And you’d better be at work!

God bless America!  What other country celebrates its independence with a show of extreme gluttony?  The most famous American event on July 4th, aside from fireworks, is the annual hot dog eating contest at Nathan’s at Coney Island, New York.  The winner is the person who eats the most hot dogs (buns and franks) in 10 minutes.  It’s a lot of fun if you like these things (thousands of people attend the eatoff), but there’s also a prize of $10,000 and two cases of hot dogs.

The contest was less than an hour ago, but the video is already up on YouTube.  Joey “Jaws” Chestnut has won for the fourth time, downing 54 dogs, or an average of one dog every 11 seconds.   That’s not near the record of 68, set by Chestnut last year, but it’s an increase of more than 100% since the record of 25.12 dogs a decade ago.  Here’s the clip, with a particularly noxious and jingoistic introduction. Note that Chestnut’s technique is to eat the dog and bun separately, squishing up the bun with water to reduce its volume.

There’s a dearth of evolution news during the holiday break, so I thought I’d call attention to a oft-discussed problem with the World Cup and a little known paper that suggests a solution.  The debate (which, as a football neophyte, I won’t attempt here to resolve or even contribute to) centers on whether the arrangement of World Cup matches is the best way to determine the best team.

To win the World Cup, a team need win only six or more games out of seven against a variety of teams, and to clinch victory it need win only a single game against an opponent it hasn’t previously met in the tournament.  This is in strong contrast to American games like basketball or baseball, in which the two final teams are pitted against each other in a series of games, so that you have to win more than one (four in the case of the baseball World Series) to become champion.

There are two interrelated problems here. The first is that the championship is decided with a single game, and the second is that the number of goals that a team must score to win is relatively low—sometimes just one—so a win can reflect luck, or the events of a single day, rather than a persistent and repeated superiority over an opponent. (The American football championship, the Superbowl, is also decided by a single game, but it typically involves several goals and many points.)  Can we really be sure that the victor in a single World Cup game is the best national team in the world?

This problem was taken up in 1966 by John Maddox, in an piece he wrote for Nature called, “We wuz robbed” (you can download it by going to this page).  If you’re a scientist, you’ll know that Maddox was the plain-spoken and controversial editor of that journal, where he served for two terms (1966-1973 and 1980-1995). He died last year. 1966 was, of course, the only year that Brits ever won World Cup, in a 4-2 final with Germany that featured the only “hat-trick” (three goals by one man; in this case Geoff Hurst) ever performed in a World Cup final.

Maddox fitted the number of goals among all teams in that year’s World Cup to a Poisson distribution.  This is a statistical distribution that occurs if there is a constant but very low probability of an event (say, a goal) occurring in a small interval (say, one minute of a game).  If the probability is constant, then the distribution of events over a longer interval (say, goals in a 90-minute game) should fit the Poisson.  Here from the article is Maddox’s compilation of each team’s World Cup goals, and the expected distribution from under Poisson expectation whose mean is equal to the average number of goals scored by a team (1.234 in this case).

The fit looks pretty damn good, and I confirmed this by doing a chi-square goodness of fit test, which gave the result χ² = 5.73, df = 6, 0.5 > p > 0.4, which isn’t even close to a significant deviation from the Poisson expectation. (I’m told that Mike Whitlock and Dolph Schluter show a similar Poisson distribution of more recent soccer scores in their statistics book The Analysis of Biological Data.)

The fact that the distribution fits so well, as if it were a single team with a fixed probability of scoring goals, led Maddox to say this:

The mere fact that a Poisson distribution can describe so well the distribution of scored by individual teams goes a long way to suggest that the teams were much of a muchness in talent and their scores were independent of each other.  From this point of view, the decision that the outcome of a single competition should depend on the outcome of a single game between the two so-called finalists was as much of a farce as a great many West German supporters already know it to have been.  If it is assumed that the goal scoring potentiality of the two teams is equally sell described by the Poisson distribution already specified, the chance that the result will be a draw is a mere 0.27. In other words, if two teams are equally matched, the chance that the result will be an active injustice to one of them will be 0.73.  By the same token, a team which is slightly less skilled than its opponent can nevertheless expect a one in three chance of winning the deciding match.

Well, I’m not sure I’d consider the loss to an equally-matched team to be an “injustice,” but Maddox has a point.  There are not many baseball World Series matches in which the losing team has failed to win a single game, and so we might be wary of saying that a team that wins the World Cup has decisively demonstrated its superiority to all other national teams.

The solution would seem to be making the championshp depend on winning more than one game.  Maddox suggests a World-Series-style final of several “replicated’ games, so that

. . the finalists go on playing against each other either until the superiority of one or the other of them is properly established, or until both parties agree to negotiate a draw.

Such a negotiation is of course out of the question, but a series of matches is not.  Maddox suggests, tongue in cheek, an alternative:

[R]edesign the parameters of the game of football in such a way that a respectable degree of confidence in the outcome of the competition can be acquired in a reasonable interval of time.  If, for example, it were agreed that single cup finals should remain, but that no team should be declared the winner until its score exceeds that of its opponent by three standard deviations of the Poisson distribution, it might be necessary to design the game of football so that it would be practicable for one side to score 100 goals or so within the limits of endurance of the spectators.  This implies that the parameter q [the mean score] would have to be much greater than under the present rules.  Such a change could easily be brought about, possibly by widening the goalposts or by abolishing goalkeepers.

Nobody’s having that, but why not multiple games in the final?  The downside is that this would make the World Cup much longer (especially if multiple games are also held in the earlier stages), and would also eliminate the drama of the championship coming down to a single 90-minute game that the whole world watches.  But really, isn’t the World Cup about determining which country’s team is best, a decision that the winning nation can proudly claim for the next four years? Is there anyone here who would defend the present system against one involving multiple games in the final?

_______

Maddox, J. (writing anonymously).  1966.  We wuz robbed.  Nature 211:670.

h/t: Geoff North

Last week I posted about the National Academy of Sciences’ new committee on ensuring that science is portrayed accurately by Hollywood.  Here’s Hollywood’s pre-committeee attempt to do so, from the egregious movie Evolution (2001), starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, and Julianne Moore.

The assignment on the blackboard undoubtedly refers to one of the several papers that my student Allen Orr and I co-wrote on speciation in fruit flies (“Drosophila”, written behind Bloom’s Jones’s shoulder).  The page numbers are completely fictitious.

Science writer and accommodationist Clay Farris Naff explains why God works through Darwinism:

So, where can we turn for an answer to the puzzle of God? I humbly suggest we look to evolution. The creative power of Darwinian evolution is, evidently, almost without limit. Let’s suppose there’s a Creator out there with limited power. If the Creator wanted to bring about a result like us — life, that is, capable of contemplating, appreciating, and sustaining life — he, she, or they surely might have done worse than to create a Universe with just enough scope and variation to let evolution do all the labor of design. What sort of Creator might do that? One in our own image, of course: An intelligent life seeking to pass the torch of life across the cosmos to a new generation.

There is more to ponder, here, of course, and I’m the first to admit that there is no evidence to tip the balance. But let me stake my claim here: the just-good-enough Universe we inhabit is more consistent with my view than any other rationally acceptable explanation proffered so far. If I’m right, we are the children of loving cosmic parents, and we are charged with becoming what they once were. How cool is that?

Not so cool, actually.

Germany 4, Argentina 0.  The German team is a mighty machine; can anyone stop them?

CONTEST:  Pick the final two teams in the World Cup, the winner, and the score before any shoot-out.  (If you predict a tie draw after overtime extra time, then please include your guess about who will win on penalties.) Closest guess gets an autographed copy of WEIT; in case of tied entries, the first one wins.

Contest closes at midnight tonight Chicago time (Saturday, July 3).

These reviews are bit tardy given that Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s book has been out a few months, but better late than never, especially when two arrogant authors need a spanking.

The first review is by John Horgan at The Philadelphia Inquirer (you might remember Horgan as the author of The End of Science and the essay “The Templeton Foundation: A Skeptic”s Take”).  Horgan joins the long parade of critics who don’t like the book:

Some sections of What Darwin Got Wrong – in spite of the book jacket’s promise of “crystal-clear philosophical arguments” – read like a parody of philosophical impenetrability. Consider this nutshell summary, from the book’s preface, of its theme:

“[T]here is at the heart of adaptationist theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. We will argue that: Darwinism is committed to inferring (2) from (1); that this inference is invalid (in fact it’s what philosophers call an ‘intentional fallacy’).”

FPP may be trying to say something about correlation not equaling causation, but I’m not sure. I doubt whether anyone at Farrar, Straus & Giroux could parse this or many other even murkier passages. Farrar, Straus probably bought the book, which expands on a 2007 essay by Fodor, in the hopes that it would stir up a highbrow ruckus good for sales. (It has, so maybe they’re happy. [JAC note: What Darwin Got Wrong didn’t sell that well, and is now at #55,424 on Amazon.]  I suspect that when Farrar, Straus got the manuscript, the editors realized that if they cut out everything that didn’t make sense, there wouldn’t be much left. So they left everything in, hoping readers would mistake obscurity for intellectual depth.

Horgan makes one comment, though, that I’m not keen on:

I was particularly eager to hear a serious critique, motivated by scientific rather than spiritual concerns (Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are proud atheists), of natural selection. Darwin’s theory has always struck me as both breathtakingly powerful and vaguely dissatisfying—and I’m not alone. The philosopher Karl Popper once called the theory of evolution by natural selection “not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.” Attacked for this statement, Popper pretended to retract it, but shortly before his death he confessed to me that he still disliked the theory. Biologist Lynn Margulis once told me evolutionary theory cannot really explain the emergence of new species, which is like saying that chemistry cannot explain how elements form compounds.

A pity that Horgan doesn’t tell us why he considers evolutionary theory “vaguely dissatisfying,” but never mind.  What’s wrong here is the idea, which he gets from Lynn Margulis, that we don’t understand how new species arise.  That’s completely bogus.  Margulis has been going around for years saying this, but she’s wrong, which she’d know if she had even a nodding acquaintance with modern evolutionary biology. The process of speciation is in fact the topic of a book that Allen Orr and I wrote, Speciation, and most of the book shows how the origin of new species (which most biologists define as groups separated by genetic barriers to hybridization) seems to be a byproduct of evolutionary processes occurring in geographically isolated populations.  And there’s lots of evidence for this, including the observations that isolated populations of a single species show signs of incipient reproductive isolation, and recent work showing that genes that have evolved adaptively in different populations don’t work well (causing inviability or sterility) when put together in a hybrid genome.

As for Margulis’s idea that most speciation comes from symbiosis, it’s dead wrong.  When we look at reproductive barriers between closely related species, we invariably find that they’re based on changes in genes, not on the acquisition of new symbionts.

Over at The London Review of Books, Peter Godfrey-Smith dissects Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book in an essay called “It Got Eaten” (this refers to predation). The prose in Godfrey-Smith’s piece is a bit tedious, somewhat of an object lesson about how professors shouldn’t write so academically in a popular magazine, but it gets the job done.  The main job is to show that, as I pointed out in my own review, even if biologists sometimes personify natural selection in a way that can look misleading, that doesn’t mean that natural selection doesn’t occur:

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini criticise the tendency to talk of selection as if it were an agent. They are right that this is often misleading, but they seem to be making a similar mistake when they treat it as something over and above the ordinary facts of life, death and reproduction. For Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, it makes sense to ask: ‘Even if trait T causes organisms to reproduce more while T* has no effect, how can selection see that fact?’ But there is no question to ask here, nothing extra that selection might achieve or fail to do.

Nota bene: to those who have complained that critics have simply misunderstood Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s subtle arguments because those critics are not philosophers, be aware that Peter-Godfrey Smith is a professor of philosophy at Harvard.  Other philosophers, including Philip Kitcher and Ned Block, have also found What Darwin Got Wrong seriously deficient.