(From a pleasant story about rescuing orphaned night monkeys)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
My students are also blogging here:
You know I teach the 8am courses every term, right? Every semester for years I get my oddball classes that weren’t present in the curriculum 13 years ago (when I started here) stuffed into the cracks of the schedule. I’m slowly getting to be a little pushier and am gradually making my way into wakier hours with other classes, but so far, developmental biology is still in the darkness. Fortunately, this talk was so jam-packed with excitement and action that they couldn’t possibly sleep through it! Right?
Just a word about the presentation slides: I’m a firm believer that less is more. My goal is not to display my lecture notes, or lists of bullet point slides that make my points for me, but to show complex and interesting illustrations that I talk about and explain — whoa, I know, how radical. I’ve sat through too many talks that flash 60-80 slides at me in an hour, and it’s too much. Take your time, people! That said, I used 18 slides in a 65 minute lecture today, which I felt was a little excessive — I aspire to someday do a lecture with half that number. But I am weak and need the crutch now.
Also, I returned exams today. People asked if I’d post their answers. No way in hell! These are exams and have the privilege of privacy. I will say that in general the students answered well. The goal of that kind of exam isn’t to confront students with a question that has a specific answer, but with a problem that they should explore, defend, or criticise.
So the subject today was maternal effect genes in Drosophila, specifically the prepatterning information that specifies the anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral axes. Yes! I can tell you’re all excited!
So I gave them the precursor observations to the actual molecular biology, all this lovely modeling of gradients and information domains that was rich with Turing elegance, and then I dashed their optimism with the cold water of reality: molecular biology has shown that instead of beautifully designed systems, we’ve got bits and pieces cobbled together in a functional kludge. Any pretty patterns we do see are the product of brute force coding.
So they got the overall picture of A/P patterning in flies: a gradient of the Bicoid protein, high in front and low in back, is read by cells to determine their location — its the GPS signal of the early fly. The Nanos protein, also found in a gradient but from back to front, is a hack: it’s only purpose is to clear away a leaky remnant of another gene, Hunchback, which isn’t supposed to be expressed yet (although Nanos may be the diminished rump of a more elaborate ancestral posterior patterning scheme). And the Torso related genes are specifically involved in ‘capping’ the front and back ends of the fly.
The main point of interest about the terminal genes like Torso is their mechanism: we sometimes talk about maternal genes as like a paint-by-number system in which Mom lays out the lines for different areas of differentiation in Baby, and then the embryo fills in the details. The terminal genes are like a perfect example of that: in the follicle, cells literally paint the vitelline membrane of the fly with different informational molecules during the construction of the egg, and then as the embryo develops, these molecules trickle across the perivitelline space (a gap between the outer membrane and embryo proper) to bind receptors and trigger regional differentiation.
It’s also a nice segue into the dorsal/ventral patterning genes, because flies do something similar there: proteins imbedded in discrete regions of the vitelline membrane diffuse to Toll receptors, where they selective activate the Dorsal protein by freeing it from the Cactus inhibitor. We go from a paint-by-number kit to a restored gradient from back to belly side of localization of free Dorsal protein to the cell nucleus. By the way, in case they were getting bored with flies, Dorsal is homologous to NF-κB in us vertebrates, using the same nuclear exclusion/inclusion mechanism, and NF-κB is a hot molecule in biomedicine and cancer research right now.
That was my hour. I closed by threatening them with talk of zygotic genes, specifically the gap genes, next week.
Also, Wednesday we’re going to try something a little different. We’ve finished chapter 5 of Carroll’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful so they should be ready to weigh the importance of various mechanisms, so I split the class in two and told half of them to read Wray’s article on the importance of cis-regulatory mutations in evolution, and Hoekstra and Coyne’s article that argues for a more balanced emphasis. I’d love to have a fight break out in the room.
Imagine if you lived in a town where the only hospital was owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you were in a car accident — you’ve got a ruptured spleen, you’re bleeding internally, and your life is at risk. The surgeon is going to go in and stitch up and cauterize everything, but you’re warned that they don’t keep any kind of blood supply in the hospital, and they refuse to do blood transfusions — they have an in-house professional ethicist (who is a Jehovah’s Witness, of course) who rejects the morality of exchanging sacred blood, and the administrators have signed an agreement with the church to never, under any circumstances, carry out blood transfusions.
If you need a blood transfusion, they say, don’t worry, the ambulance will take you to a different hospital…50 miles away. You, unfortunately, are in shock, you’ve got a gusher pouring blood into your body cavity, and this is not an option. You get to die.
We would not tolerate this situation. That hospital would have a change of ownership as fast as the public could drive it, and if anyone did die because of that kind of criminal neglect and refusal to follow standard medical procedure, a malpractice suit would be the least of their worries. Someone would be going to jail.
So why are Catholics allowed to buy up and impose Catholic dogma on hospitals? Is it because their ignorant dogma does the greatest harm to women (especially those slutty ones who have sex) and bizarre rules about reproduction don’t directly harm men?
But Catholics are buying up hospitals all over the country. They’ve got declining attendance, they’re closing churches, they’re having trouble recruiting priests, but they’ve still got buckets of money, and they’re using that money to impose control in another way — by taking over your health care.
Catholic institutions across the nation are merging with secular hospitals, clinics, and even small private practices at an unprecedented rate. Optimists explain that the consolidation and shared infrastructure help reduce costs. Pessimists point out that the aggressive mergers come at a time when Catholic bishops are exerting and expanding their authority. “I see it as a conscious effort to achieve through the private market what they failed to achieve through the courts or at the ballot box,” says Monica Harrington, a San Juan Island resident who’s spent the last year fighting a Catholic hospital in her town.
Three of the largest health-care systems in the Northwest—PeaceHealth, Providence Health & Services, and Franciscan Health System—are Catholic entities, and they’re busy making new deals in our state. According to MergerWatch, a nonprofit that tracks Catholic hospital mergers across the nation, there was a record-breaking 10 mergers announced in Washington State in 2012.
It’s a chilling story. Catholics can’t get their way in popular opinion, so they’ve followed another path, buying up and limiting health care options so that you have no choice but to follow their ancient biblical rules. The linked article is an examination of the growing move to limit your medicine to Catholic medicine in the Pacific Northwest, but it applies everywhere. They interviewed doctors who reported on their constraints.
Three physicians working in Whatcom County eventually agreed to speak with me. PeaceHealth bought out the secular hospital in 2008. Since then, PeaceHealth has systematically bought up nearly every specialty clinic in the area, from cardiologists to pediatricians, hospice to oncology. The physicians who agreed to meet me for coffee talked about the mindfuck of being raised Catholic, turning to atheism, and excelling in medicine—only to wake up one day with the church as your boss. The first physician joked grimly about the religious directives being “medieval torture porn.” He talked about the struggle of trying to balance his duty to patients with the edicts of a Catholic hospital.
These religious directives are nightmarish. They aren’t always followed — these really are rules laid down by religious fanatics who have no experience or connection to the actual practice of medicine, and conscientious doctors try to find workarounds — but what limits them now is competition. If Catholics get a monopoly on health care in an area, then the trouble really begins.
To understand Catholic health care, it’s important to know the rules that guide Catholic hospitals, otherwise known as Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs). These directives are drafted and tweaked by the rotating cast of mostly white, mostly celibate bishops couch-surfing at the Vatican. ERDs operate like a code of conduct that medical staff in Catholic hospitals agree to abide by, regardless of whether or not a particular staffer is Catholic. For the most part, the directives aren’t suggestions—they’re prescriptive.
“Any partnership… must respect church teaching and discipline,” one directive states. The church monitors the implementation of these directives through hospital ethic committees overseen by regional bishops like our very own Archbishop Peter Sartain.
Sure, in 43 pages of Ethical and Religious Directives, there’s some common-sense guidance to be found. But they’re also flush with horrifying detail. As you’d expect, the directives pertaining to women’s fertility read like a misogynist romance novel or found art from the Middle Ages: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” Emergency contraception can only be given to rape victims, and even then only “if, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already.” Vasectomies and tubal ligations are also prohibited. Egg and sperm donors are deemed “contrary to the covenant of marriage,” surrogate motherhood is prohibited because it denigrates “the dignity of the child and marriage,” and doctors at Catholic hospitals can’t help infertile couples conceive artificially—using their own eggs and sperm—because test-tube babies “separate procreation from the marital act in its unitive significance.”
Then there’s this: “Abortion… is never permitted.”
Not even when the egg attaches outside the uterus and puts a mother’s life in danger: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.”
The short-sighted and selfish male readers out there (and we know we have no shortage of those assholes in the atheist community) aren’t possibly quite as outraged as they should be. These rules affect women, right? I got mine, let them worry over it, it’s not my fight.
Unfortunately, Catholics also have some weird ideas about LGBT relationships. Another set of people who are going to be hurt by this Catholic takeover are those who are in any kind of relationship that doesn’t fit their narrow definition of one man, one woman…and give them the power to flex their ideological muscle, and you might find yourself snubbed if you’re divorced.
So maybe you aren’t gay and your sexual relationships are conservative and conventional. The other big problem is death, which all of us will do someday. Washington state passed a death with dignity law a few years ago, allowing physician-assisted suicide in terminal cases. Guess which hospitals ignore the law and will prolong your suffering indefinitely?
Don’t let Catholics control your hospitals. Keep the church out of your health care decisions. Make Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) illegal — individuals may follow them at their personal discretion, but no health care facility gets to impose them on their patients, especially when they defy the law.
Wow. Talk about major failure. A new study out correlates levels of Foxp2 with levels of vocalization in rats: basically, male rats squeak more than female pups when they’re stressed by separation from their mothers, and mothers tend to rescue the rat who squeaks the loudest. They then found higher levels of Foxp2 in males, and also found that reducing male Foxp2 levels in male pups with siRNA also reduced vocalizations. So far, so good; looks like a reasonable and interesting experiment. Then they extended it to humans half-assedly, finding that 4 year old boys have lower levels of Foxp2 in their left hemisphere (the side that largely controls speech) than 4 year old girls; they could not do the siRNA experiment in human children, obviously.
And that’s where it goes so, so wrong. The researchers assumed that women talk more than men, four-year old girls have more Foxp2, therefore their results conform neatly to what they observed in rats.
You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.
Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.
The only problem here is that that statistic is false, and men and women talk at about the same rate. Oops.
This is so unfortunate. There is evidence that girls on average learn to talk a little earlier than boys, and that would have been a safer correlation, especially since they’re describing different levels in young children. That interpretation is still fraught, though: they haven’t worked out cause and effect, they know nothing about how Foxp2 mediates this vocalization difference (and we don’t even know if it’s a direct effect on vocalization; it could also modulate a stress response), and in humans, we don’t know if different socialization pressures could be causing differences in the expression of this gene.
This is why scientists are supposed to be cautious in their interpretations. Especially when trying to explain human behavior, there’s far too much temptation to push the results to fit stereotypes as a kind of unconscious validation.
You’d think with all those arms they’d have at least one free to focus and set the exposure. This is a picture taken by an octopus who stole a divers’ camera.
The diver chased it and got the camera back. Otherwise, we’d be waiting for the octopus to get online and upload the pictures to youtube.
I rarely laugh out loud when reading science papers, but sometimes one comes along that triggers the response automatically. Although, in this case, it wasn’t so much a belly laugh as an evil chortle, and an occasional grim snicker. Dan Graur and his colleagues have written a rebuttal to the claims of the ENCODE research consortium — the group that claimed to have identified function in 80% of the genome, but actually discovered that a formula of 80% hype gets you the attention of the world press. It was a sad event: a huge amount of work on analyzing the genome by hundreds of labs got sidetracked by a few clueless statements made up front in the primary paper, making it look like they were led by ignoramuses who had no conception of the biology behind their project.
Now Graur and friends haven’t just poked a hole in the balloon, they’ve set it on fire (the humanity!), pissed on the ashes, and dumped them in a cesspit. At times it feels a bit…excessive, you know, but still, they make some very strong arguments. And look, you can read the whole article, On the immortality of television sets: “function” in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE, for free — it’s open source. So I’ll just mention a few of the highlights.
I’d originally criticized it because the ENCODE argument was patently ridiculous. Their claim to have assigned ‘function’ to 80% (and Ewan Birney even expected it to converge on 100%) of the genome boiled down to this:
The vast majority (80.4%) of the human genome participates in at least one biochemical RNA- and/or chromatin-associated event in at least one cell type.
So if ever a transcription factor ever, in any cell, bound however briefly to a stretch of DNA, they declared it to be functional. That’s nonsense. The activity of the cell is biochemical: it’s stochastic. Individual proteins will adhere to any isolated stretch of DNA that might have a sequence that matches a binding pocket, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the constellation of enhancers and promoters are present and that the whole weight of the transcriptional machinery will regularly operate there. This is a noisy system.
The Graur paper rips into the ENCODE interpretations on many other grounds, however. Here’s the abstract to give you a summary of the violations of logic and evidence that ENCODE made, and also to give you a taste of the snark level in the rest of the paper.
A recent slew of ENCODE Consortium publications, specifically the article signed by all Consortium members, put forward the idea that more than 80% of the human genome is functional. This claim flies in the face of current estimates according to which the fraction of the genome that is evolutionarily conserved through purifying selection is under 10%. Thus, according to the ENCODE Consortium, a biological function can be maintained indefinitely without selection, which implies that at least 80 − 10 = 70% of the genome is perfectly invulnerable to deleterious mutations, either because no mutation can ever occur in these “functional” regions, or because no mutation in these regions can ever be deleterious. This absurd conclusion was reached through various means, chiefly (1) by employing the seldom used “causal role” definition of biological function and then applying it inconsistently to different biochemical properties, (2) by committing a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent,” (3) by failing to appreciate the crucial difference between “junk DNA” and “garbage DNA,” (4) by using analytical methods that yield biased errors and inflate estimates of functionality, (5) by favoring statistical sensitivity over specificity, and (6) by emphasizing statistical significance rather than the magnitude of the effect. Here, we detail the many logical and methodological transgressions involved in assigning functionality to almost every nucleotide in the human genome. The ENCODE results were predicted by one of its authors to necessitate the rewriting of textbooks. We agree, many textbooks dealing with marketing, mass-media hype, and public relations may well have to be rewritten.
You may be wondering about the curious title of the paper and its reference to immortal televisions. That comes from (1): that function has to be defined in a context, and that the only reasonable context for a gene sequence is to identify its contribution to evolutionary fitness.
The causal role concept of function can lead to bizarre outcomes in the biological sciences. For example, while the selected effect function of the heart can be stated unambiguously to be the pumping of blood, the heart may be assigned many additional causal role functions, such as adding 300 grams to body weight, producing sounds, and preventing the pericardium from deflating onto itself. As a result, most biologists use the selected effect concept of function, following the Dobzhanskyan dictum according to which biological sense can only be derived from evolutionary context.
The ENCODE group could only declare function for a sequence by ignoring all other context than the local and immediate effect of a chemical interaction — it was the work of short-sighted chemists who grind the organism into slime, or worse yet, only see it as a set of bits in a highly reduced form in a computer database.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, a function can be assigned to a DNA sequence if and only if it is possible to destroy it. All functional entities in the universe can be rendered nonfunctional by the ravages of time, entropy, mutation, and what have you. Unless a genomic functionality is actively protected by selection, it will accumulate deleterious mutations and will cease to be functional. The absurd alternative, which unfortunately was adopted by ENCODE, is to assume that no deleterious mutations can ever occur in the regions they have deemed to be functional. Such an assumption is akin to claiming that a television set left on and unattended will still be in working condition after a million years because no natural events, such as rust, erosion, static electricity, and earthquakes can affect it. The convoluted rationale for the decision to discard evolutionary conservation and constraint as the arbiters of functionality put forward by a lead ENCODE author (Stamatoyannopoulos 2012) is groundless and self-serving.
There is a lot of very useful material in the rest of the paper — in particular, if you’re not familiar with this stuff, it’s a very good primer in elementary genomics. The subtext here is that there are some dunces at ENCODE who need to be sat down and taught the basics of their field. I am not by any means a genomics expert, but I know enough to be embarrassed (and cruelly amused) at the dressing down being given.
One thing in particular leapt out at me is particularly fundamental and insightful, though. A common theme in these kinds of studies is the compromise between sensitivity and selectivity, between false positives and false negatives, between Type II and Type I errors. This isn’t just a failure to understand basic biology and biochemistry, but incomprehension about basic statistics.
At this point, we must ask ourselves, what is the aim of ENCODE: Is it to identify every possible functional element at the expense of increasing the number of elements that are falsely identified as functional? Or is it to create a list of functional elements that is as free of false positives as possible. If the former, then sensitivity should be favored over selectivity; if the latter then selectivity should be favored over sensitivity. ENCODE chose to bias its results by excessively favoring sensitivity over specificity. In fact, they could have saved millions of dollars and many thousands of research hours by ignoring selectivity altogether, and proclaiming a priori that 100% of the genome is functional. Not one functional element would have been missed by using this procedure.
This is a huge problem in ENCODE’s work. Reading Birney’s commentary on the process, you get a clear impression that they regarded it as a triumph every time they got even the slightest hint that a stretch of DNA might be bound by some protein — they were terribly uncritical and grasped at the feeblest straws to rationalize ‘function’ everywhere they looked. They wanted everything to be functional, and rather than taking the critical scientific view of trying to disprove their own claims, they went wild and accepted every feeble excuse to justify them.
The Intelligent Design creationists get a shout-out — they’ll be pleased and claim it confirms the validity of their contributions to real science. Unfortunately for the IDiots, it is not a kind mention, but a flat rejection.
We urge biologists not be afraid of junk DNA. The only people that should be afraid are those claiming that natural processes are insufficient to explain life and that evolutionary theory should be supplemented or supplanted by an intelligent designer (e.g., Dembski 1998; Wells 2004). ENCODE’s take-home message that everything has a function implies purpose, and purpose is the only thing that evolution cannot provide. Needless to say, in light of our investigation of the ENCODE publication, it is safe to state that the news concerning the death of “junk DNA” have been greatly exaggerated.
Another interesting point is the contrast between big science and small science. As a microscopically tiny science guy, getting by on a shoestring budget and undergraduate assistance, I like this summary.
The Editor-in-Chief of Science, Bruce Alberts, has recently expressed concern about the future of “small science,” given that ENCODE-style Big Science grabs the headlines that decision makers so dearly love (Alberts 2012). Actually, the main function of Big Science is to generate massive amounts of reliable and easily accessible data. The road from data to wisdom is quite long and convoluted (Royar 1994). Insight, understanding, and scientific progress are generally achieved by “small science.” The Human Genome Project is a marvelous example of “big science,” as are the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Abazajian et al. 2009) and the Tree of Life Web Project (Maddison et al. 2007).
Probably the most controversial part of the paper, though, is that the authors conclude that ENCODE fails as a provider of Big Science.
Unfortunately, the ENCODE data are neither easily accessible nor very useful—without ENCODE, researchers would have had to examine 3.5 billion nucleotides in search of function, with ENCODE, they would have to sift through 2.7 billion nucleotides. ENCODE’s biggest scientific sin was not being satisfied with its role as data provider; it assumed the small-science role of interpreter of the data, thereby performing a kind of textual hermeneutics on a 3.5-billion-long DNA text. Unfortunately, ENCODE disregarded the rules of scientific interpretation and adopted a position common to many types of theological hermeneutics, whereby every letter in a text is assumed a priori to have a meaning.
Ouch. Did he just compare ENCODE to theology? Yes, he did. Which also explains why the Intelligent Design creationists are so happy with its bogus conclusions.
How is it, living in the Anthropocene?
Sea levels will likely rise a few feet by the year 2100. Current fish wet biomass is about 2 billion tons, so removing them won’t make a dent either. (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.)
The current world shipping fleet has a displacement of about 2.15 billion tons (most of which is oil and ore), so yeah, we humans are now bulking out more volume in the oceans than the fish do (we’ve got a long ways to go before we overtake invertebrates and bacteria, I suspect).
The other depressing point in the article is that global warming is adding more water to the oceans every second, and that every 16 hours we’re adding more than that 2 billion tons of water to the ocean.
I like reading David Roberts’ stuff on Grist, especially when I disagree with him. Sadly, there’s not a thing I disagree with in this piece rebutting Andrew Revkin on opposition to Keystone. (Perhaps excepting his characterization of Matt Nisbet as a “professional wanker,” which I find overly generous given that I have always found Nisbet sorely lacking in professionalism.)
This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.
As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded “my way or the highway environmentalism,” y’all, but don’t worry, he’s got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.
This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.
Nice line, that last one. Useful in SO many contexts.
Roberts’ casual slam against the Frameinator comes in response to this tweet, in which Nisbet chides 350.org types for not hewing to his own special brand of 13-dimensional chess:
@globalecoguy @revkin @levi_m @philaroneanu @350 Strategy distracts, limits ability for Obama et al to broker path forward, even w/ Dems.
— Matthew C. Nisbet (@MCNisbet) February 18, 2013
What struck me about the thread that tweet came in was the overwhelming criticism of Keystone pipeline opponents for not having an overarching strategy that extends past stopping the Keystone pipeline as they mobilize people to oppose the Keystone pipeline. That criticism isn’t quite true: 350.org, for instance, is full of local student groups putting pressure on their colleges to divest from fossil fuel companies, in much the same fashion as the anti-apartheid divestment movement that hit U.S. campuses in the 1980s.
But there’s also an uncanny similarity between the objections voiced in that thread to Keystone opponents’ lack of a formal program, and objections we heard to the Occupy Wall Street folks way back in 2011. We heard back then that because OWS didn’t have, say, a 13-point program to adjust the schedule of lunches at quarterly SEC hearings, that they weren’t Very Serious People.
Which, of course, essentially translates to “your genuine groundswell of concern and subsequent activism threatens to undermine our position as experts.”
I used to get lots of letters and emails when I worked at Earth Island Institute from helpful people who thought somebody ought to start a campaign to do something. That something varied: take on the issue of overpopulation, plant redwood trees along the shore of San Francisco Bay, teach inner city children about marmots, whatever. The problem was that very few of these missives were phrased in the first person: “I would like to do this work.” It was almost always “…you should do this thing I think is important.”
I roundfiled those letters, but they kept coming.
Which all raises two questions for me:
From Jacquelyn’s fine blog The Contemplative Mammoth, a bit of context:
You’re enjoying your morning tea, browsing through the daily digest of your main society’s list-serv. Let’s say you’re an ecologist, like me, and so that society is the Ecological Society of America*, and the list-serv is Ecolog-l. Let’s also say that, like me, you’re an early career scientist, a recent graduate student, and your eye is caught by a discussion about advice for graduate students. And then you read this:
too many young, especially, female, applicants don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented.
I’m not interested in unpacking that statement beyond saying that “don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know” is basically a really sexist way of saying that they female applicants “are on par with or even slightly exceed others.” There is abundant evidence that perception, not ability, influences gender inequality in the sciences– it’s even been tested empirically.
What I am interested in is why other people in my community don’t think those kinds of comments are harmful and aren’t willing to say something about it if they do.
And then the question:
After the sexist comments were made, some did in fact call them out. This was immediately followed up with various responses that fell into two camps: 1) “Saying female graduate students are inferior isn’t sexist” (this has later morphed into “she was really just pointing out poor mentoring!”), and 2) “Calling someone out for a sexist statement on a list-serv is inappropriate.” Some have called for “tolerance” on Ecolog-l; arguably, more real estate in this discussion has gone into chastising the people who called out Jones’ comments. These people are almost universally male. To those people, I ask:
Why is it more wrong to call someone out for saying something sexist than it was to have said the sexist thing in the first place?
That is a really good question.
[Updated to add:] Apologies to Jacquelyn for misspelling her name at first. Need moar coffee.
