Science online, caricatures of ant toiletry edition

Posted on by
Crowd Is it getting crowded in here? Photo by James Cridland.
  • This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The evolutionary compromise made by attractive flowers.
  • And, at The Molecular Ecologist: I mused about how science depends on what scientists notice.
  • Actually a pretty tidy solution. Ant larvae are completely constipated.
  • Woah. Has NASA captured images of water flowing on Mars?
  • Turning somersaults to remain inside the cave. The mental gymnastics of creationism.
  • Drosophila-philiac. A history of the fruit fly as a model organism.
  • Maybe not scary? No, that’s still a lot of people. Some fresh projections for world population growth—and a great in-depth report on the successful history of family planning in, of all places, Iran.
  • Where to even start? Fighting the good fight for science literacy online.
  • Hmm. Why don’t we have any numbers on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of online classes for minority students?
  • Because they’re designed to! When statistics make caricatures.
  • Superb. The endosymbiosis at the origin of eukaryotic life.
  • Step aside, Tyrannosaurus. Some fossil mammals that are just as cool as dinosaurs.

◼

The Molecular Ecologist: Noticing what we scientists notice

Posted on by
"Regular" GFP A GFP-tagged nematode, and also a metaphor of sorts. Photo by Andy Peters.

Over at The Molecular Ecologist, I’m doing some musing about how scientific progress is shaped by what attracts the attention of scientists.

The probable selective impact of Joshua tree’s pollinators is obvious—it easily catches in the sieve of our attention and our desire to work with interesting critters. But I think it’s also fair to ask how much an interaction as specialized as the Joshua tree pollination mutualism actually tells us about the evolution of much more common, much less finely co-adapted relationships.

Do you ever worry that your study system limits what you can, well, study? Go read the whole thing, and tell us in the comments there.◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: A flower is an evolutionary compromise

Posted on by
Pollination IMG_4730D Welcome, pollinators! But, um, everyone else can just stay out, okay? Photo by Yeoh Thean Kheng.

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, I’ve written about a neat study of the tropical vine Dalechampia scandens, which has to solve an evolutionary puzzle that confronts most flowering plants:

But there’s a downside to making a big, showy display to attract pollinators—you might also attract visitors who have less helpful intentions than gathering up some pollen and moving on to the next flower. Showy flowers might attract animals that steal the rewards offered to pollinators—or they might attract animals that eat the flowers themselves, or the developing seeds created by pollination.

To see how a team of biologists directly measured this evolutionary compromise (spoiler: it involves counting pollen grains with a hand lens) go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, yet another final argument edition

Posted on by
First Stars There’s probably at least one class-M planet somewhere in this picture. Photo by redeye^.
  • This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Stalking the wild holobiont.
  • And at The Molecular Ecologist: How to “triangulate” your genome scan.
  • The fault is not in the stars, but in our telescopes. Will we ever find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars?
  • Wow. With winter precipitation at a record low, California is facing the third year of a catastrophic drought.
  • It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a scientist in possession of a hypothesis must be in want of Jane Austen. Jonathan Eisen takes issue with some literary advice for scientists.
  • A review of The Signal and the Noise. Why scientists need prior knowledge.
  • Yeah … probably not. Is this comparative karyotype the final piece of evidence that will shut down creationism?
  • In memoriam, Philip Seymour Hoffman. The science of addiction, in very personal perspective.
  • Wow. How a photographer caught a bee mid-sting.
  • The flaw in their thinking is the implicit assumption that a cat is a rigid body, an assumption that is obviously false to any cat-owner! The physics that lets cats land on their feet.

◼

The Molecular Ecologist: Triangulating the targets of natural selection

Posted on by
torridon view Photo by paul.mcgreevy.

At The Molecular Ecologist, guest contributor K.E. Lotterhos discusses an important consideration in designing studies that “scan” the genome for regions experiencing natural selection—to be truly informative, they must “triangulate” using independent data:

Let’s say a number of individuals were collected from heterogeneous environments on the landscape. Some SNPs were significant both in an FST outlier analysis and a [genetic-environement association]. Would we consider these SNPs to have two independent sources of evidence?

NO, because the two tests were performed on the same sets of individuals.

What counts as “independent” in this context? I think that’s still something of an open question—but go read the whole thing and se what you think!◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Stalking the wild holobiont

Posted on by
figure made from dishes containing images of microbes Photo by Pickersgill Reef.

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Sarah Hird introduces us to the concept of the holobiont and its hologenome:

Most evolutionary biologists probably consider the individual as the fundamental unit of natural selection. We think about the genes of one mother or one father being passed on to one descendant. But is this view too constrained? The “hologenome” is all the genomes that belong to the “holobiont” – an organism and all its microbes.

Would natural selection be better understood as acting on organisms together with all the microbes they host? Go read the whole thing and see what you think.◼

Science online, living in the future edition

Posted on by
Monarch (Butterfly), Virginia Will the future have monarch butterflies? Photo by Minette Layne.

◼

On blogging under my Real Name

Posted on by

2013.12.09 - at the growth chamber Hi, yes, this is me. Photo by jby.

The following is my contribution to Hope Jahren’s roundup of commentaries from scientists who use their “real” names in online settings. I solemnly swear that we started working on this before it turned out to be so very, very timely. You should go read all the contributions!

I can’t recall exactly why, when I decided to start a blog over the holiday break in December 2006, I put my real name on it. I think I had some vague, naïve sense that attaching my own name to my online writing would hold me accountable to some degree of professionalism and quality. I do know that I was operating under the assumption that no one would ever read the damn thing, anyway. (Even though—let’s be honest—I was also hoping that someone, lots of someones, would!)

Eventually I started writing about evolutionary biology, which is what I actually do for a living. My dissertation advisor somehow found the blog, and decided that it meant I should take charge of building a website for my University’s hosting of the Evolution Meetings—and this is probably the point at which Shit Got Real.

I devoted a page on the site to aggregating blog posts about the conference, including several of my own. I set up a Twitter feed for the conference, and started a personal account for good measure. This was the equivalent, in HTML and RSS feeds, of jumping up and down in front of the entire international body of my colleagues and saying “hey, look! I have a blog!”

Hello My Name is Opportunity Photo by One Way Stock.

And this turned out better than I had any right to expect. The same year as the Evolution meetings, one of my posts won me a trip to ScienceOnline 2010, where I made some of my first contacts in the broader community of popular science writers. I’ve landed a couple guest posts at the Scientific American website, and gotten pieces included in print collections of online science writing. As I was wrapping up my Ph.D., I talked some grad school buddies into joining me at a new group blog, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, and on the strength of that site’s success, I was offered the job of managing The Molecular Ecologist, the blog for the journal Molecular Ecology. Just in this past year, my online contacts among gay, lesbian, trans* and queer scientists came together to help with a study of sexual identity in scientific careers—I’m currently writing up the first results for publication.

Writing, outreach, and interacting with my colleagues online have been major parts of my professional development as a scientist. Blogging is all over my CV, in a dedicated section of my teaching statement, and in every “broader impacts” section of every grant proposal I’ve written in the last three years. At this point, I genuinely cannot imagine how I would do some of the most basic functions of science—finding interesting new papers, reading what other people think of research results, learning new analyses and programming tricks, communicating my own thoughts and results—without online media.

When I was a graduate student, my blog was a way to try my hand at science outreach with a low bar to entry—did I have time to write a few paragraphs about an interesting new journal article this week? Now it’s a (still, I think) relatively novel, demonstrable strength I have to offer in my hunt for funding and faculty positions. But most of this would be inaccessible if I wrote under a pseudonym.

What’s more, even if I toyed with the idea of restarting under an assumed name, I can’t think of much that I’d do differently—more cussing, maybe? (I do about as much as I want to already.) More sniping at bad science? (Really, where would I find the time?) I suspect that my profile—youngish gay biologist with a thing for species interactions, a distaste for sloppy evolutionary storytelling, and a stylistic crush on David Foster Wallace—would, in a word, out me.

I’m keenly aware that there are risks in putting my real name and face all over the Web, attached to a years-long blog archive and thousands of offhand, 140-character remarks—including not infrequent mention of the fact that (surprise!) I’m gay. Some of the risks, I’m privileged to evade. As gender-conforming white dude, I generally don’t have to worry about attracting stalkers, or field the relentless harassment that women often deal with in online settings, and (I think) I’m allowed some social space to “raise hell.” Some of the risks I minimize to the degree that common sense and my own technical chops let me. I think I mostly keep things professional on Twitter—as professional as I keep things in the lab, anyway—and my Facebook profile is (I think) pretty well locked down.

And finally, I’ve decided that some of the risks aren’t really risks: If a faculty search committee looks at my online record and says, “there’s no way we can hire this guy,” then I think I probably don’t want that job anyway.◼

Science online, every major’s terrible edition

Posted on by
k7964-1 Much data. Photo by Minette Layne.

And, because I’ve just wrapped up another round of Citizen Science (well, except for the grading), a little advice for some of my “undeclared” students, via io9:


◼