I (Ken) was away this week, to give a talk at the 55th Congress of the Brazilian Genetics Society. The meeting was held in a relatively isolated hot-spring resort town, Aguas de Lindoia, north of Sao Paulo (the picture is of capybara, the world's largest rodent, in a lake near the meeting place). Around 2500 people were there, representing the wide array of genetics research, from ecology to experimental to biomedical.Most of the attendees by far were young, enthusiastic students. Their posters and presentations (those I could understand through my lack of Portuguese) were first-rate, and shows a high degree of development of genetics research in this huge and burgeoning country. Several outsiders, like me, were privileged to be invited to talk to those attending.
The purpose of this brief post is just to pay a tribute to these achievements. With its huge resources for studying both the academic and practical sides of ecology, ecological change, and human impact, Brazil is a fascinating place that will be important in applied, evolutionary, and population ecological genetics. My guess is that the Brazilians, naturally friendly and open people, will continue to be receptive to potential collaborators who have good ideas. But they will be full collaborators, not just investigators in need of outside expertise or resources.
This meeting, like so many, was themed to honor the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. My only issue with this, and one I raised in my own presentation, is that the focus on Darwin and 1859 is somewhat misplaced and unfair. The reason is that it denies credit to Alfred Russel Wallace who, with Darwin but in the year before (1858), independently developed a theory of evolution. Wallace's was somewhat different from Darwin's, focusing more on group or species competition with the environment rather than among individuals, and Wallace's were somewhat more accurate relative to current knowledge in some other respects than Darwin.
Also, 1858 was the year in which Rudolf Virchow published his cell theory, that all life is cellular and all cells descend from other cells. That is an understanding upon which modern biology (evolutionary as well as functional) is entirely based.
So perhaps we missed doing our proper duty, and should have been celebrating last year. Wallace and Virchow might have gotten more notice, but of course, Darwin would still have been at the heart of the festivities!
5 comments:
Any comments on Brazil's reluctance to share material with researchers outside of the country?
No, as I didn't know about that so didn't ask anyone. But it may be similar to other countries in the 'developing' world (if that still applies to Brazil), who have been exploited by the industrialized world. Samples go out to labs with more technology in the 'west', and the Brazilian collaborators have their names on papers but are not the lead and are often treated rather patronizingly.
Another issue has been patenting and GMO kinds of problems where the wealth countries take samples out, modify them, and then sell them at a profit back to the originating country. This has been a problem in agribusiness and I think pharmaceuticals where large companies comb a country for natural substances that can be made into effective drugs.
And in anthropology it has been the outsiders who get the indigenous DNA samples and do the analysis, tacking on the local country authors as collaborating investigators. In this case, too, there's been concern that the 'west' will patent genes, or publish results that lead to discrimination against the indigenes, or will violate their sensibilities by using science to revise their cultural origin myths, etc.
This is a long story, because I happen to house some DNA samples collected decades ago by someone (Jim Neel) whose post-doc I was (I never was in the field there). There are all sorts of claims of abuse of the Brazilian indigenes associated with the trips that collected these samples. Activists have accused outsiders of misappropriation and so on. In my case, our samples are slated to be returned as soon as proper, safe shipment methods are agreed on. I don't know about other issues, or about current problems of taking samples out of the country.
At this meeting, there was a large hall of biotech company exhibits, just as you'd see in Europe or the US, and by both companies we have and others that I didn't recognize and seemed Brazilian. The papers were fully modern, sophisticated, and scientifically rigorous: no sign that this is a group of investigators who can't hold their own. So I don't know what the issues are, and I saw no indication of them at this meeting (but I don't speak Portuguese).
RE: Separating wheat from the chaff -- Neo-Darwinism (or Dawkinsism) vs. Darwinism!?
This meeting, like so many, was themed to honor the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. My only issue with this, and one I raised in my own presentation, is that the focus on Darwin and 1859 is somewhat misplaced and unfair. The reason is that it denies credit to Alfred Russel Wallace who, with Darwin but in the year before (1858), independently developed a theory of evolution. Wallace's was somewhat different from Darwin's, focusing more on group or species competition with the environment rather than among individuals, and Wallace's were somewhat more accurate relative to current knowledge in some other respects than Darwin.
Also, 1858 was the year in which Rudolf Virchow published his cell theory, that all life is cellular and all cells descend from other cells. That is an understanding upon which modern biology (evolutionary as well as functional) is entirely based.
So perhaps we missed doing our proper duty, and should have been celebrating last year. Wallace and Virchow might have gotten more notice, but of course, Darwin would still have been at the heart of the festivities!
I thought that is pretty fair description of Darwin, among his contemporaries of naturalists and biologists; and of their respective works and ideas in developing the “theory of evolution” in their then naturalism of species taxonomy, ecology (primarily in relations to geology and geography), organisms and cell biology, etc. In fact, the independent “inheritance” work of the Austrian botanist-monk Gregor Mendel’s (later dubbed genetics) was completely unheard of, by Darwin, at all!?
Also, in retrospect, the (once considered seminal) “tree of life” diagram, that Darwin outlined in his notebook in July 1837, may have been modeled on “a very similar angular branching diagram constructed by Martin Barry, which that naturalist labeled “The Tree of Animal Development.” Barry’s diagram (reproduced here) was meant to illustrate Karl Ernst von Baer’s theory of relationships among animal archetypes; it appeared in a journal that Darwin read a short time before he sketched his July diagram.”
Furthermore, beware of the neo-Darwinist reductionism, distortion, and abuse of Darwin’s original works and “hermeneutics” such as Dawkinsism: one which the renowned armchair author of over 10 reductionist books -- including The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006) -- Richard Dawkins has had reduced the classical Darwinism, into his current anti-religious rhetoric -- or neo-atheism without conscience -- that I recently analyzed here: "Let's begin the Dialogue and Reconciliation of Science and Religion Now! -- RE: What's mind (or never mind)!? -- Deciphering idiosyncrasies of scientific/religious rationalism vs. neo-Darwinist/ID-creationist irrationalism, in science and philosophy today!?" (PhysForumEU; August 2); and which you also commented here: "The religion-evolution 'debate': such an egocentric waste of time!" (August 23).
[to be continued in next post]
RE: Separating wheat from the chaff -- Neo-Darwinism (or Dawkinsism) vs. Darwinism!?
[continued from last post]
Last, but not least, regarding the question of “Brazil's reluctance to share material with researchers outside of the country?” especially in cancer research, I thought there may still be problems of harmonizing the universal experimental research procedures and standards, in and outside Brazil, as one observation that I recently made here: "Tick saliva could hold cancer cure: Brazilian scientists -- RE: Standard anticancer drug discovery procedures!?" (PhysOrgEU; August 28).
Best wishes, Mong 9/6/9usct1:24p; practical science-philosophy critic; author "Decoding Scientism" and "Consciousness & the Subconscious" (works in progress since July 2007), Gods, Genes, Conscience (iUniverse; 2006) and Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now (blogging avidly since 2006).
This is a long comment and I don't understand all of it. We ourselves have reprinted the famous Darwin notebook drawing, and certainly did not mean to suggest that CD had no intellectual ancestors, if that is the impression you have.
As to Mendel, Darwin had a copy of a journal or book (offhand I can't remember which) that referred to Mendel's work (the rumor that he had a copy of Mendel's paper with the pages uncut, is incorrect). There's no evidence I know of that Darwin was aware of Mendel, at least not enough to have written about it in books or letters.
As to hyperreductionism or hyper-Darwinism, which I think you are referring to, we would probably agree that life itself is more nuanced. Genetic variation has effects that range from zero to lethal to fabulous. Differential reproductive success among genotypes occurs on a spectrum from no-difference to lethal or fabulous. These parameters are relative rather than absolute in most if not all cases, so that evolution can't be captured adequately by a simplistic theory, tempting as that may be to those who hunger for simplistic universality. The religion debate is a whole other story.
As to Brazilian rules on taking materials out of the country you seem to be suggesting that Brazilian science standards are somehow sub-par. My reaction is that clearly that is not generally the case,and there's a world of shoddy research done here in the US, as in any other large, active country.
John Ioannidis has not long ago published arguments that indexing or inclusion of scientific studies should be based on some agreed-on metric of quality, and suggested that a lot of research in China was substandard and misleading to consider. The major policing of quality is peer review, and time, not nationality. Perhaps I missed your point, but at least I can say from direct experience that Brazilians are doing some very fine genetics research.
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