

Aria C, Caron J-B (2019) A middle Cambrian arthropod with chelicerae and proto-book gills. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1525-4.

The MIT Media Lab is going to be getting some intense scrutiny

The Chronicle of Higher Education has now noticed Caleb Harper’s “Food Computer”. It’s a long article, and a good chunk of it focuses on the novel funding setup MIT has for the Media Lab — it’s basically a semi-autonomous unit set loose to harvest money from rich people (that’s the good part) with relatively little oversight on the quality of the work done with that money (the bad part). So while some people are screaming “You accepted money from pedophile!”, others are now yelling “And you spent it on WHAT?!!?“.

If I were employed by the Media Lab, I’d be scrambling to update my CV and apply for jobs that would allow me to run away before someone wrote a revealing article about my project to teach spiders how to solder circuit boards … which hasn’t worked once, but boy howdy did Silicon Valley like my idea of replacing small Asian children with even cheaper spiders.

Hey, isn’t that what science is supposed to be all about, skimming creamy rich money off our excess of gullible, over-hyped tech billionaires? That’s what the MIT Media Lab was all about anyway. It’s Harper’s turn to be exposed and ridiculed, but I’m wondering what other fantasy-land projects were cooking over there.

But let’s give Caleb Harper a chance to defend himself.

Harper’s optimism helps raise money, and without money he won’t be able to see this dream of an international network of food computers come true. His critics, he said, “are basically jealous because I raise a lot of funding while giving away knowledge for free.” Harper also said that he doesn’t mislead the public. He’s explained his progress in great detail in a series of Medium posts, he said. Some may have misinterpreted his vision as current reality, he said, but if they listened closely they would not be mistaken. “Can you email a tomato to someone today? No,” he said. “Did I say that in my TED talk? Yes. Did I say it was today? No. I said, you will be able to email a tomato.”

It’s true that Harper didn’t quite say that food computers can email tomatoes or apples, though you could be forgiven for thinking exactly that. He frequently leaves the impression that the project has achieved, or is on the brink of achieving, an enormous breakthrough. It’s a style that has attracted the sort of high-profile attention, not to mention corporate funding, that fuels projects at the MIT Media Lab, and his willingness to showcase food computers beset with problems feels consistent with Ito’s “deploy or die” philosophy.

So his dream is to be able to email a tomato (or more precisely, a set of instructions to a “food computer” that will allow it to replicate the exact growing conditions for a specific tomato), so he’s doing this fun thing of making an extravagant claim (“email a tomato”) while simultaneously admitting that he can’t, and is building boxes that allow him to fake emailing a tomato. It reminds me of Fritz Leiber’s SF story, “Poor Superman”, about a scientology-like cult that invents wild stories of colonies on Mars and super-technology, knowing they’re false, but justifying them by saying they have to pretend to convince people to implement the reality.

Here’s the final word from a real working crop scientist on this story:

She also labels this approach “Sugar Daddy Science”, in which you just have to court an ignorant patron to siphon off money into your pocket for your bad ideas.

Tsk.