The power of the ellipsis

I’ve pointed out before how creationists like to butcher quotes from scientists to completely change their meaning, in a practice called quote mining. Guess who else does this?

Jordan Peterson. Tell me you’re surprised.

He and his publisher spattered the back cover of his latest book, Beyond Order, with blurbs from reviewers that praised it highly…or did they?

Another objection came from The Times reviewer James Marriott, because the blurb included from his review quoted him calling the book “A philosophy of the meaning of life… the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written.”

In a now-deleted X post, Marriott noted that the ellipse covered up that his full sentence was “A philosophy of the meaning of life which is bonkers.”

“My review of this mad book was probably the most negative thing I have ever written,” Marriott said. He later added that he was amused by the situation, “Though my amusement is tinged with annoyance at being misrepresented to the tens of thousands of people who will buy that book in paperback.

Oh man, you can’t trust Jordan Peterson? Shocking.

I called it

Back in May, I suggested that we have seen who Ken Ham’s chosen successor would be. I was correct. It’s Martyn Iles. Ho hum.

Iles was formerly the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, and was kicked out because he was terrible at his job and godless Australians kept winning legislative victories while membership in the organization declined. Let’s hope he keeps his losing streak going!

There are many people at Answers in Genesis who have stood by Ham — I really wonder about the internal politics here, when the Big Boss brings in a total stranger over the heads of the existing staff and announces that he will be the next man in charge. I almost feel sorry for Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, who has now been officially passed over.

Update: I don’t think they were lesbian spiders

I’m sorry to disappoint, but looking at my Steatoda borealis population, I think what I’ve got are dimorphic males: some with huge spiky palps, some with slender pencil-shaped palps. I have no idea if these are distinct subtypes, or just developmental differences.

I have the full story on Patreon, and posted some photos on Instagram.

Lesbian spiders would have been cool, though, unlikely as that was.

Consent is obedience

Also, up is down. George Orwell saw it coming. A woman named Kelly Schenkoske gave a talk in Philadelphia and made a remarkable assertion.

During the session, Schenkoske strongly objected to the concept of “consent” being included in sex ed curriculum. She argued that teaching kids about consent is counterproductive and leaves children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. “[K]ids are often taught to be obedient.” Schenkoske said. “And to teach kids consent is a shift away from really strongly teaching, it’s okay to have those really strong boundaries and to say no, because not always do kids have that faculty to strongly say no.”

So, she opposes sex ed and the principle of consent because knowing that you have the power to refuse sex is a suggestion that you will obediently consent. It makes no sense. But then, Schenkoske is a member of Moms For Liberty, so you already know it’s garbage.

She even makes the Orwellian comparison explicit.

On August 15, Schenkoske promoted a post stating, “Diversity is segregation” and “Inclusion is exclusion.”

Her audience was just as awful.

The session concluded with the opportunity for audience members to ask Schenkoske questions. “In Michigan, we voted on Proposal 3… we literally voted our parental rights away,” one audience member said. “[W]e have lost our parental medical rights of our children… the schools have all the things that they are able to pass out, the abortion pills, they are able to start transgender, trans, you know… Your child can go to the clinic between 2nd and 3rd hours and have their abortion pill… This is in our middle school and high schools.” Later the audience member said, “[a] boy can start the process of cutting his penis off right there in his high school on his lunch.”

Now there’s an image. What is gender affirming care? That’s when you hand a schoolkid a steak knife and let him hack away at body parts. I don’t know what they were thinking to specify that it happens on lunch hour — does he saw it off and slap it on a hot dog bun? There are weird twisty things going on in these people’s brains.

Lesbian spiders? Dimorphic males? Precocious adolescents?

Yesterday, I set up a cage for Steatoda borealis. I haven’t successfully raised them in the lab, probably because I haven’t fine-tuned their environment, but I thought I’d give it another try. I caught these individuals living in a communal environment (my compost bin), so I made a substrate of moss, for burrowing in, and added 5 females, all in the same confined space.

I came in today, and what do I find? They’ve built a communal web and they’re all perched on it, spaced about 2cm apart. This is already interesting.

Something to know about S. borealis: the adult males are distinctive, they have palps that look like massive medieval instruments of war, while the females have slender palps. I was pretty confident I’d segregated them by sex accurately, on the basis of casual inspection.

So I added a male this morning. All the spiders seemed somewhat agitated, there was much scurrying and tapping and exploratory sensory behavior, as I would expect. The male was courting the biggest, plumpest female in the cage.
Then, to my immense surprise, two of the females (I think) paired off, and one of them was aggressively thrusting its skinny little palps at the others genitals. Whoa, what? Did I misgender them, or was this some kind of social behavior?
Then I get dragged away to attend some fucking meeting, and couldn’t inspect them more carefully. This was extremely annoying, as you might guess.

Now I’m intensely curious. I’ve searched the literature, there is no mention of male dimorphism in this species, but it’s an interesting possibility that warrants further investigation. The other possibility is female:female sexual behavior — these spiders are somewhat social compared to others I’m working with, so it could be some kind of bonding behavior? Another possibility is that I’m fooled by juvenile males that exhibit typical sexual behavior but just haven’t completed their final molt to acquire their gloriously developed sexual organs.

I’ll be putting them under the microscope tomorrow to find out.

Be it resolved

I will never attend another meeting in person again.*

I have a day of meetings scheduled for the rest of the day, but the first one nearly killed me. It was two hours long. We had a detailed 5-page agenda that had been emailed to us, and that should have been all we needed. I dutifully attended, ankle wrapped up and immobilized, as the pain continued to raise, despite the brain-addling drugs I’m taking, and worst of all, I’m taking a diuretic. Breaks? No.

It was fucking agonizing, a thoroughly unpleasant meeting in which I learned nothing I hadn’t already learned from a few decades of experience and reading the agenda ahead of time. I got to listen to a parade of administrators while squirming and almost breaking down and praying to a benevolent god for a merciful ending. I knew my prayer for a lightning bolt to end my suffering wouldn’t be answered, though. Jumping out a window was tempting, but the room was on the ground floor.

I’ve got more meetings scheduled, but screw it, I’m not going unless they’re over Zoom.

I’m two years away from retirement, and I swear, this experience confirmed my commitment to getting out in Spring of 2025. I just can’t handle it anymore. Maybe if I were in good health, I’d be able to cope, but I’m right on the edge of erupting and melting down, and it was too much.

Classes start next week, and that’s going to be interesting. Lectures are one hour, not two, so that helps, but I’m also going to have to give up on the medication, which makes me drowsy and stresses my kidneys. Isn’t it great when a job is a compromise between getting the work done and your health?

*Student meetings excepted. I like those.

All we’ve got are bones

History is ugly. You can dig up things that will horrify you.

Archaeologists in Poland have unearthed the 400-year-old skeleton of a young child buried face-down with an iron padlock on its foot – seemingly to stop its rising from the dead.

The child was buried in the 17th century in the village of Pień near Poland’s northern city of Bydgoszcz, in what seems to have been a graveyard for “abandoned souls” and the poor who could not afford to be buried in a churchyard.

The archaeologists estimate the child was between 5 and 7 years old at death.

OK, dead child who was demonized and buried with a symbol of mistrust. I have to wonder about the pain the family must have felt…although they also found more bodies buried with various vampire accoutrements. Maybe it was a whole blighted family cursed by the religious abuses of their culture?

Charles Murray is still an ignoramus

I’ve been telling you, Charles Murray is an ignorant hack. I can’t stand listening to this know-nothing pontificating on genetics when he’s so full of shit on the topic, which doesn’t stop him from being arrogantly confident about it.

Anyway, here’s a good critique of The Bell Curve — it’s hard to believe we still have to argue about it.

Understandably, these arguments provoked the ire of progressively minded scientists and commentators. However, the sweeping and reflexive manner in which opponents of the hereditarian arguments advanced their objections to The Bell Curve often led these critics to adopt counterproductive conclusions. Unhelpfully, they conflated two distinct issues. The first is the question of what it means to claim that something is genetic, and the second is the inevitability of certain life outcomes based on the biology of a particular organism.

Properly speaking, genetics concerns some characteristic of an organism varying across individuals in a group in a given context. It is, by definition, not an explanation of the behavior or development of a given individual in a given instance. Conflating the issue of the causes of differences with that of the inevitability of the development of a particular organism is an important part of the hereditarian rhetorical strategy deployed by the likes of Herrnstein and Murray. To the extent that their arguments have managed to gain some traction in the world, it has been because they have managed to convince their critics to commit the error for them.

Whoa there — the heart of my criticisms of Murray has always been that genetics is not as determinative as the naive people who learned about Punnett squares in fourth grade think. But do go on, this is an important definitional issue and bears repeating.

But the confusion in Murray and Herrnstein’s thinking doesn’t just stop at their pessimism about the kind of practical responses to differences purportedly caused by genetics — it goes all the way down to their understanding of what genetics is. Let’s start by clarifying what we mean by “genetic” and outline why that which is genetic is not necessarily inevitable. For one, genetics deals with groups of organisms rather than the life outcomes of individual organisms. All organisms have genes, but it takes groups of organisms to have genetics because genetics is ultimately about how variation is structured within a group.

Take a single tomato plant in isolation. It has a genome that is between one-fourth and one-third the size of that of a human’s in terms of the raw amount of DNA. Inside its genome are a few tens of thousands of genes, which, in this case, are stretches of the genome that form a chemical template for the cellular production of the proteins and other biochemicals that are vital for the structure and function of organisms. However, since we are dealing with a single plant at a single point in time, there is no comparative context that would allow us to identify the differences among organisms that characterize the rich diversity of life.

Exactly! This is also why it’s important that students actually do real crosses with real organisms. The abstractions of theory might tell you that oh, one quarter of the progeny will have a particular phenotype, but when you sit down and have to closely examine a thousand flies, you get to see all the variation you did not predict and you learn that it’s never as simple as the models tell you it is. The variation is also interesting.

But yes, genetics is fundamentally probabilistic. You can’t use it to predict individual destiny. It’s also the case that genetics has significant interplay with the environment.

But even having many organisms to compare is not sufficient for a biological system to display genetics in the proper sense of the term. Genetics in the sense that matters is ultimately about variation that arises from genetic differences. To see this, think again about tomatoes. They can be cloned with ease by taking cuttings from a single plant and growing them in their own allotments of soil. Genetically, the different newly individualized plants will be identical to one another, with the exception of a very few mutations — spontaneous changes to DNA that can occur during cellular replication.

If we were to compare a large number of these cloned tomato plants, we would find many differences among them. The shape and sizes of leaves would differ, as would the coloration of the fruits and the pattern of branching along the stalks. Since, on account of being clones, the plants are all genetically identical, these differences could not be attributable to genetics. While each of the plants has genes and we have a group of plants to form the basis for comparison needed to establish that there is variation, there are no genetic differences among the plants that could account for any of that variation. That is, while our tomato plants have genes, they display no genetic differences among one another despite having physiological differences.

Yes, that’s always been obvious if you actually look at populations. I had tanks of zebrafish that were about as genetically uniform as you can get, highly inbred for over a century — yet I could recognize individuals in a tank and see differences in behavior. I’ve only been inbreeding spiders for a half dozen generations, but I don’t see variation diminishing, at least not yet.

How do people take Murray seriously when his fundamental understanding of biology is so wrong?

If this is what we’re like, the heart of America is rotten

The Washington Post continues it’s depressing dissection of Ales Hrdlicka. I wish we could say he was a forgotten relic of a benighted time, but no, some anthropologists were still celebrating his life in more recent years.

Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist, worked at the Natural History Museum in the early 2000s after the Smithsonian had reckoned with what he had done in Larsen Bay. She recalled when employees at the museum gathered around a cake to commemorate the anthropologist’s birthday more than 50 years after his death.

“He was … deified,” said Watkins, now an associate professor and department chair of anthropology at American University. “It’s like Thomas Jefferson at [the University of Virginia].”

Ugh. The old ghoul should be treated as a shameful embarrassment, but instead he’s lionized by some now as much as he was in life (he died in 1943). This newspaper article from 1926 is incredible, not only for how credulous the journalist was,but for how smugly and confidently Hrdlicka makes predictions about the future evolution of the American population — don’t worry about the flappers, they’ll be strict parents.

(You can click on this to get an enlarged article that is marginally readable.)

The modern white nationalists and racists didn’t just appear out of thin air. They’ve been here all along, provided with pseudo-scientific support from establishment scientists like Hrdlicka.