Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The feminist crayfish

What else can you assume they are? The marbled crayfish are triploid, they’re all female, they only produce daughters, and they’re taking over the world.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

I don’t know whether to bow down before our new crustacean masters or prepare for an awesome crawfish boil.

Back to Moscow with me!

This Friday I’ll be speaking at Darwin on the Palouse, in Moscow, Idaho. All you Eastern Washington/Idaho people should show up, it’s free!

I’ll be talking about “On the Edge of Evolution: A Critical Evaluation”, looking at some of the hullabaloo over the last few years about a new synthesis, all that evo-devo/accommodation/epigenetics/etc. stuff, trying to put it into a more reasonable context. My message, in case you can’t make it, will be that of course in a lively and active science, we’ll be uncovering new stuff all the time, but it’s more of an evolution of evolution than a revolution of evolution, and people need to master what’s already known before announcing that it’s all wrong. It’ll be fun!

Don’t use MLK to sell capitalism — he’s going to rise from the dead and bite you

Dodge tried to use Martin Luther King Jr’s words to sell trucks in the Superbowl yesterday. They used the wrong speech, though: someone overlaid a more appropriate speech on the ad.

That is perfect.

I must have low testosterone or something

Look at this beautiful cake. I saw it and was immediately impressed –what a nice geode.

Unfortunately, there was a follow up comment from the store that sells this cake.

*At manager’s meeting on Monday*

“Well, once again we’ve underestimated our customer’s ability to see genitals in our baked goods. Let’s put that cute mushroom cake we had planned in the ‘do not make’ file.”

Now we could place the blame on the bakers’ lack of discernment, but I prefer to blame the customers, who clearly need to acquire a deeper appreciation of geology.

Also, as hard as I stare at the cake now, I just don’t see it — it looks nothing like a vagina. Maybe we also need to try harder to educate the public about basic human anatomy.

What are you going to do with the jerks in our midst?

Christian Ott, the astronomer with a history of sexual harassment and who left Caltech, has a new job: he’s an astronomer with no teaching duties in Finland. Good for him, maybe. There’s always the question of what to do with the ‘naughty boys’, AKA abusive assholes, once they’ve been caught. Throw them in jail? They’ve ruined women’s careers, but unfortunately that often isn’t a prosecutable crime. Ban them from academia forever? We don’t actually have a mechanism to do that. I’m not going to declare that Ott ought to be fired from every position he lands, but it is going to be a growing problem.

Janet Stemwedel has some recommendations for what any abuser can do to regain trust.

1. Own what you did.
2. Accept the descriptions of the harm you did given by those you harmed.
3. Have your defenders stand down.
4. Avoid the limelight.
5. Don’t demand anyone’s trust.
6. Shift your focus to work that supports your scientific community, not your individual advancement.

I think that’s a good set of things for the individual to do, and it looks like that’s a hard set of hurdles to cross — I note that a lot of abusers can’t clear step 1. But I’m curious about what institutions should do, since there’s a reasonable concern that they will repeat their behavior. Yet sometimes these guys have a tempting skill set and a history of success within their field of research, so it would be a waste to demand that a highly trained scientist resign themselves to the job of gas station attendant for the rest of their lives. So what are universities to do?

I have some suggestions.

1. Make employment provisional. Don’t hand them tenure, but temporary appointments subject to review are a good starting point. That’s what the University of Turku has done: Ott has a two-year appointment.

2. Isolate the person from students and post-docs. Again, that’s what Turku has done — he has been appointed “a senior researcher without any teaching or supervising responsibilities”.

3. Monitor the heck out of the guy. I don’t know how Turku is handling this, but at my university we have yearly reviews of teaching, science, and service. They should have an explicit fourth category for people like Ott, a review of interactions with colleagues and students. That means someone should be talking with other personnel every year to catch potentially harassing behavior before it becomes an issue, and any concerns should be openly discussed with him and his colleagues.

4. Apply the Stemwedel suggestions to him. If he’s denying his actions, don’t hire him in the first place. If he turns into a blustering, grandstanding prima donna who demands attention and distracts his colleagues, fire him, no matter how good his research.

I’d add a fifth, but it’s awfully hard to police. Every large department already has its own enablers and jerks, and one way harassers can thrive is by constructing their own local community of like-minded obnoxious twits who sympathize with them. Watch who the new hire is associating with — if they’re building their very own clique of good ol’ boys, they can be difficult to deal with later.

Basically, let him work, but don’t forget his past.

I actually read the youtube comments on my own videos

I made a video a while back titled The Deceptive, Dishonest Logic of Intelligent Design, and it got a bunch of comments from irate creationists. I decided to follow up with responses to a couple of representative comments with a rebuttal.

Stuff cited:

The 12-mer peptide with specific binding to naphthalene.

The only CSI paper you need to read:

Elsberry W, Shallit J (2011) Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”. Synthese 178:237–270.

David Brooks rides again

Brooks latest column (which I am not linking to, because goddamn fuck the NY Times) is all about the poe-faced insipid Staunch Republican giving advice to the Democrats on abortion, because gosh, we’re not building a winning coalition by allying with hypocrites and religious zealots, like the Republicans have done. First, why should we heed the advice of a right-wing goon who wants nothing less than the destruction of the liberal party, or better yet, their assimilation into the soul-sucking void of the rich people’s greed party (which seems to be happening already, unfortunately)? Secondly, whatever happened to the illusion that a political party ought to stand for some kind of social ideals? I know the Republicans abandoned that pretense long ago, but the Democrats sometimes still hang on to the tattered shreds of a belief in equality, opportunity, social justice, and the rights of the working person (although, honestly, that last one hasn’t been mentioned in a long, long time). When the Democratic party fuses with the Republicans to champion the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and S&P 500, and nothing else, then I’ll totally abandon them, too.

But never mind me, go read Robyn Pennacchia, who points out that many of Brooks’ ‘facts’ are not. The idea that the Republican coalition with the Religious Right is a direct consequence of Roe v. Wade is flaming nonsense — it emerged with the Southern Strategy and opposition to racial equality. The one thing you can trust about Republicans is that they’ll oppose rights for Women and Negroes with the same vehemence they use to support tax cuts for the wealthiest kleptocrats in the nation.

Or read The Rude Pundit, who is surprisingly not rude today — he just flips the tables on Brooks. What if he wrote the same column to give advice to Republicans?

Reading either of them is better than reading the NY Times, anyway.

Altered Carbon: Interestingly problematic

Good news, everyone! In the future, we’ll have flying cars! And the world will be deeply multicultural, a melange of different ethnicities, all working side by side, with equal status. That’s the bright side of the science fiction universe in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.

Now the bad side. The key innovation in this story is the ability to upload and download minds. Everyone is walking around with a little disk in their neck that archives their mental state and memories continuously; some people also have a kind of brain wifi that allows them to periodically upload everything in their head to a remote backup. This means that if someone dies, they can just cut out that disk, insert it into a new body, and voila, you are revived! Unless someone shoots you in the neck, unfortunately; destroying the archive is Real Death. If you’ve got the wifi option, you can also restore from the last backup.

Wait, what’s so bad about that? It’s effective immortality! That’s where the series is most interesting, in exploring the consequences of radical new technology. One of those consequences is that income inequality skyrockets off the charts; imagine if Jeff Bezos were immortal, and could hang onto and build his wealth for centuries. It also creates new opportunities for strange situations. Is it justice if you abolish the death penalty, and instead just freeze bodies and extract their minds and store them for centuries? How about if you use the bodies of convicts to temporarily implant other people’s disks, so that people who’ve lost their bodies can be reanimated? What if one way to punish people is to restore their minds to a body not their own: a little girl wakes up to find herself in the body of a middle aged woman, or a woman finds herself in the body of a man (there are some potential positives to explore in that part of the story, but this show doesn’t really get into them)?

This is not a technology that will ever be achievable, just like those flying cars, but it’s provocative to think about it, and the series does take advantage of a lot of the weirder possibilities and complexities, so there’s a cerebral side to it all.

There is, unfortunately, a downside to the implementation, the problematic part. It’s taken a hint from Game of Thrones, and there is gore and gratuitous nudity galore. One minute you’re thinking about the implications of being able to shuttle minds from one body to another, and the next there is a bloody gunfight, with an additional twist: in the aftermath, you get to graphically gouge out the mind disk from the necks of the casualties and crush them to make them really dead. There are many scenes of torture and bodies getting hacked up (it’s OK, kiddies, the victim’s minds are being preserved while all the horrors are perpetrated). It was…distracting, to say the least.

Similarly distracting: if a young woman is playing a significant role anywhere in the story, it’s pretty much guaranteed that she will appear naked, full frontal, before the end of the series, and will probably be in a sex scene. Offhand, I can think of only one exception. The male protagonist and a few others will also get a nude scene or three, but it’s almost an iron-clad rule that the significant female characters are going to have to flaunt everything at some point. It reaches peak absurdity in one scene where the hero stumbles into a clone bank, and a woman downloads her mind into her clone, jumps out stark naked and unarmed, and tries to fight him…he guns her down. So her mind reanimates another clone, she stupidly jumps out starkers again, and he blows her away. Repeat that half a dozen times, to no purpose at all, except to splatter the room with blood and fetchingly undressed corpses. It’s kind of peak misogyny.

Buried deep in this story, there is a fascinatingly twisty, dystopian tale with some intelligence to it, but it’s so thoroughly swaddled in blood and breasts and bloody breasts that I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to extract it. It’s a shame that such an interesting premise gets lost in mindless gore and sex (I don’t object to gore and sex, if it advances the story or enriches the world — this doesn’t). Read the book instead. It’s violent too, but at least the imagery won’t stupefy you.

Boy, in the future, people sure do get naked a lot, and commit a lot of murders, nothing like the present. Unless I’ve been attending the wrong parties and the wrong gunfights.

A work of prophecy!

A cartoonist in the 1920s predicted what would happen if we invented pocket telephones.

You are saying to yourself, “But he couldn’t imagine people inventing an off switch?”, to which I reply “Maybe he’s also predicting people’s inability or unwillingness to learn how to use the off switch,” which makes this a double prophecy. I may have to start worshipping W.K. Haselden, the creator of the cartoon.