thinkevolution.net

Science is hard. Or is it?

Advice columnist Emily Yoffe, who writes Dear Prudence on Slate, now performs live Q&As Mondays on the Washington Post. This week’s session included a complaint about bad math attitudes, and later, an insightful follow-up comment by a physicist. From the conversation:

Philadelphia, PA: I’m a graduate student in mathematics, and my particular area is very abstract. When people ask me what I do, or see me with a textbook and ask what I’m reading, no matter how simplified an explanation I give them, inevitably the person remarks that my area is “way beyond” them or that they’d “never be able to grasp that.” I always want to tell them, “You definitely won’t with that attitude.” …How do you suggest I respond to these kind of comments?

Emily Yoffe: A few years ago, in an attempt to help my daughter with her math homework, I enrolled in the elementary school math prep program, Kumon. I scored at the first grade level. Even if I tried, I probably couldn’t truly understand what you’re doing. But I would be interested if you could explain what this math is used for—modeling subprime mortgages? Global warming? Then we’d have something to talk about. So ignore the self-put downs, and don’t add any of your own. Instead think of it as an opportunity to show that what you do is interesting and can—on some level—be grasped.

Comment from another reader: I think this writer deserves more of an answer. I’m a woman in physics, and nearly everyone makes a self-deprecating comment when I say so. The point really is this: there is a cultural pride in innumeracy that doesn’t exist for illiteracy—no one will brag about not being able to read, yet feel free to essentially brag about not being good at math. This is not people being candid about their abilities. It actually is a way of dismissing the importance of the field of study by implying that it has no cultural necessity or meaning. …This hurts everybody!

I think there’s a great point buried in that comment. First, I’m pleased to learn a new word, innumeracy. Second, I’m going to take it a step further: cultural pride in innumeracy might not really be a party foul at a cocktail party, but it is part of the problem with science in America. It seems Americans have a schizophrenic relationship with science. On one hand, science holds such authority that pseudoscientific explanations are rampantly invoked to justify just about anything. On another, religious conservatives reject science as the work of the “liberal elite,” and we are still recovering from our last president’s dedication to ignorance. The chasm between what scientists know and what the public understands permits this dysfunction. I can understand irritation when otherwise well-educated people express a marginalized appreciation or interest in math or science. Sometimes, a dismissal of someone else’s work as being “way over my head!” can sound a lot like that.

Confidential to Philadelphia, PA: Do I know you? I’m a science grad student in Philly too! Email me…

It’s been a while since I grumbled about inappropriate evolution-speak in science writing in the NY Times. So at the risk of sounding shrill, I’m going to take another stab. Jane E. Brody has written about the immunological benefits of babies eating dirt. The idea that exposure to germs in early childhood can boost immune development and reduce risk of allergies and other auto-immune disorders has been around a while, and Brody’s article doesn’t really cover anything shocking. But this passage was annoying:

Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that [babies putting their grubby little hands in their mouths] has helped us survive as a species.

Do all instincts have an evolutionary advantage? Are all instincts adaptations? That opening line sounds irritatingly like another indiscriminate claim for adaptation. But in biological terms, instincts are hard-wired, not learned, and improve fitness. So I think by definition, instincts are adaptive. But has natural selection really favored babies putting things in their mouths, to increase exposure to germs and boost immunological development? (Is there variation in this? Have babies ever not eaten dirt?) I doubt it.

For most of human history, we didn’t have lysol antibacterial spray, soap, or running water. Babies, like the rest of us, were perpetually grubby and reliably teeming with microbes. So I can’t imagine that they needed an adaptation to increase exposure to germs. Only in our over-sanitized present does an instinct to seek and ingest dirt really make sense. So maybe this “instinct” is an adaptation—a really, really recent one. But… haven’t babies always eaten dirt?

Some things are really hard to understand. Like, how to resolve pathways of functional coupling in human hemoglobin—even if using quantitative low temperature isoelectric focusing of asymmetric mutant hybrids. So hard!

Fortunately, Dr. Vince LiCata, a researcher at Louisiana State University, has performed an interpretive dance on this very topic. In fact, Dr. LiCata has recently won the 2009 AAAS/Science “Dance Your PhD” Contest in the “professor” category. (There are also grad student, post-doc, and most-popular-on-YouTube categories.) Watch Dr. LiCata and his team perform the winning dance:

This is an extraordinary contest. Previous winners received a year’s subscription to Science. But this year the winners get something more:

Each [winner] will be paired with a professional choreographer. (A team of 4 choreographers in Chicago are ready and waiting.) Over the next couple of weeks (via email and telephone) you must help your choreographer understand your article, its aims, the hypotheses it tests, and its big-picture context. With that knowledge, the choreographers will collaborate with a group of professional dancers to create a 4-part dance based on the science behind the 4 winning research articles.

You will be honored guests at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago in February, [where] you will have front row seats to the world debut of “THIS IS SCIENCE”—the professional dance interpretation of your scientific research.

The mission of this contest is to bring scientists and artists together, and to engage the public with science. I’ve never heard of anything quite like it, at least not anything that is being developed from such grassroots origins—the intent is to produce a full theatrical run and world tour! Winners are expected to participate as “science diplomats,” bridging that perilous gap between basic science research and public interest and understanding. How fantastic! You can watch other dances, like creator John Bohannon’s interpretation of the role of the WSS operon in the adaptive evolution of experimental populations of Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25, on the contest site or on YouTube.

The original nerdy Philadelphian.

A couple months ago the NYTimes published an article about “nerdy” people in an East Village bar giving powerpoint presentations on things like intestinal fish tapeworms and light-sensitive robots. Nerd nite originated in Boston and has boasted such presentations as “Beyond ‘Simple Gifts’: the music of the Shakers” and “Cnidaria and Porifera: the socially misunderstood invertebrates.” We really, really need to get something like this going in Philadelphia. Maybe Geekadelphia can get on it?

Anyway the Times article opened with quite a hook (pun intended), aiming, I’m sure, to reel in the dweeb-inclined with a list of what really does have to be the nerdiest of all the creatures. “Pinworms. Flatworms. Roundworms. Fish tapeworms tens of meters long, inside someone’s intestine.” Gross! For those of you for whom this sounds awesome, I have it on good authority that someone may be talking about worms again soon in the East Village. This time the presentation will be on a bizarre copulatory plug phenomenon, in which male worms—which usually put the copulatory plug in the female vulva, where it belongs—sometimes put it on the heads of other males! Obviously, you don’t want to miss it.

Tiktaalik visiting the Leidy Biology building at UPenn during the filming of The Tiktaalik Song music video.

The University of Pennsylvania conducts something called the Penn Reading Project each fall for incoming first-year undergrads. Each student reads (or is supposed to read) an assigned book, and faculty from all different departments in the university host small-group discussions.

This year the book is Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by (former Penn professor!) Neil Shubin. Shubin co-discovered Tiktaalik, a 375 million year old amphibious fish.

Spicing up this year’s reading project is… a music video about Tiktaalik! The Ohio band The Indoorfins was commissioned to write a song about this transitional fossil, its discovery by Shubin, its participation in the Penn Reading Project… The whole thing is pretty wild. Check out the video here. Warning: the refrain is really catchy.

Lots of people don’t believe in evolution, and some of them are pretty influential. Here’s an update to the previous list of famous people who… you know.

Got a tip? Leave a comment!

Ron Paul, Congressman (R, Texas)

Video of the Spartanburg (SC) GOP Executive Committee meeting, November 1, 2007

Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

“The Trap is Set,” blog post by Thomas Robb, April 24, 2008

Ben Stein, actor (Famous line: “Bueller? …Bueller? …Bueller?”)

“Ben Stein to Battle Darwin in Major Film,” World Net Daily, September 28, 2007

Claude Vorilhon, founder of the Raelian Church

Raelian Movement website

John Boehner, House Minority Leader (R, Ohio)

Judd Gregg, Senator (R, New Hampshire)

Rick Santorum, former Senator (R, Pennsylvania)

Letter to the Discovery Institute (PDF) asserting Congress’ position that students should learn about theories other than evolution, in reference to their support of the Santorum Ammendment to the No Child Left Behind Act

Ronald Reagan, former President of the United States

“God, Satan and the Media,” The New York Times, March 4, 2003

Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Founder and leader of the Unification Church

Chapter 1: The Principle of Creation, from the Divine Principle, the main theological text of the Unification Church

Ted Nugent, musician

“Vegans, Keep Out: It’s Hunting Season,” The New York Times, September 27, 2005

Grover Norquist, lobbyist

“Conservatives and Evolution,” The New Republic, July 7, 2005

Pat Buchanan, politician and The American Conservative co-founder

“Conservatives and Evolution,” The New Republic, July 7, 2005

Sherri Shepherd, The View co-host

The View television clip

(more…)

Today on Hullabaloo, tristero writes an affectionate post about the marvelousness of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It’s cool to see interest and enthusiasm for this work outside of science media. The inspiration came from Olivia Judson’s piece in the The Times, which confesses that lots of biologists haven’t actually read it. Both posts are appeals to correct that. I’d like to add another argument to theirs: the most impressive thing about The Origin is Darwin’s staggering amount of observation and inference, and its explanatory power is a delight to non-scientists and a thrill for modern biologists.

The Origin is one of the most important theoretical accomplishments in science, yet it is entirely accessible to lay readers. This simply doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, Darwin’s entire process would be unusual today. Although he did some tinkering, particularly by breeding animals, Darwin was not really an experimentalist. Mostly he was a naturalist: he kept his eyes open, recorded everything, and synthesized it all to produce his cohesive—and largely correct—theory of natural selection. Now, experiments, often complicated and expensive experiments, test hypotheses. (This is called the scientific method.) Even observational studies are formally executed, with carefully circumscribed parameters—and certainly they are published that way, unlike Darwin’s creative assemblage of facts, insights and conjectures. But even as hypotheses are carefully chosen and experiments painstakingly designed, the ultimate synthesis still takes place in the brain. Darwin’s beloved book will always be relevant, because it is an inspirational reminder to keep the breadth of observation as wide as possible.

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.

According to Salon’s Broadsheet blog, I’m not the only graduate student frustrated by portrayals of scientific discoveries in the popular media. Anthropology student Allison Sherrill indicts MSNBC for spinning news from an archaeological dig into an entirely new story. Discovery of a small female figurine dressed in clothing prompted the MSNBC journalist to cry, “Prehistoric women had a passion for fashion.” The truth, in Sherrill’s words:

This type of news coverage typically frustrates archaeologists. Unfortunately very common — in order to make a better story, the media frequently portray a very tentative conclusion as well-supported truth, and furthermore, those hypotheses are often twisted into a meaning that the archaeologist never intended. In this case, some figurines that portray women in some kind of costume have been spun into a sweeping conclusion about women’s innate love to shop. The article even mentions that the archaeologists felt that their most important find had to do with early copper production, but obviously, that headline does not look nearly as exciting (or maybe they just couldn’t think of one that rhymed?).