Women who don’t want babies are DENYING BIOLOGY!

Here we go again: Jerry Coyne is flogging another dead dichotomous horse. All it takes is for anyone to say that sex isn’t binary, and he charges in over all those people who demonstrate that it really isn’t so simple to say it is too! Now it’s the NY Times, which published an op-ed titled, The Maternal Instinct is a Myth that Men Created. Dr Coyne is not alone — it set the racist and misogynist internet on fire (Go ahead! Google it! I sure see a lot of links I wouldn’t post anywhere.) How dare the NY Times question the purity of women?

Let’s take a look at that article first. I didn’t find it at all objectionable, but then, I am an SJW soy-boy. It points out that simplistic notions of a maternal instinct are invalid — some women are uninterested in, or even repelled, by the idea of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a child (and some men, obviously, are thrilled with the joys of parenthood). It can’t be a simple matter of inheriting a chromosome that makes you want babies — there’s a complex continuum of maternal behavior, and it’s not only exhibited by people with two X chromosomes, or a vagina, or certain hormones, or whatever excuse conservatives have been making for an intrinsic female nature for the last century. There’s a peculiar impulse that makes some human beings want to cast everything in a black/white light, though.

The myth of maternal instinct places a primacy on biological mothers, suggesting the routes to parenthood fall into two categories: “natural” and “other.” It sustains outdated ideas about masculinity that teaches fathers that they are secondary — assistants, babysitters — and encourages mothers to see them that way, too. It undermines the rights and recognition of same-sex couples and transgender and nonbinary parents, whose ability to care for their children is often questioned.

That’s the message: human behavior isn’t binary. The idea of everything about people being the product of simple either/or switches has failed. And if you want to know how such a notion has taken over, we ask, “Cui bono?” It’s men who benefit from enforcing this arrangement.

Coyne doesn’t like that, and he has a rather silly argument against it. It first relies on typological thinking — the average defines the individual.

But to claim that women don’t have a greater desire than men to care for offspring, or have a greater emotional affinity towards offspring, is to deny biology, and evolution in particular. (I freely admit that many men love their kids deeply, and that some men care for them as much or more as do mothers, but I’m talking about averages here, not anecdotes.)

Women (aggregate noun) have greater desire (uniformly, it appears) to care for offspring. OK, what about people who don’t? Are they not women? We’ve seen this flavor of argument before from people who want to claim that some universal characteristic is an unambiguous and unmistakeable marker for sexual identity. Yeah, some AFAB women have wombs. So? Why should that one character define the totality of the person, and why should its absence likewise define other people?

I’m not impressed by his argument — it’s basically the idea that animal females can have babies, therefore we get to associate a whole lot of culturally determined other attributes on them — but I was amused by one thing. He sorta half-assedly cites Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to support his ideas.

UPDATE: In a comment below, Randolph Nesse, one of the founders of “Darwinian medicine,” cites a book I’d forgotten:

If only everyone interested in this topic could read “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species”, Sarah Hrdy’s 2020 book on the topic. And if only the NY Times would review such excellent science books so people would know about them! I am tempted to send Conaboy a copy.

Hrdy is a highly respected anthropologist, and you can order her book by clicking on this screenshot:

I highly doubt that Hrdy sees maternal instincts as pure social constructs designed to hold women down. I’m going to read it, and I hope Conaboy does, too. Then we can expect her to retract her article (LOL).

He hasn’t read it? I’ve read it. It’s a very good book. It doesn’t support his binary reductionism, though, and nobody sees human behavior as pure social constructs — that’s a Pinkerish straw man. She asks hard questions and comes up with complex answers that are entirely compatible with evolutionary theory, but don’t support the kind of binary reductionism Coyne is peddling. She writes, for instance:

Is a mother born instinctively nurturing? (“She is a motherly type,” I’ve sometimes heard it said.) Does something inside her change during pregnancy that makes her maternal? (“Before the baby was born, her nesting instinct really got going.”) Is the increased responsiveness due to stimulation from the infant? (“She just fell in love with her new baby.”) Is a female gradually primed to be a mother by experiences?

For mice at least, the answer to these questions is: all of the above. “Instinctive” is a reasonable way to describe her maternal behavior, as long as it is understood that mother mammals do not necessarily exhibit automatic, full-blown commitment to infants immediately after birth. Rather, her “maternal instinct” unfolds gradually, in “baby steps” in which infants, too, are implicated.

Nature cannot be compartmentalized from nurture, yet something about human imaginations predisposes us to dichotomize the world that way. Nature versus Nurture, innate or acquired. The persistence, decade after decade, of a nonexistent dichotomy puzzles me.

Me, too.

Here’s one of her conclusions.

Rather than some magical “essence of mother,” what makes a mother is that she is (invariably) at the scene, hormonally primed, sensitive to infant signals, and related to the baby. These factors lower her threshold for giving of herself to satisfy the infant’s needs. Once her milk comes in, the mother’s urge to nurture grows stronger still. Furthermore, compared to the father (who also shares at least half of his genes with this infant by common descent), there is a good chance that this infant represents a higher proportion of her reproductive prospects than of his (though not necessarily, if she has several, and this is the only child he ever sires). These factors make the mother the likeliest candidate to become the primary caretaker. But they do not constitute an unyielding prescription.

Well, that neatly answers what Coyne considers to be his definitive point: How do we explain the fact that, across the animal kingdom, when members of only one sex do most of the childrearing, it’s almost invariably the females? Consider it explained without resorting to a universal maternal instinct driving all women’s behavior. Your idea of what a woman is supposed to be and do is not an “unyielding prescription,” it’s neither a “should” nor a “must,” yet that’s how most of these authoritarian thinkers use the concept.

Maybe it would help to treat women as individuals and people first, rather than as avatars of a sex?

Trapped in a cheesy horror movie

I used to think that seeing characters make really bad, stupid decisions in horror movies (“let’s split up!” “let’s have sex in this abandoned cabin!” “let’s read this ancient curse aloud!”) broke the willing suspension of disbelief, but nowadays I think they add verisimilitude. That’s what real people do all the time. It’s what the people in charge, who are supposedly smarter than the rest of us, do. It’s how we’ve bumbled our way through a pandemic.

So this proposal is perfect.

I would watch that movie. I would tell you all that it is perfectly accurate in every detail.

(I still wear a mask at work. I feel so alone. I don’t think the Cassandra character gets to make it to Final Girl, so I’m also feeling a bit doomed. It’s official university policy.)

I hope you weren’t eager to get Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book

D’Souza made a stupid, and clearly debunked, “documentary”, 2000 Mules, in which he claimed Democrats smuggled in crates of faked ballots to steal the election. Now he’s trying to turn it into a book. Oops, a snag.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book version of “2000 Mules,” based on the film that makes widely debunked claims that people were paid to dump fraudulent ballots at collection boxes in key 2020 election states, was abruptly recalled by the publisher Monday, the eve of its release.

Recalled? Publication delayed? You might think that’s a small thing to have happen, except…the publisher is Regnery. Regnery don’t care. Regnery publishes the most godawful stupid right-wing garbage without a qualm.

Now I really want to know what kind of garbage is in the first publication of that book that would make even Regnery gag.

Technoidiocy

Jared Kushner lives in a pampered bubble where he thinks he’s going to be sheltered forever.

From the last year, the one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since I left the White House was, you know, getting some exercise in. I think that there is a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s going to die. So, we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.

There is no evidence that we can increase human life spans much beyond slightly over a century, and the only people claiming otherwise are scam artists or pseudoscientists (or both, <cough> Aubrey deGrey). The reasonable goal is to make our lives productive and comfortable within the limits of our biology, and that’s a good reason for exercise. Not this ridiculous post-human bullshit.

We’re not even doing that, though. Just browsing through the news, there have been catastrophic floods in Pakistan.

Millions of Pakistanis affected by the worst flooding in a decade are in desperate need of aid as authorities say they have been “overwhelmed” by the scale of the disaster, with the country’s climate minister calling it a “serious climate catastrophe”.

The death toll from monsoon flooding since June has reached 1,136, according to figures released Monday by the country’s National Disaster Management Authority.

Have Republicans been helping much with preventing deaths from climate change? Or take a look at the recent heat waves in Europe.

An extreme heat wave that meteorologists call an “apocalypse” broiled much of Europe and the United Kingdom on Monday, and hundreds of people died because of record high temperatures and ferocious wildfires.

At least 748 heat-related deaths have been reported in the heat wave in Spain and neighboring Portugal, where temperatures reached 117 degrees this month.

Gosh, it looks like science, or rather, our technological capitalist dystopia, has been inventing all kinds of unpleasant ways to die.

Mustn’t forget: at least six and a half million dead from COVID-19.

I would also point out that thanks to advances in science, Jared Kushner has an enhanced probability of dying on a guillotine. That’s far more likely than that he’d live forever.

And there are so many ways he could face mortality! Maybe it’ll be in the chaos of a civil war incited by his father-in-law, or in food riots after the collapse of the economy, or in a backstabbing struggle for power in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or his cozy relationship with the Saudis could end in betrayal and sawed off limbs, or he could just get cancer and die. So many possibilities! Science won’t save you from human nature or the physical limitations thereof.

Chew your food!

Don’t just bolt it down! Chew it until there’s no doubting it’s dead. Especially if it’s an octopus.

Stephens says that the 4.6-pound cephalopod appeared to have grabbed onto Gilligan’s larynx with a tentacle, preventing it from reconnecting to the dolphin’s breathing apparatus and effectively suffocating him to death.

“That octopus might have been, in theory, dead, but the sucker was still functional,” Stephens says, adding that while nobody wins in a situation like this, “the octopus gets a bit of a last hurrah.”

What a horrible way to go — not only choking to death, but getting your post mortem photo plastered on websites as an example of gluttony. Or being murdered by a mammal, and having your arms shown dangling from its mouth.

A flimsy excuse to do nothing

When science is being faked in the published literature, that is a big problem. You’d think the gatekeepers would want to do something about it.

In a new report now being made public by Retraction Watch, Artemisia draws attention to four main groups centered on Ali Nazari, Mostafa Jalal, a postdoc at Texas A&M University, Ehsan Mohseni of the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Alireza Najigivi of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The whistleblower lists a total of 287 potentially compromised papers in the 42-page report.

Two hundred eighty seven papers with dodgy data, all churned out by these interlinked lab groups! That’s nuts. It’s practically a criminal enterprise. Part of the problem is at the university level, where the number of papers, without concern for their content, is the metric for promotion. But it’s also a problem with the proliferation of poorly managed journals, where the sole concern is volume and collecting those publication fees.

The guilty person at the journal level here is Guido Schmitz, at the University of Stuttgart, who is the editor of the International Journal of Materials Research, where this crap is published. He had an astonishing response when the bad papers in his journal were reported to him.

I can assure that I do not like fraud in scientific results and I will do my best to prevent them. But on the other hand, I hate anonymous accusations. So it would be my pleasure to follow up this matter after you have discovered your personality to me and send contact data under which I can reach you.

Wait wait wait. Because the person reporting the problem to him, “Artemisia”, is an anonymous whistleblower, he refuses to do anything? That makes no sense. If they had a Nobel prize attached to their name, would he jump up and take care of the problem immediately? Not knowing who they are is reason enough to ignore a credible complaint? This is not how it’s supposed to work. Any action taken would not be on the basis of the say-so of the person reporting it — his fucking job is to evaluate the evidence given and act appropriately.

He has been handed documentation that shows these papers contain falsified images, and he chooses to sit on his hands and not do anything because he doesn’t see a named authority behind the complaint. It’s rank credentialism. He’s also snooty and dismissive.

I will not take any action based on an anonymous accusation. As soon as you discover your clear name, contact address and your personal motivation in this issue, I will consider the appropriate and required means.

That doesn’t matter. If Bozo the Clown hands you evidence that figures were faked and data manipulated, you do due diligence and look at the work and verify the concerns, and then you take action, based on the evidence, not your perception of the authority of the complainant. If you don’t, why were you appointed to be editor of this journal?

Cancel Culture strikes again!

Poor Mary Nicosia. She’s a victim. A wealthy, white victim of racism.

Nicosia spent much of her time at the mic complaining about the cruelty of cancel culture, saying she’s suffered since Jones announced his suit.

The mom teared up about the “unbearable pain” caused to her and her family by the lawsuit by Jones, noting how she was suspended from the board of the Landmark Society of Western New York.

“To see our entire world collapse in a matter of hours was bewildering, it was like a bad dream,” she complained.

Incomprehensible! How could this happen? She just held a Juneteenth party for her rich white friends with buckets of fried chicken and bottles of Hennessy — oh no, that has nothing to do with stereotypes — and then, while explaining herself, it’s revealed that she runs a horribly racist Twitter “parody account”. Ooops. But no, she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body!

I’d love to hear what this crap is “parodying”.

Oh. Her lawyer claims it was about making fun of liberals.

Nicosia’s lawyer, Corey Hogan, displayed the invitation for the party at the presser in an effort to absolve his client of racism, saying it was called the “1st annual Liberal Smashin Splish Splash Pool Party.”

Hogan insisted it was intended to mock liberals, and was about politics, not race, and claimed the KFC buckets were not intended to hold meaning. Most of the decorations, he said, were meant to be “liberal bashing.”

Her husband, a dentist, is also complaining that he was victimized.

Nicosia’s husband, Dr. Nicholas Nicosia, also spoke, insisting that “there’s been nothing with any interaction with us that would even suggest that we’re racist.”

Instead, he complained, it was “cancel culture” — calling it “an organized, malicious, well-orchestrated, politically charged attack” motivated in part because they were seen as a “snooty couple that lives in a big mansion.”

“It took me 32 years to build my reputation, and less than two hours to destroy it,” he sniffed.

I think he was carefully crafting a reputation that, once it was exposed outside their little bubble of entitlement and privilege, was seen to be hateful and horrible. It wasn’t cancel culture that brought it down, he’d just spent 32 oblivious years building a rotten life.

How sad. She coulda been another Libs of TikTok.

Who are these people?

I know their names — Adam Brown, Chris Kemp, Christine Peterson, Gaia Dempsey, Metaculus and Robin Hanson — but I don’t understand why anyone would listen to them babble about subjects they can’t possibly know anything about. So I started listening to this video of a panel about The Far Future & Space Tech Tree: Space & Longtermism, only to have to frequently yell, “how do you know that?” at the screen. None of it made any sense. They’re building castles in the sky on weird presuppositions.

The first guy is Robin Hanson, certifiable whack job, babbling about the risk to his vision of the far future. He’s worried that we’re going to get a world government that is too centralized and too darned successful at making people happy, and that means we’ll lose interest in taking risks, so we won’t expand to fill the galaxy out of fear of encountering big bad aliens.

Think about that. 1) There’s no evidence that a government is taking over the world, and 2) he has no grounds for psychoanalyzing trends over millions of years (yeah, he’s extrapolating over a span that’s probably longer than our species will exist), and 3) he doesn’t like the idea that humans might develop contentment and stability. That would be bad.

It’s nice in a theoretical, principled sense that the professoriate allows people to lounge about and daydream about humanity’s fantasy future, but sometimes you feel like there ought to be at least a token grounding in, you know, evidence of some kind. How could this happen? Hanson is at George Mason University, a place that has been bought lock, stock, and barrel by extremist capitalists of the very far right. The Kochs basically own the place, and it’s become a locus of power for the Federalist Society. You know, the wellspring of the very worst sort of judicial influence.

Documents obtained by alumni and students through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over the past year and one half reveal that George Mason University’s public law school has been taken over by the conservative Washington DC based Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. Since April 2016, the Federalist Society has been influencing faculty and student placement, recommending and establishing legal programs, redirecting large amounts of scholarship revenues to support the Law School’s most-politicized centers for the “Study of the Administrative State” and “Liberty and Law,” and even reorienting the Law School’s judicial law clerk program to place “conservative” law students associated with the Federalist Society as clerks to the nation’s judges.

Two years ago, on March 31, 2016, George Mason University announced that as a result of a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor and $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, it was changing the name of the Law School to the Antonin Scalia Law School. This generated intense controversy about renaming a publicly-funded state law school after one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice in history. Accompanying that controversy were concerns about inappropriate influence by an anonymous donor and the Charles Koch brothers who have long exerted control over George Mason and its affiliated Mercatus Center and Institute for Human Studies. Less known outside of legal circles is that Justice Scalia was the founding faculty advisor to the Federalist Society in 1982 and its highest-profile member and frequent speaker for the next 34 years, with four speeches at Federalist Society events in 2015 alone.

And that, in turn, reflects a distortion of our political economy by the existence of the obscenely wealthy, the billionaires who can use all their money to promote their personal, idiosyncratic beliefs and bloated egos.

One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.
The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.

That kind of money means they don’t have to touch down on reality ever, and it shows. They are not very smart people, they only know how to manipulate the system and maximize profits from their inherited wealth, and that allows them to distort the perception of reality to their advantage.

My only question is…why are really rich people drawn to longtermism? It makes no sense. It’s bad science. Maybe there’s some germ of wish fulfillment there — they imagine living forever and becoming Spaceman Spiff, and going off and dominating the universe in the same way they currently dominate the United States and UK. They want to imagine a world where rich idiots get free rein, like they Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the best way to get that is to put buffoons like Hanson in positions of intellectual influence.

Unpalatable on all counts

I don’t know which would be worse, 55,000 year old beef or the doggerel they served with it. After uncovering a frozen steppe bison in the Alaskan permafrost, this group of university people, for some unfathomable reason, decided to cut off a chunk and eat it. Then someone decide to make a poem of the meal.

The skeleton, the skin, the muscles — all in near-impeccable condition,
Guthrie named it Blue Babe, then sliced off a piece for a culinary mission.

“You know what we can do?,” he asked
Host a dinner party and with cooking the meat, I’ll be tasked.

The Blue Babe neck steak served eight,
With veggies and spices, and lots of booze they ate

Years later, writing about the taste,
Guthrie said, When thawed, one could mistake

The aroma for beef, not unpleasantly earthy.
But once in the mouth, his wife, Mary Lee Guthrie,
Told podcasters from Gimlet, it was worse than beef jerky.

Here’s what it looked like:

I would not consider for a moment the idea of putting any of that in my mouth, especially since decay and bacteria would have predigested it, and who knows what species of organisms had started breaking it down, or what byproducts had accumulated in tens of thousands of years of slow rot.

I suspect the booze was the most important ingredient in the recipe, and in the composition of the poetry.