Blue Collar Scientist

The upcoming meetup for science buffs and skeptical thinkers - to be held at 7:00 PM, Thursday, March 20, in the cafe at Barnes & Noble on Northern Lights in Anchorage - has received some very high profile publicity, and I’d like to thank everyone for helping out.

PZ Myers has given his blessing on Pharyngula, the 500 pound gorilla octopus of science blogs, although someone pointed out to me that it looks like we have made him sad by not inviting him to attend personally. Actually, if you read carefully, the sadness is because we didn’t invite him and offer to pay his way. Maybe PZ should be told that the beginning of breakup is not an attractive season to visit Alaska. As I write, I’ve had about 150 hits referred from PZ’s blog or its mirrors.

The Bad Astronomer has also blogged about it, which has the effect of getting the announcement into the USA Today Alaska-edition feed, which I know a lot of local people read. The BA has driven about 75 hits to our announcement, combining the traffic from his blog and the USA Today feed. Also, I have finally figured out what a “BA-Blogee” is, and it is the same thing as what I styled a Bad Astronomy Buddy. I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to grok this prior to now, but I assure you, from here on out I will refer to BA fans (including myself) with the officially sanctioned nomenclature. (Did you actually get that through the IAU General Assembly, Phil?)

The Shepchick blog has done an over-the-top job of promoting us, too. Whereas I expected Rebecca to add our event to the Skepchick calendar and move on to more interesting things, what she actually did was add us to the calendar and then write a great post with a pertinent and eye-catching headline. When I saw it I got all excited - “cool,” I thought, “I get to go to a GEEK MEETUP!” - then I realized I was the guy organizing it and began to doubt my qualifications as a rational thinker. And so we’ve had about 60 hits from the Skepchicks blog.

So, that’s about 285 unique hits from these three bloggers, and Anchorage folks who didn’t know about us before learned about us from all three of these sites. So thanks a bunch, guys! Now I’m wondering what to expect. A few people have e-mailed me or commented that they are going to attend, or try to; but I wonder what percentage of the traffic that isn’t resulting in e-mails or blog comments are (a) Alaskans, who (b) are planning to attend? If it is even 10%, we’re going to have a lot more people than I anticipated. Which would be really cool. I expect the promotion conducted at my talk on exoplanets will get a few people out to join us as well.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this, so don’t be surprised to see me promote it a couple more times over the next week.

I’m pleased to announce the first (of hopefully many) Anchorage meetup for:

• the Anchorage Skeptics
• Pharyngula Fans
• Bad Astronomy Buddies
• Skepchick readers
• And anyone else interested in science and skeptical thinking.

We will meet on Thursday, March 20, at 7:00 PM, in the cafe at Barnes and Noble on Northern Lights Blvd. in Anchorage. The cafe serves the usual gamut of coffee and tea (in both high-test and decaf versions), juices, soft drinks, muffins, pastries, and so on.

You can get a map if this one won’t do and you don’t already know where it is.

Among those who are planning to attend: Zach of the When Pigs Fly Returns blog, Scott of Coherent Lighthouse, at least a couple people from the Alaska Science Teachers Association, two regulars from the Pharyngula comments threads, two people who have actually met the Bad Astronomer, a local veterinarian who practices evidence-based medicine, and of course, yours truly, the BCS.

If you don’t know any of us, that’s fine - come anyway! Look for the group that has a white Apple MacBook with a sticker on it that says JREF:

The agenda for the meeting is to hang out, shoot the breeze, and plan the next such get-together. I will be sharing some material relating to an upcoming Mythbusters show, I’d like to have Zach explain how pterosaur arms work, and hopefully we can convince Scott and Zach to bring some dinosaur art to show.

Writerdd over on Skepchick, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers, has some remarks about non-fundamentalist religion:

In comments on another post a few weeks ago, I questioned the idea of criticizing Christians for “cherry picking the Bible” — that is, ignoring the parts they find abhorrent and clinging to the parts they find inspirational…. Ignoring parts of the Bible or Koran should not be ridiculed. It is a good thing that leads away from fanatical violence. We should be encouraging this type of behavior.

I agree, utterly and completely.

The fact is, sensible people will read parts of the Bible and correctly discern that it isn’t a science textbook. In a recent TV interview on the evolution wars, I said that a person reading the first four chapters of Genesis as a story that tells us about human nature - our curiosity, our response to authority, etc - has done a sensible thing. Not as sensible, perhaps, as studying psychology, but they’ve at least read the text and learned from it the things that I think the author was trying to teach. Somewhat more discerning people might read the same text and recognize that it is also a slap in the face to prevailing political and religious institutions in contemporary Babylon - and if so, they’ve done an excellent job of interpreting the text.

Readers who decide those chapters are an anatomy lesson and come to the conclusion that men have fewer ribs than women¹ have made a fundamental error about the scope of the text. As have those who believe that it is a textbook for science and/or history. If someone reads the first four chapters of Genesis and still thinks that men and women have the same number of ribs, does it make them an infidel,² or somehow not-really-Christian³?

Ummm, no, it makes them more sensible than their peers.

In doing the science/skepticism educational activities I’m neck-deep in, I have to communicate with forthrightly religious people all the time. The sensible ones, who lack fundamentalist impulses, have no difficulty grappling with the reality that is demonstrated by experiment. And lest we body-check them for nevertheless believing in god, let’s keep in mind that all but the superheroes among us believe something that isn’t true⁴.

Dialogues often develop between fundamentalists and less strident religionists in the class discussions that I lead, and my conclusion from these experiences is that I want more of the latter in my world. They are simply much less prone - no, let’s say, not prone at all - to condemning me to a violent end for “believing in” the Big Bang Theory, and shutting out everything I have to say simply because my beliefs aren’t the same as theirs. What’s disturbing about that is my “beliefs” are never aired - they just assume the person they are dealing with is a minion of Satan. As writerdd notes, there is a big gulf in social adjustment between these two populations.

And that is why I distinguish between religious extremists, and everyone else. (Well, that, and because the term marginalizes extremists.)

1. This is a belief I have actually encountered in the wild. [↩]
2. From the perspective of fundamentalist Christians. [↩]
3. From the perspective of an atheist or adherent to another religion. [↩]
4. That’s actually the most humbling thing about doing science - finding out that your view of reality is seriously messed up, over and over again. [↩]

The BCS will be interviewed for a television news-magazine show on Monday, or possibly Tuesday. The topic will be evolution, which is outside my field of expertise¹, but that never stopped me from shooting off my mouth before. Fortunately I’m at least quite well-read on the topic and am known in the market it will be airing as a science educator/popularizer type person.

Since I know a little about what is coming down the pike, I’m preparing for it. I’ve worked up some talking points, because I know TV is brutal about keeping the word count down and the clarity as high as possible. I’ve been practicing in front of a camera to work on looking at least vaguely competent and likable. I’ll have some time to do a couple of mock interviews with others posing as hostile interviewers². I lack any media training, but that doesn’t mean I have to go in without any clue.

If any readers happen to have any advice to offer, please shoot me an e-mail or comment here. Hopefully I can get a copy of the interview and post it after it is all over, and we can all do a post-mortem.

1. I’ve noticed there is very little demand on television for experts on the application of simplified heuristics approximating Hamiltonian paths as applied to astronomical search order algorithms that are optimized to instrument-imposed overhead limitations. But I can’t imagine why. [↩]
2. Or at least “hard hitting” ones, although if this journalist actually takes a swing at me I’d be quite surprised. [↩]

Andrew Kitchen, Michael M. Miyamoto, and Connie J. Mulligan report in PLoS-ONE on their development of a three-stage model for the colonization of the Americas by Homo sapiens. This issue is of deep interest to anthropology outreach in Alaska, and I’m accordingly very interested in the paper. The attention that these ideas will likely receive in Alaska suggests several major avenues for effective public outreach:

• It provides an opportunity for “what is the nature of science and knowledge” education. The concepts of falsifiability and refinement of knowledge over time are particularly rich opportunities with these new results.
• It provides an opportunity to provide some “cutting edge” science to students. As noted below, many of the interpretive materials in greater Anchorage on these subjects reflect what was “cutting edge” twenty years ago, but which is now largely rejected in paleoanthropology.
• This paper is largely about analysis of genetic populations, and statistics. Therefore, it is an open door to talk about mutation rates and evolution, and some simple statistical exercises could easily be devised to give students an idea of what the authors are doing in their analysis.
• It provides an example of multidisciplinary work in science. The authors present a genetics analysis but subject it to controls imposed from other fields.
• Because some broadly similar studies of the past have not been subject to those controls, it provides an example of why there might be apparent disagreement about knowledge amongst scientists. For example, I’ve heard about genetic data that supports migration into the Americas both much earlier, and significantly later, than well-dated archaeological sites. By not imposing constraints from other fields of study, such findings result in apparent disagreement, without necessarily being valid disagreement. The distinction is worth teaching since organized antiscience uses such cases as a wedge.

The authors propose that the population of Amerind ancestors expanded out of east central Asia between 43,000 and 36,000 years ago, and occupied Beringia, the easternmost portion of Asia and the western part of Alaska, including the sea floor which was exposed at the time. A stable population of 8,000 to 10,000 people remained there from that time until around 16,000 years ago, at which time 1,000 to 5,400 of them rapidly expanded into the Americas. The study conforms to prior hypotheses that this expansion occurred either through an ice-free corridor in eastern Alaska and western Canada, or along the coast.

Consistent with other recent work, this paper proposes a single migration, as opposed to studies of the past that considered Amerinds, Na-Dene, and Eskimo-Aleuts to be the result of different migrations. This hypothesis gained popularity in the mid-1980’s, and is the model adopted by a number of interpretive materials in and around Anchorage. The model has been in disfavor for some time in the professional literature, and it seems likely that this new study would help to change these interpretive aids (assuming that scientific evidence trumps political expediency).

The authors point out that the genetic studies to date have strongly supported a single-migration model, but that they have varied significantly concerning the proposed date of the migration, with dates anywhere from about 13,000 years ago, to 40,000 years ago. As a result, that data has been interpreted by a variety of scenarios involving additional migrations, migrations of various ages, and so on. At least from the layman’s perspective, many of these seemed like clever possibilities that had the unfortunate air of being ad-hoc about them.

The new study accommodates some of the more puzzling aspects of the prior genetic studies, particularly ones that come up with very old dates of 30,000 years or more for the migration. A stable population in Beringia for some thousands of years would explain those results, and also explain why there are no American archaeological sites older than around 15,500 years old, while accommodating nicely the archaeological evidence that Homo sapiens was in northwest Beringia by about 30,000 years ago.

The study incorporates data from both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of both Native Americans and Asians. Mitochondrial DNA evidence was cited in 2005 (with quite a bit of publicity, at least in Alaska) to support the idea that the population colonizing North America was extremely small, so it appears to me that the re-analysis of the mitochondrial data is of particular interest. Also of interest is that this study, unlike some in the discipline, uses archaeology, geology, and paleoecology as opportunities for imposing controls on the analysis of the genetic data. Some of the genetics studies of the past have given the appearance of being statistical analyses that avoided giving very much consideration to what is known from other disciplines. The study constrains divergence time to 15,000 years ago, and by trying out different migration rates between Asia and Beringia (and back), it is shown that the lower (and “more biologically realistic,” as the authors put it) the migration rate the larger the population of Amerind ancestors:

Our results demonstrate that smaller estimates of Ne depend upon a substantial level of migration from Asia to account for present-day levels of Amerind genetic diversity, e.g. Hey’s estimate of ≈70 founders is associated with a mAsia→NW > 9.0, which is twice the migration rate for contemporary Europe (m = 4.3).

Emphasis mine. I agree with the authors that the high migration rates assumed by other studies are implausible. Intuitively, I have a hard time accepting that the rate of migration on a modern industrial continent serviced by jets and trains is substantially lower than that found in east Asia in the Pleistocene, but I’m not an expert.

The authors also build into the paper a very nice opportunity for those doing outreach to talk about “what is science:”

Our goal is to provide a comprehensive model for the initial settlement of the Americas that generates new testable hypotheses and has high predictive power for the inclusion of new datasets. In light of our results, we propose a three-stage model in which a recent, rapid expansion into the Americas was preceded by a long period of population stability in greater Beringia by the Paleoindian population after divergence and expansion from their ancestral Asian population.

In other words, science produces conclusions that are testable. When you come to a conclusion, you are sticking your neck out a bit - because by definition a scientific finding is subject to being disproved at some point by someone who has better data, or is better at interpreting your data than you are.

One of the most interesting aspects of this paper, from an outreach perspective, is the opportunity to discuss how we know the dates. Here in a single paper are incorporated various methods for dating prehistoric events and materials (carbon dating, stratigraphy, genetic statistics, and surely a few others), and all of the methods agree that this recent event in world geological history still took place thousands of years before some believe the world was even created. The contrivances that are required to refute these vastly different, yet mutually-supporting dating techniques are awesome in their implausibility, and that’s where the teaching opportunity comes from.

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This blog article is about:

Kitchen, A., Miyamoto, M.M., Mulligan, C.J., Harpending, H. (2008). A Three-Stage Colonization Model for the Peopling of the Americas. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1596. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001596

The BBC, LiveScience, and others are reporting on the discovery of a new pterosaur found in north-east China. The find also confirms a prediction of evolution. From the BBC story:

“It is very likely that this pterosaur represents a lineage of arboreal creatures that lived and foraged for insects in the gymnosperm forest canopy of north-east China during the Early Cretaceous,” the researchers write in PNAS.

They conclude this from curved bones in the feet, which are similar to those found in perching birds. This pterosaur is also smaller than most others, of a size that makes sense for perching on branches. Cladistics suggest that this pterosaur was close to the ancestors of the giant pterosaurs, including Quetzalcoatlus, which had a 30-foot wingspan. Thus the new fossil is transitional, being in some ways less derived than later specimens but more derived than the pterosaur’s hypothesized concestor.

“It is interesting to see some clear arboreal adaptations in this species,” said [Smithsonian paleontologist Matthew] Carrano, who was not on the research team.

“It confirms a suspicion we had, that pterosaurs were more diverse in their habitats than we knew from the [fossil] record.”

Let’s be a bit more direct here, in the interests of effective science outreach and clear communication. The notion that pterosaurs were more diverse (in their habitats, or in their phenotype - both apply) than the fossil record previously demonstrated is a prediction of evolutionary theory, not merely a suspicion of paleontologists. There are actually two predictions here, both of which are confirmed by this fossil.

1. Evolution predicts that some species will be absent from the (known) fossil record, and that some of them, if they were known, would illuminate the evolutionary development of their lineage. Here we have an example of a fossil which was unknown until recently, and which does just this. Score one for evolution.
2. Evolution makes the more specific prediction that, when you have lots of fossils of lots of species with specialized adaptations - such as pterosaur fossils - that less derived species will exist earlier in the lineage. Not only that, but it says that most of the characteristics that are common to most or all of the more specialized species will be present in the less derived one. Again, from what’s been published, this fossil confirms this prediction.

Seems I’m on a paleontology kick lately. Undoubtedly this is a result of spending so much time in museums over the last month, looking at fossils. Fair warning - there’s at least one more of these in the pipeline. I’ve had some interesting information and photos from the PI of the crayfish fossils I reported on earlier that I’m working up.