Ham-on-Nye: What we have here is not, at least not entirely, a failure to communicate

I really don't have anything to add to the "who won and who lost" discussion about this week's Ham-on-Nye debate. So here's an analysis, not of the debate itself, but of some of the analysis of the debate, much of which has been laying the blame for the significant public rejection of the theory of evolution here on poor science communication. "Bad Astronomer," Phil Plait's opinion piece on the Slate website is a good example of this kind of criticism.

I would be one of the last people to claim that science communication does not need improvement. Improving science communication is important to me and to the organization I run, the Atlanta Science Tavern. But there's a lot more at issue here than whether the way we go about communicating the science evolution has been good or bad.

From what I've read, public science communication in the U.S. is not all that different from informal science education in much of Europe where evolution is widely accepted. The reality of anthropogenic climate change isn't such a hard-sell in Europe, either. But, interestingly enough, rejection of vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure is commonplace both here and abroad. Vaccination, in particular childhood vaccination, is considered by a large fraction of both populations to be dangerous, in spite of concerted efforts to educate the public to the contrary. The reason this is happening is because the question of vaccination safety and effectiveness has ceased to be a scientific issue in the last dozen years or so and instead has become a political one. This is an important distinction.

Revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening

So we need to appreciate the political dimension of our "evolution problem" in order to address it properly. Rejection of evolution here, much like the denial of climate change, is rooted in our political and cultural history, a history marked by "Great Awakenings" of religious fervor and a stubborn insistence that America is in some respects exceptional and that the rules that apply elsewhere in the world, however rational, do not necessarily apply here.

The implication is that the kind of difficulty that we experience in trying to maintain the integrity of the science curriculum in public schools, has a lot in common with the challenges we face in enacting rational gun control laws or sensible policies that ensure access to necessary health care for all our citizens. Of course, better communication, whether on the theory of evolution or the costs of gun-related crimes and accidents or the benefits of a healthy populace, is an important part of solving these problems. But it is not the entire solution, maybe not even most of it.

So, by all means, let's redouble our efforts to improve science communications. But it is important to keep in mind that the struggle here is primarily political and that it has more to do with values beliefs and less to do with knowledge and understanding.

Model Darwin Day Proclamation for the City of Atlanta

This is a draft proposed proclamation for Darwin Day 2013 that will be presented for adoption by Mayor's Office of the City of Atlanta sometime in the next few weeks. I offer it here for comment and with the hope that it might serve as a model for similar proclamations.

The idea for a proclamation originated with Atlanta Science Tavern plans to commemorate Charles's birthday with a public celebration, the first that I know of here. Visiting the International Darwin Day Foundation website in order to register our event with their worldwide list, I saw that a proclamation might be a good way for us to extend our outreach and our impact. I decided that the maximum effect here would be achieved by a proclamation that emphasized the numerous profound, enduring benefits that have been realized as a result of Darwin's pioneering theory.

Updates will follow as the process of transforming this proposal into a real proclamation takes place. In its final form, if adopted, it will be presented with a list of supporting institutions and individuals from the Atlanta area. Please let me know if you would like to be included. Other feedback is welcome as well.

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Draft Proposed Proclamation

City of Atlanta, Georgia

Office of the Mayor

Kasim Reed

WHEREAS, Atlanta is a great science city and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, stands as one of the great theories in the history of science; and

WHEREAS, Charles Darwin was born 203 years ago on February 12 in the year 1809, sharing that birth date with our great president Abraham Lincoln; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s teachers and educators at all levels of instruction rely on Darwin’s theory to communicate to their students the wondrous relatedness of all living things; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s internationally-recognized colleges and universities are guided by Darwin’s theory in their search for a better understanding of the origins of our own species and of others; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s world-class biotechnology industry employs Darwin’s theory to develop cutting-edge products and services that contribute to our local economy and benefit society as a whole; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s medical institutions and research centers turn to Darwin’s theory to help them determine how diseases arise and how they can be effectively prevented and treated in order to reduce human suffering and extend human life; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s first city-wide Science Festival, scheduled for March 22-29, 2014, will feature many of the accomplishments made possible by Darwin’s theory; and

WHEREAS, the Atlanta Science Tavern, Atlanta’s premier grassroots science forum, will be celebrating the occasion of Darwin’s birth with its first annual Darwin Day Dinner Symposium.

Therefore, I, Kasim Reed, Mayor of the City of Atlanta, do hereby declare that Tuesday, February 12, 2013 is

DARWIN DAY

in the City of Atlanta, in recognition of how this great man’s theory has been so successfully used by Atlanta’s teachers and scholars, researchers and healers to advance our understanding of the biological world and to improve the quality of life for people here and elsewhere.

Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools

This essay began as my contribution to a discussion on the Atlanta Science Tavern message board having to do with the topic of a recently announced meetup, The Christian Right's Assault on Public Education and the Science Curriculum, featuring Katherine Stewart, author of the book, The Good News Club. One of our members Deb spoke out about what she felt was the threat posed by the kind of close mindedness which would prevent including creationism, for example, in the public science classroom. What follows is an edited version of my response to her.

I wanted to add to this lively exchange by trying to focus the discussion to see if we can make some headway with the issue at hand - or at least what I believe to be the issue at hand - and that is the proper way to go about formulating the science curriculum for public primary and secondary schools.

Let’s begin by turning our attention to Deb’s concern about the price we pay by closing our minds to alternative points of view in science and elsewhere. In some respects I couldn’t agree more, open mindedness is a personal virtue, one that I aspire to in my own life. I hope that I can live up to Deb’s expectations for me!

Of course, our striving for open mindedness has to be tempered with what I would call discernment. Each day we have to entertain a myriad of choices, but ultimately we have to make final decisions, sometimes critical ones having to do with our own welfare or that of other people. Good judgement is the balancing act we perform that results from maintaining an open mind while relying on significant lessons we have learned about what sources of information and advice we can trust as we go about selecting between alternative courses of action.

In addition, I would agree with Deb that it is incumbent upon us to inculcate open mindedness in our children, and I do believe that the schools, both public and private, have an important role to play in this process. That said, schools are also a way for us confer upon our children the hard-won rewards of our experience, not only as individuals, but as a culture and as a civilization. To lay before them a set of options without offering them the benefit of our collective knowledge would be a disservice, perhaps even a crime.

Nowhere is this obligation clearer than in the K-12 science curriculum. That is because, unlike other other fields of human endeavor, after centuries of struggle, the scientific enterprise has answered fundamental questions about the nature of the world beyond any reasonable doubt. The confidence of these positions is embodied in what is called the scientific consensus. While acknowledging that scientific “truths” such as these are always provisional, we understand them to be of a different quality than competing opinions and so raise the bar as to what will be the foundational knowledge that we choose to transmit to young and growing minds.

To understand this better, I think that it is useful for us to consider another element of the science curriculum and that is the germ theory of disease. I ask that the participants in this discussion to test the validity of their approaches by considering how well they fare in this analogous context.

Louis Pasteur photographed
by Pierre Lamy Petit

The germ theory of disease, the idea that disease originates, at least in large part, as the result of infection by microbes was, like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, a triumph of 19th century science. This is not to say that it reached its current form then. Viruses were unknown to Louis Pasteur. Likewise, the injuries that can result from chronic exposure to, say, low-level radiation or pesticide residues were unanticipated by Pasteur. No doubt, much of the harm that befalls us is self-inflicted, indicative of bad “lifestyle choices” having to do with diet, for example or the use of addictive drugs and has nothing to do with germs.

Nonetheless, the germ theory has become enshrined as part of the scientific canon and recognized as the undisputed scientific consensus. More than a theoretical notion, Pasteur’s and Robert Koch's legacy has been the foundation for the development of medical therapies - everything from the practice of asepsis in hospitals, to childhood vaccinations to antibiotic drugs - that have saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Quartz (Rob Lavinsky / IRocks.com) 

Be that as it may, a controversy still swirls around the germ theory of disease, not in the scientific community, but in a variety of sectors of the public mind. Some of these challenges have to do with an understanding of the very origin of disease itself, with the blame laid not with bacteria and viruses but with such things as an imbalance of energy fields in our bodies or the misconfiguration of our spines. More commonly the controversies have to do with what constitutes effective treatment of disease, with homeopathy and crystal healing being offered notably as competing "alternative" therapies. There is even significant opposition from some quarters to vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure.

I want to emphasize that the question I am posing is not whether there is some documented basis to these competing claims - I am confident that the list of citations is endless - but whether they should be introduced into the public school curriculum to balance the teaching of the germ theory of disease.

Two-year old Rahima Banu of Bangladesh,
the last person infected with
naturally occurring Variola major, in 1975

Would we be derelict not to include our classroom discussions the presentation of homeopathy, crystal healing, chiropractic as effective alternatives to the treatment of human ailments, on a par with antibiotics and accepted surgical practice? Are we obligated to teach this controversy? Should we instruct our children in elementary school that they should be suspicious of the vaccinations that their family doctors give them, telling them that there are some people who say vaccines are not only ineffective but even dangerous?

Furthermore should the science curriculum in this regard be expanded to include a discussion of the “ultimate” cause of disease, causes that in some immaterial sense precede its origins in entirely natural processes?

Should students in a high school  biology class learn that disease might find metaphysical roots in the karmic balancing of accounts from our past-life transgressions? Should they be taught that cancer, for example, could be construed as the fruit our original sin and proof of our fundamentally corrupt nature? There are not an inconsiderable number of people, if the popularity of Oprah's book selections is any indication, who believe that the ailments that beset us, including those that torment the tiniest infants, emanate from our failure to maintain a positive attitude about ourselves and about the world around us. Should these points of view be included in our biology textbooks?

So, in closing this addition to the discussion, I ask for you to put the particulars of evolution debate aside and consider the analogous question about teaching a different scientific theory - with an open mind of course. I look forward to hearing whether you see the parallels as being applicable to the original debate and how concerns about “teaching the controversy” might apply here.


Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Cautious Darwin, a Fossil Sneeze, and the Real Octomom

Charles Darwin was a cautious scientist. More than 20 years passed between the conclusion of his voyage on the Beagle, during which he made many of the observations that would impel the development of his theory of natural selection, and the publication of his world-transforming work, "The Origin of Species". Darwin understood the potential trouble posed by the iconoclastic things he had to say, both with respect to his personal life - his wife Emma was a devout Christian - and with respect to his standing in the scientific community.

Although we imagine now that Darwin had "nailed it" when he published "Origin" in 1859, there were significant elements of his nascent theory that were subject to reasonable challenge. For one thing, Darwin had no knowledge of the mechanisms of inheritance upon which his process of natural selection relied. It would be half a dozen years before Gregor Mendel's discoveries involving plant hybridization would be published, and these would go largely unnoticed for another three decades. How, indeed, were "favored traits", so central to Darwin's hypothesis, transmitted from generation to generation? Without anything like a theory of genetics, Darwin hadn't a clue.

To make matters worse, Darwin was painfully aware of the problems presented by what he called "the imperfection of the geological record", enough so that the topic merited a chapter of its own in his book. The absence of fossil evidence for transitional species - so-called missing links - was a vulnerability that Darwin addressed as best he could. Today we can make allowances for the fact that the collection and identification of paleontological specimens was then still in its infancy as a systematic enterprise - a defense that was hardly available to Darwin at the time. Much to the chagrin of creationists, who - contrary to the wealth of discoveries made in the last 150 years - insist that these deficits in the fossil record remain, few missing-links have gone missing. In fact, the contemporary fossil record is rich in finely graduated intermediate forms.

It does turn out that Darwin was wrong about one claim he made in "Origin" with regard to fossilization, one that underscores his cautious expectations. In enumerating the many limitations of geological evidence, he despaired that "no organism wholly soft can be preserved." Shells and bones are all that we could count on, according to Darwin, and even they "can disappear when left on the bottom of the sea".

Meet Keuppia levante, a 95-million-year-old octopus, whose fossilized remains were recently discovered by Dirk Fuchs and fellow researchers from the Freie Universität Berlin and announced March of this year. Since octopuses consist pretty much of muscle and skin, what isn't eaten almost immediately by scavengers upon their demise, decays rapidly into a blob of slime. The odds of finding a fossil octopus have been compared to those of finding a "fossil sneeze". Looking at this Cretaceous-era octopus, so exquisitely preserved in Lebanese limestone, it would appear it is about time - finally - for someone offer an appropriate "fossil gesundheit".

What is, perhaps, more remarkable, according to Fuchs and his colleagues, is how closely this ancient specimen resembles its present-day descendants. Such invariance in form would have come as a surprise to Darwin, since his conception of evolution by natural selection imagined the accumulation of favored differences - gradually, but inexorably - over time. To him, the probability of a particular species remaining largely unmodified over the eons of geological time would have seemed to have been astronomically small.

(As an aside I'll note that this "error" on Darwin's part serves to remind us that, although his were the first words in the theory of evolution, they are certainly not the last. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in some quarters to equate Darwin's hypotheses in "Origin" with our current understanding of the process of natural selection. Enough confusion exists that some suggest, "let's get rid of Darwinism," declaring to the world, in all deference to the master, that we have, in the last 150 years, moved significantly beyond many of his original proposals. I think they have a point.)

But, although Darwin could possibly be faulted for not anticipating that, by dint of the hard work of 21st century paleontologists such as Dirk Fuchs, fossil sneezes, such as Keuppia levante, would ultimately be unearthed, there is a method available today to evolutionary science to probe the biological past that he could never have anticipated in his wildest dreams - namely, the analysis of the DNA of living creatures.

With this in mind, allow me to introduce Megaleledone setebos or, as I call her, the real octomom.

Thirty million years ago octomom or, more accurately, members of a species quite similar to hers, roamed the waters surrounding Antarctica. Sea ice was, for the first time, massing on the surface, removing fresh water from the Southern Ocean and leaving below it a highly saline environment enriched in oxygen - a fitting octopus habitat. As the climate continued to cool and the Antarctic ice shelf grew, streams of these salty, oxygenated waters flowed northward along the ocean floor carrying with them octomom's sisters and cousins, who would, themselves, become the founding mothers of new, distinct deep-water octopus species in other parts of the globe.

How do we know the details of this octopus "out of Antarctica" saga? Since they are so exceedingly rare, scientists couldn't use fossilized octopus remains to reconstruct this prehistoric exodus, so, absent a fossil record, they turned to the genetic one, the record written in the DNA of the cells of octopuses living today.

Thanks to the work of the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project begun in 2000 "to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life", specimens representing a number of the living species of deep-sea octopuses were collected and delivered to researchers at Queens College in Belfast. There, by analyzing extracted DNA, biologist Jan Strugnell was able to formulate a family tree for these creatures which not only demonstrated the extent they were related to one another, but also resulted in a calculated genetic profile for their common ancestor, who, although 30 million years older, turns out to be a dead ringer, so to speak, for Megaleledone setebos, our very own octomom.

Darwin's misstep in doubting the possibility of the fossilization of organisms consisting almost entirely of soft tissue is quite understandable. How could he have anticipated the discovery of a fossil sneeze? His concerns about the deficiencies in the geological record have been - and continue to be - addressed and rectified by the diligent work of paleontologists, who, from all appearances, leave no stone unturned. To augment these traditional methods of evolutionary investigation researchers use the tools of molecular biology and genetic science now at their disposal. These allow them to peer into the deep time of the history of life on earth using DNA from the cells of living organisms - a window into the past that Darwin could not have imagined.

All said, Darwin would, no doubt, be astounded by and proud of what his scientific heirs have made of the simple - and cautious - beginnings of his theory of evolution by natural selection.


Cautious Darwin, a Fossil Sneeze, and the Real Octomom by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Evolution and Anti-Magical Thinking

A friend of mine, Mick Stone, is about to take his Anti-Magic Show on the road. Now, Mick's show, billed as "the magic show for magic haters", works quite well for magic lovers, too.

After attending one of Mick's performances last fall, I found my fascination for stage magic revived. How delightful it was - for a brief time - to suspend disbelief and imagine that things happen in the world that defy explanation.

Suspension of disbelief and willingness to rely on supernatural explanations, a fun way to spend the evening with friends, turns out, though, to be a very bad way to go about doing science.

Magic had largely been banished from contemporary scientific discussions until 1989 and the attempt to insert of the doctrine of Intelligent Design (ID) into the biology curriculum in this country. The defining contention of ID is that there exist features of living organisms that are so complex that they can not be explained as the result of the processes of undirected evolution by natural selection. According to ID, these extraordinary biological artifacts are deemed to be irreducibly complex and are, therefore, evidence of the hand of a transcendent designer, the ticking proof of a supernatural watchmaker.

For most scientists - and many supporters of science - the controversy stoked by ID is a political one, and, for them, ID is not much more than a stalking horse for so-called creation science and its determined program to return teaching of the creation myths of Genesis to high school biology classes. Although I believe this to be the case, I accept that there are proponents of Intelligent Design, whose agenda is not religious and whose intentions are sincere. These people, many of whom subscribe to the broad outlines of Darwinian evolution, are at a loss to see how it alone could account for certain biological phenomena. Instead, they turn to magic for their scientific salvation.

Unfortunately for ID and these earnest seekers, the three premier examples of irreducible complexity, championed by ID advocate Michael Behe - the cascade of reactions that causes blood to coagulate, the elaborate structure of the eye, and the 40-part molecular engine that propels bacteria - have failed to remain inexplicable as advertised.

Much of the ID argument concerning the physical impossibility of the origin of the blood clotting pathway assumes that the multiplicity of chemical factors involved in coagulation had to come into existence all at once, an, admittedly, astronomically improbable event. Yet, not only does natural selection allow the mutations responsible for these clotting factors to accumulate over an extended period of time - a much more likely course of events - it also appears, contrary to ID assertions, that not all these clotting factors are essential for clotting to occur in all species. This is not to say that the evolutionary development of this complex process is completely understood, but a thorough understanding of it would seem to be reasonable possibility without having to invoke a magical helper.

Claims that the structure of the eye are too complex to be explained as a result of a natural processes stem from Darwin's admission that its evolution presented difficulties to his own theory. But much has been added to our understanding of the origins of the anatomical features of the eye in the last 150 years, enough so, that how its gross components originated is no longer a mystery. Behe contends that the lineage of the molecular mechanism of the eye's photo-receptor still defies explanation. This is an area of active research. It looks likely, though, that, supernatural intervention will not be needed to account for the origins of vision, either.

The problem of the evolution of the flagellum, the whip-like propeller and intricate motor that allows bacteria to swim about, was long-considered the poster child of the Intelligent Design movement. When ID came on the scene, the flagellum was presented as its foremost example of irreducible complexity. At the time, its evolutionary origins were, at best, vague. This is no longer the case. In the last half dozen years evidence has mounted that the flagellum - whose evolutionary construction ID insisted could only have been accomplished through supernatural meddling - had gotten its start as a sort of molecular syringe used to inject toxins into other cells.

So much, then, for the ID claims of that such things are forever beyond our ability to explain as the results of long-term physical processes driven by natural selection. No magic is required. The poster child of Intelligent Design has become the prototypical example of why ID is, on its face, scientifically untenable.

To underscore this point, let's consider my reaction to Mick's magic show, again. I admit to being amazed and baffled by his tricks. Honestly, I can't even begin to say how he does what he does. Yet, be that as it may, it never occurs to me that my inability to give an account of how Mick creates his illusions restricts anyone else from figuring them out.

This is the the essential fallacy of Intelligent Design. Its adherents assert that the contemporary failure to produce a naturalistic explanation for the origin of a particular complex biological feature means categorically that no one will ever be able to do so. The limitations of our understanding and capabilities here and now, somehow become those of all investigators for all time to come.

The fact of the matter is that some problems in science, in general, and in evolutionary biology, in particular, are formidable. Ironically, it is the very activity of dogged scientific inquiry that has led us to pose many of these difficult questions. When, then, it must be asked, has the cause of science ever been advanced by insisting that hard-to-understand phenomena have to have a supernatural explanation? At best, such claims have been quickly discredited - as with the supposed irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum - at worst, such recourse to the supernatural has discouraged research and foreclosed avenues of investigation.

So let's hear it for magic - of the Mick Stone variety. But let's repudiate the defeatist reliance on magical thinking advanced by doctrines such as Intelligent Design. It only serves to undermine our bold efforts to confront and solve the mysteries of the scientific world and it demeans us as the intellectually restless and ingenious species that we are.