Is there a theory of life? Most biologists will claim so, but do they actually care? Part I

Happily, one of our favorite BBC Radio 4 programs, In Our Time, is back on the air after a summer hiatus.  The most recent program was a discussion of Scottish philosopher, David Hume.

David Hume (1711-1776) was one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment period in western intellectual history.  This was the time  when empiricists like Galileo and Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, among many others, and philosophers like Descartes, Francis Bacon, and (again) many others began to reject various philosophies of life and knowledge that had persisted essentially since the classic Greek philsophers.

The new view was empiricism.  Whatever the truth of the world is, the only way to know it is by observations.  Our brains were not ordained, as philosophers had suggested in the past, by their creator with some inherent sense of world-truth.  That truth might be confirmed or elaborated by experience, but we could reason out the truth in many ways simply because our brains were built to be consistent with it or to understand it.  We're oversimplifying, of course, but ideas of scripturally revealed, or organically a priori means of knowledge were commonplace for millennia in western culture.  These views were known in various ways, but are captured by the term 'rationalism', meaning that we can reason out the truth without observing it.

It was quite a revolution in thought to suggest, as Hume and others did, that knowledge came only from observation first.  Debate concerned the role of reasoning about observations, but basically the idea of induction was at the core of the idea that the world must tell us, by its consistency and pattern, how it works.  Science might devise 'laws' to explain these regularities of observations, but essentially only to give reasons why we consistently see effects always follow from presumed causes.

These ideas became the core of the so-called scientific method, by which we reduce outcomes to their individual causal elements, assuming causes can be studied in isolation.  We cling to this idea, teach it, and lobby for it all the time, even though it has many fundamental problems.  The idea is that we have a theory of our field, say of biology or physics or chemistry, and it is against that theory that we evaluate evidence to understand particular observations or make predictions about future events by using the theory to go beyond the specifics of past experience.  That is the assumed, often unquestioned, basis of modern science. 

We know that our theories can be wrong, as scientific 'revolutions' have periodically shown.  That should make us much more humble about our current views than we are, and Thomas Kuhn's famous analysis of scientific 'revolutions' asserted, reasonably accurately, that we cling to our current theory (he called it the 'paradigm') as if it were (so to speak) the God's truth, until forced to think otherwise.

However, Hume himself was in essence more skeptical as to whether we can ever know truth. We can only work from our history of observations, and the explanations ('paradigm' or 'theory' or 'laws') that we currently accept.  But these are limited to our sensory systems and experience to date, and we have absolutely no way of knowing whether we are interpreting causation correctly (or even the idea that there is causation as we think of it).

Such debates are more important than just as a source of employment for philosophers (and the fact that they make far less money than scientists may say something about the relevance of the debates).  They are at the heart of some of the more important discussions in science today, and nowhere is that clearer than in genetics and evolutionary biology.

That's because the empiricists' belief that nature was law-like and that empiricism would lead to discovery of those laws of Nature formed the conceptual environment of Darwin and Mendel, and thence to the present when many if not most biologists routinely invoke what amounts to be strong, law-like deterministic views of genetic causation and, connected with that, evolution.

We'll discuss these issues in Part II of this series.

Adaptation is often overrated

The search for signatures of natural selection keeps many anthropologists, and biologists in general, occupied these days, and in turn, journalists and science writers (a recent piece in the NYT is a case in point).  Often the search is founded on the assumption that all traits allow their bearer to be well-, if not exquisitely-adapted to the niche in which it lives. 

Kew Gardens Palm House, public domain

It's interesting to be reminded, in rereading Darwin's Origin for work with a student, that Darwin himself cautioned about overdoing this.  In Chapter 5, on "The Laws of Variation", he emphasizes acclimatisation, the ability of an organism to adapt to a new environment.  He wrote, e.g., that species of plants can be found in a wide variety of climates, and it's not possible to predict whether a plant will survive in a climate outside of its native habitat -- these of course were the days when naturalists were sending plants back to Britain from all over the world, and whether or not they'd survive at, say, Kew Gardens was an issue. Darwin wrote,

But the degree of adaptation of species to the climates under which they live is often overrated. We may infer this from our frequent inability to predict whether or not an imported plant will endure our climate, and from the number of plants and animals brought from warmer countries which here enjoy good health. We have reason to believe that species in a state of nature are limited in their ranges by the competition of other organic beings quite as much as, or more than, by adaptation to particular climates. But whether or not the adaptation be generally very close, we have evidence, in the case of some few plants, of their becoming, to a certain extent, naturally habituated to different temperatures, or becoming acclimatised: thus the pines and rhododendrons, raised from seed collected by Dr Hooker from trees growing at different heights on the Himalaya were found in this country to possess different constitutional powers of resisting cold. [emphasis mine]

So, plants -- or animals, for that matter -- aren't necessarily selected for a specific environment, but are simply 'selected for' the ability to succeed in their current environment.  This is, really, all Darwin said and it is very different from the widespread idea that every species is fine-tuned (or, if a generalist, was selected 'for' not being fine-tuned).  This is really just an invocation of an axiom--an assumption not by itself a fact--that everything has been ordained by selection. 

On this view, the capacity of enduring the most different climates by man himself and by his domestic animals, and such facts as that former species of the elephant and rhinoceros were capable of enduring a glacial climate, whereas the living species are now all tropical or sub-tropical in their habits, ought not to be looked at as anomalies, but merely as examples of a very common flexibility of constitution, brought, under peculiar circumstances, into play.

And, Darwin concludes,

On the whole, I think we may conclude that habit, use, and disuse, have, in some cases, played a considerable part in the modification of the constitution, and of the structure of various organs; but that the effects of use and disuse have often been largely combined with, and sometimes overmastered by, the natural selection of innate differences.

Whether or not his discussion of use and disuse verges on Lamarckism, the point here is that Darwin himself underscored the importance of adaptability, or facultativeness, in response to changing environments.  He didn't say so, but we do in our book, The Mermaid's Tale, that the ability to adapt is a fundamental principle of life, and ubiquitous as it is, it was probably selected early in the history of life, and is fundamental to success. Unfortunately, Darwin was human and in many other places he states that effectively all variation is screened by selection.  So, like all of us, he was somewhat inconsistent. 

But this should be a sober reminder that, while selective explanations for any trait might be appealing, the most successful species are often those that can respond to change, not those that have fine-tuned their adaptation to a specific niche. The latter may be doomed to relatively quick extinction.

Do we cheat the best to protect and 'advance' the rest? Part III of a series on Education

Many programs in the K-12 education crisis in the US aim to raise 'the' levels of achievement of kids in our way-behind school systems.  The idea is that to be 'competitive', the US needs to regain some quality edge in general education, and that for various reasons we've been falling way behind other nations.

Now a study asks whether by doing this highly democratic act, we are actually undermining ourselves.  By our No Child Left Behind, teach to the test, include all policy, we are damping the learning and advantages that our sharpest kids have, that is in a sense just the opposite of what 'competitiveness' demands.

In universities, the grab for tuition takes the form of increased enrollments, grade inflation, faculty size reduction, class size increases, and reluctance to fail students who really don't belong (intellectually) in serious colleges or universities.  We see it here in stark ways at Penn State, but it's a general problem (even, to some extent, in the elites, with their grade inflation).  When we admit more students, dare not fail them because we need their tuition to pay our salaries (that is, of the faculty, so we can do 'research' while instructors with no tenure and lower pay do the teaching), then we are watering down classes.  Penn State is as usual part of the crowd, not taking a lead in setting a higher standard, which means that while we're part of the problem we're not particularly culpable.  We like most universities pay too much attention to student course evaluations, turning faculty into entertainers who don't make courses too difficult or assignments too long.

The result is that we make classes passable by students who really would be better served at less research-intense, less ambitious universities.  We water things down and the main victims are the really smart and serious students, who are here in substantial numbers as we can personally attest.  That's because they deserve much more than watered-down courses.  They deserve, and can handle, much more rigorous courses.  We don't mean just 'hard' courses or poorer grades, but simply courses that present more sophisticated material.

If we dumb down and thereby cheat the students in K-12 and then continue the process at the college and university level, naturally what we get at the end of the pipeline are people less well trained than they could be, and nobody is more affected in this way than the very best students.

October Carnival of Evolution

The October Carnival of Evolution is up, hosted by Kevin Zelnio over at Scientific American blogs.

The Socratic road to more of the same? A series on Education, part II

Still catching up on what happened while we were gone.  It was good to be disconnected in many ways, but it does make plugging back in a bit time consuming.  In keeping with our theme of yesterday on ways to learn, we focus today on a story we missed on NPR a few weeks back on how lecture classes don't work.

Teachers have been lecturing for millennia, the story reports, and it has never been terribly effective.

“Before printing, it was very difficult to create books, and so someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He points out that the word “lecture” comes from the Latin word meaning “to read.”

Redish is trying to change the way college students are taught. He says lecturing has never been an effective teaching method, and now that information is so easily accessible, lecturing is a waste of time.

“With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it,” Redish says. “Get ‘em to do it once, put it on the web, and fire the faculty.”

Students who do well in lecture classes are the students who would do well with any method, including self-teaching.  But most students can't pay attention long enough to grasp all that's being taught, and most professors know too much about their subject to be able to communicate it to beginners.

The solution?  According to physics professor Eric Mazur at Harvard, it's to take a peer learning approach.  He has his students read the material ahead of time, answer some questions online about it before class to make sure they've done it, and talk to each other during class to iron out any confusion, and the professor then uses the Socratic method -- questions, and discussion -- to reinforce what they've learned.

The first goal is to teach the basic concepts, and once students understand those, they're much better prepared to put what they've learned into practice.  Professors generally try to convey both with the lecture format, but the kind of rote memorization, without real understanding that the lecture/exam format encourages doesn't prepare the student to actually use the material, never mind retain the material long-term.

Ironically, the Socratic method is the original pedagogy (in known history of western culture).  It involves active interaction.   So why have we invested, and continued to invest, in expensive research on 'education' and how and what to teach, when we are if anything regressing, according to these stories?  And how much difference is there, really, between the current way--that, after all, has educated the vast middle classes over the last couple of centuries, when they had little other than apprenticeship education for all of history before that--and our cultures are so much better and more powerful than in the past?  Clearly the don't-learns exist but overall the system is teaching.  Otherwise, how do we have iPods, big-screen tv's, and electronic toasters?

The truth is perhaps that we don't need armies of people with solid physics knowledge.  If we're falling behind other countries, it's at the margins, not because the lecture system is bonkers.  After all, that's what they have in China and Japan, Russia and Eastern Europe, not to mention England and France etc., where our graduate students are largely coming from.

And, we believe we've read somewhere that even the august Socrates bemoaned how uninterested or unable so many of his students were.  Others in history have done the same.  And, after all, Socrates was so good that they made him drink hemlock for his contributions to society (this was, in a sense, for teaching sedition to young people by teaching them rhetoric by which they could argue even false points of view).

Socratic, interactive teaching does work if one keeps expectations realistic.  We've tried it with success in our own classes, though they were not in the hundreds in a large auditorium.  For that, for a middle class large-scale operation, you have to have large classes, or something less intensively interactive (and a model from elite Harvard isn't exactly relevant).

The real problem is not the lecture systems--informal peer-group and so on approaches will work for some, but in no way will it yield a nation of physicists here!  The problem is a lowering of expectations and standards, opening up universities to students who haven't adequate backgrounds--indeed, the acceptance of a pre-college educational system that leaves so many kids unprepared--and pandering to students with easy courses and high grades, so we can grab their tuition and pay the faculty to spend their time on their (our?) precious research.  But even were we to re-balance the system, we can only expect a modest increase in results, because that's all that large societies can achieve.  Still, small differences per student, in a big society, could make a major difference overall, even if not everyone waiting for a bus will be discussing muon half-lives.

The locus of learning. A series on Education, Part I

One of the greatest teachers of all (known) time, Socrates, taught in the streets of Athens.  He and others whose work we know, were basically paid by well-off young gentlemen to instruct them.  They were largely peripatetic--literally, walking about while teaching.  Although schools existed, they probably were not like the campuses where we learn today.  No powerpoint lectures.  And, while they participated in blood sports, the arenas weren't on campus!

The first major European universities came about only about 1500 years later, in the middle ages.  There, too, basic subjects for gentlemen, including theological, legal, medical, and military training were taught.  The professors had to attract students to pay them, as they didn't have TIAA/CREF retirement plans, and so on. 

Over the centuries, these evolved into the grand, architecturally and even intellectually centered (or ossified?) institutions we know and work in today.  Oxford, Cambridge, major universities in Italy, Germany, and France all grew to be stationary campus-centered places, with physical libraries and classrooms.  Learning was largely from lectures and in-person discussions with tutors.  Even as far back as 1618, an Oxford don named Robert Burton wrote a play called The philosophasters, which satirized university professors, and their scams for making money and avoiding work---some things that seem true today were already in place back then!  (spoof though it was, however, it was written in Latin for performance in an Oxford college).

Now, johnny-come-lately universities all over the world have modeled themselves on this static, physically centered (or stadium-centered in the US) institutions.  Students arrive in droves, sit in soft chairs by the hundreds, take notes (or doze), and regurgitate on exams.  The curriculum is based on being there (though, these days hungry for tuition, we don't usually actually take attendance).

But is this the right or best way to learn?  Could it be that a modern version of the older ways would be as effective, or even more so?  A New York Times story asks about this.  Online learning is booming, whether or not it's as yet up to the same standard as sit-in universities.  'Real' universities are scrambling not to lose too much business to the basically fake online offerings of some online universities.  But various companies are offering online or equivalent at-home courses, and the major universities are hastening to get into the act.

Will this be better for knowledge?  Or is it an excuse for pretending to have an education, getting a degree, and offering that to employers as evidence of achieved knowledge and skill?

In the 19th Century, Darwin's famous advocate, Thomas Huxley, worked very hard (and often nastily) to oppose the elitist Oxford-Cambridge traditions, by offering lectures to the working class of England.  Science was at that time largely denigrated by 'real' universities as beneath a gentleman's time.

The spread of this form of teaching and learning to the general publisphere may, like social networking, transform not just how we learn, but what we learn and how we adjudicate interpretation of knowledge.  Time will tell.

Would it really change things if the UN meeting on NCDs had been a success?

We've been away, so we're late following up on the story of the UN meeting on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) (which we first blogged about here). The meeting of 'high-level' representatives of many nations was convened to address the issue of diseases that aren't often on the agenda of poor countries, where infectious diseases are usually considered the major health problems -- chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, respiratory diseases and cancer, largely the effects of tobacco use and alcohol abuse, poor diet, inactivity, and other lifestyle factors. These are major causes of morbidity and mortality in industrialized nations, and have been for decades, but are now becoming much more prevalent in the rest of the world, where of course health care amelioration is much scarcer than it is in the 'developed' world.

The meeting took place in New York on Sept 19 and 20, and by many accounts, was not a roaring success. But then, given the conflicts of interest represented there, this isn't a surprise, and indeed was the predicted result.

According to a piece in Family Practice News,

In the consensus document, known as a political declaration, UN members pledged to promote the reduction of salts and sugars; to eliminate trans fats in foods; to increase access to affordable, quality-assured medicines and technologies; and to strengthen health care systems so they can address NCD prevention and treatment.

The UN also endorsed WHO efforts to combat smoking, to improve diet and physical activity, to reduce the harmful use of alcohol, and to halt the marketing of unhealthful foods and beverages to children.

The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged UN representatives at the meeting to carry out the provisions of the document and to "bring NCDs into our broader global health and development agenda."

But, goals were made voluntary rather than regulatory, because representatives of the food industry had been invited to participate.   

Instead of compulsory targets, the UN tasked the WHO to establish a comprehensive global monitoring framework and to prepare recommendations for voluntary global targets before the end of 2012, as well as to report initial progress in 2013, enabling a lack of accountability that the editorial authors deemed "a missed opportunity."

And an editorial in The Lancet concludes,

Ultimately, events in New York were underwhelming. An opportunity to create political cohesion to tackle the biggest health challenge facing future generations has been missed. Although the declaration sets out the scale of the challenge, it lacks ambition and is more a politically correct declaration than a political declaration of war. Individual countries must now take bold steps to accelerate their responses beyond the slow timetable the UN proposes if real progress is to be made.

Ok, so let's agree that conflicts of interest kept any real teeth out of the UN declaration that resulted from this meeting (which you can read here). But even if it did have teeth, would disease reduction goals, goals with deadlines, actually be attainable?  And, do we know that if, say, the food industry were required to reduce salt in processed food by, say, 25% that this would in fact make a difference in prevalence of stroke and heart disease? 

Further, if the declaration required that diabetes be reduced by some set amount, how would countries accomplish this? It's not as though medicine isn't trying to prevent or cure these problems now. Certainly the food industry has a vested interest in convincing people to drink sugary sodas and eat fat and salt laden foods, but this isn't the whole problem. People would still have to change their behaviors; eat less, move more, and we don't know how to make this happen.

So, it would have been nice if this meeting had produced a forceful document with public health goals that countries could commit to if for no other reason than that it's good for everyone to agree on the direction they should be going in. But without the knowledge of how to meet those goals, this would have been yet another document not worth the paper it was written on.

The problem is both epistemological and political.  Here in the US (and presumably in other well-off countries) the NIH has proclaimed a series of goals (Healthy People 2000;  No More Health Discrepancies 2010; and so on).  They sound great, and perhaps are nobly envisioned.  But they are also largely marketing techniques to keep the population believing that they are doing major things to improve health, reduce racial and other societal discrepancies related to health, and so on.  Bureaucrats have hearts, too, and perhaps want to achieve these kinds of things.  But it is even harder in international organizations with little actual power, such as the UN, than it is for the NIH (that never comes really even seriously close to these program goals).

The problems of inequity are difficult enough in the world, but there are always vested interests of all kinds that resist real reform.  It would be nice if what is actually achieved could, at least, be more substantial than it is, even if the realities are that complete achievement of ideals is never possible.