How does this nonsense persist?

I keep seeing lies about biology like this on social media. This is all wrong.

A man’s DNA can stay in a woman for years sometimes. The DNA of other men can even affect her next child’s physical features or mental traits especially if the women had a child with another man or even a miscarriage or abortion. This was probably well know by the ancients or modern day religions like Islam which is why they would strongly prefer to marry and have children with virgins. So let it be known fellas, the more your girl slept around before you met her the more men’’s DNA is flowing through her like ghosts of the past, and her 🐱 is the cemetery gates

I have embryology textbooks all over the place, and this is what they have to say.

Sperm can survive in a man’s testicles for a few months. That’s a pleasant environment for a sperm cell, but even there they’re undergoing a slow process of maturation, and are eventually going to be broken down and resorbed. That’s the maximum longevity for these cells.

A woman’s reproductive tract is warm and moist and allows for limited survival, but is adapted to protect her from infections by maintaining a mildly acidic environment. It’s a somewhat hostile place that has to tolerate foreign cells, but not for long — sperm will last for 3-5 days, not years.

You may have heard of a phenomenon called microchimerism, in which fetal cells, shed during pregnancy, persist for years. These are somatic cells, not sperm cells. Sperm cells are highly specialized and have minimized their cytoplasm and cannot survive for that long.

The textbooks usually mention that sperm can survive for about an hour outside of a human body. That’s optimistic (or pessimistic, if you want to avoid pregnancy). Evaporation or absorption of the surrounding fluid is going to kill the little fuckers pretty fast.

It’s clear how these bad ideas get around — the hint is in the text. The “ancients” or “religion” are terrible sources of information, since none of them had anything but the vaguest notion of how reproduction or inheritance work, and didn’t even know about the existence of cells until, at best, three hundred years ago. Another obvious source is a cultural bias favoring virginity (a bogus concept already), and this is an attempt to rationalize that belief with made-up “facts”.

If we’re going to hang any member of the “loser generation,” start with…

He looks like a genuine American Psycho

Joe Lonsdale. He’s emblematic of the problems of the rich: he’s a billionaire, he’s an entitled dumbass, he despises education, and he wants to kill people less privileged than he is. He has a name for students who seek accommodations for disabilities.

Loser generation. At Stanford, it’s a hack for housing, though and at some point, I get it, even if it’s not my personal ethics. Terrible leadership from the university.

College is only for rich, healthy people who want to join a frat. He also disparages university education.

Claiming your child has a disability to give them a leg up became an obvious dominant game theoretic strategy for parents without honour in the 2010s. Great signal to avoid a family / not do business with parents who act this way.

…

No great companies are interested in the BS games played by universities.

What great companies? Lonsdale was a member of the PayPal Mafia, and he made his fortune at Palantir — not a great company by any means, but a damned evil one. He got a BS degree in computer science from Stanford, one of those elite colleges that the rich pollute with their bogus aspirations. Who needs an education when any dumbass can get filthy rich by gouging government contracts and being buddies with other amoral billionaires.

Remember, this guy was a cofounder of the University of Austin — he’s undermining his own scam by scorning universities, which tells you he’s not very bright.

Now he’s also defending turning murder into spectacle.

Joe Lonsdale defended open-air executions in a series of posts on X, saying their reintroduction would be an example of the “masculine leadership” the country is sorely lacking.

“If I’m in charge later,

Wait. Hold it right there. He has hopes of being in charge? Dear god no.

we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others,” he wrote. “Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Biggest sign of an entitled asshole: he throws around the word “masculine” as if it is a flawless great good, and treats “feminine” as a weakness. I want leaders who are human and humane, and don’t think more than half the population are unsuited for learning or leading because of their biology.

Acquit Luigi Mangione. His job isn’t done.

Another mass shooting

This time, at Brown University. It’s deja vu all over again. For some of the students, this was their second school shooting.

As the deadly attack unfolded at Brown University, leaving students hiding under desks and reeling as gunshots rang out, the scene was eerily familiar for at least two students.

Years earlier, Mia Tretta, 21, and Zoe Weissman, 20, had both survived school shootings. “What I’ve been feeling most is just, like, how dare this country allow this to happen to someone like me twice?” Weissman told the New York Times.

Two people were killed and nine others wounded on Saturday after a man dressed in black opened fire during final exams at one of America’s most prestigious colleges. Hundreds of police spent the night scouring the campus and nearby neighbourhoods as the suspect remained at large.

I’m working on some simple statistical problems for my genetics course — you know, basic stuff like the probability that two rare mutations would simultaneously occur in a single individual, etc. I’m not going to set up any problems around this kind of event in America, because this has become too real and too close to home. Also finals are an easy target: students are under stress, they’ve been openly studying (and complaining!) for weeks, and the finals schedules are easy to find online. It’s like we’re advertising that a herd of students will be gathering in a large space at precisely Day X and Time Y, and nobody plans on bringing a gun to such an event, other than cowards with nefarious intent. Maybe we need to start being more secure and confidential with this kind of information.

This story ends with another coincidence. Every story about a mass shooting somehow ends with a fairly typical and familiar conclusion.

Saturday’s attack has again cast a spotlight on longstanding calls for gun control in the US, where gun laws rank among the most permissive in the developed world. So far this year, there have been 389 mass shootings across the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines incidents where four or more victims have been shot. Last year, more than 500 mass shootings were reported.

Yeah, how weird that every story has to end with a conclusion deploring the USA’s insane gun policy.

I have another familiar part of the conclusion: nothing will be done.

I’ve been distracted lately

If you’ve noticed that I’m posting less, it’s the timing: my sabbatical is ending, I’m getting ready to plunge back into the teaching grind in January, and I’ve got a lot of prep work to do. And then we were hit with more cloudflare errors…but now we’re back.

Last year, I incorporated a significant unit on race and genetics; this year, I’m going to prepare the students a little better by including readings from the scientific literature throughout the semester, so I’ve been searching for good, easily digestible papers on the subject. One that I found (but probably won’t use in the course) is “Teaching the Science of Race and Racism,” by Kevin N. Lala, Jasmeen Kanwal, and Kalyani Twyman, which came from this book, Innovations in Decolonising the Curriculum: Multidisciplinary Perspective. The abstract for the paper hit me a bit hard, personally.

Social Science departments of universities regularly teach the history of scientific racism and how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race. By contrast, biology departments rarely embrace this challenge, and ‘race’ and racism barely feature on the curriculum. Seemingly, professional biologists shirk any social responsibility to educate future generations about these pressing social issues, despite the fact that racism is heavily reliant on the propagation of biological misinformation and that biologists are well-qualified to teach facts related to ‘race’ and racism accurately.

Harsh, but that’s why I added the topic of race to an otherwise convential transmission genetics course. I am feeling simultaneously vindicated and embarrassed for my discipline. I guess I’ll have to continue expanding on the subject.

I don’t think I’ll be facing much pushback from students and colleagues — the authors didn’t, after all.

Here we describe the experience of teaching a senior undergraduate course entitled ‘The Science of Race and Racism’ within the School of Biology at our institution in the UK. The module discussed the history of scientific racism, how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race and tackled race and sport, race and health, and race and intelligence controversies. Misgivings that delayed our offering the course proved unfounded: the course was extremely positively received by the students, and extraordinarily rewarding to teach. We encourage others to grasp the nettle and teach similar courses.

My students seemed to appreciate it last year, let’s hope they like it and learn something this year. I might only be teaching this course this year and next year before finally retiring!

Where’s his white hood?

He’s always been this revoltingly racist, but somehow he got elected, because a lot of the citizenry are revoltingly racist.

Trump lied. Back in 2018, it was reported that he used the phrase “shithole countries” to describe various nations of brown people, and he denied it, claiming that he [n]ever said anything derogatory about Haitians. He was quite vehement about it, issuing repeated denials, claiming that this was another Democratic effort to discredit him.

That was then. Now, in 2025, open racism is fine and popular.


Trump, Dec. 9: I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.

Audience member: Shithole.

Trump: I didn’t say shithole, you did. [Laughter.] Remember, I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So, they came in, and they said this is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We wanted to be honest, because our country was going to hell, and we had a meeting and I say, “why is it we only take people from shithole countries,” right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few, from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.

Two things about that speech. I avert my eyes from Trump typically, because I despise him so much and am sick of seeing him every goddamn day, and I instead focus on the gawping baboons in the claque behind him. Where do these people come from? What is wrong with them, that they would laugh and cheer at such ignorant remarks? These are the people who would attend a lynching and pose for photographs with the corpse afterwards. They are the monsters in our own backyard. We’ve got all this facial recognition technology that is currently used to track down people who oppose fascism; every one of these videos ought to be labeled with the names of the people performing hatefully in them: like, “at 1:18, Ralph Goonburger of Altoona, PA howls joyfully at a racist remark,” just so future generations can appreciate the contributions these otherwise unnamed citizens are making to the culture.

The other thing is that I, personally, am descended from immigrants from Norway and Sweden (and also England). Much of the history of my family in the 19th century was generation after generation of people from Norway bringing in new wives from Sweden and raising big families on frigid farms far from the mainstream population, creating kids with thick accents to work as farm laborers. We managed to avoid the worst of the general bigotry because it was displaced to more obvious targets — African and Asian peoples — but we had much in common in our circumstances with the Somalis and Hmong who followed along later. The only grounds for singling us out as “nice people” (we are nice people!) is the color of our skin. I cringe to see my tribe brought to the front of the room to be presented to the class as one of the good ones, setting us in opposition to our fellow, equally worthy, equally valuable citizens as somehow better. We aren’t. They aren’t lesser.

It’s ironic that he’s been complaining bitterly about Minnesota lately, a state where we acutely aware of and proud of our makeup as a blending of Scandinavian and German immigrants, with a good population of Native Americans (who we are embarrassed to say were treated shamefully by the state), which has been welcoming to other immigrant populations from Africa and Asia. We do have horrible racists living here, but generally, we’re conscious of them and try to do better.

What he was saying was simply blatant bigotry. That’s our president, the racist-in-chief.

It must be because of his German ancestry. We should work harder to keep those people out.

Famine fears allayed

I’ve got all these spiders getting to a size where fruit flies don’t cut it anymore, and unfortunately, my mealworm colony crashed, I tried buying live critters online but they’re expensive and half of them died en route thanks to the bitter cold, so I was panicking that this new generation of black widows might go hungry. This is not good. I was planning to start breeding in the next week or so, and hungry females are more likely to feed than to…ummm, mate.

Ice fishing season to the rescue, just in the nick of time! This time of year a popular bait is the lowly wax worm, so I was able to get a few dozen quite cheaply at the local bait shoppe.

Spiders love these things, but I can only get them during ice-fishing season. Fortunately, that lasts until April/May, so by then my mealworms should be back on track.

Good to know the administration has its priorities straight

Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
…
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.

Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.

Sympathy for Samantha Fulnecky

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!

Racist old fool trash-talks Minnesota

Worst president ever.

Mr. President, thank you. Um, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is saying that he’s actually proud to have the largest Somali community in the country. And his police chief,
he’s a fool.
Well, his police chief is also saying,
I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian. Look at their nation. Look how bad their nation is. It’s not even a nation. It’s just a people walking around killing each other. Look, uh, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. [Not true]It’s a fraud. She tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because, you know, just happened. She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.[Why? Because she’s black and a member of the opposition party?] And I’m sure people are looking at that. And she should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, man, they have destroyed Minnesota.[Cool. I’m looking out my window at the snow coming down. Doesn’t seem to be destroyed] Okay, Minnesota, you have an incompetent governor. You have a crooked governor. He’s crooked as hell, but he’s incompetent. [no evidence given]
Uh Waltz is he’s should be ashamed. That beautiful land, that beautiful state, it’s a hell hole right now. [I don’t know about that. I kind of like it here] And the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain. [Isn’t that what Donald is doing here?] You have her. She’s always talking about the Constitution provides me with uh go back to your own country and figure out your constitution. [She’s an American citizen, she is talking about her constitution. Donald just doesn’t like the American constitution] All she does is complain about this country and without this country she would not be in very good shape. She probably wouldn’t be alive right now. So Somalia is considered by many [When a student hands in an essay with this kind of vague handwaving and evidence free claim, I fail them] to be the worst country on earth. I don’t know. I’ve I haven’t been there. I won’t be there anytime soon. I hope. But uh what Somalia what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota is is not even believable. It’s not even believable. [Correct. What the president says about Minnesota is not believable] And a lot of it starts with the governor. A lot of it starts with Barack Hussein and Obama because that’s when people started coming in. And you have to have people come in that are going to love our country, cherish our country. They want to kiss our country good night. They talk about our country. We want them to pray for our country. This is not the people living in Minnesota. And she’s a disaster. She should not be and her friends shouldn’t be allowed. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people. Okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people because they don’t represent the interests of our country. [She represents my interests well. Trump? Not so much] Anybody else? There you are.

That’s just appalling. He just rambles on lying, and dumbass people accept it.

Are the Washington press corps going to just stand there and take it? Trump needs to be deposed and leave office immediately.