Adam Driver and I have something in common

Besides our facility with the Force, that is. He doesn’t like to listen to or watch himself, and walked out of an interview when they threatened to play a clip. He has a history of doing that.

…in a New Yorker profile in October 2019, interlocutor Michael Schulman described Driver’s reluctance to watch himself as a “phobia.” The actor himself recalled feeling nauseous during a première of Star Wars: The Force Awakens; and hiding out in a greenroom during a screening of BlacKkKlansmen.

There are videos others have made of me floating around on the internet. I never watch them. Never. I feel a cringe crawling right up my guts when I encounter them. It’s peculiar because I don’t mind public speaking at all, it’s just seeing it again that makes me want to cry. When I started making youtube videos of my own, the hardest part was editing — I have to pretend that’s some dull old stranger in the recording so I can chop out the really bad bits, and then I don’t watch them ever again once they’re online.

It’s nice to see that even famous movie stars share this problem. See? I’m normal! Are you normal?

Another test of the upsuck hypothesis

There’s an interesting argument that’s been raging for decades about women’s orgasms: are they useful or not? Normal people, especially women, are probably wondering how that can even be a question — you probably find them very nice — but that’s missing a deeper point, which is, do women’s orgasms increase their fertility? Which I would argue masks an even deeper question, which is about women’s Ultimate Purpose. And apparently, the ultimate purpose of having a woman orgasm is that it makes her cervix more likely to slurp up the manly ejaculate, a phenomenon called upsuck or insuck.

On to this paper by Robert King, Maria Dempsey, and Katherine Valentine. It’s a weak paper, but the authors, to their credit, acknowledge the weaknesses and submit it as primarily a method of testing one aspect contributing to potential fertility problems that individuals can test for themselves in their home. The procedure is simple. Six women (they also admit that their n was tiny) were each given a Mooncup, a rubbery device usually used as an alternative to tampons or pads, a supply of an artificial semen simulant, a 10ml syringe, a spoon, and a surgical glove, and sent home to masturbate. Their instructions were to first use the syringe to squirt 5ml of fake semen into their vaginas, and then flip a coin. Half the time they would masturbate to orgasm, and the other half they would masturbate for roughly the same amount of time, but then stop before orgasm, as a control. The next step was to place the mooncup over their cervix, and after an hour, remove it and measure how much of the fake semen had flowed back out of the upper reaches of their reproductive tract, which they were then to measure with the syringe.

Sounds romantic, I know.

The hypothesis was that muscle contractions during orgasm would propel semen deeper into their bodies, and that as they later relaxed, it would flow back into the mooncup, so they could compare the amount squirted up into the uterus/fallopian tubes/etc. in orgasmic vs. non-orgasmic situations. The prediction was that if orgasm were effective at increasing semen flow into relevant parts of the reproductive tract, they’d see more retention of semen after an orgasm. The answer is…they did.

I have a few problems with the study. As already mentioned, it has a minuscule number of participants, but also, it is not at all a blind study. The subjects knew what the expected result should be! I would not accuse them of outright cheating, but it’s very human to see an experiment that is purportedly testing the potency of your orgasms as a judgment, and that maybe a little fudging in one direction or another is acceptable. I’m also wondering why the contribution of the women’s fluids to the outcome wasn’t taken into account; they specifically excluded situations where the women produced female ejaculation, but as the investigators must know, women will produce more vaginal fluids with orgasm than without, which would have contributed to the volumes they measured.

One of the biggest problems of interpretation, though, is that nothing in this study actually tests fertility and the odds of conception. I would take it for granted that triggering vigorous contractions in a muscular, fluid-filled tube is going to move those fluids all over the place, but the question is whether this contributes significantly to successful fertilization. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, nothing in these observations answers that question, or even whether this is a relatively significant factor compared to all the other variables in conception.

But that is the biggest problem of them all. If you’re trying to determine whether there is a selective advantage to a woman having an orgasm, why focus exclusively on the mechanical effectiveness of getting her pregnant? Humans are psychologically and sociologically complex, responsive to all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle cues, and with a huge amount of individual variation. Looking at what is essentially the very last step in an elaborate courtship dance and declaring that that is the critical thing that evolution is looking at tends to kind of minimize an intricate behavioral complex that is also subject to evolutionary forces.

This reductive, narrow approach to a tiny aspect of a question is a common approach in some disciplines. Another subset tends to view programmed female responsiveness to male signals as the mechanistic goal of evolution. Evolutionary psychology, I’m looking at you.

King R, Dempsey M, Valentine KA (2016) Measuring sperm backflow following female orgasm: a new method. Socioaffect Neurosci Psychol. doi: 10.3402/snp.v6.31927

Impeachment? I’m not enthusiastic

Now if we were talking firing squads, guillotines, or rioting mobs tearing down every stick and brick of the White House, I might be roused enough to cheer. Today, though, I see a criminal running the country, an entire political party dedicated to corruption over democratic representation, and an electorate that wants to negate every aspect of human progress in the USA and celebrate the barbarity of oppression, so excuse me if I don’t get excited about plodding procedural maneuvering by bureaucrats cautious about protecting their privileges. Especially when I expect Republican sycophants to block any change, while continuing to pack the judiciary with incompetents and ideologues.

I expect my grandchildren will remember this era not for the clown in the oval office, but for the way we ignored real crises in the environment and civil rights, fueled by a selfish majority and short-sighted politicians. They’re going to wonder what was wrong with us that we didn’t storm the halls of power and change our course right now.

Oh, well. We’ve got a dedicated thread for discussing the infuriating political situation. Join in there! I just don’t have the heart anymore.

Today is the big day!

This morning, I wrap up my semester by giving a final in cell biology. Immediately after, I start grading through the afternoon.

I don’t expect that I’ll get everything done, though, and will have to finish it tomorrow, and possibly get all my grades submitted by Friday evening. In part the delay will be because it’s going to be a lot of papers, but also because my evening is going to be interrupted by my attendance at the Morris premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

I’m going in with serious trepidations. This franchise has been an inconsistent mess benefiting from an epic beginning that has favorably colored our views of the subsequent slipshod sequels, and honestly, some of them have been so bad that they belong alongside Battlefield Earth in the hall of terrible science fiction movies. They don’t get ranked there only because they always make money.

I’m only going to attend because I still remember fondly the glow I felt one sunny afternoon in 1977 that I spent watching the original movie twice, unwilling to leave my seat (which explains how bad sequels still make money), and also because, well, it’s a professional requirement now.

Don’t tell me if it’s good or not. I want to cling to my delusional optimism for just this one day.

A lot of people think lip service to science is sufficient

I guess we’re approaching time of year for news count-downs, and here’s one already, The Biggest Junk Science of 2019. It’s got all the usual suspects, and a few odd novelties: the Florida Board of Education, Fox News, the paleo diet for dogs, climate change denialists, people growing horns, radioactive quackery, anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, and of course, Bill Maher. It features the smug face of Maher sitting atop the page, even.

It’s sad that one of the most prominent voices in skepticism and atheism, who won a Richard Dawkins award, who is regularly highlighted in every zealous atheist social media group alongside Hitchens & Dawkins & Harris, is simultaneously the poster boy for popular quackery. It just goes to show that bigotry and foolishness are such easier sells to the American public that even the segment that loves to praise its own rationality will fall for it.

I’m gonna need a fax machine

Just one. And some letterhead. And a catchy name.

We’ve seen this strategy before: remember Bill Donohue and the Catholic League? He’s got no clout at all with Catholics or anyone else, but he’s got his little office with his fax machine and maybe a secretary (at best), and a willingness to fire off angry press releases, and this translates into invitations to appear on Fox News and donations.

Here’s another one: One Million Moms and Monica Cole. She’s it. The other 999,999 moms don’t seem to do much except echo Monica in annoying emails to their nieces and grandchildren and other hapless relatives. She has a kind of power, though, since she bullied the Hallmark Channel into yanking an ad that featured a lesbian couple.

Hey! I want to be able to bully the Hallmark Channel, too!

So now I’m thinking I ought to falsely claim to be the head of a mighty swarm of angry fanatics. I’ll just need to reserve a domain name and design some stationery and start firing off demanding press releases. I only have to come up with that intimidating title.

Which do you think is scarier? “onemillionatheists.com” or “tentrillionspiders.com”? I can tweak the numbers freely, since they don’t actually mean anything real. Hmm, maybe the arachnidleague.com. Let me know what you think.

Why hasn’t Rush Limbaugh collapsed into deflated pile of canvas & sticks?

Ian Marsden

Like an empty gasbag should? I guess he’s still ranting on the radio, but I haven’t heard from him in years, and apparently he hasn’t mellowed or acquired the wisdom of age yet. He’s still one of those people who is responsible for some of the worst science denialism, like this:

The first thing to notice about Greta Thunberg is that she’s 16 years old. She claims she has Ansperger’s type — Ausperger’s — or autism — Asperger’s — some kind of problem in that area.

And so she is made the Person of the Year by Time magazine, which is what? A political news magazine. Greta Thunberg has been introduced into the political arena by the worldwide left, including the Democrat Party. They have made her a political figure. They do this on purpose.

So she’s out tweeting and politicizing, and she is free to lie and say whatever she wants to say about climate change and who’s responsible for it. And nobody is permitted to question her, you see, because she has — what did they call it? She is in the autism spectrum, so you can’t disagree, you can’t question, because she’s not well.

So. Much. Wrong.

Yes, Time Magazine’s person of the year is popular fluff chosen to sell magazines. It doesn’t mean much, except that it throws a certain kind of person into a tizzy. There is no “worldwide left”, it’s very disorganized, and the Democratic Party is a centrist political party at best, not at all aligned with the Left. Time Magazine is right-centrist outlet that is not controlled by the Left, nor does it lean Left by any sensible meaning of the word.

Greta Thunberg has achieved notoriety because she ably represents a scientific consensus, and is angry and vocal about the way the Old Guard has wrecked the environment and set us on a path to environmental catastrophe. This shouldn’t be an exclusively Leftist awareness; the only reason it has a political dimension is because the Right, including decrepit gasbags like Limbaugh, have made a refusal to recognize the consequences of our technological/industrial/capitalist society. Reality ought to be apolitical. Our process for dealing with reality is most definitely a political concern. But the Right is simply refusing to deal, denying the observable phenomena looming on the horizon and sweeping in fast.

Thunberg is autistic. That is simply a different way of thinking, and to label it as a “problem” or “not well” is disgraceful. She has made her autism a strength and has used her personality to present her ideas forcefully to the world community, and has constantly demonstrated her effectiveness as an advocate. Never has she hidden behind her nature to refuse to answer questions or to disallow any questioning. However, flatly declaring her ill to avoid addressing the problems she presents is not questioning her — if you want to criticize her, go ahead, discuss the evidence against global climate change.

Limbaugh can’t, because there isn’t any, and also because he’s an ignorant coward who’d rather label someone with a syndrome so he doesn’t have to face his shortcomings.

Chew more gum, for posterity

Behold, a discarded lump of chewed birch pitch from Denmark:

Awesome, I know. Heating up birch bark produces this dark, sticky substance that can be used as an adhesive, and also can be chewed like chewing gum. It apparently has some antiseptic properties. No one has told me yet what it tastes like, I guess I’ll have to try it for myself sometime.

That lump was thrown away 5700 years ago, after someone had been chewing on it for a while. What’s cool is that lots of DNA was extracted from it, and we know a bit about the person who’d been using it.

We successfully extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from a 5700-year-old piece of chewed birch pitch from southern Denmark. In addition to a complete ancient human genome (2.3×) and mitogenome (91×), we recovered plant and animal DNA, as well as microbial DNA from several oral taxa. Analysis of the human reads revealed that the individual whose genome we recovered was female and that she likely had dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes. This combination of physical traits has been previously noted in other European hunter-gatherers, suggesting that this phenotype was widespread in Mesolithic Europe and that the adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation in European populations only occurred later in prehistory. We also find that she had the alleles associated with lactase non-persistence, which fits with the notion that lactase persistence in adults only evolved fairly recently in Europe, after the introduction of dairy farming with the Neolithic revolution.

We also know that she had duck for dinner and had been snacking on hazelnuts. She carried the Epstein-Barr virus, so she’d probably had mononucleosis at some time in her life. She probably wasn’t a farmer, but was a member of a known hunter-gatherer population in central Europe, which fits with her diet of wild game and foraged nuts. Her descendants would eventually migrate north to colonize central Scandinavia, and intermingle with other hunter-gatherers migrating from the east.

Oddly, most of the popular press reports I’m seeing on this story call the gum-chewer a girl. I don’t know why, maybe it’s based on this reconstruction, but I don’t see any evidence in the paper to characterize her age — she could have been the Svyltholm Old Lady, for all we know.

I don’t chew gum, but maybe I should start, just to leave some trace of me to be found in 7000 AD. Now I just have to figure out where to leave my wads of gum to maximize their odds of being found…

Jensen, T.Z.T., Niemann, J., Iversen, K.H. et al. A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch. Nat Commun 10, 5520 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13549-9

But I don’t want to go play in the snow!

Here in frigid Minnesota, there are only brief windows of time where the weather is suitable for making snowcreatures — most of the time, it’s so cold the snow doesn’t pack well, and it only takes a few minutes of exposure to get frostbite. Lately, though, the comics are all telling me the wonders of playing outside.

This has to be taking place in some warmer, neo-tropical place, like Iowa.