Alive on YouTube again

I guess I’ll try revive my long-neglected YouTube channel.

Transcript below the fold.

I’m free! It’s the end of the semester, it’s time for a summer break, and I’ve got a sabbatical term coming up in the Fall. I will have no teaching responsibilities until January! I’ve had a harrowing few years where I’ve been struggling to keep up with all kinds of teaching and administrative duties that meant one of the first things I had to jettison was all this YouTube stuff, but now I’ve got some slack, so I’m back, and I feel like I’ve got to reintroduce myself. So…Hi. My name is PZ Myers. I’m a biologist at the University of Minnesota Morris. I used to be an active and vocal atheist, but the corruption and hypocrisy of the New Atheist movement made me less active and less vocal, but I’m still an atheist. Maybe I’ll get louder about that again. My first love, though, is biology, and I started becoming slightly popular several years ago because I was promoting evolution and fighting creationism. I experienced some burnout over that because evolution is fundamentally an established fact with so much evidence that it is perverse to argue against it, and only fools and liars support the myth of divine creation, especially if they deny the existing evidence that exposes their follies. It is absolutely insane that people reject science to promote theological dogma that makes no sense, that contradicts physics, geology, genetics, molecular biology, and paleontology. I am infuriated to see Abrahamic crap working its way into our government and education system. I am a somewhat different evolutionary biologist, though. I’ve taught all the basics of population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis, but there are other people on YouTube that are better at that than I am. I consider myself a developmental biologist first and foremost, that’s what interests me most, and I’m evo-DEVO, not purely evo. And that’s good for the science ecosystem as a whole — what creationists can’t comprehend, because they’re stuck with an obsession with “Darwinism” (sorry, losers, it died out in the 19th century as deeper understanding of the mechanisms of change evolved) and modern evolutionary biology is wide and deep and diverse. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is a true aphorism, and every branch of biology has converged on evolution as the central explanation of how our biological world operates. There are biochemical evolutionists, structural evolutionists, neuroscience evolutionists, taxonomic evolutionists, ecological evolutionists, physiological evolutionists…you name the subfield, there are evolutionary biologists emerging from it, including developmental biology. We are legion. You may wonder what the developmental perspective on evolution might be. I entered the field as a shiny new graduate student in 1979, which many of you may know as a watershed moment in evo-devo. Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus published their dynamite paper on the genetics of spatial patterning in Drosophila in 1980, which essentially launched the whole field, and I remember reading it and thinking this was awesome. Unfortunately, I set it aside and told myself I’d get back to it later, because at that time I was neck deep in neurophysiology (of spiders! Foreshadowing!) and over my head in studying the molecular biology of cytoskeletons, in preparation for my preliminary exams. I won’t keep you in suspense: I passed. I then spent years studying neurodevelopment in zebrafish. And later I moved on to studying neurodevelopment in grasshoppers, which was a gateway to studying molecular genetics in Drosophila, and then I was prepared to dig deep into evo-devo. What is the developmental perspective on evolution? My primary interest was in the mechanisms of transformation at the organismal level. Comparing the embryonic nervous system of a grasshopper to that of a fruit fly, we can see surprisingly similar patterns of organization. I know I was dazzled when, after studying grasshopper ganglia in detail, I first looked at fruit fly ganglia…and I could identify the same pathways even the same cells between the two species. But I could also see significant differences. What changes made a growing neuron in a grasshoper take a left turn at one crossroads while fly neurons turned right, or grew straight? What are the signals they use? They’re simple molecules, obviously, so what evolutionary change affected the ligands or receptors or gene expression to change one into the other? One of the implications of the Nusslein-Volhard/Wieschaus work is that the signals are universal, but applied in different combinations or with subtle changes in different species. The mechanistic rules applied to zebrafish as well as fruit flies, but obviously you get different outcomes in fish and flies. The developmental perspective is less “how are alleles distributed in a population,” and more “how do the genes and alleles in this organism build an eye,” or a flower, or a brain, or a physiological response. It’s all about specific instances of the construction of complex structures. A population geneticist might be more focused on the logistics of getting all the pieces together at the construction site; I’m more of a “OK, we’ve got all the elements gathered together, now how do we put them together into a functional structure in the organism.” All of those perspectives are necessary to understand evolution, but it’s such a complex problem that no one angle is sufficient to figure it all out. What evo-devo adds is the comparative approach — one of the tools for inferring evolution is by comparison of related species. Another thing about the developmental perspective is that some of the creationist complaints look positively silly. “How can evolution produce something as complex as an eye?” they ask, and I say, “Here, I’ll put a zebrafish zygote on the microscope, and you can watch as an eye self-assembles. It takes about a day. No magic required.” These are entirely natural, physical processes that you can study, and you don’t even need to pray to do it. Oh, and by the way — you will see a fair number of people touting revolutionary interpretations of evolutionary biology, calling themselves “The Third Way” or “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” or something else that suggests they have some novel insight, and often they cite evo-devo as a key part of their program. I have no interest in their nonsense. My evo-devo is one piece of the biological puzzle, and must be integrated within the existing paradigm. It does not replace it. So sorry, I don’t peddle sensationalistic revolutionary BS here. Another kind of BS I don’t tolerate, and it’s also a consequence of my mechanistic view of life, is that I’m a hard-core atheist. Not a “I don’t believe in a god” atheist, but an “I actively deny the existence of a god” atheist. I’m not waiting for someone to show me evidence, because I know that so many processes do not require a god; even if you find a gap in our knowledge, and there are many, I see no need for a magical, supernatural force to transform a bacterium into a multicellular organism, or a basic multicellular organism into a fish, or a fish into a human. I am a collection of membranes with ions flowing across them, and the concepts of gods have no role to play in ion flux, so why bother with them? I will sometimes talk about atheism here, but this will not be a debate channel. 1) I dislike debates. 2) I’ve seen a few debate channels, and their main entertainment value is witnessing how stupid the arguments of religious apologists are. 3) There is no point in debating about the existence of gods, since they don’t exist. If you’re an apologist you’re wrong at best and most likely you’re a fool. The only interesting question is how so many people can fall for the con. That’s what you can expect from me for the next few months. I’m fascinated by ecological development, the effect of environmental factors on developing embryos. I’m really into spiders, to an embarrassing degree, so I’m warning you now: photos and videos of spiders being cute and charming will appear here in the near future. I’m also getting old and am all out of patience with your goddamned foolishness. Stay tuned. I write every day on my blog, at freethoughtblogs dot com slash pharyngula, I’m on bluesky as @pzmyers, I’m on mastodon at freethoughtonline @pzmyers, and I’m on patreon as, can you guess it? pzmyers, where I’ll post my videos a day before I put them here on YouTube. I’ll talk to you later, and if I slack off, just use the time to go find some spiders.