Academic job-seeking and weblogs
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running this pseudonymous column discussing the perception of blogs by academic hiring committees. It includes some important cautions:
A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.
The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
The column has an interesting point of view -- one that may be typical of many senior faculty -- in that it significantly underrepresents the diversity of the blogosphere. It unfailingly describes blogs as full of personal rants, unprofessional smears, and irrelevant tripe. Reading this, you would have to conclude that anyone who bothered writing regularly online is either a narcissist or a closet jerk:
We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?
But of course, the same thing could be said of any kind of accessible writing. After all, what motivated this author to write a pseudonymous column for the Chronicle?
The article has an important message, though. If you are pursuing an academic career, and you are interested in writing online, then you can't assume that the two will be symbiotic. Clearly you can enhance your prospects with a good blog -- one that is very carefully written, that retains a serious professional perspective, and that gives credit to others where it is due.
But your effort must be both highly consistent and integrated into your academic mission. There are a lot of irrational attitudes out there about blogging right now, many of them widely represented in the academy. In the column, one candidate fares poorly because of what someone else wrote about them in a blog, while committee members voiced concerns that any blog, no matter how professionally written, might be used as a forum to "air dirty laundry." In any academic committee, there is a fair bit of projecting one's own concerns onto others. If you are writing things you wouldn't want a hiring committee to read, you'd better be using a pseudonym, too.
As for myself, I want to thank my readers. The weblog now averages 600 unique readers a day, who view 2400 pages, and download 82 megabytes of files. In June, the weblog was read in 74 different countries. This means that every day I reach more people than will likely ever read any one of my academic papers, regardless of whether they have a university library or subscription to academic journals. A weblog is communication, pure and simple, and that is what academia is about.
AMNH Human Origins exhibit opening
Another museum-related AP story details the new "Hall of Human Origins" at the American Museum of Natural History:
"I think this is the first major exhibition in the world where the fossil evidence and the genomic science are brought together to tell a mutually reinforcing story," museum President Ellen Futter said at a media preview on Tuesday. "Bringing the two stories together is extraordinarily powerful."
The hall, covering more than 9,000 square feet, succeeds the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution and was a couple of years in the planning and installation. It features the casts of more than 200 fossils and artifacts as well as DNA evidence, a host of technology and interactive features and of course the dioramas for which the museum is well known.
I think the whole exhibit sounds really exciting. I like the genomics aspect, although I wonder how it is really described (not so easy to do for a walk-by exhibit). John Noble Wilford's review calls this part "not as visually compelling." I guess it's just harder -- museums are really good at the dinosaur skeletons, but DNA is not obviously visual, it takes some interpretation to make it more apparent.
Bear left in the hall, and there is the sign "DNA Tells Us About Human Origins." Below are three tubes containing particles of DNA in a milky white solution. The samples are not particularly impressive, until you think that this is the stuff of encoded information shaping an entire organism and the material that has transformed the study of genetics, or genomics, and revealed the place of humans in the rest of life.
Oh, those Spitzers:
The Hall of Human Origins occupies the galleries of its predecessor, the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, which had its opening 12 years ago, before many of the advances in genomics and a number of major fossil discoveries. That exhibition closed in September 2005 to make way for its more up-to-date replacement, supported by a gift from the Spitzers, the parents of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.
If somebody goes to see it, please let me know how it is! I'll be happy to pass it on.
When fossils traveled
On the subject of the "Lucy" exhibit, a 1984 article (links are to the Times Select archive, which is not free) recalls the problems that accompanied another transatlantic voyage of human fossils:
Rift over fossils from South Africa
A cultural and political battle has erupted over the inclusion of fossils from South Africa in a major exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History.
A bill introduced in the City Council last week, and supported by a statewide coalition opposed to the racial policies of South Africa, calls for the cutting off of the city's $7 million annual support to the museum if it does not remove the South African fossils from the exhibition. Several members of the council have asked that the museum formally denounce apartheid - both in a public statement and in an addendum to the program for the ''Ancestors'' exhibition.
Leaders of the museum have refused to do so, saying that the exhibition, by showing a common ancestry for all humans, is the strongest argument against apartheid. And both Mayor Koch and Bess Myerson, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, have said that while they abhor the racial policies of South Africa they oppose any censorship of the museum and the exhibition.
"Ancestors" showed nearly 50 human fossils, the only time these have ever been seen together in one place, and was accompanied by a large conference of scientists from around the world. Another article by Walter Sullivan in the April 5, 1984 Times recounted the scene at the meeting:
Never has there been such an assembly. There was the skull of a Taung child who lived in South Africa 2.25 million years ago. Next to it were specimens of Tautavel Man, who inhabited the south of France 450,000 years ago. Across the room, and estimated to be 600,000 [sic] years old, was the original Neanderthal skull, found in 1856 in the valley of Germany's Neander River.
...
''Casts cannot compare with seeing the real thing,'' Dr. Tobias said. ''We've never had this chance before - extraordinary!''
There were other concerns besides apartheid. For instance:
The representation of human forebears at the meeting is not complete in other respects. Contemporary Australian aborigines objected to plans for putting fossils of their remote ancestors on display in New York. Nor was the British Museum willing to part with any of its specimens, apparently because of fear that some countries that say the specimens belong to them, such as Zimbabwe, would initiate legal action to get them back.
On the subject of comparing "Lucy" and the Dead Sea Scrolls, similar comparisons were already being made in 1984:
Mayor Koch added: ''Fossils have no nationality. They may be possessed by someone for a time, but human fossils belong to no one. They are the holy relics of humanity and it is New York City's privilege and right, as a center of intellectual and artistic freedom, to host this exhibition.''
The Museum board later changed its position on the apartheid statement, as reported in a later article. Plus ça change...
Drifting away from selection
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
My problem is not an misconception, it is a pet peeve. As I've noted before, random genetic drift is a catchall explanation for everything.
Well, I thought that was worth a post of its own instead of an update, because it probably annoys me even more than the species divergence thing.
It is a periodic revelation for me how many committed Darwinists don't use or understand natural selection. I think they place natural selection somewhere between Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy -- useful to explain a few really strange phenomena, but pretty much irrelevant to evolution.
There is, of course, some reason to be cautious about selection. A little selection goes a long way toward explaining almost any pattern of evolution. Selection can make populations stay the same, and it can make them change. It can make them change fast, or it can make them change slowly. And at the genetic level, there are good reasons to suppose that many nucleotide changes don't have a phenotypic effect -- necessary for them to be selected. So it is reasonable a lot of the time to take neutrality (and therefore, genetic drift) as a null hypothesis for change.
Null hypotheses aren't there to be believed, they are there to be tested! Neutrality is a better null hypothesis because the hypothesis of some kind of selection is harder to refute. But neutrality is pretty hard to refute too, at least for the kind of evidence we usually have at hand.
It doesn't help at the molecular level that clearly non-neutral patterns of variation can be explained by extreme demographic changes (and no selection), or selection. Which hypothesis do we choose then? Most people pick neutrality, but not always for good reasons.
Nor does it help that morphological change over long time spans tends to average to very small amounts per unit time. That pattern of change is thoroughly consistent with genetic drift, but equally consistent with slowly changing stabilizing selection. And depending on the density of fossil sampling, it is often consistent with occasional pulses of strong directional selection.
Testing the difference between these hypotheses statistically is murderously hard with fossil samples. So what do we accept provisionally?
Myself, I'm a natural selection man. Accident is overrated.
You know, there's something depressing about collecting a bunch of annoying misconceptions -- and I suppose reading all of them must be sort of annoying itself. Of course, there's always the hope that writing about them might have some effect ...
Comparing astronomy to paleoanthropology
Both sciences study rare events that happened a long time ago. Both require interpretations of process, and rely on comparisons between different observed cases -- stars, supernovae, and the like for astronomy, fossils for paleoanthropology.
It would seem that observing astronomical objects and events ought to be freer -- anyone with a telescope can look up and see them, right? But of course, the very distant, very rare, and therefore very interesting events can't be observed with just any telescope; they require special instrumentation, fixed investment in large telescopes and processing computers, and arrangements to share time between different projects on said instruments.
It's sort of the same with humans lately. Anyone can sequence a gene these days, so evidence for human evolution is almost free to anyone. But the very rare, and therefore very interesting, human fossils are difficult to obtain, require specialized facilities and personnel to prepare, and of course require special arrangements to share access among researchers studying them.
So there are some broad similarities. But there are also differences. The comparison occurs to me because of a story from NASA today about the detection of a recent gamma ray burst.
MOST DISTANT EXPLOSION DETECTED, SMASHES PREVIOUS RECORD
Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite and several ground-based telescopes have detected the most distant explosion yet, a gamma-ray burst from the edge of the visible universe.
This powerful burst was detected September 4. It marks the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole. It comes from an era soon after stars and galaxies first formed, about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
"We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the Universe," said Swift principal investigator Dr. Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Now we've got one and it's fascinating. For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there," he added.
Here's the part that interested me the most:
Swift detected the burst and relayed its coordinates within minutes to scientists around the world. Reichart's team discovered the afterglow using the Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope atop Cerro Pachon, Chile. Over the next several nights, the UNC team used SOAR and the Gemini South telescope, also on Cerro Pachon, to calculate a redshift of greater than 6 using a light filtering technique. A team led by Nobuyuki Kawai of the Tokyo Institute of Technology used the Subaru Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to confirm the distance and fine-tune the redshift measurement to 6.29, using a technique called spectroscopy.
So, after detecting the furthest gamma ray burst yet known, they immediately broadcast the news to colleagues around the world to make observations from other stations, depended on the special capabilities of other teams to supplement their observations and provide independent replicates, and integrated those observations into a single picture of the astronomical event.
Paleoanthropology is also collaborative in this way. Research teams are made up of people with many different specialties, and people from outside the team may be drawn in to address special aspects of anatomy, to apply special techniques, or to independently check conclusions. The process appears less public than in astronomy, and it has a much slower response time to new discoveries and events, but then it is also much more poorly funded. Even so, not just anybody is supposed to find out about new stuff, as witnessed by the recent premature announcement of the Kuiper belt objects in the face of internet cracking attacks.
The biggest difference I see between the fields is in the dissemination of results. New results in physics, including astronomical research, are disseminated through arXiv, on which new research preprints are freely available. This system encourages early comment on new research as well as openness about what conclusions are supported by data, and which are more speculative. As an ideal, it encourages a scientific hierarchy based on ideas rather than data access. This is because its entire existence is about communicating ideas more quickly to those equipped to evaluate them.
The arXiv does not replace traditional journal publication in physical sciences; instead, journal publication remains highly important for peer review, provision of an imprimatur of quality, and status. There are suggestions that arXiv should itself begin to incorporate peer review of high-traffic articles, as a step toward ensuring the long-lasting utility of certain papers. But even lacking this, the utility of the arXiv service is clear: ideas are available for scrutiny long before they appear in journals.
Without as strong a tradition of circulating results, paleoanthropology is at a comparable disadvantage when it comes to quality of science. We have a long history of retractions. This is not necessarily bad; indeed, I would say that our research results ultimately undergo a much higher degree of scrutiny than most in the physical sciences. It is the truly exceptional gamma ray burst that gains as much attention as a new hominid fossil. But this heightened scrutiny takes years, when the basic issues might be sketched out in weeks with a faster mode of communication.
Is it only a matter of time before paleoanthropology moves in this direction? That is difficult for me to say. There is no institutional incentive at present for people to share their research. The Paleoanthropology Society has already begun making dissertations available for download -- a sort of mini-arXiv for theses, with participation voluntary. Since 2003, there has been a section of arXiv devoted to quantitative biology, the intersection between mathematical sciences and biology. This includes research devoted to populations and evolution, and I have been following the submissions for some time. So the infrastructure for such a system is not far away -- it is well within the capabilities of a single university, department, or organization.
But without the social expectation of communicating results quickly, there is really no force that can drive people to change. Graduate students are enculturated into a cult of secrecy -- sometimes the hard way as someone else steals their results or yanks their access to specimens. Entire books are published with factually wrong information because no outside professionals read them in advance.And new ideas from cranks get just as much attention as new ideas from established scientists, because the press cycle gives too little time to distinguish the two.
The lesson I draw from astronomy is that these problems are not inherent to the study of rare events, expensive analysis, or historical phenomena. They are symptoms of a social disorder.
I increasingly find that openness works. I get far more insightful peer review on what I write for free here, than on anything I have ever submitted to a journal. And it's instantaneous. I don't write scholarly review articles here, and I don't give out any research results. There's no incentive for it, and there's a positive disincentive in the likelihood of a high-ranking journal turning down previously published material. But if an incentive were available -- with credit for a tenure record -- I would start.
Reorganizing anthropology at ASU
Inside Higher Ed reports on the reorganization of anthropology at Arizona State University into the new School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
On Tuesday Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution & Social Change officially opened for learning. It's the outcome of a reorganization of the institution's anthropology department that's been almost two years in the making. While many faculty members at the university are pleased with prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration that come along with the change, others are concerned that anthropology as a discipline is getting the short end of the evolutionary stick.
Seems like a very interesting development, potentially rooting anthropology at the center of interdisciplinary research in social science. In other universities (not mine) it often seems that anthropology is treated as peripheral to social sciences like economics and political science.
The article does cite some detractors:
Linda Wolfe, the chair of anthropology at East Carolina University, who holds the biological seat on the anthropology association's Executive Board, cautioned that winning grants may pose a challenge for some anthropology scholars at Arizona State's restructured school. "Grants, like those at NSF -- there are a few that can be awarded to interdisciplinary programs, but most of them are for mainline disciplines," she said Tuesday.
Upon reviewing the mission of the school, Wolfe added: "This kind of program isn't going to strengthen anthropology, it's going to destroy anthropology.... I think their rankings will go down because it's not an anthropology program anymore, it's an interdisciplinary mish-mash."
The ASU school has a news page that lists many of the new hires and some of the grants of continuing faculty. It seems to me that ultimate success depends on whether people develop links, value each others' work, and successfully colonize other programs with their students. But in the bureaucratic battle of securing continuing university support, having your own school can't hurt.
I find the school's name interesting. It certainly works for the strengths that ASU is trying to accentuate. And it certainly works for me -- as a paleoanthropologist I naturally view our evolutionary history as the fundamental basis for human behavior and culture. On the other hand, I wonder how many anthropologists would approve of the idea that "human evolution" and "social change" are intricately linked? Or does listing them both imply that they are parallel processes? Hmmm....
I got the story via this Savage Minds post by Kerim, who adds some comments as well.
Biocultural breakdown
Harvard undergraduate Stephen Cupps writes in an op-ed that his biological anthropology major is being "killed":
While as a whole, this step [reorganization of the Life Science curriculum] was a well-planned movement to provide smaller concentrations to students, one problem existed: HEB [Human Evolutionary Biology] was identical to biological anthropology in every way except that it replaced social anthropology and archaeology requirements with pre-med classes.
The obvious effect was a flight of pre-med students who would have potentially concentrated in the interdisciplinary biological anthropology to the HEB, which is little more than concentrating in pre-med. Overnight, BioAnthro quietly started to fade into that sacred elephant-burial ground where concentrations go to die. All the biological anthropology classes from the tutorials on up have been renumbered to HEB classes. Students who attempted to get a study card signed for biological anthropology were encouraged by the department to strongly consider HEB. As a result, biological anthropology has gone from a small but lively concentration to one in which at the beginning of this semester only three sophomores still exist.
The complaints seem to be that the new major has no four-field component, and that it includes low-rated introductory courses in biology.
There's nothing special about Harvard; the decline of four-field anthropology has been progressing in many institutions for many years. The long intradisciplinary territory-marking is not all that interesting, but in aggregate these changes clearly mark a decline in the perceived legitimacy of a biocultural approach to human evolution and biology. A comment on the story at the Crimson reinforces this interpretation:
Over the last couple of years, they've been trying to break away from the anthropology department -- in part because they think that either standing alone as a department of Human Evolutionary Biology, or being another part of Organismic and Evolutionary Bio, would give them more legitimacy as mainline natural scientists. That is, many faculty and grad students in the bio anthro wing believe that not being affiliated with social anthro and archaeology will open up more funding opportunities (and potentially more jobs!) for them.
I think it's worth pointing out that, at most institutions, whatever four-field training there is in anthropology is conducted at the undergraduate level. Graduate students have little or no expectation of training outside their subdiscipline, except as necessary for their research topic. So to the extent that new graduate students come in from programs that have no real four-field component, they won't finish their degrees with any such training. That means that new professionals in biological anthropology often don't have an expectation that their work should involve insights from sociocultural anthropology.
Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it certainly doesn't describe my research agenda. If I wanted to be a human zoologist, I wouldn't have gone into anthropology. Considering the increasing ethical and sociological components of genetic technology, I think that we should encourage all our students to include sociocultural anthropology in their studies of "human evolution" or "human genetics".
The key is to be selective -- although the broad study of anthropology involves many possible directions, a number of core issues from cultural anthropology are fundamental to the field; just as a broad understanding of human evolution and relationships are fundamental. It is a shame that, instead of breaking apart, anthropologists haven't found a new way to organize this subdisciplinary diversity into a cohesive whole.
(HT: Razib)
Is blogging going to kill me?
That's what the New York Times seems to be suggesting:
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Um...not me.
The problem seems to come from unoriginality -- if your blogging strategy is being the absolute first person to point to some other story (the examples in the story are mostly tech writers), then you have to be awake and waiting for it.
Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco -- hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.
"I've got a background getting punched in the face," he said. "That's why I'm good at this job."
Let's just say I'm not in that kind of competition.
Decomp
Time covers the problems Texas State University has had finding a site for a large outdoor cadaver decomposition laboratory:
[N]eighbors complained that the facility would affect property values and attract coyotes and vultures. TSU had to abandon the site, over concerns that gathering vultures would threaten aircraft, and university officials say the body farm will be built elsewhere in the area.
I can understand why they wouldn't want to see that headline: "Body farm vultures threaten aircraft". It's like the seventh voyage of Sinbad or something.
The article has some history:
The first facility at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility, was opened on a three-acre site in Knoxville in 1971 by noted anthropologist William Bass. Prolific crime writer Patricia Cornwell popularly dubbed it a "body farm" in her novel of the same name. Bass himself has co-written a series of best-selling novels set on the farm; the first, Carved in Bone, was described as "southern-fried forensics" by Kirkus Reviews.
The popular appetite for forensic stories is seen not just in novels and on TV but in a new CSI exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Across the country more universities are adding forensics classes to their criminology programs. In addition to the proposed TSU facility, Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers and Chico State in California are planning their own outdoor criminology labs.
And also explains the practical importance: decomposition times are very different in these different parts of the country, and they have different insect populations.
Every semester I have students who want to study this stuff. Somehow, I don't get as many who want to be research subjects! It is much more environmentally friendly than embalming....
"Unteachable, to a first approximation"
This PLoS Genetics interview with David Botstein is really interesting (via GNXP). Especially his current moves to improve undergraduate biology education:
What we did was we had eight senior faculty, a sort of Noah's ark of science, sit every Monday at lunch for two to three hours and simply ask the following question for all of these fields at the most introductory level: Is this problem or this idea or this concept fundamental, or merely traditional? We collected all the fundamentals and did the best we could to make them into a coherent sequence.
We tell the students, "This is not the low-energy path to medical school."
On the subject of graduate study:
We have one such course called Method and Logic in Quantitative Biology, and we teach the classic papers, many of which are forgotten because they can't be taught now because people don't understand the math. You may remember reading Luria and Delbruck, and you may remember that nobody understood Luria and Delbruck because they didn't have the math--and these were MIT graduate students! Poisson distribution--don't bother me.
I worry sometimes that the same thing is happening to math that happened to Latin -- nobody remembers why it is useful, and it's a self-reinforcing deterioration. It's like a forgotten language, yet it makes everything so clear when you can read it.
A bust for the ages
It's Wellcome Image Bank tag -- now that they have put their huge historical and contemporary image collection online, the game is to find your favorite image. Larry Moran started, Carl Zimmer follows with Wren's diagram of the brain (from Carl's book; hardly sporting that one...).
So here's one that speaks for me, an English major who found anthropology:
Diagram comparing bust of Shakespeare's head with "moderate" size skull of modern Englishman. By Arthur Keith, 1914. Creative Commons License, Wellcome Images.
References:
Keith A. 1914. Some portraits of Shakespeare and Burns. Brit Med J 1914:461-466.
Openness, casts, and CT scans
Earlier this week, I wrote a little post referring to an article that pointed out why original fossils remain valuable long after their discovery. I got quite a lot of correspondence about it.
Some people were incensed that I had exaggerated the problems of using casts in research. Of course, since all of my research has involved casts in one way or another, this would really be pot-kettle territory.
In fact, I would argue that more good research is done with casts than with original fossils. Anthropology is a comparative science. For the most part, it is impossible to compare original fossils with each other, because they are housed in different places. It is much better to use a large collection of casts to test hypotheses about human evolution than a small collection of fossils. Sure, you have to make sure that the casts don't mislead your analysis -- but in practical terms most of us are very aware of the deficiencies of particular casts and reconstructions. You have to gain this familiarity to be a paleoanthropologist.
There is a lot of idol worship in the field of human evolution. Many of my colleagues won't take someone seriously until they have knelt in the presence of the sacred relics. This is symptomatic of a kind of gatekeeping behavior -- scientists who want to "keep out the riffraff," which generally consists of other peoples' students, but also professionals who haven't "put in the time in the field."
Another aspect of gatekeeping behavior is the availability of CT scans. One of my correspondents wrote that CT scanning will make casting irrelevant, because everybody will have CTs of all the fossils and will be able to make their own casts when they want to. Boy, it sure seems like this ought to happen. After all, CT scans are even better than casts in some ways -- they let you see internal details and allow computer reconstructions, for example. They're not perfect, particularly for close details beyond the resolution used in today's CTs. But they should be very cheap to distribute. A world that can disseminate Craig Venter's complete genome to anybody who wants it ought to be able to find some way to get a few hundred CT scans sent around.
A number of efforts are starting to make CT distribution possible -- notably, NESPOS, the Vienna Virtual Anthropology group, and a few others. I expect these efforts will improve, and we will see more and more students able to access the essential data of paleoanthropology.
But for those who've been reading the blog for any length of time, you'll remember I wrote about this problem two years ago.
During the two years since that post, there has been a great deal of progress in scanning fossils. Most papers about new fossils are supported by data from scanning. A small proportion of these scans have been made available to paying professionals, or soon will be. Most are locked away, with no long-term prospect of ever being distributed. Today, none are openly available. Not a single scan of a hominid fossil can be obtained in the open, free of charge.
Why do I argue so strongly for completely open access? I believe it is a matter of credibility. A fundamental principle of science is replicability. If someone else cannot replicate your results, they have no reason to believe you. You have no scientific credibility.
In practice, we don't replicate every piece of science. We accept the word of competent scientists. The greater their reputation, the more we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their reputations makes it more likely that they will be published in journals like Science and Nature. These journals are invested heavily in making novel results. Open things by definition are not novel. In paleoanthropology, if your fossil has been published before, these newsmaking journals are much less interested. So secrecy yields dividends.
But today paleoanthropology faces a real credibility problem. A substantial majority in most of the world's countries believes that we are lying about human evolution. In the few nations that are exceptions, a substantial minority holds the same belief: human evolution is false. The human fossil record has been fabulated.
The beauty of science is that it is self-correcting. You can read this blog to find the obvious mistakes in papers published in those marquee journals. This self-criticism is essential to science's credibility. But it is hampered by secrecy. The reputations of many powerful scientists have been built on secrecy. In certain quarters, their secrecy enhances their power. But the science as a whole is like the crew of a wrecked ship, treading water. Some of the crew are climbing up on the shoulders of others, pushing them below the surface. Sure, these drowning people respect the power of those climbing up on them. But they're just drowning faster.
Is there a lifeboat on the horizon? Many of the influential scientists and curators dedicated to the fossil record understand this problem. Many of them have worked to make the human fossil record more and more open. They recognize that fieldworkers have a genuine interest in benefiting from their finds, that careful analysis of the fossils is more important than immediate access to them. But they balance these real needs with the recognition that the field's future depends on its credibility, that the next generation of students cannot be trained without seeing the important evidence, and that comparative science is not possible without comparative data. Along these lines, eventually there will be greater openness. I believe it is inevitable, because the field cannot survive without it.
Other fields have dealt with the same pressures in fundamentally different ways. Genetic data are mostly open and freely available. Physics papers are often developed entirely in the open, on the arXiv. These models have not been attempted in paleoanthropology, and they might never work. But it is clear that open access is directly contrary to the interests of the gatekeepers. I doubt we will see scans within the next 20 years. Someday that the blind will see and the lame will walk. But I think on that day, we still won't be able to get CT scans of hominid fossils.
Is Nature pushing drugs to scientists?
So last year, Nature did an editorial about "cognitive enhancement" drugs, and now they've done a web survey to follow up on the editorial, asking their readers to comment on whether they've used prescription or other drugs for enhancing their performance. It's been widely reported that this is a survey of scientists (Nature's main audience), although being a web survey it's probably not all that representative.
The magazine reports on the results this week:
One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Use did not differ greatly across age-groups (see line graph, right), which will surprise some.
The graph mentioned shows that the 60-year-olds dose themselves just as much as 30-year-olds, and nearly as much as those less than 25. The main drugs are Ritalin, Provigil, beta blockers (which combat anxiety), and Adderall. The number who use these under prescriptions is dwarfed by those using them illicitly.
But here's what I find interesting:
The most popular reason for taking the drugs was to improve concentration. Improving focus for a specific task (admittedly difficult to distinguish from concentration) ranked a close second and counteracting jet lag ranked fourth, behind 'other' which received a few interesting reasons, such as "party", "house cleaning" and "to actually see if there was any validity to the afore-mentioned article".
In other words, some proportion of the respondents started using drugs because they read about it in Nature.
Jeez, I wonder what other things people start believing just because they read it in Nature...
An argument for open access
A minor flap has erupted regarding blogging and scientific publishing that I'd like to draw some attention to: Shelley Batts, who writes the Retrospectacle blog posted her own summary and review of a research paper published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. In the summary, she included a figure and a table from the paper. This is the sort of thing that I do all the time -- it is impossible to comment intelligently on some research without being able to refer to graphical presentations of the results.
Then, she got a letter from the journal threatening legal action unless the copyrighted figure and table were removed. You can read the letter and some commentary at her site. She removed the figure and table, replacing them by entering the data in Excel and making equivalents -- there's no copyright on data. So that solves the problem for her, and removes the threat.
I'm linking this because, like Razib, I think it's important to shine a light on this behavior by publishers. But additionally, I think there are some issues that are not easily resolved.
Others have been arguing that the use of the figure is clearly fair use. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a short FAQ on fair use doctrine, with links to other longer reviews. I would certainly prefer that all uses were fair use, but it is not at all obvious to me in this case.
Retrospectacle is a ScienceBlogs site, and they run advertising. In other words, somebody is taking money for running the ads. Now, whether the ScienceBlogs should be considered a part of Seed Magazine or merely a loss-leading subcompartment of the Seed Media Group, it is understandable that a scientific publisher might balk at the use of their copyrighted figures in that context without permission or royalty payments. I'm not saying that this particular case was not fair use; just that it isn't an obvious conclusion.
And what about all those blog posts on ScienceBlogs that quote copyrighted text? Maybe a figure is worth a thousand words, but two or three paragraphs of text on an ad-supported site seems pretty likely to violate fair use doctrine. I'm not trying to pick on ScienceBlogs -- I read and link many of them -- and the problem is not unique, since many Blogger, LiveJournal, and other sites are configured to use ads. But noncommercial versus commercial is one of the main criteria in fair use doctrine. Others include criticism, comment, and scholarship, which many -- though not all -- science blogs embody. So it's a good question.
Nobody's making any money on the John Hawks Anthropology Weblog. I am always very careful to choose those figures necessary to support and interpret my text, and I limit direct text quotes to abstracts and those parts of a paper that are necessary for my discussion. I don't think you can get any more fair use than this site. No grey area: if it's not fair use, it's not posted here.
So, you're probably thinking, "That was a nice statement for the lawyers, Dudley Do-right, but the entire web is based on quoting-and-linking." And I'm no exception. But my paranoia is ratcheted up a level above a normal level, for the basic reason that stuck-out necks attract axes.
I'm concerned about the chilling effects of copyright, because for most of the papers I review, the data aren't so easy to transcribe. Many papers don't supply their data at all. In some papers, the essential data are photographic. If the weblog is going to be a vehicle for commentary on research, it is necessary to use figures sometimes, and these figures cannot simply be replicated from data tables. It is entirely foreseeable that aggressive copyright enforcement could be used to block dissent from published results (will they let you use a published figure in a submission to another journal?).
If that's not a worry for you, then consider that a journal going after a blog for posting a figure is uncomfortably close to a journal going after an author for posting a PDF. After all, that's not distribution of a single figure (which might drive some people to buy the whole thing), but distribution of the entire paper -- and many, many papers are available from authors' own websites.
I hope the journals never crack down, because I depend on all those PDFs for my research. At the same time, I've never posted any of mine, because copyright agreements are very clear that posting PDF reprints is verboten.
Should you be as paranoid as me? I have to be cleaner about copyright than most authors, since it's much more likely that somebody will notice a PDF that I post here than somebody else on a random lab website. It's why I take fair use and other copyright issues so seriously.
But if you're an author of anthropology papers, you should watch out. The publisher in question is Wiley -- publisher of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, among others. Now you may see why this is worth some attention -- if Wiley is sending its lawyers after the use of a figure on a blog, will they be coming after your PDFs next? I doubt it, but there are those copyright agreements...
I don't think there is any imminent danger, but it serves as a reminder to be vigilant. And to choose open access journals where it is practicable.
E-mail: natural selection and intelligent design
OK, I'm sure everyone has seen this story already, but can I just say, "Amen"?
A new study finds that the correspondence of Albert Einstein, as well as that of Charles Darwin, followed patterns similar to modern e-mail communication.
Einstein sent more than 14,500 letters. But he received more than 16,200, and responded to only a quarter of them. Darwin mailed more than 7,500 letters. He responded to 32 percent of the roughly 6,530 letters he received.
Of course letter writing takes more time than e-mail, but the mathematical relationship between quick replies and delayed responses was similar, explains Joao Gama Oliveira of the University of Aveiro in Portugal.
Last week I hoovered 400 messages out of my inbox. Thankfully, I can maintain a lower reply rate than Einstein, since only about five or ten e-mails a day require some kind of reply. And short e-mails are much more acceptable than short letters -- they're more in the nature of telegrams really. So if you run the numbers, I send around a quarter of Einstein's lifetime output every year. But almost all of these are very short contacts -- just a way of keeping in touch, keeping projects going, or affirming queries.
In that way, it's not hard to see why e-mail has become more central than letter-writing as a form of correspondence (at least in science): it is much more polite to be able to send short replies than nothing at all -- but most letters don't really require anything more than a short reply, which wouldn't be worth sending in the post. From that standpoint, e-mail is certainly much more personal. On the other hand, the more formal nature of letters means that even in something that is only a short reply, you put in lots of filler -- how are you, I remember fondly that summer at the Cape, how are the kids -- that make letters read a lot more pleasantly (and open more of a channel for personal relationships) than e-mails. So there are pluses and minuses for this change in correspondence, but it is one that is very much in accord with the culture.
This is sort of interesting to me because I have been reading the letter and telegram correspondence of Einstein and Leo Szilard. It's fascinating they way that people exchanged considered arguments by letter, which would often take weeks to get a reply, but would telegraph (literally) their arguments in sentence form to bring attention to an oncoming letter, or to let a sender know that they got something and had something more to say. Sometimes the telegrams were quick probes for interest or snap reaction -- kind of like contact calls in primates. And this during a time that these physicists were trying to coordinate efforts to keep physical descriptions of chain reactions out of journals, since they clearly perceived a war was coming.
Now if Darwin had a blog...that would have been worth reading!
Looking at the last 25 years of paleontology
Discover magazine has been doing a series of retrospectives by scientists on the last 25 years of progress in science, in honor of the magazine's 25th anniversary. The current (July 2005) issue has paleontologists discussing what, in their views, were the most important finds of the last 25 years, and what they expect to be the most important of the next 25. Included in the group are several paleoanthropologists. Here are some snippets:
Richard Leakey:
The most important event in paleoanthropology during the past 25 years is the discovery of a fossil skull, 7 million years old, of an anthropoid that has been named Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The anatomy of this specimen forces a debate on what is most fundamental: What, if anything, distinguishes an early ape from an early hominid?
Chris Stringer:
The most important development was the coalescence of fossil and genetic data to show that our species had a recent origin in only one region -- Africa -- and that everyone traces their origin back to that continent. Regional differences lie in only a few genes that evolved during the last 100,000 years, as humans spread out and settled the areas where we find them today.
Christopher Beard:
During the last 25 years, the greatest advances in primate paleontology have been in charting the very beginnings of the anthropoid radiation . . . . My colleagues and I found the first of these dawn monkeys, which we named Eosimias sinensis, in China.
Richard Klein:
Archaeological and especially genetic advances over the next 25 years should clarify whether the modern human expansion was grounded in a quantum behavioral (cultural) advance, and if so, whether the advance stemmed from a genetic change that fostered the modern human brain.
My favorite is Tim White's response, partly because it generalizes more widely than the others, and partly because it is the change that underlies my efforts here:
I think that the most important development in paleobiology during the last 25 years was the networking of paleontologists and colleagues via the Internet. When paleontologists discovered that they could communicate quickly and economically across global distances, collaborations blossomed and intensified.
Of course, I wouldn't say, as he goes on to imply, that internet collaboration led to new discoveries of Ardipithecus....
The picks from non-anthro paleontologists are likewise a mix of entertaining and enlightening, with Mark Norell and Kevin Padian both citing the Liaoning fossils, while Jack Horner chose the recent T. rex soft tissue discovery, and many others were represented as well. In all, a chance for a little self-promotion and a mix of topics with some obvious predictions and some more interesting ones.
Cognitive expert: Don't blather jargon
From a reader, I have this paper by Daniel Oppenheimer in Applied Cognitive Psychology:
Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly
Daniel M. Oppenheimer
Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1-3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction. Implications and applications are discussed (emphasis added).
Not sure if this is some kind of hint or something....
Anyway, for you students out there, beware! You know those grade-level assessments in grammar checkers? It seems like papers written around the seventh-grade level are usually pretty readable. If you can't make it clear at that level, believe me, you are losing all possible readers, including your professors! Not because the facts aren't there; just because they are too hard to follow. Which means they probably don't follow.
References:
Oppenheimer DM. 2006. Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly. App Cogn Psych 20:139-156. DOI link
Science from the bottom looking up
Janet Stemwedel (of Adventures in Ethics and Science) has been following the aetosaur scandal, and has followed up with two posts looking for suggestions about how junior scientists and graduate students should respond to unethical behavior by their senior colleagues.
In most senses, it is not fair to generalize about ethical problems across different sciences. The fundamental issues of money, data access, learning curve, and potential for new approaches are too different: Paleoanthropology poses its own ethical dilemmas that would never occur in chemistry, for example.
But in many ways, the students in different disciplines share much more with each other than the professionals do -- and junior scientists share more than senior scientists do. Each discipline is a guild with its own political structure and barriers to advancement, but from the bottom looking up they all look pretty similar.
The first of Stemwedel's posts, Ask an ethicist: How can I stand up to misbehavior in my field? begins with an anecdote and profers a bevy of suggestions of how to respond. But the interesting thing about these posts are the comments. I don't generally dive into people's comment sections to link, but I want to give some flavor of the discussion and why it's worth reading.
Commenter Will S. brings some thoughts about students:
Almost all of the scoops and thefts and other violations I experienced victimized a student. Students catch it twice in [Vertebrate Paleontology] because limited funding puts them at the mercy of a large number of professors at school while a deep gulf between "student" and "professional" status marginalizes them among the professional community. When student work is scooped, they're given the options to quit or start over--even when, as in the several cases I experienced, the scooping academic was invited in by one or more members of the student's committee. Student work makes up a giant proprotion of presentations and posters at VP conferences, and since student work is regarded (by some more than others) as a kind of gray literature, it is fair game for intellectually bankrupt academics; students even rip off other students in this environment. Student papers pass through the publication process more slowly than others do, and usually involve more reviewers, lending themselves to cherry picking; I'm not alone, I'm sure, in walking into a conference and hearing my ideas recited verbatim by someone who had just reviewed my manuscript for Journal X.
Taking the comments together, they all illustrate one general observation: The really offensive cases of plagiarism, data theft, and other bad behavior are carried out by people who already are masters of the strategies junior people can use for redress, and who therefore are well situated to game the system in order to get away with it. This includes recruiting their own departments' and universities' administrative apparatus in their support, using their positions on editorial boards to quash challenges, and using their professional network contacts against their would-be accusers.
In this context, all the platitudes and legalistic advice offered by administrators really amounts to CYA window-dressing. Advisors know this, and many suggest sub rosa that students accommodate themselves to theft -- often sharing their own stories of being jerked over, once upon a time.
So the second post, Senior scientists, give us some good news! tries to draw out senior people who have helped junior colleagues in such situations. Unfortunately, Stemwedel doesn't find many. The bottom line appears to be that genuine abuses occur and that whistle-blowing is rarely rewarded and always damaging to an individual's career.
Late in the discussion, commenter CC throws some water on the fire, which probably should serve as a disclaimer to the whole discussion:
I really hope that no one makes a decision about what field to go into based on a handful of anecdotes from commenters with a range of axes to grind and no knowledge of other fields.
A good point, since this is a highly self-selected group of commenters, each writing from his or her own distinct perspective.
Anyway, in any individual case it is hard to distinguish between a student holding a grudge after a misunderstanding about his role in a research project, and a senior scientist really abusing his position and influence by stealing ideas. Most outsiders will judge such cases according to the reputations of the people involved, and unfortunately for students, they don't have one yet. So outsiders will judge according to what they know about other students, which is usually not especially positive.
I'm not sure the suggestion of "record-keeping" will help very much, since most students and junior scientists don't enter into collaborations with written contracts about who will take on what responsibilities and how credit will be shared. One of the appealing aspects of science is that it is an area where many deals are still sealed by a handshake -- but this means that disagreements may be hard or impossible to adjudicate.
That's problem enough, but in science, peer judgment occurs anonymously and secretly -- not only in journal reviews, but also in tenure and promotion reviews. This situation means that a junior scientist would be near-insane to make waves.
Happily, in most fields there is more work to do than there are people to do it. Good ideas come in limited quantities, and it is always tempting to borrow them. Still, if data are easy to find, then a young person can apply someone else's ideas on a new set of observations. That's what we call "normal science."
But in some fields, the data are also highly limited. Conflicts arise when both ideas and the opportunities to apply them are at a premium. If money is also limited, that introduces an even worse problem -- since the competition for money depends on past results. Vertebrate paleontology is such a field. Paleoanthropology is another.
I think that strong abuses, such as plagiarism and stealing research results, are rare in paleoanthropology. However, a large number of students are deterred from the field, or have their careers stopped before they really begin, because the system is obviously not designed to protect students from such abuses.
One thing that paleoanthropology has going in its favor is that the journals have developed a healthy tolerance for repetition. After all, if the number of ideas is limited, and the number of specimens are limited, then we are bound to see a lot of the same studies replicated on the same specimens -- albeit with minor differences in method. How many studies have there been on the cranial diversity of Lower Pleistocene humans? Fifty?
It's a symptom of a field in which students are given nothing better to do than to replicate twenty-year-old research. This helps to protect them -- at least they aren't competing with established scientists for access to new specimens -- but it protects the interests of the established scientists also. Money is always going to be tight, and everything tends to concentrate it in the hands of a few.
If I were starting out in the field today, I'd think long and hard about what kinds of data may be easily accessed or are freely available. It's enough to risk failure -- but the risk of success coupled with theft of results or denial of access is really too much to bear.
Building a research infrastructure in Ethiopia
In the current Science, Elizabeth Pennisi reports on Ethiopia's efforts to bring more resources and tourism to its fossil heritage:
Then in 2003, that lab [at the National Museum, built in 1982] was razed to make way for a six-story, modern structure that includes a two-floor library, a 500-person auditorium, and 200 rent-free offices, plus storage and study space for more than a million specimens. The three wings are devoted to paleontology and archaeology; art and history; and administrative, conservation, and educational spaces.
...
Foreign aid is helping: France is supplying furniture, and Japan may outfit the hominid spaces. Everyone involved is thrilled and not just with the prospect of more space. "It shows how much emphasis has been given [to research]," says Ethiopian native and paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio. "In a country that has a lot of needs, the government could have easily used that money for something else."
The article includes a map showing the impressive array of 25 active archaeological or paleontological field sites across the country. The funding and effort are also being devoted to training students -- not only in paleontology but across the sciences -- including the establishment of new universities.
One of the more controversial areas is tourism -- including the encouragement of travel to active research areas:
At the same time, "one of the most important things that needs to happen is the integration of tourism and science," says [anthropologist Tim] White. And that, too, is happening. National Geographic has pledged support for an educational center at the village nearest to Hadar, home of the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy. With better roads under construction, "it could easily be a destination spot for tourists," [anthropologist Donald] Johanson predicts. Exhibit plans are still taking shape, but there likely will be casts of Lucy and other fossil hominids, as well as photographs from the site.
This raises fears (by some) that the sites will be more vulnerable to destruction by trampling and looting. On the other hand, bringing a better transportation infrastructure is bound to improve matters for the scientific research teams, possibly including the most enduring problem -- security.
Personally, I wonder whether such projects can be a financial success. Many of the paleontological museums in the American West are a great experience for visitors because you can get close to the original (and often still-active) sites, see original specimens, and do it all without the huge crowds of urban natural history museums. But that's the point: there are no huge crowds of people. These are substantial tourist draws for small towns in the West, but they aren't often making back the substantial federal or state grants that help to build them. It's an important cultural resource and a valuable investment, but it may not be realistic to expect small regional Ethiopian museums to draw premium paleo-tourist dollars.
References:
Pennisi E. 2008. Rocking the cradle of humanity. Science 319:1182-1183. doi:10.1126/science.319.5867.1182
Cargo cult science
I ran across an online version of Richard Feynman's essay, "Cargo Cult Science", and thought I'd share it. It's an engaging example of Feynman's great wit and clear advocacy of science:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
Another "First Human" review
David Begun reviews Ann Gibbons' The First Human in Science:
Gibbons profiles in some detail a dozen among the hundreds of past and present paleoanthropologists. In an even-handed manner, she presents both sides of each conflict, a few cases of which are highly acrimonious, if not borderline criminal, in nature. Some would say she is in places a bit too kind, but that is for the reader to judge. Paleoanthropologists will understand that the conflicts and dubious activities the author describes are not typical of their field, and other scientists will recognize that their own ponds have a film of prima donnas sometimes behaving badly that rises to the surface and comes to the attention of outsiders.
If you didn't catch my review here in June, check it out.
Five scientists who made the modern world
If you were to make a list of the top five scientists who ever lived, who would you choose? People are asking the question (also, here, here). So far, it hasn't been all that interesting. All the lists have two or three names in common, and throw in two or three unexpected names for balance. Physics is highly overrepresented, either because people are easily impressed, or because they've watched Cosmos one too many times. Don't get me wrong, I like physics as much as anybody. But once your list includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo, well there's not much room for anything else. None at all if you take Darwin as a given.
So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes, Newton was great, but gravity goes on without him. Many later discoveries stood on his shoulders, but Newton's achievements were far more intellectual than practical. I'm looking for people whose accomplishments saved lives, prevented wars, stopped hunger, or released people from endless drudgery. This isn't a list of inventors -- if it were, there would be a lot of ancient inventions like the moldboard plow that deserve more attention than anything modern. It's a list of scientists whose impact stretched across many fields, and without whom life today would likely be worse.
1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher's innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.
2. Louis Pasteur. Everyone knows that he kept milk from souring. His work established the germ theory, with immense effects on human medicine, food (and beer) production, and the care of crops and domesticated animals. Less well known is his early research on crystallography, which discovered the chirality of organic molecules and made use of methods that would later be essential to determine the structure of DNA. And, oh yeah, he developed the first man-made vaccines, curing the otherwise incurable rabies.
3. Leo Szilárd. How good can a physicist be and still be virtually unknown? Szilárd may set the bar. In his early career, he set out the mathematical connection between physical entropy and information, and was the first to conceive and (with Fermi) carry out a nuclear chain reaction. Most of the important physicists of his day were involved in the Manhattan Project, but Szilárd initiated it, drafting the famous letter from Einstein to Roosevelt. He organized pre-war efforts to keep atomic research secret, and founded post-war efforts to promote arms control. Then, he became a biologist: discovering that UV light kills bacteria, and inventing the chemostat. He made the atomic bomb and nuclear power possible, did everything possible to keep them from the Axis, and laid the groundwork for molecular biology. All this from a man who set out with his partner to invent a refrigerator with no moving parts. The partner: Albert Einstein.
4. John von Neumann. The indispensable mathematician, he did more than anyone else to create the postwar world. His developments in game theory shaped the Cold War, his work in formal logic led to Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem, and his early work with computers paved the way to the information revolution. He brought computers into the Manhattan Project, helped develop the hydrogen bomb, and developed new simulation methods essential to building efficient jet and rocket engines, and ultimately modeling all kinds of scientific problems.
5. This one is for you. Who else belongs on this list?
Framed!
This piece called "Framing Science" by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney is driving people crazy. It's in the "Policy Forum" section of Science this week, and it's addressed to all those scientists who want to make a difference in politics. At least, I guess so, since it is entirely about how to make a political argument that people will like.
I'm strictly apolitical here, but I think it's an interesting question, to what extent scientists should craft a message to appeal outside their fields, and to whom?
Greg Laden writes about how the article gets the frame concept wrong:
Nisbet and Mooney apply the concept of "frames" to the problem of science and scientists communicating with the public, and being understood in a public forum. With a little digging, it is possible to ascertain that when they speak of "frames" they are speaking of Goffman's Frame Analysis Theory, a widely known concept in Anthropology, Education theory, etc. This is an idea that anyone writing (in a great journal like Science) about communication, etc. would know about and understand. But, what is actually happening here is that the authors are using the word "frame" in a way totally unrelated to Goffmanâs ideas. This is not a modification of Goffman, or an update, or a better use. Itâs just misuse and misunderstanding. It borders on being just dumb shit. Considering the value of column inches in science, it is a bit of a shame.
I recommend Laden's post.
Despite any confusion about "framing", Nisbet and Mooney appear to mean something fairly simple: scientists should appeal to non-scientists by presenting their work in a way that conforms to common biases. That may help to communicate (in a way that Coturnix discusses).
But I sort of doubt it. This kind of cynical strategy is the province of used car salesmen and other charlatans. And it's easily exposed by any clever critic who happens to be watching -- why just within the last few days there is this Powerline post fisking an AP article that transparently "frames" William Gray as a crank, and this Ron Bailey article pointing out that the "scientific consensus" "frame" deployed in support of global climate change arguments somehow is illegitimate as applied to genetically modified crops.
My point isn't that these critics are right, but that such criticisms pretty much write themselves! A scientist trying to "frame" in this way is going to end up discredited unless they retreat to the facts anyway. This is, after all, why scientists are typically so cautious in print -- because they work in a field where bad arguments are quickly torn apart by their critics. Why in the world would anyone think politics would be any easier?
UPDATE (4/17/2007): This post got some attention, including a mention on Bloggingheads.tv, so I thought it would be worthwhile to post an update. Greg Laden has been busily carrying on a conversation with Nisbet about framing. Nisbet's blog, Framing Science has a roundup of some of the reactions to their commentary. Nisbet himself was kind enough to forward to me a few references in framing in the context of political science -- a field that has undergone substantial development since the 1970's. Laden comments on this literature as well. As an anthropologist, I have to say that I agree with Laden on this: the political science context appears to have developed by using a simplified version of a richer concept from linguistics.
Nisbet forwarded a book chapter (PDF) by Dietram Scheufele reviewing the concept of framing science-related public policy debates. Scheufele has a post on the subject on his own blog. One of the pullout points of the chapter was this:
The popular notion of 'spin', while used more broadly, often refers
to the idea of framing.
That's basically the point. If you want your general concept to be received positively by an uninformed public, then "frame" your message to draw upon their already-extant knowledge and beliefs in a positive light.
As politicians generally discover (and often exploit), spinning a message also tends to change it. For instance, a scientist trying to communicate about climate change two years ago might have tried to frame the issue in the context of the increased number and severity of Atlantic hurricanes in that year. Hurricanes were a major focus of the news; people knew about the damage they caused, nobody likes them. The sound byte, "Global warming causes more hurricanes" might have done more to move public opinion on the issue than any other single argument.
But it was clearly misleading. A number of climate change scientists pointed this out at the time -- noting that a long-term trend in hurricanes could not predict hurricane severity in any given year, that 2005 was exceptional but not outside the range of historic hurricane incidences, and that weather events are generally not the best evidence for long-term climate change.
Noting all these details was the responsible thing to do -- it was not only scientifically correct, but it was also practically correct.
Because last year did not have a high number of Atlantic hurricanes. The "climate change is happening" message might have been momentarily strengthened by the "global warming causes more hurricanes" frame -- the benefit of the spin might even seem (to some) to outweigh the cost of its misleading nature. But it ain't science. In this case, the frame created a backlash.
Public opinion has moved on this issue because scientists have been (mostly) responsible in representing the science, and because they have convinced other opinion leaders (like news anchors and politicians) that climate change is happening. I don't think that has to do with framing; I think it has more to do with status-seeking, social relationships, and the political payoffs of the moment.
A more practical issue is that scientists already have a pretty effective frame working for them. "We're smart and rational. We've thought about this. We're looking for the truth. We're not starting from a biased conclusion."
Now, you'll notice that this particular frame has taken some damage over the years. That damage increases every time it looks like scientists are in fact working to confirm their biased conclusions. In other words, every time we start spinning our results.
Coturnix of Blog Around the Clock has several posts on the topic, which are recommended by Nisbet and Mooney. His consistent position has been that "framing" is not a scientific endeavor, but a necessary political one in which scientists must engage. He writes:
But we need to start funding stem cell research today. We need to start stopping global warming today. We need to rethink our energy use and energy production today. We need to rethink about food production and use today. We need to rethink our economic system, our electoral system, our foreign policy - everything. And science can inform all of those areas. And to an audience that is not interested in (or is even hostile to) science, the policies have to be sold on other merits, on the economic, medical, emotional and esthetic interests of the voters, with the underlying science being brought up as needed and in small, palatable measures.
Framing science is not teaching science. Framing science is persuading voters that a policy (which, in this case is based on some underlying science) is good. It has little to do with science, and all to do with politics. But we have to win some political battles first (hello, see who is running all branches of the government these days!?) if we want to survive and if we want science to survive as an endeavor.
I think that Nisbet and Mooney framed their original commentary very carefully. Clearly their intent is that scientists take up the banner of political activism, as reflected in their first sentence:
Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up.
These are marching orders. Yes, all good scientists must rise up to influence the 2008 U. S. presidential election. It'll be just like that "Simpsons" episode where Mayor Quimby resigns and the council of learned elders takes over the city. One Frink to rule us all!
But a consistent remark by critics (notably, Larry Moran) has been the failure of the authors to show any evidence that their strategy actually works. And in their commentary, Nisbet and Mooney don't even specify their goals! Consider the paragraphs just following the first sentence:
Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively "frame" information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside.
In reality, citizens do not use the news media as scientists assume. Research shows that people are rarely well enough informed or motivated to weigh competing ideas and arguments. Faced with a daily torrent of news, citizens use their value predispositions (such as political or religious beliefs) as perceptual screens, selecting news outlets and Web sites whose outlooks match their own (2). Such screening reduces the choices of what to pay attention to and accept as valid (3).
Frames organize central ideas, defining a controversy to resonate with core values and assumptions. Frames pare down complex issues by giving some aspects greater emphasis. They allow citizens to rapidly identify why an issue matters, who might be responsible, and what should be done (4, 5).
As they say on the SAT, the main idea is clearly this "frame" thing. The thesis is "scientists must learn to actively 'frame' information."
But the article never tells us why scientists would want to do this. It leaves us with several possible goals, without specifying which is correct:
(a) to make information relevant to different audiences.
(b) to make controversy subside.
(c) to tell citizens what to do.
(d) to identify why an issue matters.
(e) to identify "who might be responsible."
Of course, all of these are the sort of things that "well-intentioned" scientists might like. But only (a) and (d) are arguably proper roles for science, and (c) and (e) are downright scary. None of them logically follow as proper goals for "framing"; for instance, if we want to make information relevant to different audiences, why not use plain language? Why not say, "The information from my science is relevant because of X?" Why "frame?"
Why am I so exercised about this?
Clearly most people do not know the scientific concepts that would be necessary to really evaluate climate change science or any number of other topics. These definitely are relevant in a political context. Communicating the relevant issues widely requires simplification. People will not accept simplified arguments (which are often easily contradicted) that disagree with their core assumptions. So why not smooth things over with a good frame?
The reason, at least in my mind, is that science is never unanimous. Consensus itself is a meaningless concept in science. Even a crank can be right, if his predictions come true. Science depends on the concept of testability, which in my mind makes it the most special system of knowledge ever devised. It is good that science is conservative, and it is good that it is slow, because both these things contribute to claims being tested properly.
But even though science is not governed by consensus, a great number of scientists behave as if it were. That is almost enough to make it true. There are no end of scientific papers that begin a literature review with words like "the scientific consensus on X is...", or "X idea is intellectually dead." These are frames, but they are frames in a scientific context. Indeed, every literature review begins with assumptions (open or hidden) which in effect frame the results of analyses. Change the assumptions and you change the conclusions.
It is the job of the scientist to figure all this out. It is the job of the scientist to be skeptical of claims, and to root out hidden assumptions. Not all scientists are good at this job.
Reasonable people may disagree with me, but I think that more framing will make this worse, not better. I think that scientists are unlikely to be unchanged by the public discourse. I think that cautious, conservative scientists who stick to the facts represent themselves in the best light -- and really, in the most effective frame. I think that if this frame is the accepted role of scientists, we will have an enriched public discourse.
It may be very difficult for science to affect politics, but it is very easy for politics to affect science. Science has far more to lose by accepting the strategy of framing than politicians have to gain by hearing us more easily.References:
Scheufele DA. 2007. Messages and heuristics: how audiences form attitudes about emerging technologies. Pp. 20-25 in Engaging Science: Thoughts, Deeds, Analysis and Action, Turney J, ed. Wellcome Trust, London. Online
Theme of the year: be a gap junction
I think it's a good idea to set out with a purpose for the new year. If there is one thing that describes the important work underway, it is bridging the gap between the natural history of humans and our molecular makeup.
Except, well, "bridging the gap" is way too overused. It's like "building bridges to the 21st century" and the like. Plus, it has this huge structural connotation. It takes a lot of people working together to build a bridge. Everybody knows that.
That's why it's such a good metaphor: plausible deniability. "Hey, the bridge didn't get built? What are you looking at me for? I'm supposed to build a bridge all by myself? Get outta here!"
So I'm picking "be a gap junction". Let's look at what they are:
A gap junction is a junction between certain animal cell-types that allows different molecules and ions to pass freely between cells. The junction connects the cytoplasm of cells.
It makes a certain kind of connection between two things, allowing things to flow between them -- like a bridge. But it's tiny and operates rapidly, on a molecular scale. It's an individual, although it may work collectively with others.
For me, the gap junction is a perfect embodiment of this year's theme -- making connections between human molecular evolution and human natural history.
The evolution of our molecules has been coming rapidly into focus. Much more information about the broad scale of human molecular evolution will be coming online this year. There aren't so many people who can take this information and find the aspects of human natural history that it can address. The important changes in human evolution -- beyond the brain to other aspects of our biology, such as life history, diet, and social strategies -- are just as much a black box to many molecular biologists as genomics has become to many traditional anthropologists. There is something interesting there, no doubt, but what is it?
That's my field. That's what I'm working on. It's really exciting.
I bring this up not only because of the New Year, but also because of this article by Carl Zimmer in the current PLoS Computational Biology. It may not be a journal you typically read, but it's open access and worth a look.
Zimmer sets out to describe the dichotomy between natural historians -- paleontologists, field biologists, ecologists, and the like -- and molecular biologists. He gives a quick account of the hippo-whale problem, but it is in no sense exceptional -- anthropology has it's own examples of phylogenetic discord between molecular and paleontological specialists, such as Ramapithecus. The point is that there are increasingly two kinds of data -- molecular and natural historical -- and nobody is a specialist in both:
This experience made a strong impression on me. I was struck by the divide between these two kinds of biologists. Each group had a profound confidence in their own sources of information, and an abiding skepticism about the other's. As I learned more about the history of modern biology, I realized that this rift did not begin in the 1990s. It was already present in the 1950s, as molecular biologists began championing their new science over more traditional ways of understanding life.
Harvard University's biology department was a microcosm of this conflict. James Watson, fresh from discovering the structure of DNA, breezed into the department in 1956 with revolution on his mind. âIt was time to sweep beyond mere description of animals and plants and move into a new biology based on chemistry and physics,â as Watson's biographer, Victor McElheny, writes [4].
Needless to say, the Harvard naturalists were not happy. Edward O. Wilson, entomologist, ecologist, and sociobiologist, pushed back hard. âWatson, having risen to historic fame at an early age, became the Caligula of biology,â he writes in his autobiography, Naturalist. âIt was foolish, we argued, to ignore principles and methodologies distinctive to the organism, population, and ecosystem, while waiting for a still formless and unproved molecular futureâ [5]. The struggle only ended when Harvard's biologists agreed to split their department in two.
The Watson-Wilson dichotomy is an emblematic example, in that the real problem is as more due to personality and temperament than to the inherent difficulty of the subject. How many molecular biologists are requiring their students to learn about the fossil record? How many natural historians have been requiring molecular biology and genetics of their students? The answer is not zero -- indeed, far from it. But one or two courses in genetics generally give a good grounding in the molecular biology of ten years prior. The fossil record doesn't change so quickly, but a full theoretical grounding in the means of analyzing fossil samples takes a long time. It is very easy to pick and choose hypotheses and worry about the niggling doubts later.
As Zimmer points out, this problem of training leads to absurd extremes. Imagine a paper summarizing the evolution of a mammalian family -- one richly represented in the fossil record -- that doesn't include a single fossil.
One example of this new ambition was a paper published earlier this year on the evolution of cats [6]. The scientists offered a sweeping scenario for cat evolution, complete with migrations of cats out of Asia into the New World and back, along with the emergence of the major groups of felids, ranging from ocelots to bobcats to lions. The scientists based their scenario entirely on an analysis of cat DNA. They did not consider a single fossil of a cat, nor did they have a paleontologist expert on cats as a coauthor. Cat fossil experts inform me that fossils of true cats as old as 17 million years have been discovered in North America. The geneticists put the arrival of cats in North America at only 8 million years ago. Whether or not the DNA results are correct, it is striking that the report does not even mention the existence of fossils that do not fit the pattern.
Zimmer has written much about natural history, and has great sympathy for the paleontologists he has worked with. So the article's theme is the value of natural history knowledge as applied to molecular information (he refers to this as "computational biology", but that gives the lab guys short shrift). As an example, he describes the evolution of early vertebrates: Molecular information shows evidence for genome duplication between present-day jawed vertebrates and the agnathans. As Zimmer points out, this led the hypothesis of a sudden burst of evolution leading to the features of jawed vertebrates, but paleontology shows that the jawed vertebrates emerged gradually in the fossil record over a long time, with different features emerging at different times. In this instance, a "striking" hypothesis from considering molecular features in isolation is easily disproved by looking that the fossil record.
This is the frontier of human evolution: integrating the data from human genomics with our knowledge of human prehistory. The days when we had to argue about the phylogeny of a single gene are long behind us. Anthropological genomics is about being a "gap junction" -- taking specialist knowledge of human prehistory and applying molecular information to test evolutionary hypotheses.
And if single genes are behind us, so are single events. "Out of Africa" doesn't explain everything, nor does the origin of Homo, the origin of the hominids, or any other single event. When we were limited to one gene, we were limited to one event, more or less. More than likely, that one event really was about natural selection and the phenotypic expression (or linkage) of the gene. Genomics has opened new doors that let us examine the evolution of phenotypes over hundreds of thousands of years. We can examine the differences between loci in their genealogical patterns, and in some cases we can link those differences to demographic events.
It's about finding diversity among the evolutionary histories of different genes, and linking that diversity to the diverse causes of our own evolution. This will be the year that a true anthropological genomics begins to emerge.
References:
Zimmer C (2006) The Genome: An Outsider's View. PLoS Comput Biol 2(12): e156 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0020156
Most annoying evolutionary genetics misconception
I happened into a post on Uncertain Principles soliciting candidates for "Most annoying misconception about your field". The choice there was the nature of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
RPM at Evolgen posted an annoying genetics misconception, namely:
the idea that by sequencing a genome, we are "decoding" it
Personally, I think this would be a great topic for a meetings panel. I can think of about fifty really annoying misconceptions. The nature of these two seems especially science-fiction-y -- the sort of thing that people generally knowledgeable about science sort of understand to be true or meaningful.
On that level, I would nominate the one-gene, one-trait fallacy -- the idea that every trait is encoded by one gene. From this we have the popular idea that you can discover a gene "for" something. Of course, the usual case is that you discover a gene with a particularly bad allele in some people with a genetic disorder. But that generally gives little clue about what the gene does, or what its evolutionary history might be.
But that isn't actually the one that annoys the most.
Instead, I am most annoyed