Twinkle, twinkle little spacelink

I’m happy to see the new, revitalized Skepchick, and I’ve been checking in every day. I’m recommending you all read Nicole’s recent post on the Spacelink intrusion. I guess Elon Musk just decided for all of us that we needed a few thousand satellites cluttering the sky, so he spewed a bunch of them upwards to get in the way of astronomers. Nicole gives a, I guess you could say, balanced perspective, but even at that she doesn’t have much good to say about this commercial venture.

Get your hands dirty for mental health?

I was getting worried. My wife is on a gardening kick, fencing off a part of the backyard and tilling and planting and weeding — she’s been coming into the house with disgustingly filthy hands, and has been suggesting that I should get out there and dig in the muck, too. For a moment, I was afraid this article on “Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders” might give her more ammunition in her battle to get me to help out with the weeds. Fortunately, after reading it, I think I can argue it’s irrelevant.

You’ve all heard of the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that exposure to diverse neutral and pathogenic organisms from an early age might play a vital role in shaping our immune systems. Further, there’s the idea that we might also pick up beneficial organisms from soil that evolution has shaped us to use in regulating our immune systems, so that being away from dirt is throwing our physiology out of balance in subtle ways.

“The idea is that as humans have moved away from farms and an agricultural or hunter-gatherer existence into cities, we have lost contact with organisms that served to regulate our immune system and suppress inappropriate inflammation,” said Lowry, who prefers the phrases ‘old friends hypothesis’ or ‘farm effect.’ “That has put us at higher risk for inflammatory disease and stress-related psychiatric disorders.”

Lowry has published numerous studies demonstrating a link between exposure to healthy bacteria and mental health.

One showed that children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and may be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers.

OK, that sounds plausible, although I’d say that there are so many differences between growing up on a farm vs. in a city that it’s going to be hard to persuade me that exposure to Bacterium X is the crucial variable. The only way to find out is to read the original paper. So I did.

This particular paper does no evolutionary testing. It doesn’t compare farm kids to city kids. It doesn’t look at human stress disorders at all. It tests the effects of a molecule found in cell bacteria on cells from mice isolated in culture. Basically, they synthesized and purified 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and tested it on cells loaded with receptor and recorder constructs so they could determine its mechanism of action — the bottom line is that this molecule under these conditions seems to have a potent effect in reducing activation of an inflammatory pathway. Here’s their summary of the results:

The free fatty acid form of 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid, decreased lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of the proinflammatory cytokine IL-6 ex vivo. Meanwhile, next generation RNA sequencing revealed that pretreatment with 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid upregulated genes associated with peroxisome proliferatoractivated receptor alpha (PPARα) signaling in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated macrophages, in association with a broad transcriptional repression of inflammatory markers. We confirmed using luciferase-based transfection assays that 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid activated PPARα signaling, but not PPARγ, PPARδ, or retinoic acid receptor (RAR) α signaling. The effects of 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid on lipopolysaccharide-stimulated secretion of IL-6 were prevented by PPARα antagonists and absent in PPARα-deficient mice.

That represents a lot of work, and I think that result sounds reasonable and potentially useful — who wouldn’t want another anti-inflammatory compound? But all that stuff about evolution and mental health and the hygiene effect were extraordinarily hand-wavey, and none of that was tested here at all. Which is a relief if my wife comes to me to say I should do some gardening so I could stock up on 1,2,3-tri [Z-10-hexadecenoyl] glycerol, 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid and be less stressed and grumpy, because I’ll just tell here that the effective dose in a handful of dirt hasn’t been found, the connection to mental health is speculative, and I am not a mouse.

Smith, D.G., Martinelli, R., Besra, G.S. et al. Psychopharmacology (2019). https://doi-org.ezproxy.morris.umn.edu/10.1007/s00213-019-05253-9

Whoa, his name really is “Randy Rainbow”?

His father’s name was Gerry Rainbow, and they named him Randy. It’s not a stage name. That’s the least of the trivia I learned from this profile of the YouTube star.

I think he’s fabulous, and all of his videos are entertaining…that’s the important thing. He also says he’s not very political, which I can believe. He’s just a normal guy with considerable musical talent who is just expressing a normal, ordinary perspective on the current odious absurdity. Check out his channel if you haven’t already.

Godzilla, king of big dumb fights

I saw the new movie, and it was classic stuff: ever more gigantic monsters trample on cities, while po-faced humans project their gnomic interpretations of the monsters’ intents on them, and while the monsters thrash at each other and go “GROOONK” as they stand atop rubble. If that’s all you need, you’ll enjoy it. It brought back memories of old Saturday matinees with Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah, all awful, but all marching through the same schtick, just like this one.

What did Boston do to deserve to be the locus of monster destruction, though?

Spider party at my place

Today my spider squad is stopping by my place for a spider identification party — they’ve been out sampling spider diversity, and are bringing their captives to a central location so we can figure out who they are (don’t worry, we’ll be setting the majority of them free afterwards). Then we’re going to run through our survey protocol, practicing on my garage, and set up our schedule for site visits starting next week. This is going to be challenging because I’m not a spider expert by any means — but the only way to get better at it is to dive in and start actually working with the adorable little beasties.

I can now spot Parasteatoda tepidariorum fairly easily, but other species I have to stare out for a while and flip through notes. P. tepidariorum is the species I’ve got thriving in the lab colony. Well, “thriving” is a little optimistic: the individuals are well-fed and looking good, but I still suffer from a shortage of males. I need more egg cases so I can separate the spiderlings early and alleviate some of the male mortality, but obviously I need more males to get more egg cases.

It’s going to be great fun!

As long as Shermer is a respected skeptic, movement skepticism will be an embarrassment

So this is what skepticism has become, Michael Shermer interviewing racist bigot and cult leader Stefan Molyneux because he is one of the most articulate podcasters for reason.

People were flabbergasted. How could he do this? Shermer has an excuse: ignorance.

I’ve done a few interviews in my time, and I always look into the other person ahead of time, if, for nothing else, to have some idea of what topics would provide a good discussion. No, not Shermer! He knew nothing and did zero prep. I don’t believe him, but if I did, that would tell me his podcast has to be total crap.

Don’t you worry about Shermer, though. He’s moving on to grand new projects that won’t be at all skewed by his biases, no sirree bob.

The membership in the Intellectual Dork Web is small and self-proclaimed, so I don’t understand the point of a “scientific survey”. Is this to be an assay where the questions are contrived so he can say that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson aren’t really conservative right-wingers? I trust him to do that about as much as I trust him to honestly vet the people he interviews on his podcast.

Godzilla!

The new movie is playing in town, so I’m hoping to see it tonight…except that I’ve been prescribed cetirizine to suppress the allergies that might be causing my tinnitus, and I’ve been known to slip into unconsciousness at odd times of the day. It’s annoying, and worst of all, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. So, if I can keep my eyes open tonight, I’ll be going to see Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

It’s about science, don’t you know. It just got a write-up in Science magazine!

The “evolutionary biology” of Godzilla is a topic of enduring interest among devotees, with numerous fan pages and forums dedicated to the subject. If we accept Godzilla as a ceratosaurid dinosaur and Lazarus taxon—a species thought to have gone extinct, only to be rediscovered later—then it represents a sensational example of evolutionary stasis, second only to coelacanths among vertebrates. Yet, the creature’s recent morphological change has been dramatic.

Godzilla has doubled in size since 1954. This rate of increase far exceeds that of ceratosaurids during the Jurassic, which was exceptional. The rate of change rules out genetic drift as the primary cause. It is more consistent with strong natural selection.

The strength of this selective pressure can be estimated by using the breeder’s equation, where the response to selection “R” is the product of the heritability (h2) of a given trait and the strength of selection. If we assume that h2 = 0.55 for body size—a reasonable estimate according to quantitative genetic studies of lizards—then the observed increase in Godzilla’s body size would require a total strength of selection of 4.89 SD. To put this number in context, the median value of natural selection documented in a review of more than 2500 estimates in the wild was 0.16. Godzilla, it seems, has been subject to a selective pressure 30 times greater than that of typical natural systems.

One problem with this analysis: isn’t it the same Godzilla in every movie? I could be wrong, but I think this is a specific individual returning over and over again, not a member of a population of Godzillas over many generations. It would have to be a very large and prolific population to hold up under that kind of selection pressure, too. It seems more likely to me that this is an example of a long-lived individual that is undergoing continuous growth over its lifetime, and therefore this is more of a matter for the developmental biologists, and is an example of a physiological adaptation.

Even if Godzilla is multiple different members of a changing population, we have no idea of the extent of the variation present within the population. The 1954 Godzilla could have been the Peter Dinklage of Godzillas, while the 2019 Godzilla could be the Yao Ming of the group. We don’t know, but I think that trying to argue for rates of selection is premature.

I must disagree with this diagram as well.

The 1998 monster does not look anything like the others, and must be from a completely different species, so don’t try to tell me it’s a Godzilla.

You’ll probably be disappointed

Here’s a site calling itself “A People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.” It’s a concept that might have some promise, except that instead you discover a list of celebrities in politics, movies, and most of all, sports, where the connection to the location is often extraordinarily tenuous. For example, here’s my region of West Central Minnesota.

I didn’t recognize any name, except Westrom — he’s the Republican representative for my district, I can’t stand him, but it’s fair that his name is up there. For Morris, on the other hand, it’s some guy named Aaron Schock. I never heard of him. He’s never in any of the local papers. I looked him up, and learn that he was born here and moved to Illinois at a young age. So what is he famous for?

Schock resigned from Congress in March 2015 amid a scandal involving his use of public and campaign funds. A subsequent congressional ethics investigation “revealed that he used taxpayer money to fund lavish trips and events”. In November 2016, a federal grand jury indicted him in connection with the scandal. After he pled not guilty, prosecutors reached an agreement with him in March 2019 whereby all charges against him were dropped. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee, Schock for Congress, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.

He got into Wikipedia for being a crooked politician, and the Wikipedia entry mentions where he was born, and that’s it. Now this map tars the town with him, because it has such sloppy criteria for inclusion.

Oh, well. Take a look at your hometown, maybe you’ll be lucky and discover some worthy who actually has some substantial connection to the place. Probably not, though.

The hero we need

This beautiful man took bold action.

If you want to complain about the harm done to those poor racist, Confederacy-worshipping seccessionists, I don’t care to hear it. I want to see a thousand heroes like that man. He ran like he was the cavalry, now we just needed a few infantry throwing punches and an artillery flinging milkshakes, and those scumbags would have been routed.

How to scare away creationists: be tolerant of gender preferences!

Answers in Genesis got a dose of reality, and it slapped them hard in the face. They sent a pair of representatives to the American Alliance of Museums‘ National Conference, and boy howdy were they ever shocked. They had all-gender bathrooms and stickers to declare your preferred pronouns!

Drs. Purdom and Rivera are responsible for designing many of the wonderful programs, workshops, and other educational activities we offer here at the Creation Museum. But the potential usefulness of the AMA meeting was completely eclipsed by the “virtue signaling” and political correctness of the organizers.

It eclipsed it so much that Purdom and Rivera skipped the whole conference and went sight-seeing in New Orleans.

The whole point of a conference supporting LGBTQ+ individuals is to get that irrelevant stuff out of the way: the conference is about museum content, and by stripping away all the formalities, they streamline everything. Does anyone want to waste time correcting every single person who comes up to them and misgenders them? No. Put it on a sticker, put it in the program, put it on a conference slide, presto — no fuss acceptance.

One of the first things Georgia and Jennifer noticed when they arrived were the signs posted outside the restrooms.

As you can see, the AAM invited everyone to use whichever restroom facility they wanted. Now, that view is anti-science, anti-genetics, anti-biology, and anti the truth about male and female. Jennifer said that, because the lines to the women’s restroom were long, several women left the line and used the men’s restrooms since the signs invited them to use whichever restroom they wanted. This is probably not what the organizers had in mind!

Science does not dictate society’s approach to gender issues, so that’s not anti-science. It’s not anti-genetics or anti-biology, because we know that sexual differentiation is complex and multi-layered, and isn’t the result of a holy book decreeing that there can be only two genders. Having to pee or poop is something all humans have to do, so it makes sense that such facilities can be used by all humans.

I suspect the organizers had the fact that attendees could use any facility that they wanted in mind — using a restroom is not some grand statement that requires a fanfare and a calligraphic testimonial about the nature of your particular gender. Again, the organizers want people to just get the job done so they can get on with the business of the conference.

In a further denial that we’ve been created male and female (Genesis 1:27), the convention featured ribbon stickers for attendees to attach to their name tags if they so chose. These stickers announced one’s preferred pronoun, and they came in three options: he/him/his, she/her/hers, and fill in the blank for whatever pronoun they preferred.

Ho hum. Completely routine at conferences nowadays.

Clearly, the AAM wants to be seen first and foremost as an LGBTQIA+ ally. But, really, it’s an outright denial of biological and biblical reality—we’re created male and female. A denial of this truth leads to confusion and chaos, as was exhibited throughout the convention.

I’ve been to many conferences with this approach. I’ll be attending Convergence next month, where gender neutrality is taken for granted. It causes no confusion or chaos, but rather the opposite. How would they know that the convention was chaotic? They abandoned it the first day!

What the Hamites want you to think is that this was an example of persecuting Christians.

It’s interesting that the AAM was being very cautious not to offend anyone and to come across as welcoming, tolerant, and accepting to everyone . . . except for Christians or others who believe that we’re created male and female. They don’t care if they offend or isolate Christians, a trend we increasingly see in a culture that claims to be tolerant. What we see is that they are only tolerant of views that agree with theirs! It makes you wonder how many museums that belong to AAM have policies and teaching that align with these secular, unbiblical views.

So, having a sign on the restroom door that says you aren’t allowed to stare at, question, or threaten other users is offensive to Christians of his sort. Which of those three things did the AiG contingent want to do?

Most educated, aware professionals implement such tolerant policies as much as they can, and as educated professionals, they are a majority secular in purpose.

So really, this conference turned out to be a gathering not primarily about museum programs and workshops, but the AAM allowed it to be an LGBTQ agenda-driven conference disguised as a museum conference.

No, it was primarily about museum programs and workshops, open to all professionals, and how you peed was disregarded. Ken Ham just thinks a museum conference ought to be more about putting people into one of two bins.

Speaking of disguises, why were those two frauds even in attendance? The Ark Park isn’t a museum, it’s a church disguised as a science museum.

I’m happy to see, though, that we now have a simple way to keep creationist trolls out of our events. Just put this sign on the door.

Big bonus: It’ll repel all those regressive atheists, as well! It’s amazing how much alike creationists and a certain ugly contingent of the atheist community sound.