I Wish My Country's Leader Could Say This!

 
I don't think Prime Minister Stephen Harper believes any of the things that Barack Obama says in this video. My country is cutting back on science at the very time when science needs all the support it can get.

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[Hat Tip: Pharyngula]

Monday's Molecule #108

 
Today's Monday's Molecule really is a molecule. Your task is to identify the molecule from the cartoon shown here. It won't be sufficient to just find the name of the molecule, you will also have to identify the significance behind determining its chemical structure.

There's one scientist who was involved in that determination who also did some important work based, in part, on knowing the sequence. This scientist was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work but the prize didn't come until 15 years later. Name this Nobel Laureate.

The first person to identify the molecule and the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first won the prize.

There are eight ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Ramon, address unknown, Jason Oakley of the University of Toronto, John Bothwell from the Marine Biological Association of the UK, in Plymouth (UK), Wesley Butt of the University of Toronto, David Schuller of Cornell University, Nova Syed of the University of Toronto, Dima Klenchin of the University of Wisconsin and undergraduate Alex Ling of the University of Toronto

John, David, and Dima have offered to donate their free lunch to a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to continue to award an additional free lunch to the first undergraduate student who can accept a free lunch. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you came make it for your free lunch (with a friend).

THEME:

Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureate(s) so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.

Correct responses will be posted tomorrow. I reserve the right to select multiple winners if several people get it right.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours.

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IDiots and the Genetic Fallacy.

 
The term Genetic Fallacy is used to describe fallacious arguments that attack an idea based on its origins (genesis) and not its current validity.

The most common (but not the only) examples are attempts to discredit someone's idea by impugning the character of the person who originated the idea. For example, you could try to cast doubt on Thomas Jefferson's views about freedom by attacking his morality. Same with Benjamin Franklin, who, we all know, wasn't a very nice person. That has no bearing on the truth of his ideas or his work on electricity.

In the battle between rationalism and superstition, we can always count on the Intelligent Design Creationists to give us examples of every single logical fallacy. They are very good at irrational thinking.

Here's the latest from Denyse O'Leary: If you accept the argument in Descent of Man, you accept a racist argument. Some of her arguments against science are so classic I wouldn't be surprised if they enter the philosophy textbooks as examples of the important logical fallacies.

Quite honestly, I find current Darwinist efforts to get the old Brit toff off the hook for racism embarrassing. Far from differing from his generation's racist beliefs, Darwin wanted to provide solid scientific support for them. And to the extent that anyone accepts the argument in Descent of Man, they accept a racist argument.

Has anyone noticed how Darwinists carefully protect themselves from having the issue framed bluntly in those terms?

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[Image Credit: ThadGuy.com]

Chuck Lorre on How to Become an Atheist

 
Chuck Lorre is a TV producer. One of his shows is Two and a half men, another is The Big Bang Theory. Chuck Lorre has a blog but it's a strange kind of blog—no comments allowed and the titles of each posting are just numbers. Many (all?) of them appear in the credits at the end of his shows.

Here's #240, posted on Feburary 2, 2009.

A wise man once told me that we are all God in drag. I like that. Sometimes when I'm in a public place or sitting at a stop light, I'll watch people walking by and I'll silently say to myself, "He's God. She's God. He's God. She's God." Before long I always find myself feeling a warm sense of affinity for these strangers. The experience is even more powerful when I do this while observing a person who is clearly suffering. On occasion I'll test my little spiritual practice by turning on Fox News. Within minutes I become an atheist.

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[Photo Credit: Could Chuck Lorre Be the Smartest Person in Television?]

[Hat Tip: Carmi's Art Life World: Chuck Lorre Makes Me Laugh]

In Praise of Jodrell Bank

 
Jodrell Bank was one of the instruments that excited my imagination back when I was a junior member of the astronomical society. Ms. Sandwalk and I are thinking of visiting the Lake District in England. She would be delighted to take a side trip to see Jodrell Bank.

The photos of the main telescope almost convinced me to be an astronomer—but then I found out that biology was much more challenging!

Mark has posted an article In Praise of Jodrell Bank on Cosmic Variance.

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Variation and Natural Selection

 
Here's a photograph of many varieties of hybrid radish. It's from the Botany Photo of the Day posted on Darwin's birthday by Nhu Nguyen to illustrate speciation in action.



Please visit the UBC website to see the entire posting. I'd like to comment on one particular statement. Nhu Nguyen writes,

This is a weedy species that grows in coastal (and some central) areas of California. According to research by Norman Ellstrand's group at UC Riverside, this species is evolving in a quantifiable manner. It is a hybrid between Raphanus sativus, the common radish, and Raphanus raphanistrum.

Curiously, the same hybrid occurs elsewhere in similar climates such as that of South Africa, but something special about ecosytems in California allowed it to proliferate. It is now different enough from either of its parents that Ellstrand's group is considering describing this as a new species. This has occurred within the timespan that the two parents were brought together by humans in California."

There are many color variations of this evolving species. It is exactly through this variation that the process of natural selection works. If allowed to go its own way, some of these color morphs may persist, others may perish, all depending on the selective forces present where they occur. Eventually, each of these via time and selection could become a species of its own. California thus would be the center of diversity for a new group of Raphanus species.

What is the evidence that natural selection is acting one these variants? I doubt that there's any evidence at all.

While it's true that evolution may result in many of these variants becoming separate species, there's no reason to suppose that there are "selective forces" working on different colored flowers. It could just as easily happen that one or more colored variations could become fixed in a new species by random genetic drift.

I'm not sure what the problem is here. Is it just sloppy language on the part of some botanists? Do they use the words "natural selection" as a synonym for "evolution" without thinking about it? Or, are they confirmed adaptationists who actually believe that all visible phenotypes must be subject to selection?

There seem to be a large number of scientists who think that all speciation events are driven by natural selection. This was (mostly) what Darwin thought but I was previously under the impression that this had changed in the 20th century to recognize that random genetic drift plays an important role in speciation.

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Does This Look Designed?

 
Check out today's Botany Photo of the Day from the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research. The species is Euphorbia caput-medusae L. from South Africa.

It's an example of a strange-looking species that most of us are not familiar with. We need to keep in mind that life is complicated and weird.

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Literary Darwinism

 
A reader tells me that Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada) celebrated Darwin's birthday with a talk by Joseph Carroll on The Historical Position of Literary Darwinism. She asked me what I thought of Literary Darwinism.

I had never heard of it so I asked my good friend "Google" and he (she?) didn't disappoint. There's a Wikipedia entry on Darwinian Literary Studies (aka Literary Darwinism).

As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby indicate in their essay "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," scientific models and theories allow us to sense abstract objects and relationships just as our eyes and ears allow us to sense concrete ones. In Darwinian literary studies, as in evolutionary psychology, "[t]he tools of evolutionary functional analysis function as an organ of perception, bringing the blurry world of human psychological and behavioral phenotypes into sharp focus and allowing one to discern the formerly obscured level of our richly organized species-typical functional architecture."[2] In other words, since the human mind is embodied in evolving organic structures such as the brain, researchers should be able to explain aspects--not only of cognitive systems such as language ability, but of cultural systems such as art and literature--in terms of the environmental factors, or selection pressure, that give rise to them. A chief goal of Darwinian literary studies is to show how the reading and writing of literature contributes to the inclusive fitness of the human organism. In this sense the discipline relates closely to adaptationism, and it shares with the adaptationist social sciences the ultimate goal of understanding human nature.

So it's closely related to adaptationism and evolutionary psychology, eh? I don't think I'm going to like literary Darwinism. Sounds like just another misinterpretation of evolution by a bunch of non-scientists.

Let's look at an example.

A good example of applied Darwinian criticism is Joseph Carroll's reading of Pride and Prejudice, which shows how the fundamental biological problem of mate choice informs the plot of Austen's novel[3]. In this view, the novel narrates a social order in which males compete on the basis of socioeconomic attributes such as money and rank, whereas females compete according to 'personal' attributes such as youth and beauty. The story of Darcy and Elizabeth's courtship establishes a model for partial subversion of this social order, since the couple manage to abide by it even though the proximate causes of their mutual attraction have more to do with the conventionally undervalued attributes of dignity, honesty, kindness, and intelligence. A Darwinian critic might argue that the whole book functions as a tool for humans to perceive, order, and make sense of the conflicting impulses that characterize romantic relationships.

I don't know whether I count as a "Darwinian critic" or not but it seems to me that Austen is pointing out that women can be either smart or stupid when it comes to choosing a mate and so can men. Jane Austin is describing the breakdown of an English social order that existed prior to the nineteenth century. That social order is very different than those in other societies at the same time (e.g. India, China, North American natives), which, in turn, is probably nothing like the society of our ancestors 50,000 years ago. I don't see what this has to do with human evolution—or whatever these English scholars mean by "Darwinism."

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Dan Falk Gets It Right!

 
Dan Falk is a Toronto-based science writer and winner of 2002 Canadian Science Writers’ Association Science in Society Journalism Award. He writes for major Canadian newspapers and is a frequent contributer to the CBC television program Quirks and Quarks. He is the author of In Search of Time: Journeys Along a Curious Dimension, which I have not read—an oversight I plan to correct as soon as possible.

I'm critical of many science writers for misrepresenting science in their articles appearing in newspapers or magazines. It's even worse when ordinary journalists attempt to write about science [The Ottawa Citizen Should Be Ashamed of David Warren].

Today I'm deligheted to bring to your attention an excellent article by Dan Falk in today's Toronto Star "[You are here: Your microspot in the universe: What Galileo and Darwin should really be remembered for: making us feel smaller"].

You really should follow the link and read the whole article. Here's the conclusion—I hope it will tempt you.

As physicist Steven Weinberg famously said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

Both Galileo and Darwin showed us that our place in the cosmos is less central – perhaps less special – than we had imagined. For some it has been a bitter pill to swallow. But there is also every reason to rejoice in their discoveries. We are indeed animals, but we are animals that can comprehend the structure of DNA and the unity of life.

And yes, we live in one remote corner of the galaxy, itself one of billions of galaxies, but from this outpost we have probed the fabric of the universe, from the smallest quark to the most distant quasars.

Galileo and Darwin broadened our horizons, perhaps to a greater degree than any other two thinkers in history. As a result of their vision, we live in a larger, richer and more wonderful universe.

Thank-you Dan Falk. It's refreshing to see that kind of writing in a major newspaper. I'm looking forward to the letters to the editor, especially from those who haven't yet swallowed the bitter pill.

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[Photo Credit: The photograph of Dan Falk on the University of Toronto campus is from his article, TIME TRAVEL AND THE DOWNING STREET DILEMMA, on the pagebooks.ca website.]

Congratulations Steve Darwin!

 
Steve Darwin is Steve #1000. Find out who he is (no relation to Charles) and why he is #1000 by visiting the website of the National Center for Science Education [Steve Darwin is Steve #1000].

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You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think

 
Here's a video of Pat Robertson and Ray Comfort—two of the best secret weapons on the atheism side. Just watch this video to see why.

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[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist]

Jerry Coyne Meets Ken Miller

 
Read about it on Coyne's blog [Darwin Day, Philadelphia. 1. I meet Ken Miller].

At any rate, after dinner I met Ken and we chatted about things. The first thing he said to me was that one of his friends advised him to break a beer bottle over my head, which was more than a little intimidating when imparted to me by a guy well over six feet tall looking down on my puny five-foot-eight self! But we discussed our differences, tried to iron out misunderstandings on both of our parts, and amiably shook hands. We will never agree on the science-versus-faith thing, but on most issues we are on the same side, and I admire him in many ways. I was glad that we met.

I'd love to have been there.

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Can You Guess Who Wrote This?

 

Yet how the former led to the latter, how it was that complexity emerged and is sustained even in that near-miracle of a chemical factory we call the cell is still largely enigmatic. Self-organisation is certainly involved, but one of the puzzles of evolution is the sheer versatility of many molecules, being employed in a myriad of different capacities. Indeed it is now legitimate to talk of a logic to biology, not a term you will hear on the lips of many neo-Darwinians. Nevertheless, evolution is evidently following more fundamental rules. Scientific certainly, but ones that transcend Darwinism. What! Darwinism not a total explanation? Why should it be? It is after all only a mechanism, but if evolution is predictive, indeed possesses a logic, then evidently it is being governed by deeper principles. Come to think about it so are all sciences; why should Darwinism be any exception?

But there is more. How to explain mind? Darwin fumbled it. Could he trust his thoughts any more than those of a dog? Or worse, perhaps here was one point (along, as it happens, with the origin of life) that his apparently all-embracing theory ran into the buffers? In some ways the former possibility, the woof-woof hypothesis, is the more entertaining. After all, being a product of evolution gives no warrant at all that what we perceive as rationality, and indeed one that science and mathematics employ with almost dizzying success, has as its basis anything more than sheer whimsy. If, however, the universe is actually the product of a rational Mind and evolution is simply the search engine that in leading to sentience and consciousness allows us to discover the fundamental architecture of the universe – a point many mathematicians intuitively sense when they speak of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics – then things not only start to make much better sense, but they are also much more interesting. Farewell bleak nihilism; the cold assurances that all is meaningless. Of course, Darwin told us how to get there and by what mechanism, but neither why it is in the first place, nor how on earth we actually understand it.

To reiterate: when physicists speak of not only a strange universe, but one even stranger than we can possibly imagine, they articulate a sense of unfinished business that most neo-Darwinians don't even want to think about. Of course our brains are a product of evolution, but does anybody seriously believe consciousness itself is material? Well, yes, some argue just as much, but their explanations seem to have made no headway. We are indeed dealing with unfinished business. God's funeral? I don't think so. Please join me beside the coffin marked Atheism. I fear, however, there will be very few mourners.

The answer is at ... Darwin was right. Up to a point.

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[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]

Moving Darwin

A statue of Charles Darwin was sculpted by Sir Joseph Boehm in 1885. It cost £2200. The money was raised by soliciting individual contributions from individuals around the world and so much money flowed in that there was enough left over to fund research in evolution.

The statue was unveiled on June 9, 1885. Charles Darwin was hugely popular, as you can see by the crowd of people outside the Natural History Museum. The statue was placed in a prominent position at the top of the main staircase in the Central Hall.

In 1927, Darwin wasn't as popular and his statue was moved to make way for an elephant display. The place of honor was soon taken up by a statue of Richard Owen, founder of the museum, and not a huge fan of Darwin [The North Hall Statues].

Darwin, and his friend Huxley, sat in the North Hall, under the main stairs in what became the museum cafeteria. This is not a place of honor and when I saw it there in 2006 I thought it looked very much like the museum was trying to hide Darwin from its visitors.



The Natural History Museum decided that they had better take steps to rehabilitate Darwin in preparation for the 2009 celebrations. So last Spring they moved Darwin back to the original position at the top of the stairs in the Central Hall.

You can watch a video of the statue on the move on the Natural History Museum website [Darwin's statue on the move].

I'm glad they decided to move the statue. While there's a danger of reading too much into the traveling statue, I think it reflects a time in the early 20th century when Darwin's reputation was somewhat eclipsed. At that time, there were many scientists who didn't think that natural selection could explain evolution.

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Quotable Quotes

 
From PZ Myers [I get email].

One frequent motif recurs in creationist email: they may believe in god, but they don't believe in paragraphs.

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