Can Maher be the next guy knocked off his pedestal? Please?

Would you believe Bill Maher is claiming credit for putting the brakes on the Milo train? Of course you would. His ego is just that big.

Given all that has transpired since Friday’s show, how do you feel now about your decision to have Milo Yiannopoulos as a guest, and how those segments transpired?

Well, let’s recap. About a week ago, I went on Van Jones’s show, and somebody asked me about the booking. I hadn’t really gotten into the details of M1l0 yet. He was just getting on my radar. I said, specifically, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Then we had M1l0 on, despite the fact that many people said, “Oh, how dare you give a platform to this man.” What I think people saw was an emotionally needy Ann Coulter wannabe, trying to make a buck off of the left’s propensity for outrage. And by the end of the weekend, by dinnertime Monday, he’s dropped as a speaker at CPAC. Then he’s dropped by Breitbart, and his book deal falls through. As I say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. You’re welcome.

Jebus. Maher gave a softball interview in which he called Yiannopoulos not unreasonable for thinking transgender women were just crashing bathrooms to rape people — he’s one of the Yiannopoulos enablers. You don’t get credit for knocking someone off a pedestal when you’re one of the people who put him up there.

Laurie Penny uses words real good

Not only that, she wades right into the muck to get a story. She’s been traveling with the Odious Yiannopoulos for the last few weeks, and has written up an account of what it’s like to hang out with the Lost Boys during his fall from grace.

It is horribly ironic that of all the disgusting nonsense Yiannopoulos has said — about women, about Muslims, about transgender people, about immigrants — it is only now that the moderate right appears to have reached the limits of what it will tolerate in the name of free speech. The hypocrisy is clarion-clear: This was never, in fact, about free speech at all. It was about making it OK to say racist, sexist, transphobic, and xenophobic things, about tolerating the public expression of those views right up to the point where it becomes financially unwise to do so. Those suddenly dropping Yiannopoulos are making a business decision, not a moral one — and yes, even in Donald Trump’s America, there’s still a difference. If that difference devours Yiannopoulos and his minions, they will find few mourners.

Those damned SJWs have been saying this for quite a long time. We’ve also noticed the extreme projection these guys exhibit.

It turns out that some words do hurt. You may have noticed that, in this piece, I have not explicitly described Yiannopoulos or the movement that has made him famous as white supremacist, Neo-Nazi, fascist, or racist. The main reason for that is that it has been made explicitly clear to me that, were I to write such a thing, a libel suit the size of Mar-A-Lago would drop on me, and Yiannopoulos would use every trick in his surprisingly defensive playbook to prize out an apology, because that’s what friends are for. He’s done it to other reporters. He’s not the only one. In fact, a defining feature of the new-right populists is their ability to build a reputation as rhino-hided truth-sayers while flailing their hands in panic if anyone uses whatever words happen to hit them where it hurts. So, for legal reasons, I must state that Milo Yiannopolous, possibly alone of all the smug white people in the world, is not a racist. For moral reasons, however, I must state that Yiannopoulos’ personal beliefs are irrelevant given that he’s built a career off peddling bigotry in public. What about sexism? “Sexism I don’t have the energy to wrestle with you over,” says Yiannopoulos, who, I can personally confirm, is the maple-cured bacon of misogynist piggery — oily and sweet and crass and, on a gut level, dreadful for your health.

Read the whole thing.

So much for the myth of the liberal professor

demetriouclaims

We’ve got a problem brewing here in idyllic Morris, Minnesota: one of our faculty, Dan Demetriou, has made racist comments that became widely known among everyone here, and are now getting aired on Inside Higher Ed.

In what seems like the latest installment of the academe edition of the post-Trump culture wars, students and faculty members at the University of Minnesota at Morris are planning a teach-in Monday, following a professor’s harsh criticism of immigrants and refugees on social media. The professor says he wrote about an issue of concern on a private Facebook page and is being punished for being out of step with the politics of his colleagues.

“Illegal immigrants lower the confidence in the rule of law and add people and workers and students we don’t need,” Dan Demetriou, associate professor of philosophy, recently wrote on Facebook, according to screenshots that have been made public. “They on average have IQs lower than natives and low skills. They are harmful to an economy about to automate, especially when it is a welfare state.”

Refugees, meanwhile, are “way worse,” Demetriou wrote, “as most adhere to a religious-political cult with repulsive values at war with the West from its inception. No country who has taken the current crop of refugees has made it work.”

He isn’t being “punished” in any way, as far as I can tell. He is being criticized in a far more civil way than he criticized a significant fraction of our student body. He’s currently on sabbatical in Sweden (!), which sounds like a pretty sweet ‘punishment’ to me, especially since next year was supposed to be my sabbatical year, and I’ve been asked to delay it.

He is no claiming that he is being persecuted by left-wing “feelings”.

Maybe you can imagine being me, hearing most of my colleagues advocate for policies that, as far as I can tell, are failing spectacularly overseas and in many communities at home. No one much cares for how their expressions may discourage, alienate, frustrate or sadden someone who, like me, sincerely believes that his children — our children — will be put in grave risk by leftist immigration policies. Nor should they care, because my feelings don’t determine facts. That someone is upset by a claim is wholly irrelevant to its truth.

Facts matter. What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is how badly out of alignment with the truth his original comments are. He’s being criticized, not because of his political alignment, but because he is wrong.

We teach young people who are immigrants, or children of immigrants, and several of our faculty are immigrants. They are just as intelligent as our white students whose families have been here for several generations. It’s also jarring to see a faculty member from a campus with a significant enrollment of Indian students to use the term “natives” — I don’t think he’s comparing our Somali students to our Lakota students. He’s got a peculiarly privileged understanding of “native”.

IQ is particularly problematic in this context. IQ scores were invented as a rationale for immigration quotas — they are inherently biased. To accuse someone who speaks a couple of languages, who had the ambition and strength to escaped an oppressive situation, and who is now working hard to establish themselves as citizens of a new country, of being unintelligent is simply absurd. People who can rise up out of such difficult circumstances should be welcomed and recognized for the contributions they can make. It’s easy to have the leisure to study and be comfortable in the conventions of the culture you’ve been brought up in, to do well on an IQ test; it’s remarkable when you’ve been on the run from tyrants who want to kill you, or from a rain of American-made bombs, that you can then adapt and thrive to new opportunities.

Of course, that’s what humans do.

I’d like to know where Dan thinks the cutoff for percentage of refugees enrolled makes for a bad school. Is UMM such a school? We tend to praise our university for its diversity relative to other Minnesota colleges (while also regretting that it isn’t higher). Does he think our “foreign” students degrade the quality of the education offered here?

As for failing to make absorption of refugees work in all countries…he’s in Sweden. Sweden is in the news because of similarly ignorant comments made by our president. There’s a lot of information available on immigrants to Sweden. It wrecks his claims.

In the past decade, there’s been a spike in immigration to Sweden. In 1990, 9.2 percent of Sweden’s population was foreign-born. That figure was 11.3 percent in 2000, and 15.4 percent in 2012.

Immigrant rates have grown even further in recent years, owing in large part to the global refugee crisis. In 2014, Sweden admitted more asylum seekers, per capita, than any other country on Earth. Many Swedish immigrants today hail from war-torn Muslim-majority countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

immigrationtosweden

Some people assumed this would produce a major uptick in the rates of violent crime in Sweden. Historically, immigrants to Sweden do commit crimes at higher rates than the native-born, though children of immigrants commit crimes at basically the same rate as children of native-born Swedes (controlling for income).

However, there’s no evidence of a massive crime wave. Here is an official Swedish government tally of the rates of six different types of crime directed at persons — fraud, assault, threats, harassment, sexual violence, and mugging. (Homicide is excluded because the rate is tiny; in 2014, there were 87 murders in the entire country of roughly 10 million.)

swedishcrime

As you can see, there is no significant uptick in any of the crime categories alongside the rise in immigration. The most recent official report available in English, covering 2015, is not incorporated into that chart — but it concludes that the rates of these crimes are at “approximately the same level as in 2005.” That’s a slight increase over the 2014 rate, but hardly evidence of a crime wave — let alone one committed by migrants or refugees.

Demetriou is a professor of philosophy. He doesn’t seem to know much at all about sociology or history or biology, but he’s quick to declare himself the victim of a political witch-hunt by people who don’t care for his ‘truth’. He’s the son of Greek immigrants, so maybe it’s a problem with his IQ?

I’m in agreement with our chancellor’s statement on this incident.

Colleagues,

It has recently come to my attention that messages have been circulating that include comments perceived of as disrespectful, disparaging, and directed at other community members. While democracy should and does rightfully tolerate expression of differences of opinion, some members of our community have found these communications both personally and professionally distressing.

I want to strongly reaffirm our mission and values as a University community and in particular, Morris’ campus vision that we celebrate and support the multicultural and international inclusiveness of our community. Differences are our strength, and our community values and respects diversity of all kinds.

We no doubt will continue to have differences of opinion and perspective. At the same time it is imperative that we all make every effort to express these differences in a respectful way.

As a model for civil discourse, I offer the University of Minnesota Board of Regents Guiding Principles which provide timely and sage advice whether members of our University community are acting as individuals or representatives of UMM:

“In all of its activities, the University strives to sustain an open exchange of ideas in an environment that:

• embodies the values of academic freedom, responsibility, integrity, and cooperation;
• provides an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice and intolerance;
• assists individuals, institutions, and communities in responding to a continuously changing world;
• is conscious of and responsive to the needs of the many communities it is committed to serving;
• creates and supports partnerships within the University, with other educational systems and institutions, and with communities to achieve common goals; and
• inspires, sets high expectations for, and empowers the individuals within its community.”

I look forward to working with you all as we productively and constructively address the issues of the day on our campus.

Michelle
Michelle Behr, Ph.D.

Now, though, is the time for Demetriou to strike back. I’m sure he’s going to be popular with reporters from Breitbart, InfoWars, and the Daily Mail. I wish him luck with his new celebrity.

2005 just called. I think it was a wrong number.

On today of all days, an obliviously clueless liberal has decided to advise us all on how to deal with Milo Yiannopoulos. You may be amused, or not. It’s the old “don’t feed the trolls” speech from the last decade.

My advice: Ignore him.

When he’s giving a speech, don’t protest it. When he says something offensive, ignore it. When he acts like a bottom-feeding lowlife, understand he’s doing it so you’ll get offended and give him attention, so don’t.

Don’t prove him right.

If you really want to “get at” Milo Yiannopoulos, do what trolls hate most — ignore them. They thrive on attention, anger, and getting a reaction out of people. The more hostile, offended, and outraged folks get by things Yiannopoulos says and does, the more vindication he gets and the more he’s going to do it.

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god. That is so painfully stupid.

It’s wrong. People like Yiannopoulos are playing to a crowd, and it’s not us. He throws bloody red meat to assholes, and thrives on their approval. What gave 4chan a bit of corrupt power was not liberals either avoiding or criticizing them, it was a gigantic mutual circle-jerk of horrible people reinforcing each other’s regressive views. Ignore them and you’re just giving them room to grow.

It’s also the kind of thing only an oblivious man who has not been the target of the concentrated hatred of the mob could say. Yiannopoulos and his ilk have been ranting, pointing their fingers and screaming shrilly, at people for years. The women who have been doxxed by his kind will tell you that ignoring them doesn’t help when you’re stalked, when you get bomb threats, when your inbox is clogged with detailed plans to rape you. The transgender individual who was gaily outed by Yiannopoulos in public doesn’t have the option to just ignore him.

This guy claims he can effectively deal with trolls by ignor[ing] them or respond[ing] with kindness. Bullshit. That works with small numbers of casual haters that you can deal with one on one. But clearly he has never had to cope with a swarm of fanatical, obsessed people who find his identity itself to be offensive.

Don’t feed the trolls does not work. Seriously. I’ve got experience in this area, and even at that, I have not been the focus of the same flamethrower of hatred that others have experienced.

Weirdly, this guy is delivering his archaic and useless advice at a time when we’re finally getting through to demolish Yiannopoulos’s authority. He lost his book deal, he has just resigned from Breitbart, and none of this was accomplished by ignoring him. It was by keeping up the pressure, exposing him for what he is, and letting his own words turn him into a pariah.

Do you know who we should ignore? Ignorant liberals who keep on indignantly informing us of the same wrong solutions, over and over.

There’s one thing that will get me to turn on Fox News

Sunsara Taylor will appear on the Tucker Carlson show in about an hour, at 9ish ET.

I wonder if Carlson will do that insipid, uncomprehending face he always puts on when someone says something that doesn’t fit his world view?

Your purge is clumsy and obvious

Iowa:

The party affiliation on your voter registration card could block you from employment at Iowa’s state universities were a newly proposed bill by Senator Mark Chelgren to become law. Senate File 288, proposed by the Ottumwa legislator, could bring about a Soviet-style purge of liberal-leaning college staff in Iowa. Chelgren wants to impose an ideological litmus test in order to create a “partisan balance,” based on how Iowa has voted in past elections.

The legislation proposes that a “person shall not be hired as a professor or instructor member of the faculty at such an institution if the person’s political party affiliation on the date of hire would cause the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by ten percent the percentage of faculty belonging to the other political party.”

I’ve been through a few job searches. We are not allowed to ask about personal matters: no conversations about family, sexual preference, religion, or political affiliation. We are supposed to judge the ability of the person to do the job entirely on their ability to do the job. It will sometimes come up if the job candidate brings it up, but we do not get to use that information at all in our evaluation. If I even tried to make a comment in our recommendation like “We should hire because they are a nice liberal atheist lesbian who hates Trump almost as much as I do!”, or “We should not hire because they voted against my interests”, I would probably get hauled up in front of a review committee and chastised, not to mention that if that comment were revealed to any of the other candidates who did not get the job, I’d get my butt sued.

Chelgren doesn’t have a clue about how university hiring works. He’s a Republican, of course.

What the heckity-gosh-darn is epigenetics?

comfortable

Today in my class we talked for a while about epigenetics. I used it as an example of a term we’d encountered more than once in our ecological developmental biology course, but that has some complicated ambiguity and fuzziness that has led to all kinds of weird popular confusions about the subject. I was also using it as an example of critical analysis of a paper, as I discussed yesterday, and it was a lead-up to having the students discuss papers on relevant topics they were interested in — so we spent most of our time talking about other things.

But I’m going to talk now about just this one paper I read. You see, Larry Moran and I have been having this long-running disagreement about epigenetics — nothing hostile, just an occasional cocked eyebrow in each other’s direction — which you can see on display in this article by Larry on epigenetics, in which he disagrees with my definition of epigenetics, back in 2008. Here’s my definition:

Epigenetics is the study of heritable traits that are not dependent on the primary sequence of DNA.

And here’s the definition used in Gilbert’s text:

…molecular processes around DNA that regulate genome activity that are independent DNA sequence and are mitotically stable.

And here’s Larry’s objection:

Here’s the problem. If this is epigenetics then what’s the point? When I was growing up we had a perfectly good term for these phenomena—it was regulation of gene expression. Why is there a movement among animal developmental biologists to use “epigenetics” to refer to a well-understood phenomenon?

While I agree that “epigenetics” is a huge, broad, diverse category of phenomena, I think he’s overlooking a key point to claim it is synonymous with gene regulation. It is gene regulation that is heritable and mitotically stable. It’s still far too open-ended, but it’s not just any old example of gene regulation.

It’s also clear and consistent. Larry challenges us with eight instances of regulatory phenomena and asks which ones qualify as epigenetic. Easy. 1, 2, 6, 7, 8. Those are the ones where he specifically mentions multi-generational inheritance of a regulatory state. 3, 4, and 5 describe responses within a single cell in a single generation (5 is sneaky, though: Drosophila oocytes are having gene expression modified in ways that might be transmitted through multiple generations — it’s just that those cells are being loaded with bicoid RNA, not having their bicoid genes being set to a sex-specific state).

I am also comfortable with the idea that inheritance of the regulatory state of the lac operon is an example of epigenetics. It’s arguable whether that’s a useful category, but it does fit the definition.

So one approach that could be taken is to come up with a more specific or more practical definition.

Larry has a more recent article in which he agrees with a new paper by Deans and Maggert that tries to do exactly that. It also takes a much appreciated historical approach, giving the various definitions that have been wafting about since the 1930s. For instance, here’s Waddington’s ancient physiological definition:

the branch of biology that studies the causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being

Yes, I agree — that would simply be gene regulation nowadays. You can’t blame us wicked developmental biologists for promoting that one, though, because we don’t use it anymore.

Now we favor the Holliday definition:

the study of changes in gene function that are mitotically and/or meiotically heritable and that do not entail change in DNA sequence.

To me, “heritable” is the magic word that makes all the difference. This, however, is not enough for Deans and Maggert. They want to add more focus, often a good thing, and narrow the definition. I was not happy with their argument, and thought it poorly made, though. See if you can find what was objectionable in this section of their paper (I highlighted it to make it easy, an epigenetic modification that does not change the sequence of the letters in the text.)

We don’t feel that it is possible to reconcile Waddington’s focus on gene regulation with Holliday’s more specific criteria within one field and still maintain the level of clarity needed to produce a useful definition. The efforts to preserve a relationship between these two conceptualizations have been impaired by the fact that there are just too many phenomena, with too few mechanistic connections, to categorize into one field. Also, among the definitions that do maintain the requirement of heritability, we feel that many lack the detail to be functionally useful in directing the testing of specific hypotheses, particularly as it relates to the location or site (cytoplasm or nucleus) of epigenetic phenomena. To mitigate these shortcomings, we advocate defining epigenetics as “the study of phenomena and mechanisms that cause chromosome-bound, heritable changes to gene expression that are not dependent on changes to DNA sequence.”

We feel that this definition makes a strong distinction between gene regulation (Waddington’s definition) and epigenetic inheritance (Holliday’s definition), and also emphasizes that epigenetic phenomena must deal exclusively with chromosome-bound changes. By making these distinctions, we have efficiently separated expressional changes caused by cytoplasmic compounds, which are more closely tied to gene regulation, from those which occur on, or in close association to, the chromosome. Doing so makes the focus of the field much clearer and identifies epigenetic mechanisms more explicitly.

We feel that this definition touches on several important elements not encompassed by other definitions, yet commonly implied in most uses. To further explain the reasoning behind our definition, as well as its utility for improving epigenetic research, we would like to offer a clarification and a test.

Yeesh. I don’t feel that your personall feelings are a strong argument, and I cringed when I hit that page. At least edit it to remove the emphasis on your personal discomfort; just say that the old definitions lack detail, rather than that you feel they lack detail.

So let’s pull out their shiny new definition.

the study of phenomena and mechanisms that cause chromosome-bound, heritable changes to gene expression that are not dependent on changes to DNA sequence

Well. All this fuss for a single change, the addition of the phrase chromosome-bound. That’s it. I agree, it does narrow the topic, but it’s still covering an awful lot of territory. I’m not feelin’ it. I have the impression that the primary virtue of the new definition is that it reduces a class of phenomena to a subset that many people are comfortable studying already, and in part reinforces a gene-centered perspective on cellular behavior.

It also leaves me wondering…what about the inheritance of cytoplasmic or membrane-bound factors that induce consistent changes in gene expression in daughter cells? The gene regulation aspect may be mundane, but it’s the inheritance that is interesting. Under the Deans and Maggert definition, this is no longer under the umbrella of epigenetics — it’s something different for which we have no general name now.

It makes Larry happier, though.

I think this is a useful definition. Nobody cares if dividing E. coli cells inherit molecules of lac repressor and continue to repress the lac operon. That’s a trivial form of epigenetics that never posed a threat to our understanding of evolution.

That’s odd. I do care that the lac repressor is cytoplasmically inherited, but then my primary interests, in the most general form, would be in the patterns of stability and change in cellular properties, rather than the metabolism of sugar. Telling me that I should only pay attention to inherited proteins or methylation states that are directly bound to DNA seems arbitrary.

I also don’t consider “poses a threat to our understanding of evolution” to be a relevant criterion. I agree that lac repressors don’t challenge evolutionary theory, but neither do heritable histone modifications or methylation. I’m one of those people who think epigenetics (even under the old definition!) is important and interesting, but doesn’t affect evolutionary theory much at all.

Larry and I agree.

Methylation is trivial.

Well then, if inheritance of the lac operon is such a trivial form of epigenetics that it should be excluded from the definition, then we apparently need yet another definition that excludes the triviality of methylation.

Or, really, we should recognize that “trivial” is not a good reason to exclude something.

I will still second Larry’s argument that none of this stuff overthrows modern evolutionary theory in any way. It would require extremely persistent inheritance of an epigenetic state over many generations to have those kinds of repercussions.

(The Gilbert text does mention one significant effect: the toadflax plant, Linaria vulgaris, has a radically different flower morph, Peloria, that Linnaeus himself classified as a different species. As it turns out, they only differ in the methylation state of the cycloidea gene, but the DNA sequence is identical. This is a case of an epigenetic change persisting for hundreds of generations. It’s a rare case, though, and also…would still definitely fall under the Deans and Maggert definition.)

Why haven’t women already realized what you can do with super-glue?

mensez

Would you like better control over your periods? Then ask a man who knows nothing of female physiology and doesn’t bother to test his solution. He’s a man, he must be right. Rebecca tears down this product for ‘feminine hygiene’, called Mensez, and which is simply a stick of glue to…glue…your vagina…shut. No, seriously. That’s how he proposes to control your periods.

I’m thinking it might be useful to men, too, who need to control explosive diarrhea. Or to shut their mouths when they’re talking too much.

Anyway, the inventor’s own brother showed up in comments to say what he thinks.

braddopps

He hasn’t tested it, but he’s put together a website with stock photos to sell it. No product, and it would be nice to say he must be marketing genius, except that calling it “men-sez”, and promoting it as “lip-stick”, with a logo that looks like a pair of testicles, kinda shoots that idea down.

Ecological Development: Getting critical

far_side_good_hands

In class last week, we continued our discussion of developmental plasticity and began to talk about epigenetics, and in particular, the underlying molecular mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance. In addition, students had to discuss papers on plasticity that they’d researched. Some of the topics covered were: sneaker males and alternative reproductive strategies; aggression in dog breeds, how much is genetic and how much is training; temperature-dependent and behavior-dependent sex determination in reptiles and fish; and physiological responses to variations in gravity (someone has put pregnant rats in a centrifuge and looked at the effects of 2 gravities on development). It was all fun stuff, and I made the students do all the work. Perfect!

This week they have another assignment. There’s a common problem in student writing about science: they tend to describe what a paper says. That makes for very boring reading, I’m sorry to say — if I just wanted to know what was in the paper, I could read it myself, after all. So this week they’ve been asked to write a critical analysis of a science paper relevant to the course. This is a routine skill that needs to be cultivated and practiced.

What’s involved? You first have to identify a key question or assertion in the paper, or even in a short section of the paper, and ask yourself if the authors have adequately defended the claim. Even if you agree with the claim, and think it’s eminently reasonable, you have to approach it as a critic and try to tear it down.

I’m going to try to lead by example, so I have given them a couple of papers to read ahead of time. One is “Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life” by Douglas Erwin, which makes an argument that should be familiar to the students, because we’ve already talked about some of the concepts. Here’s the abstract:

The history of life as documented by the fossil record encompasses evolutionary diversifications at scales ranging from the Ediacaran–Cambrian explosion of animal life and the invasion of land by vascular plants, insects and vertebrates to the diversification of flowering plants over the past 100 million years and the radiation of horses. Morphological novelty and innovation has been a recurrent theme. The architects of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory made three claims about evolutionary novelty and innovation: first, that all diversifications in the history of life represent adaptive radiations; second, that adaptive radiations are driven principally by ecological opportunity rather than by the supply of new morphological novelties, thus the primary questions about novelty and innovation focus on their ecological and evolutionary success; and third, that the rate of morphological divergence between taxa was more rapid early in the history of a clade but slowed over time as ecological opportunities declined. These claims have strongly influenced subsequent generations of evolutionary biologists, yet over the past two decades each has been challenged by data from the fossil record, by the results of comparative phylogenetic analyses and through insights from evolutionary developmental biology. Consequently a broader view of novelty and innovation is required. An outstanding issue for future work is identifying the circumstances associated with different styles of diversification and whether their frequency has changed through the history of life.

Let’s take that apart. Erwin is saying that there are some long-held assumptions in evolutionary biology that he is going to suggest are possibly invalid. Those assumptions are:

  1. Diversity is the product of adaptive radiations;

  2. Radiations are driven by ecological opportunities; and

  3. Most morphological variants emerge early, in the process of filling open niches.

He’s going to propose alternative processes.

  1. Initially non-adaptive variants are going to generate morphological diversity;

  2. Novel forms construct the niches that they will fill; and

  3. Variation is a constant event in a lineage.

I am predisposed to like those new perspectives, and I’m also biased by the evidence we’ve discussed in class, that ecology and development are in a constant state of reciprocal feedback. But rather than reporting and describing this paper as something that reinforces my views, I need to examine it critically. Does Erwin adequately support his claims? Are there significant questions he does not address? He’s also given us a list of sources of evidence that he’ll use to challenge orthodoxy: “the fossil record, by the results of comparative phylogenetic analyses and through insights from evolutionary developmental biology”. Does he succeed?

I’m just going to consider his first point, whether it is adaptive variation that drives radiations (lesson for students: focus. Better to do one thing well than 3 things poorly). His evidence in this section comes primarily from analysis of the fossil record, which is going to raise some objections.

Erwin does not deny the existence of adaptive radiations, and wisely begins by discussing known examples. He cites the work on Galapagos finches, where we have strong evidence of morphology being shaped by adaptive necessity. He also discusses cichlids, where variations in the environment have clearly played a role in, for instance, feeding adaptations. To then argue for alternative mechanisms using the fossil record is problematic: adaptive radiations are seen in cases where you’ve got close-up, fine-grained observations of single clades, but the evidence for adaptation fades when you use a more coarse-grained, less well-sampled method?

One piece of evidence presented is basically an absence-of-evidence argument. There is a lack of evidence of character displacement in the fossil record. Character displacement is the shift in morphology away from each other from two similar species competing in an overlapping range; it ought to be seen if two populations are adapting to avoid competition.

His argument that solutions to adaptive problems can exist for milllions of years without a radiation occurring is more interesting. He points to Anolis lizards in the Caribbean that converge on similar strategies when they evolve on different islands as an indication that the potential for particular morphologies is present in the species before they find themself with fresh opportunities on a new island. The carnivore fossil record shows a limited repertoire of optimal feeding strategies, which canids exploited repeatedly. Sea urchins have been evolving to follow similar feeding patterns repeatedly, as well.

It’s a somewhat frustrating argument, though. He’s trying to show that a radiation can’t have been driven by the acquisition of an adaptation if the adaptation had existed for long periods previously without a radiation. I can see the point, but one could argue that the radiation depended on both the prior potential in the organism and ecological circumstance, which is part of his second point…which makes point #1 and point #2 codependent on one another.

I’d have to say that I wasn’t entirely satisfied that he’d supported his first conclusion to my satisfaction. It’s also the case that he’s arguing that both adaptive and non-adaptive radiations occur, meaning it’s a quantitative question of which of the two is most important under what conditions, and he hasn’t done anything to measure that balance. I don’t reject the hypothesis, but I also don’t think the work has been done to confirm it — yet. He concludes the whole paper by predicting that gene regulatory networks are characterized by stability, so morphological novelties may be based on features established outside the core GRNs, and are thus more flexible. I don’t know. That’s definitely well outside anything you could figure out with fossils, so it’s going to require a different approach.

That’s how I’m going to talk about a paper I enjoyed with my students (and you Pharyngula readers think I’m harsh with my mere movie reviews). I’m also going to discuss a second paper on epigenetics that I didn’t care much for — the heart of the paper is a painful exercise in writing about how they feel about certain definitions of epigenetics which made me snarl — but I still think it made some valid points.

That’s really the purpose of the whole exercise. Stop treating science papers as holy writ that you can’t challenge; think critically about everything, and try to find logical holes that can be plugged with better evidence. That’s how science gets better and better. These are smart students and they just need to learn that they can actually disagree with Famous Scientists.

The real challenge, too, is that my plan is to talk about these examples for maybe 15 minutes, and then put the students into groups to discuss the papers they’ll have brought with them, trying to punch holes in them. It might be fun. It might be difficult and frustrating. As mentioned, one of the annoyances of student writing is that too often they think of it as reporting, describing what’s in it rather than engaging with the ideas with their very own brain and questioning what the paper says.

Hey, maybe I shouldn’t call it “reporting” since that’s also what journalists should be doing, but too often aren’t. Reciting summaries credulously shouldn’t be what either scientists or journalists do.

Erwin DH (2015) Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life. Curr Biol 5;25(19):R930-40.