It’s not even Christmas yet, and Mary and I got a present in the mail.
It turns out it has magical properties, too. All morning, this cat we’re fostering (want her?) has been pestering me, clambering about and digging her claws into me and nagging me to feed her, and I sat down next to the pillow, and she fled. I think she had presentiments of her fate if she persisted.
Thanks, Caine!
OK, so that Daily Mail piece that talked about my refutation of the MFAP hypothesis — the idea that humans are ape-pig hybrids — has been getting a fair amount of attention. The article actually did quote me tearing into the idea fairly thoroughly, although it did also give far too much attention to a crackpot, but here’s the thing: the media doesn’t care that much what I said, it’s all the kook nonsense driving the reporting.
For example, Jennifer Raff heard it on Alex Jones’ radio show. Jones is a wacky, hateful, loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist, and what is he talking about? Not that there are good explanations for human evolution, but that a kook with a ridiculous idea has demolished the theory of evolution.
What really drew my interest in the subject was the way Alex Jones discussed the news article. He called Eugene McCarthy a “top geneticist” and an “expert”, and while rightly dismissing the hypothesis as idiotic, he implied that it was in line with the current scientific consensus on human origins: that evidence was increasingly disproving evolution as an explanation. Instead, alternative ideas, such as an Intelligent Designer (Jones kept calling it “aliens” and mentioning the movie “Prometheus”) were becoming mainstream explanations for human origins, and this chimp-pig hybridization idea was yet another example. Framing the story in this way, he went on to say that “They (scientists) have no idea what they’re doing” (quote paraphrased from my memory), and therefore evolution is nonsense. And he’s not alone. The creationist/Intelligent Design site Uncommon Descent also dismisses McCarthy’s hypothesis while simultaneously dismissing “neo-Darwinism”
Raff goes on to list all the red flags thrown on McCarthy’s loony hypothesis, which ought to get any reasonable journalist to immediately question and reject the idea. But the lesson I’m seeing from the differential attention given to my explanation and McCarthy’s is that I clearly did not throw enough red flags.
So I’m pointing out that a Christian, conservative, dominant minority is conspiring to suppress my radical idea that evolution, a natural process, has generated all the diversity of life on earth, and that as a top expert authority I plan to lead a revolution in scientific thinking. I know that’s a wild claim and that I’ll probably be pilloried by the mainstream establishment, but I’ve just got to get past the scientific gatekeepers to bring this secret knowledge to the masses.
Alex Jones, call me. We’ll talk.
The one thing you must read today is David Dobbs’ Die, Selfish Gene, Die. It’s good to see genetic accommodation getting more attention, but I’m already seeing pushback from people who don’t quite get the concept, and think it’s some kind of Lamarckian heresy.
It’s maybe a bit much to ask that the gene-centric view of evolution die; it’s still useful. By comparison, for instance, it’s a bit like Mendel and modern genetics (I’ll avoid the overworked comparison of Newton and Einstein.) You need to understand simple Mendelian genetics — it gives you a foundation in the logic of inheritance, and teaches you a few basic rules. But once you start looking at real patterns of inheritance of most traits, you discover that it doesn’t work. Very few traits work as Mendel described, and one serious concern is that we tend to select for genes to study that behave in comprehensible ways.
And every geneticist knows this. Mendel was shown to have got some things wrong within a decade of his rediscovery: Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment, for instance, simply does not hold for linked genes, and further, linkage turns out to hold important evolutionary implications. But I still teach about independent assortment in my genetics course. Why? Because you need to understand how to interpret deviations from the simple rules; it’s an “a-ha!” moment when you comprehend how Morgan and Sturtevant saw the significance of departures from Mendel’s laws.
Most of genetics seems to be about laying a foundation, and then breaking it to take a step beyond. Teaching it is a kind of torture, where you keep pushing the students to master some basic idea, and then once they’ve got it, you test them by showing them all the exceptions, and then announcing, “But hey! Here’s this cool explanation that tells you what you know is wrong, but there’s some really great and powerful ideas beyond that.”
That’s what’s fun about genetics: compounding a series of revelations until the students’ brains break, usually right around the end of the term. Over the years I’ve learned, too. Undergraduate genetics students usually collapse in defeat once I introduce epistatic interactions — the idea that the phenotype produced by an allele at one locus is dependent on the alleles present at other loci — but it’s always great to see the few students who fully grasp the idea and see how powerful it is (future developmental biologists identified!).
And that’s how I see the gene-centric view: absolutely essential. You must understand Mendel, and Fisher, and Wright, and Hamilton, and Williams, and once you’ve mastered that toolkit, you can start looking at the real world and seeing all the cases where it’s deficient, and develop new tools that let you see deeper. The new idea that Dobb’s describes, and that is actually fairly popular with many developmental biologists, is that phenotype comes first: that organisms are fairly plastic in response to the environment in ways that can’t be simplified to pure genetic determinism, and that the genes lag behind, acting to consolidate and make more robust adaptive responses.
I’ve written about genetic assimilation/accommodation before, and have given one lovely example of phenotypic change occurring faster than the generation of new mutants can explain. It’s always baffled me about the response to those ideas: most people resist, and try to reduce them to good old familiar genes. It’s a bit like watching students wrestle with epistatic modulation of gene expression when all they understand is Mendel, and rather than try to grasp a different way of looking at the problem, they instead invent clouds of simple Mendelian factors that bring in multi-step discrete variations. They can make the evidence fit the theory — just add more epicycles!
I’m seeing the same responses to Dobbs’ article — it’s still all just genes at the bottom of it, ain’t it? Oh, sure, but the interesting parts are the interactions, not the subunits. We need to take the next step and build tools to study networks of genes, rather than reducing everything to the genes themselves.
Here’s my talk on the Cambrian from Skepticon 6.
Oh, hey, I just realized I could post the content of that text-heavy slide I flashed, showing the sources I used. So here you go:
Web reviews from Donald Prothero, Nick Matzke, Larry Moran.
Briggs, D.E.G.; Fortey, R.A. (1989). The early radiation and relationships of the major arthropod groups. Science, 246(4927), 241-243.
Budd, G. E., and S. Jensen. 2000. “A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phyla.” Biological Reviews 75:253-295.
Erwin D and Valentine J (2013). The Cambrian explosion : the construction of animal biodiversity. Greenwood Village, CO, Roberts and Company Publishers.
Marshall, Charles R. (2006). “Explaining the Cambrian ‘explosion’ of animals.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. 34: 355-384.
Smith MP, Harper DAT (2013) Causes of the Cambrian Explosion. Science 341:1355.
Long M, Betran E, Thornton K, Wang W (2003) The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old. Nature Rev Genet 4:865.
Knoll AH, Carroll SB (199) Early Animal Evolution: Emerging Views from Comparative Biology and Geology. Science 284:2129.
Erwin DH, Laflamme M, Tweedt SM, Sperling EA, Pisani D, Peterson KJ (2011) The Cambrian conundrum: early divergence and later ecological success in the early history of animals. Science. 334(6059):1091.
Peterson KJ, Dietrich MR, McPeek MA (2009) MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion. Bioessays. 31(7):736.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
They’re going to be doing deliveries by drone.
I don’t think I’ll live close enough to a distribution center for these to come buzzing by my house, so I’m not going to worry about them yet. I’m am remembering that in my younger days I was a deadly shot with a slingshot…I may have to start practicing.
I might change my pessimism about fleets of drones flitting about overhead, if they’re actually shown to represent an energy savings.
So I watched this show with Anderson Cooper’s name on it; he didn’t bother to show up, so maybe he has some sense of shame. It was dreadful. It was three anecdotes about people who had experienced serious trauma, and then invented lovely narratives about a happy afterlife to make themselves feel better, or to justify their prior religious beliefs. There was no fact-checking. It was just these three women getting interviewed and telling unverifiable accounts of events that happened while they were unconscious.
First woman: She claims to have “died” in a kayaking accident in Chile. Her kayak was pinned underwater by a rock; she describes all of her sensations, including her legs breaking when her friends dislodged the boat and she was torn free by the current. Her friends were frantic, yet she’s happy to claim that they accurately described the passage of time, and that she was under water and deprived of oxygen for 30 minutes. She said she “gave herself up to god”, was visiting spirits/angels/whatever while resuscitation was attempted, and that she had a conversation with Jesus who told her she had to go back to take care of her husband. Her husband was later diagnosed with lung cancer. Thanks, Jesus! Also, she’s flogging a book
Verdict: completely unverified account of a “death”. This was a religious woman who experienced a serious trauma, and who had also experienced the death of a child and wanted to believe that there was a purpose to life. It was a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
CNN’s verdict: “Amazing”. Not one word of doubt about anything in the account.
Christian Mingles is advertising on this show, of course.
Second woman: Child growing up in Hong Kong, of Indian descent. A friend dies of cancer, and she becomes paranoid; she later is diagnosed herself with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She deteriorates under treatment, and later lapses into a coma. Claims to have heard doctors talking while she was in a coma, and that they said she was going to die within 24 hours. She was, she said, “in another world” where she felt peace, and her dead friends were all there. Dead people told her to go back and live, so she did.
She recovered consciousness, cancer goes into remission, she’s still alive. In fact, nothing in her account said she died at all.
Verdict: A lot of story telling and confabulation. Nothing remarkable in the story at all; Hodgkin’s has a roughly 80+% 5 year survival rate, and she was apparently getting good medical care.
CNN’s verdict: Accepted every bit of it without reservation. No attempt to verify any of the claimed facts, not that there was anything particularly unusual about it.
Third woman: Has a son with a serious heart condition. He and his mother engaged in a fair bit of Jesus talk. One day he collapses and is hospitalized, and claims to see a bright light and an angel. Later he collapses at his school again, and claims to have been in a good place and not wanting to come back. But “he came back for a reason”. The family does a lot of praying and bible reading. Then the son dies on Christmas day. He doesn’t come back.
Verdict: Absolutely nothing remarkable or unexplainable. No evidence of much of anything presented.
CNN’s verdict: Ends with a clip of a video of the dead boy holding up a sign saying he believes in god and angels.
Overall assessment: Gullible dreck, lots of fantasizing, no evidence presented of much of anything, and no critical thinking from the reporters at all. A disgrace.
I didn’t believe a word of it. There’s only one comment on the show website, and Randy didn’t believe it, either, but for rather different reasons.
This is all a liar, heaven is a holy place and those that Enter must be born again of the water and of the spirit, those that have excepted Jesus as their personal savior and have been born again of the baptism of the Holy Ghost will make it in.
I despair.
Oh, wait. There’s another one: The Carnival of Evolution has a Doctor Who theme this month.
