Agent Scully, Reporting For Duty

For over 10 years I've been called "Scully". It was initially the long black coat that did it, then the glasses (every time I bought a new set of frames, she appeared with very similar ones), the passport photo, and finally dyeing my hair red (for shits and giggles). At a PhD interview in Chicago in 2003, I came face-to-face with a grad-student who was the living image of Mitch Pileggi. It was proposed that I went up to him and said "Hey Skinner, have you seen Mulder?", but I wimped out (plus my American accent is rubbish).

Now, finally it has been shown - I AM Agent Dana Scully, from the X-Files...

"If we're good enough for Julia, are we good enough for you?"

Ping!

Which was the noise my back made yesterday, as I became yet another statistic - one of those people who injure themselves doing something really simple and mundane (in my case, pulling up my pants after a trip to the toilet, a task I have completed several times a day for at least the past 23-24 years). I've strained a muscle. I think it's the lower part of the trapezius that I've done in, so the opposite end to the more usual neck strain.

Managed to get out of work (I was on my way out when I stopped off for a "comfort break"), but halfway to the station I had to stop walking because it was so painful. And of course it was standing room only. It wasn't the wisest decision to get on the train, but to get a seat on a Heathrow-bound train from Green Park, I'd have been waiting for hours and I just wanted to get home.

I thought I'd be going to the doctor today - Paul was all for making me go. But I've woken up with less pain and only partially restricted movement (full motion in my arm but I can't look over my right shoulder) as the amazing machine that is the human body gets to work repairing it. I checked with my mum (felt a bit guilty asking her about back strain as she's just had major spine surgery and would probably kill for as little pain as I'm in right now) and I appear to be doing everything right (heat pack and maximum dose of ibuprofen and paracetamol). It's a pity it's thoracic rather than lumbar as then I could wear Paul's back brace.

So I have resigned myself to going into work. I have a back support and a good chair there, so once I've dealt with the journey I'm probably best off there!

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #3

Whilst on holiday, Paul and I stopped at the cafe in the pool complex. It was a toss-up between the Sun and the Times, so we opted to share the latter while we slurped our lattes. Normally, the science editor, Mark Henderson, is pretty good, so I was disappointed to read "The dinosaurs that burrowed to safety when Earth was hit by an asteroid". Unfortunately, Henderson has taken several key facts and made about 50 out of 1+1+1:

• Oryctodromeus cubicularis exhibited burrowing behaviour
  
• Burrowing behaviour allows individuals to escape harsh environmental conditions
  
• Survival of terrestrial vertebrates at the K-T boundary has been attributed to sheltering/burrowing behaviour

This is all very well and good, but the problem is that O. cubicularis lived 30 million years before the K-T extinction event. So this article is not introducing the dinosaurs that burrowed to safety when Earth was hit by an asteroid. They weren't even there, man! I just hope there are sufficient people intelligent to work this one out before we get some hack in the red-tops saying "Dinosaurs survived the asteroid".

I haven't read Dave Varricchio's paper yet (don't have access to Proceedings B). With any luck the Times at least got the quotes in properly. I've suffered from Chinese-Whispers-esque idiocy on the part of journalists (BBC News did a re-hash of a Wash U Record article which even then didn't get my quotes right!) and I've taken the flak for it in the community, so can sympathise if this is a "But I didn't say that!" moment.

Oh, and if you were looking for page 32 of the Times in the coffee shop at the Plaza, I took it. Consider yourself fortunate not to have had to read the article for yourself.

Holiday Village

Paul and I have just got back from a short break at Center Parcs in Longleat Forest. We went with his brother and sister-in-law, and two of our friends. For my American readers, Center Parcs is (I believe) a pan-European holiday village - families or groups stay in villas or apartments in the forest, and a variety of activities are available for all age groups. We had a fantastic time, despite the less-than-clement British weather (nothing quite like riding a horse in the rain...). Between us, we signed up for archery, climbing, abseiling, falconry, fencing, tai-chi, clay pigeon shooting and horse riding. And of course there was the all-important spa. I took my running kit and went for a 2-mile run round the pines, which probably undid much of the good my hour-long Swedish massage did, but it all felt good.

Paul and I had never been on holiday as a couple with other couples, so this was a nice change. We had a really good, very grown-up holiday (four bottles of wine, a crate of beer, a bottle of tequila and half a bottle of gin were consumed between the six of us over the course of four evenings), and got a lot of fresh air. The village really came into its own at dusk, when all the kids were inside. The boardwalk, in the mist, looked out onto tall pines with little lights dotted in between - more than one of us thought it looked a bit like the Star Wars planet Endor.

But here's the thing - the whole place was wasted on small children. The parents looked exhausted (I saw one father chain-smoking whilst cycling along with his child in a buggy behind), and the toddlers were without exception screaming the place down at every available opportunity. I did not see one happy baby. The question had been put - why bother going to Center Parcs if you don't have children? Well, why bother going to Center Parcs if you do have children? The little shits were hardly grateful to their parents or enjoying themselves, so they may as well have gone to Skeggy for the day. Any residual broodiness any of the party may have had was thrashed out by the little darling in the sweet shop screaming "IIIIIIIIII WAAAAAAAAAANT AAAAAAAAA TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYYYYY!" at the top of its lungs. A dog is far happier with its existing toys - in fact the dogs I know will reject new toys in favour of the old stinky saliva-ridden ones.

Now, don't get me wrong - Center Parcs must be fantastic for kids over the age of 10 or so. I remember my aunt and uncle bringing my cousins to the Sherwood Forest one a few times, but they were in their early- to mid-teens at the time. And I'm pretty sure a 13-year-old will not scream down the sweet shop because they want a toy. I think we'll go back to Center Parcs - it was a really good value holiday, and I got to try so many new things. But we would never go back with small children. Would love to take a dog there though - we saw such a happy alsatian out with his mum and dad, and he was grinning from ear to ear. There's someone who had fun at Center Parcs.

*Cough*Backpedalling*Cough*

According to today's Financial Times, the four big US car chiefs are pledging to fight global warming. This is Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota (North America) and General Motors. You may remember that three of these companies (Ford, Chrysler and GM) were the ones at the Detroit Motor Show, who said that us Europeans were "quasi-hysterical" over our claims that global warming was happening.

Still not impressed. They're only going to support a US-wide reduction in carbon emissions as long as it "did not disproportionately target car producers". Well, guys, if you continue to make huge stonking gas-guzzler cars (I believe the big executive LWB saloons are as inefficient as SUVs), sooner or later you're going to get hit with the bill. I suggest you give serious consideration to biofuel engines, or even those really efficient electric cars whose patents you're sitting on in case it renders the internal combustion engine obsolete.

It Could Have Been Worse

Well, I was unimpressed with the reliance on stock "Walking With Dinosaurs" footage. Especially as they used Deinonychus to talk about Velociraptor (as I predicted), Torosaurus to talk about Triceratops, Coelophysis to talk about Troodon and Diplodocus, a sauropod from the Jurassic period, to talk about the late Cretaceous. But I accept that there must have been budgetary constraints (as unhappy as I am to see less well-known genera passed off as the "cool" dinosaurs from the kids' books).

They did provide a possible means of humans evolving alongside dinosaurs even in the absence of other mammals. It's apparently all in the angiosperms. The presence of edible fruit and nuts allowed early primates to flourish in the trees, a niche that dinosaurs never really exploited. Ha - anyone who's ever seen 50 starlings descend on my parents' mountain ash tree and strip it of berries would disagree with that statement. And who is to say that, with a ready food source in the trees, dinosaurs would not radiate into the canopy? With dinosaurs dominating the ground would early hominids have been successful if they had come down from the trees? We simply cannot assume that our evolution would have proceeded down the same "trouser legs", to paraphrase a Terry Pratchett concept.

I'm also still not convinced by the dinosauroid concept. For starters, if you're going to have a dinosauroid capable of walking down the high street unnoticed, buying groceries and meeting a friend for coffee and a chat, make it put some clothes on!! Or make us all naked. If dinosauroids and humans had evolved alongside each other and shared the same culture, it would only be natural - cultures and customs evolve at a far faster rate than Bauplane and ecological niches. Convergent evolution certainly exists, and where animals occupy the same ecological niche, albeit several thousands of miles apart (or several million years later), homoplasies appear, e.g. the similar body shape of the shark, the Ichthyosaurus and the dolphin, or the wings of the pterosaur, bird and bat. They have similar structures and functions, but evolved independently.

So perhaps dinosauroids and humans would resemble each other, because they adapted to similar niches. But for every pair of animals that look a bit similar there are many more that find different solutions. Dinosaurs, starting from a bipedal stance, may have found different ways of exploiting the top brainy predator position to the small tree-dwelling apes from which we evolved. Whilst opposable thumbs are pretty handy (if you'll pardon the expression), it is very human-centric to assume that because we like using them they would necessarily evolve in other intelligent beings. Unfortunately if you assume the human form is the pinnacle of evolutionary perfection then you end up with a universe that resembles "Star Trek".

But as I said, I'm not convinced. It's an evolutionary palaeobiological question to answer, not a geometric morphometric one. So while I'm happy to join in the debate, there are better people to be doing the debating. It was an okay programme, but as with everything you watch (come on, you don't really think the "CSI" computers can zoom in on crappy photos of a victim to see the reflection of the photographer in their pupils do you?) use some common sense and don't buy everything you watch in documentaries.

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #2

They've only gone and spelt "theropods" incorrectly. The word is "theropods", not "therapods". BBC Horizon, please fire whoever it is who sends out the programme descriptions to television channels. Capitalise Protoceratops and Homo sapiens too.

My Pet Dinosaur

The BBC Horizon series kicks off with "My Pet Dinosaur" tonight. The big question posed - "what if the meteorite had missed?". I'm interested to see how they feasibly think hominids could have evolved without all the other mammals (if there aren't apes and monkeys in this what-if world then I will be very disappointed). And why they assume that the small brown furry creatures would be the dominant intelligent lifeform over and above the highly established dinosaurs. But I shall watch with interest.

What is amusing is that the publicity shot in all the TV listings shows a young boy with a pet Deinonychus (although it will no doubt be referred to as a Velociraptor because no one has heard of Deinonychus). It's on a lead. Wholly unrealistic of course. A Deinonychus would no doubt have been banned under the Dangerous Dinosaurs Act 2006, or it would at the very least require to be muzzled in public. And declawed.

The Criminalisation Of Scientists

Foreign science students could be deterred from studying in the UK by new checks aimed at stopping the spread of weapons technology, it is feared.

So says a report on the BBC News website. Non-EU postgraduates wishing to study "proliferation-risk" subjects will now need to apply for approval. Proliferation-risk subjects would include some biological and physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and computer sciences. Now this may look very innocent - the UK merely trying to protect its military technology - but look at the 2002 article it links to. This is all an anti-terrorist measure, designed to stop Al-Qaeda operatives gaining knowledge from our universities and using it against us.

Do the powers that be really think this is going to work? Seriously? Come on - it doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to work out the numerous ways of getting around this. What nationality were the 7 July bombers? British. What nationality were the failed 21 July bombers? British. So there's an instant flaw in the plan. What happens when a British Asian student applies for a PhD in organic chemistry? Is he or she going to be dobbed in by the university and hauled off to Paddington Green for questioning? If you put extra security checks on students of certain nationalities, then a really determined terrorist cell is just going to recruit from "safe" countries. It's what they do.

And where will the line be drawn between "proliferation-risk" and non-proliferation-risk sciences? It may be very easy to say there is no way a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology could be deemed "proliferation-risk", but the geometric morphometric techniques I use have many non-palaeontological applications. I remember reading a report of a morphometrician being called as an expert witness in a trial to show that the defendant had a particular incapacitating disease. If, however improbable this outcome is, I developed algorithms that could be applied to military operations, this could fall under the "proliferation-risk" umbrella. Consider the more geologically-minded friends of mine using tomography, seismology, satellite imagery.

Paul tells me that when he attended CUSU meetings, one of the topics they discussed was the proposed Export Control Bill 2002. This would have prevented certain PhD theses from being transported outside of the UK, among other things. Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, makes the point a lot more succinctly than I can. All I can add to his great arguments is that it would be ludicrous, grossly unfair and would seriously damage the UK's academic reputation in the world to restrict the movement of scientific research.

Presumably it is only a matter of time before I and my professional colleagues are stopped and searched on our way to conferences. Given that most security officials can't tell the difference between fruit cake and semtex - and that's using all the wonders of technology at their disposal - I doubt their ability to tell the difference between a thesis with top secret formulae for biological weapons and my morphometrics presentation. So you know what's going to happen, don't you? All scientific literature is going to be confiscated. We'll just put the reprints bin next to the liquids bin on the way into the security screening area, shall we?

I think - I hope - that this is an over-reaction on my part. But if this happens, then this is bad. Every little erosion of the freedoms that the terrorists supposedly hate (never quite figured that one out, Bush...) brings us one step closer to becoming like the regimes our politicians are aiming to eradicate. And it brings Paul and me one step closer to emigrating to Sweden.

For now, though, my research is safe. No real military applications of vertebrate palaeontology...


© Bill Watterson 1985-1995

Ah, It Was Only A Matter Of Time...

Conservapedia has been hacked/vandalised/abused. Quick - go take a look at the entry for sexual intercourse before they "correct it"!


I took the above screenshot for posterity. As this is a bit too small to read comfortably, it says:

This is the most important thing in the universe. More Important than God, because without this, there would be no humans. And it's fun too.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Death Masks

I'm lazing around catching up on some of my RSS feeds. The Holy Moly feed had an article about Jodie Marsh's blog (which is SO worth reading!), and a comment comparing Jodie's features to Voltaire's death mask. Not knowing what Voltaire looked like alive, let alone dead, I googled it.


Handsome fellow isn't he? The accompanying Wikipedia article on death masks is very interesting. I didn't realise, for example, that death masks were used as a permanent form of identification (although I don't understand why they would need to record the features of the dead for anything other than for the sake of it). The two links at the end of the article take you to the online gallery of the One Street Museum in Kiev, Ukraine and the Laurence Hutton Collection at Princeton University. The latter has life masks too.

The latent anatomist in me is quite fascinated by the way the life and death casts vary - I would assume that it is most comfortable for the live subject to be reclining, so the position would not make a difference, but muscle control would certainly help to prevent the slight distortions of the death masks. It's clear to see that the weight of the plaster or wax pushes the skin away from the nose and mouth. You can achieve a similar effect if you put your hands on your cheeks and move them towards your ears - the nose flares a little and the lips widen and seem more prominent.

A scary thought occurred to me though, whilst looking through the masks - by the time John Keats was my age he'd been dead for nearly two years.

Citationitis

Since Friday night I have input 268 references to Endnote. I'm going quite goggle-eyed with it. I discovered that the first time I wrote "Systematic Zoology" in the journal box I missed out an "o", so now all my reference from that journal are apparently in "Systematic Zoolgy". I wish Endnote had the option to auto-complete publishers too, as I'm getting worryingly good at writing "Cambridge University Press" in about two seconds.

The household decision has been made - we need more filing cabinets. Having reinstated all the reprints flying around the house, my existing cabinet is full at just over 220 references. I could probably fit more in, but it would be at the expense of being able to find the references easily by name and by topic. So two more filing cabinets have been ordered and I'm going to be hard pressed to work out whether the non-sleeping, non-cooking, non-bathing room in the house is a lounge or an office.

I'm pining for the days when I had an office. I'm really pining for those few months when I was at the Natural History Museum and I had an office all to myself. While I can't afford to take the 50% pay cut necessary to be a full-time PhD student, I'd love to have an extra room for the work. This is going to suck. And before you ask, if we could afford a two-bedroom place, we'd have one...

But for now, the filing cabinets will have to form a "feature" either side of the fireplace.

Sauropodcast

I've just bought the domain http://www.sauropodcast.com. There's nothing there at the moment, and for now I'm hoping it'll just forward here. But it's an idea I've had, so maybe once I'm back in the swing of academia (135 references updated last night) I might get going with it. I've been told I have a good face for podcasting.

If anyone is interested in a joint venture, http://www.theropodcast.com appears to be available still.

You're Not Entitled To Your Own Facts

I groaned when I read this: Conservapedia - the US religious right's answer to Wikipedia, published in yesterday's Guardian. A supposed source of "unbiased" information to counter the "liberal bias" in Wikipedia. The founders of Conservapedia complain that Wikipedia is becoming increasingly anti-Christian. Was it ever pro-Christian anyway? Did Wikipedia ever come out in favour of one religion or another?

"Facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored," says the founder of Conservapedia. Define "facts"!! A 4000-year-old, multiply-mistranslated story of creation written in language that nomadic tribesmen would understand telling you that God created everything in six days does not constitute a fact! Facts are backed up by evidence, and what you "feel in your heart" and what you believe, and what your Southern Baptist preacher tells you on a Sunday morning is NOT evidence. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: "You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts."

It stands to reason that a well-edited online encyclopedia will remove unsourced and uncited material. And Wikipedia does provide the Creationist side of the argument - in the Evolution entry, there's a sub-section on social and religious controversies. There's a whole entry on "Objections to evolution" - the objections article is longer than the original article on evolution. How is Wikipedia biased?

The Guardian cites a couple of examples of totally different articles in Wikipedia and Conservapedia: dinosaurs and the Democratic Party.

Wikipedia entry on dinosaurs:

Vertebrate animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for over 160m years, first appearing approximately 230m years ago.

Conservapedia entry on dinosaurs:

They are mentioned in numerous places throughout the Good Book. For example, the behemoth in Job and the leviathan in Isaiah are almost certainly references to dinosaurs.

Gaaah!! The source for the above statement is Answers In Genesis. Sources set up purely with the purpose of proving Genesis. The authors have the conclusion they want to put forward, and they have searched for "evidence" to back this up. This is results-driven "science", not hypothesis-driven science, and is therefore invalid. Compare this with the citation in Wikipedia for The Oxford Companion to the Bible, an academic study of the Bible, where the behemoth is shown, in all likelihood, to be a hippopotamus. The leviathan could not possibly have been a dinosaur because it was aquatic, but it simply translates as "whale".

My one comfort is that, for now, the Conservapedia is only being served up to home-schooled children, children who would be taught the Young-Earth Creationism farce anyway. The very fact that it calls itself the "Conservapedia" should be enough warning for most normal parents to steer clear. Imparting a political standpoint on the name of your supposedly "unbiased" online resource is not a particularly intelligent design...

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #1

I have a horrible feeling this will be a running series over the course of several months or years, so I've taken the unusual step of numbering this post. I rolled my eyes at a letter in the Metro this morning:

After films such as X-Men and the new US series Heroes, I'm left raising my eyebrows at the story of little Yassir Hammud, who was born with a "soon to be removed" extra finger on each hand (Metro, Wed). Yassir is in perfect health. How can his paediatrician Dr Kolberg-Schwerdt, a mere homo sapiens [sic], stand in the way of evolution? If doctors were around when animals first decided to venture on to land, we'd all be swimming to work today.
Brendon Peros, London SW15

Okay. Mutations occur all the time in nature. Some are advantageous (such as the mutation of a fin into a tetrapod foot, to use the author's example). If a mutation is advantageous, then it will confer an, um, advantage onto the organism, and that organism will be better equipped to compete with members of its species for resources. That organism, and others with the same mutation, will be more likely to survive to reproduce and pass on this mutation to the next generation. This is how species evolve. Unfortunately Mr Peros has got it a bit wrong there - no animals made a conscious decision to venture onto land, and in fact the general theory is (as I understand it) that legs were initially an advantage to dealing with dense foliage in aquatic environments.

Some mutations are deleterious, or disadvantageous. In most cases such mutations result in a spontaneous abortion as the organism is not viable. In some cases the mutations produce a viable organism, but one which cannot reproduce - mutations of the sex chromosomes often result in this.

But some mutations are neutral. They are just there. They do not confer any advantage on the individual, nor do they kill it. Extra fingers and toes are neutral mutations - think it's the Hox genes that mutate, but don't quote me on that one as I'm really not a very good geneticist. However, in today's society, where anyone who looks a bit different is mocked and bullied (or turned into a freak show for the edification of circus audiences or the viewers of Channel 5), removing an extra finger or toe here and there is probably the best thing that can be done.

Still, here's the thing. Removing the actual fingers and toes does not mean that the extra-digit mutation is lost. Baby Yassir still has a genotype for extra fingers and toes. Physical removal of the digits does not remove the genetic information. Characters acquired in an individual's lifetime cannot be passed to successive generations. This is Lamarckism, a theory that has been disproved fairly substantially. When I was younger, I had two unsightly moles removed from my abdomen (they were starting to rub and it was better to remove them than to risk them turning cancerous). That does not mean that my children will be mole-free, because I am still genetically predisposed to having moles. About 9 years ago, I had surgery on my feet and had the distal phalanges of my second toes removed. This does not mean that my children will only have two phalanges on their second toes, because my genes still "code" for the correct number of toes. They may have hammer toes like I did, because that condition is in the genetic information which my children will inherit, as I did from my mother and my grandparents.

So, in the same way, even if Yassir has the extra fingers and toes removed, he will still contain genetic information within his cells which may be expressed in his offspring, and they may have extra fingers and toes too. And until having more than 10 fingers and 10 toes proves advantageous (I don't even use all of mine for typing, so I'm wondering how more fingers could be useful), babies will probably continue to have extra digits removed. In fact, Yassir is significantly more likely to be in a position where he is able to reproduce because he will have the "normal" number of fingers and toes!

On an unrelated note though, I do wish people would get their Linnean binomials right. If you're referring to the genus and species name for human beings, please capitalise the first letter of the generic name and italicise the whole binomial, e.g. Homo sapiens. Same applies for dinosaurs. I'm fed up of T-Rex. It's Tyrannosaurus rex or T. rex.