Pieces of Flower

In lab today we saw creatures
From two of the three domains-
Identified cocci and bacilli,
Paramecium and Amoeba swimming
or streaming under cover glass.

Then the plants-mosses green,
With diploid sex brown and erect;
Fern's hidden gametophytes
Androgynous creatures dwarfed
By cozy sitting room fronds.

Finally we consider the lillies-
Pink and spotted petals,
Orange pollen shed from anthers,
Little orange creatures slithering tubes
Down the style for sperm swim to the eggs.

Linnaeus glimpsed the flower's
Blindness to our conceits
Though his colleagues spun around
In their shrouds, screamed:
"No proper plant does this!"

Lab over, petals and sepals and ovaries
Are wings pulled from flies-
Pieces of flowers diced and swept away-
All the bone white facts collected,
Objectives checked for the next quiz.

We return to our cages and sit,
Peeling our soft triploid carpels,
Blind in our shrouds.

Science From Multiple World Views?

Recently I stumbled upon a small publisher of home school materials called Gravitas Publications. This publisher's main product is called Real Science 4 Kids by Dr. Rebecca Keller. I have no expertise in home school curricula, and from what I have seen some aspects of her approach seem sensible.

What bothers me is her claim that science can be taught from the point of view of multiple world views in a strictly neutral sort of way.

She writes:

"Yes! Real science doesn’t choose sides. So when teaching science, it’s important that the lessons let kids explore all sides. Otherwise, choosing one side can get in the way of understanding the real science. Darwinism, creationism, intelligent design theory, and all the other “isms” are simply paradigms (or “lenses”) through which science is viewed. The “-isms” are philosophies based on perceptions for how science is interpreted. Students need to learn how “-isms” play a role in science."

Ok, science doesn't choose sides in that is ideologically neutral- there is no conservative science, or Christian science, or Buddhist science. There ideally is just science. And she is right- our world view does affect how we interpret science. But is science really neutral in terms of the world view it admits?

Personally I think not. For example I don't see much support in science for the notion that the Universe or the Earth is say 10,000 years old or that the goal of a liquid is to seek its lowest level, or that magic is real. At the very least science since it is empirical forces scientific explanations and tests of scientific ideas to be mechanistic and transparent.

At any rate, check out Dr. Keller's video discussing the issue of multiple world views and see what you think:

Itsy Bitsy Spider

Caught this little jumping spider on a daffodil today. I am just a sucker for these spiders.

Late Night Visitor

I think this cutie-well I think it's cute- was probably feeding on left over seeds spilled from our bird feeder.

Cats and Birds....

There is an interesting article in the science section of the New York Times about the effects of domestic cats on bird populations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/science/21birds.html





As the headline suggests, domestic cats are a major threat to bird populations. The article suggests that over 500 million birds are killed by cats each year in the United States-half by feral cats and half by house pets. The article also makes an interesting point that people get all upset about bird deaths due to wind turbines and yet seem to be much less upset about bird deaths due to cats. Wind turbines by the way can apparently be situated to minimize bird deaths.

We accept predation as somehow natural but forget that the domestic cat is not native to North America and so is really an invasive species-so they are more like those big constrictor snakes that people have let loose in the everglades. Now if only we could train cats to attack non native birds such as starlings or English sparrows but I don't think that is going to happen.

Just by chance, my indoor only cat Carl caught and killed a chickadee that had gotten on to our screened in back porch yesterday. He had caught one other chickadee during the winter but he just held it in his mouth very gently and I managed to rescue the bird. This time he clearly figured out that the next step in hunting after catching the bird is to kill it.

I hope he never figures out the eating stage.

More Ann Coulter Science

Ann Coulter whose previous forays into science have included such insightful critiques of evolution as the giant raccoon passing gas analysis of evolutionary theory has struck again. Apparently she has decided that we need not worry about radiation from Japan.

She bases her argument on a controversial idea called hormesis. The basic idea of hormesis is that certain environmental pollutants be they PCBs or ionizing radiation are harmful until you get to low dosages which mysteriously become beneficial. Proponents of this idea point to studies from a wide range of organisms that suggest that the phenomenon may indeed exist. But to argue as Coulter seems to that this means that government radiation safety levels are somehow useless seems to me to be the height of stupidity.

A bit of Coulter's reasoning can be seen in this quote from her article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucac/20110317/cm_ucac/aglowingreportonradiation

"I guess good radiation stories are not as exciting as news anchors warning of mutant humans and scary nuclear power plants -- news anchors who, by the way, have injected small amounts of poison into their foreheads to stave off wrinkles. Which is to say: The general theory that small amounts of toxins can be healthy is widely accepted --except in the case of radiation.

Every day Americans pop multivitamins containing trace amount of zinc, magnesium, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, boron -- all poisons."

So would she then argue that more is better? In the radiation case it may well be that DNA repair mechanisms are activated by low levels of radiation but that is precisely in response to the harmful effects of DNA, not because the radiation is beneficial.

A good critique of Coulter's ideas is at PZ Myer's blog: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/will_radiation_hormesis_protec.php

Coulter by the way, is an alumna of Cornell University which goes to show that you can show a person to how to think but you can't make them think.

A New Word.

Picked up a new word today courtesy of an article in Scientific American on Freeman Dyson. The word is "bunkrapt." The neologism coined by Peter Medawar in the 1980's means, to according to the article, to be "infatuated with bunk." So I guess it is from bunk + rapture. I can't wait to use this on my favorite intelligent design hipster or anti-vaccine fanatic.

The article's author John Horgan notes referring to what he sees as some of the wacky beliefs of Freeman Dyson that:

"The gleeful rebel Dyson, it seems to me, embodies our bunkrapt era, when the delineation between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge is becoming increasingly blurred; genuine authorities are mistaken for hucksters and vice versa; and we all believe whatever damn thing we want to believe."

Oops that's not right!

In my distant past I was a research assistant working with a scientist who had a whole bunch of pair wise correlations between variables in a very large data set. The researcher found some interesting correlations between some of these variables and complained that the statistician involved with the research said that the correlations were not significant even though looked at in isolation they were significant. I had to agree with the statistician and fortunately was able to convince my boss that the statistician was indeed correct here. My reasoning was basically by analogy-if you flip 100 coins you expect to find on average 50 heads and 50 tails and your results should vary around that by chance. Further, every once in a while, you expect to find say 20 heads and 50 tails just by chance and you would not get excited about that. In the same way if you have a slew of uncorrelated variables by chance you can get some significant correlations.

Scientists love statistically "significant" results but this last year a very interesting article titled "The Truth Wears Off" appeared in the New Yorker looking at a disturbingly common pattern in science, called the decline effect. Often, especially with complex phenomena initial experimental results are highly significant , but then with replication the results either are not so pronounced or disappear entirely. The results cannot be replicated. The article's author Jonah Lehrer gives a wide range of examples from both basic and applied science and lists a number of reasons why this phenomenon happens.

Some of the reasons discussed are bias toward positive results, include regression toward the mean, and publication bias, none of which by themselves explain what is going on. The most likely culprit seems to be selective reporting and this has actually itself been tested by a biologist by the name of Richard Palmer. Lehrer says the following about Palmer's investigation:

"Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel....after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results."

Palmer's results suggest that reporting bias is everywhere in science and Palmer concludes that:

“We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”

The article gives a range of disturbing examples from a wide range of disciplines and gloomily concludes that:

"Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions."

So what's to be done? From my perspective there are several things, some of which are discussed int he article. First of all scientists have to avoid what the article terms significance chasing-getting excited about seemingly significant correlations as my old boss did. Related to that, scientists need to be sure that they are indeed using appropriately conservative tests, that is tests that minimize the chance that an incorrect hypothesis will be accepted. Data needs to be open and available for scrutiny and experimental controls carefully laid out. When I teach, one one thing I tell my students is that the hypothesis and the experimental design has to be worked out in advance of testing the hypothesis including the sample sizes.

Maybe we forget- and don't properly train our students to remember- that a hypothesis is just that - it is a guess, perhaps informed by theory but it is still a guess and non significant results are still meaningful. Of course it would help if funding agencies by they governmental or private would remember that as well!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer