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Kennel posted:(and then when you've read all the good thorsbys, it's time to read The Evolutions of Homosexuality and Suicide and be disappointed) I read this with concern, because I love thorsby and it sounds like a not great title. I am both gay and a geneticist and I was pleasantly surprised. It's surprisingly genetics-literate. It's wrong, but not because of any particular misunderstanding on thorsbys part, in fact he's got a better grasp on basic population genetics than some of my first year students. It's only wrong because genetics of behavior is a lot more complicated than the punnet-square level logic he's using. It -feels- offensive, but only because it's got that weirdly frank and forthright autist-logic style he has. Overall, this could have been a lot worse. I would not have wanted to have learned that thorsby was a nazi today.
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Jul 9, 2021 15:51
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That's a dichotomous key taxon ID manual, haha. Okay thorsby has 100% done a genetics undergrad.
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Jul 9, 2021 16:09
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snergle posted:ill have to take your word for it but it seems really gross to make that comic. esp when suicide genetic or not more often effects gay people . he also completly discounts lesbians except for the page being like hey why are all gay men femme? completly ignoring butch gay men. he also makes an insane assumption that asexual people would be more likely to be killed then gay people in prehistoric man societies. we cant say for certain he is wrong but all of the modern era that is 100% wrong. No, no. His conclusions are very wrong for multiple reasons. I was just pleased he wasn't doing some kind of Nazi adjacent survival of the species bullshit. Its also definitely gross and insensitive, but at least it seems to be coming from a genuine scientific curiosity and not a place of hate.
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Jul 10, 2021 16:58
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Bobby Crosby penned the entire "storyline" for Pupkin by engaging in a One Word Story with people who, ostensibly, had shown up for a job posting on Craigslist to rebuild a fence. You can tell that one of the people in the circle had nothing but contempt for the bait-and-switch, as the comic vacillates between wholesome and nihilistic with clockwork regularity. The exact number of participants isn't clear, but it's probably like 4 willing to 1 unwilling. Is this true
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Oct 12, 2021 03:50
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:Hitmen for Destiny #174: Passion, lies, and fungus V I know I can go read the whole thing whenever I want, but it is a genuine pleasure to watch this scene unfold in this thread.
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Oct 13, 2021 00:05
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Jeez, hitmen for destiny is one of my favorites and I normally don't mind the art style. But those clouds are loving atrocious.
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Nov 19, 2021 18:05
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Oh heck, also, didn't kill 6 billion demons do an invisible fortress that the heroine traverses by spraying the blood of her enemies around? I think I was mixing those up, somehow.
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Nov 19, 2021 18:08
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gently caress, that wages thing is a good joke.
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Dec 2, 2021 23:47
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Ultrafilter you have got to make a website for powerup. I know a bunch of people who would appreciate the crap out of your stuff but they're not going to search Twitter or come to this dead forum. Whip up a deliberately lovely WordPress site why don't you.
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Dec 3, 2021 00:24
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If that were true what would the joke be
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Dec 5, 2021 03:32
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I understand the pipeline from radfem to terf, but I'm not clear on how that transitions to maga?
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Dec 15, 2021 09:04
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Mr. Sunshine posted:You start out posting transphobic poo poo, get called out by people who aren't transphobes and get lauded by people who are transphobes. So you start hanging out with transphobes, because those people won't call you an rear end in a top hat. And before you know it you've fallen down a social media rabbit hole were everyone who agrees with you and compliments you and interacts positively with you in any way are altrighters, qanonists and magamen. I understand now
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Dec 16, 2021 15:09
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Is it just me or does onstad draw himself pretty frikkin swole. I never noticed before and also have no idea what he really looks like.
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Dec 16, 2021 15:30
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I think about this one a lot.
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Dec 21, 2021 11:53
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Well I missed it on first viewing.
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Jan 13, 2022 14:12
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:I haven't totally decided but I'm leaning towards taking a break from daily comic posting when hfd is done. But we'll see! Please post it. Please.
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Jan 28, 2022 02:35
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Also I got the cookbook back in the day and those oven fries are a valiant effort but it's not a thing that can be done.
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Jan 28, 2022 02:37
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Tendales posted:I've said before that the funniest thing about Thorsby's biotruth digressions is that they're obviously *wrong* but it's not entirely trivial to explain *why*. I could do that! I am both a non-reproductive gay uncle and I have a PhD in genetics. What other people have said is true: this looks like the rare case of a biotruths guy approaching the subject in actual good faith. Bizarre to learn such a thing is possible really. So thorsbys analysis is actually pretty spot on if you were trying to consider homosexuality as a single-gene trait. It works just as well if you abstract the concept to any altruistic kin-selection single gene trait. Which is why those are basically never found in nature. The many reasons thorsby is wrong include: Sexuality is trivially not a single-gene trait. Behavior traits are notoriously polygenic. That means the adaptive value of the trait has to be considered based on its actual contribution to survival and reproduction, which we can speculate about but would need to be actually empirically tested. Even if it was single-gene, the assumption that homosexuals are necessarily childless, especially in a premodern context, is way off, which throws his whole simplistic probability analysis out the window on its own. This is probably the main problem with his analysis, since homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom is quite widespread, but exclusive homosexuality to the point that it impacts reproduction is rarer. In humans, social effects complicates analysis, but we can look at the history of human homosexuality and you do tend to see much more bisexuality as well as homosexuals that still have children. Childless gold-star gays like myself appears to be a relative historical rarity. He also ignores non-reproductive roles of sex. Close relative Bonobo chimps famously use bisexual sex as a social cohesion tool, and only do it for reproduction about 25% of the time. It seems more likely that homosexual behavior in humans is retained as an adaptive helpful social trait than that it's a maladaptive trait retained for kin selection or sexual antagonism purposes. That's just one gay geneticists opinion of course but thorsby missed the idea completely. Meanwhile, thorsbys "correct theory" is actually much closer to plausible. You guys were laughing at his drawing of the pregnant woman "unknowingly doing something" to the foetus, but he's probably on to something. Exposure to sex hormones in the womb, both those originating from the foetus and those originating from the mother, are basically THE determinant of sexuality and sexual identity. Once you're out of the womb, you're basically done and there's gently caress all evidence that anything society can do can change you. But at least some of the effect is likely to come from the mother, because there's the birth order effect where if a male child gestates in a womb that has housed a male child before, he's up to 50% more likely to be gay. It's a pretty well replicated effect and it works for test tube babies too so it's definitely coming from the mother. By the way, the modern way to look for genetic influences on complex traits is to do a GWAS, and the biggest ever study on human homosexuality came out in 2019. They identified variations in 5 genes related to sex hormone regulation that account for 8-25% of the variation of human same-sexuality. That's big numbers for a GWAS. That number is also probably an underestimate because it relies on self-reported same sex behavior. There's no way you're getting a genetic effect that large on a trait that's been around so long without it having some adaptive value, in my opinion anyway. Tldr: thorsbys single-gene model is wrong as gently caress but there are definitely both genes that make you gay, and maternal womb effects that make you gay, and it's pretty likely that the trait is adaptive even if it would be tricky/impossible to be certain of exactly why.
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Jan 29, 2022 00:38
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ultrafilter posted:You know anything about the prevalence of various alleles of those genes in the population? I know that there's some work on genes associated with autistic traits that claims they're a little too common to be selected against, and I wonder if there's a similar analysis here. Yeah, the prevalence of the gay effect allele for the five SNPs are: 73% 83% 33% 37% 90% It might seem weird that this means most people are walking around with at least one of the five gayest genes in the world, but that's how genetics works. Each allele contributes a tiny amount to the probabilities and effect sizes of the traits. If you only have one of these 5, you're about 1% more likely to be gay. But if you have all 5 of them together, that jumps up to 25%. To be clear, there's a lot more than 5 genes contributing. Probably thousands, but with each one having an effect so small it doesn't show up on the (ridiculously strict) statistics standards of a GWAS.
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Jan 29, 2022 01:18
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RabbitWizard posted:I know comics are better if you ignore the last panel, but maybe give it a read this time. Well yeah, he admits his model is wrong but that's just because he's about to move on to his other, equally wrong theory.
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Jan 29, 2022 01:21
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This poo poo is particularly hilarious to me because there was a time in the field of genetics when just making poo poo up like that was common enough that there had to be a professional backlash against it. Gould and Lewontin and the spandrels of San Marco and all that. It's very easy to get carried away by a little understanding in genetics. Needless to say, at this point it's all just wrong. E: that is to say it's wrong in the special context of sexuality. Complicated kin-selection altruism effects do exist roughly as described. Fagtastic has a new favorite as of 14:56 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 14:53
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Ellie Trashcakes posted:Blanchard is a hack That may be so but the fraternal birth order effect is pretty well replicated and quite robust. It's pretty definitely real, though it only accounts for like 30% of gay men, tops, so there's more to the picture. I mean, we have pretty good evidence that being gay is something your born with, that can't be deliberately caused or undone by social effects, so there's no reason not to expect a biological underpinning as far as I can see. Thorsbys working with the evidence we have. But none of that means the gay caveman uncle theory is good. Genetics just doesn't work the way he thinks it does. Which isn't really his fault because that's how it's taught at school/first year/pop science level.
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Jan 31, 2022 06:12
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Tree Bucket posted:What about the bottoms? HA
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Jan 31, 2022 17:57
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Yeah same, which is why when it is over I will be shamelessly begging for Trixie slaughteraxe to be posted in the same way.
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Feb 1, 2022 11:46
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some plague rats posted:Do you imagine yourself being any kinder to the little dipshit Sure, but it's a bit weird too. It clearly wants to be a moral story showing the consequences of Pinocchios dickery, but then every time he tries to do something right the universe conspires to make everything fall to poo poo on him anyway. It's definitely having the overall effect of having me root for the puppet. That loving snail pissed me off.
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Mar 13, 2022 22:50
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Did I miss something in brain chip? When did bba and co show up? There were only 4 of the guy last I saw
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Apr 4, 2022 14:44
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I feel stupid for asking but... Why does the number of brain chips double each week?
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Apr 4, 2022 21:50
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Ditocoaf posted:The scientist lady Vera offhandedly described that behavior at the very beginning. "Every week the chip will connect to a new universe and a new version of you" -- meaning that every Ulf will split into two perspectives every 7 days. Installing the chip split him in two, a week later she was running some tests as he split into four, and now another week has passed and we're not even watching the splits happen every time anymore. Fair enough. It does it because that's going to be incredible fuel for farce, good enough for me
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Apr 4, 2022 22:06
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gently caress I love tdbc.
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Apr 30, 2022 14:19
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You know, ever since I tried to analyze thorsbys weird genetics comic, I've realized he's a perfect blend of clever and also really dumb. Therefore so is his work. It's perfect.
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May 2, 2022 14:40
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Hang on did brain chip come after hitmen for destiny, or before.?
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May 2, 2022 14:41
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I just saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the central plot conceit is so similar to transdimensional brain chip that it's uncanny. Great movie.
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May 3, 2022 18:11
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Greens facial expressions are second to none. I wonder how many times he redraws panels to get them so perfect, or if he just gets every detail in the exact right relationship first time at this point.
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May 4, 2022 22:41
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the holy poopacy posted:the best thorsby strip ever
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May 7, 2022 15:22
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I can't wait for the next tdbc. It must be due any minute.
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May 11, 2022 12:37
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Ah yeah that's the good stuff
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May 11, 2022 14:23
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Foolish behaviour, the dramatic tension I am expecting is superb.
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May 11, 2022 17:47
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Wow, I can't believe cat and girl is still going. Looks pretty good too! I remember it having good facial expressions and the occasional real gem.
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May 17, 2022 03:57
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Probably haven't read it in twelve years, there must be a heck of a backlog.
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May 17, 2022 03:58
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Oh Christ okay she's getting a drat brain chip
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May 17, 2022 14:06
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