Blue Collar Scientist

Just a quick note that Barak Obama was asked about evolution by a Kansas newspaper:

Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design. What’s your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?

A: “I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”

Obama is looking like the evidence-based candidate to me, what with McCain having an orgy with every science denier he can find….

Over on Panda’s Thumb, there is a posting about the case of Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Bretheren, opposes intelligent design, and she wrote an article critical of creationist Philip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial. She has said that intelligent design creationism is not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”

For her trouble, Philip Johnson called up a trustee of Fuller and reportedly tried to have her fired.

“His tactic has always been to fight dirty when anyone attacks his ideas,” (Murphy) said. “For a long time afterward, I would tell reporters I don’t want to comment, and I don’t want you to say I don’t want to comment. I’m tired of being careful.”

According to the story, Johnson denies it:

Johnson denied he had tried to get Murphy fired. He said that he had spoken with a former trustee of the seminary who was himself upset with Murphy but that he was not responsible for any action taken against her.

Yeah, right. Both the trustee and Johnson were pissed off at Murphey but they didn’t talk about being pissed off at Murphy and nothing they said could have encouraged such persecution. Makes perfect sense.

Anyway, if you read down through the comments, you come to a very interesting list of people that creationists have harassed, gotten fired, threatened, or killed because of their understanding of evolution. (Yes, creationists have killed someone over evolution.) It kind of puts the lie to creationist Johnson’s further remarks:

“It’s the Darwinists who hold the power in academia and who threaten the professional status and livelihoods of anyone who disagrees,” Johnson said. “They feel to teach anything but their orthodoxy is an act of professional treason.”

Apparently, Johnson is having some trouble telling the truth. Here’s a working list of people fired, compromised, or killed by creationist nutbags (no claim is made that this list is complete, and I’d like to see some citations to sources, so maybe I’ll work on that for a future post):

2 professors fired, Bitterman (SW CC Iowa) and Bolyanatz (Wheaton)

1 persecuted unmercifully Richard Colling (Olivet)

1 attempted firing Murphy (Fuller Theological by Phillip Johnson IDist)

1 successful death threats, assaults harrasment Gwen Pearson (UT Permian)

1 state official fired Chris Comer (Texas)

1 assault, fired from dept. Chair Paul Mirecki (U. of Kansas)

1 killed, Rudi Boa, Biomedical Student (Scotland)

Death Threats Eric Pianka UT Austin and the Texas Academy of Science engineered by a hostile, bizarre IDist named Bill Dembski

Death Threats Michael Korn, fugitive from justice, towards the UC Boulder biology department and miscellaneous evolutionary biologists.

Will Expelled be talking about these cases? Right. Didn’t think so.

Edit to add: Link for Richard Colling.

For years, creationists have shrilly insisted that the more complex a life form is, the slower it could evolve adaptive traits. Supposedly this showed that evolution wouldn’t work, or something.

Of course, just bleating that something is true doesn’t make it so. And as in so many other cases when we are dealing with creationist rhetoric, this one isn’t true either.

Yesterday Nature published a paper with the inspiring title Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the ‘cost of complexity.’ The experiments described in the paper deliver a body-blow to the so-called “cost of complexity” hypothesis.

The researchers did something very straightforward - they caused mutations in mice, and then measured the results. If the “cost of complexity” crowd were right, then making a single genetic mutation should affect many different unrelated traits. If they were wrong, then the effects would be limited to either a single trait, or several related traits. The researchers found that the latter was the case.

A more technical way of discussing the findings is to say that pleiotropies are rare. A pleiotropy exists when a single gene strongly affects a variety of phenotypic traits. While pleiotropies do exist - a famous example causes phenylketonuria in humans - the study shows that they are not common in a broad sample of gene mutations, as creationists claimed. As a consequence, even complex organisms can adapt through mutation without paying a price for their complexity.

From the abstract:

As perceived by Darwin, evolutionary adaptation by the processes of mutation and selection is difficult to understand for complex features that are the product of numerous traits acting in concert, for example the eye or the apparatus of flight. Typically, mutations simultaneously affect multiple phenotypic characters. This phenomenon is known as pleiotropy…. Some authors have suggested that pleiotropy can impede evolutionary progress (a so-called ‘cost of complexity’)…. Here we show, by studying pleiotropy in mice with the use of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affecting skeletal characters, that most QTLs affect a relatively small subset of traits and that a substitution at a QTL has an effect on each trait that increases with the total number of traits affected. This suggests that evolution of higher organisms does not suffer a ‘cost of complexity’ because most mutations affect few traits and the size of the effects does not decrease with pleiotropy.

Wired has a nice article about the paper including some quotes from the PI:

“I think the main broader impact of this work is on the evolution-creationism debate,” wrote [Yale University evolutionary biologist Gunter] Wagner in an email. “I would say the only intellectually interesting argument that the creationists are using, at least the scientifically more sophisticated ones, is that random mutation can not lead to the evolution of complex organisms. And there are interesting mathematical arguments that have been made to support that. But our results show that organisms found a way around that problem by restricting mutational effects on very narrowly confined parts of the organisms.”

This paper undermines the whole creationist argument based on information theory that has become so popular in recent years. This should be remembered, and pointed out when creationists trot out their silly claims.

Over on Skepchick, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m particularly fond of articles by writerdd. A short time ago, she unleashed her latest in a series of especially sensible posts about communicating our ideas as evidence-based thinkers.

I personally find debates tedious and grating…. I believe that story telling is much more powerful form of communication, particularly when talking to believers. That’s not to say that evidence and logic should be left to whither on the vine, but data and factual evidence should be incorporated into a personal message that has emotional as well as intellectual punch.

As someone who does science education and outreach primarily through public speaking, I couldn’t agree more. At some of my presentations, people pick debates with me during Q&A, often about subjects peripheral to the topic I’m speaking on. The Big Bang Theory, which is disliked by creationists almost as much as evolution, is a frequent target; evolution is as well, even though I am not a biologist and say so forthrightly to people who engage me on the topic.

Nevertheless I have some stock material that I generally reply with. As writerdd suggests, it does incorporate data and evidence, meant to show why I accept science on an intellectual level.

I’d make a wild guess this is part of what bugs writerdd about debates - they are typically only about intellectual assent. Even if emotional appeals are made (typically of the “Hitler was an atheist” variety), the idea is to bludgeon your opponents into agreement, and stifle their thinking. Such emotional appeals are not meant in a constructive, positive way. They are not uplifting to humans; they are just manipulative debate tactics.

Writerdd is correct that we should be making positive emotional appeals. And my stock material doesn’t stop at data - includes very blatant appeals to emotion. I have a few stock slides about evolution¹, and they show things like transitional fossils, they offer examples of molecular evidence for evolution, they offer examples of how evolutionary theory helps us by dealing with resistant bacteria and preventing birth defects, and so on. But at the end of this material, I talk in blatantly poetic terms about how much better a world we live in as a result of understanding evolution, and I talk about how

When I go hiking², and I take a break on a ridge and I’m looking out over miles and miles of tundra, forest in the distance, birds circling in the air, and moose in the valleys below, I know that I’m related to every living thing that I see. I know that because of evolution. Thanks to evolution I know that my DNA is pretty much the same as the DNA in everything else alive. But it means more than that to me. It isn’t just about what I know, it is about what I feel. It makes me feel connected to my world. It makes me feel like I am a part of something bigger, and something far better than me. I’m just some guy, but I’m part of a bigger system, and everything else in that system shares my blood, my tissue³, and the special molecule that made me. I know that going back through the generations, through millions of generations of parents, my family tree hooks up with the family tree of every butterfly and every flower on the planet. That is very important to me, and incredibly powerful for me.

If I’ve been baited into rolling out this material by a creationist, I’ll end it with:

The alternative to this glorious feeling of connection, this deep understanding that I have a place in this system, and the understanding that it is for this reason we must be good to our neighbors - the alternative that some people would force on me, is that I’m made of dirt.

At which point I show a slide of a strip mine. Granted this latter bit is somewhat argumentative, perhaps in the way that writerdd would see as a debate. But the lead up to it is not. The lead up is a positive expression of what an understanding of evolution does for us spiritually.

It doesn’t matter what your topic is - if you can’t include some positive emotional appeals to make your topic attractive and accessible to people, you have failed at communicating it. Science does not exist in a vacuum. Reality is reality, and a scientific experiment is going to have a certain outcome regardless of what we’d like to be the case, but once we know the truth about the universe - once the scientific results are in - we are then obligated to communicate this in a way that matters to people. And people are emotional folks.

1. And in my “copious free time” I am working on preparing them so that I can post them here for all to use. [↩]
2. Remember, I live in Alaska, where the hiking is absolutely glorious. [↩]
3. I’ll typically grab my forearm at this point by way of passionate illustration [↩]

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! [↩]

Quick - have a look at these YouTube videos before some creationist cooks up a fraudulent DMCA copyright infringement claim to have these taken down.

Both videos explore phylogeny from the transitional fossil record in an interesting and compelling way, and set to some wonderful music.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.

The second issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is available on the Springer site.

The irritating and user-hostile necessity of downloading every article separately as a PDF has not been resolved for the new issue. But it is still well worth reading it if you are teaching this subject.

So I’m enjoying a low-pressure Saturday afternoon, clicking the “StumbleUpon” button, and it takes me to the Dinosaur Facts site - specifically, the page about Eudimorphodon. On that page I notice the following text:

The Eudimorphodon was a flying dinosaur that lived in the late Triassic period.

Now, I’m not an expert on dinosaurs. What I know about dinosaurs and carry about in my head would not be too much trouble to write down. But it seemed to me that Eudimorphodon was not a dinosaur, but in fact was a pterosaur. The picture certainly looked like that of a pterosaur. And I hadn’t really heard of non-feathered flying dinosaurs anyway. And one last objection - a flying dinosaur in the late Triassic? Not impossible, I suppose, but I don’t recall hearing of such a thing.

A quick look at Wikipedia seemed to confirm that Eudimorphodon is a pterosaur.

Now if there’s one thing that motivates me, it is finding errors. Having found this one, I decided to read the rest of the page. I read to the end and then I look at (what in print media would be called) the sidebar, which is titled Did you know, and which contains this gem:

Eudimorphodon was a pterosaur, not a dinosaur.

Er, ok then. Contradictory information on the same page just bugs me, but that’s the web for you. At least this time they had the right answer.

But here’s the thing. I don’t actually know what a Pterosaur is. Yes, I know that it is a flying Mesozoic reptile - I just don’t find that to be very meaningful. So I did a little web searching, and I quickly realized that for me, “what is a pterosaur” is answered not by the mantra about flying reptiles, not by their morphology, but by their phylogeny. Their phylogeny is not yet super-well established, which makes drawing firm conclusions chancy, but nevertheless cladograms exist. Looking for one led me to this image (from here):

So Pterosaurs are closer to the dinosaurs than crocodilians, but diverged before the dinosaurs originated. Nice. That’s actually a perfect answer - it tells me exactly why pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs, and also suggests some attributes of Pterosaurs that it wouldn’t share with dinosaurs, or crocodiles.

So, why are we still using the mantra “flying reptile” to describe a Pterosaur? Phylogeny and phenotype together do a much better job, yes? Why do none of the benchmarks or standards used by the teachers I work with include cladograms? I’m sure this concept can and should be explained to 9-12 students.