Apologists for state-sponsored violence can fuck right off

I knew this was coming. We saw it before with 9/11, when any criticism of American policy in the Middle East caused an instant knee-jerk response: you’re siding with the terrorists! You must hate America!

You all remember the madness, which is still ongoing.

Now we have a new horrendous terrorism event that will be used to polarize people and trigger more extremism, the terror attack by Hamas in Israel several days ago. There is no doubt that this was terrorist extremism, unjustifiable and vile. Unfortunately, it’s already become a tool to excuse all of the horrors perpetrated by Israel. You know you can condemn both sides, right? Some people seem to think you’re either good or evil, with nothing in between.

Case in point: this comment on a post I made in which I condemned the violence on both sides. I guess you aren’t allowed to do that.

Any re-think of the verging on Jew-hatred comments here now?

Not that the disgusting Old Testament “eye for an eye” murdering Israel is and will do is in any way justified, not American support for it.

Hamas was never an organization worthy of any respect or trust: terrorists only interested in murder and revenge. oppressor of their own people as well, Muslim extremists of the most intolerant type and motivated by hatred,

Except for ISIL, there the worst of the worst. That’s what they’ve been and what they are.

I really do want to hear what you have to say about this now, PZ. You have more facts and have had time to cool down and evaluate it. The Gurdian certainly isn’t pro-Likud, or even pro-Israel.

Certainly, I’ll never associate with anyone who excuses this ever again.

Fingers crossed in hope.

There was no “Jew-hatred”. The political state of Israel is not synonymous with Judaism, but this is the most common criticism I see: if you dare to oppose the military actions of the Israeli state then you are anti-Semitic. It’s a disgusting tactic.

No one here has offered any “respect or trust” for Hamas. Hamas is not synonymous with the Palestinian people. Standing with the Palestinian people in their demands for autonomy is not excusing the terror attack. Opposing genocide is not making excuses for terrorists.

There certainly are people who excuse it, but not me, and not the majority of commenters here.

As a humanist, I do evaluate my choices in light of my principles, and those principles tell me that all people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, have the right to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Anyone who tries to deprive others of that right is in the wrong. At least I’m consistent in that belief, are the apologists for Israeli atrocities?

Mopin’ time

I had grand plans for this weekend. It’s our Fall Break, so it was going to be 4 days off…and I’m pretty well caught up on everything, so I’m not going to use it for grading. It’s also going to coincide with my granddaughter Iliana’s fifth birthday, so we were going to go to a birthday party!

I wake up this morning to dismal news: Iliana has COVID. She’s doing OK, but party canceled.

Worse news: my mother is in the hospital with serious pulmonary issues, serious enough that the doctors asked the family if they should put in do-not-resuscitate orders. If you’re a woman over 65 with a history of smoking, lungs are what’s gonna get you. She’s improving right now, but I am concerned.

I’ve made new plans for the weekend. I’m going to sit around and mope and worry.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not stand a chance of succeeding in his campaign for the presidency — he’s weird, he’s loony, he’s a crackpot. If he were a greedy sex-pest and liar, maybe he’d do better, but Trump has a lock on that niche. Now he’s running as an independent, which means Joe Biden is probably a bit relieved. Not that he had cause to worry, but at least the wacky anti-vaxxer isn’t tainting the Democratic ticket, and now maybe it’s Trump’s turn to be concerned.

Could Kennedy pull votes away from Trump? Trump’s campaign team certainly seems to think so, at least according to Shelby Talcott at Semafor. She reports that “internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election.” In their typical self-aggrandizing style, a Trump campaign member told Semafor they plan on “dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views.”

They may find that this is a more difficult task than their belligerent rhetoric suggests. Because the slice of voters Trump and Kennedy could be competing over aren’t defined by political beliefs that map neatly onto concepts like “liberal” or “conservative.” Instead, they’re fighting over the crank vote: People who are addicted to gobbling down kooky, bizarre and above all, false information. The QAnon crowd, in other words.

Splitting the crank vote and diminishing their ability to poison the election sounds like good news to me.

It’s also good to see the words of WB Yeats apply to the far right. Fracture away!

How’s your relationship going?

Have you been in a break-up? Miss your partner? Hate your ex-partner who has blocked you on all social media and want to rip into them? No problem, AI to the rescue!

Just feed all the texts you have stored on your phone into an app called Amori, and it will construct a simulacrum of them that you can talk at forever!

Our GPT-powered algorithm will analyze your text conversations with your lover or ex, providing you with some extra sassy relationship insights and a compatibility score to share with friends.

It’ll even simulate phone sex for you.

That’s not creepy at all.

For added verisimilitude, buy one of those inflatable sex dolls, tape a photo of your ex to its head, and run this app while you have a conversation with it.

One of the few reasons to read Xitter: Lee Cronin’s whines

Crank meltdown in progress. Leroy Cronin, who published that ridiculous “assembly theory” article in Nature has been struggling for the last few ways to cope with the ridicule coming his way.


Make a theory at the intersection of evolutionary biology, theoretical physics, complexity theory, & prebiotic chemistry = x 4 the ‘normal’ trolling fun. I love the virtue signalling & the fact they clearly have not even read the paper which is no excuse as it is open access.😂

‘Everyone who disagrees with me is a troll!’ is not the triumphant comeback you think it is. Yes, it’s a theory that combines a lot of disciplines, I agree. But has he considered that maybe the reason he’s getting so much pushback is that people who actually know something about each of those disciplines is saying that the authors don’t understand how the discipline works? I can say that his paper didn’t get evolutionary biology at all right, so now I’m wondering if he also got theoretical physics, complexity theory, and prebiotic chemistry just as wrong.


Gosh first the complexity theorists, then prebiotic chemists followed by the theoretical physicists, & evolutionary biologists. Is that all? Now the creationists are trolling me also. 🤷

I haven’t seen the creationists responding to assembly theory, but now I want to. Not hard enough to actually go digging, unfortunately.


Paradigm shifts involve 1) confusion & anger followed by 2) pronouncements on how obvious it is with the final 3) it has already been done or they thought of it before & it was trivial.

Yikes. The kooks always claim to be leading a ‘paradigm shift’ and start quoting Kuhn.

Here’s another famous quote, this time from Carl Sagan.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

The fact that your ideas are laughed at is not evidence that you are correct.


I love critical feedback because it helps improve stuff & I also get excited when people get ‘triggered’ scientifically as it means something REALLY interesting is shifting. It ain’t pretty but it might accelerate science. #AssemblyTheory

Also, the fact that experts are triggered and reject your theory is not interesting, and doesn’t mean you’ve made a productive change in the world. Creationists trigger me too, that doesn’t validate creationism.


I’m happy to be wrong as I learn more. I like to be almost right occasionally so I can dig deeper. I also want to be bold & honest about it. Science is about taking risks, not beating people up that offend your world view.

No one is offended. No one is beating people up. Cronin is being told that his ideas are wrong, which is what we’re supposed to do.

He’s feeling resentful about being corrected, nothing more. Well, also there should be some shame at publishing such a crappy article in a prestigious journal.

Finally, he reposts something from a supporter:


Absolutely wild to open Twitter and learn that evolutionary biologists think the origin of life is either solved or a non-problem.

No one has said that. The origin of life is not solved and is most definitely a problem of interest. The catch is that assembly theory does not solve any of the problems anyone is wrestling with, and doesn’t seem to solve much of anything.

This is all reminding me of how Dr Wolfe-Simon reacted defensively to criticisms of her claim that life can substitute arsenic for phosphorus. Things got loud back in 2010, and she was insistent that she made a great discovery, but when was the last time you heard about arsenic life? The idea was dead within a year.

Let’s check back in Fall of 2024 and see how Cronin’s theory is holding up.

Kill them all, let god sort them out

I’ve heard this sort of call to action many times before. Here’s Marco Rubio with his solution to the Israel/Palestine problem.

I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages. I mean, these are people, as you have been reporting and others have seen, that deliberately targeted teenage girls, women, children, the elderly, not just for rape and murder, but then dumping their bodies off in the streets of Gaza, where the crowds can then defile their lifeless bodies.
I mean, just horrifying things. And I don’t think we know the full extent of it yet. I mean, there’s more to come in the days and weeks ahead. You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.

“Savages.” “They have to be eradicated.” What a familiar sentiment! And what a deplorable perspective.

Notice that Tapper pointed out that a million of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are children, and Rubio just ignored that reality to call for their murder. I agree that the individuals who executed that horrific attack were evil people who need to be caught and punished, that there should be no forgiveness for their crimes, but that’s very different from pointing at an entire people, most of whom had nothing to do with the attack, and declaring that they all, women, children, the elderly, need to be eradicated. Wrong. They all deserve to live happy lives, a right they’ve been denied, and only the guilty need to be removed from civil society.

I’m just afraid that Rubio’s attitude is going to be popular among the right-wing fascists. When horrors are piling up on horrors, you don’t end the cycle by adding fresh horrors to the pile.

Signs of hope

About 15 years ago, Minnesota was dealing with a bunch of ignorant radicals who were packing school boards, and had even captured the position of educational commissioner in the form of Cheri Yecke. It was ugly. I was attending school board meetings that featured train of young earth creationists standing up to parrot nonsense…but, fortunately, we also had genuine grass roots people standing up to oppose them. We’ve still got wretched right wingers filling school boards, but at least I think we totally crushed the creationist insurgence here, and Yecke is long gone.

Now, though, the US (not so much Minnesota) is dealing with another group of astro-turfing assholes, Moms for Liberty. There are signs that they are getting desperate. Would you believe Moms for Liberty was trying to build a claque to attend a school board meeting? They were recruiting “talented clappers” to pack the audience.

It’s not working.

What’s happening instead is that the general public is getting fired up. They hate those arrogant Karens. They’ve recently won school board elections, but like the creationists, as word gets around, the public rises up and notices and starts firing back.

Most of the attendees saw that appeal as a minor victory, or at least as evidence that they were gaining ground in the battle for control over the school district — one of hundreds of similar battles unfolding all over the country. Yes, the Pennridge school board was dominated by far-right members, one of whom had been present in Washington for Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally-turned-riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Yes, at least five of the nine board members were linked to Moms for Liberty, a right-wing “astroturf” organization that has orchestrated a national campaign to remake public education along arch-conservative and anti-intellectual lines. But Pennridge board meetings for months had been dominated by outraged parents speaking out against the Moms for Liberty incursion and the board majority’s apparent agenda. Conservative forces were sufficiently worried about the optics, it appeared, that they were eager to pull in “talented clappers” from outside the community.

A tightly packed group of Moms for Liberty supporters did indeed show up, huddled together in a few rows of seats. Their mood could best be described as “glowering.” These were not exactly the “joyful warriors” that Moms for Liberty proudly proclaims fights on their behalf. That term would better fit the majority of attendees at Pennridge High that night, who needed no coaxing to whoop and applaud as one speaker after another took the mic, defending the basic freedom to read whatever books one wants, and denouncing the ahistorical and misleading curriculum that conservative board members wanted to force upon the district’s teachers.

This is news that gives me a little optimism. I think the public at large wants to do what is right, even as a minority of hateful, motivated scumbags exploit the system to secure some degree of power. Temporarily.

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day

And I don’t want to hear you say otherwise. We don’t celebrate greedy genocidal monsters around these here parts, we honor the people who lived on this land.

For the third year running, a U.S. president has officially recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

President Biden issued a proclamation on Friday to observe Monday, Oct. 9, as a day to honor Native Americans, their “resilience, strength, and perseverance” and “determination to preserve cultures, identities, and ways of life,” even as they have faced “violence and devastation,” he said.

Assembly Theory is Ontogenetic Depth relabeled, nothing more, and is just as useless

How exactly did this dreck, Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution, get published in Nature?

It’s a stunningly bad paper to be published in such a prestigious journal. Let’s dissect that abstract, shall we?

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution1,2 with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.

This makes no sense. Evolutionary biologists have not had any problem with physical laws — it has always been assumed, as far as I know, that biology fits within the framework of chemistry and physics. What grappling? Have biologists been proposing theories that violate physics, and they didn’t tell me?

The citations to back up that outré claim are Stuart Kauffman, who can get a little weird but not that weird, and Ryan Gregory, whose papers I’ve used in class, and is probably a bit annoyed at being told his work supports that ridiculous claim.

These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena.

Sure. Emergent properties exist. We know you can’t simply derive all of biology from Ideal Gas Law. So far, nothing new.

Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection.

Uh-oh. Just selection? Tell me you know nothing of evolutionary biology without saying you don’t know anything about evolutionary biology.

To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary3,4,5.

Here it comes, more bad theorizing. It is implicit in evolution that there is no “inherent design blueprint,” so where did these authors get the idea that design was a reasonable alternative? They don’t say. This is simply another imaginary controversy they’ve invented to make their theory look more powerful.

We don’t need a new approach to selection. To support that, they cite Charles Darwin (???) and Sean B. Carroll, and a fellow named Steven Frank, whose work I’m unfamiliar with. A quick search shows that he applies “evolutionary principles to the biochemistry of microbial metabolism,” which doesn’t sound foreign to standard biology, although he does throw the word “design” around a lot.

But here we go:

We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units.

Again, what biological theory has ever been proposed that alters the laws of physics? They keep touting this as a key feature of their model, that it doesn’t break physics, but no credible theory does. This talk of formation histories is nothing revolutionary, history and contingency are already important concepts in biology. Are they really going to somehow quantify “assembly”? They’re going to try.

We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly.

I’ve heard this all before, somewhere. A new term invented, a claim of a novel measure of the complexity of a pathway, a shiny new parameter with no clue how to actually measure it? This is just ontogenetic depth! Paul Nelson should be proud that his bad idea has now been enshrined in the pages of Nature, under a new label. I did a quick check: Nelson is not cited in the paper. Sorry, Paul.

Here is all assembly theory is: You count the number of steps it takes to build an organic something, and presto, you’ve got a number A that tells you how difficult it was to evolve that something. That’s it. Biology is revolutionized and reconciled with physics. It’s just that stupid.

a–c, AT is generalizable to different classes of objects, illustrated here for three different general types. a, Assembly pathway to construct diethyl phthalate molecule considering molecular bonds as the building blocks. The figure shows the pathway starting with the irreducible constructs to create the molecule with assembly index 8. b, Assembly pathway of a peptide chain by considering building blocks as strings. Left, four amino acids as building blocks. Middle, the actual object and its representation as a string. Right, assembly pathway to construct the string. c, Generalized assembly pathway of an object comprising discrete components.

I told you, it’s just ontogenetic depth, with basic math. Here’s how to calculate A:

All you have to do is recursively sum the value of A for each object in the series, and you get the value of A for the whole! How you calculate the value of A for, say, acetate or guanine or oxaloacetic acid or your nose or a lobe of your liver is left as an exercise for the reader. It is also left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how A is going to affect their implementation of evolutionary biology.

By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

I read the whole thing. I failed to see any new aspect of physics, or any utility to the theory at all. I don’t see any way to apply this framework to evolutionary biology, or what I’d do if I could calculate A for one of my spiders (fortunately, I don’t see any way to figure out the A of Steatoda triangulosa, so I’m spared the effort of even trying.)

The primary author, Leroy Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow, acknowledges that the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Quelle surprise!

I honestly don’t understand how such a steaming pile managed to get past the editors and reviewers at Nature. It should have been laughed away as pure crank science and tossed out the window. There has to have been a lot of steps where peer review failed…maybe someone should try to calculate the assembly value for getting a paper published in Nature so we can figure out how it happened.

Sharma, A., Czégel, D., Lachmann, M. et al. Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9