Category: lunacy

Now Colossal proposes to “de-extinct” the moa; Peter Jackson helps

July 9, 2025 • 9:00 am

It’s an hour until.Walrus Call, so I wanted to bring to your attention another insane attempt by Colossal Biosciences to “de-extinct” a species. This time it’s the moa, one of several species of this flightless bird that used to inhabit New Zealand until the Māori killed them all of by bopping them on the heads with jade clubs. Or so I recall.

It is thus just and fitting, and a form of reparations, that these indigenous people will have a big hand in trying to bring back the one unlucky species of moa chosen for “de-extinction.” To see why this endeavor will not happen in our time, have a look at my Boston Globe op-ed explaining why this “experiment” is not only impossible with our present technology, but also unethical. One thing it is, however, is lucrative, with donors ranging from Paris Hilton to wealthy and famous football players. This time, since the moa is a bird from New Zealand, kiwi moviemaker Peter Jackson has kicked in— probably a lot of money.

Apparently Mr. Jackson is unaware of the formidable problems of truly resurrecting a species in its genetic entirety, and doesn’t know that an ostrich with a few genes derived from ancient moa DNA is not a real moa.  It would lack, for one thing, the genes that built the moa brain, affecting its behavior and ability to deal with the environment. And there are no close relatives to serve as surrogates. (I can’t give links here because the internet is so damn slow.)

The NZ website Stuff, along with a tweet by Colossal Bioscience itself (the latter still calls itself “The de-extinction company”) describes the insanity.

Our mainstream media does it again! On 9 July we have more nonsense, presented as science (Burr, 2025). Apparently, Colossal Biosciences believes that it can de-extinct the moa within the next decade and that the moa will be alive and walking by 2035.

Apparently, Colossal Biosciences has teamed up with South Island iwi  [tribe]Ngāi Tahu, Canterbury Museum and Sir Peter Jackson to bring the moa back to life. These groups have signed up to a strategic partnership which aims to de-extinct nine moa sub-species, starting with the South Island giant moa. Burr informs us that this situation leaves the door open to resurrect other extinct species too – such as the huia.

Unfortunately, Colossal Biosciences knows very well that bringing any extinct species to life is completely impossible and in effect it has already admitted so in relation to much publicized attempts to recreate the “dire wolf” (Le Page, 2025).

. . . Professor Jerry Coyne explains the problems in more or less the following terms (Coyne, 2025). Attempts to bring back extinct species are scientifically misguided and mis-reported by the press. He says that the press distorts what has been achieved scientifically, and pretends that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is identical to an extinct species.

Changing a living species by editing a few genes to get something that looks like the extinct creature is not the same thing as re-creating the extinct creature. Professor Coyne tells us that extinct species embodied thousands of genetic differences from related modern species, including genes that affect metabolism and behavior. Control regions of genes, which lie outside protein-coding regions, are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives, but we do not know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

Some unwarranted optimism:

Particularly worrying is an assurance from Canterbury Museum’s senior curator, Paul Scofield, that it will happen.

“This will happen. There’s no doubt about it whatsoever. This is the world’s foremost group of scientists working to this goal now.”

Sorry! It will not happen! The practical challenges are much too great. But the real problem for New Zealand is not only a biased media, but one that is scientifically illiterate, ready to put false ideas into the public domain, and that refuses to publish the considered responses of professional scientists.

Well, it may happen, but not in our lifetime—unless you’re less than ten years old and Colossal stays in business that long.  I will be in the clay before anything close to a moa “de-extinction” occurs, so I won’t have to apologize on this website for raining on Colossal’s ever-changing parade. Remember when the company said they’d “de-extincted” the dire wolf, then admitted that they hadn’t really resurrected the dire wolf but then later did a 180° turn with Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientific officer, arguing that yes, they had brought back the dire wolf? To do this, she had to adopt the Species Concept That Nobody Holds (SCTNH), which is roughly this: “If something resembles in any way another species, then it they are members of the same species.” By those lights, we’re the same species as chimps and bonobos.

I was sent both a tweet from Colossal as well as their latest YouTube video about the project. I can’t see either of them here since the Internet is so bad, but watch and judge for yourself.

All I can say is that to pretend that a few gene edits can bring a species back to life is to be both disingenuous and arrogant.  But of course if Colossal admitted the truth, they’d be out of business. That’s why they pretend that the edited gray wolf they confected is really a “de-extincted dire wolf.”

Misguided branch of British Medical Association rejects UK’s Supreme Court decision that “woman” is defined by biological sex

April 30, 2025 • 10:00 am

As I reported two weeks ago, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom voted unanimously to affirm that the term “woman” under the legal Equality Act refers only to biological women and not trans-identified men. That means that a biological male holding a gender reassignment certificate would not have the same legal status as a biological women.  I added this:

In all the stuff I was able to read this morning, I was unable to find the definition of a “biological woman”, save that it refers to one’s natal sex, though they don’t mention gametes. The ruling does refer to the binary nature of sex (see below). And the ruling implies as well that the word “man” can mean in law only a “biological man”

That would seem to settle things, at least as far as the Equality Act is concerned, and the ruling was celebrated by those who favor the existence of “women’s spaces,” including sports competition, locker rooms, and jails.

But some members of the British Medical Association (BMA), as reported by the Times of London and other venues, have taken issue with the Supreme Court’s decision, implying that rrans-identified men are also women.  The subgroup of the BMA that voted against the Supreme Court Decision was the group of “resident doctors,” previously known as “junior doctors,” and so represent younger physicians. Note that the BMA is a registered trade union and does not regulate doctors; that role is given to the General Medical Council.

Click below to see an archive of the Times report:

A précis:

Doctors at the British Medical Association have voted to condemn the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex as “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.

The union’s wing of resident doctors — formerly known as junior doctors — passed a motion at a conference on Saturday criticising the ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex.

The doctors claimed that a binary divide between sex and gender “has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people”.

The branch of the British Medical Association (BMA) — representing about 50,000 younger doctors — said it “condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country”.

The BMA’s stance is likely to raise concerns that the medical profession may seek to obstruct attempts at implementing new NHS guidance on trans patients, being drawn up after the Supreme Court ruling. It follows the union’s decision last summer to lobby against the Cass Review and to call for an end to the ban on puberty blockers for children identifying as transgender.

Lobbying against the Cass Review—a sensible report that banned the use of puberty blockers on individuals under 18 and dismantled the dysfunctional Tavistock Clinic that hustled gender-dysphoric children into “affirmative therapy”—shows where the ideology of this group lies. Although the Cass Review was widely applauded by doctors, these “resident doctors” are clearly infected with the mantra that anyone can claim to be any sex they want. As the yahoo! article below notes, “Last year, the BMA became the only medical organisation in the UK to reject the findings of the Cass Review into the provision of gender identity services for young people.”

And their ideology is clear:

The BMA motion, responding to the ruling, said: “This meeting condemns the Supreme Court ruling defining the term ‘woman’ with respect to the Equality Act as being based on ‘biological sex’, which they refer to as a person who was at birth of the female sex, as reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical.

“We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.”

It added that the BMA is committed to “affirming the rights of transgender and non-binary individuals to live their lives with dignity, having their identity respected”.

Of course we all respect the rights of transgender individuals–as transgender individuals. But those rights clearly clashed with the rights of other groups, most notably biological women, and the court adjudicated that clash in its definition of “woman”. Nobody of good will wants “erasure” of trans people, but we have to recognize that the claim that “trans women are women” leads to a clash of rights whose solution was taken up by the UK Court.

Note the “sex and gender are complex” assertion often used by ideologues or the benighted to claim that sex is not binary. (Yes, there are a very, very few exceptions., as I mention below, but for all practical purposes biological sex is binary.)  And, of course, it is binary in nearly all transsexual individuals, who even recognize the binary by wanting to adopt the role of their non-natal sex.

A bit more:

Sex Matters, the campaign group, accused the doctors of being an “embarrassment to their profession” and said it is “terrifying” that people who have undergone years of medical training can claim there is “no basis” for biological sex.

Indeed; for the doctors are redefining sex (and gender) as some multifactorial, “multifaceted aspect of the human condition”.  Perhaps gender roles fit that definition, but the Supreme Court was defining sex, not gender, and stayed away from gender, which is not part of the Equality Act.  This clearly shows the ideological nature of the resident doctors’ efforts and their unwarranted conflation of sex and gender.  Sex is a biological issue; gender a social one, also mixed to some degree with biology.  Don’t these doctors know that? Yes, of course they do, but pretend otherwise. If they’re not pretending, they are witless and don’t deserve to be doctors.

Yahoo News! (click below) gives the text of the resident doctors’ resolution:

Here’s the text of the resolution:

“This meeting condemns the Supreme Court ruling defining the term ‘woman’ with respect to the Equality Act as being based on ‘biological sex’, which they refer to as a person who ‘was at birth of the female sex’, as reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical.

“We recognize as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people. As such this meeting:

“i: Reiterates the BMA’s position on affirming the rights of transgender and non-binary individuals to live their lives with dignity, having their identity respected.

“ii. Reminds the Supreme Court of the existence of intersex people and reaffirms their right to exist in the gender identity that matches their sense of self, regardless of whether this matches any identity assigned to them at birth.

“iii. Condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country.

“iv. Commits to strive for better access to necessary health services for trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people.”

The deeming of the Supreme Court’s ruling as “trans and intersex-exclusionary” is confusing.  Most trans people do indeed fit into the Court’s categorization of “man” or “woman.” The exception, the “true” intersex people, range in frequency from 1/5600 to 1/20,000, and so are very rare, making biological sex as binary as you can get. (In contrast, the frequency of people born with extra fingers or toes is about 1/2500 to 1/800, and yet we refer to humans as having “ten fingers and toes”.) It’s clear that this controversy is really not about the rare “true intersex” individuals, but about individuals who fit the biological definition of “man” or “woman” but identify otherwise—as either “nonbinary” or “transsexual”.

h/t: cesar, nick

Now they’re trying to create “woolly mice” on the road to the woolly mammoth

March 5, 2025 • 11:45 am

Matthew Cobb and I have repeatedly criticized the efforts of geneticist George Church and his colleagues to “bring back the extinct woolly mammoth,” because in fact all they intend to do is insert a few genes for stuff like hair into the elephant genome, creating a hairy elephant rather than resurrecting an extinct species (see our posts here and especially the one here).  The NBC Evening News, after showing these fluffy rodents, even said that the mammoths could appear as early as 2028!

And problems are greater than just the duplicity involved in saying that a few inserted genes can re-create an extinct species: they also involve how to put those genes into an Asian elephant egg, and create a womb that will nurture the modified egg and keep the fetus alive. Not to mention that if you want to keep this bogus “species” going, you have to produce at least one male and one female.

The Guardian has given new life to this fiction by saying that the creation of “woolly mice” who carry inserted genes giving them longer and newly-colored hair is the first step to creating the woolly mammoth. The article even even has the temerity to describe the woolly mice as a “new species”, which under any reasonable species definition is sheer nonsense.  It’s a long way from putting extra hair on a mouse to putting extra hair on an elephant, even if that extra hair somehow supports the crazy idea that “we’ve re-created the mammoth!”

Read this mishigas by clicking on the headline:

An excerpt. The bolding is mine:

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.

The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.

However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

The team also disrupted a gene associated with the way fats are metabolised in mice and was also found in mammoths, which they suggest could play a role in cold adaptation.

Note that they don’t know if the gene is associated with cold tolerance, and they changed only nine genes involved with hair. There are probably thousands of genes that differentiate the Asiatic elephant from the extinct mammoth.

As you see above, yes, they got furry mice, which of course are NOT a new species as they can interbreed with house mice.

Why don’t these people have the simple realization that:

a.) You don’t recreate an ancient species by making a modern one that somewhat resembles the extinct one but doesn’t near have the genetic differences that separate them. (What about behavior, for crying out loud?)

b.) You can’t genetically manipulate elephants the way you genetically manipulate mice.

c.) You have to create a lineage of breeding hairy elephants so the “revived species” will perpetuate itself.

But there’s at least one sane person who’s quoted:

Dr Tori Herridge of the University of Sheffield, said: “Engineering a mammoth-like elephant presents a far greater challenge: the actual number of genes likely to be involved is far higher, the genes are less well understood – and still need to be identified – and the surrogate will be an animal that is not normally experimented upon.”

And while some said the goal of reviving the mammoth had drawn closer, others were more sceptical. “Mammoth de-extinction doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon,” said Herridge.

I suspect Church will be dead before they even get close to their mammoth goal.  If I were in charge, I’d simply give up this tedious and worthless project.

Here’s a reconstruction of the real ancient wooly mammoth from Wikipedia.  How are they gonna make those long, curved tusks?

Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In an abysmal article, Nautilus dismisses the importance of genes

March 26, 2024 • 11:30 am

This is one of the worst papers on genetics I’ve seen in the last 15 years, and although it’s from 2019, this same kind of palaver keeps coming around again and again, and in exactly the same form. And so when a reader sent me the link, I reacted instinctively. The laws of physics mandated that, like a starving leopard encountering an antelope, I must fall on it and rip it to pieces.  So here goes. (Yes, Carole Hooven is right: males tend to have the killer instinct more than do females!)

The piece is intended not for professionals but for laypeople, and appeared in Nautilus, a quarterly magazine on science and its relationship to and implications for society. Founded by a big grant from the John Templeton Foundation, it does publish solid science articles, but sometimes the Foundation’s purpose (to find evidence of God in science) shines through. This occurs through promoting bizarre science, like panpsychism, or touting dubious reconciliations between religion and science. This paper falls into a third class: doing down “modern” genetics to imply that there’s something terribly wrong with our modern paradigm. (Evolution is a related and favorite target.)

The author, Ken Richardson, seems to have derived most of his genetics from fringe figures like Denis Noble and James Shapiro, with the result that the casual, non-geneticist reader will buy what these people are selling: genes are of only minor significance in both development and evolution.

Richardson is listed in the article as “formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University (U.K.). He is the author of Genes, Brains and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence.”

Read it by clicking below, or find the article archived here.

I was torn between ignoring this paper—for the author deserves no attention—or taking it apart. I decided on a compromise: to show some of the statements it makes that are either flat wrong or deeply misguided. Richardson’s quotes are indented, and my take is flush left. Here’s how he starts:

The preferred dogma started to appear in different versions in the 1920s. It was aptly summarized by renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a famous lecture in Dublin in 1943. He told his audience that chromosomes “contain, in some kind of code-script, the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.”

Around that image of the code a whole world order of rank and privilege soon became reinforced. These genes, we were told, come in different “strengths,” different permutations forming ranks that determine the worth of different “races” and of different classes in a class-structured society. A whole intelligence testing movement was built around that preconception, with the tests constructed accordingly.

The image fostered the eugenics and Nazi movements of the 1930s, with tragic consequences. Governments followed a famous 1938 United Kingdom education commission in decreeing that, “The facts of genetic inequality are something that we cannot escape,” and that, “different children … require types of education varying in certain important respects.”

The “strengths” and “permutations of genes” was not widely viewed as the underpinnings of different races. Yes, racial hierarchies were constructed based on supposed genetic constitution, but not the image of the “code script”.  It was the claim that racial differences were inherited, regardless how inheritance worked—much less the unproved notion of “code script”—that buttressed the Nazis’ eugenics program.  But somehow Richardson manages to connect the Nazis with the genetic code at the very beginning of his paper. But this is a minor quibble compared to what follows.

Richardson then uses what he sees as the disappointing performance of the GWAS (Genome-wide Association Studies) method (used to locate, from population surveys, regions of the genome responsible for various traits, which helps narrow down the location of “candidate genes”):

Now, in low-cost, highly mechanized procedures, the search has become even easier. The DNA components—the letters in the words—that can vary from person to person are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. The genetic search for our human definition boiled down to looking for statistical associations between such variations and differences in IQ, education, disease, or whatever.

For years, disappointment followed: Only a few extremely weak associations between SNPs and observable human characteristics could be found. Then another stroke of imagination. Why not just add the strongest weak associations together until a statistically significant association with individual differences is obtained? It is such “polygenic scores,” combining hundreds or thousands of SNPs, varying from person to person, and correlating (albeit weakly) with trait scores such as IQ or educational scores, that form the grounds for the vaulting claims we now witness.

Today, 1930s-style policy implications are being drawn once again. Proposals include gene-testing at birth for educational intervention, embryo selection for desired traits, identifying which classes or “races” are fitter than others, and so on. And clever marketizing now sees millions of people scampering to learn their genetic horoscopes in DNA self-testing kits.

So the hype now pouring out of the mass media is popularizing what has been lurking in the science all along: a gene-god as an entity with almost supernatural powers. Today it’s the gene that, in the words of the Anglican hymn, “makes us high and lowly and orders our estate.”

Although GWAS studies are hard and require big samples, and give genomic regions rather than genes there have been some notable successes in both medical genetics and agriculture, as one would expect in the past five years (see this Twitter thread for some examples).  The implication throughout the paper is that the failure of GWAS to locate individual genes responsible for traits shows that the variation of genes themselves aren’t responsible for the variation in traits. There must be something else!

But that’s completely wrong. We already have a way to judge the influence of genetic variation on trait variation, and that is heritability analysis. Heritabilities (symbolized as h²) range between 0 and 1, and are a measure of the proportion of variation for a trait in a given population caused by the variation among the genes in that population (the rest is due to environmental variation, interactions between genes and environments, and other arcane factors). But the point is that heritabilities calculated from our earlier crude methods are nearly always higher than heritabilities estimated from GWAS analysis, simply because GWAS (but not h²) misses a lot of variable gene sites that have small effects, and isn’t good at detecting effects of rare alleles. But the more we use GWAS, the more variation we find, and, for well studied traits like height, heritabilities estimated from traditional methods are now converging with heritabilities estimated from GWAS.

And heritabilities of most traits, which are most extensively studied in humans, are often quite high. Have a look at this list, for example, which includes cognitive traits, behavioral traits, and physical traits. Most heritabilities range between 0.2 and 0.8, which means that for a typical trait, between 20% and 80% of the inter-individual variation in a population is due to variation of genes. When asked to guess the heritability of an unknown trait, I’d usually say, “well, probably about 50%”.  That seems, for example, to be close to the heritability of IQ in a population.

This shows that genes are highly important in explaining human variation, just as they are variation in animals and plants. This phenomenon was well known ages ago. If genes weren’t important in variation, selective breeding of dogs, plants, pigeons, and so on would be almost useless. Here’s a famous quote from Darwin’s in The Origin:

“Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

If genes weren’t important in variation, animals (and plants, which of course have been bred out the wazoo) wouldn’t be so plastic. Ergo genetic variation is important in explaining the variation of organisms.

Despite this, Richardson makes the following statement, which would astound most geneticists:

. . . . it is now well known that a group of genetically identical individuals, reared in identical environments—as in pure-bred laboratory animals—do not become identical adults. Rather, they develop to exhibit the full range of bodily and functional variations found in normal, genetically-variable, groups. In a report in Science in 2013, Julia Fruend and colleagues observed this effect in differences in developing brain structures.

Full range? Really? Yes, there is still variation among clonal individuals raised in identical environments, but not nearly as much as among genetically variable individuals raised in different environments! Clonal populations show a heritability of zero (they have no genetic variation among them), so there is less phenotypic variation among the individuals.  As for the Fruend paper, it shows plasticity of brain development, because of course learning is a form of adaptive plasticity that can change the brain. But that by no means says that genes aren’t an important source of variation.

I could go on and on about how Richardson claims that genes aren’t important, all the while showing that they are. Here’s a good example:

First, laboratory experiments have shown how living forms probably flourished as “molecular soups” long before genes existed. They self-organized, synthesized polymers (like RNA and DNA), adapted, and reproduced through interactions among hundreds of components. That means they followed “instructions” arising from relations between components, according to current conditions, with no overall controller: compositional information, as the geneticist Doron Lancet calls it.

In this perspective, the genes evolved later, as products of prior systems, not as the original designers and controllers of them. More likely as templates for components as and when needed: a kind of facility for “just in time” supply of parts needed on a recurring basis.

So what? There were primitive replicators first, which might as well be called genes, but the modern system of sophisticated gene action, often involving introns, splicing, transcription factors, and so on, is what we know about now, and what Richardson says about early organisms is irrelevant.  But wait! There’s more!

Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Where does Richardson think that those enzymes and proteins come from, which are often used to manufacture vitamins and amino acids? Where do the cell signalling factors come from? They all come from genes! The “dynamical systems” that he touts so highly come largely from genes, and without genes we would have no organisms and no evolution. Yes, environmental factors are important in controlling the timing and action of genes, but often those “environmental factors”, like signals in different organs that lead to differential development, are themselves derived from genes. And the sequestration and use of externally derived chemicals, like some amino acids and vitamins, are also controlled by genes.

I can barely go on, and if I continue this would last forever. Just one or two more pieces of stupidity:

Accordingly, even single cells change their metabolic pathways, and the way they use their genes to suit those patterns. That is, they “learn,” and create instructions on the hoof. Genes are used as templates for making vital resources, of course. But directions and outcomes of the system are not controlled by genes. Like colonies of ants or bees, there are deeper dynamical laws at work in the development of forms and variations.

Some have likened the process to an orchestra without a conductor. Physiologist Denis Noble has described it as Dancing to the Tune of Life (the title of his recent book). It is most stunningly displayed in early development. Within hours, the fertilized egg becomes a ball of identical cells—all with the same genome, of course. But the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

My answer is “yes it could have, and it is”. Those “chemical systems” that cause an organism to develop come from genes, which have changed over evolutionary time in a way that leads to adaptations, including proper development. By and large, genes control development, particularly early development.  Organisms with pretty much the same genes (members of the same species, for example) always turn out pretty much alike, with similar behaviors and appearances. Further, the more closely related species are, the more similar they tend to be. This reflects genetic similiarity, not some nebulous similarity in “dynamical systems,” whatever those are.

One more:

But it’s not so simple. Consider Mendel’s sweet peas. Some flowers were either purple or white, and patterns of inheritance seemed to reflect variation in a single “hereditary unit,” as mentioned above. It is not dependent on a single gene, however. The statistical relation obscures several streams of chemical synthesis of the dye (anthocyanin), controlled and regulated by the cell as a whole, including the products of many genes. A tiny alteration in one component (a “transcription factor”) disrupts this orchestration. In its absence the flower is white.

This is a good illustration of what Noble calls “passive causation.” A similar perspective applies to many “genetic diseases,” as well as what runs in families. But more evolved functions—and associated diseases—depend upon the vast regulatory networks mentioned above, and thousands of genes. Far from acting as single-minded executives, genes are typically flanked, on the DNA sequence, by a dozen or more “regulatory” sequences used by wider cell signals and their dynamics to control genetic transcription.

“Statistical relation”? What is described in peas is a direct causal relation: a mutation, acting through pathways, is responsible for changing flower color. If you flip a light switch, the light goes on. If you have the right mutation, the flower is white. What’s the big deal? Further, “transcription factors” are coded in the DNA; they are proteins that regulate the transcripotion of other genes: how those genes make messenger RNA.

And the ultimate dissing of genes:

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Finally, because GWAS studies aren’t yet developed to the point where they always can pick out important genes (remember, variation in most traits is due to variation in many genes, with the variants having small effects, and GWAS misses rare genes), Richardson says this:

The startling implication is that the gene as popularly conceived—a blueprint on a strand of DNA, determining development and its variations—does not really exist.

Well, as Dawkins has pointed out, genes are more like “recipes” than blueprints, but this isn’t what Richardson is saying here. What he is saying is that genes play at best only a small role in development.  He is both wrong and muddled.

It is this kind of popular science that I most despise, because it dissimulates, misleads, and even fibs about the state of modern science. By misleading the public about genetics, it affects not only their understanding of science, but, when shown up to be nonsense, as I and other have done, erodes public trust in science.

If you want to read this piece, be my guest, but if you know anything about genetics, keep a big glass of Pepto-Bismol at hand.

 

h/t: the always helpful Luana

Critic of “Woke Kindergarten” suspended

February 13, 2024 • 10:30 am

Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)?  The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school.  And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped after the wokeness was sprayed on the students. (To see how completely bonkers this program is, go here or to the program’s website here.)  All power to the little people! Sadly, the program appears to be designed for black students and the students are 80% Hispanic.

After an article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the program, there was a huge backlash from people who, properly, thought it was bonkers.  So what did the school district do? Did they drop the program? There’s no indication of that. Instead, they did what defies common sense:  they put one of the teachers who criticized the program in the article on leave (with pay) for unknown violations. They are actually defending Woke Kindergarten when they should be defunding it. I suspect, however, that we’ll see no more of the program. It’s simply too stupid, woke, and embarrassing.

At any rate, the Chronicle has a new article (click headline below, or find it archived here), discussing the firing and giving the school’s defense.

First, though, this is how the teacher critic was quoted in the first Chronicle article:

 Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

And from the new piece, his punishment for such heresy:

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle.
Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

 

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

District officials declined to comment on his status or any allegations, saying it was a personnel matter.

A defense of Woke Kindergarten from the original article:

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Defenses in the second article. Yep, they refuse to say that adopting it was a bad move:

District officials declined to comment on their social media posts, given Gross was paid using taxpayer-funded federal dollars.

“We cannot comment on her personal political or social views,” Bazeley said.

Some teachers have defended the Woke Kindergarten program, saying that after years of low test scores and academic intervention, they believed in a fresh approach. The training was selected by the school community, with parents and teachers involved in the decision.

“We need to try something else,” said Christina Aguilera, a bilingual kindergarten teacher. “If we just focus on academics, it’s not working. There is no one magic pill that will raise test scores.

“I’m really proud of Glassbrook to have the guts to say this is what our students need,” Aguilera said. “We didn’t just do what everybody expected us to do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Sixth-grade teacher Michele Mason said the Woke Kindergarten training sessions “have been a positive experience” for most of the staff, humanizing the students’ experiences and giving them a voice in their own education.

These are clearly teachers who want to keep their jobs.  Finally, a bit about how Craven-Neeley was treated by his colleagues:

The Wednesday staff meeting, however, was tense, Craven-Neeley said, as he tried to explain that before going to the Chronicle, he approached school and district staff as well as the school board to raise questions about the program and the expense, with no response.

“There was so much anger toward me,” he said. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking over me.”

. . . . Craven-Neeley said the meeting grew tense about an hour in, when another teacher stood up, pointed a finger in his face and said, “ ‘You are a danger to the school or the community,’ and then she walked out of the room.”

Not long after, a district administrator asked him to leave the meeting.

“I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I left. I was very shaky.”

Another Glassbrook teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions at the school, confirmed that a staff member put a hand in Craven-Neeley’s face and called him a disgrace and a threat to the school.

Craven-Neeley then had a video meeting with school officials and was told he’d be placed on paid leave pending an “investigation”. The university also “denied the district’s actions were related to Craven-Neeley’s participation in the story or his complaints about the program. The district spokesperson added, ‘We would not put any employee on leave as any sort of retaliation or squelch anyone’s free speech rights,” [Michael Bazeley] said’.”

Well that sounds like a flat-out lie to me. What Craven-Neeley said to the Chronicle was indeed free speech, and there’s no other indication of anything else for which he’d be punished.  All I can say is that it looks as if Woke Kindergarten affected the teachers (if not the students). They’re all censorious and defensive!

Remember the “woke wonderings” that were part of the program? Here’s one:

The answer, of course, is “not much!”

Kent Hovind, young earth creationist, ex-con, and overall ignoramus, is desperate for me to debate him

February 8, 2024 • 9:20 am

Yesterday I got an email from a factotum of young-Earth biblical creationist and ex-con Kent Hovind, a man apparently desperate to debate evolutionists. (He spent eight years in the can for tax evasion, despite the fact that he complains in the video below that evolution erodes morality!) Here’s what I got:

Dr. Coyne,

I’m writing to ask if you’d like to Debate Dr. Kent Hovind? He is willing to travel to your University or you can come down to his Theme park where we’ll put you up in a Cabin and provide meals, even pick you up from the airport if need be. Or it can be done over zoom if that would be better for you. If your interested call PHONE # REDACTED for Dr Hovind or ext 4 for tech support to schedule you in.
Check out the video
NAME OF FACTOTUM REDACTED
I replied simply, “No, thank you.” Note the superfluous question mark after the first sentence and the absence of the apostrophe in “your”.

I’ve debated a creationist exactly once, and it went fine (it was before the meeting of the Alaska Bar Association!). But since then I decided not to debate them any more, as such engagements give their views a scientific credibility it doesn’t deserve. It’s like debating a flat-earther.  At any rate, the video is below.

In this 51-minute comedy video, Hovind gives a running commentary on a filmed discussion about evolution I had with Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor for their “Freethought Matters” series at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.  Hovind’s main point is that a). evolution is a religion, not science, and b). there’s no evidence for evolution.  I find the video vastly amusing, because Hovind keeps saying the same thing over and over again, including invoking young-earth creationism—including the existence of Noah’s flood. And only Ceiling Cat knows how many times he asserts his claim that evolution is a religion. Well, it surely isn’t in the sense of religion involving the supernatural, but I suppose he means that, to those of his ilk, evolution (like Hovind’s Christianity) is based not on evidence, but pure faith. Yet he doesn’t explain why evolutionists are so keen to accept a scientific fact that’s buttressed by no evidence at all. Are we all in some sort of anti-religious cabal?

Hovind’s mind dump includes claims like these:

The fossil record doesn’t exist, there are “just fossils.” Hovind advances the long-refuted claim that evolutionary change as seen in the fossil record is bogus because the fossils are dated by the sedimentary layers they’re in, and the layers are dated by the fossils they contain; ergo the fossil evidence for evolution begs the question. Apparently Hovind hasn’t heard about radiometric dating! In contrast, he believes that the fossil record itself constitute evidence for the Great Flood.  But, of course, the order that organisms appear in the fossil record isn’t consonant with their simultaneous extirpation by God’s Flood. (Why are fish some of the earliest vertebrates to be found? Shouldn’t they be up at the top, left as the waters recede?  And why are fish way lower down than whales? And so on.)

The evidence for evolution from embryology somehow “justifies abortion”.

Evolution can’t be true because “nobody’s ever seen a cow produce a non-cow.”  In other words, he thinks that evolutionists accept an instantaneous form of massive evolutionary change—a “macromutational” or “saltational” event. Nope, not true.

At points in Hovind’s tirade, he actually admits that evolution could have happened. For example, at about 15:38, he admits that all butterflies may have had a single common ancestor. Well, that’s an admission that all butterflies not only evolved from that ancestor, but that different species of butterflies evolved.  So evolutionary change as well as speciation happened, but of course Hovind would say that all the descendants of that common ancestor are “still butterflies”. In other words, he admits there is evolution, but that it has limits: one “kind” can’t evolve into another “kind.”  But no creationist has ever advanced a good reason what these limits are; there’s a whole sub-field of creationism (“baraminology“) that repeatedly tries and fails to discern the created “kinds.”

Hovind also admits that there is evolutionary change in bacteria as they become resistant to antibiotics, but dismisses that as  not real evolution because it represents a loss of information; and of course a resistant bacterium is still a bacterium. But Hovind is full of it: some antibiotic resistance involves appearance of new “pumps” that get rid of the antibiotic before it harms the bacterium, the appearance of new enzymes, and the ‘horizontal’ acquisition of genes for resistance from other bacteria or viruses. To claim that the evolution of bacterial resistance involves the inactivation of some enzyme or feature is to espouse ignorance.

Finally, he notes that by teaching evolution, I’ve destroyed the faith of “who knows how many students.” I doubt it, but if learning scientific truths dispels faith, that’s not the fault of science. Nor is dispelling faith my aim in teaching evolution.

I know that this post is giving Hovind the attention he so desperately craves, but it’s salutary for us to occasionally see the kind of willful ignorance that pervades the young-creationist movement.

But what’s truly scary is not Hovind, who’s amusing, but something I mention in my FFRF discussion: 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years, and another 33% think that humans evolved, but God guided the process. That makes 73% of Americans—nearly three out of four—accepting some form of divine intervention in the development of life.  Sadly, only 22% of Americans believe that “humans evolved but God had no part in the process.”

The results of the 2019 Gallup poll are shown below the video. Note that the question asked was only about humans, and some exceptionalists may think that while all other creatures evolved in a naturalistic way, humans were the one species created by God. Even granting that, it’s clear that the genus Homo is way, way older than 10,000 years!

 

The misguided South African “genocide” accusation

January 22, 2024 • 11:15 am

If you’ve been following the charade that is South Africa’s (SA’s) claim at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, you’ll know that SA—that paradigm of good governance and equity—is relying heavily on statements by Israeli officials and military people made right after October 7—statements to the effect that Gazans should be wiped out.

Those statements were either made in the heat of the moment or, as the article below shows, are simply misquoted. Further, if you want to see whether Israel is committing genocide, you don’t use quotations; you have to observe if its behavior is aimed at wiping out not just Hamas, but all the Gazans. Only a dolt would think that’s true: the IDF is clearly the world’s most moral army, warning Gazans of strikes, telling them where to go to avoid fighting, never deliberately going after known non-combatants, and so on.

In contrast, Hamas is among the world’s most immoral militant groups, deliberately trying to kill Israeli civilians (do they ever warn Israelis before they strike Don’t make me laugh.); firing rockets willy-nilly into Israel, sending terrorists across the border to blow up Jews, committing repeated war crimes by hiding behind civilians, and, of course, explicitly stating that their aim is to exterminate the Jews. (The deaths of Gazan civilians, reprehensible and sad as it is, can be largely laid at the door of Hamas, who seems to want Gazan civilians killed and facilitates it.)

Moreover, as Hamas has emphasized, the butchery of October 7 was just a rehearsal for repeated episodes of the same kind of butchery.  It is shameful that although South Africa, the paradigm of current hatred and bad governance in Africa, can bring a case against Israel, no other nation in the world is willing to bring a case against Hamas, the group that runs Gaza. And that case would be much easier, since Hamas has declared its genocidal intentions.

The only upside for Israel of this sad episode is that when the country is found guilty—as is inevitable in such a lopsided world—it can and will simply ignore the Hague’s decision.

But it turns out that the Israeli quotes tossed around with such abandon by South Africa, supposedly approving of genocide, aren’t as damning as they seem.

Reader Norman, who sent me this article from The Atlantic, added his summary:

No, writes Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic. Some on the far right have made stupid statements, but Israel’s leadership—Netanyahu, Gallant, Herzog—have not. They have called for the elimination only of Hamas. At least some of this chatter about the genocidal intent of Israel has been perpetrated by a reporter at NPR, whose conclusions were carelessly spread by other news outlets. (I don’t trust NPR on any subject.) Other claims of genocidal intent come from (indefensible) purposeful omissions, mistranslations from the Hebrew, missed plays on words, misinterpreted biblical allusions, as well as innocent—but careless—reportage. On balance, it seems to me that the media is all too ready to believe—and spread!—the worst interpretations of Israeli words and actions.

Click the screenshot to read, but more likely than not you’ll be paywalled. (NOTE: a kind reader gave a link, here, that’s good for 13 days; I’ve added it to the screenshot.) Judicious inquiry can also yield you a copy (I haven’t found it archived), but I’ll give a few quotes (indented) to show how flimly SA’s assertions are:

Rosenberg recounts how NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed David Crane, a lawyer with expertise in prosecuting cases of genocide at the Hague. Crane said that making a case against Israel would require proof that the head of state had directed those under him to destroy all or part of a people. The article goes on:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.

Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.”

As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.

On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video.

The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.

But of course given the dislike of Israel by the mainstream media (NPR is a particularly frequent offender), the mistake spread (“duplicative journalism,” as Harvard would call it):

And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.

Does nobody do fact-checking anymore? Apparently not; one outlet copies another, and nobody checks the source. Could this be because the quotes are so convenient a way to indict Israel, even though you need much, much more than quotes to prove genocide? It turns out that this kind of distortion wasn’t rare:

Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.

Often people are referring to Hamas and not Gazans (as in Gallant’s characterization of Hamas as “human animals”, misrepresented by the antisemite Rashida Tlaib in her defense of the SA accusation.  Those words may not present good “optics,” but they’re no.proof of genocide.

Likewise, Netanyahu did not broach the idea of deporting Gaza’s population—he was referring to Hamas. Netanyahu’s statement about Amalek (I won’t go into it; you can read it) was gotten wrong by the media: there are two such stories, and the media used the wrong one to imply that Netanyahu was calling for the extirpation of an entire people. He was not: he was referring to another story that calls for revenge for those who killed innocents. He was subject to yet another distortion when referring to a story in the Old Testament.

Make no mistake: Rosenberg is no fan of Netanyahu (nor am I):

I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.

In the end, Rosenberg concludes this:

These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened.

He doesn’t explain why, but it’s clear from the words above: this is part of an “erroneous attempt to indict [Israeli leaders].”  Rosenberg is too kind. It is part of a pervasive dislike of Israel and the desire of the media to see the country found guilty.

Rosenberg comes to an anodyne conclusion—the media should get things right—but it’s still important, for this is an indictment of a country for genocide

Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.