Relentless use of passive voice

Image from ragan.com.

Image from ragan.com.

I have had the phrase “relentless use of passive voice” in my head for years as a criticism of overly dry scientific writing. I thought I learned it from the excellent paper “How to write consistently boring scientific literature” by Kaj Sand-Jensen. Like Gould’s tennis stadium in “Muller Bros. Moving & Storage,” though, when I went back to look for it, it wasn’t where I thought it was. If anyone can tell me where the phrase actually originated, I would be grateful.

Wherever I first heard it, the phase has affected my scientific writing (or should I say ‘my scientific writing has been affected by the phrase’). I have the impression, supported by no hard data whatsoever, that the relentless use of passive voice has declined over the past few decades in scientific writing. It is now common to read about what “we” (the coauthors) did in the Methods and what “we” found in the Results. It’s not even that rare to see descriptions of what “I” did or found in a solo-authored paper (the horror!).

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Problems with major transitions: Maureen O’Malley & Russell Powell respond

The Great Oxidation Event by Adelle Schemm.

The Great Oxidation Event by Adelle Schemm.

In a recent series of posts, I reviewed Maureen O’Malley and Russell Powell’s paper in Biology and Philosophy, “Major Problems in Evolutionary Transitions: How a Metabolic Perspective Can Enrich our Understanding of Macroevolution.” Although they made several good points, I thought that some of their criticisms were off the mark and that their proposed solution to the real and perceived problems with the major transitions framework was unsatisfying.

Drs. O’Malley and Powell are both heavy hitters in the philosophy of biology, and as I usually do when I dig deeply into someone else’s paper, I invited them to respond to my criticisms. They kindly provided a thoughtful rebuttal and permitted me to post it here. I’ll have more to say later, but for now I’ll just say that they make some good points and (most importantly) fairly represent my arguments. As usual for guest posts, I have made no edits to the content of their response, only formatted and added links:

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The evolution of undifferentiated multicellularity: the Gonium genome

Blogging took a backseat to the wedding of two dear friends two weekends ago and to morel hunting last weekend, so I’m only now getting around to a post that should have been written weeks ago (I promised on April 22 that it would be out the following week). Last month, Erik Hanschen and colleagues published the Gonium pectorale genome, filling in some crucial bits of the transition to multicellular life in the volvocine algae. This was a big project, taking several years and involving over 20 authors from over a dozen institutions. The final paper is open access in Nature Communications.

I did post an effort to explain some aspects of the paper to the cdesign proponentsists at Evolution News and Views, who, by their own admission, failed to understand it (“After reading this paper, we’re none the wiser.”). I also complained of the science media’s tendency to refer to all algae as ‘pond scum.’ The lead author of the genome paper kindly followed up with a guest post addressing some of ENV‘s other misunderstandings, such as the purpose of model organisms in biology and the difference between ‘assertion’ and ‘evidence’. But now it’s time to dig into what the genome paper actually says.

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Evolution is religion; intelligent design is science

BizarroWorld

According to back-to-back posts on Evolution News and Views, evolution is religion, while intelligent design is science. In a badly argued post today, Cornelius Hunter says,

As I have explained many times, evolution is a religious theory…

Yesterday on the same platform, Steve Laufmann explained

…intelligent design is science, though not everyone knows it yet.

Well, he’s right about the second part.

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GMO and DNA

Figure 4 A & B from McFadden & Lusk 2016. Views about mandatory labeling.

Figure 4 A & B from McFadden & Lusk 2016. Views about mandatory labeling.

A recent paper in The FASEB Journal by Brandon R. McFadden and Jayson L. Lusk examines views on mandatory labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods (that’s the best link I could find; it’s not the final, formatted version, and it may differ in content as well). What a shitshow:

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Test post: featured images working properly (?)

The last couple of posts have shown up in my feed reader the way I always thought they should: with the image I chose in WordPress as the “Featured Image.” In the past, they have included the first image, no image, or the FreeThought blogs logo.

HelloWorld

I don’t see what the point of identifying an image as “Featured” is if it doesn’t show up in the rss feed. I hope this means I can count on this to happen in the future. Let’s see…I’ve included one image in this post and identified a different image (of the rss icon) as the Featured Image. [Read more…]

Buy your Ph.D.

100 pages ought to do it, I think. If you’re worried that that won’t pass the weight test, just add on a great big appendix; nobody’s going to read it. Think of the time and money you can save! Think of the poor slobs pipetting their youth away while you’re partying. Don’t think about how your committee is going to react to a data-free dissertation at your defense. What can they say? They have to pass you; it’s 200 pages!

StudyBay

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Thoughts on a year of blogging

Facebook reminded me the other day that it’s been a year since I started the original Fierce Roller blog. I didn’t know back then if I’d stick to it this long, and I still don’t know if I’ll keep it up another year. One step at a time.

HelloWorld

My very first blog post.

What is Fierce Roller, exactly? I guess it’s a few different things. One of the ideas from the start was to be a service to the Volvox community, reporting new papers, meetings, and news relating to volvocine algae. But that has only been one aspect. It is also a place for me to talk about my research interests, both scientific and philosophical. Scientific usually means that it has to do with the so-called ‘major transitions’ or related evolutionary themes. I wish I could cover this topic more thoroughly, but it has become a big subfield within evolutionary biology, and I can’t possibly keep up with the relative flood of papers. Philosophical usually means that it has to do with the one discussion in the philosophy of science that I’ve contributed to, about the meaning of biological individuality. There is also, of course, a thread of skepticism, occasionally about ‘alternative’ medicine, but usually responding to creationist arguments.

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