I like this Neil deGrasse Tyson fellow

Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.

I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.

Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.

Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.

By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.

I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.

That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big. Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.

Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.

The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.

It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.

They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.

Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.

Have your genes been pacified?

A reader sent me a request to help him debunk an evolutionary psychology paper. It’s easy: it’s evolutionary psychology, which ought to be sufficient, but also it’s by Henry Harpending, notorious white nationalist and spewer of scientific racism nonsense.

To be fair, I’ll give you a chance to read the paper and judge for yourself: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. The premise is that the operation of the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized. Our violent genes have been “pacified”. I tried looking up this concept of “genetic pacification” in the scientific literature — it seems to be a term of art used only by evolutionary psychologists, without any quantifiable definition. This paper claims to try, though.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

You will not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no data presented anywhere in the paper. The authors cite a purported correlation between historical endorsement of the death penalty and a decline in the homicide rate, while ignoring all the other complex social changes that were going on over the same period of time, a typical reductionist strategem. The paper fails to provide any evidence that criminality is heritable, but just assumes that it is.

What the authors pretend is evidence is a model they have built, but they don’t report any details about how the model works, and report very few quantitative conclusions from it…which are pointless anyway since they don’t explain how they derived them. What the do tell us about the model makes it laughable, though. Here are the assumptions they’re working from, in addition to their assumption that crime is caused by genes:

1.The death penalty was the only selection pressure acting against personal violence;

2.Without the death penalty, condemned men would have each killed only one person on average over a normal lifetime;
and
3.Condemned men had no offspring at the time of execution.

I think we can dismiss their whole model out of hand, based on the obvious falsity of all three of those assumptions.

At least the authors didn’t feel any need to make the implicit conclusion explicit — that white westerners are genetically more civilized than all those other people in the world.

Do not trust this man with your medicine!

Didier Raoult, quack

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.

Hey, I can mangle thermodynamics, where’s my million dollars?

It’s been a weekend. My wife pulled a double-shift last night, and I took advantage of the boring silence in the house to wrap up the preparations for my last week of classes, and was up way too late. For my history of evolutionary thought class, I have the laziest plan ever: the students are doing presentations all week, and are also responsible for evaluating their peers. For my intro class, I’ve got one last lecture all queued up and ready to go, and then on Thursday they get an exam. But right now, I’m really tired and should get some sleep tonight.

Now for some light entertainment. A company called Extropic is getting millions of dollars of funding on the basis of this kind of gobbledygook.

Extropic describes itself as building a computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world. [Extropic, 2023]

There you go. Translate, please.

I’m no physicist, but even I can see that that’s a lot of noise — they’ve garbled up a few thermodynamics buzzwords and mixed them up with the magic word “AI”. Helpfully, they go further to try and explain.

And the hardware wants to be stochastic, if we want to keep scaling. So why don’t we just cut the Gordian knot and simplify things, and implement AI algorithms in, as the stochastic physics of the world. So what we’re building at Extropic is a full stack, Physics-based computing paradigm focused on AI. And we harness the stochastic physics of electrons directly in order to instantiate probabilistic machine learning, which is the parent concept to generative AI.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just a lowly biologist. Maybe I’d just like to know how someone can con millions of dollars out of silicon valley venture capitalists with that kind of insipid, pretentious babble. Are VCs just not very bright?

All it needs is some goofy AI-generated ‘art’ to make it look like sci-fi…and look, the gullible tech press provides!

Fluff and nonsense

I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.

As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.

She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.

Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.

Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!

He gives us four things that religion does.

But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.

Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.

Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.

Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”

Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.

I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.

But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?

That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.

You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!

But what about that claim of neuronal reserves that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.

Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.

They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!

That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.

I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.

Do you believe him yet?

Elon Musk revealed the latest generation of his Optimus robot on stage. They didn’t do much: they walked slowly into the audience, accompanied by protective Tesla employees, while Musk hyped them up.

“The Optimus will walk amongst you,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk qips. “You’ll be able to walk right up to them, and they will serve drinks.”

Musk explains it can basically “do anything” and mentions examples like walking your dog, babysitting your kids, mowing your lawn, serving you drinks, etc. He said it will cost $20,000 to $30,000 “long term.”

“I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind,” Musk says.

They had some interacting with attendees, handing out cups of ice and playing rock-paper-scissors, but I’d bet those were remote controlled by other engineers, out of sight. The claim that they’d be able to take care of your pets or kids is ludicrous, coming from a guy notorious for his neglect of, and abuse of, his children.

He’s not going to be able to produce a reliable robot with all those capabilities for $30,000, and no, I’m not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to own a big clumsy machine to take care of my evil cat poorly, and to serve me drinks. We recently had to replace our refrigerator, and we just laughed at the idea of getting one that had internet access and a drinks dispenser on its door…why would we want that monstrosity in our home, when you can’t even store a package of frozen peas in it?

As usual, Musk is just confirming that he’s a very bad salesman whose lies are getting increasingly unbelievable.

This is why the Republicans want to ban NOAA

The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote: For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.

He added, Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.

Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.

During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?

The big hat must cover a big brain.

Jonathan Wells is dead

Wells was one of the worst liars at the Discovery Institute, which is saying a lot. His pals out there in Seattle are writing his praises, of course; you won’t be surprised that they don’t understand why Wells’ books were loathed. Here’s Casey Luskin, who inevitably gets everything wrong.

A lot of people hated Jonathan, not because he was a hateworthy person, but because of the bad news he delivered about their scientific arguments. His ideas threatened their paradigm, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. But he didn’t hate back. He was a kind and caring person who used his gifts to make an immense impact, helping to reform junk science that had bloated evolution education worldwide. For all these reasons, Dr. Jonathan Wells will not be forgotten anytime soon. By his many friends, readers, and others who have benefited from his research, and of course by his loving family, he will be greatly missed.

He did not deliver bad news about scientific arguments; he didn’t understand, or pretended not to understand, the science he was criticizing. Everything he wrote was a misrepresentation. He didn’t reform junk science, he vomited up books that were nothing but junk science. I am confident that he wasn’t just ignorant, but that he intentionally, willfully, and maliciously lied about the science.

He was an intelligent man who got a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale, and then got a second Ph.D. in cellular and developmental biology from the University of California Berkeley. There’s rarely ever a good reason to get a second Ph.D., and Wells had the worst reason ever: he had become a Moonie, and he got the second degree at the behest of his church so that he would be better equipped to destroy Darwinism.

Father’s [Rev. Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

Yeah, he was one of those misguided people who went through a research program not to learn anything, but to get a few letters after his name so he could pretend to be an authority. He also dishonored Berkeley with a badge of shame; it is appalling that someone so dishonest and so committed to distorting the science could fool the research scientists at that prestigious university.

He distorted every idea he touched. Larry Moran thoroughly debunked his treatment of junk DNA, for my part, I wrote about how he constantly botched and misinformed people about developmental biology. Here’s an example of one of my posts in which I wasted my time dissecting the glurge of garbage pouring out of his Moonie brain.

The next person–apparently a professor of developmental biology–objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve began by pointing out that the genetic code is not universal, but the questioner loudly complained that 2he was not answering her questions. I stepped up and pointed out that housekeeping genes are similar in all living things because without them life is not possible. I acknowledged that HOX gene mutations can be quite dramatic (causing a fly to sprout legs from its head in place of antennae, for example), but 3HOX genes become active midway through development, 4long after the body plan is already established. 5They are also remarkably non-specific; for example, if a fly lacks a particular HOX gene and a comparable mouse HOX gene is inserted in its place, the fly develops normal fly parts, not mouse parts. Furthermore, 6the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: 7If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Finally, 8the presence of HOX genes in sponges (which, everyone agrees, appeared in the pre-Cambrian) still leaves unanswered the question of how such complex specified genes evolved in the first place.

The questioner became agitated and shouted out something to the effect that HOX gene duplication explained the increase in information needed for the diversification of animal body plans. 9I replied that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content. She obviously wanted to continue the argument, but the moderator took the microphone to someone else.

It blows my mind, man, it blows my freakin’ mind. How can this guy really be this stupid? He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in developmental biology, and he either really doesn’t understand basic ideas in the field, or he’s maliciously misrepresenting them…he’s lying to the audience. He’s describing how he so adroitly fielded questions from the audience, including this one from a professor of developmental biology, who was no doubt agitated by the fact that Wells was feeding the audience steaming balls of rancid horseshit. I can’t blame her. That was an awesomely dishonest/ignorant performance, and Wells is proud of himself. People should be angry at that fraud.

I’ve just pulled out this small, two-paragraph fragment from his longer post, because it’s about all I can bear. I’ve flagged a few things that I’ll explain — the Meyer/Wells tag team really is a pair of smug incompetents.

1The genetic code is universal, and is one of the pieces of evidence for common descent. There are a few variants in the natural world, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: they are slightly modified versions of the original code that are derived by evolutionary processes. For instance, we can find examples of stop codons in mitochondria that have acquired an amino acid translation. You can read more about natural variation in the genetic code here.

2That’s right, he wasn’t answering her questions. Meyer was apparently bidding for time until the big fat liar next to him could get up a good head of steam.

3This implication that Hox gene expression is irrelevant because it is “late” was a staple of Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution and the Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s a sham. The phylotypic stage, when the Hox genes are exhibiting their standard patterns of expression, of humans is at 4-5 weeks (out of 40 weeks), and in zebrafish it’s at 18-24 hours. These are relatively early events. The major landmarks before this period are gastrulation, when major tissue layers are established, and neurulation, when the neural tube forms. Embryos are like elongate slugs with the beginnings of a few tissues before this time.

4What? Patterned Hox gene expression is associated with the establishment of the body plan. Prior to this time, all the embryonic chordate has of a body plan is a couple of specified axes, a notochord, and a dorsal nerve tube. The pharyngula stage/phylotypic stage is the time when Hox gene expression is ordered and active, when organogenesis is ongoing, and when the hallmarks of chordate embryology, like segmental myotomes, a tailbud, and branchial arches are forming.

5Hox genes are not non-specific. They have very specific patterning roles; you can’t substitute abdominal-B for labial, for instance. They can be artificially swapped between individuals of different phyla and still function, which ought, to a rational person, be regarded as evidence of common origin, but they definitely do instigate the assembly of different structures in different species, which is not at all surprising. When you put a mouse gene in a fly, you are transplanting one gene out of the many hundreds of developmental genes needed to build an eye; the eye that is assembled is built of 99% fly genes and 1% (and a very early, general 1%) mouse genes. If it did build a mouse eye in a fly, we’d have to throw out a lot of our understanding of molecular genetics and become Intelligent Design creationists.

Hox genes are initiators or selectors; they are not the embryonic structure itself. Think of it this way: the Hox genes just mark a region of the embryo and tell other genes to get to work. It’s as if you are contracting out the building of a house, and you stand before your subcontractors and tell them to build a wall at some particular place. If you’ve got a team of carpenters, they’ll build one kind of wall; masons will build a different kind.

6No, the similarity of Hox genes is not a problem. It’s an indicator of common descent. It’s evidence for evolution.

7Good god.

Why is a fly not a horse? Because Hox genes are not the blueprint, they are not the totality of developmental events that lead to the development of an organism. You might as well complain that the people building a tarpaper shack down by the railroad tracks are using hammers and nails, while the people building a MacMansion on the lakefront are also using hammers and nails, so shouldn’t their buildings come out the same? Somebody who said that would be universally regarded as a clueless moron. Ditto for a supposed developmental biologist who thinks horses and flies should come out the same because they both have Hox genes.

8You can find homeobox-containing genes in plants. All that sequence is is a common motif that has the property of binding DNA at particular nucleotide sequences. What makes for a Hox gene, specifically, is its organization into a regulated cluster. How such genes and gene clusters could arise is simply trivial in principle, although working out the specific historical details of how it happened is more complex and interesting.

The case of sponges is enlightening, because they show us an early step in the formation of the Hox cluster. Current thinking is that sponges don’t actually have a Hox cluster (the first true Hox genes evolved in cnidarians), they have a Hox-like cluster of what are called NK genes. Apparently, grouping a set of transcription factors into a complex isn’t that uncommon in evolution.

9If you photocopy a paper, the paper doesn’t acquire more information. But if you’ve got two identical twins, A who is holding one copy of the paper, and B who is holding two copies of the same paper, B has somewhat more information. Wells’ analogy is a patent red herring.

The ancestral cnidarian proto-Hox cluster is thought to have contained four Hox genes. Humans have 39 Hox genes organized into four clusters. Which taxon contains more information in its Hox clusters? This is a trick question for Wells; people with normal intelligence, like most of you readers, would have no problem recognizing that 39 is a bigger number than 4. Jonathan Wells seems to have missed that day in his first grade arithmetic class.

It still infuriates me that a guy with a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Berkely would ask, if flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Because the Hox genes only trigger the deployment of downstream genes of the animal, ya idjit.

Casey Luskin is wrong. I didn’t hate Wells personally — I never met him — but I did hate his lies, of which there were many, whole books worth of ’em. Good riddance to lying scum.

Finally, a cause to unite the Right and Left

Who knew we could find unity in the cause of killing children? Right-wing loonies and left-wing moonbats have been working together to erode food safety and loosening milk pasteurization laws and allowing ideological weirdness to be poured down the throats of innocent children. But at least it’s bipartisan!

The contentious belief that raw milk may be healthier than pasteurized is a bipartisan one, however, it has captured the imagination of, as the Atlantic put it in a 2014 story, “urbanite foodies (read: progressives).” That same year, Joel Salatin, which the publication referred to as a “food and farm freedom celebrity,” told Politico that it was nice to have some liberals join the fight for the mainstreaming of raw milk.

“When I give speeches now,” he said. “The room is half full of libertarians and half full of very liberal Democrats. The bridge is food.”

You know, we actually have data. We know that childhood mortality was greatly reduced when we required that milk be pasteurized. It’s a simple and relatively easy parameter to measure: when you require pasteurization vs. allow raw milk to be sold, how many dead kids do you stack up in each category? We know the numbers.

The CDC would want us to remind you here that, yes, you are allowed to take risks in private, but raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk.

When we were raising kids, we made the decision to exclude Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria from their diet as much as possible. It wasn’t just the cost and trouble of paying for funerals, but the nuisance of infants with diarrhea. Trust me, it’s no fun for anyone.

If you’d like to see an entertaining discussion of the thrills of raw milk, Talia Lavin has you covered.

Pasteurization changed the dairy game. By 1911, Chicago and New York had mandated milk pasteurization in commercial operations, with other major cities quickly following suit; by 1936, 98% of milk in the United States was pasteurized. This coincided with lots of other medical discoveries and improvements in public hygiene, but the milk-pasteurization push had particularly drastic effects: between 1890 and 1915, infant mortality dropped by more than half. By midcentury, babies drinking swill milk and dying of diarrhea was largely a thing of the past. Most people would agree that this is, generally, a good thing. I personally drink milk daily with my coffee; I am glad it doesn’t come with a side of typhoid.

I said that this movement was bipartisan, but now it’s fueled by a lot of right-wing “own the libs” influencers and nutcases.

It’s just that the contemporary opponents of pasteurization—the “raw milk” movement, as they call themselves—are so fucking dumb, and so knee-jerk about it. The movement is endorsed by such disparate grifters as Gwyneth Paltrow; RFK Jr.’s erstwhile running mate, Nicole Shanahan; Christian TikTokers; the existentially stifled Mormon tradwife that is the wanly smiling face of Ballerina Farm. The overwhelming number of recent raw-milk converts—and its loudest current evangelists—are on the far right: over in the raw milk aisle you’ll find an assortment of right-wing Fitness Guys with steroidal vasculation filming themselves chugging raw milk, alongside Alex Jones, QAnon influencers, the CEO of racist Twitter clone Gab, and a motley assortment of also-ran far-right Congressional candidates, plus organizations like the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance.

Now normally I might be willing to shrug off this suicidal insanity — let the kooks voluntarily weed themselves out of the population by swilling contaminated food — except that the primary victims of this lunatic movement are kids who have no idea of the risks, and who are simply expressing a natural trust in what Mommy and Daddy tell them. The problems arise when Mommy and Daddy are named Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones. That’s who the food safety laws are aimed at.