Knee deep in the fetid pools of evolution

I am, as I may have told you before, an evolutionary biologist at heart. And one of the things I love about evolution is how messy, random and complicated it is. Evolutionary outcomes aren't just survival of the fittest, but also reproduction of the luckiest and replication of the not overly deleterious. Natural selection often doesn't get its way and the optimal trait often doesn't exist or can't quite win out. Evolution is a box of dirty tooth-marked mismatched Legos with no instructions all in clumps from previous projects, and that is how I like my Legos

So I always enjoy talking with colleagues who really think about evolution in depth, not as a nice neat optimization process (which it isn't) or a collection of family tree (which it can be, but this misses the forest) but rather as the beautiful mucky anarchic tangled mess of genes, lineages, mutations and highly fallible biology that it is. Sure, there is a lot of phylogeny in there, and a bunch of natural selection, which to an extent can optimize things, but it is like optimizing the design of a boat when all you have to work with is coconut husks, maple syrup and a swarm of fire ants. It isn't so much optimization with constraints as a bowl of constraints with optimized sprinkles on top. To really capture the beauty of it you have to do away with the basically creationist notion that organisms are perfect for their niches and the anarchic view that biology follows the rules we write in text books. Organisms only breed with members of their own species, except when they don't, and clones are genetically identical to each other, unless you look closely.  Only changes to DNA are heritable, except those non-DNA heritable traits. Rules, broadly defined, do not apply to fungi. The dissertation that was defended from me this week showed that in real wild populations, genetic drift is sufficient to speed aging and shorten lifespan. These populations aren't short lived because there is something optimal about it, but rather because drift isn't letting selection have its own way. I'm oversimplifying, and you'll have to wait for the details to come out, but it is a wonderful example of evolution in its slip-shod Rube Goldberg glory.

I'd like spend more time with colleagues who think deeply about the gorgeous multi-layered sub-optimality of evolution. That's where the fun is.

Brave=Denotation(Foolish)-Connotation(Foolish)*2

When colleagues started telling me that what I was doing was brave, I knew I was in trouble. People tell you are brave as you march off to war, or volunteer to babysit multiple toddlers around bedtime, or (it seems), when you undertake the organizing of a new scientific society. They mean, "Man, you're going to end up unemployed, but I'm sure glad you are doing it instead of me."

I waited until they had a few drinks in them and had mostly finished going back for seconds on the salmon, then commandeered one of the cocktail tables as a podium. I proposed the formation of an society and then opened the floor for discussion.

The good news is that we now have about 50 members including many of the big names in the field. The bad news is that everyone seems to think I have an actual plan. How will we fund the first meeting? What kind of official and financial structure should we have? Will we take over that other, mostly defunct but somewhat related society for the benefit of their infrastructure and their resources, or will we start fresh? Do we need to incorporate? I don't know any of these things.

So here is what I am doing. I'm organizing the election of a board, and I'm making sure there are people who know what they are doing standing for election. I'm communicating with the people who will organize the first meeting next year. I want the society to exist, and I'm happy to help, but I certainly don't plan to run the thing by myself. That would be a little bit too brave.

lebenslauf

I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of these German CVs. The lebenslauf (life run) is the rough equivlent to a curriculum vitae, but it is a lot more personal. Many of the lebenslaufen I have seen contain not only educational and employment infomation, skills and other things relevant to qualifications, but also things that from my frame of reference simply don't belong. What legitmate reason would a potential employer have for wanting to know the applicant's religion, the name and employment of her parents and siblings, what primary school she went to and her photograph?

Will the culture shock ne'er end?

Christmas Party of Science

I was Santa Clause at the Institute’s X-mas party this year. I asked everyone if they had been good, and handed out presents and chocolate. I made small children cry. I got chocolate in my long white beard. It was great. I think it speaks to how far Germany has come that no one thought it odd to have a Jewish Santa.

My favorite part of the party was the Powerpoint Karaoke. This is a game which could be popular only with academics. Each player gets up to give a talk with power-point slides, which sounds boring, until you consider that he has never seen these slides before, and they are on a topic he likely knows nothing about. There were three contestants, including Santa, and each of us prepared a set of slides another one of us had to speak on. We were not kind to each other. My friend Jon spoke first, on a set of slides I had made, on sesquipedalianisms. I had the longest and most complicated words in several languages under the bright red heading “SAY THESE WITH ME!!.” He made a valiant attempt. Next I got up, in costume, and my slides were entirely in Greek. I recognized the alphabet, but had no idea what any of the words said, and there were no pictures. Lucky for me, most of my audience also didn’t read Greek, so I pretended that I knew exactly what the slides said, and that they were designed to correct common misconceptions about Santa (e.g., Santa does not in fact employ any reindeer, as their odor offends his sensitive nose.) The talk went quite well, and only afterwards did I find out that it was a presentation in Greek on numerical modeling. Finally, my friend Mikko got up and gave a talk on obscure economic phenomena he knew nothing about. He did a creditable job of pretending he knew what he was saying, or rather of being so precise in his vagaries that it was a believable if entirely uninformative talk. It was the first time I’d played this game, but I think it will not be the last.

Frohe Weinachten! Ho Ho ho!!!