A good maggoty morning to you, too

Even though it is officially Spring Break, I had to trudge through the snow (yeah, it snowed again) to the lab to take care of my students’ flies, since they’re away doing splendidly fun things and couldn’t be bothered to come into the lab and maintain their experiment themselves, and I had to do it all. Which wasn’t much…they set up their crosses last week, and I just had to come in and kill their parents before they had an opportunity to commit incest.

I am happy to report that their bottles were mostly full of maggots, some had entered the wandering stage and crawled up the sides of the bottles, but none had pupated yet. Our timing is perfect — I expect they’ll be eclosing this weekend, so the students will return to buzzing bottles full of purebred Drosophila adults for the next stage of the cross.

I’m sure they were all concerned so I just sent them all a note to read on their holiday, reminding them of what’s next.

Does China know something we don’t?

I kinda sorta envy Chinese science policy.

The Chinese government is ramping up its support for science, announcing plans to boost two key budgets at the country’s biggest political meeting called the Two Sessions.

China has proposed to increase its overall research and development (R&D) expenditure by at least 7% per year over the next five years, which translates to billions of extra dollars each year. This typically covers government and private-industry spending on basic research, applied research and experimental development.

China’s R&D expenditure has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Last year, it exceeded 3.9 trillion yuan (US$567 billion). For the past five years, it has has increased by at least 8% a year.

They had me at “support for science.” I don’t have an unqualified envy — the USA has been gutting science in this country, which I’d like to see stop — but there’s more to improving science than throwing money at it. China is going to direct money by dictating how it should be spent, and I’d rather see science supported by informed, peer-directed investment.

Unfortunately, the US approach is to slash the science budget and put it under the control of an asylum full of demented lunatics who know nothing about science. We’ve chosen the very worst science policy possible!

Darwin was not the final authority on anything

Sal Cordova is promoting this very silly book review on Reddit, which is the only reason I’ve seen it. The International Journal of Organic Evolution published a review of a book titled Rereading Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Hesitations of an Evolutionist, which is taking a deep historical perspective, comparing Darwin’s idea of evolution with the modern theory, and noting serious conflicts between the two. This is totally unsurprising. The reviewer, Alexander Czaja, adds an odd twist to it, though, title the review An approaching storm in evolutionary theory, threatening dire consequences if evolutionary biology continues to promote the cult of Darwin and his flawed theory.

For about 10 years, something important has been brewing in the world of evolution, a great storm that, unfortunately, has so far only made itself felt among a few biologists, historians, and philosophers of biology and evolution (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005, 2020; Laland et al., 2014; Müller, 2017; Pigliucci & Müller, 2010; Skinner, 2015). Reading the work of most practicing biologists, one hardly sees any sign of this gathering storm. On the contrary, in standard textbooks and popular literature, no winds of resistance have been felt, and the ship known as the Modern Theory of Evolution (MTE) sails safely and undisturbed from its usual academic course. It remains to be seen how strong the storm will ultimately be.

Dramatic, much? It’s hard to take the author seriously when he is pushing such an extremely distorted version of modern science. The Modern Theory of Evolution is unconcerned about Darwin’s theory of evolution because we don’t read the Origin anymore. It’s out of date, obsolete, and no longer relevant to the study of evolution. I was never assigned to read the Origin at any point in my academic career, and I’ve never assigned it to my students ever since. It’s a well-written text in an old Victorian style, but since we’re not studying changes in literary English over the last 150 years, it’s not really relevant to an education in biology.

The theory of evolution has evolved significantly since 1859, so it’s no surprise that looking back on the original idea we see discrepancies.

To get straight to the point: The book has no intention of capsizing the MTE ship or to unseating the modern theory but puts forth some provocative theses against the generally accepted view that Darwin was the first modern evolutionary thinker in history: the authors try to demonstrate that there is a wide gap between Darwin and evolutionists today. The most daring of their theses states that Darwin was not an evolutionist in the modern sense of the word. Indeed, the authors question the appropriation of Darwin by proponents of the MTE, who have always placed him and his Origin of Species at the conceptual center of their own model. The book provides compelling arguments that the MTE is based on a highly distorted and anachronistic picture of Darwin, both of his time and main work. Having set forth their case for a fresh look at the Origin, the authors delve deep and meticulously in Darwin’s main work, by uncovering its neglected ambiguities and contradictions. After years of collective Darwin euphoria, in which—as the authors self-critically note—they themselves actively participated, it is now time for a more critical approach. The authors call it “returning Darwin to the human dimension” (p. x) and they wonder “[w]hy has it taken so long for us to realize that Darwin’s commitment to evolutionism was incomplete?” (p. 6)

I fail to see how anyone can claim that “the MTE is based on a highly distorted and anachronistic picture of Darwin”, since it is not based on Darwin at all. Like any scientific theory, it changes to accommodate the evidence, and there has been an astonishing amount of evidence incorporated into the MTE. We don’t worship Darwin, we don’t regard the Origin as holy writ, and we know that Darwin had doubts and errors: witness his reaction to Fleeming Jenkin’s objection that evolution was incompatible with his model of blending inheritance, or the sad debacle that was his promotion of the idea of gemmular inheritance.

We’ve had bigger “storms” than anything modern science has come up with: Darwin missed out entirely on genetics, population genetics, molecular biology, and genomics, and now you want to tell us we’ve been slavishly following a 19th century version of evolution? Psssht, get out of here, ya looney.

Phenotypic plasticity is part of evolution, too

This is a cool short video that will annoy phrenologists and “race realists”. Analysis of a 12,000+ year old skeleton of a young native American woman, now named Naia, who fell into a cenote and died were initially interpreted to imply evidence of multiple migrations into the Americas — the morphologically distinct shape of her skull was used to suggest that she was not ancestral to modern American Indians, but belonged to a separate branch of the family tree.

I’ve heard similar arguments about Kennewick Man, the 8,000+ year old skeleton found in Washington state. His remains looked “caucusoid,” therefore could not be Native American, and therefore laws that protected native remains did not apply. DNA showed otherwise. It turns out that “looks like” is a poor criterion for assigning genetic relatedness.

Same with Naia. DNA testing showed that she really was related to modern South American natives.

Why was her skull so different from the people she was genetically related to? Scientists once thought that distinctive skull shapes were rigid markers of separate ancestries, implying that robust ancient populations in America, and even Australia and Europe, must be genetically distinct from the populations that came later. But Naia proved that the two population theory was wrong. The dramatic differences in skull shape were not due to different blood lines, but to rapid evolutionary adaptation. Scientists now realize that skull shape is highly plastic and changes based on what we do.

I hope that there is a growing appreciation of the concept of phenotypic plasticity — we are products of both our genes and our environment.

Grading day

All of my students are above average, and handsome, too

The students have survived their first genetics exam, everyone passed, hooray! Now I have to figure out went wrong in the problems they missed, and shore up their weaknesses in the next week.

First thing I notice is that they are rock solid on simple Mendelian genetics, but that’s not a surprise. Mendelian genetics is dead easy, which is why I have to roll my eyes when I see racists and eugenicists babbling out terms from high school genetics — it’s all the later, more sophisticated stuff that trips them up every time. Getting cocky about the basics is a sure way to fail when reality makes its ugly appearance.

What I really have to work on are probability and statistics. Some of the students are unclear on what a p value implies, and they’re getting tripped up by simple things, like the binomial theorem. I had no idea when I got my biology degree that I’d end up having to teach math!

(Really simple math, too. High school teachers, make sure your students are aware that biology is not a math-free discipline!)

An unpleasant memory

I just had a flashback to my worst academic experience ever. I think it was a combination of my recent posts about all those scientists losing their jobs and that cool video of Pakistani mechanics cutting and shaping steel.

In the 1990s, I was an assistant professor at Temple University, and I had a magnificent custom microscopy rig. A top of the line Leica was at the heart of it, but I had modified the heck out of it. I’d built an air table — a massive 2cm thick sheet of steel resting on a cushion of tennis balls — that had been a huge effort to get cut and hauled up to my lab. I had hydraulic actuators for single cell injections. The microscope itself was modified with a motorized stage and a UV filter wheel (thanks to my friends at Applied Scientific Instrumentation, who are still in business, I’m pleased to see) all programmable and controlled by custom software I’d written. It was beautiful, and unique.

Unfortunately, I did not get tenure at Temple. You may not be aware of this, but if you’re hired by a university for a tenure track faculty position, and you do not get tenure, you’re done. You have one year to clear out your stuff, and then the axe falls, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. You’re a dead man walking, still ambling zombie-like about the university, still obligated to do your teaching and committee duties, but there’s a deadline ahead of you, at which time you have to vacate your office, your lab, everything, it all comes to an abrupt close.

Yeesh, but that was a miserable year, with all my former colleagues cutting ties. Fortunately, I landed another job in Minnesota, but that gorgeous microscope was not mine, it belonged to the university. I had to abandon it.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. At that time, there was a political crisis: HMOs were consolidating and going bankrupt, and many of them had associations with research universities that they were abruptly shutting down. Temple saw that they could buy up entire research groups for a song! It was time to shuffle out the peons working at their university already, and instead bring in all these big biomedical people who already had research grants. And so they did.

One day, in the waning days of my employment, a pair of these new hires walked into my lab, zeroed in on my microscope (that I was using at the time!), and started taking photos, writing down part numbers, and measuring stuff with a tape measure, while talking to each other about where they could put it in their lab space. They looked a bit puzzled by the filter wheel and the weird piezoelectric stage and the strange camera I was using, but they didn’t ask about any of it. They didn’t talk to me at all. They didn’t even acknowledge my existence. It was a strange experience that left me feeling like a ghost, and also sad, because these clueless twits were no doubt going to carve up my microscope for parts.

It was a dehumanizing experience that poisoned all my good memories of working at Temple. It did make me feel better about saying goodbye to that place.

Academia is a cruel and heartless beast, and overpaid biomedical researchers who lack the basics of human interaction are the worst.

They aren’t coming back, you know

Conservatives hate science. This is why they slashed budgets to science agencies, and put lunatic ideologues in charge of the NIH, NSF, and the environment, with the clear intent to cut the knees out from under science education and policy. Jessica Knurick is precisely right on this matter.

You can also see it in the staffing of all of these critical science organizations.

It’s like science got pushed off a cliff when Trump took office.

Perhaps you would like me to reassure you that once we throw the rascals out and elect responsible politicians who respect the role science has played in American prosperity, we’ll just hire them back. No, sorry, this isn’t like rehiring workers at the Amazon warehouse. A science hire is accompanied by a large investment in equipment and personnel. I’m at a small liberal arts college; when I was hired here, I was also offered tens of thousands of dollars in startup money to set up my lab the way I needed to be able to do my work. I was dirt cheap. I’ve known colleagues who were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even a few who got somewhere near a million dollars, to cover the ancillary costs of setting up a major lab.

It’s not as if a custom lab and technicians and instruments are sitting around waiting for someone with the expertise to do cutting edge research to show up. This stuff needs to be assembled at great cost to fill a need.

The people are also not generic tools you can swap in and out. We pay science staff peanuts for years, and we hang in there to do the work we love — we generally don’t have a massive financial cushion to weather heavy shifts in employment. Some of those laid off personnel are going to leave the country, looking for work in a nation that doesn’t disrespect science, while most are going to simply give up, get a job at that Amazon warehouse or switch to writing software. Their hearts are broken by the American science establishment. They’re not going to revisit this occupation shown to be willing to discard them if an orange moron gets elected or a con man with half his brain eaten by worms gets appointed.

That is a graph of disillusionment. It would take decades and a new generation to repair it, if we even had the will to bring science back. Given that the damage is being delivered right down to support for grade school education, don’t even count on a single generation being enough.

It’s not just a few people being let go. It’s the demolition of a cultural heritage of science.

Why is genetics hard?

First day back in the classroom, teaching genetics, and I speculate for a bit about why so many people find the subject difficult. I’ve had smart students who struggled with the concepts. I think the answer is that many people don’t get the whole idea of chance and probability and the statistical nature of inheritance.

The autofocus on my camera was a bit goofy. Someday I’ll get this all figured out.