I am very disappointed. There is this site called How Stuff Works that I’ve run into a few times, that has nice, short, kid-friendly summaries of, obviously enough, how stuff works. I hadn’t used it much, but it seemed like a cool idea…until a reader suggested I take a look at the section on how evolution works.
It’s terrible.
The author has a very, very poor understanding of basic biology, and it looks like the essay was simply spun off the top of his head, with a few quick glances at some websites. The author, Marshall Brain, is an electrical engineer and computer scientist, and it shows, embarrassingly enough.
The whole general introduction is thin and strange and far from how a biologist would discuss it, but rather than going over everything, I’ll focus on one section as an example, a summary of “Holes in the theory“. While giving far too much emphasis to problems than is appropriate, this section has another serious flaw: his holes ain’t holes. All this section is is an airing of the author’s ignorance.
He lists three “holes”, and the first is this one: How Does Evolution Add Information?. Uh-oh. He thinks this is a problem? What could he mean?
Evolution’s mutation mechanism does not explain how growth of a genome is possible. How can point mutations create new chromosomes or lengthen a strand of DNA?
First sentence: dead wrong. Variations in genome size are trivial, and happen all the time through the mechanisms of duplication and deletion, and the inheritance of translocations. He writes about transposons and polyploidy as possible mechanisms, but misses the big ones. And of course, point mutations aren’t the only kinds of mutations present. I’m sorry to say that Mr Brain doesn’t have even a basic knowledge of genetics, so it’s extremely troubling to see him presenting himself as an authority on this subject.
His second question is even worse, reflecting some innumeracy and lack of logic skills that I would expect from an engineer. He’s bothered by “How Can Evolution Be So Quick?“. I’d expect a good mathematical discussion from a population geneticist about rates of mutation and fixation, etc., that would show that actually, rates of evolution are well within the bounds of reason, but instead, he uses several peculiar examples that just don’t make sense, and worded misleadingly to cast false doubt on the idea. Here’s one example, the growth of the human brain.
Modern human brain size averages about 1,500 CCs or so. In other words, in about 2 million years, evolution roughly doubled the size of the Homo erectus brain to create the human brain that we have today. Our brains contain approximately 100 billion neurons today, so in 2 million years, evolution added 50 billion neurons to the Homo erectus brain (while at the same time redesigning the skull to accommodate all of those neurons and redesigning the female pelvis to let the larger skull through during birth, etc.).
Let’s assume that Homo erectus was able to reproduce every 10 years. That means that, in 2 million years, there were 200,000 generations of Homo erectus possible. There are four possible explanations for where the 50 billion new neurons came from in 200,000 generations:
- Every generation, 250,000 new neurons were added to the Homo erectus brain (250,000 * 200,000 = 50 billion).
- Every 100,000 years, 2.5 billion new neurons were added to the Homo erectus brain (2,500,000,000 * 20 = 50 billion).
- Perhaps 500,000 years ago, there was a spurt of 20 or so closely-spaced generations that added 2.5 billion neurons per generation.
- One day, spontaneously, 50 billion new neurons were added to the Homo erectus brain to create the Homo sapiens brain.
None of these scenarios is particularly comfortable. We see no evidence that evolution is randomly adding 250,000 neurons to each child born today, so that explanation is hard to swallow. The thought of adding a large package of something like 2.5 billion neurons in one step is difficult to imagine, because there is no way to explain how the neurons would wire themselves in. What sort of point mutation would occur in a DNA molecule that would suddenly create billions of new neurons and wire them correctly? The current theory of evolution does not predict how this could happen.
That’s just plain goofy. I don’t know why he claims there are just four possible explanations, unless he thinks round numbers have some kind of deep significance. All he’s really saying is that there is a range of possible rates for brain growth, from slow and steady, generation by generation, to abrupt and sudden. We can actually look at the fossil data to get an idea of the rates, as we can see below.
(from Falk D. 1998. Looks Can Be Deceiving. Science 280(5370):171)
He’s also guilty of grossly typological thinking—”the Homo erectus brain”, “the Homo sapiens brain”—and making the mistake of assuming that each child gets 250,000 neurons added to it. This is nonsense, of course. What we have is a wide range of variation in a population, and under selection, those with larger brains do statistically better at surviving and reproducing than those with smaller brains. Is there such variation? Of course! And Brain even includes a diagram of skulls that demonstrates this, with ranges of 1200-1600 cc listed for the modern human skulls.
To put that in context using his simplistic measure of neuron numbers, that means some perfectly normal kids are born today that will have a cranial capacity about 400 cc greater than other kids, or about 25 billion more neurons than some of their fellows. 250,000 neurons is trivial; it represents about 0.00375 cc. Yet, somehow, a variant with 0.00375 cc greater cranial capacity is something that makes him uncomfortable, and for which he can see no evidence, while blandly and (apparently) obliviously mentioning the fact that there is 400 cc of variation in the population.
As for his concern that he can’t imagine how point mutations (again with the point mutations; he really needs to brush up on some genetics) could generate more neurons, and he doesn’t understand how they’d also get wired up…that is a legitimate question and one of great interest to many of us. It’s actually not hard to see how mutations in regulatory genes could cause a cascade of effects leading to changes in rates of cell division in the brain; one candidate is ASPM. Wiring up additional neurons is only a problem if you are under the faulty impression that every connection is specified by the genome. This is not the case, but instead are negotiated by cell:cell interactions during development, a phenomenon called plasticity. Our genomes aren’t full of micromanaging details about what single cells should do, but instead encode general extensible rules for sorting out cells and synapses—variation is easily handled.
His third “hole” in evolution, Where Did the First Living Cell Come From?, at least is asking a genuine question, one that scientists actually wonder about, unlike his first two. However, having just read a book on abiogenesis, I can say that the details in this section completely miss all the real issues, and it basically amounts to a statement that cells are really complicated, and Marshal Brain doesn’t understand how they came to be, and also hasn’t bothered to do his homework to see how scientists are addressing the issues.
As I said, I’m very disappointed. I don’t think I could recommend that site to anyone, given the deep flaws in an entry on subject matter with which I am very familiar. I’m also not at all impressed with the author list, which contains no one with any substantial science credentials (the head guy is trained in engineering, not science, strictly speaking). On top of all that, the site contains overly credulous articles on ESP, Tarot Cards, UFOs, and witchcraft. The overall impression is of excessive babbling with no quality control and no competence to evaluate many of the claims they’re writing about.
Is not the basic problem that the article focuses on random mutations as the only possible engine of evolution?
Did anyone notice the list of “popular searches” in the sidebar?
* Body Armor
* Hurricane
* Hypnosis
* Intelligent Design
* Military Technology
* Stem Cells
* UFOs
I’ll take “Things a conspiracy theorist would say” for $200, Alex.
I’ve noticed that the anti-evolution crowd is over-impressed by engineering degrees. What’s up with that?
I would strongly suggest that someone really comptetent, AND who is a good communicator write up a suitable screed for this site, and that it then be sent to Marshall Brain (A pseudonym?) with a strong recommendation that it be substituted.
No mention of competition pressures, or sexual selection, or isolation pressures?
Oh dear, and I’m a physicist/Engineer – even I know about these….
So it’s Wikipedia?
Awesome, PZ. As a physics prof, I find that students often head to this website first when I give them a homework assignment that asks them specifically how something (Refrigerator, CD player etc) works.
Can I have your permission to hand out an edited version of this article to my students along with my syllabus? :)
Sure, if I post it here, consider it free for the taking.
And excessive advertisements. How could you bear to make it through more than one or two articles there? I found it difficult, and that was WITH flashblock, animations turned off, and most banners diabled. What a mess!
“So it’s Wikipedia?”
I think you’ll find that the articles on Evolution in wikipedia are far more reliable.
Sounds like should have heeded the warning tag on his computer keyboard: Marshal brain before applying fingers.
(Sorry, I know puns are the lowest form of humor, but I couldn’t help myself.)
Oddly, Mr. Brain is the brains behind “whydoesgodhateamputees.com”, a website advocating atheism. Not that there’s any reason why that should make him more likely to get the science right, but still…
He lists both talk.origins, and true.origins. WTF?
You should have seen the Wikipedia article on the “arument from evolution.” Until I changed it entirely and plenty of other people improved what I wrote significantly, it basicly said that evolution was atheist jargon designed specifically to disprove God. Now it talks about why Intelligent Design is wrong from a biologist’s standpoint.
Here it is if you want to see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_evolution
Brain is a very smart guy who used to teach at my alma mater. He has made a few boneheaded screw ups in the last few years. But he’s generally on the side of the angels.
PS-why is it, every time I try to comment on this damn site, it fails, I have to go delete my cookies, and then it works? Shouldn’t that be fixed by now?
I can understand engineers not understanding biology, but I don’t understand not understanding it and writing about it anyway — engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this. Certainly they’re capable of learnign before writing — why do they so often skip that learning step?
I’ve noticed that the anti-evolution crowd is over-impressed by engineering degrees. What’s up with that?
delagar: My guess is that it’s as close to science as a creationist can get without having to question his beliefs.
Marshall Brain doesn’t know evolution, but he does know robots and automation. I think the scenario, especially the early parts, that he depicts in Manna is quite likely for the U.S. We’re already moving in that direction.
If Wikipedia was designed so that the first person to write a ~10 page article for a subject were the only one allowed to edit it. And they split the content into less-than-bite-sized pages to maximize ad views. Then yeah, it’s Wikipedia (but with more pictures).
I don’t see why a doubling of brain size is any more remarkable than the doubling of any other measurement. An incredible amount of variation is possible within the same species. A 4lb. Chihuahua is a member of the same species as a St. Bernard weighing 40 times as much ( http://www.cycledog.com/weight.htm ). Dogs are the result of human-directed breeding, but this examples is sufficient to demonstrate what can happen very rapidly by selecting from an existing pool of variability.
In the present of sufficient selective pressure for brain size, you’d expect to see the top percentiles flourish and change the overall distribution within a small number of generations. Keep in mind the “rule of 72” approximation (usually applied to investing). If the average increase per generation is x% then for small x, a doubling occurs in about 72/x generations. So a barely perceptible increase of 1% per generation in any measure would give you a doubling of that measure in 72 generations. All you’d need to observe this assuming a normal distribution within generations is a slight bias favoring the higher percentiles.
Not really relevant to the above, but speaking of huge variability, it can clearly result from environmental factors as well. I grew some sunflowers two years ago, some of which were at least 8 feet high (maybe 10). I happened to leave the flowerheads in the garage near the door and I found a sunflowering growing in a crack in the concrete last year. It reached a height no greater than 18 inches (but by cubic scaling probably weighed no more than 100th the weight of its parent). It actually produced a flower, but I’m not sure if any of the seeds were viable.
The Wikipedia entry on evolution is arguably the most comprehensive and well-researched article on that site. It was a featured article and contains everything you need to know about evolution, with citations for everything.
HowStuffWorks is still a very good place to go for engineering and mechanical stuff (their article on lock-picking is pretty cool, and I think they have a good article on Magnetic Resonance Imaging), but don’t expect good biology from an engineer.
I’ve noticed that the anti-evolution crowd is over-impressed by engineering degrees. What’s up with that?
I think part of the problem is that a lot of engineers are overly impressed with themselves. I have a BS in Computer Science and I can’t count the number of times I’ve encountered engineers who took one class in Fortran who were sure they knew more about programming than Computer Science graduates. I find this behavior more than a little insulting.
So it’s Wikipedia?
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html
BTW, I have this sudden fear of being accused of Lysenkoism for what I said about sunflowers. To make it crystal clear, I meant that genetically identical sunflowers can reach maturity in very different ways depending on their environment. I assume the seeds that grew outside my garage would have grown over 8 feet tall if I had put them in good soil and watered them a lot. Moreover, if the tiny plants produced viable seeds, those too would have grown tall under the right conditions.
Actually, I don’t know for sure if all the seeds could grow in a crack in concrete, so it’s possible that the one that grew this way was atypical compared to other seeds in that flowerhead. I guess if I tried this out for a few generations, I might start to select for smaller sunflowers that require less water (which as I understand it is probably closer to what they would have been like before people started selected them to grow tall and produce single giant flowers).
Dbpitt wrote:
“You should have seen the Wikipedia article on the “arument from evolution.” Until I changed it entirely and plenty of other people improved what I wrote significantly, it basicly said that evolution was atheist jargon designed specifically to disprove God.”
The article which is there now is excellent (you did great!), but it is possible that you misunderstood the context of the original entry. I’m not sure what was there before, but among the many “arguments against the existence of God” there is indeed an “Argument From Evolution.” It’s only a probabilistic argument which has, I think, 5 sections, but it’s sometimes used by Paul Draper and others as part of an inductive cumulative case for naturalism, with evolution being a fact about the world which is more likely under naturalism than supernaturalism. This doesn’t make evolution an “atheist theory” any more than the Argument from Scale (the size and scope of the universe is more likely under naturalism than theism) makes the large universe of modern cosmology an atheist theory.
The Argument from Evolution is seldom used in formal debates, though. My guess is that this is for pragmatic reasons. The audience is too likely to miss the point and think that the atheist is saying that evolution is atheist science. No. It’s just science. We can use it, however, to point out problems with specific forms of religion or with supernaturalism in general. Or to make a case for ontological naturalism all the way down, ala Dawkins.
PaulC: the magic phrase you are looking for is “Norms of Reaction”. It’s a distinguished and honorable topic of study.
Maybe the emphasis is on “How stuff works that people designed to work in a particular way.” This would not be a good starting point for explaining evolution, since human designs tend to be explainable in teleological terms (intended to do something) and often follow clear, deterministic causal chains.
I say “often” because there are many important engineered processes that exploit stochastic behavior. Think of the process of enriching uranium by gaseous diffusion. Nobody can just pick out the U235, but you can increase the concentration over multiple passes. The concentration of U235 in highly enriched uranium is over an order of magnitude greater than when you started, but only increases slightly during each pass due to a statistical bias. This is similar to a gradualistic understanding of how traits can change by natural selection, though I imagine there are other mechanisms as well.
PZ:
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
Roger that, Dilirious. As a Computer Engineer (student, anyway) I can’t pretend to know as much about algorithms and sophisticated language concepts as a Comp. Scientist. I will say, though, that I sometimes find certain scientists’ attitudes toward engineers just as insulting. (Oh, you’re engineer? Must be a scientist wannabe who couldn’t hack it.)
There should be peace between our people!
Apologies for my inability to spell internet names, Dilireus
Hey, don’t knock all EEs. Some of us have actually learned to shut up now and then (just perhaps not me at this moment). It’s unfortunately a field where there is no real conflict with religious fervor and so i tend to hear a lot of very stupid things coming out people with some technical apptitude. Such as, “They’re using evolution as a reason to kick professors out. It’s totally political.”
I’ve noticed that the anti-evolution crowd is over-impressed by engineering degrees. What’s up with that?
Perhaps the Designer holds an engineering degree?
JoeB:
As computer scientist (PhD, pubs and all) I appreciate your deferential tone, but I don’t think they consider us scientists either. Actually, the study of discrete algorithms–what I know best–is effectively a branch of mathematics, since the results are considered valid if provable through logic: definitions+lemmas+theorems=QED. This is a far cry from experimental science which has to be able to validate theories empirically.
I think that HowStuffWorks would be happy to have an improved article from you, PZ.
Okay enough with the slamming of engineers. I seem to remember there are quite a few MDs, Mathematicians and others on the Discovery list. Also, not all engineering disciplines are devoid of a rigorous scientific approach.
I am a research scientist/engineer in the field of aerodynamics. My specialties are inverse design methodologies, icing research, and advanced turbulence modeling. Roughly 70 to 80 percent of my work is experimentally based.
I can also think of quite a few times when some Comp Sci weenie thought they understood aero better than us aero weenies. Since they had worked on some coding for us, that was obviously a perfectly good substitute for a proper aerodynamics education. These “enlightened” folks proceeded to layout absolutely ridiculous ideas about airfoil design, or turbulence modeling, or ice accretion, etc.
It happens to all professionals in all fields. A little education is a dangerous thing.
The problem is when people decide to speak outside of their expertise without employing the proper rigor in education and research. I seriously doubt this is a problem limited to or even concentrated in engineers. You would be amazed at the number of professionals who think they understand how aerodynamics “really” works, how willing they are to tell us poor myopic “engineers” how we just cannot see the truth because of our dogma and how absolutely and completely wrong they are.
The last guy that did this to me was an MD, a heart surgeon. He had some fluids courses, and owned a plane, so obviously he knew as much as I while at the same time, since he was not bogged down with all of my dogmatic “theory” he could see it more clearly than I. His ideas were complete crap. Sound familure?
Had I seen this, I would have been tempted to write to Mister Brain, introduce myself as an expert in the area, and offer to edit it. Sure that is littered with pitfalls as we all know. Yes this is more fun and funny, and provides the opportunity to point out the numerous errors and misinformation in popular sites.
You have great points but why bring his credentials into it? Many math/engineer folks – or in fact people with a high school education, could write a simple tutorial on evolution, especially if they put their mind to it and checked the facts. Was your point to diss his credentials or did it just come accross that way?
PZ: Variations in genome size are trivial, and happen all the time through the mechanisms of duplication and deletion, and the inheritance of translocations.
Are there any examples of gene duplication besides the blood clotting cascade? That seems to be the standard example. I’ve looked in Talk origins and I can’t find anything (different).
The recent sequencing of the Chimpanzee genome should show some duplications against the Human genome, I think.
Go to OMIM.
Type “duplication” in the little box.
Click “Go”.
I am not dissing Mr Brain’s credentials. They are quite respectable, and I expect he’s got some good solid domains of competence.
Biology isn’t one of them. That’s all I’m saying.
I really don’t get this sensitivity to being told that someone is not a flawless Renaissance man, possessing all knowledge and skills. If someone wants to tell me I’m a crappy electrical engineer, I’d say, “yeah, I know,” without any embarrassment at all.
His biggest flaw in the brain issue is that, according to an article I recently read, the genes specific to the brain are 100% identical between humans and chimpanzees, with the exception of what could be thought of as the following:
brain_size = 37;
cnt = 0;
do until cnt = brain_size {
double_neurons();
cnt ++;}
Or, in other words, our difference in size is because “brain_size” went, more or less, from 35 to 37. The natural doubling from a single cell produces the 100 million plus in only “two” extra steps and all it takes to cause it is “one” change in “one” gene, which makes replication from the base cell last longer. How the #@$@%@ hard is that to figure out, its just 2^n…?
All you engineers and computer scientists posting in this thread, go tell ScienceBlogs how to fix this annoying comment problem where people have to delete ScienceBlogs’s cookies before they can comment again.
?? I don’t have that problem Steve. Are you using something lame, like Infernal Exploder? But seriously, I am using Firefox and the only problem I have is with some other site, with refuses to stay logged in. When I used Opera on my other system (power supply died on me), I didn’t even have that problem. And I never had one here at all.
Like Steve, I cannot just post to this blog: I get Comment Submission Error (it always says I didn’t put in my name and email, which is a barefaced lie.) I have to go to Internet Explorer.
Type “duplication” in the little box.
Click “Go”.
Ahhh… Many hours of light reading.
Thanks!
Nonsense. You’re conducting an experiment every time you evaluate a set of claims. Everything you do is validated empirically.
Ah, just what I would expect from an evolutionary biologist. He sees a couple of examples and thinks he’s seen them all.
My point was that CS theory uses mathematical standards of proof, which makes it different from empirical science. In a trivial sense, I suppose a proof is validated empirically, but only in the sense that having been demonstrated to follow from axioms, it remains true independent of any empirical data (given some widely held assumptions about the correctness of logical inference). Typically we separate observation and analysis. To refer to mathematical proof as an experiment strikes me as a particularly unuseful conflation of the two concepts.
Maybe my point was not clear or I should have said that “all” experimental science can do accumulate empirical validations of a theory but does not establish its ultimate truth in a mathematical sense. But I would not put it that way, because experimental science provides a way to approach questions that are probably never going to be nailed down as theorems. Either way you want to look at it, theoretically computer science is not a science in the sense that biology is and is effectively a branch of discrete mathematics. I have never before heard anyone suggest that this is a controversial claim.
You know, I always figured that the mere volume of brain tissue was a red herring, and that brain function was far more important. Obviously, a certain minimum of volume is necessary, but I have a hunch that it is far smaller than mose people think. An obvious counter-example in this regard are child prodigies, who exhibit enormous mental capabilities with a brain volume far lower than the average adult human. Another counter-example are those individuals who, for whatever reasons, have developmental conditions which cause their physical size to be far smaller than the average adult human, but who nevertheless have the exact same range of intelligence as adult humans.
Or in other words, IF YOU THINK THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE, WHAT ABOUT PYGMIES+DWARFS!!?!?
I may be wrong about my brain-size hunch, and I’d like to see an explanation of why if I am, but I really, really needed to get off that one line…
“I can understand engineers not understanding biology, but I don’t understand not understanding it and writing about it anyway — engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this. Certainly they’re capable of learnign before writing — why do they so often skip that learning step?”
My take on it is that engineers often of necessity become experts on quickly making things work in fields they have never worked in before. This is accompanied with a quick and perhaps superficial overview. An engineer tend to take that experience with them into other new fields. It’s a reinforced habit that functions well in the usual line of work where it often doesn’t immediately matter if a model is correct outside the verification at hand, but not so well against prediction and peer-review.
In the ’80s, at my university — like, I suspect, many others — students washed out of engineering into computer science. From there they washed into business, then psychology (etc.), ending up in education. (The school of education was closed a few years later, none too soon. Its product, by the way, wasn’t teachers; it was “educators” who would oversee teachers.) Engineering students took a 40%+ greater courseload than most other majors
Those who could handle the engineering classes found the computer science curriculum more or less trivial. Electrical engineering graduates — who had, commonly, taken the same classes the CS graduates did in addition to their own mathematics and engineering work — easily displaced CS graduates from job openings. In junior-level CS classes I attended it was common to hear complaints, when the instructor used freshman calculus, that it was not listed in the prerequisites.
Disparaging engineers is dangerous to any argument: everything engineers do has to *work* — every time. There’s no room for wishful thinking, no room to prefer mathematical elegance over the facts as the universe sees them. A biologist can spend a whole career believing in fantasies (and many have) with no repercussions. If an engineer believes in fantasies, people die.
Who designs the instruments that take the measurements that scientists depend on? The data collected by engineer-built and -operated space probes and telescopes will remain valuable long after the fantasies of the current generation of astronomers have been forgotten.
The craft of engineering, of making things that work, is no bastard child of science. It is, rather, the mother of the more rigorous scientific disciplines. Most recent among these might be plasma fluid dynamics, where the defining mathematics have long been considered too inelegant to attract the attention of mainstream physicists. Before that there was solid-state physics, fluid dynamics, crystallography, electromagnetics, metallurgy.
In a similar vein, one treats technicians as inferior at one’s peril: a working MD is the precise analog to an aircraft pilot, and either one’s observational skills are far more finely honed than the typical scientist’s or engineer’s. That it has taken many decades for pilots’ observations of stratospheric electrical phenomena to be accepted is equally as damning as medical science’s decades of ignoring physicians’ “anecdotal” successes, e.g., notably, ulcers.
Even disparaging people for judgments outside their field is not entirely safe. Biochemist Linus Pauling is routinely trotted out as a medical quack, but after all these decades it turns out ascorbic acid really does appear to attack cancer:.
Except, perhaps, in a blog — or in a review of a paper submitted to a journal — glibness is a poor substitute for being right.
About the number of nerve cells in the brain…
I have seen it suggested that primates like ourselves don’t really have more nerve cells than similar-sized animals, just more of them concentrated in the skull than distributed throughout the body. In other words, we didn’t necessarily add neurons to get where we are, we moved them into our skulls in much the way whales moved their nose to the top of their heads.
Not being a vertebrate biologist, I’m not equipped to evaluate the claim.
That Linus Pauling URL referenced above was http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/38/13604 .
That Linus Pauling URL referenced above was http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/38/13604 .
The only nit with the Wiki Evolution article is that it says in the first sentence that it is an explanation of the rigins of life, bio divirsity and the origins of the universe. In fact Evolution does not deal with origins of life or the universe.
Ah, I see why some people think I’m insulting engineers. That can be interpreted two ways: 1) that I expect a lack of logic skills in engineers, or 2) that he lacked the logic skills I expect to see in engineers. My intent was #2.
Seen this?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5479410612081345878
PaulC et al: Curiously, one can make the case that computer science departments contain people whose research interests lie in pure science, applied science, and technology. (In the sense that I have written about at other times.)
That said, the hypothetico-deductive style of investigation is not what makes for the first. Instead it is the subject matter – namely those people interested in pure recursion theory, as one sometimes finds in CS departments. (There are others, but this is the clearest example.) A good way to see that the H-D style doesn’t do the work here is to note that there are H-D approaches in many fields: physics, economics, even philosophy. One could even have some axiomatic engineering or medicine, though at present there is little presented in that format.
I see that the PYGMIES + DWARFS issue has cropped up again. To resolve this question once and for all, I propose to subject it to the rigors of anagramology.
This turns out to be less than straightforward, however. PYGMIES + DWARFS is an anagram for WIMPY FAG DRESS, so one obvious conclusion would be to blame gay men. Yet this can remain no more than a hypothesis, since we also have SWAMPY FRIDGES which, reinforced by SWAPS MY FRIDGE, strongly supports the refrigerator-industry-conspiracy theory.
(Some investigators’ results have included FEW GRASPS MY ID, but this must be discounted as an outlier in the experimental data. It’s obviously irrelevant, and ungrammatical besides.)
FEW DIG MARS SPY proves that the influence of undercover agents from the fourth planet is negligible. In addition, it neatly demonstrates the falsifiability of anagramology, thus proving it to be a real science.
Still, anagramology remains in its infancy, and the finer details of its experimental methodology remain to be worked out. If, for example, we were to accept Tolkienesque orthography, i.e., PYGMIES + DWARVES, further controversy is bound to raise its head as one is quickly drawn to the conclusion that MYERS WAVED PIGS. On the bright side, this hypothesis is actually easier than most to investigate — one can simply query Dr. Myers for the salient details: Were the pigs waved by design, or was the waving random? Did it happen ~6000 years ago, or did it immediately precede the Cambrian Explosion? And why choose pigs as experimental subjects in the first place?
And what do we make of the startling fact that, out of all the possible thousands upon thousands of anagrams, nary a one mentions the FSM? Or even spaghetti? Coincidence? Hah! If you believe that, you’ll believe anything and are not nearly sceptical enough to be a scientist.
I’ll admit that the above doesn’t actually settle the PYGMIES + DWARFS question, but it does suggest several promising avenues of research. What we need at this stage is more experiments. And with more scientists working actively in this promising new field, experimental methodology will no doubt fall into place.
I think this is mainly because CS as currently defined is a catch-all with a lot of historical baggage. It’s almost as if somebody decided to have an “optical science” department that included biology using microscopes, astronomy using telescopes, along with optics theory–and then admitted a bunch of undergrads whose ambition was to become optometrists.
I studied theory of algorithms. I think its main connection to computers is that it would be less appealing to study it if people had to carry out the algorithms by hand. Note, though, that some fairly sophisticated algorithms were known before the computer existed. Gauss supposedly was aware of the Fast Fourier Transform, though it was only rediscovered after computers existed to make it a really useful tool.
Anyway, the methodology I used was not that of empirical science, so speaking only for myself, I’m more comfortable being called an applied mathematician–to the extent that there are really any applications of my work.
I think the warning sign in this article is the magic word “Humans”.
Whenever you see that word in close proximity to “evolution”, you’re sure to see some special pleading on its way. Sorry, folks, but peoples is animals, just like arthropods and fishes. They weren’t “pre-ordained” they ain’t “the end all be all” and they sure as hell ain’t the end of the evolutionary road – unless we take measures to insure it stops dead. Nuklear holocaust anyone?
Just sayin’…
I’ve posted some other comments on the skull comparison graphic at
http://community.livejournal.com/sloppyscience/6070.html
Huh. My last comment did not post. I got some note about being held by the blog owner.
Nathan Myers:
So I guess, for example, all these engineers look at the union-find algorithm and immediately deduce that its asymptotic complexity per operation is the inverse Ackerman function, right? Amazingly, the best some dumb computer scientist managed to do on the first attempt was to bound the complexity using iterated logs. Is that retarded or what? Or, say, the polynomial complexity of linear programming. That’s just obvious to engineers, right? Or the application of holographic proofs to the complexity of approximation problems. Engineers know all about this trivial stuff I’m sure.
(I had URL citations for all the above but my comment would not post and I am testing if that’s the reason.)
I cannot speak for any particular curriculum, but computer science is as hard as you want it to be. There is actually some validity to the point that introductory engineering courses are harder than introductory CS. This is mainly because they build on continuous math (algebra and calculus) that many people should have learned but failed to learn in high school. Computer science tends to begin with elementary discrete math making it possible for less prepared students to start on an even footing with others. But there is nothing intrinsically easier about discrete math. You can rapidly come up with simple claims that are hard to prove: the four color theorem for example. There are many very difficult results in combinatorics as well.
What I have noticed is that certain kinds of very bright engineers–who can probably solve certain differential equations in their heads–cannot wrap their brains around recursion or self-reference. This isn’t because it’s difficult but because they’re not accustomed to thinking that way. When engineers take advanced courses in complexity and algorithms, they do not have any particular advantage over those of us with a “trivial” CS background.
Marshall Brain has an engineering degree, but isn’t really an engineer. He made his money selling computer services to credit card companies (he says it himself on his web site: he finished writing a book on Motif just as every financial services company decided to upgrade to it, so he capitalized on his luck.)
On the other hand, if you read some of his futurist work, you get a better idea of what he’s capable of: he fully understands applying selector logic to economics. However, he’s still a futurist, and that’s where he runs into a problem, they’re used to making inference from weaker correlations than real scientists, and they get a little license to use their imagination for their work.
If you emailed him, I bet you’d find him amicable to straightening it out.
Hello, Jason. I’m the reader who brought the article to Dr. Meyers’s attention. I stumbled across the Evolution entry a week ago and used 3 different methods in an attempt to contact someone at the site with my concerns, including emailing Mr. Brain directly.
After zero acknowledgement, I began my efforts to publicize it as much as I can.
Hello, Jason. I’m the reader who brought the article to Dr. Meyers’s attention. I stumbled across the Evolution entry a week ago and used 3 different methods in an attempt to contact someone at the site with my concerns, including emailing Mr. Brain directly.
After zero acknowledgement, I began my efforts to publicize it as much as I can.
Posting from a Sidekick II often results in the dreaded double post.
Posting from a Sidekick II often results in the dreaded double post.
Posting from a Sidekick II often results in the dreaded double post.
Posting from a Sidekick II often results in the dreaded double post.
PaulC: Of course I was referring to undergraduate CS classes. Any subject tackled with rigor and in depth presents an unending supply of difficult problems. It seems most likely the problem at my (state) school was the poor quality of students entering (boom-time) computer science. The engineering college was used to washing out two out of three freshmen, while the school of science was unaccustomed to the necessity. The problem has probably self-corrected by now.
Death Eats a Cracker: Those of us named “Myers” appreciate having our name spelled carefully.
Again, I blame the Sidekick II.
“One could even have some axiomatic engineering or medicine, though at present there is little presented in that format.”
Umm… Axiomatic design, the TRIZ method, and quality control, perhaps? IIRC, I’ve seen some fun stuff about developing algorithms for how to check and repair complex systems.
Death Eats A Cracker-
Were you able to avoid starting said email with “Dear Retard”?