On the Cessationism v. Continuationism controversy.

Politics poisons everything?

Suppressing Science at Brown University
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

What happened to Lisa Littman at Brown offers the most recent evidence of how scientists are pressured not to stray beyond politically approved conclusions — something that ID researchers have known for a long time. Alex Barasch at Slate thinks that what has been done to Dr. Littman isn’t “censorship.”

  

All Brown and PLOS One have promised is a more rigorous review of the study design, which clearly warrants one; far from being censored, the paper remains fully accessible on the journal’s website. In other words, the scientific process is moving forward as usual.

Oh please. If not one of outright censorship, this a story of suppressing and intimidating a researcher who violated an implicit speech code. Littman published her (peer-reviewed) study in PLOS One, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,”concluding that young people may pick up gender dysphoria socially, in part through circles of friends and social and other media. That’s not something you are supposed to say. PLOS One and Brown’s School of Public Health, where Littman teaches, caught blowback from activists, and Brown in particular collapsed under the pressure. 

A “Cautionary Tale”

They took down a news release from their website and replaced it with a“statement, community letter on gender dysphoria study.”The study of gender dysphoria is not the point of interest here. The trampling of academic freedom is. Jeffrey S. Flier, professor and former dean of Harvard Medical School, writes at Quillette that he is disquieted by Brown’s hanging Dr. Littman out to dry.

The fact that Brown University deleted its initial promotional reference to Dr Littman’s work from the university’s website — then replaced it with a note explaining how Dr Littman’s work might harm members of the transgender community — presents a cautionary tale.

Increasingly, research on politically charged topics is subject to indiscriminate attack on social media, which in turn can pressure school administrators to subvert established norms regarding the protection of free academic inquiry.

Here’s what happened:

There is no evidence for claims of misconduct in Dr Littman’s case. Rather, unnamed individuals with strong personal interests in the area under study seem to have approached PLOS One with allegations that her methodology and conclusions were faulty. Facing these assertions, which predictably drew support from social media communities populated by lay activists, the journal responded rapidly and publicly with the announcement that it would undertake additional expert review.

In all my years in academia, I have never once seen a comparable reaction from a journal within days of publishing a paper that the journal already had subjected to peer review, accepted and published. One can only assume that the response was in large measure due to the intense lobbying the journal received, and the threat — whether stated or unstated — that more social-media backlash would rain down upon PLOS One if action were not taken.

There were also said to be unidentified voices within the Brown community who expressed “concerns” about the paper. But when Brown responded to these concerns by removing a promotional story about Dr Littman research from the Brown website, a backlash resulted, followed by a web petition expressing alarm at the school’s actions. The dean of the School of Public Health, Bess Marcus, eventually issued a public letter explaining why the removal of the article from news distribution was “the most responsible course of action.”In her letter, Dean Marcus cites fears that “conclusions of the study could be used to discredit the efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate perspectives of members of the transgender community” (my italics). Why the concerns of these unidentified individuals should be accorded weight in the evaluation of an academic work is left unexplained.

The Really Cowardly Part

But this is the really cowardly part:

There is no suggestion whatsoever of support for Dr Littman, a faculty member in good standing for whom the personal and professional consequences of these events could be devastating. The dean of a school is in effect the dean of the faculty. While she must exercise balance and objectivity when controversial issues arise, her responsibilities include the expression of appropriate support for a beleaguered faculty member until and unless clear evidence emerges to impugn that scholar’s behavior or work.

You can still see the deleted press release via the Wayback Machine.The headline sounds proud of Dr. Littman’s accomplishment — “Brown researcher first to describe rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” But while I’ve sometimes misjudged the impact of things I’ve written, even I could have told them this was going to give offense to PC censors:

62 percent of parents reported their teen or young adult had one or more diagnoses of a psychiatric disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before the onset of gender dysphoria. Forty-eight percent reported that their child had experienced a traumatic or stressful event prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria, including being bullied, sexually assaulted or having their parents get divorced.

This suggests that the drive to transition expressed by these teens and young adults could be a harmful coping mechanism like drugs, alcohol or cutting, Littman said. 

You don’t have to take Littman’s paper down to “censor” or perhaps more accurately, “censure” her. Is her “methodology” sound? The paper’s peer reviewers clearly thought that it was. If they were wrong, let those who know better criticize and debate the merit of her work. That’s scholarship for you. 

But that is not what happened here. Littman has been served a very potent warning, potentially a “devastating” one, that when she is challenged by a mob, her university will not support her. It will panic and back right down, insinuating that she is at fault when there is no indication she actually is. Other researchers would be fools not to take serious note and to adjust their own work and thought accordingly.

Dreadfully Familiar

This is all dreadfully familiar to scientists who favor critiques of Darwinian theory and arguments for intelligent design. They have seen what happened to researchers who, perhaps naïvely, went public with their own reflections on the evidence for teleology in nature and biology. You’ll find some of those stories at the Free Science website.

Lisa Littman is Scott Minnich with a splash of Eric Hedin. I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes for this assistant professor — considerable distress, no doubt — but I hope there is no aspect of Richard Sternberg or Günter Bechly or Caroline Crocker.That is, I hope this does not end in her being forced out. I know plenty of other ID sympathizers, including at high-profile institutions, who would be put in serious jeopardy if their identifies were known. This is how the vaunted “academic consensus” is maintained.

Professor Flier says this business with Dr. Littman’s paper in PLOS One is without parallel in “all my years in academia.” That’s funny — I can think of a very close comparison. Just a couple of years ago the very same journal caved in response to a different mob of enraged activists after PLOS One published another peer-reviewed paper, this one by Chinese researchers, on the human hand and noting its “proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.”

As with Professor Littman, PLOS One issued a statement that “We are looking into the concerns raised about the article with priority and will take steps to correct the published record.” This was following online complaints, including by editors of the journal. It then retracted the paper. I wrote here, “The note of career anxiety — no, panic — is telling. These folks don’t want to be rendered ritually impure by contact with a bit of injudicious language.”

It’s the very same thing with Lisa Littman. Career anxiety is exactly how heterodox thought is policed and stamped out in the academic world. I’m sorry to associate Littman in any way with the taint of design science — I have no reason whatsoever to think she would appreciate it, or is in any way in sympathy with it. But the parallel must be pointed out.

I could add, coincidentally, this is also not unlike my own experience at Brown, though I was only an undergraduate not a scientist. It was perhaps the most educational thing that happened to me in college. See “Kafka Meets Coppedge.” Clearly, not much has changed.

Darwinian evolution is gradual (except when it isn't)?

A Beautiful, Wonderful Solution to the Cambrian Puzzle?

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Another contender in the race to rescue Darwin from the Cambrian explosion is getting hurrahs from the media. Jordi Paps, a champion in Darwin dodgeball, is giddy with euphoria over the new proposal. In his article, “How animals went from single cells to over 30 different body types,” in The Conversation, he poses as spokesman for the world:

The origin and evolution of animals is one of the most fascinating questions in modern biology. We know that the entire wonderful variety of animals alive today arose from single-celled ancestors. And we know that this transition was likely related to the planet’s environment and how organisms interact with it, as well as changes in their genetic material (genome).

But we don’t know if the diversity of animal shapes, those “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that Darwin described, emerged quickly after the first animal lifeforms or whether it came much later in their evolution. A team of evolutionary biologists from the UK and the US have tried to tackle this question in a most beautiful and most wonderful paper published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Pats on the Back

The authors of said paper pat themselves on the back for their achievement in a statement from the University of Bristol, echoed by cheers from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, who affirm that the new study “has revealed the origins and evolution of animal body plans.” Finally!

First, they make sure that readers know the required answer before asking the question. They don’t want any Heretic to be seen or heard in the chambers during the debate.

Animals evolved from unicellular ancestors, diversifying into thirty or forty distinct anatomical designs. When and how these designs emerged has been the focus of debate, both on the speed of evolutionary change, and the mechanisms by which fundamental evolutionary change occurs.

It’s a one-party debate, but a debate nonetheless. Even one-party governments can have lively discussions among themselves. Here, it’s not whether Darwinian evolution is a fact, but how it works in the face of evidential challenges from those pesky Cambrian fossils.

Did animal body plans emerge over eons of gradual evolutionary change, as Darwin suggested, or did these designs emerge in an explosive diversification episode during the Cambrian Period, about half a billion years ago?

Valid Empirical Work

Before critiquing their solution, let’s give them credit for some valid empirical work. First, wisely, they included fossils as well as living forms. Additionally, Jordi Paps says:

They collected anatomical data for nearly 2,000 anatomical features for 210 animal groups, sampling many groups within each phylum. Then they analysed their anatomical similarity with cutting-edge statistics. These produce a map of sorts, in which each group is a dot and the distance among groups is proportional to their anatomical similarity. 

The resulting map is the centerpiece of their work. By making both axes the same (evolutionary distance), their data points spread into clusters, allowing easy visualization of just how disparate the animal groups are. The grid forms a morphological “design space” (where “design” to them means a successful bodyplan as opposed to an “impossible” one). The caption explains:

This image is based on the presence and absence of anatomical features, like jointed legs and compound eyes, neurons and boney skulls. Considering all of these features, animals that are similar group together, far away from animals that are dissimilar. Most of this ‘design space’ is unoccupied, in part because of extinction of ancient ancestors that are unrepresented, in part because animals have only been around for half a billion years and that is not enough time to explore all possible designs, but most of the design space is unoccupied because those designs are impossible.

Did you hear that right? Ancestors that are “unrepresented”? What are those? Apparently, they are potential bodyplans that were never actualized because of limited time for evolution to “explore” those parts of “design space.” The paper appears to say that the authors simply imagined animals in the spaces where no remains are known:

Thus, by comparing only living taxa, it could be argued that we have captured only net historical disparity. Therefore, we coded a phylogenetically diverse and representative sample of Cambrian taxa, principally the earliest representatives of ordinal level clades. This entailed coding 70 fossil taxa for the existing character set and adding 111 mostly autapomorphic characters. Coding these fossil taxa was potentially problematic in that most of the characters (54.1%) are not preserved, and therefore unknown.

Visualizing Intermediates

For Darwinians, visualizing intermediates in those empty spaces is not a problem, because imagination is a key tool in their toolkit. It’s legit, because they already “know” that “animals evolved from unicellular ancestors, diversifying into thirty or forty distinct anatomical designs.” The “unrepresented” forms, therefore, must have appeared, and then disappeared without a trace. (Compare this tactic with the use of “ghost lineages” as gap fillers.)

The map shows that a few phyla, especially the arthropods and chordates, continued to diversify extensively after the Cambrian. Consider that both fish and giraffes are vertebrates! Co-author Bradley Deline quips:

“Many of the animals we are familiar with today are objectively bizarre compared with the Cambrian weird wonders. Frankly, butterflies and birds are stranger than anything swimming in the ancient sea.”

They take this extreme diversity within phyla as justification to Darwinize the extreme disparity between phyla in the Cambrian. If evolution was powerful enough to generate birds from Metaspriggina, it surely was powerful enough to generate trilobites from microbes. That makes sense, doesn’t it? We mustn’t underestimate the creative power of mutation and natural selection!

The Bristol evolutionists do take Darwin to task about his gradualism, though. Co-author Philip Donoghue shows that it’s OK to adjust the emperor’s clothes as long as you don’t oust him from the parade:

“Our results show that fundamental evolutionary change was not limited to an early burst of evolutionary experimentation. Animal designs have continued to evolve to the present day – not gradually as Darwin predicted – but in fits and starts, episodically through their evolutionary history.”

In other words: “Sure, there was an early burst of evolutionary experimentation, but what’s the surprise? That’s been the pattern throughout evolutionary history.”

Taking Stock

Let’s take stock of the story so far. They admit that the appearance of animals was explosive, but assert that is the normal pattern in evolutionary history. They imagine transitional forms that are “unrepresented” in design space, but went extinct, leaving the appearance of gaps. What’s lacking so far is a mechanism to generate the initial body plans. “Distilling the phenomenon of animal disparity is one thing; establishing its causality is another,” they admit. The causes they consider (only unguided causes, of course) are either intrinsic (e.g., genome expansion, protein fold expansion, gene regulation) or extrinsic (e.g., environmental challenges, such as the expansion to land). Or, evolution might just be doing a “random walk” through morphospace.

Their favored conclusion is that the evolution of gene regulation is the primary cause, but not the only one. Co-author Jenny Greenwood cuts through the paper’s jargon, stating succinctly, “it is the evolution of genetic regulation of embryology that precipitated the evolution of animal biodiversity.” Colleague Kevin Peterson agrees, saying “Our study confirms the view that continued gene regulatory construction was a key to animal evolution.” (Note: They reference Davidson and Erwin on this point, but not Charles Marshall.)

In short: animals evolved, because they evolved. Evolution is fast, except when it operates in fits and starts. It’s the nature of living things to explore possibilities. In their random walks, gene regulatory networks hit on some bodyplans that worked. When you see gaps between the bodyplans, just imagine some intermediate forms that were exploring “shape space,” but went extinct, leaving gaps. Cambrian explosion solved? Almost. With thanks to Neil Shubin for refereeing their work, they end their “most beautiful and most wonderful paper” with promissory notes:

Our results also suggest that debate on whether early animal evolution has been underpinned by uniformitarian or nonuniformitarian processes has been misplaced. Animal evolutionary history does not appear to have been characterized by a uniform rate and scale of change but rather by a high frequency of small changes and low frequency of changes of large magnitude within the context of intrinsic genetic and developmental variation and extrinsic environmental change. Such patterns are readily open to modeling in the same manner as nucleotide and amino acid substitution frequencies. Future research in this direction will inform understanding of the nature of phenotypic evolution, its relation to molecular evolution, underpinning the development of phylogenetic methods. However, it will also provide for a more precise characterization of the tempo of metazoan diversification and the processes that underpinned the establishment of animal bodyplans.

Shallow thinking about major problems in evolution continues because its defenders have shielded themselves from real debate. Once again, this paper and its cheerleading articles completely ignore the issues raised by Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt.