Jul 20th, 2008 by ravi
Minor tremors in Biology: Evolution and Natural Selection

Some recent majordomos like Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago) have used language akin to George W. Bush’s “aiding and comforting the enemy” to shut down or criticise any criticism of the orthodox position (The New Synthesis) in Evolutionary Biology. To them, everything from Jerry Fodor’s controversial essay, “Why pigs don’t have wings” to the “Altenberg 16” and their meditations on an “extended evolutionary synthesis”, do nothing more than arm the creationists and ID theorists. While it is true that this line of thought is easily misused by the creationist gang (search for the Altenberg 16 in Google and the first two links are one titled “The Evolution Industry” and another that of an ID proponent), that is no more a reason to avoid it than the sort of criticisms that Bush wants to silence. But the more nuanced and less religious approach to understanding evolution is not new, as Lewontin shows in the previously mentioned review of books on and by Stephen Gould:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

Gould’s interest in form and function led him to revive interest in what was for some time a neglected aspect of evolution, the change in relative size of different body parts. It was well known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that during the course of evolution different parts of similar organisms changed their relative size. So, for land vertebrates, as bodies grow larger in evolution, limbs get relatively thicker, but cranial size grows larger more slowly than the rest of the body so that heads get relatively smaller.

A major change in this relation of head size to body size occurred, however, in the immediate ancestors of humans. In the human line, cranial size has grown larger more rapidly than body size so we have, compared to apes, heads too big for our bodies. On the other hand our teeth have become much smaller. In recent years this regularity of differential growth, or allometry, of body parts is sometimes neglected because of a fashion for adaptive explanations of evolutionary change. A famous example is the Irish elk, a very large deer with grotesquely enlarged antlers. It was common to explain these huge appendages as the result of natural selection favoring males with the largest antlers, who would then win out in head-on struggles with other males in the competition for females. It was further imagined that the Irish elk as a species went extinct because it was too much of a strain to carry all that weight around on their heads.

Steve Gould neatly deflated this just-so story by showing that the antlers of the very large Irish elk were exactly the size that one would expect from the general differential growth rate of body and antlers in deer. As for the Irish elk’s extinction, their more modestly antlered ancestral species also became extinct, so it is not clear why we should pick out their extravagant headgear as the cause. The important point is that it is easy to make up adaptive stories out of one’s imagination for any feature of any organism, but that there are concrete realities of growth and physiology that need to be taken account of before lapsing into unchecked fictions. A chapter in The Richness of Life, coauthored with David Pilbeam, develops this theme for human evolution.

The phenomenon of allometry is only one of a number of possible factors that need to be considered in explaining particular evolutionary changes. It is a vulgar error to reduce the explanation of all evolutionary changes to the action of natural selection. It is not only in everyday language, however, that evolution is made synonymous with the effect of the higher reproductive fitness of some forms. Within the profession of evolutionary biology during the last thirty years there has developed an overwhelming fashion for adaptive explanations of every feature of organisms. This has been encouraged by the development of theories of kin selection and group selection in which it can be shown formally that a trait may spread in a population even though it is a disadvantage to its carrier, provided that close relatives or the population as a whole may have an increased reproductive rate. This form of reasoning, easy to do in theory but extremely difficult to demonstrate convincingly in nature, has swept through evolutionary biology.

One essay, “The Spandrels of San Marco,” reprinted in The Richness of Life, has itself become the subject of a very considerable literature. It argues that there are multiple possible explanations for evolutionary change besides direct natural selection for a trait.[4] Steve Gould was enamored of early Italian church architecture and familiar with spandrels—the triangular spaces between a series of arches and the straight cornices running above them. He suggested the spandrel as a metaphor for anatomical features of organisms that were not themselves adaptive, but were the architectural consequences of building another feature, just as the spandrels filling in the space surrounding a church dome are a necessary outcome of placing a circular object on a square base. As the church spandrels may then incidentally become the locus for decorations such as portraits of the four evangelists, so anatomical spandrels may be co-opted for uses that were not selected for in the first place.

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

More on the Fodor affair and related matters later!

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Jul 20th, 2008 by ravi
Lewontin on Gould, and the practise of science

In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

There is hardly a chapter in the main body of The Richness of Life that does not repay a careful reading. Of all the essays in it the one that is most important to the public understanding of science is “Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology,” for it deals with an issue that is so discomfiting for scientists that they avoid it when they can. Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else’s. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already “knew” to be true.

In particular, scientists have repeatedly reported that whites have larger brains than blacks. Gould shows that when the preserved brain is measured before the race of its former owner is revealed, this difference disappears completely. Similarly, claims of larger heads of professionals as compared to laborers are not statistically significant because of very large variation from individual to individual. What is important about this essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

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Jul 7th, 2008 by ravi
The Cuban Missile Crisis…

It turns out that much of what we think we know about one of the most studied episodes in modern history is either inaccurate or incomplete. Even more alarming, much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations rested on flawed intelligence reports.

Far from being an example of “matchlessly calibrated” diplomacy – a term used by Camelot historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr – the missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the ever-present “screwup factor” in world affairs.

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