April 2008 Archives
In 2007, ExxonMobil delivered a record $40.6 billion in net income, with each of our businesses - Upstream, Downstream, and Chemical - achieving record earnings performance. Return on average capital employed was 32 percent and cash flow from operations and asset sales was $56 billion. These exceptional results reflect the fundamental strength of our integrated businesses in a year of robust industry conditions.2But not all shareholders are happy. Robert Monks may be a "corporate gadfly", as the Wall Street Journal describes him, but now he has the support of Rockefeller's heirs for a shareholder resolution to split the role of board chairman and chief executive at ExxonMobil.
What does this have to do with going green?
Whenever I lecture about quantitative genetics, I always talk about height in humans as an example of a trait influenced by the expression of many genes. Since I teach at the University of Connecticut, I often show the pair of photographs in this article from Genetice1, because (a) it shows a nice bell curve of heights and (b) it allows me to show how the environment can influence the expression of quantitative traits.2 I talk about Nilsson-Ehle's results on kernel color in wheat as an example of how multiple genes3 may influence the expression of a phenotype.
Now thanks to recent work described in Nature Genetics I can give students a best guess as to how many genes influence height variation in humans. The answer?
Your correspondent is all for scientific progress, but biologists have spent about 15 years trying to determine how best to set conservation priorities. Although the science has improved over the years, the continued emphasis on what to save, rather than how to do it, seems like cataloguing deck chairs on the Titanic. Biologists are still running modelling experiments to determine whether to save the Wedgwood or leaded crystal as the house smoulders and timbers fall from the roof.That's how Green.view (from The Economist) sees it.
I haven't spent a lot of time studying the reserve design litereature (I only have one lecture about it in my course, after all), but my experience in Connecticut tells me that's right. Over a decade ago I helped start a short-lived collaboration among scientists and consevation organizations called the Connecticut Biodiversity Forum. At one of these meetings I remember going over a list of priority habitats and sites for conservation protection. After the meeting Dick Goodwin came up to me and pointed out that the list we'd just developed was almost identical to one he, Bill Niering, and other early leaders of The Nature Conservancy had developed for the state in the early 1950s.
Of course if we start making decisions now we'll make some mistakes. Of course we could make better decisions if we had better data. But that's not the choice facing us. The more time we spend gathering data on what we ought to save, the less of it there is to save. It's not a question of doing a poor job now when we could do a better job later. It's a question of saving something while there's still something to save. It's past time to devote at least as much effort to figuring out how to save the places that remain as we spend oo deciding which places to save.
1Thanks to Luigi for the pointer.
Expelled opened last Friday. On Saturday Friendly Atheist linked to a piece by Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly, quoting this passage approvingly:
Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures fell over the weekend from 8th to 10th place after earning $1.2M Friday and $989K Saturday for a $2.9M weekend. But the per screen average for Friday was a low $1,145 and for Saturday $940 (and $2,830 for the entire weekend), showing there wasn't much pent-up demand for the film despite an aggressive publicity campaign on right-wing media. So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood”.
Yesterday, Chris Mooney called Expelled “a box office success,” and Greg Laden quickly followed up with a post in which he suggested that Chris “every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist.”.
Time out!
No, this isn't about ScienceDebate2008. Nor is it about recent challenges to the integrity of science. It's about drawing a lesson from recent events that illustrates an important wy in which the process of reasoning science is different from our everyday reasoning, a difference that is often poorly understood.
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased....
To understand your feelings about Wednesday night's debate, consider the Dartmouth-Princeton football game in 1951. That bitterly fought contest was the subject of a landmark study about how our biases shape our understanding of reality.
Psychologists showed a film clip of the football game to groups of students at each college and asked them to act as unbiased referees and note every instance of cheating. The results were striking. Each group, watching the same clip, was convinced that the other side had cheated worse – and this was not deliberate bias or just for show.
“Their eyes were taking in the same game, but their brains seemed to be processing the events in two distinct ways,” Farhad Manjoo writes in his terrific new book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” (Nicholas Kristof, Divided they fall, The New York Times, 17 April 2008)
From this week's AIBS Public Policy Report:
As recent state-level legislative attacks on the integrity of science clearly illustrate, advocates for creationism/intelligent design and similar religious viewpoints are now actively pursuing “academic freedom“ initiatives across the southern United States. Despite a recent setback in Oklahoma, where a broad cross-section of academic, business, and religious leaders beat back an "academic freedom" initiative, several similar initiatives have surfaced in other state legislatures.
A science debate among presidential candidates has not yet occurred. There are several dates when such a debate could take place; as of this writing, none have been agreed to by the candidates. After a decade of what could be seen as antiscience in our nation's public discourse, and in a mainstream media culture more suited to sound bites than paragraphs, politicians are understandably reluctant to engage. But that reluctance is the very reason for this effort and for similar efforts. In an increasingly scientific world, science will become ever more intertwined with policy issues. Scientists must embrace every opportunity to engage in broader public discourse as ambassadors, popularizers, inspirers, educators, and, especially, policy-makers.Our primary mission, to raise the profile of science in our national dialogue and in the minds of policy-makers and the public, remains. The effort has made the candidates aware of how critical science policy issues are in our global society whether they show the courage to debate them or not, and their response to this initiative will be on record and will form a basis for future development. Looking ahead, the science debate initiative may provide a means of injecting science into political discourse in the next cycle of congressional races and the presidential race of 2012.
Human population geneticists have enormous numbers of polymorphic markers at their disposal. The HapMap project, for example, makes data from 3.2 million mapped single nucleotide polymorpisms freely available on its website. That's one SNP every kb on average. Those working on model organisms, like Drosophila or Arabidopsis don't have quite that much information available, but they have complete genome sequences and access to a wide variety of genomic tools.
Those of us working on non-model groups, like the plant genus Protea have a much more limited set of tools available to us. There are a few widely used chloroplast and nucelar sequences in plants – matK, rbcL, the trnL-trnF intron, ITS, ETS, waxy, and a few more. But identifying new possibilities has been very tedious and has had a low probability of success.
Now nunatak at The Beagle Project Blog points out a paper in PLoS One that I missed. The technology described there – Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) – seems quite promising.
As the small number of you who read this blog can probably guess, I'm not one of those bloggers described in this piece from the New York Times a couple of days ago:
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
It's hard to get stressed about blogging when (a) you're not doing it for a living and (b) you post three or for times a week rather than three or four times an hour.
UConn Magazine, has a short piece on me in the current issue: “Renaissance scientist: Kent Holsinger's research opens new paths for others to follow.” It's in the “Focus on Faculty” section. The other person featured is Sarita Arteaga from the School of Dental Medicine.
So it doesn't appear that there will be a science debate in Philadelphia next week. But that doesn't mean that organizers of the debate effort have given up. It simply means they've shifted their focus. Here's what Shawn Otto has to say in an e-mail that I received this morning (see the related report on MSNBC):
Our opening gambit, an April 18 debate in Philadelphia, is looking less and less likely. Obama has declined, Clinton has been non-committal, and McCain has been non-responsive. We want to acknowledge a national debt of gratitude to the Franklin Institute for their outstanding and visionary leadership on this issue, and we will undoubtedly work together with them in the future.But if not April 18 in Philly, then what? Is it over?
Not by a long shot.
Rather, the candidates' reluctance demonstrates the very reason why our initiative is so important and must continue. These issues will not go away by sticking our heads in the sand, and neither will the candidates' responsibility to tackle them, or the voters' right to assess the candidates on their plans. So like the candidates, we are beginning to focus on the next major primary venue, which is Oregon in May.
I mentioned a couple of months ago that I think David Goldston is very smart and very perceptive. He's provided more evidence supporting that assessment in his latest column in Nature.
Here are the two key observations:
- [The] conceit that science alone should and can dictate clean-air standards is propagated by political figures of all stripes and often by scientists themselves.
- [R]egulatory decisions involve policy judgements as well as scientific determinations, and the science is often uncertain.
From today's installment of Chris Mooney's reflections on framing:
Hey, I'm all for long term educational policy improvements – and long term cultural changes. But framing--the height of political pragmatism – is about communicating through the mass media on contested issues of immediate import, where you don't have time for either educational reform or long term cultural change. So framing should be seen as complementary to these needed efforts.
Bingo! Framing shouldn't be seen as an alternative to improved formal and informal science education. It should be seen as an addition to the science communications arsenal. Its role is limited and its purposes are well-defined – “communicating through the mass media on contested issues of immediate import, where you don't have time for either educational reform or long term cultural change.”
When I wrote this post suggesting that we “speak directly to the people that the broader public listens to”, I didn't realize that Gore's new campaign on global warming relies on precisely this kind of tactic.
Matt Nisbet explains why it makes sense to target influentials much better than I did.1 Go thee forth and read his post on the two-step approach to popularization.
A little over a week ago, Chris Mooney made a post suggesting that the Dawkins/Myers/Expelled controversy was helping the movie to get attention it didn't deserve. The result was an explosion on ScienceBlogs, with invective and insults flying. Chris didn't use the word “framing” in his post, but he clearly was thinking about the controversy in a “conflict” frame,1 and many of the attacks on Chris' suggestion also attacked the idea of framing. Chris was taken aback by the ferocity of the debate, and earlier this week he began a dialogue on framing.
Today he continues the dialogue, laying out eight premises that underly his conception of framing and ansking for comment. I think framing makes a lot of sense, but I do want to comment on one premise.
