Friday: Hili dialogue

April 21, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the work week: Friday, April 21, 2023, and National Chocolate Covered Cashews Day.

It’s also Big Word Day, National Tea Day in the UK, Thank You for Libraries Day, Tuna Rights Day, and Ask an Atheist Day.

Reader who wish to single out special events, births, or deaths that happened on this day should go to the April 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This news will cheer you up because, no matter whether Republican or Democrat, it shows the hegemony of empirical fact over wish-thinking. It’s about a disproof of election denialism:

MyPillow founder and prominent election denier Mike Lindell made a bold offer ahead of a “cyber symposium” he held in August 2021 in South Dakota: He claimed he had data showing Chinese interference and said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous year’s U.S. election.

He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.”

On Wednesday, a private arbitration panel ruled that someone did.

The panel said Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, was entitled to the $5 million payout.

Zeidman had examined Lindell’s data and concluded that not only did it not prove voter fraud, it also had no connection to the 2020 election. He was the only expert who submitted a claim, arbitration records show.

He turned to the arbitrators after Lindell Management, which created the contest, refused to pay him.
In their 23-page decision, the arbitrators said Zeidman proved that Lindell’s material “unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.” They directed Lindell’s firm to pay Zeidman within 30 days.
LOL, as they say. The juicily ironic bit is that the winner himself voted for Trump. Lindell claimed that he had archival internet captures demonstrating that the Chinese interfered in the 2020 Presidential election. Zeidman, a text expert, examined the complicated data and showed that none of it had anything to do with the 2020 election. Bingo, checkmate, and Zeidman is $5 million richer.

*The SpaceX Starship launch was somewhat successful: the ship cleared the launch tower and nearly got to separation of the capsule from the booster. But then the rocket pitched end over end and EXPLODED.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded on Thursday, minutes after lifting off from a launchpad in South Texas. The rocket, the most powerful ever built, did not reach orbit but provided important lessons for the private spaceflight company as it works toward a more successful mission.

At 9:33 a.m. Eastern time, the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster ignited in a huge cloud of fire, smoke and dust, and Starship rose slowly upward. About a minute later, the rocket passed through a period of maximum aerodynamic pressure, one of the crucial moments for the launch of any rocket. Shortly after, it began to tumble before exploding in a fireball high above the Gulf of Mexico.

. .  . . The space agency is relying on SpaceX to build a version of Starship that will carry two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon during its Artemis III mission. There was great anticipation from the flight, which had been delayed from Monday as the gargantuan rocket could one day carry massive amounts of cargo and many people into space.

Before the launch, which had no people aboard, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, had tamped down expectations, saying it might take several tries before Starship succeeds at this test flight.

As you can see in the video below, which goes from launch to “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (as the SpaceX announcers called it), at about 3:30 in the ship turns end over end (it was supposed to invert once before separation of the booster), and then explodes into smithereens at 4:05. The explosion might have been triggered deliberately to prevent damage to humans below. Space experts don’t regard this as disastrous because the purpose of these launches is to work bugs out of the system (NASA had plenty of failed launches like this in the old days), and also because no humans were injured.  In the coming days we’ll learn what went wrong.

*Inside Higher Ed reports something that I mentioned briefly the other day involving the notoriously venal scientific publisher Elsevier. They make tons of dosh charging libraries exorbitant fees to subscribe to their journals, and charging authors exorbitant “publishing fees” to get their papers to appear. Now they’ve gone too far (h/t Jon):

Elsevier, which says it disseminated about 18 percent of Earth’s scientific articles last year, declined editors’ requests to lower the $3,450 publishing fee at one of its journals.

NeuroImage editors said they formally asked Elsevier in June to drop the charge below $2,000. Early last month, they warned they would resign.

“We believe that the current slow decrease in submissions/publications is primarily due to the APC [article publishing charge]—we hear a lot on this from researchers in our field, no longer willing to submit papers or review,” they wrote.

“We appreciate that you do not accept that, but it’s not helpful to argue further in the absence of definitive proof.

The company wouldn’t budge, and so. . . .

On Monday, every editor at NeuroImage and the NeuroImage: Reports companion journal—over 40 people—resigned.

“It’s a pretty big exodus,” said Cindy Lustig, a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychology professor and one of the eight now former senior editors of the open-access NeuroImage. The departures also include editors in chief and handling editors.

“Pretty big exodus” is a wild understatement: it’s a fricking disaster, and one that may lead to the death of that journal. (Elsevier, however, publishes 2800 other journals.) What will happen now? The departed editors are going to start a newer, cheaper journal covering the same topic:

They’re starting their own journal, taking themselves, the Twitter profile they were using and (almost) the same name. They plan to publish their new Imaging Neuroscience with MIT Press.

Elsevier says it has over 2,800 other journals. But the en masse exit is part of continuing backlash against the business model of the world’s largest scientific journal publishers.

I signed a petition a long time ago not to have any connection with Elsevier journals. I’m not a Marxist, but this is capitalism gone wild. The $3,450 publishing fee means that the taxpayers pay twice for the research: once via government grants to fund it, and then again when scientists use grant money to pay the money-grubbing publisher.

*Jessica Grose in the NYT has an op-ed in which she dilates on a favorite topic of mine: the declining religiosity of America.  The piece, “Lots of Americans are losing their religion. Are you?“,  (h/t: Ken)

“In the United States,” the authors tell us, “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches close down every year, either to be repurposed as apartments, laundries, laser-tag arenas, or skate parks, or to simply be demolished.” (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my apartment was once the rectory of a church, also built in the 1800s and transformed, a couple of decades ago, into condos for yuppies who want dramatic windows and a hint of ecclesiastical flavor.)

It’s not just the frequency of churchgoing or temple membership that’s declining in our country: Last month, The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago surveyed around 1,000 American adults about the importance of different values to Americans, including the importance of religion. In 2023, only 39 percent of respondents said religion was very important to them, compared to 62 percent who said that in 1998.

But Grose, a secular Jew, says that what’s happening is more nuanced than a simple decline in religiosity:

When you look at the full results, the picture becomes a bit more complicated. Sixty percent of respondents said that religion was either somewhat or very important to them, and only 19 percent said religion was not important to them at all. The United States is still a more religiously observant country than our peer nations in Western Europe — according to Pew Research in 2018, for example, we are more likely to believe in God or some kind of higher power and more likely to pray daily.

But two things can be true at the same time, said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at Duke Divinity School who directs the National Congregations Study: America can still be a comparatively observant nation and religious observance can be on the decline in various dimensions, happening at different paces, Chaves explains. “The decline in religious belief and interest is much slower than the decline in organizational participation,” he said when we spoke.

Where’s the nuance in that? Churchgoing, identification with a church (the “nones”) and belief in God are all falling, with the last falling more slowly than the others—but still falling!  Grose tries to flaunt her “I’m better than both atheists and believers” attitude by saying that she doesn’t care much whether religion is good or bad for society:

My goal: to inject some nuance and specificity into this discussion, since I feel like it can be and sometimes is dominated by partisans who want to argue that the decline in religiosity is either uniformly good or bad for society. My own feeling is one of profound ambivalence. I have no interest in going back to temple and little trust or appetite for organized religion. But I feel passionately about being Jewish, and a little heartsick about not knowing quite how to pass along my ritual and history to my children. I do wonder about what may be lost by not having a community connected by belief, but I’m not quite sure what that is, or if replacing it is possible, or even desirable.

It’s certainly possible to replace belief communities, as Scandinavia and northern Europe amply demonstrate. And if you can have their moral and empathic societies without having the undeniably bad bits of religion (Catholic priests raping women, Muslims killing apostates and infidels, orthodox Jews oppressing their wives and keeping their children from learning) then why isn’t the lack of religion also desirable? All religions also tout faith—belief without good evidence—as a virtue, and that by itself makes religion bad, for it’s an enabler of other forms of belief without evidence (e.g., Donald Trump really won in 2020).

It’s interesting that Grose, who may be an unbeliever, is passionate about being a Jew, for Judaism is the one faith where vast numbers of its advocates are atheists. One can be a cultural Jew, but not a cultural Muslim. For many of us, Judaism isn’t even a religion, but simply a tribe or a club. I don’t believe in God or a word of Jewish dogma, but I still enjoy being Jewish.

* Voting along party lines, the House of Representatives passed a sensible vote that will undoubtedly be rejected by the Senate, or, if passed there, will be vetoed to death by Biden:

Transgender athletes whose biological sex assigned at birth was male would be barred from competing on girls or women’s sports teams at federally supported schools and colleges under legislation pushed through Thursday by House Republicans checking off another high-profile item on their social agenda.

The bill approved by a 219-203 party-line vote is unlikely to advance further because the Democratic-led Senate will not support it and the White House said President Joe Biden would veto it.

Supporters said the legislation, which would put violators at risk of losing taxpayer dollars, is necessary to ensure competitive fairness. They framed the vote as supporting female athletes disadvantaged by having to compete against those whose gender identify does not match their sex assigned at birth.

And, in fact, that’s the correct framing. Here I stand with the Republican vote itself, even if some of its members are surely motivated by transphobia. The Democrats frame it another way:

Opponents criticized the bill as ostracizing an already vulnerable group merely for political gain.

The House action comes as at least 20 other states have imposed similar limits on trans athletes at the K-12 or collegiate level.

The bill would amend landmark civil rights legislation, known as Title IX, passed more than 50 years ago. It would prohibit recipients of federal money from permitting a person “whose sex is male” to participate in programs designated for women or girls. The bill defines sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

I’m sorry, but the Democratic framing is largely bullpucky. The simple fact is that the data show, over and over again, that transwomen who have gone through male puberty retain, probably permanently, muscle, bone, and physiological features  that give them substantial athletic advantages over biological women. There are no data I know of to the contrary. To deny the evidence in favor of ideology puts you in the camp with ivermectin-pushers and QAnon conspiracists.

To me the bill is about keeping sports fair to women, not demonizing transsexuals, and although I get my share of emails for being a transphobe, I laugh them off. What I can’t laugh off is that organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who support the participation of trans women in women’s sports—even if the transwomen are medically untreated biological men who identify as women—are trampling on women’s rights without admitting it. I hate being in bed with Republicans, but on this issue the facts stand on their side. And their definition of sex as “reproductive biology” is okay, though they should have left out the “genetics” bit. They need a biologist to tell them what a biological woman is: it’s simply about gamete size and the reproductive apparatus that makes different-sized gametes.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are worried:

A: What are you looking at?
Hili: We are observing global warming.

In Polish
Ja: Na co patrzycie?
Hili: Obserwujemy globalne ocieplenie.

And a photo of baby Kulka:

********************

From Barry, checkmate religion! (This appears to be a real organization, at least.)

From Facebook, a cartoon by Jimmy Craig:

From Jesus of the Day. It helps if you sit several feet away and move your head, though some might see it without moving:

From Masih: More brutality directed towards protestors in Iran. Look what they did to this girl! Be sure to read the whole tweet by clicking on it.

I found this one after I discovered that Twitter will accumulate tweets that it thinks you will like. Sound up.

. . . and I found this one too. Ten tweets by FIRE showing the disturbing trend of scholars being investigated for speech and their work. It’s skyrocketing!

From Simon. Someone applied SpaceX’s description of the “malfunction” today to the Hindenburg:

From “Otter”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a family probably gassed upon arrival at the camp. The boy wasn’t even a year old.

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s temporarily abandoned Twitter for his book. (Good choice!) Thank Ceiling Cat I have a backlog of his tweets.  Here’s one of a nice gentleman saving an owl. The Google translation is:

“The best part of a good man’s life is his small, unknown, forgotten acts of kindness and love.”

I wonder if this guy got beheaded because he didn’t show sufficient fealty to The Cat:

The biology of quitting: when you should hold ’em and when you should fold ’em

April 20, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Someone called this Big Think piece to my attention because some quotes from me are in it. And they are, but that’s not the important part, which is the evolutionary biology of giving up, and I guess I’m the Expert Evolutionist in this take.  The piece is by Julia Keller, a prolific author and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2004, and this is an excerpt from her new book  Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free. which came out April 18.

Although I had some association with Julia when she wrote for the Chicago Tribune (I think she helped me get a free-speech op-ed published), I don’t remember even speaking to her on this topic, but it must have been quite a while back. At any rate, I certainly want to be set free from my maladaptive compulsions, which include persisting when I should give up, so I’ll be reading her book.

Click on the screenshot to read:

The science involved is largely evolutionary: it pays you to give up when you leave more offspring by quitting than by persisting. Or to couch it more accurately, genes that enable you to assess a situation (consciously or not) and give up at the right point—right before the relative reproductive gain from persisting turns into a relative loss compared to other gene forms affecting quitting—will come to dominate over the “nevertheless she persisted” genes.  Keller engages the reader by drawing at the outset a comparison between Simone Biles stopping her gymnastic performance in the 2021 Tokyo games, and, on the other hand, a honeybee deciding whether or not to sting a potential predator of the nest.

If the bee does sting, she invariably dies (her innards are ripped out with the sting), and can no longer protect the nest. But if that suicidal act drives away a potential predator, copies of the “sting now” gene are saved in all the other nest’s workers, who are her half sisters. (And of course they’re saved in her mother—the queen, the only female who can pass on her genes.) If a worker doesn’t sting, every copy of that gene might be lost if the nest is destroyed, for if the nest goes, so goes the queen, and every gene is lost.  On the other hand, a potential predator might not actually prey on a nest, so why give up your life if it has no result? You have to know when stinging is liable to pay off and when it isn’t.

Inexorably, natural selection will preserve genes that succeed in this reproductive calculus by promoting stinging at the right time and place—or, on the other hand refraining from stinging if it’s liable to have no effect on colony (ergo queen) survival.  And in fact, as you see below, honeybees, while they surely don’t consciously do this calculus, they behave as if they do, and they do it correctly.  Often natural selection favors animals making “decisions” that cannot be conscious, but have been molded by selection to look as if they were conscious. 

As for Simone Biles, well, you can read about her. Her decision was clearly a conscious one, but also bred in us by selection—selection to avoid damaging our bodies, which of course can severely limit our chance to pass on our genes. This is why we usually flee danger when there is nothing to gain by meeting it. (She did have something to gain—gold medals—which is why she’s like the bees.)

Why do young men street race their cars on the street, a dangerous practice? What do they have to gain? Well, risk-taking is particularly prevalent in postpubescent males compared to females, and I bet you can guess why.

I’ll first be a bit self aggrandizing and show how I’m quoted on evolution, and then get to the very cool bee story. It’s a short piece, and you might think of other “quitting vs. non quitting” behaviors of animals that could have evolved. (Hint: one involves cat domestication.)

“Perseverance, in a biological sense, doesn’t make sense unless it’s working.”

That’s Jerry Coyne, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, one of the top evolutionary biologists of his generation. [JAC: a BIT overstated, but I appreciate it.] I’ve called Coyne to ask him about animals and quitting. I want to know why human beings tend to adhere to the Gospel of Grit—while other creatures on this magnificently diverse earth of ours follow a different strategy. Their lives are marked by purposeful halts, fortuitous side steps, canny retreats, nick‑of‑time recalculations, wily workarounds, and deliberate do‑overs, not to mention loops, pivots, and complete reversals.

Other animals, that is, quit on a regular basis. And they don’t obsess about it, either.

In the wild, Coyne points out, perseverance has no special status. Animals do what they do because it furthers their agenda: to last long enough to reproduce, ensuring the continuation of their genetic material.

We’re animals, too, of course. And despite all the complex wonders that human beings have created—from Audis to algebra, from hot-fudge sundaes to haiku, from suspension bridges to Bridgerton—at bottom our instincts are always goading us toward the same basic, no‑nonsense goal: to stick around so that we can pass along little copies of ourselves. [JAC: note how this is an individual-centric view rather than the correct gene-centric one, but it’s good enough.] It’s axiomatic: the best way to survive is to give up on whatever’s not contributing to survival. To waste as few resources as possible on the ineffective. “Human behavior has been molded to help us obtain a favorable outcome,” Coyne tells me. We go for what works. We’re biased toward results. Yet somewhere between the impulse to follow what strikes us as the most promising path—which means quitting an unpromising path—and the simple act of giving up, something often gets in the way. And that’s the mystery that intrigues me: When quitting is the right thing to do, why don’t we always do it?

Well, who ever said that every aspect of human behavior was molded by natural selection? Please don’t think that I was implying that it was, as we have a cultural veneer on top of the behaviors conditioned by our genes. In this piece Keller doesn’t get to the subject of why we don’t quit when we should. I’m sure that’s in the book.

Now the very cool bee story:

Justin O. Schmidt is a renowned entomologist and author of The Sting of the Wild, a nifty book about a nasty thing: stinging insects. Living creatures, he tells me, echoing Coyne, have two goals, and those goals are rock-bottom rudimentary: “To eat and not be eaten.” If something’s not working, an animal stops doing it—and with a notable absence of fuss or excuse-making. . . .

. . . For a honeybee, the drive to survive carries within it the commitment to make sure there will be more honeybees. And so she defends her colony with reckless abandon. When a honeybee stings a potential predator, she dies, because the sting eviscerates her. (Only the females sting.) Given those odds—a 100 percent mortality rate after stinging—what honeybee in her right mind would make the decision to sting if it didn’t bring some benefit?

That’s why, Schmidt explains to me from his lab in Tucson, sometimes she stands down. When a creature that may pose a threat approaches the colony, the honeybee might very well not sting. She chooses, in effect, to quit—to not take the next step and rush forward to defend the nest, at the cost of her life.

His experiments, the results of which he published in 2020 in Insectes Sociaux, an international scientific journal focusing on social insects such as bees, ants, and wasps, reveal that honeybees make a calculation on the fly, as it were. They decide if a predator is close enough to the colony to be a legitimate threat and, further, if the colony has enough reproductive potential at that point to warrant her ultimate sacrifice. If the moment meets those criteria—genuine peril (check), fertile colony (check)—the honeybees are fierce fighters, happy to perish for the greater good.

But if not… well, no. They don’t engage. “Bees must make life‑or‑death decisions based on risk-benefit evaluations,” Schmidt tells me. Like a gymnast facing a dizzyingly difficult maneuver that could prove to be lethal, they weigh the danger of their next move against what’s at stake, measuring the imminent peril against the chances of success and the potential reward. They calculate odds.

And if the ratio doesn’t make sense, they quit.

That’s a bit oversimplified, for the calculus is not only unconscious (I doubt bees can weigh threats this way), but the decision capability has been molded by competition over evolutionary time between different forms of genes with different propensities to sting or give up. Further, individual worker bees are sterile, and so what’s at stake is the number of gene copies in the nest as a whole—and especially in the queen. The asymmetrical relatedness between the queen, her workers, and their useless drone brothers (produced by unfertilized eggs) makes the calculus especially complicated.

On the other hand, explaining the gene calculus to lay readers is hard, and it might be better to read the seminal work on how this all operates: Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. 

Here’s Schmidt’s short paper (click to read; if it’s paywalled, ask for a copy). He died just this February.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ credulity

April 20, 2023 • 11:15 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “fakes,” points out a change in society that makes it easier to be religious (Jesus even thanks himself for that!). But I don’t think it’s any harder now to winnow truth from fiction; it’s just that there’s a lot more fiction.  This makes the task more time consuming, but the methods used for the winnowing are the same as ever.

Readers’ wildlife photos and story: the gruesome manipulation of hosts by parasites

April 20, 2023 • 9:45 am

Fortuitously, when I hadn’t prepared any posts for today that require my neurons to work, reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior came through with one of his patented text+photo stories, this time a fascinating one about how opportunistic natural selection can create predator/parasite niches within niches in completely unexpected and astonishing ways. This hierarchy was wonderfully expressed in the short poem “Siphonaptera” (the order in which fleas are placed) by British mathematician Augustus De Morgan:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Athayde’s text is indented, and click on the photo to enlarge them.

The body snatchers

by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior

Family feuds abound in history and in the tabloids, but things got really out of hand with the offspring of Egyptian gods Geb (Earth) and Nut (sky). As the first-born, Osiris was naturally chosen to be the ruler of the world. But his brother Set didn’t care one bit for this undemocratic arrangement, so he decided to despatch Osiris to the Underworld. So he set out a murderous plan worthy of an Agatha Christie story. Set first commissioned a beautiful casket, tailored to fit a body with Osiris’ exact measurements. Set then organised a magnificent banquet, inviting heavenly celebrities and bro Osiris. When they were all done with the eating and drinking, Set announced a surprise. The casket was brought in, and the host told his guests that whoever could fit inside, could take it home (an odd gift to us, perhaps, but who are we to judge Egyptian gods?). One by one the guests climbed into the casket, which was too small or too big – until Osiris had a go at it. He laid down inside the casket, which, to his glee, fit him perfectly. Set’s trap was set; he slammed the casket’s lid shut and locked it, killing his sibling. Later Set retrieved Osiris’ body and chopped it into small pieces.

The Mummy (1932) escaped from his sarcophagus, but no such luck for Osiris. Art by Karoly Grosz, Wikimedia Commons:

Set’s shenanigans were the perfect inspiration for naming a new species from the genus Euderus, a small group of parasitic wasps in the family Eulophidae. Most Euderus species are moth and beetle parasitoids, but the wasp discovered by Egan et al. (2017) in Florida (USA) is peculiar, to say the least. Its host, Bassettia pallida, is itself a parasitic wasp, but of a different kind: this species is one of the many gall wasps or cynipids (family Cynipidae), which lay their eggs in oaks (Quercus spp.) and less commonly in related plants (family Fagaceae). The egg-laying induces the plant to produce a gall, which is an abnormal growth resulting from increased size or number of cells (galls can also be caused by tissue feeding or infections by bacteria, viruses, fungi and nematodes). Cynipids trigger their host plants to produce nutritious tissue inside their galls, which become ideal places for a larva to grow: there’s nothing better for one’s survival than a cosy, safe and nourishing nursery.

Oak galls or oak apples, growths resulting from chemicals injected by the larva of gall wasps © Maksim, Wikimedia Commons:

In the case of B. pallida, it induces the formation of galls inside stems of sand live oak (Q. geminata) and southern live oak (Q. virginiana). Each of these galls is called a ‘crypt’. So appropriately, B. pallida is known as the crypt gall wasp. When the adult wasp completes its development, it chews an exit hole from inside its woody quarters and flies away.

(a): a crypt gall wasp; (e): adults’ exit holes © Weinersmith et al., 2020:

Life looked good for the crypt gall wasp in the southeastern United States—until we learned about the machinations of its recently discovered enemy. The Eulophidae parasitoid locates a crypt and pierces it with its ovipositor, laying an egg inside the chamber, near or into the developing crypt gall wasp. We don’t know exactly what goes on inside the chamber, but the outcome is not good at all for the crypt gall wasp. When it tries to chew its way out, it’s no longer able to create a hole big enough to fit its body: the wasp becomes entrapped inside its crypt, Osiris-like. During its failed attempt to get out, its head blocks the exit hole. All the better for the parasitoid larva that hatched inside the crypt: it can feed at leisure on the host’s weakened body. On completing its development, the adult parasitoid wasp chews through the host’s head plug and comes out to the big wide world. So there was no better name for this species than Euderus set, the crypt-keeper wasp.

JAC: Isn’t that an amazing story? I’m sure we don’t know how the parasitoid disables the gall wasp in this way. Imagine the genetic changes involved in this complex evolution, involving the parasitoid’s egg-laying and multiple behaviors of its larval stage. But that’s a passing expression of amazement; let’s continue with Athayde’s tale:

(c): a crypt-keeper wasp pupa in a chamber made by a crypt gall wasp; (f): an exit hole plugged by the head capsule of a dead or dying crypt gall wasp; (g): a crypt gall wasp head capsule chewed through by an exiting crypt-keeper wasp © Weinersmith et al., 2020.

The relationships between oaks and these wasps are examples of host manipulation, which happens when a parasite influences the host’s behaviour or physiology to its (the parasite’s) advantage. The crypt gall wasp induces its host plants to produce galls for its benefit, and in turn the crypt-keeper wasp forces its host into becoming trapped and an easy meal for the parasitoid’s larva: the manipulation of a manipulator is known as a hyper-manipulation, an uncommon phenomenon.

A female crypt-keeper wasp, a hyper-manipulator © Egan et al., Wikimedia Commons.

There are many cases of host manipulation, and the zombie-ant fungus described by the co-author of the theory of evolution by natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) is one of the better known. This fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) induces its host ants to climb up the vegetation and clamp their mandibles around a twig or leaf vein. An infected ant will stay put, rain or shine, while the fungus grows inside it. After 4-10 days the ant dies, the fungus grows a ‘stalk’ (stroma) from the ant’s head and releases spores that will infect ants walking about on the forest floor.

A dead Camponotus leonardi ant attached to a leaf vein. The stroma of a zombie-ant fungus emerges from the back of the ant’s head © Pontoppidan et al., 2009:

The more researchers look into it, the more they find cases of host manipulators such as the Darwin wasps Hymenoepimecis spp., which parasitize several species of orb-weaving spiders in the Neotropical region. A female wasp stings and temporarily paralyses her victim, laying an egg on its abdomen. The emerging larva bites through the spider’s cuticle and feeds on its ‘blood’ (haemolymph). The spider carries on with its life, building webs and catching prey, but the growing parasitoid takes its toll; eventually it kills its host.

L: A H. heidyae egg attached to a Kapogea cyrtophoroides. R: Third instar H. heidyae larva feeding on a recently killed spider; the inset shows details of the dorsal hooks used by the larva to cling to its host © Barrantes et al., 2008.

But shortly before the spider’s demise, somehow —probably by hormone injection—the larva takes command of the host’s behaviour. The spider builds a cocoon web made of thickly woven silk, which doesn’t look at all like a normal web. The spider dies, the larva enters the cocoon and completes its development. Some days later, the adult wasp emerges and flies away.

a. A normal K. cyrtophoroides web; b. The web’s hub; c. A cocoon web induced by the parasitoid; d.  Central section of the cocoon web and the wasp’s cocoon © Barrantes et al., 2008.

Parasitic wasps are not deterred by the defences of hosts such as Anelosimus eximius. This is one of the few species of social spiders; they build massive tent-like nests that shelter hundreds or thousands of individuals, who hunt together in raiding packs and even cooperate in raising their young (click the next link to watch their comings and goings). But in the Amazon region, A. eximius can’t evade the Darwin wasp Zatypota sp. A parasitized spider leaves the colony and builds its own cocoon-like web. It then becomes immobilised, so that the wasp larva can unhurriedly consume it. When finished with its meal, the larva enters the cocoon to complete its development. The larger the spider colony, the more chances of being parasitized; up to 2% of individuals become hosts to the parasitoid (Fernandez-Fournier et al., 2018).

L: A group of A. eximius in a communal web © Bernard Dupont, Wikimedia Commons. R: A 5-m long, 3-m high colony of A. eximius; photo by A. Bernard © Krafft & Cookson, 2012:.

A fierce looking H. neotropica and its larva feeding on an Araneus omnicolor © Sobczak et al., 2012.

Host manipulation seems to be much more common than we thought, so we shouldn’t expect pollinators to be safe from it. And they are not. The conopid fly (family Conopidae) Physocephala tibialis forces bumblebee hosts to bury themselves in the soil just before dying. The nematode worm Sphaerularia bombi, found throughout the northern hemisphere and South America, infects queens of several bumble bee species, castrating its host. And at least for the buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris), the nematode also alters the bee’s behaviour (Kadoya & Ishii, 2015). An infected queen feeds normally, but does not breed or build a nest. Instead, she keeps flying into the early summer months, and by doing so she unintentionally helps to spread the nematode. Certainly many other cases of pollinators’ manipulation by parasites wait to be discovered because their effects can be subtle and inconspicuous.

CSI Garden: a post-mortem examination of a buff-tailed bumble bee found dying on a roadside pavement in England revealed an infestation by the host-manipulating nematode S. bombi © The Encyclopedia of Life:

Host manipulation can be seen as a form of extended phenotype (Dawkins, 1982; phenotype refers to a species’ observable characteristics resulting from the expression of its genes). By changing the host’s behaviour for its own benefit, the parasitoid – ultimately, its genes – expresses its phenotype in the world at large. In Dawkins’ own words, ‘an animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes “for” that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it’. The phenomenon would have deep consequences for natural selection, but the extent of extended phenotypes has been debated since the publication of Dawkins’ book.

If you are smugly assuming that behavioural puppeteering is for lower animals such as insects, you’d better think again. Some studies suggest that rodents infected with the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii become more active but sluggish in reacting to alarm signals; worse, they may become attracted to the smell of cat’s urine. If so, an infected mouse has a good chance of prematurely ending its days in a moggie’s maw – which was T. gondii‘s ‘intention’ all along, since cats are its ultimate host. And the plot thickens: infected cats excrete T. gondii spores in their faeces, which can make their way into other mammals. A 26-year study with grey wolves (Canis lupus) from Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA, revealed that infected individuals – probably the result of contact with pumas (Puma concolor) – are bolder, more likely to become pack leaders and have better chances of reproducing (Meyer et al., 2022). In humans, toxoplasmosis, the infection caused by T. gondii, is widespread but usually does not have any symptoms. Most people don’t even know they have it, but all sorts of behaviour and mental disorders such as heightened aggression and Parkinson’s disease have been linked to the infection. The effects of T. gondii on rodents and humans have been disputed because data often show weak, inconclusive or no effects (Johnson & Koshy, 2020). In any case, our invulnerability to the manipulative power of parasites should not be taken for granted. Rephrasing the quote misattributed to Margaret Mead, always remember that in biology, Homo sapiens is unique. Just like every other species.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Art by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Wikimedia Commons.

JAC note: I don’t think that in any of these cases of host manipulation (or any others that I’ve heard of) do we know the chemical and developmental basis of the manipulation. What does a fungus do to an ant to make it climb a stalk of grass, grip it tightly with its mandibles, and then die? How does the Darwin wasp manipulate the spider’s behavior to cause it to weave a cocoon-like web instead of its normal web—something good for the wasp? These are incredibly sophisticated manipulations that have evolved in ways we don’t understand.

If this is the work of a creator, he must have been a sadist!

Starship launch likely today in the next 1.5 hours. Watch NOW!

April 20, 2023 • 8:09 am

I’m posting this quickly, as you don’t want to miss it. Elon Musk’s Starship, designed to be the vehicle to take people to live on Mars or the Moon, is scheduled to launch this morning after the first launch was scrubbed a few days ago.

The one-hour launch window is between 9:28 and 10:28 a.m. Eastern, or 8:28 and 9:28 a.m. Chicago time, and 2:28 to 3:28 pm London time. That means the window starts about 20 minutes after this post goes up. The vehicle will circle most of the globe and is slated to come down

To see it, click on the screenshot below to go to the SpaceX site, and then click the “watch” box, which I’ve circled in red. You’ll be sent to another screen and then you’ll have to hit “watch” AGAIN. Who can fathom Elon Musk.

From the NYT:

What is Starship?

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 394 feet tall, or nearly 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty with the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy, the lower section that will propel the Starship vehicle to orbit, has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. They are able to generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, far more than the Saturn V that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Starship is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is expected to land much like SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

Why is SpaceX building Starship?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the most frequently launched rocket in the world. Starship is the next step. It would be able to carry far more cargo and many more people than Falcon 9. And because it is fully reusable, Starship could greatly reduce the cost of launching payloads to orbit.

NASA is paying SpaceX to build a version of the vehicle to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface for the Artemis III and IV missions later in the decade. The spacecraft is also central to Mr. Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.

What will happen during the flight?

For the test flight on Thursday, Starship will fly almost completely around the Earth, starting from Texas and splashing down in waters off Hawaii.

About eight minutes after the launch on Thursday, the Super Heavy booster will splash into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship vehicle will fly higher into space, reaching an altitude of about 150 miles and traveling around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere. If it survives re-entry, about 90 minutes after launching, it will splash into the Pacific Ocean some 62 miles north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

But with all the new systems in Starship, the SpaceX founder acknowledged the difficulties of achieving all of the flight’s goals.

“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” Mr. Musk said. “I could go on for hours.”

h/t: Jim Batterson

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 20, 2023 • 7:30 am

Greetings on Thursday, April 20, 2023, National Pineapple Upside Down Cake Day, a treat I dearly love but never get to eat (my mom used to make it for me).

I returned from Paris yesterday late afternoon, after an eight-hour flight that, with watching a few movies whose names I won’t divulge, wasn’t too unpleasant.  And here is my last meal in France, or at least on Air France.  Winnie expected that an Air France flight from Paris would have good food, but, sadly, it didn’t. Have a gander:

Le Menu

Gloppy chicken and mashed potato with some kind of nondescript gravy
Salad with lentils and various veggies (not bad, but not that good, either)
Semi-stale roll with a pat of butter and a hunk of unripe and cold Camembert cheese
Dessert: a chocolate fudge cake that was decent but the portion was too small
Diet Coke (my order; I don’t usually have alcohol on flights). Cut was too tiny.

This is pretty much the same thing we had flying to France, except the Camembert was replaced by a lame cheddar cheese.

For our prearrival snack, we had some kind of dreadful vegetable sandwich, a muffin, and a container of drinkable yogurt before we landed at O’Hare. I could have paid $450 to upgrade to business class, but it wasn’t worth it for a slightly better seat and meal.

Yes, I know I’m spoiled with respect to food.

Posting will be light for a few days until I get up to speed, as I’m badly-jet lagged and have to catch up with tasks that accumulated. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz is also short: There’s a NYT op-ed by Jack Resneck, Jr., President of the American Medical Association, about the ludicrous intrusion of courts into the FDA’s system of drug approval—namely, one courts’ decision that the FDA decided wrong. The op-ed is called “This could be one of the most brazen attacks on American’s health yet.” And it is for it allows the judiciary, which has no expertise in this area, to arrogate to itself whether a drug has been properly tested for safety.

But I would be delighted if readers would bring me up to date on the last week’s news, perhaps with a brief comment on what they thought was the most important event since April 11.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is up in the rosebushes, looking quite regal.

A: So why did you get there? You will prick yourself.
Hili: None of your business.
In Polish:
Ja: No i gdzie tam wlazłaś? Pokłujesz się.
Hili: Nie twój interes.
*********************

From Divy,  a truth all rational people know:

From Nicole, who has chosen wisely:

From Science Humor on FB:

A tweet from Masih. Although the women covered their faces, the photos are on their social media pages, so they could still be identified. (“Haram” means “forbidden” in Islam.)

From Simon, another mockery of academia by Oded Rechavi. Simon adds,  “Wrong font! Even if you match the space you can’t ignore the font requirements….”

From Malcolm, An overeager cat:

A Pinocchio weevil from Dom!  Now what is that rostrum for?

From Luana; this appears to be a true story of a man who put himself in a burka.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, with everyone in the family probably gassed upon arrival.

Tweets from Matthew. The first comes from his research on Crick’s life, and is a long response to a young person. The mentions of Avery et al. and Chargaff are right on, and everyone should know what their contributions were to solving the structure of DNA:

Of course Poncho won’t obey. He’s a CAT!

God will save King Charles—with pieces of the True Cross

April 19, 2023 • 10:30 am

If all the wooden relics alleged to be parts of the “true cross”—the apparatus on which a supposed Jesus was said to have been crucified—were genuine, you could carve Mount Rushmore out of them. They are, one and all, phony.

Yet people treat them as real and revere them. In fact, when Charles and Camilla are crowned as the King and Queen of England on Saturday, May 6 (they’re already in effect King and Queen), the ceremony will receive God’s blessing—from a relic donated by the Vatican. Click on the BBC screenshot below to read.

From the article (bolding is the BBC’s):

Fragments said to be from the cross on which Jesus was crucified will be included in a newly made Cross of Wales used at the head of the coronation procession in Westminster Abbey.

The relics of what is known as the True Cross were given to King Charles by Pope Francis, as a coronation gift.

The cross uses Welsh materials such as slate, reclaimed wood, and silver from the Royal Mint in Llantrisant.

King Charles hammered the hallmark onto the silver used in the cross.

The announcement about the new cross is a reminder that, alongside the pomp and pageantry, the coronation on 6 May will be a religious ceremony.

Of course that’s why they cry, “God save the King/Queen”, for they assume that God will hear. But of course he doesn’t hear, and that was proved by SCIENCE.  In the first test of the efficacy of intercessory prayer, Francis Galton—a cousin of Charles Darwin—determined the longevity of Britain’s royals and compared it to the longevity of people in similar situations of well being. He figured that since millions of people pray each week for the health of the King or Queen, they should on average live longer than, say, landed gentry.

Nope. As this article notes,

Just for the record as examples of [Galton’s] data, the 97 cases of members of the Royal family were recorded as having an average life span of 64.04 years, the 945 members of the clergy in his sample having an average lifespan of 66.49 years and the 1,632 members of the gentry a life span average of 70.22 years. While we can detect a satirical flavour to Galton’s study and despite obvious individual exceptions such as Queen Victoria, or to bring the cases up to date, the Queen Mother and the present Queen, it is hard to avoid the inevitable conclusion that this form of stylised prayer of petition does not always get the desired result.

Since then there have been other studies of the power of intercessory prayer, including one on recovery of cardiac patients that was funded by the Templeton Foundation. The results of all of these? Nada, zip, zilch. Prayer doesn’t help kings live longer nor people recover from surgery or illness.

The conclusion? Petitionary, intercessory prayer doesn’t work, either because God isn’t listening, is listening but doesn’t care, or, most likely, doesn’t exist. (This must have severely disappointed the people at Templeton.)

Yet the charade goes on. From the BBC again:

The cross, made by silversmith Michael Lloyd, is inscribed with the words of St David, patron saint of Wales. It is a gift from the King to the Church in Wales.

The coronation will be an Anglican service, but the prominent inclusion of a gift from the head of the Roman Catholic church reflects how other denominations and faiths will be represented.

Set into the silver cross will be two small wooden shards, originating from what is claimed to be the cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Such relics of the True Cross have been venerated for centuries, with pilgrimages made to churches where they are held.

At least the BBC adds this caveat:

There has also been long-standing scepticism about the volume and authenticity of such relics and whether they could all come from a single cross.

Indeed!

Well, the first thing they should do is some carbon dating on tiny bits of the “true cross”.  It should be at least two millennia old, but that’s just a start, because we can get wood that old from several species of living trees, or from pieces of wood known to be ancient. But no, Charles plays along, even participating, as in the picture above, in the invasion of knavish Popery into the coronation.

The King will then be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury (an Anglican), and that’s supposed to be the Holy Moment when the face of God smiles on Charles III:

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who is conducting the service on 6 May, has highlighted how the heart of the coronation is a religious ceremony, likening it to the ordination of a priest.

In a newly-published official souvenir programme, the archbishop says that in the middle of all the “magnificence and pomp” is a moment of “stillness and simplicity” when the King is anointed with holy oil.

The archbishop says the anointing will see the King in a simple white shirt, rather than “robes of status” and he says the King will be “in the full knowledge that the task is difficult and he needs help”.

This is a moment not previously seen by the public, and did not form part of the television coverage at the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

There has been speculation about whether or not it will be visible for next month’s ceremony, but current expectations suggests it will remain a private moment in the coronation proceedings.

In fact,  the British public appears to be against government funding of the coronation, which is indeed largely funded by the state:

Alongside some opposition to the coronation from anti-monarchy groups, a survey on Tuesday raised questions about the level of support for public funding of the occasion.

The coronation is a state event, but a YouGov poll of 4,000 adults found that 51% were against the government paying for it, compared with 32% who supported state-funding, with the rest saying they “didn’t know”.

Among 18-24 year olds, 62% thought the government should not fund the coronation.

And this:

The amount that it will cost the government will not be revealed until after the event.

Of course! We don’t want people grousing about how all that pomp is coming out of their pockets. We want them to think that faith is playing a substantial role in the ascendancy of Charles to Britain’s throne.