Unscientific America and those awful atheists

To return to Unscientific America again, I hardly touched on chapter 8, where they express their dismay at those uppity “New Atheists”. I am not going to address his personal criticisms of me — there’s no point, you obviously know I think he’s completely wrong, and the uncharitable will simply claim my disagreement is the result of a personal animus — so instead I’m only going to address a couple of other general points that Mooney and Kirshenbaum get completely wrong. They plainly do not understand the atheist position, and make claims that demonstrate that either they didn’t read any of the “New Atheist’s” books, or perhaps the simple ideas in them are too far beyond their comprehension.

This is a basic one, from philosophy of science 101. There are several different ways to derive a naturalistic position. Mooney and Kirshenbaum sort of get it right, although I disagree with some of the details.

Modern science relies on the systematic collection of data through observation and experimentation, the development of theories to organize and explain this evidence, and the use of professional institutions and norms such as peer review to subject claims to scrutiny and ultimately (it is hoped) develop reliable knowledge. A core principle underlying this approach is something called “methodological naturalism,” which stipulates that scientific hypotheses are tested and explained solely by reference to natural causes and events. Crucially, methodological naturalism is not the same thing as philosophical naturalism—the idea that all of existence consists of natural causes and laws, period. Methodological naturalism in no way rules out the possibility of entities or causes outside of nature; it simply stipulates that they will not be considered within the framework of scientific inquiry.

Following this, he proceeds to damn the “New Atheists” for “collapsing the distinction” between methodological and philosophical naturalism, and argues that Dawkins is taking a philosophical position and misusing science to claim it “entirely precludes God’s existence.”

One big problem: we don’t. Oddly enough, this is one of the most common canards used by theistic critics, that we’re demanding a kind of philosophical absolutism, yet Mooney is an atheist. The “New Atheist” approach is firmly grounded in methodological naturalism; it’s an extremely pragmatic operational approach to epistemology that leads us to reject religious claims. None of us make an absolute declaration of the impossibility of the existence of a deity, either.

One strand of this view is simple empiricism. Science and reason give us antibiotics, microwave ovens, sanitation, lasers, and rocketships to the moon. What has religion done for us lately? We have become accustomed to objective measures of success, where we can explicitly see that a particular strategy for decision-making and the generation of knowledge has concrete results. I’m sorry, but faith seems to produce mainly wrong answers, and in comparison, it flops badly.

Now, now, I can hear the defenders of religion begin to grumble, there’s more to life than merely material products like microwave ovens — there’s contentment and contemplation and a sort of subjective psychology of ritual and community and all that sort of thing. Sure. Fine. Then stick to it, and stop pretending that religion ought to be a determinant of public policy, that it can inform us about the nature of our existence, or that it provides a good guide to public morality. Get it out of our schools and courthouses and workplaces and governments, take it to your homes and your churches, and use it appropriately as your personal consoling mind-game. And stop pretending that it is universal and necessary, because there are a thousand different religions that all claim the same properties with wildly different details, and there are millions of us with no religion at all who get along just fine without your hallowed quirks.

The other strand is reciprocity. We atheists and scientists have ideas that we are expected to explain and support with evidence, and we are accustomed to being jumped on with sadistic vigor if we fail to provide it. We merely apply the same methodological standards to religion. We do not insist a priori that gods cannot exist, we instead turn to all those people who insist that they do, and ask, “how do you know that?”

Would you believe that for all the fervor of their certainty, none of them have ever adequately answered the question?

There is no philosophical or metaphysical certainty on the part of us “New Atheists”, and we have no problem admitting it. Dawkins wrote it down forthrightly in his book when he scores himself as a 6 on a 7-point scale of atheism: “6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not
there.'” It’s genuinely remarkable how many people say they’ve read his book, and then walk away to claim that Dawkins says science “entirely precludes God’s existence.”

I agree entirely with Dawkins’ sentiment. I also turn it around to use an agnostic sentiment on religious interlocuters: “I don’t know for sure, and you don’t either, so why are you being so high-handedly specific in your claims that god was a Jewish carpenter, or his prophet was a polygamist with a flying horse, or that Ragnarok is imminent? Give me a method for evaluating your claims, tell me what rational reason you have to believe that, show me the evidence!” And then they don’t. I’m just supposed to have faith.

It doesn’t even have to be some weirdly specific, quirky bit of historical fiction — even the vague claims fail on epistemological grounds. How often have you been told that “God is love”? How do they know? What does it even mean? It’s just feel-good babble. If it makes you feel good to think it, go ahead…but please, let’s not have this standard of unsubstantiated wishful thinking be regarded as a useful contribution to philosophy, or science, or morality, or poetry, or social cohesiveness, or much of anything other than a trivial activity, like the twiddling of your thumbs that you do in idle moments.

Now notice: Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning, or at least to be unable to share insurance policies? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

But no. The book is silent on the people who directly oppose science politically, culturally, in our classrooms, and on our radio and television. They aren’t the problem, I guess. If only we could clear away the distracting Atheist Noise Machine, train a generation of science journalists to stop bashing religion (as if they do now), and presto, the populace will obligingly stop shaking their angry fists at science and will lie back and accept that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, that the climate is changing and we need to take political action, and oh my yes, gay people can have their civil rights, too.

Oh, wait, I’m over-generalizing. They do say something about those people who believe in talking snakes, angels, and the power of mystic mumblings.

The American scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists—and neither does the stature of science in our culture. We should instead adopt a stance of respect towards those who would hold their faith dear, and a sense of humility based on the knowledge that although science can explain a great deal about the way our world functions, the question of God’s existence lies outside its expertise.

Respect faith. Be humble. Pretend that all those beliefs are unquestionable.

Bull…oh, excuse me. Mooney gets rather pearl-clutchey when strong language is used. I shall restrain myself (and you commenters, too, please: I normally trust you all to cope with adult language without too much concern, but apparently a couple of authors with very delicate sensitivities will be reading this and counting your four-letter words).

Look, the only reason “the question of God’s existence” is in any way outside the domain of science is because it is such an amorphous subject that the believers will always rapidly move its definition beyond testability when pressed. However, they also claim that these deities had major material effects on the world — and most also claim ongoing, direct participation by their favorite god on their personal universe. Those are not beyond the realm of science! If absolute knowledge of this superbeing’s existence is out of our reach, we can at least easily push him/her/it/them back into a fairly tenuous connection with the world, to the point where they are irrelevant.

And if science can’t say a thing about the existence of gods, sweet jebus, Mooney, be consistent and admit that the jabbering, sanctimonious priests can’t either! Why we should respect their fairy-tales and complete lack of humility while you castigate godless science for relying on mere evidence is incomprehensible.

The essence of what Mooney and Kirshenbaum recommend in their book is that science must cut off its own balls, science must wear her corset cinched tight, science must not dissent from the masses, science must be obliging and polite, because that is the only way the public will accept it.

I rudely disagree.

There is nothing condescending about appreciating that almost every human being, even the most god-soaked, has a functional mind and that maybe they can actually learn about science and a scientific way of thinking that makes their myths untenable. There is nothing condescending about being uncompromising in our expectations and trusting that others can hear and think and express their own ideas. There is something deeply condescending about setting aside a big chunk of people’s experience and telling people that they should not question it.

Science is a sublimely human activity and a central part of the best of Western culture…and of every culture on earth that aspires to be something more than a collection of dirt-grubbing subsistence breeders, propagating for the sake of propagating. It’s what gives us the potential to reach beyond making do, that gives us the leisure and freedom to flower in the arts and explore the diversity of human experience. Even institutionalized religion itself is an incidental byproduct of the first clever dicks who thought to reroute the flow of a river to irrigate fields and led to centralization, urbanization, hierarchies of leadership, accounting, writing, and the whole avalanche of change that followed. It’s important. Mooney and Kirshenbaum know this; it’s what their whole book is about.

In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It’s a process carried out by human beings, and it can’t be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn’t rock the boat. Imagine they’d written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn’t challenge the culture; we’d laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don’t get it.

Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan’s great magic trick was that he didn’t make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they’re wrong. Sagan’s great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of “billyuns and billyuns”, but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.

Another example: Feynman. Watch the man, and what is the impression he makes? Absolute joy. He’s laughing at the universe. People love his lectures because he’s cocky and bold and doesn’t hesitate to show you where you’re wrong.

For a less openly abrasive case, how about E.O. Wilson? In his talks, he seems to be a soft-spoken gentleman who’s willing to concede quite a bit of respect to everyone — but read his work, and there’s a steely spine there, too, and if you get him talking about ants, you discover he’s cheerfully obsessive.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s prescription for improving the fate of science in this country is to train young scientists to be more media- and politics-savvy, to build a generation of cautious barometers of the public mood “capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence.” And perhaps we could get more support for the arts if young artists were taught to favor bucolic photo-realism, if poetry was required to be in greeting card meter, and if all music was appropriate to elevators? We’d surely have a new renaissance if the NEA only funded art that a conservative senator would find inoffensive!

I recommend something different. Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn’t hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you’ll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.

Face the fact that some of us (but definitely not all of us) will be so smitten with this wonderful, powerful way of thinking that we’re going to follow our bliss and laugh at the hidebound ritualists who expect us to respect their superstitions, and at the prissy wanna-be moralists who demand bloodless conformity. You will not generate new Sagans by insisting on deference. You will not change a culture with a declining appreciation of science by demanding that scientists respect the beliefs of people who despise science the most. Mooney and Kirshenbaum single out the increasingly vibrant atheist sub-culture as something that needs to be muffled, and that’s symptomatic of the failure of their suggestions: what other ideas should be stifled lest they disturb American complacency? And shouldn’t shaking up that complacency be exactly what scientists do?

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum were right about one thing.

They sent me a copy of their new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), with a strange request: “We hope that like Dr. Coyne, you will suspend judgment until reading the book, at which point we’ll be interested to hear what you think.” I was a bit offended; of course I was going to read it with an open mind. Why would they think it necessary to ask me to do so?

That was before I got to chapters 8 and 9, however, which open with very direct and personal attacks on me and on Pharyngula, atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect. “Oh, that’s why they warned me,” I realized, “it’s like asking the victim of a hatchet job to hold still for a moment so they can get in a good whack.” They definitely did need to request my forbearance, so I wouldn’t just toss their hypocritical and ignorant paean to mealy-mouthedness in the trash right away, which was one perceptive moment on their part. And yes, I freely admit that my opinion of the book is colored by the palpable contempt they hold for me.

But I get ahead of myself. As I said, the discombobulating assault didn’t begin until chapter 8, but the problems I had with the book started much earlier.

In chapter one.

This chapter is completely baffling. They chose to illustrate the serious problem of the disconnect between a science-illiterate public and the science establishment with a strange example: the redesignation of Pluto as a non-planet. This event was accompanied by a public outcry, by people who had some peculiar emotional attachment to the idea that Pluto was the ninth planet, an attachment that was fed by a willing media that found this level of trivia to be about as complex an issue as they could handle. We know that certain topics rouse the public, and often it’s unpredictable what will catch the fancy of the news. But this? This is the opening story on which they build their argument that “consequences of the science-society divide may prove far more damaging”? And what do they propose we should do to resolve the issue?

This is where I am first taken aback. They come down on the side of Pluto being redesignated as a planet! Why, is not clear — they clearly list the scientific reasons why astronomers thought it didn’t merit the title of “planet” — but they talk over and over about “rifts” and “conflicts” and the “danger of being seen as an Adlai Stevenson egghead”. Apparently, the sin of the scientists was a failure to bow before popular opinion, and insufficient attention to the PR consequences of a scientific decision.

Well, Chris and Sheril, what should the astronomers have done? Should they have had a binding referendum delivered to the public to get their say? Are there other scientific matters that should be decided by popular vote? (Let’s put the truth of evolutionary biology up for decision in a poll!) Should scientists take the time to explain with a little wit and humor and sound scientific reasoning why they made that decision? If so, they missed the boat: they should read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s The Pluto Files(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) for exactly that. How about some discussion about exactly why they think that failed?

This chapter was symptomatic of the deficiencies of the whole book. We’re told over and over about how scientists suck at the job of science communication (which is largely true), and that we need more media- and politically-savvy scientists (definitely true), but then…what? Apparently the job of these science diplomats of the future is to bow to the will of the people, and tell the nerds back in the lab what they should be doing. And of course, one of the keys to being a successful media scientist is to show the proper deference and respect to cultural conventions.

Carl Sagan is their hero, and he’s one of mine, too. He’s the model of the scientist who is also both a skilled communicator and an activist, and I would agree entirely that we need more like him. However, they fail to notice the peculiar disjunction in their story: while reciting the wonderful efforts of Sagan and praising his skills and efforts, they’re also telling the story of the dismal state of science education at the same time. Strange…the object of their praise was influencing many of us growing up at that time, those of us who were already enthusiastic about science, but the culture was not improving, and was even getting worse. Is it possible that perhaps the problem does not lie entirely in the minimal PR skills of scientists, but in greater institutional forces at work in our society? The religious right was not glued to their TV sets every night that Cosmos was on, you know. Sagan was preaching to the choir, and there’s nothing wrong with that — it can be a powerful tool for motivating and informing a wider cadre of science communicators.

The book entirely neglects the anti-scientific forces. Our salvation apparently lies entirely in the hands of scientists who quietly promote the positive values of the scientific outlook, while turning their eyes away from deep-rooted values and institutions that directly threaten science. To challenge those would be to offend people! And if we offend anyone, we lose! It’s an exceptionally defeatist attitude in which they plainly recognize a serious problem in American society — it’s the premise of the whole book! — but at the same time, demands that we avoid addressing the structural roots of those problems.

It’s even in the weirdly oblivious conclusion to the whole book.

Science is not merely culture’s “essential component”, and we don’t just have to mend the rift between science and culture: We have to create a perfect union. Science itself must become the common culture.

I can agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment…but how, exactly, are we to accomplish it without challenging anti-scientific attitudes? Like the Pluto incident, what Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to want is that science conform itself to that common culture, that somehow science will accommodate itself to the popular will, and everyone will be happy. They lack the realization that what they’re actually proposing is a rather radical change in cultural values, and that that will not come without some pain and conflict.

Another blind spot is present throughout the book, but particularly in the chapters where they excoriate the “New Atheists”. They regard Dawkins with considerable distaste (but at least they spare him the outright contempt they give to me!), and at the same time they bemoan the lack of great science communicators since we lost Sagan. Wait, what? Are they aware at all that Dawkins is an excellent and popular writer, that he has sold millions of books and has made a number of documentaries? That he’s taken good advantage of the web? I’d be curious to know who has sold more books, Dawkins or Sagan, but if I had to bet on one it would be Dawkins. He has critics and even enemies, including Mooney and Kirshenbaum, but that’s irrelevant — they know that Sagan was also strenuously vilified by critics on the Right and among the religious, as well, yet somehow that opposition is regarded as the defining element of Dawkins’ popularity, yet is overlooked in the case of Sagan. Scientists will always be delivering hard truths; if our hypothetical desired media-savvy science communicator cannot make anyone uncomfortable, then he or she is a failure at science.

And then there’s this exasperating nonsense, in which Mooney and Kirshenbaum are discussing how to get science into the popular media.

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot. [emphasis mine]

What Mooney and Kirshenbaum fail to grasp is that to a scientist, factual accuracy must be paramount; it is not a matter on which we can compromise. Further, what they fail to recognize, and what they excuse for Hollywood, as that accuracy does not have to compromise narrative, drama, and character! They berate Dawkins as if he has no awareness of the basics of what makes a good story, which makes me wonder if they’ve read any of his books at all — do they think he simply drily recites a body of abstract thoughts at the reader? Perhaps they should take a look at The Ancestor’s Tale(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to discover that he actually has addressed this imaginary deficit.

The bottom line is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book recites the obvious at us, that there is a fundamental disconnect between science and the popular imagination in our country, but offers no new solutions, and in fact would like to narrow our options to a blithe and accommodating compromise of science with rampant ignorance. Their own bigotry blinds them to a range of approaches offered by the “New Atheists”…a group that is not so closed to the wide range of necessarily differing tactics that such a deep problem requires as Mooney and Kirshenbaum are. It’s not a badly written book, but it’s something worse: it’s utterly useless.

For dedicated bibliophiles only

What a deal. For only 99¢, you can get an abridged version of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; you can tell it’s been abridged because the title has been reduced to Origin of Species. It’s also special because it contains a 50 page introduction by Ray Comfort, which tells you everything that the creationists are sure is wrong about the rest of the book. It’s like a book with multiple personality disorder — two parts that absolutely hate each other, an intro that is the inane product of one of the most stupid minds of our century, and a science text that is the product of one of the greatest minds of the author’s century.

But wait! For only $3.99, you can also get a copy of The Charles Darwin Bible, which is the only Bible in existence to mention DNA, the Cambrian, mutations, peppered moths, etc. And it includes “In-text study notes written specifically for atheists”! Unfortunately, Charles Darwin had nothing at all to do with this Bible; it’s actually the product of Answers in Genesis.

I’m tempted to get copies of each. They look like beautiful examples of creationist “thought”.

Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution

When I was growing up, I had no introduction to evolutionary theory. Sure, I assumed it was true, and I went through the usual long phase of dinosaur fandom, but I was never taught anything at all about evolution throughout my grade school education, and what little I did know was largely stamp-collecting. That all changed, though, when I went off to college.

I can’t credit the schools I went to, unfortunately: most of my undergraduate education (with a few wonderful exceptions) was the usual mega-survey course, where the instructor stuck a funnel in our heads and poured in facts for a term — so more stamp-collecting. What happened to me, though, was that I was struck by two thunderbolts at almost the same time. The hot science book that was published during my freshman year was E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, and I bought it and devoured it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was more buckets of facts, but in this case, these facts were deployed to illuminate an overarching idea about how the world works…and I found it wonderful.

The second thunderbolt was Stephen Jay Gould. He was doing the same thing, promoting ideas powerfully with evidence and rhetoric, and he was far easier to read than Wilson, and communicated even more clearly. It was also wonderful.

Of course, if you know anything about the intellectual landscape of the 1970s, you know that I had acquired as two scientific god-parents two warring camps who were hellbent against one another in a period of angry evolutionary ferment. I am the product of a broken home! It was especially tragic, because in my naiveté, I thought most of the conflict was a waste, that each side had an important perspective, and that the right answer was an appreciation of the power of selection and an understanding of the other modes of change operating over history.

I’ve long been interested in the battle royale that went on in that period — it’s like a child’s morbid dwelling on the scab of an ugly parental divorce — and in particular with that central figure, Steve Gould. Last week I was sent a copy of a book by David F. Prindle, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), so of course I had to read it.

[Read more…]

Life Ascending

I admit, I was initially put off by the mere title of Nick Lane’s new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I’m one of those many biologists who is adamant about the absence of direction in evolutionary history, and ascending just sounds too much like life climbing the rungs of the ladder of life, so I picked it up in a somewhat prejudicial mood.

Have no fear, though, I was won over. Right at the beginning, he admits that it is a subjective list; his criteria for including the ten chosen evolutionary innovations are that it had to revolutionize the living world, that it was important to a significant subset of life today, that it was a product of biological (not cultural) evolution, and that it had to be iconic — it had to symbolic and arrestingly interesting to human beings. That’s fair enough; one could write a book on just the evolved properties of prokaryotes, but yeah, operons and chemical sensing and secretion and motility are of vast importance, but they’re only going to be iconic to a rather restricted set of readers. And since my own personal interests run more to metazoan innovations, I’m not going to complain about a book that gives my hobby horses a more substantial run.

Even better, though, what enlivens the book is the biochemist’s perspective: Lane isn’t so much interested in the superficial matters of morphology, but in the emergence of new properties in the molecular machinery of the cell, and how it affects the world around us. Somehow, it always thrills me when we drill down right to the interactions of molecules to explain how biology works.

So here are the ten evolutionary inventions Lane describes.

  1. Origins of life: Where and how did life arise? A review of some of the models for abiogenesis.

  2. DNA: What conditions would allow for the synthesis of nucleotides? Where did the genetic code come from?

  3. Photosynthesis: The photosynthetic pathway is a combination of two very different functional pathways — what does this tell us about their evolution?

  4. Complex cells: How did cells become more complex? A chapter on horizontal transfer and endosymbiosis — borrowing and stealing and kidnaping by ancient cells.

  5. Sex: Why do we have sexual reproduction? A question that focuses on the cytological and genetic machinery.

  6. Movement: How do organisms get around? Cytoskeletons and motor proteins, and where they came from.

  7. Sight: How did vision evolve? A fairly wide-ranging discussion of opsins and crystallins and Hox genes and the weird glow of black smokers.

  8. Hot blood: Another chapter with a little taste of everything: respiration, metabolism, insulation, and how a key feature of our physiology affects everything.

  9. Consciousness: Where did our awareness come from? You won’t be surprised to learn that Lane is a materialist — the answer lies in the wiring of the brain.

  10. Death: Why do all organisms die, and why do we even have genes that contribute to senescence and death?

So the topics aren’t that biased: only three exclusive to multicellular animals, and six that are about eukaryotes almost exclusively — and even in those our prokaryotic heritage is discussed. And really, when you’re talking about genes and biochemistry, you can’t get away from the fact that you are dealing with genuinely universal processes.

The book is also a fun read, deep enough to give you some substance, yet clearly written with the general public in mind. If you aren’t a biologist or biochemist, don’t shy away — you will be able to read this book, and you will learn a lot from it. When I was reading it, I was thinking this would be a really enjoyable text to build a freshman seminar course around. The chapters are readable and each one addresses an interesting topic in biology, bringing up both current research and pending questions, and it’s meaty enough to spark some good discussions.

How to build a dinosaur

I’ve been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market.

It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that’s part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of short stories, and you’ll get into the groove.

The first part is about Horner’s life in Montana, the Hell Creek formation, and dinosaur collecting. Hand this to any kid and get him hooked on paleontology for life; I recall reading every book I could get my hands on that talked about Roy Chapman Andrews as a young’un, and it permanently twisted me…in a good way. This will have the same effect, and many people will think about heading out to Garfield County for a little dusty adventure. I know I am — all that stands in my way is South Dakota.

A good chunk of the book is about molecules and how they show the relatedness of dinosaurs to birds, and to the work of Horner’s former student, Mary Schweitzer, who discovered soft tissue in T. rex bones. Horner presents a good overview of the subject, but is also appropriately cautious. You’ll get a good feel for the difficulty of finding this material, and for interpreting it; he clearly believes that these are scraps of real T. rex tissue, but how intact it is, what kinds of changes have occurred in it, and how much information will be extractable from these rare bits of preserved collagen (or whatever) is left an open question.

Finally, the subject of the title…Horner was an advisor to the Jurassic Park movies, and right away he dismisses the idea of extracting 65 million year old DNA in enough quantity to reconstitute a dinosaur as clearly nothing but a fantasy. That’s simply not how it can be done. But he does have a grand, long-term plan for recreating a dinosaur.

What is it? Why, it’s developmental biology, of course. Development is the answer to everything.

Here’s his vision, and I found it believable and captivating: start with a modern dinosaur, a chicken, figure out the developmental pathways that make it different from an ancient dinosaur, and tweak them back to the ancestral condition. For instance, birds have lost the long bony tail of their ancestors, reducing it to a little stump called a pygostyle. In the embryo, they start to make a long tail, but then developmental switches put a kink in it and reduce it to a stub. If we could only figure out what specific molecules are signaling the tissue to take this modern reducing path and switch them off, then maybe we could produce a generation of chickens with the long noble tails of a velociraptor.

My first thought was skepticism — it can’t be that easy. There may be a simple network of genes that regulate this one early decision to form a pygostyle from a tail, but there have been tens of millions of years of adaptation by other genes to the modern condition; we’re dealing with a large network of interlinked genes here, and unraveling one step in development doesn’t mean that subsequent steps are still competent to respond in the ancient pattern. But then, thinking about it a little more, one of the properties of the genome is its plasticity and ability to respond in a coherent, integrated way to changes in one part of a gene network. That capacity might mean you could reconstitute a tail.

And then, once you’ve got a tailed chicken, you could work on adding teeth to the jaws. And foreclaws. And while you’re at it, find the little genomic slider that controls body size, and turn it up to 11. What he’s proposing is a step-by-step analysis of chicken-vs.-dinosaur decisions in the developmental pathways, and inserting intentional atavisms into them. This is all incredibly ambitious, and it might not work…but the only way to find out is try. I like that in a scientist. Turning a chicken into a T. rex is a true Mad Scientist project, and one that I must applaud.

One reservation I have about this section of the book is that too much time is spent dwelling over ethical concerns. Need I mention that real Mad Scientists do not fret over the footling trivia of the Institutional Review Board? These are chicken embryos, animals that your average member of the taxpaying public finds so inconsequential that they will pay to have them homogenized into spongy-textured slabs of yellow protein to be slapped onto their McMuffin. Please, people, get some perspective.

As for respecting the chickens themselves, what can be grander and more respectful than this project? I would whisper to my chickens, “With these experiments, I will take your children’s children’s children, and give them great ripping claws like scythes, and razor-sharp serrate fangs like daggers, and I will turn them into multi-story towers of muscle and bone that will be able to trample KFC restaurants as if they were matchboxes.” And their eyes would light up with a feral gleam of primeval ambition, and they would offer me their ovaries willingly. I’d be doing the chickens a favor. Maybe some chicken farmers would have cause to be fearful, but I wouldn’t be working on their embryos, so let them tremble.

Oh, all right. Horner is taking the responsible path and putting some serious thought into the ethics of this kind of experiment, which is the right thing to do. It’s also the kind of project that will generate serious and useful information about developmental networks, even if it fails in its ultimate aim.

But I have a dream, too. Of a day when biotechnology is ubiquitous, and middle-class kids everywhere will have a cheap DNA sequencer and synthesizer in their garages, and a freezer with handy vectors and enzymes for directed insertional mutagenesis. And one day, Mom will come home with a box of fresh guaranteed organic free range chicken eggs, and Junior’s eyes will glitter with a germ of a cunning plan, fed by a little book he found in the library…and 30-foot-tall fanged chickens will triumphantly stride the cul-de-sacs of suburbia, and the roar of the dinosaur will be heard once again.

Idiot America, new and expanded

Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Pierce then goes through several sublime instances of American Idiocy: the Creation “Museum”, the Terry Schiavo case, the Dover creationism trial, the War on Terror, right-wing talk radio, climate change denialists, the Republican roster of candidates in the last presidential election…it’s terrifying and humbling that this country has so excelled at churning out such appalling stupidity. And, of course, he points out everywhere how our journalists simply gaze on approvingly, churning the chum and making money out of mindlessness. He uses one of my favorite (for a version of “favorite” flavored with schadenfreude) examples, the way the NY Times covered creationism and evolution, and especially that willing palimpsest, Jodi Wilgoren. Wilgoren, by the way, has since been promoted at the Times — I think for vacuity above and beyond the call of duty.

Lest you think Pierce is doing nothing but delivering a thunderation of his own, he also often reveals a fondness for the quirkiness of cranks and kooks — he clearly thinks they spice up American intellectual life. He even starts his book with the tale of a famous local kook, Ignatius Donnelly, a 19th century visionary who founded a utopian city on the banks of the Mississippi…a dream that failed dismally, after which he turned to writing bestsellers about Atlantis and Velikovskian (although he long preceded that crank) cometary catastrophes. He was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, and most importantly, there was little risk that he could rise to run the country as president.

That’s the heart of the problem. Wild, loony ideas aren’t dangerous in themselves — what’s dangerous is when criticism is set aside and wacky ideas are given unquestioning acceptance and allowed to set the national agenda. It changes the dynamic: no longer do kooks have to work to get their voices heard, but the more insane their claims, the more likely they will be given media attention, promoted and passed around, given the imprimatur of authenticity because, well, Larry King featured them on his show.

What has America become? America has become an episode of The Office, where lovable assholes are put in charge to fumble their way along incompetently, coasting on the slack, disinterested efforts of their underlings. The show is a comedy, and it can be hilarious, in part because there is some stinging truth to it.

You won’t laugh very much at Idiot America, though. It’s too real.

The Eagleton Delusion

The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O’Hehir of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I’ve read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words “brisk, funny and challenging” or “witty” never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O’Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn’t read Eagleton’s book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and plainly.

So I was in New York the other day, and was offered a copy of Eagleton’s book, and took the first step in my imminent doom by accepting it. Then I tried to fly home on Saturday, one of those flights that was plagued with mechanical errors that caused delays and long stretches locked in a tin can, and also flights that were packed tightly with travelers…so crammed with people that they actually took my computer and book bag away from me to pack in the cargo hold, and I had to quickly snatch something to read before the baggage handlers took it away. I grabbed the Eagleton book. Thus was my fate sealed.

I was trapped in a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but Eagleton and the Sky Mall catalog.

This is an account of my day of misery.

[Read more…]

John Holbo makes a discovery

And it’s gorgeous. Holbo has found a set of scans from a 1972 biology textbook (and an associated blog) that will blow your mind, baby. Here are some eukaryotic cells.

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I think this is a very trippy metaphor for the synapse.

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I like it. It’s got style. I’m going to have to cruise some used bookstores to see if I can find a copy of Biology Today. If nothing else, I can imagine using some of those illustrations for talks…I’m also going to have to get a polyester suit with very wide lapels and a paisley print shirt, let my hair grow out, and shave the beard, but keep the mustache. Oh, I remember the 60s and 70s!

Sausages being made

The horror…if you’re at all squeamish, you may not want to read this article by an editor at a textbook publisher on how public school textbooks are made. If you’re curious about why Texas has such an absurd weight in the world of textbooks, though, it will explain all.

It’s a system that needs to be fixed. The article has some interesting suggestions, too, although the plan — more modularity and flexibility in curriculum materials, and a move away from reliance the massive all-in-one tome — also has potential for abuse. (I’m picturing the creationists producing little, slim ‘supplemental’ pamphlets for the schoolroom, and getting them approved by school boards. We also need some standards on what is not acceptable in the class.)

(via Nic)