Neil Shubin, recent guest on The Colbert Report, author of the cover story of this month’s Natural History magazine, author of the newly released book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and most significantly, well known scientist and co-discoverer of the lovely transitional fossil, Tiktaalik roseae, has made a guest post on Pharyngula, describing his experiences in preparing for appearing on television — it’s good stuff to read if you’re thinking of communicating science to the mass media, or if you’re a fan of either Shubin or Colbert.
Shubin apparently reads Pharyngula now and then, and he’ll probably take a look at the comments on that article — if you’ve got questions, ask away, and maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll grace us with a reply.
Ack! Check the spelling on that.
I just got a giftcard for Border’s Books. I will try and find the book this weekend. I look forward to reading it.
There are plenty of transitional forms, and this one looks interesting in various ways. I note the first comment from the link post, about it being amazing to have that combination of fish/amphibian (I presume) features. I’m also curious about the opening posted statements there,
Paleontologists have uncovered yet another specimen in the lineage leading to modern tetrapods, creating more gaps that will need to be filled. It’s a Sisyphean job, working as an evolutionist.
If that means, having one thing in between makes for two more spaces around it, OK, but we intuitively expect such a find to leave fewer gaps not more. (Sorry, not a biologist, some physics savvy but mostly philosophy ,;-) )
One thing I’m looking for, an opinion on punctuated equilibrium. I’m assuming it’s still considered a real feature of the fossil record (and not to be confused with earlier big gaps, just the uneven rate of change as of mollusks etc.) So, how real versus artifact, why, etc? tx
Niel:
The ‘more gaps to be filled comment’ refers to the common ceratotard retort that if we find a species that is apparently transitional between, say, reptiles and amphibians, then we have to find the transitional between that fossil and the prior two.
To illustrate.
We have fossils A & H. We find fossil D. Now we have to find the fossil between A-D, and between D-H. =P
At least according to cdesign proponentsists……
Cheers.
Dr Shubin, what were some other organisms that lived in the same estuaries as Tiktaalik?
Any placoderms like Bothriolepis canadensis?
You did very well on Colbert, and he can drive almost anyone, friend or foe off their balance.
A few questions if I might?
1. What is it that makes you sure Tiktaalik is not just a better preserved Elpistostege watsoni?, as opposed to an Elpistostegid?
2. Are you and Alhberg friends?
3. Oh, and who was the first person to actually recognize Tiktaalik for what it was? Was it recognized in the field, or did someone suddenly realize afterwards in the lab what it actually was?
I was cutting through Barnes and Noble last night because it was raining and saw the little green Tiktaalik sitting on a shelf by the exit. I bought it on the way out.
Sometimes I feel like my body is 3.5 billion years old!
I thought the interview was quite good. Here’s a link for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I just looked at it myself.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=147281
That’s actually pretty funny #2, as I also used a gift card I received to purchase the book on Amazon. The whole process is rather user friendly, and add to that another book, and you can get free super saver’s shipping. But let it be known, I’m no amazon shill.
Nick, you should take over this blog… Mwa ha ha ha ha ha… :)
Reminds me of the publisher of the Nation’s grandfathers grandfather’s cousin, the mariner.
Enterprising young man, given charge of a New York sloop in 1802, when he was but 19. Took her down east to Halifax to load salt herring and was hailed by a revenue cutter as he returned to American waters
“What Vessel are You ?”
” The _Flying Fish_!”
‘What’s your cargo?”
“Pickled Fish!”
“Who’s your Captain?”
“Preserved Fish”
They boarded him and were greatly chagrined to find his papers in order.
@Neil B:
One thing I’m looking for, an opinion on punctuated equilibrium
Wes Elseberry wrote a decent, fairly recent review:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html
you’ll still find a lot of opinions on it, but from my POV by and large it is no longer seen as necessary to explain the apparent patterns in the fossil record, and never did have much explanatory or predictive power wrt to traits we have examined within extant populations.
so, IMO, while not eliminated as an hypothesis, it most often isn’t really seen as one that is necessary, either.
It is my impression that Shubin held up much better than most who wander into the nuthouse that is Colbert’s show.
Nice work.
Punk Eek rules!
see? told you you’d get a lot of opinions, NeilB.
:p
I want to get “Punk” tattooed on one butt cheek, and “Eek” on the other…
Tiktaalik’s website is pretty cool too: http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/meetTik.html.
Darn it! Try this link instead (sorry!): http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/
Picked up the book tonight…gotta finish rereading “Sirens of Titan” before I dive in.
Prof. Shubin made this very thoughtful remark on his guest post :
“We live in a society where Britany Spears latest foible gets more ink than Mello and Fire’s 2006 Nobel discovery of RNAi– a breakthrough on a little worm that will likely lead to treatments of many diseases. Something is wrong here.”
I think this would merit an entire thread in itself.
It raises numerous questions :
– Has this always been the case or is there evidence that the problem of interest in science and its communication in the general media is worsening ?
– Is there evidence that the general public is simply not really interested with scientific discoveries, or is it due to the lack of good science communicators, journalists or the choices made by editorial board members ?
– Is this really a problem, knowing that in the end, the Britney Spears related issues will be largely forgotten within a few years, whereas scientific discoveries do make history ?
– Will there ever be any chance of reversing these “infantilization trends” in a free-market model where what counts is to keep spectators watching, show them what appeals to their most primitive emotions and enable the sale of avertising spots. In other words is education via TV and other commerical mass media a lost cause ?
Hey Ichthyic,
How’d they get you to wear a suit and pose for the that cover shot? ;-)
Try a little experiment, approach the non scientists in your circle of aquaintances and suggest they watch something like the Beyond Belief Enlightenment 2.0 series of lectures,then keep track of how many of them watch the whole thing…
Or better yet tell them they can attend a free science course from MIT on line:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm.
I’ll bet you most people will continue to watch Fox news and sitcoms, thinking and learning about reality is just way too hard for the average person.
Not to mention that realities such as AGW and Peak Oil are frightening and very unpleasant, much easier to deny it all.
Prayer vigils at universities are where we’re at.
Fernando,
the examples you give are not entirely fair.
For instance,
“Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”
did get seen by more than 600 million people throughout the world, people who were facinated, enlightened, mesmerized by the wonderous beauty of the universe and its reality.
This is an example, I think, of how Science can be efficiently communicated.
The problem, of course, is that we’re talking 25 years ago. People like Carl Sagan do not come about that frequently, and there is not much effort to facilitate and stimulate this kind of culture.
Scientists seem to be very good at studying the nature of reality, but not that good at communicating it.
With respect to Carl Sagan, Cosmos was all big concepts hand-waving wonder-of-the-universe stuff. Much of science is detail and data and THAT is the turn-off. How much depth can an audience stand? I suspect it’s more than many current shows allow for, but at the same time not enough to more than scrath the surface of a topic.
Last time I checked (pdf), punk eek fit most — though not all — cases where the fossil record has a sufficiently high resolution to record speciation. (This apparently never happens for terrestrial vertebrates. It might happen for snails confined to a single lake, but that’s debatable. Try forams, diatoms and nannoplankton.) Just keep in mind that it is a very small-scale phenomenon, in spite of the rhetoric that used to surround it. If you want to look at the origin of limbed vertebrates, your resolution is much too coarse to detect punk eek or its absence. Also keep in mind it’s not due to some internal force, it’s due to stasis and change in the environment and isolation of small populations — in environments without isolation, you don’t get punk eek, as shown by the example of the equatorial Pacific diatoms in the paper.
Last time I checked (pdf), punk eek fit most — though not all — cases where the fossil record has a sufficiently high resolution to record speciation. (This apparently never happens for terrestrial vertebrates. It might happen for snails confined to a single lake, but that’s debatable. Try forams, diatoms and nannoplankton.) Just keep in mind that it is a very small-scale phenomenon, in spite of the rhetoric that used to surround it. If you want to look at the origin of limbed vertebrates, your resolution is much too coarse to detect punk eek or its absence. Also keep in mind it’s not due to some internal force, it’s due to stasis and change in the environment and isolation of small populations — in environments without isolation, you don’t get punk eek, as shown by the example of the equatorial Pacific diatoms in the paper.
Lee,
what would you rather have, people watching Cosmos and memorizing the key ideas about the universe, or people only interested with the Britney Spears saga and having a knowledge about reality limited by the first few pages of Genesis 1 ?
You prove my point : scientists can’t seem to understand that communicating Science to scientists or future scientists, which requires precision, coherence, indexation, etc… is not necessarily equivallent to communicating Science to non-scientists.
Take a magic trick. Most people are just interested with the answer. Very few, are much more interested in finding the answer by themselves.
I thought this sounded familiar when PZ brought it up the other day. Is it wrong that I had to wrench my eleven year old away from the article in Natural History to make him do his homework?
A great many scientists are in fact VERY GOOD at communicating their results. Where the difficulty lies is time management between maintaining an active research program (which includes scientific publications) and communicating the results of investigations to the public at large. I have met very few active researchers who could not communicate (when time permitted) a topic of their specialty in an interesting way.
About punctuated equilibrium. It was a typical ‘gouldian’ device to name a thing already well known in general by pointing out extreme cases. His ‘exaptation’ was another such non-new-concept. Both ideas were already known- everyone knew that evolution occurred at differing rates in different organisms and at differing rates within a given lineage at different times. Also, long before exaptation there was ‘co-option.’ Gould’s contribution to science was not original research, but rather the communication of the wonders of the natural world to the general public in his essays in Natural History.
mothra said, “About punctuated equilibrium. It was a typical ‘gouldian’ device to name a thing already well known in general by pointing out extreme cases.”
Except, according to Gould, it was Niles Eldredge who named punctuated equilibrium.
@29- True and I should have (at least) mentioned Niles Eldredge.
How’d they get you to wear a suit and pose for the that cover shot? ;-)
how do you think?
$
I’ll bet you most people will continue to watch Fox news and sitcoms, thinking and learning about reality is just way too hard for the average person.
of course.
however the problem is that even though “reality is just way to hard for the average person”, they still feel qualified to expound their conceptualizations and rationalizations of it, nonetheless, and some even want those same codified into law.
the point is, intuition (what the average “joe” considers important often in determining their view of reality), is actually based in large part on exposure to previous information. thus, shifting “intuition” is also highly dependent on exposure to information. However, that exposure does indeed appear to have a larger effect on the young than the old:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5827/996
one doesn’t necessarily come to a different way of thinking by carefully analyzing available data; over time, simple exposure to repeated information will “reform” intuitions.
it’s exactly how religion has survived so long to begin with (“a lie repeated often enough…”). I hope that, eventually, after removing repeated exposure to misinformation, and exposure to more accurate information, the “intuition” expressed by people will change as well.
I’m actually encouraged by the various movements to change science standards (at the same time being incensed by some of the creobot attempts to do so), simply because it recognizes that education still does play a role in how we formulate worldviews.
even the creobots appear to recognize the value of it, and are becoming quite a bit more visible in their attempts to subvert the process.
at some level, they know intuitively that replacing their dogma at the primary and secondary level of education with accurate information spells the eventual end of their cult.
punk eek fit most — though not all — cases where the fossil record has a sufficiently high resolution to record speciation.
must be a matter of interpretation, since, when you summarize the literature previous, you get the authors of the paper you cite as agreeing that:
that’s what I saw, too. Even Phacops (coincidentally mentioned in the trilobite thread), the quintessential example used by Eldredge, can be interpreted in different ways.
It’s possible that a reinterpretation of viewpoint and terminology might lend more value to it as a concept, but then is it really still what Gould and Eldredge proposed at that point?
*shrug*
Kindly don’t wander off the point. Who here is suggesting that Britney is more edifying than Sagan?
The point is that science is hard. It is intricate. It is detailed. It is nuanced. It is deep.
Cosmos is all very well for making people enthused about science, about selling the wonder of science, but it skipped lightly from subject to subject, not spending much time on any of them. It was a poor vehicle for conveying anything deep. Put simply: it was not good enough.
Here in Britain I’ve seen the TV science magazine Horizon transform from a show that would convey relatively in-depth understanding of its subject matter, to something that is increasingly shallow and reliant on spectacle. I know what good science programming looks like, because I have seen it. It was the product of dedicated public broadcasting producers working hand-in-glove with scientists. It was the product of great institutions such as TV’s Open University. However, I suspect that kind of programming peaked in 1978. And as the BBC has become increasingly market led, I doubt we will see the like of it again.
Lee,
you seem to be hoping for the impossible. The main mistake is to believe that broadcasting and other mass media will ever be capable of conveying the level of detail required for a proper science education. This is a fallacy. As can be demonstrated with the example you are giving, Open University.
The objective of a good science communication on TV and other mass media should exactly be the one that you are acknowledging for Cosmos : make people interested in Science, make them want to learn more.
And this is exactly the point which is missing today. We do not make people enthused about Science, they hear 1000 times more about Britney than about the Nobel prizes (most people only heard about the peace Nobel prize this year because of Al Gore).
However, I agree that making things simple doesn’t mean that they should be made simpler than they really are (Good Old Einstein). And they shouldn’t either oversell scientific theories and turn them into making sensational superstitious claims such as the Horizon program on Parrallel universes.
There are many other more adequate means to convey the intricacies of science. What TV needs to do is rise our consciousness to the beauty of Science, not turn everyone into a Scientist, but ensure that the population is sufficiently curious and not completely illeterate.
When I first saw Cosmos, I was 18 year old. It was one of the things that made me want to know more, to read books, to study Physics and cosmology. But it’s impossible to expect that such a program would be capable of explaining, even methaphorically, the intricacies of the FRW cosmological model, or of the Schwartzchild metric.
However, I suspect that kind of programming peaked in 1978
yes, and no here.
I keep thinking that OVERALL the interest in science-qualtity programming has waned in favor of more “cryptozoology” nonsense, but then there is NOVA, which often has excellent programs on areas of interesting research, and the PBS special on evolution a few years back was very well done.
it’s just that you don’t often see this kind of thing OUTSIDE of PBS on the more popular cable stations.