Uh-oh, we have competition

I told you that the University of Minnesota Morris has an opening for a tenure track position in quantitative biology — really, we do, and we urge qualified individuals to apply.

Only now it turns out that we have some competition in the market. Liberty University is also trying to fill an assistant professor in biology position.

Disclaimer: Liberty University’s hiring practices and EEO Statement are fully in compliance with both federal and state law. Federal law creates an exception to the “religion” component of the employment discrimination laws for religious organizations (including educational institutions), and permits them to give employment preference to members of their own religion. Liberty University is in that category.

Minimum Qualifications
Ph.D. in a biological field, or an M.D. minimum qualifications or 18 graduate hours in biology related coursework. Candidates must be committed to the evangelical standards and mission of Liberty University.

Preferred Qualifications

Ph.D. in a biological field, or an M.D. minimum qualifications or 18 graduate hours in biology related coursework. Candidates must be committed to the evangelical standards and mission of Liberty University.

I might be wrong, but I think there might be some religious requirement for the job at Liberty. You might want to read it carefully, I could have missed it.

In the spirit of true academic collegiality, though, if you meet the requirements for the Liberty position, I urge you to apply there. Not to UMM. We’re secular, super gay, and satanic. We might be drawing on a different pool of applicants.

The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

Now there’s an ambitious title: Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. It’s a substantial book, but I would have thought it would have had to be a bit longer to cover everyone, and really, a biography of every individual who ever lived would probably get a bit repetitious.

Fortunately, this isn’t a collection of actuarial tables and obituaries. It’s something much more useful: a description of how we know what we know about humanity, from the perspective of genetics, with a solid awareness of the limitations and capabilities of such an approach. That’s helpful — one of our big problems right now is the abuse of genetics by the ignorant to advocate for an impossibly deterministic and racist view of human history. This book counteracts that by describing the methodology accurately, and you’ll learn a lot by reading it. But don’t panic, it’s not a textbook — it does tell the stories and is a good read.

If you doubt me, a revised chapter has been made freely available, A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas, just for us provincial Americans (the full book has a far more global perspective). This one focuses on some of the historical and scientific controversies around efforts to pigeonhole American Indians into one ill-fitting racial category or another.

The idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have non-native parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.

The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity—and suspicion—toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can’t), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the 19th century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.

When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, “We were hesitant. Science hasn’t been good to us.”

Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave. But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one’s scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.

A book about human genetics with a humanist perspective? That debunks 19th century dogma about race and intelligence? Yeah, it’s good. I’ve been trying to think of ways I could fit it into my already packed-full genetics course, or whether I could offer a non-majors course that incorporated it as a text.

But at least I can tell you all that you need to read it.

There will be a test. Not that I’ll be giving it, but rather that our entire culture seems to be testing you on this subject right now. You should read the book so you can answer it correctly.

What are we going to do about the Nobels?

Ed Yong points out the problems with the Nobel prize: they don’t reflect how science is actually done, they tend to reinforce an archaic notion that scientists work alone and have “Eureka!” moments, they are arbitrary in picking which of the many scientists who contributed to a discovery get the award, and when they make those arbitrary choices, they tend to be biased towards male establishment scientists. It also adds an excessive luster to recipients — it’s for a single discovery, but you’re set for life if you get one, and it gives people who had a singular insight, for which their prize was justly deserved, an unwarranted authority on all too many things. That’s how we get a Watson, a Shockley, a Mullis.

He doesn’t mention another problem, though: the narrowness of the categories. You cannot win a Nobel prize for mathematics, or computer science, or evolutionary biology. Not even biology: all the great work in my field has to be warped to fit a category called “physiology and medicine”, which the Nobel committee does (after all, they’ve managed to award developmental biology a few times), but still, it forces us to look at the world of science through a specifically focused 19th century slit.

Rosbash, Young, and Hall, who won for their work on the molecular basis of circadian rhythms, did great work and should be acknowledged. But thanks to the arcane rules of the prize — no more than three people, who all must be alive — there is an army of researchers who also contributed to the work, and will be ignored. Among those contributors was the late Seymour Benzer, a real scientist’s scientist, who made amazing discoveries in the arcane fields of phage genetics and neurogenetics and of course, circadian rhythms. It’s not that Benzer was neglected — he had awards out the wazoo — but that a life of sustained effort and scientific discipline does not get the ultimate award (it’s also bothersome that there is an “ultimate award”) and won’t get the public attention he deserved.

I don’t know what to do about it, though.

The Nobel prize is the result of a wonderfully successful PR campaign that does a good job of highlighting good science…but it also contributes to the public perception of all worthy endeavors as being kind of like a horse race. It’s not what they did or how they got there or where we go to next, it’s all about who got to the finish line first and who gets to wear the shiny gold medal. You can’t exactly abolish them — they’re the outcome of a committee and an endowment, and people have every right to honor scientists — but it would sure be nice if those honors could be spread around more to everyone who deserves them, rather than being concentrated to create an artificial scientific elite.

Bottom line is that we aren’t and shouldn’t do anything about the Nobels. We should have more ways to recognize scientific accomplishment, though, and the media should be able to notice the science happening all around them instead of celebrating gold disks handed out every October.

Teams of Memes, bursting from the seams

Image courtesy of the googles.

Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back is a lengthy and winding journey. It is characterized (including by its publisher) as a general explanation of the evolution of minds and various peculiar mental functions, consciousness and language being the two most hotly discussed by philosophers, but there’s a better way to read it. As its best, the book is a tour of Dennett’s personal philosophical repertoire, illustrating how ideas from his books and papers fit together.

Dennett’s general theory of the development of genetics stems from his broad theory of memes, where a meme is any informational entity that can be transmitted and replicated. The rough idea is that minds are meme-machines in the way that organisms are gene-machines (in Dawkins’ analogy of the gene’s-eye-view). This is a fruitful analogy, in some respects, though I think it can and should draw some skepticism from readers. I’ll return to those worries later.

The basic building blocks of Dennett’s view are indicated by gestures and short explanations, which is a challenge since he’s spent so much time discussing and arguing for them elsewhere in his work. In any case, there are really two that it is important to understand.

[Read more…]

On the bright side, we have another reason to be best buddies with Saudi Arabia

OK, I’ve had enough. A resolution before the UN to condemn executions for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and consensual same-sex relations has passed, but Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates voted against it.

Oh. And one more. The United States voted against it, too, all for allowing countries to continue to execute people for being an atheist or a gay person. The United States. My country.

Can I have myself frozen and thawed out a century, or maybe a thousand years from now, when this madness is over?

(Damn it, no. That cryogenics stuff doesn’t work. We don’t have time machines, either. Technology, you have failed me again!)

Pressure rising…rising…rising

Good god, our president is in Puerto Rico and he opened his mouth, and this came out:

The bit at the beginning in which he jokes about having to spend money on their island, You have thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that’s fine, is bad enough. But listen to the whole thing, and what came next is even more nauseating.

…if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous…hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and if you look at what happened here with a storm that was totally overpowering, nobody has ever seen…what is your death count here? 17, 16, 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands, you can be very proud of all of your people…

He’s comparing it to a real catastrophe like Katrina, and justifying his belittling attitude with a fucking body count. Hey, Puerto Rico, what are you complaining about? We spent money on you, and you’ve only got 16 dead (so far), compared to something really bad.

This president is going to kill me. Only question is whether it’s going to be explosive exanguination when my blood pressure blows the top of my head off, or nuclear apoplexy.

Do we need another reason to mourn Tom Petty?

He was thoughtful, and admitted when he was wrong.

The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have.

In 1985, I released an album called Southern Accents. It began as a concept record about the South, but the concept part slipped away probably 70 percent or so into the album. I just let it go, but the Confederate flag became part of the marketing for the tour. I wish I had given it more thought. It was a downright stupid thing to do.

He gives a great answer, and he doesn’t hesitate to reject all the awful things done under that flag.

Beyond the flag issue, we’re living in a time that I never thought we’d see. The way we’re losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What’s going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That’s a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, “You mean we privatized the prisons so there’s no profit unless the prison is full?” You’d think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We’re creating so many of our own problems.

He’s also a reminder that Southerners can be great and good people.

Actually, I do want to take your guns away

Not all of them, just most of them. And I’d like to have every gun registered, and sold in a regulated way, no more of this “gun show” shit. And I’d like to have serious restrictions on who can own guns — like, if you’ve been convicted of domestic violence, you don’t get to fondle guns anymore. Let’s ban all those assault rifles and any weapon that can be fired fast enough that you can murder 50 people in short order. We should also criminalize the NRA, because they’re already destructive enough to society.

I’m looking at this list of NRA contributions in the last election, and it’s kind of eye-opening. The only Democrat who received any donations from the NRA was Hillary Clinton, and it was more of a pathetic token tip.

Over $11 million to elect Trump, almost $20 million to oppose Clinton? Yeah, that $265 she got from the NRA is more of an insult than a donation. Then there’s this list of all the NRA blood money recipients who also sent fucking thoughts & prayers to the Las Vegas massacre victims.

By the way, that murderous asshole hauled 23 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition to his hotel room. Shouldn’t owning that many weapons be indicative of a pathology that makes the person a danger to their community? This was a sick man — not sick in the sense of mentally ill, but sick in the sense of possessing a vicious, deadly criminality.

Oh, one more thing I want: repeal the second amendment. It’s been twisted far beyond its original intent, for those who have a religious devotion to the intent of the Founding Fathers, and its original intent was selfish, elitist, and racist, for those who don’t.

I suspect I won’t get any of my wishes met in my lifetime, though, because this country is run by plutocrats with millions of yahoos in their pockets.

Needs more panels. Maybe the artist ran out of red ink?

The evolutionist drifts, seemingly unknowing, from the safety of his herd.

The creationists pounce. Gabble gabble, they squawk. Jesus luvs you, gibber gabber!

The evolutionist cowers down, trembling. The creationists converge avidly on the isolated scientist.

But wait, what’s this? As the mob surrounds him, there is a cruel glint in the eye of their solitary victim — a slowly growing grin, exposing canines like needles, incisors like razors, long rows of jagged splintery back teeth. Claws emerge from their sheaths, and keep emerging, long as sabers. The evolutionist laughs a harsh, triumphant laugh and leaps up, whirling and gnashing and slashing. A half dozen creationists fall with deep gushing wounds, and the rest run away squealing.

Dinner time.

I don’t know why the cartoonist failed to include a few more panels that would have shown the fun stuff.