It is warm enough (in Minnesota terms — 9°C) that I have thrown open the doors and windows and am airing out the house. Fresh air? I’ve kinda missed the stuff that isn’t so cold your nostril hairs snap off.
All I need now is for the spiders to wake up.
It’s become a joke that physicists think they understand all ‘lesser’ fields of science than the people with actual training. Now we lesser beings have a beautiful example to point at and laugh.
An Australian astrophysicist, stuck at home by the pandemic, decided to try and build a device to help with the coronavirus — a gadget that would signal when your hands moved close to your face. I have to admit that that does sound like something a physicist would be capable of doing, but everything went wrong. He somehow thought putting magnets in his nose would be helpful.
Reardon said he placed two magnets inside his nostrils, and two on the outside. When he removed the magnets from the outside of his nose, the two inside stuck together. Unfortunately, the researcher then attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them.
“At this point, my partner who works at a hospital was laughing at me,” he said. “I was trying to pull them out but there is a ridge at the bottom of my nose you can’t get past.
“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.
“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”
Before attending the hospital, Reardon attempted to use pliers to pull them out, but they became magnetised by the magnets inside his nose.
“Every time I brought the pliers close to my nose, my entire nose would shift towards the pliers and then the pliers would stick to the magnet,” he said. “It was a little bit painful at this point.
It’s terribly unfortunate that he ran out of magnets. If only he’d had a few more this story could have gone on even longer!
This New Yorker interview with “legal scholar Richard Epstein” is one of the most amazing exhibitions of arrogance I’ve read lately…and I’m living in the age of Donald Trump. Epstein earlier wrote an essay for his home base, the right-wing think tank the Hoover Institution, in which he predicted that the coronavirus pandemic was over-exaggerated, that it would peak with about 500 deaths and then fade away. His work was widely cited by conservatives, claiming that it showed that the cure was worse than the disease. His estimate was passed within a week, and the death toll is still rising. He’s wrong, definitively, and his prediction was quickly falsified. But he’s still defending it!
Most galling, his defense is that his prediction is supported by evolutionary theory. I know a little bit about evolution, so that was a startling claim. He’s a lawyer, not a biologist. He tries to explain his justification in this interview, and it turns out to be built on wishful thinking and faulty beliefs in how evolution works.
Here’s why he thinks the pandemic wouldn’t be as bad as the experts say.
But then adaptation starts to set in. And, in my view, adaptation is a co-evolutionary process in which things change, not only in human behavior but also change in genetic viral behavior.
OK, sure, humans are evolving, the virus is evolving, but how does that support the notion that the virus will kill 500 and not 100,000 people? There’s a leap there that emerges murkily.
…as the virus becomes more apparent, adaptive responses long before government gets involved become clear.
Wait, so his argument is that the virus will adapt to become relatively harmless before any public health work can take effect? I seem to recall that this viral adaptation to become weaker didn’t happen with, say, polio. He’s making assumptions about the rate of change.
Well, what happens is it’s an evolutionary tendency.
Also assumptions about a “tendency”. How does this work? He explains that. It’s jaw-droppingly stupid.
So the mechanism is you start with people, some of whom have a very strong version of the virus, and some of whom have a very weak version of the virus. If the strong-version-of-the-virus people are in contact with other people before they die, it will pass on. But, if it turns out that you slow the time of interaction down, either in an individual case or in the aggregate, these people are more likely to die before they could transfer the virus off to everybody else.
So his idea of why slow-the-spread works is not that it gives health services time to treat severe cases, it’s that he imagines there is this substantial variation in lethality of the virus, and that isolation allows people carrying strong strains to die, eliminating those variants, giving weak strains a selective edge. This ruthless Darwinian winnowing of viral strains will occur over the course of a few weeks.
He’s postulating a hyper-evolutionary acceleration; it’s very similar to the arguments of creationists who think all the vast amount of variation in species emerged from a few kinds preserved from the Flood 4000 years ago. Good evolutionary biology does not treat selection as a god-like force that instantly generates an optimal solution — we’re entirely aware of the limitations and how fast it can potentially work. We can use math. Epstein’s mechanism might work…over a few hundred thousand generations, which I suspect is even slower than our dilatory president’s response to the crisis.
And you’re not an epidemiologist, correct?
No, I’m trained in all of these things. I’ve done a lot of work in these particular areas. And one of the things that is most annoying about this debate is you see all sorts of people putting up expertise on these subjects, but they won’t let anybody question their particular judgment.
No, he’s not trained in those particular areas. He’s a lawyer. They work contrary to how scientists work. Lawyers start with the conclusion that they want to reach, and then select evidence that fits that conclusion.
That comment is particularly ironic because it applies spectacularly well to him. He’s claiming expertise he doesn’t have. You know, as I said, I actually do have some training in evolutionary biology, but I understand the limitations of what I know. I understand general principles and basic rules, but I also know that there are domains of specialization, like epidemiology, that I know very little about. I wouldn’t try to trump an epidemiologist’s detailed understanding of pandemics with my general knowledge of evolution of fish and spiders and cephalopods. Yet here’s Epstein, asserting that his legal training qualifies him to know better than epidemiologists.
I also wouldn’t declare that my knowledge of biology means I know better than Epstein how the law works.
What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case.
There is actually a field of Darwinian economics. It’s mostly a bunch of economists who are smart enough to know that biologists have built up a lot of theory about how evolutionary biology works, and they’re trying to apply biological principles to economics. That’s not what Epstein is doing. He’s trying to jigger his fantasy Libertarian notions of economics to fit biology, and throwing a snit because biology is not obliging.
Oh yes, a snit. The following exchange is a stunning demonstration of how thin-skinned Richard Epstein is.
I was just asking about—
I’m saying what I think to be the truth. I mean, I just find it incredible—
I know, but these are scientific issues here.
You know nothing about the subject but are so confident that you’re going to say that I’m a crackpot.
No. Richard—
That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?
I’m not saying anything of the sort.
Admit to it. You’re saying I’m a crackpot.
I’m not saying anything of the—
Well, what am I then? I’m an amateur? You’re the great scholar on this?
No, no. I’m not a great scholar on this.
Tell me what you think about the quality of the work!
O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.
What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.
O.K. Can I ask you one more question?
You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?
Wow. Like, wow. I’m speechless. A bit touchy, isn’t he?
Richard Epstein, you are an amateur and a crackpot, and also arrogant and ignorant. I hope this interview follows you for the rest of your days and demolishes your credibility in all scholarly things.
In my struggle to get my classes back on track as quickly as possible after spring break, I wanted to get everyone thinking and focused again, so…
They were supposed to send them to me by email.
Today, you may notice, is 30 March.
I opened my inbox this morning, and recoiled in horror. So many of my students were industrious and on the ball and possibly bored out of their minds, so they got everything done early. There are others who are still working on them, so I expect even more to trickle in during the course of the day.
The next exams are staggered a bit, at least, but I should have done that this time. The shock of the sudden isolation event just put everything in sync.
$3.7 million.
Net worth: $100,000 million.
Just his house alone is worth $147 million. He pays a million a year in property taxes.
$25 million.
Net worth: $58,000 million.
He recently spent $60 million to buy two houses in Lake Tahoe. When he buys a house (he owns 10 of them), he also buys up adjacent properties just “for privacy”.
These parasites aren’t making any sacrifices, they aren’t making a serious investment in scientific research. They are buying PR for cheap, and the media is so innumerate that they fall for it. Fuck these motherfucking fuckers. Bring on the guillotines…or at least, the punitive tax rates and the forfeitures and the corruption trials.
Also, fire all journalists who can’t do basic math.
Inspired by this video (even though it really fails to cover the full range ot possibilities), I think it’s a good night for a spider movie.
There’s a wide selection on Amazon Prime, and a few on Netflix. I’ve got to spend some time on the elliptical, I could put something with big cute spiders on the TV while I do that.
I’ve been seeing some wild speculation that this pandemic is the product of genetic engineering — that it’s a biowarfare weapon that escaped from a lab somewhere. This is nonsense. I’ll refer you to an article in Nature Medicine, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, which discusses a systematic analysis of the structure of SARS-CoV-2 in comparison to other coronaviruses.
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.
A little translation: the virus has a spike protein that binds to an enzyme on the surfaces of cells, called angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE. This enzyme is important in regulating blood pressure, and is expressed by cells in lung capillaries (fun fact: your lungs play an endocrine role in sending out signals that maintain blood pressure). This is one reason the virus has such a dangerous respiratory effect — the lungs are the primary targets, where it can use the spike protein to bind to cells that express ACE and drill into them.
The RBD is the Receptor Binding Domain of the viral spike, and is the most variable part of the virus. This makes sense: the RBD is the key the virus uses to get access to your cells, and it varies because it confers target specificity. So there are all these different varieties of coronavirus, most of which don’t bother humans because they lack the human key — they are adapted to invade other animals’ cells. SARS-CoV-2 has acquired a spike with a human unlock code. Could some cunning super-villain have modified the spike?
Not likely, for several reasons. The virus has other similarities to coronaviruses in other animals; it’s not a de novo construct, but is a member of a large family of viruses. The modification to the spike protein is unusual. It works, but it’s not one that scientific experts would have used — they would have used something that would have been previously modeled. Then also bioengineers have lots of clever tools that could be used to stuff a desired sequence into a virus, but they all leave tool marks, little scraps of the molecule used to do the replacement. Those marks aren’t there. The best explanation is that we’re just seeing natural selection amplifying random variations in the spike.
While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.
Yeah, see, if I were a nefarious super-villain, we already have an even better RBD we could yank out of other viruses, and I would have used that to build a deadly virus. But instead, the SARS-CoV-2 RBD is some clunky variation that came out of nowhere, by accident, without any other signs of intentional manipulation.
They also consider the possibility that this was an accidental variation acquired in a lab — if you pass a virus through a lot of host cells in a cell culture system, it will continue to evolve, and you might imagine the RBD might acquire a random variation that allows it to thrive in those cells, and then it accidentally escapes the lab. This is also unlikely, because it shares a lot of similarities with the pangolin coronaviruses. It’s more likely to have arisen from an existing pool of related viruses in the wild, then either acquired its novel binding site there, or after infecting humans and experiencing selection for better binding to human cells.
The best strategy is to look for intermediates in animals, or in the sequences of humans who were infected early in the pandemic.
The identification of a potential intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2, as well as sequencing of the virus from very early cases, would similarly be highly informative. Irrespective of the exact mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 originated via natural selection, the ongoing surveillance of pneumonia in humans and other animals is clearly of utmost importance.
Sorry, conspiracy theorists. The best explanation is evolution and natural selection, not Evil Intelligent Design.
The viral spike protein. The RBD is in green.
I guess it is. I have to say it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore — It’s astounding, Time is fleeting, Madness takes its toll — since I’m just stuck at home, seeing no one, coming unmoored from everything, but I do have a thought which makes me feel slightly better.
Which would you rather?
A. Have a job that lets you work from home, even if it means you’re in isolation.
B. Be isolated at home without a job.
C. Not be isolated because your boss forces you to work in some mindless service job.
D. Not be isolated because you have an essential job, like health care, that exposes you to a high likelihood of getting COVID-19.
E. Have the disease.
There, that puts it all in perspective. I’m an A. I am so lucky. Which one are you?
Anyway, today my plan is to churn out a video lecture for intro bio — the historical battle between biometricians and saltationists, which was basically resolved by everyone realizing that genetics was so much more complex than Mendel thought, followed by a lot of non-Mendelian examples — and get that ready to post by Monday.
Sunday is going to be spent churning out a video lecture on linkage mapping for genetics. There are always students who get lost on this stuff, so I expect to spend some Zoom time going over it next week. Then I have to finish grading some lab reports.
I am going absolutely nowhere. Spiders were fed the other day, so I’m not going to set foot in the lab this weekend. I have everything I need to live on in my house, so no trips to the store. I might step out onto the deck to my fenced back yard and remind myself what the sun looks like, but otherwise, I am definitely an A.
I still dream about cephalopods, even if the arachnids are snaring most of my attention.
Via special request by @SarahMackAttack, reposting this spectacular brief encounter w/ Taningia danae (also known as Taning's Octopus squid) ROV SuBastian was descending on a pervious #NingalooCanyon expedition dive! More info in thread that follows: pic.twitter.com/GNHedtvSqg
— Schmidt Ocean (@SchmidtOcean) March 27, 2020
