On a related note:

University of California's endowment loses $1Billion in value.

"UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said that if the financial markets continue their downward slide in coming years, there could be future reduction in endowment support for scholarships, research and funding to recruit and retain faculty, among other things."

Graduating into a Depression

The number of professorships in the country does not vary much from year to year. Usually the number of positions opening up approximately equals the number of professors dying, retiring or moving to other jobs. Occasionally a new campus opens or there is a major expansion of enrollment, and a bunch of new positions are created. Other times the economy sucks (to use the technical term) and as a cost-cutting measure positions are retired or left vacant for a few years. As an example, the budget problems California has been having ever since the dot com bust have caused UC Berkeley to greatly increase the average time between one professor leaving and another being hired.
Right now, professorships are hard to get and I fully expect them to get harder. Somebody or other, a housing economist I think, was on NPR today predicting that the housing market will hit bottom in another three years. I expect the academic job market to hit bottom around the same time, or possibly a year or two later.

Which brings me to me. I will be getting my PhD in a little under a year. I then expect to spend two or three years as a Post-Doctoral researcher in Germany. That should have me searching for an assistant professorship just about the time there are no professorships of any sort to be had.

President-Elect Obama, I think an investment in our nation's universities and research institutes would be a great way to stimulate the economy, improve education and develop the technologies we need to deal with environmental issues and health care. Sooner is better than later. I have this three-year plan.

Team of Science

We attempted to get me and my entire team of undergraduate rotifer wranglers into our tiny lab space all at once. Two people couldn't make it, but 12 of us plus a photographer jammed in. The room is 12m^2 but about half of space that is occupied with counters, furniture and large equipment. Hopefully at my next job I will have a larger lab space, a smaller team, or both.

Population Doubling

As I am preparing for my talk, I am doing some intense demographic analysis of my rotifer data set. One interesting factoid I have calculated is that the population doubling time, assuming I could keep an infinite number of rotifers and didn't have to get rid of any, is 28 hours.

A related calculation: If I started with one newly hatched rotifer and let the population grow (with my average age-specific reproductive rates and death rates), after one month I would have 159 million rotifers.

The average volume of a rotifer is about .001 cubic millimeters. A million of them pressed together makes one milliliter. A billion makes a liter. 10^27 would be a cubic kilometer. Earth's oceans have a total volume of 1.347*10^9 cu km, meaning I would need 1.347*10^36 rotifers to fill them completely with no space between rotifers. At the demographic rates they maintain in my lab, assuming I didn't cull any, this would take 138 days.

I only have time, container space and staff to keep track of 450 rotifers at a time, so I end up culling a significant portion of my population every day.

Rotifer Demography Talk Wednesday

I'm a biology grad student, but my funding and my fellowship are all through the Demography department. One service I return to the Demography department is to attend their weekly seminar and who ever the speaker is, suggest biological literature relevant to her topic of study. Some demographers take better to this than others. Most seem to appreciate the new perspective, even if they are not really interested in thinking about humans in a biological context. (For the record, I also go to biology talks and bring up demographic concerns.)

The next speaker I will have to deal with differently, because the speaker this coming week is me. I'll be presenting on demographic aspects of my rotifer research. Age specific mortality and reproduction. Effect of food supply on longevity. Infant mortality. I'll get into the biology a bit too, but mostly they'll want to hear about the demographics. If I was in my audience, I would suggest more of a focus on the biology.

Whose next?

Of the thirteen students working with me in on rotifer work, only one is white Christian heterosexual male. This never occurred to me before yesterday, when we were sitting around the lab, talking about the fact that should Obama win, he would be the first POTUS who was not a straight white Christian man.

I asked my students if they thought, now that we were getting a non-white president, we would have a female president, a non-Christian president or a homosexual president first. Some said we would have a woman soon, others said America would elect a Jewish president before a woman. Everyone agreed that there is still too much bias against homosexuals to have an openly gay president any time soon. I asked them if they thought Americans would ever elect a scientist as president. They all said no, and a couple of them said that was probably a good thing.

Three of my students a naturalized citizens, and therefore are barred by our constitution from running for president. But the other ten, in my opinion, should all have equal shots at the White House. The fact that they are all science students studying evolution at Berkeley means that this chance is zero is bearable, so long as it is an equal and unbiased zero.

Strengths

In science, as in most anything, it pays to know your strengths and weaknesses.

I am about as good as anyone I have known at understanding, remembering, integrating and evaluating biological concepts. I am terrible at calculus. I am very good at recruiting, evaluating and training assistants. I am hopelessly slow at learning programming. I have very steady hands for lab work and a hip that is bad enough to keep me from doing much field work. I am a gifted improviser and a mediocre follower of protocols. I am the king of scrounging and am pretty good at applying for funding, but I struggle with remembering to do the accounting or keeping track of receipts. I am a great teacher but a disinterested disciplinarian. I am unrivaled in my ability to start research projects, but need serious improvement in my ability to finish them. I have great fun with ideas but no fun with spelling. I collaborate well but self-motivate poorly. I am good at being blunt and bad at being not-blunt. I am a good scientist, but need improvement as an academic.

What I've been working on

Here is the last bit of my post-doc fellowship application:

Summary and Conclusion:
Evolutionary Biodemography has focused on explaining late-life mortality patterns and overall longevity. The evolutionary basis of early-life mortality has been studied more rarely and less systematically. My proposal boils down to four basic steps intended to firmly establish the field of early-life evolutionary biodemography:
1. Mathematically define and parameterize the age specific mortality patterns that characterize Human-like Early-life Mortality (HEM).
2. Compile, review and organize those evolutionary hypotheses potentially explaining HEM.
3. Use these hypotheses to predict life-history traits that may be necessary causative factors of HEM, and thereby predict which taxonomic groups are not subject to HEM.
4. Gather data to determine in what species or populations, if any, HEM does not occur, thereby testing my collection of evolutionary hypotheses.
Early life mortality has a tremendous effect on a wide range of populations, and our failure to date to understand its evolutionary basis is a major gap in our understanding of both evolution and demography. Working at MPIDR, I will begin to fill that gap.

Writing to the audience

One of the most basic pragmatic points of writing is tailoring the language one uses to one's intended audience. I would use different words in a text book for first graders than in a paper sent to a scientific journal, even if the exact same concept was being communicated. I have to estimate the assumptions, interests, background knowledge, tolerance for jargon and a host of other parameters about my readers in order to write in the most useful voice and tone.

This becomes a problem when I don't know who my audience is. I am applying for a DAAD research grant, and while I know I need to submit four copies of my proposal, I have no information on the four people who will be reviewing it. They may be four evolutionary biologists, in which case I would like to write a fairly detailed and technical proposal, using all the appropriate terminology, so as to show that I know my topic and have detailed plans. They may be four non-biologists, but still natural scientists. They may be social-scientists, or a mix of academics from all fields. They may be (although I doubt it) four German first-graders, in which case I would write a very different proposal. But as I don't know who they are, I have been trying to write a proposal which is appropriate to all of these groups, and finding it nearly impossible. How does one write an audience-neutral grant application?

All global warming is local

I got home from the lab late last night and turned on NPR. There was a voice I instantly recognized, my major professor, and the director of the MVZ, Craig Moritz. What, I wondered, was Craig doing in my radio at this late hour? Being interviewed by All Things Considered for this piece on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Yosemite National Park.
Mean monthly minimum temperatures in Yosemite have risen by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the hundred years since the MVZ's first director, Joseph Grinnell, surveyed the wildlife there. Apparently in response, many of the wildlife species in the park have moved their upper and lower limits thousands of feet higher than they were.

The project is described in great detail here, and a subset of the Yosemite data were just published in Science. I wasn't involved in this work, in case you were wondering.

Compresed Timeline

The Max Planck Society is a network of research institutes, mostly but not entirely in Germany. Many people consider it, to be the world's leading non-university research organization. The member institutes are more or less autonomous in terms of planning and executing research, as far as I understand, but all of them have the reputation for world-leading excellence.

A couple of years ago, at a conference on aging I had the pleasure of meeting the Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Jim Vaupel. At the time, he and my professors, Ron Lee, discussed the possibility of me coming to MPIDR at some point. I was excited by the prospect. Here at Berkeley there is effectively no one outside of Ron's lab group who thinks much about the kinds of questions I do, while MPIDR has a whole Evolutionary Biodemography Lab, at which they think about and work on pretty much everything I do, plus a lot more.
But then I went off to PNG, and then I was injured, and pretty soon I figured the opportunity had passed. But then I got an email announcing that there was a fellowship available through the German Academic Exchange Service (better known by its German acronym, DAAD, for North American researchers to come work in Germany if they had the invitation of a German institution. The email conversation that followed was suprisingly short, spanning little more than 24 hours, and completely reorganized my timeline for finishing grad school. If I may paraphrase, it went something like this:

Me to Ron: Should I apply for a DAAD fellowship to work at MPIDR.
Ron to me: Do you want me to ask them?
Me: Yes, thank you.
Ron to Jim Vaupel: Dan is an excellent young biologist, should he apply for a DAAD fellowship to come work there?
Jim to Ron (to me): Yes, he should apply, but even if he doesn't get the fellowship he should come here as soon as is convenient, and we can support him.

Just like that, no application, no interview, I had a desirable post-doctoral position lined up at a time when the economy is tanking and most of my peers are wondering if there will be any positions for them at all. My deliberations consisted of describing the situation to my wife to make sure she didn't mind spending some time on the Baltic, and emailing Dr. Vaupel to make sure I understood him properly.

What this means for my grad-school timeline is that instead of 16 to 21 months, I have eight to ten months to finish. I was thinking I would finish December of 2009 or May of 2010. After the offer from MPIDR, I thought I would have to finish by August of 2009. Afer talking to my major proffessor today, it is clear I need to be pretty much done by May of 2009.

My department's commencment is May 23rd 2009, and I plan to walk then, if at all possible. I won't actually be finished at that point, but I will be finished enough to convince my faculty persons that I can file my disertation before the end of summer. My wife's graduation from UC Davis is mid-June 2009. That summer I will finish my dissertation, then we will pack up our lives, take the cat's to my sister's house, and fly to Germany.

That seems like a lot to accomplish in one year.

Yikes.

Student Researchers

I've added a Student Researcher section to my website, so all my students can have research sites. There will be more in the coming days.

I wiggle my eyebrows ~1000 times a day.

I spend about eight hours a day in front of a microscope. I generally have a student on either side of me. I look at the first rotifer in our population and report how many eggs and juveniles it has, whether it is alive, and anything else notable about it. "Two forty six dash bee five is alive has three eggs, two juveniles and extended foot syndrome. The largest juvenile has one egg."
The student on my left, at the computer, enters all of this into the spreadsheet and tells me what to do with the juveniles, based on our established culling rules. "Put the biggest juvi in two forty eight dash a one, cull the other two."
I pick up the mom rotifer in a specially bent glass pipette and wiggle my eyebrows such that my glasses slide off my forehead and onto my nose so that I can see the student to my right. She uses her pipette to point at the hole where the rotifer is going. I squeeze the bulb at the end of my pipette to eject the rotifer into that hole. She looks through a second microscope to make sure the rotifer is actually there. I push my glasses back up, look through my microscope, pick up the juvenile, wiggle my eyebrows again, move it to the well where it needs to go, then move on. All of this takes 15 seconds to one minute, depending on the complexity and which students are working with me. We repeat this process 450 more times each day. By the end of each day we have gathered more demographic data than many field studies of long-lived vertebrates do in several decades. By the end of a month we can see significant evolutionary changes based on the selective pressures we apply through our decisions about who to cull and how much to feed them. It is not glamorous, but it is effective.

One foot in this world...

From my perspective as an evolutionary biologist, all of the social sciences are parts of the study of human behavior, which is a part of the study of animal behavior, which is a part of biology. I don't generally bring this up to the social scientists I know.

I recently attended a talk, in which the speaker was an historical economist, studying the marriage market in post-WWI France. The lack of marriageable men(due to combat fatalities) led to the surviving males having the ability to be much more choosy than they otherwise would. Many men were able to marry women from social classes higher than their own. Many women simply never married. This effect faded away as a new crop of young men got old enough to marry. At the end of his talk I raised my hand, and asked if he was aware of the biological literature on the effect of skewed operational sex ratios on mate choice and assortative mating. I believe that the idea of looking at the literature on the same phenomenon in other species hadn't occurred to him. To a natural scientist this is almost scandalous. To a social scientist, it is the standard and correct way to proceed. It is a very different world view.

But now my field of expertise is becoming evolutionary demography, which draws as much from social science as it does from natural science, and this has begun to affect my thinking. This afternoon I was presenting my research plans to my professor's lab group, and one of the biologists asked why everything I said kept relating back to humans. I told him that as I was studying post-reproductive lifespan, and humans have more PRLS than any other species we know of, and we know more about it in humans, and therefore it was inevitable that most of our questions and methods would relate back to humans. It took me a minute to realize this wasn't the whole truth. The broader answer was that I had started to think a bit like a social scientist, meaning anthropocentrically. In the social sciences one doesn't need an excuse to focus on humans, the social sciences are all about humans. Having a conversation with social scientists requires one to be able to understand anthropocentric thinking, and if one practices this enough, one can start to think like them.

There are times when anthropocentrism is absolutely necessary and proper. Most of human activity revolves around interactions with other humans, and many of the problems we face can only be understood by focusing deeply on understanding humans. Part of the reason I work on problems relating to humans is because that is what society values, and as I've said before, I think this is appropriate. But the reason society (through a grant to an economic demographer) is paying me, rather than an economist or a demographer to do this work, is because it is useful to have your conversation about humans be illuminated by knowledge of other species.

If I stay in this field, which I plan to, I will have to learn how to converse one moment with those for whom humans are almost everything, and the next with those for whom humans are just one very over-studied species.

Whither hence?

My PhD is preparing me to be an expert in evolutionary demography.

The question is, what does one do with such expertise? There are maybe ten researchers in the world with a focus on evolutionary demography. How likely is it one of them will need a post-doctoral scholar when I need a post-doctoral position?

You want fries with that?

Pompous Lab name needed

I need a door sign. My laboratory space is a tiny little nothing of a room directly across from the main elevators. Everyone walks right past it, even people who are looking for me, because it looks like it should be a janitor's closet or boiler room. I need a big sign on the door that lets everyone know it is a research space. I could just put up a sign saying "Dan's lab space." or "Rotifer Lab," but neither of those is entirely satisfying. I'm thinking more grandiose, more pompous. That and I'd like to have the conceptual idea Evolutionary Demography as part of the name. Here are some initial ideas.

Berkeley Evolutionary Demography Society (BEDS)
Berkeley Laboratory for Evolutionary Demography (BLED)
Berkeley Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Demography (BLEED)
Laboratory for Evolutionary Demography (LED)
Institute for Evolutionary Demography (IED)
Dan's Institute for Evolutionary Demography (DIED)
Levitis Institute for Evolutionary Demography (LIED)
Center on Evolutionary Demography (CoED)
Center for Evolutionary Demography and Rotifers (CEDaR)
Society for Experimental Evolutionary Demography (SEED)
Berkeley Evolutionary Demography Laboratory (BED Lab)

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Editorial of Science: No More Years

My work on the evolution of aging got started on the basis that the National Institute on Aging is better funded than almost any other non-military research branch of the government. Older people vote, politicians and administrators tend to be older, and our population is getting older, so we offer funding to researchers who will work on issues relating to aging. I happen to also find the topic fascinating, and think it raises wonderful evolutionary questions, but I would not have ended up pursuing it if there was no funding available. America cares about aging, so I study it.

In many ways, this is how it should be. If you hire a doctor or a lawyer, you are likely to have some specific benefits you are willing to individually pay for. Remove the cancer, fight the charges. When society hires an academic researcher, individual level benefits are likely to be few or far off, but society expects societal returns. Those who funded early research into the nature of electricity did not anticipate the particular technologies we enjoy based on that work, but they correctly predicted it would somehow be very useful to society.

Few objective observers could deny that for much of the twentieth century, American science and technology greatly outpaced most other developed countries, and much of our economic, military and diplomatic power was derived, at least in part, from this technical prowess. America was one of the best places to do science, and this drew many of the finest scientists from around the world to move their activities, and their intellectual contributions, to America. Einstein is one obvious example. The term "brain drain" was invented in part to describe the mass movement of scientists and academics from other countries to the US. The US government not only invested heavily in science, it valued science, honored scientists and encouraged its citizens to see scientific progress as vital to our national future.

How things have changed. Several of the most promising young American scientists I know have moved to other countries, because the US is no longer competitive in funding or respecting science. Why study evolution in the US when New Zealand will pay you more and take your work more seriously? Why work on alternative energy technology when Canada or Germany will give you many times the research funding and implement your advances more quickly? Scientists follow the priorities of their society, or they move to another society.

Those who read the American press often hear about how America needs more scientists. But when I ask promising science majors why they are going into medicine or industrial engineering instead of science, they inevitably mention uncertainty about whether it is possible to make a decent living in science. Four years of college, two years of a masters degree and five years of doctoral study to qualify for a post-doctoral assistantship making $35K a year? No one smart enough to be a scientist thinks that's a financially desirable option. We can't have more scientists until we have more, and better paying, and better funded, and better respected, positions in science.

This national problem has gotten particularly bad over the past eight years. The right wing of the Republican Party takes a particularly low view of science. This is partly because they espouse a particularly anti-intellectual form of populism. In this view, normal people should only respect other normal people, and anyone who is too smart or too educated is not normal, but rather elite. The highly educated (who conveniently are overwhelmingly Democratic according to most polls) don't understand you and are keeping you down.
But the rightwing also dislikes science because science keeps producing answers that are contrary to the dictates of the far right. The far right knows that evolution does not occur, global warming is a naturally occurring hoax and trees are the primary cause of air pollution. The far right knows that Abstinence Only Sexual Education reduces pre-marital sex and teen pregnancy. The far right knows that homosexuality has no biological basis, that cities with more guns have fewer shootings, that we can drill our way to lower oil prices and that prayer is the most effective medicine. The far right knows that the lower our tax rates the higher our tax income. Science has the gall, the sheer pointy-headed elitist snobbery, to fail to support even one of these views, and to provide data directly contradicting most of them. The far right responds by treating science, and scientists, as somewhere between irrelevant and the enemy. Worse, under the Bush administration, there has been the consistent effort to bend, break or fabricate the conclusions of science to support every politically expedient fantasy. Research funding has been cut, science belittled and distorted and scientific reports edited, suppressed and distorted like never before.

This brings me to the current Republican ticket. John McCain has staked much of his campaign on the promise that drilling for oil in the US can bring down consumer fuel prices in the near future, a proposition one needs only simple arithmetic to disprove. Governor Palin is among the most anti-intellectual figures in her party, which is why the religious right so adores her. She strongly holds all of the fantasy-based, anti-intellectual views of the theocratic base. She has sworn to fight those who want evolution taught, those who want to do something about global warming, those who support sex-education policies that actually accomplish something and so on. Under a McCain-Palin administration, we can expect not only a continuation, but a strengthening of the Bush anti-science agenda. Should this happen the US faces a new brain drain, but in reverse. If science is not funded and not respected in the US, scientists in the US will have little choice but to give up science, or take their skills and knowledge elsewhere.
More immediately, and more importantly, we as a nation cannot afford to have another administration that so thoroughly rejects the foundational assumption of science: the best way to understand the world is by carefully observing it. The Bush-Cheney administration has consistently refused to allow observations of the world to influence their understanding of the world, or their strategies within it. Every sign points to a similar immunity to reality in any McCain-Palin administration. We can afford no more years of that.

Eek!

This semester I am taking on the biggest and most complicated experiment I have ever attempted. Three populations of 150 rotifers, each population with different rules about how each individual is fed and which ones I cull. Frightening complexity just in planning the experiment, not to mention hiring an training enough undergraduates to staff 150 person-hours per week. This is not going to be an easy time, but I think it could produce a really significant paper. Lucky for me, my advisors think so too, and I should have enough funds to pull it all off.

Biodemography poem

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~dlevitis/213ex1

Picture of Science! Kitten in an Academic Household