Friday Cephalopod: TRAITOR!

I am horrified by this article by Daniel Engber — remember that name — that denies that amazingness of cephalopods. I thought everyone loved them, but no, there is apparently a backlash of contrariness beginning.

For 10 years, I subscribed to this very point of view, forgoing any dish with octopus on account of the animal’s half a billion neurons, its sophisticated behavioral repertoire, and its apparent capacity for learning. How could one go on eating something so remarkable?

But, reader, I’m no longer having it. Or rather, I should say that in the past few years I’ve been having it every way I can: raw on sushi rice, braised with black olives, grilled with garlic and a pinch of Spanish paprika, etc. You see, as the cult of octopus intelligence has taken on adherents, I’ve begun to have my doubts. A slimy, brainy, eight-armed sea snail has been rebranded, uncritically and all at once, as the soulful “genius of the ocean.” But are Inky, Otto, and their ilk really what they seem—or could it be that we’re the suckers in this story?

<gasp> Everyone. Point and hiss at the heretic. Shun him.

Some of his arguments…OK, I will admit they do have smaller brains, they don’t exhibit the degree of abstract thought we might expect of a complex intelligent creature, and there are brainier aquatic organisms, like cetaceans. But still, this is a bad argument:

Hochner and his colleagues made several big discoveries, among them how the octopus controls the nearly infinite degrees of freedom in its arms. In short, it simplifies the task and does its best to dumb things down. Instead of waving all those arms around willy-nilly, the octopus falls back on a narrow set of “motor primitives.” When it reaches to a piece of food, for example, it aims the base of its arm in the right direction and then elongates and unfurls along its length. When it needs to bring an object to its mouth, it bends its arm in three specific places. And when the octopus crawls along the ocean floor, it works its arms like worms: One or two will shorten up, sucker to the ground, and then push off, always with the same amount of force.

From a scientific point of view, these facts are very interesting: They tell us how the octopus evolved to handle its outrageous anatomical complexity. But from the octopuses-are-amazing point of view—the perspective that might inspire you to get octopus tattoos, buy octopus best-sellers, or watch octopus-related content on TV—these facts seem a little sad. Sure, it makes a lot of sense for the octopus to use simple motor programs to control its arms instead of calculating every bend and twist of eight muscular hydrostats. But wouldn’t it be a little more impressive—wouldn’t it be cooler—if the octopus really did those calculations?

All right. Go outside with a ball right now, and throw it to someone. This is actually an interesting problem in geometry and physics, yet people who know no math and no theoretical physics have no problem doing this at all. Wouldn’t it be cooler if humans really did those calculations?

This is a non-argument. Simplifying cognitive tasks is exactly what even the brainiest creature routinely does. Would we be more impressed if it did tasks in the most computationally intensive way, with the most difficult, intricate calculations, or should we be more impressed with its efficiency?

Engber almost makes up for his heresy with his conclusion. Almost.

The modern octopus stands not for terror, exploitation, and expansion, but for amazement and delight.

We know that cephalopods can change their colors in an instant, or even flip their boneless bodies inside out. Now we’ve inverted octopuses for ourselves. We say that we’re enchanted by their shifty, frisky otherness, but I think it’s more apt to say that we’re the victims of that quality—that we’re beguiled by their talent for disguise. Yesterday we peered into the main and thought we’d found a ruthless, suffocating tyrant. Today, we see a charming rascal. Who knows what sort of animal we’ll think we’ve come across tomorrow. The mollusk of a thousand faces appears at different times in different ways, as a monster or a genius or perhaps a bag of slime. Maybe that’s the secret at the heart of its phylogeny: We may be on the hunt for greater meanings, but the octopus evolved to get away.

OK, so I won’t sic the Kraken on him just yet. Yet. But I’ve got my eyes on you, Engber. Terror and exploitation aren’t entirely off the menu, you know. Especially if you keep photoshopping bogus “eat me” signs onto my friends.

Botanical Wednesday: Maybe it’s a trojan horse

My wife gave me my birthday present a month ago. “It’s not my birthday,” I said. She told me to be patient.

My present was a bucket of dirt. “Gee, thanks,” I said.

“You have to take care of it,” she said. “Oh, great,” I said, “A bucket of dirt and a new chore.”

I did as I was told. It was supposed to do something on my birthday, but my birthday is still more than a week away. And now the bucket of dirt looks like this already.

Is it going to get bigger and more garish by my birthday? Should I be worried that it’s going to eat me? Because that would be a surprise.

Marketing is not science

I’ve written about Brian Wansink before, but here you go, a grand summary of the bad science at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. They’ve gone over an archive of emails, and it’s worse than I ever imagined: they’ve just been churning over crappy studies, looking for garbage associations that will go “viral”. It’s embarrassingly awful.

“That’s p-hacking on steroids,” said Kristin Sainani, an associate professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. “They’re running every possible combination of variables, essentially, to see if anything will come up significant.”

In a conversation about another study in August 2015, Wansink mentioned a series of experiments that “were chasing interactions that were hard to find.” He apparently hoped that they would all arrive at the same conclusion, which is “bad science,” said Susan Wei, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.

“It does very much seem like this Brian Wansink investigator is a consistent and repeated offender of statistics,” Wei added. “He’s so brazen about it, I can’t tell if he’s just bad at statistical thinking, or he knows that what he’s doing is scientifically unsound but he goes ahead anyway.”

Everything they do in that lab is stuff I was told way back in the beginning of my career was bad. They do “experiments” without a prior hypothesis — they’re just fishing out of pool of lots of meaningless numbers that they generate by collecting observations of shitloads of variables. Then they crunch away at it until they find a correlation that they can build a paper around, and shop the paper around until it finds a journal with low enough standards to publish it.

In the first year biology class I’m teaching right now, I have a lecture or two at the end of the term on bioethics. This is going to be the case study we’ll go over this year. I’m wondering what’s wrong with Wansink’s education that he never learned that you don’t get to do any of this, since he’s oblivious to his sins.

I also have to point out (probably won’t in class, though) that the real problem here is that Wansink hasn’t been doing science — he’s been doing marketing, and marketing is an evil of capitalism. Please keep your capitalism out of our science, OK?

By the way, this was on Buzzfeed, and Buzzfeed gets a bad rap. I know there’s a big pile of capitalism tainting Buzzfeed, too, which has had more of a reputation for click-baity quizzes and pop news, but their news division is actually pretty good — it’s like a circus that opened a serious news outlet and hired real reporters to staff it, unlike some of the news networks that hired clowns to read the news at you. Virginia Hughes is the science editor there, and she’s serious and smart and is part of a good team that has been doing some exemplary reporting.

Biohackers: irresponsible showboats trusting homeostasis to keep them alive

Look. When this guy thinks maybe biohacking has gone too far, you know biohacking has gone too far.

Zayner is no stranger to stunts in biohacking—loosely defined as experiments, often on the self, that take place outside of traditional lab spaces. You might say he invented their latest incarnation: He’s sterilized his body to “transplant” his entire microbiome in front of a reporter. He’s squabbled with the FDA about selling a kit to make glow-in-the-dark beer. He’s extensively documented attempts to genetically engineer the color of his skin. And most notoriously, he injected his arm with DNA encoding for CRISPR that could theoretically enhance his muscles—in between taking swigs of Scotch at a live-streamed event during an October conference. (Experts say—and even Zayner himself in the live-stream conceded—it’s unlikely to work.)

Josiah Zayner has done lots of stupid stunts. Now he calls himself a “social activist”, which apparently in his mind means someone who does irresponsible and ineffective stunts to provoke the public to be similarly irresponsible. Now he’s waking up, a little bit, to what he’s been doing.

I didn’t realize what my actions could result in. I’m just starting to come to grips with that.

Biology is really, really complicated, minor changes can have radical consequences, and we don’t understand 90% of it. OK, 95%. Maybe 99%. When people’s lives are at stake, you poke at it very, very cautiously, because you don’t know what kind of cascading systems failure you’re going to trigger. The system does exhibit a lot of resilience that helps maintain equilibrium, which means these showboats can play games that mostly do nothing, giving the misleading idea that they’re harmless, but all it takes is one accident to set everyone back. Responsibility is an important concept in science.

Everyone should know by now that Twitter is a bad company

From an inside look at Twitter’s problems with management, technology, and trolls:

At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”

Calls to rethink that approach were ignored by senior executives, according to people familiar with the situation. “There was no real sense of urgency,” the former executive explained, pointing the finger at Harvey’s superiors, including current C.E.O. Jack Dorsey. “It’s a technology company with crappy technologists, a revolving door of product heads and C.E.O.s, and no real core of technological innovation. You had Del saying, ‘Trolls are going to be a problem. We will need a technological solution for this.’” But Twitter never developed a product sophisticated enough to automatically deal with with bots, spam, or abuse. “You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into. You fast forward, and it was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we just have basic rules in place where if the suggestion is to suspend an account of a verified person, there should be a process in place to have a flag for additional review, or something?’ You’d think it would take, like, one line of code to fix that problem. And the classic response is, ‘That’s on our product road map two quarters from now.’”

None of this means that Twitter is going to vanish soon — after all, COBOL is still around, and software legacies just hang around, decaying slowly, like an assortment of pseudogenes. But still, maybe you should consider jumping ship, since the one way to kill it is to erode its user base. Mastodon is out there, waiting for you with open arms.

Friday Cephalopod: So that’s what octopus porn is like

The photograph is, I think, tastefully provocative.

A male and female giant Pacific octopus mating in captivity at the Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco, California, USA). The male is on top. The arrow points to the insertion of the male’s hectocotylized arm into the mantle cavity of the female. (Photo by Kevin O. Lewand.)

It’s the accompanying text, describing multiple observations of mating, that gets hot and heavy.

A female was placed in a 12,000 l display tank and the male was added 10 min later. The female weighed 18 kg and the male weighed 20 kg. The female was sitting motionless in a lower corner of the tank when the male was added. She was oriented horizontally, facing outward from the corner. As he swam to the bottom, the male inked. He jetted directly to the female and enveloped her with his web and arms. There was then an active intertwining of arms for 2 min. At the end of this period, the female was facing into the corner and the male was on top of her facing the same direction, with his dorsal arms wrapped around her head and mantle. The hectocotylized arm of the male was inserted into the right mantle opening of the female. He was a mottled gray/pink color with frontal and mantle white spots apparent. The mantle was papillose. The female was dull red and smooth. The male’s respiration rate was 5.9 sec/breath, and the volume was judged “deep breathing.”

At 78 min after first contact, there was an increase in the intensity of the mottling and the brightness of the white spots on the mantle of the male as he raised his body up off the female slightly and then settled onto her again, whereupon the intensity of the mottling and white spots dulled. This was likely an arch and pump. At 3 hr 43 min, the male removed the hectocotylized arm. He moved away from the female at 4 hr 1 min. At this point, he was smooth and bright red; she was smooth light pink.

After 17 min apart at the opposite corner of the tank, the male again approached the female. She was in the same corner facing outward. He mounted and grasped her as before and turned mottled and papillose with mantle and frontal white spots apparent. After 3 min, she turned toward the corner as before, so they were facing the same direction. He again held her with his dorsal arms. His hectocotylized arm was inserted into the mantle of the female. They maintained this position for another 4 hr 12 min. He then moved off to an opposite corner of the tank and turned smooth dark red. She maintained a smooth pale pink for several minutes and then turned mottled and papillose. No spermatophores were observed protruding from the female’s mantle cavity as reported by Mann, Martin and Thiebsch, (1970).

Whew. Get back, EL James, there’s a new bestseller in the making. I’m also impressed with the male’s endurance — 3-4 hours? We hoo-mans are not worthy.

Playing games…for Science!

For the past few days (and wrapping up today) I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota as one of a team of advisors helping them on a future interactive exhibit on evolution, which I’m not going to tell you about, except to say that they have an ambitious schedule and maybe you’ll get to see it as early as this summer. One of the things we had to do yesterday is introduce ourselves with a 5 minute talk about what we can contribute to the project, and so I threw together a little something about my background and my experience as a teacher, yadda yadda, and because I could, I put up an illustration on YouTube to play on the screen behind me — so I used this one, which is just a general time-lapse of zebrafish development.

You have to picture me standing at the lectern, saying something like, “…and this is the experimental animal I work on”, clicking on the play button, and turning to wave gracefully at the screen…and discovering that YouTube had inserted an ad at the beginning, and that what I was pointing at was a shirtless, hunky, muscular man flexing and saying something about an exercise or diet program, I don’t know, because I was busy clicking on the “skip ad” button.

Now everyone has a much more exciting impression of my research.

Aside from that little misstep — do not trust YouTube to serve up your sober, serious videos — it’s been an enlightening experience. My colleagues here have an eclectic mix of skills, with theater people, professional game designers, and museum directors all contributing to the construction and critique of this coming exhibit. Our evenings have been spent playing games, looking for ideas that could be used to involve and inform the general public.

I have been introduced to escape rooms. I did not have the slightest inkling these even existed until this weekend. I guess I’ve been totally out of it, and you’re probably going to tell me you’ve been doing these for ages, and make me feel old.

Anyway, for my fellow old codgers, escape rooms are a big booming business right now. The idea is that someone designs an elaborate series of puzzles in a locked room — you have to figure out a hidden code with clues in the room to find a secret switch that opens a concealed door that leads to a room with more puzzles that then fit with clues to reveal more puzzles, for instance, and if you solve them all within a certain time limit you are allowed to escape, or discover the murderer, or save the world, or something. They seem to be hugely popular — a search for Minneapolis escape rooms reveals they’re dotted all over the map.

And now, I’ve gone from a state of total ignorance to having played 3 escape rooms at the Science Museum’s expense.

I’ve learned many things this week — if you want to teach people about science, it’s helpful to listen to theater people and game designers, and it’s good to get away from the model of telling people what the answer is to instead have them figure it out for themselves. Also, escape rooms are kind of fun.