Cat story

As many of you know, I live with an evil cat who demands my obedience. But she’s also a weird cat (all cats are weird) who has some predictable behaviors.

Every morning is like Christmas when I get up. She knows I’ll use the bathroom first thing, so she rushes in there, finds a good vantage point, and watches patiently while I pee. Then she runs up and down the hallway because her patience has expired, and while I do pointless things like comb my hair and brush my teeth and put on a shirt, she has to gallop back and forth waiting for me to finish, because the real point of my rising is to give her her morning wet food.

I walk to the kitchen with this annoying beast darting about underfoot, I don’t know why — she could make me trip and fall and break my neck and provide a big mess of meat to gnaw on, but she’s very picky: her cat food has to be fish flavored, and she won’t even touch chicken or beef or long pig (I haven’t tried the latter, though, maybe she has an appetite for it). Once I get to the kitchen, she starts yowling and making strange sounds, as if she’s trying to tell me to hurry up in Human. She’s uncontrollably eager, until I arrive at her plate with an open can of food. Then she goes silent and sits and waits.

I plop a big lump of fishy brown stuff on her plate. She looks at me nonchalantly — she seems to be saying, “What? For me? You shouldn’t have.” She walks a little closer, stops, sticks her neck out and sniffs cautiously. “Really? I don’t know if I should.” She looks at me again. “I’ll think about it. You may go now.” Once I turn my back on her, only then will she charge in and snarf it all down.

She puts on this little act twice a day, because I feed her when I get up in the morning and when I fix dinner for us humans. I haven’t told her yet that I’m not fooled, because if she thought her secret was out she might decide to silence me.

They knew and did nothing?

Swamp Creature

Should I be shocked about the Matt Gaetz scandal? Maybe. But he was such a transparent sleaze that I kind of felt like his behavior was going to be exposed sooner or later.

What really surprises me, though, is how flagrant he was. He was waving around photos of nude women and bragging about his sexual conquests to his peers in congress, and they said nothing. They built a wall of support for one of their own, instead.

The most surprising thing about Gaetz’s current position is just how unsurprising every Republican in D.C. seems to find it. But there’s a good reason: Not only did Gaetz show off naked pictures and videos of his supposed conquests to other Republican members of Congress, his staff apparently sent around videos of his most outrageous exploits to their counterparts with other Republican officials.

When it comes to Matt Gaetz, Republicans weren’t facing vague rumors about his conduct, they were getting bragging self-confessions from the man himself. And they were getting both photos and video, some of it delivered by Gaetz right from the floor of the House.

Part of what made Gaetz feel as if sending his sex tapes to fellow Republicans acceptable can be seen in a new Orlando Sentinel article that describes Gaetz’s feelings about such images. Gaetz believes that once he has an “intimate” picture of someone, that image is his to use however he wants. That includes feeding his ego, or using the image as revenge porn. Which is why Gaetz as the primary source of opposition to a bill against revenge porn when he served in the Florida house.

Alexandra Petri nails it on the appropriate response.

I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is because the first time went better than it should have.

To me, this is something you do, ideally, zero times. You never experience the impulse to do it, and you lead a pleasant life. You travel. You eat lunchmeat sandwiches. Maybe you do a marathon, or climb something. You lead a blithe existence for many decades, you die in your bed in your mid-nineties surrounded by your cherished relatives, and in all that time, you never walk up to a colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives and out of nowhere present him with a nude photograph of someone you claim to have had sex with.

But if you can’t do it zero times, then ideally it happens only once. It happens only once, because the moment you do it, the person you show it to responds the way a person should respond. You produce your photograph to your colleague, and your colleague looks at you and says, “Never show that to anyone, ever again. Go home and rethink your life. I do not feel closer to you. If anything, I want to have you removed forcibly from my presence by strong gentlemen whose biceps are tattooed with ‘MOM.’ The fact that you thought this would make us closer makes me question every decision in my life that has led me to this point. Leave now and never come back.”

That’s exactly right. I’ve never been in Congress, but in the communities I have been part of, I’ve always been the rat who, if told of something unethical you or someone else did, I’d not only say “no, that’s not acceptable” to you, but I’d also tell everyone else. That’s another part of the problem, though: once you do that to your sleazy colleague, no one ever confides in you again.

I can understand the wall of silence his fellow Republicans put up around Gaetz’s disgusting behavior, but it doesn’t excuse it. A conspiracy to hide Gaetz’s behavior required the involvement of more than just Matt Gaetz. Maybe none of his colleagues participated directly in the abuse of women, but they enabled it.

While we’re pointing out cowards who tolerated revolting behavior, why is Jim Jordan still in congress?

Things we’re accustomed to here

Just to inform you: if call in to a location in the upper midwest at a particular hour in, usually, the first week of the month, you may find yourself drowned out, as this bewildered reporter discovered. She seems a little flustered and concerned.

Every month, communities around here test out the tornado alert system. When I first moved here, it sure startled me — piercing sirens suddenly going off once a month, and at first I had no idea what it was about. Air raid? Nuclear war? Nah, it’s just a routine test in case a howling funnel of savage destructive winds descend on you and wreck all the buildings around you. Nothing to worry about.

I remembered Paul Nelson Day this year!

It helped to have all these people emailing me reminders in advance.

Paul Nelson Day, for you blessed souls who are unaware, is the day we commemorate the failure of a fellow of the Discovery Institute to follow through on his claims. Nelson actually presented a poster at a genuine scientific meeting, the Society for Developmental Biology, in which he proposed a novel metric he called “Ontogenetic Depth”, which supposedly measured the complexity of a lineage or something, producing numbers which he was certain spelled the doom of evolutionary theory. He even had a student, he said, measuring the ontogenetic depth of various species. Data? What? A creationist with data? I had to know how this worked. If I had his protocol, I’d even be willing to try to apply it to my organisms. You know, independent replication.

He was a bit dodgy about his methods, though, and they weren’t on the poster, and he promised to get back to me with a paper in a few days. A few weeks. A few months. A few years. It’s been 16 years now. No paper. Lots of handwaving.

I think we can safely say that ontogenetic depth is dead, and abandoned by its creator. It ought to be an embarrassing failure for Paul Nelson, but creationists never fail, they just bounce on to another delusion.

Paul Nelson has now invented another pseudo-sciencey phrase: Design Triangulation. Oh boy. Behe struck gullibility gold with the two-word mantra, “irreducible complexity”, that every creationist fool loved, because it was two long words that they thought made them sound clever…but it’s an empty claim, and IC has crumbled under even the most casual gaze. They also jumped on the “Design Theory” bandwagon, which fails because there is no Design Theory — it’s a mask over the words “God did it”. Nelson tried to get lightning to strike twice with “Ontogenetic Depth”, which also flopped. His mistake was promising something measurable and testable, which he wasn’t able to do.

Now it’s “Design Triangulation”. What is it? I don’t know. This time he apparently decided to start by writing out a thorough explanation — we weren’t going to be able to ask him to provide a paper he didn’t write this time!

Except…

He seems to have written it in PowerPoint — big loud fonts, lots of colors, assertion after assertion, lots of bold claims, clearly he’s thinking he needs to make a splashy, flashy argument. There’s one thing missing, though: data. There is no data in the document. There is lots of sniping at evolutionary theory, which they don’t understand, and bogus arguments about probabilities.

It’s also 243 pages long.

I read the whole thing. It claims to be “Sketches for a Method of Design-Enabled Biological Research”, which sounds familiar — he claimed Ontogenetic Depth was a “method”, too. I read it with an eye towards picking out what bits had utility in research. Give me one thing I could use in a lab or in the field, one thing that could give me a discrete result. It’s not there. Instead, there’s a lot of noise of the sort that gives philosophy (bad philosophy) a bad name among working biologists. It’s tortured philosophy. It’s philosophy abuse. It’s the sort of thing that makes scientists and respectable philosophers scream in pain. It goes on and on, never coming to a point, never providing anything concrete. Like a lot of creationists, Nelson is constantly getting distracted into tedious railing against evolution, asserting that evolution is impossible, and never ever saying anything specific about his magical chant of “Design Triangulation”, which he mentions multiple times but never defines.

I thought I’d illustrate this article with a catchy slide from his overlong presentation, but there aren’t any. Yeah, he steals some lovely biological examples so he can say they couldn’t possibly have evolved, and he’s got a bit about Michael Lynch pointing out that there’s more to the evolutionary process than natural selection (which is not the problem for evolutionary theory that Nelson imagines it to be), and lots of wordy babbling about philosophy, but nothing that captures the guts of Design Triangulation. So the best I can do is give you the culmination of his presentation, the one image he’d leave with those viewing it:

That’s it. Design Triangulation is just…Design. There is no method given, as promised in the subtitle of the file. If you like the fantasy of Design and Designer(s), you’ll lap this crap up — Nelson knows his audience. If you expect some intelligent criticism and useful methodology, you won’t see it at all, because Nelson isn’t writing for you. You aren’t the kind of rubes who’d fall for pompous verbiage and empty promises.

It’s perfectly fitting for Paul Nelson Day!

Spider deaths

The spiders I’ve been raising live to be approximately two years old in the lab. What typically happens is that they start showing signs of decline: they aren’t as responsive, they begin to hide in small silken nests, they fall into lassitude, and then one day they fall to the ground, dead. I worry that I’m doing something wrong, that the cages are too humid or not humid enough, that some disease is spreading through the colony, but I’ve tried different regimes of watering them, it makes no difference. It’s not surprising that very small animals are not evolved to endure. I tend to think “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy,” about my little friends.

They live longer than they do in the wild, at least. The past couple of summers I’ve kept my eye on a few spiders that take up residence on the outside walls of my house. They thrive for a month or two, and then one day they’re abruptly gone. There are waves of spider species that flourish over time: early in the summer, I start to see young Parasteatoda and Steatoda building cobwebs along the downspouts and under the windows; mid-summer I see them being replaced by the denser webs of grass spiders; around the time of the first frost, they’re all gone or in decline. We had a large, beautiful cat-faced spider lurking under the eaves of our house all last summer, and then in the fall we found her unmoving corpse. Every year in late summer those big yellow garden spiders take over the grasslands, building their zig-zagged orb webs and growing large enough to hog-tie grasshoppers, and then they die as winter arrives, leaving behind another generation that will overwinter in egg sacs. It’s a tough life, being a spider, especially when you live in a region with strong seasonal variation and severe climate.

And then I read about a trap-door spider in Australia that was documented as living for 43 years. I don’t consider most of Australia to have a gentle climate, but what they did have was constancy, so they could be adapted to a fairly uniform seasonal environment. She also didn’t have to cope with months of sub-zero temperatures, which are harsh on little poikilotherms, and that also wipe out the prey these predators have to consume. Even spiders in the Australian wheat belt are going to die, sometimes in even more horrific ways.

When she arrived at the clearing that day, she noticed that the twigs around the door had lost their meticulous spiral fan shape. They lay scattered in disarray.

Mason looked at the silk door, and saw a tiny hole in the center, as if something had pierced it.

She lifted the door and lowered an endoscope into the burrow, and confirmed what she already suspected. The spider was gone.

A parasitic wasp had likely broken through the seal, and laid its eggs in 16’s body.

“She was cut down in her prime,” Mason said. “It took a while to sink in, to be honest.”

On April 19, Mason, Main and Grant Wardell-Johnson co-published a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology, announcing the death of spider 16 at age 43.

She was the oldest spider known to have existed, Mason wrote, eclipsing the previous record set by a 28-year-old tarantula.

Ugh. Parasitic wasps. I think I’d rather freeze to death, or gently fade away in the decrepitude of old age.

What next, Iowa?

After all, they elected this guy.

It’s going to be fun times in Iowa. Maybe they’re going to remove the requirements that you be licensed to drive, or practice dentistry, in the near future, and it’ll become a libertarian hell-hole where anything goes. At least, that’s the way it seems to be going, now that they’ve stripped out any licensing requirements at all to carry a handgun.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) on Friday signed a bill that allows people to purchase and carry handguns in the state without a permit.

“Today I signed legislation that protects the 2nd Amendment rights of Iowa’s law-abiding citizens while still preventing the sale of firearms to criminals and other dangerous individuals,” Reynolds wrote in a statement.

“We will never be able to outlaw or prevent every single bad actor from getting a gun, but what we can do is ensure law-abiding citizens have full access to their constitutional rights while keeping Iowans safe,” she added.

You won’t need a permit or any safety training at all to carry a gun into any public spaces! It’s an NRA wet dream! She defends it as a 2nd amendment issue; why do the gun nuts always forget the “well regulated militia” part of the Constitution?

I’m feeling trapped. I’ve got the assholes of Iowa to the south of me, and the ignorant yahoos of the Dakotas to the west of me, and Senator Ron Johnson guarding the borders of Wisconsin to my east. I’ve still got Canada as a bulwark of relative sanity to the north, but I know one thing for sure: I won’t be visiting Iowa until they throw out their Republican governor and restore some competence to their government.

On top of pandemic woes, emerging technologies force me to revise my courses!

I am not an immunologist by any stretch, but I do teach a bit of basic immunology in my cell biology course every year — you know, just the basic concepts of immunological memory and core proteins and the innate and adaptive immune system, that kind of thing. I’d heard about the idea of mRNA vaccines, but if you’d asked me last year, I would have said that’s far too speculative for a course that was just an overview, I can’t possibly wedge such a tenuous proposal into the class, and why should I? It has no real world utility yet. Well, next year I’ll have to start wedging. Here’s an article that describes the importance of mRNA vaccines.

…mRNA’s story likely will not end with COVID-19: Its potential stretches far beyond this pandemic. This year, a team at Yale patented a similar RNA-based technology to vaccinate against malaria, perhaps the world’s most devastating disease. Because mRNA is so easy to edit, Pfizer says that it is planning to use it against seasonal flu, which mutates constantly and kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. The company that partnered with Pfizer last year, BioNTech, is developing individualized therapies that would create on-demand proteins associated with specific tumors to teach the body to fight off advanced cancer. In mouse trials, synthetic-mRNA therapies have been shown to slow and reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis. “I’m fully convinced now even more than before that mRNA can be broadly transformational,” Özlem Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, told me. “In principle, everything you can do with protein can be substituted by mRNA.”

In principle is the billion-dollar asterisk. mRNA’s promise ranges from the expensive-yet-experimental to the glorious-yet-speculative. But the past year was a reminder that scientific progress may happen suddenly, after long periods of gestation. “This has been a coming-out party for mRNA, for sure,” says John Mascola, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “In the world of science, RNA technology could be the biggest story of the year. We didn’t know if it worked. And now we do.”

At least the article does a lot of the work for me, organizing the history of the technology and explaining its strengths and weaknesses. Maybe I can just assign it as reading in the class, because I just checked the latest edition of our textbook, which seems to come out with a new edition every year, and there isn’t a whisper of a hint of a suggestion of this use for mRNA. That’s how fast this technology has emerged.

The last time this happened was when CRISPR/Cas appeared on the scene — 3 or 4 years ago I had to start including a segment on that in my course, because it was starting to appear in students’ senior seminars, and had such obvious research applications. But there was negligible clinical use, and none of my students had used or been the subject of CRISPR/Cas. Now this fall I expect every single one of my students to show up having been injected with an mRNA vaccine, so I’d better get it into the curriculum.

I do appreciate that the article also comes right out and explains that mRNA vaccines aren’t a miracle cure for everything.

“This is not a magic bullet, and it’s not perfect for everything,” Pfizer’s Dormitzer told me. His partners at BioNTech concurred. “I do not claim that mRNA is the holy grail for everything,” Türeci said. “We are going to find that there are diseases where mRNA is surprisingly successful and diseases where it’s not. We have to prove it for each and every infectious disease, one by one.”

It also makes it clear that this isn’t the product of a single genius making a breakthrough.

The triumph of mRNA, from backwater research to breakthrough technology, is not a hero’s journey, but a heroes’ journey. Without Katalin Karikó’s grueling efforts to make mRNA technology work, the world would have no Moderna or BioNTech. Without government funding and philanthropy, both companies might have gone bankrupt before their 2020 vaccines. Without the failures in HIV-vaccine research forcing scientists to trailblaze in strange new fields, we might still be in the dark about how to make the technology work. Without an international team of scientists unlocking the secrets of the coronavirus’s spike protein several years ago, we might not have known enough about this pathogen to design a vaccine to defeat it last year. mRNA technology was born of many seeds.

The one thing it’s missing is the growing awareness that the missing ingredient here isn’t technological, it’s sociological. The absurd opposition to vaccines in some quarters isn’t based on evidence or reason, it’s a phenomenon of irrational brains. I’ll resist the temptation to wedge a whole course on sociology or psychology into my biology class — that’s why I’m at a liberal arts college, because the students should be studying that with real experts in a different building on campus.

Don’t call it “childish”

Here’s a too-common story about how some citizens are responding to the pandemic by shirking their responsibilities.

Kelly Sills paid a small fortune for an enchanting trip to “the most magical place on Earth.”

Instead, the Baton Rouge resident — like several other Disney World guests who have defied coronavirus restrictions — visited the Orange County jail.

Amid heightened precautions for the virus at the major Florida tourist attraction, Sills, 47, skipped the temperature screening required of guests, authorities said. He was confronted by security about it at a Disney Springs restaurant, the Boathouse, when he yelled and refused to leave, according to an Orange County Sheriff’s Office arrest report from Feb. 13. When deputies insisted he would be charged with trespassing, he pointed to how much he spent on his vacation, according to body-camera footage released this week.

My first reaction: people spend $15,000 on a vacation? What? How?

My second reaction: you booked a trip to DisneyWorld during a pandemic? That’s nuts.

My third reaction: and then you’re so petty and obnoxious that you skip past basic health checks? That’s how plagues spread, ya bozo.

My fourth reaction: my two-year old granddaughter is more mature and responsible than Mr Sills.

Smarter, too.