Symbioting yer brainimals

"I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"

 

2Pac - Staring Through My Rear View 

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It occurs to me that mentioning Lynn Margulis in a fantasy TBS faction blurb might've seemed like a non-sequitur to most people. (I get very socially insightful like that sometimes after committing a Rain Man moment.) Or that most did not mark her name during bio class. 

 

During the nineties and until the mid-2000s she was everyone's praised and laureated science baby. Partly this was due to the usual feminist propaganda promoting any woman whatsoever as combating the evil of male existence. But her legitimate claim to fame promoting* the endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells (read: your cells) has remained uncontested, and makes a fascinating bit of evolutionary history explaining a major step in how all multicellular life even became possible. And the topic found much more widespread applications after that. I did think it a bit ludicrous when doing a semester project around 2010 on freshwater ciliates that it was harder to find papers on algal symbionts from the preceding years which did not name-drop Margulis as last or next-to-last author for celebrity appeal. (Which probably means she contributed a grand total of one phone conversation; maybe fast-tracked a grant.) For a topic closer to the current news cycle, the massive coral die-offs, the worst of which was just last year, you might remember also involve endosymbionts and their loss.

 

But then, as such things do, the fame went to her head and she continued pushing her pet theory to absurd lengths, insisting that symbiosis and not natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, which is where my fantasy shadow-wolves' banter took a swipe. It's just too easy to demonstrate that symbiosis serves as a competitive advantage within the framework of natural selection (two teaming against various third parties) and mechanisms like parasitic reduction in complexity of genome and function take the wind out of the more hippie-friendly kumbaya view of cooperation above all. But I digress. Margulis went to fringier fringes by promoting the Gaia Hypothesis (that the whole damn planet is a gigantic superorganism) which you might remember made its way not only into SciFi (e.g. the Pandora books) but into video games in the nineties with titles like Sim Earth and Alpha Centauri. Though I absolutely love it as a classic Big Think, even its core claim that the Earth maintains homeostasis had been readily demonstrated by the early 2000s to have far more arguments against it than for.

 

But none of that quite killed Margulis' star power, until she threw in with the 9/11 Truth movement claiming the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government. After which her name was quietly dropped from polite conversation. 

Umm... Why?

How does her belief in a ludicrous (and quite importantly, unrelated) conspiracy theory undo her work on one of the most important evolutionary topics?

 

This happened near or even shortly before the start of what we now call cancel culture, and biology (like all sciences) has other examples whose names' mere mention is now met with awkward, embarrassed silence despite their previously acknowledged accomplishments. Robert Trivers proudly took money from Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein didn't waste his time to make him debase himself and beg and scrape for every dime like grant committees do. "In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales." Julian Huxley was a leading eugenicist and humanist at the same time. Hell, Konrad Lorenz was a freakin' Nazi! Not neo-, not sympathizing or leaning, but full-bore original flavor Nazi. Sometimes they have shameful youths, sometimes they go a bit loopy in their old age, sometimes they just don't give a shit about wider society's morality except to play along just enough to follow their actual interests. There's a decent chance by the way that your surgeon might be a sociopath who enjoys cutting people up and has merely found a socially acceptable (and highly lucrative) way to do so. Do you want your appendix crammed back in, knowing that?

 

I find Margulis' example particularly informative for just when she began to be unpersoned. Everyone had known she held fringe interests for decades, but didn't mind so long as they could be spun into convenient leftist academic personal politics. Her balls-to-the-wall promotion of symbiosis as the be-all biological force was melded with feminist propaganda of supposedly higher-minded female cooperation as opposed to masculine head-butting competitiveness i.e. natural selection. The Gaia Hypothesis, obviously enough, is total hippie catnip. So it was all a case of oh, hah-hah, you know that Lynnie, she can be a nutty ol' gal sometimes, but she's still one of ours, one of us chickens... until the World Trade Center thing. Whatever its actual demographics 9/11 Truthism was fundamentally viewed as the domain of crazy gun-toting conspiracy uncles, as right-wing and masculine. Thus, though they would not admit to prioritizing this objectively minor detail of her views, academics gradually stopped bringing her up in conversation, got to shortening her mention in texts as footnote to endosymbiosis itself, where they had previously gone great lengths to voice admiration or beg her for a byline name drop.

 

But it was great while it lasted, wasn't it, glorifying her for putting men in their place, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

 

Look, this is not an issue with one idol, or with idolatry in general, or with academia alone. If anything, conservatives are far, far guiltier of getting their panties in a bunch over some public figure voicing the slightest support of environmentalism or socialism or heavens forfend, atheism! And, just like social justice claptrap, it ends up coloring those institutions in which conservative viewpoints prevail. If you think it's hard finding right-wing scientists, try left-wing bankers! Not a lotta hippies preaching up in the stock market temples. Moneyed, religious, meat-and-potatoes kinder/kuche/kirche culture's been cancelling speakers all throughout history. Usually by far more violent means than Hollywood and universities employ.

"True that

Only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed" 

 

But in particular the image of the milquetoast, deferential nerd scientist has never held up any better than the "mad" scientist stereotype at its antipode. Reality is weirder than our mundane monkey intuition, and those minds considering the weirdness of the natural world, from amino acids to quasars, will end up holding some weird attitudes, some quaint, some harmful, some intriguing, others flat-out insane. "Outcasts, left far and few like southpaws" Deal with it. If you had ever held any hope for human progress, it would have had to entail the mental fortitude to live with uncomfortable details, to admire a person for something you agree with while at the same time admitting a point of disagreement, and not allowing either to erase the other. If I can live with her feminist crap, you can live with the false flag operation nonsense.

 

Those thoughts can coexist in your skull.

Call it memetic symbiosis.

 

 

 

 

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* Not inventing; it had been proposed since the early 20th century years of the modern synthesis of biological thought but was ignored until molecular biology demonstrated ribosomal disparities and other confirming evidence.

Flickering Cells

"How can I change the path that I'm on?
This is my destiny
This is my life, my own right or wrong
Bring it on back to me
How can I say what it is that I want?
Wisdom speak to me"

 

Syntax - Destiny

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"Aw, man! Brain-bug right up the nose! How plain silly! What are the chances it'd be shooting out of the drain right when my nose was over it? What's the word I'm looking for?

Argh!!!

'Contrived!' "

 

Sluggy Freelance, 28 Geeks Later parody, 2005/07/21

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Walk with me, dear reader, we'll be taking some twists and turns. First, among zombies:

What? This is too a zombie movie! See, they're looking for the zombies, with flashlights, it's totally plot relevant. I rarely bother with the subgenre, but re-viewing 28 Days Later gave me a chance to compare it (quite favorably) against more recent brain-muncher fare like Army of the Dead, whose pile of cliches indicates how hopelessly played-out zombies had become by '21. The most random of these appear to fit no purpose in the story but to fill script pages, like political posturing on immigration, obligatory scene of action girl visiting vengeance upon an obligatorily stupid and greedy male sexual predator, nerd who must prove his manliness, obvious sneering hateable backstabber, and the daddy who must spend all movie making amends to his daughter for just not being daddy enough for her tastes. But even the more genre-specific, like super-zombies, the Bride of Frankenstein or the utter, cartoonish ease with which our designated heroes dispatch endless swarms, all strain so hard at upping the ante it's no wonder they just went ahead and made a Las Vegas song-and-dance number out of the whole mess.*

 

Of course even two decades earlier 28 Days Later was itself trying to dodge being pigeonholed as a "zombie" flick with all due shambling, given the genre's increasing saturation, so instead played up the societal collapse. The lights no longer come on, the water no longer runs, the double-deckers got double-decked, food doesn't get brought in, the tunnels are clogged, there's no cops to keep the thugs in check. No maids sweep away the rubble, no minimum-wage employees put the shopping carts back in their places. You might say these are also cliches used in common with Mad Max and disaster movies but if so it's because they're natural out-growths of a complex world we take for granted, not merely feel-good applause moments engineered by Hollywood. A collapse is a collapse, whether by zombies, thunderdomes, ETs, superstorms or an invasion of redcaps. Our monkey instincts push us to view everything as a social conflict, victory to be achieved by crushing a rival, a personification of evil, a bogeyman, one which can be screamed at and taunted or threatened with sky-waved fist. But the universe itself is death, scratching at this illusory blip of sapient civilization with a myriad tendrils, constantly.

 

Is the blood drop scene in 28 Days Later contrived? No, the contrivance is that it didn't happen sooner, that they'd get so far in the first place without stumbling face-first into an infected blood-puddle, that they didn't get fried by an electrified puddle of water near a still-functioning backup generator or flattened by debris falling off skyscrapers and that no mosquitos passed the infection around. The true contrivance is the universal storytelling convention that nature must step back so the narrative gets resolved by a heroic plot arc satisfying our primitive mammalian social/competitive instincts. A real collapse will come with more hazards than a marketing tagline can express. The whole point of avoiding civilization-destroying contrivances like mushroom clouds, gray goo, global warming or engineered plagues is that once you let rip with a stinker like that, the wind's gonna blow it whichever way it pleases.** The world is bigger than your stupid monkey ambitions.

 

Which is not to say it's completely unpredictable or inexplicable.

The COVID-19 pandemic had its funny moments, like this illustration of sampling error. Unless you believe the small country of Lesotho, completely surrounded by South Africa, actually had so fewer cases than its one neighbour and largest trade partner, or that Africa as a whole had so few cases. In which case I've got some Venusian real estate to sell you. No, it just had few test kits to discover why exactly grandpa coughed himself to death. And despite the lack of hard, positive scientific proof of untested cases, if you have a working brain you can spot the necessary interconnection (geographic, physical) in that image and take the results with the requisite fistful of salt.

 

Contagion, edge effects, cross-contamination, downstream effects, thermoclines, subduction zones, habitats and niches, study the natural world from most any angle and you run into endless examples of matter impacting other matter in very complex ways based on very simple rules. All it takes is a few gradients - of energy, of density, of pressure, of elevation, of whatever. It can be as simple as on/off states.

Conway's Game of Life is one nice way to get yourself into that mindset, and you need not delve any convoluted mathematics to see individual squares or larger structures as rudimentary biomes, organisms, molecules, whatever magnification you want to imagine. Bilateral symmetry is quite easy to achieve and there's even predation of sorts, when an overpopulated, exploded structure swarms out and demolishes anything nearby, or when a glider impacts a stable structure just right to send a new glider off in another direction. It makes a nice rejoinder to the cretinous religious insistence that self-replicating life is too complex to have arisen by itself. Bullshit. Look at repeating, dispersing patterns arising from far less complexity than that provided by carbon compounds. And each individual cell's next state is driven by its surroundings, much as in life.

 

Of course, that's too much information for the average voter, which can only rattle a single isolated binary in its hollow skull at a time. The American presidunce spat out one of his innumerable random bits of idiocy on the occasion of last month's cold snap in the Eastern U.S., claiming as usual that it disproves global warming, and the degenerate inbreds going truck-nuts over his every dribbled inanity picked it up as gospel. Unsurprising as "if it's currently cold in my back-yard there's no global warming" is routinely dredged up as a redneck sound bite as often as "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" The real explanation was of course simple enough. Europe and the U.S. were two cold fronts isolated in a swirling totality of overheating. Cold air was actually channeled southward by warm, humid air over the oceans. If that explanation sounds familiar, it's because the disruption of the polar vortex by global warming has been explained to the rabble every couple of years for an entire generation when it keeps causing such local cold snaps, over and over again. Looks like a glider impacted something.***

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is a particularly funny phrase for how often it must be repeated because everyone keeps forgetting it. Some things cannot repeat. The Black Forest is gone. The Nemean Lions of southern Europe were exterminated at the dawn of recorded history. And the coral reefs I visited with my parents on vacation a quarter century ago are now dead, and will only get deader along with all the life that depended on them. But the pattern repeats. Our species is death. We are the ravenous, brainless, ever-swelling shambling horde.

 

Our own behavior is just more squares on the grid, lighting up predictably in response to adjacent stimuli. Easy enough to explode if you know where to click. There's a grim comedy to the recent rumours that ICE agents (y'know, the thugs shooting civilians in the back in the middle of the street?) here in the U.S. have not been getting their promised $50,000 signing bonus from their all-star team. Specifically, the comedy always lay in the amount itself, precisely ten times the $5000 promised by the exquisitely Trumpian dictator Berzelius Windrip to every American should they elect him in the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Which (important plot point) of course nobody ever receives. It is only mentioned again to illustrate how disjointed from reality they'd remained even as various characters began being herded into concentration camps while still dreaming of their promised loot. Even the few which did initially make out like bandits rapidly turned the same treatment on each other. A work of fiction? Now adjust that pie in the sky tenfold for inflation. Your recruiters are laughing right in your faces because you're too moronic to see it.

 

"Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner no matter how many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily" - The Marching Morons, C.M. Kornbluth

Funny thing about conservatism: you can't conserve when the squares around you start flickering. We'll be piling shopping carts as barricades soon enough. Won't keep the boiling flood waters out, though.

 

Here's one last parting shot: remember that climactic moment in 28 Days when the hero bursts in, rampaging in the jealous rage of any murderous ape rushing to the defense of his mate, the moment when the hero is indistinguishable from the monsters. There's a lot of talk here in the states about the mid-term elections and the possibility of overturning the incipient dictatorship. Of course, there very well may be no further elections. The murderous thugs willing to gun you down at a protest will not shy away from doing the same in front of a voting booth if you look too un-American for their tastes. But if the self-appointed rebel alliance should win, it will still not have ever questioned the myriad ways in which its own obsessions drove politics into the current cesspit. It will retrench in its gender Lysenkoism and identity politics insanity, proselytize its irrational postmodernist anti-realist dogma all the more forcefully. Thus the cycle will only roll over again two years from now and you'll be looking back at these months as the last chance, the single remaining heartbeat of opportunity when you should have taken the shot - at your own heroic selves.

 

You think you can sell the right ad campaign, but how different are you from the morons? 

 

 

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* The zombie tiger though, that was legit coolsauce. Not that it actually does much.

** Compare with a writer who got it quite right, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the ease of death in a world of Ice-9.

*** Even if your attention were so feeblemindedly restricted to your back-yard square, you could've compared temperatures on the same day in your back-yard over the past few decades, or average yearly temperatures locally, or the number of below and above average temps in a single year, and almost certainly received the same confirmation that the warming trend continues. In fact you can do that for free through the National Weather Service's records.

The Mighty Shovelhead

It's Darwin day. I never bothered with it until I realized how much it cheeses off the fundies, so stroke your beards and let's do another evolutionary topic to make Jesus not roll over in his grave because he's been dead for two thousand years and long-dissolved skeletons don't do that.

 

I stopped watching Jurassic Park movies after the second (and that idiotic gymnastics scene) but corporations being what they are, they've apparently been cranking out increasingly pointless sequels ever since, with increasingly ridiculous dinos that have basically become either goblins or kaiju, it's hard to tell. Or maybe I just don't care to. They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if at least one recent installment, Dominion(?) included Lystrosaurus of all things, and of course gave it an adorable pug face with humid baby eyes, chubby cheeks and expressive human eyebrows, because you can never say hello to too many kitties.* I assume they heroically murder a laser-armed T-Rex like the ewoks they are.

 

But, for the very same reason Lystrosaurus makes a ridiculous addition to an action movie, it's an interesting evolutionary emblem. Look at the damn thing. Just... look at it. Even without expert reconstructions, from gross skeletal anatomy alone you can guess the piggish little overgrown newt-moles lacked most any big ticket evolutionary adaptations like speed, reach, defense, weaponry, etc. It's one of the most stunningly unimpressive life-forms to have ever existed. And yet, for millions of years at the start of the Triassic, those doofy, quasimodoed stooges ruled the land.

 

For decades, countless learned pates appear to have bent over backwards trying to explain by reason or/of adaptation why Lystrosaurus took over so thoroughly. But so far, the best explanation remains the simplest and least flattering: the waddling clowns just got lucky! They're the classic example of a disaster taxon cranked up to eleven by the biggest disaster before we came along to destroy all of creation. The Permian mass extinction ("The Great Dying") wiped the board of their competitors and predators, and the few survivors reproduced out of control, filling that elusive environmental niche known as "mine, all mine" until reptiles and dinosaurs gradually outpaced and drove them into extinction.

 

The meek really did inherit the Earth, and then God fed 'em to giant salamanders. Ah, the grandeur of a perfect omniscient plan.

 

 

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* Looks like the movie also took some license with the shoulder joint and limb length to make it more action-oriented. Actual reconstructed skeletons look more splay-limbed and stubby. Then again, I'm guessing this is the least of what's wrong with the movie series.

 

By the by, Lystrosaurus wasn't a dinosaur or even any kind of "saurus" at all, but a therapsid cousin to our own proto-mammalian ancestors. Ugh, this was our champion? Man, we really took a beating back in the Mesozoic. Must be why we're destroying everything now. Repressed therapsid trauma.

Splish-splash, we're all taking a bath

"like the water's flow under December's snow"

Longfellow - The Skeleton in Armor (1841)

Dunno whatcher talkin' 'bout Hank, Christmastime's t-shirt weather.

I'd like to remind everyone of a concept increasingly fading from our lexicon: the spring thaw.

This photo was not taken this year.

Y'see kids, you wouldn't know it from looking out the window but at temperate latitudes it was heretofore considered normal for snow to gradually accumulate for weeks at a time over the winter months, especially in upland regions, thawing or sublimating only gradually or partially in late winter and then finally melt altogether sometime in late February or early March when the temperature decisively rose. The resulting meltwater flooding caused occasional problems, but as it turns out, temperatures just above freezing don't help evaporation much either, so what we're getting now with fewer sub-zero days every year is longer and longer months of repeated freezing and thawing and miserable slushy, deformable ground wreaking havoc on infrastructure. Previously, wide, flat sinks like you see above managed the springtime overflow (and were in no small measure supported by it) plus ecosystems have adapted to winter ground cover, as exemplified by the now extensively studied snowshoe hare example. The bunnies don a white coat during winter months to blend against snow. With snow lasting less and less every year, instead of being camouflaged, now they pop out against the scenery like brilliant little lightbulbs, drawing the eye of every fox, hawk, raccoon and coyote like an all-you-can-eat corn dog buffet to a redneck.

Stop posing heroically just because you've finally admitted reality exists. The evidence for global warming was never difficult to understand. It didn't take long for timelapses of melting glaciers to pile up. Any advanced calculations were done for you. Hell, I was bugging my relatives and did a junior year high school science class presentation about it back in the late nineties. It was already old news. For my entire lifetime, you've been able to read evidence not only from atmospheric physics and dwindling albedo estimates, but chemical analyses of soil, ice, air and water samples, biological analyses of wildlife geographic ranges shifting uphill and northwards to deal with warming habitats, hell, even social corroboration. One of the saddest moments came in 2005-ish? when a delegation from (I believe?) Vanuatu addressed the United Nations, meekly begging hat in hand for some measures against rising waves because quite a few of their islands are atolls merely a hand's breadth above sea level, and they're already getting washed away millimeters by millimeters every year. We all knew they'd be ignored. And they've been sounding the same alarm ever since. And they've been ignored.

 

I suppose what I'm really getting at is that the next elected official feeding convenient lies to the degenerate braindead hordes of hillbilly refuse which have denied global warming for a hundred years based on fairy tales about divine providence and are STILL denying it even as it's sloshing against our boots in the middle of January deserves to be held face-down in one of those puddles above until it stops kicking.

The Rape of the Duck

"Would you kill kill kill for me?
You won't be kissing me unless you kill for me"

 

Marilyn Manson - Kill4Me

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"Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did."
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (minute 1:04:00 here)

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"There's the answer, if you're clever:
Have a child for warmth
And a Baker for bread
And a Prince for... whatever"

- Into the Woods

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Back in the mid-2010s it was quite trendy to voice shock and outrage at duck penises. As it's been a while, let's remind younger readers of this particular bit of pop-culture insanity. Far as I can tell it started some years earlier, with a 2007 paper detailing the peculiar genital morphology of waterfowl, mallard ducks in particular. However, it took several more years for the topic to filter down to mass media, for a video of the explosive eversion of a duck penis to go viral, for comedians to start tacking duck penis jokes to their acts and for "journalists" to start publishing articles like DUCKS ARE SADISTIC RAPING MONSTERS!!! Nor was the hub-bub totally useless; the study's lead author made a career of it.

The basic observations are solid. "Forced extra-pair copulations" do happen in any number of species and ducks really do have weird corkscrew-shaped genitals, unusual in birds which are overwhelmingly lacking in the ding-dong department. But then the animal world is replete with trauma and bizarrerie both, so this particular factoid's time in the limelight is better explained by its political convenience. It was framed as a battle of the sexes. As the "Weinstein effect" and #MeToo witch hunt ramped up, media figures and reddit echo chambers cast as wide a net as possible for any bias-confirming sound bites, and rapist ducks certainly make a memorable one.

 

The original discussion and subsequent reiterations had framed ducks' plight squarely as inter-sexual competition with a clear villain: males started raping, so females (purely in defense against male aggression!) developed convoluted genital tracts to protect against insemination; then the evolutionary arms race continued lengthening and twisting both pegs and holes. The important part is that it fits the fearmongering "rape culture" narrative, complete with lurid high-FPS footage of corkscrew dongs comin' ta getcha! It fits the image activists want to draw, of a world utterly pervaded by violent rapists at every corner, even where you least expect them like harmless-looking quackers, and of masculinity as malformed, Lovecraftian monstrosity. Perhaps even more importantly it also frames femininity as an innocent, protective, united front.

The basic facts are fine. The politically correct framing? Therein lies the bullshit.

 

You might well guess "the unsympathetic side being wrong about everything" is too simplistic an argument to really cover a real-world situation... but you wouldn't guess it from how it's addressed in universities, much less media coverage. The original studies hinged on the females' genital tract being longer, spiraling in the opposite direction from the males' penis (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) and having blind pouches to divert eversion, but however effective those obstacles may prove in foiling giant rapey corkscrew dongs, they are implicitly even better at eliminating males lacking that adaptation. The females' "defense" breeds out non-rapists more effectively than it does rapists. (With demonstrably absolute effectiveness, in fact.)

There is in fact a very widespread group of adaptations in the animal world termed "cryptic female choice" (itself a euphemism for getting away with cheating) which seems more likely to have kicked off the ducks' intersexual arms race. What came first, the duck or the egg? The rape or the cryptic choice? If females' genitals get so good at separating out sperm, at cheating on their mates, that a more invasive penis is the only guaranteed means of insemination, they are de facto breeding that trait into their progeny. A Royal Society published follow-up by the same authors in 2009 dismissed the question of cryptic choice offhandedly with:

"females of many waterfowl species select and pair bond with mates weeks or months before the breeding season" - which time frame seems irrelevant if she's going to cheat on him anyway

- and, more egregiously:

"direct costs of forced copulations are expected to be high for females" - which flies in the face of the injuries up to and including death which males of the vast majority of species incur in reproductive contest. The only way that statement sounds like an argument-ender to you is if you're working on the conceit that girls are just smarter than boys and would never make a bad choice. But remember, our savage mother nature doesn't give a flying duck-fuck about your personal well-being. If an inherited predilection for self-harm results in you leaving more reproductively successful offspring, then the next generations will show more self-harm. "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" runs an increasingly relevant saying in biology, counterintuitive as it may sound. Females' control over reproduction, their closer association with the offspring's success, generally affords them a greater care for their own health as proxy for the young's. (In fact females' most common means of avoiding extra-pair copulations is to outsource that confrontation to their male companion via mate-guarding. After all, if the father of future offspring changes, the female may get lower quality young, but the original male gets eliminated entirely from that equation; thus males are more motivated to risk harm both cheating and preventing cheating.) But female prissiness is by no means an absolute. If getting your hands (or cloaca) dirty gets you better kiddies, then better kiddies shall be got.

Which brings us to the sexy son hypothesis. In most species, variation in the number of young females can produce is minor, say between two or three. But in males that difference can be between zero (because many do not have a chance to reproduce) and dozens for the NBA stars of every species. And because natural selection hinges on RELATIVE reproductive success, females can often pass down their genetics more successfully by having wildly oat-sowing sons. You may lift an eyebrow hearing that Genghis Khan and his sons might have descendants in the tens of millions, but if true, I bet you've never considered the necessary corollary that so do the queens, whores and courtesans who fucked them! (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

Revenons a nos canards, that story about plucky, ducky damsels valiantly fending off the assaults of quackling maleficent male-ards falls apart when you realize a female getting "raped" by a male "raping" five other females runs a good chance of producing a son who will rape five other females in turn, as opposed to her loser of an official mate who just sticks by her side and will likely father a son who sticks by one female. One choice might give her four or nine grandchildren, the other thirty-six. The trick is, if you're making that trade-off, to ensure you only select for the rapiest rapist, which is where the convoluted genitals come in. The female's genital tract as "resistance" to rape becomes a proxy for the estimated reproductive success of a potential sexy son. I don't mean to imply any sort of waterfowl or waterfair moral value by this. Again, nature simply doesn't care. Females which produce the rapiest rapists leave behind more grand-daughters inheriting the tendency to produce successful rapists, and so on. The pattern builds on itself. Note, even if you accept the premise that it must have been males' propensity to rape which kicked off such a dynamic thousands of generations prior, the female counter-adaptation has only worsened and accelerated the supposed problem with every generation. And that's the part you don't hear from either college professors or the New York Post.

Also, the question is too commnly posed as either/or: either a stable mate or a rapist. That's not how cryptic choice works. Why not both? Why not have their cake and eat it too? Overtly, females pair-bond with a baseline acceptable male. Whatever rapists come along must beat that baseline viability. If a really rapey one gets through, you've got yourself a sexy son. But, if none of the randos that season have big enough corckscrew dicks to grab you by the ovaries, well, it's not a complete loss, you still have your standard schlub, your plan B as backup. Roll the dice but hedge your bets. Clever girl.

So, first off, realize that whatever perception you have of women as a group as some plucky rebel alliance merely defending itself against the evil testicular empire has not come from objective analysis of reality. It comes of being bombarded all your life with just such sound bites as "rapist ducks" piling on, drowning your reason out by ginned up moralistic calls to save the world from the dire threat of duck rape, or really anything which fabricates a subconscious impression of female entitlement and male debt towards the unfairer sex. Every such random bit of outrage starts from the presumption of exclusive male guilt and willful ignorance of females' shared culpability, profiteering or simply demonstrably exercised agency. (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

I was living in Illinois in the 2000s during the media circus concerning Drew Peterson, a cop who murdered two of his wives. What makes it an interesting case study is that he was actually married four times, had a history of cheating on and beating on the first two wives and his children, murdered the next two wives (presumably while still cheating on them) and got engaged to a fifth WHILE being investigated for those murders. Note one headshrinker interviewed as to why women keep doing this immediately shifted the conversation to the Oedipus complex, inattentive daddies and women being "at risk of being seduced" in other words shifting all the responsibility onto men. Umm, nope, bullshit! Girls want bad boys. This is female mate choice at work. You want the rapists. You want the murderers. They swagger oh so damn sexy! The same personality traits which make him an overbearing sadistic thug make him irresistible to women. I may be an asshole sometimes (in fact I'm fairly sure I am) but I've never killed anyone. I have zero children. The double murderer has at least six. Which of us is looking like the sexier son?

In fact, a recurring item in both "news" fluff and trash TV has always been the flood of marriage proposals women send to men on death row. Sure puts having a few neck feathers plucked out into perspective, don't it?

 

Second off, if you've ever taken a course on evolution, you've likely had to listen to your professor bemoaning the rampant sexism of Victorian politics refusing to acknowledge the importance of female mate choice in natural selection, because Victorians refused to believe females might have that much power. Here you have a prime example why modern feminist attitudes are so often likened to a Victorian fainting couch. It's all well and good to say look at those pretty peacock tails that peahens have selected for, but we still refuse to acknowledge female mate choice wherever it might have negative implications, like picking the most destructive mates because they want offspring which will destroy the competition, from double murderers to finance bros. The power females wield over males by controlling reproduction is just that - power! - and with power comes superheroic responsiblity for its application. Might not society's refusal to openly acknowledge female agency be less a matter of oppressive patriarchy than women dodging responsibility, whether personally or for the world's ills? (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

 

Third off, anyone interpreting inter-sexual conflict at face value as male aggression upon innocent females would do well to remember your Nibelungenlied. There are entirely too many cases to ignore in which a Brunnhilde merely refuses to mate with any unworthy male that cannot best her feats of strength.

 

Lastly, and on the more speculative side, let's reverse the polarity. In humans, the neediness of our young prompted increased paternal investment and resource contribution, but that contribution also gave males some value and a greater degree of choice, at least the ones registering as good providers. And there is every reason to believe that our excessive neoteny may have been prompted by cuter females being better at securing male protection and providence. The guy sticks around the pretty girl more than the virago after mating, one child benefits more than the other, increased viability, boom, ya gotcherself an adaptive advantage. Human males have selected for the most effective raptors, for those who can best steal our attention. We love the cute ones. We selected for our own manipulation in the distant past, not for our own benefit any more than those raped female ducks, but because better kiddies were thus got.

 

It applies to a female's viability as mate too. A cuter one instills maternal protectiveness, gets ganged up on less by the tribe's other females, gets more resources. Though men have far fewer reproductive options than women, due to our use as labor we nonetheless do exert some evolutionary pressure, and it is again in the morally wrong direction, picking greedy, manipulative, sociopathic bitches, one obvious interpretation being if she can make your life a living hell, she'll leverage that much more subterfuge and acquisitiveness into promoting the survival of your shared progeny after she throws you under the bus.

 

So stop favoring the showgirls. C'mon guys, we all know we're not that picky. Sexy enough is sexy enough. Wanna really improve the breed? Fuck a librarian.

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

 

P.S.: If you're curious about the waterfowl extra-pair copulation question, there was a more multifaceted article published shortly after the penis papers back in 2010. It doesn't largely disagree with them (and I'm sure the author would be scandalized at being recommended by a mangy snarler like myself) but does a much better job of contextualizing the issue:

Sexual conflict in waterfowl: why do females resist extrapair copulations?

 

P.P.S. After I referenced Brunhild, I was so, so tempted to rename this "riding the valkyries"

Silence Sprung Upon You

Belatedly (by a month) I realized/remembered/speculate on a likely reason why the pre-dawn chorus (and birdsong in general) suggests such a feeling of rightness to the world.

Because we're monkeys.

 

To illustrate, I thought back to the few times I've seen golden and bald eagles. They're not particularly common in my various habitats, but if their colors didn't give 'em away, their size would. Massive-looking compared even to our more common hawks and vultures, the impression one made upon the local wildlife upon flying overhead was sheer, mute panic every time. Ducks and geese dive for the shore, tree bark scratches with sheltering squirrels, and all the symphonic glory of Class Aves goes silent faster than you can say intermission.

 

Now think of our ancestors, munching various fruit up in the forest canopy. Songbirds must've been part of our alarm system. So long as the fluffy little morons kept chittering away, busying themselves with reproductive contests instead of survival, it probably, hopefully meant no truly terrifying dangers were in range, be these fires, storms, climbing leopards or swooping raptors - and the bigger eagles may certainly carry off great apes' lesser ancestors. Unnatural silence sounds eerie for a reason. If forest birdsong is more or less a constant, a sign all is well with the world, then when it stops... panic!

Equating unexpected silence to some predatory menace hanging over us may add some perspective to my perpetual unease back when my family moved from the noisy city out to a lifeless dormitory town suburb.

Maybe batty man needs more robin?

I Spy With My Little Chloroplast

Guess I should mark Darwin Day somehow? Let's talk about the abode of pigments.

Basically in order to make use of light (whether to see or eat it) an organism needs to stick photopigments in its way, generally by embedding those pigments in a layer of cellular membrane exposed to light. But of course, since light easily penetrates thin tissue (much less a single membrane) one layer would be a waste of surface area for how little light it would capture. This problem finds a common solution in both

A) the lettuce you ate for lunch (here's the schematic representation for reference)

and

B) the eyeballs you're using to read this (that TEM's from the University of Utah, but here's Wikipedia's schematic of a retinal rod cell)

While the specific morphology differs a bit (semi-isolated sacs vs. more narrowly anchored shelves) both inside your eye and inside a plant leaf the photopigment-containing membranes within each cell are folded atop each other by the dozens to trap whatever light "leaks" through them sequentially. I'll confess I haven't looked into the exact evolutionary history here but given we've traversed numerous sightless uni/multi-cellular stages of development since we diverged from plants' ancestors, during which we were blind worms etc. this arrangement seems just one more striking example of convergence. Certainly in cyanobacteria thylakoid orientation is far more diverse (scroll down to images in results in this paper) but even there flat layering seems to predominate.

Why?

Because it works.

I mean, if you were trying to deliberately, intelligently design a light-capturing system, you might use denser, sturdier, more specialized materials like you see in solar cells requiring less layering, but evolving from an existing stage of isolated receptors in a membrane, simply stacking more and more redundant membranes maximizes the use of surface area so parsimoniously that your grandkids basically write themselves.

If You Believe

"Here's a little agit for the never-believer

[...]

Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's

[...]

Moses went walking with a staff of wood

Newton got beaned by the apple good"

 

R.E.M. - Man on the Moon

 

 

Like everyone who's anyone, I spent my solstice evening watching the Greatest of all conjunctions! (- and I am very much including "but" for "and" "or" other junctions) yet it wasn't until I zoomed the image in to its full pixelated glory that I noticed a couple of surprise appearances.

 

I thought at first the flattening on the left of both planets might be their night side, but other reference photos and the planets' positions relative to us and the sun make this out to be just an artifact of my jittery hands.

 

Also, they don't line up with the light's angle on the moon and all these fancy space rocks are supposed to be roughly in the plane of the ecliptic, but then again what do I know from optics and axial tilt?

Nothin'! - that's what.

Still, for a snapshot taken freehand while shivering on a clear but windy winter evening, I'd say I caught a decent one. And no, I did not howl at the moon, thankyouverymuch. These days nights the discerning lycanthrope just snaps his fingers a few times with an air of solemn detachment, beatnik style. Diana digs it.

 

More startling, I was not expecting the little clusters of pixels around Jupiter, which though distorted vertically just like the two planets are a bit more solid than the usual amateur photographic artifacts. They seem to be at about the correct distance for me to brag I managed to accidentally photograph two of the Galilean satellites. Io and Europa, maybe?

If those stray pixels really are the real deal, then I have to wonder how Galileo and Kepler ever managed to spot them though primitive telescopes of 8x-30x magnification and foggy focus and probably worth a house to boot, the pinnacle of scientific equipment back in 1610, with Ottoman pirates hounding the coasts and the West Indies a largely unexplored shore, and inquisitors breathing down your neck lest your new toy with the stacked lenses catch Yahweh with his pants down.

 

Millions of better images were produced yesterday, of greater magnification and clarity than my own feeble attempt, but this one remains noteworthy by its very feebleness. I do not work at an observatory. I don't even own a telescope. I did not drive up to a mountaintop in search of clear, rarefied air or torture the digital image through a quadrillion clock cycles' worth of post-processing. Ignorant and unmotivated, possessed of no specialized knowledge whatsoever, I took a five minute stroll, two hundred meters away from my apartment complex to an empty field, aimed vaguely in the direction astronomers pointed out, and clicked the shutter on my $160, off-the-shelf, mid-range consumer-grade autofocus camera. The same instrument I use to snap pictures of the family dog and funny-looking birds and the forest at sunset and a selfie for my senile grandmother, this half-kilo plastic, glass and copper lump in my coat pocket, can bring into mundane reach aspects of the universe which puzzled and frightened better men than myself for millennia. There was a time when the existence of other planets' moons was denied, because nothing could revolve around any astral body other than the Earth.

We most often hear scientific advance described either in terms of abstract, specialized projects like supercolliders or of technological intrusion into our social lives like cellphones, but somewhere between those extremes, between the abstruse and the vulgar, lie endless straightforward, accessible means to verify reality for ourselves. This is a golden age for autodidacts.

Now flip the channel to current events.

There's the astrology section, going as strong as it ever has. There's the state lottery raking in tens of millions. There's another stampede at Mecca. There's a million Flat Earth conspiracy nuts calling the moon landings hoaxes, and dust-caked sadhus with million-dollar Swiss bank accounts claiming they eat cosmic rays, and Bigfoot lurking in every blur, and Jehovah's Witnesses scared of turning into Dracula and presidents farting from the strain of trying to disbelieve the existence of methane, and Deepak Chopra curing your quantum autism by squinting at you, and neon-haired attention-whores claiming their gonads are a social construction, and grunting, hooting creationists missing as many links as they can, and Alex Jones defending us all from gay frogs and feminists defending us from rapist ducks and flood "geologists" whitewashing all the rock strata, and separatists goose-stepping in protest against "the government", and the political correctness police crying "defund the police", and tarot decks prophesying the fifth or sixth Mayan apocalypse this year alone, and bored widows with university educations paying through the nose to speak to the ghosts of their dead poodles, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, idiots, morons, cretins, imbeciles, retards by the billion, by the billion, a never-ebbing tide of simian degeneracy choking the life out of the world...

At some point you have to realize it's not just stupidity but neurophobia. Terrified of their own inadequacy, of being outpaced by reason, the masses take refuge in denial, in as ludicrous an idea as possible, the better to define themselves by their dogma. Their goal is not to seek alternate interpretations of the world but to find allies in anti-intellectual vandalism, to band together under the standard of a shibboleth in defense against an incomprehensible reality. Apes huddling in the darkest cave they can find, blinded by a few points of light giving the lie to the center of their universe.

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

Ophrydium vs. Conochilus: Fight!

"And when the seasons change again then I will too
But I just wanna be closer to you"

Brandi Carlile - Closer to You


Happy Darwin Day! How have you advanced the values of inquisitiveness and intellectual integrity today?

Let's see... what would make a good evolutionary topic? Aha!

Compare Exhibit A to Exhibit B, ignoring color for the moment. Do they seem like the same organism to you? Both are actually groups and not a single critter. Both are funnel-shaped and elongated with a narrow point of attachment at their base. Both grow in roughly spherical colonies, orienting themselves with a flattened "mouth" part outward to slurp in their prey. Both might be perfectly at home in your nearest stream or lake, depending on where you live. Both are even roughly the same size, from one-tenth to just under half a millimeter in length.

Yet A is a rotifer, an animal composed of a thousand or more cells. B is a single-celled eukaryote, a ciliated protist, called Ophrydium. Its green color comes from hundreds of smaller intracellular symbiotic Chlorella algae. The two organisms are separated by several hundred million years of evolution. They haven't shared a common grandma since before most instructional videos even bother measuring continental drift. In fact, according to modern classifications, ciliates along with the other alveolates are more closely related to the grass in your back yard than to you, me, rotifers, all other animals or even the mold under your toenails. Aside from bacteria, there are few things in the world less related than those two hungry-hungry specks of life.

But hey, at that size and in that environment and with those nutritional capabilities, that shape and organization just... works! And that's what life does: whatever works. I guess we can chalk up yet another of the endless examples of convergent evolution along with fins and wings and the various filamentous photosynthesizers we so naively lump together as "algae" at first glance.

Now, call me petty but for me it's not a Darwin Day without a jab at brain-dead creationists, so ask yourself the usual question: why the mind screw? Why the ever-loving fuck would any "intelligent designer" go to the trouble of separating these two organisms 600,000,000 laps around the sun ago only to re-mold them to almost exactly the same size, shape and function just to confuse biology students straining their eyes through a microscope in 2019?

____________________________________________________

P.S. Though I can barely guess my way around a few words of Portuguese, I must say the Brazilian website Planeta Invertebrados boasts a very impressive collection of photographs on the topic of... well, invertebrados.

edit 2025/06/06: Apparently I had Conochilus misspelled as Conochilius all these years.

Jesus is my cigarette filter

Funny thing happened today on my way to the computer. Forced to comply with the new form of American compulsory bankrolling of insurance corporations, I signed up for health insurance. The process was as unbearably dull for the most part as might be expected from a smokescreen designed to distract from their disgusting profiteering off human misery, but one stage of one particular questionnaire made me chuckle.

"Do you smoke" is a fairly predictable question. Being asked how much you smoke is a logical variation. However, being asked how much you smoke outside religious use is as hilarious an example as any of the destructively facetious irrationality of political correctness. So long as you're huffin' an' puffin' in the name of the Great Spirit, he'll keep your P53 in its proper 53 !

To her credit, the bored minimum-wage functionary on the other end of the phone didn't even miss a beat when I started giggling.

P.S. I know it's April 1st and all, but honestly, I could not make this stuff up.