Science magazine has presented its list of the top scientific breakthroughs of 2005. The list, as cribbed from the BBC website, is
- Winner: Evolution in action. Genome sequencing and painstaking field observations shed light on the intricacies of how evolution works.
- Runner up: Planetary blitz. Europe’s Huygens probe touched down on Saturn’s moon Titan in January. It was joined by a fleet of other explorers, including Nasa’s Deep Impact, which smashed a hole in a comet.
- In bloom. Molecular biologists pinned down several of the molecular cues responsible for spring’s vibrant burst of colour.
- Neutron stars. Satellites and ground telescopes shed light on the violent behaviour of neutron stars; city-sized corpses of stars that pack matter into an extreme state.
- Miswiring the brain. Researchers gained clues about the mechanisms of disorders such as schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourrete’s syndrome.
- Complicated Earth. Comparisons of rocks from Earth and outer space forced scientists to scrap long-held views of how our planet formed.
- Protein portrait. Scientists got their best look yet at the molecular structure of a voltage-gated potassium channel.
- Change of climate. More evidence implicating human activities in global warming was presented, the magazine said.
- Systems biology. Molecular biologists are looking to engineering in order to understand the behaviour of complex systems.
- Bienvenue Iter. After 18 months of wrangling, the $12bn International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) got a home: Cadarache in France.
There’s some great stuff in here, but I am delighted that evolution sits at the top of the list. It’s not that I think that the greatest scientific results in 2005 necessarily came from biology – any choice for this spot would be debatable in any year. But given the orchestrated political and religious assault on this pillar of modern biology, I’m grateful for any opportunity to make it clear that evolution is one of the most experimentally established and successful scientific theories there are.
The magazine highlighted several specific evolutionary advances for which the number one slot was awarded, including
the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome; recreation of the 1918 flu virus in a laboratory; and a study on European blackcap birds which demonstrated how two different populations can become two separate species.
I’d agree that these achievements can compete with those from any field of science over the last year, but I suspect that the following was important in choosing a winner
Colin Norman, news editor of Science, said the choice was based solely on the merits of the research, not the battle over intelligent design.
“I suppose if [that debate] influenced us at all, it was in the realisation that scientists tend to take for granted that evolution underpins modern biology,” he told the BBC News website.
“The arguments about intelligent design just made us a little bit more aware of it.”
Mr Norman said he hoped the choice would send a message to scientists and the public: “Evolution is not just something that scientists study as an esoteric enterprise,” he explained.
“It has very important implications for public health and for our understanding of who we are.”
I particularly liked that planetary probes, and specifically Huygens, earned second place. Like most physicists, I am in awe of the remarkable science that robotic space missions can perform. The payoff for the amount of money required makes them clearly the way to move forward with science in space, although this is at stark odds with recent political decisions regarding NASA.
Planetary science aside though, there’s another reason I’m impressed by the Cassini mission (of which Huygens is a part). As you might imagine, communications with a spacecraft across large distances within the solar system, require scientists to take account of the subtle effects of General Relativity, which governs the paths (geodesics) that radio waves take as they travel between Earth and Cassini.
In fact, the timing of such signals is exquisitely sensitive to differences between the predictions of General Relativity, and those of theories involving even small modifications. As an example, Brans-Dicke theories, which are a particular example of scalar-tensor theories of gravity, involve a dimensionless parameter, omega, which is a measure of the deviation from GR. Only for omega=infinity is GR recovered. Before the Cassini mission, experiments bounded omega>3500. The timing of signals between Earth and Cassini improved this bound to around omega>40,000, which is a remarkable result. This new measurement has actually been quite important for several projects I’ve been involved with in the last couple of years.
Anyway, I encourage you to enjoy the list, take a look at the video presentation about the winner and listen to the podcasts about the runners up.
‘Tis the season to celebrate great science – Happy Holidays to you all.
December 24th, 2005 at 11:35 am
Today’s Doonesbury: String Theory Appreciation Club??
http://www.ucomics.com/doonesbury/
We could use some Evolution Appreciation clubs on high school campuses–
The “war against science” has demonstrated many things, but i would concur that the focus on evolution has made that field, and biology in general, step up and make commitments to being “better?” and more collaborative, even in considered disagreements. Another aspect of the “war” is that the general scientific literacy of the US population is shows to be woefully poor.
December 24th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
I recently read Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll (no the biologist). It is about the current understanding of evolutionary development biology. It presented a portrait of biology that was completely new to me. I have not studied biology in a very long time. The recent understanding of how certain genes are used in all animals and that the differences in timing of the gene experssion is what produces the remarkable variety we see. It is truly beautiful science. If I were choosing a science to study today, Biology would be much more competitive with physics than it was when I was in school.
December 24th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
FYI, that elegant gravitational experiment will be tried again with the GAIA mission. See section 7 of this paper:
http://www.rssd.esa.int/SA/GAIA/docs/Gaia_2004_Proceedings/Gaia_2004_Proceedings_5.pdf
December 25th, 2005 at 1:20 am
I do not have the expertise to evaluate how much evolution is well-established and proven by experiments, so I have to trust biologists and paleontologists.
Given that, I think nobody can deny that there are small variations at the birth of a new life form. And it is obvious that some will survive better and some will not.
This will for sure create some differences with enough time, in species.
I don’t think anybody can deny this simple and rather obvious fact.
On the other hand what darwinists do is:
1. to extrapolate all this to explain ALL life forms, starting from some simple primordial organism.
2. to assume that this simple primordial organism is spontaneously generated in the early histroy of Earth.
3. to assume that all the variations are random.
What puzzles me in all this debate is:
1. to what extent point number 1 is proven?? And to what extent it is an assumption? I can easily uderstand how a bird can evolve in another bird with a longer spout. But I have an hard time in understanding for example how a brain or an eye come out in a continuous way from some primordial organism, or how a peacock can be like this, etc..The mechanism of replication of DNA itself: where does it come from?
2. even admitting point 1, point 2 puzzles me even more. I have really an hard time to believe that an extremely complex and organized thing like life can form spontaneously from random chemical reactions. So, to what extent this is proven or it is another assumption?
3. Finally the point 3….what really Intelligent Design believers should argue is: how can we know that variations have been always random? This is clearly an assumption. And my big question is: is that a realistic assumption?
Is 5 billion years enough to produce life (and what a complex life!) as we know it, with a reasonable probablity from pure randomness? I wonder if biologists have an understanding of this probability, or they just take it for granted.
But maybe I am wrong (as much of the public opinion): maybe the scientific term “evolution” means only explanation of the small variation through selection and not all the rest (points 1,2,3).
In this case I have nothing to argue.
But, in this case, it should be made clear what evolution says, and what does not say. Then everyone should be free to judge what seems to him more realistic and reasonable among the assumptions: is that pure randomness or the process is driven by some external factor?
December 25th, 2005 at 4:01 am
1. To the extent that none of the data suggests that any species has not been effected. Simple Inductive argument strengthened by a heck-of-a-lot of data.
2. ‘Spontaneously Generated’ is a bit loaded. Look at the virus. Is it alive? Now imagine something just a bit simpler than that. Now imagine something just a bit more sophisticated than a virus. Yada Yada Yada… Bang! now you have a single celled organism.
3. a. the variations are NOT random, they are occuring through natural selection and very possibly many other mechanisms. b. This would be like asking “How do we know the universe didn’t start 5 minutes ago”. You could say it’s hypothetically possible, especially with a creator that doesn’t have any limits. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. There is no evidence to suggest it, therefore it is not considered. Likewise, there is no evidence to suggest that any supernatural process occured anywhere in history.
Furthermore, This post on realclimate discusses the nature of skepticism.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=210#more-210
Just my understanding. I’m not a bioligist (I’m a classical musician in training) so any that come by please correct me if I’m mistaken.
Thanks
December 25th, 2005 at 9:14 am
Skeptic. These are, of course, valid and good questions. This is where being a biologist (or a well-informed non-biologist helps). No scientist takes a few observations and extrapolates them into something grand and has the idea accepted by scientists without mountains of experimental support. The questions you ask have all been addressed many times (and they are, by the way, identical to the tired questions the ID camp keeps trotting out despite them having been answered, as is your use of the non-existant term “darwinists”).
You might try http://www.talkorigins.org/ for some answers.
Happy Holidays.
December 27th, 2005 at 12:00 am
Skeptic,
Your use of the term “random” should be qualified as “random within constraints imposed by initial and boundary conditions and the laws of physics”. This is an extremely important qualification. Living organisms, and whatever chemical precursors they may have had, are physical systems. The laws of physics, and thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in particular, are far from irrelevant to the possibility or even the details of biological evolution.
Furthermore, on general mathematical and logical grounds the expression “purely random” is nearly meaningless. Randomness is difficult to define precisely.
Finally, granting the prima facie soundness of objections based on the so-called irreducible complexity of structures like the eye or the brain, what does talk of design really contribute to the discussion? Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who blather on about the role of design in the origin of living things have never actually designed anything, and have no idea what it involves or presupposes.
Of course they’ll respond, “it requires intelligence—the existence of purpose, the formulation of goals, the focused solution of problems”. Okay then, so what is intelligence, really? How does it does conduct these activities? The actual living examples of intelligence that we have to study are enormously complicated and flawed physical entities and processes, that must somehow function in the face of that complexity and those flaws. In fact, design as actually learned and practiced involves a tremendous amount of trial and error; it resembles nothing so much as biological evolution itself. After all, purposes and goals may be unrealizable or misconceived, putative solutions to problems may not work. What then? You try something different; you guess. You hope your guesses are adequate, you may have criteria for distinguishing good guesses from bad ones, but in the end the criteria themselves may be mistaken; they are part of your guesswork.
A hackneyed example of something “designed” turning up in an otherwise natural setting are the famous sculpted busts on Mt. Rushmore. Everybody, it is glibly alleged, can recognize that they were designed. Well, suppose the faces depicted were not those of familiar figures in American history? Suppose they didn’t depict human faces? Suppose they didn’t represent members of any living or terrestrial species? How then would we recognize that they are designed? If one asserts nonetheless that they were designed, then one simply begs a thousand questions about why, and about the kind of entity or entities that did the designing. Of course, one may have no interest in answering those questions, or may have a set of facile answers in hand that one is uninterested in testing. If so, then to that extent one is simply uninterested in doing science.
[I would suggest that a deep appreciation of the both the products and processes of scientific research consists largely of appreciating the creative potential of trial and error in general, and the trials and errors involved in actual scientific practice over the past several centuries. Of course, more often that not, this is obscured in the teaching of science; Einstein once remarked that "to punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."]
December 27th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Belathor:
of course I know reasonings as your point 2 about viruses: first you form aminoacids, then you form proteins, then viruses, then cells, then cells go together, etcc..
I was pointing out that this to me seems unlikely, because all these structures are extremely complicated. Therefore I was asking if there is any quantitative understanding of this paradigm,as there should be in any scientific claim: is the probability of the process high enough? Remember there is “only” 5 billion years to make it work.
If there is no quantitative understanding I have to remain skeptic. The mere extrapolation is not enough for a scientific claim(i.e. a claim that has to be accepted by everyone on the basis of evidence).
As for your point 3, this is not a good analogy: there is evidence for the Universe to be older than 5 minutes. I have the feeling(correct me if I am wrong) that the paradigm of “spontaneous evolution of life” is an assumption without solid evidence.
Also: of course i know that there is selection, but I was talking about the varaitions at birth of a new life form.
Mark:
I am not anglophone so I though the word darwinist exists(and indeed is present in many websites). I mean by that somebody who claims that the process of evolution proposed by darwin can explain life as we know it starting form no life at all.
By the way, I do not think the questions are tired: I just don’t know a simple quantitative answer to my doubts (as I know for cosmology: CMB, nucleosynthesis are striking quantitative evidence for big bang cosmology).
Chris W.:
I completely agree with your precisations on randomness. It is of course constrained by laws of physics. but there is some intrinsic randomness that is not constrained by laws in physics itself.
What I was asking is: can we discriminate if an intrinisic randomness is driven or not by an external intelligence?
For example, if you do an experiment (like throwing a dice) only once how can you know if it was random or if somebody decided the result before?
There is no way.
The only way is to repeat the experiment many times(but you can’t do it for life on earth as a whole). Or to have many random phenomena. If one is able to show that generically the total probability for all these many random phenomena is to lead to life, then I am satisfied.
For example: if you throw many times a dice you expect generically to have as many “1″ as “2″ etc….
But if only one combinations of dice results leads to life than I may suspect that there is an external intelligence who selected this result.
(or maybe a person who believes in anthropic arguments will start saying that it exists an infinite number of Earths and Universes and we happen to live in the only one who allows life……)
December 27th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Skeptic. I was trying to make two points. First. The term “Darwinist” is one that is used by ID proponents. It is not a good one, since evolutionary theory today contains many pieces which were not part of Darwin’s way of thinking. Second, I think the questions are tired, not because I’m trying to blame you for having them, but because they’ve been trotted out again and again by (you’ve guessed it) ID proponents, despite having been soundly answered many times over. The link I gave you in my last comment should be sufficient to deal with them.
Best.
January 11th, 2006 at 12:46 am
[...] As Mark has recently discussed, Science magazine has just reported on what it regards the science breakthroughs of 2005 – Evolution in action was the winner. Tacked onto the end of that article describing the top exciting revelations that science provided in 2005, was a sidebar of a more somber note: Breakdown of the Year: U.S. Particle Physics [...]