‘Rawdogging’?

No, just no. I know that language evolves, but sometimes it degenerates in confusing ways. Would you believe “rawdogging” has acquired a new meaning? I know what it used to mean, but now it’s something very different, entirely harmless, and actually rather effete.

A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.

The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.

“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.

This has got to be a joke. You need to be taught how to sit quietly doing nothing on a flight?

But West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

Wait…I usually take the cheapest flight I can get, with few entertainment options, and since the pandemic I don’t take my mask off for the entire flight. I’m a rawdogger now? I thought I just wanted to avoid catching a disease.

It begins. Again.

I’ve been away this weekend. I walked back into the lab a short while ago, and here’s what I found.

A Parasteatoda egg sac had hatched out.

A second Parasteatoda egg sac hatched.

And another black widow produced a third egg sac.

Ooof. I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

The real mission

I lied. We weren’t on a spider-hunting trip this weekend. We were visiting our granddaughter and delivering a bicycle. She took to it enthusiastically, and was pedaling all over her neighborhood with us chasing after.

“We” meaning the crotchety, rickety old grandparents, because Iliana’s mom is still recovering. Skatje has some titanium screws holding her tibia together and her patella is somehow secured in position, and there’s an awesome long vertical scar over her shin, so she can’t keep up. We contributed by bringing her daughter a rapid transport device and turning her loose. She was busy biking all over their apartment when we didn’t take her outside and point her at a sidewalk. I know, grandparents are just the worst.

Then we had to make the long drive back home — 7 hours each way! — and I got my usual reward. I got to stand around awkwardly while Grandma got all the hugs and sad farewells, because I’m the homely, repulsive, off-putting, superfluous male, the danger-even-if-not-a-stranger guy. At least I get to console myself with spiders.

Iliana was a natural, though. She’s going to bicycling across country to visit us (or at least, grandma) someday. When she’s 18, she said. She’s 5½ right now, she explained, so she can’t go that far, yet.

Vacation trip!

It’s been quiet here on the blog over the weekend because Mary & I took off on a short road trip. Obviously the purpose of the whole drive was to find more crab spiders.

Also, the grass spiders have arrived! You can find their silk platforms in the morning, callecting dew.

See? That’s all it takes to draw me away for a few days.

Dembski’s Delusion and Dishonesty Detector

Last night, I saw this video where a trio of Evilutionists romped through a memelist written by a teenager raised on Tumblr quizzes and mocking it.

Oops, no. It’s a 40 question questionnaire written by un-esteemed old crank, William Dembski, which purports to reveal your degree of devotion to the dogma of Darwin. It’s far more revealing of the ignorance of the twit who composed it than anything else. You don’t have to watch the video to deal with this childish test: take it here. It’s bad.

Each item consists of two statements, one being what a creationist imagines an evolutionary biologist believes, and one being what the creationist imagines is actually true. For instance,

1.
•Evolution in the sense that all present-day organisms arose from one or a few ancestors (common descent) is now a proven fact.#
•Evolution in that sense is still an unproven hypothesis.

The one with the # symbol is always the evilutionist position, in Dembski’s mind. In this case, he gets it right, except that I don’t like the word “proven”. It is a fact, though, supported by the molecular evidence.

Other statements get it thoroughly wrong.

2.
•The theory of natural selection (i.e., retention of chance variations) adequately explains common descent.#
•Even assuming full-blown evolution to be a fact, the theory of natural selection does not adequately explain it.

Nope, selection is not sufficient. What about mutation, drift, recombination, and most trivially, that cell division is a binary process? We are all children of our parents.

Others expose creationist misconceptions.

19.
•The concept of “junk DNA” was a major scientific blunder directly attributable to Darwinian thinking.
•Darwinian thinking advanced science by correctly characterizing non-coding DNA regions as “junk DNA.”#

No biologist ever thought non-coding was synonymous with junk. That’s the false idea promoted by creationists.

Others are just plain weird.

30.
•The motivations of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice cannot be understood at the deepest level without a knowledge of evolutionary theory.#
•Jane Austen had no need of evolutionary theory to understand human motivations at the deepest level relevant to literature.

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, when Charles Darwin was 4 years old.

It’s just badly designed, too. Each question has the “incorrect” choice marked with that # symbol, so a creationist can march through, selecting the answer without the # and get a perfect creationist score; if you’re a biologist, you’re often going to be stumped because both options are wrong. Would you believe this “test” was designed for an educational website?

James Barham and I developed this questionnaire some years back for an educational website. To appease the search engines, the website eventually dropped it. Lightly dusted off, it is presented here. The questionnaire provides a useful mirror for understanding the influence of Darwinian ideas on our lives and culture.

It’s more of a mirror for letting creationists see what they want to see. Evolutionary biologists (not “Darwinists”) are invisible in it.

Flawless slasher movie content

We were strolling in the garden, and noticed that the place was full of horny pollinators. If they weren’t eating, they were fornicating.

It was like hanging out with teenagers. And I thought, if this was a 70s teen horror movie, what should I see next? And I was right.

If I were a spider, I’d want to just hang out in flowers and wait for those obnoxious teenagers to stop by. It’s the perfect place to find distracted prey.