Blue Collar Scientist

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

I just did a quick google search on reviews of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and have come up with the following gems for your entertainment. And I have to say, my respect for movie reviews has gone up a lot in this process - not that I disrespected them before, but I did not have a lot of (ahem) faith that movie reviewers would be able to engage with the scientific issues as well as they have. In my searchings, I didn’t find any positive reviews that weren’t associated with religious or right-wing political publications - and then only two of those.

The Star Tribune gives it one-half out of four stars:

According to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the source of all evil in the modern world is Darwinism, a philosophy that, the film posits, is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

The New York Times leads with:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

From Time:

It’s in the film’s final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and–wait for it–Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We’ve always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

From the LA City Beat:

One might accuse Michael Moore of similarly facile, manipulative techniques – and I have – but Moore has never gone to lengths nearly as outrageous as the makers of Expelled. (For what it’s worth, he’s also funnier.)

In the third act, Stein and company move beyond mere visual associations, when they build a case linking Darwinism to Nazism – which is not merely insultingly lame, but also ranks as one of the cheapest, most offensive exploitations of the horrors of the Holocaust I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve witnessed plenty).

Expelled is another expression of the right wing’s victim complex. It’s classic paranoid thinking: Since we’re pure and correct, any setbacks we suffer must be the result of an Evil Conspiracy. Communists are fluoridating our water. Purity of Essence. We couldn’t be doing substandard academic work. Our poor advancement must have to do with a blacklist! (Stein himself used this idea to bully Norman Lear into giving him a writing job.)

From the New York Post:

After all of his efforts to unhook the ID caboose from the creationism train, Stein makes it clear that his beef with Darwinism is that it weakens religion.

In a long, greasy detour, Stein shows that the Nazis were Darwinists. So what? They also liked skiing. Having Nazi fans doesn’t make Darwin wrong.

From Slant Magazine:

For a film about American freedom of expression and the necessity for open dialogue, it’s hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest.

To their film’s catastrophic detriment, Stein and director Nathan Frankowski fail to provide concrete examples of the flaws in Darwin’s theory, content instead to simply have speakers (many with impressive credentials) state that it’s problematic and then treat such unsupported statements as verifiable truth. Nor, ultimately, do they examine the obvious and crucial religious underpinnings of the “intelligent design movement,” whose onscreen adherents deliberately refuse to speculate on the source of this creative “intelligence” because their opinion on the identity of this fundamental biological architect—God—would conclusively reveal Expelled as propaganda for a Christian-right movement whose own champion, Ronald Reagan, Stein ultimately depicts as his spiritual counterpart.

From E! Reviews:

A flunkout of a documentary, this features Ben Stein—still best known for his monotone “Anyone…anyone?”—advocating creationism, er, intelligent design, in science classrooms. Stein’s credibility is blown on this poorly constructed diatribe, and you’d be smart to save your bucks.

Plus, he’s tedious and unfunny.

With a heavy, heavy hand, the pic punctuates every scene with over-the-top archival footage—the Berlin wall, Stalin and other Cold War imagery.

Despite insisting “intelligent design” isn’t pro-God propaganda, Stein argues we’re waging a religious war (cut to cannon fire) with Darwinists smiting the faithful with—gasp!—atheistic ideas. Most outrageously, he plays the overused Nazi card—he tours an old concentration camp and notes Hitler himself was influenced by Darwin. Yes, kids, studying evolution leads to this (cut to dead prisoners).

Expelled pretends it wants to encourage debate but shuts down and edits around every Darwinian scientist who attempts to explain complex issues, as Stein makes snide remarks in voice-over.

From the Colorado Springs Independent:

Nazis? It’s all about Nazis?

In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter turned ironic symbol of the anti-hip, may be making a documentary about how the Nazis used the “controversial” theory of gravity to make bombs fall to earth — so, of course, the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and in this universe Ben Stein is actually telling us that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong.

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact.

Expelled isn’t about “intelligent design,” about an alternative scientific theory, or even about academic freedom. It’s about Stein believing he has proven that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism (and also, we’re told, to such horrors as birth control). Hence, evolution cannot be allowed to be true. Even if it is.

From Newsday:

Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He’s definitely smarter than I am. What’s galling about his new documentary, “Expelled,” is that he seems to think we’re both slobbering idiots.

In an increasingly hysterical tone, Stein lambastes Darwinians as misguided, ignorant fascists, cutting repeatedly to old footage of the Berlin Wall - a metaphor for squelched thought.

Finally, he unleashes his biggest attention-getter, holding Darwinism responsible for Nazi atrocities and genocide. I’m no lawyer, but that’s a pretty lousy argument.

Did Stein really think audiences wouldn’t balk at being suckered into a propaganda rally? Or was he preaching to the converted from the start? Stein claims to denounce the tyranny of dogma, then browbeats us with his own.

From Variety, whose reviewer is predisposed to like the movie:

Even more offensive is the film’s attempt to link Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ideas and Hitler’s master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust), complete with solemnly scored footage of the experimentation labs at Dachau. Evocations of the Berlin Wall, treated as a symbol of a bullheaded scientific establishment on the verge of collapse, are equally fatuous.

The Village Voice:

[Stein's] thesis: Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today—bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the recession combined. A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center

ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical.

The Orlando Sentinel, whose review was also run by the Chicago Tribune:

….Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, [is] a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

It’s a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts, dubious ID “experts” and mockery of hand-picked “weirdo” legit scientists to attack those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right’s efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

It just isn’t particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin’s image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it’s not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently has a rating of less than one out of ten.

Update: As of Saturday, April 19, this post is number four in a google search of “expelled reviews,” and it is getting a lot of traffic. This post keeps switching places on the google front page with “Expelled Exposed,” so I figured that I’d better do an update to reflect more reviews that I’ve found over the last day. Here you are:

The Waco Tribune:

[The] film’s arguments are a rhetorical mishmash of straw men, red herrings, guilt by association, quote harvesting, gotcha interviews and post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) associations that may cause your head to pop. It’s a propaganda form highly polished by director/activist Michael Moore on the other end of the political spectrum.

Those coming to Expelled hoping to learn something about any research behind ID, a fair appraisal of weaknesses in evolutionary theories or — perhaps the film’s most glaring and telling omission — how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science will leave sorely disappointed. The latter is quickly dismissed by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians and duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom.

From TV Guide:

It’s hard to pinpoint the most insulting aspects of this obvious propaganda piece from Ben Stein, the eye-drops spokesman, conservative writer and pundit whom most people remember from a bit part in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF.

But surely the film’s greatest offense is the utter shamelessness with which it exploits the Holocaust, veering far off topic for a side trip to Nazi killing centers at Hadamar and Dachau in an attempt to tar Darwin with the old “Evolution led directly to eugenics and the Final Solution” brush. The camera’s slow tracking shots through the death camps are followed by a similar creepy crawl through Down House, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. None of this has anything to do with the validity of evolutionary theory or intelligent design, and only serves to point up how any theory can be used to justify evil ends.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The scholars Stein and the film’s producers interview say they just want an open debate where creationism - pardon, intelligent design - and Darwinist evolution can be discussed side-by-side. What’s wrong with that? Stein asks with mock-innocence.

Alas, the movie’s makers (Stein and co-writers Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and director Nathan Frankowski) don’t debate honestly. Stein mocks university officials for not “getting off [their] script,” but says nothing about the repetitive talking points from the ID crowd. The ID folks complain that the term “evolution” is too vaguely defined, and yet never adequately define what “intelligent design” is. They swear they aren’t espousing religion, then try to discredit the leading evolutionary biologists - such as Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers - because they are atheists.

Oddly enough, the tactics employed in “Expelled” undercut the movie’s argument, most notably in the interviews with Dawkins and Myers and in Stein’s trip to Darwin’s British home (now a museum). Either the filmmakers suckered these participants under false pretenses, or the evolutionists are more open to debate than Stein suggests. Perhaps the intelligent-design proponents know that in a truly open debate, their argument isn’t fit enough to survive.

From the Seattle Times, hometown newspaper to the Discovery Institute:

Pop quiz: What is the real source of evil in the modern world? Greed? Intolerance?

Well, according to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” it’s Darwinism, described as a philosophy that posits the pointlessness of life and encourages the “de-privileging of human beings” — and as such is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

But Jon Stewart is a lot funnier than Stein.

From BeliefNet:

Like the tobacco companies once they could no longer question the legitimacy of the scientific evidence connecting cigarettes and disease, Stein quickly shifts the debate from a head-to-head assessment of analysis of data to frame the issue as one of freedom of speech. The movie opens with archival footage not of science labs or the animal life on Galapagos Island, where Darwin first began to develop his theory, but of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Stein tries to draw a parallel between the wall that divided Germany and the impenetrable wall that keeps Intelligent Design out of the science establishment. But he is also associating Darwinian science with Godlessness, communism, and totalitarianism, with detours into Nazi atrocities and atheism so over-the-top that it becomes shrill and irrational.

The conservative Ayn Rand Institute:

“The premise of Expelled is that proponents of ‘intelligent design’ have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. “But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven’t been ‘expelled’ they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

A Scientific American podcast reports on the movie’s dishonest quoting of Charles Darwin:

Toward the end [of the movie], Stein reads the following quote from the book Descent of Man: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

…I went to a full text of Descent of Man online and found the quoted passage. And then found the sentences that come right after where Stein stopped quoting.

So here’s Charles Darwin again, from Descent of Man: “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.“

(Update: It is now April 28, and this post is still getting a lot of traffic, so I wanted to provide a link to an article about the film by noted conservative columnist John Derbyshire and appearing in National Review. It is probably the strongest slapdown of the movie I’ve ever seen.)

National Review says:

…creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

…The creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science” engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all! I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles.

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media…. Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization.

Zach of When Pigs Fly Returns has put together a reading list for people interested in dinosaurs. The genesis of the idea was selfish - I wanted to learn more about dinosaurs - but it blossomed into the idea that Science and Skepticism in Anchorage could offer these kinds of resources to people and other similar groups on the web. We’re hosting this over at the SSA site as a PDF, as well as here at BCS, and maybe it will find its way elsewhere on the web as well.

Here’s a pretty clever scientific technique. Let’s say you’ve got a source of amber - lots of amber - and you want to check it for fossils. The problem, though - the amber is impure, or it has nonbiological inclusions, or it is badly scratched up - whatever the reason, you can’t see through it and can’t tell what is inside. It looks like this:

Researchers have come up with a pretty cool technique to get around this problem. They are x-raying it instead.

This may sound pretty obvious, but it isn’t. The surface texture of amber scatters x-rays like mad, and this makes it very difficult to get an image of what is inside. The researchers came up with a clever way around this. The density of amber ranges from 1.05 to 1.15 grams per cubic centimeter. That’s really close to water, at 0.998 grams per cubic centimeter. Since scattering occurs preferentially when electromagnetic radiation encounters a density variation, the researchers simply put their amber samples into water. The water flows into the scratches and fills them up, making the surface of the amber look a lot smoother to the x-rays than it otherwise would.

The researchers used a very specific imaging technique, with the winsome name propagation phase contrast microradiography. Someday, I hope to understand exactly how that works in x-rays, but I know about phase contrast micrography in optical wavelengths, and that’s a tangent I think is worth exploring. To do this in visible-light microscopes, you start with partially coherent light, and you shine it through a ring, and then focus it on your specimen with a condenser lens. Once it has gone through the specimen, it goes through the objective, and then passes through a ‘negative’ ring - instead of a piece of material that has a donut-shape cut out of it to let light through, this piece of material is a donut-shape that blocks light (but allows light through the donut hole as well as though the outside of the donut). Once the light passes through this apparatus, you focus it into an image, and you get a really weird effect. Diffraction converts small changes in the phase of the light into large differences in amplitude - or brightness. The result is that stuff you have a real hard time seeing any other way leaps out at you. It is such an impressive technique that its inventor, Frits Zernike, won the Nobel Prize for coming up with it. Nikon has an excellent discussion of the optical technique.

Presumably, the x-ray apparatus works on similar principles. In any case, they’ve come up with this:

The top image is a standard x-ray, while the bottom image utilizes the phase contrast technique. Amazing.

The scientists imaged 640 pieces of amber from the Charentes region in southwestern France. They discovered 356 fossil animals, going from wasps and flies, to ants or even spiders and acarians.

Acarians, by the way, are mites and ticks, and one of them that was found in the amber was only 0.8 millimeters in size. Quite impressive. And I really recommend you click over to the press release, which has lots of pictures well worth seeing. The researchers report they’ve been able to determine the families of 53% of the inclusions, in some cases from 3-dimensional images. I don’t know how that compares to optical techniques on transparent amber, but it is certainly good enough to be useful. The method could potentially shed a lot of light on the evolution of small arthropods.

There are two really cool things about this. The first is that most amber is opaque - 80% of it at Charentes, where the researchers took their samples. The second is that there’s probably lots of opaque amber sitting around in museums that has been kept because it is interesting for some reason or other. This amber can now be studied.

Want the original paper?

M. Lak, D. Néraudeau, A. Nel, P. Cloetens, V. Perrichot and P. Tafforeau, Phase contrast X-ray synchrotron imaging: opening access to fossil inclusions in opaque amber, Microscopy and Microanalysis, Forthcoming article, doi: 10.1017/S1431927608080264

The Anchorage Daily News is finally running a story about the arctic pliosaur that BCS reported on February 28 - three weeks and a day ago. The ADN piece is a reprint from a Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

The reporting offers extensive new quotes from Patrick Druckenmiller of the Museum of the North, and Christi Hang, the reporter, even manages to get Jorn Hurum, the PI, to acknowledge Drukenmiller, even though his institution’s press release previously credited only “Norwegian paleontologists” as being on the team.

Zach Miller at When Pigs Fly Returns has an outstanding post called An Edmontosaurus named Dakota. Dakota is a fossil dinosaur mummy that is getting news coverage yesterday and today for no immediately apparent reason.

Leveraging the power of TIVO, I watched a National Geographic Channel show on this dinosaur a couple weeks ago. It was promoted with high-hype breathlessness as a major discovery that had completely overturned our knowledge about dinosaurs - or at least hadrosaurs - and I got sucked in. Unfortunately, the actual show disappointed me.

From memory, there were only two things the program asserted had been learned from Dakota:

• Dakota had differently-sized scales in patterns that are similar to the way differently-sized scales in lizards indicate differently colored areas of skin.
• Dakota’s tail vertebrae were not fused nor in contact with one another, but were separated from each other by about 10% of their length (so my memory of the graphic would suggest, at least).

The documentarians showed a reconstruction of a hadrosaur with the tail vertebrae in contact with one another, and this mount was seized upon by Daktoa’s principle investigator, Phillip Manning, to make a dramatic - dare I say histrionic? - statement on-camera along the lines of, “we thought we had this all figured out, but we were WRONG!”

Well, first off, of course we were wrong. Ignorance has a way of doing that. Until you find an articulated fossilized hadrosaur skeleton, you’re likely going to make a few mistakes putting such things back together. Second, if you spend any amount of time at all working in science, you are going to find out that you are wrong all the time, and that this is neither very dramatic nor very significant. But finally, and more fundamentally, I’m virtually certain I’ve seen hadrosaur mounts that have the tail vertebrae separated by an inch or two. It made me suspect that a straw man was being cooked up by the documentarians. Are we to understand that one incorrectly-done mount signifies a serious and drastic error throughout the whole of dinosaur paleontology? Or is my recollection false, and it really was is thought that hadrosaur tail vertebrae were in contact in life?

Or maybe the mount that was shown was one that Manning had put together himself and he was shocked at having made such an error? I’m really not sure. Anyway, Manning came off as smarmy - and in another part of the documentary, as unprepared and a little less than competent.

Manning and his team took the mummy to Boeing, where they have a giant CAT scanner. The idea was to fit the mummy on the scanner, scan it, and see what was inside. The program gave the impression that the process was largely a debacle. The largest piece of the mummy (which is apparently in at least two pieces) could barely be lifted by the lifting equipment. Once that problem was solved the piece couldn’t be fit on the scanner. I think this was solved by knocking off some excess matrix. (Did anyone think about using a tape measure before hauling the fossil all the way out there? The documentary didn’t say.) When they finally got the specimen on the scanner, with inches of clearance at most, they couldn’t see anything inside. There was too much matrix, I guess, or maybe the fossil itself was too extincting of the X-rays. In any case, they got some images that were perfect specimens of noisy astronomical CCD images with no signal - dark frames, in the parlance.

Couldn’t an assay of extinction at the energies of the CAT scanner have been done prior to hauling the mummy halfway across the country? I would have thought yes, that doing this would have been easier than moving the fossil, but what do I know.

And why didn’t they just try for a CAT scan after the matrix had been removed? My vague understanding was that they wanted to use the CAT scan results to guide the removal of matrix, but that impression might be a result of a desperate mental need to find sense and meaning in the inexplicable spectacle that I was seeing. I’m not suggesting that Manning’s team was incompetent in fact; but the documentary made it look that way, by playing up setbacks as dramatic moments without also discussing the kinds of preparation that the team undertook and the reason the risks were being taken.

So much for the big piece of the mummy. A smaller piece was scanned as well, and lo, there were the aforementioned tail vertebrae. And that was about that. The mummy was sent to another location and preparators worked on taking off the matrix. I walked away from that documentary thinking that they had a potentially nice specimen, but that watching an hour of TV about it had been a pretty pointless thing to do.

Now Zach weighs in on his blog:

This fossil has been known since 1999, its genus was just released today, and its species is still unconfirmed.

Whoah. Nine years just to identify the genus. I hadn’t been aware of that. The documentary kind of glossed over the fact that they didn’t really know what dinosaur they had on their hands.

…it’s curious that not a single peer-reviewed publication exists about Dakota, yet two books have been penned (one of them a kid’s book, one an awful popular science book). The National Geographic channel has aired two specials about Dakota, too. Dakota needs to be studied and published.

I hadn’t been aware that nothing scientific had been published. Again, the documentary kinda glossed that over. This is insane, to be fast approaching the decade anniversary of the fossil’s discovery, and still have nothing in the scientific literature about it at all. It is true that a thorough study of a good dinosaur mummy will probably take twenty years or more, but you need to start somewhere. Twenty years are half up and the PI has no results.

Zach rightly points out that Manning, or his funding sources, appear to be trying to do science by press release with this mummy. Someone, like his scientific peers perhaps, needs to give Manning a kick in the pants to actually publish something. If an astronomer had sat around on similarly significant discovery for ten years without publishing anything, their institution or funding sources would probably have kicked them off the job and found a new PI for the project by now.

Some interesting research about the evolutionary development of the human skull is being reported by UC Davis. The researchers have concluded that random change - called genetic drift in the parlance - accounts for most of the differences between human and Neandertal skulls.

In their new study, Weaver and his colleagues crunched their fossil data using sophisticated mathematical models — and calculated that Neanderthals and modern humans split about 370,000 years ago. The estimate is very close to estimates derived by other researchers who have dated the split based on clues from ancient Neanderthal and modern-day human DNA sequences.

This is significant, because it tells us that rigorous study of morphological changes in fossils gives us dates in good agreement with that of DNA methods. The picture here is that two separate disciplines offer mutually reinforcing insights into human evolution over this time period.

But then the press release gets a little strange. The principal investigator, Tim Weaver, says:

A take-home message may be that we should reconsider the idea that all morphological (physical) changes are due to natural selection, and instead consider that some of them may be due to genetic drift. This may have interesting implications for our understanding of human evolution.

As a layperson with a pretty solid understanding of evolution, I’ve been suspicious at times of some scientists’ tendency to see natural selection where I felt¹ some things might more simply be explained as neutral features - not selected against, not selected for, just arising randomly without any particular immediately adaptive traits. On the other hand, I’ve always been aware that I’m not the expert, so I’ve been inclined to trust the authorities and quell my own misgivings.

But despite my being predisposed to have sympathy with this conclusion, I have to admit that this is where the press release falls down into a morass of uselessness.

There is, almost certainly, a reason why Weaver thinks that his research indicates genetic drift, rather than selection, has been a major influence on the evolutionary development of the human skull. I’d bet that reason is a really good one, too. But the UC Davis release, as well as the PhysOrg coverage, are completely silent on what that reason might be. The closest they come to giving a reason for their belief is that they used “sophisticated mathematical models.”

I think it is problematic for a press release to pass up an opportunity to explain not only what we know, but how we know it. As has been often repeated, science is not a collection of purported facts. Science is a process for finding things out. A press release that gives such thin treatment of how a discovery was made, in favor of discussing what the discovery was, fails in its fundamental task of informing the general public.

The model behind this press release may be that laypeople are little people who live outside the University and can’t really understand what is being done, but might have a chance at understanding the conclusions. Or it could be that the public relations writer who wrote the press release² couldn’t understand, or didn’t have time to understand, the reasons why the research led to the conclusions it did.

Whatever the reason, this press release crosses the line between “providing an elegant explanation suitable for laypersons,” and “dumbing down science.” This is an extreme example of dumbing down, because the release appears to make the dual assumption that not only will the public not understand the reasons - however well expressed - but they also will find the principles behind the mathematical model too “sophisticated” to understand.

I call this the Moses model - some bearded guy on a mountain conveying the results of his research on tablets of stone to the masses below. What is demanded of all researchers (and their PR collaborators) in this environment of deplorably poor science education is to provide compelling examples of the scientific method in action, and compelling explanations of their research.

Wondering if I could improve upon the press release, I went searching for the paper. I found it here; and for a measly ten bucks, I can purchase the privilege of being able to read the paper for two days. I’m not going to do that, because (a) the subject is outside my field of expertise, so I’m not likely to get as much out of it as someone more familiar with this field of research; and (b) I’m not actually working on an educational program on human-neandertal skull divergence. But I did read the abstract, and noticed the first line was this:

Recent research has shown that genetic drift may have produced many cranial differences between Neandertals and modern humans.

So, it turns out that this paper does not lead to the conclusion that human skull evolution was driven by genetic drift as opposed to natural selection; it’s the other way around: the conclusion led to the paper. The conclusion was raised as a possibility by previous research, and this paper provides a test of the hypothesis. If only I could be cited back to that previous research, perhaps that abstract would further illuminate me. But I don’t know where to look, because (as is largely customary in abstracts), there is no citation.

The abstract again:

Close correspondence between cranial and DNA-sequence results implies that both datasets largely, although not necessarily exclusively, reflect neutral divergence, causing them to track population history or phylogeny rather than the action of diversifying natural selection.

Now this is fine for an abstract - if you want to learn the reasons why this correspondence is evidence for genetic drift, you are supposed to continue on and read the paper.

But this kind of thing is not fine for a press release, which must provide an accessible explanation of why the scientists believe the things they are asserting. Without doing this, the press release is useless as a tool to increase public awareness or education about the subject. It is far more difficult to write a press release than a research paper abstract, and the system that generated this release has had a major malfunction. However obvious the conclusions are to the research team, they are not going to be obvious - nor necessarily even interesting - to a layperson reading the press release.

I have a psychic³ prediction to make: this paper is going to have virtually no penetration into the public awareness. But it could have had widespread penetration, and it could have been an important event in educating the general public about human evolution, if only some kind of explanation of the conclusions had been offered that the average person could not only understand, but embrace as interesting and logical. As it stands, UC Davis gives us only a dry set of assertions.

Fail.

1. For no good reason, admittedly. [↩]
2. Most press releases are not written by anyone on the research team; the research people provide information to the PR department of their university, and then it is largely out of their hands. [↩]
3. Not! [↩]