I f’in hate evolutionary psychology

Sorry, I saw this evo psych study and had to vent.

Here’s the protocol: subjects were primed with powerpoint slides of modern economic devastation with an explicit slide with text saying the 21st century is a “harsh and unpredictable world”. The controls, near as I can tell, saw the same slides without the text. Then they flashed a slide of topless women’s torsos with breasts of varying shapes and sizes, and asked the subjects to rate the women.

Let me just say that if you’re doing any kind of psych study that ends with a request to rate women’s breasts, you’re doing something wrong. I can’t even begin to unpack all the assumptions you’ve pre-loaded into the work.

And then the results are underwhelming: a bunch of bar graphs that show very little variation in the responses, with a few showing statistically significant but totally unimpressive differences. Overall, men rated women with larger breasts as more attractive, fertile, healthier, reproductively successful, and likely to befriend. The n was 144, all drawn from college students at a midwestern American university, so of course we can infer universal principles of human evolution from it.

Here’s the kind of graph you can make as an evo psych goofball.

Dazzling information. If you hate yourself as much as I do, you can read the paper, too. It’s awful. So many statistics to strain to extract something significant from noisy data already compromised by cultural indoctrination.

A truly sinister trend

Look at the data, scientifically!

In 1900, only about 3% of the population would admit to being left-handed. In the mid-1970s, it was up to about 11%. I don’t want to know what it’s like now, but being left-handed is clearly trendy, and if we just extrapolate from those numbers of an 8% increase in 76 years, I’d estimate that the population must be about 16% left handed today, and that the lefties will have completely taken over by 2800. We righteous righties are on the path to extinction! This is the real Great Replacement! Someone needs to alert Tucker Carlson and get the word out!

Physics is an atavistic form of biology, then

I have addressed the nonsense about cancer as an atavism multiple times here, and I even made a video about it. Paul Davies is a medical crackpot, and his pal Charley Lineweaver is just as goofy, but it seems they noticed me, and I got a nice polite email from Lineweaver about it.

Hi PZ,

I just came across your video

I plead innocent of subscribing to the Haeckelian view that

“Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”

at 14:38 of your video.

If you remove the word “adult” then I would agree more with the statement.

You might be interested in our two recent papers (attached).

Also, as a biologist, you might be interested in an online video course
I just put up at arewealone.us

It’s got a lot of biology in it.

If you find any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Yours for better science,

Charley Lineweaver

First, I would note that removing one word doesn’t help: “Development stages recapitulate evolutionary stages” is just as bad as “Development stages recapitulate adult evolutionary stages”. Development does not recapitulate the evolutionary history of the organism. Are we going to claim that mammals evolved from an ancient ancestor with a trophoblast that attached to a larger organism to leech off its fluids? Of course not. Mammalian extra-embryonic membranes are great examples of an evolutionary novelty appearing at a time in development that does not reflect a phylogenetic sequence.

As for his claim that cancers are atavistic reversions to a primitive state, see the links I posted above. Enough said. It’s garbage science. I’m just mildly horrified that yes, he sent me two more papers on the subject, published in 2021, and the idea is still getting published in respectable journals. Maybe I’ll dig into those papers some other time, but I think it’s sufficient to dismiss them out of hand since they provide no new information, and are just more exercises in frantic handwaving. Flap, flap, flap, oh look, we made another paper. Flap, flap.

I was mildly intrigued by the web site he mentioned, calling it an “online video course”, which it isn’t. It also doesn’t have much biology in it. But you be the judge: visit arewealone.us for yourself.

It was very nice of him to include a video summary of the “course”, titled “The Course in 7 Minutes”. Great, I can spare 7 minutes!

I didn’t even give it 7 minutes, I’m afraid. I skipped a lot, missing nothing of substance, because all it is is an excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth played while random images flash by. There is no content there. There are no words, no explanations, not even an attempt to stitch any kind of story or explanation to it. It’s an incoherent mess. It is an accurate summary of the “course”, I’ll give him that.

I dug deeper, and he does have kind of a syllabus.

Week 1 – What does “Are We Alone?” Mean?
Week 2 – Our Evolution Over 20 Million Years
Week 3 – Our Evolution Over the Past 500 Million Years
Week 4 – Our Evolution Over the Past 3 Billion Years
Week 5 – Our Evolution Over the Past 4 Billion Years
Week 6 – Origins of Life: What is Life?
Week 7 – Intelligent Extraterrestrials?
Week 8 – More Conversations with Experts

Each of those entries is a link to more videos, and once again, we descend into chaos. Lineweaver’s approach seems to be to ask various of his science friends to let him interview them, and he drops by and sets up a camera in their office and asks a bunch of questions, like these:

This video-based course probes the question “Are we alone?” Unlike SETI scientists, Mars rovers and planet-hunting astronomers, we take a biological approach and ask: “How did WE get here?” Like salmon swimming upriver to the pond where they were born, we are led upstream from whence we came. We take a pilgrimage into the past to the origin of life 4 billion years ago. During this evolutionary odyssey with astrobiologist Charley Lineweaver, we ask: Who is “we”? Why did our brains get so big? How did life get started? Are viruses alive? What is life? Answers to these questions may help us get from How DID life start? to How DOES life start?

This leads to a confusing collection of short (typically 5-6 minutes) video interviews. There is no synthesis. There are no answers, not even an attempt to assemble some kind of consensus. I watched a few and then gave up.

If I were asked, “are we alone?”, my answer would be something like, “I don’t know, but probably not. I think the prebiotic chemistry that led to life is probably universal, so it could be common, but we’ve got an n of 1 so far. If we found signs of ancient life on Mars, though, that would increase the probability of life of some sort being common.” That’s all we’ve got so far. I also think that anyone who says yes, absolutely, or no, absolutely, isn’t worth talking to further.

I would turn the questions about, though, and ask how Charley Lineweaver, an honorary associate professor at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Research School of Earth Science at the Australian National University, a man with an advanced education that is entirely in physics, who has a PhD in physics from Berkeley, gets to call himself an astrobiologist, and does that mean I get to call myself an astrophysicist, despite an education that was almost exclusively in biology, and despite having a position as a biology professor?

Oh, wait. He also says he is “the son of a high school biology teacher”, so I guess he inherited his parent’s qualifications. With that logic, that means that my father’s line of work means I get to call myself a diesel mechanic now. Or maybe an astro diesel mechanic?

Who writes these things?

Here’s an article to make you wonder: Future evolution: from looks to brains and personality, how will humans change in the next 10,000 years?. In my case, what I wondered is who would write a long essay on the topic, because if I were to do it, it would be one line, either “I don’t know” or “Incrementally, probably imperceptibly.” But no, in this case it’s written by a “Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology” — whoa, he’s qualified — but the answer is drivel.

Ten thousand years is nothing. Ten thousand years ago we looked roughly like we do now, and we have to go back a hundred thousand or more years before we might see some differences visible to the naked eye, and even those we wouldn’t be able to distinguish from environmental differences. Why would you expect major changes in the next ten thousand? Are you going to predict colossal environmental changes, which would make this a rather dire story? Again, no. It doesn’t talk about serious changes in climate, or catastrophic collapses of social structures…it’s all about mysterious trends that evolution predicts (it doesn’t).

So we get platitudes.

It’s hard to predict the future. The world will probably change in ways we can’t imagine. But we can make educated guesses. Paradoxically, the best way to predict the future is probably looking back at the past, and assuming past trends will continue going forward. This suggests some surprising things about our future.

If we’re basing everything on “trends”, how could that suggest anything surprising? Isn’t it going to be just more of everything going in the same direction?

We will likely live longer and become taller, as well as more lightly built. We’ll probably be less aggressive and more agreeable, but have smaller brains. A bit like a golden retriever, we’ll be friendly and jolly, but maybe not that interesting. At least, that’s one possible future. But to understand why I think that’s likely, we need to look at biology.

I’m at a loss. We’re going to be like golden retrievers? Why would you think we’re becoming less aggressive and more agreeable? I think he’s been reading Pinker.

I agree, though, let’s look at biology. Unfortunately, he doesn’t.

Some scientists have argued that civilisation’s rise ended natural selection. It’s true that selective pressures that dominated in the past – predators, famine, plague, warfare – have mostly disappeared.

Starvation and famine were largely ended by high-yield crops, fertilisers and family planning. Violence and war are less common than ever, despite modern militaries with nuclear weapons, or maybe because of them. The lions, wolves and sabertoothed cats that hunted us in the dark are endangered or extinct. Plagues that killed millions – smallpox, Black Death, cholera – were tamed by vaccines, antibiotics, clean water.

Would you believe that he wrote this in March of 2022? Pollyanna lives!

He goes on and on. We’re going to live longer. We’ll get taller. We’ll become more beautiful, thanks to sexual selection. The “trend” says that our brains will get smaller. We’ll become more conformist. But maybe we’ll speciate!

In the past, religion and lifestyle have sometimes produced genetically distinct groups, as seen in for example Jewish and Gypsy populations. Today, politics also divides us – could it divide us genetically? Liberals now move to be near other liberals, and conservatives to be near conservatives; many on the left won’t date Trump supporters and vice versa.

Could this create two species, with instinctively different views? Probably not. Still, to the extent culture divides us, it could drive evolution in different ways, in different people. If cultures become more diverse, this could maintain and increase human genetic diversity.

Aaargh. Is the current American political divide going to be lasting and worldwide? Does he think Trump is a trigger for a speciation event? I give up. This article is just too stupid.

If someone were to ask me to write such an article, my first response would be “go away.” If pressed, I would say that what matters are entirely contingent evolutionary responses to material conditions which we cannot predict and therefore can’t use to estimate changes to our genes. And if an editor suggested just extrapolating from past changes in the last ten thousand years, I would point out that they are assuming that the patterns are a product of inherent biological processes and assuming that environmental forces don’t exist, and neither assumption is likely to be true.

Like I say, my version of this article would be very, very short. I don’t understand the reasoning behind any scientist’s decision to accept such a commission.

Three stupid sources ought to be an automatic rejection

I shouldn’t have even started drilling down to the source. I started at Answers in Genesis, a mistake I know, but at least the ridiculed (for the wrong reasons) the next article in the chain, which was in The Daily Mail. Here’s the Daily Mail headline:

Hey, how about if you demonstrate the existence of intelligent space-faring aliens before you start speculating about their motivations? But they’ve got a scientist who’s doing the speculating, and the Daily Mail loves scientists who agree with their biases.

Sci-fi films and TV shows have routinely depicted a brutal race of aliens visiting Earth in their spaceships and enslaving unfortunate Earthlings.

But according to one expert, extraterrestrial life may actually be too scared of ‘dangerous’ and ‘violent’ humans to want to come here.

Dr Gordon Gallup, a biopsychologist at the University of Albany, argues that humans are ‘dangerous, violent and ceaselessly engage in endless bloody conflicts and war’.

How do you become an expert in alien biopsychology, I’d like to know. We’re about to bottom out, though, since we’re about to learn where he published these claims.

Dr Gallup has presented his argument in an open access paper published in the Journal of Astrobiology this month.

Oh god. AiG, the Daily Mail, and the Journal of Astrobiology? Is this Dumpster Diving Friday or something? Have mercy. Here’s the abstract for the paper.

We evaluate claims for extraterrestrial intelligence based on the logic behind assertions such as the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To assess intelligence elsewhere in the universe we outline two of the principle scientific claims for intelligence on Earth. One involves the idea that intelligence involves working out the reasons for our own existence. The other involves self-awareness and the capacity to make inferences about what others know, want, or intend to do. The famous quote from Rene Descartes “I think; therefore, I am” needs to be revised to read “I am; therefore, I think.” Some of the conclusions we derive about intelligence include the idea that most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness); humans are the only species where what you know could get you killed; if humans become extinct it is highly unlikely that human-like intelligence will re-emerge on this planet and the odds of human-like intelligence evolving on other worlds is infinitely small. However, if intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe it may not have revealed itself because humans are dangerous and are perceived as posing too great a risk.

I’d reject it out of hand for the blatant human exceptionalism and the false claims right there: most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness). Most species on Earth don’t have brains, for one, but additionally, have you met my cat? Not very clever, but definitely full of herself and quite aware of herself. There are a lot of claims in this abstract that the author does not adequately justify in the remainder of the opinion piece (it is not a scientific paper).

Then, in the first paragraph of the introduction, he cites Rhawn Joseph three times. Ugh. He’s an affiliate member of the Panspermia Mafia, I think we’re done.

I couldn’t help myself. I took a quick look in the table of contents to see what ol’ Rhawn was up to now. He’s still poring over NASA’s Mars photos, drawing circles and arrows on them, to claim now that there are tube worms and crustaceans on Mars.

At least he’s got the Daily Mail and Answers in Genesis to continue pretending he has any credibility at all left!

Kent Hovind is a busy, busy man

Wow. Kent has a full schedule this month, with lots of debates to brag about. He’ll “win” them all, too!

I am a bit dismayed. I’ve never heard of any of his opponents, they’re all “debating” exactly the same topic — which tells me that Hovind set it — and also, they’re all hosted on the same “impartial” YouTube channel, Standing for Truth Ministries. You’ve been suckered, gang. You’re getting gamed. These are all a sham. Why do people keep falling for this nonsense?

I can guess why. Hovind is stupid, shallow, and repetitive; you listen to him talk and you think, “that’s all wrong, I know enough to counter that argument,” and you confidently challenge him to a debate. But then you let him set the agenda, since he’ll refuse to talk to you if he doesn’t, and he decides the venue, because, again, he’ll refuse if you don’t let him. Then when you do engage him, he just says the same dumbass crap every time. Evolution is the dumbest religion in the world. Do you believe you came from an amoeba? Cats have never given birth to dogs. Yadda yadda yadda.

You might precisely and eloquently deliver the facts that demonstrate he’s wrong on every point. You think you’ll get him this time, because you listen to a few of his “debates” and discover that they never change, he always says exactly the same stupid things, so you will be prepared. It doesn’t matter, because Hovind will consider it a victory if he obtusely refuses to accept anything you say. He’s got the mind of a two-year-old who has learned the word “NO”. He’ll sail through your debate, rejecting all evidence and reason, and emerge at the end not having learned anything, and then he’ll sign up another sucker who will let him execute the same performance.

Stop doing this. Show a little spine. If you really want to debate him (I can’t understand why, it’s not going to look good on your CV), then demand a debate on a much narrower topic, and get a moderator who is not a fawning lickspittle creationist like SFT, one who will actually shut you down if you veer off topic. This is the way. It is the only way.

You’ll at least get the satisfaction of seeing Kent Hovind yip-yip-yip as a runs away from your conditions.

Neuralink is feeling the heat

Neuralink is pumping out a flurry of PR to counter the reports of animal neglect at the company. Here’s Ryan Tanaka making excuses for them:

Tanaka is an odd one — he claims to have no affiliation with the company, he just loves them so much that he has a YouTube channel dedicated to fluffing Elon Musk and Neuralink. Even here, notice how the justification is I think it’s worthwhile to keep the long-term goals of the team in mind — the end justifies the means. Then he trots out a string of Neuralink employees to say how wonderful the company that pays them is.

That’s worthless.

The goals of Neuralink are sci-fi nonsense and hype about mundane technological developments. They’ve got a chip with more channels than previous efforts…but that’s not where the questions lie. Just throwing more needles into the brain does nothing if you don’t understand the interactions, or the long term consequences of healing, repair, and response to exogenous signals. It’s really a brute force approach to physically interacting with a mammalian brain, and it’s going to be increasingly disastrous as these people fumble about crudely under the directives of an incompetent narcissist.

I don’t want to hear what paid employees say. This is a case where an independent review is necessary by people who don’t get a paycheck from Elon Musk. I’d still like to know why UC Davis no longer supports Neuralink’s animal research. Is it under an NDA? That wouldn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I bet all those employees have a threatening NDA stapled to their backs.

If you want to see something really sad, though, check out Tanaka’s YouTube channel. Read the comments on this video, for example, but they all sound alike. They’re full of desperate people looking for hope. ‘Please sir, cure my seizures/paraplegia/tinnitis/depression/autism/Parkinson’s/multiple sclerosis/schizophrenia. Will it let me talk to animals?’ That’s where the fervor comes from. Musk is the messiah who will heal everything.

Then there are the sci-fi fantasies.

Very ambitious! Nope, not gonna happen.

I want an invasive, dangerous electrical device imbedded in my brain to help with my homework! Sheesh, CS nerds.

That could help with the research. Using an unreliable device and Tesla software to assist you in driving your motorcycle will generate a huge number of test subjects.

Oh, and all the people asking to sign up for the experimental trials! It’s madness. No, don’t do this. Don’t. Just don’t. One of the signs you’re in a cult is the willingness to let the cult leader do experimental neurosurgery on you. It will never end well.

Will this finally kill Jordan Peterson’s career? No, it will not.

That’s quite a list of critics of the Rogan/Peterson circle jerk. All these people with relevant, advanced degrees in climatology are explaining that Peterson is childishly inaccurate and foolish, as if maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that he is a lying incompetent.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick:

“He seems to think we model the future climate the same way we do the weather. He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.

“He has no frickin’ idea,” she said.

Dr Gavin Schmidt:

“Guys, for the love of everything holy, please, please, have somebody on who knows what the heck a climate model is!!!”

Schmidt told the Guardian he was reminded of a quote from the famous British statistician George Box.

“Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’,” Schmidt said.

Prof Steve Sherwood:

Peterson was “making the ancient climate sceptic error of mixing up weather and climate”.

“Anyone who has taken an introductory course in climate or atmospheric science would spot this problem,” he said. “Errors in a weather forecast indeed accumulate such that after a couple of weeks the forecast is useless.”

But with climate, Sherwood said, the models work differently to project how the climate will respond to different factors, such as higher levels of CO2.

“[Peterson’s] argument is like saying we can’t predict whether a pot of water on a flame will boil, because we decide in advance what variables to put in our model, and can’t predict each bubble.”

Prof Christian Jakob:

Peterson’s comments were “ill-informed” and that he’d “mixed up weather prediction with climate projections.

“People are entitled to their opinions, but science and climate modelling isn’t about opinion. If you’re not well informed about how something is done then it’s not right to make comments about it on a large platform.”

Prof Michael Mann:

Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s facilitation of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Peterson’s claim that the climate was too complicated showed “a total lack of understanding of how science works” and could be used to dismiss physics, chemistry, biology, “and every other field of science where one formulates conceptual models”, according to Mann.

“Every great discovery in science – including the physics that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast their ridiculous conversation – has arisen through that process,” he said.

Prof John Abraham:

the episode was “a word salad of nonsense spoken by people who have no sense when it comes to climate.”

“To say that climate model errors increase like compound interest is laughable. Jordan Peterson displays a near complete misunderstanding of climate change, and the tools climate scientists use to understand what is happening to our planet.

“It’s as if someone, with zero expertise and knowledge, made comments about something he knows little about.”

You know, people have been blasting this message since he first squelched his way into the public consciousness with his wrong interpretations of an anti-discrimination law, his wrong explanations of gender, his wrong ideas about evolution and neuroscience, his wrong notions of epidemiology and disease, all undergirded by his wrong opinions about religion and supernatural phenomena, and his foundation in the wrong ideas about psychology (his profession!) built on a bizarre Jungian framework. His audience doesn’t seem to care. They just seem to like that he’s blissfully confident about his wrongness, and that’s what they love about him.

Wacked again

Kent Hovind featured me on his wack-an-athest segment last night on YouTube. It was the same ol’. As usual, he never listens to anyone, so he spent a bunch of time telling me that I really do believe I came from a rock, and then he skipped through a few pages of Campbell Biology, reading excerpts from their short history of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, condensation of the Earth, etc., to declare that that textbook also says we came from a rock. He also said he’s been in 260 debates, and that he has won every one of them, and that even the professors and atheists all agreed that he had defea-Ted his opponents, while his Igor, Matt Powell, nodded vigorously over his shoulder and his claque jeered in the background.

The man is delusional and insane, and he’s got a cult who believes his every word. He invited me to come on down to his Alabama compound again, but who in his right mind would do that?

I won’t link to him, you’ll have to look it up on YouTube yourself, but only if you’ve been very naughty and feel the need to be punished. Hint: he misspelled my name as Meyers in the title, because of course he did.

Oh, cool. Now Brett Keane is piling on. I’m being dragged down into the slime for sure.

Jordan Peterson is talking out of his ass again

Of course he’s peddling more conspiracy theories. These new COVID variants that require booster shots are apparently the product of convenient whims of Big Pharma.

When is that a variant? How about whenever it’s convenient for the pharmaceutical companies?

The man is firmly in Joe Rogan territory. We recognize variants by their genetics and by their phenotypic effects on their host, things that we can actually measure. The pharmaceutical companies can’t just conjure up new strains of a virus that is already infecting millions of people.

Peterson is a fucking idiot.

By the way, he’s putting on a show in my backyard, at the State Theater in Minneapolis, on my birthday. Tickets are in the $200-$400 (absolutely astonishing), and I want you to know…that would be quite possibly the very worst birthday present I could imagine getting. Fortunately, no one on Earth hates me enough to inflict that on me.