Category Archives: Evolution

Evolution, Network theory, Plectics

Liveblagging: Geoffrey West

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I’m sitting in MIT’s lecture hall 34-101, where a Venerable Personage is introducing today’s physics colloquium speaker, Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute). Like most colloquium speakers (or so it seems to me) West has a string of academic honors to his name; perhaps more unusual is his membership in Time magazine’s “100 most influential people” list, for which he was profiled by Murray Gell-Mann. (At that, he had more luck than Richard Dawkins.) West’s talk will concern scaling laws in living systems, and its abstract is as follows:

Life is very likely the most complex phenomenon in the Universe manifesting an extraordinary diversity of form and function over an enormous range. Yet, many of its most fundamental and complex phenomena scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion. For example, metabolic rate scales as the 3/4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude from complex molecules up to the largest multicellular organisms. Similarly, time-scales, such as lifespans and growth-rates, increase with exponents which are typically simple powers of 1/4. It will be shown how these “universal” 1/4 power scaling laws follow from fundamental properties of the networks that sustain life, leading to a general quantitative, predictive theory that captures the essential features of many diverse biological systems. Examples will include animal and plant vascular systems, growth, cancer, aging and mortality, sleep, DNA nucleotide substitution rates. These ideas will be extended to social organisations: to what extent are these an extension of biology? Is a city, for example, “just” a very large organism? Analogous scaling laws reflecting underlying social network structure point to general principles of organization common to all cities, but, counter to biological systems, the pace of social life systematically increases with size. This has dramatic implications for growth, development and sustainability: innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.

Now, let’s see if I can keep up!

SCALING BEHAVIOR

“I think it’s patently obvious that I’m not one of the hundred most influential people in the world,” West says, “which should be obvious after I’ve finished my talk.” There follows an amount of fumbling as West and the distinguished personage try to turn on the overhead projector — “We need an experimentalist!” — before the big red button is found, and the projector screen glows into life.
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BPSDB, Evolution, Pseudoscience

News from the Google Hit Parade

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BPSDBCuttlefish was feeling upset that a piece of creationist drivel was ranking higher in the Google search results for the word “cuttlefish” than his own site, so in a gesture of amity, I’m doing my bit to help. Restore justice, truth and verse to the Network: link to Cuttlefish today!

And while we’re thinking about search results, Googling for {expelled movie} is finally bringing up some sensible results for Ben Stein’s monument to dishonesty, hatred and incompetence, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. One instance of the trailer sends the reader to Richard Dawkins’s website, which is a promising start. Then we’ve got a Digg entry for Phil Plait’s demolition of Expelled, and a fairly old post — last September — from the Bad Idea Blog, pointing out the dishonesty of Expelled‘s producer.

The “sponsored links” over on the side gives me RationalWiki’s debunking of Expelled promo material. That’s also good. Notice, however, what’s missing?

Expelled the movie -- Exposed!The official site of the National Center for Science Education, devoted to debunking the movie — Expelled Exposed — doesn’t appear in the first one hundred results. In fact, as of right now, it doesn’t appear until result 280.

We need to fix this.

We’re trusting the NCSE with the big responsibility of maintaining a clear and informative central site for this subject. I think they’re up for it; I also think, gosh darn it, they need to know we care.

Evolution, Favorites

Dawkins and the D-Word

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I’ve written before about the different ways people define the word Darwinism and its close relatives. The short version is that American biologists and other academics don’t seem too likely to use the word: they just like to say “evolutionary biology” and be done with it. In the U. S. and A., hearing the word “Darwinism” is a pretty sure sign you’re dealing with a creationist, or at least a person whose knowledge of science derives too much from creationist misinformation. Over in Britain, serious academics still use the word, as do people who appear fairly pro-science (maybe there’s some kind of national pride thing going on?). One can still see negative uses of the D-word over in the UK, of course, particularly from people who confuse “social Darwinism” with actual biology or radically misinterpret kin selection and the “selfish gene” idea, but sorting out all their problems would require a book of its own.

Occasionally, people here in the land of motherhood and sport-utility apple pies get upset with Richard Dawkins for using the D-word himself. I mean, here we are, trying to make the point that science is not dogma and Darwin was not a prophet, and then this furriner comes along to screw up the lexicon. So, an event which transpired during a recent Q&A session is rather noteworthy. Both H. H. and Jackie Stone attended Dawkins’s talk at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society on Saturday, 15 March; I’ll quote H. H.’s account:
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Evolution, Popularization, Video

A Counter-Proposal

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Expelled the movie -- Exposed!A while back, Paul Gowder suggested we scientists get our act together and make our own movie, for general consumption, countering the damnable and insipid lies of Ben Stein’s Expelled. Shortly thereafter, PZ Myers noted that, while he was sympathetic to the idea, it would be foolish to neglect the practical experience of filmmakers in doing so: the people who write the screenplay have to know how movies work.

Today, a variant of this proposal occurred to me. Somebody else may well have thought of it first, but I haven’t noticed the suggestion being made. Instead of explaining what evolution is all about, why not make a movie which explains why the Holocaust happened? To be sure, one historian will argue with another about which factors were most important in causing a sustained programme of cruelty to arise when and where it did, but a good documentary could lay all those factors out and, in so doing, make the point that Darwin and Wallace are not heading up the list.

Something tells me this project would be an easier sell than a feature-length nature show (I bet you could get Spielberg as an executive producer). And, at least in general terms, there’s a bit of a precedent for scientists entering this territory:

Discuss: what could be done that hasn’t been done before? What are the up-sides, down-sides and middle-sides of this idea?

Evolution, Pseudoscience, Video

Dawkins and Myers on Being Expelled

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Expelled -- Exposed!Josh Timonen has filmed a dialogue between PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins. The clip below describes what happened when the two of them went, with friends and family, to see the creationist propaganda flick Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Many people have already observed that the movie’s subtitle is a blazing beacon of irony, but gosh darn it, that observation gets truer every day: the makers of Expelled are bound and determined to drive home their lack of acumen.

The Harvard/XVIVO animation to which the biologists refer, one which creationists have plagiarized before, is available on Harvard’s website.

Evolution

Currently Reading

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Karen M. Page and Martin A. Nowak, “Unifying Evolutionary Dynamics.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002): 93–98 (PDF). Abstract:

Darwinian evolution is based on three fundamental principles, reproduction, mutation and selection, which describe how populations change over time and how new forms evolve out of old ones. There are numerous mathematical descriptions of the resulting evolutionary dynamics. In this paper, we show that apparently very different formulations are part of a single unified framework. At the center of this framework is the equivalence between the replicator–mutator equation and the Price equation. From these equations, we obtain as special cases adaptive dynamics, evolutionary game dynamics, the Lotka-Volterra equation of ecology and the quasispecies equation of molecular evolution.

Page and Nowak disavow interest in explicitly spatial models, although they do incorporate frequency-dependent selection by writing the fitness of strategy [tex]i[/tex] as a function of the population distribution:

[tex]f_i(\vec{x}) = f_i(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n),[/tex]

where [tex]x_i[/tex] denotes the frequency of strategy [tex]i[/tex].

Evolution, Transhumanism

Happenings

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Pain.

Waves of pain ratcheting up through the fading numbness of ebbing anaesthesia, pain strong enough to trigger my synaesthetic response, becoming a camera flare of magnesium light radiating out of my jawbone. Suddenly, it occurs to me that the odd array of mechanical noises I’d heard emanating from inside my mouth whilst I reclined in the endodontist’s chair really did denote the removal of matter from my head.

But, one filled prescription later. . . Mmmm, delicious hydrocodone.

While I indulge in painkillers and a modest dinner of very soft foods, here are links to some interesting things happening in my local cluster of Network nodes:

First, Brian Switek is growing old! Everyone should congratulate him on making it this far, and warn him that he’d better retain his youthful enthusiasm.

Russell Blackford has a couple thought-provoking posts, the first on transhumanism and atheism, and the second on Francisco Ayala’s book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (2007), an entry in the Templeton genre which Blackford has reviewed for Cosmos magazine. Meanwhile, Ben Allen reports about computer science ideas spreading into other areas of science, such as an interesting result on the computational difficulty of finding equilibrium points in exchange markets.

Next stop on this random walk: both Abbie Smith (1, 2) and TR Gregory have weighed in on some recent remarks by microbiologist Carl Woese, who seems to have looked at the poor state of high-school biology education and given up hope that evolution could ever be taught at the high-school level. I can only guess at the frustration which could drive a man to the philosophy that the cure for bad education is no education; in the end, I agree with Prof. Gregory:
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Bibliophilia, Classical Mechanics, Evolution, Favorites, Video

Physics versus Fear

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In the Channel 4 programme Breaking the Science Barrier (1996), Richard Dawkins faces down a pendulum:

This is a classic example of a “put your money (or nose) where your mouth is” physics demonstration. It also appears in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact (1985), for example, and Feynman did it during the freshman physics lectures he gave at Caltech.

Later in the same show, Dawkins interviews Douglas Adams, and gives a few comparisons to help understand the depths of evolutionary time:
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Bibliophilia, Evolution

Bloggers of the 1930s

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I wonder if it’s true that you can only be a starry-eyed youngster once. I discovered the science fiction of Isaac Asimov when I was a ninth-grader, so far out of the social whirl that I didn’t even expect I was missing anything. I had my books and my BASIC compiler, and a few friends who shared my tastes in both, so what need had I for cheap beer? I collected the whole “Greater Foundation” series, from the Robot stories to the last Foundation book; Robots and Empire (1985) was the hardest to get, only turning up in my relatives’ used-book store in Seldovia, Alaska. Looking back through them in more recent years, big chunks don’t hold up that well, but I find myself inclined to view even the clunky and dated parts of, say, Pebble in the Sky (1950) with favor. Is it just sentiment at work? Do we each get a quota of one author we read through rose-tinted spectacles, just because they were the first we discovered?

When I try to put sentiment aside, I find that some stories still work, chief among them The Caves of Steel (1954). Still, if I want a book to read for “comfort food,” or to give myself an emotional pick-me-up and reinvigoration, I’m more likely to turn to Asimov’s non-fiction, from which there is plenty to choose. (I’d actually discovered the nonfiction first, several years before beginning my love affair with the Robot stories. For years, the only Asimov fiction I knew was the English-language screenplay of Gandahar (1988).) Among his best nonfiction is, funnily enough, his autobiography, of which there is also no shortage, as it comes in two strictly chronological volumes carrying his story through the 1970s, followed by a memoir published after his death and a book of his letters published after that.

All this is added value to make the passage I’m quoting today somewhat more admissible under “Fair Use” law. One of the fascinating things about Asimov’s autobiography is that it begins with his family history in Czarist Russia, on the borders of Belarus, then follows his nuclear family through Ellis Island into slum living in Brooklyn, then public school during the Depression, on through World War II. . . right the way to Watergate and, in the third volume, to glasnost and the TRS-80. One human life can cover a great deal of territory. Then come the odd moments of synchrony, when a bit of 1930s New York springs out at you and gains a strange relevance. To that end, here is In Memory Yet Green (1979), p. 209, describing the background to the Greater New York Science Fiction Club’s splitting into the Queens Science Fiction Club and the Futurian Science Literary Society, all the way back in 1938:
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Evolution, Wobosphere fun

Hiaasen on Florida Education

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Listen up, Alabama, because you’re next:

Over the years the Legislature has worked tirelessly to keep our kids academically stuck in the mid-1950s. This has been achieved by overcrowding their classrooms, underpaying their teachers and letting their school buildings fall apart.

Florida’s plucky refusal to embrace 21st century education is one reason that prestigious tech industries have avoided the state, allowing so many of our high-school graduates (and those who come close) to launch prosperous careers in the fast-food, bartending and service sectors of the economy.

By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us.

Is that what we really want?

Come to think of it, I wonder how much money the Alabama State Board of Edumacation spent — in time, labor and materials — putting those “don’t you worry your purty li’l head” stickers in all our biology textbooks. It might have been a substantial amount of cash, but it probably wouldn’t have been enough to pay somebody other than the basketball coach to teach our biology class.

BPSDB, Evolution, Pseudoscience

A Pseudolinguist Does Pseudobiology

BPSDBM.J. Harper has a book available in your friendly local Barnes and Borders-A-Million, entitled The Secret History of the English Language. The short version of the professional critique of his linguistic claims is that they’re garbage. However, just as garbage attracts flies, so too will one kind of pseudoscience find happy companionship with another. (It occurs to me that I’m being a little unkind to flies with this metaphor.) Take what Harper says about biological evolution, in which he dredges out the old and tiresome canard that evolution is unfalsifiable:

Take the exemplar of all modern academic paradigms, the Theory of Evolution. There’s no question that the theory is valuable in so far as it has led more or less directly to the creation of the modern Life Sciences, but, true or false, the theory no less certainly contains the seeds of its own infinite survival. Having adopted a properly scientific root-and-branch model of speciation in which ex hypothesi all species must be demonstrably linked to other species, it permits the indefinite opening of new categories whenever a species cannot be demonstrably linked to other species. This has the unavoidable corollary that nothing can ever discovered from now until the end of time that can ever call the model into question.

That sound you hear is the figurative ghost of J. B. S. Haldane screaming, “Fossil rabbits in the sodding Precambrian!”

The modern understanding of evolution has multiple components, all of which are supported by countless interlocking lines of evidence. Common descent is one of these components, as is the principle of natural selection. Evidence could force us to revise our understanding of common descent, while leaving natural selection largely untouched. Other lines of evidence could conceivably challenge natural selection and show that it hasn’t operated to a significant extent over the history of life, but that evidence, to put it mildly, hasn’t yet come to light. In short, each component is falsifiable, but Nature has not falsified them.
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Bibliophilia, Evolution, Popularization

Hypothesis Testing

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Hypothesis: if you can take an idea which most people thought was the most hated concept in America this side of al-Qaeda’s mission statement and turn that idea into a book which stays on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year, publishers will let you write your own ticket at least once.

Evidence: Richard Dawkins is being paid $3.5 million for his next book, Only A Theory? (to be published in 2009), which will lay out evidence for evolution.

Hypothesis: People who have a vested interest in portraying Dawkins and other “uppity atheists” as detrimental to science education and/or Western civilization will ignore or undervalue this book, along with all other attempts by “uppity atheists” to parlay their notoriety for good causes.

Evidence: Consider the reception (or non-reception) of Dawkins’s television series, The Enemies of Reason (2007). This is a lamentable oversight, since the struggle to keep pseudoscience out of medicine is surely an area on which atheists and at least some moderate theists can find a genuine common ground.

Hypothesis: I could sure have a lot of fun with $3.5 million.

Evidence: Forthcoming. Come on, in the interests of science, pretty please, with blueberries on top?

(Tip o’ the fedora to Tyler.)

BPSDB, Evolution, Neuroscience, Pseudoscience

Panglossing Over the Dirty Bits

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BPSDBThe evilutionary superscientist P-Zed has just finished debating a horrid simpleton (i.e., a professional creationist) on talk radio. Being a professor, P-Zed knew to read up in advance, which in this case was a laugh riot in itself, because it meant reading his opponent’s book, What Darwin Didn’t Know. One chapter, “Purposeful Design,” argues (among other things) that the sexual organs of the human female were designed to maximize the pleasure of the missionary position.

Yes, it’s another entry in the department of “you couldn’t make this up if you tried.” Better still, for my money, is this bit:
Continue reading Panglossing Over the Dirty Bits →

Bibliophilia, Evolution, Favorites, Popularization, Transhumanism

Spraying Habits of Pop Science

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OK, my fellow specimens, it’s time for a rant. This subject came up at lunch today, and I noticed it again at Terra Sigillata; the second occurrence managed to ruin the good mood I’d achieved by reading Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish (2008), which is a great book that everybody should buy.

The subject of this rant is the role economics plays in debates on science education, and more broadly, on a meta-level of rantery, the way people are deciding the roles which different tactics should have in science education. To illustrate the problem, let’s have a story. You’re a scientist, I’m a concerned parent, and we’re at a PTA meeting. You say, “We have to teach evolution in our schools, because evolution is the central concept in biology, and the biotech sector is a big part of our economy.” You’ve got my attention — that’s step zero! Job well done. Isn’t the appeal to the pocketbook — and the “think of the children” ploy — an effective tactic?
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Evolution, Network theory

On the arXivotubes

Salvo Assenza, Jesus Gomez-Gardenes and Vito Latora say in their e-print, “Enhancement of cooperation in highly clustered scale-free networks” (arXiv:0801.2416),

We study the effect of clustering on the organization of cooperation, by analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma on scale-free networks with a tunable value of clustering. We find that a high value of the clustering coefficient produces an overall enhancement of cooperation in the network, even for a very high temptation to defect. On the other hand, high clustering homogenizes the process of invasion of degree classes by defectors, decreasing the chances of survival of low densities of cooperator strategists in the network.

Suddenly, with regard to cooperation issues, I have gone from [tex]N[/tex] papers behind to [tex]N + 1[/tex] papers behind. Question: If we construct a time-dependent network model of a population, can we represent both kin recognition and the effect of spatial distribution by node clustering?

BPSDB, Evolution, Pseudoscience

Taylor County, Florida: WTF?

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BPSDBThe people in charge of Taylor County, Florida’s science education are scientifically illiterate. Exhibit A:

Whereas, the new Sunshine State Standards for Science no longer present evolution as theory but as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence,” we are requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.

Let’s look at that last part again:

. . . so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.

Yes, and the American Revolution is only one of several explanations for the invention of agriculture, stone tools and fire.

Browsing the TalkOrigins Index of Creationist Claims, we find that the Taylor County school board has regurgitated CA041 and CA201, for starters. I never knew the job of a school board member was so easy!