Just this little El Niño, in an unexceptional year:

So far, that doesn’t look so unexceptional. That looks dangerous in unexpected ways.

The peak is widely expected to be about 4° C anywhere from November to February, the most powerful El Niño in at least a thousand years. It is so far beyond Super size that scientists are using highly unscientific terms for it: jaw dropping, mind blowing, Godzilla-like.

The boy child? No, this is El Niño Diablo, the devil boy.

Uh-oh. So what do I do now? I’m going to drain the garden hoses, is that not enough?

Plenty of articles offer estimates of how many people will die because of this due to heat, hunger or extreme weather events.

But the truth is that nobody really knows what El Niño Diablo will do.

We know what climatologists’ computer models predict, but it is going beyond what the models are designed to handle. If the models are missing some interactions anywhere—ocean currents, glacial melt rates, atmospheric water vapor load, cloud cover, anything—that leaves us more blind than we are accustomed to being with climate forecasting… and therefore less able to prepare for specific impact on us.

“What do you think of this El Niño?”

El Niño Diablo is a major turning point. I think we will regret it.

BUT WHAT DO I DO?

It was going to be a bunch of white male dweebs strutting around, thumping their chests. These were all losers, and I hadn’t heard of most of them, except for Sean Davis, who was a founder of The Federalist, so I didn’t post anything. It looked predictably stupid. I figured I’d wait until after the conference and look for some reviews.

There weren’t any. This conference wasn’t at all newsworthy.

However, someone did an analysis of the speakers. She goes through each of the men on that poster, and they were, without exception, deplorable Christian nationalists who hate immigrants and think women should shut up, stay home, and take care of the kids. Follow that link if you’re curious about who they are.

For instance, David Schrock:

Conspiracy theories are also at the heart of some of the scheduled speakers, especially with David Schrock. Schrock is the editor in chief of Christ Over All. His X feed is filled with how to minister to Muslims, critical analysis of Islam and anti-Sharia laws in America, anti-vaccine posts, concerns that the church is too effeminate, and celebrations of the Southern Baptist Convention further restrictions on women in pastoral roles.

They’re all that pathetic. For a short summary of the whole group, consult this revised poster:

And here’s a more serious summary:

What we find in the speakers under the misleading title of muscular Christianity, is instead a MAGA Christian nationalism, whose men are the victims of progress, feminism, LGBTQ2SA, and democrats. The speakers are a convergence of conspiracy, racism, hate, extremism, and anti-LGBTQ2SA, hoping to mobilize Christian men to support their metapolitical movement. In the past when we have dismissed these movements it has been to the detriment of society, as distasteful as these groups are, they are having an impact. We may make fun of them, we may meme their posts, but we have to be aware and respond to them.

We do have to closer eye on these people, because the media won’t do it for us. These are jokers who have managed to work their way up into the highest levels of power.

This guy claims that he can disprove abiogenesis. He has two arguments:

• Hydrolysis. All the molecules would be soaking in water, and water breaks down chemical reactions. He compares this to monkeys with typewriters, with the addition complication that they have to type in the rain.

• Chirality. The typewriter has to be twice as big to accommodate both the left- and right-handed molecules, and if the monkey types the wrong handedness, the whole paragraph it’s typing is ruined.

I trust you can see the colossal flaw in his claim. If true, then no chemical reactions could occur in modern, living cells — all that water would be dissolving everything. If chirality was a problem, then no protein could be assembled without picking amino acids having the wrong handedness. The thing is, hydrolysis and condensation reactions are going on continually in the cell, and the whole system pivots on maintaining an equilibrium of disassembly and assembly. As for chirality, enzymes have extremely specific chirality requirements, and will only process molecules of one handedness — and only synthesize molecules of the necessary chirality.

To refute him, I only have to point out that he is mostly made of water, yet he isn’t dissolving in front of me, and that before he self-liquidates, his proteins are made up of only L-amino acids, and not a random mix of L- and R-enantiomers. This is basic biochemistry, and he doesn’t understand it.

Somebody may have confronted him with these facts, compelling him to slump into slimy racemic puddle years ago. H e hasn’t posted in over 3 years, and didn’t have more than 200 followers. Poor dumb creationist.

It’s nice to know we aren’t the only country that throws away money on hideous, grandiose buildings with terrible cost overruns and rumors of corruption. Of course, if it were built here, it would be excessively gilded, and would be a deathtrap.

Talk among yourselves about construction projects. Or whatever.

Previous thread

Those flowers weren’t quite so black earlier this summer.

They look quite dead, actually.

Did I mention that the overall texture was wet and slimy?

I think this might be my favorite time of year.

Were you there? Straight from the mouth of Ken Ham.

Bailey won the Republican primary, which is no surprise, but the polls currently show Pritzker in a comfortable lead, 54-34.

Imagine I were invited to join a lab, and was given access to their data. I frequently talk with lab members, and I help them with writing up their results. Then, suddenly, I publish a grand paper summarizing their work, claiming that any novel insights were entirely my own, and didn’t give any credit to that generous lab.

Would you accept my claim to full credit?

That’s precisely what Anthropic has done!

When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

I don’t understand how they can claim that they didn’t suck evidence and arguments from a human science lab — that’s their whole business model! What’s not good for their business, though, is stealing credit, which has a natural consequence.

Dr. Mestre had become increasingly enthusiastic about using A.I. for his science. Just last month, he began using Claude Science, a new Anthropic A.I. tool tailored to researchers.

But after Anthropic’s announcement last week, he is winding down his projects with Claude and shifting to other models.

“I’m shutting down everything,” he said.

Why would anyone type their hard-earned evidence directly into a machine that will blithely steal it?

I went through rush, the campaign to enlist new students into a fraternity/sorority, my first year at the University of Washington. They attempted to lure me in with alcohol, which I drank, and gambling, which I rejected as stupid, and with overly friendly women, which I was too addled by the aforementioned alcohol to have a coherent conversation with. I quickly concluded that fraternity life offered me absolutely nothing of interest, and would have just been a wasteful distraction. I’ve never liked the whole fraternity philosophy ever since — they are places for young men to gather and learn terrible lessons about the world.

I was not surprised by the news from Cornell. In short, a young underage woman was given alcohol at a bar. She drank it, and was probably not at all accustomed to it. She drunkenly staggered off to the Chi Phi fraternity, where “friends” gave her ketamine, and she stupidly consumed it. Then they took her to a back room, raped her repeatedly for 7 hours, and even got on snapchat and invited their fellow frat brothers to join in the gang rape. This was not something she chose, or could even choose, being zonked out of her mind on drugs and alcohol.

This was a crime, plain and simple. The 7 rapists should have been arrested and faced severe criminal sentences, greater than mere expulsion. They were not. When the reputable university of Cornell heard about this atrocious, outrageous criminal act, they held an internal investigation, and kicked two of the criminals out of the university, without passing them on to civil authorities. The others were told to write essays.

Essays. I had no idea that writing was such a dreadful punishment.

The university is not supposed to be a bubble where horrific crimes are diminished to the point where you can rape a woman and expiate your crime by writing words. Being a student shouldn’t be a state of privilege, but apparently in this time when being a student is associated with being a child of a rich family, it has become a mark of belonging to an elite who can be excused for criminal actions.

No. I reject that. They must face the consequences. The students should be arrested and tried for rape. The bar that willingly served alcohol to underage women should face severe criminal penalties, their liquor license should be at risk. The Chi Phi fraternity should be shuttered permanently. Or at least that’s what I thought until I read the national headquarters statement on the incident.

The sexual assault allegations involving parties at Cornell University are deeply concerning. Anyone who reports sexual violence deserves to be heard and treated with compassion, dignity, and respect.

Chi Phi unequivocally condemns sexual violence. Our founding principles of Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity, and our mission of Building Better Men, call on every brother to demonstrate character through his actions and respect for the dignity and safety of others. Sexual violence is fundamentally incompatible with those expectations.

Oh god. Platitudes. How is the fraternity system at all about Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity? How does drunkenness and notoriously wild partying Build Better Men? It’s all a lie. Burn every chapter to the ground.

And shame on Cornell. They’ve built a safe space for the rapist sons of wealthy donors. They (and many other universities) need to change the university culture, but they won’t. The system is built with layers of privilege maintained by fat cats on managing boards, and they don’t care.

Am I naive to believe a university should be a place of learning?

Don’t forget these names: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. They’re the ones who drugged and raped a helpless woman. That should be on their CVs, at the very least. I also hope their mothers know what their boys have been accused of.

This sane, sober, well-informed video doesn’t do it for me.

I am interested in the tactics the defenders of the movie take. One event is improbable, unlikely but well, maybe possible; another event could only happen under rare circumstances; yet another event could happen if a confluence of different conditions occurs; add them all up, and presto, declare it could happen. That’s not how things work.

I learned something I hadn’t really thought through. Whales have a complex ruminant stomach that is muscular and crushes and tears food before passing it on to an acid-filled forestomach. I don’t care how many faint “maybes” you stack up, once you hit a single “impossible,” you’re done.

Script below the fold.

Hey, friends…

I have been neglecting youtube for a while. One reason is that I’ve been busy with classwork, but that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that I assigned myself an obligation that I’m choking on right now.

My last video was about the first half of this terrible Christian video by Calvin Smith, titled “How one atheist accidentally made the case for god 10x stronger”. I was the “one atheist”. He wrapped my words in apologetic bullshit and tried to claim that I was making a case for god, but nah, that’s silly. So I made one video about the bad first half, and said I’d get around to the second half later.

And that promise has been hanging around my neck ever since.

That second half is awful and stupid, and every time I listened to it, because I wanted to be responsible in my analysis, I hated the video a little more, and I hated Calvin Smith even more. He’s a pretentious hack who can’t assemble a coherent argument, and can never look beyond his ignorant presuppositions. I did not want to watch this video, and I didn’t want to shovel through his garbage ideas, and I especially did not want to deal with his lies and his obnoxious mannerisms.

Good work, Calvin Smith, you silenced me on YouTube for a few weeks by being egregiously idiotic.

But not today. Today, I told myself to muscle through the noise and get something done, so that I would never have to listen to Calvin Smith ever again. I ruthlessly cut down his long-winded noise to a few short clips, and will try to address them now. Be strong, everyone, I’m diving in.

[clip 1]

His goal here is to tie evolutionary thinking to abortion, which is how I ended up in this segment. He is not, however, ever going to get around to linking my views on evolution to my views on abortion.

One thing I have to mention that drove me crazy is how often he cuts to pictures of his hands opening books, flipping through the pages, or running his fingers over lines. He never names these books, he doesn’t actually read from them, and it’s all a performance to give the impression that has serious, literary sources, but he doesn’t. He just has his Bible. Who needs to read them if you just use them as a prop?

But now he’s going to give the Calvin Smith version of the pro-choice argument.

[clip 2]

So we’re arguing that the early conceptus is just a “clump of cells”, and that it’s “not a human baby”, and that it “can’t be murdered”. That’s fine, but he never gets around to justifying why those positions aren’t true. A blastula has some significant organization, but it is a “clump of cells”, and it is not a ” baby”, and while some Republicans are trying to declare that termination of a pregnancy is murder, that is not a position hallowed by history or tradition. Even the Christian Bible does not treat abortion as murder! People have always recognized a substantial difference between a fetus and a baby, with different penalties for induced abortions vs. infanticide, and traditionally, at least until the politicization of abortion in the 1970s, there was a boundary defined by the “quickening”, or that moment in the middle of pregnancy when the mother felt the fetus move, that was when the fetus was alive. These are not hard and fast boundaries.

Also, I have to mention something else that drove me crazy. The latin phrase “id est”, which is abbreviated “i.e.”, is for the written form only. When spoken aloud, say “that is,” which sounds more natural. True pedants know this. Calvin Smith says “i.e.” constantly throughout the video, and he sounds like a yokel.

Next he’s going to make some assertions about the definition of a human being.

[clip 3]

While lingering over a clip of a cute newborn, he says “The choice as to whether you will willingly destroy an innocent human being or not, i.e. [ick] whether you should have the choice to murder someone.”

I would not question whether that baby was innocent, or human, but I do think it’s debatable whether it’s a “being” or “someone”. That’s the crux of the argument that he is ignoring. At what point in development does that “clump of cells” become a being or a someone or a person, deserving of respect and good treatment, rather than an insensate tissue with no thoughts or feelings? We have a range from a fertilized oocyte to a gurgling cooing baby, where do we draw the line? Only a fool would claim to know exactly where the boundary is, and claiming that it’s at the moment of conception is ludicrously stupid…just as stupid as decreeing that a baby is an automonous intelligence only at the instant they breech the vagina.

Now brace yourself: Calvin is going to hold an old book under an antique lamp and explain what modern science has to say.

[clip 4]

He makes a series of claim. The first I agree with.

“You are human from the moment of fertilization”

Yes, true, you’re nothing else. But that modifier is doing a heck of a lot of work there. To say that something is human is only a statement about its origin. I can hold up my hand and say, “this is HUMAN”, but that does not mean that it is an independent thinking agent that I can send off to run errands at the grocery store.

If I find a footprint in the mud of my yard, I can announce that, since it is a HUMAN footprint, I can send it on a march to the garden. I can’t. That would be silly.

Like wise, if I sent you to our bathroom, and you found poop floating in the toilet bowl, if I brought in a forensic expert to analyze it, they might be able to determine that it was a HUMAN poop, but that does not imply that we should endow it with a divinity degree and send it off to teach sunday school.

That is not how the word works. It modifies the object it is attached to. I am not impressed with people who throw around the word “human” as if it has the magic power to bring mundane things to life.

Now if you instead say “human being” or “person”, those are words I will recognize as demanding some degree of dignity and meaning.

Next he said,

“all of your DNA is there from the beginning”

Sure, I will mostly agree, but personhood is not a deterministic propery of your DNA. That takes something more, something that he ignores and lies about in his next comment.

“your personhood is intrinsic, and it is just a matter of time and development, not some increasing quality of substance before we clearly see this new human being.”

Absolute nonsense in every word.

What is personhood that it can be intrinsic? Does he think your personality, your feelings, your entire history of chance events is somehow encoded in your DNA? No scientist will agree with that.

It actually IS a matter of time and development, with your self being progressively shaped by your experiences. Change happens, it’s unavoidable. I can say that the death of my grandmother when I was 12 was not a predetermined event, but it did strongly influence my personality and how I saw the world.

And yes, there is an increasing quality of substance over time. Embryonic me before the closure of the neural tube was qualitatively and quantitatively profoundly different in substance from the old man you see now. There’s a whole host of significant changes that affect us in development. To quote Wolpert, “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.” One could quibble with it, but it’s still a fact that the quality of our substance does increase over time. Let’s not forget puberty in there, either!

The heart of his argument is dead and stupid. It relies on his belief that the self, or dare I say the soul, is fixed and unchanging from conception to graveyard, and to hold to that he has to deny the reality of what he has experience.

From that foolishness he’s going to retreat to his nameless random books and flip through the pages without comprehension.

[clip 5]

“the root cause catalyst for the downgrade of western culture” is all those other churches that have accepted the fact of evolution. “Evolution provided atheistic bible skeptics and naturalists a way to undermine the foundation of all Christian doctrines, the book of Genesis, while simultaneously building up a powerful and aggressive materialistic platform, from which to launch humanistic teachings and beliefs into society.”

Cool. That is a truly inspiring passage.

“Evolution provided atheistic bible skeptics and naturalists a way to undermine the foundation of all Christian doctrines, the book of Genesis, while simultaneously building up a powerful and aggressive materialistic platform, from which to launch humanistic teachings and beliefs into society.”

>

How about some more good news?

[clip 6]

We are abandoning the authority of god’s word! Hallelujah! God’s words are cruel and barbaric, and I’m happy to be leaving them. And replacing them with humanist values? Even better.

Is Calvin trying to encourage us to further efforts?

Now he warns the liberal churches that they’re doomed to failure if the accept science and evolution.

[clip 7]

I don’t see that adopting evolutionary ideas has led to spectacular failure. Rather, the increasing influence of evangelical Christianity is leading to our downfall. Maybe Christian churches that accepted reason and a rational approach to the natural world would be stronger and less likely to fail, unlike those churches that spark a crisis of faith whenever someone explains a rainbow with principles of refraction, or when someone digs up a dinosaur bone in their backyard.

But you do you, Calvin Smith. And do continue to preach an apocalypse for your faith.

[clip 8]

What a happy way to end this video!

While you’re in a blissful glow, dreaming of collapsing churches, do remember to click on those link and subscribe buttons, and you might as well also visit patreon.com/pzmyers. Cheer me up some more.

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.

No, a person can’t be swallowed by a sperm whale (strike #1) and no, a person is not going to survive for an hour in the whale’s guts (strike #2). A very large sperm whale is the only whale with a gullet wide enough to swallow an object the size of a person, but not one wearing all the gear involved in scuba diving, and especially not since the whale is adapted to consume soft squishy prey. Furthermore, the gut isn’t just a passive volume — the victim is going to be mashed and squished by the muscular walls.

ScienceNews tries to break the news gently.

But no one has ever observed this process in sperm whales. And researchers aren’t sure sperm whales actually swallow prey whole. When these elusive giants do surface with squid, it’s either with “literal chunks hanging out of their mouths or chunks floating behind them,” Gero says.

Swallowing people is also not in sperm whales’ nature, Reidenberg says. It makes for a thrilling movie night, but “these whales are very gentle when they’re around people who are not bothering them.” So while physiologically possible, their behavior and taste for deep-sea creatures make the events “very, very unlikely.”

You’re also not likely to get hoovered up by a sperm whale by accident. These whales can dive more than two kilometers deep in search of a meal — far deeper than human divers can reach, Gero says.

Popular Science consulted the same whale biologist

.

“More than likely, the human drowns the second they get smashed into the mouth of the whale, whether they were drawn in by a squid or accidentally brought into the mouth of a whale,” he says. “My guess is the person dies the second they enter the mouth.”

Gero raises another interesting possibility. Sperm whales usually prey on boneless squid, so consuming a scuba-outfitted human could be a choking hazard, and could choke to death.

This would certainly make for a shorter movie, but Gero notes that the whale’s body could also have a more lively response to an unwanted foreign object in its mouth.

“When I swallow something that I shouldn’t have, it’s like a non-controllable response — your body just starts moving its mouth and coughing,” Gero says. “In that sort of movement, or freakout, it probably is going to do a lot of physical damage to the human.”

Although Gero acknowledges that he is not a whale anatomist, he still believes that it would be highly unlikely for any living creature to make it into the stomach of a sperm whale, let alone set up camp there.

“There are acids and gases,” he says. “The digestive tract of any mammal is not meant to be a livable place for any prey that ends up there.”

So, yeah, it’s a ridiculous movie with a bad premise.

But you know who is thrilled by it? Ken Ham.

Could Jonah have survived three days and three nights inside the belly of a great fish?

Well, I think more people will be asking that question next month after a new survival thriller movie, Whalefall, hits the box office. This movie is based off a 2023 novel of the same name by author Daniel Kraus, and the premise is basically this: A young man diving in the Pacific Ocean is accidentally swallowed by a hunting sperm whale. He only has one hour’s worth of oxygen left and must find a way to escape the belly of the beast.

Of course, such a story immediately reminds viewers of the biblical account of Jonah—and the author apparently intended that. In an interview he said,

The impetus for the book was that I wanted to treat the Biblical Jonah story with scientific and biological accuracy. I talked with whale experts as I developed the plot, and they would listen to my ideas and say, “You know, that is theoretically possible.” So, that’s why it’s believable: We got the science right.

No, he didn’t get the science right. He talked to experts and cherry-picked the most charitable, tentative statements they made, and scurried off to write a stupid story that would sell, being especially attractive to brain-dead Christians, like Ken Ham. And now we’re going to have to deal with apologists who will claim it’s possible because they saw it in a movie.

Ham did say one honest, revealing thing.

Just as there is no fully naturalistic explanation for how Jonah could have survived such an ordeal, there’s no naturalistic explanation for how Jesus could be crucified, die, be buried in a tomb, and then three days later walk out of that tomb alive. It was a miraculous event that was only possible because God is omnipotent and nothing is impossible for Him.

The story makes no sense, there is no naturalistic explanation, but he’s going to believe it because god said so, and it was a miracle. Who needs a reasonable, factual explanation when you’ve got the whims of a god to back you up?

It’s a great place. I miss the opportunity to visit it.

But now I learn that it was bought up by Drexel University. This was part of an ugly consolidation of academic institutions that distorted higher learning in the the region — they also bought up the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and Salus University, as part of a pattern of expansion. They slapped their name on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (I will never call it that.) And now, on September 1, they abruptly announced that they were closing the Academy as of September 30. That’s rather short notice for a collection that has been growing since 1812.

At the time I lived there, Drexel had a great reputation as an engineering and computer science school, but apparently they’ve now become a massive do-everything school with a focus on making lots of money, and screw science and history. Drexel has become the bad guy in this story.

Keep up with the news at the Save the Museum page, and sign the petition. What the hell happened to Drexel?

She’s also anti-trans. Minnesota has a reputation for tolerance, and people here are very proud of their state, so I think these statements by Tafoya ought to follow her everywhere.

I’m voting for Flanagan in November.

Argiope bruennichi

The colloquial name is the wasp spider, and they’re not normally spotted in Cheshire, but one was found in a recent survey. There is some concern when a non-native species shows up — is this a sign of climate change? Also, English northerners are not accustomed to these big honkers.

“You know your big, chunky house spiders – the ones you think are massive and frighten the life out of you in your living room? A female wasp spider is probably a bit bigger than those,” said Scott Wilson, head of field programmes at the zoo.

I’d be thrilled and surprised if I saw a wasp spider — they’re native to Europe and North Africa, and I haven’t seen any here. We instead have two equivalent native species, Argiope aurantia and Argiope trifasciata (we have a lovely A. aurantia living in our backyard right now). Maybe they are a sign of a warming trend in the UK, but they are quite nice animals, inoffensive and helpful in clearing out your grasshoppers and crickets. They just look a little intimidating. Don’t be frightened.

Sorry, spiders, you might see more of us as we revel in a good hot scouring.

This figure, used by ScienceDaily, is totally irrelevant to the topic and has a caption that doubles-down on the nonsensical part of the article: “The human brain may actually be two ancient nervous systems fused into one, a discovery that could transform how scientists study brain development and devastating neurological diseases.”

I guess I should address this, since so many people are emailing me about it. There is an article titled “Stanford scientists discover the human brain may actually be two separate organs”, which takes a basic reality of developmental biology and blows it up with a ridiculous conclusion. No, your brain is not two separate organs, any more than your liver is multiple organs because it contains multiple tissue types — that, for instance, there are different lineages of hepatic progenitor cells in liver differentiation that produce hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. We take this for granted; development is a hierarchical, branching process, and so yeah, we see sequential separation of developmental lineages. It’s to be expected! We don’t promote the work by claiming various organs are in fact multiple organs.

The sensationalist spin is being placed on competent work that traces markers that distinguish regions of a single organ, markers that have a deep history in both development and evolution. Calm down. This is a routine observation that does have some practical uses.

The weird twist was put on it by the Stanford press office and ScienceDaily. The actual paper (which is fine) it is based on is titled “Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain”, a much more sensible and accurate title, although it also claims that the brain is a “composite organ”, which is a little bit silly. Every organ is a composite organ in some sense. We are a multicellular gemisch with some regional organization.

Development is hierarchical and sequential. It’s disappointing that this isn’t taught in grade school.

A recent article in Science has been deleted and a curious editorial comment added to it. The article title is Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information, and the editor’s note is:

Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.

The attributed author was Caroline Williams. The real Caroline Williams has written elsewhere:

Fake Caroline update:

The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.

Link to the retraction / editor’s comment here: https://lnkd.in/eSQ2XEAJ

The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.

I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.

On the plus side, I now have some very nice contacts at Science and Nature and plan to write something better for them as soon as possible. And the fact that payment was made opens up the possibility of tracking down who is behind this. Watch this space…

It’s weird. Fake Caroline got nothing out of this but a paycheck, which does make me wonder how much one gets paid for a news article in Science. It can’t be much, given that scientists who publish there get nothing, and are in fact expected to pay the journal for the privilege.

There is a great deal of gain to one’s reputation, but not if you publish under someone else’s name, obviously. You can’t list it on your CV.

It can hurt the real writer’s reputation — now editors might be on the alert that submissions by “Caroline Williams” could be fraudulent. But this is a lot of effort to go to for a weak effect on someone. I can’t believe this elaborate fraud was a devious hit piece.

So now I’m left wondering why anyone would do this. Is there some subtle scam at play?

If you ever thought Steven Pinker was a member of the liberal intelligentsia, think again. That was his carefully maintained facade, an illusion built on his politeness and careful speech, but underneath it all, he really is a kind of troglodyte with regressive views. Like so many right-wing podcasters, he’s been hiding behind free speech absolutism; whenever some horrid troll says something that ought to get them slapped down hard, here comes little Stevie, the Harvard professor, to defend them with a shout of “Free Speech!”

He’s had a long history of playing this gambit, and it’s starting to catch up with him. Virginia Heffernan lays out all the evidence, prompted by yet another book from the man. It must be hard on him to see his legacy dissolve.

But something’s not right. Pinker’s off his cognitive game. He’s admittedly had a hard stretch over the past few years, during which his reputation has sustained slow-rolling but significant damage. His glory days – from The Language Instinct in 1994 to his selection by Time magazine as a top evo-psych influencer in 2004 – may simply be behind him now. And though Bill Gates, Joe Rogan, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and other masters of the manosphere continue to look up to him, Pinker’s also at the centre of a cyclone of academic catastrophes.

For one, he’s still smarting from a six-year-old petition that tried in vain to get him removed from a linguistics association for alleged racist statements. “In the old days,” he said of cancellation culture on a recent podcast, “there were public hangings, public crucifixions, burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures.”

There’s the weak point of all those “free speech” claims. It’s really ‘free speech for me, not for thee’ if, when someone exercises their free speech to accuse him of racism, why, that’s comparable to a public crucifixion in his mind. These days he’s remarkably busy, since so many of his friends have done so many odious things, and he has to race around defending them all while trying not to muss his hair.

In his hard-won role as a public intellectual, Pinker has taken it upon himself to defend the freedom of anti-woke darlings to say and do whatever they want. These include the British philosopher and alleged sex pest Colin McGinn, the American academic fraud Marc Hauser, and the American “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who ignited the media campaign against Professor Jason Arday.

Notably, too, Pinker worked with his friend Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer, on the legal defence of their associate, the eugenicist and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

And now his intellectual child, evolutionary psychology, is in trouble.

And if stumping for the outlaw brotherhood weren’t taxing enough, Pinker’s domain of study has quietly collapsed. Evolutionary psychology, which he pioneered, came under a cloud after the exposure of its iffy methodology (in which its claims can’t be disproven), and controversies over race science (in which racial hierarchies are biological) and rape apologetics (in which rape is a reproductive strategy). Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED, yes, PED), where Pinker was a regular, closed ignominiously in 2021.

News of the death of evolutionary psychology may be premature — that collection of ugly misinterpretations of science is remarkably resilient, drawing as it does on the never-ending wellspring of racism and sexism. I wouldn’t count it out just yet, even if I do wish it would truly go away. I don’t think Pinker is the knight in shining armor who will rescue it. His reputation is finally being tarnished.

In 2019, Pinker’s reputation took its biggest hit when his clandestine ties to Epstein surfaced. It seemed that Epstein had hosted Pinker on his jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, and the men appeared in friendly photos together. Part of their relationship was Pinker’s starring role at Edge, a masculinist network of billionaires and academics that Epstein bankrolled and used to advance his plans for a master race. (I was a lesser light in Edge; that story is told here.)

Then there’s something darker: the evidence that Pinker helped Dershowitz with Epstein’s legal defence in 2007 – and did so knowingly, as was recently reported by the anthropologist Cathryn Townsend in Liberal Currents. (Pinker says he didn’t know which of Dershowitz’s clients he was helping.) Then in 2015 he tweeted out Dershowitz’s defence of Epstein and the former Prince Andrew.

Follow that link to the story of Edge — I was also a lesser light in that community, and wasn’t involved long enough to perceive how dark and evil that group was. But wow, did I ever dodge a bullet there.

He can’t help himself. He tends to ally himself with the worst people who are eventually exposed, and he’s left holding a bag of excuses.

Pinker, who never met an anti-woke campaign he didn’t like, recently joined the crusade of “race realist” Cofnas against Arday, the onetime Cambridge sociologist and suspected plagiarist who died last month. On X, Pinker grieved not over Arday’s presumed suicide but the fact that he and Cofnas had been been “tarred” with charges of racism for their attacks on him.

Metaphors that turn speech acts into medieval torture have become Pinker’s stock-in trade. For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies (a devastating 2015 study found that more than half of psychology studies could not be replicated) to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection, but Lord knows if those studies hold up.

Heffernan does not recommend Pinker’s latest book.

Skip the new book. The once-sharp Pinker has trouble landing a point these days, and it’s even a little worrying to see a don of his stature reduced this way. Pinker already blocks me on X for pointing out his ties to Epstein, so I’m sure he won’t see this piece and fear me as a hangman. (See “Free Speech Crusader Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties.”) But if he does, I will be careful not to say something violent. You read this piece, Professor? Perhaps you felt your blood pressure rise…

Thanks for the suggestion, but reading anything by Pinker has not been on my to-do list for many years. I will skip it. I’m not at all interested in anything by an Epstein apologist.

1. Taxonomically Restricted Essential Genes (orphan genes)
2. pervasive molecular convergence
3. upstream development gene regulatory networks cannot be mutated without lethal disturbance

Aron sent me a more thorough summary of his claims that I’ll include below the fold, but it was really a lot of pompous noise from a guy who had been gleaning scientific terms from the creationist literature, which he presented as evidence that refuted evolution and therefore, in creationist illogic, proved creation.

So we had a little dialogue about these claims. It could have been a debate, but the creationist ran away and refused to join the conversation.

The summary from Aron Ra:

I asked this idiot for evidence for his magical creator, what he calls a “common designer”. This was his reply:

“Observed biological facts for common design… Yes.

(1) Taxomonically Restricted Essential Genes (orphan genes),

About that, he said that orphan genes are “100% unique to a specific species, genus, and family”. And that “These genes show strong evidence for separate ancestry. Studies across comparative genomics show that roughly 10% to 20% of the genes in every sequenced organism are orphan genes.” He describes this as contradicting evolution, requiring what he calls a “rescuing device” to maintain belief in evolution, and that rescuing device, he says is “De Novo. This explains how the non-coding random junk DNA spontaneously mutated into functional protein coding genes.”

(2) pervasive molecular convergence (identical codes for echolocation, digestive enzymes, prestin in unrelated organisms),

About that, he said that “Finding a stable, novel enzyme fold by chance in unguided sequence space (1 in 10^77 functional space) is statistically and chemically equivalent to an unguided physical impossibility.” And that “Whenever identical complex genetic machinery or identical gene-breakage patterns (like GULO across primates, bats, guinea pigs, and birds) contradict a single evolutionary tree, universal common descent invokes unguided “convergent evolution” over and over.”

“The motor protein Prestin produces identical acoustic high-frequency amino acid convergence between echolocating bats and toothed whales, grouping them together ahead of other mammals on a raw molecular tree.”

“Phylogenetic trees rely on common ancestry as an unchallengeable null hypothesis, dismissing conflicting sequence data (like Prestin) as “convergence” and treating human intra-species genealogy tools (PMC12336972) as proof of macroevolutionary transitions across phyla.”

And (3) upstream development gene regulatory networks cannot be mutated without lethal disturbance.”

About that, he said that: “In modern laboratories, altering upstream dGRN kernels causes developmental catastrophe and embryonic lethality. Postulating that ancient unguided mutations somehow rewired core developmental kernels without causing lethality appeals to an unobserved, untestable exception to developmental biology.”

“In molecular biology, core replication origins and transcriptional complexes operate under strict biochemical constraints. Eukaryotic and prokaryotic machineries are non-exchangeable, requiring dual-origin shuttle vectors during cloning. Even within mammals, regulatory sequences of ribosomal RNA genes exhibit strict species-specific promoter-polymerase barriers; human RNA Polymerase I transcription factors cannot properly recognize mouse rDNA promoter elements, and vice versa.”

“transitioning between fundamentally different body plans (such as non-bilaterian to bilaterian, or invertebrates to vertebrates) requires the origin of novel, tightly integrated developmental Gene Regulatory Networks (dGRNs) and taxonomically restricted (“orphan”) genes with unique protein-coding structures.”

“Constructing the chordate architecture (notochord, dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal arches) requires a distinct, tightly integrated set of upstream dGRN kernels. As Eric Davidson demonstrated, core kernels cannot be altered in developing embryos without causing developmental catastrophe. Moving downstream switches (such as FGF4 retrogenes in Dachshunds) explains minor limb scaling within an established family, but operational science provides no mutational mechanism showing how the upstream chordate regulatory kernels arose from a non-chordate ancestor.”

His conclusion is that “Common design accounts for the empirical evidence we observe daily: modular regulatory switches that permit rapid, robust horizontal diversification within kinds, accompanied by hard developmental and reproductive boundaries, lineage-specific orphan genes, and deep structural constraints that resist unguided transformation.”

https://www.youtube.com/live/FaUZ-e188tE

In addition to all of that, he also said that “evolutionary biologists claimed 98% of the human genome was junk DNA. Only 1% to 2% of human DNA codes for proteins. The rest were evolutionary leftovers.” But then he said that “in 2012, ENCODE published papers that 80% of the human genome is biologically active and functional. In a famous 2013 paper titled “On the Immortality of Television Sets”, evolutionary biologists Dan Grair wrote: “If the ENCODE functional capacity is 80% then evolution is false”. To keep evolution intact, the functional part of the genome had to be less than 10-15%. They shifted to “well, transcription doesn’t mean function, most of that activity is useless cellular noise, so junk still exists”. This “noise” continues to shrink with regulatory roles for non-coding DNA regions and uncovering other functions. And the rescuing device in this case was mostly co-option.”

And finally, he said that “fossil succession is disparity preceding diversity.” And that “Phylum-level architectures appear abruptly, followed only by sub-lineage pruning and variation.”

If we have time, we may also cover the following:

“Kinds are defined by reproductive compatibility and hybridization limits, aligning generally with the family level (Canidae, Felidae, Equidae). Distinct species within these families readily interbreed to form viable hybrids, while cross-family breeding between distinct body plans does not occur.
This boundary is real and testable:”

“I appreciate you consulting Professor PZ Myers, though it is telling that a university biologist opened a scientific critique with vulgar schoolyard insults (“What a wanker,” “bullshit”). Setting the bluster aside, what was his substantive answer to my question on how the upstream chordate dGRN kernels originated from a non-chordate ancestor? He noted that fruit flies use Brachyury homologs in gut invagination while chordates use Brachyury in notochord formation, concluding they were “readily co-opted into the GRN for notochord formation… so we know where, when, and how notochords evolved.” Declaring that a master transcription factor was “readily co-opted” is not a demonstrated mutational mechanism; it is evolutionary teleology. In fruit flies, mutating that pathway halts gastrulation. By what demonstrated mutational steps does an unguided process rewire an essential endodermal gut-formation program into an axial mesodermal rod without causing embryonic lethality during gastrulation in the intermediate organisms?
Myers didn’t cite a mutational pathway; he pointed to a shared protein family and declared the problem solved by co-option. Reusing identical modular parts across different biological platforms is the hallmark of common systems engineering.
Furthermore, Myers cited Di Gregorio’s work on cis-regulatory modules (CRMs). As Eric Davidson explicitly defined, CRMs and differentiation gene batteries are peripheral, downstream switches – the exact switches I have repeatedly noted allow terminal variation. Di Gregorio himself conceded the “lack of self-evident linear conservation between the cis-regulatory regions identified in Ciona and those identified in other chordates.” Shuffling downstream transcription factor binding sites does not demonstrate how the core upstream kernels that establish the chordate body plan assembled.”

“This exchange has confirmed the real impasse. When pressed on hard developmental genetics:
– PZ Myers pointed to fruit fly gut genes being “readily co-opted” into chordate notochords; a storytelling narrative, not an observed mutational mechanism.
– Eric Davidson’s documented embryonic lethality regarding core dGRN kernels remains unbridged by unguided mutations.
– The existence of Taxonomically Restricted Essential Genes (orphans) remains unexplained by gradual duplication and divergence.
– The mathematical search across sequence space (1 in 10^77) remains an impassable combinatorial barrier for unguided mechanisms.
Universal common descent relies on historical storytelling, computational tree assumptions, and an endless array of ad-hoc rescuing devices to preserve a single tree.”

He specifically said “genetic markers do not confirm ancestry”.

Evolution can also explain away more contradictory results, the orphan genes (100% unique to a specific species, genus, and family). These genes show strong evidence for separate ancestry. Studies across comparative genomics show that roughly 10% to 20% of the genes in every sequenced organism are orphan genes. And, we have a rescuing device for this as well: De Novo. This explains how the non-coding random junk DNA spontaneously mutated into functional protein coding genes.

What the Kearns and Ambrose cases didn’t have was a thick overlay of racism. Arday had been aggressively harrassed for a long time by a guy named Nathan Cofnas, before the accusations had filtered into British journalism, which treated them much much more seriously and marshaled the public to question the legitimacy of Arday’s work. I don’t know enough about Arday’s discipline to say whether more investigation was necessary, but I am familiar with Cofnas, that fine specimen of Caucasian superiority shown on the right, and I can tell you that if anyone should have been exiled from academe, it was that fucking Nazi.

Cofnas calls himself a “race realist” and promotes “scientific racism”. He got a PhD in philosophy from Oxford in 2020 for a thesis that sounds like evo-psych muddled up with naive philosophy, arguing that morality is rooted in biological predispositions. I’ve got a copy, but haven’t been able to get through the whole thing, and am unfortunately incapable of throwing a pdf against the wall. He promptly got a job at Emmanuel College, and was promptly fired for grossly racist remarks disparaging black people, generically. He was picked up by Ghent University, why I don’t know, racism shouldn’t be a trait on one’s CV that makes them readily hireable. He’s currently suspended from Ghent because he chose to use his academic freedom to launch his campaign against Arday, because he’s black, and Cofnas does not believe black people should be able to do anything outside of sports and entertainment.

He’s now doing the rounds of racist and right-wing podcasts, and recently appeared with Glenn Loury (a black man) and John McWhorter (a black man) to babble about how he’s not really a racist, but because he’s also a spectacularly stupid person, he couldn’t help but fumble his story.

Incredible segment from this discussion between Nathan Cofnas and Glenn Loury & John McWhorter where Cofnas starts to explain how the Nazis were right about racial differences, then catches himself and pivots to how the Nazis were right about the conspiring elites. pic.twitter.com/fsHE9LdlRd

— Sasha Gusev (@SashaGusevPosts) September 20, 2026

There’s this bit where he’s talking about a science paper about the evidence for directional selection in West Asian peoples, and he let’s slip a few bad beliefs that he desperately tries to talk himself out of the hole he dug.

The Nazis are saying, look, we were right all along. Now they aren’t right, they…they were…they were right that there are…well, they don’t, they say there are like essential fundamental differences between races, which is not true, but there…they said that the left wing establishment that said that all races are exactly the same, uhh, now it’s obvious that the establishment was lying and the establishment has no credibility, which means the Nazis have much more credibility to many people.

No, the left wing establishment, whatever that is, does not argue that all races are exactly the same; which he calls race communism. How could they, when we acknowledge that all individuals are different? And when there are obvious differences in the distribution of physical traits in different populations? Yet somehow this jumped up racist philbro with no comprehension of what population geneticists actually say is happy to claim that now Nazis are more credible.

Let’s hope that Ghent University makes the sensible decision to give this bigoted clown the boot.

AiG is losing their tax incentives, so they’re going through various arcane legal maneuvers right now to…it’s not clear. They’re trying to convince the city of Williamstown to build a fire station on a peculiar piece of property, surrounded by AiG land? They want to build a Tower of Babel attraction to get new tax incentives? They’re meeting behind closed doors with city officials? Nobody knows, except the overpaid officals at Answers in Genesis.

Seeing all the convoluted nonsense they can squeeze out of the Bible, wait until they’re done twisting the law.

This looks like a relevant and interesting documentary: The Last Picture Shows. It’s about all those small town movie houses that still exist, even as Hollywood tries to strangle us all.

Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving. Between the stops along the way, Rustin poetically intersperses excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film The Last Picture Show, as well as reflections on past and present hardships facing the film exhibition industry. The Last Picture Shows is not only a timely portrait of an industry in crisis, one facing the headwinds of consolidation, streaming, and the diminishing theatrical experience, but it also reminds viewers that even in vast cinema deserts, there are oases of community and gathering that remain, where the movie house continues to be a place of wonder, contemplation, and connection.

There were actually two centers of small-town life in Morris, the railroad station and the theater. The railroad station is a wreck right now, with no passenger rail service to our town. The theater probably fits into the category of “struggling to hold on,” but we are currently in the black, just barely. We’ve got costly plans to revitalize the theater right now, mostly mundane stuff like a $30,000 expense to repair the roof, and further down the road we plan to remodel the run-down restrooms, and update the marquee. These are daunting costs, especially for an institution only this year boasted a net profit of about $5000. We figure if we keep plugging away, pennies at a time, we’ll eventually get there.

Meanwhile, the next closest theater in the small town of Benson, the DeMarce Theater, has a “For Sale” sign posted. I don’t know if they’re failing, or if the owners are just aware of how much work it takes to keep these businesses afloat.

I was not alone. Mary’s father, who was a veteran US Marine who’d fought in all the major Pacific battles in WWII, would sit quietly, slowly sinking into our chairs as the sonic assault continued. He had the advantage of years of training and intense combat experience, and also more years with these four women than I ever had. Me, I was the fresh meat, the raw recruit who could only learn by suffering through the engagement. We came out of it alive, together.

I bring this up as background because I did a double-shift at theater last night, and the first movie I saw was Practical Magic 2, a movie I’d never heard of, nor had I heard of Practical Magic 1, but it must have been popular, since it featured A-list stars, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, etc. It’s all about sisterhood among a family of cursed witches, cursed to never fall in love. The waves of estrogen were gushing off the screen, but my training at family gatherings helped me persevere. The cast was almost exclusively women.

There was one earnest, caring boy at the beginning, but the daughter he was dating made the mistake of saying “I love you” to him, triggering the family curse and sending him out on a bicycle to be run over by a truck, so that he spent the rest of the movie in a coma, conveniently. I was thinking that they’d never have this problem if they lived in the Midwest, rather than New England, because here we’re all emotionally repressed and never communicate our feelings.

The rest of the movie is a trio of family witches stumbling about crumbling ruins in the English countryside, looking for a cure for the curse. There is magic involved, and many whispered conversations where they overtalk one another. They do find one possibly helpful man, but they take him out with a frying pan to the back of the head and a sleeping potion, so he’s not cluttering up the climax of the movie. There is a third man, but he’s the villain, naturally.

There’s a battle where the three witches join psychic hands and use the power of love and sisterhood against a screaming, ranting man. I’ll let you guess how it ends up.

Was the movie any good? I don’t know. The magic was nonsense and was only conjured up when the plot needed it, the story was pure schmaltz, but from the outside looking in, I can empathize and comprehend how a story of sisters working together could appeal. My wife wants to go see it now, so I might be seeing it again.

The second movie was more my style: Resident Evil. One man, battling a series of indescribable horrors, alone, with virtually no conversation the entire movie. He’s on a solo mission to deliver a vital component to the Umbrella Corporation in Raccoon City, and that’s absolutely all you need to know about the plot. I just nailed it. Do I need to go on?

OK, a little more explanation. Umbrella Corp has ‘accidentally’ released a horrific virus that has spread through the population. This virus doesn’t exactly zombify everyone (I’m tired of zombie movies), but is instead a kind of infectious body horror disease. People fuse into these disgusting masses of limbs and heads that try to snarl everyone into a gooey corrupted form by biting or spewing bloody filaments or ropes of intestinal glop.

The best part of the movie to me was the protagonist, who was doggedly running this mission while maintaining a constant mumbling running monolog of profanity, consisting of mainly repeated variants of the word “fuck”. It was beautiful. I identified perfectly with his character — that’s exactly what I would do if I had to run through a city full of slimy predatory body parts. I wouldn’t be an action hero, I wouldn’t know how to use the guns he picks up, just like the protagonist, but I would be angrily railing against the situation under my breath.

The bottom line: not a great movie, lacking any depth at all, but just about a perfect capture of a standard video game scenario.

It was an interesting pairing of two movies that are more or less the antithesis of each other. What I’d like to see now is a synthesis — it’s going to take a lot of slime and blood and horrific gore, but if there were a fusion of a sisterhood power movie with that guy constantly snarling “fuck” as he tried to figure out what was going on, I’d watch it.