Category: science journalists acting badly

Scientific American dedicates itself to politics, not science; refuses to publish rebuttals of their false or misleading claims

August 21, 2022 • 10:30 am

On August 14, I received a conciliatory email from Laura Helmuth, editor of Scientific American. As you know if you’re a regular here, I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing their woke coverage and editorials, which make all kinds of accusations that don’t hold water (see emails below for some examples, or you can access all my posts here).

My critiques of the magazine have been similar to those of Michael Shermer, who wrote a regular column for Scientific American for eighteen years. After he turned out a couple of columns that weren’t woke enough for the journal, and were rejected, he was given his walking papers. Michael documented the decline and fall of the journal in two Substack pieces, “Scientific American goes woke” and “What is woke, anyway? A coda to my column on ‘Scientific American goes woke’.” His columns, particularly the first, cite and link to a number of ludicrous pieces published in the journal. I’ll give some of those links below.

At any rate, since I told Laura in my response that I’d keep her initial email confidential. I’ll just characterize what she said in a few words. She was kind enough to be conciliatory, though she noted that I was unhappy with some of her coverage. She praised my criticisms of theocracy and emphasized that, politically, she and I were on the same side with respect to matters of reason and social justice. Finally she urged me to contact her to discuss any ideas I had for stories or my own pieces for the magazine.

It was a polite email, but the last bit—the invitation—prompted me to respond in this way, by suggesting that I write my own op-ed:

From: Jerry Coyne To:Subject: Re: Greetings from Scientific American

Hi Laura,

Thanks for your conciliatory message, which I appreciate. I’m sorry that I have had to go after some of your stories sometimes, but I’m truly puzzled at the direction the magazine is taking. One blatant example was that editorial by McLemore that accused not only Darwin of racism, but also Mendel!  Seriously, how did that get through the editorial process? Is there no fact-checking? Likewise, nobody bothered to look up what SETI is really doing when it tries to find life on other planets. One look at the photos that Carl Sagan included on the Voyager record shows that he was emphasizing the diversity of life on earth, both human and nonhuman.  What bothers me, and you surely know this, is the magazine’s Pecksniffian tendency to call out racism in everything, most recently the SETI program.

Yes, we are indeed both liberals and against the theocratic strain that’s taking over American life.  But if you must be political (I don’t think science magazines should be, of course), why not commission pieces about the stuff you mention below and leave out the authoritarian progressivism and pervasive accusations of racism? In my view, that not only doesn’t do anything to ameliorate racism (how does falsely accusing Mendel of racism do anything for minorities?), but also dims the patina of class that the magazine had.

Of course I had to say this, but you know this already because I’ve written about this stuff a fair amount.

I do appreciate your reaching out, and of course will keep your email confidential, but would you consider an op-ed about how extreme Leftist progressivism is besmirching science itself by distorting the truth? (Example: arguments that sex is not bimodal in humans, but forms a continuum.) I could make a number of arguments like that about biology that, contra McLemore, have truth behind them.

If you’re really interested in presenting a diversity of views on science and politics in your op-eds, I’d be glad to write something like that (and no, it would not be shrill).

Thanks for writing.

Best,Jerry

The correspondence continued, with Laura emailing me to explain the political leanings of the journal, which in my view were not concerned in science but with social justice. And of course she rejected my offer to contribute an article to the magazine because it didn’t comport with those leanings. Such a letter would be “kicking down” (i.e., “punching down”).  I won’t reproduce her second letter even though, in my response, I didn’t say I would keep it confidential. But I will characterize her words in my response—and quote a few of them—in the email I wrote her this morning. Here it is. I’ve added links to the Sci. Am. articles that I mention or to my discussion of them (each of my posts links to the orginal Sci. Am. piece). I’ve corrected a few of my  errors of spelling and punctuation.

Sun 8/21/2022 6:14 AM

Dear Laura,

I of course expected that you would accept editorials only from the “progressive left” point of view, even though, as you noted, we’re both on the Left. That is your editorial call, but I disagree with it.  When “progressives” are engaged in attacking science with lies or distortions (i.e., claiming there’s a spectrum of sex, not gender, in humans, or that Mendel was a racist), I would think that Scientific American would publish, indeed, want, some kind of corrective. Seriously, you let one your writers accuse Mendel, Darwin, and E. O. Wilson of being racist, and SETI of being likewise and that denial of evolution is white supremacy; and yet you refuse to publish rebuttals of that calumny because to oppose those ridiculous accusations would “feel like kicking down.”  Do you really think that someone not as famous as Mendel is allowed to call him a racist because to deny that would be “kicking down.”

Frankly, I find that response disingenuous. Sticking up for correct science in the face of ideological distortion is not “kicking down”: that phrase—or its alternative “punching down”—is used by every ideologue to immunize their ideas from criticism. Science is supposed to be a debate in search of truth, with nobody barred from criticizing anyone, but yet you are placing much of that debate out of bounds because it’s “kicking down”!

The telling part of your email is at the end when you assert that science isn’t really a target of your editorials, but politics is, and the “targets” you say the magazine has chosen include “the Supreme Court endorsed forced pregnancy, Florida is denying care to trans people, white nationalists are infiltrating every branch of government, and anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists are causing people to die. . . . . But with limited resources, those are the sorts of issues we’re focused on in our opinion coverage.” But when is it the editorial policy of Scientific American to address those issues at all? Given its title, I thought your magazine was about science, even in its opinions, and not a program for enacting a brand of social justice that has either little or nothing to do with science. There are literally hundreds of magazines, websites, blogs, podcasts, and other media sources that cover those issues endlessly 24/7 from left, right, and center.

SciAm readers go to your site to get straight science, not political commentary, and deciding that the “progressive” (i.e., extreme) Left has the correct positions on these issues is to essentially alienate over half the country, including moderate liberals like me being turned off by this risible political posturing.

Let me speak frankly: some of the editorials I’ve criticized involve lying or distorting the truth for politics. It’s simply not true, for example, that mathematics and other STEM fields are irredeemably racist and misogynistic [see also here], that Darwin and Mendel were racists, that the Jedi in Star Wars are toxically masculine white saviors, that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is implicitly racist and colonialist, and that denial of evolution is an expression of white supremacy. These assertions are ridiculous, and yet you not only give them space in your magazine, but refuse to publish any opposing opinions. Thus others like Michael Shermer and I have to rebut them on our websites (as you know, Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American for eighteen years, but then was fired because he failed to hew to the ideology you’re promoting).

It is your magazine, of course, but I am not alone in being appalled at the direction it’s taken. I can assume only that you have given it that direction. This is a great pity: Americans can get their politics in a million places, but there are few where they can get straight science untainted by ideology.  Scientific American used to be that way, but it isn’t any more.

cheers,Jerry

I’ll note one more thing: Thirty-one biologists, including some very notable ones, wrote a letter to Scientific American pushing back on their article that E. O. Wilson (along with Darwin and Mendel) was a racist. Of course the magazine refused to publish our critique. You can see that letter, the signers, and my take on it here.

What is crystal clear is that Scientific American has decided to take on a social-justice program of a particular stripe—that of the “progressive” or “woke” Left—even if the politics the journal espouses have nothing to do with science. Not only that, but they refuse to publish any pushback or criticism of some of their crazier assertions. (Show me where Mendel was a racist, for instance!) It’s very odd that what was once America’s premier science magazine not only has taken up woke cudgels, but is stifling criticism of what they publish. In this way Scientific American can act as if there’s no opposition to the politics they cram down the throats of curious people who just want to read about science. They are censorious, and certain they’re right. Such views have repeatedly stifled and misguided science over the years, right up to the time of Lysenko.

And that is why I’m writing this post.

_________________

About Sci Am’s refusal to let me write; sent by a friend:

It would be so easy to just let you have your say in the magazine and then whenever so accused of bias they could say “we published Jerry Coyne’s rebuttal!” And could hold their heads high for at least offering some balance, but they obviously can’t even bring themselves to do that! It’s all so unnecessary, but if they feel it is necessary (to do their share of social justice) then at least let the other side speak.

 

Scientific American finds the search for extraterrestrial intelligence racist and colonialist

August 12, 2022 • 9:30 am

UPDATE:  Michael Shermer emailed me with his response to this quote below, taken from the Sci. Am. Piece.

We may not be able to recognize intelligence when we see it, and we may not respect or honor things we don’t perceive to be intelligent. That is what we did in many colonial interactions. Certain countries in Europe made “first contact” with Indigenous peoples, perceived them to be nonintelligent and therefore not worthy of life, not worthy of respect or dignity. And that is troubling to me. What’s going to be different next time?

Michael’s response:

The difference is 500 years of moral progress! There are exactly zero people in SETI who think Intelligence is restricted to what we think and do and that any ETIs who show intelligence different from ours should be thought of as inferior and therefore subject to genocide and enslavement. Literally 0!

And there have been debates and discussions on the nature of intelligence for over half a century in SETI communities, with everyone breaking their skulls trying to think of ways that ETIs might communicate, think, act, etc. (From Sagan’s Jupiter cloud creatures to Fred Hoyle’s interstellar dust cloud computing beings, absolutely no one in this community thinks that intelligence is defined by what we do.) This article is so ignorant of the SETI community and the vast literate it has produced. In any case, at this point, SETI scientists would be happy to find ANYTHING that was not random noise, much less tapping out prime numbers (oops, those are the culturally constructed Western colonial mathematics, right?)

And he added a tweet with an antiracist take on extraterrestrial life by—of all people—Carl Sagan:

Note that Shermer himself wrote a piece called “Scientific American goes woke” that I highlighted here.

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I claim that there is no practice, institution, or object that can’t be “wokeified” these days. If pumpkin lattes, yogurt, glaciology, and Pilates can be turned into a subject for Woke beefing, then anything can.

This time it’s the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), popularized and brought to life by Carl Sagan, whose eponymous institute at Cornell, along with the SETI Institute, have, using a variety of instruments, scoured the skies looking for evidence of life on other worlds.

As you know, we haven’t found evidence of such life, but of course there are gazillions of planets that could support life, most of them light years away.  The lack of any signal of life could reflect any number of causes: we’re truly alone in the Universe (I consider that unlikely), other planets with life may not be sending out signals, or it’s nearly impossible to detect any signals. But according to this new article in Scientific American, our failure is partly our own fault: we’re doing the search wrong. And we’re doing it wrong because we’re colonialists and racists.

In this piece, Scientific American author Camilio Garzón (it’s an article, not an op-ed) interviews Rebecca Charbonneau, identified as “a historian in residence at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as well as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.”

Charbonneau’s thesis:

. . . .increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.

Yep, Scientific American is rapidly descending to the status of a risible, woke, and useless publication. I used to read it avidly when I was a kid, but back then it was full of science. Now, like Teen Vogue, it’s a disguised way to propagandize its readers.

Yes, I could hear your kishkes tighten up when you read Charbonneau’s thesis above, but there’s a lot more. Click below to read for free—and that’s all it’s worth.

Charbonneau sees space exploration not just as a manifestation of scientific and intellectual curiosity, but largely as “an extension of our imperialist and colonial histories.” That manifests itself in several ways: not just in plans to colonize other planets (where there’s no life to dominate!), but mainly in the very way we go about detecting life in the Universe—through SETI.  She adds: “And SETI in particular carries a lot of intellectual, colonial baggage as well, especially in its use of abstract concepts like ‘civilization’ and ‘intelligence,’ concepts that have been used to enact real, physical harm on Earth.”

Her thesis, then, is SETI is not propping up the harms of colonialism on Earth using racist and colonialist methods involving things like “civilization” and “intelligence”.  Since “intelligence and “civilization” are colonialist ways to assess intelligence, what are we to do in our search for extraterrestrial life.

Garzón’s questions are in bold, Charbonneau’s answers in indented Roman type.

If decolonization isn’t just a metaphor but rather a process, that implies it’s about reckoning with history and striving to fix past mistakes. That’s something easy to say but much harder to actually define, let alone to do. In the context of SETI, what might decolonization’s “reckoning” look like?

It’s a great question. Ultimately, in Tuck and Yang’s interpretation of decolonization, this would look like prioritizing the sovereignty of Indigenous cultures and respecting their wishes regarding settled scientific infrastructure. And while that is critically important, we shouldn’t entirely discount the symbolic, dare I say metaphorical, nature of colonialism at play in SETI. Fundamentally, SETI concerns listening to alien civilizations, ideally, but we also have to get better at listening to Earthlings! We’re not very good at that right now, but we’re starting to move in that direction. There are members of the SETI community, myself included, who are very interested in listening to marginalized and historically excluded perspectives.

A lot of SETI scientists start their research from the technical search perspective, without deeply considering the implications and impact of their listening. They are simply interested in finding evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations, which is valuable. I think that to do that, however, without thinking critically about how we conceptualize big abstract ideas, such as “intelligence” and “civilization,” and without considering the ethics of the search and its cultural implications, would be a huge mistake. These ideas are tightly bound with the histories of racism, genocide and imperialism, and to use them haphazardly can be harmful. How we use these symbols of the past when thinking about alien civilizations also says a lot about how we view Earth’s civilizations, and this is where Indigenous Studies scholars, such as those who contributed to the special SETI issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, can make great contributions. They have a unique perspective on the impact of contact, and how concepts like “intelligence” can be weaponized.

The last paragraph of Charbonneau’s answer is blather, just another attempt at self-flagellation for our treatment (admittedly very bad in the past) of remote cultures. So she manages to drag in genocide, imperialism, racism, and indigenous studies, which really have nothing to do with the way SETI scholars go about finding life on other planets. And she totally ignores the years and years that SETI scientists have pondered ways to communicate with extraterrestrial life, and how they might communicate with us (see below).

Charbonneau does not explain clearly how listening to “marginalized and historically excluded perspectives,” listening that, by the way. is going on all the time these days, is going to help us communicate with other planets. Is it not sufficient to say that “we’re all human and share certain characteristics”? That, after all was the subject of Sagan’s “golden record” sent on Voyager spacecaft.  As the Planetary Society describes it:

On board each Voyager spacecraft is a time capsule: a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk carrying spoken greetings in 55 languages from Earth’s peoples, along with 115 images and myriad sounds representing our home planet. Selected for NASA by Carl Sagan and others, and produced by science writer Timothy Ferris, the disks are essentially a “greatest hits” package portraying the biodiversity of Earth and the diversity of human cultures. From the Golden Gate to the Great Wall, Beethoven to Chuck Berry, from mountain breezes to crashing surf, a dog’s howl and a baby’s cry, the disks may someday serve as “letters of introduction” to a passing extraterrestrial civilization that may stop and inspect the robots and become inquisitive about their place of origin.

Is this colonialist? Greetings in 55 languages, showing the diversity of speech, and 115 images, which are a combination of scientific stuff and pictures of people from all over the planet.  After all, the images are not meant just to show what life on Earth looks like and how we live, but how far we’ve advanced technically—useful information for an extraterrestrial civilization.

Here’s the record:

But wait! There’s more!

It does feel ironic. SETI is built around listening for something out there but perhaps at the cost of ignoring much of what is right here on this planet. For instance, you’ve repeatedly mentioned the cultural implications of terms such as “intelligence” and “civilization,” but how about the word “alien,” too? All of these terms have very different connotations—even destructive ones—as historically applied to Indigenous peoples or, for that matter, as applied to all the other sentient beings that live on Earth. Even now some people don’t consider nonhuman animals to be sentient, let alone possessing any real intelligence. And throughout history, building empires has come at the cost of discounting and dehumanizing Indigenous peoples as lesser beings, incapable of sophisticated thought and societal organization. Yet “intelligence” is right there in SETI’s name. Should we reconsider that framing?

SETI is designed to listen outward, but as you said, it’s not always so great at listening inward. And I should preface this by saying that there are members of the SETI community who are very interested in doing this work. And oftentimes these missteps are not made consciously—we’re all operating within our own cultural frameworks. And so, of course, when we are thinking about the “other,” the imagined alien, we’re going to project our own understanding of what that looks like onto this blank slate. In fact, some people even call SETI a mirror. Jill Tarter, an eminent SETI scientist, famously referred to SETI as holding up a cosmic mirror, where we’re looking for the “other,” but in the process of doing that, we are really learning about ourselves.

As for “intelligence,” that’s certainly a dangerous word, and it has been used in very harmful ways. Eugenics, for example, used the limited concept of “intelligence” to justify genocide. I’m therefore sometimes troubled by the word intelligence in SETI. For one thing, we might not even be able to identify what intelligence is. And because of this, maybe we [will] someday make contact and [won’t] even recognize that we’ve done so. But it’s also important to think very critically about why we search for intelligence. Is there something special about intelligence? Does intelligence deserve more respect than whatever we might perceive to be nonintelligence? We might perceive microbes as nonintelligent life, for example. Does that life have a right to exist without us bothering it? Or is it just germs—just bugs that we are going to just bring back and study and pick apart?

Oh for crying out loud, OF COURSE there’s something special about intelligence! Are there forms of it that far surpass ours? What forms can it take? We are also interested in animal intelligence for the same reason.

I’ve put Charbonneaus’s money quote in italics below:

We may not be able to recognize intelligence when we see it, and we may not respect or honor things we don’t perceive to be intelligent. That is what we did in many colonial interactions. Certain countries in Europe made “first contact” with Indigenous peoples, perceived them to be nonintelligent and therefore not worthy of life, not worthy of respect or dignity. And that is troubling to me. What’s going to be different next time?

I don’t think Charbonneau knows how SETI works. They are of course looking for signs of technological development, like radio signals or deliberate attempts to communicate, but is that colonialist? Further, SETI also uses astronomy, telescopes, and so on. Those don’t really depend on intelligence: they could, in principle, detect signs of life produced by organisms that don’t have “intelligence” in the human sense. The fact is that SETI scientists have spent decades thinking about how extraterrestrial civilizations might communicate, and designing their endeavors around these ways.

If there’s another way to detect extraterrestrial life beyond these, I’d like to know. Charbonneau certainly doesn’t tell us, nor does she seem to care. She cares more about chastising us for bad acts of the past and showing how virtuous she is.

Let me push back on one aspect here, though. Might there be a degree of incompatibility between openness to other ways of being and SETI’s core tenets? After all, SETI—all of astronomy, really—is built on the assumption of universality, that the laws of physics are the same throughout the observable universe regardless of one’s social constructs. A radio telescope, for instance, will work the same way whether it’s here on Earth or somewhere on the other side of the cosmos. Regardless of context, certain shared fundamentals exist to allow common, predictable, understandable outcomes. SETI takes this conceit even further by elevating mathematics as a universal language that can be understood and translated anywhere and by anyone. What are your thoughts on this?

So let me preface this by saying I am not a mathematician. But I do write about math. And there are many anthropologists who study mathematical systems in different cultures. They see that, even on Earth, among human cultures, there are different ways of thinking about math. And while mathematics is the language we use on Earth in our hegemonic culture to describe what we are seeing, we don’t know that another species will use that same language to describe what they are seeing. So while I don’t want to discount universality, I do think any assumptions about this are perhaps optimistic, to put it kindly. The core of what I’m trying to say is that we must critically interrogate our assumptions about life and universality, because we will all too often find that they say more about us than aliens.

So, Dr. Charbonneau, given that other creatures won’t understand the kind of math used by Earthlings, what about just regular pulses of radio waves that can’t have a purely physical origin? And once again, Charbonneau, ignoring those mathematicians that think that math is an “objective truth” (I have no dog in that fight), fails to tell us how our colonialist fixation with Earth math will impede us from finding other cultures. “Interrogating our assumptions” won’t help us one whit.

I don’t know what’s happened to Scientific American, but it’s full of stuff like this; I’ve written about it often (see here). Actually, I do know: under the aegis of editor Laura Helmuth, the magazine has gone woke—big time.

h/t: John

Guardian retracts claim that Cornwall is infested with “venomous crabs”

August 8, 2022 • 11:15 am

Yesterday morning, thanks to Matthew, I pointed out that the Guardian had screwed up one of its biology stories, the one noted in this headline:

What apparently had happened is that somebody at a news service (see below) googled “crab spider” instead of “spider crab”, and concluded that spider crabs were venomous. Then the Guardian simply cut and pasted the false assertions about the spider crab—no crabs are venomous though some are toxic to eat—to create a clickbait story.

Pity, pity, because since the crabs aren’t venomous, the story loses a lot of its click-y allure.  A number of people pointed out to the Guardian that this story wasn’t exactly true (the swarming part was). Matthew also informed one of his friends who works at the Guardian (see below). Regardless, the complaints worked, and now there’s a new story sans venomous crabs. Click below to see the latest story, lacking the word “venomous”.

And kudos to the Guardian for noting that they changed the story. At the bottom of the new page you can read this:

 This article was amended on 8 August 2022. An earlier version incorrectly stated in the headline and text that the spider crabs massing at Cornish beaches were “venomous”; no species of crab is venomous. Also, their Latin species name is Maja brachydactyla, not “Hyas araneus” as we said.

Someone else must have corrected the species name. I took the paper at its word, for Hyas araneus is the “great spider crab”. Now we learn that these un-venomous crabs are actually Maja brachydactyla, in a completely different family. Now how did they screw that one up?  By copying from another source?

Well, all’s well that ends well, except, perhaps, for the would-be bathers who avoided the waters off Cornwall.

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Here’s Matthew’s email to the Guardian:

From: Matthew Cobb

Subject: Crab spiders

Date: 7 August 2022 at 22:11:22 BST

To: “guardian.letters@guardian.co.uk” <guardian.letters@guardian.co.uk>

Over the weekend The Guardian website followed the rest of the UK press by printing a story about ‘venomous spider crabs’ moving into shallow waters off Cornwall to moult [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/06/spider-crabs-swarm-in-shallow-waters-on-cornish-beach].

Virtually all of these stories – including that in the Guardian –  claimed the crabs ‘have a venomous bite that is poisonous to their prey but harmless to humans’.

This is not true. No crab is venomous. Indeed, out of over 7.000 species of crustacean, only one is known to be venomous, and it is not a crab.

This error – which the Guardian has still not uncorrected, despite repeated alerts on social media – appears to have originated in some journalist googling ‘spider crab’  and not noticing that the pages they got back referred to ‘crab spider’. It was then simply copied by other journalists, including your own.

It is hard to know which is more disheartening: the original error, or your thoughtless repeating of it. This example does not particularly matter, but confidence in the press is a fragile thing.

Matthew Cobb

The Guardian responded by saying that the false claims about venom and species name were provided by a news agency based in south-west England, and noted that they’d changed the text and added a footnote. 

The Guardian screws up a science article

August 7, 2022 • 7:30 am

After Matthew corrected this story via Twitter, it’s still up prominently on the Guardian website (at least as of 6:30 this morning Chicago time).  Click to read:

The relevant bit from the story is this:

Thousands of venomous crabs converged on the beaches of Cornwall due to rising sea temperatures caused by the climate crisis. The migratory creatures swarmed in the shallow water in St Ives, shedding their shells before returning to depths of up to 300ft.

The crustaceans are instantly recognisable for their long legs and pincers and have a venomous bite that is poisonous to their prey but harmless to humans.

Oy! What clickbait: guaranteed to drive the swimmers out of the Cornwall seas! And it did!

Their presence at Porthgwidden Beach was enough to put many bathers off entering the sea.

However, Kate Lowe, a marine photographer captured the event just days after a snorkeler was bitten by a blue shark during an excursion off Penzance.

 

Remember, this has happened “just days after a snorkeler was bitten by a blue shark” – like that has anything to do with anything except alarming people!

Furthermore, it’s wrong: this species, Hyas araneus, the giant spider crab, is not venomous. As far as I know, while some crabs are poisonous (their bodies contain toxins that could kill you), no crabs are venomous, i.e., injecting venom into their prey.

These crabs are innocuous unless they nip you.  But how did the Guardian get it wrong?  Matthew explains:

The article is about spider crabs, which are indeed crabs. They are coming into shallow, warm waters in Cornwall to moult together. About two days ago, the tabloids here had the story, and said these crabs were venomous but this was harmless to humans. The Guardian freelancer  basically cut and pasted the story, including this phrase, which comes from a Google hit for “crab spider” (which is a spider, and is obviously venomous). They also headlined it “Venomous visitors”. There is only one known venomous crustacean, it is a remipedian (more closely related to a fly than to a crab).

Matthew even tweeted to the Guardian to get them to correct this (we petulant biologists dislike these errors, especially if they can panic the public):

This was over four hours ago, and the headline stays. (I also tweeted them.) As Matthew emailed me:

They won’t chnage it… Any more than any of the tabloids did. Google this
are spider crabs venomous
And you get about a dozen identical articles – from all the leading UK media – with the same crap cut and pasted…
Come on, Guardian, get someone who knows to vet your science articles!

Our letter about evolution to the Guardian (and other stuff)

July 6, 2022 • 9:45 am

NOTE: I put up this post after the Guardian had published three letters about Buranyi’s article (below), assuming they had decided not to publish the letter by Brian Charlesworth, Deborah Charlesworth and me, which was submitted earlier. Yesterday, however, they called Brian and said they might publish our letter, so naturally I took down this post, which contains what we submitted.  And in the end they decided to publish our letter, so I’m putting the original post back up, but adding in the published version as well as a superb letter by Doug Futuyma that wasn’t published. There are also the previously published letters about Buranyi’s “the theory of evolution is obsolete” paper), and the cover letter Brian wrote to the Guardian detailing a few of the factual mistakes in Buanyi’s letter. And I left in my take on the three letter the Guardian published a few days ago.

In the interests of keeping this post on the record, then, I am republishing it replacing our submitted letter with the published version, which identical to what we submitted. They added a title, but I don’t much like the one they chose.

What is indented in italics below is our introduction to the original post:

On June 28, the Guardian published an article by Stephen Buranyi, “Do we need a new theory of evolution?“, asserting that the modern theory of evolution was woefully incomplete—if not obsolete. I wrote a longish critique of the piece on this site, but of course such an egregious and misleading article needs a critique in the Guardian itself—not least because I was mentioned in the piece as a defender of the “obsolete” theory. Three other people also mentioned felt the same way: the distinguished evolutionary biologists Brian Charlesworth, Deborah Charlesworth (both at Edinburgh), and Doug Futuyma (at SUNY Stony Brook).

Brian, Deborah and I decided to write a short rebuttal letter to the paper, and Doug did so independently. Although three letters to the editor were published yesterday (see below), none of them were ours. So, with permission, I’m putting our letters here to make them available and show you what objections we wanted on the record. It may also expand your knowledge of what’s new versus what’s old in evolutionary biology.

Brian also sent a cover letter (below) detailing some of the factual errors made by Buranyi in his piece; this was not intended for publication, but to show the editors what shoddy reportage Buranyi had produced.  He doesn’t seem to have done his homework. But we knew that from the article itself.

Our new letter, freshly minted in the Grauniad. Click to read it:

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The rest of this post was published previously on this site, so you may have already read it. If that’s the case, ignore the following:

Brian also sent a list of errors in Buranyi’s piece in a cover letter:

Dear Guardian,

I enclose a letter by Deborah Charlesworth, Jerry Coyne and myself concerning Tuesday’s Long Read article by Stephen Buranyi. All three of us were referred to in the article. We feel that the article gives a misleading account of the field of evolutionary biology, which we try to point out in our letter.

The article also contains several errors of fact, which show that Mr Buranyi has a poor understanding of the subject. Unfortunately, space does not permit us to list these in our letter. These errors could easily have been removed by proper fact-checking. We are dismayed that the Guardian would fail to ensure factual accuracy, given its famous motto.

Here are some examples.

Scientists working in the new field of genetics discovered rules that governed the quirks of heredity. But rather than confirm Darwin’s theory, they complicated it. Reproduction appeared to remix genes – the mysterious units that programme the physical traits we end up seeing – in surprising ways. 

Mendelian genetics shows that maternal and paternal genes do not mix, but remain distinct from each other, in contrast to Darwin’s belief in blending of maternal and paternal contributions. This lack of blending is actually critical for variability to be maintained in populations, and hence for the effectiveness of selection. Buranyi has got it backwards.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, showed that by breeding millions of fruit flies – and sometimes spiking their food with the radioactive element radium – he could produce mutated traits, such as new eye colours or additional limbs. These were not the tiny random variations on which Darwin’s theory was built, but sudden, dramatic changes.   

The artificial induction of mutations used X-rays not radium and was discovered by H.J. Muller, not Morgan. Muller was the leading expert of his time on mutations, and always emphasised that most mutations have very small or no observable effects on the organism.

… the American livestock breeder Sewall Wright…

Wright was a geneticist, not a livestock breeder (he worked on guinea pigs), and did his most famous work as a professor at the University of Chicago.

While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope , focusing on individual molecules. And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be.They found that the molecules in our cells – and thus the sequences of the genes behind them – were mutating at a very high rate.

First, molecular evolution was first studied by comparing protein sequences from quite distantly related species, so large “chunks of time” are indeed involved. Second, the major proponent of the neutral theory of molecular evolution (to which this passage refers) was not a molecular biologist but the theoretical population geneticist Motoo Kimura. Third, this statement confuses the rate of evolution of sequences with mutation rates. It is true that these are the same under the neutral theory, but the rates are not “very high”- about 1 in 100 million per DNA site per generation in humans.

Yours sincerely,
Brian Charlesworth

 

****************

Letter to Guardian from Doug Futuyma (apparently not to be published):

Stephen Buranyi (Guardian, June 28, 2022) has provided a sensationalistic portrayal of a controversy in evolutionary biology, pitting supporters of an “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” (EES) against the “evolutionary synthesis” (ES) of the 1930s and 1940s. He quotes my assertion that the ES “remains, mutatis mutandis, the core of modern evolutionary biology.”  It is that. But in that paper, and at the London meeting of the Royal Society to which Mr. Buranyi refers, I described the history of evolutionary biology in the last 80 years as one of constant expansion, in which new subfields such as evolutionary ecology and evolutionary physiology developed, and which was profoundly changed when molecular biology provided new research tools. Almost all the new knowledge has been compatible with, yet has amplified, the ES.

Mr. Buranyi describes some past challenges to the ES.  Traditional evolutionary biologists were, indeed, taken aback by evidence that considerable evolution at the DNA level was due not to natural selection, but to random genetic drift – which had already been developed in theory by the geneticists who led the ES. They were taken aback not because of blind faith in the supremacy of natural selection, but because of abundant evidence that even slight differences in organisms’ features were affected by natural selection. Random evolution at the DNA level is certainly the most thoroughgoing change, or expansion, of evolutionary biology since the ES.  Mr. Buranyi portrays Eldredge and Gould’s claim of rapid, episodic evolution in fossil lineages as a violation of ES principles, but high and variable evolutionary rates were already known to authors of the ES. Eldredge and Gould departed from the ES by proposing a mechanism of episodic, rapid change that was theoretically implausible and which has not been supported by any evidence since they proposed it in 1972.

In contrast to these past challenges, most of the ideas advocated in the EES are fully compatible with traditional theory of evolution by mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift. “Niche construction” occurs when organisms choose to live in certain environments and may modify them; that this guides their evolution of adaptations (by natural selection) is obvious to anyone who compares the form and lifestyle of swallows and ducks. All organisms have some features that are “plastic,” whereby a single genotype develops different features, such as skin melanin, in different environments. Plasticity has been extensively studied since the 1940s. That it might produce novel changes that become inherited features of a species has been recognized as a possibility since the 1950s, but only recently has there been any evidence that this occurs in nature. How often is not known.

Mr. Buranyi cites the origin of complex, novel features, such as eyes, as a special challenge to the notion that mutation plus natural selection explain evolution. The steps by which eyes can have evolved from very simple precursors have been well described in molluscs and other animals, but the origin of novel features is an important theme in modern research. This question resists a simple, general answer because it requires knowing how gene mutations could give rise to novel variations – and that depends on how the relevant genes direct the development of a feature. Advances in molecular biology have clarified many developmental processes, reinvigorating the field of evolutionary developmental biology, which has illuminated the origin of some novel traits. This simply shows that a generalized theory (mutations and natural selection) needs to be particularized in order to understand the origin of any particular feature. (What are the effects of the mutations? What feature is favored by natural selection?)  If we want to understand the evolution of particular proteins or physiological or anatomical traits, we need knowledge of proteins, physiology, or development. But in all cases, the ES theory is still fundamental.

Douglas J. Futuyma
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

****************

Finally, click below to read the three letters that the Guardian chose for publication.

I’ll excerpt the first letter and reproduce the other two in their entirety (the third one is very short):

Jonathan Bard is listed as an evolutionary biologist, but his letter, printed first, is rather obscure, and in one place completely opaque here (my emphasis):

Stephen Buranyi misses some key points in his article (Do we need a new theory of evolution?, 28 June). Darwin saw novel speciation as resulting from natural selection acting on anatomical variants, but that simple skeleton needed fleshing out. It took a century of research, for example, for us to understand the importance of inheritance in very small populations if novel variants were to become predominant.

What is the sweating professor trying to say? Is he talking about genetic drift? Why is inheritance more important in small than in large populations?

I think what he’s trying to say is that it took a long time to understand how novel “neutral” or even maladaptive variants could rise in frequency in small populations. But that’s not even true: it took a decade or so, not a century! At any rate, neither Brian nor I can figure out what the part in bold means. 

The second letter, by Nicholas Maxwell, is almost teleological!

Those biologists who are critical of current Darwinian orthodoxy and who want to modify the theory in the direction of the “extended Darwinian synthesis” need to take things further. They need to recognise that all living things are purposive. They pursue goals – without necessarily being aware of it – the ultimate goal being survival and reproductive success.

Purposive action can, in a multitude of ways, influence what has survival value – and thus influence the future course of evolution. Purposive action that results in living in a new environment, or pursuing new kinds of food, can change what has survival value for that creature and its offspring, and thus can influence the future course of evolution. Foxes hunting rabbits breed rabbits better able to escape; and rabbits escaping breed foxes better able to catch them.

Above all, when animals make discoveries and learn from one another, cultural evolution becomes possible, and that can have a massive impact on subsequent evolution, as the case of human evolution, and the evolution of language, show.

We need a new, unified version of Darwinian theory that recognises that the purposive actions of living things play a vital role in evolution. This is very definitely not Lamarckism, although too many biologists have denied the Darwinian role of purposive action in evolution for fear that that commits one to Lamarckism. For more about this, see chapter 6 of my 2020 book Our Fundamental Problem: A Revolutionary Approach to Philosophy.

Nicholas Maxwell
Emeritus reader, science and technology studies, University College London

What looks like “purposive” action is of course behavior molded by natural selection, so the first paragraph says nothing new—but is still confusing. We have long recognized that the appearance of “purpose” is part of the appearance of “design” that is created not by God but by natural selection. The second paragraph also says nothing new: it’s been recognized for decades that an animal’s evolved behavior can change the subsequent course of natural selection (see Doug’s comment on “niche construction” above). But the example of foxes and rabbits doesn’t seem to exemplify even that point! Cultural evolution is old hat now, and “gene-culture” coevolution has been worked on for years. Finally, as I said, we already have a theory of evolution that recognizes that evolved “purposive” actions can affect future evolution! Maxwell is calling for nothing new, but simply muddies our understanding of the evolution of behavior by introducing the element of “purposiveness.” This of course will confuse lay readers who confuse the appearance of purpose with either God’s purpose or an animal’s conception of purpose.

I guess the Guardian published the third letter because the editors thought it was cute:

 Surely there’s no problem with having several conflicting theories of evolution? Eventually the fittest will survive.
Pete Bibby
Sheffield

As Vonnegut said, “So it goes.”

h/t: Anne