Is stasis a general trend across non-skeletal traits?

In today's eSkeptic, which celebrates Darwin's 203rd birthday, Donald Prothero writes about the most cited paper in all of paleontology: Eldredge and Gould's Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism (1972).

Prothero explains that the revelation was that species (at least as described by fossils) mostly don't change, but rather are in stasis for most of the time. Gradualism, as proposed by Darwin, doesn't describe the change of species very well.

For the first decade after the paper was published, it was the most controversial and hotly argued idea in all of paleontology. Soon the great debate among paleontologists boiled down to just a few central points, which Gould and Eldredge (1977) nicely summarized on the fifth anniversary of the paper’s release. The first major discovery was that stasis was much more prevalent in the fossil record than had been previously supposed. Many paleontologists came forward and pointed out that the geological literature was one vast monument to stasis, with relatively few cases where anyone had observed gradual evolution. If species didn’t appear suddenly in the fossil record and remain relatively unchanged, then biostratigraphy would never work—and yet almost two centuries of successful biostratigraphic correlations was evidence of just this kind of pattern. As Gould put it, it was the “dirty little secret” hidden in the paleontological closet. Most paleontologists were trained to focus on gradual evolution as the only pattern of interest, and ignored stasis as “not evolutionary change” and therefore uninteresting, to be overlooked or minimized. Once Eldredge and Gould had pointed out that stasis was equally important (“stasis is data” in Gould’s words), paleontologists all over the world saw that stasis was the general pattern, and that gradualism was rare—and that is still the consensus 40 years later.

Stasis, which I have blogged about previously, is not nothing, but a phenomenon to be explained. Why would populations not change gradually, as some had expected? The environment does change ever so often, perhaps even what cold be termed gradually at times. Does stasis in the fossil record have to do with the fact that the information we get from fossils are predominantly about the morphology of vertebrate skeletons? Could it be that gradual changes in response to selection causes gradual changes in traits that don't affect skeletons (such as physiology or behavior)? Could there be general features of genetic architecture, for example, that constrains how skeletal morphology can change?

Alternatively, are is there evidence of stasis on other kinds of traits?


Gould, Shermer, and Prothero in 2001.

Program of the Proceedings of the 44th Carnival of Evolution

We are happy to announce the program for the Proceedings of the 44th Carnival of Evolution to be held at The Atavism:

Session 1. Symposium on the evolution of novelty
Session 2. Evolutionary ecology and life history evolution
Session 3. Philosophy and evolution
Session 4a. Experimental Evolution
Session 4b. Timing and tempo of evolution
Session 5. Outreach and anti-creationism

The poster session will start following the last talk, and will be followed by a banquet.

Notable speakers include

Carl Zimmer, The Loom
Eric M. Johnson, The Primate Diaries
Jeremy B. Yoder, Denim & Tweed
John Wilkins, Evolving Thoughts
S. E. Gould, Scientific American
Zen Faulkes, NeuoroDojo

Registration is free, and we hope you can all attend.

Organizing committee:
David Winter, The Atavism
Bjørn Østman, Pleiotropy, Carnival of Evolution

Behe on Behe, and Behe on evolution

I hadn't seen before that Leo Behe gave an interview last year.

He says as well as anyone what is wrong with the argument from design:

As for the arguments from design, such as irreducible complexity or the so-called fine-tuning of the six cosmological constants, I have many reasons for dismissing them each in particular, but one overarching reason would be the common refutation of William Paley’s classic watchmaker argument—the only reason that complex objects appear to be designed is because we as humans create complex objects, and we then assume that complexity is indisputably indicative of a designer. This is an association we make only as a result of what our “common sense” tells us.

A much too much unappreciated fact.

And Behe Jr. on Behe Sr.:

I would like everyone to realize that he doesn’t have any sort of religious agenda and he’s not trying to denigrate science in any way. Long-held beliefs, especially beliefs developed during childhood, operate on a very deep and basic level of thought—almost subconsciously. These beliefs can exist independently in a perfectly honest and intelligent scientist who is simply doing his part to further theories or ideas that he believes are supported by the scientific data. The best way to progress is through respectful and thoughtful discussion and debate, as it has always been.

I wish this to be true. I've met Michael Behe briefly at a conference, and I would like to believe that his mind is merely clouded by his religious thinking (and I hasten to say, in much the same way that most of us are clouded in our thinking in some ways or other - to me, one of the greatest joys* in life is to discover my own delusions).

That being said, take a look at Michael Behe's take on the newest research out of Lenski's lab: More from Lenski's Lab, Still Spinning Furiously (not a site I spend a lot of time on nor link to much, but making this one exception). He goes:

So at the end of the day there was left the mutated bacteriophage lambda, still incompetent to invade most E. coli cells, plus mutated E. coli, now with broken genes which remove its ability to metabolize maltose and mannose. It seems Darwinian evolution took a little step sideways and two big steps backwards.

Seems to me that what he's doing here is confuse the evolution of the whole system consisting of bacteria and virus (which from the outside does end up with the same dynamics of infection), but ignores the really interesting thing that goes on in the virus in response to the changes in its host (the bacterium). First, what a shame that he can't appreciate the evolutionary processes that took place in these experiments. If this is not a blatant example of inability to break free of dogma, then something else is.

Second, I have always had a problem understanding proponents of Intelligent Design, because they seem to at some level agree that evolution does occur, and yet they have problems with research that shows how new things are made. This is the domain of the "designer", apparently. But then, why not just say that that's what he did? ID proponents still - as far as I am aware - haven't described how evolutionary events such as viruses evolving new ways to attack the bacteria look different from when they happen naturally. In other words, there's no way of distinguishing the two ways (which would be a great step forward for the "debate" if someone would take this question seriously), so why don't the ID proponents just say that this is the way the designer does it in the first place? I mean, instead of this yapping about whether some research is profound or not.

* Along singing, dancing, playing, drinking, thinking, eating, winning, losing, procreating, baking, kissing, camping, biking, skiing, and writing in dew.

Link between political views and physiology

It is becoming more and more clear that political views are in fact not completely decided by rational considerations, as common sense would have us believe. Rather, previous studies have shown a link between emotional (i.e., largely uncontrollable) responses and position on the left/right spectrum: "those on the right are ‘distrustful of differences … fear change, dread disorder, are intolerant of nonconformity, and derogate reason’."*

A new study takes this even further, showing that there are physiological differences between people to the political left and right: "compared with individuals on the political left, individuals on the right direct more of their attention to the aversive despite displaying greater physiological responsiveness to those stimuli."

The researchers measured skin conductivity of people as they were looking at aversive images (spider on a face, maggots in a wound, crowd fighting with a man) and appetitive images (happy child, bowl of fruit, cute rabbit).

In the physiological session, participants were shown a series of 33 still images. Each image was shown once and was preceded by a fixation point that was displayed during an inter-stimulus interval. The order of slides was initially randomized and then presented in the same order to all participants. During the slide show, electrodermal activity (in the form of skin conductance readings) was collected using a pair of Ag|AgCl electrodes and standard psychophysiological equipment. Since eccrine glands release moisture as part of sympathetic nervous system activation, and since the rate of movement of electricity across the surface of the skin is a good indicator of the presence of moisture, electrodermal activity has long been accepted as a fairly direct and pure representation of sympathetic activity, making it a good measure of the psychological concepts of emotion, arousal and attention.

The skin of test subjects on the political right conducted more electricity than those on the left when presented with "aversive" images. That is, conservatives react more strongly to disturbing images.


Triangles: political right. Squares: political left.

As good researchers always should, the authors here moderate their discussion of these findings to not condemn:

Rather than using colourful adjectives, perhaps, the proper approach is simply to state that the aversive in life appears to be more physiologically and cognitively tangible to some people and they tend to gravitate to the political right.

They conclude that we can best understand political inclinations as being partly determined by something other than rational discourse, and propose a way forward:

Rather than believing those with political views opposing ours are lazily uninformed or wilfully obtuse, political tolerance could be enhanced and cultural conflict diminished if it is widely recognized that at least part of our political differences spring from subconscious physiological and cognitive variations that lead people to experience the world in fundamentally different ways and therefore to believe that fundamentally different political policies are appropriate.

Even if we recognize that people on the political right experience the world in a different way than those on the left, and that these differences are strongly influenced by genetic and physiological predispositions - perhaps prompting us to view them as pathological - and thereby fostering greater acceptance, it is in my mind by no means given what "left" and "right" means. The far left and far right have quite different meaning in different societies. In Denmark, for example, being on the far right does not imply that one is against welfare or abortion, while in the USA those go hand in hand. In other words, the Overton window can be moved, and the result will be that people who are on the far right will shift their actual political views, while still associating with the political right. What people identify as may be determined by non-rational factors to a large degree (but most likely not entirely), but where it is even possible to locate yourself is evidently affected by public discourse. We should therefore not view public outreach as futile because people anyway (mostly) can't change their minds, but as imperative to shifting what it means to be liberal and conservative.

* The rest of the quote from the paper goes "while Block & Block [53, p. 395] find that those on the right are ‘easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, relatively over-controlled and vulnerable’." Hell yeah!

Reference:

Dodd MD, Balzer A, Jacobs CM, Gruszczynski MW, Smith KB, & Hibbing JR (2012). The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 367 (1589), 640-9 PMID: 22271780.

SOPA and PIPA

These US House and Senate bills will censor the internet. Sign the petition to vote no on both.

What determines rates of ecological speciation?

Speciation models are the most beautiful thing in evolutionary biology. This is widely known, and those who disagree are the crazies. Other models have their place, and empirical evidence for speciation, and insights from there into how speciation takes place are crucial for progress. But real understanding of this question of questions in evolutionary biology only comes once a model is constructed and validated. It is the ultimate goal of scientific work to condense knowledge in terms we can share and peruse, and this we do in models - which you may call theory, but I tend to regard this distinction with distrust.

Case in point is a model of ecological speciation in a population of sexually reproducing diploids adapting to different resources scattered heterogeneously in the environment: Patterns of Species Ranges, Speciation, and Extinction.

Specific questions asked and answered include: What is the effect is limited vs. wide dispersal, i.e., how is the rate of speciation affected by individuals occupying a small geographical area? How does the distribution of resources (food, a place in the sun, etc.) affect the rate of speciation?

And the answers are: The more widely the individuals roam, and the more mixed resources are in the environment, the lower the rate of speciation is. So when individuals only get their resources from a small geographical area, and when there are few types of resources within that area, the more speciation happens.


Examples of environments with many types of resources within a small area (A) and resources distributed such that individuals will mostly find only one type within the area they roam.

With four different types of resources, the simulations are started with only 20 identical individuals in the corner of an area like the ones above. By reproduction and mutation the population grows and diversifies. Whether resource specialists or generalists emerge depends primarily on the two factors already mentioned: range and resource distribution. Specialists, which are very good at utilizing a single resource, can coexist with other specialists when they use different resources. You eat the bananas, and I'll the the leaves, and then we can get along. However, different generalists, in this model defined as those who use more than one resource, may not get along so well, because they overlap in resource use, and so one will tend to outcompete the other. We thus have that the emergence of specialists equates to higher rates of speciation.

Here are some results:



A and B: highly mixed resource environments. C and D: fragmented resources. A and C: low dispersal range. B and D: large dispersal range.

In A there are three specialists using only one resource (red), five generalists using two resources (blue), and two three-resource generalists (green) coexisting.

In B there is only a single generalist (no speciation).

In C there are four specialists coexisting.

In D there is one specialist and two two-resource generalists.

And Birand et al. did lots of simulation runs to get a good handle on the importance of the different parameters governing speciation rates. In addition to the two already mentioned (dispersal and resource distribution), another important one is the strength of trade-offs. It can be set as more or less difficult for individuals to be good at utilizing more than one resource. As an example of trade-offs, think of lemurs: Some lemurs eat leaves, and in order to digest the hard-to-digest cellulose, they have really long intestines. Other lemurs eat fruit containing lots of sugar, which is easy to digest. They don't need to have long intestines for that, so they have short ones, and thus can't digest leaves very well. At the same time, lemurs with long intestines can't eat fruits, because they tend to rot while making it all the way to rectum, which makes the lemurs sick. Thus, there is a trade-off between which foods the lemurs can eat, which makes the two species able to coexist (at least in theory - I don't know if they have overlapping ranges). Competitive exclusion (wiki) prevents lemurs that use the same resources from coexisting in the same area, while two species that occupy different niches won't have a problem with each other.

But, while trade-off are important to have for speciation to occur, varying the strength of it had little effect compared to the effects of limited dispersal and resource distribution.

In fact, geography turns out to be the most important feature in this model:

Indeed, when resources were distributed randomly, which resulted in highly fragmented landscapes (figs. S1, S11), there was always only one species regardless of the dispersal range D and trade-off coefficient b (of the 90 simulations initiated with all the parameter combinations of b and D, only one simulation resulted in two species).

That is to say, if it wasn't because resources are distributed in a patchy way, then speciation just doesn't occur at all. When individuals can find all four types of resources within their dispersal range, then generalists are always of higher fitness, and specialization is not favored. This also means that this model cannot account for (strict) sympatric speciation, where there is no geographical structure, and where individuals are not limited to mate with those close by, or use resources in their neighborhood. Not surprisingly, parapatric and allopatric speciation (where geography is a factor) is much easier than sympatric speciation (where geography is not). For that something else is needed. Stay tuned.

Reference:
Birand A, Vose A, & Gavrilets S (2012). Patterns of species ranges, speciation, and extinction. The American Naturalist, 179 (1), 1-21 PMID: 22173457

My time with Hitchens

So Christopher Hitchens died. It is sad when someone dies, mostly, and it is a good time to remember the good thing about the deceased. When the dead is a person like Hitchens, troublemaker extraordinaire, people will do the usual an extoll his accomplishments, but will also point out the extent to which they disagree with him. I don't personally have a problem with either (and feel quite certain that Hitchens wouldn't either, for what that's worth), and he has been given a lot of praise and taken a lot of flak since his death. But I see it as I do with other great contributors to thought - scientists in particular - that we can take from them what we appreciate and leave the rest for historians. Newton was not a nice person, and likely died a virgin (pft!), but we admire him as the greatest thinker of all time because of his accomplishments. And as for Hitchens, what does it matter to me that he was a drunk and supported the Iraq War? None. What matters is the things he said that I can use.

In spring 2008 I took a course with Michael Shermer at Claremont Graduate University called Evolution and Society. Shermer assigned us to answer the same question that he asked a bunch of luminaries via the Templeton Foundation: Does science make belief in God obsolete? Hitchens' answer is in the newest edition of eSkeptic, titled "No, but it should." That sums it up pretty well, and the substance of his reason why religion ought to be obsolete is captured by his sentence "It [religion] is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence," and thus captures the essence of what is exactly wrong with religion and faith: a lack of evidence and dismissal of evidence.

My own essay is listed here (comments by Shermer in Brackets):

Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?

As an atheist scientist, I dismiss the supernatural, and am therefore tempted to rule belief in God obsolete. There are many obvious reasons why – from a scientific point of view - science and religion cannot both be true. To cite just one example, Genesis 1 - what we have learned through science directly contradicts this biblical story of creation. They cannot both be the correct model of our origins.

By itself, however, this fact doesn’t render belief in God obsolete Because belief in God serves multiple purposes. Although science is superior at predicting and describing the world around us, has brought us true insight and utility, and has been used for a broad range of purposes, both good and bad, it cannot do some things that religion does very well.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are nearly identical in the way they are utilized by some of their followers, most notably in ways that science cannot replace. This God of a bronze age desert people continues to serve many people very well today.

What this God does for people is to tell them how to behave by word and by example. This frees people from thinking about such moral matters, and justifies the behavior of those who live and act as commanded by God. Many people still believe that it is through God we have our morals, and they cannot imagine a world without a deity to guide them. Logically, there exists no way of inferring how we should behave from what we can learn through science (the so-called “is-ought” problem, or the naturalistic fallacy), and religion thus trumps science in this matter. Science can explain what we come from, but it cannot tell us how to behave.

Belief in God allows some people to make a living without producing anything of value to society. Interpreting scripture and telling people how to live as God commands, they are generously supported by the rest of society [in what way?]. They [who is “they”?] do not contribute anything tangible, but purport instead to be a link to God, and to know what God wants from us [do you mean priests and pastors? In America they are voluntarily supported by their customers, the members of the church, who by making donations signal that they do, in fact, believe there is something of value being presented]. While science requires scientists devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, scientists cost society far less than what it earns from the resulting discoveries.

Throughout history, belief in God has given rulers the justification for their positions of superiority [I think you mean here the divine right of kings concept]. Oppression and tyranny has been, and continues to be, done in the name of God. Kings and emperors would never have been able to control the masses without the belief that God had personally chosen them. World leaders today continue to justify their means by invoking God, and they are often supremely confident that they have the moral high ground over those people who do not share their particular belief, let alone over those who do not believe at all. Science does not do this. It cannot, because it deals only in knowledge, and thus doesn’t speak of superiority. [what about Marxism, and Marxism-Leninism, supposedly grounded in solid social science and applied throughout the Soviet Union and Mao’s China?]

But perhaps more than anything else, belief in God comforts. People are scared of life, and they are scared of death. It’s a frightening world, and we are but dust blowing in the wind, with minimal control over our own fate. Death is final, and that’s all there is [too colloquial, best suited for a bumper sticker] [these short toss-off lines are not sentences]. Belief in God means, perhaps more than anything else, that once you die, you get to go to a better place, where you will stay forever together with your loved ones. Your life on Earth is merely a test, and if you pass it, you will fear no more, forever. Those lewd unbelievers can go to Hell, where they will burn and suffer forever for their unbelief, by will of God, loving and omnipotent. All science does in this respect is tell you that this life is all you’ve got. That’s it.

So belief in God is by no means made obsolete by science. While my professed disbelief strongly suggest a heap of sarcasm [I’ll say!], I honestly mean it when I say that belief in God is extremely useful, just not in any way in which I would like to participate.

I believe that this world would be better place without belief in God. Science has been a way for me to gain comprehension, and thus a way to accept who we really are, and what life has in stall for us. I am also afraid, but I have come to accept that fear as part of who we are. I refuse to join those who extort and oppress others in the name of God. I am a scientist, and I shall not waiver. Faith is obsolete for me – there is nothing that I dare not question.

I met Hitchens when he came to Pitzer College in 2008 to give a talk before a student audience. He hadn't prepared a presentation particularly for this event, but asked a small group of us over dinner what we would prefer, and it was generally agreed that he should talk about atheism. However, at one point he noted that he also had a great memory for limericks, and asked if we wanted to hear some. Second question: Can we handle some dirty ones? General excitement, except from one woman behind me who gloomily went "No. No. No." Among the many he shared, I only recall this one:

There once was a hooker from Q
who filled her pussy with glue.
She said with a grin,
if they'll pay to get in
they can damn well pay to get out too.

And for that, we thank you.

Pun five

Pun four

Pun three

Pun two

Pun one

Problems with My Citations

Google Scholar Citations is not quite working the way I had expected. Apparently I am the author of a 1935 paper on Field of Science in the journal Women. I wish.



Title: Field of Science
Authors: Bjørn Østman
Publication date: 1935/2
Journal name: Women
Volume: 2009
Pages: 432
Description:
Why drug design is like airplane design. And why it isn't. ... Influenza - putting the Trojan into the horse but should you open it? ... ResearchBlogging.org When the environment is stable, it's good to be robust against mutations. This is because all mutations in an adapted organism will be deleterious or neutral. ... When the environment changes, being robust against mutations means that it is more difficult to adapt, so being robust is not good. This is because robust organisms have a hard time finding the mutations that lead to phenotypic change.

Don't panic! CoE #42 is here

In case you missed it, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolution (aka CoE #42) is up at the Ocelloid.


Image created by Troy Britain.

The Muslim creationists refuse proper education

A second wave of creationists are making trouble, following Christian creationists (who are not done, but seems to be get less media attention these days). Muslim creationists are now walking out of medical lectures because of their beliefs.

Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain's leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.

Would you want to be treated by a physician who skipped classes that mentioned evolution? Microbes that make us sick evolve fast, leading to antibiotic resistance and virulence. Humans have many traits that are shaped by evolution, and the genetic differences among different ethnicities is likewise a subject of evolution. Should we not require that medical doctors know about these topics? Imagine if you weren't sure if your doctor knew enough about some disease because he had walked out on all lectures that mentioned Darwin or evolution. No thanks for me. [Evolutionary medicine.]

The emergence of the schism between Islam and evolution has much to do with Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya). I have written about him before:
Stasis does not falsify evolution
Adnan Oktar repeats challenge ($$$) in a white suit
Creationism in Europe is also bad

Suffice to say that he is the author of the Atlas of Creation, a lush illustrated tome of fishing lures sent free of charge to academics in much of Europe and the US.

As stupid as Christian creationists have proven to be, I fear that will be nothing compared to the zealotry of their Muslim counterparts.

Reproductive species vs. ecological species

Why are two breeds of dogs who can't mate without human assistance the same species, while two fish species, which can and do have fertile offspring, but which are intermediate in size and therefore not as good at obtaining resources as the parents, are different species?


The dog example is pre-zygotic isolation, and would seem prohibitive, if not for human assistance. The fish example is called "extrinsic post-zygotic isolation". So, we have that we consider populations who can't actually interbreed the same species, but those who really do mate are different species.

Personally, I can go either way (but do have a preference), but I really wish we could all agree to apply the Biological Species Concept a little more rigorously. My point is always that the BSC doesn't always work (as with (mostly) asexual species, such as bacteria), and other definitions should then be used. My view is that if two populations are different species by any of a set of good species definitions, then they should be called different species. This is an all-encompassing view of what species are.

Don't lose track of the fact that what we are trying to do when we designate something as species is to say something about biology. At the end of the day, species is a term that must say something about the clustering of genomes, and remember that it is possible to cluster a continuum.

Other good species definitions include the Ecological Species Concept, which classifies species as a set of organisms adapted to a particular set of resources, called a niche, in the environment. This definition* is more difficult to test for in natural populations, but that is neither here nor there when we talk about these basic theoretical questions.

And do note that here I am not even talking about the appropriateness of applying one definition when it doesn't match the actual process by which speciation occurred. Two populations may diverge and become different ecological species despite continuous interbreeding, and only after many generations become reproductively isolated (as in not able to have fertile offspring, for whatever reason, save physical isolation). Thus, saying that there are only different species many generations hence when some mutation occurs that changes the ability of sperm to enter the egg, say, makes no sense in the light of the adaptive processes that made the two groups different.

Let's call two populations different "reproductive" species or "ecological" species when the BSC or the ESC applies, and let's for Heaven's sake be rigorous when applying them!

P.S. If you want to have a crack at this, please don't think you can resolve this by putting meaning into the use of the words "breeds" and "species" in the examples above, 'kay?

* Oh why oh why must we call the definitions "concepts"? A "species" is a concept. Tsk, tsk, Mayr.

Reference:

Rice, W., & Hostert, E. (1993). Laboratory Experiments on Speciation: What Have We Learned in 40 Years? Evolution, 47 (6) DOI: 10.2307/2410209

Who benefits from giving advice about résumé writing?

Interesting little commentary on how (not) to do a résumé: Final Cut: Words to Strike from Your Resume.

I don't have a résumé, 'cause in science that isn't expected. I have a CV, and the difference is that there we just list pretty much everything we've ever done, as opposed to write about how great we are. But I used to have one when I was working as a programmer, and I made just the mistakes that Elizabeth Lowman cautions against:

• Saying what you hope to do in your next job (you should list your top accomplishments)
• Saying you're experienced (you should give details of that experience)
• Saying you're a team-player (you should give examples of how you have been a successful team-player)
• Saying you're dynamic and energetic (you should accurately describe your skills instead)
• Saying references are available upon request (you should assume that the prospective employer knows this)

These all sound like great points to me, and I hereby pass them on. However, my point with this post is to ask what use it really is to do so. What use is it really to do so? Why should anyone give away this advice at all?

The reason I ask is that the job-market surely is a zero-sum game. There are at any one time only a finite number of jobs, and presumably those jobs will be filled. At least, those that won't probably aren't filled because applicants didn't have the world's best résumés. Of course, passing this advice on to your friends has a direct benefit to you - that is, if you care more about your friends than about everyone else. But giving away this advice on the internet? Is that because one cares more about job applicants who read stuff on the internet?

It's seems a little like commercials and advertisements: Who do they benefit? Ignoring the fact that commercials are very often misleading and deceitful (and if you don't know which ones tell you lies, then how can you trust any of it?), nearly the best thing one can hope for is that they shift market shares. A new detergent - no different from the nine brands already on the shelves - can conquer a large percentage (though not more than 100) of the market with an enticing ad campaign. But it doesn't make people do more laundry, does it? (Not that that would be a good thing, either.) Rather, it takes away market shares from other companies. And it's not that I care which company survives, or even that we have 9 rather than 10 that do (though I guess I don't prefer monopolies), but I care that so many resources are spent making and watching commercials. It is, like coffee, wasted resources on a planet that is already not able to feed everyone the way its resources are currently managed. If the people who make commercials were made to do something useful (and lands for coffee beans were instead used to grow food), perhaps we could make this place a little bit better.

So why? Who benefits from giving away this information? The answer is, of course, that Forbes and Elizabeth Lowman benefits. It's a known fact in evolutionary theory that what benefits the individual often doesn't benefit the whole population. What is good for me is not always good for society. It needn't be bad for society, as in the case of this advice being given away in Forbes, but it definitely does look nice in Elizabeth Lowman's résumé. And I'll admit that it is good to have an educated and competent citizenry, and it certainly doesn't hurt that people can sell themselves well in their job application - as long as it doesn't skew the hiring results in a way that makes it less likely that companies will hire the best person for the job.

Nevertheless, the résumé building advice is hereby passed on, and I think it's pretty good advice, too. And you may very well then ask me why I blog about this in the first place. What's in it for me? And the answer is that I don't know. I just felt like it, I guess. There are definitely people who I'd like to do well, such as friends currently looking for jobs. I could of course just have sent you an email with a link to the article, but I know you read this...

Good luck hunting for jobs!

The mind is a mysterious place

Limits free us? Do we need constraints to create? "We break out of the box by stepping into shackles." On a related note, in How To Write A Lot, the main message is that to be a prolific writer, you have to allot time to write, like 9-11 am every day, which seems like a constraint as well.


Those annoying songs that get stuck in your head are called "earworms". But how do earworms start?

Male-to-female transexuals have brains that are physically similar to other men's. Mostly. But also, the 24 individuals examined had "a smaller thalamus (the brain's relay centre) and putamen (an area involved in motor control) and increased gray matter in the right insula and inferior frontal cortex (regions involved in representing the body, among other functions)." The researchers speculate that this difference could arise from "a constant rumination about one's own body". So I wonder, can thought processes change not only which brain cells live or die, and which are connected to which, but also the actual amount of gray matter?

Can you live with a scientist?

It's not just a hypothetical question. It is a hypothetical question, but not just. See what I mean? Isn't that annoying? Yes or no? Why do you think it's annoying? Enough with the why-questions, already?

Do couples who are both scientists form couples because they meet in college, or because no one else can stand being around them? Adorable as some people find geeks, my feeling is that some of those some end up frustrated with the geek despite the initial infatuation.

I'll admit it does take a certain patience at times to live with a scientist. They can be annoying in their insistence on understanding things, and in both colleagues and myself I see that the problem is that this insistence can drive other people less interested in comprehension crazy.

Does this all sound too personal yet? Too close to home? Too icky?

You know what? I don't care, because I am happy being the inquisitive person that I am, and if you can't live with that, then you can be on your merry way. It's not exactly that I look down on people who can't handle a scientist (and the truth). Not exactly. But close. Is that arrogance? People have called me that on more than one occasion, so given a scientist's healthy love for statistics, perhaps I should accept that. In fact, let me calculate a p-value for that. Living in four different places, I have found 6, 3, 5, and 8 who called me arrogant, while 4, 1, 0, and 5 said I was not. A one-tailed t-test gives p=0.0423, which means I am statistically arrogant.

Okay, so that was annoying.

What annoys you about scientists? Even if you like them at times, or "all the time", is there ever something about their personality that drives you nuts on occasion? People who have ever broken up with someone - how much was their scienticity a factor? I'd love to hear from other people.

Speciation in the virtual social world: Facebook vs. G+

It may just be me and the people I follow, but isn't Google+ used more for serious stuff that people want others to see, while Facebook is for whatever friends do to each other. That would make sense, I suppose, given that you can't control who follows you on G+. But does it mean that G+ and Facebook are not really competing for the same niche? Even if there are overlapping functions, as there clearly are, are the two so diverged from each other in function that they will continue to coexist side by side in this virtual sympatric habitat of the internet?


In other words, from whence they both came, are they now effectively different species?

Biological species - and by that I do not exclusively mean reproductively isolated species - may compete for many of the same resources, and yet still remain isolated from each other. This can mean that there is no gene flow between them (or rather, not enough to break down the species barrier), better known as no sex despite all the interspecies love. In the case of asexual species, it can mean that one species doesn't outcompete the other because their ecological niches are different enough that negative frequency-dependent selection saves the species that becomes scarce. I believe Facebook and G+ are asexuals, even though code may transfer horizontally between them, just as with unicellular microbes in the world of biological life. Therefore, as long as Facebook is the best at something not insignificant, and G+ is better than anyone else at some function that people really like, then it is unlikely that one will trash the other.

Niche dimensionality have an effect on speciation. Both theoretically and empirically there is mounting evidence that the more ecological niche dimensions (i.e., traits, such as ability to use a certain resource, or the service of video uploading) between diverging species, the higher the chance that the species barrier will persist (Nosil & Sandoval, 2008; Garant et al., 2007; Gerhart & Brooks, 2009). Think of the chance that two species are going to be different from each other in some essential way: the more things they can do - the higher the niche dimensionality - the more likely that they will not completely overlap in function. And the more distinct they are from each other, the higher the probability that they will not drive each other to extinction.

Negative frequency-dependent selection occurs when it is advantageous to be rare. For example, if two species overlap in the use of some resources, but also both use some resource that the other one doesn't, then when one species becomes scarce, the resource it is specialized on becomes abundant (since that species is the main consumer of it). This in turn makes that scarce species have higher fitness, because there is so much resource available to so few, and it again grows in number. On the other hand, if a new species totally covers the function of another species, then it can drive the weaker species to extinction. I wonder if this is what is happening to MySpace (which I have never used, so I am not sure what the trait overlap is between that and Facebook)? Is MySpace all but dead already?

Same question for Twitter and G+. Is there anything you can't do in G+ that Twitter can do? Couldn't G+ just has well fuel revolutions, or is there a special benefit to a 140 character limit? For mobile devices, perhaps? I do actually use Twitter (@CarnyEvolution), but am guilty of only posting - I can't see why I would go there to get updated on anything ever (but then again, I have not been involved in any revolutions lately, nor do I own a mobile device with the capability).

Mutations, changes in code that alters traits, may eventually make either G+ or Facebook better than the other at everything, and then the other should meet its end. Yesterday I was reading about the history of multi-user dungeons (MUDs), which I played for a while in the early nineties. No one plays those anymore, because they have been superseded by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like EverQuest, which do all the same things, but adds graphics, which makes them fitter. In biology, there is plenty of empirical evidence that mutations confer higher fitness to a species (more precisely, to a population) in its current environment (i.e., adaptation), both empirically (Barrick et al., 2009) and theoretically (Østman et al., 2011).

Environmental change may eventually change this situation of hostile coexistence, if mutations don't do it first. The hardware may change again, such that some of the services offered on Facebook and G+ become obsolete. Or user preferences may change, for example by many people being really annoyed with Facebook's privacy policy, leading to massive exodus, and bankruptcy.

So, what's your prediction about the future of virtual online social media? Will G+ drive Facebook out of business by being better at everything? Note that Google does many other things that G+, so it is not likely (at all) that G+ will disappear now that it has some traction, because Google gains lots of fitness from al those other traits (search engine, RSS, maps, YouTube, email, etc.). Google really is like the rats or the cockroaches of this world: hellishly adaptable and not so easy to get rid of. Facebook, on the other hand, aka LinkedIn for teenagers, only does one thing, which is dangerous. But as long as it does this thing better than anyone else, perhaps it will be safe?

References:

Nosil P, & Sandoval CP (2008). Ecological niche dimensionality and the evolutionary diversification of stick insects. PloS one, 3 (4) PMID: 18382680

Garant D, Kruuk LE, McCleery RH, & Sheldon BC (2007). The effects of environmental heterogeneity on multivariate selection on reproductive traits in female great tits. Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 61 (7), 1546-59 PMID: 17598739

Gerhardt HC, & Brooks R (2009). Experimental analysis of multivariate female choice in gray treefrogs (Hyla versicolor): evidence for directional and stabilizing selection. Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 63 (10), 2504-12 PMID: 19500145

Barrick, J., Yu, D., Yoon, S., Jeong, H., Oh, T., Schneider, D., Lenski, R., & Kim, J. (2009). Genome evolution and adaptation in a long-term experiment with Escherichia coli Nature, 461 (7268), 1243-1247 DOI: 10.1038/nature08480

Østman, B., Hintze, A., & Adami, C. (2011). Impact of epistasis and pleiotropy on evolutionary adaptation Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.0870