Category: scientists

A visit with Dick Lewontin

July 19, 2019 • 2:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

While on the East Coast to attend the Evolution 2019 meetings in Providence, Rhode Island, I also stopped for a few days at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Jerry’s and my alma mater), and got a chance to visit with Dick Lewontin, Jerry’s Ph.D. advisor, and my de jure Ph.D. advisor (my actual advisor, E. E. Williams, was retired, and so could not officially be my advisor). WEIT readers may recall that Jerry posted greetings for Dick’s 90th birthday earlier this year. I went to see Dick with Steve Orzack, another one of Dick’s Ph.D. students, who took the two pictures below.

Visiting with Dick Lewontin, Cambridge, Mass., 21 June 2019. Picture by Steve Orzack.

We chatted for an hour or two about various things. Steve and I both had some things we wanted to ask Dick about, one of mine being whether Dick’s advisor, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was Russian or Ukrainian. (Wikipedia claims he’s Ukrainian, and I once had a Ukrainian complain to me about an exhibit about Dobzhansky that I curated that referred to him as Russian.) Dick was adamant that Dobzhansky was Russian, noting that he spoke Russian at home with his wife, thought of himself as Russian, and had Russians as his lab assistants and technicians. Historians, friends, and colleagues of “Dodik/Doby” have always called him Russian, so I was not surprised by Dick’s response.

Dick hams it up for the camera. Picture by Steve Orzack.

Dick also regaled us with stories of when he worked with Buckminster Fuller on geodesic domes back in the ’50s, when Dick was at North Carolina State. Bucky, he assured us, did not understand the geometry of solids! Dick mentioned that he considered leaving academia to work full time with Fuller, but was now glad he hadn’t, as Fuller’s company went under a few years later. Steve replied that if Dick had joined the company full time, Dick could have saved the company!

Dick has given up essentially all his space at the Museum, and most of his papers (correspondence, etc.) have been taken by the American Philosophical Society, (which also has a considerable trove of Dobzhansky material), and Dick has given his books to the Ernst Mayr Library– the library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. This is appropriate, as Ernst Mayr, while Director of the MCZ from 1961-1970, engaged in correspondence with Dick on “genetical problems” (Haffer , 2007:265), and pushed for the building of the Museum of Comparative Zoology Laboratories, the MCZ’s lab wing, completed in 1973 (Mayr, 1973), of which Dick’s fly lab was one of the first inhabitants, arriving at Harvard in that opening year. (Dick mentioned that the proximity of the MCZ to his summer place in Vermont, which he’d had to travel to by train from Chicago, was a consideration in moving from the University of Chicago to Harvard.)

Dick’s books are being sorted, and I looked though several of them, finding a number of interesting inscriptions. First, a set of inscriptions from Mayr himself. These show that Mayr was presenting Dick with his books as early as March 1969, prior to Dick’s arrival at Harvard. I’m not sure if discussions involving Dick’s movement to the MCZ had begun this early.

To Dick Lewontin, | evolutionary geneticist, |who appreciates the importance of systematics, | in friendship | Ernst | March 1969

The ISBN stamp on the following cover page (and some further below) are from a cataloging effort in Dick’s personal library, not from the MCZ Library.

To Dick Lewontin | fellow worker in the evol. vineyard, | in the hope that he will crack | some of the nuts that were too hard for me! | With best wishes | Ernst | Christmas 1976

 

To Dick Lewontin | to whom I owe so much intellectual | stimulation | in friendship and admiration | Ernst

 

For Dick Lewontin | whose deep understanding of genetics | I admire beyond words (and song!) | in friendship | Ernst Mayr

[I am unsure of my transcription of the final word of the third line, “song”.]

 

For Dick Lewontin | in friendship and admiration | from the non-Marxist dialectic materialist | Ernst Mayr

The following is Dick’s MCZ bookstamp, which appears in many, though not all, of his books from his MCZ years.

The following is of interest, coming from Tom Schopf, one of the “young Turks” of paleontology in the early 1970’s, whom I mentioned in my tribute to David Raup.


To Dick Lewontin | I hope you will enjoy this effort to make invertebrate paleontology a “creative, chancy young man’s game” | As you will see from citations to your | work, you have had a large influence. | And I look forward to your continuing | analysis of problems critical to paleontologists. | Tom | December 2, 1972

The following is an inscription to Dick from a younger colleague, Jonathan Losos, on his book Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree. Note that Dick had been Jonathan’s intro bio professor!

Dick, | With great appreciation for the influence you have had on my | career through your writings, your teaching | of my introductory biology class) of which | I have vivid recollections) and your | helpful conversations with specific | reference to points herein. | Jonathan

And finally, some inscriptions from Dick’s Ph.D. advisor, Theodosius Dobzhansky. These I got from Dick several years ago, when I visited him while preparing my exhibit on Dobzhansky. I used all three inscriptions in the exhibit. The first is on a copy of the third edition of Dobzhansky’s classic Genetics and the Origin of Species. It was published in 1951, which is about the time Dick went to Columbia to work with Dodik. (Dick was in the Harvard class of 1950, but since he had been “rusticated” for a year, he actually graduated in 1951.) The inscription isn’t dated, but it seems to be earlier than the other two, referring to Dick’s “scientific youth”, and his “coming” eminence. According to Dick, Dodik referred to finishing graduate students as “soon to be professor” (as did Dick himself), so this inscription is probably early in Dick’s grad school days.

To Dick Lewontin, the coming | eminent geneticist, in his scientific | youth, with best wishes of continued | success | Th Dobzhansky

The next inscription is on a bound set of numbers I to XX of Dobzhansky’s monumental series of paper on “The Genetics of Natural Populations”. These 20 papers were published from 1938 through 1952. It is interesting that Dodik refers to the greater success of succeeding generations; the inscription was made only 5 years before Dick published his groundbreaking papers with Jack Hubby on allozyme polymorphism, confirming Dodik’s long-argued view that genetic variation was abundant and “normal” in natural populations.

Progress of science means that | succeeding generations do better than | preceding generations— and this | is what is to happen when the | genetics of natural populations | is investigated by my old | friend and spiritual son, | Prof. R. Lewontin! | Th Dobzhansky | New York, February 4, 1961

The final inscription is on a bound set of numbers XXI-XL of “The Genetics of Natural Populations”, published from 1953 through 1968. This inscription is undated but necessarily postdates initial Dick’s work on allozymes. There were three more papers in the series to come, published from 1969 through 1976; for the last, Dobzhansky was a posthumous coauthor, having died in December,1975. (The notation “GNP | XXI-XL” was made by me on the copy I made, and is not on the original.)

These lucubrations of the | old age of Th. Dobzhansky | dedicated to the super-star | R.C. Lewontin

You can see in these inscriptions the development of Dobzhansky’s appreciation of Dick as a scientist, from promising “youth”, to “old friend and spiritual son” (Dobzahnsky had one child, a daughter), and finally to “super-star”. You can also see Dodik’s colloquial phrasing and sense of humor, also evident in his  aphorism, “Heaven is where, when the experiment is over, you don’t need statistics to figure out what happened.” (Which Dick reconfirmed, on my latest visit, was indeed Dodik’s.)

Haffer, J. 2007. Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy: The Life and Science of Ernst Mayr 1904-2005. Springer, Berlin

Hubby, J. L., and R. C. Lewontin. 1966. A molecular approach to the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations. I. The number of alleles at different loci in Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 54:577-594.

Lewontin, R. C., and J. L. Hubby. 1966. A molecular approach to the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations. II. Amount of variation and degree of heterozygosity in natural populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 54:595-609.

Losos, J.B. 2009. Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: Ecology and Adaptive Radiation of Anoles. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Mayr, E. 1969. Principles of Systematic Zoology. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Mayr, E. 1973. Museums and biological laboratories. Breviora 416, 7pp. BHL

Mayr, E. 1976. Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Mayr, E. 1988. Toward a New Philosophy of Biology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Mayr, E. 1991. One Long Argument. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Mayr, E. 1997. This is Biology: the Science of the Living World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Schopf, T.J.M., ed. 1972. Models in Paleobiology. Freeman Cooper, San Francisco.

Dick Lewontin at 90

March 30, 2019 • 12:00 pm

My Ph.D. adviser, Dick Lewontin, turned 90 yesterday, as Grania noted in the Hili Dialogue. I couldn’t be there to fete him, but my friend Andrew Berry at Harvard went over to the facility in Cambridge where Dick lives with his beloved wife Mary Jane. Andrew carried some written wishes from Dick’s students and postdocs, and I reminded him to take a picture (below). Andrew’s report.

Dick was in a happily self-deprecating state of denial about turning 90, and appreciated receiving your messages (which I printed out to give him hard copy). It’s alway great to see them.

And here is the man we always called “The Boss”. He’s the smartest scientist I’ve ever met (yes, I know I haven’t met everyone), and the one who gets my All Around Excellence award for the high quality of his written prose, his talks, and his work. I don’t have many heroes in science, but he’s one.

Long may he run.

Addendum by Greg Mayer. My Ph.D. adviser was E.E. Williams, but because EEW was retired, my official Ph.D. adviser was Dick.  On a trip to Cambridge in January, 2017, Steve Orzack (another of Dick’s students) and I had lunch with Dick at the Town Diner in Watertown, Mass.; Steve took a picture of me and Dick outside the diner.
I’ve said before here at WEIT that Dick is the smartest guy I have ever met; I’ve also noted that Dick is very consistent in what he wears. It is not uncommon for scientists to limit their clothing choices, as a way of eliminating distraction– they’re dedicated to what’s truly important. Take a careful look at the two photos– Dick is wearing a blue work shirt, and the same red plaid lumberman’s jacket, in both! Happy Birthday, Dick!

Cox interviews Attenborough on Darwin (and other interviews)

February 19, 2018 • 7:45 am

by Matthew Cobb

My friend and colleague Professor Brian Cox is not only a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, he is also Professor for Public Engagement in Science at the Royal Society in London. As part of this, he decided to interview a number of Fellows of the Royal Society about their scientific heroes, in a series called People of Science. These brief interviews are informal,  insightful and fascinating. The one that will probably interest readers most is the one with David Attenborough, on Darwin. Here it is, it’s only 5 minutes long:

 

[Gratuitous comment by JAC: I have one beef with what Sir David says about The Origin at 3:50:

“What is marvelous about it is that anybody can read any page and it makes absolute sense. It’s not full of jargon; it’s full of argument and observation.”

True, it’s full of argument and observation, and Darwin generally avoids jargon. But it’s simply not true that anybody can read any page and make sense of it. Sometimes it’s hard going, even for a biologist. For those who believe Sir David’s words, I challenge you to read the chapter on “Hybridism”. My students often objected to my requiring them to read it because they weren’t used to the dense Victorian prose. (Eventually I gave up and went to the “abridged” Origin. That, too, was a failure.)  I should know, because I’ve read the book a gazillion times and the margins are full of question marks. Here’s my copy of the first edition, dog-eared, taped together, and covered with scrawls. Now that the pages have started falling out, I’ll have to retire it.  If you haven’t read this book, you can’t consider yourself educated!]

Back to Matthew:

Readers might also like this interview with Sir David Spiegelhalter about the work of amateur mathematician Thomas Bayes and of statistician Ronald Fisher (includes some practical experimentation!):

This one is about Alexander Fleming, and is with Brian’s fellow Manchester graduate, Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer (to do with public health):

The other three interviews are developmental psychologist Uta Frith discussing Alice Lee (no, you haven’t heard of Lee), author Bill Bryson (yes, he is an FRS, or an honorary one, anyway) on Benjamin Franklin and President of the Institute of Physics Professor Julia Higgins on Michael Faraday.

The interviews all take place in the library in the Royal Society’s home on Carlton House Terrace in London (you’ll notice a bust of Darwin in the background). Until 1939, the building was the German Embassy, before being closed for obvious reasons. In a nice twist, when General de Gaulle came to London in June 1940 following the fall of France, the Free French, as they became known, had their headquarters at the other end of the terrace. The Royal Society moved in there after the end of the war.

Bill Nye excoriated for attending State of the Union address with Trump’s proposed NASA chief

February 1, 2018 • 10:15 am

I’ve made no secret about my lack of affection for Bill “The Science Guy” Nye.  Although at one time he may have been a great promoter of science for kids, he seems unable to survive out of the limelight. The result is that he’s engaging in all sorts of activities to keep himself in the public eye: debating Ken Ham about evolution, popping up at events like the Reason Rally (where he refused to sign my book for charity), and starring in his misnamed television show, “Bill Nye Saves the World.” It also rankles me that he pretends to be a scientist but he’s really not: he was an engineer at one time, but he hasn’t even done that for 32 years.  I don’t care if science popularizers have science degrees so long as they can present the material cogently and engagingly, but I do mind when they pretend to be scientists.

The last straw was the incursion of politics into his science show, which proved horribly cringeworthy. Behold “My vagina has its own voice”, followed by “Ice cream sexuality”:

 

I can’t imagine Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Richard Dawkins presenting any of those videos, which aren’t even science but ideology.

There are many other reasons I dislike Nye, but this will suffice. Others, of course, disagree, and love the laterally compressed man with the bow tie. Many of them were turned on to science by Nye when they were kids, and I can’t fault that. All I know is the man I see today, and he makes the soles of my shoes curl up.

This week, however, Nye decided to attend Trump’s State of the Union Address, which was fine, but what rankled people is that he went with Republican congressman Jim Bridenstine. Trump proposed Bridenstine as the new director of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), but the nomination has been held up because Bridensteine is unqualified, not having a science degree (though he’s a pilot and was director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum), and, most important, he won’t say openly that human activity is the major cause of global warming. When examined in a confirmation hearing, Bridenstine admitted that global warming was in part anthropogenic, but wouldn’t say that human activity is the main cause.

To many that is heresy, but I think that a partial admission is a step in the right direction for the man, though of course he may have been lying. I don’t think he should be confirmed, for he’s simply unqualified, but in the end his failure to fully sign on to what is seen as settled science will probably be the main factor blocking his nomination. After all, most of Trump’s nominees are unqualified!

What bothered people a lot was that Nye went to the State of the Union as Bridenstine’s guest, which apparently they saw as Nye’s endorsement not only of Bridenstine’s views and Trump’s policies, but also, by proxy, of xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, ableism, and yes, anti-science. No matter that Nye accepts and speaks about the dangers of anthropogenic global warming, or that he dissociated himself from Bridenstine’s and Trump’s political views. As the New York Post reports:

“I will attend the State of the Union as a guest of Congressman Jim Bridenstine — nominee for NASA Administrator — who extended me an invitation in my role as CEO of The Planetary Society,” the science educator and engineer tweeted Monday night.

“While the Congressman and I disagree on a great many issues — we share a deep respect for NASA and its achievements and a strong interest in the future of space exploration,” he wrote.

“My attendance tomorrow should not be interpreted as an endorsement of this administration, or of Congressman Bridenstine’s nomination, or seen as an acceptance of the recent attacks on science and the scientific community,” he continued.

I don’t have a beef with Nye going to the speech with Bridenstine; I have a beef with him constantly pushing himself into the limelight, and he’ll do it in any way he can. I object to Nye’s rampant careerism, not to his politics. In this case, though, his self-promotion required him to go with a Republican.

Many others took issue with that, though, and pushback against Nye’s attendance was reported and/or promulgated by many places, including Salon, Geekwire, and CNN. The only temperate voice was reported at Geekwire:

The Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier volleyed back, saying that it’s important to acknowledge Bridenstine’s shift toward the mainstream on climate science.

“If pro-science activists want to see their policies succeed, by definition they will have to gain new supporters, and in so doing they will have to change people’s minds — and embrace it when it happens,” he wrote.

Nye is the CEO of The Planetary Society: one of the reasons he’s associating himself with the NASA mission.

But three other groups spoke out loudly against Nye’s actions.  An online petition by Climate Hawks Vote, which says what’s below, has gathered more than 35,000 signatures:

President Donald Trump is a bigoted climate denier. So is Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s embattled nominee for NASA Administrator. So why is Bill Nye “very pleased” to be Bridenstine’s guest at Trump’s first State of the Union address?

Bill, please be the Science Guy, not the Bigoted Climate Denial Guy. Cancel your plans to attend Trump’s State of the Union as Rep. Bridenstine’s guest.

You can be “very pleased” to be someone’s guest without endorsing Bridenstine’s policies, and Nye explicitly said he didn’t, and has emphasized human-caused global warming constantly.

More pushback at Climate Truth.org, with an article called “Tell Bill Nye: Don’t provide cover to Trump’s climate denier appointee” (their emphasis):

Bill Nye has been a stalwart voice against the Trump administration’s climate denial in the past year. Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine is exactly the opposite: a climate denying, fossil fuel-funded politician who has no business running NASA. As a member of Congress from Oklahoma, Bridenstine has already racked up $170,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. Even though he refutes the science of climate change and has no scientific background, he just moved one step closer to becoming the head of NASA.

NASA performs critical climate science research, and if the Senate confirms Bridenstine’s nomination he could work with Trump to end NASA’s earth science missions, and ground essential research satellites. With his controversial nomination heading soon to the Senate floor, Bill Nye’s tacit endorsement could be just what Bridenstine needs to get enough votes to be confirmed. We have to stop this in its tracks.

Tell Bill Nye today: Don’t support the Trump administration’s disastrous climate denial agenda by attending the State of the Union as Jim Bridenstine’s guest.

And the most vociferous pushback came from a group of 500 women scientists on a Scientific American blog, in a piece called “Bill Nye does not speak for us and he does not speak for science”. Two excerpts:

As scientists, we cannot stand by while Nye lends our community’s credibility to a man who would undermine the United States’ most prominent science agency. And we cannot stand by while Nye uses his public persona as a science entertainer to support an administration that is expressly xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, ableist, and anti-science.

Scientists are people, and in today’s society, it is impossible to separate science at major agencies like NASA from other pressing issues like racism, bigotry, and misogyny. Addressing these issues should be a priority, not only to strengthen our own scientific community, but to better serve the public that often funds our work. Rather than wield his public persona to bring attention to the need for science-informed policy, Bill Nye has chosen to excuse Rep. Bridenstine’s anti-science record and his stance on civil rights, and to implicitly support a stance that would diminish the agency’s work studying our own planet and its changing climate. Exploring other worlds and studying other planets, while dismissing the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change and its damage to our own planet isn’t just dangerous, it’s foolish and self-defeating.

Further, from his position of privilege and public popularity, Bill Nye is acting on the scientific community’s behalf, but without our approval.

That seems over the top to me, for Nye surely doesn’t endorse xenophobia, homophobia, and that whole slate of sins; in fact, he’s disavowed much of this (see above). Even though the videos about are cringeworthy, they nevertheless do attack homophobia and misogyny. So Nye’s supposed “implicit” support for these things has been rejected explicitly. I also question whether science at NASA, or anyplace else, cannot be separated from identity politics. There’s no logical connection between the two, except that most scientists are liberals, and most liberals don’t endorse homophobia, xenophibia, et al. Finally, does Nye need anyone’s approval to appear at the State of the Union message? He was not acting on the scientific community’s behalf, but on his own behalf.

There’s this, too:

The true shame is that Bill Nye remains the popular face of science because he keeps himself in the public eye. To be sure, increasing the visibility of scientists in the popular media is important to strengthening public support for science, but Nye’s TV persona has perpetuated the harmful stereotype that scientists are nerdy, combative white men in lab coats—a stereotype that does not comport with our lived experience as women in STEM. And he continues to wield his power recklessly, even after his recent endeavors in debate and politics have backfired spectacularly.

In 2014, he attempted to debate creationist Ken Ham—against the judgment of evolution experts—which only served to allow Ham to raise the funds needed to build an evangelical theme park that spreads misinformation about human evolution. Similarly, Nye repeatedly agreed to televised debates with non-scientist climate deniers, contributing to the false perception that researchers still disagree about basic climate science. And when Bill Nye went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to “debate” climate change in 2017, his appearance was used to spread misinformation to Fox viewers and fundraise for anti-climate initiatives.

There’s a bit of truth here, because Nye does “keep himself in the public eye”. More important, I too won’t debate creationists because it gives them credibility—but that’s not the only reason. Other reasons include creationists’ “Gish galloping” in these debates, and because rhetoric in a live debate is not, I think, the best way to let the public issues. But I don’t mind if some other folks debate creationists, so long as they’re prepared and know what they’re doing. But surely going on television and pushing for recognition of global warming is a good thing: we can’t always avoid our opponents, and sometimes debates, with the proper science advocates, can be useful.

I’ll leave you to judge for yourself whether Nye perpetuates stereotypes of science. If he does, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is black and doesn’t wear a lab coat, must dispel them.

In the end, the way to make your point in this case is not to demonize Nye, but to defeat Bridenstine’s nomination. (His nomination seems  a lost cause anyway.) Write to your senators and representatives! Write to the White House! This may seem like bawling up a drainpipe, but if that doesn’t do anything, surely calling out Nye will do even less.

I find myself in a strange position defending Bill Nye, as I don’t like him, don’t admire him, and don’t think he’s doing much for science. But I simply can’t get worked up about him going to the State of the Union address with a Republican nominee, especially when Nye has explicitly disavowed Bridenstine’s views on climate change.

h/t: Tom

The science books that inspired eight science writers (and me)

July 11, 2017 • 11:00 am

Yesterday’s Guardian has nice survey of eight science writers (many of them working scientists): “‘I was hooked for life’: Science writers on the books that inspired them.” They don’t make it clear that they’re really asking about popular books, as some of the books that “fired my imagination”, as the article notes, weren’t science trade books but technical books written for professionals. I suppose they wanted books that the layperson could read with profit.

Nevertheless, I’ll list the writers queried by the Guardian and link each name to the book they found inspiring. (If you don’t recognize someone, the Guardian identifies them.)

Brian Cox
Gaia Vinc
Garry Kasparov
Andrea Wulf
Adam Rutherford
Claudia Hammond
Richard Fortey (and a second book)
Venki Ramakrishnan

Now of course I’m going to ask the readers to name the science book or books that most inspired them, and to be fair I’ll have to give my own list. I’ve divided it up into two parts: trade (popular) books and technical books. I’ll surely forget some of them, but I have a limited time here to remember them! I’m listing only the books that influenced me when I was younger, before I was a professional scientist, but over at Five Books I’ve also listed some books I greatly recommend to the general reader. (The only recommendation I’d change is the Gould book; I’d now recommend reading an early collection of his essays.)

Trade books

The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif. Now almost forgotten, the book, though perhaps a tad overwritten, infected me with a love of research–the thrill of the hunt for facts)–when I was very young.

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. de Kruif in fact collaborated with Lewis when he wrote Arrowsmith, telling Lewis about science and basing the book’s characters on real scientists he’d known. It’s the only novel on my list and the best science fiction (i.e., fiction book about doing science) I know of. Again, it’s written in Lewis’s sometimes breathy style, but portrays the wonder of science better than any novel I know.

On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This was, after all, a book written for the public, and it sold very well. I needn’t say why this was influential except that it shows you how to make one long and unanswerable argument, and testifies to the need for anal thoroughness and hard work when you do science

Technical books

Systematic and the Origin of Species (1942) and its updated version Animal Species and Evolution (1963) by Ernst Mayr. These books and the next one were the books that got me interested in speciation, and drove me to the path of studying the evolutionary genetics of speciation.

Genetics and the Origin of Species by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1937). This is generally seen as the book that launched the “modern synthesis” of evolution, in which the observations of natural history and experiments were made consonant with the findings of genetics. Note the similarity of title to Mayr’s books: both saw the “species problem” as paramount in evolution: the observation that nature isn’t a continuum but is divided into discrete and pretty objective units: the populations we call “species”. That in fact was the major problem of evolution that Darwin didn’t solve, despite the title of his most famous book, which turns out to be more about the origin of adaptations within species than about species themselves. Here’s a statement of “the species” problem from the second page of Dobzhansky’s book:

“Organic diversity is an observational fact more or less familiar to everyone.  It is perceived by us as something apart from ourselves, a phenomenon given in experience but independent of the working of our minds. A more intimate acquaintance with the living world discloses another fact almost as striking as the diversity itself. This is the discontinuity of the organic variation.

If we assemble as many individuals living at a given time as we can, we notice at once that the observed variation does not form a single probability distribution or any other kind of continuous distribution.  Instead, a multitude of separate, discrete, distributions are found. In other words. the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by an unbroken series of intergrades, but an array of more of less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or rare.”

Isn’t that good? It’s a succinct and clear statement of “the species problem.” And it was largely solved by Mayr and Dobzhansky. (Mayr was one of my mentors at Harvard and Dobzhansky was my academic grandfather: the advisor of my own advisor, Dick Lewontin.,

All three of these books are remarkably well written, especially considering that Mayr’s native language was German and Dobzhansky’s Russian. It’s rare to find technical books these days written with such clarity and style. These are the books that, along with The Origin, made me an evolutionary geneticist. And they inspired me by showing me that the problem they raised in the Thirties and Forties had lain fallow for several decades thereafter, with few people that interested in speciation. As a student I saw a vacant niche I could fill, especially doing genetic studies of reproductive isolating barriers, and hence my career. That culminated in the book I’m proudest of having written, Speciation (2004) with H. Allen Orr. It’s a technical book, but rereading it recently I realized that I’ve lost the intellectual acumen I had when Allen and I wrote it. I couldn’t do that now: my mind and ability to synthesize diverse material were keener 13 years ago.

As I said, Speciation is a technical book, so I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who hadn’t studied a lot of evolution. My friends who bought it because they liked me did so against my advice, and found out I was right.  But I hope to write a short popular treatment of speciation for Oxford University Press, and that’s why I’m rereading the earlier book, as well as reviewing the literature on speciation since 2004.

This turned into a bit of an autobiography, and I didn’t mean to do that. At any rate, be you scientist or layperson, put in the comments the science books that most influenced or enthralled you.

 

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Krauss’s two articles on the Science March

April 22, 2017 • 11:30 am

As I’ve said repeatedly, I’ve been conflicted about participating in the March for Science, and have explained why I decided not to participate—but why I don’t discourage others from doing so. I wish them well, and hope that they effect some change.

In the meantime, physicist Lawrence Krauss has published two simultaneous pieces on today’s March: one in the New Yorker (“What is science good for?“), and the other in Scientific American (“March for Science or March for Reality?”). They’re both good, especially the first one, which makes the point that the March’s goal of “[calling] for science that upholds the common good” is a bit problematic. That goal, says Krauss, leads to political decisions about supporting science having foreseeable and beneficial concerns to humanity, and of course turns the “common good” into an “inherently political” and subjective aim that shouldn’t govern scientific research. I agree with him when he says that pure curiosity should be the center of the scientific enterprise. And his point about science being, in that respect, similar to the humanities—a kind of art, but one that finds objective truth—is one I’ve often made. But here—read for yourself:

And yet, as important as these economic and technological spinoffs of science are, knowledge, in itself, is still at the center of the scientific enterprise. In this respect, perhaps the greatest benefit of science for society is how it transforms our culture. Science provides us with a new perspective on our place in the cosmos and a better understanding of ourselves as human beings. It helps us overcome our otherwise myopic preconceptions about how the world works. At a deep level, it allows us to see through some of our illusions about reality, which result from the peculiarities of space and time within which we happen to exist, and to perceive, instead, the detailed, fundamental workings of nature.

In these aspects, science resembles those other human activities, like art, music, and literature, that distinguish humanity as a species. We don’t—or shouldn’t—ask what the utility of a play by Shakespeare is, or how a Mozart concerto or a Rolling Stones song upholds “the common good,” or how a Picasso painting or a movie like “Citizen Kane” might be in “the national interest.” (Perhaps it’s because we insist on thinking in such terms that support for art, music, and literature is also under attack in Congress.) The free inquiry and creative activity we find in science and art reflect the best about what it means to be human.

In one small respect, Lawrence undercuts this thesis by arguing that research driven by curiosity still has had salubrious spinoffs for society, and that, too, should get people to support basic research. Further, a lot of directly goal-driven medical research has itself had beneficial results, or transgenic work like the creation of “golden rice.” That kind of work should be supported.

Nevertheless, human curiosity is a worthwhile motivation for scientists, but, I’d add, only if the results if that research are passed on to the people who fund it: the taxpayers. The implicit conclusion is that to make the results of pure science a true “common good” in the Kraussian sense, researchers must tell the public about their work, making public outreach a real priority for all scientists. (Some aren’t very good at it!). I agree again, and that’s one reason why I do it. And the eloquent quote by Wilson given below should be read and remembered by all of us:

In 1969, Robert Wilson, the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, was asked by Congress whether the huge particle accelerator being built there would contribute to “the national defense.” His response then is appropriate now:

No, sir. . . . I don’t believe so. . . . It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with, are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Finally, I agree with Krauss’s conclusion about the goals of a good science march, and had the ones given below been the main aims, without the pollution by identity politics and the unsustainable accusations that science itself is a tool of oppression, I’d be adding my carcass to the group:

The March for Science can meaningfully celebrate the ways in which the process of science enhances our lives, and it can usefully demand that the government pursue evidence-based public policy. It’s certainly true that Congress should use the knowledge developed by free inquiry to assist in developing policies to promote “the common good,” as the electorate conceives of it. But the standard of “the common good” should not be the one by which science is judged, because such a standard risks politicizing what is inherently apolitical. The March for Science must be clear-eyed in its defense of the scientific process as an independently valuable human activity. It should defend the core value of the scientific process: discovering more about the universe, and ourselves.

The Sci Am piece deals less with the nature of science and much more with the malfeasance—and lack of respect for truth—of the Trump administration itself, pointing out all the ways that administration has lied about or tried to suppress science. We all know, despite the claims of the March’s organizers, that it’s really a political protest about Trump, more like the “Women’s March, But With Scientists”. That’s fine, but Krauss argues that perhaps Trump himself, and our constant efforts to publicize his administration’s lies and missteps, will itself accomplish what the Science March is supposed to do:

By providing such a constant and sharp explicit and observable contrast between policy and empirical reality, the Trump administration can encourage a new public skepticism about political assertions vs. reality, and a demand for evidence before endorsing policies and the politicians who espouse them—the very things that most marchers on April 22nd will be demanding. This skepticism is beginning to manifest itself in data. A Gallup poll result on April 17 indicated that only 45 percent of the public believe President Trump’s promises, a drop of 17 percent since February.

. . . The Trump Administration is discovering that obfuscation, denial, and hype may work when selling real estate, but in public arena eventually reality has a way of biting you in the butt. And the public is watching. The March for Science may be lucky to capitalize upon a growing awareness that there is no Wizard behind the curtain. The number of marchers, their backgrounds, or even their myriad messages may not drive the success of the March. Rather, it may be driven by the harsh examples coming out every day that reality exists independent of the desires or claims of those in power. In this case, the greatest asset the March for Science has going for it may be Donald Trump himself.

My only beef here is that Krauss, as a secular Jew, should have said “tuchas” instead of “butt”. 

Google celebrates Antonii van Leeuwenhoek

October 24, 2016 • 8:45 am

Today is the birthday of Antonii van Leeuwenhoek, and in honor of his achievement Google made an animated Doodle (click on it to go to Google). Since Matthew is an expert on the man and his science, which forms a part of his book The Egg and Sperm Race (also called Generation), I asked him to write a few words about the honoree (below).

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by Matthew Cobb

Antonii Leeuwenhoek (he adopted the aristocratic ‘van’ as a pretension later in life) was one of the great figures of 17th century discovery. He was a draper, not a scholar, and yet he was able to make two of the most amazing discoveries in the history of science. Like many other people in the 17th century Dutch republic (including the great philosopher Spinoza), Leeuwenhoek (roughly pronounced Lay-wen-hoak) made microscopes out of a tiny bead of glass.

The lens was then put into a rectangular metal frame, and the object to be looked at (an insect, or a fluid in a capillary tube) was put on a rod on one side of the lens. The Google doodle shows this quite well. He then had to hold the apparatus into the sunlight (candlelight would not do) to see what he could see. Single lens microscopes were much more powerful than the compound microscopes of the time.

Leeuwenhoek’s two great discoveries were made early in his career (he was introduced to the Royal Society by one of his neighbours, the Delft-based Reinier de Graff, in 1672). In 1674, de Graaf was trying to find out why pepper is hot, so he ground up some pepper corns in water and allowed the solution to move up a capillary tube. His idea was to see the structure of whatever it was in pepper that made it spicy. Instead, he observed bazillions of tiny ‘animacules’ – bacteria and protists – zipping about in the water. For some years, it was assumed that the tiny things were released from the peppercorns, and it was called the ‘pepper water’ experiment. Until someone did the obvious thing of leaving out the pepper… Micro-organisms are still called ‘infusoria’ after this principle of making an ‘infusion’.

Leeuwenhoek’s second, and astounding discovery was made in 1677, when following the suggestion of a medical student, called Ham, Leeuwenhoek looked at his semen (this had previously been suggested to him by the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, but Leeuwenhoek declined to take the step). The description of how he did the experiment, which eventually appeared *in Latin* (not English) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is interesting:

He reassured “his Lordships” that he had not obtained the semen by any “sinful contrivance” but by “the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations.” Think about that. He goes on to say that a mere “six heartbeats” after ejaculation, he found “a vast number of living animalcules” in his ejaculate (it is not recorded what his wife thought of this…). The Royal Society didn’t believe him, and in classic modern style sent him away to do more experiments. Eventually, they published his report in 1678.

Several points: firstly, Leeuwenhoek at first thought that the sperm he saw were simply parasites (and this is reflected in the name we still give them – spermatozoa, the animals that live in semen). Second, he thought the interesting bit of the ejaculate was some weird thready material that no one else has seen before or since. He eventually changed his mind on this. Finally, although it had been suggested 10 years earlier that women have eggs, and de Graaf had shown experimental support for this idea in 1672 in rabbits, the scientific world did not recognise that egg and sperm were complementary components of the future organism.

That did not happen until the 1840s, after a) it was realised that something was inherited (the word ‘heredity’ had no biological meaning before the 1820s) and b) it was realised that all organisms are composed of cells, and therefore that egg and sperm were both cells. Instead, for 140 years science was more or less divided into the ovists and the spermists. For the spermists, like Leeuwenhoek, the egg was either non-existent (as in mammals) or food for the sperm; for the ovists (most people) the sperm somehow ‘awoke’ the egg, like an electric shock, but played no equal role in producing offspring.

Leeuwenhoek was an extraordinary man who made remarkable contributions to our understanding of the world. If you want to know more about him, and the weird route ideas took to come to our current understanding, despite it looking so obvious in retrospect, you can pick up a good second-hand copy of my 2006 book Generation, for less than $4! (In the UK it was called The Egg and Sperm Race…)