Retired for “health reasons”

One thing I’ll agree with: Karl Kjer was one sick fuck. He was an entomologist at UC Davis who quietly retired “for health reasons” in 2016, and no one bothered to publicly mention what was learned in 2015.

“When I first started working with Kjer, we were going to set up a really nice imaging system for publications or just high-def microphotography [of] specimens we were going to use for his research,” the junior specialist said. “Since we did not get our imaging system first, we decided to kind of prepare for it, and so he [Kjer] asked me to order two hard drives.”

After opening files on just one of the two university-purchased hard drives stored in Kjer’s office over Winter Break, the junior specialist and volunteer found a lot of “terrible images that he recorded of quite a lot of women without them knowing.”

“There was a lot of folders of internet pornography that he downloaded, and we kind of closed the window and looked at each other like, ‘What did we just find?’” the junior specialist said. “At a later point, after we looked through it and made notes [of] when they were taken, when did he last access them — they were spanning at least all the way back from 2010, up to 2012, 2013. A lot of them said that he was still accessing them up to 2015, when I was working.”

In addition to the internet pornography stored on the hard drives, the junior specialist estimates that there were more than 10 videos Kjer had recorded himself, including a video of him installing the camera in the bathroom in his home in New Jersey. It appeared the camera was pointed at the shower and some individuals being filmed were partially clothed while others were nude — “all of them definitely did not know they were being filmed or imaged at the time.”

He had been clandestinely filming students in his bathroom, and filing the videos away in his porn collection on hard drives he purchased with grant money. That’s enough to get one fired, but not enough to bring down public shame on their heads, I guess. Gwen Pearson has some cogent comments on the university’s efforts to dismiss him on the down low.

Pearson discussed what she says is a pattern in the scientific community where a male professional will engage in inappropriate behavior, resign and quickly find another job.

“Right about the time they’re called on it, and proceedings begin, if they resign, it’s over because they’re no longer an employee and the university no longer has any sway over that,” Pearson said. “Very often what happens is […] someone will get in trouble and resign, start over at a new institution and their bad behavior doesn’t necessarily follow them from institution to institution.”

An example of this pattern, which Pearson discussed, is that of the accusations of sexual misconduct as well as research misconduct aimed at University of Kentucky Professor of Entomology James Harwood, who subsequently resigned from his position. The university decided not to pursue an investigation after Harwood’s resignation.

“I’ve seen it happen a couple of times where someone resigns and back channel talk is all — they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have done — and they get a new job,” Pearson said. “It really baffles me why, when there’s such a huge pool of talented scientists, why do we keep rehiring people who we know behave badly?”

I get it. Universities don’t want to have to deal with an ugly mess in their own back yard, so it’s in their interests to quietly shuffle the bad actor away. It’s a strategy for evading responsibility, and that’s how it persists.

Hate doesn’t necessarily win elections

Some of you may have seen this awful video that was making the rounds a while back.

In May, Jazmina Saavedra streamed video of herself harassing a transgender woman in a Denny’s bathroom. For half an hour, Saavedra paced in the restaurant, shouted at the transgender woman through the stall wall, and laughed with a friend about how she carries a stun gun and pepper spray for situations like that.

“So, that guy is violating my right to use the ladies’ room here, and he’s saying he’s a lady! Stupid guy,” Saavedra said in the video, which Facebook removed.

The most appalling thing about it was Saavedra’s smugness: she was full of sanctimonious and self-righteousness as she harrassed this poor woman who was just trying to use the bathroom, and she also made unsupported accusations that she was a drug user. And the thing of it is, Saavedra was the one who posted the video of her own disgraceful behavior! She was proud of it!

She was also a Republican political candidate at the time. Good news: She lost the election in a landslide. We need more happy results like that.

Describing a problem isn’t an explanation

Once again, we’ve got people behaving badly, and numerous think pieces popping up stating that people are behaving badly. Here’s a reasonably good example with a good summary of the problem that somehow doesn’t resolve anything: Why are (some) Star Wars fans so toxic?

I don’t know about you, but when I see a question posed as a headline, I expect that somewhere in the body there will be an answer proposed and argued. We do get a good description of the problem, at least.

It’s a poisonous tributary of fanboyism that appears again and again. Earlier this week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actor who plays Rose (and the first WoC in a lead role in the saga) deleted all her Instagram posts. While Tran hasn’t specifically stated that online trolling is the reason she left social media, since the release of The Last Jedi in December she’s been on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse. Some comments voiced dissatisfaction with the character of Rose itself, or deemed it necessary to attack Tran personally about her performance. Others were more concerned about her gender and her race. For an idea of what she’s been dealing with, one individual even went so far as to amend Rose’s entry on the Wookiepedia Star Wars wiki to read, “Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass fucking character Disney made and is a stupid, retarded, and autistic love interest for Finn. She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.” If constant invective like this is the reason for Tran leaving social media – if she thought it best to sever the unbroken line of communication between her and the type of person who thinks sending this to a stranger is the right thing to do – then you can hardly blame her.

That individual? Total asshole. An embarrassment to his mother and his entire family line. Someone who ought to be fired from his job, his girlfriend ought to leave him, his computer and his phone thrown in a dumpster, and who should be quarantined until he gets extensive retraining in how to be a human being. But what is the problem with Star Wars fandom? (And note that we could substitute lots of different things for the words “Star Wars”: atheism/skepticism, veganism, Unix, beanie babies, science, whatever). The question is “WHY?”, not “WHO?”

I am so goddamn familiar with this ongoing problem that it doesn’t help to see another turd bobbing about in yet another genre punchbowl. I’m cynical enough to expect the situation to arise everywhere, and I don’t think it contributes to a solution to try to analyze the punch, rather than the turd.

Anyone who followed GamerGate is probably already drawing parallels between the misogyny of that sorry affair and these hissy fits in reaction to harmless pieces of family entertainment. The most vocal offenders in Tran’s case, as always, are an infinitesimal minority of the millions around the world who enjoy the films, or at least don’t feel the need to harass those they perceive as being to blame if they don’t. These males – and it is males – feel they have ownership over a piece of entertainment: that geekdom is their safe space, theirs alone, and the newfound mass popularity of the genre is bringing a lot of casuals into their hitherto predominantly straight, white, male dojo. Diversity isn’t what some of them want. Which is bizarre, considering the benefits of diversity are what quite a lot of sci-fi is actually about. But it’s not what these people believe they paid for, and therefore see themselves of having part-ownership of. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

OK, there’s something odd going on here. I know about fandoms, I’ve participated in a few. At their purest, they’re easy to describe: it’s people meeting and saying “You like this thing, too? I love this thing!” and jumping up and down while simultaneously gushing about their favorite part. I’ve seen it at science fiction conventions, and at evolutionary biology meetings. It’s beautiful. It’s community. It isn’t flawless, because there are always those annoying human problems: there’s always someone competitive who has to show that they love that thing more, and there are bad attempts to gloss over misbehavior, like that Big Name fondles young fans, because they love the thing so much that we mustn’t mention anything that might taint it, but this feels like something different. This isn’t the usual clumsy, socially maladroit behavior of overly-enthusiastic geeks, or the fumbling efforts to willfully avoid seeing bad behavior.

This feels like something intentional and malicious.

You know you can belong to multiple fandoms at once, right? When you talk about the people in Star Wars fandom, you’re actually talking about a collection of very different overlapping interests. There are the cosplayers who see it as a target-rich environment with many exotic costumes, but they may also view Final Fantasy fandom as another fine place to play. There are cinemaphiles who just adore the approach to technology of the movies, and look at other science fiction movies through the same lens. This is not a problem. It’s actually a plus when people with different perspectives on the same thing interact.

Except…I think there’s another kind of fandom that has been growing for decades now. Let’s call it the Dark Fandom, or DF for short, just to pin a label on it. This is a fandom that celebrates snideness, jeering, crudity, and taking a dump in the punchbowl. It’s 4chan/8chan. It’s a substantial chunk of Reddit. It’s YouTube comment sections. It’s community, too. It’s people coming together and saying, “You hate feminism? I hate feminism even more! High five!” or “Hey, you like trashing parties? Let’s invade rec.pets.cats and piss off some normies!” (Yeah, this has been a phenomenon since the early days of usenet).

This isn’t necessarily a problem with Star Wars fandom. It’s a problem with that segment of Star Wars fandom that overlaps with the DF. Or the atheists who are card-carrying members of the DF. Or the gamers who enjoy a particular video game, but think the game culture could use some more DF. Just as cosplayers might want to participate in a fandom with cool costumes, these people want to join in with more cool shitposting.

That’s the real problem. The question is what are we going to do about it?

We need ways to identify DF members, first of all. I’ve generally found that anyone who is proud to have participated in 4chan, for instance, is almost always pure poison. Anti-feminism isn’t a coherent position, it’s simply a pathology of bros, so that’s a useful marker. But 4chan was anonymous, not every discussion is about feminism, and people can use DF tactics for all kinds of causes.

We need to ostracize the DF. We all sort of do this already: someone who is disruptive and who contributes nothing but complaints and bitterness tends to be unwelcome at meetings and in any kind of productive interaction. But all too often we let them linger on, maintaining an association. We usually think of a synthesis of overlapping fandoms as a good thing, and we like to consider a diversity of interests to be a strength. But the DF is a cancer that weakens us when we allow it to persist.

We need to help people get out of the DF. It’s only a first step to kick out members of the DF — we also need a way to let them back in if they change. We need standards of behavior for our own fandoms, so people understand what it takes to be a respectable member of the Star Wars fan club, or whatever.

The bottom line is that we need to recognize that not all fandoms are good, not all are compatible, and take steps to deny associations with shitposting Dark Fandoms, like the ones flourishing in various media right now.

Anthony Bourdain was the same age I am

Anthony Bourdain has killed himself. This was a guy who was admired, whose job involved flying to exotic places and eating good food, while probably getting paid far more than I’ll ever see, and still, there was this seed of despair inside of him that led him to end his life.

That just tells me that depression is something deeper than anything that can be addressed by superficialities like more money and more people telling you how much they like you. He was an intelligent, charismatic person, and that wasn’t enough.

Big fish on the hook. I repeat, BIG FISH.

I predicted that the creationist clickbait in the title of that stupid article about all animals originating at the same time would snag a few doofuses. I was right. Look who is tweeting about it: Eric Erickson and Ted Cruz.

Unfortunately, that means the nonsense will be spread even further.

Have you ever noticed how often the origin of breasts is explained as “for men”?

I made a video about hypotheses for the evolution of breasts in women. Sort of a video. It’s not very visual, and is just me talking, because I didn’t want anyone distracted by sexy pictures — that wasn’t the point. I even left my sexy face out of it.

Since it’s just me droning on, I include my script below, so you can skip the video altogether and just read what I said.

[Read more…]

Writing synopses of science articles is hard

Really, it’s harder than you think. Individual science papers typically build on a larger body of knowledge and don’t stand alone; it is assumed that the reader has significant amounts of training in the subject at hand so that the authors don’t bother to fill in all the background. When writing a summary of the article for a general audience, one has to provide a lot of context, without simply reiterating the contents of, for instance, a molecular biology textbook and a year’s worth of upper level biology education. And if someone writing a summary of an article lacks that knowledge altogether, the misinterpretations can be disastrously wrong.

Take this article in TechTimes, Massive Genetic Study Reveals 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time. The title alone is creationist clickbait, and the author of the story clearly didn’t understand the article at all. She gets it all wrong.

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species.

In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time.

More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

No, it didn’t. The paper says nothing of the kind.

The paper is an analysis of DNA barcodes. DNA barcoding is a process that uses a short stretch of mitochondrial DNA to map an individual organism to a species — it’s a technique that lets you look at a sample of a few cells, amplify and sequence a single gene (COI or COX1 are commonly used in animals), and then unambiguously identify the specific species those cells came from. Being able to do this relies on an interesting property of a species: there is limited variance in the barcode sequence within the species, but there has to be greater variance of that sequence from other, even closely related species. In other words, DNA barcodes form tight little clusters of similarity that correlate well with other criteria for defining a species.

That raises questions. You can read the original article, Why should mitochondria define species?, for yourself and see. The question is about why variations within a species should cluster so tightly. Stoeckle and Thaler propose a couple of hypotheses to explain that phenomenon.

Either 1) COI barcode clusters represent species-specific adaptations, OR 2) extant populations have recently passed through diversity-reducing regimes whose consequences for sequence diversity are indistinguishable from clonal bottlenecks.

It’s a meaty paper that goes through the evidence for both of those hypotheses, and I’m wishing I’d seen this paper last semester, when I was teaching evolutionary biology — there is a lot of useful evolutionary thinking going on here. Maybe I can revoke all of my students’ degrees and tell them they have to come back for one last thing? I think we can go through the paper adequately in about a week, so I’m sure they won’t mind.

Their final conclusion, after analyzing millions of barcodes, is fairly straightforward, I think.

The simple hypothesis is that the same explanation offered for the sequence variation found among modern humans applies equally to the modern populations of essentially all other animal species. Namely that the extant population, no matter what its current size or similarity to fossils of any age, has expanded from mitochondrial uniformity within the past 200,000 years.

This is not saying that there was a single instant in the last 200,000 years from which all modern species arose simultaneously. It’s a statement about the process of speciation: species arise from isolation of a limited subset of an existing population, which is why they have limited variation in their DNA barcodes, followed by an expansion of the new species’ population, during which the DNA barcodes accumulate variation slowly.

No, they did not find out “that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago”. New species arise continuously, but they do so by going through a population bottleneck in geologically recent times. Homo sapiens arose as a distinct species between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, but that notorious London Underground mosquito may have evolved in the 18th century…which is still within the past 200,000 years, you may notice.

It’s a bit like reading a statement that almost all people are less than 100 years old, and then wondering, publicly and in print, about what happened in 1918 to cause every human being on Earth to have been suddenly born in that year. That must have been some orgy to celebrate the end of the Great War.