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I’m doing my best to inoculate PJ against conspiracy-style thinking. I mention Occam’s Razor every chance I get. I also told her this story from my first years on the job, when I and everyone else at my level was really worried about promotion.

There was a colleague who had come in a year ahead of me who was very nervous about whether she was impressing the higher-ups enough. She absolutely did not need to be; she wound up getting a better job at a better place; but for whatever reason, her thinking about promotion had taken on a paranoid cast. Every year they held a reception for our section which a lot of us blew off. She told me never to blow it off because of the name tags. They made name tags for us, and if you didn’t go, you wouldn’t pick up your name tag, and then when they looked at the name tags left over after the party, they’d know you hadn’t been there, and it would be a held against you later.

I was like, well, she’s been here longer, maybe this could be true…and then I asked myself a question that I think would kill most conspiracy theories if you could get people to ask it:

Whose job would that be?

Someone would have to be in charge of collecting the unsued nametags, making a list, and then either recording that list in some database or transmitting it to someone *else* who would record it. Whose job description would include that? The people who generated the nametags were not the same people who cleared up after the event. Getting the information about who didn’t show from the staff at the event to the people who made the promotion decisions would involve a chain with several links in it. I couldn’t see anyone deciding that it was a good idea to add any of this to anyone’s workload. 

You can try this on any conspiracy theory. For instance, that Bill Gates has somehow implanted individual microchips in COVID vaccine. OK. Whose job would that be? Who’s the Vice President for Universal Vaccine-Enabled Surveillance? Who’s their liaison at Moderna? At Pfizer? At Johnson & Johnson? How do they ensure there’s only one chip in each dose? Do they have to train the people who administer the vaccine on this? Whose job would that be?

Option 1: Whatever part-time temp office clerk they hired to take out the trash, grabbed the printouts of the PPT and sold them to a journalist.

Option 2: Whatever office clerk had to MAKE the damn PPT files, sent a copy off to a friend with a note, “omg you would not believe what I am wasting my time doing. Pie charts. They’re talking about international security issues, and they want it all in pie charts.”

I guarantee the only reason there is not endless - and I mean endless - corporate and gov’t secrets leaked absolutely everywhere, is that 95% of all bureaucracy is boring as hell. And for the parts that aren’t, the average mailroom clerk has no idea what to do with that info, even if they recognized it as Interesting and Important.

If you haven’t been the person whose job is, “please edit this spreadsheet with these new numbers and print me a copy; oops, no, add these numbers too and do it again; wow sorry no; please remove column 8 and do it again, and get me six - no, eight - no wait, I only need six after all - copies before the meeting in half an hour,” then you don’t realize (1) how many unsecured, slightly-inaccurate copies are bouncing around the office at any given time, nor (2) how little attention anyone is paying to what happens to the digital files or the printed pages.

And that’s before we get to executives who leave their laptops in the taxi, or who give their secretary their company ID login info so she can approve all 45 of the billing reports, or who forward half their business email to their personal account so they can review things on the weekend.

…and then give their secretary their personal email login, so she can edit the report before Tuesday.

When looking at any conspiracy theory, ask yourself:

1) Who has to gather and distribute all that info, and what are they using to organize it?

and

2) Who knows it’s going on and has to keep quiet about it?

If #2 is “more than 10 people,” and the secret would gain someone status or power if they told… that theory is a bust.

Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.

Folks disqualified for hyper-androgenism in womens athletics.

Francine Niyonsaba

Caster Semenya

Dutee Chand

Margaret Wambui

And more

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Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.

A drone has crashed into Iceland's spewing Fagradalsfjall volcano, with its final spectacular moments being captured on video.

You can not go Against Nature in the way that you Are because you are nature and nature is only itself. There is not a Rule about how living things can be. There are only living things being.

The words we use to describe Biological Realities are not boxes we are sticking nature in they are flashlights we are pointing at it

“come up with a definition for Woman that excludes all men” we can’t!!!!!! I was reading the book Weird Life by David Toomey and there is a section in it where it talks about the definition of life and how it may actually be impossible to come up with a complete definition for life. My biology textbook in high school had a list of eight criteria for life, but those criteria are full of caveats and exceptions. An obvious one is that life is capable of reproducing, but some things that appear to be alive (mules, for example) cannot reproduce

A lot of people already know that “meme” was coined in the 1970’s by Richard Dawkins, to describe like, a unit of information that is passed down and evolves like a living thing. But here’s the part I had never heard before. By the definition of life we mostly use today, that defines “life” by how it is subject to evolution, memes are not “like” life. They ARE life.

Anyway, my brain is breaking like. There is no Should Be there is only Is and what Is, is Basically Everything, because biology does legitimately whatever it can get away with

Rafflesia, genus of non-photosynthetic plants that have no stems, leaves or roots and simply spread their tissues throughout the host plant’s. also they do horizontal gene transfer and steal DNA from their host plant

All members of this fish species produce both eggs and sperm, and reproduce by pairing up with other fish and taking turns producing eggs and sperm.

This fish switches freely back and forth between male and female.

This fish species also produces both eggs and sperm but they fertilize themselves.

This animal, a cnidarian known as a hydra, has three sexes: Male, Female, and Both. Typically, though, they reproduce asexually, creating clones of themselves. They also have green algae living inside them in symbiosis, which is cool.

Slugs are all hermaphroditic, and mate with partners by exchanging sperm, after which both slugs will lay eggs.

These flatworms are hermaphroditic and engage in “penis fencing,” in which two worms duel to see who will impregnate the other. Yes, there is a Wikipedia article for penis fencing.

This species of salamander is made up of all females, who breed with males of a similar species to fertilize their eggs but then throw out the male’s genes and use only their own. 🤨

In bees and some other social insects, sex is determined by the number of sets of chromosomes in an egg—a fertilized egg will become female, whereas an unfertilized egg will become male.

Hammer-headed bats (like several other bat species) haven’t any Y chromosomes; the sex of the offspring is determined whether they get a chromosome from the male or not. 

Introducing the Brassica oleracea, a plant species whose cultivars include…all of the above. They all originated from the same plant aka THIS FUCKER! 

No, really. This thing has existed in Europe for thousands of years, during which time different societies had different culinary preferences, leading them to selectively breed for different traits. For example, a preference for the eating leaves led farmers to select seeds from the plants with the largest leaves, resulting gradually in the development of kale.

The real fun thing is, this happened on a vast timeline. Kale was developed over 4000 years ago, while Savoy cabbage was first documented just 5 centuries ago. And different cultivars developed in different regions across Europe and Asia, with their phenotypes and names changing wildly over time. (Fun fact, Brussels sprouts are indeed named for Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, where they were developed from a predecessor imported from Rome.) 

The list above isn’t even exhaustive btw. There are plenty of other ridiculous cultivars (such as the Jersey cabbage, pictured below), and there’s no telling how many other forms existed throughout history, and which would have counted as distinct cultivars, and how many names and groups they were separated into, and, and, and—and imposing taxonomy on the real world is a mess, basically, because the real world does not give a shit about making itself comprehensible or categorizeable. But still we try. Planet Earth has Hot Mess Energy, and would you really have it any other way?