Moar food for the guest

March 17, 2011 • 4:53 am

My guest, Michael Turelli, left Chicago this morning, bound for a thesis exam in Rochester.  But before he departed we gave him a send-off meal at my favorite Chinese restaurant in Chicago.   It’s a small place called Spring World, specializing in the spicy and complex food of Yunnan province.  Turelli and I went with my Chicago colleague Manyuan Long, who happens to come from the border of Yunnan and Szechuan.   That, of course, gave us a special entrée to the food, and we placed ourselves in his hands.  Here’s what he ordered (I recommend clicking on each dish to enlarge it in full gustatory glory):

Beef with rich sauce and several kinds of wild mushrooms. This dish was fantastic:


Chengdu cold rice noodles with spicy sauce, a Szechuan dish.  These were incendiary, but superb.  The sauce, heavily laden with hwa jo (Szechuan peppercorns) tasted exactly like the kind of stuff I ate on a trip to Szechuan several years ago:

Jao, pork-filled dumplings.  I liked these better than the northern Chinese version, for the wrappers were quite thick and chewy.  Yum!

Duck smoked over wood (I didn’t find out which wood) and served scallions and what I think was hoisin sauce—much like a Beijing duck, but without the pancakes:

Yunnanese crispy chicken:

Home-cured Yunan ham with leeks.  This has a taxonomic resemblance to twice-cooked pork:

The end of a perfect meal: Drs. Turelli and Long, sated.  We forgot to order vegetables. . . . .

Manyuan, having spent most of his life in China, is naturally picky about Chinese food.  In fact, Spring World is the only Chinese restaurant in Chicago where he’ll dine (the only better place is his own kitchen).  I’m not quite as picky, and usually choose among three favorite places.

New book shows that humans are genetically nice, ergo Jesus

March 16, 2011 • 11:47 am

A while back I mentioned the disagreement that I (and many others) had with a recent Nature paper by  Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson. I characterized their paper as a “misguided attack on kin selection,” for it claimed not only that kin selection was something different from natural selection (it’s not—it’s a subset of natural selection), but also that kin selection was both unproductive and incoherent.  I argued that kin selection was certainly coherent, and, more important, had made many contributions to our understanding of nature.  A published exchange on this issue, in which I am participating, will appear in Nature on March 24.

In the meantime, there’s a report at the Daily Telegraph about not only that paper, but a new book by Nowak (coauthored by New Scientist editor Roger Highfield), SuperCooperators.  (A review by Manfred Milinski has just appeared in Nature.) The Telegraph report is dicey on the scientific issues.  For example, it says this about the concept of inclusive fitness (the idea that the “fitness” attached to a gene involves not only its direct reproductive effects on its carrier, but its ancillary effects on other individuals carrying the gene):

This concept is considered central to biology, since it provides the best explanation for why existence is not simply a dog-eat-dog, Darwinian struggle. But Prof Nowak is doubtful. “Inclusive fitness is somewhat like an epicycle,” he says, referring to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system with the Earth at its centre, which required the planets to move in complicated flower patterns to explain their movement in the sky. “Somehow you have the impression that there is some reality attached to it, but the actual mathematical description of any evolutionary process shows that evolutionary fitness is an unnecessary concept.”

To equate a well-established evolutionary concept like inclusive fitness with a bogus model of planetary motion is simply invidious.  And to say that inclusive fitness has no “reality” is just ignorant.  Even though Nowak denies that inclusive fitness is a useful biological concept (and here he’s dead wrong, as the published responses will show), he can’t say it’s not real, for it’s simply a combination of fitnesses of a gene’s carrier with those of like-gened individuals with which it interacts.  Finally, to say that “evolutionary fitness is an unnecessary concept” is bizarre, for even if Nowak rejects the whole idea of inclusive fitness, there is still the valid and very important idea of individual fitness: the relative reproductive contribution of carriers of a gene. Every evolutionist knows how valuable that concept has been in making evolutionary models of nature and, more important, in understanding nature.  Rejecting that idea is like claiming that the whole gene-centered approach to evolution is wrong.

Indeed, in the next paragraph Nowak brings up the importance of a gene-centered approach:

Instead, Nowak stresses that co-operation and altruism are just as important. “The two pillars of evolution are mutation and natural selection: mutation generates diversity, and natural selection chooses the winner. What I want to argue in this book is that, in order to get complexity, there is a third principle, co-operation. It’s not just a small phenomenon, it is something that is really needed to explain the world as we see it.” Without it, he says, we would have a world without multi-cellular creatures – or even without cells, just monomolecular replicators in an organic soup.

If there’s a way for cooperation and altruism to evolve without conferring genetic benefits on their carriers, or on groups of related individuals, I’d like to know how!  “Cooperation” is not a third principle on top of mutation and natural selection, it is a behavior that evolves by either natural selection (as it must have done in the many species that do cooperate without culture, like social insects) or is socially mandated by complex creatures like humans.  It’s clear in the article, though, that Nowak is talking about evolved cooperation, and that takes genes and therefore differential fitness of cooperators versus noncooperators.

I’ve tried to fob off Nowak’s strange statements as the misunderstandings of a lay reporter, but since they’re verbatim quotes that’s hard to do.  This seems more to me like a publicity grab, especially because Nowak does a lot of name-dropping to tout his expertise:

His speciality is using mathematical equations to model and predict biological behaviour. “I talked to Bill Hamilton a lot, when I was at Oxford. And I talked an awful lot with Richard Dawkins as well. But I’ve never written a paper with them,” he says. “I have written a paper with John Maynard Smith, and one with Ed Wilson,” he adds, casually dropping two giants into conversation. And who are the ones who have most influenced you, I ask. “Robert May [the former chief scientific adviser to the government], influenced me very, very much.”

Well, so be it.  The final judgment of science does not depend on big names, but on truth, and the field will ultimately judge whether Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson’s attempt to overturn a dominant paradigm of evolution will bear any fruit.  I predict that it won’t.  And I’ll reserve judgment on Nowak and Highfield’s book until I read it.

But I must deplore Nowak’s use of biology to sell Jesus, and to push accommodationism.  Here he is on science versus faith:

Nowak, however, sees no conflict. “I think that science and religion are components of what people need and what people want in terms of the search for truth. I don’t see science as constructing or providing an argument against well-formulated and thoughtful religious philosophy.” He is a Catholic, but in his book he quotes with approval Einstein’s line about God as a sort of abstraction, seen in the beauty of nature’s laws. I ask him to expand, but he shies away. “I am very open-minded, very curious, very keen to learn from other different traditions, different approaches.” He does, however, believe in the divinity of Christ.

The great irony of his work, which heartens and amuses his religious side, is that he is, in essence, making a scientific argument that the virtues preached by Jesus – compassion, concern, love for your neighbour – are encoded into the laws of biology. “The mathematical analysis shows that winning strategies in the game of co-operation have to be hopeful, generous and forgiving.”

As Church Lady would say, “Well, isn’t that special!” What Nowak fails to consider is that yes, maybe altruism and compassion are in our genes, but so perhaps are aggression, spite, xenophobia, and hatred.  There is precisely as much evidence for genetically evolved compassion and love among nonrelatives as there is for genetically evolved traits that we consider “bad”—that is, very little.  What we know is that altruism and compassion are near-universal among human societies, but so are aggression, spite, Schadenfreude, and the like.  We think that we may have evolved morality, altruism, and the like, for, as Frans de Waal points out repeatedly, building blocks of those traits are seen in other primates.  But so too do we see aggression, hostility, and even murder in our primate relatives.  I agree with Steve Pinker that our genome probably contains information prompting for both “good” and “bad” behaviors.  For there are reproductive benefits to be gained by being, at times, either an angel or a devil.

Why does Nowak concentrate on just the wonderful behaviors we’ve evolved?  Could it be . . . . Templeton?

The Telegraph article says this about Nowak:

What riles some scientists is that he is not just the holder of prestigious prizes, but also a committed Christian. In particular, he is on the board of advisers of the Templeton Foundation. . .

I can’t confirm that he’s currently on the main advisory board of Templeton (the “N” page doesn’t list him), but he used to be.  My data show him serving in that capacity from at least 2005 to 2009, and I can’t get earlier records.  But he is currently on another Templeton board: the 12-member board of the Templeton Advanced Research Program of the Metanexus Institute. The purpose of this board, according to Templeton, is twofold:

The primary goal of this new research program is to foster innovation in research design as well as the scientific scope and impact of religion and spirituality.
A second goal is to encourage the development of creative insights into the forces that shape and expand world religions and the human conceptualization of God.

During or after this time—that is, after Nowak had taken a position on Templeton’s advisory boards—he got this kind of dosh:

Since I’m not sure when Nowak started on the Templeton board, I can’t confirm that he got the following monies when he was already advising them:

  • A grant from Templeton to the Royal Society of London in affiliation with Nowak, George F. R. Ellis, John Polkinghorne, and Ziauddin Sardar for two lecture series: “The Nature of Human Knowledge and Understanding.”  Total amount:  $281,885; dates 2004-2007.

I suspect, but don’t know, that one also gets money for being on the two advisory boards that I mentioned above. Nowak also contributed to the Templeton essay collection “Does evolution explain human nature?”, which was published in the New York Times and for which contributors received a fee.

Has Templeton been happy with Nowak’s work? I suppose so, since they keep giving him money, and the Nature paper he wrote with Tarnita and Wilson, attacking the idea of kin selection, is prominently highlighted at the Templeton website.  And it can’t hurt that he’s a Catholic who believes that Jesus was divine. His message, that evolution produces results exactly consistent with the teachings of Jesus, certainly buttresses Templeton’s mission of uniting (or conflating) science and faith.  Look for Nowak to nab a Templeton Prize in the coming years.

Let me close by saying two things.  First, I consider it ethically marginal for Templeton to put people on their advisory boards and then fill those people’s pockets with stupendous amounts of cash.  That’s tantamount to the organization existing to enrich itself.  And it gives people the idea that if you want to get a lot of money for yourself or your research, then simply agree to help the Templeton Foundation.  As Sunny Bains pointed out in her recent report on the organization, it’s not that Templeton always takes its high-performing grantees and makes them members of its advisory board; rather, it often gives grants to members of the board after they’re already on it.  That is not a good practice.

Second, this attack on kin selection, and Nowak’s book, seem to me to involve more than just finding out the truth about nature and imparting that truth to the public.  They appear to involve the darker side of human nature—the side that Nowak seems to ignore in his warm-and-fuzzy book.  It’s the side that involves greed, money, ambition, dubious ethics, and an overriding concern for one’s legacy and place in the pantheon of science.

Second eaglet hatches

March 16, 2011 • 7:05 am

I’ve been remiss in announcing that, as revealed by the Virginia EagleCam, a second eaglet hatched yesterday. The third and final chick should hatch within a few days.  One reader was concerned about the older bobblehead “attacking” the younger one at feeding time. According to the EagleCam moderators, this behavior is normal:

You will see some sibling rivalry at times which is perfectly normal. You also will notice the older one receiving more than the younger one – that is normal too as the needs are greater for the older one. The younger one will catch up and the sibling rivalry prepares them for the tough world they will eventually live in.

Note that every year for the past three years, this pair has laid three eggs and successfully fledged all three chicks.

I just went over there and saw the two bobbleheads; here’s a screenshot of one of them:

A visitor gets ribs

March 16, 2011 • 5:38 am

As I grow older, I’ve become more vociferous about things that I’d like to do when I’m invited elsewhere to give a talk.  I usually, for example, specify that I’d like to try a certain kind of indigenous food, or visit a local attraction.  When I went to the University of Kentucky, I expressed a desire to try bourbon, a “hot brown” sandwich, and to see thoroughbreds run, all of which were kindly gratified by my hosts.

So I was quite chuffed when my academic visitor, Michael Turelli from the University of California at Davis, asked—nay, demanded—to be taken for ribs. Turelli, a friend of more than thirty years’ standing, was giving the departmental seminar on cytoplasmic incompatibility in insects caused by an infectious bacterium, a microbe he’s using to try to control dengue fever (which is carried by mosquitoes) in Queensland.

When someone asks for ribs, and is serious about the request, there’s only one place to go.  Chicago has great ribs, but the best are the rib tips found at Uncle John’s Barbecue on the South side.  It’s only a ten-minute drive from my house and lab.  It’s an unprepossessing place, and is only carryout, but what delights lie within!

Dr. Turelli (right) about to sample the best ribs in Chicago (click all pictures to enlarge):

Ordering.  The South Side of Chicago is crime-ridden, so many food emporia serve you from behind a plexiglas wall. You order, push your money through the slot, and receive your comestibles through a small revolving window:


Here’s a menu (this is not my photograph, so it’s slightly out of date). What you want is the #7 (links and rib tips), which is now $9.50.  It’s a combination of rib tips (the ends of the pork ribs), and “hot links,” homemade sausages infused with spices, hot pepper and, of course, BBQ smoke:

The ribs and everything else are smoked in an “aquarium smoker”: a large glass box with the smoke provided by hickory and other woods burning beneath.  The ribs are lovingly tended for hours so that they stay juicy and become deeply infused with the wood smoke.  It’s not an easy job, and only a few people can do it properly.  Here’s the guy chopping ribs on the day we ordered; you can see the wood underneath the counter:

The real pitmaster, though, is Mack Sevier, a large and amiable fellow who honed his skills at other BBQ joints before starting his own a few years ago (this is not my photo, but comes from the LTH Forum):

The goods!  The bag, with two orders of tips and links, must have weighed about eight pounds:

Getting ready to feast.  The ribs were consumed with a lovely bottle of 1989 Chateau Meyney.  The postprandial tipple was a 2006 half bottle of late harvest Riesling from the Belle Terre vineyard of Chateau St. Jean in California.

Here’s one order, which includes two large hot links, a heap o’ rib tips, two pieces of white bread (obligatory for sopping up the sauce), a pathetic little container of cole slaw (the “vegetable”), and a pile of fries underneath, which rapidly become sodden, acting not as fries but as another starchy vehicle for the wonderful sauce:

To those of you who feel compelled to tell me that ribs and sausages are unhealthy, be aware that I know this already, and that I don’t eat these too often.  But I can’t imagine life without ribs.  Say “ugh—I don’t like these” if you must, but please refrain from health lectures!

Bon appetit!

Possible evidence for God

March 16, 2011 • 4:20 am

UPDATE:  Since P.Z. at Pharyngula has posted on this, implying that I might consider this scenario actual evidence for God, let me add that I don’t find this evidence even remotely convincing.  I’m offering it merely as a specimen of the kind of evidence believers might adduce for God.

__________

Okay, I said I was dropping this topic for the nonce, but I feel compelled to mention that, over at his Forbes blog Progressive Download, John Farrell—inspired by all of us—discusses “What would evidence for God look like?”  I was supposed to give him my take on his scenario, but the press of work prevented me from a personal response.  At any rate, he proffers a scenario that he considers “might offer the kind of evidence, or at least data, to make a skeptic take a second look.”  Here it is:

Here is a scenario I’ve adopted from an idea that New Testament scholar Ben Witherington used in a recent novel. In terms of evidence for God it’s much less fanciful than a being accompanied by angels descending from the sky in view of hundreds of people, but:

An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.

There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)

Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.

But could archeologists and geneticists go further? If this is the body of a man supposedly resurrected once before, could there be anything to look for to further ‘test’ the truth of the story? Is there a medical condition that could have fooled people of the time into thinking he was dead when he really wasn’t? And would any sign of that persist in the remains that we could find signs of?

What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’

Those of you who think that no evidence is possible, or that some evidence is possible, but Farrell’s isn’t good, have at this.  If you agree with him, say why.   I can’t resist adding that Jesus DNA wouldn’t have any sequence from the Y chromosome (no dad), and, given his origins, might even completely lack heterozygosity, since he might have been haploid (i.e., having only one set of chromosomes). The absence of cancer-causing mutations is not dispositive, since presumably they weren’t homozygous in his mother.


NYT special issue on human/animal relations

March 15, 2011 • 11:17 am

Worth reading today is the New York Times‘s special issue on “The Creature Connection,” which has six diverse articles centered on humans and their relationships with other species:

The lead article by Natalie Angier, “The creature connection“, about our strange relationship with pets and domesticated animals

Benedict Carey on the role that pets play in American family life, “Emotional power broker on the modern family”

Carl Zimmer on the evolutionary origin of animals:  “Where do animals come from?”  This is a good piece and a must-read if you’re interested in evolution.

Carol Yoon on the ethics of eating plants:  “No face, but plants like life too”

Biologist Sean B. Carroll on the developmental genetics of polydactyly (with a kitteh connection): “For whom the cell mutates: the origin of genetic quirks.”

Nicholas Wade on the origin of human sociality: “Supremacy of a social network.” I don’t much like this piece, as it’s full of speculations without the responsible solicitation of dissenting views—a hallmark of poor science journalism.