What are we going to do about the Nobels?

Ed Yong points out the problems with the Nobel prize: they don’t reflect how science is actually done, they tend to reinforce an archaic notion that scientists work alone and have “Eureka!” moments, they are arbitrary in picking which of the many scientists who contributed to a discovery get the award, and when they make those arbitrary choices, they tend to be biased towards male establishment scientists. It also adds an excessive luster to recipients — it’s for a single discovery, but you’re set for life if you get one, and it gives people who had a singular insight, for which their prize was justly deserved, an unwarranted authority on all too many things. That’s how we get a Watson, a Shockley, a Mullis.

He doesn’t mention another problem, though: the narrowness of the categories. You cannot win a Nobel prize for mathematics, or computer science, or evolutionary biology. Not even biology: all the great work in my field has to be warped to fit a category called “physiology and medicine”, which the Nobel committee does (after all, they’ve managed to award developmental biology a few times), but still, it forces us to look at the world of science through a specifically focused 19th century slit.

Rosbash, Young, and Hall, who won for their work on the molecular basis of circadian rhythms, did great work and should be acknowledged. But thanks to the arcane rules of the prize — no more than three people, who all must be alive — there is an army of researchers who also contributed to the work, and will be ignored. Among those contributors was the late Seymour Benzer, a real scientist’s scientist, who made amazing discoveries in the arcane fields of phage genetics and neurogenetics and of course, circadian rhythms. It’s not that Benzer was neglected — he had awards out the wazoo — but that a life of sustained effort and scientific discipline does not get the ultimate award (it’s also bothersome that there is an “ultimate award”) and won’t get the public attention he deserved.

I don’t know what to do about it, though.

The Nobel prize is the result of a wonderfully successful PR campaign that does a good job of highlighting good science…but it also contributes to the public perception of all worthy endeavors as being kind of like a horse race. It’s not what they did or how they got there or where we go to next, it’s all about who got to the finish line first and who gets to wear the shiny gold medal. You can’t exactly abolish them — they’re the outcome of a committee and an endowment, and people have every right to honor scientists — but it would sure be nice if those honors could be spread around more to everyone who deserves them, rather than being concentrated to create an artificial scientific elite.

Bottom line is that we aren’t and shouldn’t do anything about the Nobels. We should have more ways to recognize scientific accomplishment, though, and the media should be able to notice the science happening all around them instead of celebrating gold disks handed out every October.

Teams of Memes, bursting from the seams

Image courtesy of the googles.

Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back is a lengthy and winding journey. It is characterized (including by its publisher) as a general explanation of the evolution of minds and various peculiar mental functions, consciousness and language being the two most hotly discussed by philosophers, but there’s a better way to read it. As its best, the book is a tour of Dennett’s personal philosophical repertoire, illustrating how ideas from his books and papers fit together.

Dennett’s general theory of the development of genetics stems from his broad theory of memes, where a meme is any informational entity that can be transmitted and replicated. The rough idea is that minds are meme-machines in the way that organisms are gene-machines (in Dawkins’ analogy of the gene’s-eye-view). This is a fruitful analogy, in some respects, though I think it can and should draw some skepticism from readers. I’ll return to those worries later.

The basic building blocks of Dennett’s view are indicated by gestures and short explanations, which is a challenge since he’s spent so much time discussing and arguing for them elsewhere in his work. In any case, there are really two that it is important to understand.

[Read more…]

A food science scam

Where’s the data on this sign’s effect on spelling?

Brian Wansink has a problem. First, he’s been jiggering his data until he gets a statistically significant result, which to me means that none of his conclusions are to be trusted. Then, he was reworking these thinly significant results into multiple papers, taking watery gruel and sliming the literature with more noise. And now he’s accumulating more retractions as his shoddy research practices are exposed.

I’m just increasingly appalled at the crap that is earning him tens of millions of dollars of research funds. It’s cartoonishly superficial. Let’s put goofy names on the food in school lunchrooms!

The most recent retraction — a rare move typically seen as a black mark on a scientist’s reputation — happened last Thursday, when JAMA Pediatrics pulled a similar study, also from 2012, titled “Can branding improve school lunches?”

Both studies claimed that children are more likely to choose fruits and vegetables when they’re jazzed up, such as when carrots are called “X-Ray Vision Carrots” and when apples have Sesame Street stickers. The underlying theory is that fun, descriptive branding will not only make an eater more aware of the food, but will “also raise one’s taste expectations,” as the scientists explained in one of the papers.

You know, I believe this actually does work — I have no doubt that creative labeling can draw the attention of kids (and adults!). But would it make a significant difference in kids’ eating habits? Don’t you suspect that there would be a bit of a backlash? Kids aren’t stupid. They’re going to see right through this game fairly quickly, and a trivial relabeling is going to have only a transient effect. And they’re paying 30,000 schools up to $2000 each to try out these labeling strategies! Is it worth it? I don’t know. And you still can’t trust Wansink’s work.

People are finding inconsistencies in the papers, statistical errors, and outright statistical abuse. What can you say about a paper that decides p=0.06 meets the criterion for signifcance, and further, miscalculated the p value in the first place?

In a blog post, Brown expressed concern about how the data had been crunched, and confusion about how exactly the experiment had worked. He noted that a bar graph looked much different in an earlier version. And, he pointed out, the scientists had said their findings could help “preliterate” children — which seemed odd, since the children in the study were ages 8 to 11.

In yet more scathing blog posts, Anaya and data scientist James Heathers pointed out mistakes and inconsistencies in the Preventive Medicine study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” which claimed that elementary school students ate more carrots when the vegetables were dubbed “X-ray Vision Carrots.”

Worse…when those mistakes were pointed out, Wansink discovers that all the original data for those papers is ‘missing’. How convenient.

Wansink runs something called the “Food and Brand” lab. You can guess from just the name that he’s encouraging corporate support, and I suspect that’s a big part of the problem — this lab isn’t about science, it’s about reinforcing economic values for the benefit of their corporate collaborators.

She had me at “rivers of maggots”

Christie Wilcox writes about the ecological experiment asking what happens to the environment of a mass die-off, done by dumping 6 tons of dead pigs in a heap in a forest. It’s impressive. The scavengers swoop in and proliferate, and you literally do get heaving, writhing rivers of maggots pouring off the rotting mass.

There is video at the link. I decided not to imbed it since I didn’t know if all of my readers would have finished lunch yet.

Friday Cephalopod: I succumb to peer pressure and will mention Octopolis

Wow. Every person on the planet saw one version or another of this “Octopolis” story and had to send it to me. It was the subject of a Friday Cephalopod a year ago, you know.

Apparently, this is the second octopus city discovered, which is interesting — they’re exhibiting more complex social behaviors.

However, I have two complaints.

  1. A lot of the stories are describing Octopolis/Octlantis as “gloomy”. Why? Is it because the inhabitants aren’t swimming around with toothy grins? The cephalopods look quite normal to me.

  2. A more serious complaint, about this quote:

    The discovery was a surprise, Scheel told Quartz. “These behaviors are the product of natural selection, and may be remarkably similar to vertebrate complex social behavior. This suggests that when the right conditions occur, evolution may produce very similar outcomes in diverse groups of organisms.”

    Nope. You don’t know that. There’s no evidence and no reason to think this behavior is the product of natural selection — quite the opposite, actually. It looks to me like the spontaneous emergence of a novel property of octopus behavior in an unusual and fortuitous environment.

That sounds like a promising idea

Rebecca Otto is running for governor of Minnesota, and she has some good, progressive ideas for improving our energy self-reliance.

Here’s the elevator speech version: Minnesota residents get around five thousand dollars cash (over several years), monetary incentives to upgrade all their energy using devices from furnaces to cars, some 80,000 new, high paying jobs, and in the end, the state is essentially fossil fuel free.

About half of that fossil fuel free goal comes directly from the plan itself, the other half from the economy and markets passing various tipping points that this plan will hasten. The time scale for the plan is roughly 10 years, but giving the plan a careful reading I suspect some goals will be reached much more quickly. This means that once the plan takes off, Minnesotans will have an incentive to hold their elected officials accountable for holding the course for at least a decade.

I like it. It’s incremental, it provides incentives for citizens to do things that will be good for them and the state, and it’s a great long term investment. My only concerns at this point are that the sums are on the small side — I could use $5K to make some small improvements in energy efficiency in my house, but big changes require bigger capital investment — and it’s not obvious how these incremental investments will get us to the point of being free from fossil fuels. There are more details, and I’ll have to look into it.

Even if it cuts fossil fuel usage by 20%, though, that’s an improvement worth doing. I might have to vote for this person in the next election and get this plan implemented.

You’re telling me dinosaur reconstructions contain assumptions?

They do, and they always have. Here’s an interesting way to illustrate that: make reconstructions of modern animals as if we had no idea about the expected distribution of fat and other soft tissues. Here’s a baboon drawn from its bones while pretending ignorance of hair and lips and such unfossilized stuff:

This is from a book by John Conway, CM Kosemen, and Darren Naish, called All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. I’m going to have to add it to my list.