Convergent crocodilians

This attractive individual lives in the Zoo Basel. It shares a large enclosure with these two:


As we gazed upon their toothy serenity, my wife asked me what species they were. I had to admit I didn't know. There may have been a placard somewhere, but in the crowd of humans I didn't notice it. Clearly crocodillians, and not alligators or caimans, but beyond that I couldn't say. Gharials have longer, skinnier snouts for catching fish, and most crocodiles have thicker, heavier snouts for pulling down large terrestrial animals. These seemed to be somewhere in between.

I've looked up what species of crocodilians have snouts like this, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that there are three candidates: the Slender Snouted Crocodile, the False Gharial and the Freshwater Crocodile. All three have similarly shaped snouts and eat a mixture of fish and terrestrial prey. All three are said to bite humans only when harassed, and all three live in fresh water. Each is found on a different continent and they are not closely related to each other. The African Slender Snouted Crocodile, the South Asian False Gharial and the Austrailan Freshwater Croc have apparently evolved into similar niches and therefore converged on similar morphology. Interestingly, despite its numerous crocodilians, the Western Hemisphere seems to lack a similar species.

I found out that these are Australian Freshwater crocs only by looking up which of these three species the Zoo in Basel keeps.

They also hold three of these, Nile Crocodiles:
That's what the above water part looks like. The below water part of the same individual in the same position looks like this:


Notice the much wider, more typical crocodilian snout.

Choughs in the wind.

Pilatus is a minor alp at 2132m (7000ft), but impressive for its sheer ruggedness, and the way it hangs over Lucerne Switzerland and several large lakes and forests. Its peak can be reached by a cog-wheel railroad, except in the winter, when snow and ice block the tracks. In these months, only the aerial cable cars, leaving from Lucerne, reach the top. The large gondola that carried us the last few thousand feet to the peek hung from a great cable with no support between its two ends, excepting one tower, which stood atop a sheer drop of close to a thousand feet. The top half of the mountain was snow covered, with evergreens petering out some hundreds of feet below the top. As we stepped out of the Gondola and into the visitor center on the mountain's top, it began snowing.

Standing outside the visitor center we could see impressive peaks, valleys, lakes and forests stretching far and wide. A stiff wind was blowing, and within two or three minutes we couldn't see much beyond the peak we were on. We went inside and had hot chocolate and pastries. As we sat and sipped, gazing through floor to ceiling windows, visibility continued to drop. We noticed that the staff were starting to close up, which seemed odd, as it was still morning. A smiling suited man with a managerial manner came through announcing something in Swiss German and everyone started moving towards the cables cars. Our friend Annette explained that the wind was picking up so much they were afraid they wouldn't be able to run the cable cars, and they were sending us all down the mountain before that happened. By the time we got down one flight of stairs the wind was too strong, the cable cars couldn't safely operate. We and a couple of hundred other visitor and staff waited perhaps half an hour before the manager came through and announced we would just have to wait the storm out. He invited us all back to the restaurant for free refreshments. So we sat in the big exposed glass walled restaurant consuming free soup, hot beverages, pastries and good bread and watched the blizzard lash the mountain. Chunks of snow the size of small cars broke off the cliffs and were thrown up and out. A wooden bench which had been left outside was hurled into a metal fence hard enough to snap some of the welds. Visibility was perhaps ten meters.

In the middle of this frozen hurricane, this onslaught of white fury, something, no two somethings black and sleek and solid appeared on the edge of visibility and simple hung in the storm. It seemed ridiculous that anything could live on a mountain peek in such a blizzard, but these forms seemed not only unconcerned, but rather playful. Annette and I, both former ornithologists, each had binoculars out and pointed within five seconds. Too slow, for the seemingly magical forms rotated slightly and in unison shot at amazing speed down wind and into the white-out.


"Alpine Choughs!" announced Annette, and several tables-full of other tourists turned around to look for the now vanished birds.



Over the next hours, as the storm slowly passed, we watched the choughs hovering, flipping, clearly playing, in conditions that would kill any normal bird long before it could flee down the mountain. They seemed to seek out the crevices through which wind blew fastest, so as to make their acrobatics all the more impressive. When it finally stopped snowing, we could see dozens of choughs racing and chasing with no apparent goal but to use the still gale force winds to show off for each other. As the winds slowed most of the choughs settled into a snow bank a few meters below the absolute top of the mountain. Their bright yellow beaks and red feet did not hide within their thick black feathers, but stayed exposed to the ice and wind, as though the weather was warm and sunny. They danced on the barbed wire that keeps animals away from the weather station at the peak, swinging in time with the wind.


And with that the manager stopped handing out the free refreshments and herded us down to the cable cars. Our car, rated to hold up to 3000kg, was stuffed with 2985kg of tourists. The wind swung the car side to side as we slid down the cable and over the cliff. It took at least four cars to get everybody down.

Safely back in Germany, I've been reading about the choughs, and they are pretty amazing. They can be found at the tops of high mountains from North Africa to western China, and unlike most other wildlife often do not move to lower elevations in winter. Being corvids (members of the crow family) they are smart and social. They are omnivores, feeding in rapidly moving flocks on insects, seeds, eggs and anything provided by tourists. They eat a lot of berries in winter. They will eat from people's hands at ski resorts and other places where they are fed regularly. Their bills are smaller and their feathers thicker than other crows, but otherwise nothing about their appearance would make one think they were so immune to cold. They likely store food in rock crevice where the cold keeps it good until they want it. They may nest at higher elevation than any other birds. Seeing them play was well worth being stranded on a mountain top for, especially when the stranding was accompanied with free soup, hot chocolate and pastries. I would gladly have shared the pastries with the Choughs, if I wouldn't have had to go out in the storm to give it to them.

Octopuses good, octopi non-existent.

Note to world: the plural of octopus is octopuses, not octopi. I have discussed this with more than one expert on octopuses, and they consistently report that 'octopi' is is just plain wrong. Octopus comes from Greek roots (octi=eight, pous=foot), not Latin. Greek does not pluralize words ending in -us by ending in -i. That is Latin. The old fashioned plural was octipodes, but that went out with dropsy and mammifers.

Will do math for chocolate

I don’t usually pay too much attention to the conversations in my office that are in German. My office mates both have many people coming in to talk to them and are both German, so speak in German with their German visitors. This particular conversation caught my attention primarily because it repeatedly used the work ‘Schokolade” one of the few German words I have no trouble with. Also there were four people involved. Eventually one of my office mates said, “Ask Dan, he is very interested in chocolate!”

So the conversation was about a simple demography puzzle, and my boss had offered a chocolate bar to whoever solved it first.
The problem is this: 100% of a population were alive at the beginning of a year. 60% were alive at the end of the year. Assuming that the mortality rate is constant throughout the year, what percentage of individuals were alive at the exact middle of the year?

Note that a constant mortality rate does not mean that the same absolute number of individuals die each day, but rather than the same proportion of those starting the day alive end the day dead.
Motivated by chocolate, and using one simple bit of algebra, I secured the Intense Orange Lindt dark chocolate bar.

So I can’t hang a chocolate bar in the comments section, but I can promise kudos if you can tell me what portion of individuals were alive after six months, and how you got that answer.

What I'm literature searching for now..

how does one tell if a fruit fly egg has died, other than waiting to see if it hatches, which doesn't tell me at what developmental stage it died, which is what I want to know.

So far I can't find any evidence that anyone has a method for this.

Brain melt.

I have been sick to various degrees, and with various different bugs, continuously for the last three weeks. Tonight I am developing a fever again.

It is very hard to get any science done while I am sick. Partly there is the general lack of energy, lack of focus and slow mental activity. But I also make the weirdest mistakes while I am sick. I send people emails with the same sentence three times in a row phrased slightly differently each time, without realizing I am repeating myself. I decide that I have accidentally deleted all my emails when in fact I am just looking at the wrong mailbox. I write a thought that pertains to one paper into a different paper, then have trouble figuring out which paper it is.

I understand that my body is scaling back on certain activities (such as cognition) so as to be able to go all out on others (immune response), but honestly given the quantity of lipids I am carrying around I would think a little bit of multitasking could be supported.

A fallacy in need of a name

At a party I attended earlier this year, one particularly vehement guest announced that, "Russia was justified in bombing civilian targets in Georgia because Georgia had killed ethnic Russian civilians in South Ossetia." I pointed out to the vehement fellow that neither Russian law, nor Georgian law, nor international law, nor moral reason allow for collective capital punishment based on ethnicity or nationality, and therefore of course it doesn't make any sense that if the Georgian military killed ethnic Russian civilians, the Russian military is allowed to kill Georgian civilians. Unable to refute this logic, he switched to another argument, using the same logical fallacy, claiming that we as Americans cannot object to the behavior of the Russian government, because the American government has killed so many civilians in so many countries. When I pointed out to him the possibility that the Russian and Georgian and American governments may all, simultaneously, be culpable for their own actions, and that we need not be apologists for any war crimes, despite the multiplicity of criminals, my wife suggested it was time we leave the party. This was a very sensible suggestion, so we did.

I've recently written about the importance of having names for common logical fallacies, and this got me wondering what the name for this guy's fallacy is. It is an extremely common one, and is in no way original to him. The fallacy is this: assuming or implying that if one side in a debate/argument/conflict is wrong/guilty the other side is therefore right/justified. This most often comes up in moral contexts, where the misdeeds of one party are used as a defense for the misdeed of the other party, but is also used in the context of disagreements about fact. For example when it comes out that an evolutionary biologists was wrong about anything, creationist make the leap to this being proof of Creation, rather than simply a flaw in the thinking of a biologist. One side is wrong, so the other must be right, even if the flaw is immaterial to the disagreement. Similarly, it is common in interpersonal disagreements to hear one party respond to an accusation of misbehavior only by pointing out a misbehavior of the other party without ever replying to the statement about their own behavior. This often goes well beyond "two wrongs make a right" to "my behavior is necessarily right because yours is wrong." This is also distinct (and almost opposite) from the idea of moral equivalence. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, some people argue that the crimes committed by supporters of the two sides are morally equivalent, and therefore neither side can be held responsible. Each side often responds to this nonsense with the counterfallacy that our behavior, whatever it may be, is justified by their crimes. They are criminals therefore we are just. I would tend to assume that each party or individual is responsible for its own actions, and whether or not the crimes are equivalent is morally irrelevant.

So this raises three sets of questions for me:

1. What is this fallacy called? If we want to describe a response as following this pattern, how should we refer to the pattern?

2. Why do humans do this so freely? On some deep level are we programmed by evolution to use this type of rationalization? Is this culture specific, or do all humans do this?

3. Why is this particular type of illogic useful/successful in arguments? Perhaps it is particularly effective because it allows one to move from being on the defensive to being on the offensive, to accuse rather than excuse (or to effectively do both at once)? Or maybe it is just very hard for people to find fault in both sides of a conflict at once, so by making them see the fault in the other side you make them forget about the fault in your own?

I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this, particularly what this type of fallacy should be called, or if it already has a name. I've checked Wikipedia's list of fallacies, and it ain't there.

The right's next big scare tactic

My office mate occasionally organizes a movie night, showing something or other that people at the Institute might want to watch in the seminar room. When he heard that there were two movies, called Demographic Winter and Demography Bomb, he figured they would be of interest to an Institute full of demographers, and he got a copy of the DVDs from somewhere.

Twenty or thirty of us came to watch. Now Demographers are a pretty staid crowd, but by ten minutes in people were chuckling, and within a half hour there was full-bellied, breathing-difficulty, rolled over in pain laughing going on. Clearly, people who actually think about demography were not the target audience.

These two documentaries, are based on the premise, which they take intensely seriously, that humanity (or at least the white section thereof) is at risk of economic ruin, political chaos, pain, suffering, homosexuality, the death of the traditional family and ultimate and total extinction because of a population control conspiracy by the UN, the EU, the Ford Foundation, Democrats, Liberals, Communists, UC Berkeley, Charles Darwin, Malthus, W.E.B DuBois, Gloria Steinem, Big Gay, Nazis, Feminazis, and most of all Paul Ehrlich. Dr. Erhlich, a professor at Stanford is a favorite punching bag of the right because he made many and varied dire predictions back in the sixties and seventies, and like most prolific prognosticators, many of his forecasts were wrong. His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, is identified as the driving source behind the idea that overpopulation might be a problem. In it he made various overly pessimistic predictions about the rate of population growth and the rate of food productivity growth, and concluded that we would see mass starvation of hundreds of millions of people by the 1970s or '80s. That this didn't happen is taken as proof that there are no possible ill effects of overpopulation, and that in fact humans are now heading toward population decline, which will by the end of the century see an under populated world dominated by geriatric patients, Muslims and Latinos. The same three or four animated graphics are shown incessantly, demonstrating that "westerners" (i.e., white people) are going extinct. "By the end of the century, there may not be any actual French people in France." They string together statements from representatives of various Teabagger interest groups and wildly out of context statements by academics (often repeating the same clip of the same academic to make it seem like they are agreeing with two very different ideas) with alternatively faux-reasonable and openly snarky narrators. The failure of the US auto industry, the housing bubble, immigration, homosexuality, terrorism, crime, feminism and the excesses of Wall Street are all shown to be symptoms of insufficiently rapid population growth. Demographers from all over the world hooted and guffawed and thought it was just the funniest damn thing they had seen.

Now like most vehemently presented lies, there is a grain of truth to the hysteria behind the movie. That grain is this: some, but not all, population forecasts predict that world population will cease growing some time around 2050, and may gradually decline for some decades thereafter, falling from maybe 9 billion to maybe 8.5 billion by 2100, and in the mean time the ratio of older people to younger people will temporarily increase. (Forecasts any further out than that are beyond the realm of speculation into pure fantasy, but one thing we can say with high confidence is that no population is likely to just stop breeding and go extinct.) This will pose some serious issues we need to think about over the next few decades. (I've written about this before, here.) Our markets, as currently structured, assume continuous population growth, and we don't yet have very clear ideas about how we need to adapt to population decline if it happens. Having lots of old people per working adult is a problem if you assume that it takes the same number of working adults to take care of each old person, and ignore that their will simultaneously be fewer children for those adults to take care of. The problem with the argument, even if you take out the hysteria, conspiracy theorizing, snarkiness, smear tactics and brain-washing techniques, is that overpopulation has known, current and disastrous consequences (see "Collapse" by Jared Diamond for several hundred pages on that, also a significant portion of the articles in Population and Development Review or Conservation Biology). I have never met a demographer who argues the problems of population decline are likely to be worse than those associated with population growth, or with trying to maintain a planet with more than 9,000,000,000 people on it. Second, I've never heard any demographer suggest that the cause of the eventual decline will be anything resulting from any policy of population control. Rather, educated, urban, mobile populations (and especially educated women) have fewer kids later in life, and that slows population growth. As the educational level and economic mobility of the world's women improves, and as people continue to move to cities, they will tend to reproduce less, no matter what the UN or Professor Ehrlich tells them. The clergy also have relatively little influence (see Italy).

But now that the lie is out there, no matter how laughable, it is a convenient tool for anyone who wants to argue against population control measures, family planning, contraception, feminism, etc. A friend pointed out to me a post on The Weekly Standard's blog stating that, "the discussion in demography circles isn't 'How do we cope with two extra China's?' Rather, it's "'How do we manage one of those extra China's disappearing?'" Living in a "demography circle," I can report that the Weekly Standard's unnamed source for that statement is a made-for-Fox-News propaganda special called "Demographic Winter" and its sequel (which borrows numerous lengthy sections from the first part) called "Demography Bomb." Type "population decline" into Google blog search and up come numerous posts on conservative blogs mumbling the same point.

So while my international colleagues were laughing their lungs out, I was exchanging dark glances with the only other American in the room. To those not familiar with the propaganda machine of the U.S. far right, the movie was pure, bizarre, hilarious fluff. Man-eating purple platypus stuff. One of my colleagues later asked me, "Republicans aren't idiots right? So they do not take that [compound expletive] seriously. Maybe a few nutballs? This is a joke?" But to me, it was clear this was yet one more battle being opened in the American right's war on science. As long as one is denying evolution, climate change and the moon landings, may as well claim that demographers don't see any possible drawbacks to overpopulation, and in fact that population collapse is just around the corner.

Expect to hear more of this particular lie in the years ahead. As the right touts the four biologists willing to deny the possibility of evolution, expect them to repeatedly trot out the few demographers willing to pretend that humanity's very existence is threatened by population control.

The climate tempest's teapot

You may have noticed the recent hullabaloo about the stolen email records from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The people who hacked into the system, and the climate-change-denier community generally, have taken the content of these emails as proof positive that climate science is all one big hoax. What they actually have is evidence that on one occasion one climate scientist informed his colleagues that he was doing some mildly misleading things to one graph to make it look prettier. Clearly he shouldn't do that, but this is proof of basically nothing beyond itself. I won't dwell on the point. Those who can't accept the global flood of evidence for anthropogenic climate change are not susceptible to logic or evidence, and none of the seven regular readers of this blog are among that crowd.

What I think is interesting about this is the extraordinarily high level of truthfulness we expect from our scientists these days. Journalists, politicians, doctors and lawyers are all expected to, in varying degrees, present pictures which are rosier, clearer, more advantageous or less illegal than the straight hard truth. A defense attorney is expected to find the most preferable interpretation of truth, rather than the straight up truth. Doctors need to make their patients feel comfortable and confident, even if that means overstating their confidence. No one is surprised when Republican appointed judges reach different decisions than Democratic appointed judges. Text-book writers are free to get as much wildly wrong as they want, usually for no apparent reason. Advertising is the art of misleading without directly lying in a provable way. But Phil Jones, the guy who fudged the graph, is resigning his appointment.

This is not to say that I think this level of expectation is a bad thing. Scientists don't have the excuses for bending the truth that lawyers or doctors or journalists have. We are supposed to fight desperately hard against our biases, against anything that prejudices our communications or thinking. Of course realistically many scientists fail to live up to this ideal, and there are (and should be) consequences when these failings are exposed. But one of the many things reactionary deniers of all sorts (moon landings, evolution, Holocaust, climate, HIV/AIDS, etc.) tend to refuse to see is that science also has powerful mechanisms for keeping any one person's malfeasance from making too much of a difference to our larger understanding. The more respected and influential a scientist is, the more people there are looking to poke holes in everything he does. The more enshrined an idea is, the more it benefits the career of a young researcher if she can point out a fatal flaw, an exception, a modification, even an unexplained corner. Every scientist that was ever great built his or her reputation and career by finding flaws, limitations or unanswered questions in the work of older, more established scholars. If I could produce convincing evidence that macroevolution doesn't happen, I would be the most successful scientist of the century (unfortunately for me, macroevolution happens, so producing that evidence is going to be hard). Under such a system, fakery may help get a single paper published, even help build a successful career, but it can't easily lead to a lasting consensus that is contrary to data that somebody else can go out and collect, because somebody is always trying to tear a hole in anything that could possibly be torn. The single best argument for anthropogenic climate change is that nobody has yet succeeded in blowing a hole in it.

"Possible to live forever"

Iris came to the Institute to have lunch with me. We were sitting and eating the tasty pasta dish she'd made when my friend passed by. He stopped to say hi. Iris picked up on the fact that he was excited about something before I did.

"What's new?" she asked.

"I have discovered that it is possible to live forever," he said, with no hint of irony.

"Oh?," I said, taking another delicious bite of pasta and doing my best to maintain a neutral tone.

He went on to describe how he had noticed that under a set of mathematical assumptions about the pattern of human aging, if one plugs in the right values for various parameters, one can get the result that life expectancy approaches infinity. I'm not going to give away his secrets, or try to explain the bit of calculus he uses, but the whole proof fit on one page including only a handful of equations. There, in black and white was mathematical proof that one could live forever. Well sort of. The math was impeccable, at least I couldn't peck it. The question is how relevant was the mathematical model, and how meaningful were the limits he was taking?

Often when we use mathematical models of the world it is because we think they not only approximate the outcomes of the pattern, but actually describe something about the underlying process. An object fired up into the air will fall to earth in a parabola, a real, honest, no tricks involved parabola. The form arises just from the interplay of momentum and gravity, and the parabola arises, not as a fluke, but under a wide range of gravities and velocities. In other words, we think that sometimes the mathematical ideal is what the world is actually approximating. There is thinking that the mathematical forms my friend employs actually are the underlying form of human aging. They are our best guesses anyway. So maybe, just maybe, exploring the limits of that form tell us something about the limits of possibility when it comes to aging. Unfortunately, relationships that hold under a wide range of velocities often don't hold at the limits. Shoot the object at an improbably high velocity and it will escape Earth's gravity entirely, and likely end up orbiting the Sun, eventually making an ellipse. Shoot the object too slowly and forces such as viscosity, friction and wind become increasingly important, and the object will trace a good approximation of a line-segment to the ground. So while my friend's mathematical discovery is interesting and novel, I remain skeptical that he has found the possibility of immortality. Rather he has shown that if one makes extraordinary and unexpected assumptions, one can arrive at extraordinary and unexpected conclusions. Important, but hardly the key to eternal life.

Sorry to be such a downer.

Stupid Eustachian tube tricks

From Wikipedia:

Some people are born with an ability to voluntarily contract just these muscles called Voluntary Tubal Opening, similar to the ability of those who can wiggle their ears. Those who have this ability can hear "pop" or "click" sound in the middle ear when actuating these muscles, and are able to hold the muscle contraction (some refer to this as 'clicking your ears to equalize the pressure').[citation needed] Doing so will make one's voice sound louder to oneself. This ability allows such people to voluntarily equalize pressures at will when making rapid ascents or descents, typically in aircraft flights or large elevation changes in either tall buildings or mountainous treks.

I am one of these people, although clearing my ears without swallowing wasn't something I was aware I could do until I took SCUBA classes some years ago. When I do this it makes a click loud enough that my wife can hear it if she puts her head close to mine. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to help in clearing a lingering ear infection, as I can't currently get my left ear to click.

Constructive trashing

I very much wanted to like the first paper I peer-reviewed. Having gotten some negative peer reviews on my own papers, I didn't want to inflict the same upon whoever the authors might be. So when the journal sent me the manuscript, I was eager to see the good in it. I wasn't able to find much. The analysis was poorly designed, the questions not clearly framed and the writing somewhat loose and hard to follow. The topic was interesting, and the authors had the data to address it well, but failed to do so. I decided that if I couldn't write a positive review I could at least give detailed criticisms, so that if the authors do rewrite the paper they will have some guidance on what needs to be fixed. To the authors this will look like two pages of dumping, at least at first. I hope they do rewrite, as it has the potential to be a useful paper, and I hope that if they do, they find my comments helpful.

I had decided beforehand that whatever I wrote, I would keep the review anonymous. This means that the journal editors know who wrote it, but the authors do not. They give reviewers the option of signing their reviews, but I'm not sure why. The temptation of course is to sign the positive reviews only, but this is considered something akin to slimy. I prefer to be able to give my opinion without considering what the authors might think of me, or how they will review my papers in the future. Unlike online forums where people can be as abusive as they want because they are entirely anonymous, here the editors of the journal know who wrote what and can respond accordingly.

I'm happy to have been asked, by a well-respected journal, to be a reviewer. I've learned from the experience. Perhaps I should request that next time they send me a paper I'll like?

conflation

Word of the day: Conflate (v)- to mistake two or more separate things as being only one thing, generally in a way that leads to further logical flaws.

from Latin con- (together) -flate (blow, as in inflate).

I'll give you a few examples of conflation:

There was, some years ago, a debate as to what to call that portion of the American electorate who wanted the US government to be run according to the precepts of the right-wing evangelical clergy in the US. Should they be the Evangelical voters, the Christian Right, the Values Voters? It seemed to many on the political left that we should simply use the word which by definition means, "those who advocate for government according to the rules of a particular religion." This word of course is "theocrats.' Leaders of this movement for Christian government, when asked about the term theocrat would reply that this word comes from Greek theos, meaning god and kratos, meaning rule or regime, and therefore theocracy is direct rule by God, and so they weren't advocating for theocracy, merely rule in the name of and in line with their understanding of the will of God. It is a common trick by those who wish to redefine a word for political or rhetorical purposes to conflate etymology with denotation.

In another example from the news, a large species of Atlantic ray, the flapper skate, has been fished nearly to extinction. It had been conflated with the blue skate, a smaller, faster breeding distinct species, such that for several decades we thought the two species were one, with the flapper skates merely being the larger individuals. As the number of larger individuals declined, no legal protections were put in place, as the relatively numerous smaller individuals indicated reproduction was still sufficient to maintain the population. Oops. Now that the two species have been deconflated, we know that the flapper skate is all but gone.

Finally, on this thanksgiving day, let us not conflate sweet potatoes, which are commonly eaten in North America, with yams, which are not. Whether orange or white, they are sweet potatoes.

So what, you might ask is the difference between conflation and confusion? The answer is that conflation is a specific type of confusion, one that is worth being aware of in its own right. Having a name for a logical flaw, in my experience, makes it easier to spot it.

Extinction is evolution

I often enjoy Olivia Judson's science blog on NYTimes.com. She has an actual science background, and gets the science badly wrong far less often than most other reporters of science.

Her most recent post is more in line with what I expect from science journalism. Without recapping her whole argument, she writes, "But if [evolution] has that much potential — how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?"

She then goes on to make a big deal about how evolution fails each time a population fails to evolve. But in so doing she fails to admit the distinction between evolution on the one hand and adaptation on the other.

Evolution is genetic change in lineages with time. Adaptation is the process by which the genetic makeup of a population is altered in a way that helps individuals of that population be more successful in their environment. Adaptation is one mechanism, and result of, evolution. It happens to be the best known mechanism, and the one that in the popular imagination defines evolution. But evolution has lots of other mechanisms. Genetic drift for example. Imagine you have a small population of squirrels on an island, some gray, some black. A disease comes through and kills a significant portion of the squirrels, and even though they are all equally susceptible to the disease, through the randomness of epidemiology more grays than black catch it and die. After the disease, the population has a higher proportion of black alleles than before. The population has evolved, because the proportional genetic makeup of the population has changed. But this is not an example of adaptation, because the genetic change was not caused by one version of the color gene conferring a selective advantage over the other. The allele frequencies "drifted" without being pushed by selective considerations. The next time the disease comes though more black squirrels could happen to catch it, and the allele frequencies could drift back.

So adaptation is not the be all and end all of evolution. Much of the evolution that happens is non-adaptive. And another important mechanisms of evolution is extinction. Imagine now that the disease killed not just some, but all of the squirrels on the island. That population is extinct. They are no longer represented in the genetic diversity of squirrels more generally, of rodents more generally, of mammals more generally. The remaining diversity, through the removal of that population, has changed. The extinct population has ceased evolving, but through their removal the larger group is left genetically less diverse. The genetic makeup of the larger lineage has changed, so evolution has occurred. It is also possible that the residual populations are more fit than the pre-epidemic average, because they are resistant to that particular disease. Whether or not this qualifies as adaptation depends on the fine details of the definition of adaptation you prefer. There is no standardly accepted definition, or rather different groups of biologists prefer different definitions. But all evolutionary biologists, save those who have crossed over into journalism, agree that extinction is an example of, not a failure of, evolution.

Return on Investment in Higher Education

One of the major debates in US politics is usually framed like this: Should we spend more on things that are worth doing, or should we maintain balanced budgets by spending less. The underlying assumption of this type of argument is that spending more necessarily worsens the budget outcome. If the budget outcome income minus spending, doesn't it make sense that spending more worsens the outcome? Only if we can assume that the spending does not spur more income. In other words, only if we assume that investment is impossible. Investment is spending intended to increase income.

After reading Mike Hout's recent article on the importance of public higher education, I was left wondering how public expenditure on higher education compared to other investments in purely budgetary terms. Mike points out that education leads to higher personal incomes, higher rates of entrepreneurship and other good things that increase tax revenues. At the same time education leads to lower rates of things that cost the state money, like imprisonment and needing public assistance through social security/unemployment/health expenditure. So I wondered, how does the expenditure function as a investment. If the state of California could either spend an extra Billion on education, or invest that money in the stock market, how fast would the market have to rise to give better returns than the education (ignoring the non-fiscal benefits of education)?

I wrote to Mike to ask him, and it turns out he is scheduled to give a talk on that very subject here in Rostock some time soon. He sent me a copy of a 129 page report he and colleagues wrote on the subject in 2005. A pdf of that report (or a draft of it) is here.


The concluding summary of the report says:

The state devotes a substantial portion of its budget to supporting education in
California. That support is not wasted: the costs of neglecting education are
high, and the return this investment brings to the state is equally high. Laudable
though it may be, California’s investment in higher education is insufficient. If
things stay as they are now, that is, if future students progress through their
educational careers at the same rates as their ethnic counterparts did in 2000, the
state will suffer a net loss, and that loss will increase as years pass. With no other
changes, the state will forgo revenues from the increased earnings that education
encourages, and pay more to support a population in a situation of increased
poverty and incarceration. If, rather than maintaining the per-person level of
educational support and access, the state were to limit capacity, the situation
would become even more dire.
However, based on existing trends in educational demand, we expect that high
school graduation rates and college going rates will increase, and demands on
state support for education will climb commensurately. California will have to
invest in community colleges and universities in the short run, but both the state
and its residents will benefit handsomely from this additional support in the long
run. Our calculations suggest net savings to the state will exceed the additional cost by three-fold or four-fold, while its population will enjoy lower levels of poverty, crime, and dependency, and higher levels of average income and political participation.

(Emphasis mine)

The report also specifies in great detail the time scale on which these returns occur, and the majority of returns are "realized in the first ten years after investment because the benefits it buys -- lower welfare, less crime, and healthier children -- are problems/ benefits that disproportionately affect 18-34 year olds."

Now this suggests that we are getting 300% return within the first ten years. So let's just say our $1Billion turns into $3Billion by the end of ten years. That is about 11.5% annual return on investment (1.115^10= 2.97), better than the 11% average rise in the Dow Jones from 1926 through to its pre-dot com bust peak in 1999.

I am a strong believer in the value of education, and would gladly quadruple expenditure on education, but I find this purely monetary claim incredible. This is such an extraordinary claim that we are forced to consider the background of the person making it. The only one of the authors I know is Mike, and what I know about him is that he is the Chair of the best Demography graduate program in the Western Hemisphere, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a careful scholar. Mike does not go around spouting grand pronouncements. If he makes a claim like this it is because his analysis tells him it is true. There really is a strong argument to be made that in purely fiscal terms, investment in higher education pays off better and more consistently than investment in stock.

In that light, two things surprise me. First, that I haven't heard that argument made before. I hang around with a lot of people distraught about the direction American (and particularly Californian) higher education is going, and no one has ever mentioned this. Second, I'm amazed that Wall Street hasn't tried to securitize this yet.

I'm eager to hear what new work on the subject Mike will be presenting at his talk.

Finally, and sadly, I've just heard that Berkeley's demography department won't be able to accept any new graduate students this year. The lack of funding makes it impossible for them to hire faculty to replace those who have retired or left for better funded institutions. If this does not improve in the next few years, I would guess the department will have to close its doors.

Urg.

I just got back a paper I submitted last month. They didn't reject it, but they want major revisions. I'm currently too sick to think through exactly what needs to be changed, or rather how little reanalysis and rewriting I can get away with doing. I want it to be a good paper, but I also want to be done with it so I can write other papers. And of course I want it to be published.

Iris also has rewriting and resubmitting to do, so we can be grumpy as a family.

Education, hippies and commies

Iris: This guy is writing about a pipe dream:

Me: True, but it is a good pipe-dream. A well reasoned and researched pipe-dream with a firm empirical basis and deep social wisdom.

Iris: You mean he's a hippy.

Me: Actually, he's the Demography Department Chair at Berkeley.

Iris: Difference?


Prof. Mike Hout's recent piece on Rationing College Opportunity is timely and worth a read. One question he doesn't address, but I will likely write to him and ask: How long does it take for government investment in college level education to budgetarily* repay the government through taxes and avoided expenditures due to all the economic benefits he discusses? I would guess someone has made such an estimate, and if they haven't they certainly should.

The piece was published in The American Prospect. The subtitle of The American Prospect is "Liberal Intelligence" which Iris takes as further proof that only hippies or possibly communists** write for it.

Anyway, Mike writes well and I suggest you give his pipe-dream a read.


* Yes I know that budgetarily isn't a word, but my Grandma Esther, one of the finest kindergarten/1st grade teachers New York City has ever known, told me that because the English Language does so much for us, we have to do what we can for it. Therefore, to her thinking, we have the responsibility not only to use it well, but to give it new words that it should have but somehow doesn't have yet. 'Budgetarily' for example.

** Note that Iris was raised among hippies, and is the only person I know who waxes poetical about Soviet architecture, so she means the terms "communists" and "hippy" in the fondest possible senses. Further note that my Grandma Esther was a socialist with strong communist leanings, and would have agreed with Iris that Prof. Hout sounds like some kind of commie.

Emails from the Chancelor

UC Berkeley is having a bad day:

From: Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
to "Academic Senate Faculty, Staff, All Academic Titles, Other Members of the Campus Community, Students,"
date Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 9:02AM
subject URGENT: Wheeler Hall


The campus police are working to resolve a protest action that is occurring in Wheeler Hall. Staff, faculty and students who would normally be working in Wheeler Hall are asked to remain out of the building until further notice. Employees who can contact their supervisors should talk to them if possible to determine whether telecommuting or relocation to another work area is an option. Those in the building right now are advised to leave until the situation has been resolved.

Employees who remain on campus may check in at Dwinelle Plaza at 10am. for further information.

Thank you to all of the members of the campus community for your patience in this matter.

And at 10:42AM California time:

Campus police continue to work to resolve the protest action at Wheeler Hall. Campus police are striving to end the occupation of Wheeler Hall with the safety of our campus community, including all those involved in this action, as an uppermost priority.

Wheeler Hall will remain closed until further notice. Instructors who teach in Wheeler Hall will be contacted shortly by e-mail.

And at 11:30 local time:

Approximately 200 protestors are continuing to demonstrate on the south side of campus in the area around Wheeler Hall. Wheeler Hall is occupied by protestors and the building remains locked.

All classes at Wheeler are suspended until further notice and employees who work in Wheeler Hall are advised that they should plan on not being able to enter the building for the remainder of the work day. Employees should confirm alternative work arrangements with their supervisor, as possible. Instructors who teach in Wheeler Hall are being contacted by e-mail.

Fire alarms have been intentionally set off in several buildings including Barrows, Dwinelle, and Sproul Hall. The fire department is verifying that these are false alarms and will allow people to reenter buildings when it is safe to do so.

The safety of our campus community, including those involved in this protest, are an utmost priority of our police as they work to resolve the situation.

Thank you to all members of the campus community for your continued patience in this matter. Please check for updates throughout the day on the Berkeley home page http://berkeley.edu

Concepts in the evolution of senescence about which I am increasingly skeptical:

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic mortality
Optimality hypothesis
Mutation Accumulation hypothesis
Agonistic Pleiotropy hypothesis
Disposable Soma hypothesis
Caloric Restriction Effects
"Rate of living" hypothesis

This list includes most of the theoretical basis for the field

Business trips

I'm being sent for three days in Paris next week. Most of it will be spent touring a laboratory and meeting with the potential collaborators who run it. Still it will be nice to see Paris.

A couple of weeks later I may be going for a meeting in Cologne, to talk with another potential collaborator. Again, it will mostly be work, but it will be nice to see Cologne.

Iris isn't coming with me on either of these business trips, but she may well get a baguette and some cologne out of it.

Hard to know what she will get this weekend on our trip to Hamburg, given that we are vegetarians.