Bloggasm

Though the name Charles Darwin is known by every creation scientist (who curse him), Evolutionary Biologist (his greatest defenders) and the general population (who know of him but usually have a wide range of misconceptions about his theory), not many people would know that there was another scientist who wrote a paper on natural selection before Darwin published his famed The Origin of Species.

That man, Alfred Russel Wallace, was profiled in this week’s New Yorker because of a recent surge in biographies written about him:

When he was twenty-four years old, Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, had his head examined by a phrenologist who determined that, while his “organ of wonder” was very big, his “organ of veneration,” representing respect for authority, was noticeably small. Wallace was so struck with the accuracy of this report that, sixty years later, he mentioned it in his autobiography. It was wonder that drew him to nature, and an instinctive disregard for authority that made it easy to challenge an entire civilization’s religious convictions, as he did when, in 1858, he dashed off a paper proposing a theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Unlike Charles Darwin, who spent twenty years keeping a similar conclusion to himself in private dread, Wallace didn’t give a damn what people thought. This utter independence from public opinion is one of several reasons that he has all but vanished from popular consciousness.

There was several reasons Wallace drifted into obscurity while Darwin was propped up as the father of evolutionary theory. His major mistake was sending his paper concerning natural selection to Darwin, who had been sitting on the theory for years, afraid to come forth with it. Realizing that another scientist was going to beat him to the punch. Darwin quickly moved forward and published his book.

This wasn’t Wallace’s only error, however. What doomed him most was his own double life; one that was grounded in science, the other in superstition. He spent most of his life trying to find a connection between theism and evolutionary theory, and as a result he wasn’t taken seriously by the scientific community.

There were other mishaps as well. That his own version of Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle” ended in a sunken ship. His poverty and lack of formal education.

Darwin’s theory is propped on some of the predictions made by previous scientists (his grandfather being one of them), and Wallace arrived at the conclusions using the same chain of ideas, and did so completely separately from Darwin’s own work. It’s really just a matter of bad mistakes and luck that his name isn’t as famous as Darwin’s.

But thanks to the new string of biographies, Wallace now seems to be in vogue, and might receive some long-awaited recognition.

What’s most interesting in the article is the debate over whether Darwin stole some ideas from Wallace:

What followed has been called the “Delicate Arrangement.” The term, drawn from a phrase used by Huxley’s grandson, provides the title of a 1980 book by Arnold C. Brackman arguing that Darwin received Wallace’s paper earlier than he acknowledged, incorporated aspects of it into his own work, and then sent it on to Lyell pretending that it had just arrived. Much poring over postmarks and manuscripts is involved in this argument, but the recent biographies all make it pretty clear that, at its root, this was primarily an instance—perhaps the greatest—of great minds thinking alike.

It then goes on to outline his greatest downfall: embracing Spiritualism:

Wallace’s sister Fanny had become a spiritualist while he was in the Tropics, and, partly through her interest, Wallace began attending séances in 1865. Though he was skeptical, looking behind doors and under tables in advance of the proceedings, he quickly fell under the spell of these events, enthusiastically recording what he saw. Fresh flowers materialized on a table. (Wallace duly noted each species.) A spirit hand reached down to touch the keys of an accordion. The name of a deceased brother turned up on a piece of paper that Wallace had hidden.

I’m actually quite surpised that religion apologists don’t start quoting him more often.

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PZ Myers is the writer for what is arguably the most popular science blog on the internet: Pharyngula. He writes about a variety of science-related issues for a general audience, not afraid to delve deep into controversial politics whenever they seem to be attacking science.

Myers is currently an associate professor of biology at University of Minnesota, Morris, within the Division of Science and Mathematics. Within the last year, he officially joined the Science Blog team for Seed Magazine along with forty-seven other bloggers.

Simon Owens: Chris Mooney, in his book The Republican War on Science, talks about how the Republicans started to successfully use the phrase “sound science” to obscure their true political goals which were based on anything but sound science. Do you think this is the result of scientists not being proactive enough in getting their views out to the public?

PZ Myers: Partly. “Scientist” is a diverse category, politically, and it would be difficult to come up with a term under which we could all be consolidated, though, so I wouldn’t entirely blame us. It’s much easier to come up with convenient slogans against science when you’ve got a group whose major raison d’etre is to oppose scientific conclusions.

However, it is true that many scientists have been myopic. We find it hard to believe that there could be coherent opposition to rationality and evidence-based decision making…but it’s happening. I think more of us are starting to wake up.

Simon Owens: With all the recent attacks on science, ranging from global warming, to Intelligent Design, to misinformation about fuel economy, to abstinence-only education, what would you consider to be the most atrocious attack on science in the past decade?

PZ Myers: I wouldn’t name a specific event. It’s a growing attitude, best represented by that creationist slogan, “Teach the controversy.” It’s this strange attitude that any opinion deserves equal recognition by the media and politicians and educators, and that an expectation that we should have supporting evidence is superfluous. That idea that mere expression of a claim is sufficient has allowed religious thinking to flourish, poisoning the debates with stupid ideas and the demand that we respect them no matter what.

Simon Owens: What made you decide to blog for Seed Magazine? How did that come about?

PZ Myers: Growing traffic, first of all. The site was being run from a server in my lab, and whenever traffic rose to about 20,000 visitors a day, it would strain and start to break down. I needed professional help!

Seed provides that reliable support, which was my first consideration. The other factor, though, was that talking to the people there convinced me that they “got it”–they were going to value the diversity of opinion that is the hallmark of blogs, and even though I think they might cringe now and then at some of the positions we take, they’re committed to letting us state them. They understand that we aren’t the propaganda arm of the Seed Media Empire, we’re part of a science conversation on the web, and they’re confident enough in the quality of their work that they know we’ll make them a positive part of that discussion.

Simon Owens: I’ve interviewed several bloggers before who were also professors. I’m always curious to find out whether a professor’s students and faculty pay attention to the blogger’s online work.

PZ Myers: Yes, they do. I don’t know to what degree, but I do get comments from students, and colleagues, and just people on the street in town. It’s a little weird. I sort of mentally dissociate myself from that, though; I don’t want to be self-conscious, and I don’t want to be reluctant to discuss something because I’m afraid of pissing off the box boy at the grocery store.

Simon Owens: Do you have a hard time sometimes writing for a more general audience? How do you balance scientific jargon with articulating your views to non-scientists?

PZ Myers: No, it’s not hard at all. I’m used to trying to explain things to 18 year olds. I don’t mean that in a condescending way, either: I make a living talking to smart people who don’t know much about a subject YET, but are sincerely trying to learn. That’s the attitude I take, anyway — I assume my readers are intelligent people with an honest interest in a subject they haven’t heard much about, and the rest just follows.

Simon Owens: There’s been a number of books recently about religion that have brought on a lot of hype, including The God Delusion and Tempting Faith. I remember seeing Dawkins on the BBC, and when asked about scientists who manage to be Christians, he said he didn’t really understand them. Do you think that scientists who view the bible as a metaphor in the attempt to claim it doesn’t disagree with science are being intellectually dishonest with themselves?

PZ Myers: No, they’re being honest to their selves. People are complicated, messy, organic creatures, and part of our nature is the ability to accommodate many mutually contradictory ideas. I disagree strongly with those scientists who make these unlikely, sloppy, silly attempts to rationalize their religious belief — both Francis Collins’ recent book and Ken Miller’s book, which fall into abysmal stupidity whenever they start babbling about religion — but I think they are completely sincere. Sincerity and honesty don’t make them right, though.

Personally, I’m like Dawkins, and I don’t understand them myself. Science erodes faith–it sets up values that directly oppose the expectations of religion. I can’t imagine being so committed to a superstition that I’d voluntarily shut down my critical faculties rather than analyze the evidence with a skeptical scientific eye.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

PZ Myers: I think I’ll pass on that question. I’ve got a couple of hundred blog feeds in my newsreader, and I’d rather not discriminate against 98% of them by naming just a few. Here’s a complete list — otherwise, everyone should just find the ones they enjoy!

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The always-excellent Clive Thompson points to a new experiment where a team of scientists make a highly-detailed simulation of the 9/11 attacks.:

Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation that uses scientific principles to study in detail what likely happened when a commercial airliner crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

The simulation could be used to better understand which elements in the building’s structural core were affected, how they responded to the initial shock of the aircraft collision, and how the tower later collapsed from the ensuing fire fed by an estimated 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, said Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering.

The simulation is so detailed that after 80 hours of work, they’ve produced only a half-second of simulation, but already in that half-second they’ve learned a lot. This kicker for 9/11 conspiracy theorists is here:

“Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor,” he said. “This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse.”

Of course, the experiment wasn’t done to disprove 9/11 conspiracy theories, that’s just a byproduct of it. And a detailed simulation is a hell of a lot better than grainy footage produced in Loose Change.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but in some cases, patients are allowed to tour the medicine factories that produce the drugs they use. This article claims that it’s because the companies rely on word-of-mouth rather than mass advertising since they only treat rare diseases.

She was among 70 patients, relatives and support group organizers from around the country who took up Talecris Biotherapeutics on a rare, all-expenses-paid invitation: Tour the Clayton plant where Talecris makes treatments for immune disorders, hemophilia, burns and severe blood loss…

But company officials had good reasons to hold the open house. Talecris avoids mass advertising on television or in popular magazines because its customers are small groups of patients with rare diseases. Instead, the company relies on word of mouth and occasional advertisements in medical journals.

Hopes are that the open-house guests will spread the word about Talecris and its blood-based medicines in tight-knit patient communities. The company is considering turning the visit into a regular event.

I’m not sure exactly how this causes word-of-mouth advertising. For one, there’s no positive experience that’s causing the word-of-mouth. Showing someone where the drugs are made doesn’t really do anything.

It is fascinating, however, because it mentions “tight-knit patient communities,” which reminds me of the beginning of Fight Club where Ed Norton visits grief sessions for the terminally ill. But if the diseases are so rare, what are the chances that there would be lots of others within driving distance of you that have the disease?

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I think the list of things that wine can supposedly cure has sky-rocketed in the last ten years. Everyone repeats the idea that drinking a glass of wine a day is good for your heart. Well, add one more to the list: Red Wine May Prevent Alzheimer’s:

Red wine might put a cork on the formation of brain proteins tied to Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows.

But don’t raise your wine glass to celebrate yet. The study only included mice. It’s too soon to know if the findings apply to people.

Still, the data deserves further study and support the theory that one daily drink of red wine for women and two for men “may help reduce” Alzheimer’s risk, write the researchers.

Ok, so it has only been tested on mice. But at least now you know how to prevent Alzheimer’s with your pets: pour red wine into their water bowl every night.

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Clive Thompson, never afraid to take a movie seriously when it isn’t supposed to be, has a post that analyzes the science in Snakes on a Plane’s “snake vision” they use in the movie. As you remember (because you did see the movie, right?), there were several green-vision shots through the eyes of the snakes right before they attacked, and he wondered if Snakes really saw things in this way:

As it turns out, the question of Snake-O-Vision has long puzzled scientists, particularly in two types of deadly serpents — pit vipers and boid snakes. These snakes can strike prey with accuracy even when they’re blindfolded, which suggests they’re using a “pit organ” on each side of their head that senses infrared radiation. The problem is that these pit organs are one millimeter in size and not very deep — which means they could produce only extremely blurry images. So how do the snakes do it?

A trio of German scientists now theorize that the snakes use firmware in their brains to error-correct the lousy imagery by harnessing the infrared noise produced by a moving prey. They built a neural-net model in a computer that mimics this, and fed it the actual data produced by a pit organ’s 2000-odd receptors. Presto: It refined the blurry images into startlingly precise results. Check out the example above: There’s the actual bunny, the blurry image from the pit organ (top right), and the result generated by their neural net (bottom right).

So if you ever create a comic book super hero called Snake Man, make sure you have a scene where he’s blindfolded and still able to take out his enemies with his infrared vision.

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Rather than using the superior smelling techniques of dogs, air port security will soon be using sophisticated laser technology to find bombs:

A Scottish company has developed sensor technology which it says can “fingerprint” explosives and could be used in airports.

Cascade Technologies believes its system, which uses a laser-based sensor to detect explosives, is at a “critical” stage and is seeking government support, the BBC reports.

The company, which was spun out of Strathclyde University in 2003, says its quantum cascade lasers are more effective at detecting gases in the air than trained sniffer dogs.

The article goes on to say that this technology could be put in place within two years, which is a pretty fast track indeed. Even though it claims that it can out-sniff dogs, it doesn’t say to what degree.