The lies will kill us all

Don’t you know? RFK jr is not anti-vax. He supports safe vaccines.

News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety, Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccines play a critical role in health care.

He lies! Those two words need to be written on his tombstone, preferably sooner than later.

We know he lies because he just slashed half a billion dollars from the budget of the department specifically tasked with developing and testing new vaccines.

The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.

He basically wants to kill mRNA vaccine development, the technology that saved millions of lives in the recent pandemic. His excuse? In addition to his usual claim that the vaccines contain fetal tissue and DNA fragments — all false, and even if it were true, what does he think is present in the roadkill he eats? — he claims that mRNA vaccines are ineffective against viruses that affect the upper respiratory tract.

Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.

“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.

COVID was an upper respiratory infection, and the mRNA vaccines seem to have helped protect millions of people against that, but RatFucker Jr is going to just ignore that. He lies, and is wrong.

KENNEDY: “As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

THE FACTS: His claim is contradicted by scientific evidence. Countless studies show that vaccinated individuals fare far better against COVID-19 infections than those who are unvaccinated, while others have estimated that COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of deaths during the global pandemic. The mRNA vaccines do not prevent respiratory diseases entirely, experts say. Rather, they can prevent more serious illness that leads to complications and death. For example, an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 may prevent an infection in the upper respiratory tract that feels like a bad cold from spreading to the lower respiratory tract, where it could affect one’s ability to breathe.

While he’s cutting the budget for specious reasons, he’s also telling the scientists he doesn’t want to pay to pursue a new/old line of research.

He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.

There is no link between vaccines and autism. There is a link between mRNA vaccines and preventing death.

He lies.

Avi Loeb makes stuff up about another space rock

3I/ATLAS

Avi Loeb, the ridiculous Harvard astronomer who claimed that the interstellar object ʻOumuamua was a technological artifact, has battened on a different rock that was discovered in July called 3I/ATLAS as the object of his alien fantasies. He’s published his explanation in an in-house journal (which is not peer-reviewed) in a paper titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?. The answer is “no”, but Avi really wants it to be “yes.” To give him a chance to make his argument, here’s the abstract.

At this early stage of its passage through our Solar System, 3I/ATLAS, the recently discovered interstellar interloper, has displayed various anomalous characteristics, determined from photometric and astrometric observations. As largely a pedagogical exercise, in this paper we present additional analysis into the astrodynamics of 3I/ATLAS, and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ’Dark Forest’ resolution to the ’Fermi Paradox’. We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%. Furthermore the low retrograde tilt of 3I/ATLAS’s orbital plane to the ecliptic offers various benefits to an Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (ETI), since it allows the object access to our planet with relative impunity. The eclipse by the Sun from Earth of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion, would allow it to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival in late November/early December of 2025, and also, a non-gravitational acceleration of ∼ 5.9 × 10−5 au day−2, normalized at 1 au from the Sun, would indicate an intent to intercept the planet Jupiter, not far off its path, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.

The paper is full of the technical details about the orbital mechanics of this object. It’s unpleasantly dry and boring, with occasional insertions of his wild speculations. Fortunately, he also has a blog post titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? which is enriched for the Loeb lunacy, so I’ll mainly write about that.

Finding a big rock or comet of interstellar origin is not a revolutionary discovery — it’s interesting, but not something that is necessarily indicative that aliens are hitching a ride on it. His justification for suggesting that it’s an alien artifact are tenuous and based entirely on speculations about its trajectory. For instance, it’s approaching on roughly the ecliptic plane.

The retrograde orbital plane (defined by the orbital angular momentum vector) of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth — the so-called ecliptic plane. The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%.

So it’s unlikely that a rock flying through interstellar space would have the particular approach angle that this one has. But wouldn’t any specific trajectory be unlikely? So what?

Another coincidence is that it’s going to pass sorta close to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter.

For its orbital parameters, 3I/ATLAS is synchronized to approach unusually close to Venus (0.65au where 1au is the Earth-Sun separation), Mars (0.19au) and Jupiter (0.36au), with a cumulative probability of 0.005% relative to orbits with the same orbital parameters but a random arrival time.

Therefore it might be a probe that’s sent here to inspect the planets. It’s checking us out!

You might be thinking that zooming by Venus, Mars, and Jupiter is fine, but what about Earth? It’s not coming anywhere near us, which is evidence that it is a probe.

3I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth. This could be intentional to avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes when the object is brightest or when gadgets are sent to Earth from that hidden vantage point.

So it’s checking us out, but specifically avoiding being detected by us. Convenient.

But the aliens must be fascinated by us! So he postulates that 3I/ATLAS will fire up its engines and change its trajectory out of our sight, on the other side of the sun, so it can intercept the Earth.

The near alignment of the retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane offers various benefits to an extraterrestrial intelligence, since it allows a spacecraft to access Earth with relative impunity. The eclipse of 3I/ATLAS by the Sun at perihelion for observers at Earth, would allow a spacecraft to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth maneuver, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival in late November or early December of 2025. Detection of a non-gravitational acceleration could also indicate an intent to intercept Jupiter, not far off the path of 3I/ATLAS, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.

Note that this kind of maneuvering would suggest that 3I/ATLAS is an alien artifact, but it has not been observed. He can’t use a hypothetical motion that has not been seen as evidence that the object is capable of maneuvering. All of his evidence that 3I/ATLAS is an artifact is about remarkable changes in trajectory that have not been observed.

He has NOTHING to support his hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS is alien technology! The idea is that if it suddenly changes its path and approaches Earth, then it must be driven by some novel propulsive force. And, yeah, if a bunch of little green men pop out of it and use flying saucers to visit us, then at last Avi Loeb will be vindicated.

But of course, he does not predict that.

Our paper is contingent on a remarkable but testable hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS is a functioning technological artifact, to which I and my two co-authors do not necessarily ascribe.

So he does not predict that, but if it happens, he’s staking his claim on it. Very cheesy. He’s going to have a future as a television psychic, vague and making predictions so broad that they can cover all eventualities.

But there’s more! He wants us to prepare for the alien invasion!

1. The consequences, should the hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity, and would possibly require defensive measures to be undertaken (though these might prove futile).

2. The hypothesis is an interesting exercise in its own right, and is fun to explore, irrespective of its likely validity.

He doesn’t actually believe 3I/ATLAS is an alien artifact, but we’d better start preparing defensive measures (what would those be, I wonder? Like maybe back in the 15th century someone should have suggested to the native Americans to prepare defensive measures.)

And no, it’s not an interesting exercise. He also admits that his speculation are a pedagogical exercise, and that it is probably just a comet.

Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.

He went ahead and spread his unfounded hyperbole, though. The story has made it to the NY Post, and you can guess what the headline was: ‘Possibly hostile’ alien threat detected in unknown interstellar object, a shocking new study claims.

I have to give some credit to the NY Post, though — they actually talked to real astronomers and got their opinion of Loeb’s hypothesis.

“All evidence points to this being an ordinary comet that was ejected from another solar system, just as countless billions of comets have been ejected from our own solar system,” added Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada who studies solar system dynamics, Live Science reported.

“Astronomers all around the world have been thrilled at the arrival of 3I/ATLAS, collaborating to use advanced telescopes to learn about this visitor,” Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford who helped simulate 3I/ATLAS’s galactic origins, told Live Science. “Any suggestion that it’s artificial is nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.”

That ought to be the take-away on this story, that it’s “nonsense on stilts,” and it ought to diminish Avi Loeb’s already tattered reputation.

All eugenicists are incompetent geneticists

It’s more of a pathetic squeak.

Dave Futrelle found something provocative: a new type of guy (and he has lots of opinions about breeding). It’s an out-and-proud eugenicist, one who doesn’t seem to know very much about genetics, but he has written an unfinished app called Seekia, a genetics aware mate discovery network with the goal to help humanity mate in a genetics aware manner. It makes many grand claims about being able to compare your genetic constitution to that of a potential mate, and calculate the likelihood of healthy offspring. It is not at all clear where it’s getting genetic information from, so the premise is dubious, but also the app announces that it is incomplete, and cannot actually connect to the internet, so its conclusions are entirely imaginary. Furthermore, you can’t directly download the silly thing: you have to download the source code, and compile it for yourself.

No, I’m not going to do that.

Anyway, Futrelle had many examples of claims made by the creator of Seekia on Bluesky that were entertainingly demented, but Bluesky’s censorship police seems to have deleted them. Damn you, Bluesky! No, wait, that’s actually one of the good features of Bluesky, that weird stupid racist garbage is less likely to survive. Maybe he should use Twitter.

Do not be dismayed by all the “Post not found, it may have been deleted” announcements all over the We Hunted the Mammoth article. The creator of Seekia, Simon Sarasova, has helpfully archived his posts on his own web page, so you can still be entertained by his stupid thoughts. What would you do without this insight?

Obesity is an enormous problem which harms billions of people.

Obesity causes people to be uglier, less mobile, less healthy, less capable of having sex, and less able to enact virtue in the world.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of obesity.

The world would be a better place without obesity.

The answer is eugenics. Or what about this problem?

Stupid people are worse at driving cars.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to make people more intelligent and better at driving cars.

The world would be a better place with fewer car accidents.

Cool. Instead of traffic tickets, the police will just send a medical team to your house to sterilize your children, I guess. They’ll also check those children to enforce gender norms.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of gender dysphoria disorder.

The world would be a better place without gender dysphoria disorder.

He’s also fond of quoting the Unabomber and Stefan Molyneux. But those are all short, social media style posts — to really see deeply into his shallow thoughts, you have to read his blog. Here’s an excerpt from one of his articles, Why Race Extinction Matters, so you can better understand why maybe responsible social networks are undermining his ability to spread his message.

Modern transportation technology has facilitated the spread of all human races to all regions of the world. This has accelerated the rate of interracial breeding, and has thus accelerated the rate of change in humanity’s appearance. I posit that global population growth and modern widespread human race mixing have both increased the total quantity of races. Novel combinations of races are being bred into existence.

Many modern human races are at risk of going extinct. Both the increased prevalence of interracial breeding and global fertility collapse are contributing to the risk of race extinction. Without intervention, all modern human races will eventually go extinct due to evolution, which gradually changes each race until their old traits disappear. For example, modern humans look very different from humans who lived 100,000 years ago.

Seekia is a race aware mate discovery network I created. Users can share their racial information in their profiles and filter prospective mates based on their race and the calculated race of their offspring.

One of Seekia’s goals is to help prevent race extinctions by helping members of modern endangered human races to meet and have children.

I don’t think he understands the terms “race,” “extinction,” or “genetics,” while simultaneously being obsessed with race, extinction, and genetics. Also with beauty, circumcision, acne, driving, baldness, female body hair, penis size, and obesity.

He fits right into the Manosphere. Although…does the manosphere still exist? You don’t hear much about it anymore.

Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

I suggest we call it the “Unread Journal of Stupid Ideas”

Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.

“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.

Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.

Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.

I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?

To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.

Astronauts can be total dumbasses, too

I have talked to many creationists who, when asked for evidence that the universe was created by a god, tell you to look at the trees. They think the fact that the world can be beautiful is sufficient to prove the existence of a supernatural being, and therefore you should be converted to Christianity by contemplating biology, but I’ve been thinking about biology for a few decades, and I look at a tree and am impressed by the chemistry of photosynthesis, and don’t see any Jesus in it.

Look at the trees is shorthand for the most vapid, shallow, stupid kind of creationist argument. In a propaganda coup, Answers in Genesis has found three astronauts who are willing to endorse religious beliefs because they saw the grandeur of the Earth, because people float in space, and the Earth is a beautiful planet. They claim the Bible is absolutely true, it’s inerrant, it’s sufficient for everything we need, it’s not a science book but where it speaks to science it is absolutely accurate, 100%. Watch this video and see your respect for these men plummet.

Nauseating. AiG is hosting them at some event at the big fake Ark this summer (buy your tickets now!), but all I see is a couple of pilots and mechanics who have been persuaded by religious nonsense to believe in anti-scientific ideas. Sad.

Ironically, there’s a chunk in the middle of this video where they get quite irate about people who think the Earth is flat or that the moon landings were fake. It’s utter foolishness. And frankly it’s becoming more concerning, If you can get caught up in that kind of system of belief, you’ve completely detached yourself from the truth. The truth of scripture, that is, he quickly adds, before going on to denounce the wicked lie of evolution.

Bret Weinstein is an ignorant clown

I’ve posted a new video, but I’m making it complicated to see.

OK, I’ve put it on my Patreon account. If you’re a sponsor, you can watch it there right now, ad-free. I’m going to be doing that from now on, I think. Join and you get it before everyone else!

It’s going to go live on YouTube at 6pm Central time today, so if you’re patient, you can get it for free there. YouTube will stick a few ads in it, I’m sorry to say.

Or if you don’t want to wade through this video nonsense, I’ll post a transcript right here at 6pm, so you can just read the damned thing. That’s especially good if you don’t think my amateurish video abilities are worth a half hour of your time

The video is a dissection of Bret Weinstein’s conversation with Joe Rogan about Tucker Carlson’s idiotic denial of evolutionary biology, so it’s not as if this is essential stuff. I try to explain why Weinstein’s vague handwaving about mysterious “layers” of genetic information that no one knows about except him. Here’s some news: we do. We don’t know everything about information in the genome, but we know enough to be aware that it isn’t magic.

Anyway, check back in about 6 hours for my explanation.

[Read more…]

We’ve made Nathaniel Jeanson cry

Jeanson, the creationist who got a Ph.D. to be better able to pretend to be a real scientist, is whining because he can’t get no respect.

Today, creation scientists like me are prohibited from running academic labs. They are denied government funding for their projects. They are forbidden from publishing in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. In short, creation science is excluded from every stage of the scientific process.

To clarify, scientists who happen to be creationists are allowed to run academic labs, to receive government funding, and to publish in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. But only if they never promote creationist conclusions.

Why? Because mainstream scientists are convinced that creationists don’t do science. The specific, technical manifestation of this view is the claim that creation science doesn’t make testable predictions.1 For creation science to be considered science, creationists would have to put in print predictions that future experiments in the lab and in the field could demonstrate to be true or false. In other words, creation science has to be, in theory, able to be disproven. It’s not that evolutionists are waiting with bated breath for creationists to meet this standard. No, they’ve concluded that creationists have not met this standard and never will.

I know the feeling. I can design bridges, I can draw pictures of bridges, I can make predictions that my bridges will not fall down, but do the engineers regard me as a fellow engineer? No. They refuse to let me build my fabulous trans-atlantic bridge, not matter how beautiful my balsa wood model is.

And then they laugh and show that my calculations are all wrong, and do more calculations that show my design is unstable and will fall down. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you, they’re out to get me.

Jeanson has been making predictions. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make predictions, they also have to be justified and tested multiple times. My balsa wood model of a trans-atlantic model is a “prediction” that could be “tested”, but the fact that it doesn’t fall down when I troop trained mice across it does not mean I am a great engineer. Not even the fact that I dressed them up as clowns matters.

He whines that his mice in clown clothes haven’t been appreciated by the scientific community.

The problem for the evolutionary community? I’ve been publishing, testing, and fulfilling creation science predictions for over 10 years. My early work focused on the origin of species. I made predictions about their genetic rates of change (i.e., mutation rates) and about genetic function.2 I also predicted the genetic mechanisms by which species would form and how fast new species would appear.

That’s nice. I’m sure it impresses the rubes. But when scientists assess his predictions, they all fall apart. Here’s an example from Dan Stern Cardinale:

His books have not been reviewed kindly, either.

Nathaniel Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin could be called pseudoscientific, but arguably this may be unfair. Pseudo comes from the Greek pseudēs for ‘false’ and pseudos for ‘falsehood’. Labeling Replacing Darwin as pseudoscience suggests the participation in a deliberate lie and at the moment I’m unwilling to offer that suggestion. I am happy to grant Jeanson his sincerity. Because the bulk of the errors in Replacing Darwin are errors of omission I lean towards describing it as quasiscientific. Quasi is Latin for ‘as if’ and it is indeed as if what you are reading in Replacing Darwin is science. It is in fact only partially and ostensibly science.

I am also willing to be generous and accept that the majority of these omissions are simply due to an author with no actual expertise in the field he is writing about. The subject of Replacing Darwin is rooted in population genetics, biogeography, ecology, phylogeography, speciation, molecular evolution and systematics, none of which are fields where Jeanson possesses any professional expertise.

I am also unaware of Jeanson ever having someone with any actual expertise in these fields reviewing either his book or any of his articles published on the Answers in Genesis website. As far as I know he’s only had his fellow like-minded creationists chime in on his work or at best someone with some molecular biology background who he has described as a friend and theistic evolutionist. His only attempts at outside reviewers are high-profile popularizers of evolution like Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers. With the exception of Jerry Coyne he apparently never solicited a review from anyone with active research in the fields the book covers, despite the fact there are thousands of working population geneticists and systematists out there.

I am embarrassed to note that Jeanson’s Ph.D. was in the field of developmental biology, just like mine, and just like that Intelligent Design creationism fraud, Jonathan Wells (is there something about this field that attracts cranks and kooks? Don’t say yes). The thing is, as I can testify from personal experience, is that developmental biology does not require in depth training in phylogenetics and population genetics. I look at cells and organisms changing over time, I don’t do the mathematics of allele frequencies! So why is Jeanson publishing all these poorly done, deeply flawed analyses of population genetics?

Now I’m worried that if I actually knew anything about materials science & load capacities & stress distribution & geology of the ocean floor, my trans-atlantic bridge might actually have a few problems.

Scale it up, and New York to London, easy!

Mokele-mbembe!

Creationists have been going on and on about a dinosaur living in the Congo, called mokele-mbembe (IFLScience also has articles on it, if you didn’t believe me when I said that site sucks). Answers in Genesis has defended the idea of a dinosaur lurking in the African swamps.

For believers in the prevailing evolutionary view that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, the idea that they might be alive today is hard to accept. This is despite the recent discovery of the living Wollemi pine tree, also believed, from fossils, to have been extinct since the ‘dinosaur age’.

Christians, however, should not be surprised, as the Bible teaches that God created the dinosaurs only thousands of years ago.

It’s bunk. Here’s a good article on the origin of the myth.

Mokele-mbembe is the Congo Basin’s bigfoot. Or that’s what it’s become, anyway — a cryptid. Nobody is sure when the myth originated, but it was born among the basin’s communities, who passed it down as an oral tradition. Locals tell me the myth was spiritual at first — a metaphor, perhaps, for humankind’s delicate relationship with the land. But today, nobody can say with certainty what exactly it meant because foreigners long ago twisted it well beyond recognition.

“Congolese people originally believed mokele-mbembe was a spiritual being, not a real dinosaur,” Oyange told me last year. “But that all changed when the white man came to Africa.” A confluence of European colonial expansion into Africa and the birth of paleontology gave rise to a version of mokele-mbembe that was a literal, flesh-and-blood, swamp-dwelling reptilian beast. Tales passed around by explorers, missionaries and colonial functionaries became warped by notions from Victorian literature and emerging science.

“Everything that we now regard as the mokele-mbembe canon is based on European explorers in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Darren Naish, a British vertebrate paleontologist and author, told me.

It’s simply another example of the corrupting influence of colonialism. It’s origin doesn’t matter — the idea that there is a dinosaur living in the Congo has become a widely held idea. A guy named David Choe made a short “documentary” about searching for it, but it’s mainly self-indulgent babbling.

They don’t find a dinosaur. But it was good enough to get him an interview with Joe Rogan!

But no dinosaurs — no actual dinosaurs, anyway — are found. In fact, the film ends with a dejected Choe, in a lake, saying to the camera, “We might have to come back. We’ll see,” before he submerges himself into the murky water, prompting the credits to roll. If the film is judged on its success in searching for mokele-mbembe, it was a flop. But if it’s regarded as an exercise in grabbing attention, well, then it was a massive hit. It racked up over 1.7 million views on YouTube and even caught podcaster Joe Rogan’s notice. Several years later, in 2020, Choe appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he told of his multiple attempts to find mokele-mbembe. “When I saw your show,” Rogan tells Choe during the podcast episode, “I was like, ‘Look at this dude, this is crazy. He’s looking for a fucking brontosaurus in the middle of the Congo.’”

Yeah, no. An endorsement by Rogan tells you the whole story is garbage. It’s part of a Western/Christian trend of appropriating myths to distort them into support their dogma

. Talk to the locals, though, and you’ll learn otherwise.

Mayor visited the vine-engulfed temple in 2010. She told me her Cambodian guide, a former teacher, considered the carving a joke. “The amazing, overgrown ruins of Angkor Wat offer a perfect setting for outsiders to imagine a lost, primitive civilization that coexisted with prehistoric dinosaurs,” she said. In her view, just as the outside world has hijacked the story of mokele-mbembe, it has done the same with Angkor Wat — imposing interpretations that distort and even disrespect the original cultural significance.

She also pointed out how the dinosaurization of mokele-mbembe as an oral tradition paralleled how ancient petroglyphs and pictographs in the American West have been misinterpreted as dinosaurs, too. Creationists and young-Earthers argue that certain imagery etched into the rock slabs implies that the Indigenous paleo-Indians must have lived alongside dinosaurs.

The most notorious example, Mayor said, is the two rock art panels at Kachina Bridge in Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument. Some — including creationists — claim that the imagery is a depiction of a sauropod and triceratops dinosaur.

“If our story is told to the world by the oppressor,” I remember Veronique telling me as she clucked her tongue, “then whose story really is it? Ours, or theirs?”

The joke is on the creationists, though. Even if they did find some derived saurischian descendant in the Congo, it wouldn’t refute evolution, and biologists would be scampering joyfully to Africa to study it.

Do not trust IFLScience

I fucking detest IFLScience. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it started as a Facebook page, “I Fucking Love Science,” that later expanded into an independent web site, and it has always specialized in presenting bright colorful images and gushing enthusiastically over them with little understanding and gives the impression of a kid squealing at a cool picture. It’s Facebook science. It’s awful.

Here’s an example.

That’s a photoshopped image. It’s about a technique for inserting red fluorescent protein in a spider silk gland to make silk that can glow. It has an excitation wavelength of 558nm (so you shine a green light on it) and an emission wavelength of 583 (greenish yellow). You have to use a microscope with excitation and emission filters, and the emission filter has a long tail that lets longer wavelengths through, so what you actually see is a dark background with, in this case, a strand of silk glowing a dark red.

That is obviously not a fluorescent image.

The text is even worse.

One of the reasons why this has never happened before is that spiders themselves are difficult organisms to work with within the laboratory. They are a diverse group, have a complex genome structure, and their cannibalistic nature means that they have to be reared individually, otherwise their cage neighbors would be gobbled up. Despite this, new developments in Parasteatoda tepidariorum have allowed this species to become a research model.

That’s bullshit. I’ve found spiders easier to work with than, for instance, zebrafish, and zebrafish are far easier than mice. The cannibalism is routine. Zebrafish will line up behind a female laying eggs to suck them up as soon as they leave the oviduct; anyone who works with mice know that stressing the mothers can induce them to chow down on their newborn pups. This was written by someone with zero knowledge of actual hands-on biology.

For the record, when a spider egg sac hatches, the spiderlings can scamper around their mama with negligible risk that she’ll eat them. The babies will eat each other, though.

Of course, this summary is made from reading a real paper. It’s a techniques paper, just demonstrating the feasibility of KO (knockout) and KI (knock-in) mutations in Parasteatoda. This is what the real fluorescent images look like:

mRFP fluorescence within the major ampullate gland. a) Red fluorescence could be detected in the offspring of the KO mutant spiders in the major ampullate gland (scale bar: 277 µm). b) The cartoon recreates the major structures of the major ampullate silk gland: tail, sac, and spinning duct. c) The highest fluorescence intensities could be observed between the tail and the sac (scale bar: 140 µm).

That’s not sexy enough for IFLScience, though, so they cobbled up a stock photo of a spider and drew a bright red laser line shining out of its butt. That’s just what IFLScience does.

It’s a shame. They’re summarizing what isn’t a great paper, but a useful one, and making a mess of it.