Copulins?

Over on We Hunted the Mammoth, there’s a discussion of this odd post by one of those Men Going Their Own Way about copulins — which are apparently sex pheromones secreted by the vagina. This was the first I ever heard of them, which gave me a moment’s panic. I am a biology professor, and I do teach human physiology, and here was this phenomenon I’d never encountered before? Worrisome. But only for a moment. There are a lot of details I know nothing about, so maybe this was an opportunity to learn something new.

I’ve got a small collection of physiology and neuroscience texts, so I checked there first. Nope, unheard of term, nowhere in any of their indices.

[Read more…]

Online Gender Workshop: Detour, Social Construction Ahead edition

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

To understand gender, it is vital to understand how it comes about. While the etiology of individual gender identities is very much in doubt, the etiology of gender as a framework, as a concept, that is not in doubt: Gender, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is a social construct.

Few feminists would dispute that. However, when I taught courses on gender-related topics to people who already espoused the idea that gender is a social construct, it frequently, even typically, became clear that they didn’t understand the statement at all. So while many might not dispute it, the statement itself is not helping us. Indeed, it appears to be hurting us. So let’s add to the discussion another statement, more commonly disputed among feminists: Sex is a social construct.

There. That should make all the rest easy.

[Read more…]

Coelacanths illustrate the difference between real science and creationist science

Ken Ham says something stupid and dishonest again.



The fish that forgot to evolve? Here’s the difference between observational and historical science: ow.ly/Ug1wU

If you bother to read the awful article, it includes a standard creationist canard: Coelacanths haven’t changed a bit over their long history, and this disproves evolution.

Well, this fish apparently forgot to evolve for 65 million years! You see, the living coelacanth is easily recognizable from the fossils. Despite having supposedly “primitive” features, many of these features not seen in any living vertebrates, this fish has survived basically unchanged for an alleged 70 million years.1 How is this possible?

Well, it’s a matter of interpretation. You see the fossil of the coelacanth is studied in the present—we observe it today. But what happened to make it a fossil is in the past—it’s historical science because we can’t directly test, observe, or repeat the past. So what you believe about the past is going to influence your interpretation of the evidence. In the case of the coelacanth, evolutionists have the presupposition that the fossil record shows Earth’s history over millions of years. So when they find this fossil that doesn’t have a living match today, they interpreted that fossil to have gone extinct millions of years ago. Now, the fossil itself didn’t tell them that. Their interpretation of that fossil through their evolutionary worldview drew that conclusion. And that conclusion turned out to be very wrong. Coelacanths were happily swimming deep in the ocean all along and were even being sold in fish markets, unbeknownst to scientists.

[Read more…]

Looming weekend of labor and dread

My students are turning in lab reports later today. That means…I’ll have to read them all, critically. Imagine how much fun I’m going to have tomorrow! No, don’t, I don’t want you to start crying.

And I just realized that I haven’t even started preparing my talk for Skepticon, and I’ll be there in lovely Springfield, Missouri at this time next week.. Wait, no, I always wait until the last minute to throw that together, so no problem. I’ll just do it on the flight.

No! Hey! I don’t have to give a talk at all this year — I’ll probably finish that Ann Leckie novel on the flight. And then I’ll just relax with the happy enthusiastic people attending the conference, and I’ll be one of them! I expect to see you there, and we’ll spend long days and late nights talking pleasantly together. And I’ll have all the lab reports graded, and we can heal all the scars together.

OK, Canadians, you can stop crowing at me now. Message received.

Yeah, they’re all sending me messages bragging about the new Trudeau cabinet: gender parity, diverse, and representative of all of Canada. I am duly impressed.

Now can we get the American presidential candidates to pledge to do likewise with their appointees, once they’re in office? It would be the right thing to do.

I do worry a bit, though, about all the token men they’d have to sign up for positions, taking away slots from better qualified women.

Liars

It’s yet another tale of misogynists building myths about feminists. Feminists are all out to get those hard-working, super-smart guys working in the tech industry, don’t you know.

Yesterday, Eric Raymond, a software development and open-source software advocate, published an explosive allegation on his blog: a recently disbanded group called the Ada Initiative, which advertises itself as helping make tech more welcoming for women, had been attempting to entrap men by using “honey pots” to seduce them and then accuse them of rape. “The MO was to get alone with the target, and then immediately after cry ‘attempted sexual assault,” wrote Raymond’s source, an IRC correspondent he doesn’t name but who he says has been “both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past.”

Worst of all, these evil feminists have been gunning for a high-profile target: Linus Torvalds, the tech-hero founder of Linux. “Linus hasn’t spoken out about this; I can think of several plausible and good reasons for that,” writes Raymond. “And the Ada Initiative shut down earlier this year. Nevertheless, this report is consistent with reports of SJW [social-justice-warrior, a derogatory term used frequently in anti-feminist writing] dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere and I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.”

[Read more…]

You found the capslock key once, can you find it again?

This rant pushes a lot of my buttons: ALL CAPS, the pre-declaration that some might find it offensive, the dishonesty, the pseudo-piety that makes forcing your beliefs on others a requirement, and that the idea of leaving people alone is an intrusion on your rights. And of course, it’s the War On Christmas.

capslockxmas

Look, raving nutter, I don’t believe in Jesus. You can’t demand that I accept your wacky myth in order to enjoy a day off in December. You believe in Jesus. I don’t have the power to rummage around in your head and change that — you can believe the 25th of December is your special day to love Jesus even more, and I’m just going to shrug and say, “OK. Knock yourself out, guy.”

If you want to believe that Armistice Day celebrates the time Jesus put flowers in soldiers’ rifles, go right ahead; you want to celebrate Arbor Day by praising Jesus’ wood, fine; if you think the 4th of July honors the day Jesus visited Philadelphia, you get to. You can tell people “Merry Christmas” on Halloween if you want, there’s no law against it. That I choose not to believe your bullshit is not an infringement of your rights.

Besides, you’re probably doing Christmas wrong. There’s supposed to be lutefisk and lefse, and krumkake for dessert, and if you don’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian, you’re going to Hell. If you don’t agree, then apparently you are waging war on my Christmas.