Do you want $100,000? (Or is it $200,000?)

I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.

One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.

The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.

‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.

It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.

So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.

Fox News is mad at a Minnesota teacher

And it’s not me! They’re upset because a St Paul science teacher is a socialist, and not shy about it.

A Minnesota science teacher in the Saint Paul Public Schools district lambasted cell biology lessons, particularly on mitochondrion, for containing “capitalist” propaganda, Fox News Digital found.

Mandi Jung, a teacher at Highland Park Middle School, said, “Lately, there’s been a lot of conversation about teachers indoctrinating students to their beliefs. And I always find this funny because our children are seeped in capitalist indoctrination from like the second they’re born, basically.”

She’s right, you know.

Jung proceeded to provide the “perfect example” of how “capitalist indoctrination” is expressed in her seventh grade science classes.

“Seventh grade science… [is] the year that you learn that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and all this cell biology. So at the end of the unit, I have [students] take a test. And one of the questions is ‘A person says the nucleus is the most important organelle in the cell. Do you agree or disagree, and why?”

“And almost every child says, ‘Yes, I agree. Because without a boss, the cell would be in total chaos.’”

Jung added the students’ responses “cracks me up,” and went on to claim microscopic bacteria were the “original anarchists.”

“Bacteria don’t have a nucleus, and they are arguably one of the most successful classes of organisms on the planet. Bacteria out here being the original anarchists, right? No nucleus, no master. Seize the means of metabolism. I don’t know. It’s funny to me,” she said.

She’s right again! I’d also mention our erythrocytes, which lack a nucleus and seem to function just fine. It’s a good point she’s making, that all the organelles in a cell are functioning cooperatively, without any one running the show.

Fox News makes her point for her, and finds it outrageous that anyone would have an anti-capitalist opinion, and went running to the administration to tattle on her.

Fox News Digital asked the Saint Paul Public Schools district whether Jung’s commentary is part of its curriculum, and they sent over a science unit used in the district. The district did not directly answer the question.

Jung frequently posts anti-capitalist views on her social media platforms.

For example, she shared on Twitter, “You are not a capitalist, you are an exploited worker with Stockholm syndrome.”

The sentence in the middle is revealing: she says these things on “her social media platforms.” She is allowed to hold her own opinions, you know, and she was making a valid point with her test question, even if the anti-science twits at Fox don’t understand it.

She’s been in trouble with Fox before. She dared to hand out a survey in class asking their preferred pronouns.

The questions asked students about their preferred pronouns and names, and whether those can be used when speaking directly with a student’s parents.

Some of the questions included:

“What name should I use when speaking to your parents?”
“What pronouns should we use when we talk about you? (CHOOSE AS MANY AS YOU WANT)”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to your parents?”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to other students or the class?

Are you horrified yet? Of course, Fox News went screeching to the authorities. They got rebuffed.

Fox News Digital reached out to the district for comment, and a spokesperson referred to existing policy which said, “Respect all students’ gender identity and gender expression by honoring the right of students to be identified and addressed by their preferred name and pronoun.”

They go on to complain that she asked these questions of students without telling their parents. They’re keeping the parents “in the dark”! I guess students aren’t allowed to have autonomy, or question capitalist hegemony, or even consider the fact that there are forces that want to keep students in the dark.

I also wish to report Mandi Jung to the St Paul school district…for a commendation. We need more teachers like that.

He’s making a list…

There’s something suspicious about making lists, especially when the list-maker clearly has nefarious intent.

Today it has been reported that Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas attempted to get a record of all transgender people who have legally changed their gender on their drivers license in the state. Although the initial request only asked for the monthly numbers of those who changed gender markers, the request did state that they may need drivers licenses and ID numbers later – some of which were eventually delivered. This comes months after Paxton sent a letter to Governor Greg Abbott that stated the parents of transgender children in Texas should be investigated for child abuse. This policy has been nearly universally decried and led to harsh investigations and suicide attempts among trans youth in Texas. Fears of registries continue to grow in the transgender community as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and other states all consider policies that would create lists of trans people in the state. These lists can ultimately be used for nefarious means, especially if you believe that states will continue to target transgender people with laws designed to further restrict and criminalize their lives.

I wonder why he wants a list of all the trans folk in Texas? Do you think it’s so they can deliver appropriate health care more efficiently?

Just when I think I’m out, they drag me back in

OK already. It’s supposed to be my break, but I had to take care of some things, for the spring term. So I got students registered for my writing course, got flies ordered for my genetics course, and worked out my spring calendar. One pleasant surprise: my schedule fell out in such a way that I have no classes on Friday (three day weekends all semester long!) and no class before 11:45, which is a bit of a waste since I’m up by 6am every day anyway. Although it does mean I’ll have a fair amount of Spider Time to look forward to.

Now go away, job. I don’t want to think about you any more until January.

Except for the grading I have to do on Saturday, that is.

The ugly death of Twitter at the hands of a clown

Some of us are trying to make ends meet. Some of us are worrying about how we can afford retirement. Some of us are looking at medical bills and weeping. But not Elon Musk! He’s the what-me-worry kid. He borrowed billions for an impulsive purchase of Twitter, and he’s not worried at all about his rather desperate situation.

With interest on his loans totaling over $150m/month and a company grossing $5B before screwing it all up and chasing the advertisers out, Twitter’s reluctant purchaser Elon Musk seems to be running out of options.

He’s bleeding $150 million every month on just the interest payments? On a company he is visibly mismanaging? In his shoes (his brightly-colored, oversized clown shoes), I’d be a wreck. I’d be worried about all the employees I was letting down, and how I’d meet operating costs, let alone the interest. But not Elon! He has a plan!

To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.

Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.

The aggressive moves signal that Mr. Musk is still slashing expenditures and is bending or breaking Twitter’s previous agreements to make his mark. His reign has been characterized by chaos, a series of resignations and layoffs, reversals of the platform’s previous suspensions and rules, and capricious decisions that have driven away advertisers.

Whoa, you can do that? I could just refuse to make our mortgage payments or skip out on our credit card bill? That would free up a whole lot of money that I could spend on fun stuff.

I think, though, that at some point the law would catch up with me, and I’d be evicted or forced to meet my contractual obligations or maybe even be arrested and jailed. Could that happen to the second richest man in the world? Probably not, because the world is not just. We’ll have to settle for watching his reputation get flushed away.

The devils on Mars

When I was a boy, we lived for a time at the edge of farmland — acres and acres of lettuce and corn. My brother and I would often wander those fields, looking for entertainment. We’d scan for anything, whether it was a chance to skip stones across a pond, or climb a tree, or poke a stick at a skeletonized dead animal, or find an opportunity for a dirt clod fight, or just whatever. One of the things we would do when the season was right was dust devil chasing. The right season was late spring before the planting or the fall after the heads had been plucked and the corn reduced to stubble, after at least a week of dryth, so there was dust, and then we’d see the dust devils skirling about. What else would a couple of 12 year olds do but try to run and catch them? We rarely succeeded, and when we did it accomplished little more than tousle our hair and get grit in our eyes.

I thought of this because there was a strategy we didn’t try, which was to stop and wait for one to spawn nearby and fortuitously run over us. That’s never an option for 12 year old boys, but that’s what NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars did. They just waited for a Martian dust devil to happen on them, and recorded it.

Murdoch said the team’s success in capturing a dust devil’s sound reflects both luck and preparation. The rover’s microphone takes recordings lasting a little under three minutes, and it does that only eight times a month. But the recordings are timed for when dust devils are most likely to occur, and the rover cameras are pointed in the direction where they are most likely to be seen.

“Then we have to just cross our fingers,” she said.

That clearly did the trick, because Perseverance managed to capture the dust devil through multiple instruments, registering the drop in air pressure, changes in temperature, the sound of grains making impact, all topped off with images that show the size and shape of the vortex.

And now we can hear it!

That’s the sound of lonely ghosts on a dead planet.

Well, well, well…look what just got published in Nature

Nature‘s Journal of Human Genetics, that is. It’s a little piece titled “The collective effects of genetic variants and complex traits” by Mingrui Wang & Shi Huang, and the abstract is a bit odd.

Traditional approaches in studying the genetics of complex traits have focused on identifying specific genetic variants. However, the collective effects of variants have remained largely unexplored. Here, we evaluated whether traits could be influenced by the collective effects of variants across the entire protein coding-region of the genome or the entire genome. We studied the UK Biobank exome sequencing data of 167,246 individuals as well as the genome-wide SNP array data of 408,868 individuals. We calculated for each individual four different measures of genetic variation such as heterozygosity and number of variants and two different measures of the overall deleteriousness of all variants, and performed correlations with 17 representative traits that have been studied previously. Linear regression analysis was performed with adjustment for age, sex, and genetic principal components. The results showed a high correlation among the six different measures and an inverse association of two well-correlated traits (educational attainment and height) with the total number of all variants as well as the overall deleteriousness of all variants. We have also categorized the genes based on whether they are expressed in the brain and found that the association with educational attainment only held for the brain-expressed genes. No other traits examined showed a significant correlation with the brain-expressed genes. The study demonstrates that common traits could be studied by analyzing the overall genetic variation and suggests that educational attainment is inversely related to genetic variation.

Basically, the authors did some correlations on genomic data in a database, and they think they’ve found an inverse association — high genetic diversity in a population is coupled with low educational attainment. That is, coming from a region with high genetic diversity, like say, Africa, is correlated with, for instance, lower education. To which I would suggest that maybe that’s not surprising, that a continent that has been exploited and colonized for centuries, might have historical reasons for its people not having the advantages of the colonizer countries. But this paper wants to imply that that educational handicap is genetic.

Who reviewed this thing, anyway?

The authors use cautious wording in the abstract. The corresponding author, Shi Huang, is letting his racist freak flag fly on Twitter, though. He’s explaining how we’re supposed to interpret it.

Our latest paper. We show that genetic diversity is a new genetic factor in cognition, challenging the Out of Africa model. GD in human is under selection and has little to do with long evolutionary time or being human ancestors.

Excuse me? We’ve already gone from “educational attainment” to “cognition,” which is enough of a leap, but he’s somehow using these correlations to claim that modern humans did not evolve from African ancestors? Data not shown. Then, remarkably, he claims that genetic diversity is somehow selected for, that it has nothing to do with history or ancestry. Fucking data not fucking shown. This makes no sense. How does he get to this conclusion?

The San have the highest GD and the lowest cognition/civilization in humans and are believed to be the ancestors, i.e., Out of Africa. The only alternative is the maximum GD theory that GD has an upper limit, which is inversely proportional to brain function or complexity.

That this African group have high genetic diversity compared to other populations has been noted before, but “lowest cognition”? That’s absurd. This smacks of the discredited pseudo-scientific racism of Shockley and Lynn. “Lowest civilization”…again, how do you measure that? It’s more Western bias.

Then he completely demolishes his credibility. No one believes the San are the ancestors of other groups of people; they can’t be. They’re a modern human culture. They’re as derived as any other population on the planet, equally divergent from our shared distant ancestors. This guy is a professor of genetics? And there he goes again, blithely transforming “educational attainment” into “brain function or complexity.” That’s not valid.

The thread just goes haring after all kinds of absurdities.

This inverse relationship holds well among species (the higher the complexity, the lower the GD), which means that the highest GD of the San may be the reason for their cognition level being the lowest. The origin of humans may actually not be in Africa but in E Asia.

Wait wait wait. So he’s arguing that highly inbred species with high degrees of homozygosity, like many lab animals, are going to have a higher “cognition level” than wild and genetically diverse animals? How did he measure “complexity”? He’s claiming a correlation throughout the animal kingdom, did he really measure the genetic diversity of a large number of species and show that small-brained species are a causal consequence of having greater genetic diversity? Alternative hypothesis: the larger your brain, the more specialized in that category you have to be, and the smaller your population size can be, thereby limiting the number of variants that can exist in the population. You aren’t large-brained because your population has limited diversity, and also, because all Shi Huang has done here is a correlational analysis, he can’t claim causality.

He really has a bug up his butt about the out-of-Africa model. I suspect it’s more about not wanting to have African ancestors, and is fundamentally a racist bias.

For completeness’ sake, here are the rest of his claims. I don’t care anymore. He’s a fool.

Our study analyzed genotype/phenotype from more >400,000 people in the UK, calculated multiple measures of GD for each individual, and examined which traits these measures were associated with using linear regression analysis that has controlled for confounding factors.
Among 17 traits examined, only education attainment, a proxy of IQ, has the best association (inverse) with GD. Only brain-expressed genes, but not brain-non-expressed, showed an association. The association of non-syn variants is higher than that of syn or intronic variants.
Low cognition is subject to natural selection, and so the underlying GD must be also rather than being time-related and not subject to natural selection as assumed by the molecular clock and neutral theory. The finding challenges the assumption of the OOA model.

I tried to dig deeper into who this guy is, but was repelled because he seems to be beloved by the scientific racists. For instance, I got a little of his background from the Free Times (FriaTider), a radical right wing newspaper in Sweden.

Shi Huang received his doctorate from the Univ. of California… and then worked… for a couple of decades, including as an associate professor at The Sanford-Burnham Institute. In 2009 he moved back to China and has since been a professor at Central South University in Hunan. Today he has a professorship in genetics, epigenetics and evolution…

Unfortunately, I got there from a horrible racist blog called “subspecieist”, which, I’m sorry to say, I won’t link to because it is so deeply despicable, but I will mention a previous “discovery” by Shi Huang that got them extremely excited.

Geneticist Dr. Shi Huang: Shocking evidence, Africans closer genetically to Chimpanzees than Eurasians

Jesus. What an ignorant crock of shit. No. That makes no sense at all. Both modern Africans and modern Eurasians are equally distantly removed from our chimpanzee ancestors. Shi Huang really desperately wants to argue that he didn’t have any black ancestors, I guess, and he’ll make all kinds of illogical leaps to demonstrate that.

And this crank still gets published by Nature.

The crisis of gullibility

Follow the dogwhistles

I feel like I’ve been railing against nonsense for my entire life. I got into the skepticism side of everything starting with my opposition to creationism — there I was, diligently studying developmental and evolutionary biology, and I started encountering these raving loons who outright rejected all of science while claiming the earth was 6,000 years old and that all life was magically created in a short week. It was offensive. It was absurd. Yet those kooks continue to thrive.

Since then, the bullshit has continued to pile up. We have flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, sovereign citizens, crypto fanatics, and satanic panics, all patently bogus, and they have led to a world of transphobia, homophobia, insurrections, armed militias, anti-education sentiment, and a Supreme Court and Congress packed with some of the dumbest idjits ever to grace this country. People hold the incredible as credible. The media take the silly seriously.

What is going on? It’s an epidemic of idiocy.

I admit that I live in a bubble of sanity, but people outside that bubble aren’t stupid. They’ve been misled and misinformed, their fears have been stoked, but the people wearing MAGA hats and attending anti-vax rallies are also a minority. Perhaps a growing minority, but still…they shouldn’t have as much influence as they do. In a sensible world, they ought to be laughed at.

I’m going to blame social media. I saw it on Facebook, with old friends getting sucked down into a vortex of insanity, people self-reinforcing each other over the latest extreme conspiracy theory, which would be actively promoted by the medium. It was an environment designed for kooks; they got free license to say anything, which was fine, but then criticism of bad ideas was walled off and contained, so the circle-jerks grew unchecked. If you dared to speak up and say, “Errm, the world is round, all the evidence says so” you would be shouted down by a massive crowd of people finding confidence in their numbers. It was ugly. I finally had enough and had to leave that site, cutting off all connections and closing my account.

Now it’s Twitter. This service has the potential to be even worse than Facebook, because now it has been bought up by a billionaire with bad taste and bad ideas who is endorsing QAnon, going full anti-vax, and calling for Fauci to be imprisoned. He’s insane. He’s going to lead Twitter into full collapse as a madhouse of raging nitwits.

That also leads into another big American difficulty — the way unfettered capitalism has produced a class of overvalued morons who can buy further degradation of the system.

It’s a nightmare, and I can’t abide it. I’m eventually going to have to kill my Twitter account, in the same way I murdered my Facebook account. Right now, I’m using Twitter as a free advertising service for the blog, and that’s it. I post links to Pharyngula there, but I am as of this moment refusing to engage further on the site: no other chatter, no conversation, no discussion — if you want to talk to me (and I do want to talk with other people), we’ll all have to make the effort to find other ways to engage. I’m on Mastodon, I have YouTube, and most of all, I have Freethoughtblogs.

I don’t know what else to do. Social media is a failed experiment that has had disastrous consequences. Bring back RSS!

Greetings from my new world

It’s all different now. Yesterday was the day of my last big effort in the fall semester, when I sat down for most of the day to put together two final exams. I got them done! I posted them online! The ball is in your court now, students! My sense of relief was immense. It was so great that I went online and watched a movie*, while not feeling the customary dread that I’d forgotten something.

I’m not quite done, but it’s just clean-up left. I have an administrative meeting this morning, and I’ll have to grade those finals this weekend — but one is an optional exam that only a few students will take, and the other is designed to be machine-gradeable.

This morning I woke up to incredible silence. We’re at the beginning of a major snowstorm, and everyone is staying home, swaddled up to keep warm. No cars! Everything is blanketed with snow, muffling the sounds further! Even the birds have gone silent! It’s a good thing my exams are all totally online, everyone should stay safe at home. It’s still snowing, and is expected to snow all day, and keep snowing through Friday.

I should probably stay home too, but I might get out for a walk this afternoon, if it isn’t too icy. Big fat flakes coming down, temperatures that are reasonably warm (right around 0°C), that’s pleasant.

Man, it feels good to shed that load that’s been clinging to my back the last few months.

*The movie was Slash/Back, an Inuit/Canadian horror movie. I liked it! The setting gave a glimpse into the lives of a group of Inuit kids — there were honest illustrations of poverty and alcoholism, but also showed off their amazing self-reliance and casual adaptability. The alien monsters were cool and creepy, too. On the negative side, these kids were clumsy self-conscious actors, the ending was a bit abrupt and rather pat, but I forgave it all for being refreshingly different. I enjoyed it more than the last slickly-made Marvel movie I watched.