Evolution in 5 minutes

OK, it’s cute and catchy, but it’s also got a very awkward sudden jump from the mammal-like reptiles to the primates, and unfortunately it perpetuates the “evolution as a process on rails” concept by showing a single lineage — ours, of course. Why not show a progression to a modern rose, or a fly, or a fish? Or better yet, illustrate evolution as an ongoing explosion of diversity? I know, I know, it isn’t as engrossing to self-centered humans, the market for this sort of thing.

Coyne is on the Loom

We had Neil Shubin here last week, and now Jerry Coyne is guest-blogging at The Loom. I look forward to the day that I can just sit back and invite prominent scientists to do my work for me here.

Although, I have to say that while Coyne is largely correct, he’s being a bit unfair. He’s addressing Olivia Judson’s recent article on “hopeful monsters”, a concept Coyne and the majority of the biological community reject. I reject it, too, but I think there are some legitimate issues that are associated with the idea that are also all too often and unfortunately discarded.

One point that Coyne handles well: there is a disconnect between the magnitude of genotypic changes and phenotypic effects — a single point mutation can cause amazing morphological changes. As Coyne points out, though, although this can happen, it’s not likely to be a major force in evolutionary change. Dramatic, single-step phenotypic effects are the kinds of things that geneticists select for, but they are also exactly the kinds of things that nature selects against. Evolution is much more likely to sidle up towards a major change by successive smaller steps, since those small changes are less likely to be accompanied by major deleterious side effects. Also, phenotypic outcomes of development should be robust to be advantageous, which typically means that there are many regulatory events cooperating to produce them — and they are therefore buffered by multiple controls.

But please, let’s not always dismiss Richard Goldschmidt when discussing “hopeful monsters”. It really wasn’t that awful an idea. Goldschmidt worked on stable variations in organisms: he studied sex differences (ever noticed that males and females have pretty much the same genes, but different phenotypes?) and metamorphosis (similarly, an organism builds two or more very different morphologies with exactly the same genome). He postulated that there could be specific, well-structured, stable nodes of patterns of gene expression — genes weren’t generally fluid, but tended to lock in to particular states. If he were writing today, he’d probably be bringing up the notion of attractors in chaos theory; the ideas are very similar. In that context, he was proposing a worthy concept that should have been taken more seriously than it was — Mayr’s hatchet job was particularly awful.

The “hopeful monster” concept was not shot down by the synthesis — it was ignored. I think it’s been dismantled by developmental biology, though; what we’ve learned is that the stable morphological types we see in a single species are not simply fortunate stable nodes in a nucleus that can be tuned in different ways, but that each are the product of many generations of slow sculpting by the processes of evolution, and that they are riddled with clumsy kluges that aren’t the outcome of some elegant global pattern switching mechanism, but of a long history of small tweaks.

Now also, Coyne is no fan of evo-devo, and he briefly voices the suggestion that the evolutionary developmental biologists are among the sources of this idea that saltational changes lead to sudden, drastic changes in body plans … but I’m just not seeing that. I am seeing work, for instance, that suggests that Hox duplications have been part of the process of producing additions to body plans, but it’s not a case of “poof, arthropods gain a metathorax in one change” — it’s been quite conventional. It’s more like “poof, arthropods gain an extra Hox gene, which initially adds redundancy and is later shaped by evolutionary processes that confer additional specializations on a segment,” quite ordinary stuff that shouldn’t be at all objectionable to Coyne.

It’s especially peculiar to pin the “hopeful monster” concept on evo-devo, when the one evo-devo expert he quotes, the biologist Sean Carroll, explicitly points out that evo-devo doesn’t support it.

Coyne is also going to be speaking at an evo-devo symposium I’ll be attending in April — I’m going to be very interested to hear what he has to say.

Guest post by Neil Shubin: preparing for TV

I thought it might be useful for the readers of Pharyngula to get my sense of the Colbert show experience.

Being a scientist on the show carries with it some challenges. We need to convey facts of science correctly and do so in a way reveals how fun our science is to do and to think about. We need to educate, enlighten, and excite. The challenge is we need to do this in 5 minutes with Stephen Colbert sitting across the table. To make matters worse, the show does not tell you the tack Colbert is going to take in advance, largely because so much of what he does is ad lib.

Because of this, I was terrified when I received the invitation last Fri. I took a few hours to accept, largely because I needed a family conference on the strike. Once I came to terms with my decision (the readers do a good in the commentary on the various issues that swirled for us), I began to prepare for the interview.

How did I prepare for the Colbert interview? In watching successful science interviews (of which there are a number of real good examples to emulate) I saw some general patterns to a successful visit. It also definitely appears that Colbert likes scientists and he want them to be able to tell their story.

The best answers I saw responded to Colbert’s questions with a sentence that captured the essence of the science in an entertaining way. So, the day of my interview I came up with a number such answers for the questions I thought I’d get. For the most part, I prepared with answers defending evolution vs. other non-scientific approaches.

I was pretty nervous before the interview, so much so that I didn’t sleep much the night before. And, as it turned out, my predictions about Colbert’s questions were largely wrong– Colbert didn’t even touch creationism and did a number of riffs on things that weren’t even in the book (like the final questions). I was aided, though, by the experience of preparing my answers. It exercised my brain in a way that allowed me to respond to the questions he really asked.

In thinking about the experience a few days later I have one thought on language. As scientists we are very used to using language with a great deal of precision (note the string in the commentary on common ancestry, group inclusion, etc.). The challenge is adapting our highly precise vocabulary to the demands of a five minute performance on a show which is fundamentally not about science. It is a tough tightrope to walk to balance between language that is both engaging and precise. I had mixed success, but that has to be our aspiration for these kinds of experiences.

You can ask the question, a valid one, why bother with these kinds shows? If it is so difficult, and the conceptual and linguistic apparatus of science doesn’t easily conform to this venue, why do it? For me the answer is that we need to make science part of the public conversation. We live in a society where Britany Spears latest foible gets more ink than Mello and Fire’s 2006 Nobel discovery of RNAi– a breakthrough on a little worm that will likely lead to treatments of many diseases. Something is wrong here.

Thanks for your comments and criticisms and I hope my personal experience gives some perspective.

Neil Shubin

Where do the hagfish fit in?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Hagfish are wonderful, beautiful, interesting animals. They are particularly attractive to evolutionary biologists because they have some very suggestive features that look primitive: they have no jaws, and they have no pectoral girdle or paired pectoral fins. They have very poorly developed eyes, no epiphysis, and only one semicircular canal; lampreys, while also lacking jaws, at least have good eyes and two semicircular canals. How hagfish fit into the evolutionary tree is still an open question, however.

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The Minnesota Science Standards are due for review

This is the time — you can give feedback on the Minnesota science standards, and you can also apply to be on the standards writing committee. Here’s where you have a chance to make a difference.

The Minnesota Department of Education is now soliciting feedback from the public on the current Science Standards via an online survey. The survey will be open until February 21, 2008.

First, review the current Science Standards on the Science Standards Web page.

Then take the Science Standards online survey.

Applications are also being accepted for individuals interested in serving on the Science Standards Revision Committee. Before applying to the committee, please read the Assumptions and the Timeline documents posted on the MDE Science Standards Web page. Serving on the committee means a commitment of at least one meeting a month, from March 2008 through February 2009. The initial 2-day meeting is scheduled for March 4-5, 2008, and is required of all committee members. Applicants who are selected for the committee will be notified on or before February 21, 2008. (Applications accepted January 8-21, 2008.)

First, read the Assumptions and the Timeline documents posted on the Science Standards Web page.

Then, apply for the Science Standards Committee.

If you have questions about the Science Standards or the revision process, please contact Clark Erickson, State Science Education Specialist, at 651-582-8753.

Please share this information with your district and school staff, particularly teachers or administrators involved in science education.

If you understand the science and want to contribute to the next set of standards for the state of Minnesota, get to work. Remember, the current standards were written under the malignant influence of Cheri Yecke, and they’re good given the difficulty of the conditions, thanks to the hard work of the previous committee. We can make these standards a shining example for the rest of the country this time.

Mixed messages from the NAS

The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We’ve used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary for free. If you teach high school biology or have kids in high school, grab that: it’s an outline of what every educated adult ought to understand about evolution.

However, it does play the bland game of religious appeasement to a small degree, and although it is only a short part of the book, it’s a blemish that would have been better left out. The NY Times review plays up the religion-and-science-are compatible angle, unfortunately; as you might expect, Greg Laden doesn’t sound impressed and Larry Moran doesn’t fall for it. I don’t either. It’s not enough to dissuade me from urging more people to read the book, since it really is an inconsequential dollop of pablum tossed on top of some good science, but I have to say that it really looks stupid in there.

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All chance, no purpose

That friend to the Discovery Institute and creationist advisor to the Vatican, Cardinal Schönborn, has a new book out, titled Chance or Purpose?. I haven’t read it, but Michael Behe has, and Zeno finds a particularly delicious Behe blurb:

Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose, and scientists who do so are outside of their authority. In Chance or Purpose? Cardinal Schöborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.

Why should science be incapable of addressing the questions of an ultimate purpose? I hear this all the time: science can’t give us meaning, science can’t explain love, science can’t do this or that. It’s usually said by some clueless git who has his own ideological axe to grind, and wants everyone to line up in support of his or her own dictated decrees about the truth, which are usually obtained by revelation (i.e., whim) or dogma, and which are challenged by a process that actually tries to examine reality in search of a truth. And those ideologies, such as Catholicism, have no legitimate claim for better understanding than any other traditional nonsense.

I say otherwise. We have no other, better tool. If we’re going to discover an ultimate purpose, it will be through the process of studying our universe — through science. The only thing these putative other ways of knowing affect our reach is by impeding us.

As Zeno notes, Behe’s quote is beautifully self-contradicting. He starts by declaring that science can’t tell us anything about our purpose, and then he goes on to immediately declare that the data of biology lead to an understanding of purpose. Behe is an incredibly muddled thinker — he’s got the background that values science, but at the same time he’s bogged down in these peculiar presuppositions that make a mess of his brain.

The data of biology do not point to purpose, but to a history of accidents shaped by short-term utility to replicators. Schönborn is unqualified to assess it — he’s a blithering theologian — and both Schönborn and Behe are blinded to the overwhelming dominance of chance in our biology by their ideological predispositions.