Video: Hymn to evolution sung by an innocent child

Genius.


Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

An evolutionary psychology blog (worth reading)

Two years ago I was excited by the launch of the first blog by a major evolutionary psychologist - Satoshi Kanazawa's The Scientific Fundamentalist. Unfortunately, it turned out Kanazawa is batshit insane and often face-palmingly wrong, so my search for a blog by a reasonable evolutionary psychologist continued. Luckily, a while back the interwebs provided: Rob Kurzban's ingeniously entitled Evolutionary Psychology Blog hosted by the equally ingeniously entitled journal Evolutionary Psychology. Being twice shy and all that, I didn't want to recommend Kurzban's blog before I gave it a good long look. Now that I have, I can say Kurzban's blog is well worth reading.

So... check it out.

3 Quarks Daily science blogging award

The three winners of 2010 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Science, judged by Richard Dawkins, have been announced. The winning posts:

1. "Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria" by Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
2. "Skullcaps and Genomes" by Carl Zimmer of The Loom.
3. "The Evolution of Chloroplasts" by Margaret Morgan of My Growing Passion.

All three articles are most certainly worth a read, so do check them out.

A slight criticism... As I pointed out in the comments at 3 Quarks Daily, the winning entries this year are rather similar - too similar. Not only are all three on biology, all three two concern horizontal gene transfer. The chances that the 'real' best three science blog posts of the year just happened to be on a single two closely related topics is infinitesimal. Both Dawkins, and the editors who whittled down the entries to the nine semifinalists, frankly, ought to have been more ecumenical. I thought "MSL: Mars Action Hero" deserved to be in the top three...

Telegraph Science Journalism Fail: Or, ARRRRGHHHH!!!111!

I was alerted to an absolutely daft article in the Telegraph via Derren Brown's Blog (who, disappointingly, didn't seem to notice it's daft). Basically, the article completely misrepresents a paper, "Bonobos Exhibit Delayed Development of Social Behavior and Cognition Relative to Chimpanzees", in press at Current Biology. The paper showed, roughly and among other things, that both bonobos and chimps are cooperative when they’re young, but then chimps become progressively less cooperative and more competitive with age, whereas bonobos don’t. The authors hypothesize that this may be due to pedomorphosis, that is, evolutionary changes to the developmental pattern such that juvenile characteristics persist into adulthood.

The 'science correspondent' at the Telegraph, one Richard Alleyne, however, would have you believe the researchers involved "now believe that being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature." How the hell Alleyne got from the paper to THAT conclusion is utterly beyond me, the researchers never even hinted that there is connection between 'civilization' and their findings. Alleyne goes on to commit a bunch of science howlers: among other things, saying chimps are "more evolved" and that chimps and bonobos are monkeys (ARGH). Anyway, I was going to blog about this in more detail, but luckily Alison Campbell at BioBlog has a most excellent take-down of the article, so go there for more (and more competent) analysis.

By the way, this is not the first time Alleyne has gotten it spectacularly wrong. Ben Goldacre has exposed his breathtaking misinterpretation of climate science (which he refused to correct) and his shameful distortion of a graduate student's MSc thesis which he claimed concluded women who get raped, essentially, were asking for it (at least this was half-heartedly and partially corrected). 

In conclusion: 

Ida: Damp squib...

So remember Ida? The fossil that was going to "change everything"? That was a "missing link"? That was supposed to be a human ancestor? Well it seems all that media hype was for nothing because, according to a new paper in Nature, Ida was the ancestor of... nothing. (Or at least nothing extant).

I don't have the necessary expertise to have an opinion about the controversy itself, but lots of people who do were skeptical right from the start and the naysayers now hove more ammunition that ever. Note to all: doing science by media is a really, really Bad Idea.

Further reading:

• "When It Comes To Being The "Missing Link", Ida -- You Are NOT The Candidate" at Prancing Papio.
• "Breaking the Link - Darwinius revealed as ancestor of nothing" at Not Exactly Rocket Science. 
• "Bone Crunching Debunks ‘First Monkey’ Ida Fossil Hype" at Wired Science.
  
• "Ida Redux" at NeuroLogica.
  

Lazy Linking

"The Durban Boredom Festival"

• So a friend, my fiancée and I went to a local psychic fair recently. I was planning to write about it... but it was a horrid experience, so I never got round it it. Luckily, Angela (the aforementioned fiancée) has written a great account of what went down at the fair and trust me, short as it is, her post contains everything you'll possibly want to know about it. Overall conclusion: way too much incense, rampant woo, boring as hell, complete ripoff.

"The latest verdict on using brain imaging for lie detection"

• BPS Research Digest reports on using fMRI et. al. to spot lying. Short version: it doesn't work. (At least not yet).

"Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?"

• Malcolm Gladwell's latest New Yorker piece in which he compares the morality of dogfighting - almost universally reviled - with that of American football. It turns out that, like with boxing, a football career often results in an Alzheimers-like condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Amazingly, new resarch using accelerometers has revealed players regularly suffer hits to the head of up to 90gs. Not surprisingly this is a Bad Thing that does severe damage to the brain over the long run. Gladwell suggests this may make football morally comparable to dogfighting: the injuries and suffering of the players are an inherent and ineradicable feature of the game.
• As a big rugby fan I couldn't help wondering what the situation is like for my favorite Saturday diversion. Do rugby players also suffer as much damage? Obviously, only research could settle the issue (and some may already exist, I don't know). From the armchair, it's difficult to tell: on the one hand, there are many fewer hits to the head in rugby but, on the other, the players don't wear helmets or much protective gear. My (rather bland) guess, for the little that's worth, is that brain trauma is not as common in rugby as it is in football or boxing, but significantly more prevalent than in the general populace. I'm not going to stop watching though, that's for sure.

"Psychology: A Reality Check" (paywall, I think)

• A great Nature editorial calling for evidence-based clinical psychology in the United States. I'd say it's also much needed elsewhere, the training of psychologists is often criminally devoid of science or even critical thinking. 
• "Clinical psychology at least has its roots in experimentation, but it is drifting away from science. Concerns about cost–benefit issues are growing, especially in the United States. According to a damning report [pdf] published last week an alarmingly high proportion of practitioners consider scientific evidence to be less important than their personal — that is, subjective — clinical experience."
  
• "The irony is that, during the past 20 years, science has made great strides in directions that could support clinical psychology — in neuroimaging, for example, as well as molecular and behavioural genetics, and cognitive neuroscience. Numerous psychological interventions have been proved to be both effective and relatively cheap. Yet many psychologists continue to use unproven therapies that have no clear outcome measures — including, in extreme cases, such highly suspect regimens as 'dolphin-assisted therapy'."

"How We Lost Our Diversity"

• Interesting piece by the excellent Ann Gibbons about new research on the causes of human genetic homogeneity (relative to other primates).
• "Modern humans are a lot alike - at least at the genetic level - compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago."
• See also: John Hawks' fairly critical analysis of the same study.

"Analogies to apes lead us on the wrong track"

• Razib Khan over at Gene Expression on how Ardi drives home the message that drawing analogies between humans and the other extant apes can be misleading. Six million years is a long time, and there's no reason to think our common ancestor with the chimps and bonobos was particularly chimp-like. Somewhat counterintuitively, the opposite might even be true.

"Dear Penn and Teller: Bullshit!"

• I've only recently remembered that I have Season 6 of Penn & Teller's Bullshit so I'm only watching it now. And like Massimo Pigliucci in the above post, I just hated their episode (6-06) on environmentalism. Libertarians so obviously have blinkers on when it comes to global warming that it positively amazes me that they're not more self-critical. It also reminds us all, of course, that being vigilant about our own biases is important.  

"Islam: A Shifting Focus"

• One of the most widespread misconceptions about Islam is that most of its faithful are Arabs. In actual fact, Asian Muslims vastly outnumber Muslims from other parts of the world, making up 61.9% of the global number of 1.57 billion believers.
• "A new survey of the world’s Muslim population, by the Pew Research Center based in Washington, DC, will help those who are keen to break that link [i.e. the perception that most Muslims are Arabs]. It estimates the total number of Muslims in the world at 1.57 billion, or about 23% of a global population of 6.8 billion. Almost two-thirds of Muslims live in Asia, with Indonesia providing the biggest contingent (203m), followed by Pakistan (174m) and India (160m)."
• "Perhaps more surprising will be the finding that the European country with the highest Muslim population is not France or Germany, but Russia, where 16.5m adherents of Islam make up nearly 12% of the total national population. Compared with other surveys, the report gives a lowish estimate for the number of Muslims in France (3.6m), as it does for the United States (2.5m); in both those countries, secular principles make it impossible to ask religious questions on a census."

Carnival of Evolution 16

• A superb edition of the Carnival of Evolution - there are many worthwhile posts to check out. My pieces on foxes and on chameleons were featured. 

Video: Ardipithecus ramidus

So unless you've been living under a rock for the last two weeks (well, or you don't follow the science news at all) you would have heard about Ardi (a female Ardipithecus ramidus), who is the oldest known hominid and a possible human ancestor. Ardi's remains and her likely habitat was analyzed in detail in a Special Issue in Science and several of the results are very surprising, including that she had arboreal adaptations (i.e. traits for living in trees) despite being bipedal.

Anyway, I don't have much to say (not my field) but I do want to point to this video (embedded below, or click here) that the team at Science produced and that has not received enough playtime. It's a great primer on the significance of the find and what it could tell us about hominid evolution.



(By the way: John Hawks has pointed out that one of the photos used in this video is poorly scaled, so it doesn't give a good indication of the skeletal proportions).

Chameleons DO change their color to blend in with their environment

For reasons that are not to hard to fathom, myths about chameleons abound. The Victorians thought they lived entirely on air; a common Zulu superstition is that they're evil (as I confirmed for myself a while back when I tried to show a chameleon I had caught to our gardener); and, more recently, I've been hearing a lot of people say chameleon color changing has nothing to do with camouflage. Even Cracked has got in on the act with an article on "bullshit animals facts", which argues a chameleon's color is determined largely by its mood. I call bullshit on their bullshit.

Thanks to frequent childhood visits to a family farm, I've had lots of encounters with these amazing critters and I've seen them change color to blend in with their environment with my own eyes. Not particularly good evidence, I hear you say. Agreed, so I spent 2 minutes on Wikipedia, followed a link, and found this New Scientist piece, about this study in Biology Letters. And guess what? At least one species of chameleon, Smith's dwarf chameleon (which, incidentally, is South African), does change color to camouflage itself from predators. The paper, "Predator-specific camouflage in chameleons" by Stuart-Fox et. al., demonstrated in several behavioral trials that these chameleons engage in background matching when presented with model predators. In other words, these guys do their best to blend in with their environment when they encounter things that want to eat them. (You can see a clear example of a chameleon matching its background in this YouTube clip [Note: James informs me in the comments that this might be fake]).

So why do people think chameleon camouflage is a myth? It seems other research (also by Stuart-Fox) that concluded color changing evolved for social signalling has been misinterpreted. The conclusion of this second paper was: "our results suggest that selection for conspicuous social signals drives the evolution of colour change in this system, supporting the view that transitory display traits should be under strong selection for signal detectability." In other words, the primary evolutionary 'function' of color changing in chameleons seems to be social signalling. But it does not follow from this that chameleons cannot also use color changing for crypsis -- the ability may have evolved for social signalling, but nothing stops it from being exapted for camouflage. It is such an obvious evolutionary trick that I'm surprised anyone interpreted Stuart-Fox et. al. second paper in this way. If you already have a visual system (to detect background color), you can already change color, you suffer predation and camouflage thus increases fitness, we should positively expect exaptation for crypsis.

As I also pointed out on my fox domistication piece, I'm not a biologist so you should be especially skeptical of my opinions on this (though, I managed to convince biologist Richard Glor over at Dechronization that my interpretation is right). But still... At least some chameleons change their color to blend in with their environment. Obviously.

UPDATE: I emailed Stuart-Fox and asked whether my take is correct. Here is the reply in part (my emphasis):

Yes, your interpretation is correct. Colour change in chameleons serves multiple current functions including camouflage (background matching), thermoregulation and communication (courtship and male-male contests). But we need to distinguish current functions from the selective pressures driving the evolution of the abiltiy to change colours. Some species can change colours much more than others - the question I was trying to answer is why such variation? And it seems that sexual selection for communication (signalling) is the most important selective pressure because the species that change colour the most have the most conspicuous colour patterns that they use to communicate.

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Stuart-Fox D, Moussalli A, & Whiting MJ (2008). Predator-specific camouflage in chameleons. Biology letters, 4 (4), 326-9 PMID: 18492645

Stuart-Fox D, & Moussalli A (2008). Selection for social signalling drives the evolution of chameleon colour change. PLoS biology, 6 (1) PMID: 18232740

Silver fox domestication

I recently linked to an extract from Richard Dawkins’ new book in which he mentions a fascinating long-term experiment on silver foxes. The short version: starting in the late 1950s, the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev selectively bred a population of silver foxes for tameness, and, surprisingly, they acquired a dog-like morphology as a by-product (floppy ears, turned-up tails, and so on). In other words, determining which foxes got to breed based solely on how tame and friendly they were produced not only successively tamer foxes, but dog-like physical traits as well. Belyaev believed (and Dawkins concurs) that the reason for this link is pleiotropy, the phenomenon of a single gene having multiple and seemingly unconnected phenotypic effects. As Lyudmila Trut, Belyaev’s successor as head of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, explains (pdf):

Behavioral responses, [Belyaev] reasoned, are regulated by a fine balance between neurotransmitters and hormones at the level of the whole organism. The genes that control that balance occupy a high level in the hierarchical system of the genome. Even slight alterations in those regulatory genes can give rise to a wide network of changes in the developmental processes they govern. Thus, selecting animals for behavior may lead to other, far-reaching changes in the animals’ development. Because mammals from widely different taxonomic groups share similar regulatory mechanisms for hormones and neurochemistry, it is reasonable to believe that selecting them for similar behavior—tameness—should alter those mechanisms, and the developmental pathways they govern, in similar ways.

Now, this may be entirely correct but I can think of a fairly obvious alternative explanation: subtle biases in the researchers that meant the foxes were not really selected based purely on tameness. (A bit like Clever Hans in reverse). There is an Olympus Mons-sized literature on how human decision-making is influenced, entirely subconsciously, by a dizzying array of crazy things. To take one random example (also previously linked to), holding a heavier clipboard affects judgments of value and importance. Given the ubiquity of such latent biases, are we really to believe that some mutation (unconnected behavior) that merely made the affected fox look tame – made it look a bit more like a dog, say – didn't influenced judgments of tameness? To flesh this thought out a bit more, consider how the foxes were classified. Trut again:

At seven or eight months, when the foxes reach sexual maturity, they are scored for tameness and assigned to one of three classes. The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III… Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the “domesticated elite,” are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. 

Class III seems unambiguously defined and it’s likely pretty straightforward to spot animals that belong to this category. The differences between the other classes, though, are significantly more subjective, and thus liable to all sorts of subtle biases. What, exactly, is an ‘emotional or friendly response to an experimenter’? What, exactly, is ‘eagerness to establish human contact’? It seems entirely possible – indeed likely – that animals that just looked tamer, had stereotypically domesticated features, were more likely to be assigned to Class I than to class II. If so, the foxes were not really selectively bred for “tameness and tameness alone”. No matter how scrupulous and honest the experimenters tried to be, I find it very hard to believe that they succeeded, continuously and without fail, to assign animals objectively to categories. Indeed, the researchers working on the foxes (including Trut) outlined a new scoring method in a 2007 paper, in which they admitted that a cross-breeding experiment “clearly demonstrates that the traditional scoring systems established for selection of foxes for behavior has limited resolution for measuring behavior as a continuous variable”. Assuming, as seems likely, that tameness-aggressiveness forms a continuous behavioral axis, we cannot be confident that Belyaev and his colleagues invariably selected for tameness alone. If this is correct, the pleiotropy story is somewhat undermined, though by no means refuted, of course. It seems significant, however, that the alternative explanation is more parsimonious: it need not posit nearly infallible experimenters, nor a priori unlikely pleiotropic linkages.

Of course, I’m no expert on this topic, so maybe I’ve misunderstood the protocols, or perhaps the alternative I sketch was been refuted somewhere in the literature. I would, however, be very interested to find out how the researchers ruled out this alternative hypothesis...

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Trut, L. (1999). Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment American Scientist, 87 (2) DOI: 10.1511/1999.2.160

Kukekova, A., Trut, L., Chase, K., Shepeleva, D., Vladimirova, A., Kharlamova, A., Oskina, I., Stepika, A., Klebanov, S., Erb, H., & Acland, G. (2007). Measurement of Segregating Behaviors in Experimental Silver Fox Pedigrees Behavior Genetics, 38 (2), 185-194 DOI: 10.1007/s10519-007-9180-1

Richard Dawkins TV

So Richard Dawkins is embracing Web 2.0: his website has been a big success and he's now gone further with the launch of Richard Dawkins TV, a platform for releasing regular videos explaining the basics of critical thinking and evolution. (I do hope he expands to atheist topics). All the videos are available on YouTube, but also as high-quality .mov downloads. Anyway, one of my favorites so far, "Comparing the Human and Chimpanzee Genomes," is embedded below, but also check out "Ants that farm, compost and weed" and "The Baloney Detection Kit" (featuring Michael Shermer).

DS Wilson on Evolutionary Psychology and the media

David Sloan Wilson has a pretty interesting piece in the HuffPo about evolutionary psychology and its portrayal in the media. Wilson argues, among other things, that the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective is flourishing and rigorous, but that it is significantly more diverse than sometimes thought. Specifically, he says the term evolutionary psychology has become overly identified with the Tooby & Cosmides school of thought (the “Santa Barbara school”) which Wilson thinks is flawed in several respects. The meat:

How did the blueprint offered by Cosmides and Tooby go wrong? Let me count the ways: 1) They portrayed the mind as a collection of hundreds of special-purpose modules that evolved to solve specific problems in the EEA. 2) Their conception of the EEA was limited to the range of environments occupied by humans during their evolution as a species, which they acknowledged to be diverse. However, it did not stretch back in time to include primate, mammalian and vertebrate adaptations; nor did it stretch forward to include rapid genetic evolution since our hunter-gatherer existence. 3) They emphasized a universal human nature, or rather separate male and female natures, while minimizing the importance of adaptive genetic variation that cuts across both sexes. 4) They dismissed open-ended, domain-general psychological processes as a theoretical impossibility, creating a polarized worldview with "Evolutionary Psychology" at the positive end and "The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)" at the negative end; 5) Their blueprint had almost nothing to say about culture as an open-ended evolutionary process that can adapt human populations to their current environments. They did not deny the possibility of transmitted culture, but they had almost nothing to say about it. Their most important point was that what seems like transmitted culture can instead be an expression of genetically programmed individual behavioral flexibility (evoked culture).

Ending on a more optimistic note:

Evolution is here to stay as a theory that can help us understand the human condition, along with the rest of the living world. With understanding comes the capacity for improvement. This is not just an idle intellectual pursuit but has consequences for the solution of real-world problems, so the sooner we can advance our understanding the better. One reason that we are just starting is because the term "evolution" became stigmatized early in the 20th century, in the same way that terms such as "sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology" tend to become stigmatized today. This problem can be avoided by distinguishing particular schools of thought from the more general theory, so that the former can be accepted or rejected on their own merits without questioning the merits of the latter.

The longest ellipsis...

(Note: this post is shamelessly unoriginal – John Lynch did all the hard yards on this one).

The most annoying thing about creationists, I submit, is not that they’re wrong (and they are) but that they are often astonishingly intellectually dishonest. One manifestation of this dishonesty is their wont to quote mine, and the nadir of quote mining is constructing unfavorable quotes by using absurdly long ellipses. John Lynch of Stranger Fruit uncovered a doozy of this genre a while ago. Attempting to discredit Darwin by linking him to Marx, social Darwinism and the Nazis, Edward T. Oakes writes:

Darwin actually, if unwittingly, promulgated the charter for all later social Darwinists: "Let the strongest live and the weakest die... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."

As many of you no doubt noticed, there is something decidedly odd about this Darwin quote. And this is it: the first part of the quote comes from the last bit of the last sentence of Chapter 7 of On the Origin of Species. And the second part? The (famous) last paragraph of Chapter 14. Yes, that’s right: seven chapters – or almost 200 pages – later. Astounding, isn’t it?

The more charitable among you may object that perhaps Oakes got the quote from another creationist (from the book he's reviewing?) and thus maybe he’s guilty only of bad scholarship, not bona vide intellectual dishonesty. I would vehemently disagree: pretending to know when one does not is an especially vile form of intellectual dishonesty and if Oakes is not guilty of deliberate deception, then he’s certainly guilty this intellectual fakery. His claim, after all, concerns Darwin’s beliefs, and intellectual honesty demands, surely, that anyone making such claims demonstrate enough familiarity with Darwin’s most famous work to recognize its most famous passage and notice it doesn’t really go with the first bit of the quote.

All of this, of course, is strictly irrelevant to whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is true or not. Even if it were the case that Darwin was a sadistic wife-beating pedophilic Nazi bent on genocide, it wouldn’t change the fact that his theory is true. Nice guys don’t always finish first...

Oh, and some fun proving both sides can play this ellipses game...

"Luke... I am your... father".
-Colossians 4 :14, Genesis 27:31, Genesis 2:24

Books III

I do book reviews once in a while, but I've been naughty and haven't done one in months... To make up for it, here are no less that 8 mini-reviews.

Somewhat strangely, I was introduced to the theory of evolution by natural selection (while I was in high school) through evolutionary psychology, specifically, through Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. And, following Pinker’s references, I read Dawkins, Dennett, Cosmides, Tooby and that crowd. To put it mildly, Stephen Jay Gould was never popular with these writers so I found myself being suspicious of and vaguely hostile to Gould, despite having read only bits of his work. When I came across a collection of Gould’s writings, The Richness of Life, in a bookshop last year it struck me how unreasonable this attitude was: partisans never paint a flattering picture of their opponents. I would have to read Gould himself to come to a fair assessment. So I bought the book and read all 600+ pages and I am extremely glad I did. Gould was without doubt a masterful essayist, a stupendously gifted writer, enormously erudite and capable of making charming connections between seemingly disparate topics. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Gould was one of the greatest 20th century essayists, up there with Medawar and Berlin.
That is not to say that I agree with Gould about everything or that I think his work was uniformly excellent. On the contrary, I think “The Spandrels of San Marco” was a travesty (and unoriginal to boot), and “More Things in Heaven and Earth” (his infamous New York Review of Books piece) was just horrendous. Gould's views about evolutionary psychology (“ultra-Darwinism” he called it) and the evolution of the human mind generally were silly. And, the actions of Science For the People – with which Gould was centrally involved – were inexcusable. Moreover, Gould misled the public because he failed to be clear about when he was explaining or illustrating settled science and when he was engaging in partisan debate.
All that said, I don’t think we should condemn him too much: it’s human (‘all too human’) to be led astray by one’s passionate political and moral convictions. Besides, there is no doubt that nearly anyone has much to learn from Gould and that his essays are, on the whole, delightful, cogent and enlightening. Read Gould (but with eyes open and pinches of salt at the ready).

Unfortunately, South Africa does not have very many science journalists who know their stuff (see George Claassen on this point), so we better support and treasure the ones we do have. Leonie Joubert (who blogs and has a Mail & Guardian column) is certainly on the side of science and reason and, yes, she knows her stuff. Scorched, her first book, is a riveting and beautiful account of the science of climate change and the projected effect this will have on South Africa. While not perfect (there are a few stylistic solecisms, there are missing references and Joubert sometimes bombards her readers with facts) Scorched ought to be widely read. The South African reality-based community, at a minimum, should all go out and buy this book and policy-makers would do well to pay attention.

The Tipping Point, published in 2000, is Malcolm Gladwell’s first book and though it is considerably less serious than his subsequent offerings, it is still worth a read. (It helps that it is short and very easy to read – I finished it in a couple of hours). The book, says Gladwell, is a biography of an idea: that products, messages and behaviors spread like epidemics. Broadly speaking, then, Gladwell is popularizing a kind of memetics, with the addition that ‘little causes can have big effects’ and that there can thus be dramatic and rapid changes when the Tipping Point is crossed. Gladwell illustrates these ideas with his trademark case studies and anecdotes, in this case, the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies in the 1990s, the dramatic fall in crime in New York, the success of Sesame Street, suicide in Micronesia, and others. Along the way, he outlines three ‘rules’ of the Tipping Point: the Law of the Few (“a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work” [p. 19] and these people can be divided into Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen), the Stickiness Factor (“there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable” [p. 25], often by tinkering at the margins [p. 131]), and the Power of Context (“human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they might seem” [p. 29]).
Gladwell has often been criticized for being unoriginal and not particularly rigorous and, frankly, I mostly agree. Indeed, Gladwell has admitted to the former (he’s a popularizer of science, not a scientist). The latter charge is more damning and is in evidence throughout the book. The ‘rules’ of the Tipping Point, for instance, are extremely vague, even when fleshed out considerably more than above, and there are no doubt many exceptions. Moreover, several of Gladwell’s examples are rather pat – he seems to simplify complicated phenomena for the sake of narrative clarity. For example, the story Gladwell tells about how HIV spread in North America – through so-called Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas – crudely simplifies the real situation, and has been disputed.
Nevertheless, Gladwell remains my favorite science journalist, despite his flaws. I read his articles and his books because they introduce me to interesting research, which I can (and do) then follow up for myself. This may be condescending, but I don’t really expect scholarly rigor from Gladwell: he writes popular science for a wide-audience, not academic tomes for specialists. Just like you don’t watch the latest shoot-‘em-up for intellectual stimulation, or read trashy romance novels for their literary merit, or, indeed, read Science for its humor, so you shouldn’t read journalists for unimpeachable rigor or entirely justified true beliefs. In short, read journals, not journalists, for rigor. A well-written and entertaining but simplified account of solid research, worked into an interesting narrative, certainly has its place. And that is exactly what Gladwell provides.

Dark Continent My Black Arse by Sihle Khumalo is an engrossing, entertaining, funny and wonderfully politically-incorrect account of the author’s trip, entirely overland and by public transport, from Cape to Cairo. While not quite up there with Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson’s travel writing, the book is nevertheless very good indeed and worth the price of admission. A single complaint (the skeptic in me couldn’t let this go…): Khumalo on a number of occasions endorses bollocks, most notably, saying that rhino horn is ‘the best medicine for sexual vigour’. Six words: magical thinking + placebo effect + lamentable superstition.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an absolute tour de force, a modern masterpiece. [Mild spoilers follow]. The central character is the eight-year-old American Jew Philip Roth, who inhabits an alternative history where Charles A. Lindbergh, the notoriously anti-Semitic aviator who was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, wins the 1940 presidential election. True to form, Lindbergh then tacitly supports the Axis powers in World War II (under the guise of isolationism) and enacts successively more repressive anti-Jewish laws (under the guise of assimilation). The rest of the novel follows Philip and the rest of the Roth clan as they come to terms with, and accommodate to, the new dispensation. [Spoilers end].
I don’t pretend to be a competent literati, so I won’t do much of a review except to note that the prose is sublime and that Roth has a preternatural ability to render the psychology of people buffeted by events beyond their control and understanding. I said the same about McCarthy, but I think it’s equally true of Roth: he deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is, in my view, Richard Dawkins’s best book since the excellent Blind Watchmaker. The device around which the book is built, modeled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is a pilgrimage starting at the present with Homo sapiens, and working backwards in time to meet our common ancestors with the rest of life. The first rendezvous, for example, is with chimpanzees and bonobos (our common ancestor lived 5-7 million years ago), the 6th with the New World Monkeys (40 million years ago), the 17th with amphibians (about 340 million years ago), the 23rd with lancelets (very approximately 560 million years ago), and so on. Along the way, various creatures tell tales, among other things, about the history of life, the principles and quirks of evolution, and the methods and techniques biologists use to figure all this out. The book, then, is simultaneously a history of life, a primer on evolution, an account of human ancestry, and a survey of the diversity of life.
While it’s quite an investment of time – 629 pages in paperback – The Ancestor’s Tale richly repays that investment: I haven’t learned so much from a single book in a very long time. Not only that, but it’s as beautifully written as we’ve come to expect from Dawkins, and, perhaps more importantly, it illustrates the wonders of life, and sparks one’s curiosity and enthusiasm for such under appreciated critters as sponges, lungfish and fungi.
The dust jacket quotes the Financial Times thusly: “One of the richest accounts of evolution ever written”. It’s not hyperbole.

John Allen Paulos is a rare specimen indeed: an effective popularizer of and unflinching advocate for mathematics who is himself an academic mathematician. Not only are his mathematical credentials excellent, more importantly for his role as popularizer, Paulos writes exceedingly well. In his third book, Innumeracy, Paulos argues mathematical and, more particularly, statistical ‘illiteracy’ (the eponymous innumeracy) leads to the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of reality. He shows persuasively that the innumerate are vulnerable to personalizing the random, and thence to charlatanism, magical thinking and pseudoscience. The book is not, however, an abstract treatise on the importance of mathematics, it’s a vade mecum for the educated but innumerate. As such a guide, the book succeeds admirably: it gently introduces the basics of number and probability with a series of well-chosen examples. Overall, it is a superb little book which, I daresay, might benefit the numerate as well.
I can’t resist quoting Paulos at length:

The discrepancies between our pretensions and reality are usually quite extensive, and since number and chance are among our ultimate reality principles, those who possess a keen grasp of these notions may see these discrepancies and incongruities with greater clarity and thus more easily become subjects to feelings of absurdity. I think there’s something of the divine in these feelings of our absurdity, and they should be cherished, not avoided. They provide perspective on our puny yet exalted position in the world, and are what distinguish us from rats. Anything which permanently dulls us to them is to be opposed, innumeracy included. The desire to arouse a sense of numerical proportion and an appreciation for the irreducibly probabilistic nature of life – this, rather than anger, was the primary motivation for the book.

Blogging for Darwin

February 12th is the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and, to celebrate, there is going to be a blog swarm! I'll certainly be participating, and so can you...

The Mouse Man

Image by Laura-Elizabeth via Flickr

One of the things I learned from Jim Endersby's fantastic A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (which I reviewed here) is that progress in biology often depended on the creation of suitable model organisms. That is, before certain scientific questions could be answered, wild-type animals had to be transformed, often laboriously, into model-organisms. New Scientist magazine has a very nice article on the American geneticist C. C. Little (aka "The Mouse Man"), who created an important strain of genetically identical mice.

It's an interesting little vignette in the history of science and biology -- have a look.

I, Procrastinate

Sometimes I procrastinate. Tonight, I spent a good 5 minutes creating a tag cloud out of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1st edition) using the very cool Wordle.net... Nothing surprising, but still pretty interesting.


(Inspiration: this Marginal Revolution post).

Licking wounds

I was looking through the list of human universals in the back of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate the other day when I saw an item I hadn't previously noticed: sucking wounds. Then I remembered reading something about a compound in dog's saliva having been identified that speeds up healing. I couldn't find the dog saliva story again, but did find a study (press release) published back in July that concluded human saliva promotes healing. Specifically, saliva contains a peptide called histatin that not only kills bacteria, but seemingly accelerates wound closure. This finding, together with the observation that wound licking is a human universal, is exceptionally interesting, but before going on to speculate rather wantonly about its significance, a couple of caveats are in order. Firstly, the study was conducted in vitro, not in vivo, and thus its net clinical significance is unknown. Secondly, the researchers used epithelial cells - those that line the cheeks - in their experiments and so one has to extrapolate, if fairly reasonably, to the conclusion that saliva accelerates wound closure in other types of cells. (Though, there is some evidence that saliva promotes healing in skin cells). Finally, the research I cited is quite preliminary, and thus will have to be replicated before we can be confident about its findings.

Doubts aside, this is fascinating stuff. Why? Because if wound licking really promotes healing (but not obviously so), and all human beings lick their wounds, then it's plausible to suggest this behavior is adaptive. Or, in other words, if it increases fitness and if nearly everybody does it, it's possible that licking one's wounds is a behavior that evolved by natural selection. (Do note that I say 'plausible' and then 'possible'. The evidence I've presented here is merely suggestive and far, far from definitive). Moreover, if wound licking behavior occurs widely among mammals - and a couple of searches in Google Scholar suggests it is, including among several species of non-human primate - then it might be a very ancient behavior indeed. That is, because specific characteristics that different but related organisms share is likely to be inherited from a common ancestor, wound licking could have arisen tens of millions of years ago.

So next time you instinctively pop your injured finger into your mouth, remember that you're engaging in a behavior that may be significantly older than even the hominid lineage. You animal you.

Islamic creationism

Creationists are not known for their facility with reason and evidence, but Adnan Oktar, the infamous Turkish Islamic creationist, is several standard deviations dumber and crazier than any other creationist I've ever come across. Here's Oktar in an interview with Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent of the New Atheists, has recently brought out his bestselling book, The God Delusion, in Turkish and we gather it has already sold 15,000 copies. One of the things he writes is that religion can be a cause of terrorism.

Oktar: Darwinism was the foundation of Hitler's and Mussolini's Fascism and Stalin's Communism. And if we look at the present day, we see that all terrorists – even those who consider themselves to be Muslims – are actually Darwinists and atheists. A believer who prays regularly does not plant bombs. The only people who do that are those who are pretending to be Muslims – or who are Darwinists clearly saying that they are terrorists or Communists. So it follows that they are all Darwinists.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you seriously believe that someone like Osama Bin Laden, who uses the Koran and the godlessness of the West to justify terrorist attacks, is being driven by Darwinist ideals?

Oktar: These people aren't always the way they seem to be in their youth. If one tests them to discover their true beliefs, one realises that they are materialists and Darwinists at heart. It is impossible for a person who fears Allah to commit terrorist acts. Such acts are perpetrated by people who have studied abroad and have had a Darwinist education, people who have internalised Darwin and later call themselves Muslims.

I stand in awe of such utter stupidity.

Nature & Human Nature

There is a great article by Gordon Orians in the spring edition of Daedalus entitled "Nature & Human Nature". Orians, an eminent biologist, has long defended the view that human beings have an evolved preference for certain landscapes, primarily, ones that were fitness enhancing to our ancestors living on the African savanna. Orians traces the intellectual history of human beings' relationship to the environment, outlines the evolutionary psychological view and then relates it to conservation efforts. His view, incidentally, has much in common with E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis. Orians' conclusion:

We are unlikely to care about our environments and other species and be motivated to preserve them unless we live and interact with them and directly experience how they enrich our lives. Conservation success in the United States will depend to a large degree on our willingness to exploit options that fall under 'reconciliation ecology.' Reconciliation ecology is the science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, and play. Reconciliation ecology is an applied science that assists us in designing habitats so that we can share them with other species. As the ancient Chinese sage said: "The careful foot can walk anywhere." Nature needs us to walk carefully. So does human nature.

The Genius of Charles Darwin update

I criticized Richard Dawkins for his bad pedagogy in the first episode of his new Channel 4 documentary "The Genius of Charles Darwin" a while back. A quick note: all three episodes are now available for download on Dawkins' website. I haven't seen the third episode yet, but, despite the problems, I think the series is worth watching.