Not As Random As You Might Think

Let's call that month of no-blogging a holiday break. You cool with that? Good.

Now it's 2010 and we're done with the ohs, or the oughts, or whatever you want to call them. I'm fine with that. They were okay, the double-ohs, but there are better things on the horizon. I'm going to back school. I'm dancing more. I'm visiting Ireland. It's my birthday, and the sun is actually shining, having briefly broken though from whatever alternate dimension it visits during Chicago winter. So take that, universe. You have NOTHING on me today.

Now, back in September, I promised a follow-up post to the Origin of Species debacle. You'll recall the salient points - the creationist duo Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort were planning to release an anniversary edition of Darwin's famous manuscript, complete with a Comfort-penned introduction which attempts to refute the theory of evolution. I know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. However, in the invening time, a number of people have done admirable jobs of pointing out the ignorance, intelluctual laziness, and plagiarism in the introduction, so I won't be refuting the whole thing here. Instead, I'll use the rest of this post to clear up a few misconceptions about evolution. It is a counter-intuitive theory, which helps to explain some of the widespread resistance to it in American culture.

Misconception #1: Evolution is a process of mindless chance which produces complexity.

This is an objection I see raised all the time by critics of evolution, and that's unfortunate, because it's one of the most easily understood concepts in the theory. It is beyond my understanding how Ray Comfort can fail to get this. The key to dissolving this misconception lies in a simple statement: Evolution contains both random and non-random elements, and those elements work together to produce complexity. Or as Richard Dawkins puts it, "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."

The 'replicators' Dawkins refers to are organisms, or more specifically their genes. Genes are the things that make us what we are. They tell certain cells to become an arm, certain cells to become a liver, etc. Genes can change randomly through mutation. When DNA (the code in which genes are written) replicates, errors can occur. Certain genes (or parts of genes) may be deleted, cloned, or rearranged. These random changes (mutations) provide the raw material of evolution. But now we come to the important part: non-random survival. Our genetic code is not allowed to mutate at random and go its merry little way. Instead, deleterious (bad) mutations are culled from the population because the organisms that harbor them are less successful at reproducing. Nature, having no conscious plan, is selecting for survival those organisms better able to operate and reproduce within their environment. Hence, natural selection.

Misconception #2: "There are no transitional species!" or "We still haven't found the missing link."

Many creationists harp on this phrase to such an extent that it takes on an air of "the creationist doth protest too much", but I think this particular objection raises certain important points about how we think about history and classification. Here are the important points to conceptualize:

First, fossilization is difficult. Only certain parts of animals fossilize, and only under certain conditions. We find many more fossils of sea-dwelling creatures than we do of land-dwelling creatures, for precisely that reason. Also, searching for fossils is expensive and time consuming, and rarely yields the whole-skeleton fossil that is so hoped for.

However, given the difficulty of fossilization, we do have many examples of transitional fossils. Tiktaalik was a lobe-finned fish, but had certain features in common with four-legged animals. Archaeopteryx was a feathered dinosaur extremely important in helping us understand the origin of birds. (Birds, as it happens, are all descended from the dinosaurs.)

When people talk about the 'missing link', they are really talking about wanting to find a transitional fossil that is a direct ancestor of modern humans. Despite the fact that we have found many of these, people have a tendency to see modern humans as somehow special, or different. This is a reflection of our anthropocentric nature and our failure to see our true place among a long line of transitional species.

I think that's enough for now. I'm taking a biology course this semster, so I'm sure I'll have more to share once that gets started. For now, good night and good luck.

Excuse Me, But I Think Your Bias Is Showing

I ran across two things on the internet today that seemed to resonate, and sent my train of thought on a cross-country haul. So I'll re-trace the journey here.

Thing the first: This blog entry by one James Chartrand. The funny thing about James is that he's a woman. "James" is a pen name, an identity the writer assumed when she found she wasn't getting the work she wanted as a freelance writer. In this entry, James outs herself and explains the reasoning behind her decisions.

Thing the second: This NPR broadcast which features a study by Emily Sands, in which "surprising" gender biases are revealed in the theater community. Surprising is in scare quotes there because I'm not sure how surprising it actually is.

If you live on the planet Earth, you have had to think about gender bias. If you are a woman, you have had to think about it frequently. If you are a woman trying to succeed in male-dominated industry, you would probably give your firstborn in exchange for not having to think about it. So in some ways, a story like James' is not surprising. People do have biases, and they are in some ways unavoidable. Does it suck that one has to hide their identity in order to get more money for the same work? Yes, yes it does. But I'm not really sure what to do about it.

The premise of the study by Emily Sands was to send out identical script samples to male and female artistic directors throughout the country, with some scripts having a male playwright listed as the author, and others having a female playwright. (The samples were in fact written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage.) But here's the interesting part: while all artistic directors rated the script's quality equally well, the females gave it lower marks on the sections that asked about how well the script would be received by the theater community. One is made to wonder whether the female artistic directors have less faith in women playwrights, or whether they are simply being more realistic about the chances that the work has. They, having faced the monster of gender bias, know full well that the script with the female author has less of a chance to be produced. To what extent these artistic directors are creating a self-fulling feedback cycle was not addressed in the study. I'd also be curious to know what sort of theaters were asked to rate these scripts. Does the bias change when the sample set is just major regional theaters? Do small groups like the Neo-Futurists have a similar bias?

After reading both of these articles, I began thinking also about how they relate to ethnic bias. I recall vividly certain blog entries from a playwright friend of mine who has had trouble finding the elusive "stable day job." Having a foreign name, he must constantly wonder if his reusme is being sent straight to the circular file because of ethnic bias. Would he get more responses if his name were Bill, or Sam? Would he feel awful sending out resumes with a false "nickname"? Would interviewers feel tricked when he showed up with a decidedly brown face? Possibly.

I do feel that ethnic bias is perhaps a more complicated beast than gender bias. It taps into the kind of in-group/out-group thinking that was a survival necessity for our recently evolutionary ancestors. When we consider working with someone, we want to be sure we can communicate with them, joke with them, that they have a similar work ethic, cultural values, etc. These are the things that are hard to put on a resume. Perhaps in the future we'll all have video resumes so that employers can put a face to a name and get a sense of personality. But that's a minefield all its own.

Chicago/Darwin 2009

Last weekend I attended the University of Chicago's Darwin Conference. It is an apt year for such a thing - 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. The price was right and it didn't conflict with my shows, so I thought, "Here is an advantage to living in a big city. I can decide to take a day off and attend a major biology conference." So I did.

I had to miss the Thursday night plenary session. (Side note: "plenary" is academic-talk for "fully attended". So, some irony there.) I did drag myself out of bed Saturday morning and take two Metra trains and a cab down to UC, and made it in time to get my nametag (I got my own nametag!) and sit down in the main lecture hall for the first talk of the morning. (The main lecture hall was for the biology-based talks, the upstairs hall was for history/philosophy. I stuck mainly to biology, but did wander upstairs for a few talks there as well.) My condensed notes are below the jump, so please continue on if you have no fear of science-talk.

All in all it was a good time. I got to meet PZ and Marc Hauser, and even ran into a few friends.

I'll also note that PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne also have posts up covering the conference.

The Origin of Stupidity

This video has been getting some play on the old FB, and more recently on MetaFilter, so I thought I'd toss together some of my thoughts about Kirk, Ray, Darwin, and the manufactured controversy of ID/creationism vs evolution.

Backstory: Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (a goofy creationist duo) are releasing a new version of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Their version is prefaced with a 50-page introduction by Comfort, who is most famous for claiming that bananas are verifiable proof of God's existence. They've released a video to promote their anniversary edition.

The video contains a slew of the usual creationist/fundamentalist canards: Christianity in under attack, Christians everywhere are persecuted, college will make you an atheist, our kids are being brainwashed by atheistic evolution, etc. Criss responds to these with scathing wit, so I won't do so here. Instead, let's ask the question: Why should creationists feel the need to release an anniversary edition of the Origin?

After hearing Kirk give a summary of the book's new introduction, I can tell you why: they are out of ideas. Every single 'attack' made by these loons against evolutionary biology has failed utterly, so they are reduced to spending their money on producing free books with a truth-free introduction. (Said introduction is apparently being rewritten by Comfort, and is not currently available for dissection. Expect more on this later.) Here's a sampling of what will be touched on in the introduction, according to Kirk:

- a history of evolution
- a timeline of Darwin's life
- Hitler's connection to evolution
- Darwin's racism
- Darwin's misogyny
- Darwin's thoughts on God

I'm not sure how they can screw up evolutionary history or Darwin's biography, but I'm sure they'll find a way. The Hitler zombie rears its ugly head here, as was to be expected. And then we have three ad hominem attacks on the man himself. As if Darwin's personal poilitics matter when considering the validity of evolutionary theory. The introduction goes on to cover the 'hoaxes' of evolution:

- nothing created everything
- the structure of DNA
- lack of transitional forms

I'll go ahead and repeat Criss here. Evolution is not abiogenesis. The structure of DNA is a hoax... how? Everything is a transitional form. Even you, Kirk.

Criss suggests taking as many copies as you can, tearing out the toilet paper, and giving them away to friends and family. I'm going to keep one with the introduction for my own amusement. Hopefully we can take this misguided effort and turn it into something useful.