Category: scientists

Was Darwin a sluggard?

April 26, 2014 • 12:58 pm

Now here’s an interesting idea. “Visualization artist” R. J. Andrews culled through the biographies of famous people and put together a graphic depiction of their daily routines, published at Twisted Sifter  as “The daily routines of famous artists and scholars.” Number 5 on the list of twelve is our hero, Charles Darwin. First, the key to how the activities were coded:

creative-routines-and-daily-rituals-by-rj-andrews-info-we-trust-legend

 

Now, how did Darwin spend his day? Here it is:

charles-darwin-daily-routine-creative-ritual

Seven hours of sleep (same as me!), and lots of rest. In fact, it looks as if he put in about four hours of genuine work per day, and then spent two hours awake in bed (besides his seven hours’ sleep) “solving problems.”

One could conclude from this that Darwin was a sluggard, but in fact we know that’s not true. For, while having his walks, reading his mail, and reading books, Darwin was constantly pondering his Big Theory. Add to that the fact that most of the time he wasn’t well, with bouts of depression, vomiting, and general malaise. It’s amazing that besides The Origin, he wrote 11 other books.

But compared to Freud, Darwin really was a sluggard. Look at how Sigmund spent his days: a minimum of ten hours, or even 12+ if you stretch it. Pity that so much of his work yielded nothing.

sigmund-freud-daily-routine-creative-ritual

Go look at the other artists and poets, the most diligent of which seems to have been Beethoven, putting in a solid 8 hours a day of composing. That sounds tough!

One thing I’ve concluded from perusing all those graphs is that I’m working too hard and not achieving enough!

h/t: Su

An adorable geeky love song

July 14, 2013 • 1:08 pm

It doesn’t get more sqeelicious than this: a science-themed love song featuring a ukelele-playing kitten!

Note: this is slightly NSFW.

The notes at TheRealDeAnne site say this:

I made this video for my friend Shane Adamczak’s show Up Late Live, an episode of which you can see here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3c0fw…

Clark, the kitten I was fostering, stole the show.

http://www.deannesmith.com
Want me to come to your town/school/bed/wedding? Email: comideanne@gmail.com

h/t: L.

Atheism among Anglophone scientists. II. The UK

June 4, 2013 • 11:43 am

So how religious are scientists in the UK compared to those in the US? I would have thought “a lot less”. A recent study by Elisabeth R. Cornwell and Michael Stirrat (reference and online link below) shows that’s close to being the case, but the differences are small.  Michael Stirrat is a research fellow in psychology at the University of Stirling, while Elisabeth Cornwell is the director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

The link below (which used to give the entire dataset and some analysis) now has only the abstract, but I have permission to reproduce the original data, some of which I think has already been published in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

Cornwell and Stirrat inquired about religious beliefs of every member of the Royal Society of London having an active email address. That is the UK equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, as it includes distinguished scientists throughout the United Kingdom.  Requests were sent to 1074 members, who were asked to fill out an online survey. 253 of them responded (10 females, 243 males, which is proportional, sadly, to the gender ratio of members). About half the responses came from physical sciences (including physics, astronomy chemistry, computer science, and math) and the other half from biology (including medicine).

The four queries were these (taken from the survey); members had to agree of disagree with each of the statements below:

  • I believe that there is a strong likelihood that a supernatural being such as God exists or has existed.
  • I believe in a personal God, that is one who takes interests in individuals, hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions, and passes judgement.
  • I believe that science and religion occupy non-overlapping domains of discourse and can peacefully co-exist. (NOMA)
  • I believe that when we physically die, our subjective consciousness, or some part of it, survives.

Members were asked to indicate how much they agreed with each statement on a 1 to 7 point scale, with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 7 indicating “strongly agree”.  Thus lower numbers include higher disbelief.

And here are the results, given in Table 1 of the original website:

Picture 1

If you look at the “personal god” category, and lump 1 and 2 together as “nonbelief” and 6 and 7 together as “belief,” then 5.3% of the UK’s distinguished scientists believe in a personal god and 86.6% disbelieve, as compared to 7% and 72% of US distinguished scientists, respectively.  Doing the same for immortality (the only other item surveyed in the US and the UK), we find that 85% of UK scientists don’t buy it, compared to 76.7% of US scientists.  8.2% of the UK scientists, however, believe that some part of them lives on after death; the comparable igure for US scientists is 7.9%.

Biologists tended to be significantly less religious than physical scientists: here’s the plot of their answers to the “God exists” question:

Picture 2I’m not sure whether this difference reflects the same trend in the U.S.: that is, that chemists are more religious than biologists and physicists.

In general, then, the level of atheism among distinguished scientists in the UK is on par with that of the US, despite the fact that the U.S. is immensely more religious than the UK. This fact, however, doesn’t answer the question of whether the high degree of atheism among accomplished scientists reflects the conversion of scientists to nonbelief, the fact that nonbelievers are drawn to careers in science or, probably, a mixture of both. (As one reader suggested, this might reflect scientists’ higher level of education in general, though that doesn’t accountfor the difference in religiosity among “elite” versus “regular” scientists in the U.S.

One fact points to the first explanation (my favorite): religious upbringing appeared to play no significant role in the scientists’ current attitudes toward religion. 42.7% of UK scientists were, for instance, brought up Anglicans, and only 20.2% as nonbelievers.

Finally, if you look at responses to how UK scientists feel about the compatibility of science and religion through NOMA, they’re pretty even across all the numbers. That surprises me a bit; I would have thought that more atheistic scientists would be less willing to accept the “NOMA solution.”

I believe the authors are preparing this work for publication, so I’d be indebted to readers if they’d ask questions, make suggestions, and give feedback designed to improve the future paper.

_______

Cornwell, E. R., and M. Stirrat. 2013. Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: A survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Social Science Research Network

Guest post: The most poignant episode in all of the history of science

March 7, 2013 • 9:04 am

When my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, told me this story two days ago,  I realized that it would be a great post for Wallace Year. (This is the centenary of the death of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, aka The Man Who Also Thought of Natural Selection.) I begged Andrew, an excellent writer with several books under his belt (including a very nice one on Wallace), to write up this tale for my website, and he kindly complied. And so, here is . . .

The most poignant episode in all of the history of science

by Andrew Berry

On July 12th 1852 in Belem, Brazil, Alfred Russel Wallace boarded a freighter, the Helen, bound for England.  His great Amazon adventure was finally, he thought, at an end.  The four years in the field that had transformed him from a biological neophyte into a serious scientific naturalist had done their work, and it was time now for Wallace to return to Britain to try to establish himself as part of the Victorian scientific elite.

The adventure had really begun in 1841 when, in Leicester, Wallace, 18 years old and with an untutored interest in plant life, met Henry Walter Bates (of future Batesian mimicry fame). Like Wallace, Bates was largely self-taught, but he had developed a sophisticated interest in beetles, and soon Wallace too was obsessing about beetles.

But it was not just beetles: Wallace and Bates were interested in the pressing scientific topics of the day, including the “Species Question,” as evolution was termed at that time—where and how had species arisen.  If they were to do serious science, and to become anything more than enthusiastic amateurs, Wallace and Bates realized that they would have to set their sights beyond the delights of British beetles.  They would have to travel to explore biological diversity in its tropical citadel.

May 1848, then, saw the pair arriving in Brazil, planning between them to explore the Amazon basin, all the time collecting specimens.  They would bankroll the whole enterprise by selling duplicate specimens through their London-based agent. Just how naive they were can be gauged from how they chose their destination.  They were swayed by an account of the Amazon published in 1847 by an American entomologist, W H Edwards.  Edwards, presumably with an eye to book sales, peddled a bizarrely romanticized view of tropical forests.  For example, he observed that the canopy was inhabited by squirrels that “scamper in ecstasy from limb to limb, unable to contain themselves for joyousness.”

One can hardly question the choice made by Wallace and Bates: who would not want to head off to view those ecstatic, joyous Amazonian squirrels? Needless to say, the reality of tropical forests on arrival forced them to recalibrate.  Having thus rapidly been disabused of their Edwards-generated expectations of a zoo-like density of animals—Wallace wrote that the “productions of the South American forests are much scarcer than they are represented to be by travellers”—Wallace and Bates split up, with Bates heading up the main branch of the Amazon and Wallace up the Rio Negro.

Naturalist_on_the_River_A 2

The Amazon forest.   This image comes from H W Bates’ account of his journey, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.

Over the next four years, Wallace led an extraordinary, lonely, itinerant life.  He was largely on his own, dependent on the hospitality and assistance of local people, remaining throughout, as he put it, an “industrious and persevering traveller.”  His younger brother came out from England to help, but died of yellow fever on the way home.  (Wallace, still up country, did not find out about this for many months.  He had heard that his brother had contracted yellow fever in Belem, but the news that he had died took a long time to make its way to the interior).

Wallace himself nearly died on several occasions.  He traveled in to areas previously unvisited by Europeans, all the time amassing an extraordinary biological collection and taking copious notes on everything he encountered.  He collected anthropological materials as well as biological ones and was at pains to learn the rudiments of a number of local languages.  When finally it came time to head back down river, home, he discovered on arrival at Manaus, half way across the continent, that many of the specimens that he had sent off back to England had been impounded by the authorities.  No matter, the material would travel with him, making his final arrival in London all the more triumphant.  As he headed down the Rio Negro, Wallace added living animals to his collection.  This menagerie would surely be his passport to the scientific big time when he got home: imagine walking in to an early Victorian scientific meeting with a toucan on your arm!  These animals were professionally important to Wallace but they were also pets.  He cared for them, fed them, nurtured them, on that long slow journey by boat across the continent.

Now aboard the Helen, more than three weeks into the voyage and more or less in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the captain calmly roused his sole passenger (Wallace was sharing the captain’s cabin), “I’m afraid the ship’s on fire.”  Poorly stowed flammable cargo was apparently responsible.  The crew made forlorn attempts to control the fire before the order came to abandon ship.  The Helen, a tropical tinder box, was going up in what Wallace later called a “most magnificent conflagration.”

In the smoky cabin, Wallace had time to grab one small trunk of drawings and notes as the life boats were launched.  Clinker-hulled and parched after a life time spent upside down on the Helen’s deck, the boats immediately started to take on water, so bailing and caulking became an immediate priority.  In his haste to join the bailing party, and still weak from his various tropical ailments, Wallace slid down a rope in to one of the boats, badly rope-burning his hands in the process.  Baling salt water with raw, flayed hands proved unpleasant.  Now that everyone was safely aboard the life boats, what to do?  The captain decreed that they should stay close to the burning wreck as their best hope of rescue lay in other shipping coming to investigate.  No ships came.  As they circled the wreck, Wallace could only watch as those animals—his pets—struggled, and failed, to survive. Sprung from their cages by the fire, some, Wallace recalled, made it to the bowsprit, the last part of the boat not on fire.  There, confronted with the daunting prospect of an endless ocean, they turned round and plunged back in to the flames.

Save for those few notes and sketches, the entirety of those four brutally tough years of Wallace’s life had literally gone up in smoke.  His brother’s death had been in vain.  All those fever-wracked bouts of disease had been in vain.  Wallace recalled being too numb initially to take in the scale of his loss.  It was during the long days that followed that he had a chance to process things:

“When the danger appeared past I began to feel the greatness of my loss. With what pleasure had I looked upon every rare and curious insect I had added to my collection! How many times, when almost overcome by the ague, had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species! How many places, which no European foot but my own had trodden, would have been recalled to my memory by the rare birds and insects they had furnished to my collection! How many weary days and weeks had I passed, upheld only by the fond hope of bringing home many new and beautiful forms from these wild regions … which would prove that I had not wasted the advantage I had enjoyed, and would give me occupation and amusement for many years to come! And now … I had not one specimen to illustrate the unknown lands I had trod, or to call back the recollection of the wild scenes I had beheld! But such regrets were vain … and I tried to occupy myself with the state of things which actually existed.”

Rescue was slow in coming.  Wallace and the crew of the Helen spent ten days at sea in the open boats before being picked up.  Wallace, in his account of one of the nights, redefines notions of both stiff upper lip and positive thinking: “During the night I saw several meteors, and in fact could not be in a better position for observing them, than lying on my back in a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic.”

Wallace finally made it back to England after a total of 80 days at sea (his uneventful voyage out with Bates had taken 29). Not surprisingly, he was ocean-travel averse: “Fifty times since I left Para [Belem] have I vowed, if I once reached England, never to trust myself more on the ocean.”

But, having lost virtually everything and still determined to make his name as a naturalist-scientist, Wallace would have to do just that. A mere sixteen months after his return to England, then, he was once more at sea, en route to Singapore from where he would launch his second set of extraordinary exploratory journeys.  The Amazon was his scientific apprenticeship; his eight-year journey through South East Asia was, for Wallace, “the central and controlling incident of my life.”  While in Indonesia, Wallace heard that Bates and his collections had finally made it back to England from the Amazon: “Allow me to congratulate you on your safe arrival home with all your treasures; a good fortune which I trust this time is reserved for me.”

In 1862, after those eight momentous years in the field, exploring everything between Peninsula Malaysia and Western New Guinea, good fortune did indeed this time visit Wallace.  His was a painless journey home, and he returned, appropriately enough, to acclaim as the co-discoverer, with Mr Darwin, of the theory evolution by natural selection.

Naturalist_on_the_River_A 3

One of the species that Wallace was especially interested in collecting while in the Amazon, the umbrella bird.  Also from The Naturalist on the River Amazons

Atheism grows on campus

February 10, 2013 • 11:55 am

Just a quick but heartening note from the airport: a new article in Religion Dispatches, “Are atheists the new campus crusaders?”, discusses the growing influence of the secular movement on American college campuses. It highlights the Secular Student Alliance, but also mentions the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the Center for Inquiry, and the Secular Coalition for America.

Secular groups on college campuses are proliferating. The Ohio-based Secular Student Alliance, which a USA Today writer once called a “Godless Campus Crusade for Christ,” incorporated as a nonprofit in 2001. By 2007, 80 campus groups had affiliated with them, 100 by 2008, 174 by 2009, and today, there are 394 SSA student groups on campuses across the country. “We have been seeing rapid growth in the past couple of years, and it shows no sign of slowing down,” says Jesse Galef, communications director at SSA. “It used to be that we would go to campuses and encourage students to pass out flyers. Now, the students are coming to us almost faster than we can keep up with.”

Many of these organizations seem to engage in interfaith activities, which can be okay, I guess, but one is described which seems a bit, well, unseemly:

“We really encourage interfaith activities,” says Sarah Kaiser, field organizer at the Center For Inquiry, an international organization that promotes “science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.” As a student, Kaiser was member of the Secular Alliance at the University of Indiana. Her group raised money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through a “Send An Atheist To Church” tabling event. The atheists put out cups for each of the campus’ religious groups, and whichever cup raised the most money determined which church the atheists would attend as an interfaith educational activity.

The Muslim Student Union’s cup received the most donations, so the atheists attended mosque.

Now what is the point of that beyond agreeing to compromise your values to make money? Surely it won’t turn atheists towards Islam, and I’m not sure what kind of atheism/Muslim comity could result.

And the faithful are eager to argue that atheist organizations engage in some kind of “faith”:

At Stanford University, the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics (AHA!) register with the Office For Religious Life, just like Cru  [JAC: the new name of the Campus Crusade for Christ, obviously coined to make it less scary], and are a member of Stanford Associated Religions.

“There are a lot of parallels with religious groups on campus,” says Ron Sanders, Cru’s missional team leader at Stanford.

“They have weekly meetings similar to ours, and give one another support, and they do social justice projects on campus and in the communities… I don’t know that they aren’t a faith group. They don’t have a faith in God, or in revelation or something like that, but they have faith in reason and in science, as I understand it, as a guide for human flourishing.”

No we dont have faith in reason and science in the same way as “Cru” members have faith in God. I see “faith” according to Walter Kaufmann’s definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn’t even know if there’s any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it’s the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan.  And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth.  Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines.

I’m curious to see how readers feel about interfaith activities. I wouldn’t mind partnering with a liberal religious group to, say, rebuild homes for the poor, but I’d rather do it with fellow nonbelievers, for I see interfaith activities as giving some kind of credibility to the faithful, but not so much to us. It’s not going to change anybody’s minds, and we already know that some religious people can be nice. If you want to help people, there are plenty of secular organizations you can work or partner with.

The view of at least one student network seems at least a tad less compromising:

The Skeptics and Atheists Network at East Tennessee State University rather pointedly calls itself S.A.N.E.

“We do a lot of interfaith activities if they align with our humanist values, but the one thing we never compromise on is our right and responsibility to criticize bad ideas,” says Miller at ISSA. “When you assume a supernatural world, that is a train of thought that does not have a basis. When you start from that, you will automatically lead yourself to a bad idea.”

For the nonce, the value of secular student organizations is best construed not as a way to show the faithful that we are as nice and helpful as they are, but to give isolated secular people a community of support.  As I commented when arguing for people to use their real names when commenting on this site, it is often scary to “come out” as an atheist, but the more people who do it, the more closeted nonbelievers will emerge from the woodwork.

[Cody] Hashman at the Center For Inquiry says that some students come from homes and communities where they have to hide their secular identity, and secular student groups become an important community for them. “It has now become more acceptable for people to state that they are questioning or no longer religious” says Hashman. “We are dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of expression, and that can come off as abrasive, but we believe it necessary for a free and democratic society.”

Indeed. As I’ve found during this brief trip through the South, there are tons of atheists hidden among the faithful, like raisins of reason in a religious pudding.  Many atheists were once deeply religious and have had horrendous struggles, both with their families and friends and within their own heads, to reject God. (In contrast, atheists from the north more often seem to have been brought up in nonreligious homes, and haven’t had such a struggle.) Admitting your nonbelief, rejecting superstition and embracing reason, is like a nuclear chain reaction, and one day, when I’m no longer around, it will go critical—and America will no longer be held in the grip of faith.

Federal investigation concludes that Marc Hauser fabricated data

September 6, 2012 • 3:03 am

A while back Marc Hauser, a psychology professsor at Harvard,  was accused of research misconduct, which included selective use of or even fabrication of data.  I suspended judgment until an official University investigation found Hauser guilty of eight instances of scientific misconduct.  Harvard suspended Hauser for a year, not allowing him to teach, and he subsequently resigned from the university. Since then he’s been working with at-risk teenagers.

Hauser’s work aimed at discerning the roots of human behavior, cognition, morality, and communication in monkeys. He was widely known for this work and wrote several popular  and technical books. We chose him to be one of the three plenary speakers at the University of Chicago’s Darwin Day conference in 2009.

Since Hauser did the fabricated and/or flawed research using federal grant money, there was more to come, for government agencies are by law required to investigate. As boston,com reports, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) of the U.S. Public Health Service (which runs the National Institutes of Health) has given a final report on the accusations that Hauser engaged in research misconduct.

You can download the ORI’s report here; it’s a short 8 pages long, but shows that the investigators went through his research records thoroughly, looking at every graph and data point and comparing them with the original data from tapes of monkey behavior and their transcriptions. Four grants were involved in the dubious research.

Among the finding were that Hauser:

  • Fabricated data and also misrepresented data in graphs
  • Falsified the coding of monkey behavior observed in trials
  • Misrepresented how data were coded in a paper
  • Misrepresented (apparently through fabrication) sample sizes of some behavioral responses in two papers
  • Gave false statements about the number of monkeys identifiable by their markings
  • Produced statistically significant results (when they actually weren’t) by fabricating new coding for data previously coded by a research assistant

This resulted in one paper being retracted and two corrected.  Errors were also found in work that Hauser’s lab hadn’t published.  Hauser will not admit deliberate misconduct, but made this statement,

“Although I have fundamental differences with some of the findings,” Hauser wrote, “I acknowledge that I made mistakes. … I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”

To give you an idea of the depth of the investigation, here’s a brief extract from the report:

Respondent published fabricated data in Figure 2 of the paper Hauser, M.D., Weiss, D., & Marcus, G. “Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins.” Cognition 86:B15-B22, 2002, which reported data on experiments designed to determine whether tamarin monkeys habituated to a sound pattern consisting of three sequential syllables (for example AAB) would then distinguish a different sound pattern (i.e., ABB). Figure 2 is a bar graph showing results obtained with 14 monkeys exposed either to the same or different sound patterns than they were habituated to. Because the tamarins were never exposed to the same sound pattern after habituation, half of the data in the graph was fabricated. Figure 2 is also false because the actual height of the bars for the monkeys purportedly receiving the same test pattern that they had been habituated to totaled 16 animals (7.14 subjects as responding and 8.87 subjects as non-responding).

What amazes me is the leniency of the “punishment.” Making data up is the primary sin that a scientist can commit. I expected that, at the least, Hauser would be banned from ever receiving federal grant money. He also ran the chance of going to jail. But what did the ORI do? Virtually nothing: a slap on the wrist. Hauser can still apply for federal grant money, but he must do so by submitting ancillary statements from himself and the university that his research will be supervised for accuracy and, when completed, be given an imprimatur of validity by his university.  He also won’t be allowed to serve as a consultant or member of federal grant panels, which is not really a punishment at all:

Respondent neither admits nor denies committing research misconduct but accepts ORI has found evidence of research misconduct as set forth above and has entered into a Voluntary Settlement Agreement to resolve this matter. The settlement is not an admission of liability on the part of the Respondent. Dr. Hauser has voluntarily agreed for a period of three years, beginning on August 9, 2012:

(1) to have any U.S. Public Health Service (PHS)-supported research supervised; Respondent agreed that prior to the submission of an application for PHS support for a research project on which the Respondent’s participation is proposed and prior to Respondent’s participation in any capacity on PHS-supported research, Respondent shall ensure that a plan for supervision of Respondent’s duties is submitted to ORI for approval; the supervision plan must be designed to ensure the scientific integrity of Respondent’s research contribution; Respondent agreed that he shall not participate in any PHS-supported research until such a supervision plan is submitted to and approved by ORI; Respondent agreed to maintain responsibility for compliance with the agreed upon supervision plan;

(2) that any institution employing him shall submit, in conjunction with each 8 application for PHS funds, or report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS- supported research in which Respondent is involved, a certification to ORI that the data provided by Respondent are based on actual experiments or are otherwise legitimately derived, that the data, procedures, and methodology are accurately reported in the application, report, manuscript, or abstract, and that the text in such submissions is his own or properly cites the source of copied language and ideas; and

(3) to exclude himself voluntarily from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant.

Frankly, I am both puzzled and appalled that such a light punishment was levied for such severe misconduct.  This won’t serve as much of a deterrent to research fraud. However, Hauser did lose an academic plum in the process: his job at Harvard. And his research—if he continues it—will be forever under a pall of doubt.

h/t: Charles

Robert R. Sokal 1926-2012

May 1, 2012 • 11:11 am

by Greg Mayer

Robert R. Sokal,  Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, died at the age of 86 on April 9. During his long career he made distinguished contributions to evolutionary biology, systematics, human population genetics, and statistics, and generations of biologists have learned the principles and practices of statistical inference from the textbook he wrote with Jim Rohlf, Biometry (first edition 1969; fourth edition 2011). It was my privilege to be a student of his as an undergraduate at Stony Brook.

Robert R. Sokal in 1964 (courtesy the late Robert R. Sokal, via Joe Felsenstein, from Panda's Thumb)

Mike Bell has written a fine summary of his career at the Stony Brook Ecology & Evolution website, and Joe Felsenstein also has memorialized him at Panda’s Thumb (read the comments there, too). His life story was just as, if not more, interesting than his scientific career. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, his family fled the Nazis in 1939, and found refuge in Shanghai, China. There, he attended college, and met his future wife, Julie. They came to the United States after the war ended, and remained here. Their story, known in general terms to all at Stony Brook, was chronicled in the book Letzte Zuflucht Schanghai: Die Liebesgeschichte von Robert Reuven Sokal und Julie Chenchu Yang by Stefan Schomann (click on the title for pictures from their time in China).

He will be perhaps best remembered for his contributions to, and insistence on, rigorous, quantitative reasoning in all aspects of biology, and in helping to usher in the age of computer-based analysis of biological data. In systematics, he pioneered quantitative techniques in both phylogeny reconstruction and the assessment of similarities and differences. The latter, which he pioneered with P.H.A. Sneath, became known as numerical taxonomy. Sokal and Sneath argued that knowledge of phylogeny was not fundamental for the classificatory purposes of taxonomy, which they thought should be based on overall resemblance (an approach known as phenetics). This approach to systematics has not prevailed, but the methods developed have proved of great value throughout biology, including phylogenetics. Although he thought evolutionary considerations should not rule taxonomy, he was always devoted to the study of evolutionary questions, first in aphids, then weevils (a word he consciously strove to avoid saying, because of how it came out from a native German-speaker– something like “veevels”), then man, among other subjects. Ironically, it was some of his opponents in the taxonomic debate (the so-called transformed cladists) who seemed to lose interest in evolution, embracing a sort of Platonic idealism as the basis for what were supposedly phylogenetic methods.

At Stony Brook, he was a towering figure, always impeccably dressed in coat and tie, and with an Old World dignity and reserve, the latter reflected in the fact that, unlike all the other professors, he was known to graduate students as “Dr. Sokal”, until the students had gotten their Ph.D.’s.  (There was a weekly Friday afternoon social event called the “BS”, which initials might have various meanings; officially it was the “Beer Social”, but it was rumored that it had those initials so that graduate students could refer to “Bob Sokal” before getting their degrees.) He was also superbly disciplined: on a number of occasions, a hallway conversation with him ended as we approached the elevators, because he always took the six floors of stairs down, as it was a way to regularly exercise without an interruption in his other work. But he was witty, open to discussion, and generous with his time, even for an undergraduate.

For first year Ecology & Evolution (and some other) graduate students, his biometry class was, quite literally, a rite of passage: successful students were inducted in to the “Loyal Order of Normal Deviates”, whose hymn was “Freedom By Degrees”. I was fortunate to be able to take the class as an undergraduate in my senior year (fall 1978). The second edition of Biometry was in the works, and we received the revised text in xerox. As much for his accomplishments as a researcher, he should also be recognized for his accomplishments as a teacher, both in the classroom, and through his book, which I found to be perhaps the most readable self-teaching tool I have ever encountered. I have used it (or it’s shorter version, Introduction to Biostatistics or “Baby Biometry”) for 20 years, and plan to keep using it in future classes. But last week it was my sad duty to tell my class that they are the last to use it while Dr. Sokal was alive.