As a small boy was walking home from school one winter’s evening, he noticed an old, bearded man in a front garden, looking up through a telescope.
“What’cher doin’, mister?” the boy asked.
“Astronomy”, replied the old man.
“You’re a bit slow in’t’cha?” quips the boy. “We did that last year.”
Listen carefully, now, here comes the science part. Substitute ‘organismal biology’ for ‘astronomy’ in the anecdote above and you’d have a pretty fair approximation of the way in which old-fashioned zoology and botany are viewed (at least, from where I’m sitting) by some scientists, for whom molecules conquer all.
Writing in today’s Nature (‘Science teaching must evolve’, Nature 453, 31-32, 1 May 2008), Andrew Moore of EMBO argues that schools are backward in teaching students about molecular evolution, which he calls “the best approach yet to investigating biology’s central theory”. You can comment directly on that article here – needless to say, the opinions in this blog post what you’re reading right now are all mine, not necessarily Nature’s. But if they aren’t yours too, then all I can say is Shame On You.
“Worse still,” Moore continues, “the understanding [students] have – based on the fossil record – is easy prey to specious arguments from anti-science movements”.
It would indeed be a fine thing were students to learn about evolution at all, molecular or otherwise. And quite apart from the near-certainty that a beginning student would have more trouble grasping concepts such as molecules learned in sterile laboratory environments, rather than getting out there, seeing the diversity of real animals and plants – observing, collecting, dissecting and drawing – one is forced to contest the motivation of such an exercise. ‘Learning about evolution through molecules rather than the fossil record could be used to counter the specious arguments of anti-science movements’ – oh really?
Specious arguments remain specious, irrespective of our attitude towards them. In any case, anti-science movements are likely certain to cherry-pick their evidence to suit their needs, whatever scientists say. I disagree with PZ Myers on many things, but if we stand shoulder-to-shoulder on one point, it is that the way we do our science should, emphatically, run on our own program, and not dance to a creationist drum.
So much is clear, or should be. But Moore goes further.
“Phylogeny based on similarity of form is fundamentally unsound because of the adaptation and convergent evolution witnessed in nature. Such purely descriptive methods represent a mould out of which schoolroom biology must break to become more contemporary.”
This remark can but transport one to an alternate universe in which phylogenetic systematics, more handily known as cladistics, never happened. Cladistics uses the criterion of maximum parsimony to generate hypotheses of evolution in which convergence is at a minimum, a kind of ground state. The cladograms so generated are not wishy-washy family trees based on similarities observed subjectively, but rigorous hypotheses that can be tested, and which shed light on major evolutionary transitions in a meaningful, real-world way that molecules never can.
For example, no amount of molecules are likely to give the insight into the transition of tetrapods from water to land as great as that offered by the study of the mere morphology of fossils of Tiktaalik roseae or Acanthostega gunnari against a cladistic background in which the relative merits of various hypotheses about the evolution of major organ-systems can be tested objectively.
Evolutionary biologists were refining cladistics in the 1970s and 1980s, long before molecular evolution had the tools or, indeed, very much data. It would be funny, were it not so sad, to report that parsimony criteria formed the basis of many of the first-generation techniques of phylogenetic reconstruction used in molecular evolution.
Irony on irony, these techniques were developed largely by palaeontologists, as a specific response to the problems of evolution peculiar to the fossil record.
Irony degenerates to insult with the use of the word ‘descriptive’, which molecular biologists have appropriated as a perjorative term to describe the kind of biology which they consider outmoded – a biology of a theoretical and philosophical sophistication which still transcends the descriptive molecular stamp-collecting that masquerades as science, simply because it has big, shiny and expensive machines that go ‘ping’, which serve (among their more legitimate uses) to amplify the self-importance of their users.
This is not to say that molecular biology cannot play its part. For me, the greatest contribution currently being made by molecular evolution is helping to resolve long-standing morphological problems, such as the origin of the vertebrate head and neck, or the molecular basis for the variation in beak morphology in Darwin’s finches.
But these problems would not exist to be solved without the tradition of comparative anatomists going back hundreds of years, who defined the problems to begin with.
Hear! hear!
For me the point is simply that what we really want to see, what really evolves, is organisms, not a long stringy molecule that a couple of guys once wrote a note about. Unless the DNA work connects back to morphology, physiology, ecology, behaviour or whatever, it’s still just shuffling a 4 letter alphabet. What’s more interesting is how that can produce a beast capable of insisting that it should given a piece of sausage (and then falling asleep 5 minutes later).
I did my PhD at a plant sciences institute not far from your abode. One scientist from the top floor of our building was once heard to exclaim about thale cress (that’s Arabidopsis for you pipette pushers) “What, you mean it grows in the wild?!”
As you can see I have taken this one down while my colleagues poder on its now-myserious contents, so Bob’s comment seems to fall into a void. Suffice it to say that the post was all about sticking up for organismal biology against the rampant march of the molecule. I may be able to put it up later … we’ll see.
It was the ‘M’ word, wasn’t it?
If there is an ‘M’ in ‘albatross’, then yes.
What flavour was it?
I think that’s the best fate for most of my comments.
Feel free to moderate my comment out of existence, if it will make things less confusing/problematic.
@Bob. Thanks for the offer, but this post has generated far more comments already than many of mine that are more substantive.
@Richard: Rum and Raisin.
genetically modified rum and raison?
[sic]
Normal service has removed, chaps. I had to take out the part about impaling kittens on red-hot skewers. The Girrafes were offended.
That was wise. None of us would like to open the paper in the morning and read of a Nature editor struck down with a single tyre-mark across his back.
The ‘albatross’ word. As I surmised.
One scientist from the top floor of our building was once heard to exclaim about thale cress (that’s Arabidopsis for you pipette pushers) “What, you mean it grows in the wild?!”
This raises an important subsidiary point which I discussed here (Nature login probably required). In that article I said that the notions such as Intelligent Design are encouraged by scientists who use terms such as ‘THE fly’ or ‘THE mouse’ when referring to ‘their’ model organism. The heavy use of this very small andd unrepresentative sample tends to create the view that there is only one canonical way of doing things, suggestive of Design, when even a cursory look at biodiversity reveals an enormous variety of solutions for achieving the same end. This point was raised when ‘THE bacterial flagellar motor’ was touted as an example of irreducible complexity, when there exist many different sorts of motor, working in different ways. Once this biodiversity is appreciated one has to resort to even more special pleading to justify the existence of all those different sorts.
Here is a case in which, I think, teaching molecular biology might actually be inimical to the message of evolution, contrary to what Moore says or imples in his article.
Bob O’Hara said:
Unless the DNA work connects back to morphology, physiology, ecology, behaviour or whatever, it’s still just shuffling a 4 letter alphabet. What’s more interesting is how that can produce a beast capable of insisting that it should given a piece of sausage (and then falling asleep 5 minutes later).
At the risk of unintentional sarcasm… Isn’t that the point of the DNA work in this particular context?
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“Worse still,” Moore continues, “the understanding [students] have – based on the fossil record – is easy prey to specious arguments from anti-science movements”.
The “anti-science” people are capable of crafting specious arguments for any bit of evidence you can present them. They have developed this skill into an art.
I did my PhD at a plant sciences institute not far from your abode.
Aha! That must be the Max Planck Human Turnip Institute, round the back of the John Innes.
Yes, on Cloney Lane (as it was once mis-spelled). My supervisor is in that photo: he’s the one with the bagpipes.
Now I’ve finally got access to the article, it’s rather odd. One of the reasons to study systematics at the morphological level is so that we can recognise the organisms we see: I think the author of the piece is thinking that systematics is only about evolution.
Bryan – You’re absolutely correct about the creationists twisting any argument. I participate on an ID blog (it’s addictive, if your constitution is strong enough) and the way they refuse to let their ignorance get in the way of their arguments can be impressive.
I think the author is doing little more than arguing for his own subject. Which is absurd, when we know that what’s really needed in schools is more statistical instruction.
Ha Ha, Bob.
More muscle, that’s what they need. Bit of ATP cycling will sort them out.
Bob- I always end up banned or have my comments moderated out of existence on ID blogs and forums. I try to be polite, but I have yet to come up with an inoffensive way to say, “you couldn’t reason your way out of a wet paper bag!” I don’t often bother with them these days, but I’m glad there are those who do!
Update: there is a very good exchange between Dr Kutschera and Dr Moore (author of the Commentary) over at the News and Opinion forum. Dr Moore clarifies very usefully what he wrote in his commentary, spurred by Dr Kutschera’s comments. Good for Dr Moore that he’s engaging online about this.
Thanks Maxine – I shall flip over to that discussion and try not to be
tooinsulting.