Here’s click-baity title it’s hard to resist: Science Still Can’t Explain This Biological Mystery, But Scientists Like to Pretend Otherwise. Oooh. What is that “biological mystery”? I want to know!

It’s a bad sign, though, when the author has to strain to stave off criticism before he gets around to spilling the beans.

Those of us who embrace science are growing increasingly impatient with religious and spiritual traditions. To us, absolute faith in claims scribed by backwards people thousands of years ago is delusional. We think it’s time for the faithful to get over themselves. The culture wars will end when it finally does. We’re waiting, though not patiently, because much is at stake.

Much is indeed at stake, but we’re actually waiting for the scientific to get over themselves. I say this as an atheist fully committed to science as the best method yet for discovering the nature of reality.

“I’m an atheist, so you know you can trust me” (oops, no, I can’t), “now you scientists better address my demands!” OK, I know who needs to get over themselves, and it isn’t the scientists here.

But finally, what is the mystery?

Between science and faith, I think faith is te more honest about what the scientific community seems perversely averse to explaining: Organisms: what they are and how they emerge from chemistry. Scientists explain organisms away or simply assume them without explaining them. At least the faithful recognize that life’s purposefulness needs explaining, even though their explanation is no explanation at all.

Organisms? One broad, very general word, and we have to explain it to him? Try this. Go up to a plumber, and say “Pipes. Pipes are a mystery. You can’t explain them to me.” Or a refrigerator repairman: “I am confused by cold. Explain it. I think religion is more honest than physics in describing temperature.” What can you say? And he does go on and on trying to emphasize his ignorance — he’s not much different from Bill O’Reilly saying, “Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can’t explain that.” He even has his very own quaint definition of what an organism is.

Unlike inanimate things, organisms engage in functional, fitted effort. Effort is purposeful work, an organism trying to achieve what is functional – of value to it, fitted or representative of its circumstances. Effort value and representation only make sense with respect to organisms. Organisms try to benefit themselves given their environment. Inanimate things don’t.

I’m just going to have to short-circuit this whole argument. The author, Jeremy Sherman, has simply reified the word “organism” to mean something discrete and unitary — it’s a thing that functions. That’s not very useful, especially since he’s setting it up as thing that cannot have a predecessor.

To a biologist, an organism is an integrated complex of replicating chemical reactions. It’s chemistry. The search for some vital distinction between chemistry and biology is over, there isn’t one, and they simply grade into one another. Sherman is erecting an imaginary wall and telling us we can’t get past it, but all the scientists are looking at him and wondering why they should take this challenge at all seriously — show us that there is a wall, don’t ask us to prove your fantasy is non-existent.

So look at viruses. Just chemistry, right? A bit of nucleic acid, a protein and carbohydrate coat. But they replicate, are functional, and are “fit” (I’m not sure that the “fitted” Sherman is talking about is at all similar to the “fitness” a biologist would discuss) in that some viruses are better at replicating than others. We can replicate RNA with just a nucleic acid strand, an enzyme, and a few cofactors.

Sherman nags that scientists have to get over themselves and come up with an explanation that satisfies him. The thing is, though, that lots of scientists are working on origin of life research, and are asking more sensible questions than “Organisms? WTF?”.

Seriously. Mr Sherman needs to get over himself and try reading any of the wealth of books on the subject. It’s not as if there is a shortage of scientists writing in an informed way about the origin of life comprehensibly for the public.

And I followed through! I kept it short, though, so it won’t hurt too much.

Science magazine published a peculiar opinion piece titled Why I don’t use Instagram for science outreach. It’s peculiar because it starts off well, and then reaches an ugly conclusion, and because it’s coming from a graduate student who is going to be looking for a job, and there’s no effort to give her anonymity while promoting a controversial opinion and, frankly, bad reasoning. Here’s that promising beginning that could have gone off in a far more productive direction.

Science Sam is a big name on campus. She’s a Ph.D. candidate in the sciences who wants to pursue a career outside of academia, like me. But unlike me, she is our school’s science communication, or #scicomm, superstar. Her Instagram page, which aims to show the “fun and trendy” side of science, was recently celebrated in the school’s newsletter for increasing the public’s trust in scientists. At a career workshop, graduate students were urged to follow Science Sam’s example and use #scicomm to build our personal brands as we enter the job market. I already have an Instagram account, but it reflects my interests in photography and baking more than my love of science. The workshop got me thinking: Should my posts focus less on pastries and more on pipettes?

OK, so I took a look at Science Sam’s Instagram account. I’ll be honest, it personally left me cold. I’m not into Instagram, the format lends itself to superficialities, it’s focused a great deal on selfies of a photogenic young woman, and I won’t be subscribing or following it in the future. But that’s just me. There exists a large instagram-centered subculture, Science Sam is good at fitting into it, and I am glad there is someone doing science outreach there, and doing it well.

I think the @scicomm community would also agree that the point isn’t to conform, but to express yourself freely and share your appreciation of science in ways that fit your personality and interests. There should be no message that says you must be a slender woman with a large fashionable wardrobe and artful skill in applying makeup in order to be a good science communicator — I’m kind of the opposite of all that, so I (and many of the science communicators I know) would be right out of the business from the get go. David Attenborough would also be out of work.

At this point, my advice to this grad student would be yes, focus on the pastries and the photography as a hobby. You be you. There is another huge subculture that is interested in the visual arts and food, and you can be science’s ambassador to those people. If the message you got from your university’s career workshop is that you have to imitate Science Sam, they fucked up. The career workshops I’ve participated in emphasize the breadth of possibilities, and should definitely not be telling new scientists that they have to follow the path of performative traditional femininity. That is one path out of many.

But this grad student confesses to “increasing bitterness” over the example of Science Sam. She has somehow come to the conclusion that another person’s approach is directly harming her.

When I next interview for a job, I won’t have an Instagram page to show that my love of science doesn’t make me boring and unfriendly. Publicly documenting the cute outfit I wear and the sweet smile I brandish in the lab isn’t going to help me build a fulfilling career in a field where women hold less senior positions, are paid less, and are continuously underrated. Time spent on Instagram is time away from research, and this affects women in science more than men. That’s unfair. Let’s not celebrate that.

Jeez, someone needs to talk to whoever put together that career workshop, because at least one student has come out of it with a seriously warped perspective. You shouldn’t have to flash a sweet smile and a cute outfit to get a job (I know, often women are expected to, which not right and grossly unfair), but you do have to have an enthusiasm for the work, which even homely grizzled old geezers like me can achieve. If you’re trying to do science outreach, bitterly policing other people’s approach is a negative — find your own strengths and explore and expand them. You’ll be happier doing that than feeling like you have to conform to a role you detest. There also has to be work/life balance — if Science Sam enjoys spending time on Instagram as her avocation, she should! If there’s something outside of work that makes you happy, you should do it without guilt!

Seriously, too, while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Science Sam’s angle, and she’s going to be effective at reaching some people, I’d find an instagram account about photography much more interesting. So would other people. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

I really hope whoever was in charge of that career workshop is feeling rebuked by the fact that the bitterness it invoked was highlighted in Science.

At least, that’s the message I take away from this video about the evolution of turtles.

OK, OK, it turns out they’re both complementary sources of information. And you also need genomics.

Larry Moran summarizes some criticisms of evolutionary psychology. He even cites philosophers who recognize the deep flaws in the field! But then, as a coup de grâce, he carries out the most damaging criticism of all: he quotes an evolutionary psychologist. Dang. That’s low.

Even more cruelly, he quotes the ridiculous Gad Saad, a professor of marketing who has made a career out of peddling poor interpretations of evolution designed to pander to MRAs and other frauds. Saad was asked to provide a list of notable achievements by evolutionary psychology, and he obliged.

1. Women alter their preferences for the facial features of men as a function of where they are in their menstrual cycles. When maximally fertile, they prefer men possessing markers of high testosterone.
2. Babies display an immediate instinctual preference for symmetric faces (at an age that precedes the capacity for socialization).
3. Children who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia display a reversal in their toy preferences. Furthermore, using inter-species comparisons, vervet monkeys display the same sex-specific patterns of play/toy preferences as human infants. This suggests that contrary to the argument made by social constructivists, play has an evolved biological basis.
4. Individuals who score high on an empathy scale are more likely to succumb to the contagion effects of yawning. This is indicative that this particular contagion might be linked to mimicry and/or Theory of Mind.
5. How provocatively a woman dresses is highly correlated to her menstrual cycle (a form of sexual signaling found across countless Mammalian species).
6. Culinary traditions are adaptations to local niches. For example, the extent to which a culture utilizes meat versus vegetables, spices, or salt is a cultural adaptation (this is what behavioral ecologists study).
7. Maternal grandmothers and paternal grandfathers invest the most and the least respectively in their grandchildren. Whereas all four grandparents have a genetic relatedness coefficient of 0.25 with their grandchildren, they do not all carry the same level of “parental uncertainty.” In the case of maternal grandmothers, there is no uncertainty whereas in the case of the paternal grandfather, there are two sources of uncertainty. This last fact drives the differential pattern of investment in the grandchildren.
8. Good male dancers are symmetric (paper published in Nature). One would expect that some behavioral traits might correlate with phenotypic quality as honest signals of an individual’s desirability on the mating market.
9. Self-preference for perfumes is linked to one’s immunogenetic profile (Major Histocompatibility Complex).
10. When a baby is born, most family members (especially those of the mother) are likely to state that the baby looks like the father. This phenomenon is found in countless cultures despite the fact that it is objectively impossible to make such a claim of resemblance. The reason for this universally found cultural tradition lies in the need to assuage the fears of paternity uncertainty.
11. Environmental stressors (e.g., father absence) and the onset of menarche (first menses) have been shown to be highly linked. In numerous species, the likelihood of a female becoming reproductively viable is affected by environmental contingencies.
12. Women are less receptive to mandatory hospital DNA paternity testing (for obvious reasons). In other words, their willingness to adopt a new product/service is fully driven by an evolutionary-based calculus.
13. Women can smell the most symmetric men. In other words, women have the capacity to identify men who possess the best phenotypic quality simply via their nose. This is what I have referred to as sensorial convergence.
14. Using fMRI, the exposure to ecologically-relevant stimuli (e.g., beautiful faces) yields distinct neural activation patterns in men and women.
15. In choosing a mate, humans tend to prefer the smell of others that are maximally dissimilar to them along the MHC. This ensures that offspring possess a greater “defensive coverage” in terms of their immunological system.

That’s a curious mix of dubious pop psychology, random correlations, non-universal cultural biases, and unjustified assumptions that certain behaviors have a genetic, as opposed to psychological, basis. For example, you don’t need a gene for assuming that infidelity exists…you can know how conception works and figure out that women can get pregnant by men who are not their socially defined partner, which may be why there is a certain level of distrust of paternity claims.

There’s also a total inability to recognize that physiological properties are not always adaptive consequences. For instance, evolutionary psychologists seem to be obsessed with ascribing deep evolutionary causes to fluctuations in behavior associated with menstruation. I can certainly believe in hormonally-driven variation in personality and behavior — that’s unexceptional and ordinary — but to then argue that small day-to-day differences in behavior have all been driven by a necessarily intense selection pressure is absurd panadaptationism.

You might also expect a Professor of Marketing to realize that a culture saturated with commercial marketing of stereotypical sexual imagery might develop abnormal response patterns — we are bathed in messaging that is conditioning us to advertisers’ influence, and may not have anything at all to do with our evolutionary history. There’s a circularity to it all. Marketing is all about shaping our preferences in particular directions, and then you get EP marketing professors trying to persuade us that they have no influence at all, they’re just discerning the deep patterns evolution has burned into our brains, so that they can be better able to influence us to buy their cologne and the associated body images with which they advertise it.

Also, and this might just be my personal bias, but marketing is simply the blood-laced, putrefying pus oozing from the suppurating teats of that great Satan, Capitalism, upon which Evolutionary Psychology greedily feeds. It is a potent poison that is not to be trusted.

Musk is doing it again. We have to colonize Mars to save humanity!

Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday.

“It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension.

“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld.

OK. Simple question.

Which is more likely to be a habitable environment for humans?
A. Mars.
B. Earth after a massive nuclear war.

Bonus question!

After Musk’s colonization of Mars, and after a massive nuclear war, which planet is more likely to send a rescue mission to the other?
A. Mars.
B. Earth.

I could be mean and ask what the probability of either being able to mount a rescue mission would be (I’m guessing about 0%), or whether there would even be a colony to rescue on Mars (nope), but I’ll just sit down and take your answer, Mr Musk.

I can be sympathetic to transhumanism — I do believe that we’ll be gradually increasing the incorporation of biotechnology in our lives — while also thinking most of the transhumanists around today are a gang of goofy twits. In particular, this guy, Ben Greenfield, a “biohacker” who brags about trying every wildly improbable, untested biomedical treatment he encounters, is a transparent fraud. That way lies eventual catastrophe, but at least he’s up-front about what he’s trying to do.

In November, Greenfield visited U.S. Stem Cell, a controversial clinic in Florida, to have his penis injected with his own stem cells. If the name of the clinic seems familiar, that’s because it’s the same Florida clinic that last year unintentionally blinded three patients in a clinical trial of an unproven stem cell therapy. In August 2017, the Food and Drug Administration sent U.S. Stem Cell and its chief scientific officer Kristin Comella (who appears in the webinar video with Greenfield) a warning letter for “marketing stem cell products without FDA approval and for significant deviations from current good manufacturing practice requirements, including some that could impact the sterility of their products, putting patients at risk.” U.S. Stem Cell Clinic, the FDA said, even tried to interfere the FDA’s investigation by denying agency employees access to facilities. (U.S. Stem Cell did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“I wanted to go from good to great, and to get a bigger dick,” he told Gizmodo. “I’m not going to lie, that’s why guys without erectile dysfunction would do this.”

This is the worst of transhumanism, a guy who is trying to find a magical solution to his inadequacies, and meanwhile, even if they don’t work, he gets to call himself a brave “biohacker”. More like a biocharlatan — there’s no science here. An n of 1 in an uncontrolled “study” in which there is no assessment of elementary stuff like dosage and side-effects and even any measurement of primary effects is just garbage — it puts himself at risk with no possibility of learning anything new. And get a load of this:

Nonetheless, Greenfield said in the webinar that the procedure had made him “noticeably better hung.”

Three or four days after the procedure, he said, it was “almost like it grew.” His erections were also bigger, his penis got harder, and his orgasms were better, he said. The better orgasms, he said, might be a placebo effect, but the anatomical changes in size “cannot be denied.”

Gizmodo asked Greenfield whether he had measured his change in size.

“I haven’t taken out a ruler,” he said, explaining that he felt the size fluctuates too much to get a consistent measurement. But he thinks it looks noticeably larger.

“When inside of my wife, she can tell,” he added.

almost like it grew — oh, that’s persuasive. Everything he’s looked at is entirely subjective, and I’m sorry, but his wife’s vagina is not a calibrated scientific instrument, nor is her motivated opinion an objective assessment. That he hasn’t even bothered to try measuring the range of sizes before and after the treatment is a terrible indictment.

Penis enlargement scams seem to be a popular thing, though, at least from my observations of typical spam advertisements. US Stem Cell is going to get some business from desperate sad sacks with poor body image — I wonder if Greenfield gets a cut? They seem to be promoting a kind of sloppy pseudo-biology with the science removed.