Posts by Lucy Stewart
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Joe Wylie,
Perhaps that too had to be postponed until certain senior phylogeneticists had ‘left the room’.
I don't know if the presence of phylogeneticists in 1912 would disprove evolution, but I imagine it might cause physicists some concerns.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
You’ll use the fact that it was not selected for as evidence that it was not clearly advantageous, so that’s not going to work. No matter what advantage I could think of that has occurred occasionally as a trait in some creature, you’ll just find a disadvantage to save the theory, pointing to the disappearance of the trait as clear evidence of that disadvantage. Or, failing that, you can fall back on bad luck or not enough time elapsed. The theory is really quite well immunized against disproof.
With all due respect, Ben, I'm getting the feeling you don't actually understand how science - or, rather, scientists - work. "But you wouldn't believe it if it was!" is not actually an argument for the disprovability of a scientific theory.
No, those people at NASA (&c, hi Lucy!) are engaged in science that is not expected to make a return on investment. If NASA was expected to make money, it would have to be one of the most useless investment vehicles ever.
The value of NASA (and the NSF, and NIH, etc) is not in direct investment return; it's in economic stimulus. The NIH has about a 1:7 return ratio in terms of economic activity created by money spent on it. Government-funded research produces useful things/data directly; inspires industry research that does the same; and creates economic activity around the research and the products. If I do an experiment, I need reagents and equipment; other people are hired to make the reagents and equipment; other people will do other work using my publication output, and so on and so forth. That's where the (monetary) value in science investment lies.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Which means it is certainly true, but immune to disproof and thus hardly something to class as science.
How to disprove evolution: find a situation where a trait is clearly advantageous but is not selected for (c.f. the Galapagos finches, if beak distribution did not change during droughts even though smaller-beaked birds were getting more food and laying more eggs.) Or one where a trait emerges throughout a population - or in separated populations of a species - without selection, at the same time. Or good evidence of widespread Lamarckianism, that'd throw a wrench in things too. (Current epigenetic research suggests something somewhat like this may play *a* role, but it's not anything like fundamental.) Essentially: where the raw material is available for selection, and so is selective pressure, but selection does not occur; or adaptive changes without selective pressure (or prior traits to be selected). That'd be decent disproof.
Regarding the rest of it...look, I'm not a manager or HR person. I don't know the precise selection metrics you'd use. But try something like this: evaluate people on the basis of the originality of their published research. Who strikes off in profitable new directions, rather than extending known problems? Who is involved in work that approaches known problems in novel ways? Those are the people you need more of. Hire them. I don't know whether you could turn this into a numeric thing. I don't think you need to.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
But is the theory of evolution actually a scientific theory at all? Could it be proved or disproved?
1) Yes. 2) Yes. That's....really not in dispute. There is a lot of very fine work qualitatively testing evolution. Lemski's E. coli stuff is one of the more beautiful examples, or the Galapagos finch studies. Or HIV, which pretty much proves it by existing. I could go on.
wrt mitochondria, what evidence can you give that it wouldn't have been thought of within a year if Margulis didn't discover it?
Obviously I can't prove a negative, but the fact that she had to shop it to fifteen separate journals before she even got it published suggests that it wasn't likely to emerge anytime soon. As genetics improved, it would have been discovered, no question, at some point - but the discovery at that time was down to Margulis.
Care to quantify? Is an A student twice as fast as a B? Ten times faster? Whatever number you pick, that's the number of resources their talents take to replicate. They are therefore not essential at all.
I guess maybe I'm not explaining this so well, but that's not how it works. It's true that, given more people and more work, you can get enough pieces together and some things will become obvious, but the quality of synthesising multiple pieces of information from disparate areas and coming up with an answer - or more importantly, a question - is not a quality merely born of time or opportunity or luck, though all those things do play a role and are prerequisites for people achieving those things. But they are not sufficient. It's a way of thinking that some people are just better at, though it can be learned and honed as well. It's a creative quality, if you like, married to logic.
And my experience as a working scientist is that people who can do this - learned or innate - are valuable and make science work better. They are not sufficient for science working better (or working at all). They're not essential, even, but damn if they're not good to have. And that being the case - why wouldn't you want to try and get them?
It's not about deifying people; as I said in an earlier post, often people with this quality are utter crap at other important scientific qualities like staying on task for years at a time or working out how to test their ideas properly. Or, all too often, remembering that they aren't always right. (See also: all the crazy pseudo-science endorsed by Nobel prize-winners over the years. There is a lot of it.) It's not about worshipping them, it's about using what they have to make everyone's work better.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Could you give me an example? Some breakthrough that you have personally actually witnessed happening at the hands of a real live genius that you couldn’t imagine having been stumbled across by someone else in maybe a little more time?
But it's not usually "a little more time", it's "a lot of time", or "a lot of wasted effort and resources looking at the problem the wrong way". It doesn't have to be "I solved the problem!". It can be as simple as "Have you tried doing this experiment/wondering what would happen if/thinking about it this way?" There are people who are good at taking disparate pieces of information and assembling them into a coherent picture, and it's not a skill everyone has, or everyone can learn.
If you want an example, the best I can think of offhand is mitochondria. Lynn Margulis - actually a professor at my university until her death a few months ago - worked out that they are the remnants of a symbiosis between bacteria and eukaryotes, bacteria that moved into larger cells and never moved out. (So are chloroplasts in photosynthetic eukaryotes.) She drew on earlier work, sure, but she was the one who put the pieces together and pushed the theory forward. Her later hammer/nail issues aside, that was at least a moment of genius. Science isn't solely driven by that level of insight; it can't be. But it requires those contributions to work well.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to chris,
That’s still rather high given his pedigree:
The theory of evolution was synthesised from a growing body of evidence and ideas, and someone was going to come up with it sooner or later - modern biology is impossible without it. This is evidenced by the fact that, in fact, two people came up with well-developed theories of evolution at roughly the same time. One of them just had better publicists.
But making that synthesis - in the detail and extent to which Darwin made it - still takes something. It's not as if every person studying biology and descent came up with the idea at once, or even a large minority of them - it's a long way from "all warm-blooded animals" and "endued by [God] with the power of acquiring new parts" to "all life" and "natural selection". That quote sounds downright Lamarckian, actually ("delivering down those improvements...to its posterity"). The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection was genuinely new, and genuinely revolutionary. I'm not at all hesitant in saying it, as well as Darwin and Wallace, is a bit special.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Indeed, I think that if anything, people need more encouragement to develop broad skills than they do to develop specific skills – those sell themselves.
It really worries me sometimes when I get comments from people who are impressed because I can do well in a (microbiology) genetics class while being in a (microbiology) physiology/environmental lab - this is all within a subfield of biology, not even within the wider field or actually between disciplines.
OTOH, that's in large part because there is so much information in the world it's simply not viable to be a polymath, at least not with any decent knowledge in more than a couple of fields, unless you are truly exceptional - we teach everything Newton knew about physics to people by the time they hit sixth form, frex. To do good work in a field you have to specialise to some extent; it's not optional. And maintaining a broad knowledge base becomes harder and harder the deeper you get.
But what's also becoming truer, within the sciences, is that the sort of projects that get funded require collaboration between multiple disciplines, and useful collaboration requires interdisciplinary understanding. People pick up that stuff because they have to; it would be good if they knew they needed to in advance. It's one of the reasons I really enjoy astrobiology as a discipline, because it absolutely requires you pay attention to things outside your sub-sub-specialisation.
Dan Carter may be exceptional, but is he model of health? The guy had to sit out the RWC due to injuries.
But we don't need everyone to be Dan Carter; we need some Dan Carters. No-one complains that the focus on All Blacks discourages people from playing touch on the weekends. The difference, I think, is that we accept that some people are naturally gifted at sport, but maintain that mental success is almost all the product of hard work and environment.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
ETA Mind you at least half of being an A student seems to come down to being a total swot and not having to hold down 2 paid jobs at the same time, so maybe accusations of brilliance on their part are unfair.
Yes and no. There are a few prerequisites for being considered "brilliant", including, but not limited to, those things you mention. (Also helpful: patience, lots of it; a real love of thinking; lack of mental/physical health problems; good networking/social skills; etc.)
But my experience has been that there's a real, quantitative difference between people who have ideas in science and people who carry them out. It's not a binary distinction so much as a gradient; there are those who are great at expanding upon other people's initial idea, those who are great at perfecting methodology but not as worried about what it's used for, those who are just happy to do benchwork at all, whatever it is (though not many of them.)
And the caveat is that a lot (though not all) of the people who are amazing idea-generators are not so good on follow-through; they need a team of B people to get stuff done. The scale of modern science requires a lot of people chipping away at the coalface, but chipping away isn't enough. The demoralising bit is that there are a lot more jobs chipping than supervising chipping, and that supervising chipping usually necessitates giving up the actual benchwork part, which is what most people became scientists to do, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword anyway.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
This is real and it is happening right now. We can see it when we try and find students for PhDs, we can see it when we try and find technicians and try and fill post-doc positions. The quality is just not there. When we ask our colleagues in the university they say the bright ones just aren’t taking the sciences any more.
Which is interesting, because from my perspective the problem is an overload of good people for few post-doc positions. Frankly I'm not really considering post-docing in NZ because I just don't expect the positions to be there. Is the opposite really the case?
OTOH, when I think of the very bright kids I went to high school with, it's true; they're all lawyers or doctors now. Mostly lawyers. A lot of them liked science and did well at it but it wasn't the route they chose at university, even so.
They also increase the repayment rate as income increases, in recognition that those who have done particularly well from their education should be repaying society commensurate with the additional financial benefit they are getting; after all, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.
I like this. I certainly feel the current repayment threshold is too low - below minimum wage, really? That's when we think people should start paying back their loans? It screws up the whole concept of a minimum wage, which is that it's a minimum you can live on.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Ross Mason,
Funnily enough, my first major exposure to WWI history was studying those songs and other war poetry as part of sixth-form English class. Very few people in my family served in WWII, and I don't know if any did in WWI; the two I know of who did serve overseas died before I was born, one in Italy and one long after in a glider accident. Everyone else of that generation was too female, young, or exempted.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be here without WWII. My grandmother was an artist and a city girl, raised in Wellington and Auckland, but when the war came she volunteered or was conscripted as a Land Girl - I don't know the details - and so met and married my grandfather, and spent the next forty-odd years as a farmer's wife. My grandfather had been prevented from serving because his older brother had already gone and the farm couldn't lose both of them. (I believe some rather dubious medical diagnosis was given as the official reason, but that was the real one.) I understand he was always jealous of his brother the glamorous Spitfire pilot, and received a great deal of grief for staying behind. But I just don't know very much; by the time I was interested enough to ask questions about WWII, even as an era, the only grandparent I had left had been a young child during the war.