Slug Love and Snail Love – Happy Valentine’s Day

Do you like slime? On this romantic day, perhaps you might enjoy learning about the extraordinary sex lives of slugs, courtesy of Sir David Attenborough. Feel free to take notes if you'd like to add this to your own repertoire.

And also consider the sex routines of snails, as recounted at Brain Pickings (video available at the website):

This is how it happens: When a snail finds a partner, the two face each other, gently touching their tentacles together to feel if they like each other. And if they do, they glide their bodies alongside one another in a slow double embrace, until their baby-making parts fit together like puzzle pieces. Then, they gently pierce each other with tiny spears called “love darts,” which contain their genes.

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What is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

If you are looking for science at Scientific American, you'll need to look a litter harder. This is from a Scientific American article titled "It's Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal: A culture of phallus worship has slanted the science in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways."

Yet thanks to the assumption that anything large and powerful must be male, a phallus with more imposing qualities—like the hyena’s—gets dubbed a “pseudopenis,” "masculinized" or “malelike.” Those who spend a lot of time with human genitalia see it differently. “What I’ve come to realize is that everything a man has a woman has; everything a woman has, a man has, anatomically,” says Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender affirmation surgeon in Palo Alto who has done more than 2,000 male-to-female surgeries. “The penis is just a large clitoris. In fact, I don’t know why they don’t just call it a large clitoris.” Here’s why: because human biases shape scientific knowledge, and much of what we know about our nether regions has been shaped by lazy, antiquated stereotypes about what men and women are.

On Twitter, biologist Colin Wright is barely holding it together after spotting this article. That's probably because he specializes in writing "old-fashioned" biology article suggesting antiquated things like his claim that there are two biological sexes and that men are different than women. And see here.

In the meantime, back at Twitter, "M" responded to Wright's Tweet with this:

And then "Prominent Public Figure responded with this:

And there were dozens of other responses whose witticisms rivaled in intensity their frustrations of seeing Scientific American's loss of respectability.

Finally, I wanted to know more about Rachel E. Gross, who wrote this "science" article. To my dismay, I noticed that she also wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, though (thankfully) not recently. She has even written about the challenge of getting evangelicals to understand evolution, but that was before her apparent conversation to the religion of Wokeness.

Continue ReadingWhat is Passing for Science These Days at Scientific American . . .

ADHD and its Functional Twin: VAST (Variable Attention Stimulus Trait)

For many years, I thought of “ADHD” and “ADD” as dysfunctional conditions with which other people struggled, not me. Discussion of these conditions brought back vivid grade school memories of several bright and energetic boys struggling to sit still in their desks for seven hours, while nuns scolded and belittled them. I was fully aware of the social stigma that came with a diagnosis of ADHD. At the same time, I have long been aware that many successful people have been diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long been convinced that, to some degree, their ADHD traits fueled their success.

Before my divorce in 2014, my wife Anne (in our 18th year of marriage) accused me needing treatment “because of ADHD,” explaining that I was “ruining the marriage.” She had been reading a website called ADHD and Marriage. She insisted that I should see a doctor to get medication for my “problem.” She told me that I was a bad listener. She told me these things repeatedly. It didn’t help that these concerns were hurled at me, not gently broached, but I now understand her frustration better.

An ADHD diagnosis also seemed ridiculous because I had never before been told I exhibited ADHD symptoms. No other human being ever raised a concern about ADHD until Anne proclaimed her diagnosis in black and white. Nor did any instances of ADHD seem apparent in any of my close relatives.

I resented these sole-cause accusations because I saw our marriage to be much more complex than that and far more nuanced. Also, I liked who I was and saw myself as high functioning. I have always been upbeat. I enjoy many activities and I’m fairly good various things, including my legal career, writing and composing music. Also (as I reminded my wife), I was capable of sitting in front of a computer screen for twelve hours per day writing complex appellate briefs. I have received awards for my brief writing. Fellow lawyers (and opposing lawyers) have often expressed that they like working with me. On a regular basis, more than a few of my friends tell me that I am an extremely attentive listener.

After the divorce in 2014, I became increasingly intrigued about ADHD. I started reading various articles and books about ADHD. From this informal research, I became convinced that many of the qualities associated with the ADHD mind are things that describe me well. In December, 2020, Anne died suddenly causing me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things, including our marriage, including the role ADHD might have played in our struggles over the last few years of our marriage.

More icing on the cake: a counselor has gotten to know me well over the past few months. He recently blurted out: “You are ADHD from top to bottom.” Hmmm. That I am indisputably high-functioning (unlike many people who receive the diagnosis) doesn’t rule out ADHD, but it explains why I pushed back when a diagnosis was hurled at me. I’ve thought further about my ability to writing for many hours at a stretch? After the divorce learned that hyper-focusing is something that some people with ADHD diagnoses do well.

The above paragraphs are a bit awkward for me to re-read because my purpose is here is not to tout my accomplishments. It is not my purpose to drag my marital struggles into the public, post-mortem. My purpose is to show the reasons for my initial confusion and to set the stage to explain something fascinating I’ve recently learned about my way of processing the world. Perhaps my journey might help others. [More . . . ]

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The Kinds of Things You Can Learn About Your Family for $99

Here's a rather amazing thing I recently learned about myself from 23 & Me: "You inherited a small amount of DNA from your Neanderthal ancestors. Out of the 7,462 variants we tested, we found 257 variants in your DNA that trace back to the Neanderthals." 23 & Me further told me I have up to 2% of Neanderthal DNA in my genome.

I've also checked out many hundreds of my 4th-6th cousins. They have many hundreds of last names and, based upon the profile photos, they come in every size, shape and skin color. They reside in dozens of countries all over the world. I have numerous relatives born in Africa, Asia and Australia. Six of my relatives are Egyptian. 34 of my closest 5,000 relatives are at least 25% Ashkenazi Jews.

As I'm learning these things, I'm recalling the joyous presentation A.J. Jacobs made about his expansive family tree at this TED talk.

That a company can reliably tell me these things for $99 would have been unfathomable even a few decades ago--It wasn't until 2003 that scientists could read the complete genetic blueprint for building a human being (the Human Genome Project). These findings and this modest cost to learn these things are stunning. So stunning that, as I found ever more about my family tree tonight, I even chuckled a little Neanderthal chuckle.

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Inconvenient Statistics Regarding Urban Homicides and Race, Including Comparison of 2019 and 2020

Soon after George Floyd's death, thousands of people peacefully marched in American streets protesting police violence. As the sun went down in those cities, however, multitudes of people rioted and looted, causing more than $1 billion in damage.

The damage from riots and looting across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd is estimated to be the costliest in insurance history – between $1 billion and $2 billion. Insurance Information Institute (or Triple-I) compiles information from a company called Property Claim Services (PCS), which has tracked insurance claims related to civil disorder since 1950, and other databases.
Yet we have millions of people in the U.S. and major newspapers who will not call $1 billion in damages "rioting" or "looting." That is a repeated phenomenon these days on both the political right and political left: people making strong arguments by ignoring contradictory evidence.  This article focuses on denialism on the political left.  My topic is police violence and race. It's important that we gather the facts, whether it be the existence of riots and of police violence, especially violence toward African American people. Many people would rather not look at actual crime statistics, however, and this has led to an untethered and dysfunctional conversation regarding police violence. Sam Harris experienced harsh pushback (and also praise) when he released a podcast titled, "Can We Pull Back From the Brink?" His "sin" is that his podcast contained actual crime statistics:

Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

Continue ReadingInconvenient Statistics Regarding Urban Homicides and Race, Including Comparison of 2019 and 2020