Despite what some of you may have heard, speculating about intelligent design involves more than quoting scientists out of context, going to revival meetings, and helping the forces of darkness destroy science and democracy. Seriously, evolutionary bio…

Your essay also makes note of a common misunderstanding about evolution–there is no inexorable increase in complexity as a form evolves; sometimes some complexity is lost; sometimes new species are just different, neither more nor less complex.

Where were you (and the Internet) when I was a student?

Great post, thank you for sharing and illuminating the wonders of evolution.

Since the number of atoms in the universe is generally estimated to be around 10^80, that should be “far exceeds”.

I think in scientific articles there’s often a need to imply–often incorrectly–that discoveries will have far-reaching consequences or are drastic deviations from current knowledge. Whether that comes from the journalists trying to make the science more interesting and important to the reader (and the editor!) or from the scientists speaking to reporters in the language they usually reserve for grant proposals, I don’t know, but I do think that it’s an unfortunate tendency. As such, I really appreciate the way the topic today was placed into context in the article.

It had never occurred to me that the dramatization of routine scientific discoveries in the press could be having a negative impact on the public’s understanding of the way science works. Perhaps I’ve just become too blasé, too habituated to that kind of writing in scientific journals (and grant proposals.) On the other hand, a lot of these discoveries do have “profound implications” for our understanding of a given field, just not cataclysmic, start again from scrath implications. Either way, thanks for the enlightening comment.

It brings us back to what seems to be a rather fundamental problem in science education and journalism: conveying the exciting and fascinating nature of the scientific endeavor and making it accessible and understandable to all, without compromising a clear, correct view of the underlying information and methodology.

Tree space is much understudied, despite the fact that cladistics froms an incredibly important part of modern biology. Few evolutionary studies get off the ground unless backed by strong systematic data of phylogenetic relationships.

The numbers can be truly staggering: I have recently submitted a manuscript with an analysis of over 100 taxa, it comes to about 1.5×10 to 272 possible trees!!!!!!!. In one of these classic descriptions, I *think* (tenuous guess) that exceeds a number given for the number of atoms in the universe.

So spare a thought for the lonely cladists stuck on the ‘Tree of Life’. Just 15 million or so extant taxa to start with………

But then again, maybe it comes down to whats easier for the general population:

Simply believing in something that doesn`t require or even need facts, or Knowing about something that is based on evidence, and which you have to actually learn about to understand (and which you can constantly learn more about)”.

Even for Charles Darwin it was a problem that was easier solved simply by “believing”. This snip from Janet Browne’s mezmerizing biography on Darwin:

“Darwin always insisted that he believed in some form of God throughout the Beagle voyage and for some period beyond. In his Autobiography he says that he was in the end very unwilling to give up the last shreds of “my belief” and that this act took place some years after his return. But it is also clear that his kind of belief, though orthodox, was very loose, English-style orthodoxy in which it was far less trouble to believe than it was to disbelieve. Accepting the basic story of Christianity was much easier than grappling with doubt”.
Janet Browne, “Voyaging”, 1995

But then again, maybe it comes down to whats easier for the general population:

Simply believing in something that doesn`t require or even need facts, or Knowing about something that is based on evidence, and which you have to actually learn about to understand (and which you can constantly learn more about)”.

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Even for Charles Darwin it was a problem that was easier solved simply by “believing”. This snip from Janet Browne’s mezmerizing biography on Darwin:

“Darwin always insisted that he believed in some form of God throughout the Beagle voyage and for some period beyond. In his Autobiography he says that he was in the end very unwilling to give up the last shreds of “my belief” and that this act took place some years after his return. But it is also clear that his kind of belief, though orthodox, was very loose, English-style orthodoxy in which it was far less trouble to believe than it was to disbelieve. Accepting the basic story of Christianity was much easier than grappling with doubt”.
Janet Browne, “Voyaging”, 1995

The number he quoted is correct for 18 species. For 20 species, the number is 319830 986772 877770 815625, or about 320 sextillion.

And I cannot resist a challenge, however subtly stated, if it falls in my narrow domain of expertise. For 38 species, the number of trees is 13 114900 840751 548972 796135 496384 318234 575359 262373 046875, or about 13 septendecillion.

Formulas and mathematical connections may be found at Neil Sloane’s peerless On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences; look for sequence number A001147.

I think that Ignatius is half right. I think that the problem of the Internet is more anonymity and select posting of strong opinions than hostility and rage. If you could meet personally with JDR, there’s a good chance that you could have a discussion rewarding to both of you. Ignatius is wrong to imply that everything connected with blogs is sound and fury. Your blog and many others are constructive- it’s the comments that are the problem, especially if the site doesn’t screen out personal nastiness, which takes more work. Personal nastiness is catalytic and destructive.

It’s very difficult to teach emotionally important issues by Internet; our media and culture which love controversy for its own sake have made it much harder to talk about evolution-creationism issues. I’m a physician who once debated a creationist in Mississippi. It was a hostile occasion. I was later asked if I wanted to debate in another forum. I suggested a round table discussion with several people at each pole of opinion and an artist who thought that both camps were wrong to moderate the discussion. However, those who contacted me simply wanted sound and fury.

The teaching of evolution sinks of swims with high school science, which is often weak and test-oriented in this country. Why do students have to know who discovered the electron or the positron? Better that they know why those discoveries made sense and how other discoveries that made sense, like Hwang’s cloning experiments, were bogus. Those of us who believe in and love science must do more to help high school science teaching and teachers. Personal contact with the students in a respectful atmosphere can make all the difference in the world.

Might someone suggest a good and freely available article covering the current take on “embryonic recapitulation”?

But then again, maybe it comes down to whats easier for the general population:

Simply believing in something that doesn`t require or even need facts, or Knowing about something that is based on evidence, and which you have to actually learn about to understand (and which you can constantly learn more about).

Afterall, if there is one thing that we as americans generally share, it is undoubtably lazyness.

So – you’re smart enough to understand why the validity of evolution doesn’t depend on some kind of absolute loyalty to one specific evolutionary tree (etc.), and that scientists aren’t insisting that is does. So, wanna help?

“I would love people to understand evolution”

Oh, you do! Great!

“I would love people to understand its shortcomings, as well as its attributes. I’d love people to understand and seperate fact from hypothesis.”

Uh-oh. Wait up . . . this sounds a bit like – ‘I would love people to understand global warming. I would love them to understand all flaws and assumptions and . . .”

Anyway, re: communicating science, and threads teeming with creationist debate vs. much shorter serious science ones. Take this: “So, does this revive Garstang’s hypothesis of vertebrate evolution via paedomorphosis?” For meaningful on-topic comments – for a meaningful public conversation (live or via books, programs, etc. – it really helps for folks to have some mix of a) intellectual curiosity – especially active curiosity, b) interest, and c)a decent knowledge base* (although obviously not necessarily at this level!). People have noted that b varies wildly among the overall population, as if the case for numerous fields, but lots of folks who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in the above post might be interested in, say, pets, or whatever. And so on – all the points about presentation and education quality already made . . .
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Anyway, wouldn’t these findings seem to argue against that hypothesis? Annoying – it’s such a nice idea . . .

*the only reason I have any clue what the quoted comment is talking about is that I have read large quantities of popular and quasi-technical science writing. But of course, the only reason I’ve done that was because of (b). (I have an appalling lack of curiosity, in the sense of asking questions).

“So why is the message not getting through to the majority of Americans?”
Why do you think, JDR?

It’s a long way from amphioxus It’s a long way to us

This does not mean that our data is necessarily solid if we end up with a given tree from that number of possibilities, BUT as Carl says, if we a re running repeated analyses with independantly gained data sets and we continually converge on the same tree, we can have a lot of confidence on our methods and results.

I have yet to see the Nature paper so I dont know how many taxa they used, but its fair to say that returning the same (or very similar tree) from over 200 billion billion possible trees gives us a damned good result.

JDR “It was suggested that evolution needs more publicity to win its case. That’s ridiculous. . . . Every high school textbook in use in public schools has an evolutionary focus.”
Given a) the state of science ed – esp. regarding evolution and b) the level of general awareness about evolution, clearly it is not ridiculous. Much of this information is not getting out or being preached to the choir.

“The debate is engaging, it evokes interest in science in general.”
I have seen almost no evidence of this. The debate is a really sort of conceptual parasite – it burrows in and uses the poor raddled body of evolution to spawn out more of itself.

” Case in point: In the last 20 or so blog entries on the Loom, 2 have really taken on the subject of the debate (Cockroach and Dodos). The remaining 18 have a sum of probably 70 comments, while the 2 have nearly 280. ”
Go look at the zombie cockroach thread. Pages of meaningless, pointless repetition, much of it empty theologizing (guilty as charged). Look at the difference when it manages to get back on track. Fewer comments? Sure, you don’t have people flooding it with pointless comments, and endless versions of the exact same questions and answers.

>Both lancelets and sea squirts have neural-crest-like cells. But only in sea squirts do they migrate as they do in our own bodies.

Yeah, and I suppose that only in some sea squirts do they migrate.
Famous model sea squirts such as Ciona or Halocynthia do not have (at least, not discovered at present) such migratory neural-crest-like cells, though they do have non-migratory neural-crest-like cells.
So, it is possible that those cells independently acquired migratory ability in some lineages of sea squirts.

>By studying how these cells move, scientists may be able to understand a key step in vertebrate evolution.

I fully agree to the importance of such studies.

Anyway, it is apparent that the long quest for the origin of vertebrates entered a new era.

I like the way you explained the re-writing of evolutionary trees, but I thought I’d try to expand on that a little bit. I pulled up space.com to see if I could find an article about recent astronomical discoveries–and found ‘A billion stars hiding in the Milky Way’ by Robert Roy Britt, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060222_missing_stars.html. To quickly summarize the point of the article, astronomers think that a certain previously unexplained radiation is due to stars glowing very faintly rather than hot gases.

I quote the following passage directly because I want to point out the similarites between the language used and the language often used when evolutionary trees are revised: “The discovery, if confirmed, “would have a profound impact on our understanding of the history of our galaxy, from star-formation and supernova rates to stellar evolution,” according to a statement released by NASA.”

Discoveries purported to have ‘profound impacts’ on our understanding of astronomy are made with relative frequency; just keep an eye on the science portion of any newspaper or news website. And yet, this doesn’t mean that the planets in our solar system don’t revolve around the sun. It doesn’t mean that scientists have suddenly discovered evidence that will require us to re-write the basic tenents of how gravity works. In fact, what it usually means is that our ability to measure things has gotten better, as in the recent discovery of two moons around Pluto.

The re-writing of evolutionary trees is similar. Phylogenies–hypotheses as to the relationships between groups of organisms, often depicted as evolutionary trees–were often based on morphological measurements or observations before the advent of molecular techniques. Thus, when people looked at tunicates (sea squirts) and saw no muscles in blocks like the lancets had, the most parsimonious (simple) explanation was that the common ancestor of lancets + vertebrates evolved those muscles after it had diverged from the ancestor of tunicates and thus lancets were more closely related to vertebrates. The problem is, evolution does not always work by the simplest route–if the new study is right, the tunicates lost the muscles somewhere along their evolutionary trajectory. However, we couldn’t have known that by looking at the morphology; there’s just not enough information. Instead, biologists had to use new tools just like the astronomers who discovered the moons around Pluto did–and when they did begin to look at DNA sequences, they found evidence that the most parsimonious explanation might not be the correct one.

Just because a branch in an evolutionary tree is shifted slightly by a new study does not mean that evolution itself is being re-written or that evolutionary biologists don’t know what they’re talking about. Generally, these changes are relatively small compared to the structure of the overall tree as Carl pointed out above and involve times when either morphology just wasn’t a good character to use or when non-parsimonious evolutionary changes occurred.

I think in scientific articles there’s often a need to imply–often incorrectly–that discoveries will have far-reaching consequences or are drastic deviations from current knowledge. Whether that comes from the journalists trying to make the science more interesting and important to the reader (and the editor!) or from the scientists speaking to reporters in the language they usually reserve for grant proposals, I don’t know, but I do think that it’s an unfortunate tendency. As such, I really appreciate the way the topic today was placed into context in the article.

The Bible has references to the wisdom of humans vs. the wisdom of God. And, if one considers what passed for wisdom 100 years ago, and extrapolate that back 2000+ years, it must have been obviously poor. As for checking the wisdom of God, one only has to say – “well this is wrong, and there must be a correct answer, which would be what God thinks”. One can also extrapolate forward, and expect that much of today’s wisdom will be considered folly 100 years from now.

Then, for sure, people with edit with EMACS. (That’s a joke – pick your favorite religeous argument.)

This idea of using the best ideas available is not confined to science. Most disciplines attempt to do this sort of thing. But consider art. How does one know when one idea is better than another when five people have seven opinions on which of two things is better? Science advances quickly because objective measures are available. One of the things scientists can communicate is that advancing knowledge is possible, and making even quite small contributions is very exciting.