Jordan Peterson is a fool, Part I’ve-Lost-Track-Of-The-Number

You can’t do anything about global warming, he says. Might as well burn more coal, otherwise you’ll have to start burning trees. There’s nothing anyone can do to mitigate climate change.

There are more trees in the Northern Hemisphere* than there were 200 years ago, which says to me that we do have the power to enable changes in the environment. Where he goes off the rails is in implying that it would be worse to burn trees than to burn coal. Trees are a renewable resource. There is no net gain in atmospheric CO2 if you plant trees at a rate equal to or faster than the rate you burn them, while burning coal releases CO2 that has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years.

No, you don’t have to turn off your heat (Minnesota, in the winter? No, thanks). But you can get your heat from renewable sources that don’t contribute to greenhouse gases. About a third of US electricity generation is from coal, another third from natural gas, and the other third is from renewables and nuclear power. We can shift that — in Germany, about half their power is generated from renewables and nuclear, so you can clearly work in that direction without compromising industry. One thing we could do is phase out new coal power plant construction and encourage more solar and wind power (and nuclear, maybe — although that’s guaranteed to start arguments among environmentalists). It’s going to take time, but it doesn’t help to have apologists for the fossil fuel industry advocating for giving up.

It also helps to set personal limits and long-term goals. That was the whole point of the Paris climate agreement, to set goals and provide practical guidance in meeting them. You know, the agreement our President* reneged on to keep his coal and oil friends happy.

And that Peterson guy has a packed house listening to him babble garbage.

*You should ask yourself, what about the Southern Hemisphere? Why doesn’t he say anything about that? Aren’t most of the planet’s trees in the tropics? Asking us to pay attention to a success story on the fringe while ignoring a net loss of 10 billion trees per year in the core is a classic right-wing distraction tactic.

Oh, you want air? And water?

There’s a federal court case, Juliana v. United States, in the works in which the plaintiffs argue that the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness obligates the government to maintain a sustainable, livable atmosphere — or, at least, support legislation in good faith that limits how much we can poison it. That sounds like a good idea to me.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

How can you argue against that? The Trump administration has a simple defense.

By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’ — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

That is not the answer I expected. Hemming and hawing about the practicality of limiting greenhouse gasses, sure; endless lying about whether climate change is a temporary phase, or about the desirability of warming up the planet by a few degrees, or claiming that we might be getting a little warmer, but there is no threat to our existence…I could imagine all that coming out of Republicans in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

But to announce that they feel no compulsion to provide an environment compatible with life? That’s a new one.

A bad day in the spider lab

I had such high hopes this morning — necessary reagent had arrived, I had a nice egg sac, I was going to open it up and spend my afternoon exploring embryos. It was not to be. I teased apart the egg sac, and what do I find? Heartbreak. Disappointment. Failure.

The eggs were all dead. I’m not sure what happened here, but I have a hypothesis: this summer and early fall, I had all these fish tanks in the lab, gurgling away, and the place was pretty humid. Now those are shut down, and it’s winter in Minnesota, when the air dries out. Spiders like some degree of humidity, and I’ve been maintaining that by regularly misting their vials with an atomizer, but maybe that’s not enough for the embryos.

So I’m cranking up the moisture levels in the incubator. Now I’ve got to worry about balancing everything — too much and I’ll have to worry about mold and fungus.

Babies are such fussy little creatures.

I know what I’m doing tomorrow

My halocarbon oil arrived today! Finally, I can do some arthropod embryo culture.

Squeee!

Would you believe that 100mL bottle cost me $166? Since I’m going to use a 20µl drop for each embryo, that means I only have enough for 5000 experiments. I’m already feeling a little panicky about my supplies running low. Maybe I should order another bottle.

In case you were wondering what this precious stuff is, it’s an inert, high molecular weight polymer of chlorotrifluoroethylene. It’s used a lot in insect culture because you can put an embryo into a drop of it, and it prevents it from drying out, improves optical clarity, and also allows for free gas exchange. I’m eager to try it.

P.S. Oh, right, I’m also voting first thing in the morning, and then hiding from all the media about the election all day long.

I got to play educational games for a couple of days

It’s a great job when you get to do stuff just for fun. For the last few days, I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota, consulting on their new exhibit? Theatrical performance? Interactive game? called Infestation: The Evolution Begins. It’s a 3-part project funded by NSF to help teach key concepts of evolution to kids, and it’s looking pretty amazing.The first part is done, and it’s a theatrical event where the concepts are explained entertainingly, and the audience are introduced to little imaginary creatures called VISTAs. If you go to SMM today, you can watch the whole show yourself, get certified as an official VISTA handler, and get a sticker. A sticker! I got one! Oh, boy!

It stands alone, and is a fun demo. But there’s more! Not available to the public yet, but I was part of a team of consultants brought in to comment on/criticize/maybe improve some preliminary versions of interactive games that follow from Part I. Eventually, kids will be scurrying all over the museum to solve puzzles and address challenges that will require them to learn about biology and evolution. For now, it was just a troop of aging game designers, cognitive psychologists, theater people, museum curators, educators, and biologists running around trying out rough versions (some of the game rooms weren’t quite as polished as they will be). They’ve made great progress on Part II of the project, and I think, maybe, they’re hoping to have it available to the public this summer? Next fall? I’m getting an inside look at what it takes to build a professional and quite elaborate interactive exhibit in a museum, and I’m exhausted just thinking of all the labor and thinking that is done.

I had a lovely couple of days hanging out with the fantastic people who work behind the scenes at SMM — did you know real museums have large staffs of people who are doing, you know, science? — and my fellow consultants, like Scott Nicholson and Jonathan Tweet, who some of you may have already heard of. If you think combining “education” and “games” is going to flop at both, think again. This is serious stuff in the service of fun and learning.

We get to go back at some later date, once Part II is fully operational, and when Part III is in a preliminary state — we had some suggestions, but that bit is still up in the air, as it’s supposed to be a capstone that brings everything the kids learn together. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. You should all be looking forward to a trip to SMM next year when the magic is all ready for prime time.

Friday Cephalopod: They’re going to outbreed us!

Here they come, the legions of cephalopods. Massive aggregations of brooding octopuses were found near Monterey Bay.

That’s not all. The University of Georgia had a single octopus in their aquarium, Octavius, presumed male, until they discovered a surprise one morning.

“I noticed this cloud of moving dots and I realised, ‘Oh my God, she had babies. There are babies. There are babies everywhere.’ And a sort of panic ensued,” aquarium curator Devin Dumont told Mary Landers at Savannah Now.

“I immediately started scooping them out and putting them in buckets and there were just buckets and buckets and buckets full of tiny octopi.”

Finding a tank full of baby octopuses (or octopodes for language pedants) would certainly be enough to shock anybody into mixing up their Greek and Latin word roots.

I, for one, welcome our breeding swarms of transgender octopuses, and will greet them as saviors when they emerge to release humanity from its misery.

You’re not a very arachnophobic bunch

I tallied up your responses from that post about arachnophobia, and took a quick look at the distribution. Several of you complained that you had no idea what the range should be — that was intentional. You’re not supposed to be trying to fit yourself into a particular bin, you should be just answering for yourself. There’s no judgment here!

But if you’re curious, here’s the source with some general numbers. Serious arachnophobia — where the fear is actually debilitating and impairs a person’s life — is relatively rare, less than 5% of the population. There isn’t a magic number in the score that says whether you’re an arachnophobe or not. As many of you also noted, the questions are fuzzy and subjective, and as you might expect, produce a range of results. It’s a continuum — some people want to hug & kiss & love widdle spiders forever, others are horribly repulsed by them, and others are in the range from take ’em or leave ’em to “oooh, icky”. Here’s what I saw in this group of 113 participants (not a scientific poll, obviously, with a self-selected group and arbitrary participation, etc.)

Most of you are way down on the scale! It’s probably a biased sample here — I’ve chased away all the deeply arachnophobic types. I got a few responses on Facebook, and they tended to be somewhat higher than blog commenters, but the numbers are too small to come to any strong conclusions.

A new science video for Halloween!

Wednesday is Halloween! Yay! My favorite holiday!

Unfortunately, I’ve got a work engagement that’s going to tie me up for a couple of days, so no Halloween for me. Boo.

The good news, though, is that the work is playing with the gang at the Science Museum of Minnesota on a new exhibit! Yay!

The bad news is that I’ll have to neglect the blog for a while. Boo.

The good news is that I scheduled a new evo devo video for tomorrow! It’ll be available at 7am Central time, and you’ll be able to criticize it on YouTube while I’m watching the premiere, which I plan to do before getting in the car and driving to St Paul! Yay, I think?

The bad news is that there are no spiders in this video at all. Boo.

But there are cephalopods! Yay!

You say that like it’s a bad thing

There’s a surge in the spider population going on, and people are calling it an Arachnid Apocalypse.

It isn’t just your imagination. Scary sightings of larger-than-usual spiders are on the rise in Metro Vancouver this fall.

Pest control specialist Randy Bilesky has seen a 50 per cent increase in calls to his service this season over last.

“People panic … we get the phone call after someone has walked through a spider web,” said Bilesky. “They are sure it’s still in their hair, especially if it is one of the big hobo spiders.”

I prefer the term “Spider Renaissance”.

What next? Is everyone going to start complaining “Oooh, there are too many squid in the ocean” and “Ick, there are prokaryotes crawling around in my colon”?

Hate the implicit teleology…

…but love the unforeseen consequences.

Guts really do make the bilaterian. Everything follows from making a tube-shaped body plan — all the increased potential for signaling between different tissues multiplies the number of possible developmental histories, and leads to all kinds of novelties. Like a central nervous system. You wouldn’t be reading this if there’d been no gastrulation. Brains, a coelom, a circulatory system, etc. were all side-effects of a successful feeding strategy and triploblasty. You should be grateful to your guts for making you.

Although, if they hadn’t, I suppose the life of a jellyfish isn’t all that bad.