The editors of Nature remind us that ...
Extraordinary claims, as the saying almost goes, demand more scrutiny than usual to make sure they stand up. That is how science works. Claim and counter-claim: intellectual thrust and experimental parry.They report on an upcoming meeting meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing in Columbus Ohio. Apparently, this council is composed of scientists and journalists and the goal of the meeting is to search for "lessons learned by scientists and science writers" in light of their publicity campaign promoting the flawed paper.
The Nature editors note that ...
The first thing to highlight is that such a thing as the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing even exists. Too many scientists dismiss the media and journalists as sloppy and unwilling to engage in both detail and ambiguity. In fact, there can be no branch of journalism as self-scrutinizing and anxious about its performance as that which covers science. It is hard to imagine political and sports reporters taking the time to discuss so thoroughly what (if anything) they did wrong after one of their stories went belly-up.Indeed, that's admirable, but it's another example of journalistic hyperbole. I do not believe that this branch of journalism (science writing) is as "self-scrutinizing" as they would have us believe. I do not believe that science writers usually debate and discuss what they did wrong when a story goes belly-up.
But it may be true that science writers are increasingly "anxious" about their performance. Why are they so "anxious"? It's because they are doing a very sloppy job characterized by parroting press releases written by amateurs whose main goal is to promote their institution or by science journals that want publicity.
Science writers (and journals) used to get away with this but now ...
The (welcome) rise of the science blogger has fuelled this navel-gazing. Some bloggers seem to spend most of their time criticizing other science writers, or at least debunking examples of what they regard as inferior science writing. But they do lots of good stuff too. Although traditionalists lament the decline of science coverage in the mainstream press, a terrific amount of analysis and comment, much of it very technical, is happening online under their noses.There's an interesting slip of the tongue in that paragraph. If science writers are really interested in self-scrutiny then they should welcome the arrival of a group of bloggers who point out their errors. This should be a "good" thing but the Nature editors clearly contrast this role (criticizing science writers) with other "good stuff" that bloggers do. Apparently the criticism of science writing doesn't count as "good stuff." It just makes science writers anxious—which they weren't before science bloggers came on the scene and pointed out what a bad job they were doing.
Nature then admits its complicity in hyping the event and not doing a proper skeptical analysis of the findings. The editors then get to an important issue.
Some may question the timing of the announcement, made when the paper was released on the Internet, not accepted or published by a journal, but at least the evidence was there to examine. If the scientists and the media both largely acted properly, then what should be discussed at next week’s meeting? It could do worse than start by screening the celebratory online video produced by ... and released to accompany the announcement. Scientists and journalists can include as many academic caveats as they like, but the sounds and images of champagne corks popping tend to render such statements of caution just that — academic.I bet you're thinking that this is all about the ENCODE publicity campaign and how Nature was totally at fault for misrepresenting the data and hyping the false claims of the ENCODE Consortium.
There is a deeper issue here: science not by press conference but presented as an event. What in reality is a long, messy and convoluted process of three steps forward and two steps back is too easily presented as giant leaps between states of confusion and blinding revelation. At the heart of this theatre is the artificial landmark of a peer-reviewed paper. Fixed print schedules and releases to journalists under embargo (with or without champagne videos) help to lend the impression that the publication of a paper is the final word on a question — the end-of-term report on a scientific project that details all that was achieved.
Nope. It's about the discovery of gravitational waves—a paper that turns out to have been wrong because scientists didn't do the proper controls.
Meanwhile, Nature, and science writers in general, have yet to admit that they failed massively in September 2012 and they have done little to convince us "bad" bloggers that they are capable of self-scrutiny. This is serious because in this case Nature and its editors were very active participants in the making of videos and holding press releases [see How does Nature deal with the ENCODE publicity hype that it created?]. Let me remind you of the video PRODUCED BY NATURE featuring Senior Editor Magdalena Skipper in which she promotes the idea that most of the human genome is functional. [Note: I'm getting error messages when I try to run this video.]
Maybe there are other things that the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing could be talking about? Maybe there are other examples of bad science journalism that the editors of Nature should be addressing?
217 comments :
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 217 of 217OK - I will stick out my neck and post a lesson I provide my students. The message is simple.
Darwin was in fact more Lamarckian than Lamarck. The reason this true is because most texts do not really understand what Darwin and Lamarck really said.
Darwin did not understand Genetics. That explains why Darwin's theory fell off the radar until Mendel was rediscovered auguring the Modern Synthesis
Let's try that again...
Hi Diogenes,
Uhmmm...... are you certain that you are not being a little glib here?
I mean even Darwin recognized that evolution did not always lead to greater complexity
nor
was evolution always a result of Natural Selection.
Let me respond to the Berkeley statements.
1. I don't believe that organisms are as well-adapted to their environment as most people believe. I believe that the proponents of the Modern Synthesis envisaged all organisms sitting on adaptive peaks.
2. I believe that a great deal of morphological variation is neutral. I don't think this fits with the basic premises of the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. There are many evolutionary biologists who still don't believe that a large fraction of morphological variation could be neutral.
3. I believe that the vast majority (>99%) of genetic variation is neutral. This is not compatible with the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. That's why the Hubby and Lewontin papers were such a shock to the establishment and why the first molecular phylogenies were puzzling.
4. I believe that natural selection is important in shaping genomes but I also believe that much of that shaping is due to accident. The fact that most of our genome could be junk is perfectly consistent with my view of modern evolutionary theory but many of the proponents of the Modern Synthesis balk at this interpretation.
Where I differ from Joe is that I think the revolution happened in the late 1960s and modern textbooks describe versions of evolutionary theory and population genetics that are quite different from the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. We agree that none of the current fads (e.g. evo-devo, epigenetics, plasticity, horizontal gene transfer etc.) make any difference to fundamental concepts of evolutionary theory and population genetics.
Tom, I am working (slowly) on a book entitled "Evolution by Accident." The title of the first chapter is "Darwin Died in 1882." The point of that chapter is that we have moved far beyond what Darwin believed 140 years ago. Diogenes is correct. The evolutionary biologists who created the Modern Synthesis were strong adaptationists in spite of the fact that Darwin believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and other things.
I don't think complexity is the issue at all ...
Who says Darwin's theory fell off the radar? You can in large measure make do without Mendel if you have Weismann.
How is Darwin more Lamarckian (meaning, I presume, the action of use and disuse) than Lamarck?
@ Allan
The main pedagological switch I might make is to start with the neutral case and then move onto biased transmission. There is essentially one process: population resampling; starting with the biased component is historic.
Interesting... I have been thinking this one over. We are talking high school students here. Why not just say that evolution means change over time. For example, if one believes that T Rex and Apatosaurus once reigned the planet (although not together at the same time) and if one also believes that things today are different; then ipso facto one believes in evolution. Period!
Evolution means change happens. How change happens is getting down to details. Natural Selection is important and a great starting point but NOT the be all and end all of Evolutionary Theory. Even Darwin understood as much!
I prefer a more historical perspective by starting with Natural Selection and moving on to Neutral Theory.
Alas I remain unclear that I have mastered Neutral Theory. Would my citation of the U of Berkeley be sufficient? Do you appreciate that finishing the Evolution Unit with a resounding emphasis on Neutral Theory to my mind would better accomplish what we all seem to agree is the intended goal? (remembering we are talking about hgh school students)
@ John Harshman
Hi John,
Who says Darwin's theory fell off the radar? You can in large measure make do without Mendel if you have Weismann.
Excellent point! I wrote an historical overview for my more advanced students and I cite Mayr’s usage of neo-Darwinism as co-opted by Weismann.
I still contend that Darwin still “fell off the radar”, recalling my undergraduate readings of what I can remember of Gould’s writings on the subject.
How is Darwin more Lamarckian (meaning, I presume, the action of use and disuse) than Lamarck?
That and Darwin’s naïve concepts of “gemules” which to my reading of history essentially scuttled Evolutionary Theory until the "modern Synthesis". OK - maybe scuttle is too strong a term.
I include below Chapter 1 of that historical overview I provide my more advanced students.
Comments for correction or improvement welcomed from any and all
Chapter 1 So, what exactly, did Darwin and Lamarck really say?
Historically and conceptually, modern Genetics and modern Evolutionary Theory are closely intertwined. Mendel and Darwin both published their masterpieces in the mid-1800s and both were promptly misunderstood, discarded and forgotten for almost half a century. Both were resurrected around the same time.
Darwin subscribed to a “blending theory” of inheritance by mistakenly believing in the inheritance of acquired characteristics including the “effects of use and disuse” That is correct; Darwin’s theory of genetics, called “Pangenesis”, is no different than what textbooks today would call “Lamarckism”. Darwin shared Lamarck’s belief that reproductive tissue somehow responded directly to environmental stimuli in order to generate adaptive changes in the next generation.
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-05.html
Historical irony is compounded further, upon consideration that Gregor Mendel, a (frustrated and perhaps sexually preoccupied?) celibate Catholic clergyman clearly recognized that sexual reproduction necessarily contradicted “blending inheritance”. Consider the offspring of any couple; individuals of the next generation are decidedly masculine or feminine and not intermediate. (Please – No gratuitous Michael Jackson jokes! – Let the poor man rest in peace…). Accordingly, we are supposed to believe that Mendel’ new laws should have been able to rescue Darwin’s theory, had Darwin only known.
con't...
True, Mendel’s cerebral work was theoretical and his convoluted purple prose almost incomprehensible. But, there was little chance that Mendel’s principles, predicated on the peculiarities of pea plants would have ever been acknowledged “Scientific Law” at the time. Animal genetics (human genetics in particular) appeared to follow a different and non-particulate; in other words, decidedly non-Mendelian model. The offspring of African and European parents present a “mixed-race”, i.e. apparently “blended” phenotype. Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (inventor of the cable-car) “conclusively” contradicted Darwin with a decidedly racist rebuttal – so egregiously racist in fact, that modern textbooks refrain from even whispering a mention of that nasty exchange. Darwin had already conceded that “blending inheritance” contradicted Natural Selection but was unable to resolve the discrepancy.
In correspondence with Wallace, Darwin himself appreciated that a correct and proper appreciation of genetics was required to rebut Fleeming Jenkin. Fleeming Jenkin rebuttal was premised on “Blending inheritance” which presumed that the mechanics of inheritance was the mixing of fluids from both the mother and the father.
... Suppose a white man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by negroes.... Our shipwrecked hero would probably become king; he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he would have a great many wives and children, while many of his subjects would live and die as bachelors.... Our white's qualities would certainly tend very much to preserve him to good old age, and yet he would not suffice in any number of generations to turn his subjects' descendants white.... In the first generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can anyone believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population ...?
Here is a case in which a variety was introduced, with far greater advantages than any sport every heard of, advantages tending to its preservation, and yet powerless to perpetuate the new variety.
- North British Review, June 1867, 46:277-318.
Darwin said that this objection gave him more trouble than any other. “Blending inheritance” indeed contradicts Natural Selection obliging Darwin to propose his alternative model of “particulate inheritance”.
Darwin suggested a hypothesis called Pangenesis, in which parts of the body emitted “gemmules” that accumulated via the circulatory system in the gonads. Heredity has something to do with “bloodlines”.
Francis Galton the great Victorian polymath (and Darwin’s cousin) experimented with different lines of rabbits and determined that blood transfusions did not change their inheritance. http://galton.org/hereditarian.html
Of course, not all organisms have circulatory systems, so Darwin invoked other means of transport were also possible such as simple diffusion, but clearly his theory was in trouble.
Modification of inherited characters as selected by natural selection would then require modification these gemmules. How were these gemmules to be modified? Darwin proposed that parental response to the environment impacted gemmules which were then passed on to the next generation. This is starting to sound a lot like what modern textbooks incorrectly call Lamarckism.
con't
To make matters even worse, the great Lord Kelvin (in whose great honor a brand new temperature scale had been named) toppled the other pillar of Evolutionary Theory; namely “geological time”. Shortly after Darwin’s publication, Lord Kelvin calculated the age of Earth to be a mere 20 million to 400 million years. Our planet at some point was a molten sphere, which means it must still be relatively early in its process of cooling. Kelvin’s calculations were indeed precise, but grossly inaccurate; as they failed to account for the heat generated by radioactive decay.
The inexorable accumulation of stable and heritable variability constituted one half of Darwin’s great Theory. Natural Selection constituted the other. Darwin and his supporters knew Evolutionary Theory just had to be true. If Victorian English farmers can produce novel breeds of pigeons; then, Natural Selection can produce new species! The devil was in the details, requiring resolution by pursuing further scientific inquiry. The millstones of scientific progress sometimes grind slowly. Another fifty years were required before neo-Darwinism rose again like a phoenix.
The specious Darwin vs. Lamarck dichotomy so often misrepresented in current textbooks is really a vestige of a much later Neo-Darwinism vs. Neo-Lamarckism debate that actually occurred latter in the 20th Century. Several historians, including Stephen Jay Gould, have contended that modern textbooks unjustly deal Lamarck a bad rap. Not only did Jean-Baptiste Lamarck coin the new verb “evolve”; Lamarck was also the first naturalist brave enough to publicly conjecture that human beings had evolved from apes (Philosophie zoologique, 1809)
Lamarck believed that a change in an animal’s habits eventually resulted in a change of heritable of characteristics; a response acquired through “effort” or “will”. (Remember those hungry giraffes stretching their necks.) Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (a colleague of Lamarck) took his line of reasoning one step further: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire suggested heritable changes could also include more direct responses to the environment such as the inheritance of characteristics through use or disuse. At this point, vocabulary becomes confusing enough to require a flow chart: “Geoffroyism” and “Lamarckism” have both been subsumed into the compass of what Ernst Mayer would later call “soft inheritance”. Regrettably, various versions of “soft inheritance”, with all their disparate nuances and subtleties (including a conditional embrace of “Natural Selection”) have since been incorrectly labeled as “Lamarckism” (more on that later).
Darwin’s original “Pangenesis” in many ways resembles Lamarck’s (and Geoffroy’s) version of events. Darwin took for granted the now discredited idea of the “effects of use and disuse”. Darwin however did part paths with Lamarck on one key point: Lamarck embraced metaphysics, by imagining evolution to be a goal-driven process or “teleological”. Another name for this misconception textbooks often identify as “Lamarckism” often has another name: i.e. “Orthogenesis”, a version of events espoused by many 19th Century Naturalists such as the celebrated Ernst Haeckel of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” fame.
Darwin on the other hand recognized the capricious randomness of the natural order. According to Darwin, Evolution does not correspond to some specious “vector of progress”, otherwise known as the “Scala Naturae” as espoused by Lamarck, Haeckel and many other Naturalists even as recently as Teilhard de Chardin in the 1950s.
Hi Larry
Re:
Laurence A. MoranFriday, December 05, 2014 2:49:00 PM
Let me respond to the Berkeley statements.
1. I don't believe that organisms are as well-adapted to their environment as most people believe. I believe that the proponents of the Modern Synthesis envisaged all organisms sitting on adaptive peaks.
2. I believe that a great deal of morphological variation is neutral. I don't think this fits with the basic premises of the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. There are many evolutionary biologists who still don't believe that a large fraction of morphological variation could be neutral.
3. I believe that the vast majority (>99%) of genetic variation is neutral. This is not compatible with the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. That's why the Hubby and Lewontin papers were such a shock to the establishment and why the first molecular phylogenies were puzzling.
4. I believe that natural selection is important in shaping genomes but I also believe that much of that shaping is due to accident. The fact that most of our genome could be junk is perfectly consistent with my view of modern evolutionary theory but many of the proponents of the Modern Synthesis balk at this interpretation.
Where I differ from Joe is that I think the revolution happened in the late 1960s and modern textbooks describe versions of evolutionary theory and population genetics that are quite different from the 1950s version of the Modern Synthesis. We agree that none of the current fads (e.g. evo-devo, epigenetics, plasticity, horizontal gene transfer etc.) make any difference to fundamental concepts of evolutionary theory and population genetics.
I agree that the original "synthesis" was very naïve compared to today's version. But I fail to discern any fundamental contradiction of the original... "expansion" yes, but "contradiction" no.
Neutral Theory is not as different from the Modern Synthesis as say Relativity is different from Newtonian Physics.
What am I missing?
Hi Larry
I would pay a king's ransom for a personally signed copy of your book!
Thank you for your patient and indulgent replies above.
ITMT - I hope my amateurish efforts above garner a thumb's up from you.
best regards
hit "load more" button on bottom
Hi everyone. Just a heads' up. This thread has overflown and now requires the "load more" feature to see most recent posts.
Aside to Larry - this appears to be the problem I emailed you about. I think you as site administrator can fix this by changing the settings to viewing "all posts".
I hope the "recent comments widget" recognizes this post or these efforts are futile.
I find it more problematic that in an age of greater specialization and less accessible upper tier research that there is a dearth of scientists that can explain their work to even a facile layperson. To make it understandable.
Your sentiment of having "scientists write articles themselves is, I believe naive.
Post a Comment