One mermaid's path to tenure

I’m not writing this in hopes that you’ll congratulate me. This is just meant to give readers a peek behind the curtain.

I’m writing because maybe you, or maybe someone who has sway over your career, has read an academic's blog and wondered how it would affect their chances for tenure. Or, maybe you or a colleague, your chair or department head, your dean, or your provost has wondered why anyone would bother going to the trouble to write on a blog when there are more important things to accomplish. Well, in my case, there clearly weren’t, because I managed to write on this blog and still be awarded tenure. What's more, I know, without a doubt, that my writing on this blog was integral to it.

Not me and not Proconsul.
This is the seriously awesome result of googling for "Mermaid Professor." (source)

I’ve written about why I blog before. And, looking back, there is so much more I could add to that post because of what's occurred over time since. However, the main reason still stands: Writing on The Mermaid’s Tale has been immensely important for my academic life. The reading and writing I do here enhances my teaching and research and the enlightening discussions I participate in here and elsewhere (facilitated by my writing here) boost my teaching and research even more.  And the people who make the decisions about my tenure definitely noticed. My departmental colleagues, my dean, and the provost all readily acknowledged the value of my blogging in their letters recommending me for tenure. And the good people who served as my external reviewers didn't see my blogging as damning enough to withhold their support. And the good... no, great people who collaborate with me certainly never turned up their noses either!

I've known since receiving the provost's letter that I owe it to readers and other bloggers to post something about getting tenure. I also thought a tenure-related post could help out younger academics, in general, by exposing how someone who's never taught in a graduate program--with all the intellectual buzz and the worker bees to help, you know, the academic model us Ph.D.s are most familiar with--can still get awarded tenure.

But I've been dreading such a post because I really don't want to write a biography right now. It feels quite narcissistic to get tenure and then to post your life story as if tenure somehow validated that, as if anyone could possibly emulate another person's detailed path to tenure, as if anyone would want to!

Plus, where to begin? So much so deep in my past has set me up for getting awarded tenure, so many people have been crucial to this outcome, that it's impossible to know where or with whom to start except, obviously, at conception.

But what I really don't feel like writing about publicly, and in association with hooray-for-tenure, is about why I haven't done much work on early Homo despite studying with a terrifically wonderful advisor, Alan Walker, to do just that. And that's because part of the reason is a statistic here. That, as well as other parts of the explanation take away from the fact that I'm very happy with the way my career has panned out and I continue to look very much forward to every single day I'm an anthropologist.

So instead of a tour through my influenced and circumstantial history leading up to tenure, maybe I'll post the narratives I included in my portfolio. It's going to be uncomfortable. I'm going to have to look away while I paste the text, like I do when the phlebotomist pricks my vein. But here you go, minus the files of evidence that go along with each narrative.* This is a successful tenure portfolio at a small state school, in an undergraduate-only program. Hope it's useful because ouch it feels quite personal:

Tenure Portfolio Narratives

Statement of Teaching and Learning
I’ve taught four different courses so far at URI and they all focus on human origins, evolution and variation. The introductory course, APG 201: Human Origins, counts as a general education requirement for the natural sciences and also is a requirement for majors and minors in anthropology. The upper level courses attract not just anthropology majors and minors but students from diverse scholarly backgrounds who are interested in the in-depth examination of issues in biological anthropology. These upper level courses include: APG 300: The Human Fossil Record (a hands-on course which is why I dedicated a large portion of my start-up funds to the purchase of new fossil casts which augmented the existing collection); APG 310: Sex and Reproduction in Our Species (a course I created because of my new research interests in the evolution of human reproduction, as well as in procreative beliefs and how they have influenced human evolution.); APG 350: Human Variation (in which I will continue to use personal genomics to engage students.). In all of these courses, my two most important teaching goals are:

(1) Students should get as strong a handle on evolution as possible, shedding as many misconceptions as possible, so that they can best comprehend the biological, ecological, and cultural significance of human variation and evolution. (That, in a nutshell, is why human evolution is taught and studied within an anthropological context!)

(2) Students should achieve as much of this evolutionary and anthropological understanding on their own as possible, by thinking creatively, synthetically, and critically about the evidence.

Number one means that I probably take more time with evolutionary theory than most of my colleagues at other institutions. But because biological anthropology is the only college-level exposure to evolution (let alone biology) that many undergraduates have, it’s important that it's strong. Once they graduate, they’re consuming, producing, and voting based in no small part on their understanding of their place in nature and their (and others') place in the human species. This one chance that we get to represent evolutionary theory and human ecology and biology is crucial make-or-break time for us anthropology professors. Number two means that I have to deviate far from the conventional format for the introductory course.

In January 2012, I was awarded a $21,842.50 from the Provost’s Office under their initiative called “Innovative Approaches Using Technology to Enhance the Student Experience at URI”. The title of my proposal, “145 URI undergraduates peer into their genomes to trace their ancestries, discover their individualities, ponder their futures, and celebrate their unified humanity,” sums up nicely what students were able to do. It has been a transformative new curriculum on many planes, from my perspective as a teacher, from student perspectives as learners, and also for the impact it is making on how my colleagues in my field and beyond will use personal genomics to teach anthropology. That is why I will continue to use personal genomics in APG 350.

I'm always updating APG 201, every semester, with new findings in human evolutionary biology and physical/biological anthropology. I'm also always modifying pedagogy and adapting activities with the goals of improving and broadening student learning. For example, I use colored index cards (in lieu of clickers) for regularly practicing questions with immediate feedback, which seem to engage and motivate students in new ways. I also used personal genomics in this course when I awarded the Provost’s grant, however, I plan to only use it in the upper level course (APG 350) in the future, not because it wasn’t a success, but because it takes up too much time away from fundamentals that need to be covered in this introductory course.

Since arriving at URI, I have dramatically rearranged the traditional presentation of APG 201 course materials (as they are presented in every major textbook for this popular Gen Ed course in North America) and have taught it for three years in this new way with great success. The major difference is that I start with active observations and then work on explaining them with evolutionary theory rather than beginning with evolutionary theory and then asking students to apply it thoughtlessly to spoon-fed information. Starting in Spring 2015, I will begin teaching it without a textbook, using two excellent popular science books and many on-line high-quality readings instead. The syllabus for this new curriculum is included in my portfolio. I will provide essential, fundamental material in handouts when it is not covered explicitly in the readings—something I’ve been poised to do since I wrote a reference/textbook Human Origins 101 in 2007. I plan to eventually publish a paper describing this new strategy of guiding who I call “naturalists in a molecular age.” Because word has gotten out to my colleagues about both the personal genomics as well as this new curriculum, I’ve been invited to participate in an education symposium (that’s been accepted) at this year’s physical anthropology meetings in March 2015.

One of the most positive outcomes of the first run of APG 310: Sex and Reproduction in Our Species was the recruitment of a student (name withheld, Anthropology and Chemistry major, class of 2014) to take on a project in APG 470: Directed Research with me, guided by constructive input from the whole class. He updated a survey from a 1960s Master’s thesis at URI that looked into “premarital sexual behavior” of undergraduates here at URI. After earning IRB approval to administer the survey to volunteer participants, he presented his research at the end of the Spring 2014 semester to a group of students and faculty. Most interesting was the result showing no significant difference in the amount of premarital sexual behavior that male and female students reported, as opposed to the significant difference between the sexes that the first survey found, decades ago. This sort of work piques student interest and two anthropology majors from my second-run of APG 310, name withheld and name withheld, have worked with original student name withheld to rewrite the survey to bring it up to date, to be more health-focused, and in hopes of making the results more instructive to the URI community. Name withheld and name withheld will be submitting their proposal to the IRB committee in October 2015 and if approved they’ll be collecting the data and analyzing it over the course of the academic year.

I have been very lucky that some of the most enthusiastic researchers and clever minds have opted to work on projects with me for credits in APG 470. I asked name withheld (Anthropology & Biology) to co-author an article on the evolution of childbirth with me for the Annual Reviews of Anthropology because of her research skills and also her relevant interests as demonstrated in prior anthropology courses with me. And then name withheld (Anthropology & Biology) has gotten a head start on her Honors project with me already. She’s taken up a project that I’ve been wanting to get started since 2006. She’s figuring out how apes lost their tails and, thus, why we ended up tailless. In the coming academic year, she’ll be applying for funding to travel to regional museums to collect data on primate skeletons.

In the next few years, I will be devising short courses and field trips through the study abroad office to sites of anthropological interest—not just to my fossil field sites in Kenya, but to other sites in Africa, Europe, and Latin America where students can chase primates in the wild or crawl into painted Paleolithic caves.

Statement of Research
How did humans become humans, how did apes? How does evolution work? And does it work differently in humans or because of humans? These are the questions that drive my research and educational endeavors. Since arriving in Fall 2011, URI has encouraged and supported my scientific and scholarly activity as I have pursued two main areas of research (below). I have also begun a book project that brings all of these things together. These three research areas should continue to challenge me and create opportunities for students for many years to come.

1. Augmenting and making sense of the fossil record for ape and human evolution.
As part of an international and interdisciplinary team, funded by the Leakey Foundation and the NSF, I perform paleoanthropological fieldwork on Rusinga and Mfangano Islands in Western Kenya. Fossils from these sites represent plants and animals that lived in the early Miocene epoch (dating to about 20-18 million years ago), some of which, like the primate Proconsul, are good candidates for some of the earliest apes. Without the origin of apes, chimpanzees and humans would not have occurred. This work is not only geared toward finding more specimens of Proconsul and other primates, but we are also reconstructing the paleoenvironments in which these primates lived and evolved. Our latest paper to come of this project was published in Nature Communications this year.

Here at home, I continue to work on the functional anatomy and growth and development (ontogenetic) patterns of fossil apes like Proconsul, particularly in their feet and hindlimbs, as those traits relate to locomotion and to the ability to cling to mother during development, and over evolutionary time. It’s important to reconstruct how this fossil ape was moving about if we’re to understand how modern ape and human behavior came about. Since coming to URI I have taken advantage of our proximity to the primate skeletal collections at the American Museum of Natural History where I have gathered data on extant primates to compare against the fossils. Up until recently this work has been a continuation of my doctoral dissertation on anthropoid feet and hindlimbs, but recently I have begun a similar project with undergraduate anthropology/biology major and honors student name withheld on tails. By looking to primates in the fossil record (like the tailless Proconsul), to variation in extant primate tails, and to known genes for tail development, we are answering the question, “Why don’t humans have tails?”

Although there’s much to keep us busy in addressing these matters here in the U.S., I would still like to return semi-regularly to Kenya to continue the lifetime of work that needs to be done at Rusinga and Mfangano Islands, in both fossil collection and analysis. I hope to create a short course with International Programs to give URI students a marvelous experience doing paleoanthropology.

2. Reconstructing the evolution of human pregnancy, childbirth, and infant development
Living apes, not just fossils, also offer a glimpse of evolution. So along with another team of collaborators, I study energy use in apes and other mammals. Mammals process energy differently from one another and these differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures both internally within the organism and externally from the environment. Energetic use in humans is fairly well understood but it's only through comparison with other species that we can understand human energetics from an evolutionary perspective. Likewise, human data are necessary for understanding the energetic use of other primates. To this end, I’ve collected energetic and behavioral data from the chimpanzees and gorillas at Lincoln Park Zoo. The first paper to come of this work was published this year in PNAS.

I am particularly interested in the energetics and metabolic parameters of pregnancy, fetal growth, infant growth, and lactation and how those determine the timing of birth in humans and other mammals. This is a significant area of anthropological research, given how it has long been assumed that the unique human skeleton, particularly the pelvis and how it’s metamorphosed for upright walking, has limited gestation and fetal growth—that the skeleton explains why our babies are difficult to birth and are quite helpless when they arrive. My research has shown that this traditional pelvic explanation (the “obstetrical dilemma”) is much weaker than its popularity indicates and that maternal metabolism and how mothers process energy are likely to be the primary determinants of gestation length and fetal growth, not just in humans but across primates and placental mammals. Although it is my primary goal to reconstruct human evolutionary history as accurately as possible (or at least as plausibly as possible), there are also potential applications of this research toward better understanding the causes of pregnancy disorders like preeclampsia.

This research has attracted attention and I have been invited to give talks at numerous college campuses as a result. The highlight so far has been the invitation from organizers (and established human reproduction researchers) Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan to participate in a scholarly seminar at Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research (SAR) titled “Costly but cute: How helpless babies made us human.” The collection of our papers is currently under peer-review and the volume should be published next year. I’ve also been invited to write on the evolution of childbirth for the Annual Reviews of Anthropology. That manuscript is due in January 2015 and I’ve enlisted a keen undergraduate anthropology/biology major, name withheld, to co-author the piece with me.

I am currently scheming up my next research steps. (The rest of this paragraph is redacted because it's a big fun secret for now.) 

The Baby Makers: Scholarly/Popular Trade Book Project
For the last two years I’ve been working with a literary agent on a proposal for a book that I’m very excited about. It’s requiring me to scratch at the overlap between evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology—disciplines that are diametrically opposed in the eyes of many scholars. Reconciling these two schools of thought as well as discovering what, perhaps, evolutionary biology cannot explain is challenging but feels necessary in order for me to go on as both an anthropologist and an educator. The book assumes, as its premise, that ... (The rest is redacted because it's a big fun secret for now. It's a project that I've since partnered-up with Anne in, and we'll gladly talk about it but not post much about yet. We're very excited and having a ball.)

Statement of Service and Professional Outreach
I have participated in service projects at many levels at URI and within my field, while I have also prioritized outreach, locally and beyond. I will continue to perform these duties and hope to increase my contributions and impact, but here is what I have done so far:

Our department had a successful search for a new colleague and I’m proud to have been on the committee that helped to accomplish it. In addition to our regular advising majors and minors, I served as the anthropology advisor at University College for the 2013-14 academic year. The same year I joined the Faculty Senate and I served on name withheld’s Master’s committee in CELS where he defended a stellar thesis on shark feeding morphology. This year I served on the search committee for a multicultural postdoctoral fellow in BES/CELS chaired by name withheld.

Beyond URI, I have reviewed manuscripts for several scientific and scholarly journals, as well as grant proposals for NSF and the Leakey Foundation. In 2013, Nature Education launched the room of open-access, peer-reviewed articles on The Human Fossil Record, which I edited as part of their Biological Anthropology series. There are even more articles in press that will be posted soon. In addition, I was invited to give a talk at the California Academy of Sciences in November 2012 about my experience with personal genomics (23andMe) as an educator, as an anthropologist, and as a human being. While I was in San Francisco I visited an assembly of 3-8 graders as well as a high school genetics class and talked with them about science, genetics, paleoanthropology, and evolution. There, I also gave a presentation to the Leakey Foundation’s Scientific and Executive Boards about the research I’ve done that they’ve funded and will hopefully continue to support. It was well received and I was encouraged to keep applying for funding. Here in Rhode Island I have presented on evolution at a public library, a Masonic lodge, a Catholic elementary school, and three times at assisted living/retirement homes.

For the past three years I have been a core team member of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program Educator’s Network (HopEdNet). My duties include fielding questions about human evolution, via email, that visitors to the exhibit hall in Washington DC type into the computer. I’m also involved with the Smithsonian in a magnificent project called “Teaching Evolution Through Human Examples” (or “TetHE”) which is led by PIs name withheld and name withheld of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. I have helped to create new resource activities and teaching strategies focused on human evolution for AP Biology. My primary role is as scientific content consultant but I am part of a larger group of people, including the leaders of the AP Biology standards as well as pedagogy experts, all working together on this project. These curricular packets will be complete in date withheld and I am very much looking forward to using them in APG 350: Human Variation, both to teach biological anthropology but also to expose our students to this pedagogy should they become educators themselves. It’s through my TetHE colleagues that I got my scientific process lesson plan published at Berkeley’s Understanding Science site. It’s currently one of the top three teacher resources there.

I try very hard, where and when I can, to engage the greater public in anthropology, evolution, and science and so I continue to write on the blog The Mermaid’s Tale. I write about new discoveries in biological anthropology, including my own, as well as educational issues (mainly for my colleagues), and larger “how do we know what we know” questions. This is most definitely an outreach endeavor, however, the boost to my own research and teaching that comes from writing here, and engaging with my blog’s co-authors and colleagues who read the blog, is significant. A list of my best, most popular posts is here. In total, my posts have received 110,000 hits since I began writing in 2009. Most of my posts are read by hundreds, but a few have been seen by as many as 13,000+ because some colleagues assign them to students (as do I) and others have cited or re-published them on their own websites. My most recent post on natural selection was republished by the on-line science magazine io9. Another of my posts was re-published on Scientific American’s site. It’s due in part to my activity on my blog that my anthropological research got noticed by the BBC and I was asked to be part of an episode of their science program Horizon (equivalent to our Nova). Here’s the piece in the Guardian that discusses my research and that was published to announce this television program. I also filmed all about ape and human tail loss for PBS’s “Your Inner Fish” program: “How do we know when our ancestors lost their tails?”

***
Do you have questions? Anonymous or otherwise, feel free to post here or on Facebook or Twitter and I'll do my best to answer them. Cheers.


*Here's my CV and here's my scholar.google profile. In the above narratives, you may see some new typos because I've just copied and pasted them from a pdf and also because I make typos. Hyperlinks are gone because they're not the point, and I replaced all names with "name withheld" because Google searches for those people shouldn't land on this.

Evolution's got a P.R. problem

People aren't just anti-evolution, evolution-averse, or pro-"teaching the controversy" because they're clinging to supernatural explanations that help them identify with a tribe. Culture is mighty powerful but it's a lot more complex than stubborn beliefs in the supernatural as deciphered from, and reinforced by, an ancient text.

Evolution's got a public relations problem that spans beyond fundamental Creationism. It's not exactly looked upon favorably by many non-fundamental yet kind, open-minded, and educated folks either! Here I've jotted down a few thoughts about why...

1. Who cares about evolution? Sheesh, what's the big deal?
Evolution doesn't appear to matter to so many people. And getting frothy over evolution can certainly spark interest but it can also, in gut reaction, intensify the apathy. We love to go on and on about how "human" it is to wonder where we came from or to wonder how the world works. Well, it's not exactly a species-wide phenomenon, at least acting on that wonder isn't. With these folks, we can just keep doing what it is that we do and hope that they will come around to see why evolution matters and hope that until then they don't influence others to be as tuned out or turned off.   People are less likely to voice apathy about knowledge that they're accustomed to like biology, history, chemistry, geology, physics, literature, English, composition, mathematics. I think this attitude about evolution will go away once biology becomes a synonym for evolution in K-12 classrooms and beyond. 

2. Mystery is mystical by default. 
It's still acceptable to fill-in ignorance about biology with the supernatural. This is not as much the m.o. with chemistry or physics, but we tend to do it there too (like with quantum mechanics). I couldn't explain how the Internet works but I assume it's not magic and I don't know anyone who thinks it is either. Yet, missing pieces of understanding in biology are not, as default, just missing pieces of understanding. We jump automatically to magical thinking rather than assume that we just don't know and that maybe someone already does! Unfortunately, gaps in our biological knowledge don't always spark us to take more classes, to read, or to watch videos to see that many of those mysteries aren't mysteries to anyone who's studied them. Gaps in our knowledge don't always spark us to undertake controlled observation or to devise experiments at home. For some reason, instead... and I think it's the Bible and other powerful cultural influences, and also the way that the history of science unfolded ... biology's mysteries are comfortably cloaked in magic. If biological mystery is mystical, then it's easier to uphold allegiance to Creationism, or to maintain intellectual empathy with fundamentalists who ask that we simply "teach the controversy." 

3. It takes quite a bit of study, observation and life experience to understand evolution. 

Evolution is a complex, multi-disciplinary matter that few people can master in one semester of study. You need anatomy, physiology, genetics, behavior, comparative anatomy, zoology, ecology, geology, history, math, philosophy, etc. But you need only dabble a few toes in those areas to begin to form the picture. Because the e-word is so often left out of K-12 classrooms, students don't realize that they're learning it all along, in all its bits and pieces as they advance year to year. When they finally do get to a classroom that uses the e-word, they think it's a whole new subject matter and that's actually quite an obstacle. Plus, that evolution takes a while to understand in any sort of useful way means we have an under-informed population full of people who, at best, had one year of solid evolutionary exposure in high school...one year of learning our one natural explanation for all of biology. That's evidently not enough to bring everyone far enough along to overcome #1 and #2. 

4. Evolution's not even well-understood by those who claim to. 
It's not. There's a lot we don't know about evolutionary history, about how it unfolded, and that means there's a lot that we are earnestly trying to figure out. And it's clear that public patience for science is lacking and that's rooted in a lack of appreciation for how science is done, how knowledge is formed, and how the truth changes. On the one hand there are those who know full well that feeble, foibly humans are devising this knowledge and on the other hand are those who've got far too much respect for "KNOWLEDGE." (The latter is revealed on the petrified faces of my students when I announce they're "creating knowledge" by doing a laboratory assignment.) Both perspectives are working against science every time something pops up in the press as being "debated" or "overturned." Every piece ends with "more research is needed." No wonder patience is running thin. The skeptics think science is fraught with fraud because it's done by people. The others flirt with thinking (or do literally think) that knowledge comes from on high, or from Revealed Natural Truths, and not possibly from mere humans. And then there are those who study evolution who are not earnestly trying to  understand it better. They're using a half-baked tool that they call "evolution" to do their work or to advocate for evolution education. And often when their views get in the popular press they're parroted or presented uncritically by writers with an equally non-nuanced understanding of evolution, who are equally oblivious to it. 

5. Evolution is being pushed by so many unhuggable atheist intellectuals. 
This has to do with what many public intellectuals like to call "tribalism" and in-group, out-group identity. Aligning yourself with professors or intellectuals is social and political suicide for many. Aligning yourself with the godless can be even worse. Of course there are lots of folks who retain their beliefs and accept evolution, but there are fewer of them (at least in the limelight) than us who eschew or reject the supernatural.  We need more huggable atheists. We need more huggable intellectuals. We need fewer anti-intellectuals. We need fewer anti-atheists. Lack of belief in the supernatural needs to be seen as a legitimate way to be a friend, a parent, a child, a relative, a neighbor, a community member, a leader, a teacher, a human.  

6. People don't want to be animals.
With education, people come to accept reality. And they accept what they cannot change. Right?

7. Evolution seems to support racism, sexism, (and atheism, intellectualism, evolutionism, vegetarianism,) and every other -ism that's wrong with humanity.  
But it doesn't. There's too much to unpack here in this small space, but this is a huge problem contributing to the aversion to evolution out there. Evolution isn't just subversive because it goes against established religious dogma. It's subversive because it, as completely misunderstood and misapplied, supports racism and sexism and murder and warfare and rape and infanticide, etc etc etc... Understood well, or even just a little bit well, evolution cannot be used in those ways and then, as a result, avoided by those who are afraid to align with such an unsavory worldview. Evolution is just generation to generation change in lineages that have shared ancestors in the past. Evolution describes how everything depends on what came before. That is all. Evolution requires no differential value placed on one species over another (human exceptionalism). Evolution requires no differential value placed on one skin color over another (racism).  Evolution requires no differential value placed on one sex over another (sexism). Those are human inventions. Culture is powerful.  

8. Evolution tells me I'm going to die when I die. 

This is the human condition. Belief in the supernatural or not, acceptance of evolution or not, this is what we're all dealing with. We often lament how, "evolution reduces the meaning of life to survival and reproduction." Well, if it does, is that so bad?

**

Evolution's got a lot more than fundamental religious beliefs working against it.  As an educator, I can't help but think that, first and foremost, a clear understanding of what evolution is (and isn't) is key to addressing all of these issues contributing to evolution's P.R. problem.  Yesterday's post was my attempt to help provide that clear understanding: 

Evolution is the only natural explanation. And it's all we need.

Evolution is the only natural explanation. And it's all we need.

With the ongoing adoptions, state by state, of the Next Generation Science Standards (http://www.nextgenscience.org/), and with the familiar cries of resistance against a national level emphasis on both evolution and climate change...

http://evolutionpsa.tumblr.com/

...I thought it might be a good time to point out to everyone, new or old, big or small, nonbeliever or believer, something that's often overlooked:

Evolution is our only natural explanation for nature, life, biology, you, me, peaches, lobsters, trees. 

All other explanations are supernatural. 

All. Others. Are. Supernatural.

It's the same for explaining televisions and toasters...we have only one natural explanation: physics. 

All other explanations for toasters are supernatural.

Toasters are as supernatural as tarantulas. 

So today...just so everyone's up to snuff with our only natural explanation for all of biology, here's a brief guide. 

The Earth is old. The universe is older. 

This is what we poetically refer to as deep time. 

And over all these vast stretches of all this deep time, and across our vast continents, and underwater within our vast oceans, there's been a lot of reproduction. 

Our planet, under a UV lamp, glows like a cue ball. 

And now you know why. (source)

So because of all this reproduction all over the place, stacked up in deep time, there's been lots of lineages and, over time, changes have occurred along those lineages because offspring are rarely identical to parents or siblings. 

That’s not just because kids are a unique combination of only some of each parent's information, but kids are also different from mom and dad (or whatever spawned them) because each individual also has new information (mutations) that their parents don’t.

I do. You do. We all do. 

We're all built of brand new combinations of old parental molecules (i.e. old mutations) mixed with absolutely brand new molecules (i.e. brand new mutations). 

As in brand new to the Earth. And maybe even brand new to the universe.

So here we are then. There's been change over deep time in numerous (to be ridiculously conservative) lineages. Everything alive on Earth right now is not only unique but is the end of a unique lineage that began 4 billion years ago. 

You. Me. Babe the bacon. Frank the bean. Each of us is the end of 4 billion years of what Sagan called an "unbroken thread."

The processes of change that occur across these unbroken threads, these processes that change living and nonliving matter, unfold before our eyes during our lifetimes. Just as they've been doing so throughout Earth's history. This is what's known as uniformitarianism. It's an unfortunate term that appears to mean that things have been uniform over time but it actually means that change has been constantly occurring through time.

(link to quote source video)

Change, or evolution, has always been happening and it will always happen into the future.

That's just another way of defining time: perpetual change. 

So, one of the few rules of our universe is time goes on and that means constant change occurs and because of that constant change there is always variation.

The landscape at the beach is different moment to moment. Each member of a sea turtle lineage is different generation to generation.

There's been so much deep time and so much change during it that what we see on the planet right now is only a tiny fraction of the life and the variation that lived before today. 

Most everything in my and your lineage is long dead by today. 

Further, most lineages that have existed have ended before today, just like my neutered and spayed dogs' will certainly end with them, and like mine will end if I don't "have it all."

But humans have named it all!

We have names for just about everything alive now and that makes "humans," "apes," "monkeys," "dogs," "lobsters," "sea turtles" seem separate, disconnected from one another, naturally. Especially since most species are designated by their inability to reproduce with others--talk about separate!

But, for example, if you go far enough back in my lineage there'd be an ancestor you'd probably call an "ape" rather than a "human." 

Australopithecus afarensis reconstruction from 3.4 million year old fossil bones found in Ethiopia (source)

Or you might get creative and call her an "ape-human" but that's just our limited vocabulary based on animals we know are alive right now. Then if you go further back in my lineage, you'd arrive at a point where something would remind you more of a squirrel than a human or an ape. The same thing's happening. You're relating my ancestors, 65 million years ago, to what you're familiar with on Earth today. And that's fine, but today's just a snapshot of all Earth's history and those aren't actually squirrels like the ones in our dumpsters and freezers today. 

Every single one of those ancestors in my, and your, lineage is unique. None would look exactly like anything alive now. Just like I don't and you don't. Many of my ancestors would seem like mixes of different things alive now. Many would have traits that aren't in existence on Earth right now!! If you keep going further back in my lineage, you'd see what looks like today's reptiles, and further there'd be fishes. 

Maybe that's because there are limited ways to be alive during 4 billion years on planet Earth...

hippocampus and Hippocampus (source)

Anyway, at no point does a mother seahorse give birth to a kid reptile. At no point does an ape give birth to a human. At no point does a human give birth to a little green man species, except that a scientist, accustomed to divvying up the spectrum of variation in the world into boxes, says so.

See how it's so completely obvious where red ends and yellow begins? See where everyone, even with the same exact eyeballs, would agree that blue ends and purple begins?

Not. They would not. (source; and fun; and fun too)

Color labels are fraught with some of the same issues as our labels for life. They are discrete words that stand for fuzzy-edged concepts that arbitrarily break up a spectrum and, thus, they interfere with the debate about human origins, about when "human" begins in the fossil record. Same for "ape" beginnings or "chimpanzee" or "dog" or "plesiosaur" or anything. 

Nature is a connected spectrum of variation over space and time that we must arbitrarily cut apart so we can talk about about it and study it the only way we know how.  But that doesn't mean we forget that populations, species, genera (whatever we're labeling), like the rest of nature they belong to, are neither uniform nor discrete. 

Species are not uniform across space and time, are not discrete across time, and aren't necessarily discrete across space either. (source)

Species are not uniform across space and time, are not discrete across time, and aren't necessarily discrete across space either. 

If species were discrete across time, we'd have no reproduction. 

If species were uniform across time and space we'd have no evolution. 

So the way we're tempted to think of species as essential, as discrete and uniform, is not only inaccurate but it is antithetical to what's occurring in nature, antithetical to constant change and common ancestry of each unique individual, which is all antithetical to evolution. 

It's not just the words we use specifically to understand that sometimes inhibit our understanding (!)... we're also working against our limited scope. 

We're here for only a fraction of what's been happening in the universe and will continue to happen into the future. As a result, we don't get to witness much evolution in action. 

We can witness evolution in lineages that reproduce quickly like cane rats better than we can witness it in, say, humans and chimps. It's unfortunate but we don't get to watch evolution in long-lived species as if we're watching a film.

We can, however, reconstruct that film using the biology of living, dead, and sometimes well-preserved extinct creatures. We just have to compare and contrast their traits.

Things that are more similar genetically, anatomically, etc... are more closely related to one another than things that are less similar. That's all there is to it. 

I could probably pick your parents out of a lineup if I'd never even met them. The same sorts of cues, and methods for identifying those cues, are applied beyond our families and our species to establish the fact that dogs are more closely related to wolves than to dogfishes. Humans are more closely related to dogs than to dogfishes. 

And we can reconstruct these family trees--populated by people, dogs, wolves, dogfishes--far beyond our own parents and grandparents, and back into deep time. 

T. Ryan Gregory's 2008 paper "Understanding Evolutionary Trees"

And we can test those reconstructions with help from the fossil record. 

But our reconstruction of the Tree of Life is not a perfect reconstruction because fossils are usually restricted to preserving only bits and pieces of the biologies of organisms--parts like bones and teeth. 

Plus, we don't have fossils of every single thing that ever lived. That would be impossible. Dead bodies have to be recycled into living bodies for there to be living bodies. 

link

If the fossil record was complete, we probably wouldn't be here to study it.

And even if we are lucky enough to find a fossil that was lucky enough to preserve, that's just that one animal struck dead at one little moment in its lifetime, at one little flash in the entire 14 billion years since the big bang. 

And we often struggle to link relatedness up, and reconstruct change over time in lineages in the fossil record because we rarely get more than two generations in the same deposit.  And when we do, one is usually teeny tiny compared to the adult. 

Pregnant plesiosaur (Source: Robin O'Keefe)

The fossil record is a great source of evidence for evolutionary history and that it's necessarily limited is okay. As discussed above, we actually don't even need fossils to support evolution over a supernatural explanation, because living organisms provide enough evidence.  

We look at chimpanzees and bonobos and see they share more with us and we with them than anything else on Earth. When we line up our molecules, we find the same thing, just as we  predict. These relationships we deduce among living things don't require any fossil evidence to support, but fossils do help to make sure, no doubt about that. And fossils show us all the weird creatures that had to live and die first in order for all of us to be here now.

So, fossils or not, evolution explains all the similarities we have with everything else alive on Earth. That's our common ancestry at play.

And evolution explains all the differences too. That's mutation at play. Mutations are always occurring. They are part of the uniformitarianism that describes the constant state of change, of flux, of all of history. Change over time is also due, at the population level, to differential reproduction. Some individuals have more offspring than others. Therefore, future generations are always comprised of a different biological landscape, both with higher and lower proportions of some variation compared to their parents' generation, and always with some brand new mutations thrown in there as well. 

So...so far so good. We've got deep time, change over deep time in related lineages from common ancestors, like family history writ large. Some ancestors are preserved as fossils, most are not and many of those that are have not been discovered yet. Most evolutionary history is unobservable because of the inconvenient impossibility of time travel. Similarities among organisms reflect shared heritage. Differences and distance reflect constant change that occurs via mutations and constant change over the generations due to the fact that some individuals have fewer offspring than others, leaving their mutations, their traits, in lower frequencies in the next generation. 

Darwin's term "selection" describes some of this differential reproduction among individuals. Some variation dies, some variation does not reproduce, some variation enhances reproductive output and when it does, that variation shows up in greater proportion in future generations... as long as it continues to enhance the reproduction of those with it...a condition that is usually heavily determined by the environment where all this reproducing is taking place! 

Like mutation, differential reproduction is always occurring. That means that selection is always, on some level, occurring. Some traits, like a new mutation that prevents growth of the ovaries, would prevent that woman from passing that on. Selection can also describe how mutations or variation proliferates in future generations if it causes those individuals to contribute more of their variation, their mutations, to the future gene pool than others.

Selection describes how a baby that could fit through the birth canal and, with those adequate birth canal genes, can grow up to have an adequate birth canal for fitting her own offspring through. It's that simple. And babies with genes for adequate birth canals are much more common in a population than otherwise.  Fitness (a.k.a. reproductive success or reproductive output) is such a fitting term when it's truly about fit!

But saying that "differential reproduction is always occurring," also means that drift, which is differential reproduction due to chance and differential passing of this or that gene into future generations due to chance, is always occurring too.  

And in spite of constant mutation and constant drift... that is perpetual chance change...we've managed wonderfully for 4 billion years.

It's far too common to read descriptions of evolution as if selection is the only or the main process for change and they're not telling the whole story. 

Change is perpetual underneath all of that selection. Selection, as a result, is weaker than we tend to think of it. 

Constant change can be kept in check by selection against it or it can be tolerated and incorporated into a lineage, which is usually the case. If change wasn't tolerated by selection, we'd have stasis in lineages, with clones upon clones upon clones. Instead we have myriad sexually reproducing organisms that do not produce clones. Change clearly works!

All this constant change has got to make us think twice when we describe each and every amazing trait in animals as "adaptive" which is to say they're the result of selection. Perhaps they are, but perhaps adaptive traits are just the tolerated survivors that got through selection's filter. 

In that sense, nearly everything that's not a dead-end can be considered "adaptive" at any given moment. That is, all the underlying processes, quantum, molecular, chemical and physiological that keep an organism running could be considered adaptive at any point of observation. 

Inherited genetic material that's involved in growth, development, metabolism, reproduction, etc... (i.e. all life's processes) is evolving with each and every generation thanks to recombining parents' genes, mutations, genetic drift and selection all working always together. Yet, organisms are continuing to survive and reproduce like pros. 

And we have been for 4 billion  years. 

Everything is because of what came before. 

That's all evolution is.  

And that's all we need.

Human evolution, locally.

Our university's PIO (public information officer) knows I care about and get a kick out of outreach so he sets me up with folks who are looking to learn about evolution. It's great. Recently I've visited a sixth grade science class and helped to kick off their evolution unit with humans (!). Also recently, a retirement community invited me to bring my hominin casts and share what I know about the human fossil record. And I've got another retirement community visit lined up for next week.

But I wanted to highlight one particular occasion that occurred recently here:

(source)

(source)

We set up a projector, passed around bones and casts, and with far too many slides I discussed human evolution with seven people from the area.

My title slide...

A slide of books that I recommended...

One patron took this list to heart and checked out Shubin's book before going home!

A journalist caught wind of the event (thanks to the advertisement the librarian had published in The Westerly Sun) and sat with laptop, typing as we went along. This is the article he wrote that made it into a few of the local newspapers in our area: http://www.ricentral.com/content/primates-humans-follow-evolutionary-path

Some of those quotes, out of context, sound a bit dumber than they deserve. (But only a bit.) To my knowledge, I never spoke of woolly mammoths. (I prefer to talk about woolly rhinos.) The photo's not what I'd shoot or how I'd caption it. (Didn't participate in that.)

But by far I'm thrilled that human evolution was the theme of the afternoon at the Ashaway Free Library, I was delighted to speak about (and learn from) the folks at the event including the journalist, and I'm thrilled that our little evolution love-in got such in-depth coverage in our local newspapers!

I'm sharing here for a number of reasons but most of all because it's something that our group "Reporting Across the Culture Wars" (see also) at NESCent came together to try to encourage... and it happened without really any effort on my end except making it roaringly obvious how much I care about outreach to my university's PIO and then accepting the invitation from this librarian when he passed it along to me.

If this is something you think you'd enjoy doing, both personally and professionally, go for it. It's like having a college honors seminar right in your neighborhood!

Now, here's a fun guessing game. Can you spot the cranium that's out of place in this photo from the article?