Ardipithecus ramidus

 
A (relatively) new hominid named Ardipithecus ramidus is described in several papers that appear in the Oct 2 issue of Science.

Carl Zimmer is ahead of the curve on his one¹ and I urge you to read his blog and learn about this important new ancestor of ours [Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last]. The main point is that this represents the earliest well-described species in our lineage. Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what is now Ethiopia about 4.4 million years ago.

The publicity surrounding these papers gives me an opportunity to raise a related issue. Here at the University of Toronto we are about to reorganize our first year biology courses. One of the required half courses will be BIO130H: Molecular and Cell Biology and the other will be BIO120H: Adaptation and Biodiversity.

The stated goal in the second course is to teach evolution, recognizing that "All science students require an understanding of evolutionary and ecological principles so they can make informed decisions on pressing societal issues ...."

I know what you're thinking ... you're thinking that Moran will be upset about the adaptationist slant in that course. You're right, I'm angry about that, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

The course will not mention fossils and it will not describe the history of life as determined by the fossil record. I think this is a mistake. I think that in order to understand evolution you need to examine all of the evidence that supports it and learn to appreciate that many different disciplines converge on the same conclusion; namely, that living things evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Not only that, there are many fascinating parts of the fossil record that provide good opportunities for learning about evolution and for critical thinking. Hominid evolution and our relationship to the other apes is only one of them. There's also the Cambrian explosion, mass extinctions, the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, and punctuated equilibria.

It's true that you can't cover everything in a first year half course but the fossil record is too important to leave out, in my opinion. We also have a proposed new required second year course that's supposed to teach evolution. It's called BIO220H: From Genomes to Ecosystems in a Changing World. The fossil record isn't going to be taught in that course either.

What do Sandwalk readers think? Should we be graduating students with a life sciences degree when they've never heard of the fossil record in class?

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1. Where does he find the time to write so many excellent articles and books? Has he been cloned?

[Reconstructions: Copyright 2009, J.H. Matternes.]

The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design Creationism

 
The Evolution News website is run by the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington USA. In spite of the title, their goal is not to inform you about evolution. Instead, their goal is to promote anti-evolution thinking and Intelligent Design Creationism.

I'm in the middle of teaching a course about evolution and creationism so the latest posting on their website caught my eye. I urge my students to read the latest posting: Introducing The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design. They have lots of helpful hints about how to deal with evil Professors who oppose intelligent design. Not only that, they have a book for sale called "The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design." It's sort of like "Evolution for Dummies."

The main part of the book is about dealing with your Professor's "misinformed" opinions about Intelligent Design Creationism. Here's a list of nine such opinions. I better read up on how students are going to refute these arguments—at least the ones that aren't farcical or obvious strawmen.

1. Intelligent Design Is Not Science
2. Intelligent Design Rejects All of Evolutionary Biology
3. Intelligent Design Has Been Banned From Public Schools by the Federal Courts
4. Intelligent Design Is Just Politics
5. Intelligent Design Is a Science Stopper
6. Intelligent Design Is “Creationism” and Based on Religion
7. Intelligent Design Is Religiously Motivated
8. Intelligent Design Proponents Don’t Conduct or Publish Scientific
   Research
9. Intelligent Design Has Been Refuted by the Overwhelming Evidence for Neo-Darwinian Evolution

Hmmm ... on second thought, I hope my students don't see this. It looks like a pretty devastating attack on everything I've been saying in class. I'm shaking in my boots.

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Monday's Molecule #138: Winner

 
The purple molecule is cyclin bound to phospho-cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2) (yellow) and kinase-associated phosphatase (KAP) (blue). The Nobel Laureate is Tim Hunt.

There were lots of correct answers from Asia and Europe this time around but also a few from North America.

This week's winner is Joshua Johnson of Victoria University in Australia. The posting time was convenient for Australians since his email message was sent at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. There wasn't an undergraduate winner this week so I'll carry over the undergraduate prize for next week's molecule.

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This is the earliest posting of a Monday's Molecule. It should make the contest open to a whole new category of Sandwalk readers, especially those in Europe who will see it long before the readers in North America are awake.

It will also work for Asian readers and a few North and South Americans who are up very late at night. (Note to the latter group: get a life! )

The molecule is a compex of three different proteins. One of them—the yellow one—has already been featured as a Monday's Molecule last April. This time I want you to identify the purple molecule. It was first identified and characterized in the organism shown below then subsequently found in lots of other species.

The Nobel Laureate from last April shared the prize with the person who discovered today's molecule. Name that Nobel Laureate.

The first person to identify the molecule and name the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch. Previous winners are ineligible for six weeks from the time they first won the prize.

There are only three ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Philip Johnson of the University of Toronto, Ben Morgan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Frank Schmidt of the University of Missouri.

Frank has agreed to donate his free lunch to a deserving undergraduate. Consequently, I have an extra free lunch for a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to award an additional prize to the first undergraduate student who can accept it. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you can make it for lunch. If you can't make it for lunch then please consider donating it to someone who can in the next round.

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(s) and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Prizes 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.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.

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You Can't Go Home Again

This is a resurrected version of a steroid hormone receptor. It was derived from the modern glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene by mutating various codons to make them like the predicted ancestral gene. When all of the mutations were introduced, the protein was expressed and its structure was determined.

Glucocorticoid receptor specifically binds cortisol but the ancient protein binds other steroids as well as cortisol. This is pretty much what you might expect. Various gene duplication events lead to a family of proteins and each family member evolved to recognize a single ligand. The fact that you can reconstruct the presumed ancestral protein and show that it bound to multiple ligands is pretty amazing. The work comes out of Joseph Thornton's lab (Ortlund et al. 2007).

Altogether there were about 60 amino acid substitutions along the lineage leading from the ancestral broad-specificity receptor to the cortisol-specific receptor but only two of these turned out to be ones that shifted the specificity. Most of the rest probably had little effect of the function or specificity of the protein. This is the expected result. Most amino acid substitutions during evolution are neutral.

If there are really only two key amino acid substitutions that change specificity then it should be possible to convert a modern glucocorticoid receptor into one that recognizes a broad range of hormones by merely changing two amino acids. In other words, you could revert to the ancient form by reversing evolution and only a few mutations should do it.

Can you go back in time this easily? Apparently not, according to a recent paper from the same lab (Bridgham et al. 2009). Carl Zimmer is on top of this story in a article he published in yesterday's issue of the New York Times "Can Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street."

There's no conceptual advances in this paper, at least for those scientists who have a proper understanding of evolution. Some of the neutral changes along the pathway prepared the way for additional changes that were not possible in the ancestor protein. In other words, strictly neutral changes can add up to significant differences in structural stability making it possible for some adaptive change to occur that could not have otherwise occurred.

This isn't a breakthrough, it's an excellent study that confirms what was predicted on the basis of what we know about evolution. Here's how the authors describe their result in the abstract ...

Using ancestral gene reconstruction, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography, we demonstrate that five subsequent ‘restrictive’ mutations, which optimized the new specificity of the glucocorticoid receptor, also destabilized elements of the protein structure that were required to support the ancestral conformation. Unless these ratchet-like epistatic substitutions are restored to their ancestral states, reversing the key functionswitching mutations yields a non-functional protein. Reversing the restrictive substitutions first, however, does nothing to enhance the ancestral function. Our findings indicate that even if selection for the ancestral function were imposed, direct reversal would be extremely unlikely, suggesting an important role for historical contingency in protein evolution.

Because of "historical contingency" you can't reverse evolution. The path that lineages follow as they evolve is determined, in part, by chance and accident and not by natural selection alone.

You can't go home again.

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Bridgham, J.T., Ortlund, E.A., and Thornton, J.W. (2009) An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Nature 461:515-519. [PDF]

Ortlund, E.A., Bridgham, J.T., Redinbo, M.R., and Thornton, J.W. (2007) Crystal structure of an ancient protein: evolution by conformational epistasis. Science 317:1544-1548. [PDF]

Naked Adaptationism

 
Most other mammals think that humans are excessively ugly. They probably see us in the same way we see naked mole rats. We (mostly) have no hair.

What happened to our hair? There are many explanations for human hairlessness but they all share one common characteristic—they are adaptationist just-so stories.¹

If you're looking for the best example of an adaptationist then you need look no further than Elaine Morgan, author of the Aquatic Ape speculation [see Elaine Morgan and Aquatic Apes]. She has written an article for last week's issue of New Scientist: Why are we the naked ape?. It won't come as a big surprise to learn that she dismisses all of the speculations about the evolution of hairlessness, except one: we lost our hair because our ancestors lived in the water.

That's not the point I want to make. Here's what Elaine Morgan says in the first few sentences.

RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. "No one supposes," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, "that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection."

If not natural selection, then what?

The idea that our lack of hair might just be an accident is completely foreign to someone like Elaine Morgan. She's probably being deadly serious when she asks the question, "If not natural selection, then what?" For adaptationists, natural selection is the only game in town and no other sorts of explanation are possible.

If it's genetic and visible, then it must be an adaptation. If one just-so story is refuted then make up another one to take it's place. That's what the article is all about. One by one, she dismisses sexual selection, overheating on the savannah, neoteny, avoiding parasites, evaporating sweat, leaving only aquatic ape speculation that hasn't been refuted, or so she claims.

One of the problems with the adaptationist program was described by Gould and Lewontin (1979), "If one adaptationist argument fails, assume that another must exist ...." Why not start thinking about other, non-adaptationist explanations?

Why is that so hard?

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1. The one exception is the idea that our nakedness is an epiphenomenon resulting from neotony.

Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979) The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205:581-598.

Science Education by Press Release

 
Futurity was officially launched on September 15th.

As an online research magazine, Futurity highlights the latest discoveries from leading universities in the United States and Canada.

Who is Futurity?

Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of Rochester lead a consortium of participating universities (see list below) that manages and funds the project. All partners are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), a nonprofit organization of leading public and private research universities.

Futurity aggregates the very best research news. The content is produced by the partner universities, and submitted to Futurity’s editor, Jenny Leonard, (editor@futurity.org) for consideration. The site, which is hosted at the University of Rochester, covers news in the environment, health, science, society, and other areas.

We're talking about press releases. Most of the information comes from press releases written by the "leading" universities. Does anyone see a problem with that?

Carl Zimmer does. He rightly points out that universities and reasearch hospitals have a vested interest in promoting the work done at their institutions [Apocalypse Via Press Release].

What Futurity does do, however, is allow universities and research institutions to go straight to the reader. Originally, press information officers at these places wrote press releases, which, as the name implies, were things intended to get the attention of the press in the hopes that they’d cover something you’re doing. Futurity calls what it publishes “news,” but it’s still being written by employees of the organizations that are the subject of that news.

I have great respect for some public information officers; the stuff they write is, in some cases, wonderfully clear and informative. There’s good information to be had on Futurity. But I always treat press releases as a starting point. I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, “Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be.” Such things just don’t exist.

This makes a lot of sense. I really like the fact that Carl is speaking out against the excesses of bad journalism and the gross misunderstandings of science education. He's exactly right about university press releases. They are entirely one-sided—don't look for balance from a PR department.

Not only that, most press releases are horrible. I think it's fair to say that many of the worst examples of science journalism come from university press offices. That's not to say that they're all bad. I've seen some pretty good examples from my own university and from some others, but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

How soon we forget. Remember The Darwinius Affair?

You can't blame science journalists for getting their science wrong if they get it straight from the horse's mouth, right? Wrong! Read Carl Zimmer and learn how real science journalist should behave. They should investigate a story to see if the hype is justified.

Investigative science journalism is the subject of yesterday's posting by Bora Zivkovic over on A Blog Around the Clock. He points out that most science journalists do not investigate in spite of the fact that this is often what they claim to be doing. This is what distinguishes the average science journalist from the good ones, like Carl Zimmer.

That much we know. Where Bora and I part company is when it comes to press releases. Here's what Bora says ...

While we have all screamed every now and then at some blatantly bad press releases (especially the titles imposed by the editors), there has been generally a steady, gradual improvement in their quality over the years. One of the possible explanations for this is that scientists that fall out of the pipeline as there are now so many PhDs and so few academic jobs, have started replacing English majors and j-school majors in these positions. More and more institutions now have science-trained press officers who actually understand what they are writing about. Thus, there is less hype yet more and better explanation of the results of scientific investigation. Of course, they tend to be excellent writers as well, a talent that comes with love and practice and does not necessitate a degree in English or Communications.

That's not been my experience. Just look at the main page on the Futurity website for examples of bad science journalism. As I write this, the top story is ....

Wonder drug may treat cancer, addiction

UC IRVINE—A drug in development to treat cancer could have the added benefit of helping prevent relapse in people trying to overcome cocaine addiction.

In mice conditioned to cocaine, drug-seeking activity was inhibited faster and to a greater extent with sodium butyrate than without it, neuroscientists at the University of California-Irvine say.

"Our results are exciting because sodium butyrate taps into fundamental molecular mechanisms, providing a novel approach to understanding and treating drug addiction," says the study’s lead author Marcelo Wood, assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior....

That's sounds just like the kind of story that could come from the PR office of a political party or the head office of a major pharmaceutical company.

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Yom Kippur

 
My lunch buddy isn't here today. At first I was worried, maybe he's sick or been in a car accident? Then I realized that it's Yom Kippur, the most sacred of the Jewish holidays.

This is the Day of Atonement, for Jews. It's a day characterized by fasting, prayer, and seeking forgiveness. This is the one day of the year when attending synagogue is practically mandatory—even for secular Jews.

Who are "secular" Jews, you might ask? They're people who belong to the culture of Judaism but who don't believe in God. That can be a substantial percentage of Jews in some countries. Even in Israel, about 30% of the citizens are atheists (adherents.com).

I'm pretty sure this phenomenon (secular "religion") is quite common. I know lots of secular Roman Catholics and secular Anglicans.

Happy Yom Kippur¹ to all Jews, secular and otherwise.

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1. It seems a bit strange to be wishing happy Yom Kippur on a day devoted to atonement but I'm told this is appropriate for an atheist or other goya.

A Young Scientist in Italy

 
Like John Wilkins, I too have visited Italy.

Whereas John is interested in spandrels, I was more interested in the native wildlife.

John is there now [An Adaptationist in Piazza San Marco], I was there in prehistoric times.

John is old and wise, I was young and naive. (I didn't even know about spandrels back then.)

I had a Michelin guide, I bet John doesn't have a Michelin guide!

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An Adaptationist in Piazza San Marco

John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts is currently in Venice, Italy. He has just visited the Basilica San Marco (St. Mark's Basilica) according to What I am doing on my holidays….

This visit is significant since the Spandrels of San Marco are famous in evolutionary biology. They are part of the attack on adaptationism launched in 1979 by Gould and Lewontin. This is a paper that every student of evolution should read. Here's an online version: The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.

John has been struggling with adaptationism for almost fifteen years. When he first began studying evolutionary biology he, like many others, was unaware of the importance of random genetic drift and other anti-adaptationist perspectives. He certainly didn't know that random genetic drift is by far the dominant mechanism of evolution in terms of frequency of allele fixation. Over time John has developed an unusual perspective on adaptionism—one that I don't really understand.

Here's how he explains it in his latest posting ...

This is interesting, I think, in the context of Gould’s and Lewontin’s paper. It shows that claims of things being adaptive or not depend crucially on what one counts as the “task” of a structure. Since I think that everything is subjected to selection pressure at all times (sometimes not enough to overcome the noise of statistical properties), counting what is, and what isn’t, adaptive is a bit of a personal call, in the absence of access to the historical processes of particular traits. I am becoming more of an adaptationist these days.

The idea that many alleles might be slightly beneficial or slightly detrimental isn't very controversial. But that's not what John is saying. As I understand him, he's saying there can be no such thing as a truly neutral allele. He seems to be saying that anyone who believes otherwise is making a "personal call." A personal call that he believes is wrong since he thinks (i.e. his personal call) that everything is subject to natural selection.

He's also making a somewhat trivial point that doesn't contribute to the debate, as far as I'm concerned. Many alleles that are slightly beneficial are lost due to random genetic drift and many alleles that are slightly deleterious are fixed by random genetic drift. To me, that says that adaptationism can't explain all of evolutionary biology. To call yourself an adaptationist while knowing that slightly deleterious alleles can be fixed by random genetic drift seems somewhat unsatisfying.

John has a paper in the latest issue of Biology and Philosophy, an issue devoted to Adaptationism. It's not a very enlightening issue, from my perspective. The main problem with adaptationism isn't that it can't explain adaptation and it isn't that some just-so stories are wrong. The main problem is that adaptationists don't even consider any other alternatives to fixation by natural selection. Everything, especially everything with a visible phenotype, is automatically assumed to be adaptive and the arguments proceed from there.

One of the papers I liked was Seven Types of Adaptationism by Tim Lewens (Lewens, 2009). The seven types are:

A Empirical adaptationisms

1. Pan-selectionism–natural selection is the most significant of the evolutionary forces that act on populations.
2. Good-designism–evolutionary processes tend to result in organisms with suites of well-designed traits. Most lineages are highly evolvable.
3. Gradualism–adaptation is always the result of selection acting on gradual
variation.

B Methodological Adaptationisms

4. Weak heuristic adaptationism–those traits that are adaptations are likely to be correctly recognised as such only if we begin by assuming that all traits are adaptations.
5. Strong heuristic adaptationism–only by beginning to think of traits as adaptations can we uncover their true status, whether they are adaptations or not.

C Disciplinary Adaptationism

6. Explanatory adaptationism–an evolutionary biologist’s proper business is the study of adaptations.

D Epistemological Adaptationism

7. Epistemological optimism–investigators have access to the data that reliably discriminate between conflicting evolutionary hypotheses.

There are problems with all seven forms of adaptationism but the nice thing about Lewens' paper is that he effectively refutes #4, #5, and #7. In the case of methodological adaptationism it's just not true that the default assumption has to be adaptation. Evolutionary biology will be just as productive in the long run if drift is the default assumption and adaptation has to be proven.

In explanatory adaptationism, the assumption is that all of the interesting parts of evolution are adaptations and fixation of alleles by random genetic drift is so boring that it might as well not even be evolution. This is the stance taken by many adaptationists, like Richard Dawkins. As you might imagine, it doesn't take much effort to refute that kind of argument. One's personal opinion about what's interesting and what's not interesting should not play a role in determining how everyone else should go about studying evolution.

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Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979) The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205:581-598.

Lewens, T. (2009) Seven types of adaptionism. Biol. Philos. 24:161–182. [doi: 10.1007/s10539-008-9145-7]

Monday's Molecule #138

 
This is the earliest posting of a Monday's Molecule. It should make the contest open to a whole new category of Sandwalk readers, especially those in Europe who will see it long before the readers in North America are awake.

It will also work for Asian readers and a few North and South Americans who are up very late at night. (Note to the latter group: get a life! )

The molecule is a compex of three different proteins. One of them—the yellow one—has already been featured as a Monday's Molecule last April. This time I want you to identify the purple molecule. It was first identified and characterized in the organism shown below then subsequently found in lots of other species.

The Nobel Laureate from last April shared the prize with the person who discovered today's molecule. Name that Nobel Laureate.

The first person to identify the molecule and name the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch. Previous winners are ineligible for six weeks from the time they first won the prize.

There are only three ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Philip Johnson of the University of Toronto, Ben Morgan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Frank Schmidt of the University of Missouri.

Frank has agreed to donate his free lunch to a deserving undergraduate. Consequently, I have an extra free lunch for a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to award an additional prize to the first undergraduate student who can accept it. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you can make it for lunch. If you can't make it for lunch then please consider donating it to someone who can in the next round.

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(s) and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Prizes 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.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.

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Extreme Atheists Are Like Extreme Religious Fundamentalists

 
Joshua Rosenau blogs at Thoughts from Kansas but don't be confused by the geography. He actually lives in California and works at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

His most recent posting concerns an issue that is often raised when we discuss the compatibility of science and religion [see On cracks]. The issue is outlined in a quotation from Kevin Padian, who is a strong supporter of NCSE and a vocal opponent of creationism.

The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists. Everyone else doesn't really have a problem. [A majority] of Americans believe that a belief in god is compatible with evolution.

Many atheists interpret this kind of statement as an insult and Jerry Coyne called it "an anti-atheist crack." This prompted Joshua Rosenau to respond like this.

First, note that Kevin Padian is a fairly open atheist, so if this line were "anti-atheist" it would have to be a sort of self-hating atheism. Second, how is it factually wrong? Some atheists (but not all) think science and religion are incompatible. Some religious fundamentalists also think this. There are also a bunch of people in the middle of the spectrum of belief who do not think that. Whether these represent a majority of Americans depends how you ask the question and what you do with undecided responses, but it is absolutely the case that most Americans belong to religious groups whose governing bodies have asserted the compatibility of science (including evolution) and their brand of religion.

What, then, makes Padian's factually correct statement about the beliefs of some atheists a "crack"? Is there any method at all to Coyne's outrage

Yes, Josh, there's a reason why some atheists are annoyed at remarks like that. Here's a list ....

1. Padian disagrees with those of us who argue that religion and science are almost always incompatible. By labeling his opponents as "extreme atheists" he is trying to marginalize us. That's insulting.
2. He insults us by associating us with our worst enemies (religious fundamentalists) and suggesting that we think alike.
3. He uses the argument of popularity to support his position. Imagine that he lived in a country where a majority of citizens were atheists and believed that religion was incompatible with science. Would that change his opinion? Why should non-Americans, like Richard Dawkins for example, form an opinion based on whether or not it agrees with a majority of Americans? It's a silly argument. Either religion and science are compatible or they aren't. Since when did the opinion of the average American become relevant in debates like that?

If you are truly interested in the actual debate about compatibility then those kind of statements are completely useless in advancing your position.

On the other hand, if your primary objective is accommodationism—creating a comfortable place for theistic evolutionists—then Padian's statements make a lot of sense. It's a political argument, not a philosophical one. It's called "framing" and it's the official position of NCSE.

Kevin Padian is the President of the National Center for Science Education so it's not surprising that Josh defends him and the official NCSE position. Unfortunately, that defense involves alienating many former allies who happen to disagree with NCSE on the accommodationist issue. Those of us who disagree think that NCSE should be adopting a neutral position with respect to the overall compatibility of science and religion.

NCSE should continue to opposes the more obvious examples of incompatibility as manifest by the creationist attacks on evolution but it should not be in the business of defining those other areas where science is supposed to be perfectly compatible with religious beliefs.¹

UPDATE: Jason Rosenhouse weighs in: Who Rejects Evolution?

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1. What are those areas? I wonder if Josh or Kevin has a list?

Dead Fish Thinking

 
One of the popular techniques in psychology these days is to analyze brain activity in an MRI machine. In a typical experiment, the subject will be shown various images and the machine will maps those parts of the brain that are responding.

In the latest study, a group of psychologists showed a bunch of photographs to a dead salmon and measured the brain activity. The results were announced in a poster: Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction. Apparently, the salmon was thinking about the photos.

Here's the method ....

Subject. One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning.

Task. The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.

Design. Stimuli were presented in a block design with each photo presented for 10 seconds followed by 12 seconds of rest. A total of 15 photos were displayed. Total scan time was 5.5 minutes.

Preprocessing. Image processing was completed using SPM2. Preprocessing steps for the functional imaging data included a 6-parameter rigid-body affine realignment of the fMRI timeseries, coregistration of the data to a T1-weighted anatomical image, and 8 mm full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) Gaussian smoothing.

Analysis. Voxelwise statistics on the salmon data were calculated through an ordinary least-squares estimation of the general linear model (GLM). Predictors of the hemodynamic response were modeled by a boxcar function convolved with a canonical hemodynamic response. A temporal high pass filter of 128 seconds was include to account for low frequency drift. No autocorrelation correction was applied.

Voxel Selection. Two methods were used for the correction of multiple comparisons in the fMRI results. The first method controlled the overall false discovery rate (FDR) and was based on a method defined by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). The second method controlled the overall familywise error rate (FWER) through the use of Gaussian random field theory. This was done using algorithms originally devised by Friston et al. (1994).

The point of the study was to show that you need to be aware of false positives and make the effort to filter the data in order to remove them.

The bigger point, as far as the rest of of us are concerned, is that all aspects of science are complicated and we need to be appropriately skeptical. There's a tendency in the popular press to treat all these brain activity studies as gospel truth because they use a fancy machine.

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[Hat Tip: John Hawks]

University of Toronto Enrolment

 
There's some discussion about enrolment at the University of Toronto in the comments to University Students Aren't as Intelligent as They Used To Be.

Some people seem to be under the impression that enrolment at the University of Toronto has not increased recently. Here's the data from the 2009 Enrolment Report.


Enrolment has doubled since 1970 with most of the increase occurring in the past ten years as the echo boomers reach university age. The participation rate is also increasing. We currently have about 64,000 students (actually they're full-time equivalents (FTEs), but who's quibbling?). There are roughly 13,000 graduate students and 51,000 undergraduates.

Expansion is a good thing. I support it. However, it would be nice to have the extra resources that are required to do a good job of teaching these extra students.

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Atheists in America

A recent survey of religious beliefs in America resulted in 15% of the population saying they did not belong to any religion. This group, referred to as the "Nones," is the fastest growing segment having just about doubled over the past two decades.

What do these people actually believe? Are most of them atheists? The answers are in the following detailed report: American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population.

What does this group think about evolution? The results are surprising.


Among the general public, only 38% think that evolution is definitely or probably correct. This number only rises to 61% among the nones! 17% of them are certain that humans didn't evolve. What in the world are they thinking?

Well, it turns out that the "no religion" category hides a great deal of diversity. When asked about the existence of God you get the following responses ...


More than half of them believe in some sort of supernatural being and only a small percentage qualify as atheists.

An even smaller percentage will actually admit to being an atheist or an agnostic in spite of the fact that their answers to other questions identify them as atheists or agnostics. The "belonging" category refers to the answer to the question, "What is your religion, if any?" It's a way of allowing respondants to self-identify as atheists or agnostics.

As you can see from the data, almost 90% prefer to identify themselves as having no religion rather than label themselves atheists or agnostics. This group includes, of course, those people who really are religious but just don't belong to a particular religious group.

We conclude from this data that about 12% of Americans don't believe in God—or at least have serious doubts—but only 2% admit it. This number is considerably higher in other industrialized nations according to adherents.com. Atheists, agnostics, and non-believers probably represent a majority of the population in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and the Czech Republic and they are close to a majority in Finland, France, South Korea, Estonia, and Germany.

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[Hat Tip: Razib Khan]

University Students Aren't as Intelligent as They Used To Be

 
It's a well-known fact that the average intelligence of university students has been declining over the past four or five decades. This is true in spite of the fact that the average university grades have been going up.

The decline in average intelligence is exactly what one would expect, as Razib Khan explains on his blog Gene Expression: College students are not as intelligent.¹

Surprisingly, the typical student at my university doesn't want to hear this. You'd be impressed by the number of explanations they can come up with to refute the data. Maybe we'll see some of them in the comments. Are they scientific explanations?

You might also be surprised at the reluctance to accept the fact of grade inflation. The most common explanation for grade inflation is that today's students are smarter than those of the 60s and 70s and that's why they get higher grades.

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1. This is not an argument against increasing the participation rate and expanding university enrolment. I'm in favor of that. Let's just realize that there are consequences that universities need to deal with.

The real question we need to address is gradation rate. In an ideal world, what percentage of those who enter university should graduate? Should it be 100%? 50%?