Who wants to live forever?

Jennifer Raff has written an informative summary of what you can actually learn about ancient ancestors from those DNA tests.

  1. Your DNA is not a good snapshot of your whole family tree more than a few generations back. You have many more genealogical ancestors than you have genetic ancestors.
  2. Any given individual in the past (including all of the ancient people referenced in the Primeval DNA test) is extremely unlikely to have passed along their DNA to anyone, including you.
  3. Any person in the distant past—be they anonymous peasant or famous monarch—who passed on their DNA into present times might be your ancestor, but he or she will also likely be the ancestor of everyone else in the world. In other words, as geneticist Dr. Adam Rutherford explained in his post on the subject for The Guardian, “we are all special, which means none of us are.”

I like to turn all that around, and consider our descendants. 1) You’re going to be genetically disintegrated and your bits scattered among your descendants, if any; 2) most of us will not have our specific DNA represented in any distant descendants; and 3) if you do leave descendants, your genes will be dispersed among huge numbers of individuals. Sorry, everyone, there really isn’t any such thing as genetic immortality. I blame sex.

Enjoy your life now.

I think I could use an evening of frogs

We’re in the midst of a blizzard, the UMM campus is closed, but the show must go on. An evening of frogs and films by Katie Garrett is still taking place tonight, so if you’re nearby, do try to make it. If you’re not nearby, you’d be crazy to travel in this weather, so don’t.

Frogs would be a denial of our current weather situation, so I think I’ll be going.

There can be only one?

This image illustrates hominin history over 4 million years, highlighting a recent discovery in the Philippines. Is anyone else as horrified by it as I am?

It illustrates 8 species of Homo in the last million years. The fossil record is spotty, so there are probably more…and the record prior to a million years ago is going to be even weaker, and the number of species is going to be even less representative of reality. Our family was a wonderful flowering bush of diversity, and now its been pared down to a single twig, us.

That’s an illustration of failure. We should be worried, especially since we’re actively exterminating even our distant cousins, taking an axe to the whole family tree. We’re working towards only supporting one primate type on the entire planet, which seems a little selfish and short-sighted.

Julian Assange: evidence that a man can be a journalist and an asshole at the same time

Not that that proposition was ever seriously in question.

Assange’s Ecuadorian asylum has been withdrawn, and he has been arrested by London police.

Video of the arrest showed a gray-bearded Assange being pulled by British police officers down the steps of the embassy and shoved into a waiting police van. Assange appeared to be physically resisting. His hands were bound in front of him.

Ecuador, which took Assange in when he was facing a Swedish rape investigation in 2012, said it was rescinding asylum because he of his “discourteous and aggressive behavior” and for violating the terms of his asylum.

My feelings are complicated on this one.

Should he be extradited to the US for crimes against the state? Hell no. You can still argue that he was working as a journalist in Wikileaks, and you may not like that he was revealing state secrets, but I think government should be transparent. It’s fair to say he has an anti-US bias, but it shouldn’t be criminal to dislike a government.

But at the same time, he’s been accused of rape, not just doing journalism. He should be extradited to Sweden and face a court for that. But apparently Sweden has let the investigation lapse; they could reopen it.

The UK should arrest him for skipping bail. That’s also clear cut, he did. I guess he faces potentially a year in prison for that.

By all accounts, he was an unpleasant guest at the Ecuadorian embassy, so I can’t blame them for getting fed up.

My preferred scenario: Sweden gets him to try him for rape. He is found guilty or exonerated by a fair trial. Assange is done, we can forget him at that point.

Worst case scenario: The US gets him, and tries him for espionage, which apparently carries a potential death sentence (which is barbaric in itself). Once again, the US expresses its contempt for journalism, and an alleged rapist is a martyr.

Please don’t extradite him to the US. I don’t trust our courts.

He should have also specified that the execution would be by public stoning

The smirking gentleman to the right has proposed a law to the Texas legislature that would make abortion a crime punishable by death. Of the woman.

A Republican state lawmaker in Texas has reintroduced a bill that would criminalize abortion without exception, making it possible for women to be convicted of homicide and sentenced to death for having the procedure.

Texas state Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R) was placed under state protection in 2017 when he first introduced the bill because of the death threats he received, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Of course that’s the important news, that Tinderholt received death threats, not that he’s threatening to execute a substantial number of women for their “immorality”. This is not the first time Tinderholt has been in the news. He has condemned Sharia law, oblivious to the fact that threatening legalized murder of women is about as barbaric and primitive as it gets. He is also committed to protecting the sanctity of marriage and has been frantic in his opposition to gay marriage.

He’s big on personal responsibility.

“Right now, it’s real easy,” Tinderholt told the Texas Observer in 2017. “Right now, they don’t make it important to be personally responsible because they know that they have a backup of ‘oh, I can just go get an abortion.’ Now, we both know that consenting adults don’t always think smartly sometimes. But consenting adults need to also consider the repercussions of the sexual relationship that they’re gonna have, which is a child.”

He has been married 5 times.

Man, that dude is a hypocritical dumbass. I hope his bill gets slapped down hard, but you never know…it’s Texas.

Doing the Lord’s work

There’s this nifty instagram site, PreachersNSneakers, with a simple premise done well. He looks at photographs of evangelical preachers and then looks up the price of their shoes. Like this:

That’s Pastor John Gray in a really ugly pair of absurdly expensive $5000 tennis shoes. It’s an extreme example, but browsing through the page it’s clear that successful Christians think nothing of dropping $500, $600, $1000 on a pair of shoes that look weird and ostentatious, and also look out of place with the rest of their clothes. There’s just something strange going on here.

Also, I don’t understand the economics of the shoes themselves. These are cheap items built overseas by virtual slave labor, and then given an immense markup in the US. What virtue is being signaled by the existence of these ludicrous status symbols, and what are these preachers saying about themselves?

Don’t you just love reading myths about yourself?

I get a good chuckle over them. Like this claim that I am bitter about not being one of the Four Horsemen.

That’s practically an article of faith among the slymier trolls. It says they don’t know anything about me, but are colossally good at projection.

I would first point out the curious fact that I’m not and never have been an administrator of any atheist organization (I’ve fallen into the role of maintaining a blog host for a rag-tag squad of diverse writers here at FtB, but go ahead, ask them how much “administration” and “leading” I do), nor have I been on the board of any organization. I haven’t even tried to acquire any kind of leadership position, ever. Nor has anyone tried to recruit me to such a position — I think it’s been clear to every responsible person on the internet or the atheist movement that maybe I’m a little too independent (or disorganized) to be a good choice to be given any power at all.

I’m OK with that, too. I think of myself primarily as a teacher and a biologist, and I’m in my dream job right now. I haven’t even put myself up for promotion to full professor because I mainly see that as a position that would saddle me with more administrative responsibilities…although that may have to change, since I’m getting pressure from my university to fill out the paperwork and do my share of more committee work.

So this clown’s first mistake is to think I have any ambition to fill that role.

His second mistake, though, is a far more common one, and one that I consider destructive to the movement. The “Four Horsemen” were nothing but hot air. It was the equivalent of a Google hangout, with four friends getting together and filming themselves while talking. It is not an appointed position. You can’t join it now. It was four people who were already popular who hung out one afternoon, made a video, gave it a snappy title, and sold it. It’s simply perverse to think I’m upset that I wasn’t rewarded with an opportunity to shoot the breeze with some other guys, one of whom I never even liked.

What’s bad about this argument is that it has become canon that the Four Horsemen were some kind of sacred institution within atheism, something with more weight than a casual conversation.There was so much anguish expressed after Hitchens died — who now will sit in his throne? We must have a fourth horseman! It was fucking weird. It got even weirder when Sam Harris decided Ayaan Hirsi Ali ought to be crowned. There was no crown, no throne, no authority here! I said that at the time, and I say it now, the peculiar coronation of the Four Horsemen is a sign that even atheists are susceptible to symbols and myths and religious thinking, and the worst are the ones eager for authoritarianism.

Shorter answer: we never had an atheist tetrarchy, and it’s silly to think I aspired to become part of a non-existent, imaginary leadership. It’s flattering that some people think I was close enough to want to join that club, but honestly, I was also close enough to see how empty the title was, and to have a realistic view of its meaning. Which was nonexistent, except in the minds of people who desire some kind of intellectual domination.

Confirming what we already knew

Congress had a hearing on white nationalism and social media — and the social media commentary was immediately overrun with Nazis. Is anyone surprised? I tried to imagine a swarm of alt-right Nazi fuckwits trying to exercise some restraint, and I knew it was impossible and that they’d rush right in to shoot themselves in the foot, the thigh, the head.

Speaking of unsurprising outcomes, the Tucker Carlson show has been bleeding advertisers, but they aren’t quite all gone. If you’re interested, here’s a list of the die-hards still trickling money into his program.

  • PODS or Portable on Demand Storage – a moving and storage company founded in 1998 and based in Florida.
  • Reputation Defender – an online reputation management company, founded in 2006.
  • Roman – a men’s health company, founded in 2017 and based in New York City.
  • My Pillow USA – a pillow manufacturing company, founded in 2004 and based in Minnesota.
  • Nutrisystem – a commercial provider of weight loss products and services, founded in 1972 and based in Pennsylvania.
  • Sandals Resorts – an operator of resorts for couples in the Caribbean, founded in 1981 and is part of parent company Sandals Resorts International.
  • Ark Encounter – a creationist Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky that was opened in 2016.
  • DealDash – bidding fee auction site, founded in 2009 with its headquarters in Finland and the U.S.
  • American Petroleum Institute – a trade association for the oil and natural gas industry, founded in 1919 and based in Washington D.C.
  • OxiClean – a product line of household cleaning items, introduced in 1997.
  • MintMobile – a provider of wireless phone services.

Those sure are some top-tier brands there. Some of the viewers and many of the guests could use some “online reputation management” after appearing there. MyPillow is owned by a reactionary dingbat…I’ll never own one of his pillows, and it’s really weird that you can get rich selling a pillow when you can buy them for a few bucks at Target. Of course the American Petroleum Institute loves Carlson.

I was most amused, though, that the anti-science organization Answers in Genesis is happily plugging away on Fox News, and no one on Fox News has any qualms about promoting creationism. That’s also unsurprising, they’re into making America great again by rolling back time to the 18th century.