“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”

Lenar Whitney, Republican congressional candidate from Louisiana, dared to use that line from Orwell while accusing virtually every climate scientist in the world of lying.

Practically every word in that monolog is a lie, or a product of exceptional ignorance. And the terrifying thing is that she knows it.

… when I pressed Whitney repeatedly for the source of her claim that the earth is getting colder, she froze and was unable to cite a single scientist, journal or news source to back up her beliefs.

To change the subject, I asked whether she believed Obama was born in the United States. When she replied that it was a matter of some controversy, her two campaign consultants quickly whisked her out of the room, accusing me of conducting a “Palin-style interview.”

Unbelievable. But these are the people dominating the Tea Party right now.

By the way, here’s the summary of the recent IPCC report (pdf), if you want to see the data that Whitney pretends doesn’t exist.

You should be afraid

This could be bad. For years I’ve been hearing about the nightmare scenario of global ocean warming rising to a level that triggers the release of methane hydrates locked up deep in the ocean, which then lead to a major accumulation of greenhouse gases. It basically tips over the rate of warming from one regime into another, faster period of heating, very abruptly.

Well, guess what…

Vast methane plumes have been discovered boiling up from the seafloor of the Arctic ocean on the continental slope of the Laptev Sea by a dream team of international scientists. Over the last decade a warming tongue of Atlantic ocean water has been flowing along the Siberian Arctic ocean’s continental slope destabilizing methane ice, hypothesize the team of Swedish, Russian and American scientists. The research team will take a series of measurements across the Siberian seas to attempt to understand and quantify the methane release and predict the effect of this powerful greenhouse gas on global and Arctic warming. Because the Siberian Arctic contains vast stores of methane ices and organic carbon that may be perturbed by the warming waters and Arctic climate, Arctic ocean and Siberian sea methane release could accelerate and intensify Arctic and global warming.

It’s like humans are blithely giving the little nudges that start an avalanche, and then afterwards we’ll look at each other and say “I didn’t do it, it was deep ocean methane!” Or rather, we’ll try to say that while struggling to keep from drowning or cooking.

Please, taunt me some more

The latest gloating meme clotting up my email is this one; a lot of MRAs seem to think this is an irrefutable argument against feminism by a man who supports feminism, me.

sexualharassment

The incident actually happened, and those are my words. I have no problem with that. However, it’s not making a point in their favor.

  • That the incident occurred does not refute anything I’ve ever said; false rape accusations do occur. But notice the last point; they’re relatively rare.

  • In over 30 years of teaching, this was the only time a woman attempted to extort me. Once. In 30 years. At the same time, every year I have heard of rapes and/or attempted rapes on my campuses. Final point stands confirmed.

  • One thing not mentioned in the story: when I went to immediately report this incident, I was not questioned. No one asked me if I’d led her on; no one thought I was making up a story to hurt a young woman; I was taken seriously and the complaint was addressed seriously. In part it was because I acted promptly and got witnesses, but let’s have no illusions — as a man, my word counts for more.

  • Perhaps the most important lesson, that my smirking taunters ought to learn, is that I did not come away from this unpleasant occasion with the idea that all women are conniving “bitches”. I was able to recognize that this was an unusual circumstance with a desperate young woman who was not plotting against me, but on the spur of the moment tried an unlikely ploy to save her grade.

So yes, please do keep trying to strike against me or my reputation with these kinds of games. Only an MRA would think this anecdote is somehow damning.

Oh, so that’s what “cultural appropriation” means

A middle-class British white guy who worked in a mayonnaise factory has retired to pursue his dream of being an Indian — the kind of Indian he learned about by watching spaghetti westerns. So now he makes fancy feathered headdresses and elaborate wooden pipes, just like real Indians do.

You know, I do sympathize with the idea of admiring and respecting other cultures, and I think it’s a good hobby to read about and study diverse people. Indian history actually is interesting, and often tragic, and complex. Maybe he digs deeper, but this story presents his obsession as being more about the idealized exotic Western image of the Indian, rather than, say, the kind of Indian Sherman Alexie or Leslie Marmon Silko writes about.

So this promise is rather horrifying:

The 65-year-old is hoping to take his talks to schools and museums to eradicate some misconceptions there are about Native Americans.

“Eradicate” is not a synonym for “propagate”.

How we got here

It’s been 25 years since Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History crystallized the debate over the importance of contingency in evolution, most famously illustrated by his metaphor of “replaying the tape of life”. If we could roll back the history of life on earth and restart it in the pre-Cambrian, would we see the same forms arise again? Would we have dinosaurs a few hundred million years later, and bipedal intelligent apes after a half billion years?

Gould’s answer was no — that the role of chance was too great, and because the forms of life do not represent optimum ideals built by perfectly plastic forms, but rather are kludges built atop limiting and enabling prior adaptations. Some people, like Simon Conway Morris, argue otherwise that there are ideal forms (including us bipedal anthropoids) upon which life will tend to converge. I favor Gould’s view rather strongly — it’s absurd to talk about evolution without an appreciation that all organisms are the product of history, and that what traits we have now are almost entirely contingent on what traits our ancestors had.

My favorite example of the error of limited thinking about adaptive ideal forms is a comparison of bony fish and squid. Both are fast swimming, active predators that are torpedo shaped in motion (physics constrains that!), but in detail everything is completely different. If the pre-Cambrian ancestor of all chordates were accidentally squashed, there is no reason to assume that the pre-Cambrian ancestor of all molluscs would then evolve a line of torpedo-shaped predators with brainy skull at the front and an undulating muscular body for propulsion. Why should they? They have a demonstrated capacity in our universe to evolve into torpedo-shaped predators with tentacles at the front and propulsion via a jet of water squirted out of a muscular mantle cavity.

The body plan of the ancestor dictates what capacities the descendant will have. There is no reason to assume that the world as we see it now was inevitable — that’s simply a failure of imagination and reason.

An article by Zach Zorich explores other examples of evolutionary contingency. Much of it is dedicated to that fascinatingly concrete example of actually being able to roll back the tape of life, the Lenski experiments, in which populations can be frozen and restarted at any time. In that case we seen on a molecular level that the evolution of specific biochemical problems is not inevitable at all, but depends entirely on the presence of prior mutations. History, and your parents, matter!

But I also like this example.

“Not everything is possible,” no matter the process, Wake explains. “Organisms evolve within the framework of their inherited traits.” Organisms can’t pass on mutations that kill them or prevent them from reproducing. In the case of Hydromantes salamanders, their ancestors had to overcome a serious limitation: To acquire their ballistic tongues they had to lose their lungs. That’s because their tongue partly derives from muscles that their predecessors instead used to pump air into the lungs. Now, that formerly small and weak muscle is much larger and stronger. It wraps like a spring around a tapered bone at the back of the mouth, and when the muscle squeezes, the bone generates the force that fires the tongue along with its bones out of the mouth. So, Hydromantes’ ancestor did not simply acquire a mutation and evolve a fast ballistic tongue. Instead, the adaptation followed a series of mutations that first enabled the creature to overcome its reliance on lungs for oxygen and buoyancy control. Each change was contingent on the one before it.

Chameleons, on the other hand, retain their lungs. Instead of re-tooling their lung anatomy, they have evolved a piece of collagen that allows them to catapult their tongues at prey. On the surface, salamander and chameleon tongues converge, but not upon closer inspection. It takes a chameleon 20 milliseconds to shoot its tongue at its prey, a positively glacial pace when compared to the Hydromantes’ five-millisecond firing time. Why are chameleons stuck hunting with such slow tongues? The answer is that they have encountered a kind of obstacle to convergent evolution. The chameleon’s tongue is fast enough to ensure their survival, but they lack the “framework of inherited traits” to evolve the salamanders’ deadlier ballistic anatomy. The chameleons have reached what biologists call an “adaptive peak.”

Before anyone says that ballistic tongues represent an example of convergence, too, I’ll agree…but with the caveat that this is an example of modifying extant traits in the tetrapod toolkit. Two vertebrates evolved ballistic tongues, because they share the trait of having tongues. Squid also have a high speed prey capture mechanism, only lacking tongues, they use a pair of arms.

As D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson put it, “Everything is the way it is because of how it got that way.” You can’t appreciate evolution unless you also recognize the path it takes…it’s all about the trajectory.

Twitter’s #1 job must be to serve the harrassing/bullying community

If you’ve been following the world of Twitter (cue chorus of people who insist they’d never ever use stupid ol’ Twitter), you know that there’s been one of those epic corporate missteps: The CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, volunteered to answer questions sent to…a hashtag on Twitter, #askcostolo. What followed was amusingly voluminous, as the angry horde of Twitter users rose up as one to flood the hashtag with their anger at the incompetence of the company in providing tools to deal with abusers. As currently configured, Twitter makes it easy to sign up willy-nilly for anonymous accounts and for users to make racist and misogynistic threats without fear of punishment, or to create accounts solely for the purpose of stalking people online…and there are thousands of Dennis Markuzes out there, fulminating obsessively and hiding behind a flurry of throw-away accounts, all happily enabled by the mostly male engineers at Twitter.

And that’s the real problem, that Twitter won’t even take the basic steps of making it possible for users to block repeated harassers. It’s not clear why; it is clear that they don’t seem to think rape threats are actionable issues.

Anyway, one person made some simple suggestions for the least Twitter could do.

Block all users whose accounts are less than 30 days old

This is easy—it takes an arrow out of the quiver of serial harassers who use alternate accounts generated as needed.

Block all users whose follow counts are less than whatever threshold users set

Google used the social proof of “back links” to establish credibility and ranking for content over 16 years ago. This is old hat by now. Users should be able to block anyone who can’t convince other people to follow them.

Rings of followers created just to subvert this will have to be detected.

Again, hire a Google engineer. They’ve cracked this one.

Block new users whose @replies include any words the user decides

Users who are on the receiving end of harassment face startlingly unimaginative adversaries. The  same slurs and threats are used over and over. Brand new account with no followers using the n-word? Block!

That’s stupidly easy to express algorithmically.

Block any user who has been blocked by more than N people I’m following

Let’s also share the load. If all your friends block someone there’s a decent chance you’ll want to also.

Auto-blocks are opaque

There should be no feedback when a behavior triggers these measures. The harasser should believe that everything is working as normal.

The first two suggestions are a bit problematic in that there are easy ways to get around them: the obsessed stalkers will just build up a small population of sock puppet accounts that will also link merrily to each other. It’s a bit of work and requires long term planning, but really…that’s what these loons do. They also put up barriers to brand new users.

But the others…wow. Do you realize that Twitter lacks even the most basic functionality of enabling keyword filters? We’re talking 1990s technology here, and the brilliant minds at Twitter corporate are unable to grasp the concept. They also violate basic security concerns: if you are being harassed, and you block an account, the owner knows right away to switch to one of his backup sock puppets.

One example: If you follow @AngryBlackLady, who writes about reproductive justice and racism, you know that she has been harrassed nonstop for two years by a goon who makes new twitter accounts just about every day, specifically to dun her with racist slurs and misogynistic noise:

This is basic. This is easy. Any idiot could provide functionality that would reduce this problem. Twitter, apparently, only employs exceptional idiots.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: We’ve got company

We’ve been invaded by a pair of groundhogs who have taken up residence under our deck, and are apparently dining grandly on our weedy overgrown backyard. They’re evasive, though, and I’ve only got this one poor shot of one of them resting in the dappled shade.

ourgroundhog

OK, here’s a clearer shot of what they look like from the web.

groundhog

These two are big beasts, and they probably outweigh our cat, who claws frantically at the door to the deck when they make an appearance. I have mixed feelings about their presence — on the one hand, they have gnawed on things in the past, and now we’ve got a mating pair — but on the other hand, they are native Minnesotans. Maybe I should leave them be.

On the third hand, they do look rather plump and meaty, and if we weren’t all vegetarian, might be tempting to toss in a stewpot…

I get email

I propose a general rule: the surest way to get someone outraged is to criticize their heroes, whether they’re political, religious, scientific, or atheist. The only solution is to not have any heroes.

It seems that I dared to criticize John C. Wright, and one of his fans wrote to disagree with me.

Mr. Myers,

I was made aware of your blog post by John C. Wright’s mention of it. I suggest you read his opinion of it, it is instructive to say the least.

I have never read anything written by Vox Day. However I have read nearly everything by John C. Wright. I share his opinion that your choice of choice of “damning” passages written by Vox Day could have been better made. Particularly by a biologist.

Because there’s nothing more hilarious than a supposed scientist arguing that fertility in women is a social construct, and the fact that women are the only type of human who can bear children is a political issue.

So really, if that’s the worst thing you could come up with written by Vox Day, you should get yourself another horse to beat. This one’s dead.

I also saw your post, “I’ll be good Mommy…” I’m reminded of a post I wrote a while ago regarding the propaganda tactics being taken up by your fellow travelers in the mainstream press. They seemed distastefully familiar for some reason.

http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2012/12/where-have-i-seen-that.html

In case your finger is too tired to click, I’ll sum it up for you. Your behavior in demonizing gun owners is a tactic first used to good effect by Mr. Joseph Goebbels. My father and uncles spent a goodly portion of their late teens and twenties sorting that little issue out. I could go through the whole rest of my life quite happily without seeing that repeated, thanks very much. Sadly, it looks like you aren’t going to let that happen.

The Phantom

“The Phantom”? Really? Was The Shadow too busy to write?

You might be wondering what Wright said about me. Here’s Wright’s comment:

This is an interesting link. It is from a soul who thinks it is immoral to act professionally, that tolerating someone of unpopular, or, rather of rightwing opinions (which are here said both to be poison and to dominate the narrative) is intolerable. You are not supposed to read books and judge them on their merits. Politics is precisely what a professional association of science fiction writers gathered to protect the interest of science fiction should be about.

With utterly unintentional hilariousness, the writer denounces Theodore Beale in words of thunder as a misogynist, and to prove the point quotes a utter bland an uncontroversial statement that women are better off marrying young, when they are at their most fertile and most able, thanks to the energy of youth, to care for their babies. (He has said many more misogynistic things, some of which have indeed offended me; why pick this passage? I can only speculate it is because here Beale puts his finger on what feminists hate most. They hate being women, they hate being wives, they hate being mothers, they hate fertility, and therefore they hate babies with the hatred of Moloch)

For them, everything is politics, and politics is religion, and anyone not on the side of the Leftwing angels is on the side of the Rightwing devils. These are intolerant, zealous, uncivilized fanatics. It is not because of us that there is no middle ground, no quarter, no rules of engagement. This is their life. This is their all.

No sane man would agree to join, pay dues to, or remain a member of a professional organization like that.

Let me break that first letter down into two parts. The first part is this bizarre argument that Vox Day has said many things that are far worse than the one quote I gave — please, Lord, may I never have defenders this incompetent. Then, further, they make the claim that what Day/Beale wrote was “a utter bland an uncontroversial statement” [sic] that I, as a biologist, ought to know was completely true, and that somehow I was “arguing that fertility in women is a social construct”. Say what? It seems the one quote I excerpted was a particularly good one for smoking out people who thought it was innocuous. Here is the post I wrote, and here is that bland and uncontroversial quote from Day/Beale:

Because raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.

I guess I need to spell out what is objectionable in that statement to the clueless: it is not that only women are capable of getting pregnant, or that fertility is a social construct. It’s the assertion that the purpose of women’s lives is to bear children. It is the reduction of half of humanity to one biological function, without recognizing that they can have additional abilities and aspirations that give them fulfillment, and that they can contribute to society in a great many ways. It is the assumption that culture is by and for men, and that women’s role is to support them…and that they should be damned grateful for that privilege.

That Wright and “The Phantom” think that statement is uncontroversial shows how deeply the poison has gone.

The second part is the traditional invocation of Godwin’s law. The post he linked to is stupid and vacuous; it was prompted by Rachel Marsden’s response to the Newtown murders, in which she encouraged more background checks to keep guns out of the hands of the “mentally stunted, emotionally disturbed and deeply insecure”. From that beginning, “The Phantom” leapt to the conclusion that Marsden had just called all gun owners “mentally stunted, emotionally disturbed and deeply insecure”, and therefore, she was just like Joseph Goebbels because… insert cartoon of overweight gun owner fondling a gun, followed by unrelated Nazi caricature of overweight Jewish man, therefore liberals equal Nazis.

It’s the flimsiest excuse to compare gun owners to victims of the Holocaust that I’ve yet seen.