Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

“Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science”

In the news today from PNAS (open access article):

“Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science”:

Explanations for women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women’s lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women’s underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today’s causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.

So, instead of forcing overburdened grant reviewers to attend gender sensitivity training sessions, what should we do? The authors put forward some recommendations, which I wholeheartedly endorse:

Gender Equity Committees have suggested adjusting the length of time to work on grants to accommodate child-rearing, no-cost grant extensions, supplements to hire postdocs to maintain momentum during family leave, reduction in teaching responsibilities for women with newborns, grants for retooling after leaves of absence, couples-hiring, and childcare to attend professional meetings. The UC-Berkeley’s “Family Edge” provides high-quality childcare and emergency backup care, summer camps and school break care, and reentry postdocs and instructs committees to ignore family-related gaps in CVs. Research into these strategies is needed to identify which are promising.

Biology lessons from economics

The science of economics often takes a pummeling in the press, largely because this field is so intertwined with the messy business of policy. But from a pure research perspective, the way economists successfully handle extremely heterogeneous systems with some relatively simple mathematical models offers some lessons for biologists.

While reading this piece (Paul Krugman talking about his research career), I was struck by how biologists are faced with similar problems:

Robert Solow used to tell his students that there were two kinds of theorists: those who like to generalize, and those who like to look for illuminating special cases. Continue reading “Biology lessons from economics”

Missouri’s zombie creationism bill

More recent creationism news, close to home: the “teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution” bill returns from the dead yet again in the Missouri State Legislature:

The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, superintendents of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues, including biological and chemical evolution. Such educational authorities in this state shall also endeavor to assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies. Toward this end, teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of the theory of biological and hypotheses of chemical evolution.

Legislation that specifically singles out evolution nearly always fails, but even if this bill didn’t fail, I don’t see how creationists think this will help them stop their endless string of court losses. As shown yet again in the recent Freshwater case, teachers enthusiastic about teaching the “scientific weaknesses” of evolution pretty much always end up pitting the mainstream science curriculum against “supplementary material” from religious organizations, which is a legal non-starter.

Yep, this should get you fired

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students’ arms has been fired, after a long and tedious process and a lawsuit that cost the school district some big bucks.

The referee who evaluated the case for termination nicely summed up in one sentence (PDF) exactly what you can’t do when you’re a public school science teacher:

…He persisted in his attempts to make eighth grade science what he thought it should be – an examination of accepted scientific curriculum with the discerning eye of Christian Doctrine.

Continue reading “Yep, this should get you fired”

There are no ancient alien codes in our genome

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule that this situation deserves, quotes physicist and pop-science author Paul Davies:

Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record.

Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to be junk, however. If aliens, or their robotic surrogates, long ago wanted to leave us a message, they need not have used radio waves. They could have uploaded the data into the junk DNA of terrestrial organisms. It would be the modern equivalent of a message in a bottle, with the message being encoded digitally in nucleic acid and the bottle being a living, replicating cell. (It is possible—scientists today have successfully implanted messages of as many as 100 words into the genome of bacteria.) A systematic search for gerrymandered genomes would be relatively cheap and simple. Incredibly, a handful of (unsuccessful) computer searches have already been made for the tell-tale signs of an alien greeting.

(Yes, that’s me you’re now hearing, banging my head against the desk.)

Larry uses this opportunity to pose the obvious question, for his molecular evolution students and everyone else:

Assume that the aliens inserted a 1000 bp message in the same place in the genomes of every member of our ancestral population from five million years ago… If you were to sequence that very same region of your own genome what would the message look like today?

(Go leave your answer in the comments over at Sandwalk.)

Anyone who has the slightest comprehension of natural selection ought to see that the most implausible part of Paul Davies scenario is not the bit about aliens engineering the DNA of terrestrial organisms.

From the context of the full article (go to Sandwalk for the link), it’s not clear how seriously Davies takes this. I’m really, really, really hoping that this does not reflect the biological understanding of a public scientific figure, but I’m afraid it does.