thinkevolution.net

Over on evolgen, RPM notes that biologist Jenny Graves gives a compelling interview in PLoS Genetics. And she does: she makes a couple insightful points about science and popular culture, and describes her work with enthusiasm and charm. RPM pulled a quote about the importance of good science education for little kids; Graves doesn’t equivocate over her distress that some children are brought up to “believe in utter nonsense.” But my favorite comment from her interview has to do with the fundamental and inextricable importance of evolution in biology:

“[S]ometimes, when you ask a functional question, you get an evolutionary answer.”

To me, this is such an elegant way to impart the importance of being broad-minded, and broadly trained. It conveys the uncertainty of science, of how you never know just where the research will take you.

Graves explains that she was trained as a molecular geneticist, and admits she didn’t see the relevance of evolutionary biology to her work at first. (She says she thought evolutionary biologists belonged on another planet.) Her interview reveals how good science can be enlightening. When her work on gene mapping in marsupials led her to make inferences about the evolution of mammalian chromosomes, her perspective changed. She’s interested now in science education, to reverse the trend she sees in the current “credulous generation.” I look forward to the launch of her “dumb design” website, which will explain functional anomalies in evolutionary terms and, I’m sure, antagonize the intelligent design people. She also reveals why the anti-science culture is waging an ultimately futile campaign. It’s not a battle of beliefs, but a battle against common sense and, well… self-actualization:

“It’s so dangerous to encourage people to believe what they are told rather than what they observe.”

Cogito.org is a online resource for kids interested in science. It’s run by the Johns Hopkins CTY people, and provides current information about science and technology—like global warming, robotics and evolution—but it also features stories about kids making science news and links to summer camps and academic competitions. One of the neatest things about Cogito is that it also hosts online forums where students can chat with each other and with limited-engagement guest experts. Well, guess who was a recent guest expert!

I spent a week answering questions and promoting discussion about evolution in the Cogito forums (members only). The students had some great questions, including something about an economics theory that required a quick detour through Wikipedia. The interview has now been published on the main Cogito site and can be read here.

On the January 14 Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert interviewed Neil Shubin. He’s an evolutionary biologist and one of the discoverers of Tiktaalik, that fish with legs that crawled out of the ocean 375 million years ago.

Stephen Colbert: Your book has a provocative title. It’s called Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Now what the hell does that mean! I do not have a fish inside me.

Neil Shubin: Actually your body is organized a lot like a fish.

Stephen Colbert: What is it with evolutionary biologists that they just can’t let people think what they want about themselves?

Neil Shubin: Well, we’re constrained by the data!

Shubin has also published a thoughtful guest post on Pharyngula discussing his experience going on national TV.

Radio Times host Marty Moss-Coane interviewed Michael Shermer again today. In his new book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, he argues that the emotional decisions we make about money can be explained by evolutionary psychology—or by a new science called “evolutionary economics.”

In the interview, Shermer discussed how decisions about money often violate the expectation of straightforward financial gain. These decisions may appear ethical: in 1983, the US International Trade Commission imposed a 45% tariff on imported motorcycles to protect the employees of the American-based Harley Davidson company. Or they may be irrational: a stockholder may refuse to sell a declining stock because desperation makes him hope the original value will be regained. The interview included virtually no discussion of evolution or how research in evolutionary biology supports the psychology Shermer describes. I haven’t read the book, but it seems to me that “evolutionary economics” is really “why we put our money where we put it.” But of course, anything with “evolution” in the title is going to get much more attention!

Michael Shermer is the founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for Scientific American and founder of the Skeptics Society. Marty Moss-Coane is the host of Radio Times, a daily radio show from NPR radio station WHYY, 90.9 FM in Philadelphia, PA. You can listen to this show from the Radio Times archive.

NOTE: This post was originally published on November 21, 2006, on an old version of this site.

Dr. Warren J. Ewens is an internationally recognized mathematician whose contributions to population genetics earned him membership in the Australian Academy of Science in 1981 and membership in the Royal Society in 2000. He has been a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1972, and has motivated unquantifiable numbers of students and colleagues with his warmth and extraordinary ability to explain things you thought you didn’t understand.

I spoke to him in his office in Philadelphia.

How has math been important in advancing the field of evolutionary biology?

Mathematics quantifies a subject. If you don’t have some kind of quantification, you are relying on purely verbal arguments. So mathematics would come into it if you asked, Has there been enough time for the observed evolution that we see to have occurred? How does the observed amount of genetic variation relate to mutation rate? Is it consistent with the population sizes that we observe? What is the effect of natural selection? In my view, all of these questions can only be answered by a mathematical approach.

Some people reject the idea of evolution because they argue that the world as we know it can’t be due to just “random chance.” Can you explain the role of stochasticity in biology, particularly in evolution?

I think it’s a good idea here to make an analogy. Let’s imagine a casino. Clearly there is random chance with respect to which slot the ball lands in on a roulette wheel, and so on. Thus the amount of money which the casino owners make on any one day or in any one year is random. But you can be pretty sure that they’ll make money in the long run. In other words, even though there’s randomness, there’s something like a deterministic process at work, in that the casino is quite sure to be making a profit overall. Now in the genetical context, the analogy might be something like this: certainly there is randomness in the sense that the mutations which arise are assumed to be random with respect to their fitnesses; they just arise spontaneously. Perhaps 99.9% of them are unfit mutations, they are bad mutations that are then lost from the population. But a small fraction, perhaps 0.1%, happen to be good mutations and they are the ones that will eventually spread through a population and make that population in some sense better. So even though mutations arise from a random process, just as a casino has a random process, you can be certain that in the long run, enough good mutations will accumulate for evolution to occur.

Population genetics is an important component of evolutionary biology, because of the theoretical framework it provides. How would you characterize the important contributions to population genetics?

Quite a few of the formulas in population genetics have found applications in other areas of science, like physics and mathematics. But I would say, perhaps unfortunately, almost nothing of mathematical population genetics has made its way into the outside world, because so very few people understand it, want to understand it… perhaps some want not to understand it! Overall the greatest contributions to population genetics have stayed inside the theory. But within the field, it has led to a substantial quantification of the procedure, and to the extent that quantification is important in any scientific activity, it’s been important in that regard.

Do you have a philosophy on teaching?

Well, that is a very hard question to answer. I don’t think I have a philosophy that is at all unusual. I would say the main thing is you have to let the students see, especially in biology, the amazing things we are discussing: the structure of the body, the evolutionary process, things like this; and try to transfer that amazement and wonder to them so that they will be enthused themselves to become interested in those areas.