Here is a simple truth that you won’t hear from all the high priests and popularisers of science (in this case, biology):

“If you dissect the past, you can see that luck is a big part of everything in the grand scheme of evolution,” says lead author Stephen Brusatte, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History.

The researchers whose work is being commented upon above, examined the historical record of dinosaurs and crurotarsans:

[E]arly dinosaurs were contemporaries of crurotarsans, croc ancestors, during the late Triassic period about 230 to 200 million years ago. This reptilian group ranged from quick predators to two-legged vegetarians to leisurely grazers. Then, as the Triassic turned into the Jurassic, the creatures roaming the planet changed drastically. Most crurotarsans disappeared from the fossil record. But many dinosaurs survived—and flourished, diversifying into meat-eating giants, armored warriors and winged aviators.

But, they caution:

If dinosaurs were more fit for the environment, they should have had a higher rate of evolution and more diverse body types. Instead the researchers found that the two groups evolved at similar rates and that the crurotarsans had a wider range of body types, suggesting that they had actually adapted to more lifestyles and ecological niches.

The authors argue that because dinosaurs and crurotarsans were living parallel lives together for so long, it is unlikely the dinosaurs necessarily ruled. If you could travel back to the Triassic, Brusatte says, you would have guessed that the crocodilians would have won out. “There’s no way you could argue that dinosaurs were superior to them,” he says. Instead, he thinks an extinction event at the beginning of the Jurassic some 205 million years ago—like runaway global warming or an asteroid crash—may have just been bad luck for the crurotarsans.

The orthodoxy has objections:

“I think that the conclusions of the authors aren’t warranted,” says Kevin Padian, a dinosaur paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Good luck isn’t an evolutionary force…. Extinctions aren’t random.”

I am no evolutionary biologist or paleontologist, but this sort of response seems to miss the point, logically speaking. Properly understood, there is no implication that there is true randomness in evolution — or rather survival (after all, all events have causes). Rather, it seems to me, the parsimonious claim is that species flourish or perish not entirely due to their own adaptations in the constant presence of environmental pressures (and while we are at it, I thought multi-level selection was taboo and we are only to talk of individuals, not species?), but also often due to large environmental events that alter their fate. One could of course present these events as selective pressure and the pre-existing advantages of the organism as “adaptations” but I think such a tautology would rob the theory of much of its value.

[ Link: Was the Dinosaurs' Long Reign on Earth a Fluke?: Scientific American ]

Seed: Noam Chomsky + Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: So you’re talking about self-deception in at least two contexts. One is intellectuals who, in a sense, go through a process of education which results in a self-deceived organism who is really working to serve the interests of the privileged few without necessarily being conscious of it at all.
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they’re just being manipulated.

Click link for video and full conversation.

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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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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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There is an interesting phenomenon to be seen these days, every time there is some controversy. It is quickly morphed into a controversy about the response to the original one! That happened with the Muhammad cartoon issue, where the publication of some silly cartoons aimed at infuriating Muslims (the same populations that are oppressed by the North in real ways) was morphed into outrage over Muslim response to it. Similarly, the clown Imus says something despicable about Rutgers University women’s basketball team members and within a day the “national conversation” is about misogyny in hip-hop and rap lyrics.

In that grand tradition comes the response from professional blowhard and occasional biologist Richard Dawkins on the James Watson controversy (Watson being the famous co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, using data stolen from a female colleague unacknowledged for her contribution, who has stuck an eighth or ninth foot in his mouth with his musings on black people and their capabilities):

Disgrace: How a giant of science was brought low | The Observer

In the end, Watson’s decided to return home, so no meetings occurred, a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed that it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. ‘What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation,’ said Richard Dawkins, who been due to conduct a public interview with Watson this week in Oxford.

Dawkins’s stance was supported by Blakemore. ‘Jim Watson is well known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.’

In case you are misled by the righteous indignation of Dawkins and Blakemore, Watson is not being “silenced” but ignored, and rightly so for this is what he said by way of justifying his “unpalatable view”:

people who have to deal with black employees find this not true

Even if we are to follow Dawkins’ demand that we lend an ear to a bigot, his reasoning deserves the trashbin given the unscientific nature of it.

If you are in need of animated and grandiose debate, with a good measure of personal attacks thrown in, you are sure to find it in biology writing for a general audience. The latest is an outcome of Olivia Judson’s (biologist and author) resurrection of the “hopeful monster” idea with suitable provocative content to trigger a heated response from Jerry Coyne (major domo in the field). Judson suggests that we can revisit the idea of the “hopeful monster” (that a variation in a single gene can have a sudden and large morphological effect on the evolutionary development of an organism/species). Coyne will have none of it and offers some criticism, along with a fair amount of name dropping and attacks on personalities, an approach that we all now recognise as the “scientific method” ;-). Both articles/posts are interesting and informative reads!

How do you say punctuated equilibrium without saying punctuated equilibrium? Here's how:

Another Big Bang for Biology Researchers have uncovered what they think is a sudden diversification of life at least 30 million years before the Cambrian period, the time when most of the major living groups of animals emerged. If confirmed, the find reinforces the idea that major evolutionary innovations occurred in bursts.

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If there is one valuable insight that philosophers of science and sociologists have demonstrated it is that issues in science (and metascience) are frequently decided (or at least argued) in quite non-”scientific” ways (by which I mean what is generally claimed to be the scientific way — in truth a formalisation of rationality, common sense, and long-standing methods of human reasoning). In the skirmishes within science, certain “paradigms” take hold not because of their technical superiority but often because of certain very human prejudices. The idea that selfishness precedes (and even excludes) co-operation, is an example, and one that is beginning to deservedly face resistance, not just in popular science writing through which it has gained its hold, but also in more serious analysis which it had constrained in the past:

For Human Eyes Only – NYT

[...]

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

[...]

In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays, before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling, infants did not very often follow.

[...]

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning, benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

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So, here's what the public thinks about the origins of life and evolution:

Polling Report: Science and Nature

"Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process. Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process. OR, God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." Options rotated
						.
		Evolved, God Guided	Evolved, God Had No Part	Exactly As Bible Describes	Other (vol.)	Unsure
		%	%	%	%	%
	9/8-11/05	31	12	53	1	3

The report lists multiple surveys with many versions of this and related question, and in almost all cases, the majority (or plurality) have the anti-evolutionary view of things. Perhaps I should not be surprised by that?

An op-ed piece in the NYT puts forth the [at least to me] novel notion that human language evolved from mother-infant vocalizations. Those, in the left, who confuse coincidence with congruence will distance themselves from such "sentimentalities", but I find it most interesting!

Our Mother Tongue – NYT
[...] 

Had it not been for the natural selection of enlarged brains, our species would have evolved in a completely different direction. There would be no theory of relativity, no knowledge of "entangled" particles or the human genome; we'd have no great art, music or novels. The excruciating pain and trauma of childbirth are the cost our species has paid for its fancy cognition. And mothers continue to pay the debt.

But that's hardly all prehistoric mothers gave us. They also may well have touched off the evolution of language from the sounds they made to reassure their helpless infants. Baby chimpanzees, after all, can cling to their mothers' hairy chests and contentedly ride along, nursing on demand. But human infants, born immature, lack that dexterity. Before the advent of devices like baby slings, the burden of carrying helpless infants presented a quandary for early mothers as they foraged for food and water.

To accomplish their tasks, ancestral moms would at times have needed to put their babies down, and these interruptions in physical contact would have been as distressing for infants then as they are now. It's very likely that mothers began to use special vocalizations to reassure and quiet their infants. These vocalizations were the origin of the more complicated lullabies and baby talk, sometimes called "motherese," that exist today in nearly all human cultures, but which are totally absent among chimpanzees.

Motherese helps infants learn the rhythms and rules of their native speech through simple vocabulary, extensive repetition, exaggerated vowels, high tones and slow tempo. The road from mothers' reassuring vocalizations to the first speech would have been a long one, but these interactions between prehistoric mothers and infants may very well have paved the way for the emergence of spoken words.

Many linguists think that the first human language was very simple and probably consisted mostly of nouns. But to what would the first words have referred? Kin, foods, predators, tools and weather have all been suggested.

I suspect that one of the first words invented was the equivalent of "Mama." Surely, maturing infants, then as now, would have sought a name for the being who provided their first experiences of warmth, love and reassuring melody.