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Avoiding the Word "Evolution"
jakosc tips us to a disturbing article in PloS Biology on the avoidance of the word "Evolution" in scientific papers and grants. From the paper: "In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word 'evolution' is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to 'emerge,' 'arise,' or 'spread' rather than 'evolve.' Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word 'evolution' by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives... It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word 'evolution' in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy."
This is what happens when you pander to religious fruit loops - it started with the 'In God We Trust' rebrand of the US (in particular, on money) which was the thin end of the wedge and now we have a situation whereby scientists cannot even discuss things properly.
All the major organised religions seem to want is lots of uneducated children who think they are going to go to 'heaven' when they die.
Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word 'evolution' by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives
The role of science is not to manage public perception. It's to find out how things work. Unfortunately, receipt of grant money is often tied to public perception (positive, or negative).
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
When I get in an argument with my creationist friends, no one disputes what they call 'micro evolution'. The idea that single cells can mutate to become resistant to bacteria, and those are the only ones that survive. Where people have trouble is with something they call 'macro evolution', that these mutations can over time create entirely new species, organs, and reproductive behavior (sexual vs asexual). I believe it because I think people don't understand exactly how many years we are considering here in the long haul. If the scientific community is not calling 'evolution' what most people agree actually takes place, how can they expect to be taken seriously on more controversial aspects of science?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Are we still in the middle ages? Can I say something about the Sun being on the center of the solar system without being totured till I accept that the Earth is the center of the whole universe? This is so sad...
God is an acronym: Guns, oil, and drugs.
Why is this unfortunate? Evolution is a theory.
Gravity is a theory. Are you saying physicists discussing rocks falling to the floor should avoid mentioning it?
It happens that science is the process of systematically improving theories. You're telling swimmers to avoid water.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Could this possibly have something to do with the fact that the latter terms are used when they are more scientifically accurate?
If you're talking about antimicrobial resistance spreading, then it would be absolutely wrong to say that it was evolving: the bacteria has already evolved and the spread is just the increasing domination of that new line. If they have lumped all those words together than that alone could account for their conclusion by itself, although I would also argue that the other harms have certain preferable contexts for description.
The reserachers did not bother to do any actual pyschological research in their psychological study: they only looked at frequency distributions of the terminology. Apparently this is enough to infer the motivations of the medical patois. I don't suppose it's even remotely possible that the simple fact that evolutionary biologists study evolution could explain the increased frequency of 'evolve' in their personal vernacular? Perhaps if medical scientists spent all of their time researching, reading about, and writing about evolution, the word "evolve" might be as much integrated into their writing.
Regardless, it is absurd to suggest that incipient trends in word usage should in any way be a concern of either medical or evolutionary scientists. I might expect some outcry if people were being coerced (perhaps that is why there was no psychological investigation in this--not enough drama) but if you are going to throw a fit because a certain word isn't used as often as synonymns which say the same things but aren't as directly referential to your pet issue, I would say you are as much a culprit in politicizing science as any creationist school board.
Rhetoric == politics. Research results are not changed by the linguistics of the writeups.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This same issue came up on a recent episode of NPR's Science Friday (look towards the right side of the page for an mp3 download link). Essentially, biologists were being encouraged by well-meaning people at the government agencies who sponsor them to avoid the word "evolution" so that their research remains uncontroversial and doesn't run afoul of any anti-science policy makers.
This latest article raises a good point, though. By trying to cloak discussion of evolution in other terms, anyone with a grasp of basic evolutionary biology is able to understand what is meant and how the process of natural selection applies to the problem at hand. Politicians and non-scientific observers not familiar with biology, however, don't see that evolution is explicitly referenced and so they don't raise a ruckus over it.
The problem is that this can help feed the general lack of understanding about evolution that creationists exploit. On the one hand, because most schools don't teach a rigorous curriculum on evolutionary biology, creationists can argue pseudo-scientific fallacies (e.g. that the second law of thermodynamics rules out evolution of increasingly complex species. Incidentally, this is false because the second law only applies to closed systems, and Earth's ecosystem continuously receives new energy from the Sun's light and heat). Additionally, because the fact that natural selection, as the basic organizing principle which has guided research in biology for over a century, isn't emphasized in new research reports that come out, many people don't realize that the huge advances we've made in our understanding of life on Earth over the past century, and the great medical breakthroughs that have emerged, nay, evolved from that understanding would not have been possible if we didn't understand evolution. Indeed, many things that we know to be true about biology simply couldn't be true if evolution weren't at work. That's not to say that it's a perfect theory, but like many good scientific theories it is revised and its precision is sharpened as new evidence becomes available (for example, we now know about cycles of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record, and about patterns in human and other animal genomes, which Darwin didn't know about), in the same way that Einstein's relativity built on and refined Newton's laws of motion.
As loathe as many scientists are to do anything with public relations, I think that we have to do a better job of emphasizing the basic scientific theories behind today's research. So I encourage researchers out there to not be scared of using the word evolution, as it will hopefully contribute to people understanding that it is pervasively important to biology.
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You fool. Why did you tell him the Spanish Inquisition is coming. Now he's going to expect it.
Nothing is impossible. We just haven't quite worked out how to do it yet.
Yes, and according to similar polls, 34% believe in ghosts, 34% believe in UFOs, 29% believes in astrology, 25% believe in reincarnation and 24% believes in witches. With other words: a sizeable portion of the population will just believe whatever they come across without much, if any, criticism.
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I'll stand on a leg and not assume you are wanting to get modded +3 funny or +1000 sarcastic and your answer is serious.
First at all you founding father were mostly deist, with some being atheist. So if you place any value in what they produced (constitution and all) or their idea, you should be aware of that little fact.
Furthermore you are NOT living in a democracy but in a republic.
Next, you know where this lead this "we live in a democraty, so the majority decide" ? Aside this litle fact about freedom of speech, Well this lead to stuff like persecution of minority. Do you even remmember why the USA had this "freedom of religion" in the first place ? Religious persecution in Europe anyone? And yes non-religion is one form of belief (or rather non-belief in anything). Suppress the freedom of it, then next the cathos will ask the protestant to be muted, the calvinist will ask the last day adventist to be gagged, and the mormon will ask all other to shut up. And in the end nobody open his big mouth because there is always a branch of christianty which is pissed of at another.
I could add more, like the "in god we trust" coming from the darkest era of Mccartysm, but hey, that is not my country so fuck it up as much as you wish, as long as you keep a sane foreign policy of "hand off"....
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"If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction." -- Judith Hayese
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Evolution is a theory. In science, it is better to focus on the known facts (as it seems is beginning to happen).
On the contrary. Science is about researching the unknown. This is why we scientists have theories - we are trying to learn the truth, acknowledging that we don't know it all and probably never will. The only things that are 'known facts' are observations, like last time I let go of a stone it fell down, not up. Nobody knows that it will do the same next time, strictly speaking, but we have a very well researched theory that says it will. Theories are the basis for everything around you: the computer you use was developed using such a theory as quantum mechanics, which is far more speculative than evolution. After all, the theory of evolution is based on fossils you can see with your bare eyes, whereas quantum mechanics deals with things we can't see. It is quite possible - likely even - that our idea about what fundamental particles are like is only a poor approximation to reality.
So if you can accept quantum theory well enough to use computers and other modern electronics, why not evolution? As for facts - we can see that evolution has happened; the fossils are there, and just like a line of footprints on a beach tells you that somebody has walked there recently, the fossils tell you that life has evolved. There is no reasonable doubt about that, and 'evolution theory' is not about that. It is about how it happened.
Being a republic is irrelevant to the question if the US is a democracy or not. Many republics are very democratic, others are not. Many monarchies are also democracies. Few are not.
You would be right, except that's precisely what selection takes care of. Yes, most mutations are NOT beneficial, but this does not matter because the non-beneficial mutations die off quickly, and the rare beneficial ones survive to spread expontentially.
Imagine a species has 100 million members, and lets say it is a large-sized species which experiences a generation turnover every 20 years or so. Lets say there is a low mutation rate of perhaps 1% of offspring having some mutation. Let us also say that 99% of mutations are harmful, or perhaps even fatal, and a mere 1% are beneficial. Now we do the math:
If 1% of the population experiences a mutation, that means 1 million will experience a mutation per generation. If 99% of these are harmful, that means 990,000 will die or fail to procreate, or 0.99% of the total population. If 1% of the mutations are beneficial, that means 10,000 will have some superior trait.
At the end of this cycle, there are still around 100 million members, but 10,000 of them, or 0.01%, have a beneficial mutation. Now by definition of a "beneficial" mutation, from an evolutionary perspective, this means that those 10,000 are more likely to survive and procreate than the other 100 million or so.
Lets say each beneficial mutation is only beneficial by a very tiny amount, such that a pair of members without the mutation can have an average of 1.95 children survive to reproduce, while pairs with the mutation can have an average of 2.05 children survive to reproduce. In this case, within 200 generations, or 4,000 years, the members of the species which have received at least one beneficial mutation from the first generation of mutations will outnumber the unmutated members of the species by 2:1.
Feel free to tweak the numbers however you see fit, and you will see that it will still work out, and the only thing you will change by tweaking numbers is how long it takes. Evolution does not require the balance of the numbers to be in its favor, because the process of mutation and selection is intrinsically in favor of improvement, even when the beneficial changes are extremely rare.
"But it does not "evolve". It may not become better; as a matter of fact, it may become worse."
"Real, hardcore, scientific guys will dislike the word because it implies that every changed population is somewhat better than the previous (unchanged) generations, which is absolutely not true."
Real, hardcore, scientific guys know that the word 'evolve' does not imply objective betterment of the organism/population in question. The idea of evolution as a process of constant improvement is a common misconception among laymen. Organisms just evolve, ie. they become different from their ancestors. Whether this change makes them more or less fit (depends on the conditions) doesn't change the concept of evolving.
Popper's opinion of scientific process would have more force if he had been a scientist.
In fact Popper's barely concealled objective was to provide a definition of science that Marxist and Freudian pseudoscience would be unable to meet. In particular he objected to the fact that both claimed to be 'scientific' while declaring their core theories to be absolute truth beyond the possibility of doubt.
Scientists of the day were happy to go along with Popper's definition because they didn't like the specious nonsense from the followers of Marx, Freud, Jung et al either. In point of fact neither did Marx by the end 'all I can say is that I am not a Marxist' (letter to Engel).
It took another couple of decades for folk to start noticing that what scientists did didn't meet the standards Popper had set either. Or rather it took that long for people to start mentioning the fact. By then the 'scientific' claims of the Marxists and Freudians had been effectively buried and the original political ibjective had been met.
Popper himself accepted that according to his definition there had been perhaps two genuinely falsifiable theories in the history of science.
The falsification canard is regularly trotted out by folk trying to push intelligent design but they miss the entire point. Popper's definition is based on intent. Except in very rare circumstances it is generally not possible to fully meet the falsifiability criteria in full. The real question is not whether the criteria are met but whether the practitioners have the intention of seriously testing their theory by attempting to disprove it or not.
In the case of evoloution the historical theory that we are the product of evolution is inherently untestable, but so is the theory that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. What is testable is the volumes of evidence that support the claim that evolution is the simplest method of interpreting and explaining the fossil record, the one that has provided the greatest predictive power with respect to new discoveries and the one that is consistent with modern experiments that do meet the falsifiability criteria.
Intelligent Design on the other hand is exactly the type of nonesense concocted to support a preconceived notion that the practioners have no intention of seriously testing that Popper was trying to eliminate.
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Does this mean that whatever happens to organisms/populations is an evolutionary process? ... Your message reminds me of the Popper's objection to evolution: it is impossible to disprove it since whichever way organisms turn out is fine from the evolutionary standpoint.
Nah; it's only "evolution" if it affects the distribution of genes in the next generation. Of course, Darwin didn't know about genes, since genetics was still in the future. People knew that offspring inherited characteristics from their parents, but nobody knew how it worked. It took another century to find and verify the physical mechanism. He just explained how the evolutionary process works, without knowing the mechanism of inheritance.
It's pretty easy to come up with things that are "neutral" in the evolutionary process, and biologists often consider the possibility that some genetic variations are not actually significant. Thus, I have blue eyes, while other humans have brown eyes; there seems to be no survival value in humans to a particular iris color. Similar examples of trivial variation exist in many species. It's not unusual for biologists to hypothesize that some characteristic is "neutral", i.e., neither harmful nor beneficial.
At the other extreme, consider the K-T impact event 65 million years back. This would not be considered an "evolutionary event" for most of the species, because most species were simply exterminated and no longer evolved at all. Also, it's not something that the evolutionary process could adapt to, since asteroid impacts are too rare and utterly unpredictable by any genetic mechanism. The survivors survived mostly due to the blind luck of being far enough away from the impact site, in a place where they could find enough food and shelter to get through the next few years. Survivors were mostly small, opportunistic omnivores, of course, and there's an obvious explanation for this. But still, the survivors weren't adapted to asteroid impacts in any meaningful sense, and neither are their descendants.
It's common to argue that evolutionary theory is trivial and tautological, because it merely asserts that whoever survives is a survivor. But this is a "straw man" argument that's based on an extreme generalization while ignoring significant details. In the case of evolution, the significant parts include the fact that characteristics are inherited from parents, but the inheritance is error prone. This results in offspring that vary slightly from the parents, and many of the variations affect survivability. This in turn affects the relative frequency of characteristics in later generations. When you include such details, the evolutionary process is no longer trivial. And it's no longer clear that everything is necessarily of evolutionary significance.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Also, you can't evolve slowly to resist antibiotics.
;-). It's happening right now with the "antibacterial" soaps that are widely sold in the US.
Sure you can (at least if you're a bacterium
What happens is typical with such chemicals: When you apply some of it to a body part such as hands, there may be enough to kill the bacteria right there. But at the edge of the treated area there is a gradient of the antibiotic's concentration, which falls to zero over some distance. Within this gradient, there are bacteria with differing susceptibility to that particular antibiotic. Thus, withing the gradient zone, the more susceptible bacteria die, while the less susceptible bacteria live. This slightly increases the frequence of whatever genes provided the slightly better resistance of the survivors.
The bacteria in question have generation times that may be under an hour in good conditions. So over weeks or months, they can produce thousands of generations. If you are repeatedly applying the same antibiotic to small areas of your body, you are repeatedly producing gradient zones that further select for slightly better resistance to that antibiotic.
It's the evolutionary process at work right on the surface of your body, and it should be no surprise that the end result is a population of bacteria with good resistance to the antibiotic in your soap.
This process is one of the better examples of why the article's topic is significant. By suppressing understanding of "evolution", we haven't just dealt with an abstract academic theory. We have also created a society in which people are actively selecting bacteria for resistance to antibiotics. People are doing this because they don't understand how bacteria evolve such resistance. Most of them don't even believe in evolution. But the evolutionary process doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. Like gravity and many other abstract academic theories, evolution works even if you don't believe in it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The counter-evolutionistas love to huff and puff until they find a person who so soundly refutes them that they have no possible comeback. Then they ignore that person and go on making their ridiculous claims elsewhere as if they have not just been shown to be absurd.
It's frustrating. You make the same point over and over. You refute the same idiocy over and over. Nothing changes. It's like a sick game to them. They're like the baby that keeps throwing its strained peas on the floor, and we keep picking them up.
It doesn't matter how much evidence we have. It doesn't matter how many times their objections to the theory are answered. It's not about truth to them, its about belief. Specifically, control of belief, which is religion's bread and butter. It's sophistry, plain and simple. They don't argue to arrive at the truth through a dialectic process. They argue to protect their untenable belief system from anything that might threaten it.
I would say that "Deliberate and venal ignorance" is about the best working definition of "Evil" that I can come up with. Counter-evolutionistas are evil.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So you avoid modern medical science? I doubt it and suspect your faith is veneer.
Science is self-correcting. While scientist may be subjective and politics, as in all human endeavors, holds sway, science corrects itself to the data over time.
And religion was well on to those points right? The earth immovable and has a foundation, Joshua stopped the sun in the sky not the earth, there are four corners of the earth, A tree that can be see from anywhere on earth, men can threaten God by building a tower toward heaven, placing peeled and striped branches in front of livestock alters genetics, the stars are attached to tent like fabric, etc.
Here is a comment by Martin Luther concerning Copernicus...
"There was mention of a certain astrologer who wanted to pro"ve that the earth moves and not the sky, the sun, and the moon. This would be as if somebody were riding on a cart or in a ship and imagined that he was standing still while the earth and the trees were moving.... I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth "
Is that secular reasoning? That is the same reasoning resisting the acceptances of evolution today. Same battle different ground.
You can be wrong for a very long time and still be wrong. The concept of eternal life evolved and mutated and you can see that by reading the bible and seeing certain concepts emerge thru the ages (like heaven and hell)
Here is a parable.
Science is like a control system on a plane. When a plane takes off from Los Angeles to New York and goes on autopilot the plane never has the exact correct heading and attitude. There is a feedback mechanism that is always correcting. In other words the heading/attitude/altitude are always off but in the average it maintains its course and finds its way to the destination.
Religion is like taking a measurement and fixing the control surfaces at one time during the flight (canonization) and never correcting even though the plane is veering way of course and is about to crash. And the faithful will say amen.