Category: anthropology

A MOOC on Homo floresiensis, the “hobbit” hominin

November 15, 2016 • 10:00 am

I just want to let you know about a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Homo floresiensis that reader Dermot C. called to my attention. As you may recall, new dating methods have shown that this 3.5-foot diminutive hominin died out about 50,000 years ago rather than the 12,000 originally posited, and arrived in Flores (Indonesia) between 700,000 and 1,000,000 years ago. Also, new specimens have been found, making it pretty clear that the original specimen wasn’t a malformed or diseased individual, but was a member of a real and very tiny hominin species. (Their brains were about the size of those in modern chimps.)

Their phylogenetic relationship to modern H. sapiens isn’t yet clear (they haven’t been able to get good DNA from the remains), but it is clear the species went extinct without leaving descendants, like the “robust” hominins in Africa. They may have well have been descendants of Homo erectus that evolved a small size for reasons unknown.

Here’s the skinny from Dermot’s email:

I thought your readers might be interested in this free MOOC:

“Homo floresiensis uncovered: the science of ‘the Hobbit'”

The course concerns the discovery of Homo floresiensis, ‘the Hobbit’, discovered on Flores island in 2003. It started on 7th November but it is not too late to catch up. The aim of the course is to ‘discover the incredible world of ‘the Hobbit’ as modern archaeological science uncovers secrets hidden in time…Investigating a range of multidisciplinary approaches and techniques, we explore the contributions of modern archaeological science in challenging assumptions about human evolution and exposing secrets hidden in time.

This course has been developed by the Centre for Archaeological Science (CAS) at theUniversity of Wollongong in association with the Indonesian National Research Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS), and Lakehead University, Canada.’

The course leader is Prof. Bert Roberts, the Director of the Centre for Archaeological Science at the University of Wollongong and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. He was one of the archaeologists involved in excavations where Homo floresiensis was discovered. The Educator is Professor Zenobia Jacobs, Director of the Luminescence Dating Laboratory at the University of Wollongong and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. And the Mentor is Alyce Mason, an Educational Designer and researcher from the University of Wollongong.

The course lasts 4 weeks at 2 hours per week, although one can spend more time at it.

Anything for the Brits and Yanks to forget about Brexit and Trump!

Here’s a cast of a H. floresiensis cranium from Wikipedia (note the small brain case):

800px-homo_floresiensis

and where H. floresiensis remains were found.

800px-id_-_flores

If you ever get a chance to go to the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Evolution in Washington D.C. stand next to the reconstructed skeleton of this species and see how incredibly tiny they were. No wonder they were called “hobbits”!

Here’s a reconstructioncompared to a modern human female:

homo_floresiensis_with_modern_human

New study suggests a single miscreant, Charles Dawson, created the “Piltdown Man” hoax

August 11, 2016 • 8:30 am

The story of the fraudulent skull known as “Piltdown Man” is well known. In 1912, lawyer and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson turned up at the London Natural History Museum with a specimen he claimed to have found at a site in Sussex. He and Arthur Smith Woodward, the head geologist at the Museum, further excavated the site and turned up more bone fragments, including bits of a skull, teeth, jawbones, and even a piece of carved bone—an “artifact” of human devising.

Woodward reconstructed the “skull” and announced with Dawson that the skull, jawbone, and two molar teeth constituted the “missing link” between apes and humans: a 500,000-year old specimen they named Eoanthropus dawsoni. Dawson later reported finding an “intermediate” canine tooth at the site, as well as similar teeth and skull bits (“Piltdown II”) from a site 3 km away. The bones were darkly stained, matching the gravels at the site.

Here’s a reconstruction of the Piltdown Man (Piltdown I), with the original bits in brown and the rest added to fill in the gaps:

piltdown-skull_2416562b

Subsequent findings of genuine early hominins marginalized this fossil (Austalopithecus africanus was described in 1924), but many still believed that E. dawsoni was real. (There were, however, many doubters from the outset.) That lasted until 1953, when scientists showed beyond doubt that “Piltdown Man” comprised, as some had surmised, skull bits from modern humans combined with a recent ape jaw (likely an orangutan), with the ape teeth filed down to look intermediate between those of apes and humans. The jaw, as well as a modern human skull, had been artificially stained, and fossils of other species had been planted at the Sussex locality, along with a bogus “artifact” (probably an elephant bone carved with a steel knife) to give credibility to the fossils. By 1955, after a second publication, Piltdown Man was universally rejected as a hoax.

Yet some creationists still tout the early acceptance of Piltdown Man as evidence for the credulity of scientists who accepted a fake simply because they wanted to believe in human evolution. That doesn’t wash, though, in light of the doubts that accompanied the fossil’s original discovery, the subsequent uncovering of the duplicity by scientists (not creationists), and the dozens of genuine hominin fossils that have turned up since then. This is an example of the self-correcting nature of science, something not seen in the religious belief of those creationists who still tout this example.

Some questions remain. Who, exactly, was responsible for the forgery? Suggestions have included Dawson himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Dawson’s neighbor), Arthur Keith, and—Steve Gould’s choice—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and amateur anthropologist. At least twenty people have been named as possible hoaxers.

A new paper by Isabelle De Groote and many colleagues, just posted at the Royal Society Open Publishing site (reference and free download below), answers other questions, and suggests that the consistency of methods used for both Piltdown I and II specimens, points to a single forger. That forger was almost surely Dawson himself.

De Groote et al. raise three questions (in bold below), and tried to answer them using a combination of morphological analysis, DNA sequencing, radiocarbon dating, and inspection of the fossils. I’ll briefly give their responses below the questions.

  • (Q1)  Lowenstein [16] showed that the mandible was likely to have come from an orang-utan (Pongo sp.). Are the ape jaw, isolated canine (both Piltdown I) and molar (Piltdown II) indeed from an orang-utan? If so, are they likely to originate from the same animal?

Yes, the jaw and teeth from Piltdown I and II came from a single orangutan, as judged by both morphology and mitochondrial DNA sequencing. Carbon dating gave results ranging from 90-500 years, so the jaw and teeth may well have come from an Edwardian skull collection, though the authors couldn’t find records of missing specimens.

The organgutans themselves were likely, given their placement in the DNA phylogeny of known individuals, to have come from southwest Sarawak.

  • (Q2)  How many crania were used to produce the various fragments found at the Piltdown sites and can we assign them to a putative source population?

The authors suggest that at least two modern human skulls, whose dates could not be determined, were used to reconstruct the fossils. No putative source population could be identified, though the authors conjecture that the skulls were from medieval humans.

  • (Q3)  Is there consistency in the modus operandi (MO) used to modify the various materials, linking them to one or more forgers?

The answer to this one is yes. The bones and tooth sockets were all plugged with gravel, originating at both sites, that were mixed with putty. And the same putty was used on the human skulls, as well as to affix the molars back into the organgutan jawbones. That, and the artificial staining that was the same on all specimens, points to a single forger—most likely Dawson, who had the means, opportunity, and anthropological knowledge to create this fake. De Groote et al. summarize their reasons for a single hoaxer:

This is largely because the story originated with [Dawson], he brought the first specimens to Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum (Natural History) in 1912, nothing was ever found at the site when Dawson was not there, he is the only known person directly associated with the supposed finds at the second Piltdown site, the exact whereabouts of which he never revealed, and no further significant fossils, mammal or human, were discovered in the localities after his death in 1916.

The final question is this: if it was Dawson, why did he do it? The authors tackle that question, too, and show from letters that Dawson was desperate to be elected a member of the Royal Society. Fortunately, that honor eluded him (it would have been further hay for creationists), but he might well have been elected had he lived longer.

De Groote et al. finish with a lesson: paleoanthropologists shouldn’t hoard or retain exclusive possession of their fossils, for science demands verification through independent observation. I’ll add here the words of Richard Feynman, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

h/t: Latha for the original link, also sent by several other readers
_______

de Groote, I. et al. 2016. New genetic and morphological evidence suggest that a single hoaxer created “Pildown man.”   R. Soc. Open Sci. 2016 3 160328; DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160328. Published 10 August 2016

SCIENCE tells us what Jesus looked like!

December 15, 2015 • 8:45 am

Here’s a headline and subheadline from yesterday’s AOL News.  You can immediately spot two things wrong with it:

Screen Shot 2015-12-15 at 6.49.34 AM

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Seriously? That’s a news headline? First of all, it presupposes that a historical Jesus really existed, with the implication that it’s the Jesus who did the stuff described in the Bible. Well, based on the lack of evidence, I’m not prepared to admit that there really was a person who served as a model for Bible Jesus. But a more obvious problem is that any forensic reconstruction of a person’s face demands that we have his or her remains, and of course that’s not the case for Jesus Person. After all, if we had Jesus’s skull, which is what we need to reconstruct the face, we’d have stronger evidence that Jesus really existed.

For example, you probably remember that the remains of King Richard III were found under a car park in Leicester in 2013, identified by DNA analysis, and then his facial features painstakingly reconstructed from the skull (the last link also gives an idea of what Richard sounded like, based on his letters).  Here’s his skull, an early painting, and then the reconstruction based on his remains:

_65682907_richardcomp

Reconstruction based on skull:

uni_leicester_facial_reconstruction

Here’s a fascinating video showing how it was done:

Now, what about Jesus? Without a skull, what could they discern what he looked like? Well, they did something dumb, but it’s the best a believer can do. Christianity Today reports excitedly:

With this in mind, the research team acquired three well-preserved skulls from Jerusalem in Israel, where Jesus lived and preached.

Medical artist Richard Neave from The University of Manchester in England then took charge of evaluating the skulls. Using special computer programmes, his team was able to re-create the muscles and skins overlaying the skulls.

The skulls, however, did not provide two key pieces of information about Jesus’ appearance: his hair and his skin colour. To be able to determine these, the researchers analysed drawings found in various archaeological sites in Israel.

The research team ultimately concluded that Jesus had dark eyes, and was bearded following Jewish tradition.

As regards the length of Jesus’ hair, the researchers deviated from the common belief that Christ had long, straight hair. Instead, they assumed that Jesus Christ had short hair with tight curls, based on their analysis of the Holy Bible. [JAC: I don’t think the Holy Bible tells us anything about how Jesus’s hair looked!]

Well that’s certainly convincing, isn’t it? The chance that Jesus, if he really existed, looked like an amalgam of three random skulls dug up in Jerusalem (dates not given), is about nil. Nevertheless, they produced the image given below, which links to the AOL video (click on screenshot:

Screen Shot 2015-12-15 at 6.49.08 AM
What Jesus looked like!!!

Now who does that remind you of? I’ll let readers guess. Not only did they reconstruct the adult Jesus, but they also managed to reconstruct the 12-year-old Jesus, the one who confounded the temple Rabbis and went about his father’s work. To do that, they used the image from the bogus Shroud of Turin and then computer enhanced it. Here he is:

Screen Shot 2015-12-15 at 7.18.06 AM
Adolescent Jesus!!

I am SO convinced! But that’s going to cause a lot of consternation for Christians who were brought up thinking that Jesus looked Aryan, like this:

jesus-337x450

I mean, who would ever have thought that Jesus looked like a Jew from Palestine?

I’m not surprised that The Christian Post would claim that this dubious methodology can give us any idea of what Jesus looked like, but what disturbs me is how credible they (and AOL) are about thinking they have any meaningful result. The Christian Post argues that we have actually gained some information from this analysis (my emphasis in following):

For Christians, what Jesus Christ may have looked like has been a mystery. The New Testament of the Holy Bible does not provide any detailed description of Jesus Christ, nor have any drawings of Him been discovered. As a result, Christ has been depicted in various appearances by people from different times and cultures.

Fortunately, science may have found a way for Christians to finally find an answer to the age-old question of how Jesus Christ looks like.

Of course, for them it’s a given that a Jesus-person actually existed, so half the problem is solved right there. Then assume that he was, as the New Testament tells us, a Middle Eastern Jew (of course the Bible gives no description of Jesus), and you’re 3/4 of the way there. The rest is commentary—or rather, credulousness.

h/t: Jonathan S.

Wrongheaded anthropologist claims that humans aren’t apes

November 2, 2015 • 12:30 pm

It’s time to affirm once and for all that humans are apes, and to educate those who say otherwise. To deny that is to deny a palpable fact of biology and evolution: our close ancestry with other primates.

One of those who need education is Jonathan Marks, a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The University lists his interests as “Biological Anthropology, Human Genetics, History of Anthropological Thought, Evolution and Human Society.”  And he’s clearly passionate about his field, but his passion sometimes becomes rather aggressive—or even nasty.

I have a report, for instance, that Marks once gave a talk that was, in part, about human genetic variation and “races,” and in it he vehemently denied not only the existence of races, but also attacked studies of genetic variation among human populations, studies that, he claimed, were motivated by racism. When a questioner asked him, “Are you saying that anybody who studies geographic variation in human genes is a racist?”, Marks reportedly answered (in a large seminar), “Yes, and I’d put my boot up their ass.”

He’s now trying to put his boot up another posterior: the notion that humans are apes. But that posterior won’t yield, because, in fact, humans ARE apes. For that is how we’re technically classified in biology. Here’s a simple representation of that, showing that we’re apes; and one could also have put in another bracket around orangs, gorillas, the two chimp species and us, and labeled it “hominids (great apes)”.

54a1a2dd_19_01bPrimatePhylogeny_L

And the classification from Wikipedia:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Suborder: Haplorhini
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. sapiens

If you look up the family Hominidae, you’ll see that it includes all the “great apes”: orangutans, chimps (both common chimps and bonobos), gorillas, and humans. In other words, we are “great apes”. We are also “hominids”, a term once used to refer to every species on “our” side of the evolutionary tree since we diverged from the ancestors of the other apes, but now hominids refers to all the hominidae, and the former “hominid” is now “hominin“.  (You can see the full phylogenetic placement of our species here.) Finally, we are in the more inclusive superfamily Hominoidea, which are all apes, including the great apes and the gibbons.

But Marks disputes this universally accepted classification in a post at the website PopAnth called “Are we apes? No, we are humans.” What he’s doing in the post, as you’ll see below, is denying that we’re apes because the popular conception of apes includes every hominid other than humans, but not humans themselves. He also intimates that there are dire but unspecified political consequences of thinking that we’re apes. Here’s his argument:

Our ancestors were of course apes. That is what science shows. Our closest zoological relatives are apes, and we fall phylogenetically among them–indeed, we are closer to a chimpanzee than that chimpanzee is to an orangutan.

But that elaborates the identities of our ancestors, not us. They were apes, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us what we are. The problem, as Simpson understood decades ago, is that ancestry is not the same as identity.

Yes but the classification of humans as hominids—as apes—does indeed tell us what we are, at least in one sense. It tells us, as you see above, that our closest relatives are other species that share some derived traits (called “synapomorphies”) with other apes, showing that these traits arose after we branched off from other primates. You can see a list of those synapomorphies here.

Marks goes on, confusing the issue of ancestry, which is what our classification with other apes is meant to show, with “identity,” a term that is pretty nebulous and has no formal meaning in biological classification, or even in biology.

We reject the simple equation of ancestry with identity in other contexts. Why should we accept it in science? The short answer is that we shouldn’t.

Science no more says that I am an ape because my ancestors were, than it says that I am a slave because my ancestors were. The statement that you are your ancestors articulates a bio-political fact, not a biological fact. And it is ridiculous and offensive in the modern era, in addition to being false.

Here you can see the ideology creeping in, though I’m not quite sure what ideology Marks projects, though he appears to be a leftist in other contexts. But saying that we’re “apes” has no “bio-political” connotation at all, except in the minds of ideologues like Marks. It doesn’t say that we are our ancestors: it says that we belong to a group whose members share some derived traits and who are evolutionarily diverged from other primates. It becomes clear that Marks is using a concept of “ape” different from that used by other scientists: apes are those other species that we gawk at in cages at the zoo:

What are we? We are human. Apes are hairy, sleep in trees, and fling their poo. I should make it clear: Nobody likes apes more than I do; I support their preservation in the wild and their sensitive treatment in captivity. I also don’t think I’m better than them. I’m smarter than they are, and they are stronger than I am. I’m just not one of them, regardless of my ancestry. I am different from them. And so are you. You and I have 46 chromosomes in our cells; chimpanzees have 48. They are indeed very similar, but if you know what to look for, you can tell their cells apart quite readily.

Then he becomes terminally confused:

. . . Obviously we are very similar to chimps, because we shared a common ancestry with them only a few million years ago. But that doesn’t tell us that we are apes; it only says that we are genetically very similar to apes by virtue of our shared ancestry with them.

And indeed we–that is, Homo sapiens–fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “apes.” Shouldn’t that make us apes?

On the other hand, we also fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “fish.” That is to say, a coelacanth is more closely related to us than it is to a trout. So we fall within the category that encompasses both coelacanths and trout, namely, fish.

Yes, but that’s not the same thing as saying that we fall phylogenetically with the group that we call fish. In fact we don’t (see below).

Yet we are not fish. There are certainly things to be understood by confronting our fish ancestry (such as our gestation in a saline, aqueous environment), but fish can’t read, so if you are reading this, then you are not a fish.

Well, “bony fish”are in the superclass Osteichthyes, to which we don’t belong, but we do belong to the class Sarcoptrygii, which are descendants of early fish, a group that include tetrapods.

Saying that we are not apes is like saying that Drosophila are not flies (dipterans). It’s just dumb, and somehow meant to set us apart from other great apes. Yes, we do have unique traits, but we’re still in the family of hominids. And, contra Marks, that does not mean that we are our ancestors. It means we share a common ancestor that lived in the past.

Historically, Marks is a bit like Deepak Chopra, who can’t let a criticism slide. So when the commenters try to set him straight, he goes into the comments section and argues with them—nearly always a mistake, particularly if there are biologists afoot. Here’s a humorous exchange from that section:

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Finally, it may not be irrelevant that Marks is also author of a book called Why I am not a Scientist, characterized like this:

Science, Marks argues, is widely accepted to be three things: a method of understanding and a means of establishing facts about the universe, the facts themselves, and a voice of authority or a locus of cultural power. This triple identity creates conflicting roles and tensions within the field of science and leads to its record of instructive successes and failures.

Well, whatever this postmodern babble means, if Marks wants to establish that he’s not a scientist, he’s gone quite a ways towards that goal in this piece.

And let’s not forget that denying that humans are apes plays right into the hands of religious human exceptionalism as well as creationism. It may not be surprising that Marks’s University web page says this: “Prof. Marks is on leave during the Academic Year 2013-2014, participating as a Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame.”

Will humans become two subspecies?

April 12, 2014 • 7:47 am

UPDATE: I’ve heard from Dr. Curry about this piece; he’s appalled that it was published and explains the situation:

I’m sorry that you had to waste some of your valuable time dealing with the old news story about the future of human evolution. The story purports to be about my ‘research’ on the future of human evolution; it is in fact a PR stunt by the television company Bravo. The real story is that, back in 2006 I was commissioned by Bravo to write an essay on the future of humanity. The essay was science fiction, intended to illustrate some aspects of evolutionary theory to an audience of television executives. It was not serious academic research, let alone a prediction about our actual future(!). However, Bravo put out a sensationalist press release about the essay, portraying it as science fact, and this press release was subsequently reproduced by the media (including the BBC). I watched in horror as the story spread around the world, and I am equally horrified each time the story bubbles up on the ‘most read’ list on the BBC homepage (as it does every few years, for reasons that are mysterious to me, as it did again the other day, hence your flurry of emails). As I am sure you can imagine, this is a recurring professional nightmare for me; and I am grateful to you for correcting some of the misunderstandings that the story has generated.

________

I haven’t read the paper that this BBC article refers to, nor do I know whether it’s even been published in the scientific literature, but several readers sent me this piece and wanted my take on it. Since it’s from 2006, I’m not sure why several readers sent it simultaneously.

The piece at BBC News is given the provocative title, “Human species may split in two.” And the theory floated in that piece, by Dr. Oliver Curry, a lecturer at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a research associate at the London School of Economics, seems deeply unsound: in fact, not even wrong.

Here’s how the BBC describes his “theory,” but again, if there’s a paper about it (one isn’t mentioned), I haven’t read it. All the article says is that Curry’s views were presented on a “men’s satellite TV show”:

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said – before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

. . . Further into the future, sexual selection – being choosy about one’s partner – was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

. . . He carried out the report for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

I see no evidence that humanity will divide into two moieties in this way. In fact, intermarriage between humans will become more prevalent with greater migration between countries, creating genetic admixture between all kinds of genetically different populations. I’m curious how Curry manages to conclude that the human species is—or will be—splitting into two groups that will remain genetically and reproductively distinct, and that there is a bimodal distribution of matings, with attractive, creative, and tall humans on one end and short, squat, and ugly ones at the other. Is there any evidence of this happening now? Not that I know of.

Further, even if there were assortative mating for looks (and I suspect there is), it’s neither complete or associated with intelligence. Where are the data showing not only bimodal mating for height and attractiveness, but that those traits are strongly associated (for a strong association is needed to split the species) with intelligence?

There is simply no data to butress these speculations, which get press only because they’re sensationistic, smacking of 1984.  Any tendency for such assortative mating wouldn’t create bimodality unless it was mandated by the government, for there’s sufficient gene flow between his dichotomous categories (attractive people of one sex marrying not-so-attractive people of the other, and so on) that this kind of “splitting” will not occur.

Curry goes on about receding chins, our loss of capabilities due to medical technology that allows the medically deficient to breed, and so on, but I’ll ignore that for the nonce. He adds this:

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

This is again insupportable. 1000 years is only about 30-40 human generation, and if we are supposed to increase a foot in height by then, there would have to be pretty strong directional selection for height (or sexual selection practiced by both sexes). Again, I don’t know of any evidence for a higher reproductive output of people whose genes make them taller. We have no such data, nor do we know how much of height difference between human populations is based on genetic versus environmental differences. Since World War II, for example, the Japanese have increased several inches in height, but that change is due entirely in improvement of diet, as there’s only been one or two generations since then and nutrition has improved markedly. As for those squarer jaws, longer penises, and pert breasts, that’s just bunk. As far as I know, we have no data showing reproductive advantages (actually offspring number) accruing to men or women with those features.

The stuff about human morphology becoming more uniform over time is one thing that Curry probably got right (even a blind pig can find an acorn). Certainly humans are moving around more now, and people from different ethnic groups are intermarrying, evening out the lumps in the landscape of human morphology.  We all know of “hybrids” between people of different ethnic groups; I see them all the time among my students: children of Asian/Caucasian marriages, for instance. And you can often recognize them because their facial features and hair color are an admixture. But I don’t think we’ll be uniform in even a millennium.

And really, penis length? What data do we have that men with larger generative organs leave more offspring? Curry’s talking through his hat here.

This kind of unsupported speculation gives evolutionary biology a bad name.

 

 

Jane Goodall apparently guilty of plagiarism and sloppy science writing

March 27, 2013 • 6:17 am

Jane Goodall’s observations of the chimps at Gombe is perhaps the most famous work in primatology in the 20th century, and she’s rightly famous for her meticulous observations, her absolute dedication to her fieldwork, her discovery of many traits in our closest relatives that were thought unique to humans, and her tireless work on biological conservation (now 78, she still travels 300 days a year raising money and consciousness). My admiration was only slightly tempered when I found out recently that she was a goddie, and has spoken many times about her faith and the lack of conflict between science and religion.

But nobody, no matter how loved or revered, is immune from criticism; and in the case of Goodall, an iconic figure in primatology, the criticism has become particularly serious. She’s now accused of not only plagiarizing from other sources in her new book, Seeds of Hope (a book about the importance of plants, co-authored with Gail Hudson), but also of conveying inaccurate information about GMO food—serious accusations for a professional scientist.

The accusations were first leveled in an article by Steven Levingston in the March 19 “Book” section of The Washington Post, after a prospective reviewer (a botanist) noticed the problems and declined to review the book.  Levingston highlights the following instances of plagiarism (i.e., unattributed copying):

  • In the book, Goodall extols the benefits of sustainable farming. She expresses her shock at learning of dangerous conditions for workers who harvest tea.“According to Oxfam,” she writes, “a British nonprofit agency working to put an end to poverty worldwide, the spraying of pesticides on tea estates is often done by untrained casual daily-wage workers, sometimes even by children and adolescents.”That paragraph appears word for word on the Web site of Choice Organic Teas, a company dedicated to ethical labor practices. Choice Organic Teas was selected in 2010 to carry the Jane Goodall “Good for All” brand on a new line of products, and it donates a slice of its profits to the Jane Goodall Institute.
  • Goodall explains the toxic dangers in some detail, writing: “Most of these chemicals — such as Aldrin 20E, Carbofuran 30, Endosulfan 35 EC, Malathion 50 EC, Tetradifon 8 EC, Calixin 80 EC — are listed as hazardous and toxic, and a number of them are banned in Western countries. Despite dangers of exposure to these poisons, the workers are frequently barefoot and in shorts rather than protected by recommended aprons.”
    This material is replicated nearly verbatim from the same Web site page. Both passages also appear in nearly identical language on other organic tea Web sites and in the 2008 book “Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World” by Diane MacEachern. The language can be traced to a 2002 draft report, “The Tea Market — A Background Study,” which lacks an authorship credit.

The following is especially bizarre. Wikipedia? Really?

  • “Seeds of Hope” contains language from Wikipedia in its discussion of 18th-century Philadelphia botanist John Bartram, who shipped boxes of seeds to Europeans. Goodall writes: “ ‘Bartram’s Boxes,’ as they came to be known, were regularly sent to Peter Collinson for distribution to a wide list of European clients.”The Wikipedia entry reads: “Bartram’s Boxes as they then became known, were regularly sent to Peter Collinson every fall for distribution in England to a wide list of clients.”

  • Goodall marvels at the majesty of trees. “In ancient Egypt,” she notes, “the sycamore was especially revered — twin sycamores were believed to stand at the eastern gate of heaven through which Ra, the sun god[,] came each day.”

    Nearly identical words are found on a Web site called “Find Your Fate,” which covers astrology, numerology, palm reading and matters relating to love and life.

  • The phrasing Goodall uses to describe the tobacco habits of Indians in South and Central America is very similar to what is found on a Web site of tobacco history. The boldfaced words in this passage from the book echo language on the Web site: “In South and Central America the Indians smoked tobacco in pipes of many shapes and sizes, often elaborately decorated. It was sometimes chewed or used as snuff to ‘clear the head.’ Tobacco was also used as a remedy for such varied conditions as asthma, bites and stings, urinary and bowel complaints, fevers, convulsions, nervous ailments, sore eyes, and skin diseases. Some tribes cultivate tobacco as an insecticide to protect themselves against parasites.”

There’s also the possibility that Goodall, like Jonah Lehrer, made up quotations. As the Post reports:

“Seeds of Hope” tells the tale of botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London germinating 200-year-old seeds preserved in the Millennium Seed Bank. The seeds were shipped from Cape Town, were seized by the British and spent time in the Tower of London before winding up at the bank. Goodall concludes the story with a comment she says botanist Matt Daws made to her: “If seeds can survive that long in such poor conditions, then that’s good news for the ones that are stored under ideal conditions in the Millennium Seed Bank,’ Matt Daws said to me.”

Virtually the same quote from Daws appears on the Gardens Web site in a 2009 article with the headline “Plant story — 200 year old seeds spring to life”: “If seed can survive that long in poor conditions, then that’s good news for those in the Millennium Seed Bank stored under ideal conditions.” Asked in an e-mail whether he ever had a conversation with Goodall, Daws replied: “To be perfectly honest I have no recollection of speaking to her.”

An analysis of Goodall’s book by Michael Moynihan in The Daily Beast suggests there are many other plagiarized passages not uncovered by the Post, as well as another partially fabricated quote:

  • In my quick look through Seeds of Hope, I found what appears to be a similar example of plagiarism. Dave Aplin, a British botanist, is quoted telling Goodall of his discovery of seeds belonging to a long-extinct plant: “‘During my research,’ he told me, ‘I discovered a handful of preserved seeds hidden deep in the vaults of our seed bank.’ He felt a sense of awe.’ It was clear that I was probably looking at the last few seeds of this species in existence,’ he said.”

    But here is Dave Aplin quoted in a 2005 article from BBC News: “It was clear that I was probably looking at the last few seeds of this species in existence, and so some of the seeds were also dispatched to Britain so that both institutes could try to germinate them.” An added sentence—possibly from an actual interview Goodall conducted with Aplin—followed by a pilfered (and truncated) one.

Remember that Jonah Lehrer was fired from The New Yorker and disgraced for similarly fabricating quotes.

  • A quick check of other passages, randomly selected, suggest that there are many more instances of plagiarism that went undiscovered by the Post. Describing a study of genetically modified corn, Goodall writes: “A Cornell University study showed adverse effects of transgenic pollen (from Bt corn) on monarch butterflies: their caterpillars reared on milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen ate less, grew more slowly, and suffered higher mortality.”

A report from Navdaya.org puts it this way: “A 1999 Nature study showed adverse effects of transgenic pollen (from Bt corn) on monarch butterflies: butterflies reared on milkweed leaves dusted with bt corn pollen ate less, grew more slowly, and suffered higher mortality.”

The list of “unintentional borrowings” goes on, but you get the idea. Also disturbing are the many errors that Moynihan found, including attributing Confessions of an English Opium Eater to Samuel Taylor Coleridge instead of Thomas de Quincey.

That’s a small one, but there are several others. More serious is Goodall’s apparent dislike of GMO crops—which appear to be perfectly safe—and her citing of several dubious studies that appear to show their dangers (she cites, for instance, a CDC study as apparently showing that GM corn causes allergic reactions, but the CDC itself concluded that there was no effect).

As Moynihan notes, perhaps some of these errors and scientific distortions can be attributed to Goodall’s co-author, but that hardly applies to quotes from interviews supposedly conducted by Goodall—quotes that either were not uttered (since Goodall may not have spoken to the person indicated) or were partially fabricated. At any rate, Goodall is the book’s first author, and is responsible for the contents.

How bad is all this? Given the combination of distorted presentation of scientific studies, fabricated quotes, and plagiarism—and yes, by any standards it’s plagiarism—it looks pretty bad. In fact, if the book had been by a less revered person I suspect it would have been withdrawn from publication, as were two of Jonah Lehrer’s books that contained fabricated quotes or other unattributed material. Seeds of Hope was scheduled for release on April 2, but this has apparently been postponed indefinitely while the publisher, Hachette, allows Goodall to “correct any unintentional errors.”

“Unintentional errors” is the same excuse I’ve gotten in the past from students who copied material, but those students were still disciplined for plagiarism.

This is all very sad, and the scandal will surely dog Goodall as she treks around the world giving talks. It’s almost surely sloppiness and not cheating, but if we can’t trust Jane Goodall to report things accurately, who can we trust?

E. O. Wilson mistakenly touts group selection (again) as a key factor in human evolution

February 26, 2013 • 9:43 am

As most of you know, Edward O. Wilson is one of the world’s most famous and accomplished biologists.  He was the founder of evolutionary psychology (known as “sociobiology” back then), author of two Pulitzer-Prize-winning books, one of the world’s great experts on ants, an ardent advocate for biological conservation, and a great natural historian. His legacy in the field is secure.

So it’s sad to see him, at the end of his career, repeatedly flogging a discredited theory (“group selection”: evolution via the differential propagation and extinction of groups rather than genes or individuals) as the most important process of evolutionary change in humans and other social species. Let me back up: group selection is not “discredited,” exactly; rather, it’s not thought to be an important force in evolution.  There’s very little evidence that any trait (in fact, I can’t think of one, including cooperation) has evolved via the differential proliferation of groups.

In contrast, there is a ton of evidence for an alternative explanation for cooperation: kin selection, the selection of genes based on how they affect not just the fitness of the individual, but the fitness of relatives that share its genes.  Features like parental behavior, parent-offspring conflict, sibling rivalry, and preferential dispensing of favor to relatives, as well as features like sex ratios in insects—all of these are all easily explained by kin selection.  And many aspects of cooperation can easily be explained by individual selection: individuals that live in small groups, especially those in which one can recognize group members, can evolve cooperation as an individual good based on reciprocity: the “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” hypothesis.  And, as I’ve discussed before, the cooperative and “altruistic” behavior seen in our own species shows many features suggesting that it evolved via individual or kin selection and not group selection.

I’ve covered this issue many times (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here), so I won’t go over the arguments again. Wilson’s “theory” that group selection is more important than kin selection in the evolution of social behavior (published in Nature with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita) was criticized strongly by 156 scientists—including virtually every luminary in social evolution—in five letters to the editor, and sentiment about the importance of group selection has, if anything, decreased since Wilson’s been pushing it.

But Wilson persists, to the detriment of his reputation. In a new piece at the New York Times “Opinionator” site, “The riddle of the human species,” Wilson continues to make the same argument that group (or “multilevel”) selection was a key force in making humans (and social insects) the socially complicated species they are.  Since his arguments are virtually identical to those published in a NYT Opinionator piece last June, and in his book The Social Conquest of Earth (see part of my review here), I won’t dissect them in detail. I just want to highlight three points that I think make Wilson’s argument for group selection—and against kin selection—deeply misleading. I wouldn’t spend my time writing time-consuming critiques like this were Wilson not famous, influential, and given a big public forum in the New York Times. Someone has to address his arguments!

Here are Wilson’s errors (quotes indented), and my responses:

1. Wilson: Humans are a “eusocial species”:

. . the known eusocial species arose very late in the history of life. It appears to have occurred not at all during the great Paleozoic diversification of insects, 350 to 250 million years before the present, during which the variety of insects approached that of today. Nor is there as yet any evidence of eusocial species during the Mesozoic Era until the appearance of the earliest termites and ants between 200 and 150 million years ago. Humans at the Homo level appeared only very recently, following tens of millions of years of evolution among the primates.

My response:  “Eusociality” as defined by Wilson and every other evolutionist is the condition in which a species has a reproductive and social division of labor: eusocial species have “castes” that do different tasks, with a special reproductive caste (“queens”) that do all the progeny producing, and “worker castes” that are genetically sterile and do the tending of the colony. Such species include Hymenoptera (ants, wasps and bees, though not all species are eusocial), termites, naked mole rats, and some other insects.

But humans don’t have reproductive castes, nor genetically determined worker castes.  Wilson is going against biological terminology, lumping humans with ants as “eusocial,” so he can apply his own theories of “altruism” in social insects (i.e., workers “unselfishly” help their mothers produce offspring while refraining themselves from reproducing), to humans. But human cooperation and altruism are very different from the behavior of ants, most notably in our absence of genetic castes and genetically-based sterility associated with helping others reproduce. Human females aren’t sterile, and don’t usually refrain from reproduction just to help other women have babies.  My guess is that Wilson lumps humans with insects as “eusocial” because he wants to subsume them both under a Grand Theory of Social Evolution.

2. Wilson: Kin selection doesn’t work, ergo it certainly couldn’t have played a role in the evolution of eusociality and human cooperation.

Still, to recognize the rare coming together of cooperating primates is not enough to account for the full potential of modern humans that brain capacity provides. Evolutionary biologists have searched for the grandmaster of advanced social evolution, the combination of forces and environmental circumstances that bestowed greater longevity and more successful reproduction on the possession of high social intelligence. At present there are two competing theories of the principal force. The first is kin selection: individuals favor collateral kin (relatives other than offspring) making it easier for altruism to evolve among members of the same group. Altruism in turn engenders complex social organization, and, in the one case that involves big mammals, human-level intelligence.

The second, more recently argued theory (full disclosure: I am one of the modern version’s authors), the grandmaster is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists because of a recent mathematical proof that kin selection can arise only under special conditions that demonstrably do not exist, and the better fit of multilevel selection to all of the two dozen known animal cases of eusocial evolution.

My response:  There is so much fail here I don’t know where to start.  The first paragraph is basically correct except that Wilson omits “individual selection” along with “kin selection” as an accepted evolutionary process that can promote the evolution of cooperation. As I mentioned, selection on individuals in small groups can allow the evolution of cooperation without any need to invoke the unparsimonious process of differential group survival based on genes.

Wilson’s claim that the “special conditions of kin selection” demonstrably do not exist is an egregious and (I think) willful misstatement.  Kin selection can cause evolution whenever the genes in an individual benefit relatives that share copies of that individual’s genes, and can do so whenever the benefit of that behavior to the recipients, devalued by their degree of relatedness to the donor (a figure usually ranging between 0 and 1, but which can be related if an individual helps another less related to it than the average member of the population) is greater than the reproductive cost to the donor.  (“Hamilton’s rule”: rb > c.) That is known to obtain in many cases, and explains things like parental care, parent-offspring conflict, sex ratios in insects, and many other features (see the five letters in Nature mentioned above, which list some features of social behavior that clearly evolved by kin rather than group selection).

The mathematical “proof” given by Nowak et al. does not show that group selection is a better explanation than kin selection for social behavior in insects, for their “proof” does not vary the level of kinship, as it must if it could allow that conclusion.

The second egregious and false claim in this paragraph (a paragraph that’s the highlight of the piece) is that “multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists” because of the Nowak et al. paper. That’s simply not true.  The form of multilevel selection adumbrated in that paper is, to my knowledge, embraced by exactly four people: the three authors of the paper and David Sloan Wilson. There is, and has been, no increase in acceptance of group or multilevel selection in the past ten years. The Nowak et al. paper has sunk without a stone, except to incite criticism by other biologists and excitement by an uncomprehending press.

3. Wilson: Eusociality in insects arose not via kin selection, but via the initial construction of a defended nest site.

The history of eusociality raises a question: given the enormous advantage it confers, why was this advanced form of social behavior so rare and long delayed? The answer appears to be the special sequence of preliminary evolutionary changes that must occur before the final step to eusociality can be taken. In all of the eusocial species analyzed to date, the final step before eusociality is the construction of a protected nest, from which foraging trips begin and within which the young are raised to maturity. The original nest builders can be a lone female, a mated pair, or a small and weakly organized group. When this final preliminary step is attained, all that is needed to create a eusocial colony is for the parents and offspring to stay at the nest and cooperate in raising additional generations of young. Such primitive assemblages then divide easily into risk-prone foragers and risk-averse parents and nurses.

My response:  Phylogenetic studies show that eusociality in Hymenoptera always originated in species whose females mated only once: this is a statistically significant result.  And that alone militates for kin selection as an important factor in eusociality: if a female founds a colony consisting only of full siblings (as is the case when she mated only once), they are more related to each other than if she had mated multiply. In the later case, colonies would consist of half-sisters or even more distant relatives, making kin selection less efficient.

Further, relatedness is high in virtually every species of eusocial insect with the exception of a few highly derived species of ants that have many queens.  The connection between relatedness and eusociality is exactly what we expect if kin selection is important in social evolution, and is not expected if Wilson’s nest-based group selection was important. The model of Nowak et al., which starts with the construction of such nests by single females who stay in the nests with their offspring, produces precisely the condition in which relatedness can promote the evolution of sterility and cooperation.  They argue that this relatedness is a consequence of their model and not a cause of eusocial evolution, but that’s unconvincing, for they do not vary the level of initial relatedness in their model.

*****

Wilson’s claim, the theme of his newest book, is that humans are both angels and devils: we are both selfish and cooperative species, and this combination of good and bad is what makes our species unique. (That’s not true, of course, because many species show that mixture of behavior. Lions, for instance, cooperate when hunting, but when males take over a pride they immediately kill all the female’s cubs, which are unrelated to them. And that, by the way, is due to kin selection, because those cub-killing males replace the cubs with new cubs containing their own genes, including the genes for killing cubs. Cub-killing could have evolved only by individual selection and not group selection, for while killing another male’s cubs is good for an individual, it’s bad for the group, forcing females to waste reproductive energy.)

Yes, we have both selfish and cooperative behaviors, though most of our “cooperative” behaviors that didn’t arise through culture arose through forms of selection that involve maximizing our reproductive output—individual and kin selection.  There is not a scintilla of evidence, in humans or any other species, that group selection has been responsible for the evolution of any adaptation.  In contrast, individual and kin selection have productively explained the evolution of “problematic” traits like altruism and cooperation. They have been tested and work.

Why does Wilson keep writing article and article, and book after book, promoting group selection? I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know the answer. What I do know, though, is that his seeming monomaniacal concentration on a weakly-supported form of evolution can serve only to erode his reputation.  His theories have not gained traction in the scientific community. That doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, for, in the end, scientific truth is decided by experiment and observation, not by the numbers of people initially on each side of an issue. But the facts of science already show that Wilson is unlikely to be correct. What is sad is that, as a great natural historian, he doesn’t recognize this.

Wilson’s reputation is secure. It’s sad to see it tarnished by ill-founded arguments for an unsubstantiated evolutionary process.

h/t: Phil Ward, Laurence Hurst