Caturday felids: kneading

August 21, 2010 • 5:06 am

If you have a cat, you’ve undoubtedly seen it “knead”: it puts its paws on something soft, like a pillow or your stomach, spreads its toes, and makes rhythmical, alternating movements of its front paws, as if it’s kneading dough. The common explanation for this is that it’s a carryover from kittenhood:  kittens are said to knead their mothers’ stomachs when nursing, which may stimulate mom to give milk.  (Verifying this is a job for cat evolutionary psychologists.)  And damn if Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry on cat kneading,

This “kneading” behavior of cats can be put to good use.  Though I haven’t yet seen them make bread, they can do a wicked massage:

Here’s a cat massaging a dog. That’s just wrong!

Harvard dean: Hauser guilty of scientific misconduct

August 20, 2010 • 3:17 pm

As  you may know, Professor Marc Hauser of Harvard, who has done well known work on primate behavior and human morality, was accused by Harvard for scientific misconduct.  The university’s investigation, which involved raids on his lab and confiscation of data, took about three years.  There has been lots of speculation about and press coverage of the case, speculation exacerbated by Harvard’s refusal to say anything about the outcome.

Now, however, the university has put out some information.

Below, as reported by Science, is a letter sent Dean Michael Smith of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to his faculty. He reports that Hauser “was found solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty member investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS standards.”  Three papers are being retracted or corrected, and the malfeasance has been reported not only to federal funding agencies, but to the U.S. Attorney’s office, presumably for possible criminal wrongdoing.

Harvard will not, however, disclose what sanctions it applied to Hauser himself.  Curiously, these sanctions apparently do not include termination:

However, to enlighten those unfamiliar with the available sanctions, options in findings of scientific misconduct include involuntary leave, the imposition of additional oversight on a faculty member’s research lab, and appropriately severe restrictions on a faculty member’s ability to apply for research grants, to admit graduate students, and to supervise undergraduate research.

This can’t be a complete list: surely firing is an option for misconduct.  At any rate, I can’t help but think Smith sent this letter only because his hand was forced by the press.

I take this letter as dispositive of the case, at least for this website: Hauser is guilty of scientific misconduct of an egregious sort.  This is very sad, and please let us neither celebrate nor berate each other for what we said when there was little public information about the case.  Discussions of misconduct or its sanction are fine, accusations of premature judgment are not.

Finally, it is not just Hauser who will suffer as a result of what he did.  Spare a thought for his many students, assistants, and postdocs, whose own work may forever bear the taint of having been done in his lab, who may lose funding that Hauser procured, and who may have great difficulty getting meaningful letters of recommendation for future jobs.

__________________

Dear faculty colleagues,

No dean wants to see a member of the faculty found responsible for scientific misconduct, for such misconduct strikes at the core of our academic values. Thus, it is with great sadness that I confirm that Professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS [Faculty of Arts and Sciences] standards. The investigation was governed by our long-standing policies on professional conduct and shaped by the regulations of federal funding agencies. After careful review of the investigating committee’s confidential report and opportunities for Professor Hauser to respond, I accepted the committee’s findings and immediately moved to fulfill our obligations to the funding agencies and scientific community and to impose appropriate sanctions.

Harvard, like every major research institution, takes a finding of scientific misconduct extremely seriously and imposes consequential sanctions on individuals found to have committed scientific misconduct. Rigid adherence to the scientific method and scrupulous attention to the integrity of research results are values we expect in every one of our faculty, students, and staff.

In brief, when allegations of scientific misconduct arise, the FAS Standing Committee on Professional Conduct (CPC) is charged with beginning a process of inquiry into the allegations. The inquiry phase is followed by an investigation phase that is conducted by an impartial committee of qualified, tenured faculty (the investigating committee), provided that the dean, advised by the CPC, believes the allegations warrant further investigation. The work of the investigating committee as well as its final report are considered confidential to protect both the individuals who made the allegations and those who assisted in the investigation. Our investigative process will not succeed if individuals do not have complete confidence that their identities can be protected throughout the process and after the findings are reported to the appropriate agencies. Furthermore, when the allegations concern research involving federal funding, funding agency regulations govern our processes during the investigation and our obligations after our investigation is complete. (For example, federal regulations impose an ongoing obligation to protect the identities of those who provided assistance to the investigation.) When the investigation phase is complete, the investigating committee produces a confidential report describing their activity and their findings. The response of the accused to this report and the report itself are considered by the dean, who then decides whether to accept the findings, and in the case of a finding of misconduct, determine the sanctions that are appropriate. This entire and extensive process was followed in the current case.

Since some of the research in the current case was supported by federal funds, the investigating committee’s report and other supplemental material were submitted to the federal offices responsible for their own review, in accordance with federal regulations and FAS procedures. Our usual practice is not to publicly comment on such cases, one reason being to ensure the integrity of the government’s review processes.

A key obligation in a scientific misconduct case is to correct any affected publications, and our confidentiality policies do not conflict with this obligation. In this case, after accepting the findings of the committee, I immediately moved to have the record corrected for those papers that were called into question by the investigation. The committee’s report indicated that three publications needed to be corrected or retracted, and this is now a matter of public record. To date, the paper, “Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins,” Cognition 86, B15-B22 (2002) has been retracted because the data produced in the published experiments did not support the published findings; and a correction was published to the paper, “Rhesus monkeys correctly read the goal-relevant gestures of a human agent,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274, 1913-1918 (2007). The authors continue to work with the editors of the third publication, “The perception of rational, goal-directed action in nonhuman primates,” Science 317, 1402-1405 (2007). As we reported to one of these editors, the investigating committee found problems with respect to the three publications mentioned previously, and five other studies that either did not result in publications or where the problems were corrected prior to publication. While different issues were detected for the studies reviewed, overall, the experiments reported were designed and conducted, but there were problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results.

Beyond these responsibilities to the funding agencies and the scientific community, Harvard considers confidential the specific sanctions applied to anyone found responsible for scientific misconduct. However, to enlighten those unfamiliar with the available sanctions, options in findings of scientific misconduct include involuntary leave, the imposition of additional oversight on a faculty member’s research lab, and appropriately severe restrictions on a faculty member’s ability to apply for research grants, to admit graduate students, and to supervise undergraduate research. To ensure compliance with the imposed sanctions, those within Harvard with oversight of the affected activities are informed of the sanctions that fall within their administrative responsibilities.

As should be clear from this letter, I have a deeply rooted faith in our process and the shared values upon which it is founded. Nonetheless, it is healthy to review periodically our long-standing practices. Consequently, I will form a faculty committee this fall to reaffirm or recommend changes to the communication and confidentiality practices associated with the conclusion of cases involving allegations of professional misconduct. To be clear, I will ask the committee to consider our policies covering all professional misconduct cases and not comment solely on the current scientific misconduct case.

In summary, Harvard has completed its investigation of the several allegations in the current case and does not anticipate making any additional findings, statements, or corrections to the scientific record with respect to those allegations. This does not mean, however, that others outside Harvard have completed their reviews. In particular, Harvard continues to cooperate with all federal inquiries into this matter by the PHS Office of Research Integrity, the NSF Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

Respectfully yours,

Michael D. Smith

Flash: many Americans are morons

August 20, 2010 • 10:27 am

. . . at least 18%, according to a Pew Research Center poll. You’ve probably heard this, but nearly one in five Americans think that Obama is a Muslim.  34% correctly give his professed religion, Christian (I still think he’s an atheist), 43% don’t know, and 4% chose “another faith” or didn’t answer.  Fully 34% of conservative Republicans and 24% of liberal/moderate Republicans thought that Obama is Muslim, in contrast with 6% of liberal Democrats and 12% of conservative/moderate Democrats.

Curiously, despite increasing public verification of Obama’s religion (and birthplace), the percentage of Americans who say he’s a Muslim has increased from March, 2008, when it was 12%.  And the percentage of people guessing Christian is down 13 points from the 47% in March, 2008.

We can write off the 18% as fools, since anybody who’s been alive for a year should know the incontrovertible evidence that Obama’s not a Muslim, but the 43% disturb me a bit, too.  Who hasn’t heard of the Jeremiah Wright affair? And if you did, how could you not take in that Obama was attending a Christian church?

More bad news (nothing new, actually):  61% of those surveyed (a sample of 3003) agree that it’s important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs, while only 34% disagree.

The only good news:  the proportion of Americans who say that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters has risen from 43% in 1996 to 52% in 2010, while those who think that churches should express their views “on day-to-day social and political questions” has dropped from 54% to 43%. This may be a sign that the grip of faith is weakening in America, something I think is inevitable as we grow up.

The spirited atheist

August 20, 2010 • 6:22 am

I’ve just discovered that Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers and The Age of American Unreason, also has an online column, “The spirited atheist”, at The Washington Post.  You might want to look in on this from time to time: she’s a good writer and a provocative one.  Some recent pieces are on the pre-obituaries for Christopher Hitchens,

My guess is we’re not going to get this propaganda about positive attitudes and self-esteem from Christopher Hitchens. What we are going to get, judging by his first article, is a continuing, badly needed report over the next few months or, hopefully, years by a man of reason from the frightening country we all fear but must all enter one day. Christopher Hitchens and I are not personal friends but respectful professional friends. He can tell his story better than anyone else. So my colleagues should stop with the pre-obits and start listening to a man who knows what he’s talking about and isn’t about to abandon reason and start bargaining with any gods.

(By the way, for the full Charlie Rose interview of Hitchens, go here. It’s pretty good.)

the theodicy of bedbugs:

Bedbugs are also very, very hard to get rid of, in that they have developed a resistance to pesticides that were once used to kill them. After an exterminator has gone over an infested site, and you have either thrown out or washed every bit of cloth in your apartment, the final step for many New Yorkers is to bring in a bedbug-sniffing dog to find any survivors. New York writer Alan Good, in “The Bedbug Theodicy,” views bedbugs as an indicator of cosmic hostility. “Either God doesn’t exist, or God exists and hates us (or at least isn’t fond of us),” he writes. “I cannot accept that a loving God would create a creature whose sole purpose is to feast on the flesh of his so-called children.”

and the “ground-zero mosque” controversy:

I wrote a column about the proposed Muslim community center within sight of Ground Zero in May, before right-wing Republicans who hate everything about New York City got into the act and started lecturing us about what we ought and ought not to do to respect the 9/11 victims. I had not planned to write any more about this subject, but the past week’s debate has revealed an astonishing obduracy on the part of both sides. On the one hand, right-wing Know-Nothings are displaying their ignorance of the First Amendment for all the world to see; on the other, many liberals–including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg–seem incapable of distinguishing between what is legal and what is wise. . .

This eruption of base passions could so easily have been avoided by advance planning and compromise. But if and when this center is finally built, it will stand as a monument not to tolerance but to utter political stupidity and to a religious correctness devoid of common sense.

Bad breath fells aphids

August 20, 2010 • 5:43 am

Friday science quickie:  a new paper in Current Biology reports an intriguing adaptation: the breath of mammalian herbivores induces aphids to drop off plants, saving them from being eaten along with the leaves.

Three biologists at the University of Haifa in Israel noticed that two species of aphids, the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) and Uroleucon sonchi,  dropped off their plants when they were about to be ingested by a goat or a lamb.  Here’s a photo:

This escape behavior is probably adaptive, because although dropping off the plant risks death by starvation and desiccation, it surely give you more of a chance than being eaten by a herbivore.

The authors tested whether the appearance of a shadow over the plant, or shaking of the plant itself from plucking leaves, could cause this behavior  Shaking caused a moderate drop, but nowhere near as big as herbivore breath.  Nor did the aphids drop when faced with a natural predator, the ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata).   So the authors made an artificial breath machine, which controlled temperature, humidity of the airstream, and presence of chemicals in the airstream:

The result:  no chemicals, including carbon dioxide, acetone, etc., increased the aphid drop, nor did they in mixture.  Bovine nasal secretions added to the air didn’t do anything, either.  Nor did higher airstream temperature or higher humidity at ambient temperature.  But the aphid drop really took off when they increased both the temperature and humidity of the airstream.  It was the combination of these two factors, then, that the aphids used as a dropping cue.

This fleeing behavior in response to mammal breath is, so far, unique.  Other parasites, like ticks and mosquitoes, can detect and home in on exhaled carbon dioxide and body head, but using mammalian (and perhaps bird) cues to flee hasn’t been seen before.  Of course, nobody’s really looked for it before (this study resulted from a fortuitous observation), and I’ll bet that there are similar cases in other species.

One question: has this behavior evolved in recent times, when humans introduced foraging cows and goats? Or did aphids have mammalian enemies in more ancient times? The authors don’t discuss this.

____________

Gish, M., A. Dafni, and M. Inbar. 2010.  Mammalian herbivore breath alerts aphids to free host plant.  Current Biol. 20:R628-R629.

Sex versus sociality: cooperative breeding in birds

August 19, 2010 • 9:51 am

A new paper in Nature on bird reproduction ends with this provocative quote from E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: “sex is an antisocial force in evolution.”  What does that mean?  In the case of cooperatively breeding birds, the subject of the report by Charlie Cornwallis et al., it means that the cooperation between parents and their offspring is endangered if the parents have too much sex.

Cooperative breeding is the phenomenon whereby offspring help their parents have more offspring.  In birds, the young will hang around at the nest and, rather than reproduce themselves, help their parents raise the next brood.  The classic example is the Florida scrub jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens), but it’s estimated to occur in about 10% of all bird species.

It would seem to defy evolutionary sense to sacrifice your own reproduction to help your parents, but it may not.  After all, a young bird is related by exactly as much to its own offspring as to the brothers and sisters that it could help its parents to raise: in both cases there is sharing of 50% of one’s genes.  Any gene, then that promotes this behavior—do not reproduce yourself but help your parents raise more brothers and sisters—won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage.  Indeed, if there’s a problem with you being able to reproduce personally, such as your having to first learn the ropes about how to tend broods, or your inability to gain a breeding territory since the area is full of other birds, the evolutionary balance may be tipped in favor of your deferring reproduction while you stay at home for a while, but still passing on your genes by helping mom and dad.

Cooperative breeding is a case of kin selection:  animals exercising “altruism” (deferral or absence of reproduction) towards close relatives as a way of passing on their own genes.  Kin selection is also the classic explanation for another very famous case of cooperative breeding: the sterile workers in social insects like ants and bees. In this case, because males are haploid, if the queen mates only once it may be genetically advantageous for a worker to produce more sisters, with whom she shares three-quarters of her genes, than to produce her own offspring, with whom she shares only half of her genes. This genetic explanation for sterile workers is controversial, but I won’t go into that now.

Now the kin-selection explanation for cooperative breeding in birds (and social insects) breaks down if the female parent is “promiscuous”, that is, mates more than once.  If, after producing you, your mother then mates with a male who is not your own father, then your relatedness to her offspring drops from 50% to 25%.  In that case you’d share more genes with your own offspring than with your potential brothers and sisters, and so it’s not such a good idea, evolutionarily speaking, to defer your own reproduction and help mom and dad.  The evolution of cooperative breeding, then, is hindered if females are promiscuous, and you’d expect to see that phenomenon less often in promiscuous than in monogamous species.

That leads to the paper of Cornwallis et al., which is based on this prediction.  The authors analyzed 267 bird species for which there was information about cooperative breeding, promiscuity of females, and their position in the phylogenetic tree of birds.  There’s a lot of new information about promiscuity (or “extra-pair fertilization”—EPF) from DNA-based or other genetic evidence.  It shows that birds are committing adultery all over the place: roughly three-quarters of bird species that appear monogamous because they breed in pairs (“social monogamy”) are actually promiscuous to some degree.

Correlating the data on cooperative breeding with that on promiscuity (and controlling the whole lot with the phylogeny), Cornwallis et al. showed the following:

  • The level of promiscuity (that is, the number of broods containing at least “illegal” chick) was much lower in cooperatively breeding (about 12%) than in non cooperatively breeding species (about 24%).
  • There was a significant negative relationship among species between levels of promiscuity and percentage of nests having cooperative breeders. In other words, those species that had very promiscuous females showed virtually no nests with cooperative breeding.

These might be taken as verifications of the prediction, but there’s a problem with that.  Suppose that cooperative breeders formed a fairly closely related group, and the non-cooperative breeders another closely related group.  Then the data points from the different species would not be independent: if promiscuity had evolved only once, on the branch separating these species, and likewise cooperative breeding (on the nonpromiscuous branch), your correlation among species would reflect only this single evolutionary branching.  But Cornwallis wanted to see if there was a recurrent evolutionary pattern of cooperative breeding being associated with evolutionary decreases of promiscuity (and the converse).  So they looked at the data using the evolutionary tree, which tells you about when these events took place.  Doing this, they found that

  • There was still a very strong negative correlation between the evolution of cooperative breeding and the evolution of promiscuity.
  • Looking at those species that had evolved cooperative breeding from non-cooperative ancestors, those ancestors were less promiscuous than the non-cooperative ancestors of non-cooperative descendants. In other words, if you’re a non-cooperative species, you’re more likely to evolve cooperative breeding if you’re not too promiscuous.
  • There was some suggestion (though it wasn’t statistically significant) that, if you look at cooperative ancestors, those that produced non-cooperative descendants were more promiscuous than those that produced only non-cooperative descendants.

On the whole, these data provide pretty strong support for the idea that cooperative breeding is more likely to evolve when females mate with fewer males.  This verifies the kin-selection prediction that cooperative behaviors are favored when you are more related to those you help.  It’s a nice piece of work.  I’m a bit worried about reconstructing the level of promiscuity in ancestors (something that’s derived from inferences based on living species), which is problematic if the characters change too often; and there’s a potentially confounding factor if the degree of promiscuity is related to the likelihood of forming new species (which is plausible). Nevertheless, the paper gives some intriguing data supporting social evolution via kin selection, and, apart from the evolution of paternal/maternal behavior itself, we don’t have a lot of that kind of data.

_____________________________

C. K. Cornwallis, S. A. West, K. E. Davis, and A. S. Griffin.  2010.  Promiscuity and the evolutionary transition to complex societies.  Nature 466:969-972.

Pseudocopulation in orchids

August 19, 2010 • 5:26 am

A well known botanical phenomenon—one that I mention in WEIT—is pseudocopulation, in which orchids attract insect pollinators by modifying their labellum (one of the petals) to roughly resemble a bee or a wasp.  Short-sighted male insects mistake the labellum for a female, land on it, and try to copulate.  Their efforts are of course fruitless, but this is the way the orchid gets itself pollinated. During the act, the insect dislodges the pollinia (a mass of pollen grains stuck together) from the orchid, which sticks to its body, ready to pollinate the next orchid on which it lands (insects apparently have short memories).

There are of course many cases in which insects have evolved to resemble plants to hide themselves from either predators or prey. Insect-mimicking orchids are more or less the reverse, with the plant using the insect as a kind of flying sex organ.  Sometimes, in a form of deceptive chemical mimicry, natural selection has even modified the orchid’s fragrance to resemble the pollinator’s pheromones.  Click on the link in the second line to see more examples of pseudocopulation.

Here’s the Australian orchid Chilglottis formicifera, pollinated by pseudocopulating wasps.

Here’s Ophrys speculum, a wasp mimic, and an Attenborough video of a randy bee attempting copulation with that orchid but achieving pollination:


Often the flower’s mimicry is so precise that you can guess the pollinator.  I saw this flower yesterday, which stumped me at first:

But then I realized that it’s probably pollinated by this: