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.

Evolution of vertebrate eyes

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we’ve mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.

Now there’s a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution of eyes in one specific lineage, the vertebrates. The message is that, once again, all the heavy lifting, the evolution of a muscled eyeball with a lens and retinal circuitry, was accomplished early, between 550 and 500 million years ago. Most of what biology has been doing since is tweaking — significant tweaking, I’m sure, but the differences between a lamprey eye and our eyes are in the details, not the overall structure.

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