Category: science education

My WaPo review of David Quammen’s new book on evolutionary trees (and a comparison with other reviews)

August 24, 2018 • 11:00 am

I’ve just reviewed David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, for the Washington Post. Click on the screenshot to see my review. (Note that the original title, which was a bit misleading, has been changed to the new one below.) It will be in the paper version of Sunday’s Post.

Since the topic of the book is evolutionary trees, in particular their reality (or nonreality, according to Quammen), I asked that my piece be illustrated with Darwin’s famous “tree sketch” from one of his pre-Origin notebooks:

Charles Darwin’s sketch of the “Tree of Life” illustrates his theory that species evolved from a common ancestor. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The point of Quammen’s book is largely that the “tree of life” isn’t treelike, and that’s because of endosymbiosis (e.g., the creation of eukaryotic cells that harbored mitochondria and chloroplasts by ingesting and using other microbes), and, mainly, because of “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT): the movement of DNA between rather unrelated organisms.

Besides this point, Quammen’s protagonist is Carl Woese, who discovered that life really comprises three distinct domains: Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukarya. Because the book consisted of several distinct stories, I chose to concentrate in my review on what seemed to be Quammen’s main point: that the tree of life is simply “wrong” (his words), and can’t really be represented by a tree. The Tangled Tree falls into the “Darwin was wrong” genre of books.

I disagreed about the unreality of trees, especially in the Eukarya, where assumptions of branching trees have worked well in reconstructing the history of species, despite occasional movement of genes between branches. Even in microbes Quammen isn’t completely correct: while HGT is more common among microbes than eukaryotes, it hasn’t, for instance, completely effaced phylogenetic relationships between bacteria, and of course didn’t prevent Woese from discovering, via DNA sequencing and biochemistry, that Archaea is a separate “domain” from the other two. With a limit of 1200 words, I had to largely ignore the stuff about endosymbiosis and Woese’s discovery to concentrate on the main point of the book: the “hook” that was used to sell it.

You can read my review at the link, or, if you’re paywalled, you can get a copy by judicious inquiry.

I’ll also add one correction to my review. Here’s part of what I wrote:

More remarkably, more-complex species can simply incorporate genes from the environment. Microscopic rotifers, for instance, dehydrate in dry conditions; when they rehydrate, the absorbed water can contain bits of DNA from nearby species, so that the rotifer genome can become riddled with “found” DNA segments from groups like fungi and plants.

The rotifer story now appears to be not at all a case of HGT at all, but of contamination by DNA from other species during sequencing. That was revealed in an article published in Current Biology on August 6, and which I didn’t know about until my article was in press (thanks to Matthew Cobb for pointing that out to me). So even that famous example of HGT is wrong. Some biologists think that most evidence of HGT in eukaryotes is due to contamination of this sort, but I remain open-minded. We already know, as I said, that HGT is not sufficiently frequent in multicellular organisms to efface their evolutionary ancestry.

I want to say a few words about three other reviews that have appeared about Quammen’s book. The first two are at the New York Times (click on screenshots to go to articles):

Seghal is a literary critic, and it shows: she criticizes the book as a piece of writing (she likes it) but doesn’t at all tackle the science. In fact, she admits, if not flaunts, ignorance of the science:

In 1977, Woese and his colleagues at the University of Illinois announced their discovery of a “third domain” of life — single-cell microbes they called archaea — genetically distinct from what were thought to be the only two lineages of life: prokaryotes, which include bacteria, and eukaryotes, which include plants and animals. (It’s O.K., I might have missed the memo, too.)

Missed the memo? If you know the least bit about biology, you know about Archaea. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t be reviewing this book. And there’s this:

But this new knowledge — that we are genetically a mosaic — challenges our conception of human identity. What does it mean to be an “individual,” if we are such composite creatures?

Quammen raises and rushes past these existential questions; like the White Rabbit, he spends some sections in a bit of a mad rush. There’s a “Montana blizzard of facts” he wants to shepherd us through; a dizzying array of scientists, past and present, he must introduce. (Please don’t ask me if I can tell my Norton Zinder from my Oswald Avery.)

This is simple parading of the critic’s ignorance to excuse her inability to discuss the science. It is in fact embarrassing. And she doesn’t grasp the science: there’s not a peep about whether the concept of evolutionary trees are, as Quammen claims, pretty useless.  Seghal’s review is a paradigm for why science books should be reviewed either by scientists or by people who know a fair amount about the science at issue.

Erika Hayden, on the other hand, is qualified to review the book: she’s a science journalist and director of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And her review is better than that of Sehgal, although again she doesn’t weigh the evidence for the existence of evolutionary trees; she takes Quammen’s conclusions at face value.

But Hayden has her own beef: she sees the book as antifeminist:

But if Quammen is writing for the ages, his prose at times risks feeling dated. His book spans nearly three centuries and mentions more than 160 scientists by name. Of those, by my count, only 11 are women, and Quammen often dismisses their scientific credentials and achievements or portrays them as appendages to men in the story.

Lynn Margulis, for instance, fundamentally revised our understanding of eukaryote evolution, elucidating how nature’s most complex cells, including our own, arose when simpler cells joined together. She is the only female scientist who is called out and gets significant space in Quammen’s book. But we hear just as much about her pregnancies, motherhood and marriages as we do about her science.

In contrast, Quammen doesn’t really spend equal time exploring the family arrangements of the male scientists in the book. It’s a classic failure of the Finkbeiner test, formulated by the journalist Christie Aschwanden, which posits that a female scientist’s gender is not her most salient characteristic. If scientists’ family lives are important, journalists should write about the families of both male and female scientists. Otherwise, we perpetuate the stereotype that a woman scientist’s primary responsibility is to care for her family, while men should float free from such pedestrian concerns in their pursuit of research.

As for the imbalance between male and female scientists, that simply reflects the gender composition of the field at the time the work was done. In that sense the book is dated, but not unfair.

I reread those sections, and that on Margulis, to see if Hayden had a point, and concluded that she’s wrong. Margulis’s work was discussed in detail, with her science occupying far more space than a few sentences about her family life, including her marriage to Carl Sagan. (The spouses of male scientists aren’t ignored, either, and I don’t think that the women scientists, who are often praised, are given short shrift.) Quammen’s brief mention of Margulis’s family was meant only to show that she accomplished much of her work when she was a single mother of three children and holding down another job, and was meant to laud her accomplishments during a difficult period of her life. (Margulis, of course, was problematic in other ways, being a 9-11 truther, and someone who pushed her theory of endosymbiosis much farther than she should have. She wrote a book on speciation with her son, for instance, that was so bad that it was the only book I’ve ever refused to review for a major venue. It wasn’t even wrong.) In general, then, I don’t agree with Hayden calling out the book for sexism, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Finally, there’s this review from the New Republic (click on screenshot). Gaffney is identified as “a physician and writer with a focus on health care politics, policy, and history. He is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance.”

 

Gaffney’s review is good for what it is: a recounting of what the book is about. But it again falls short in evaluating Quammen’s thesis, and says only this (besides a long bit on the transfer of antibiotic resistance among bacteria by HGT):

Ultimately The Tree of Life is merely a metaphor, but I think a pleasant one: It connects us to the lineage of all living things, all the way back to the bag of chemicals—or maybe the single molecule—that one day coalesced in the primordial muck. Yet like all metaphors, the “tree” falls short of reality. For in biology, all boundaries are blurred: between species, sometimes even between individual organisms, and probably between the living and the non-living.

No, not all boundaries are blurred. Homo sapiens doesn’t interbreed with any other species of primate, nor do many, many other species. And really, is the line is blurred between, say, Jerry Coyne and Meryl Streep? How? As for the “unreality” of trees, I disagree. So long as species arise from the transformation of populations, usually geographically isolated ones, the history of life is indeed largely treelike. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the history of life. Yet we can!

Now Quammen’s book has its good points. For one thing, it tells you the nitty-gritty about how science is done, complete with rivalries, jealousies, and backbiting. Quammen did his historical homework. And it’s a well-written story. But as you’ll see from my review, I think his report on the demise of Darwin’s tree is greatly exaggerated.

 

h/t: Stephen

Tel Aviv’s new natural history museum (built to look like Noah’s Ark) deliberately omits mentioning evolution

August 8, 2018 • 8:30 am

I’ve previously written about two natural history museums in Israel that either didn’t mention evolution or covered up the evolution exhibits with curtains when school groups of creationist Haredis (hyper-orthodox Jews) were visiting (see here and here). The two were the Museum of Natural History and the Biblical Museum of Natural History, both in Jerusalem.

Now a reader has visited a new natural history museum in Tel Aviv, the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, and again the museum omits almost all mention of evolution. The word, in fact, appears only once in the whole panoply of exhibits. Here’s what my reader reports:

I’m writing to draw your attention to something that I believe is of interest to you.

I just completed a careful tour of the new museum of natural history in Tel Aviv University. Celebrated as the only natural history museum in the Middle East [JAC: well, that’s not exactly accurate], it turned out to also be the only natural history museum in the world where the topic of evolution is deliberately avoided as to not to offend religious people.

In the whole museum I could find only one sign that included the word ‘evolved’ (or any other derivation of it) and one sign with a phylogenetic tree; neither included any further explanation. One or two signs mentioned ‘million of years’ again without any explanation. In one sign they used ‘developed’ where it should have been ‘evolved’.

Here are some of the photos, one showing the mention of evolution.

Lots of mention of process and adaptation, but nothing of evolution (click on all photos to enlarge):

“Transition” and “development” used instead of “evolution”:

Once more the word “develop” is used instead of of “evolve”. That conflation will of course be confusing, as “development” can refer to what happens during the lifetime of a single individual:

Phylogeny without any mention of evolution. How are students supposed to understand this?

 

Note how the word “evolution” is avoided in the explanation below; the euphemism used is “developed over millions of years through a process determined by heredity.” That’s bogus and even wrong: evolution isn’t determined by heredity: processes like natural selection also play a role. The avoidance of “evolution” is painfully obvious.

Finally, the only use of the word “evolution” or “evolve” that my correspondent could find in the whole museum (my emphasis):

From the Museum’s webpage, we learn that the building itself is meant to reflect in part Noah’s ark:

The museum can be found at 12 Klausner Street, Tel Aviv. The building architecture itself is a mix between a treasure chest and Noah’s arch [sic], representing the large range of biodiversity found inside.

Here’s the building, and yes, it’s boat-shaped:

Seriously? Yes, I know the statement is taken from a quip from J. B. S. Haldane, but of course he was an atheist.

It’s unbelievable that a natural history museum in one of Israel’s best universities can almost completely omit mention of evolution—the process that produced the diversity of flora and fauna on display. It’s especially embarrassing to me because I’m sure this was a deliberate omission, made to satisfy those Orthodox Jews who don’t accept evolution. As a secular nonbelieving Jew with genetic ties to these people, and as an evolutionary biologist, I find this deliberate ignorance on the part of the Museum—and the religiously based creationism of the Orthodox to which the Museum caters—appalling.

Here’s a video about the Museum (notice that they refer to it as an “ark”), again omitting all mention of evolution. Founding benefactor Michael Steinhardt (his wife Judy was co-benefactor) remarks at the end, “The natural history museum here in Israel will do more for the next generations of young people than just about any other institution I could envisage.” NOT IF THEY LEAVE OUT EVOLUTION!—the great lesson that underlies the whole exhibit.

The Museum Chair, shown in the video above, is Professor Tamar Dayan (see other officers here and the scientific staff here). The page listing donors and partners also notes that “The museum operates under the auspices of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.” SERIOUSLY? The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities? Are they aware of the quasi-creationist enterprise they’re sponsoring?

Contact information for Professor Dayan, also the Curator of Terrestrial Vertebrates and a Professor at the University of Tel Aviv, can be found here, and I have emailed her the following:

Dear Professor Dayan,

As an evolutionary biologist (and secular Jew), I’m appalled to find that Tel Aviv’s new Steinhardt Museum of Natural History omits all mention of evolution except a single time, confusingly referring to it as “development.” I firmly believe, and have heard, that this omission was deliberate, designed to avoid offending those Orthodox Jews who don’t accept evolution.

It is insupportable for a major natural history museum like yours to have a huge building and many exhibits devoted to evolution while deliberately obscuring the process that produced the organisms on display.  I was also disturbed to find that the Museum operates under the auspices of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities.

There is no credible explanation for the lack of mention of evolution in your Museum save as a concession to creationists. If you have another explanation, I will be glad to hear it. In the meantime I have posted about your museum on my website, “Why Evolution is True,” which has 56,000 readers; my post is here: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/08/08/the-new-natural-history-museum-in-tel-aviv-built-to-look-like-noahs-ark-deliberately-omits-mentioning-evolution/   .

I will also contact some Israeli newspapers.

I implore you and your scientific staff to put evolution in its proper place in your museum. As Theodosius Dobzhansky (my academic grandfather) said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I hope you can fix your museum so it can make sense to the many people who visit.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne

Professor Emeritus
Department of Ecology and Evolution
The University of Chicago

Shermer on consciousness, free will, and God

July 13, 2018 • 10:00 am

The latest Scentific American has a short column by Michael Shermer on why he thinks consciousness, free will, and God are “insoluble mysteries”. Click on the screenshot to read the piece.


 

When I read it, I jotted down some thoughts that took issue with Shermer’s notion that all three are “insoluble”, and sent a few questions to Michael, whose answers I’ve put below the fold. I think he’s gone amiss with free will and God, but does have a point about consciousness. Excerpts from Michael’s article are indented, and he’s given me permission to quote his emails to me.

Here’s Shermer’s thesis from the Sci Am piece:

Are these “hard” problems, as philosopher David Chalmers characterized consciousness, or are they truly insoluble “mysterian” problems, as philosopher Owen Flanagan designated them (inspired by the 1960s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians)? The “old mysterians” were dualists who believed in nonmaterial properties, such as the soul, that cannot be explained by natural processes. The “new mysterians,” Flanagan says, contend that consciousness can never be explained because of the limitations of human cognition. I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems—not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the concepts are conceived in language. Call those of us in this camp the “final mysterians.”

Well, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, this depends on what the meaning of “solved” is. I would contend that consciousness can in principle be “solved”, but not perhaps in the sense of how Shermer conceives of a “solution.” On the other hand, I think free will and God can indeed be “solved” scientifically: that is, we can get provisional answers about their existence or non-existence. And I think those answers are in. Let’s take the three areas in order:

Consciousness. Michael conceives of a solution as solving the “hard problem” of consciousness: what is it really like to be in someone else’s shoes, or the shoes of another species (most famously Thomas Nagel’s bat? And I agree with Shermer when he says this:

It is not possible to know what it is like to be a bat (in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous thought experiment), because if you altered your brain and body from humanoid to batoid, you would just be a bat, not a human knowing what it feels like to be a bat.

. . . By definition, only I can know my first-person experience of being me, and the same is true for you, bats and bugs.

That much is true, but if you conceive of the problem of consciousness, as I initially did, as “what are the neurological correlates that make somebody or something conscious?”, then that is in principle soluble. I asked Michael if he thought I, Jerry Coyne, was conscious, and if he did, didn’t that make the neurological solution possible in principle? (That is, just see what neurology goes with thinking that something else is conscious, or produce it using AI and using the same criteria we use when deciding that other people are conscious.) Michael responded by email:

I misunderstood your question: how do I know anyone else, much less a bat, is conscious. I don’t, and I can’t, through introspection or any other subjective form of experience. It is an inference to the best explanation that since I know I’m conscious, it is much more likely that the people around me with whom I interact are also conscious than that they’re not, and ergo by extension that everyone alive is conscious (with, of course exceptions for the truly brain dead), and by further extension across the phylogenetic tree other mammals are conscious, etc. I would even extend this to AI robots, when that day comes, if they exhibit similar characteristics to humans and other sentient animals: self-awareness, emotion, perceptive sensitive, responsive, thinking, and able to feel and suffer.

He then sent an excerpt about this from his book “The Moral Arc” which  I’ve put below the fold. I agree with him that I see no scientific way to experience the consciousness of another being, but disagree that the question he didn’t ask is also insoluble: whether we can find out what it takes to be conscious.

Free Will.  I think the answer is already in here. We do not have free will in the sense that most people conceive of it: as a libertarian, dualistic form of “I-could-have-done-otherwise” agency. Physics and determinism have solved this already, and neuroscience is buttressing the negation of this form of free will. One can, of course, define free will in a form that makes it compatible with determinism, but that’s a semantic solution, not a scientific one.  Michael’s contention in his article, below, is a bit confusing, and I’ve put the confusing points in bold:

Few scientists dispute that we live in a deterministic universe in which all effects have causes (except in quantum mechanics, although this just adds an element of randomness to the system, not freedom). And yet we all act as if we have free will—that we make choices among options and retain certain degrees of freedom within constraining systems. Either we are all delusional, or else the problem is framed to be conceptually impenetrable. We are not inert blobs of matter bandied about the pinball machine of life by the paddles of nature’s laws; we are active agents within the causal net of the universe, both determined by it and helping to determine it through our choices. That is the compatibilist position from whence volition and culpability emerge.

Yes, we act as if we have free will, but so what? The solvable question, which is an empirical and not a semantic one, has been solved. We may think we could have done otherwise, but we couldn’t have.  Michael’s claims that we are not inert blobs of matter but are “active agents” and “help to determine [the causal net of the universe] through our own choices” are claims that verge on dualism.

I know that Shermer is not a dualist, but this kind of language is deeply confusing. And what, pray tell, are the “certain degrees of freedom within constraining systems”? If that is not a nod to dualism—to I-could-have-done-otherwise-ism—I don’t know what is! “Degrees of freedom” certainly implies freedom of agency, which implies that we could have done other than what we did.

God. Michael makes a mistake, I think, when he thinks that the Sophisticated Theologians’™ idea of God has removed god from the realm of testability. His article says this:

If the creator of the universe is supernatural—outside of space and time and nature’s laws—then by definition, no natural science can discover God through any measurements made by natural instruments. By definition, this God is an unsolvable mystery. If God is part of the natural world or somehow reaches into our universe from outside of it to stir the particles (to, say, perform miracles like healing the sick), we should be able to quantify such providential acts. This God is scientifically soluble, but so far all claims of such measurements have yet to exceed statistical chance. In any case, God as a natural being who is just a whole lot smarter and more powerful than us is not what most people conceive of as deific.

I think that while Shermer is right that a theistic god is a testable god, he mistakenly conflates “supernatural” with “outside of space and time and nature’s laws”. To most people, God may be outside of space and time, and supernatural, and even be outside of nature’s laws, but still can interact with people and the universe. And if that’s the case, then one can make inferences about God’s existence. For example, God could be outside of space and time, and beyond our known laws of nature, but supernaturally answer prayers. He could, for example, answer the prayers of Catholics but not Baptists or Jews, which would give us evidence for God—evidence that Shermer says cannot exist. In Faith versus Fact I give more such evidence that could testify to the nature of even a removed and rarefied God so long as he interacts with the universe. Carl Sagan gave more possible evidence in his great book The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (read it!).

We have no such evidence, despite the fact that we could in principle. This all suggests that if a god really does exist, it does not interact with the cosmos, regardless of whether it’s outside space or time, supernatural, violates physical law, and so on. The only kind of god that’s truly a mystery and must remain so is a god that does not manifest itself in any empirically verifiable way. Michael’s email response to me (below the fold) does not clarify the issue.

Have at it!

 

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Infinite Monkey Cage: Episode 100

July 12, 2018 • 8:45 am

The Infinite Monkey Cage, the entertaining BBC science and comedy show hosted by Robin Ince and Brian Cox, has just celebrated its 100th episode. You can hear the hour-long show at the link below; Matthew, who was in the audience. commented:

They have a couple of vicars on it, heaven knows why, one an ex rockstar who is always in the radio and the other doesn’t really seem to believe in the Bible at all. They got some snarky comments from Eric Idle and Alice Roberts. [JAC: One of Alice’s tweets is below.]

Here are the participants and those in charge:

To hear the show, click on the screenshot below and then the arrow at lower left:

There’s also a video version here (via @bbciplayer), but it’s not visible outside the UK. Matthew notes, “I’m in the front row next to Nick Lane next to Steve Jones. Virtually all the VIP audience members (= ex-panelists) were from University College London, but none of the panelists on this episode were.”

 

 

How best to communicate science?

June 8, 2018 • 1:15 pm

It is increasingly evident that, unlike acceptance of most scientific “truths” (i.e. provisional truths), acceptance of evolution rests not on knowing the many facts supporting evolution, but about being part of a “tribe” (liberals, intelligentsia, and so on) that either accepts evolution, or of a “tribe” (conservative religionists and Republicans) that rejects evolution. Here, for instance, is a section of Steve Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, that gives the results of a recent survey:

This is not exactly heartwarming to someone like me, whose first and most popular book is a presentation of the evidence for evolution. Did I go wrong trying to do that? Shouldn’t have I been working on getting people to change tribes rather than giving them evidence on a subject about which they’d already made up their minds? Well, yes, that’s one reason I criticize religion—the main constituent of anti-evolution tribalism.

This doesn’t just go for evolution. As you might expect, tribalism affects the acceptance of science when it comes to other stuff like global warming and vaccination, although in the case of global warming, at least, the tribalism is based more on politics than on religion. Regardless, however, when it comes to accepting “controversial” theories, scientific facts take a back seat to ideology and the desire to flaunt your membership credentials to your tribe.

A new piece in Quillete by Ryan Glaubke gives other evidence for a tribalistic effect on science acceptance. (Glaubke is a grad student at Old Dominion University in Virginia, studying climate science.) In “Communicating science in an era of post-truth” (not a title I like), he contrasts the “deficit model” of science acceptance (your acceptance is based on understanding the phenomenon) with the “cultural cognition model” (your acceptance of science is based on your perception of your social identity, and the beliefs that jibe with others of that identity). To Glaubke, the data so far suggests that the latter model is more important:

Yet the deficit model cuts against a mounting body of evidence that suggests literacy is not the primary contributor to the public’s attitude towards science. For instance, a group of researchers led by Yale Professor Dan Kahan conducted a survey of over 1,500 U.S. adults to assess the relationship between the public’s understanding of climate change and their assessment of the risk it poses to our society. They discovered that participants with an extensive understanding of the science were actually less concerned about the potential devastations of climate change, a finding that directly conflicted with the predictions of the deficit model. In its place, Kahan offered what he called the cultural cognition thesis. This holds that an individual’s perception of science—and, in turn, assessment of risk—is primarily influenced by perception of social identity.

Kahan’s theory is supported by a recent study conducted at the Philipp University of Marburg in Germany, where researchers demonstrated that a participant’s interpretation of science—as well as their opinion of scientists—is significantly influenced by their perceived membership of a social community. When presented with evidence that conflicts with their predisposed worldview, participants were more likely to doubt the integrity of the science and the credibility of the scientist. The implication here is that when our deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, we tend to dismiss the science and cling to our beliefs with even greater vehemence—a phenomenon known as the backfire effect.

These studies suggest that the implementation of the deficit model and its associated attempts at ‘educating’ the public only exacerbate the divide between experts and lay citizens. Such attempts antagonize the very people with whom professional scientists need to connect, reinforcing the perception of an ivory tower and further isolating academics from the general populace. The deficit model approach, then, cannot be the solution to the polarization we see today. As Will Storr succinctly put it in his 2014 book The Unpersuadables: “Reason is no magic bullet.”

If reason and data don’t work, then, what do we do? The only solution, according to Glaubke, is to make people think that accepted science is not contrary to the tenets of their tribe. It is, as we discussed years ago with reference to the ideas of Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet, to engage in “framing.” In the case of religion, for instance, you have to trot out religious scientists like Francis Collins to show that you can be religious and also accept evolution. In other words, you have to show people that someone they trust—a member of their tribe—accepts the science they reject.

Glaubke:

It follows, then, that in order to effectively communicate science in our modern, socially-compartmentalized society, scientists must tailor their messages to meet the concerns, priorities, and values of those they wish to reach. By reframing the science to meet the needs of the general public, communicators are able to transcend our faulty evolutionary design—tribalism, belief, our affinity for emotionally-laden thinking—by leveraging their influence over our information processing, much like a Trojan Horse that allows facts to clear the mental barriers we erect against uncomfortable truths. I call this the adaptive model of science communication.

A few recent examples illustrate the method’s utility and success.7 In an effort to connect with evangelicals about the importance of environmental conservation, the entomologist and author E. O. Wilson argued in his book The Creation that, as the species granted dominion over this world by god, we have a moral duty to act as responsible stewards of the environment. Using this moral framework, Dr. Wilson was able to reach a new audience by carefully linking the urgency of ecological preservation to the values enshrined in the Bible.

In a similar attempt to reach the religious community, the National Academies and the Institute of Medicine framed their joint report on the teaching of evolution in science classrooms by moving away from the antagonistic ‘science vs. religion’ narrative, and suggesting that science and religious faith can be reconciled. By highlighting religious scientists (such as NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins) or religious figures who accept evolutionary science (such as the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby) religious communities could be persuaded that they do not have to choose between empirical evidence and their religious identity. This is a controversial idea, but a useful tool nonetheless.

Somehow I’m unable to do this. I am not constituted in a way that can tell people that science and religion are compatible, for I feel strongly that they aren’t. This does not mean that, when trying to convince people of the truth of evolution (I don’t talk about global warming, as it’s not my area of expertise), I tell them that religion is bunk and that they’re morons if they’re creationists. Clearly you won’t get anywhere by antagonizing your audience at the outset. This is why I try to separate my criticisms of religion from my advocacy of evolution, although in evolution talks I’ll often end, after giving lots of evidence, by mentioning that the reason people reject such good evidence is religion. I don’t mix the magisteria, to use Gould’s phrase, but I don’t water down my criticisms of religion, either, nor pretend that there’s no conflict in accepting Jesus and accepting science. Of course there is!

And there’s an important bit missing from Glaubke’s article: evidence.  Although he says that Wilson’s book illustrates the “utility and success” of framing, as does as the National Academy Reports and other hypocritical incursions of such atheistic bodies into theology, there are no data showing that these methods change minds, or, more important, change them more than teaching under the “deficit model.” All he says is that E. O. Wilson or the National Academy “reach a new audience.” The important thing, though, is whether that audience is persuaded. And about that we know—nothing.

I know from experience, and the many emails I’ve gotten, that my book Why Evolution is True did change a number of people’s minds about evolution, turning them from creationists into evolution-acceptors. I also know that Richard Dawkins’s books on both evolution and religion have facilitated both acceptance of evolution and rejection of religion, as evidenced by the hundreds of letters in his Converts Corner site (note: there are 160 pages of letters). In other words, minds have been changed not by framing, but by giving people the unvarnished truth. (A lot of people have come to accept evolution simply as a byproduct of rejecting religion, for there’s no reason to be a creationist unless you’re religious.)

Now where are comparable stories supporting Glaubke’s thesis? Where are the hundreds of pages of letters saying, “You know, I thought evolution was a crock of bullshit until I heard Francis Collins say that evolution was true. Now I accept it!”.  I’m sure the method has worked for some, but there are simply no data supporting it. Likewise, BioLogos, the organization founded by Collins and Uncle Karl Giberson to get evangelical Christians to accept evolution, has been pretty much a dismal failure. Instead of roping thousands of evangelicals into the Tent of Evolution, it’s become a venue for apologetics, with Christians arguing over issues like whether there still could have been a real Adam and Eve, even though evolutionary genetics tells us otherwise. It sure hasn’t made evangelicals flock to Darwinism!

Let us all, then, act according to our constitutions. If you think people can be religious and accept evolution, by all means tell them that, and give them something to gnaw on. If you think that religion and evolution are inimical, as I do, then don’t pretend they are. Teach people the evidence for evolution and let them mull it over. It’s worked for me! Or criticize religion as being an antiscientific purveyor of myths and fairy tales. That’s worked for Dawkins and others. But let us not pretend that the best way to learn science, despite the survey data of Kahan et al., is to communicate the idea that science is consonant with the values of your tribe. That survey data might be correct, but the proof is in the outcome—and we have no evidence that the “trust-me-I’m-one-of-your-tribe” model is better than the deficit and the antagonism-to-religion models.

 

My WaPo review of Carl Zimmer’s new book

June 8, 2018 • 12:33 pm

I wrote a short-ish review of Carl Zimmer’s new book on heredity, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, for the Washington Post. It appeared online today and will be in the paper newspaper on Sunday. You can read it for free by clicking on the screenshot (and please do, so the Post knows people have read it!).

If you can’t access it for free, a judicious inquiry will yield a copy.

The review speaks for itself: the book is good (albeit a bit long for my taste), and shows Zimmer’s qualities as both a science popularizer and someone who cares deeply that what he writes is true. It’s important that every person who professes to be scientifically literate know about advances in genetics, and the best way to get up to speed is to read Zimmer’s book or the other two I mention in the last paragraph of my piece. Not knowing about CRISPR is, to a layperson, equivalent to a scientist not having read any Shakespeare.

Why do people distrust science? It’s religion, stupid!

May 29, 2018 • 9:30 am

Well, yes, my title is a bit clickbaity, as of course there are several reasons why people distrust science. But according to a new post at Aeon by Dutch psychologist Bastiaan T Rutjens, shown below (click on screenshot), an article based on a scholarly paper by him and two colleagues that I haven’t yet read in detail (reference at bottom, free pdf), the main reason is religion.

Of course that’s not something people want to hear. As Rutiens notes, “religiosity has so far been curiously under-researched as a precursor to science skepticism, perhaps because political ideology commanded so much attention)”

So politics has been indicted more strongly; in fact, it’s almost a mantra of science educators (and liberals) that science denialism or skepticism comes from the Right. (I hasten to add that one study of acceptance of evolution in Alabama showed that religiosity was the most important factor in determining whether students accepted evolution; see reference and link to Rissler et al. below.)

At any rate, read either the article below or the paper on which it’s based.

The paper from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (if you can’t download it with the free and legal Unpaywall App, after clicking on the screenshot below, ask me for it),

The initial problem with the academic study is its small sample: 105 North Americans, all employees of Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” program (MTurk). Of course one would think these folks might be less religious than the average American (or North American), but nevertheless it’s a small sample, and hardly random. They do note in the article, though, that “a large-scale cross-national study of science skepticism in Europe and beyond will follow.”

Rutjens et al. investigated four predictors of science skepticism and acceptance: political ideology, religiosity, morality, and knowledge about science. It turns out that for acceptance of most scientific propositions, religion and politics were the most important factors (hierarchical regression analysis was used to parse out each factor independent of the others), but their conclusion was based on a general acceptance of science, not the three areas they asked about (GMOs, vaccinations, and global warming).  Here’s how they judged acceptance of science, using three areas that didn’t include evolution or cosmology:

We provided participants with statements about climate change (eg, ‘Human CO2 emissions cause climate change’), genetic modification (eg, ‘GM of foods is a safe and reliable technology’), and vaccination (eg, ‘I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children’). Participants could indicate to what extent they agreed or disagreed with these statements. We also measured participants’ general faith in science, and included a task in which they could indicate how much federal money should be spent on science, compared with various other domains. We assessed the impact of political ideology, religiosity, moral concerns and science knowledge (measured with a science literacy test, consisting of true or false items such as ‘All radioactivity is made by humans’, and ‘The centre of the Earth is very hot’) on participants’ responses to these various measures.

And the results (direct quotes from the paper):

  • “Political ideology did not play a meaningful role when it came to most of our measures. The only form of science skepticism that was consistently more pronounced among the politically conservative respondents in our studies was, not surprisingly, climate-change skepticism.”
  • “Skepticism about genetic modification was not related to political ideology or religious beliefs, though it did correlate with science knowledge: the worse people did on the scientific literacy test, the more skeptical they were about the safety of genetically modified food. Vaccine skepticism also had no relation to political ideology, but it was strongest among religious participants, with a particular relation to moral concerns about the naturalness of vaccination.”

So climate-change skepticism, but not the other two areas, was related to political ideology. No surprise there. GMO skepticism was related to neither politics or religion, but was correlated with science knowledge: those who knew more about science were less skeptical of GMOs. That doesn’t surprise me, either. Vaccine skepticism was related to religion, which is the one area I might have guessed would be related to the degree of one’s faith, which I think is related to religion. In fact, I think that some of the relationship between religion and science skepticism comes not from religion directly, but from the fact that religion activates a “faith” organ: a willingness to believe what you find congenial regardless of the evidence.

At any rate, given the above, how can the authors declare that religion was so important? Because they also measured “general faith” in science, and so found the following:

  • Moving beyond domain-specific skepticism, what did we observe about a general trust in science, and the willingness to support science more broadly? The results were quite clear: trust in science was by far the lowest among the religious. In particular, religious orthodoxy was a strong negative predictor of faith in science and the orthodox participants were also the least positive about investing federal money in science. But notice here again political ideology did not contribute any meaningful variance over and beyond religiosity.

The authors conclude this, which I agree with in general:

Additionally, these results suggest that science skepticism cannot simply be remedied by increasing people’s knowledge about science. The impact of scientific literacy on science skepticism, trust in science, and willingness to support science was minor, save for the case of genetic modification. Some people are reluctant to accept particular scientific findings, for various reasons. When the aim is to combat skepticism and increase trust in science, a good starting point is to acknowledge that science skepticism comes in many forms.

I’d disagree with the general statement that science skepticism can’t be remedied by science education. It’s true, for instance, that teaching people about evolution, as I did in my book WEIT, can’t make most Americans accept purely naturalistic evolution (only about 20% do). But it can change some minds. I have emails to this effect, and of course Richard Dawkins has many more testimonies on his “Converts Corner” (see here; there are 159 pages!) about how his evolution books “converted” people not just to Darwinism, but deconverted them from religion.

But if we want a world free from creationism, the only way to do that is to make religion disappear. Yes, there will still be a few creationists, not only because religion won’t disappear completely, but because evolution has several implications that people find unsavory. Still, if I could choose between facilitating the acceptance of evolution by having people either a.) read and understand Why Evolution is True, or b.) have their religion mysteriously vanish, I’m sure the most efficacious tactic would be b.)

These authors, if you accept their results—and I await a much larger study instead of the meager 105 subjects assayed here—imply that a more general acceptance of science will also come with the death of religion. I’m not sure why that might be, though I’ve offered one theory: the buttressing of faith through religious belief, a faith that rejects propositions that are palpably true.

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, we don’t really need science courses to remediate science denialism—we need critical thinking courses.” And that may be true, though I have little experience with them and big doubts about how they’d proceed. Nevertheless, if this study is replicated, we’ll have even more ammunition against religion—as if we needed any! Few people want to be seen as anti-science, and if we have stronger evidence that religion fosters that attitude, we’ll have a powerful weapon against those who constantly point out the “good” things that religion does.

_____________

Rutjens, B. T., R. M. Sutton, and R. van der Lee. 2017. Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44:384-405.

Rissler, L. J., S. I. Duncan, and N. M. Caruso. 2014. The relative importance of religion and education on university students’ views of evolution in the Deep South and state science standards across the United States. Evolution: Education and Outreach, , 7:24