This anti-science creationist could be Vice-President of the United States of America

Thanks to PZ Myers for digging up this speech by Mike Pence in the House of Representatives [Mike Pence, creationist]. I think Pence is trying to make America great again by returning the country to the stone age.

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Why are academics such bad writers?

Not all academics are bad writers but the exceptions are few and far between. Several recent articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education have attempted to explain why we can't write. There are two types of academic writing. The style you use in your academic papers differs from the style you use in writing for a general audience. There's absolutely no debate about the style of writing in the academic literature: it is horrible and it needs to change.

I want to talk about the other kind of writing; the kind where academics try to explain things to non-academics. I'll concentrate on science writing although I'm sure the same issues apply to history, philosophy, and all the other academic disciplines. I'm particularly sensitive to this problem since I'm working on a book about genomes and junk DNA and it's very different than writing a biochemistry textbook.

The latest (Aug. 1, 2016) article is an interview with Steven Pinker, the well-known Harvard psychologist. He's published seven trade books and is widely perceived to be a good example of how academics should write for a general audience [Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker].

More junk science in Science

The latest issue of the journal Science (Aug. 1, 2016) has an article on a recent paper by Aires et al. (2016) published in Developmental Cell. Here's the abstract of the paper ...

Vertebrates exhibit a remarkably broad variation in trunk and tail lengths. However, the evolutionary and developmental origins of this diversity remain largely unknown. Posterior Hox genes were proposed to be major players in trunk length diversification in vertebrates, but functional studies have so far failed to support this view. Here we identify the pluripotency factor Oct4 as a key regulator of trunk length in vertebrate embryos. Maintaining high Oct4 levels in axial progenitors throughout development was sufficient to extend trunk length in mouse embryos. Oct4 also shifted posterior Hox gene-expression boundaries in the extended trunks, thus providing a link between activation of these genes and the transition to tail development. Furthermore, we show that the exceptionally long trunks of snakes are likely to result from heterochronic changes in Oct4 activity during body axis extension, which may have derived from differential genomic rearrangements at the Oct4 locus during vertebrate evolution.

... those ignorant of history are not condemned to repeat it; they are merely destined to be confused.

Stephen Jay Gould
Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977)The results were written up by a freelance journalist named Diana Crow [‘Junk DNA’ tells mice—and snakes—how to grow a backbone]. She writes ...

‘Junk DNA’ tells mice—and snakes—how to grow a backbone

Why does a snake have 25 or more rows of ribs, whereas a mouse has only 13? The answer, according to a new study, may lie in "junk DNA," large chunks of an animal’s genome that were once thought to be useless. The findings could help explain how dramatic changes in body shape have occurred over evolutionary history.

Scientists began discovering junk DNA sequences in the 1960s. These stretches of the genome—also known as noncoding DNA—contain the same genetic alphabet found in genes, but they don’t code for the proteins that make us who we are. As a result, many researchers long believed this mysterious genetic material was simply DNA debris accumulated over the course of evolution. But over the past couple decades, geneticists have discovered that this so-called junk is anything but. It has important functions, such as switching genes on and off and setting the timing for changes in gene activity.

Sandwalk readers will see all the mistakes and misconceptions in these paragraphs. She's talking about regulatory sequences that were never, ever, thought to be junk. The paper being discussed has nothing to do with junk DNA and the results do not in any way alter our understanding of developmental gene regulation.

If you look carefully at the abstract, you'll see the word "heterochronic." This is one of Stephen Jay Gould's favorite words. He wrote about it in Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

I wish to emphasize one other distinction. Evolution occurs when ontogeny is altered in one of two ways: when new characters are introduced at any stage of development with varying effects upon subsequent stages, or when characters already present undergo changes in developmental timing. Together, these two processes exhaust the formal concept of phyletic change.; the second process is heterochrony. [my emphasis ... LAM] If change in developmental timing is important in evolution, then this second process must be very common.

This was written in 1977—that's almost 40 years ago! These ideas were around for decades before Gould wrote his book¹ and they have been shown to be correct by numerous studies in the 1980s.

What's going on here? Science is supposed to be one of the leading science journals. How could it publish an article that misrepresents the field so badly? Do the editors send these "Latest News" articles out for review?

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1. Ed Lewis shared the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his contribution to "the genetic control of early embryonic development" [The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995].

Siddhartha Mukherjee tries to correct his book

There are lots of things wrong with Mukherjee's best-selling book The Gene. I've listed a few things that I know about [What is a "gene" and how do genes work according to Siddhartha Mukherjee?]. Others have come up with different problems.

The biggest problem is that Mukherjee misrepresents the current state of knowledge in genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology. His misleads his readers by promoting silly viewpoints that conflict with the consensus view. He doesn't mention that there are other views that are well supported by tons of scientific evidence.

The best example is regulation of gene expression. He fails to explain the standard textbook understanding of transcriptional regulation by transcription factors—a view that's solidly backed by decades of work in biochemistry, developmental genetics, molecular biology, and genomics. Instead, he promotes a flaky epigenetic theory that, according to him, threatens to overthrow Darwinian evolution.

The most important thing about nature according to Bill Martin

My friend and colleague, Alex Palazzo, alerted me to an interview of Bill Martin published in the July 11, 2016 issue of Current Biology [Bill Martin]. I loved all his answers—Bill Martin is one of my scientific heroes—but his answer to the last question was particularly insightful. The question was, "What’s the single most important thing that you have come to realize about nature?"

His answer was ....

Life is an exergonic chemical reaction. It’s the energy releasing redox reaction at the core of metabolism that makes life run, and throughout all of life’s history it is one and the same reaction that has been running in uninterrupted continuity from life’s onset. Everything else is secondary, manifestations of what is possible when the energy is harnessed to make genes that pass the torch.

I'm a biochemist so you might think I'm a little bit biased but let me tell you why this answer is so important.

You are junk

There's an article about junk DNA in the latest issue of New Scientist (July 27, 2016) [You are junk: Why it’s not your genes that make you human]. I've already discussed the false meme at the beginning of the article [False history and the number of genes: 2016]. Now it's time to look at the main argument.

The subtitle is ...

Genes make proteins make us – that was the received wisdom. But from big brains to opposable thumbs, some of our signature traits could come from elsewhere.

You can see where this is going. You start with a false paradigm, "Genes make proteins make us," then proceed to refute it. This is called "paradigm shafting."¹

False history and the number of genes: 2016

There's an article about junk DNA in the latest issue of New Scientist. The title is: You are junk: Why it’s not your genes that make you human. The author is Colin Barras, a science writer from Michigan with a Ph.D. in paleontology.

He begins with .....

IT WAS a discovery that threatened to overturn everything we thought about what makes us human. At the dawn of the new millennium, two rival teams were vying to be the first to sequence the human genome. Their findings, published in February 2001, made headlines around the world. Back-of-the-envelope calculations had suggested that to account for the sheer complexity of human biology, our genome should contain roughly 100,000 genes. The estimate was wildly off. Both groups put the actual figure at around 30,000. We now think it is even fewer – just 20,000 or so.

"It was a massive shock," says geneticist John Mattick. "That number is tiny. It’s effectively the same as a microscopic worm that has just 1000 cells."

What is "THE" theory of evolution?

I wish people would stop referring to "THE" Theory of Evolution. What they really mean, of course, is "The Theory of Natural Selection"—part of modern evolutionary theory. There's no question about the importance of natural selection and the major contribution of Charles Darwin in discovering it and promoting it to the general public. However, in 2016 there's a lot more to evolutionary theory than just natural selection and the public needs to know this. Many scientists need to know this.

There's also no debate about Darwin's contribution to promoting the evidence of evolution and descent with modification. He made a brilliant case for evolution in his books. Subsequent discoveries have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that modern life is the product of billions of years of evolution. Descent with modification is a scientific fact. The fact that evolution has occurred is not a theory. It is not a "theory" that humans and the other apes have descended form a common ancestor ... it is a fact [Evolution Is a Fact and a Theory].

We perpetuate confusion in the minds of the general public if we don't make it abundantly clear that modern evolution theory is not about whether evolution occurred and it's not just about natural selection.

I was prompted to write this blog post by a recent article in New Scientist: Darwin’s discovery: The remarkable history of evolution.¹ The author is John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of science with a special interest in Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

The article contains a box that says ...

Evolution in a nutshell

Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of evolution maintains that new species are descended from earlier ones. This long-term process happens because all organisms vary. The tiny variations are naturally “selected” by virtue of whether or not they help an organism to survive the brutal struggle for existence in nature. Many are born, but few survive; fortuitous variations are preferentially passed on. This process of endless filtering works to adapt organisms to their environment.

This is misleading in two ways. First, it states that common descent is part of the the theory of evolution. Second, it only talks about natural selection as a mechanism of evolution.

We wish to question a deeply engrained habit of thinking among students of evolution. We call it the adaptationist programme, or the Panglossian paradigm.

S.J. Gould & R.C. Lewontin (1979) p. 584Fortunately, the main body of the article is quite a bit better. Here's what John van Wyhe actually says about evolution.

Despite its baptism of fire, On the Origin of Species almost single-handedly convinced the international scientific community that evolution was a fact. In his 1889 book Darwinism, Wallace wrote of the revolution Darwin effected: "this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years!"

The theory of evolution has come a long way since. Today we think of it in terms of genes and DNA, but Darwin and Wallace had no idea of their existence. It was only in the 1930s and 1940s that genetics was incorporated into evolutionary theory. Even now, new discoveries are shaking up our understanding, but at the core of the modern theory remains Darwin’s idea of descent with modification.

Today evolution has many critics outside the scientific community, especially in the US, where a significant percentage of the population are creationists. What is forgotten is that the scientific debate over evolution was over by the 1870s and has never again been a matter of serious dispute.

Darwin showed that evolution is a fact and it's good that van Wyhe made this point in a article aimed at the general public. It's not good when he says "the core of the modern theory remains Darwin’s idea of descent with modification."

It's not good that he still refers to "THE" theory of evolution instead of "evolutionary theory," which encompasses all kinds of things other than natural selection.

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1. The title in the print edition is: "The Evolution Revolution."

The seven biggest problems in science

Here's an interesting article about the biggest problems in (American) science: The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists. Most of them apply to science in other countries.

I've added brief comments under six of the headings. Those are MY opinions, not necessarily those of the authors. The comment under #6 is a direct quote from the article.

1. Academia has a huge money problem.
   There's not enough money to do high quality science, especially basic science.
2. Too many studies are poorly designed. Blame bad incentives.
   Some experiments are poorly designed. All scientists are under pressure to make their results seem important.
3. Replicating results is crucial. But scientists rarely do it.
   Replication is important—especially in medical studies—but I think this problem is exaggerated.
4. Peer review is broken.
   The system (peer review) isn't working well. That doesn't mean there's a better system.
5. Too much science is locked behind paywalls.
   This was never a problem in the past when you had to go to the library to read science journals. You could photocopy whatever you wanted. Now it's a problem because we want instant access from our laptops.
6. Science is poorly communicated to the public.
   "But not everyone blamed the media and publicists alone. Other respondents pointed out that scientists themselves often oversell their work, even if it's preliminary, because funding is competitive and everyone wants to portray their work as big and important and game-changing.
   
   'You have this toxic dynamic where journalists and scientists enable each other in a way that massively inflates the certainty and generality of how scientific findings are communicated and the promises that are made to the public,' writes Daniel Molden, an associate professor of psychology at Northwestern University. 'When these findings prove to be less certain and the promises are not realized, this just further erodes the respect that scientists get and further fuels scientists desire for appreciation.'"
7. Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful.
   This is not just a problem for my younger colleagues. It affects all of us. It affects morale in an academic department and it affects the way science is done.

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Bastille Day

Today is the Fête Nationale in France known also as "le quatorze juillet" or Bastille Day.

This is the day in 1789 when French citizens stormed and captured the Bastille—a Royalist fortress in Paris. It marks the symbolic beginning of the French revolution although the real beginning is when the Third Estate transformed itself into the National Assembly on June 17, 1789 [Tennis Court Oath].

Ms. Sandwalk and I visited the site of the Bastille (Place de la Bastille) when we were in Paris in 2008. There's nothing left of the former castle but the site still resonates with meaning and history.

One of Ms Sandwalk's ancestors, William Playfair witnessed the storming of the Bastille.

In honor of the French national day I invite you to sing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. An English translation is provided so you can see that La Marseillaise is truly a revolutionary call to arms. (A much better translation can be found here.)

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Check out Uncertain Principles for another version of La Marseillaise—this is the famous scene in Casablanca.

Reposted from 2009.

A genetics professor who rejects junk DNA

Praveen Sethupathy is a genetics professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

He explains why he is a Christian and why he is "more than his genes" in Am I more than my genes? Faith, identity, and DNA.

Here's the opening paragraph ...

The word “genome” suggests to many that our DNA is simply a collection of genes from end-to-end, like books on a bookshelf. But it turns out that large regions of our DNA do not encode genes. Some once called these regions “junk DNA.” But this was a mistake. More recently, they have been referred to as the “dark matter” of our genome. But what was once dark is slowly coming to light, and what was once junk is being revealed as treasure. The genome is filled with what we call “control elements” that act like switches or rheostats, dialing the activation of nearby genes up and down based on whatever is needed in a particular cell. An increasing number of devastating complex diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, can often be traced back, in part, to these rheostats not working properly.

Science journal tries to fix problems with transparency and trustworthiness

The editors of Science recognize that they have a problem. They aren't very transparent or trustworthy. This is true. These same editors have been guilty of publishing and promoting lots of poor quality science over the past few years. Three examples come to mind ...

• Arseniclife: Science published a ridiculous claim that arsenic could replace phosphorus in DNA. That paper has been refuted but never retracted.
• Ardipithicus ramidus: Science fell for the authors' hype.
• ENCODE: Science falls for the hype promoted by ENCODE leaders. Editorial and feature writers announce the death of junk DNA

Don't worry. The editors have been working hard to fix the problem. After a year of study they announce their solution in the June 3, 2016 issue in the lead editorial: Taking up TOP. The author is the current Editor-in-Chief, Marcia McNutt.

She begins with ...

Nearly 1 year ago, a group of researchers boldly suggested that the standards for research quality, transparency, and trustworthiness could be improved if journals banded together to adopt eight standards called TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion).* Since that time, more than 500 journals have been working toward their implementation of TOP. The editors at Science have held additional retreats and workshops to determine how best to adapt TOP to a general science journal and are now ready to announce our new standards, effective 1 January 2017.

So, what is TOP and how is it going to make Science more trustworthy? Does it involve firing some well-known writers and editors? Does it involve better reviewers?

Nope. TOP is just a way of making sure that raw data is available to other researchers.

... we believe the benefits of requiring the availability of data, code, and samples on which the authors' interpretations rest are worth the effort in compliance (and in some cases in adjusting data ownership expectations), while acknowledging that some special circumstances will require exemptions. This practice increases transparency, enables reproducibility, promotes data reuse, and is increasingly in line with funder mandates. We are also requiring the citation of all data, program code, and other methods not contained in the paper, using DOIs (digital object identifiers), journal citations, or other persistent identifiers, for the same reason. Citations reward those who originated the data, samples, or code and deposited them for reuse. Such a policy also allows accurate accounting for exactly which specific data, samples, or code were used in a given study.

That's not going to fix the main problem.

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Nature journal tries to fix the problem of a scientific literature that's too complex to understand

I recently posted some thoughts on the complexity of the scientific literature noting that many papers are simply too difficult to understand. This includes papers that are well within my areas of interest [How to read the scientific literature? and The scientific literature is becoming more complex].

Nature journal recognizes that there's a problem. A few weeks ago (June 16, 2016) they published a brief comment on Nature distilled.

They begin by describing the problem ...

Any journal that tries to publish the most important results that it is sent, in all fields of science, will run into the same problem. Every bit of our output, we hope, is useful and interesting to somebody somewhere. But even the most optimistic of our editors would concede that the pool of readership for each of these specific advances is only a small subsection of our audience, professional researchers included. To the outside world, science is science. To those who read Nature, science is a multiplicity of specialisms — and specialists.

We know that most of you are specialists, and that you don’t read most of what we present to you. You’re busy people. It is hard enough to follow the literature that you need to read. Even the titles of research papers in an unfamiliar field can look incomprehensible. But if you’re anything like us, one reason you got into science in the first place was curiosity about the world — and not just the tiny piece of it that you now focus on. Wouldn’t it be useful and interesting to keep better track of the rest? Or at least, the rest that is published in Nature, and therefore already judged to be important?

Let's make one thing clear. It's not just the complexity of a paper that's the problem and it's not just that the science isn't explained in easy to understand sentences. There's also the more serious problem of content. Sometimes the papers are hard to understand because the significance of the results is exaggerated and its importance is not placed in proper context.

The ENCODE papers are good examples of this problem. It wasn't easy to understand that they did but, more importantly, it wasn't easy to understand the significance of their results because the authors didn't explain their results very well. They made unsubstantiated claims.

Here's how Nature hopes to fix the problems they identified.

We think so, and this week we begin an experiment to see how many of you agree. We have revisited 15 recently published Nature papers and asked the authors to produce two-page summaries of each. The summaries remain technical — these are not articles suitable for the popular press — but they try to communicate both the research advance and why it matters. The authors of these papers have been enthusiastic — they want the broadest possible readership — and we thank them for their cooperation. Now we want to know what you think. The first three summaries are published online this week (see go.nature.com/1uhcy3x). The rest will be released in the coming weeks. Please take a look. Be brave — pick a topic that you expect to struggle with — and then fill in the online survey to let us know what you think. The rest will be released in the coming weeks. Please take a look. Be brave — pick a topic that you expect to struggle with — and then fill in the online survey to let us know what you think.

I looked at two papers that were about biology and I didn't think the summaries added anything to my understanding. That's partly because the papers weren't that hard to understand in the first place if you were just satisfied with knowing what they did.

Both papers raised lots of questions in my mind about the biological significance of the studies and whether they were accurate and reproducible. The author summaries didn't help much. [Non-coding recurrent mutations in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and DNA-dependent formation of transcription factor pairs alters their binding specificity].

If the scientific literature is difficult to understand, and it is, then there's a problem with the authors. They aren't able to explain what they did in a reasonable manner and they aren't able to place their work in a proper context so we can evaluate the significance of the result. Asking them to try again (and doubling their citations) is probably not going to help.

The ENCODE authors couldn't do it.

It's a lot like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

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What is a "gene" and how do genes work according to Siddhartha Mukherjee?

It's difficult to explain fundamental concepts of biology to the average person. That's why I'm so interested in Siddhartha Mukherjee's book "The Gene: an intimate history." It's a #1 bestseller so he must be doing something right.

My working definition of a gene is based on a blog post from several years ago [What Is a Gene?].

A gene is a DNA sequence that is transcribed to produce a functional product.

This covers two types of genes: those that eventually produce proteins (polypeptides); and those that produce functional noncoding RNAs. This distinction is important when discussing what's in our genome.

Paradigm shifting at the Royal Society meeting in November

Suzan Mazur has been making a name for herself by promoting the overthrow of modern evolutionary theory. She began with a lot of hype about the Alternberg 16 back in 2008 and continued with a series of interviews of prominent evolutionary biologists.

Now she's focused on the upcoming meeting in November as another attempt to shift paradigms [see New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: The Program]. She's not entirely wrong. Many of the people involved in those meeting see themselves as paradigm shifters.

TED-Ed misrepresents epigenetics

TED-Ed is the educational arm of TED. Here's what TED says about itself and about TED-Ed ...

TED believes passionately that ideas have the power to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately, the world. This underlying philosophy is the driving force behind all of TED’s endeavors, including the TED Conferences, TEDx, TED Books, the TED Fellows Program, and the TED Open Translation Project. With this philosophy in mind, and with the intention of supporting teachers and sparking the curiosity of learners around the world, TED-Ed was launched in 2012.

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos , to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 250,000 teachers. TED-Ed has grown from an idea worth spreading into an award-winning education platform that serves millions of teachers and students around the world every week.

The scientific literature is becoming more complex

A recent paper by Cordero et al. (2016) looked at the biological scientific literature in 1993, 2003, and 2013. They found that the average publishable unit (APU) almost doubled in twenty years. There were substantial increases in the number of tables & figures and the number of panels per figure. The number of pages increased as did the number of references and the number of authors.

I agree that papers are becoming more complex and more difficult to understand for the average scientist; especially those outside of the specific field of study. The authors of this study point out a number of problems with this increase. I'd like to highlight one of them.

With respect to the number of authors, they say,

Concomitantly, with the increase in information density we note a significant increase in the number of authors per article that also correlated with the average IF of the journal. Since the famous de Solla Price predictions [38], trends toward an increasing number of authors per publication have been widely documented [23,39–44]. Such a trend of increasing collaboration could be explained by the causes suggested above for the growth of information density. The costs associated with the generation of cutting-edge scientific information, the funding restrictions, and the associated risks in scientific publishing in a “winner-take-all” reward system [45] may motivate scientists to team-up, pool resources and fractionate the risks through co-authoring. Also, the increasing complexity of scientific research has resulted in greater specialization of scientists [46], which in turn suggests that the inclusion of additional techniques requires the recruitment of additional investigators to provide that data and thus serve as co-authors. This trend could have both positive and negative consequences. Increased interaction between scientists in diverse fields could translate into greater communication and the possibility for advances at the interfaces of different disciplines. On the other hand, an increase in the number of authors, some of whom bring highly specialized knowledge, could result in reduced supervision of larger groups, and less responsibility per author for the final product and reduced integration of data.

I think the major consequence is the lack of responsibility of individual authors in a multi-author study. With increased specialization, there are fewer and fewer authors who see the big picture and who are capable of integrating the results from several subspecialties. The fact that the studies include work from several highly specialized techniques that only a few people understand also makes it harder for the average reader to evaluate the paper.

It's likely, in my opinion, that many of the authors on the paper don't fully understand the techniques being used by their colleagues. This is a big change from the science I grew up with.

Cordero et al. are worried about the possibility of fraud.

The growth in authors brings with it the concerns about the possibility that as more authors are added, there is an increased likelihood of some individuals with reduced integrity and capable of misconduct joining the group. In this regard, we note that the inclusion of one individual who has been accused of misconduct in numerous studies has led to dozens of retractions of scientific publications.

This is a very real danger but I think that outright fraud is not a significant worry. What concerns me more is the tendency to gloss over the limitations and possible misinterpretations of complex data analyses. The specialist who performs these analyses probably doesn't intend to misrepresent or exaggerate the significance of the result; it's just that they have become so used to using a particular technique (i.e. a software package) that they have forgotten those limitations. They don't communicate them to their colleagues who, because they don't understand the technique, don't realize there's a problem.

Cordero et al. summarize their results ....

In summary, our study documents a change in the literature of the biological sciences toward publications with more data over time. The causes for these trends are complex and probably include increasing experimental options and changes to the culture of science. At first glance, this data could be interpreted as a cultural change opposite to data fragmentation practices. However, it is also possible that an increase in publication density can still occur over a ‘salami slicing’ culture if the publication unit to be segregated is larger to begin with, as the result of technological improvements and increasing numbers of scientific authors. The benefits and debits of this trend for the scientific process are uncertain at this time but it is clear that there have been major changes to the nature of scientific publications in the past two decades that are likely to have major repercussions in all aspects of the scientific enterprise.

I think they're on to something.

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Cordero, R. J., de León-Rodriguez, C. M., Alvarado-Torres, J. K., Rodriguez, A. R., and Casadevall, A. (2016). Life Science’s Average Publishable Unit (APU) Has Increased over the Past Two Decades. PloS one, 11(6), e0156983. [doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156983]

How to read the scientific literature?

Science addressed the problem of How to (seriously) read a scientific paper by asking a group of Ph.D. students, post-docs, and scientists how they read the scientific literature. None of the answers will surprise you. The general theme is that you read the abstract to see if the work is relevant then skim the figures and the conclusions before buckling down to slog through the entire paper.

None of the respondents address the most serious problems such as trying to figure out what the researchers actually did while not having a clue how they did it. Nor do they address the serious issue of misleading conclusions and faulty logic.

I asked on Facebook whether we could teach undergraduates to read the primary scientific literature. I'm skeptical since I believe it takes a great deal of experience to be able to profitably read recent scientific papers and it takes a great deal of knowledge of fundamental concepts and principles. We know from experience that many professional scientists can be taken in by papers that are published in the scientific literature. Arseniclife is one example and the ENCODE papers published in September 2012 are another. If professional scientists can be fooled, how are we going to teach undergraduates to be skeptical?

Do Intelligent Design Creationists still think junk DNA refutes ID?

I'm curious about whether Intelligent Design Creationists still think their prediction about junk DNA has been confirmed.

Here's what Stephen Meyer wrote in Darwin's Doubt (p. 400).

The noncoding regions of the genome were assumed to be nonfunctional detritus of the trial-and-error mutational process—the same process that produced the functional code in the genome. As a result, these noncoding regions were deemed "junk DNA," including by no less a scientific luminary than Francis Crick.

Because intelligent design asserts that an intelligent cause produced the genome, design advocates have long predicted that most of the nonprotein-coding sequences in the genome should perform some biological function, even if they do not direct protein synthesis. Design theorists do not deny that mutational processes might have degraded some previously functional DNA, but we have predicted that the functional DNA (the signal) should dwarf the nonfunctional DNA (the noise), and not the reverse. As William Dembski, a leading design proponent, predicted in 1998, "On an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function."

I'm trying to write about this in my book and I want to be as fair as possible.

Do most ID proponents still believe this is an important prediction from ID theory?

Do most ID proponents still think that most of the human genome is functional?

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New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: The Program

I'm going to London next November to attend The Royal Society conference on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives. This is where all the scientists who want to change evolution will be gathering to spout their claims.

Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested. This meeting will present these developments and arguments in a form that will encourage cross-disciplinary discussion and, in particular, involve the humanities and social sciences in order to provide further analytical perspectives and explore the social and philosophical implications.

The program has been published. Here's the list of speakers ...

Gerd B. Müller
The extended evolutionary synthesis

Douglas Futuyma
The evolutionary synthesis today: extend or amend?

Sonia Sultan
Re-conceiving the genotype: developmental plasticity

Russell Lande
Evolution of phenotypic plasticity

Tobias Uller
Heredity and evolutionary theory

John Dupré
The ontology of evolutionary process

Paul Brakefield
Can the way development works bias the path taken by evolution?

Kevin Laland
Niche construction

James Shapiro
Biological action in read-write genome evolution

Paul Griffiths
Genetics/epigenetics in development/evolution

Eva Jablonka
Epigenetic inheritance

Greg Hurst
Symbionts in evolution

Denis Noble
Evolution viewed from medicine and physiology

Andy Gardner
Anthropomorphism in evolutionary biology

Sir Patrick Bateson
The active role of the organism in evolution

Karola Stotz
Developmental niche construction

Tim Lewens
A science of human nature

Agustín Fuentes
Human niche, human behaviour, human nature

Andrew Whiten
The second inheritance system: the extension of biology through culture

Susan Antón
Human evolution, niche construction and plasticity

Melinda Zeder
Domestication as a model system for evolutionary biology

I didn't know that Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz were going. It's a bit surprising that they would associate with some of these views. I'm glad that Douglas Futuyma will be there to represent the voice of reason. He seems to be one of the few speakers who understands modern evolutionary theory.

There are still a few spots available, according to the organizers. Sign up quickly.

The meeting is at Carlton House Terrace, which is just a few blocks from Trafalger Square and a short walk down The Mall to Buckingham Palace where the Corgis live.

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What does a person's genome reveal about their ethnicity and their appearance?

If you knew the complete genome sequence of someone could you tell where they came from and their ethnic background (race)? The answer is confusing according to Siddhartha Mukherjee writing in his latest book "The Gene: an intimate history." The answer appears to be "yes" but then Mukherjee denies that knowing where someone came from tells us anything about their genome or their phenotype. He writes the following on page 342.

... the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups. This degree of intraracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigeria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense the lump them into the same category.

For race and genetics, then, the genome is strictly a one-way street. You can use the genome to predict where X or Y came from. But knowing where A or B came from, you can predict little about the person's genome. Or: every genome carries a signature of an individual's ancestry—but an individual's racial ancestry predicts little about the person's genome. You can sequence DNA from an African-American man and conclude that his ancestors came from Sierra Leone or Nigeria. But if you encounter a man whose great-grandparents came from Nigeria or Sierra Leone, you can say little about the features of this particular man. The geneticist goes home happy; the racist returns empty-handed.

I find this view very strange. Imagine that you were an anthropologist who was an expert on humans and human evolution. Imagine you were told that there's a woman in the next room whose eight great-grandparents all came from Japan. According to Mukherjee, such a scientist could not predict anything about the features of that woman. Does that make any sense?

I suspect this is just a convoluted way of reconciling science with political correctness.

Steven Monroe Lipkin has a different view. He's a medical geneticist who recently published a book with Jon R. Luoma titled "The Age of Genomes: tales from the front lines of genetic medicine." Here's how they explain it on page 6.

Many ethnic groups carry distinct signatures. For example, from a genome sequence you can usually tell if an individual is African-American, Caucasian, Asian, Satnami, or Ashkenazi Jew, even if you've never laid eyes on the patient. A well-regarded research scientist whom I had never met made his genome sequence publically available as part of a research study. I remember scrolling through his genetic variant files and trying, more successfully than I had expected, to guess what he would look like before I peeked at his webpage photo. The personal genome is more than skin deep.

This makes more sense to me. If you know what you look for—and Simon Monroe certainly does—then many of the features of a particular person can be deduced from their genome sequence. And if you know which variants are more common in certain ethnic groups then you can certainly predict what a person might look like just by knowing where their ancestors came from.

What's wrong with that?

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Can scientists describe what they're doing to a fifth grader?

I'm working on a review of "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It raises a huge number of issues about science writing and the conflict between producing a bestseller and educating the public about science.

As part of the research for that blog post I've been reading all the reviews of his book and I came across an interview with Mukherjee on the Smithsonian website [Siddhartha Mukherjee Follows Up Biography of Cancer With “An Intimate History” of Genetics].

Here's an interesting answer to an important question ...

Evolution according to "New Scientist"

A recent editorial in the magazine New Scientist caught my eye. The title is "Long Live Evolution" and it offers support for "new ideas" about evolution. The online version is titled Darwin’s beautiful theory must itself be allowed to evolve. The author is not identified; I assume it's one of the editors.

Here's the opening paragraph ...
Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of population genetics.

Michael Lynch (2007)

Darwin's great theory must itself be allowed to evolve

THE theory of evolution is a splendid thing: an elegant and utterly logical explanation for how natural selection solves the problems of survival and creates the enormous diversity of life we see in the world around us.

There is no such thing as "THE" theory of evolution. Evolutionary theory is complex. It covers several mechanisms (natural selection, random genetic drift) and its core is population genetics—something that was unknown in Darwin's time.

We know that Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection ... was correct, but we also know that there are more causes of evolution than Darwin realized ...

Douglas Futuyma (2009)
The New Scientists editor is describing the theory of natural selection but he/she even gets that wrong because most of life's diversity is probably NOT due to natural selection.

The irony here is that New Scientist then goes on to say ...

That brings to the fore areas that are not part of the canon of evolutionary theory: epigenetics, for example, which studies how organisms are affected by changes in the ways in which genes are expressed, rather than in the genes themselves.

Attempts to incorporate such elements into evolutionary theory have not always been welcomed, however. That is understandable, given how successful the theory has been without them. Occam’s razor applies: do not add complications unless they are absolutely necessary.

But another motivating factor is undoubtedly the fear that if scientists themselves are seen to suggest that even small details of the theory of evolution could be improved upon, its detractors will seize upon them with avidity. This is a well-founded fear: it happens all the time, with well-funded and highly visible front organisations distorting scientific discussion to create the false impression of disagreement about the basics of evolutionary theory.

It is a fear scientists need to overcome, lest the admirable defence of truth mutates into defensiveness and rigidity. It is one thing to counter reactionaries who reject evolution; it is quite another to be dismissive of or even hostile to scientists who have new ideas to offer.

I recommend that the editors of New Scientist purchase and read any introductory textbook on evolution before they write any more silly editorials. They will learn that "Darwin's great theory" has already been changed beyond anything that Darwin would have recognized. The fact that the editors of a prominent science magazine don't understand evolution is an example of one of the main problems that have led to so much confusion today over recent attempts to extend evolutionary theory.

If science journalists are going to write about whether epigenetics should be part of evolutionary theory then they better do their homework before criticizing prominent evolutionary biologists for being afraid of changing even "small details" of modern evolutionary theory. I suggest they start by reviewing some "small details" like Neutral Theory, random genetic drift, hierarchical theory, species selection, punctuated equilibria, sympatric speciation, group selection, directed mutation, cladistics, kin selection, selfish genes, endosymbiosis, and a host of other aspects of evolution that have been vigorously debated in the scientific literature over the past century.

Maybe after doing their homework they will realize that prominent evolutionary biologists who question epigenetics are not doing it because they fear change ... they're doing it because "epigenetics" has been debated for fifty years and it has little to do with modern evolutionary theory. Maybe the science journalists will realize that proponents of the "extended evolutionary synthesis" are as ignorant of modern evolutionary theory as they were before they did their homework.

The editorial ends with ...

Evolution is true. But it is also a living, breathing idea that must not be allowed to ossify into a dogma of the kind that it has done so much to sweep away.

Ironically, the most common "dogma" is the false idea that evolutionary theory hasn't changed since Darwin's time and the editor of New Scientist is a prime example of this kind of ossification.

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University of Toronto press release distorts conclusions of RNA paper

My colleague, Ben Blencowe, just published a paper ...

Sharma, E., Sterne-Weiler, T., O’Hanlon, D., and Blencowe, B.J. (2016) Global Mapping of Human RNA-RNA Interactions. Molecular Cell, [doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2016.04.030]

ABSTRACT (Summary)

The majority of the human genome is transcribed into non-coding (nc)RNAs that lack known biological functions or else are only partially characterized. Numerous characterized ncRNAs function via base pairing with target RNA sequences to direct their biological activities, which include critical roles in RNA processing, modification, turnover, and translation. To define roles for ncRNAs, we have developed a method enabling the global-scale mapping of RNA-RNA duplexes crosslinked in vivo, ‘‘LIGation of interacting RNA followed by high-throughput sequencing’’ (LIGR-seq). Applying this method in human cells reveals a remarkable landscape of RNA-RNA interactions involving all major classes of ncRNA and mRNA. LIGR-seq data reveal unexpected interactions between small nucleolar (sno) RNAs and mRNAs, including those involving the orphan C/D box snoRNA, SNORD83B, that control steady-state levels of its target mRNAs. LIGR-seq thus represents a powerful approach for illuminating the functions of the myriad of uncharacterized RNAs that act via base-pairing interactions.

Tim Minchin's "Storm," the animated movie, and another no-so-good Minchin cartoon

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. If you haven't listened to "Storm" then you are in for a treat because now you can listen AND watch. If you've heard it before, then hear it again. The message never gets old.


A word of caution. Minchin may be very good at recognizing pseudoscience and quacks but he can be a bit gullible when listening to scientists. He was completely take in by the ENCODE hype back in 2012. This cartoon is also narrated by Tim Minchin but it's not so good.

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Research for a book

I'm on sabbatical this term, working on a possible book whose working title is "What's in Your Genome?: 90% of your genome is junk."

Here's some of the most important books I've read (or re-read) in the past few months.

I've also read a lot of papers and scribbled notes on what's important and what's bullshit not. The most difficult part about keeping up with the scientific literature is organizing it in some meaningful way so you can quickly find it again if you need to—something I do just about every day.

Everyone has their own method. What works for me is to keep an electronic reference with key words and links to a file folder on a particular topic. (I use EndNote.) Here are the folders with all the papers I've been reading in the past few months.

I don't know how other authors behave but for me the most difficult thing about writing a book is organizing my thoughts and planning how to present them in the most effective manner. I tend to write too much on too many topics so the initial drafts usually have to be pared down considerably. Keeping that in mind, what are YOUR favorite topics?

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John Oliver teaches us to be skeptical of scientific publications

We all know that the purpose of education should be to teach students how to think critically. We're not doing a very good job. Take biochemistry, for example. We spend a lot of time transferring information from lecture notes to student notes and then examining students on whether the transfer has worked. We think that teaching students to read the primary literature will make them better scientists when, in fact, teaching them to be skeptical of the primary literature is what's really necessary.

The ENCODE fiasco is just one of many examples where the scientific literature got it wrong. We need to make sure that our students appreciate the important parts of science; namely, the necessity of repeating experiments and the value of scientific consensus. Our students, and many of my colleagues, are prone to hype and promotion just like every one else but that's exactly what critical thinking is supposed to avoid. And it's exactly what proper science—no matter how you define it—is designed to overcome.

If students and scientists are having trouble with these concepts, imagine how difficult it is for the general public. How are they supposed to know that not every "breakthrough" is a real breakthrough and not every new study is correct?

John Oliver did an excellent job of explaining the problem on a recent (May 8, 2016) episode of Last Week Tonight. Watch it. It's worth 20 minutes of your time. The last bit on "Todd Talks" is classic.

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The Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology revisits junk DNA

The Enclyopedia of Evolutionary Biology is a four volume set of articles by leading evolutionary biologists. An online version is available at ScienceDirect. Many universities will have free access.

I was interested in what they had to say about junk DNA and the evolution of large complex genomes. The only article that directly addressed the topic was "Noncoding DNA Evolution: Junk DNA Revisited" by Michael Z. Ludwig of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Ludwig is a Research Associate (Assistant Professor) who works with Martin Kreitman on "Developmental regulation of gene expression and the genetic basis for evolution of regulatory DNA."

As you could guess from the title of the article, Michael Ludwig divides the genome into two fractions; protein-coding genes and noncoding DNA. The fact that organismal complexity doesn't correlate with the number of genes (protein-coding) is a problem that requires an explanation, according to Ludwig. He assumes that the term "junk DNA" was used in the past to account for our lack of knowledge about noncoding DNA.

Eukaryotic genomes mostly consist of DNA that is not translated into protein sequence. However, noncoding DNA (ncDNA) has been little studied relative to proteins. The lack of knowledge about its functional significance has led to hypotheses that much nongenic DNA is useless "junk" (Ohno, 1972) or that it exists only to replicate itself (Doolittle and Sapienza, 1980; Orgel and Crick, 1980).

Ludwig says that we now know some of the functions of non-coding DNA and one of them is regulation of gene expression.

These regulatory sequences are distributed among selfish transposons and middle or short repetitive DNAs. The genome is an extremely complex machine; functionally as well as structurally it is generally not possible to disentangle the regulatory function from the junk selfish activity. The idea of junk DNA needs to be revisited.

Of course we all know about regulatory sequences. We've known about this function of non-coding DNA for half a century. The question that interests us is not whether non-coding DNA has a function but whether a large proportion of noncoding DNA is junk.

Ludwig seems to be arguing that a significant fraction of the mammalian genome is devoted to regulation. He doesn't ever specify what this fraction is but apparently it's large enough to "revisit" junk DNA.

The biggest obstacle to his thesis is the fact that only 8% of the human genome is conserved (Rands et al., 2014). Ludwig says that 1% of the genome is coding DNA and 7% "has a functional regulatory gene expression role" according to the Rands et al. study. This is somewhat misleading since Rands et al. specifically mention that not all of this conserved DNA will be regulatory.

All of this is consistent with a definition of function specifying that it must be under negative selection (i.e. conserved). It leads to the conclusion that about 90% of the human genome is junk. That doesn't require a re-evaluation of junk.

In order to "revisit" junk DNA, the proponents of the "complex machine" view of evolution must come up with plausible reasons why lack of sequence conservation does not rule out function. Ludwig offers up the standard rationales ...

1. Some ultra-conserved sequences don't seem to have a function and this "shows that the extent of sequence conservation is not a good predictor of the functional importance of a sequence."
2. The amount of conserved sequence depends on the alignment and alignment is difficult.
3. About 40%-70% of the noncoding DNA in Drosophila melanogaster is under functional constraint within the species but not between D. melanogaster and D. simulans. Therefore, some large fraction of functional regulatory sequences might only be conserved in the human lineage and it won't show up in comparisons between species. (Does this explain onions?)

The idea here is that there is rapid turnover of functional DNA binding sites required for regulation but the overall fraction of DNA devoted to regulation remains large. This explains why there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the amount of conserved DNA and the amount that can possibly be devoted to regulating gene expression. The argument implies that much more than 7% of the genome is required for regulation. The amount has to be >50% or so in order to justify overthrowing the concept of junk DNA.

That's a ridiculous number, but so is 7%. Imagine that "only" 7% of the genome is functionally involved in regulating expression of the protein-coding genes. That's 224 million base pairs of DNA or approximately 10 thousand base pairs of cis-regulatory elements (CREs) for every protein-coding gene.

There is no evidence whatsoever that even this amount (7%) of DNA is required for regulation but Ludwig would like to think that the actual amount is much greater. The lack of conservation is dismissed by assuming rapid turnover while conserving function and/or stabilizing selection on polymorphic sequences.

The problem here is that Ludwig is constructing a just-so evolutionary story to explain something that doesn't require an explanation. If there's no evidence that a large fraction of the genome is required for regulation then there's no problem that needs explaining. Ludwig does not tell us why he believes that most of our genome is required for regulation. Maybe it's because of ENCODE?

Since this is published in the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biolgoy, I assume that this sort of evolutionary argument resonates with many evolutionary biologists. That's sad.

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Rands, C. M., Meader, S., Ponting, C. P., and Lunter, G. (2014) 8.2% of the Human Genome Is Constrained: Variation in Rates of Turnover across Functional Element Classes in the Human Lineage. PLoS Genetics, 10(7), e1004525. [doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004525]

Fun and games with Otangelo Grasso about photosynthesis

Otangelo Grasso just posted another one of his screeds. This time it's on photosynthesis. All of his "essays' conform to the same pattern. He looks for some complex set of biochemical reactions, usually in complex animals, then claims that it couldn't possibly have evolved because the whole thing is irreducibly complex according to his understanding of biochemistry and evolution.

It's a classic argument from ignorance.

In this case it's photosynthesis in flowering plants. He posted this figure from the Kegg database ....

Then he says,

In photosynthesis , 26 protein complexes and enzymes are required to go through the light and light independent reactions, a chemical process that transforms sunlight into chemical energy, to get glucose as end product , a metabolic intermediate for cell respiration. A good part of the protein complexes are uniquely used in photosynthesis. The pathway must go all the way through, and all steps are required, otherwise glucose is not produced. Also, in the oxygen evolving complex, which splits water into electrons, protons, and CO2, if the light-induced electron transfer reactions do not go all the five steps through, no oxygen, no protons and electrons are produced, no advanced life would be possible on earth. So, photosynthesis is a interdependent system, that could not have evolved, since all parts had to be in place right from the beginning. It contains many interdependent systems composed of parts that would be useless without the presence of all the other necessary parts. In these systems, nothing works until all the necessary components are present and working. So how could someone rationally say, the individual parts, proteins and enzymes, co-factors and assembly proteins not present in the final assemblage, all happened by a series of natural events that we can call ad hoc mistake "formed in one particular moment without ability to consider any application." , to then somehow interlink in a meaningful way, to form electron transport chains, proton gradients to " feed " ATP synthase nano motors to produce ATP , and so on ? Such independent structures would have not aided survival. Consider the light harvesting complex, and the electron transport chain, that did not exist at exactly the same moment--would they ever "get together" since they would neither have any correlation to each other nor help survival separately? Repair of PSII via turnover of the damaged protein subunits is a complex process involving highly regulated reversible phosphorylation of several PSII core subunits. If this mechanism would not work starting right from the beginning, various radicals and active oxygen species with harmful effects on photosystem II (PSII) would make it cease to function. So it seems that photosynthesis falsifies the theory of evolution, where all small steps need to provide a survival advantage.

I responded on Facebook, pointing out that the cytochrome bc complex and ATP synthase pre-date photosynthesis [Facebook: Photosynthesis]. I also pointed out that there are many living species that use only simpler versions of photsystem I or only photosystem II to carry out photosynthesis [e.g. A Simple Version of Photosynthesis]. Those nasty little facts don't seem to fit with his claim that, "In these systems, nothing works until all the necessary components are present and working."

I probably should have known better. Otangelo Grasso's standard response to such criticism is to avoid dealing directly with his false statements and shift the goalposts on to some other topic. He then posts all kinds of links to websites that seem to back up his claims even if they have nothing to do with the criticisms. You can see him at work on the Facebook thread.

It's pretty frustrating. I probably shouldn't respond to kooks, especially those who think they are experts in biochemistry.

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