Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

Thoughts on blocking evolution denial comments?

I've been away spreading CO2 emissions, and comments to my last post went down the rabbit hole dealing with creationist nonsense.

This blog tackles climate denialism, so I'm not too bothered with climate denialist comments that come up and get shot down in the comments, (altho I'd prefer the silly arguments and responding to them take up less bandwidth than is the case).  We haven't the same role on fighting the good fight for the science of biology.

I'm actually interested in the creation wars but as an observer, rather than trying to wade in against arguments that are even worse than the ones made up for climate denial.

Soooo, I'm pondering a policy to delete evolution denial.  Thoughts?  

Note that follow-up commenters might post a response before I woke up from being distracted, reference a comment that's since been deleted, and look a bit strange.

For now, no policy unless I say something in a particular blog post.  And this is just Brian talking - Eli and John manage their own threads.


UPDATE:  no outpouring of demands to block the evolution denial comments, so I'm going to let them stay.

Evolutionary psychology wars aren't helpful to climate denialists

Climate denialist/skeptics face a problem in trying to argue that 97% of the practitioners in the field are fundamentally wrong in accepting climate change: how likely is it that a field of science could get that screwed up? Generally, denialists don't care about whether the unlikelihood of their claim and whether it suggests they themselves are in the wrong. Instead they just say that climatologists don't understand climatology.

My question is whether this has happened before in modern science. If it hasn't, then denialists have to get us to assume pretty heroically that the scientific process has failed in a way that it's not failed before, and I think it might make us consider whether in fact, the denialists are wrong and the 97% of climatologists are right.

I should note that this isn't about science getting something wrong - that happens all the time. This is about the claim that the field of climatology is fundamentally unsound, which is the basic claim of denialists. And even if it did happen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it's happening now in climatology, but the precedent would make the claim a tiny bit less implausible.

I looked once before at whether modern science engages in conspiracy, in the far smaller group of scientists examining Jupiter's moon Europa and its ice cover, and I didn't think it was helpful to denialists.

So how about another potential example, in the field of evolutionary psychology. This area attracts a lot of controversy, possibly because amateurs try to use it to as a pop-scientific justification of whatever moral belief they advocate, possibly because its supporters sometimes overstate some of their conclusions, and possibly because biologists don't like psychologists encroaching on their turf. But is the field discredited?

The short answer is no, at least not the way that climate denialists think that 97% of climatologists are wrong. Even critics of many papers published on evolutionary psychology think the field can reach and has reached appropriate conclusions, like Jerry Coyne:

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

It's also worth noting that compared to climatology, evolutionary psychology is a "soft" scientific field with ethical barriers to experimentation that climatology doesn't experience. Even so, aside from the view of possibly a tiny number of critics, it's not gone as far off the rails as denialists claim has happened for climatology. The denialists are going to have to look somewhere else for a precedent.

Personally, I think evolutionary psychology is fascinating and likely to have significant insights. I think it's facetious to believe that in our psychology, which is crucial to our survival, we'd have escaped the evolutionary influences that affect every other species on the planet. Great apes are clearly smart enough to have differing individual psychologies that must have affected their survival rates over time. Getting deep and subtle insights about human evolutionary psychology will be difficult, but denying that field's validity is as about as smart as climate denialism.

Human behavioral adaptations accelerating evolutionary changes

What I'm saying is either 1. so obvious noone's bothered to say it, 2. wrong, or 3. somewhat interesting. It's about the evidence of a significant recent natural selection in the human genome, covered in the New York Times.

Our behavioral adaptations have made it possible for our primate body to succeed in new habitats and climates. After the successful introduction into new niches, we started competing against the most dangerous game, each other, and evolution started playing catch-up, adapting our bodies to colder climates, less sunlight, and higher elevations as applicable.

Then instead of just entering new habitats as hunter-gatherers spread around the world, humans also started creating new habitats through agriculture, succeeded there and began competing on evolutionary levels, like when Asians adapted to metabolize alcohol after inventing rice cultivation. In the last few thousand years or less, we created still more new habitats of dense populations in cities, and resistance to diseases that spread at high concentrations like measles began to develop.

I think it's interesting because evolution is working on us in ways or at a speed that's highly unusual, because a species usually succeeds in a particular type of habitat instead of spreading to multiple habitats simultaneously.

I suppose it's similar to adaptive radiation, like where an ancestral finch species reached the Galapagos and eventually became 14 species adapted to different food sources. I just suspect it's happened much faster with us. And of course we won't differentiate into separate species, given the high level of gene flow.

It might be interesting to look at species that have come along for the ride with us - rats, house mice, cockroaches, head lice, gut bacteria - and see if they've undergone similar recent evolution.

Chimp death, unpredictability of smart critters, and relative intelligence

Ed Yong has another fascinating post with videos showing how different chimps react very differently to death in their groups. Among other things, chimp mothers refuse to abandon dead babies, sometimes carrying them for days or weeks. Very difficult to guess what's going on in the mind of another species, but there's a clear recognition that something's happened, and somewhat flawed ways of handling it. Kind of like us.

Five years ago I wrote a post about chimp infanticide and added "Another interesting aspect is that chimp infanticide appears somewhat harder to explain with simple evolutionary principles than is the case with monkeys. That fits my own little theory that behaviour of smart animals is hard to predict...."

With my usual, blisteringly fast analytical skill, I've come up with another theory after five years. Chimp behavior isn't necessarily harder to predict than mouse behavior, it's just that it's harder for humans to predict chimps because the relative difference in our intelligence is much smaller. By analogy, a chess grand master (human) can easily predict the outcome of a chess move by a low-ranked player (mouse) but not so easily playing against a slightly less proficient chess master (chimp). They're a lot closer to our league.

All the more reason why we shouldn't treat chimps, other great apes, and maybe a few other animals as belonging in the same ethical category as mice.

---

Unsettling video of a young chimp playing with the mummified body of an infant below. An adult is clearly disturbed and wants no contact with the corpse, and the mother eventually scares off the juvenile and takes back the corpse. If you ignore that macabre aspect, though, you'll notice the chimps using stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts, one of the prime examples of chimp tool use and one of the few that many of us have done as well.

One-way evolutionary arms race solves invasive species problems, but it's slow

An interesting post by biology blogger Biotunes about predation of native species on problematic, invasive species raised some ideas in my mind as to how the invasive species eventually come under control. Obviously the current levels of predation isn't an efficient control, or the invasive species wouldn't be problematic - it would be extinct or just occupy a small niche in the ecosystem.

Over time, however, there should be evolutionary pressure on predators to prey more efficiently on invasives, while the invasives will not adapt in response. So long as the predators are inefficient, the evolutionary pressure on invasives should be to outcompete within its own species, by reproducing more and reproducing more quickly. A mutation that adapts to predators is unlikely to spread because it will likely impose a cost on reproduction (spend more time hiding and less time feeding, say) that exceeds the benefits of escaping not-very-efficient predation. The effect is a one-way evolutionary arms race.

Only when the predators become efficient at controlling the invasive population, will the invasive start adapting in response, and at that point the invasives won't be that much of an environmental problem.

So, great. Next question is how long does this all take? We've had invasive plants in the Americas for hundreds of years, and invasive animals for a century or more. I'm no expert on these things, but I do read about them and I've not heard of any invasive gradually receding to become a background species. The few that have disappeared or become minor have done so when we've imported biological controls or have adopted scorched-earth campaigns to get rid of the species.

If on a scale of a century or more, very few or no invasives have been brought to heel by the one-way evolutionary arms race, then the time-scale for this to work on most invasives has to be much longer, maybe many thousands of years. This long-term solution helps us understand how nature handles the rare, natural introduction of a new, invasive species. Considering everything else we're doing to screw up our ecology right now, however, the natural solution isn't something we can rely on as a substitute for our own action to deal with the problem we've created.

Reviewing The Greatest Show on Earth: read The Ancestor's Tale instead

I'm a big fan of Richard Dawkins' science writing (haven't been interested in his atheism stuff). His latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, unfortunately doesn't appeal that much to me, and I can only think of a limited audience who should read it. Science and evolution afficianados should instead read The Ancestor's Tale or any other Dawkins book, instead.

I guess he felt he hadn't comprehensively addressed the evidence for evolution.  You can't - Darwin had compiled too much evidence to do the comprehensive job he had planned, and it's increased exponentially ever since.  If you're trying to provide a tool useful for arguments with creationists, though, I wouldn't write a narrative book at all - I'd create a manual, something that allows easy referencing and searching for various arguments, maybe based on Panda's Thumb or the countless other resources out there.  Dawkins kept recommending Jerry Coyne's book, Why Evolution Is True, and maybe that's a better book for the evolution champions.

The book would be an excellent read for someone who actually takes creationism seriously, but I doubt they'll read it (or this blog post).  It might also be good for Dawkins fans who've read everything else from him and want something new - he's said his next book will be a children's book on myths, so the good science will be a while before we see it again.  Everyone else should find more interesting content in Ancestor's Tale.

UPDATE:  maybe worth adding that Greatest Show has received pretty good reviews, so most people disagree with me.



Bonus blogging:  why in heck did John Kerry have to hire a conservative that was spreading, in a stupid or deceptive fashion, extensive pro-torture propaganda?  If he wanted to reach out with an affirmative action hire of a conservative, there are plenty out there still who don't believe in torture.

Credible scientists don't necessarily mean credible science

There seems to be increasing connections between climate denialism and evolution denialism, with the creationist Discovery Institute increasingly interested in denying anthropogenic warming.

At my most cynical, I think this is a bank shot by the more strategic climate denialists who are worried about the Christian envangelical environmental movement getting out of hand, and see this as a way to slow it down. Only slightly less cynically, it's the creationists trying to glom on to a slightly less discredited form of science denialism than their own dreck, and using climate denialism as a gateway drug to the harder stuff.

I just finished watching Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, the Nova documentary about the lawsuit that blocked using public schools to teach intelligent design as a way to introduce creationism in the classroom. It's a good documentary although it could've gone faster (which is why Netflix is great - I watched most of it at 1.4x speed, and some of it at 2x speed).

The documentary is a useful reminder to realists and a caution to climate skeptics, in that it shows a tiny handful of real scientists, professors even in the relevant fields, who deny evolution. If you're a climate skeptic that just hates it whenever we compare your views to creationism, this is a problem. The view of a few credible scientists who oppose the mainstream view on evolution either negates the existence of a consensus, or alternatively the climate skeptics have to acknowledge having a few aging climate researchers on their side isn't sufficient proof to deny the climate consensus.

I think the most reasonable view is that a small number credible scientists can go off the deep end and believe something unreasonable even in their own field. That's what happened with evolution and happened in the climate field.

NY Times also flubs non-climate science

Below is a letter I wrote to the NY Times about their resurrection of the Noble Savage myth in a recent Science Times article, one that claimed that prehistoric humans were minimally violent:

To the Editor:

The Science Times article, "In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue," posits a false choice between two possible human evolutionary drivers: cooperative baby-rearing for in-group success, or social cohesion to overpower out-group rivals. Both forces could drive human evolution, and there may be little difference between them.

The article portrays Dr. Hrdy as supporting some version of the peaceful Noble Savage myth, and denying violence as a driving force. Scholarship such as that in the book "War Before Civilization" demonstrate otherwise, that violence between hunter-gatherer groups is and was much higher on a per capita basis than in large, organized societies.

Dr. Hrdy may be referring to evidence of a genetic bottleneck in human prehistory in order to claim small populations didn't need to fight, but that one bottleneck doesn't mean populations were always below the carrying capacity of the habitat they used. Basic biological law known since Darwin states that species will quickly expand populations until they overfill their habitats, and then something decides which groups will survive. It was almost certainly violent choices in the past, but hopefully our big brains and modern tools give us a different options for the present and future.

To be fair to Hrdy, she's apparently referring to ancient hominids who might have been genetically/culturally different from modern hunter-gatherers, but I still doubt she's right. And when she claims "the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults," I find it hard to believe a population that small could last that long and not wink out. Wiki thinks "as long as" 100,000 years, still an unlikely long time but short compared to hominid evolution. Even if it's true, that small population has to be kept small by something other than competition for habitat or intra-species violence, in order to resurrect the Noble Savage.

Anyway, I've been meaning to blog about the War Before Civilization book. It's excellent, if somewhat depressing about our past. Peace is possible without civilization, but it's not easy to keep. Afarensis did a great post about the book a while back for more info.

(And yes, this post falls into the "I read a book and now think I know more than an expert in the field" category. Oh well.)

UPDATE, Jan 2010: more evidence in support of Hrdy's position and against mine, this time that hominids had incredibly small populations dating back 1.2 million years. They also claim that chimps and gorillas had similarly-small populations despite the radically different habitat that they use. Weird. I'm not convinced, yet.

The Crank-Theory-PhD Thesis

Someone beat me to it:

No matter how wacky the idea is, you can usually find a handful of cranks with Ph.D.s to back you up!

The corrections I'd make is that it's not "usually," it's "always, if the idea is well-known" and that the Ph.D.'s will even be in the academic field that's most relevant to the crank theory. I'm sure someone could create an equation that as a theory approaches pure wackiness, the number of Ph.D. holders willing to support the theory approaches but never reaches zero.

I used to think that creationism is the one exception, but I've since heard of one or two people with biology Ph.D.s from real universities, not the fake religious ones, that will openly advocate it.

Global warming skeptics hate to be compared to creationists (except for the ones who are also creationists, like Roy Spencer), but having a few experts in a field back an idea rejected by the broad consensus doesn't give the idea much credibility.

What "Expelled" tells us about the whole science-framing thing

I think the moronic creationist pseudo-documentary, Expelled, tells us the anti-science framing crowd can be wrong even when they're right.

The science framers, mostly Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet, want to spin the discussion of science (in a good way, supposedly) to appeal the most to the target audience. The anti-framers, people like PZ Myers and Greg Laden, say science shouldn't be spun, a cacophony of voices is just fine, and strident opposition to stupidity is effective. The debate plays out repeatedly at the scienceblogs.com websites.

As of today, Expelled has made $6.6 million, and will certainly be the fifth highest-grossing political documentary in history. The pro-framers have said the anti-framers should shut up about the movie, and argued that constantly talking about it has made it successful. The anti-framers claim the movie isn't successful.

The anti-framers are wrong on two counts. First, the movie's clearly successful by any non-ridiculous standards. Second, one of the framing concepts is that people will not accept any fact that contradicts their mental model of the world, and the anti-framers' refusal to acknowledge the movie's commercial success is itself a proof of this framing concept.

Despite all this, I throw in with the anti-framers in general. I think science is or at least should be more like a cacophony of opinions being tested out, and science communication should reflect that. And strident opposition to creationist nonsense can be refreshing. But the anti-framers need to acknowledge the evidence wherever it goes, and not acknowledging it here is ridiculous.

One tangential point I haven't seen raised: when to see Expelled. I don't think there's much point in seeing it, but if people do want to, they shouldn't go until after it's been in the theater where they're thinking of going for over two weeks. Expelled's producers get a much bigger cut of ticket revenues in the first two weeks, so waiting reduces the amount they take in.

Finally understanding why archaeologists like teeth so much

Just pointing out a cool post by Afarensis, showing and analyzing pictures of an Australopithecus skull, in comparison with modern ape skulls. The thing that clarifies to me more than anything else that Australo is not an ape, contrary to the creationists, is the teeth.

Pictures like these could be very helpful in fighting the battle against ignorance.

Speciation in a classroom petri dish

Many creationists and some Intelligent Design types accept that "microevolution" occurs within a species, allowing for small, gradual changes, but "macroevolution" from one species to another does not. Here's a typical statement:

"Speciation" in the Darwinian sense of one species gradually changing by selection into another has not been observed and no examples are known.

Of course, it's wrong, but even better than reading about examples in scientific literature would be to demonstrate speciation in a high school classroom petri dish.

So here's my idea - take a bacteria species that cultures easily and normally lives in pH-neutral environment medium, not very acidic and not very alkaline. A teacher could demonstrate this by transferring bacteria cultured on a neutral petri dish to higly acid and highly alkaline dishes, where the bacteria quickly dies.

Now the invention that someone needs to make - a petri dish shaped like a long rectangle that has an acidity gradient, so that it's very acidic at one end, gradually changes to a neutral pH in the center and highly alkaline at the far end. Students transfer bacteria to the neutral pH location, and then wait. Within a time period of days/weeks, the bacteria should, through natural selection, gradually evolve and grow into areas that are increasingly more acidic or alkaline than the parent population could survive in. At the two ends of the petri dish, the students will have created two different bacteria species that are reproductively isolated from each other because they live in incompatible environments. The students can prove that by transferring bacteria from the alkaline end to the acidic end and vice-versa, and they'll observe that the transferred bacteria soon dies. Speciation as described by biologists, for all the students to see right in front of them.

Several additional notes:

Biological education isn't my field, so there may be difficulties with this in practice, but it seems doable.

The idea of a species* is a little squishy when it comes to bacteria, but even if one doesn't accept the species concept for bacteria, the experiment does simulate what happens in nature and lets students see natural selection in front of them.

If some bacteria survive as one long colony of bacteria from the acidic end to the alkaline end, the students will have created a ring species, which is itself a fascinating example of speciation.

Some creationists now accept speciation, and say all the species biodiversity on earth could have developed out of the tiny number of species that could fit into Noah's Ark. They really believe in Noah's Ark. These people will not be affected by this bacteria experiment, but when creationists are forced to start saying the polar opposite of what they had previously been saying, they're going to lose some supporters. The Noah's Ark Darwinists also have all kinds of additional problems, from speciation in slow-maturing vertebrates to zero support in the fossil record.

*UPDATE: changed language from "biological species concept" to "species". See comments for details.

UPDATE 2: I'm about to lose Haloscan comments into the void, and since there a just a few here, I'm going to append them:

The biological species concept is a little squishy when it comes to bacteria... The BSC doesn't apply to bacteria at all (or any asexually reproducing organisms); that's one of the biggest limitations of/arguments against the BSC. There are other ways to define species in prokaryotes (amount of genetic divergence, ability to exchange plasmids), but I don't think this experiment will produce species, so much as environmentally unique strains. If some bacteria survive as one long colony of bacteria from the acidic end to the alkaline end, the students will have created a ring species, which is itself a fascinating example of speciation. Technically a ring species must form a ring. What you are talking about is clinal variation along a linear gradient. Ring speciation (still a contentious topic) involves the meeting of two ends of a circular cline in which adjacent populations can easily exchange alleles, but the two ends have diverged enough to prevent gene flow when they come together to form the ring. Maybe if you did the experiment in a donut shaped container you could observe something similar to ring speciation. It would be interesting to see if the strains adapted for the pH extremes could coexist in the neutral environment. If they can, I'd question whether or not we can actually consider this speciation. Of course, if one or both strains become so specialized to their new environment that they cannot survive in neutral pH, it could probably be considered speciation. RPM | Homepage | 08.10.05 - 11:37 am | #

Thanks RPM - I probably should have said "species" as a concept is a little squishy when it comes to bacteria, rather than the term BSC. Squishy maybe, but not meaningless. The bacteria species chosen would be a much better analogue to eukaryotes if it were one that readily exchanged DNA information between cells, since that would perform much the same function as sexual reproduction. If the experiment is successful, you then get isolated gene pools in the bacteria groups. I had also thought of using a donut-shaped petri dish (it would be helpful for educational purposes), but some ring species don't form complete rings, like the California salamander. Interesting question if the bacteria from the two ends could coexist (and share genes) in the neutral environment. If so, you're probably right that speciation is incomplete. It would be complete in a natural enviroment, though, if that neutral habitat no longer existed. I also would not be surprised if the bacteria that stayed adapted to neutral pH outcompeted the two outlying groups and effectively kept them from coexisting. Brian Schmidt | Homepage | 08.10.05 - 1:04 pm | #

you mention petri dishes with a gradient in them. Which reminds me of experiments we were shown in a lecture while I was doing my Microbiology degree at the University of Wales, Cardiff. They were taking samples from high salinaty environments like roadside grit stores and plating them on square dishes with a salinity gradient on them. They were looking for the ranges that bacterial fauna would grow. I beleive these square gradient plates were pretty low-tech. You tip the plate slightly and pour in high-salt agar so that you get a layer shallow at one and deep at the other. Once it's set you tilt the other way and pour in low-salt agar. Diffusion/Osmosis take care of setting up the gradient for you. I'm pretty sure that a quick search of the literature would find the original papers. I shall quit rambling now. Just to point out that the equipment you want already exist. huw-l | Homepage | 10.11.05 - 10:36 am | #

Thanks huw-l, that's an amazingly simple way to make it work. It seems like it might also work low-acidity and high-acidity agars. Brian Schmidt | Homepage | 10.30.05 - 4:13 pm | #

key: science, politics, evolution