Research, Teaching, and Service: the academic 'mission' all in one?

Most universities consider the duties of their faculty members, and requisites for promotion and tenure, to be the Big Three: Research, Teaching, and Service (RTS).  This is a fine-sounding triumvirate, and institutions are more or less hypocritical in their application of this standard of success.  Too often the triumvirate is  RRR, a worship of esoteric productivity in professional channels where score-counting reigns nearly supreme: number of papers, number of citations, number of grants, and so on.  It's easier for Chairs and Deans to count than, well, than to think.  Bean-counting makes judgments seem safe and unbiased.  Service can more or less be dismissed with a hand-wave and counting more or less anything someone does (having coffee in a local shop and talking with the other customers?).  And teaching?  Often it's done when it can't be avoided, since tuition funds are more or less captive funds, so long as we entertain students with classes not too hard and enough sports to go to.  The RRR push also tends to turn faculty members into oarsmen on a galley always in a battle for supremacy.

Your value from a department Chair's point of view?

But what if there could be change?  What if we are on the doorstep of major unification of RTS into a real, broad and unitary type of contribution that benefits the body of knowledge, the student body, and the body politic all in one?  Could this be in the offing?

The social network
If this is possible in a way visible today, that way is in social networking and the online cosmos.  Journals are moving to the use of electrons rather than trees to disseminate the research results of the academic professions.  Reviewing is becoming more and more real-time, and less and less a way to stifle ideas.  We still have a hierarchy--often little more than a snob system driven by the profit motive (Nature and Cell journals, Science, and others from many for-profit publishers).  Since more journals are online and not associated with society memberships, access is often free and publishing costs may be coming down.

And then there are blogs and tweets. These spread intellectual contributions faster than an Arizona wildfire.  They do this globally.  Blogs reach the posters' friends, social community, professional peers across a spectrum of specialties, and the public 'news' (we're tempted to say 'hype') media.  Blogs can include simple high-viewership rants and demogoguery, but many (and we hope including this one) are responsible attempts to air and discuss serious and important subjects.  Blogs reach audiences instantly and need not wait for perfect literature citation or reviewer approval.  Many academics no longer turn first to journal table-of-contents pages to find new articles but instead rely predominantly on these kinds of venues. 

And there is online teaching.  Online coursework ranges from the purely recreational through the scamworld to the highly academic. Some are currently free, others cost more, but all are cheaper than going to a university and coughing up their tuition bills.  Reaching large audiences, local and virtual, this kind of teaching spread thoughts very widely and rapidly.

And, in addition, all of this is instantly recoverable by web-searching.

These newly available ways of communicating influence many people across the spectrum of society, and instantly, and generally free.  Because of that they truly combine Research, Teaching, and Service.  The are RTS all wrapped up in one package. But there is one little problem....

Getting professional credit
Old sods such as myself have the protection of tenure and at least some respect and audience built up over the years.  I don't have to please a Chair or Dean, and I don't have to worry about job security or salary.  It's very liberating!  But what about the younger generation?

We think that somehow the younger generation (and here we're referring to people in academic careers) need to be given credit for using these new media.  In a nutshell, an effective influential presence on the social and online media should not just be something mentioned discretely on a faculty member's CV.  It should be an integral part of 'productivity', and an influential presence on these new formats should be a criterion for advancement.

But journal and book publishing have had center stage for centuries, and institutions being as reactionary and conservative as they are, naturally tend to stick to the current status system.  This is great for the snob journals, allows them to capitalize by increasing their contents to all sorts of forms, including a lot of things that should be in lesser places, and to play the media for attention (and hence profit) like Heifitz played the violin.

The conventional media still have a strong hold on career snobbery, though at the cost of promoting business as usual while somewhat stifling really new ideas.  In addition, one must admit that if there is chaff in the regular journal realm, there is a huge amount of chaff on the internet.  There are rant blogs, junk journals, scams, pervasive commercial exploitation, and a blizzard of superficial (if personally edifying) social chatter.  But that can be sorted. 

Department chairs and deans need new ways to evaluate their faculty in career terms in ways that are not just based on new sorts of bean-counting (blog hit counts, etc). Indeed, because so much discussion of recent publications—and pre-publications--takes place online, in blogs, in blog or sometimes journal comments, on Twitter or arXiv and other pre-publication venues, and so forth, the old reliable publication citation count can no longer adequately serve as a measure of the impact of a given paper, or a scholar’s body of work.  Indeed, the fact of publication itself was once considered a measure of a paper’s worth when peer review was the gold standard for separating the chaff from the grain.  This is no longer true. 

Going beyond the bean-counting

But there are new metrics that aren't like the old bean-counting metrics.  Alternative metrics.  Altmetric, for example.  "Altmetric Explorer.  A powerful and intuitive web application that helps you see all of the attention surrounding your papers."  It'll track blog posts, Mendeley links, Tweets and more.  And, there are multiple analytical tools for tracking blog traffic, including Google Analytics and many others.  And there's always the new old standby, Googling a scholar's name.  So, really, given that so many academics have Twitter accounts, and more and more are blogging, or migrating to Mendeley or Linkedn and many other social media sites, including those I don't know about, administrators now have every reason to take online scholarly activity into account, and numerous ways to do it.

With enough pressure from below, from the younger faculty whose careers will be affected, perhaps it can happen.

A fat chance with trans fats...but chance of what?

Well, if they actually do it, the FDA is reported to be all but banning the use of trans fats in food. The idea is that this will be a huge health benefit to society because partially hydrogenated foods are unsafe. According to the piece in the New York Times, "Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the agency’s commissioner, said the rules could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year."

Source: Wiki Commons

But is this good....or bad....news?
This seems like unambiguously good news.  After all, who wants to die of heart disease?  And that will save our brobingnagianly expensive health care system lots of money, no?  But it could actually be bad news, and here's the inconvenient reason:  surprise, surprise, you'll have to die of something!

Heart attacks are fearful events.  They often kill quickly, even without warning.  That might be a kind way to go.  But if you aren't susceptible to heart attacks because your arteries remain clear, then what?  The other things that are going wrong all over your body, and they are even if they're silently doing so, will continue.  The good side is that you may live longer.  The bad side is that you may die more slowly and in a vastly more costly way.  Cancer, bone, joint and other physical decay, loss of mobility, the consequences of obesity, and neural degeneration will require expensive diagnostic testing and treatment.  Those diseases will develop more slowly, and linger for a long time.  Many will require years of institutional care.

This is the ineluctable problem of competing causes, one very clearly understood by public health systems, if not advertised by the medical research and health-care establishment.  Costs may balloon out of control if too many live too long in too degenerated a condition. And there are already other bad behaviors which, if we stop eating trans fats, may rise in proportion and do us the same amount of damage, even if in a different way.  Even, say, if we live longer and hence drive more at increased  ages.

The implications
It's not just that we'll probably live longer on average if we don't suffer from 'transfatism'  but we may have to be retired longer.  At least for a while, if this ban takes, the retirement age will remain roughly what it's heading for (say, 70?).  Even if people are still functional at that age, they'll have expected to be free by then, free to enjoy their final life-stage.  But that stage will last longer.  That means pensions will have to be paid out longer--regardless of the increased health care cost.

And who will pay for those health-care costs?  Oh, no problem, the Affordable Care Act will!  That's an illusion.  The young will pay for it, because current dollars pay for current expenses, not the dollars the elders put in years ago (which payed for their elders' care).  And the young are already likely to be heavily burdened by caring for the normal daily life costs of the huge fraction of our society that will be made of retirees.

It's a real bind.  It produces a fundamental tension between individual and population concerns.  Individuals mainly want to live as long as they can, but from a population perspective the turnover should not be so slow as to outpace resources.  One might think things were different if we had a religion that promised heavenly life thereafter.  If we really believed that and we acted according to God's instructions, we should not fear mortality, and should on the contrary be willing to get out of the way so our descendants could have as much chance to life the moral life as possible--not being so squeezed by poverty or deprivation as to act with hate, greed, violence, and so on.  Sadly, religion doesn't seem to act that way--at least, societies in  which a lot of people profess to believe in the afterlife rewards of a good life lived here, typically don't act any differently from anybody else.  Those who may be religious but continue to have large numbers of children violate both views: they don't live morally if that means considering one's fellows, and they risk putting their own offspring in the kinds of squeeze that leads to selfish behavior.

The connections between trans fats and these broader considerations is not as distant as one might think, especially because trans fats are only one of many aspects of our society that have similarly complex consequences.

Nobody would argue that we should advocate  heavy smoking, drinking, and trans-fat diets in order to get rid of people earlier in their lives, before they degenerate and develop much more costly diseases.  We don't want to wink-out sooner if we Twink-out, but if we Twink-off then we'll spend more time winking off in the ol' rocking chair. 

If there are solutions to this problem, rather than some future mass catastrophe, it is that to which the public health establishment should be giving attention.  There are no easy answers that we know of.  But that is not a reason to be an ostrich and pretend the issues aren't clearly there, waiting for each of us (who shun trans fats!).

The Land Institute and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Agriculture is a major, if not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, unclean water and ecosystem destruction, with ominous possible prospects for the future of our survival.  But there are many people thinking about how to lessen its impact.  Mark Bittman did a fine job a few weeks ago describing the work of one of those people.  Wes Jackson and The Land Institute that he founded 37 years ago on the Kansas prairie represent a growing awareness that agribusiness can and must change.  They are working to make it possible for agriculture to transition from annual monoculture, 80% of agriculture today, to perennial polyculture, that is, from growing a single crop that must be planted from seed every year to fields of multiple, complementary perennial plants chosen to contain pests and weeds, and contribute to soil retention, not erosion.

Source

The Land has done the hard work of perennializing a grain they call Kernza, although more needs to be done before it's finally commercially available, perhaps within 8 years. (See this for a report on bread made with Kernza flour.)  We think The Land will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize when Kernza's finally on the market.  Norman Borlaug was awarded one in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution.  Perennializing grain will be even more significant, as it has the potential to decouple farmers from agribusiness and its unsustainable practices growing hybrid annual grains requires (indeed, to reverse many of the effects of the Green Revolution).  Agribusiness is big business, but trades short-term profit for long-term survival.

Why is soil erosion such a problem?  Because soil is essentially a non-renewable resource; it takes on the order of 1000 years to create 2 centimeters of topsoil, which, given conventional monocultural practices, can wash away in a single season.  Industrial-agriculture relies on monocultures based on annual plants that must be replanted each year, and that means plowing and loosening the soil.  And, annuals, with short lifespans, only put down short roots.  

When soil erodes, it takes with it tons of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that were applied during the growing season, which end up in rivers, and then the mouths of rivers as in the Gulf of Mexico, where they can create huge dead zones, thousands of square miles of hypoxic waters, unable to support marine life (except for jellyfish, which thrive in these hypoxic zones; it's not a good sign when jellyfish take over).  Perennial plants with their deeper roots can be a major contributor to the prevention of soil erosion.  And, polyculture well-considered requires less toxic chemical use, less fertilizer, and less tilling of the land.

NASA-NOAA map of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; Wikimedia

5-Year Farm Bills/50-Year Farm Bill
But Bittman, and Jackson in the video accompanying the op/ed, already told this story beautifully.  What we want to talk about today is the 50-Year Farm Bill proposed by Jackson and colleagues.  Since the Great Depression, food and farm policy in the US has been structured according to farm bills that are passed every 5 years or so.

These bills have been largely political mine fields and pork barrels that maintain agribusiness more than they are solutions for the real environmental, cultural and financial problems plaguing agriculture today.  It's not all bleak, however -- since the 1990's a small fraction of the budget has been dedicated to funding beginning farmers, minority farmers, organic farmers, and fruit and vegetable farmers (these are "specialty" crops).  This has been important.

But, the 2008 Farm Bill has expired, and the temporary extension passed by Congress did not include funding for these programs. As Brian Snyder, president of PASA, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, put it in a recent blog post, 'What's at Stake in the Farm Bill?":

Even taken together, these important reform efforts are still a fairly small fraction of total farm bill spending, but they have an outsize impact – and they are helping to create the foundation for a more a more sustainable and equitable farm and food system in America.

Good news: these innovative programs were all funded as part of the last farm bill that ran from 2008 to 2012.

More good news:  they also receive renewed, and in some cases increased, funding in one or both of the Senate and House farm bills currently being considered in Congress.

Very bad news: when the current farm bill had to be extended in January to give Congress more time to complete it, nearly all of these innovative programs were denied funding in the farm bill extension that was negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and passed by Congress on January 1 of this year.

The Congress is currently debating very different versions of the new bill from the House and Senate.  One of the major sticking points this time around, at a time in our history when one of the fiercest debates in Washington is the extent to which the government should help the undeserving poor, is the amount of money that will go to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), food stamps -- this is thanks in no small part to tea partiers who've decided that it's their job to keep tax money from people who need it.  But innovative farm programs are also at stake.

Again, as Brian Snyder writes,

Congress should seize the opportunity to get our food and farm policy back on track.  Congress should pass a new five-year farm bill that includes robust funding for the programs that keep our families fed and healthy, build local economies, protect and restore natural resources, and spur the next generation of farmers.

Cap carbon!
How soon Congress will pass a bill is not at all clear, mired as it is in extremist politics.  The Land Institute, in any case, proposes a much broader view, with attention to food security and sustainable practices for the long term.  Jackson and Wendell Berry wrote in an op/ed in The New York Times in 2009, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." The aim is to bring about gradual change in the way agriculture is done, to stop "the ecological spending of ecological capital necessary for food production".

The 50-Year Farm Bill document includes this paragraph:

Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve.

Wendell Berry puts it less prosaically in a piece he wrote about the 50-Year Farm Bill published in  The Atlantic last year. As always, his concern is for traditional agricultural communities and sensible practices. 

I have described the need for a farm bill that makes sense of and for agriculture -- not the fiscal and political sense of agriculture, as in the customary five-year farm bills, but the ecological sense without which agricultural sense cannot be made, and without which agriculture cannot be made sustainable.

The program would need the support of the president, the Department of Agriculture, the Congress, non-profits, corporations and citizens.  Five-year farm bills would be incorporated into the plan, and head incrementally toward food security and sustainable farming.  This is, we think, a good idea, but even better would be if, in addition to sensible farm policy, bold political decisions were taken to limit anthropogenic climate change, such as those recently recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change such as capping carbon emissions, limiting the burning of fossil fuels.

Sensible and smart as it clearly is, we're not terribly hopeful that such a 50-Year Farm Bill will be adopted any time soon.  Our politicians don't think long-term because it doesn't pay off in the immediate currency of politics, even if a long-term policy like this one would produce handsome returns in many ways down the road.

We're not hopeful that meaningful carbon caps will become law either, sensible as they are, for much the same reason.  Is the groundswell of interest and research into sustainable agriculture evidence of an incipient revolution in how we do business, though?  We can hope.

We will never see the real answer, however.  What we're doing is leaving the surprises for our descendants, who will have to face the societal consequences of our long-term neglect.

A girl with a cat with an evolutionary message

By Ellen Weiss

Before my husband met me, he always says, he dreamed of meeting a girl with a cat.  It was all he really wanted in life; to love and be loved by a girl and her cat.

He met Max and me in 2005.  Max, now 18, has been my, and then our, companion for over 12 years.  Wise, calm, perceptive, adaptable and affectionate, sleeping every night on my right shoulder, he was a perfect friend for a wandering college student to have found.  When I met Brian, he switched to sleeping between us so he could be close to us both.

In the 8.5 years since our meeting, Brian and I have somehow managed to acquire 3 more cats (but there will be no more... no more!).  Our cats all came from a barn where Brian's family boards horses.  They are from litters years apart but all have the same father, a scrappy fellow called Mu Senior who produced prodigious amounts of incredibly affectionate and adorable kittens in his years.  When Brian and I first began cohabitating and were both working outside the home, we felt badly that Max spent so many of his hours alone, so when Brian's mother told us to come visit a crazily affectionate kitten that was following them around at the barn, we did.  We found the scraggly, knotted, long-haired, ginger colored 10-month-old girl sitting on a barrel of oats.  Brian picked her up and she settled into his arms for half an hour while we had a tour of the barn.  Brian asked his mother to ask the owner of the barn when we could bring her home.  Fifteen minutes later she was sneezing hay dust into the backseat of our car.

Feisty and unwavering in her conviction that she rules the roost, Casey brought her vibrant personality storming into our home.  We nursed her to health and she and I spent many days together during her early years and our bond has never broken.  I am her person and she is my girl.

But she was young and Max, at age 10, wasn't thrilled with her persistent attempts to wrestle with him.  “She needs a kitten,” we often said, but we lived in an apartment then that wouldn't have accommodated 3 cats well.  After we moved into a condo Brian's mother innocently told us about a new batch of Mu Sr. kittens at the barn.  We went to visit them.  She introduced us to one of them who was particularly cuddly.  A week later we brought Casey home her new kitten, Mu Jr., 4 years younger, cinnamon-and-sugar striped with that long fluffy fur I'm a sucker for.

It was a huge mistake.

To our surprise, my precious, loving Casey cat hated Mu the moment she set eyes on him.  Despite keeping them separated for weeks and introducing them slowly as directed, if given a moment alone with him she'd corner him and slap him back and forth while he lay submissive on his back, terrified, sometimes literally defecating out of fear.  We questioned whether it was kind to keep him, to force him to live in a home with someone who hated him so, but persevered because, (1) we'd fallen in love with his gentle heart and (2) we held out hope that our vet was right when she insisted they'd learn to live together.

They did eventually develop an uneasy truce and most of the time ignore each other, but Mu will never stop thinking of Casey as bad news, never stop giving her a wide berth and backing away when she's close.  And though he now surpasses her in size, she still occasionally corners him until he cowers in submission while she towers over him, reminding him that she is Queen.

“We will never get another singleton kitten,” Brian and I told each other after the 6 months of tense adjustment in our home.  “Only pairs of kittens from the same litter.”

Less than 2 years later, my mother in law posted the following photo of a new Mu Sr. kitten on  Facebook, captioned, “Kittens free to a good home”:

The freckles on either side of his nose.  The crazy fur.  The eager, bright eyes.  The resemblance to his half brother.  I have never fallen in love with any creature so fully and so fast.  He came home a week later and tumbled into our lives with absolute, unending, constant enthusiasm and unfettered joy.  He has no idea that suffering exists in this world.  Our affection for each other is among the purest I have felt with any creature of any species.  He adores me and he adores his brother Mu.

And better still than all of this, Mu adores him.  Having a little brother has given Mu a sense of place and purpose.  He has come out of his shell; he is more joyful, less nervous.  He is more affectionate with us.  He wrestles with, sleeps with, grooms Ollie.  They are unquestionably brothers, and inseparably friends.  And everyone is friends with Max.  He is grandpa to all.

But Casey.  Although she dislikes Oliver with less ferocity than she hated Mu, she will occasionally wallop him to remind him that she's boss.  Oliver has self-esteem and confidence so foundational that it cannot be shaken, and he trots off from these scuffs emotionally unscathed, unlike Mu who took them as signs that he lived in an unsafe world; but still, our fiery girl can be vicious.

Two weeks ago we saw Casey pounce on Oliver and begin to smack him.  Then, we saw Mu see what we saw.  And in a flash he charged her, hissing and growling, smacked Casey off of Oliver, and chased her away from him.

Since then we have 3 or 4 more times seen this same thing.  Mu, normally reserved in general, and nervous around his sister, in particular, sees her attack Oliver, and in an instant loses all fear, charges her, smacks her off of his brother, and chases her away.

I find myself incredibly touched by his protectiveness and affection for his little brother.  It is so poignant to me to watch his ability to see suffering in someone he cares about, and to put aside his own fear to end that suffering for his friend.  I have never seen such behavior, such empathy, in a cat; indeed I did not know it was possible.  Cats suffer from a poor image in the media (where is their PR rep?).  From the devilishly named and endlessly cruel Lucifer in Cinderella to the relentless Tom from Tom and Jerry to the hissing cats kept by villains such as Austin Powers' Dr. Evil, cats are portrayed over and over again as cold, cruel, calculating and aloof.

It is true that cats tend to be more emotionally independent than, say, many dogs, but our cats at least are far from aloof.  I spend much of every day as a revolving affection dispenser; each one comes to me multiple times per day for cuddles and hugs and all 4 are always near us.

And, our recent experience with Mu and Oliver has demonstrated that at least some cats are capable of a kind of empathy, perceptiveness and protectiveness that is normally considered to be absent from the cat behavior repertoire.

It is not therefore, of course, a coincidence that humans form close relationships with pets.  We are all biological creatures, and enough of our physiology is shared that, though our emotional lives and ranges are not identical to each other, we have enough in common that genuine affection, love and, as Mu has shown, empathy and concern, can be shared between us.

I enjoy a good dog, and grew up with a spectacular Golden Retriever.  But what I have come to most appreciate about the housecat is that they do not need their people; they do not need to be reminded by their people that they are amazing and loveable as many dogs do, for they are already confident that they are.  They share their affection with us because they choose to, and I have decided over the years that it is better to be wanted than needed.  And want us they do, our four crazy, mischievous, loving, complex cats.

Smarten up....but do it quickly!

To what extent is  'intelligence' genetic?  That is, to what extent is your intellectual ability a native ability rather than something learned or developed?  This has long been a very heated 'discussion', not because it's about individuals with truly impaired intellectual abilities, which can often be due to known genetic mutations.  Instead it's largely been about groups, that is, 'races', and it's therefore inextricably related to society at large.

One argument that IQ (here, we let that stand for whatever is measured, without making any supportive judgments that, or when and where it is an appropriate measure of something).   Heritability of IQ is not-trivial, generally estimated to be around 80%.  The remaining 20% is 'environment', and measurement error and the like.

xkcd: Idiocracy

Previous studies had shown the tremendous advantage that early exposure to language and complex concepts has on later development, and that means later school success, and that means higher IQ test achievement.  Prior work showed that by age 3, children from privileged professional families had heard millions more words spoken than children from unpriviliged families.  They also had heard many different words spoken and learned their use.  Now, the NY Times reports that this difference can be detected even by or before age 2.  Samples were small but the study reinforces the idea that very early experience is telling throughout later life.

So what?
Those who see important group differences in IQ are going to defend their viewpoint by saying that they know very well about environmental variation and take that into account but that early experiences cannot obscure the entire group difference.  We don't happen to agree, and this is clearly a matter of personal politics all round, but there are a couple of questions that are fair to ask.

First, is it possible that the actual heritability of the measure is much lower than its estimates?  If social class is correlated in families, say by neighborhood, race, or education etc., then this can inflate heritability estimates, showing similar values for similar reasons, in professional as well as lower SES families.  This is why adoption studies are often used to show the true heritability, but even there there has been evidence of SES correlation in adoptions.

Secondly, if SES inequality were removed from the picture, the overall heritability might stay the same but there would be no difference of the average and far less variance (variation among individuals) among what were previously very different SES groups.

Third, education policy strives and presumably would strive even harder, to standardize what children are taught from birth on up.  They'd be taught or exposed to what our society values, be it vocabulary or mathematics or music or sports.  IQ test scores could increase steadily, as they have done for the past several decades, by making the most of everyone's inherited abilities.

There will always be those who are unusual on this or any other kind of value-score system.  There will be those who are seriously impaired or seriously gifted, however the neural mechanism works.  But the issues of group differences would largely if not entirely disappear; there will always be some average difference between any two groups that are compared on almost any measure of attributes, but that doesn't make the difference 'important', which is a social judgment.

The current study doesn't take us all the way back to Freudian ideas that the first glimpse an infant has of the world is hugely transformative, though who knows what further studies might find.  In any case, the important fact is not about the IQ controversy, because there is no reason to doubt that an enriched environment throughout life is an enriching fact of life.

A textbook-free [Introduction to Biological Anthropology] curriculum

[Update June 11, 2014: Here's how far this project has come.]

A map of some of the Internet (source)

I'm thinking hard about ditching the textbook for my big general education (and major requirement) course: APG 201: Human Origins (aka Intro to BioAnth). 

It's for two main reasons: (a) seems like there may be enough high quality material available on-line for free to cover what this course requires, and (b) I don't teach the course in the order that any of the textbooks do. 

Here's where I discuss my approach in further detail, although I've been modifying it since then. The key to my approach is starting with accessible observations of nature, first, not theory. Once we identify some key similarities and differences between humans and others we move on to explaining those similarities and differences.  We start with common ancestry and change over time, including persistent mutation, before covering natural selection. 

Although I'm about to submit an order for the same textbook I've always used to my campus bookstore for Spring 2014, I'm working on the textbook-free curriculum now. It's because I'll need to follow these on-line, open access readings behind-the-scenes along with a status quo run of the course, first. If it feels good, then I'll go for it in Fall 2014 Spring 2015. 

Here's my working list, unit-by-unit, of readings that can replace a textbook and complement lecture material. There are too many already, and many may be better prep materials for a lecture than assigned readings for students, nonetheless I'll be continuing to update it as I find more. 

If anybody has any suggestions to add to this list, please send them my way.

Note: I have not vetted all of these items. Many of them are brand new to me. Once I have a final list of readings for a textbook-free course in Fall 2014 Spring 2015, I'll make a separate post. 

Unit 1: Anthropological and Scientific Perspectives 

• What is anthropology?
• http://www.aaanet.org/index.cfm
• http://saa.org/
• http://physanth.org/
• http://linguisticanthropology.org/
• http://www.anthgen.org/
• http://www.hbes.com/
• http://www.culanth.org/
• http://www.internationalprimatologicalsociety.org/
• https://www.asp.org/index.cfm
• http://www.paleoanthro.org/
• http://www.theabfa.org/
• http://www.paleopathology.org/BARFAA/BARFAA.html
• What's it like to be a Biological Anthropologist? 
• A Field Paleontologist's Point of View
• Notes from the Field: A Primatologist's Point of View
• Understanding Science

 Unit 2: This View of Life 

• Diversity of life, focusing on primates
• http://www.arkive.org/
• http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/
• http://ianbickerstaff.com/#/cousins/
• http://eskeletons.org/
• Old World Monkeys
• Primate locomotion
• Linnaeus and taxonomy
• http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html
• http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/06/linnaeus-name-giver/david-quammen-text
• Time: http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/faq.html
• Deep time: http://hereistoday.com/
• Darwin (for evolution only, no natural selection until Unit 4)
• http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/darwin
• http://darwin-online.org.uk/
• Reading a phylogenetic tree
• Trait evolution on a phylogenetic tree
• http://www.onezoom.org/
• The Human Brain: http://www.livescience.com/29365-human-brain.html
• Bipedalism: http://elucy.org/Main/WhatIsBipedalism.html
• eSkeletons

 Unit 3: Explaining the Similarities and Differences 

• Mitosis, Meiosis and Inheritance
• Genetic recombination
• DNA transcription
• Genetic Mutation
• DNA damage and repair
• RNA functions
• Gregor Mendel and the principles of inheritance
• Mendelian genetics
• Hox genes in development
• Things Genes Can’t Do
• epigenetics
• What are genes "for" or where are traits "from"? What is the question?

Unit 4: How Evolution Works

• Evolution is the only natural explanation and it’s all we need
• Understanding evolution
• Mutations are the raw materials of evolution
• Neutral theory
• Natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow do not act in isolation in natural populations
• Negative selection
• Wallace
• Sexual selection
• Understanding Evolution
• Comparative genomics
• Molecular clocks: http://timetree.org/
• Teaching the Process of Molecular Phylogeny and Systematics: A Multi-Part Inquiry-Based Exercise (2.5 hour lab)
• Macroevolution: Examples from the Primate World
• Speciation
• Hybrid incompatibility and speciation
• Hybridization and gene flow
• Why should we care about species?
• Primate Speciation: A Case Study of African Apes

Unit 5: Primate Ecology and Behavior

• The diversity of behavior
• What functions in living systems underlie behavior?
• Both environment and genetic makeup influence behavior
• How does social behavior evolve?
• Primate Sociality and Social Systems
• What Influences the Size of Groups in Which PrimatesChoose to Live?
• Mating systems in sexual animals
• Male Reproductive Strategies
• Measuring animal preference and choice behavior
• Primate Communication
• Primate Communities
• Primate Conservation
• Planet without apes?
• Rapid effects of steroid hormones on animal behavior
• Cooperation, conflict, and the evolution of complex animal societies
• Peace among primates

Unit 6: The Hominin Fossil Record

• Human Origins at the Smithsonian
• Becoming Human 
• A Primer on Paleolithic Technology
• Dating Rocks and Fossils Using Geologic Methods
• Overview of Hominin Evolution
• The first hominins and the origins of bipedalism
• The evolutionary history of the australopiths
• Encephalized bipedal apes
• Evidence for meat-eating by early humans
• Origin of the genus Homo
• Homo erectus
• [more...]
• Studying function and behavior in the fossil record
• eFossils
• Challenges to human uniqueness: bipedalism, birth and brains

Unit 7: Modern Human Origins, Variation and Race

• Neanderthal behavior 
• The transition to modern behavior 
• What happened to the Neanderthals?
• Testing models of modern human origins with archaeology and anatomy
• mtDNA
• Anthropological genetics: Inferring the history of our species
• Using SNP data to examine human phenotypic differences
• Evolutionary adaptation in the human lineage
• Natural selection: Uncovering the mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation to infectious disease
• Legislative landmarks of forensics
• Forensics, DNA fingerprinting, and CODIS
• Understanding Race
• What type of person are you?

Unit 8: The Cultural Controversy

• We are not the boss of natural selection
• The F-words of Evolution
• Another F-word of Evolution
• In the Name of Darwin
• From the Belgian Congo to the Bronx Zoo
• A True and Faithful Account of Mr. Ota Benga the Pygmy, Written by M. Berman, Zookeeper
• The pleasures and pitfalls of teaching human evolution in the museum
• National Center for Science Education
• Answers In Genesis
• Institute for Creation Research
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision (pdf)
• Evolution's got a P.R. problem

Videos (I only show clips in class. Long films are homework.)

• The Human Spark (three 50-minute episodes)
• Koko the gorilla: A documentary
• Molecular Visualizations of DNA
• A Biologist’s Mother’s Day Song
• Evolution of human lice, with molecular clock animation 
• Desktop Diaries: Tim White
• Expedition Rusinga
• Your Inner Fish (many clips)
• 15-minute animal behavior sampling video (chimps)
• 15-minute animal behavior sampling video (capuchins)

Books (not textbooks) 

• Darwin's Origin of Species: A biography by Janet Browne
• Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
• Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
• Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal
• Skin: A Natural History by Nina Jablonski

A better theory for biology: time for our own Solvay conferences?

In the early 19th century, it was dawning on many investigators that life could be explained in material rather than religious creationist ways.  All sorts of speculations, some wildly wrong some partially right, filled the air.  This set the stage for the two greats of the century, Mendel and Darwin.  Mendel's theory showed  how inheritance worked as the transmission of discontinuous causal particles.  Darwin's theory showed how life as a material history connected these particles in a largely continuous flow of change.  Remarkably, these two ideas also accounted in principle for the complex, highly organized traits that characterized organisms.

But upon reflection the two views had major gaps, and they seemed inconsistent with each other.  Biological change was very gradual, and seemed basically continuous, but particulate inheritance caused 'jumps' that were hard to reconcile with gradual evolution.  It wasn't until the 1930s that they were reconciled in the 'modern evolutionary synthesis'.  The molecular theory was genetic, the evolutionary part, population genetics, was statistical.  In a sense these two views were consistent, but had a kind of separate duality, or complementarity that may ironically have been paralleling dualities, particulate and statistical, in physics, that were occurring at the same time (did they have any conceptual influence on biologists?).  And the duality was also widely treated as being separate--quantitative geneticists did their work, such as agricultural breeding, without regard to evolution or specific genes, while Mendelians probed genes with clear effects and, like Mendel, largely bypassed the quantitative traits that weren't as amenable to experimental study.

Still, the two aspects of the synthesis together provided a remarkable, unified and consistent theory for the nature of life, its diversity, history, origins and continuity.  Many genes with small effects could together account for complex traits, while each gene was separately inherited as, indeed, a particulate cause. A gene with major effects would 'segregate' as a separate cause, but this would not be so for complex traits.

These theories were powerfully generic, but, remarkably, they said nothing at all about what traits would evolve, or how many species of what size, or how adapted--and to what!  But without yet knowing about DNA or about how DNA worked to bring about development, things remained largely indirect, many levels above the actual molecules.  This changed with the genetic and genomic technologies. But the theory has not really kept up with many things that over recent decades the new data have revealed (some of which we listed in our first post in this series 4 days ago).

Has 20th Century theory been exhausted?
Indeed, we argue that perhaps what this theory can do for us has, because of the very advances it enabled, reached the point of diminishing returns.  Perhaps it is too 'meta' for the phenomena, too indirect about the nature of causation, too descriptive of generalities.  Much of what is done these days is largely about documenting more cases, and more details, revealing the predictable complexities but not explaining them, or their generic nature, well enough.  It is not paying back commensurately with the increasing cost of adding each new fillip to our knowledge.  How many times do we have to hear the frustrated acknowledgment that life is 'complex', where that is offered almost as if it were an explanation and is usually followed by a plea for larger, longer, more, and more costly work of the same sort?  GWAS wasn't enough: we need whole sequence data on everybody!

It is in this sense that we believe it is time for our science to dig down deeper into the nature of biological causality, and that we should at least consider whether some basically new way of viewing life may be possible, and perhaps even discernible, if we struggle appropriately with the facts as we know them.

There is natural resistance to any such suggestion, by the community of scientists plying the current waters who are dependent on the current institutionalized research system, which they know and that pays them.  More generally, in most areas of human endeavor, not just science, people are comfortable with their current worldview and fear or resist potentially threatening new ones.  In this case, such feelings may include the argument that we can't order up genius, and that openly declaring the importance of searching might threaten the comfortable way of life we know.  We personally think, however, that facing the limits of the now century-old worldview in biology could be productive even if, yes, it would threaten business as usual, it should threaten it.  Yes, your university wants you to keep the tap flowing, and that system is hard to resist.  But if momentum can shift, the community will adapt.

Solvay for biology?
In the early 1900s, a series of conferences, called Solvay Conferences after their benefactor, were held on occasions to discuss the most fundamental advances in physics.  The greats of the 20th century regularly attended and major fundamental discoveries were presented and debated.  That was in part a reflection of the profoundly original thinking and truly 'paradigm shifting', not just incremental, advances were made.

There has been some considerable back-chatter triggered by our recent series of posts on this subject.  Tweets have reflected various reactions, from the enthusiastic to the irritated, dismissive, or defensive.  But there are now some correspondents who are suggesting that it may be time for biology to face up to the explanatory ceiling our theory of life has reached, to assess what ideas may be afoot to enable biologists to delve deeper or generalize more effectively.

Perhaps through public social media like blogs, tweets, and other kinds of interactions, a virtual 'Solvay' conference can be held, an ongoing, explicit attempt not to promote our own work but to assess where we are--to face up to the anomalies or clear facts that do not fit without a major shoe-horn into the current framework that is being exhausted.

Actual physical meetings are also possibilities, where these issues can be seriously discussed, not as a mass-meeting of thousands the way most scientific association meetings are, nor routine symposia, but in some format that really knocks hard at the door of better understanding.

Any such effort will generate a plethora of new ideas of all sorts.  But if it's done right, we would have to realize that the challenge is serious, and most of the ideas will be wrong.  None may be correct. Perhaps current theory will survive all challenge, or perhaps the time is not yet ripe.  But if there's no effort to bang on the door, the door won't be opened.  Maybe, just maybe, something profound will emerge.

To the extent that we have been in on the wave of thinking about such possibilities, or could use our MT blog as a part of the process, then to that extent the pot-stirring we have tried to do has achieved its objectives.  But time will tell.  There is a black hole of gravity to be overcome: the gravitational pull of the grant and publication system, and the usual resistance to change.   We'll see how things fall out.