It’s time for my semi-regular Patron Q&A! It’s like a colonoscopy, only more frequent.
I’ll answer any questions anyone might have, but if you don’t ask any, I’ll just talk about the transition from “On Vacation!” to “Jesus, I have so much grading to do!” It’ll be fun!
I want to know where these people learn their “basic science”.
That reminded me of this post on We Hunted the Mammoth.
They are so confident and certain when they state absolutely batshit looney misinformation. Where do they learn that kind of confidence? In church, I suspect, because they aren’t getting it in any legitimate school.
I wonder if he confused conception with photosynthesis? Nah, that would be light plus carbon dioxide.
Don’t worry that something might shatter that astonishing confidence. He’s currently doubling down.
I slept in until 8:30. I have now lingered over my coffee for a whole hour. Time to get to work!
Tomorrow they turn in a homework assignment, and I’ll do exactly the same routine on Monday.
The bee don’t care about deadlines either, she’s just doing her thing.
There’s one thing my students haven’t quite figured out yet. I do set deadlines on all the assignments, because the software requires it, but…I don’t care. I just want them to do the work so they know how to do the work, and so I can see where maybe they’re going down the wrong path, but deadlines are an invention of The Man (or maybe Satan). Try to turn things in on time so they don’t pile up on you, but if it’s a few days late, I’m OK with that.
But these are all conscientious Midwestern kids, many of them first generation college students, so I get an amazing flood of email the day of, full of apologies and reasons why they didn’t meet the deadline, which I have to read, too. I get all these panicky messages sent just before midnight, “oh no I couldn’t solve this problem, I’m struggling with it, I can’t get it done on time” followed by a 3am follow-up, “I figured it out, I submitted it a little late, I hope that’s OK”.
I just want to say…Dudes. It’s fine. The software sets this specific 11:59pm deadline minute, but I’m sleeping then. I’m not hovering over the computer, ready to dock points from anyone who turns it in at 12:01am. Or even noon the next day. The only real deadline is when I go over the answers in class a few days later, because I want you to think them through yourself, rather than getting handed them. If you turn something in a little late, well, that’s a time-management issue you should work on, but I’m going to pretend it was turned in precisely on time and give you full credit, because I don’t care. All I care about is whether you learned the subject matter.
I guess I’d have to worry if every student procrastinated and I couldn’t get the bulk of the grading done at the time I set aside for it, but that hasn’t happened yet in 40 years, and the Midwestern work ethic means it’s not going to happen in the near future. Chill. Go for a walk. Enjoy the flowers and the spiders while you can. Biology isn’t a punishment drill, it’s supposed to be something that makes you happy.
That doesn’t make me trans, does it? Or bi? I want to be both the winged wild beast and the happy bookreader. I’m intensely envious of both lifestyles.
Wait, why does he soar into the night if he’s got that whole library right there? Maybe he’s visiting bookstores to stock up on new literature.
Unfortunately, the article is 5 years old, so I haven’t found out yet if they’ve completed their conquest. It’s going to be an improvement, though…and once the spiders complete their terrestrial take-over, this will be the planet of the 8-limbed overlords.
I know, I should be grateful. Unfortunately, Sturgeon’s Law applies, maybe especially to free books.
So I got one yesterday, and the back cover was simultaneously tantalizing and repellent, which much I agree with, and other bits that sound like nonsense, and I think the author’s confidence is unwarranted.
I don’t know what the hell the book is about, or who it’s for — it seems to be trying to get an atheist audience, with a little sop thrown in for theists. I gave it the benefit of a quick glance, and opened it to see…
Oh, no. Not this creationist nonsense. I tried to figure out the context — is he arguing that this is wrong or right? (It’s not right.) Is he just trying to present different perspectives? I couldn’t tell. If you can’t be clear about your intent and meaning, I’m not going to work extra hard to extract it for you. All I know is he has a great fondness for logic games, frequently breaking into numbered syllogisms that left me bored.
I tried to find the bit where he explains how he knows a god is the energy source for the universe, but I gave up.
You get a reputation as an atheist, and suddenly everyone is sending you bad proofs. It gets wearing.
I need a great big box of these cards.
I’d give the first one to Joe Rogan, who was diagnosed with COVID-19, and thought it serious enough to spend buckets of money on treatments — mostly useless crap — and is now going around and saying it was no big deal
I got up in the morning, got tested and turns out I got COVID. So we immediately threw the kitchen sink at it — all kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin … everything. And I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip, and I did that three days in a row.
Vitamins and NAD will not treat a viral infection. Ivermectin is garbage. The monoclonal antibodies would help, but you know, if he’d been vaccinated he’d be making those himself.
The Food and Drug Administration has authorized monoclonal antibody therapy as an emergency treatment for COVID-19 to fight off severe illness. The FDA has not, however, approved the use of ivermectin, which some vaccine skeptics swear by — despite a lack of scientific evidence to support their claims, not to mention the potential harmful effects of taking the anti-parasitic drug at high doses.
IV treatments such as NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) and vitamin drips are usually administered in an effort to improve general fitness and wellness — though there isn’t much scientific proof to back their efficacy either.
I’m sorry he got better. People might have noticed and done the sensible not-like-Joe-Rogan thing if he’d died.
I’m gonna need a big box of those cards. After Rogan, I’d have to hand them out to everyone in my university administration, and then I’d have to go to the local grocery store and carpet the floor with them, and then walk the streets and stick them in the windshield of every over-sized pickup truck driven by maskless yahoos, and then…
I think there was a mixup at the hospital, because there’s no way a schlub like me could have fathered that gentleman.
This is some horrifying dystopian bullshit. Already, Texans are lining up to commit economic terrorism on doctors at the Pro-Life Whistleblower site. Report a doctor! Make beaucoup bucks!
The Texas Heartbeat Act is unique because it calls upon private citizens to hold abortion providers and their enablers accountable. Any person can sue any abortion provider who kills an unborn child after six weeks of gestation—and any person can sue anyone who aids or abets these illegal abortions. All of these individuals must pay damages to the person who sued them of at least $10,000 for each illegal abortion that they perform or assist.
Any person can sue any abortion provider, and just reporting them grants you $10,000 dollars.
And our Supreme Court just let this slide.
Here’s one possible solution:
Honest biologists like Sahotra Sarkar, that is. Unfortunately, the people that pushed the Texas anti-choice law are liars for Jesus, not biologists at all.
A recent friend-of-the-court filing in that case implicitly claims that biology – and therefore biologists – can tell when human life begins. The filing then goes on to claim explicitly that a vast majority of biologists agree on which particular point in fetal development actually marks the beginning of a human life.
Neither of those claims is true.
There is no definitive single marker for the moment when a zygote becomes “human” — we can’t even define satisfactorily what humanity means, but one thing for sure, it’s not going to be discovered by molecular biologists. Maybe by philosophers or artists or writers or something, but I suspect that if you asked them, they’d all shrug and say they don’t know either.
As a developmental biologist, I’m satisfied with the idea that a human being emerges gradually from progressive interactions between cells and environment — it is not a unitary thing, and therefore doesn’t have a single discrete point of appearance. That’s been the position of informed scientists since roughly Aristotle.
That doesn’t stop the liars for Jesus from pretending that biology supports their claim.
The most recent high-profile example of this claim is in that amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the Mississippi case.
The brief, coordinated by a University of Chicago graduate student in comparative human development, Steven Andrew Jacobs, is based on a problematic piece of research Jacobs conducted. He now seeks to enter it into the public record to influence U.S. law.
First, Jacobs carried out a survey, supposedly representative of all Americans, by seeking potential participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and accepting all 2,979 respondents who agreed to participate. He found that most of these respondents trust biologists over others – including religious leaders, voters, philosophers and Supreme Court justices – to determine when human life begins.
Then, he sent 62,469 biologists who could be identified from institutional faculty and researcher lists a separate survey, offering several options for when, biologically, human life might begin. He got 5,502 responses; 95% of those self-selected respondents said that life began at fertilization, when a sperm and egg merge to form a single-celled zygote.
That result is not a proper survey method and does not carry any statistical or scientific weight. It is like asking 100 people about their favorite sport, finding out that only the 37 football fans bothered to answer, and declaring that 100% of Americans love football.
In the end, just 70 of those 60,000-plus biologists supported Jacobs’ legal argument enough to sign the amicus brief, which makes a companion argument to the main case. That may well be because there is neither scientific consensus on the matter of when human life actually begins nor agreement that it is a question that biologists can answer using their science.
That is methodologically a terrible survey. I’d like to know the details of the question: the summary implies that they were given “options”…a multiple choice question? Was “This question is bullshit” one of the options? I think probably not. Just the idea of putting the question in the form of multiple choices or true/false limits the potential accuracy of the answer.
The bottom line is that ideas are being misrepresented by these supporters of abortion bans, and no, biologists cannot answer, or have a significantly more nuanced answer, than they want, so they are intentionally lying to the courts. Can we get ’em for perjury?
The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human.
Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges.
Except, please, keep the theologians out of it. They’ve only got dogma, not evidence.
