It’s a cracker, people

Good grief, but this is tedious. I’m still getting piles of email every day from people 1) begging me not to abuse a cracker because it is so sacred to them, piles of email telling me to 2) abuse a book because it is so sacred to Muslims (I’ve even been sent two copies of the Koran!), and of course, the 3) bizarre complaint that I’m a coward, afraid to commit sacrilege. You can all stop now. 1) Your personal sense of the sacred in a piece of bread dough is absurd to me and imposes on me no sense of obligation. 2) Since I now own one entirely superfluous copy of the Koran, it will meet the very same fate as the crackers. Thanks to all who have demanded that I treat that silly book with disrespect, I’ll have to treat both equally. 3) I have not rushed to be rude to a cracker because, well, it’s there, it’s ridiculous, and it’s not very important. I’ve been traveling, and I’ve come home to writing deadlines, and those get first priority. Heck, going into the kitchen right now and fixing myself a sandwich for lunch has higher priority. After I’ve cleared the deck of my work this week, then I might take a moment to casually demolish a sacred cow.

Now enough. You can all stop dunning me. Be patient, godless ones, and surrender to despair, O Ye Believers. And if this turns into another thousand comment thread, I shall be very, very cranky.

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Carnivalia and an open thread

Here’s some reading material for your Sunday afternoon.

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The next Tangled Bank will be at Blue Collar Scientist on Wednesday. Send links now!

I’m hosting the next Carnival of the Elitist Bastards on 26 July, and the submissions are barging in to my mailbox and demanding my attention…but I need more. I want a legion of arrogant SOBs making noise. So send me more links…don’t be shy (hah!).

Academic freedom at San Jose/Evergreen Community College?

June Sheldon was an adjunct professor of biology at San Jose/Evergreen Community College, teaching genetics. Here’s one account of a lecture she gave.

On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist’s views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook. Sheldon then explained that the class would learn in a later chapter of the textbook that homosexual behavior may be influenced by both genes and the environment.

Here’s another.

In the class discussion, Sheldon noted that the nature/nurture question was complex. She said that from the nurture point of view, fathers who wanted heterosexual sons might choose to treat their wives with courtesy. She also argued that from the nurture point of view, a theoretical possibility is that some women might have chosen lesbian relationships after having had bad heterosexual relationships.

These all sound like reasonable discussions of the issue. Of course, they are all written after the fact, so maybe the presentation has been cleaned up a bit. After all, a student found the lecture to be grounds to make a formal complaint.

On June 21st, our session of Human Heredity class was based on a development chapter. Professor Sheldon began to talk about something that had no mention in the textbook. I found many parts of her lecture highly offensive and unscientific. She presented this information, however, as hard science.

She said that a German study found that pregnant mice, when subjected to severe stress, would produce gay male rates. She said that the scientists cut off part of the pregnant mouse’s tail and dipped her in scalding water. I later found a website explaining what I’m quite sure is the study she was referencing. The study only used one mouse in the experimental group and one mouse in the control group. Not only that, the study did not explain how they determined the offspring were gay.

Professor Sheldon said that there are hardly any gay men in the Middle East because the women are treated very nicely. That comment was inaccurate, baseless, and offensive. First of all, determining a gay population is very difficult, and somewhat impossible if the atmosphere in that region is completely intolerant to gays. Also, I found it offensive that she thought women who must have written notes from a man to attend school are treated nicely.

A student asked Professor Sheldon what causes homosexuality in women. Professor Sheldon promptly replied that there aren’t any real lesbians. According to her, women simply get tire of relationships with men and pursue them with women.

To conclude her lecture, she addressed the men in the classroom, saying that if they want a “nice,” and strong son, they should treat their wives very nicely (do things like “open doors for them”). And she said, if they wanted a “sensitive” son, they should abuse their wives.

Even after a month of waiting to cool down, I am still horribly offended.

There are some things in that account that are bizarre: few gay men in the Middle East? Women who have sexual relationships with other women aren’t “real” lesbians? Just by that account, I’d agree that there might have been some weird assertions in the lecture. However, I teach genetics, too, and I know that students often come away with very garbled interpretations of what I taught, and I have the exam scores to prove it.

It’s also odd that the student doesn’t like the study he or she thinks the professor referenced. The maternal stress theory of homosexuality is a real, if somewhat controversial (like every theory about homosexuality), idea that has conflicting evidence in support about a contributing factor to sexual orientation. It’s perfectly appropriate to discuss it in class, especially if the professor also acknowledges other theories.

There are some red flags in that complaint, too. Complaining that she was lecturing about “something that had no mention in the textbook” is an argument that irritates me no end. That’s the point of having a professor — they’re there to discuss ideas with you. A class is not an exercise in regurgitating facts from the textbook. It’s also suspicious that this is a subjective account written a month after the event. The student has been sitting there stewing in outrage for weeks, and then assembles a complaint? Bleh. Throw it out on those grounds alone.

Then there is the fact that the student complains over and over about being offended. What do you want? Feel-good pablum in which you’re affirmed in what you already know? If you’re offended, speak up and argue. This was a wonderful opportunity: ask the professor to back up details of the experiment in question (Sheldon has since said that she was talking about the work of Günter Dörner, which really does involve more than one pair of mice). If you’ve got information that says the numbers in the experiment were weak, say so, and ask her to look into it. This is another reason professors are kind of useful to have around — they’re more responsive than your textbook, or should be.

I’d like to see more concrete evidence of invalid instruction than this. How about an exam question that is graded wrong if the student argues that homosexuals are not more rare in the Middle East than anywhere else? How about copies of powerpoint slides that assert nonsense? Let’s see some evidence of errors of substance.

Unfortunately, this complaint has gotten Sheldon’s contract terminated. She’s an adjunct, the university has the privilege of not renewing her contract (although it looks like they didn’t follow their own grievance procedures), so there’s probably not much she can do to oppose this, but Sheldon has filed a legal complaint anyway. Good luck to her. If professors could be dismissed on the basis of a single student complaint that they were “offended” by the content of a lecture, there wouldn’t be any of us around anymore.

I can’t say that I’m at all impressed with SJCC’s commitment to academic freedom, or their excessive reaction to a single student’s complaint. There is something more going on there, and they aren’t being forthcoming about it.

Dr Horrible

You are all aware of Joss Whedon’s new mini-epic, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, I’m sure. If not, get over there now…it’s only freely available until Sunday night.

All I can say is that it is about time someone made a sympathetic, musical tribute to supervillains. Now I’m wondering, though…the ending is not satisfactory. I want more. Whedon cannot simply stop here with a single 3 part event. I want a weekly series on the internet!

I guess that means we should actually pay for these episodes, as encouragement.

Oh, and if you liked Felicia Day in Dr Horrible, check out The Guild.

Altenberg 2008 is over

Massimo Pigliucci has posted the notes, parts 1, 2, and 3, from the Altenberg meeting that was unfortunately over-hyped by the creationist crowd (no blame for that attaches to the organizers of this meeting). It sounds like it was a phenomenally interesting meeting that was full of interesting ideas, but from these notes, it was also clearly a rather speculative meeting — not one that was trying to consolidate a body of solid observations into a coherent explanation, but one that was instead trying to define promising directions for an expansion of evolutionary theory. That’s also the message of the concluding statement of the meeting.

A group of 16 evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science convened at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg (Austria) on July 11-13 to discuss the current status of evolutionary theory, and in particular a series of exciting empirical and conceptual advances that have marked the field in recent times.

The new information includes findings from the continuing molecular biology revolution, as well as a large body of empirical knowledge on genetic variation in natural populations, phenotypic plasticity, phylogenetics, species-level stasis and punctuational evolution, and developmental biology, among others.

The new concepts include (but are not limited to): evolvability, developmental plasticity, phenotypic and genetic accommodation, punctuated evolution, phenotypic innovation, facilitated variation, epigenetic inheritance, and multi-level selection.

By incorporating these new results and insights into our understanding of evolution, we believe that the explanatory power of evolutionary theory is greatly expanded within biology and beyond. As is the nature of science, some of the new ideas will stand the test of time, while others will be significantly modified. Nonetheless, there is much justified excitement in evolutionary biology these days. This is a propitious time to engage the scientific community in a vast interdisciplinary effort to further our understanding of how life evolves.

That’s a little soft — there are no grand reformulations of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in there, nor is anyone proposing to overturn our understanding of evolution — but that’s what I expected. It’s saying that there are a lot of exciting ideas and new observations that increase our understanding of the power of evolution, and promise to lead research in interesting new directions.

Unfortunately, one reporter has produced an abominably muddled, utterly worthless and uninformed account of the Altenberg meeting that has been picked up by many crackpots to suggest that evolution is in trouble. This not only ignores a fundamental property of science — that it is always pushing off in new directions — but embarrassingly overinflates the importance of this one meeting. This was a gathering of established scientists with some new proposals. It was not a meeting of the central directorate of the Darwinist cabal to formulate new dogma.

Where one ignorant kook dares to assert her inanity, you know the Discovery Institute will stampede after her. Both Paul Nelson and now Casey Luskin have cited her lunatic distortions favorably. Luskin’s account is egregiously incompetent, as we’ve come to expect — he even thinks Stuart Pivar was an attendee. Pivar is an eccentric New York art collector, heir to a septic tank fortune, who has no training in science and whose “theory” is a nonsensical bit of guesswork that is contradicted by observations anyone can make in a basic developmental biology lab. He was not at the meeting. No one in their right mind would even consider inviting him to such a serious event. Maybe if it was a birthday party and they needed someone to make balloon animals, he’d be a good man to have on hand.

Now we can move beyond the garbled hype of the creationists. Pigliucci lists several concepts up there that have promise for further research, and that may help us understand evolution better. That’s the productive result of the meeting, and the only part that counts. Those concepts are also going to be discussed by many other scientists at many other meetings — even I talked about some of them recently — but don’t let the liars on the creationist side confuse you into thinking that the fact that scientists are talking about new ideas is a sign that evolution is in crisis. Talking about new ideas is normal science.

Pathological cephalopod

Teratology is so interesting — it gives us hints about the mechanisms driving developmental processes. In some cases, when you just have a few isolated instances, it can be frustrating, because there isn’t enough information to go much beyond speculation. Here’s one of those tantalizing cases: an octopus with branching tentacles.

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Now that is fascinating. Look at limb formation as an abstract developmental problem in which you first have to initiate a protrusion from a specific place on the body wall; the protrusion has to elongate to a specific length; and it has to be patterned along its length. Cephalopod limb patterning doesn’t involve any branching elements, unlike vertebrate limbs which show a limited radiation of bony elements as you go distally. Vertebrates can exhibit phenomena like polydactyly which are basically counting errors or expansions of a field; the mechanisms for that don’t seem likely to be the case in cephalopods. What I’d guess is that this is an example of errors in initiation. Whatever the signal is that triggers limb extension from the body was triggered again and again as the arm grew, creating sub-arms and sub-sub-arms. This could be a consequence of a mutation that lifted normal constraints that pattern limb initiation (this animal lived for some time, and produced offspring with normal limbs, all of which died shortly after hatching, unfortunately, a result that is ambiguous in determining whether the problem is genetic), or it could be an environmental signal that mimics the normal developmental signal. You can’t tell from one dead octopus!

It’s still cool, though, and says we need more research on cephalopod development.

Netroots Nation

I’m a little bit jealous: Seed is well represented at Netroots Nation, but I couldn’t swing it this year. It’s just as well, as it would have been sandwiched in between a couple of other jaunts, and I’m still trying to get back on my feet after wearing myself out in Atlanta.

It would have been great, though — a group of us, including me and Michael Bérubé, had a proposed session on academic freedom/”academic bill of rights” that got turned down. If you’re there, tell the organizers to bring us on next year!