Headhunters

They are a savage breed of subhumans, roaming the globe in search of victims. They dig up graves, they lurk about hospitals, all for an opportunity to snatch up a skull or two to mount in their collections, where other members of the tribe meet to admire each other’s stolen heads. One of the kings of the headhunters was Samuel George Morton, who collected vast numbers of ghoulish remains.

The trafficking of remains belonging to other people’s ancestors dominated Morton’s correspondence. On February 3, 1837, Bostonian Dr. John Collins Warren, an early leader in surgical education in the United States and the first dean of Harvard’s Medical School, wrote to his Philadelphia colleague, Morton, asking, “Have you the Guanche? If not, I can let you have a head.” A couple months later, Warren sent Morton the “head,” along with a brief anecdote about how his friend found and stole it for him.

Today that skull of an Indigenous person from the Canary Islands, Dr. Warren’s gift to Dr. Morton, sits on a wooden shelf in an old cabinet in the basement of the Penn Museum. On those same shelves, in those same cabinets, sit crania of people from other parts of the world.

To be fair, this wasn’t just about frivolously turning a museum into a Hallowe’en haunted house. They had a higher purpose.

Warren and Morton are just two examples of the depraved history of trafficking in the skulls of our ancestors as part of the larger racial science project of the European Enlightenment to “prove” the superiority of the white race. This laid the groundwork for the way that race operates in the present.

Hmmm. Somehow, introducing “science” into the phenomenon just makes it worse.

This wasn’t just an archaic 19th century hobby, either. More recent remains have been collected.

The presence of Black Philadelphians in the Morton Cranial Collection—the same individuals who Penn now seeks to bury—was surfaced by a report written by a Penn graduate student in February 2021. In late April 2021, one of the authors reported that the remains of Black children who were their neighbors, who were murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing, were sitting in a box in the same museum basement. These remains were used as teaching material for an online course.

I wonder what they learned from those bones? Morton’s own science has been thoroughly discredited — he believed that the different races of humans had all been created independently by god, no dark-skinned progenitors in his ancestry, for sure! — and I don’t know what anyone learned by throwing the bones of children killed in a crime into a box.

I’m fine with and see the utility of research and training on cadavers, but they have to be willingly donated, not looted from a grave site. They also have to be treated with respect. The University of Pennsylvania is currently trying to get rid of the skeletons in their closets by rushing to bury them, without doing the appropriate research to identify the bodies they snatched.

I’m left with one question, though. I know where Morton’s grave is — it’s in Laurel Hill cemetery in Philadelphia.

Has anyone got a shovel or pickaxe I can borrow?

You really don’t want to live there

I once worked in an animal surgery, and one night a 150 lb dog hooked a claw under an experimentally exposed carotid artery and exsanguinated itself. I walked into the room in the morning to find a lake of blood turning dark brown, full of fibrous clots, and the poor dog dead in the middle of it. I don’t know why I suddenly thought of that. Maybe it has something to do with the choice of colors in this map.

That’s the current state of anti-trans legislation in the US, a spreading pool of hate oozing up the middle of the country. Florida has already gone necrotic.

They also have maps of the legislative status in 2022 and 2023 where you can see the reds darkening over time as the evil spreads — you can also see that Minnesota has been getting bluer, at least. There’s a sickness in this country that is getting worse.

I can’t believe I’m gonna say something nice about Lauren Boebert

All I can say is…you go, girl.

Boebert built her career on sanctimonious, though often incoherent, lectures on the supposed threats to the family of leftist sexual “depravities” like same-sex marriage or contraception use. She also filed for divorce last month, a fact that only got into the press this week. This follows other comical examples of Boebert’s “family values,” such as celebrating teen pregnancy or standing by her now-to-be ex-husband after he exposed himself to teen girls in a bowling alley.

Her choice to leave Jayson Boebert might be the first sign that there’s functioning brain activity in Lauren Boebert’s skull. As the bowling alley story suggests, the guy is a creep. He started dating then-Lauren Roberts when she was 16 and he was 22 years old. She dropped out of high school to give birth to their first child at 18. They got married two years later. During this time, he was arrested on domestic violence charges after a fight with her. In August, he was still at it, getting the cops called on him for reportedly threatening neighbors.

She’s a great big evil hypocrite who is taking advantage of liberal social policies, but that’s exactly what they are for — to give even evil fucks the right to self-determination. Even right-wing Republicans who aren’t very bright.

This story is tasty gossip. But it’s also a window into an aspect of red state life that hasn’t been much discussed, one which is likely fueling the ugly surge in misogynist rhetoric and policy being pushed by Republicans, especially the men. The dark little secret of red state life is there’s a lot of Lauren Boeberts out there: Conservative women who disavow feminism, but, when given a shot at more independence for themselves, gladly use hard-won rights like divorce and abortion. Republican men are getting increasingly angry about even this minor loss of control over women.

The Onion explains trans sports

This is exactly how transphobes think trans athletes think.

Cackling as the steps of the dastardly plan crystallized in her mind, local trans teen Brie Chandler told reporters Tuesday that she had hatched a nefarious plot to undergo years of medical treatments and counseling to win at swimming. “It’s oh, so simple: several years of sweet-talking medical professionals, receiving hormone therapies, and enduring complex gender-affirming surgeries, and that swimming trophy will be mine!” said the 17-year-old high school senior, who provided a step-by-step account of her knavish conspiracy to take fourth or even third place in a high school or Division III collegiate swimming competition by transitioning to a female identity. “I don’t even want to be a woman—I just want to win at swimming. Imagine how I’ll laugh with glee up there on the winners’ podium, knowing that all I had to do was lie about my gender identity issues through months or years of psychiatry sessions, take a shitload of androgen blockers, go to speech therapy, and recover from multiple invasive surgeries! Those feelings of isolation as my family members struggle to accept my social transition, the bureaucratic headaches of having to change my legal documents to reflect my correct identity, and becoming more likely to be the target of harassment from strangers will be nothing compared to holding that trophy in my devilish little hands!” The trans teen noted that there was only one thing threatening her nefarious ploy to change her gender to beat several girls at a regional swimming competition, which is that she doesn’t know how to swim.

Maybe it’s just me and my overall lack of interest in sports, but I always wondered what was so valuable about a trophy or an entry in a record book that you would go through so much upheaval, and so much public vilification, to get a small and hypothetical edge in a competition. Is it possible that being trans doesn’t extirpate one’s interest in sports?

The creationist heat problem…SOLVED!

Every once in a while, it sinks into the creationist mind that they have a problem, the heat problem. They extraordinarily rapid transitions they claim had to have occurred — a globe-drowning deluge falling out of the sky and surging up out of the earth in a year, vast amounts of lava building huge geological features in a geological instant — would involve the release of immense amounts of heat, among the multitude of impossibilities in their flood myth. Just ask Phil Plait.

Creationists need the Earth (and the Universe, don’t forget) to be 6000 or so years old, due to a lengthy list of “begattings” in the Bible. The problem is, we see lots of processes going on right now that are very slow — but we see their effect because the Earth is incredibly old. But if the Earth is young, these processes have to have been cooking a lot faster in the past. Cooking indeed, because these forces expel a lot of heat. And it can be hard to dump that heat: it has to go somewhere (like an oven heating up a room when you open the door), and we just don’t see that happening.

Just imagine all the tectonic activity that we say was spread out over billions of years compressed into a single year, as creationists believe — there’d be enough heat generated to melt the crust of the Earth. Or consider all the radioactive decay that occurred to generate the elements we find on the planet, which we say is an indicator of great age. They want all that to occur in about 6000 years, postulating in some cases that radiometric dating is falsified by accelerated rates of decay…boom, that would mean natural nuclear bombs would have been popping off constantly.

Some creationists realize this, and invent all kinds of wacky mechanisms for dissipating planet-melting quantities of heat. Dan Phelps finds one who admits the one true solution: voila, it was a supernatural miracle.

However, it is important to appreciate that our inability to identify an acknowledged mechanism for removing the excess heat deposited during and after the Flood, an issue first identified over 35 years ago (Baumgardner 1986), is only a problem in the sense that it represents the limited nature of our human understanding. In a biblical context there is no fundamental problem because God purposely brought about the Flood (Genesis 6:17) as a judgment on the wicked human race of Noah’s day and covenanted with Noah to preserve human and animal life through the cataclysm (Genesis 6:18). He sovereignly accomplished both objectives, implying that environmental temperatures could not have risen beyond biological endurance limits. The only real problem is our current lack of understanding of how this was accomplished; the Flood account in Genesis 6–9 does not tell us directly whether supernatural processes were involved, though it seems very likely that they were. The same basic issue arises in connection with the topics to be covered in Parts 5 (heat due to Accelerated Nuclear Decay) and 6 (heat due to bombardments from space) of this series, and will be considered at greater length in Part 7.

I’ve been saying for years that creationists have an easy out for dealing with the difficulties their model generates. Just say it was a miracle. Just say God did it.

Usually they are reluctant to do that because it’s an admission that they don’t actually have any kind of scientific explanation.

For the birds

The Washington Post is claiming that listening to bird songs is good for you.

Looking to improve your mental health? Pay attention to birds.

Two studies published last year in Scientific Reports said that seeing or hearing birds could be good for our mental well-being.

So give them a listen as you learn why they may help.

Research has consistently shown that more contact and interaction with nature are associated with better body and brain health.

Birds appear to be a specific source of these healing benefits. They are almost everywhere and provide a way to connect us to nature. And even if they are hidden in trees or in the underbrush, we can still revel in their songs.

OK, fine, I will believe that going on regular walks in the park, paying attention to your environment, and living in a place compatible with other living things, is beneficial. I object to the idea that the effect is specific to birds. Why not spiders? A stroll in the park and checking out the trees and underbrush is something you can do while spidering, too.

You aren’t going to hear spider songs unless you have much better ears than I’ve got, but on the plus side, spiders don’t start shrieking and screeching and whistling outside your bedroom window at 5am.

Summer plans

I have turned in all my grades, and it’s beginning to sink in that there will not be a relaxing summer of relaxation. We’ve got an arachnology conference coming up at the end of June — the core data is all done, but we’ve got some details to fill in and lots of pretty photos to take, and we have an ongoing project in putting together a staging series. We’re also going to make some field trips throughout the summer to get out of the lab and see some sunshine and more exotic spiders. I’m also reviving my course in developmental ecology next spring, so I’ve got to do all the prep work for that this summer.

I just want to take a nap.