What’s in these things?

gummibears

Haribo Gummi Bears sound fun. They’re sugar free and a harmless sweet snack, right? Until you read the reviews. It seems to have a dramatic effect on people, which I’ve filed away in my memory, next to my Enemies List.

But what’s in them to cause this effect? That’s where it gets interesting. It says on the bag that they’re “Sugar Free”, but it’s a lie. They’re free of glucose and lactose, two specific sugars, but read the list of ingredients, and you discover that they’re full of other sugars.

Corn Syrup, Sugar, Gelatin, Dextrose, Citric Acid, Corn Starch, Artificial and Natural Flavors, Fractionated Coconut Oil, Carnauba Wax, Beeswax Coating, Artificial Colors Yellow 5, Red 40, Blue 1

Corn syrup is nothing but oligosaccharides. Sugar: more oligosaccharides, specifically disaccharides like sucrose (and how can they advertise that they’re sugar free when the second ingredient is “sugar”?). Gelatin, at least, is not a sugar, but a protein, collagen. Dextrose is a simple sugar, a monosaccharide, but it’s true, it’s not glucose. Still, consuming dextrose is a great way to get a rapid blood sugar spike.

So what these things are are pure, concentrated sugar bombs that pass straight into your colon as a potent syrup that drive your gut flora into a frenzy. Watch out for them.

Also, never trust that “sugar free” label.

But if you do have enemies, you can buy them in five pound bags on Amazon. Makes me wonder if they also sell pocket nukes and bulk neurotoxins.

You know where you can find good writing?

snoopy-good-writing-is-hard-work

Right here on FtB! If you’re looking for something to cleanse the palate after this mess, I recommend…

There. Much better.

MRAs don’t understand evolution or development

Since form is a consequence of differential growth of tissues, and since different tissues grow at different rates, one of the ways evolution can shape morphology is through changes in growth rate, so changes in timing can produce very different forms. There are genes that affect specific tissues discretely; for instance, the gene ASPM regulates mitotic activity in regions of the brain, so mutations in it can produce smaller brains, or microcephaly. There are also global regulators of growth, and just changing the rate of maturation of the organism can produce changes in the proportion of different tissues, because of allometric variation in different regions.

So, for instance, if developmental maturation of the somatic tissues is slowed, while sexual maturation is maintained at the standard rate, individuals retain juvenile characters at reproductive age, a process called neoteny (similarly, you can get a similar effect by maintaining a standard rate of somatic growth, but accelerating the rate of sexual maturation, a process called progenesis.) Note that what’s key here is that different tissues are regulated differently; if you just slow the rate of development of both somatic and reproductive organs, you get individuals with the standard morphology, it just takes longer for them to get there. Everyone who knows anything about development and evolution understands that neoteny/progenesis requires independent regulation of different tissues.

One of the factors thought to play a role in human evolution is neoteny. Compared to other primates, adult humans retain a juvenile morphology: heads large in proportion to our bodies, larger eyes, smaller jaws, etc. This is not particularly controversial, although I’d really like to see more specific identification of the genes involved. Our shape could, after all, alternatively be explained by character by character changes in gene expression. The neoteny hypothesis implies that a large cranium and small jaw are correlated, that is, by changing one regulator of growth you get both effects. It would also be possible that they’re uncorrelated, that (as a simplified example) one gene that generates larger brains evolved, and that a second gene for reduced jaws evolved completely independently.

Neoteny can also be a mosaic process. Big head and small jaws are a retention of a juvenile character, but other features, like our bigger noses and ears as adults compared to babies (creepy visualization: imagine a baby with a nose as big in proportion to its head as an adult’s; all cuteness disappears). Even if the neoteny hypothesis is generally valid, it can’t explain all the features of an adult human, and does not imply that humans are all big babies in every respect. Donald Trump excepted.

That’s the background. Now for the pseudoscientific appropriation of a concept from development and evolution.

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My new answer to every question

When a student comes to complain about their grades, I will answer…

I’m building a wall.

When the local bank asks why I’m waving that gun in the clerk’s face, I will answer…

I’m building a wall.

When the police come to arrest me and tell me to come out with my hands up, I will say…

I’m building a wall. I’m building a wall.

It seems to be the answer to everything.

Great gog, but that man is infuriatingly obtuse. At least the press are beginning to look a bit exasperated with him, too.

Missing the #ReasonRally

You can watch it, sort of, right here:

There’s a lot of stutter and lag in that feed, but you can get the gist. You can also follow #ReasonRally on Twitter. From the shots of the crowd, it looks to be comparable in size to the 2012 Reason Rally — so it’s good, but isn’t showing a lot of growth. It’s also not raining! I hear it’s hot and muggy, though.

I have very mixed feelings about it. I want this event to succeed, but I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for the movement in general — there are just too many asshats within atheism, and rather than disavowing them, the movement seems determined to try and take a middle road, appeasing the people who treat women as subhuman, being reluctant to embrace social justice as the significant contribution atheism can make to society, and regarding minorities as people who should be absorbed into current atheist goals, rather than transforming them. But I’m hoping it will grow and evolve.

Meanwhile, those same asshats are praying for the Reason Rally to fail. You want to see a raging failure to evaluate evidence? Look here.

That’s so dishonest it hurts to see it. No one expected 400,000 people to show up for this event; estimates were in the range of 10K+. So right away it’s an invalid comparison. And then, that’s not a photo of the Reason Rally in progress on the right. If you look at the youtube videos, there actually are quite a few people there, and that photo makes it look as if no one is there at all.

My favorite threat ever

Do you know what Obama is going to do as he leaves office?

The Viacom, CIA-run weapons system is activating the Beyoncés and all the rest of the folks to say, ‘Go out and kill the pigs.’

That sounds awesome. It’s so awesome, I confess that my brain locked up solid for a moment as I imagined it. So Obama has an army of Beyoncés? Please let them loose.

Unfortunately, this wonderful prediction comes from Alex Jones, so you know exactly how credible it is.

Agriculture was a mistake…except to the 7 billion people who wouldn’t exist without it

Jared Diamond’s 1987 article, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, got me wondering. How do you define “mistake”? He doesn’t. What would a successful species look like? He doesn’t say. While it’s thought-provoking, it’s very hard to pin down his meaning without some explanation for those concepts.

The biggest mistake, he claims, was agriculture. He argues against a progressivist view of history, which argues that agriculture couldn’t possibly be a mistake, because it must have improved human lives or we wouldn’t have adopted it, and on those grounds, I think he’s right in principle — we adopt stupid ideas all the time. But then he tries to take an extreme opposite tack, that agriculture was bad for human beings, and there I think he’s going wrong. Agriculture produced a different environment for our species, and it had a mix of consequences.

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