culture evolves!

Matt B. asked the Nature Network bloggers a couple of questions. I meant to answer them on Friday but I couldn’t decide the first one!

Who’s your favourite scientist (dead or alive) and why?

The reason I couldn’t decide was I couldn’t figure out what my criteria for “favourite” should be! There are scientists who have been inspirational or instrumental to me becoming a scientist … but mainly through their communication of ideas, rather than the science they themselves performed.

Then there are people who I know: mentors or colleagues, but that just seems like unfair weighting when they’re people you can chat to in the pub.

So I thought I’d pick someone outside of anthropology or biology: the physicist Richard Feynman. He was a marvellous communicator and teacher, and knew the importance of inspiring people–but he also did groundbreaking theoretical work and defended vociferously the importance of “big idea” science as well as the individual sense of satisfaction from puzzle-solving. And he was the ultimate geek who thought safe-cracking was a fun hobby. And he played the bongos.

Edit: Read everyone else’s answers to the question here.

If you could have another job or career outside of science, what would it be and why?

I have had a job outside of science: I was a jewellery designer for a couple of years. It was rewarding when it was good and dreadful when it wasn’t.

But my alternate life is the one where I became a professional cellist, played with an innovative chamber group like the Kronos Quartet, and had a top ten indie/classical crossover album. Why? Because music is as creative and intriguing and rewarding as science.

In the spirit of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site (who linked to this), Bad Archaeology:

Bad Archaeology is the brainchild of a couple of archaeologists who are fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that books written by people with no understanding of real archaeology dominate the shelves at respectable bookstores. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines (for example) as if they are real. 

I look forward to posts debunking such theories as the drowned civilisations of South East Asia.

Science reporting is rubbish, that’s a given. So this story (I hate myself for linking to the Daily Mail) Why blue-eyed boys (and girls) are so brilliant should have just made me roll my (no pun intended) eyes and slide on by, but it’s cropping up all over the place.

I’m not feeling the best today, and as a little rage is good for the digestion, I think: Fine, I’ll go read the paper. But lo! There is no paper? There’s not really even any clues about the researcher(s). This Joanne Rowe seems to be an emeritus professor of Physical Health at Lousiville, Kentucky. No web page of her own.

So I look on the magic academic databases, and the only things I can find are:

Percept Mot Skills. 1992 75(1):91-5.
Correlation of eye color on self-paced and reactive motor performance.
Miller LK, Rowe PJ, Lund J.

Percept Mot Skills. 1994 Aug;79(1 Pt 2):671-4.
Ball color, eye color, and a reactive motor skill.
Rowe PJ, Evans P.

These studies are 13 and 15 years old! Why is this news now? I could go for the benefit of the doubt, and say there is a paper, it’s just under the Wednesday science embargo. Likelihood?

I shall eat my hat or do follow-up detective work tomorrow.

Next up: Girls Prefer Pink O RLY? or, The Boring Nature/Nurture Debate, Redux.

The Smithsonian Institute Libraries have this wonderful resource available:

Portraits from the Dibner Library of Science and Technology

Everyone loves pictures of the scientific personalities behind abstract concepts. The wackier the better! In general, images are an absolute neccessity for academic talks. I’m pretty strict that my slides contain an image (be it a picture, a figure/graph, or text presented to make a graphic point). When I’m presented with a slide that contains nothing but text, I switch off the slides and just listen to the speaker (I try to listen to the speaker rather than read their text as a general rule). The exception would be the Steve Jobs one-phrase slide, which I recently saw Rod Page use to nice effect at the Evolution 2007 conference. I’m trying to evolve towards a style that has nothing but an active statement or question as the title (for focus), a figure of some sorts, and (optionally) no more than ten words. Sometimes that’s not possible, and sometimes I am lazy, but a talk is a presentation. It’s not a reading.

Anyhow, images are terrific as they sometimes suggest metaphors or new ways of explaining concepts. My idle time spent browsing flickr and other image websites is never totally idle (honest!), as I’m always looking for images that relate to research concepts. Graffiti, signs, and travel photography are often real gems in that regard. I’ve built up a good collection of pictures for talks. Now, if only I had a systematic way of tagging them and remembering their attributions…

There’s an engaging conversation in Nature this week with four science-fiction writers who concentrate on the life-sciences in their writing:

The biologists strike back.

I have this tremendous block about sci-fi. I have dabbled on the fringes and read Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks like everyone else, but virtually no classic sci-fi. Genre fiction intimidates me, I think, because it has its own rules and hierarchies. The other part of my block is self-preservation in the face of gateway drugs: because I’m fascinated by the communication of scientific ideas, I feel like indulging in a sci-fi reading habit would just be the end of it all and I’d never read anything else.

But perhaps that’s a cop-out? I’ve got a whole list of recommendations from various sources. I just need to start, I guess.

Radio silence for the last couple of weeks as I was in New Zealand at the Evolution 2007 meeting. Yes, there is internet access on my small island home, but I’m not one of those superstars who can multitask a big conference and blogging. So before it all dribbles out of my brain, here’s a brief rundown. [link to program pdf]

Russell Gray and I organised a symposium on Cultural Phylogenetics. There are pictures, but they will have to wait another day.

Our speakers (Mark Pagel, Michael Dunn, Simon Greenhill, Quentin Atkinson, Russell, and myself) spoke on different aspects of applying phylogenetic and comparative methods to interesting and cool questions in linguistics and anthropology. Click on the picture for an overview of the talks.

Given that it was early on a Sunday morning we had a great turnout (80-120 people) over the three hours. Really fabulous to have the hardcore evolutionary biologists come along to see some novel applications of “their” methods, and it seemed to be well-received!

The conference had about 900 people in attendance with up to eight simultaneous sessions going on for the four full days, so it was hectic running about from room to room to catch talks. Luckily most of what I wanted to hear was fairly systematically (haha) grouped, so I got to attend a number of talks on phylogenetic theory and methods, behavioural/social evolution, sexual selection, coevolution, and teaching evolution. The last day also had a great session on molecular anthropology, most of which was concentrated on questions about Pacific dispersals and human migrations.

Conferences really are great for making your brain swim 24/7 in a soup of ideas, whether they’re directly related to your work or not. It’s simply stimulating being around loads of other people who like to ask questions and think of clever ways to answer them.

While I was away I read Evolutionary Pathways in Nature: A Phylogenetic Approach by John Avise. It’s a collection of short essays that tackle questions about different critters, from spider-web building to the tracking of the AIDS virus in humans. What they have in common is that moledular phylogenies have been used to help with the detective work. It was a fun book to dip into (it’s the book the ultra-geeky biologist has in the loo), but the theme was only a thin thread on which to peg the various stories. Although the Introduction and Appendix gave a little background to phylogenetics and molecular systematics, a complete newcomer would no doubt be confused. Sadly (or perhaps not…) I think the popular science book on phylogenetics remains to be written.

You either get it or you don’t. I can’t help you. They can.

I’ll be mirroring “culture evolves!” over at Nature Network from today. Everything will still be here (I didn’t spend hours on that banner for nothing!) as it’s an experimental move on my part. I think that if Nature Network is successful in its bid to become the social networking site for scientists it’ll be a good thing, but for now I think it’s still being treated with caution. Lots of sign-ups and not much activity.

So go! Sign up and join groups and leave comments… and stuff. Especially you social scientists! Get in there with the crystallographers and yeast genomics people. Let there be more participants with “evolution” in their tags. Or anthropology. Or culture that isn’t in a petri dish.

Not that I have anything against petri dishes.

I saw this in the Metro this morning but the Telegraph article is virtually the same:

Rooks have been spotted swooping on to the tracks at Exeter St David’s railway station in Devon and placing their wings over the smoke to collect the fumes underneath.

Hee. It’s no news that rooks, ravens and crows are the intellectual heavyweights of the bird world. Crows especially are innovative tool users. Smoking out parasites seems to be a pretty clever trick - if indeed that’s what this one is doing. Of course, it could just be a delinquent juvenile having a sneaky puff. If it starts to bring its mates along I’ll be really impressed.

The piece by Harry Kroto is actually entitled “The wrecking of British Science“, but it contains positive messages as well as cautions.

In the Guardian:

Many think of the sciences as merely a fund of knowledge. Journalists never ask scientists anything other than what the applications are of scientific breakthroughs. Interestingly, I doubt they ever ask a musician, writer or actor the same question. I wonder why.

The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew “belief”, the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit.

Coming after the appalling set-piece of science “journalism” concerning an entirely groundless “electrosmog scare” on Panorama this week, such sentiments are timely.