Wired was more eloquent…

Macaca_nigra_self-portrait

Self-portrait of a female Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

…but I think I was more succinct. Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, has a new article about Sci-Hub on Wired:

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Every year, hundreds of billions in research and data are funded, in whole or in part, with public dollars. We do this because we believe that knowledge is for the public good, but the public gets very little access to the fruits of its investment. In the US, the combined value of government, non-profit, and university-funded research in 2013 was over $158 billion—about a third of all the R&D in the US that year. Publishers acquire this research free of charge, and retain the copyrights, even though the public funded the work. Researchers aren’t paid by publishers for their research as it’s sold piece-by-piece or by subscription through academic journals. The reviewers who evaluate the research aren’t paid either. So we pay for it, and then we have to pay again if we want to read it.

My slightly abridged version of this sentiment [PG-13 below the fold]:

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Time for a revision? Maureen O’Malley and Russell Powell on Major Transitions, part 1

The so-called ‘Major Transitions’ framework is an attempt to explain the hierarchical structure of life on Earth: genes within chromosomes, chromosomes within cells, cells within cells (eukaryotic cells), individuals within sexual partnerships, cells within multicellular organisms, and organisms within societies. The best-known attempt to unify the origins of these relationships is a book by John Maynard Smith* and Eörs SzathmáryThe Major Transitions in Evolution.

MajorTransitionsCover

First published in 1995, the book focused on the origins of these hierarchical levels, connecting them with the unifying theme that

…entities that were capable of independent replication before the transition can replicate only as part of a larger whole after it.

For example, after a transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms (there were several), cellular reproduction either contributes to the growth of the organism or to production of new multicellular organisms.

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So much wrong

Say what you want about the Discovery Institute; they are prolific! Evolution News & Views alone publishes several articles a day. I’m lucky if I can crank out three a week, and I try to limit the proportion that are about cdesign proponentsists being wrong. It’s a continual temptation, because those posts are easier to write than, say, digging into a peer-reviewed article. PZ promises me that blogging on FtB will eventually earn me enough to buy a cup of coffee, but I have a job. All of this means that I have to let a lot of big, juicy targets sail by. So, quickly:

DentonLeaves

Thank you, Michael Denton; no evolutionary biologist ever considered the possibility that not everything is adaptive. To answer your question, some aspects of leaf shape are adaptive, some are not. Next.

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Dual first authors

Thunderdome

A forthcoming paper in Philosophy of Science has dual first authors, Kate E. Lynch and Pierrick Bourrat (I’ve written about Dr. Bourrat’s work previously, which is part of the reason this is on my radar):

Author order has been decided randomly, therefore both authors are first authors. KEL and PB contributed equally to the manuscript. KEL’s distinct contribution was the ideas developed in Section 3. PB’s distinct contribution was the ideas developed in sections 4 and 5 and the equations in Section 3. Other sections received equal contributions from both authors.

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Intelligent design’s double standard

Double Tourbillon 30° mechanism by Greubel Forsey. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia.

Double Tourbillon 30° mechanism by Greubel Forsey. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia.

Despite protests to the contrary, intelligent design is a god of the gaps argument. Take a look at Discovery Institute blogs, and a large portion of the posts are essentially arguing that some aspect of biology or biochemistry is really, really complicated (for example, Howard Glicksman’s posts at Evolution News & Views). As if there are bunches of evolutionary biologists running around saying life is simple. So most intelligent design arguments boil down to “there’s no plausible evolutionary explanation for this aspect of biology, therefore it must have been designed.” And cdesign proponentsists insist on a high standard of evidence to consider an evolutionary explanation plausible. For example, here’s Michael Behe’s standard for believing that “…complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection…”:

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F paywalls

CritRevPaywall

Sure, I have $2000 a year to spend on this one journal.

I’ve written twice before about paywalls and how to get around them (On paywalls, Paywalls revisited). Paywalls pop up when you try to read a peer-reviewed article that you don’t have access to. If you work at a university, museum, or other research institution, you probably see these only every once in a while, because most such institutions have subscriptions to most of the big journals. Otherwise, you’re pretty much out of luck. [Warning: PG-13 below the fold]

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David Queller on individuality

Dictyostelium discoideum. Photographed by Usman Bashir (Queller/Strassmann Lab, Washington University in St. Louis). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Dictyostelium discoideum. Photographed by Usman Bashir (Queller/Strassmann Lab, Washington University in St. Louis). CC-BY-SA-4.0 License. Image obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

In the Major Transitions class, the students keep pointing out that the transitions on Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s list come in two flavors with very different properties. Sure, there are some important similarities between multicellular organisms and social insects, but they are quite different from cellular slime molds and the conspiracy of prokaryotes that make up eukaryotes.
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