Steatoda triangulosa!

I said I was going to tend to my shiny newborn Steatoda triangulosa today. It didn’t take as long as I expected. Here’s the vial of my freshly emerged spiderlings; the egg sac is the foamy looking bubble at the bottom, attached to the yellow plug on the vial, and the little dots are the babies.

There were only nine spiderlings from that egg sac. It was a bit of a surprise, since when a Parasteatoda egg sac pops, I easily get over a hundred spiderlings. It makes me wonder how well S. triangulosa does in the wild — I can tell you from our summer survey that they were the rarest of the false widows we found, with even S. borealis far more numerous, and they were a distant second to Parasteatoda. Now I’m curious about what niche they fill in the local spider ecosystem.

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Chemistry and triangulosa

Work is heating up as it always does in the first few weeks of classes. Today and Friday I’m blitzing through a basic chemistry review in cell biology, because…biology is all chemistry. A very narrow and specific domain of chemistry, sure, but if you don’t understand how electrons flow you’re getting nowhere in cell biology. Yesterday was spent re-reading a lot of introductory chemistry stuff to remind me of how this all works, today I lay it all out for the students, who might be bored, but still a bunch of them will mess up on the easy chemistry questions in the first exam.

It always shocks incoming students who think biology is all frog dissections and memorizing organs. Nope, all chemistry, and in order to get the chemistry, you need to know the math. So all you high school kids thinking it would be neat to major in biology and play with spiders, buckle down and learn your basic algebra and pre-calc, at the least, and work through chemistry and physics.

Then I have some lab stuff to do. Today I’m going to focus on our Steatoda triangulosa. We’ve got a few young second generation juveniles coming up that I need to sort into larger quarters, and another egg sac that is full of baby spiders. The cool thing about S. triangulosa, besides the pretty pigment patterns, is that their egg sacs are fluffy, loosely woven silk and are semi-transparent, so you can see the eggs right through them, and right now I peek in and it’s a mass of writhing spider legs, so they’re about to emerge, I’m sure. The less cool thing about them is that they seem to be slower to develop, and for at least the one mama I’ve got in the lab, lay a smaller number of eggs. I might have to go hunt down some more adults so I have a larger sample before the frost hits.

Anyway, I’ll take pictures! I think I’ll post a purely S. triangulosa article later today.

But first, chemistry! That’s my day sorted.

I bit the bullet and joined MeWe

It’s probably futile to resist the evil juggernaut that is Facebook, but I figured it can’t hurt to leap to this alternative, MeWe. It’s just like Facebook! Without the ads and the intrusive anti-privacy crap! Without that guy with the punchable face, Zuckerberg! Also without the teeming millions of users. It’s kind of lonely and quiet there.

But now all my friends will join! Right?

Tell us, UK, how did you do it?

Like a meteor, Boris Johnson seems to be streaking across the firmament to land with a dull thud. He’s lost his majority when Dr Phillip Lee crossed the aisle! He might have the shortest term of any prime minister in UK history! I know you’ve all got a lot of work yet to overcome the poison of Brexit, but I’m envious that you managed to take one small step towards sanity.

Tell us how to do it here.

I went looking for comparisons to help us out, and alas, I had to read Jennifer Rubin, the conservative journalist who was such a cheerleader for war in Iraq. I have no confidence in her opinion, but she did list three lessons for the US to learn.

First, Trump, like Johnson, is all bluster and no competence, and as problems of his own making mount, he becomes even less stable. As matters get worse, Trump hides more often (e.g., refusing to go to Poland), lies more (e.g., phantom calls from China’s negotiators, an anti-historical explanation for Russia’s expulsion from the Group of Seven) and lashes out more frequently.

OK, yes, we know. Both the UK and US are suffering self-inflicted wounds in the persons of Johnson and Trump. We already are fully aware of this.

Second, unlike Lee, the United States has, with the exception of Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), no sitting legislator with the nerve to call out his party’s leader and stand up for conservative and constitutional principles. If we had a “no confidence” vote in the United States — wouldn’t that be delightful?! — the Republican administration and party would collapse under the weight of Trump’s stunning incompetence. The very little man behind the curtain no longer can sustain the illusion of sanity, let alone strength.

We’re relying on conservative legislators to grow a spine and abandon the Republican party? Hah. If there’s one thing we know, Republicans lack spines, consciences, and honest principles. This isn’t going to happen. There’s too much money and power driving the dominant political party (and we’ll have to watch it that if the Democrats gain seats, they might just turn into another party with no principles — there are good signs that the DNC is already like that.)

And finally, the antidote to illiberal wannabe autocrats is democracy. Brits took to the streets to protest Johnson’s scheme, and now in the heart of the oldest deliberative body, the model for democratic legislatures everywhere, conservatives are taking on their leader. If American conservatives would only follow their example, America’s Trumpian nightmare would end sooner rather than later.

We’ve done protests — remember the Women’s March? — but there was no follow-through and none of it dislodged any of the vermin in office from their positions. Any protest would have to involve more than a day of marching, followed by going home to the status quo. I don’t know that Americans are prepared to do more.

We’re pinning all hopes on the next election, held in gerrymandered districts with active voter suppression and an electoral college that makes most of us irrelevant. There are a heck of a lot of structural problems in American democracy that make an appeal to “democracy” just as forlorn as expecting Republicans to have a conscience.

It looks to me like we’re going to have to rely instead on an old American tradition: Revolution. But that’s a real throw of the dice.

An addendum to the previous two posts

This, exactly.

The far-right conservatives and the deeply stupid (but I repeat myself) have mastered one art of discourse: regurgitating nonsense so rapidly that more sensible people can’t keep up.

I don’t understand it, therefore nobody does

We’re going to see a wave of ignorance prompted by David Gelernter’s profession of foolishness, aren’t we? Every fool in the world who hears that guy’s nonsense is now inspired to spew out some nonsense of their own.

One example is Barbara Kay, who I’ve never heard of before, pontificating in the National Post that “there’s one mystery we still can’t explain”. Only one? I can think of lots. But the fact that there are still questions in the world does not mean that all the answers we have are wrong.

Her point is especially bad, because she singles out one thing that she thinks is false, and she is wrong about it.

The human brain and the power of speech put humans way beyond the boundaries of Darwin’s own three critical criteria for natural selection, which; i) may expand an animal’s power only to a point where it has survival advantage — and no further; ii) cannot produce changes that are “injurious” to the animal; and iii) cannot produce a “specially developed organ” that is useless to an animal at the time it develops. If a Neanderthal brain three times the size of any primate’s and a unique capacity for speech do not constitute “specially developed organs,” what does?

OK. Start with Darwin: he’s not our infallible prophet. He got a lot wrong, and remember, he was writing 150 years ago. You can demonstrate Darwin’s errors all you want, and modern scientists will just shrug and say, “So?”

Kay’s second error, though, is that she overlooked the meaning of her subject, natural selection. Evolution is not synonymous with natural selection, and showing that something could not have evolved by natural selection does not refute the idea that it evolved by some other mechanism. Even if we take those three points as given, it does not negate the idea of evolution.

Third error: she has not demonstrated that point (i) means natural selection could not have occurred. Where does the survival advantage of speech stop? It seems to me that the initiation of speech with grunts and crude vocalizations could only be improved, and improved continuously, by natural selection. Speech that enabled better hunting could lead to speech that is used for love poetry, or describing geography, or telling scary stories around the campfire, or expressing philosophical thoughts. She has not demonstrated any barrier which would impede the action of natural selection.

Fourth error: The brain isn’t that special (ii). All animals have one (well, we could call sponges and jellyfish exceptions). Our ancestors had one that could visualize the environment and the future, allow for sophisticated socialization, and permitted all kinds of communication shy of speech. Speech capability builds on structures that are already present in a multitude of animals.

Fifth error: brains that could process information in a complex way before speech evolved were not useless to our ancestors (iii), even if they couldn’t speak.

Sixth and biggest, most common error in creationists: the failure of their imaginations and ignorance of the evidence does not support their claim that the science is wrong. I can’t imagine how Barbara Kay manages to type words on a machine, but I think it’s clear that she did. Probably. I can’t rule out the possibility that an editor filtered the output of a monkey pounding on a keyboard, but it’s more likely that her essay was produced by a human being who simply knows nothing about biology.

Don’t play theological games with the scientific evidence

Aron Ra got into an online debate with an Islamic apologist, Nadir Ahmed, on the science of the Qur’an. No offense, Aron, but you got suckered. It’s a total waste of time. They got into a whole bunch of goofy details, which Ahmed just oozed around slimily.

Islamic apologist, Nadir Ahmad insisted there were no scientific errors in the Qur’an. So we decided to do a series of videos listing them for him. In this episode, we talked about:
1. Sūrah 105 Birds bombing elephants with stones? Seriously?
2. Sūrah 54 The Moon (being broken in half) Didn’t happen.
3. Sperm becomes blood
4. Sex is determined later
5. Sperm = Human. We are made only of sperm, not sperm + egg.
6. Sperm comes from backbone and ribs
7. Flesh forms after bones

I haven’t watched the whole thing, but Aron let me know I was mentioned 1 hour 44 minutes in (Gah! It’s interminable!), when they’re discussing that last question, does flesh form after bones in embryonic development?

Ahmed practices expert theology. First he questions my knowledge of human embryology, trying to undercut anything I might have said. Then he begins splitting hairs: does “clothed with flesh” mean that Allah created muscles at that moment? Could he have created it first, and then draped it over the bones? Everything was word games, trying to rationalize the words of the Qur’an to fit a chronology worked out now with a body of scientific evidence that he apparently just heard for the first time right there, and I’m sorry, but Aron and his other guest got played right into that meaningless ad hoc argument, and they’re all sitting there playing the interpretation dance on screen.

Cut through the shit, guys. The verse in question is one paragraph long in English translation, just two short sentences. It’s vague and general, and it’s merely summarizing Aristotle’s view of development, part of the common currency of scholarly knowledge of the Prophet Mohammed’s time. It’s derivative and not specific enough to be a test of secret, divine knowledge bestowed upon the Prophet or the infallibility of the sacred text — and it’s a disgrace that Muslim zealots insist that it is, and that anti-Islamic atheists argue that its errors are proof that it isn’t God’s word. The former are embarrassingly ignorant, and the latter should know better. God, or rather his interpreters, lie all the time.

I’ve made this point before:

…the Quran contains negligible embryological content, and what there is is so sketchy and hazy that it allows his defenders to make spectacular leaps of interpretation. Mohammed avoided the trap of being caught in an overt error here by blathering generalized bullshit, and saying next to nothing. This is neither an accomplishment nor a miracle.

We can say the same thing about the book of Genesis. It’s like half a page! It’s clearly a poetic parable that uses guesses about how life came about, written by people who had no clue, to make some currently incomprehensible point about Hebrew destiny, and all the fine-toothed combing of the story is only obscuring the meaning. People who stack it up against all the scientific observations of the complex history of geology and biology are ludicrous, and that’s the point we should be making, not dissecting what happened on what day and how it fits the science.

Unfortunately, I commented on that video, which meant Ahmed was prepared to pounce with more irrelevancies.

He wants to debate me? No. Not ever going to happen. Hamza Tzortzis wanted to fly me to London to debate him — the prospect of a free trip to England was tempting, but no, I didn’t debate him, either, and Adnan Oktar once invited me to Istanbul for a conference on Islamic creationism, even more tempting, and I turned him down. Ahmed didn’t tantalize me with anything, and his performance with Aron told me he was just a know-nothing word parser who practices motivated reasoning blatantly. To engage with him is to elevate his importance far too much, as it would have been with Tzortzis and Oktar (Oktar has since vanished into a Turkish prison, so I can safely say that association with him would not have looked great on my CV).

Then he’s desperately reduced to questioning my credentials. What can I say? As an undergraduate, I did research on development with Jenny Lund and Johnny Palka at the University of Washington; I moved on to do graduate work at the University of Oregon on zebrafish development; I did a post-doc with Mike Bastiani at the University of Utah studying early development in the grasshopper; I was hired to teach developmental biology at Temple University; I took a position as a developmental biologist and geneticist here at the University of Minnesota Morris. I’ve taught human embryology, developmental biology of both invertebrates and vertebrates, developmental neurobiology, and ecological development. Anybody could look at what I’ve been doing for over 40 years now and see that yeah, I’m about as qualified in developmental biology as you can get.

But all Mr Ahmed, the wibbly-weebly twister of words, can do is squint and try to pretend I’m less informed about embryology than he is. That’s a taste of what any debate with him would be like, and no thanks.

What if you put on a sh*t-show and nobody noticed?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The bozos who put on Mythcon, the atheist conference that was packed with alt-right goons, put on another conference the other day, in New Jersey. Or Pennsylvania? It seems to have bounced around between various venues until settling down at the last minute in a casino in Philadelphia. They had fleck-stained list of garbage people as speakers, pseudo-journalists like Tim Pool and Andy Ngo, YouTube incompetents like Sargon and Count Dankula, but they also had an even larger initial roster that wibbled away at the last minute, which is always a reliable sign of bad management. But still, they had a reliable audience of fanatics willing to pay $150 a head to see liars reinforcing their worldview on a stage, for a one-day event.

The whole thing passed me by without a ripple, but at least Talia Levin was there to report on the event. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Freezepeachers noticed her tweets and denounced her and chased her from the casino. Follow the link, read about her adventures.

Here, by the way, is a representative attendee.