Good TV

I must thank the reader known to me only as CAC for sending me DVDs of the Inside Nature’s Giants programs. I’ve been enjoying the dissections of an elephant and a whale in the evening — most of the organisms I cut into are millimeters long and require very sharp, thin instruments, so it’s interesting to see ones that require hip waders and backhoes.

You should all lobby your local PBS stations and tell them these would be wonderful additions to the lineup! You might also suggest that broadcasting them during the dinner hour might not be recommended.

Any 5 year olds want to explain the problem to the Discovery Institute?

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting ridiculous.

Here, I have to help them out.

Date

Jefferson

Darwin

1743

 born

–

1776

 Writes the Declaration of Independence

–

1809

Ends his term as President of the US

born

1823

Writes the quote Stephen Meyer will find so appealing:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.

 14 years old.
1826

Dies.

 Darwin is a student at the University of Edinburgh.

1831

Dead.

Voyage of the Beagle

1859

Still dead.

Publishes the Origin.

1882

Still very dead.

Darwin dies, too.

They do overlap a bit in time, but Jefferson was 33 years in the grave before Darwin got around to explaining how we don’t need a designer to explain the living universe. I rather suspect that no ship was dispatched from Virginia to Shropshire to get young Charlie Darwin’s rebuttal of the 1823 claim, either. It’s even less likely that Jefferson’s zombie rose up in 1859 to take a quick gander at these new ideas spreading through biology and decided, nah, he likes intelligent design better.

I could be wrong. Maybe the Biologic Institute has been holding seances and has received Jefferson’s imprimatur — I wouldn’t put it past them. Otherwise, though, Meyer is making a ludicrously stupid argument.

By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson’s revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.

Blake is even more succinct.

What caused the Cambrian explosion? MicroRNA!

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No, not really — my title is a bit of a sensationalistic exploitation of the thesis of a paper by Peterson, Dietrich, and McPeek, but I can buy into their idea that microRNAs (miRNAs) may have contributed to the pattern of metazoan phylogenies we see now. It’s actually a thought-provoking concept, especially to someone who favors the evo-devo view of animal evolution. And actually, the question it answers is why we haven’t had thousands of Cambrian explosions.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, miRNAs are a hot topic in molecular genetics: they are short (21-23 nucleotides) pieces of single stranded RNA that are not translated into protein, but have their effect by binding to other strands of messenger RNA (mRNA) to which they complement, effectively down-regulating expression of that messenger. They play an important role in regulating the levels of expression of other genes.

One role for miRNAs seems to be to act as a kind of biological buffer, working to limit the range of effective message that can be operating in the cell at any one time. Some experiments that have knocked out specific miRNAs have had a very interesting effect: the range of expressed phenotypes for the targeted message gene increases. The presence or absence of miRNA doesn’t actually generate a novel phenotype, it simply fine-tunes what other genes do — and without miRNA, some genes become sloppy in their expression.

This talk of buffering expression immediately swivels a developmental biologist’s mind to another term: canalization. Canalization is a process that leads organisms to produce similar phenotypes despite variations in genotype or the environment (within limits, of course). Development is a fairly robust process that overcomes genetic variations and external events to yield a moderately consistent outcome — I can raise fish embryos at 20°C or at 30°C, and despite differences in the overall rate of growth, the resultant adult fish are indistinguishable. This is also true of populations in evolution: stasis is the norm, morphologies don’t swing too widely generation after generation, but still, we can get some rapid (geologically speaking) shifts, as if forms are switching between a couple of stable nodes of attraction.

Where the Cambrian comes into this is that it is the greatest example of a flowering of new forms, which then all began diverging down different evolutionary tracks. The curious thing isn’t their appearance — there is evidence of a diversity of forms before the Cambrian, bacteria had been flourishing for a few billion years, etc., and what happened 500 million years ago is that the forms became visible in the fossil record with the evolution of hard body parts — but that these phyla established body plans that they were then locked into, to varying degrees, right up to the modern day. What the authors are proposing is that miRNAs might be part of the explanation for why these lineages were subsequently channeled into discrete morphological pathways, each distinct from the other as chordates and arthropods and echinoderms and molluscs.

[Read more…]

Open thread for general revilement

I’ve just seen Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s latest eruption of petulance, and I also see that people are commenting away in various threads here. I really can’t get to it until later, and I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about addressing such a flaccid blubbery bit of self-pity anyway, so let this thread be the central place for teeth-gnashing, fulminations, denunciations, or defenses. Or if you’ve got anything else interesting to say, feel free to announce it.

You’re also supposed to read this, which should cover most of the scatological expressions of outrage.

The Disco Institute has a new hack

And following the lead of all past hires by that eminent institute of advanced ideology, Ann Gauger doesn’t understand biology or logic. She does have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, but it just goes to show that having a degree doesn’t mean you necessarily understand science. I will look forward to further examples of poor reasoning from yet another incompetent in Seattle.

By the way, she also hails from my old hometown of Kent, Washington…a completely meaningless coincidence that still manages to embarrass me.

Unscientific America: still useless

Mooney is at it again, scrabbling madly to refute my criticisms. It’s another ho-hum effort.

He claims he did spend some effort criticizing the overt anti-science forces in our country — only it was in his previous book, not this one. No, that doesn’t rebut me at all: in a book that purports to be discussing problems and solutions to the science and society divide, there ought to be some effort made to prioritizing the issues, even if it means revisiting points made in other books. Unfortunately, the message here is that we have three problems: the bumbling scientists who don’t know how to communicate, and the malicious atheists, who are hurting the cause of science education, and the sell-out media. You don’t just get to pretend that your readers have all read your other books.

He then compounds the problem by answering my accusation that he did not deal with the root causes of the problem by simply saying “did too”. Maybe he doesn’t think religion is as serious a problem as I do…but judging this book by its content, he apparently doesn’t think it has anything to do with the unusual American disregard for science.

Further handwaving ensues in his defense of the media. Apparently, his own words that label factual accuracy as “mere”, is taken out of context — which he justifies by pointing out a comment by Dawkins that the natural world is fascinating, and doesn’t need human drama. As I said before, accuracy is not the enemy of drama, so this is a silly and pointless argument. Sure, make fun, entertaining, exciting movies. They just don’t need to be imbecilic to be good.

Ah, but the real kicker here, the one that clearly is annoying Mooney most, is my accusation of uselessness against his book, that it offers no solutions at all. He says there are, there are! He says it several times, in several ways!

There are solutions in each chapter of the main body of the book, broken down by sector-politics, media, entertainment, religion. And then there is the grand solution in Chapter 10-which emerged from our collaboration, and which we don’t think either of us would have come up with on our own. So far as we know, it really is new in its particular way of analyzing the academic pipeline and finding, in it, a solution to our problems at the science-society interface.

Alas, if you read his rebuttal, he won’t actually tell you what those solutions, or even that Grand Solution, are. It’s very strange; it’s as if he’s afraid that if he even briefly summarizes what his proposals are, you won’t need to buy his book, so they’ve got to be kept secret. His book is apparently like an M. Night Shyamalan movie — if you’re told what the little twist is before you go to see it, all you’ve got left is a rather slow moving, boring story that is plodding tediously towards the big reveal. Come on, grow up. If it’s a substantial idea, it’s the explanation and the details that make your book worth reading, not the one-liner gloss on your solution. You can give it away, it really won’t hurt your book sales. And if it does, that suggests right there that you aren’t offering much.

Well, I’m going to do it. I’m going to spill the beans. I am going to give you the Grand Solution that Mooney and Kirshenbaum present in chapter 10, the one that is so new that neither of them could have come up with it on their own.

Here it is. Ready?

Here’s a summary of chapter 10: seven pages laying out the many problems that face people who want to pursue a career in science, from uninspiring teachers in grade school to the fierce competition for university positions. All true, of course, nothing at all novel here. What is their solution, presented in the final three pages? Create more well-rounded scientists, more Renaissance scientists, more scientists with specific training in communications skills, so that when they don’t manage to land that academic position, they’re still prepared to go out into society and act as ambassadors for science.

Really, that’s it. All of it. That’s their solution.

How nice.

I’m all for it. I teach at a small liberal arts college, and there’s absolutely nothing new at all in the sentiment expressed by Mooney and Kirshenbaum. It’s actually something of a letdown and rather dismaying that they think it “really is new in its particular way of analyzing the academic pipeline”. Excuse me for being thoroughly un-dazzled, but I think they could have talked to any of a few hundred thousand academics and they would have told them the same thing.

It’s also a little insulting.

You know, the majority of my cohort that entered graduate school with me are not currently employed in academic positions. Mooney and Kirshenbaum know this, they outlined the general state of affairs in the first 7/10ths of this chapter. Yet, somehow, they aren’t sitting around panhandling for Thunderbird money down at the bus station — they are gainfully employed, and they are already smart, well-educated people with considerable depth and breadth to their knowledge and marketable skills, and no, none of them (as far as I know) are now anti-science cranks out there fighting the system. They already are ambassadors for science in our culture. They vote for pro-science candidates, they support public schools, and some of them even have jobs in government, industry, and communications where they are working in their own way to better the country…and many of them are certainly more effective at what they do than I am.

It’s very strange. Mooney and Kirshenbaum say their “solution” will “alleviate pressure by opening new pathways for pent-up scientific talent to filter out into society.” I had no idea that post-docs and graduate students who left the academic track were “pent-up” somewhere! I do hope someone lets them out of their cage soon.

Now there really is a problem, that all of you readers who have gone through grad school know. There is a lot of social pressure that is piled up on you to reinforce the notion of a hierarchy of science careers. The very topmost rung is the research professor at a Research I university, getting big grants and running a big lab with a team of grad students and post-docs; anything less is regarded as something of a failure. It can make it very hard to move on to something like these Renaissance jobs Mooney and Kirshenbaum want to promote. You can also see that same attitude resounding throughout the comment threads on their own site, where being, for instance, a teaching professor at a small liberal arts college or, oh no, a mere popularizer of science are the marks of a lesser being.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful if science students could also value the noble profession of teaching, or think that communicating well was a most excellent and useful skill that they could acquire by writing and speaking throughout graduate school. Or if they felt empowered to use their knowledge for public outreach in film-making, or in working as an activist for environmental causes, or finding a job in the pharmaceutical industry that would help establish new medicines. I know I felt that way, as did enough of my peers who went on to such professions. However, nothing in their book explains how to make such an attitude occur more frequently, or even why we should expect a major change in the culture if something that is already happening, Ph.D. students finding work outside of academia narrowly defined, should continue to happen.

So, bottom line, still useless. The fact that Mooney seems so determined to hide his Grand Solution from public attention testifies to the fact that he’s offering some mighty thin gruel in his book.

Oh, but I should mention where Mooney shines, just to be fair. He’s written a rather shallow book with negligible substance, but he has managed to get articles in Salon that tells us we need to “figure out where the real blocks to accepting science are” (but fails to tell us what they are) and another in Newsweek that claims that atheists are “hurting their own cause”. Perhaps self-promotion ought to be high on the list of their proposed Renaissance curriculum.

I find it appropriate to read about this on Fox News

The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.

It’s kind of sweet, in a morbid way. It recycles! It uses renewable energy! Put a gun on it, and it could even harvest its own fuel as it mows its way through the enemy’s cities!

To be perfectly fair, though, the company building it doesn’t talk about using bodies for energy, but is more about generic biomass. Bodies are probably messy and inefficient compared to hunks of wood or corn stubble. It’s Fox News that emphasized the corpse-eating idea, which somehow seems like just the kind of thing Fox would find copacetic.