“God likes matter. He invented it” (C.S. Lewis): A talk by Kenneth Miller at the University of Maryland

On Thursday I came back to my office to find a ripped-down poster haphazardly taped to my door, announcing a talk Friday by Ken Miller--the author of popular books about evolution, such as this year’s Only a Theory. The culprits, a couple friends of mine in the department, had misunderstood Miller’s stand on evolution due to vague wording in the poster, and stuck it on my door to piss me off.

They didn’t know of course, that I just finished Only a Theory last week, loved it, had no idea Miller was coming to speak, and was overjoyed to be informed of it. Needless to say, they were annoyed that the guy wasn’t in fact a creationist, and I wasn’t in fact pissed off. The talk was wonderful though. He is as good of a speaker as he is a writer. I think he fills a very needed role in the evolution/creationist debates—as a Christian himself, he is able to speak directly to fears that evolution and theism are fundamentally incompatible. As Miller points out, people’s beef with evolution is not really scientific, it’s philosophical—the fear that evolution takes away our ability to be moral human beings with purpose in our lives.

His talk was basically a summary of OAT, but for those who haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I’ll outline the talk for you here.

He started off with an overview of all the legal challenges to evolution that have been cropping up within only the last four years: there have been two federal trials (outlined below) and two state elections (OH and KS) that hinged on questions of evolution. Anti-evolution measures were passed in six state legislatures during this period, and 44 states had local measures passed in counties or in individual communities.

At the federal level, there was the 2004 case in Cobb County, Georgia, where the school board decided to put warning labels on the inside of the local high school biology textbook (written by Miller, incidentally). The stickers read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." Miller pointed out that the scientific definition of “theory” is not “we don’t really know,” and really a theory is of a higher order than a fact, since theories explain sets of facts. Additionally, he protested that the sticker conveys a false sense of certainty about all other fields of biology, and implies that, for instance, ecology and cell biology should not “be approached with an open mind, studied carefully [or] critically considered.” Kind of insulting to all biologists, really.

And then of course there was the famous Dover trial in 2005, for which he served as an expert witness for the side of science. In this case, the local school board was guided by the Discovery Institute’s booklet, “Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook,” and bought two sets of the Intelligent Design textbooks “Of Pandas and People” for the school library, as recommended by the booklet. The board also demanded that the biology teachers re-write their curricula to include intelligent design. They refused. The school board pushed back, demanding then that the teachers at least use an intelligent design lesson plan that the school board wrote for them. They refused. The school board finally asked the teachers to just read a statement to the class about the “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory and the teachers once more refused, forcing the school superintendent to come in and read the statement to the classes while the teachers stood outside. There was immediate protest from the community, of course, and a first amendment lawsuit was quickly filed against the Dover Area School District.

A group of scientists, including Miller, volunteered to serve as expert witnesses. Miller noted in his talk that despite ID proponents’ eagerness to subpoena “evolutionists” for a courtroom trial and force them to speak under oath, 5 of 8 ID witness volunteers dropped out of the case (including William Dembski, who wrote the document linked to in this paragraph).

The details of the ruling and the evidence is really quite fascinating, and you can find a thorough summary at Wikipedia along with a link to the judge’s decision. (The judge ruled, by the way, on the side of evolution.)

Miller then went on to outline just some of the purported evidence for Intelligent Design. In his talk on Friday, he just went over one major piece of the ID case—the “irreducible complexity” of the bacterial flagellum, but his book has many more, all of which he carefully considers and thoroughly destroys.

Michael Behe, one of the major ID theorists, defines irreducible complexity basically as the inability to produce a complex structure piece by piece while maintaining one function. For example, you couldn’t evolve a mousetrap because a mousetrap with only a couple of its parts is no longer a mousetrap—all of the parts are necessary for its mouse-catching function. The IDers say that the bacterial flagellum is an example of such an irreducibly complex structure, as it would not be able to function as a flagellum without any of its parts.

As Miller described in his talk and in OAT, the major problem with this argument is that it assumes that modern-day biological structures have evolved from earlier structures with similar functions. The fact is, as structures evolve, they often acquire radically new functions. (See my earlier post on the tryptophan operon for a biochemical example of this.) The same goes for the bacterial flagellum. It turns out that the base of the flagellum has incredible homology with another bacterial structure called a Type III Secretory System, used by bacteria to pump poisons. Additionally, other parts of the flagellum are made of a number of other proteins that exist elsewhere in the cell, performing other functions. So, unlike the predictions of the Irreducible Complexity argument, it is in fact possible to “take away” parts of a complex biological machine and have it still function—it’s just a different function.

At this point in the talk, Miller switched gears. He asked: well, if the best arguments the IDers can come up with don’t hold water, why is there such popular support for ID? He put a lot of emphasis on a quote from an NPR interview about evolution with former Sen. Rick Santorum, which I think is significant enough to reproduce here in its entirety:

"It has huge consequences for society. It's where we come from. Does man have a purpose? Is there a purpose for our lives? Or are we just simply the result of chance? If we are the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us."

Miller’s point was that Santorum--and approximately half of Americans--reject evolution because they see it as materialistic to a fault: denying souls, denying order, purpose, and meaning. Essentially, Miller argued, the design movement has forced science into a corner: out of opposition to the ID movement, scientists find themselves having to take the exact opposite position—that there is no design in the universe.

Miller argued the opposite: the universe has a design; it is the design of evolution. Basically, he said that evolution is an inherent, predictable property of life. It explores adaptive space in a predictable way, filling the same ecological niches with similar types of organisms. All organisms and biological structures do have a function, but it is a function that is driven by evolution. Miller went through several examples--such as the elegance of the genetic code, the specificity of proteins, the homology between different sorts of animals—-to illustrate this evolutionary “design.” He would probably note that the fact that I just put the word “design” in quotes in that last sentence is a sign that I am a scientist who has become afraid of the word because of its attachment to the anti-science ID movement. We, as the science-loving public, must reclaim that word, he argued. Regardless of our own beliefs about religion, we must show that the design of evolution does not mean our species and our lives are ruled only by chance and accident--we can still have purpose in our lives, and we are not "mistakes." Science’s derided materialism is its virtue, not its downfall, because it allows science to find natural explanations for natural phenomena. The ID movement was founded on an opposition to this materialism but Miller (like C.S. Lewis in the title of this post) argued that materialism shouldn’t frighten us, as a society, away from science. The scientific process cannot make claims about good and evil; this is society’s job as a whole. Science, and specifically evolution, Miller argued, will not make us immoral. It will only teach us about our place amongst the life on Earth, a place uniquely suited for us and our lives, each with its own unique purpose for the greater good.

Miller deftly answered the questions from the audience after his talk. This is obviously a man who has given many, many talks to diverse audiences, has heard every possible question, and has thought about all of them. His answers were eloquent and well-considered. If there were any IDers in the audience, they did not speak up in the Q&A period. As a friend and I discussed afterwards, they really wouldn’t have much to protest in the talk. Miller really covered all of the bases, and as a practicing Roman Catholic, could hardly be told that evolution is threatening to religion. If you haven’t yet read Only a Theory I suggest you pick it up at your local library. Not only does it thoroughly annihilate the ID position from every angle (useful reading for when you are forced to argue with a creationist) and discuss the larger anti-science implications of the anti-evolution movement, but it also provides a useful and much-needed perspective on the relationship between evolution and philosophical questions of morality and purpose. Read the book, and if you are lucky enough to see an announcement of a talk by Ken Miller, go and see him--and bring your friends.

Increase in Measles Cases

The CDC has issued a press release on an increase in the number of measles cases in the U.S. this year, with 131 cases reported so far. Of those measles patients, 95 were eligible for vaccination but 63 of them were not vaccinated because of their--or most likely their parents'--belief that vaccines are "dangerous."
I'm not sure how much evidence there need to be to convince parents that the MMR vaccine, and/or the preservative in it, do not cause autism. Obviously, piles of evidence accrued from gigantic longitudinal studies of thousands of children over many years are not enough. (see here, here, here, here, and here, for starters.) Will an epidemic of preventable, deadly infections be the only thing that will change some people's minds?
If people want to put themselves in harm's way because of their willingness to believe a bunch of pseudoscientific wackaloons, that's their problem. It's a terrible shame that they're putting their kids at risk too.

Trickery and Sex in the Firefly World

This is not news in the scientific world, but it’s news to me—I ran across this in some reading I have to do for a seminar tomorrow. Further evidence that bugs are awesome:

Fireflies, lightning bugs, or Lampyrids (if you were the nerdy type). Who didn’t spend innumerable summer evenings in childhood chasing after these beetles, empty pickle jar in hand? But you might not have known of the high drama and Shakespearian trickery that was going on among these insects right there in your own childhood backyard.

There’s multiple species and genera of Lampyrids in North America, each with its own characteristic flashing pattern. Males and females of the same species locate each other for mating using these unique signals. However, females of the genus Photuris have evolved a deadly trap: they lure males of other genera by imitating their own females’ flashes. When the males come a-courtin’, the Photuris females pounce, and devour them with gusto.

You may wonder how the Photuris females ever mate, if they’re always on the prowl for dinner during mating time. Turns out that male Photuris capitalize on their female’s predilection for firefly meat by imitating the flashing patterns of males of other genera—the very insects that the female is trying to lure to their death! Some Photuris males go even farther in their imitation, by flashing not only the right pattern, but also at the right time of night, in the right location, to be even more convincing as the potential prey.

In some species of Photuris this imitative behavior has gone so far that the species has completely lost the ability to produce its own unique flashing pattern, instead conducting all its business using signals stolen from others.

I’m unaware of any papers that detail what happens next, after the flash exchange—how does the male Photuris end up as the mate, and not the dinner of the female? I’ll do some more searching because this has piqued my interest, and let you know if I find an answer.

The Darwin Particle

My father works with the particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois. As a child, when I would visit him at work and we would walk through the underground tunnels where the beam-control equipment was kept, the towering machines on each side of the walkway would terrify me: they thundered, blinked, screamed "Warning: Radiation" to me at every turn.

Now CERN has built an even bigger, scarier accelerator. And all I have in my lab is jars of termites.

Fortunately, we biologists now have our own accelerator to terrify our progeny with. At last, the final secrets of evolution are within our reach.

The Black Widow Spins Her Deadly Web... Well, Sometimes.

I always get disproportionately excited when I read about a new discovery showing behavioral complexity in invertebrates. Of course, now that we understand the incredible intricacy of honeybees' language, these sorts of things shouldn’t surprise me too much. But I still love this stuff, wherever it pops up.

Black widows alter their web architecture to be better insect traps as they get hungrier. A neat little paper in this month’s issue of Animal Behavior [76(3):823-829] describes how this happens.

When a black widow spider is well-fed, it uses that energy with gusto—spinning out lots of thread, but making a chaotic, disordered cloud of a web near the opening to its hideout. This kind of web is called a ‘tangle-based’ web, and for all that thread, isn’t really that sticky.

However, take a spider who hasn’t been fed for a week, and watch her spin a web. That jumble becomes a well-engineered, efficient killing machine. Instead of making a jumble of undifferentiated, generic thread, the spider uses three different kinds of silk structures to spin a very specific trap (using less thread overall):
(This image is taken from the original paper)



SH is the silk sheet, a flat plane on which the spider can easily maneuver, supported by a network of threads (ST). Anchoring the web to the substrate are the very sticky gumfooted threads (GF), which are kept under constant tension.

The researchers set up homes for 112 juvenile black widow females, fed half of them every day for a week, and the other half nothing for a week. After the members of each group spun their characteristic webs, the webs were imaged to quantify the structural differences between them. Then the researchers saw what happened when half of each group was then moved to the other group’s webs, and then fed.

Under most metrics used, the researchers found that it was indeed much easier for black widows of both types to catch prey when the spider was using a hungry spider’s three-thread design, rather than the chaotic mass of thread of a fed spider. It seemed that the silk sheet made it easier for the spider to sprint out towards its prey. The prey may have alerted the spider to its presence by touching the gumfooted threads and sending out vibrations, and perhaps was slowed down by those threads’ especial stickiness.

Why would black widows switch between a poor web and a good web, though? Wouldn’t it be better to just maintain the efficient functionality of the three-thread design whether the spider was hungry or satiated? This is especially head-scratching when you consider that it uses up more silk to make the jumbled webs of the full spiders. The spider would be using up energy both to modify the web as well as to make the loads of silk needed to the tangle-based web.

Consider this though: the authors point out that many spiders are prone to killing more prey than they can eat, and just leaving the extra prey rolled up in silk on their webs. It’s also been documented that some spiders may just eat themselves to death if able to catch too many prey. Perhaps the switch to the poorly-trapping tangle-based web is a smart move by the black widows, at the very least saving them the energy of pursuing and killing more prey than they can use, at the most sparing them a fate like Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote. The authors also suggest that the tangle of web of a fed spider might serve as a predator defense in those times in which it doesn’t need the web to serve as a food trap.

I think the behavioral plasticity that can be built into such a small animal is really fascinating, and the adaptability of the webs of these spiders is just another example of that. So three cheers for the black widow (one for each part of her web)!

And one more that we aren’t one of the flies who get caught by her web when she’s hungry…

On the Jury—Part II

This entry is a follow-up to last week’s “On the Jury—Part I.” If you haven’t yet read that entry, do so before reading this one.


After the closing arguments had taken place, the judge gave us his final instructions and we were sent into the deliberation room. I was very apprehensive at this point. After hearing all of the evidence throughout the two days of the trial, I did not feel supremely confident that the defendant had committed the crime. In fact, the thought that we might convict him and send him to jail put knots into my stomach. My worry was that I was the only one who would feel this way, and I would have to argue against eleven rabid, blood-thirsty conviction cowboys, I would have to refuse to budge, everyone would hate me, and the jury would be hung. At least this way the defendant would have a chance, though. My worst fear was that my innate agreeability would allow me to be convinced and the defendant would go, possibly innocently, to jail, and I would hate myself for the rest of my life starting the next morning.

No pressure.

Filing into the deliberation room, everyone was visibly on edge. Some made too-loud jokes and laughed nervously. Some looked down at the floor and didn’t talk to anyone. Everyone was very polite to one another. Our foreman was an older woman with a gentle demeanor who had been burglarized and robbed many times without ever having had a conviction, but was nevertheless chosen to be on the jury. She read again to us from the judge’s printed instructions and the legal descriptions of the two crimes we were meant to deliberate on: burglary in the first degree and theft over $500. Then it was silent. “Well,” said the foreman. “Should we begin?”

It turns out I needn’t have worried about being the only one with doubts. From a quick survey of the jury after the first few brave people had spoken up, everyone was feeling uneasy about the case. We began compiling a list of the holes in the case on a whiteboard in the room. The board quickly filled up with all the jury members’ particular hang-ups with the evidence. Where was the physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime scene? Why weren’t the watches ID’d as the Jones’ until today? Did the defendant’s complexion really change from uneven and pockmarked to smooth and even between March and August? Why didn’t they bring in a bloodhound to do a definitive trailing of the path of the burglar? Where were the jacket and the hat? Why didn’t they do a line-up of the defendant with other young black guys of light builds? Why on earth did no one check up on the defendant’s alibi? The list went on. Excited chattering groups quickly broke off from the main group, each discussing their own certain takes on the evidence. I was sitting near a middle-aged Hispanic hairdresser and several young women of my age: a black woman, a woman of color of indeterminate race, and another white woman. All of us expressed our disgust in the incompleteness of the evidence and the police’s investigation. The hairdresser weighed in with her professional opinion that the defendant was not, in fact, wearing cornrows in his mugshot.

The mood in the room became almost spirited once we realized, with relief, that we were all more or less on the same page. We opened up the burglar’s backpack, given to us with all of the other physical evidence for our deliberations, and passed around the odd contents remaining after the Jones’ property had been returned to them. There were red and gold candy wrappers covered in Chinese characters and some sort of flyer with an unknown Asian script on it. All the women I was sitting with guffawed when a pink-wrapped Maxi pad was removed from the pack. I hypothesized that the burglar had stolen the backpack and bike from a Chinese girl on his way to the Jones’ neighborhood and everyone laughed in agreement. And an item that one of the lawyers had briefly mentioned to be a “band-aid” was actually a disposable razor blade. “Good thing they actually looked hard at the contents,” somebody noted sarcastically.

The watches were passed around with a slightly different attitude. They were, indeed, gorgeous and expensive watches. Very heavy, with an aura of wealth and success. People handled them gingerly in their plastic evidence bags. I noted to the group that the gold Omega watch that was ID’d by Mr. Jones on the stand that day was of a standard, classic design, shared with most men’s watches. Of course it was gold, which made it more special, but imagine how many watches there existed that looked more or less like this one. There were no engravings or other unique features. We didn’t have the appraiser’s report that would have listed this watch among the other appraised jewelry inherited from Mr. Jones’ deceased parents, either. “I bet these don’t belong to that boy,” said one of the jurors. We murmured an agreement. “But I’m not totally sure they belong to those people either.”

Everyone wondered about Mrs. Coons’ ID of the burglar and the defendant as looking “just like DeAngelo Barksdale from The Wire.” “Hey, have any of you guys ever seen The Wire?” asked one of the jurors. We all looked around the table at each other. “Wow, a room of twelve people where nobody watches cable tv!” somebody exclaimed. So that piece of evidence went by the wayside because of all of us were pop-culturally incompetent.

“I am so angry with all of the lawyers and the police for putting us in this position!” exclaimed a middle-aged real estate agent with a strong twang from the other end of the table. “I can’t believe that they expect us just to send this guy to jail with this kind of evidence.” There were vigorous affirmations of this sentiment from all around the table. At this point, we had been deliberating for about an hour or so. The conversation had slowed. The foreman asked us if we were ready to start deciding the actual verdict. We were.

She suggested that we go around the table, each of us stating what verdict we would give and a brief statement of why. And so we did. Everyone had his or her own reason that was the strongest in their mind. The stutterer came out slowly and red-facedly with his verdict of not guilty from lack of definitive evidence. The African immigrant with the strong accent and the young Hispanic man—who was probably profiled by the police all the time—both opined that the police hadn’t bothered to go any farther in their search than the first black man they saw, and thus the defendant should be not guilty from lack of strong evidence. I said not guilty, for an overall lack of evidence but especially the seemingly bogus watch ID. The real estate agent with the twang was most unconvinced from the lack of DNA or fingerprint evidence. Others had their own reasons.

One juror, a middle-aged, well-spoken white man, agreed that the evidence was, in fact, less than would be desired in a number of instances. “But how would you explain the witnesses’ positive ID’s of the defendant if he weren’t the guy, though? I just don’t know.” He was the only one who did not say “not guilty.” After everyone had said their piece, there was a pause, and all heads turned toward this one man. He looked around and then looked down. “I agree with things that people have been saying,” he started. “I’m uneasy because of the witnesses’ identification of the defendant,” he continued. “But I’ll say ‘not guilty,’ too,” the man finished in a rush of quiet words.

With relief palpable in the room, the foreman filled out the verdict form and went through the double-knock routine at the door to inform the judge’s clerk, a young, type-A law student. After several minutes we were called back in to the courtroom. We filed in, while clerks, defendant, lawyers, and the audience—the defendant’s friends—stood silently, watching us. I noticed gratefully that neither Mr. Jones nor his neighbors were in the courtroom. I didn’t want to have to feel their hatred when we let the man off whom they were convinced was guilty.

“Who will speak for you?” questioned the courtroom clerk.

I pointed at the foreman, and she stood up and said, “I will.”

“How do you find the defendant for the charge of burglary in the first degree?” asked the clerk.

“Not guilty,” said our foreman, enunciating clearly.

With this, a movement went through the courtroom. The defendant’s friends gasped, exclaimed, cried out, began hugging each other. The defendant stood, immovable, face a mask, as he had been throughout almost all of his trial.

We repeated the same verdict for the second charge. Some other stuff might have been said, but I didn’t notice because I was watching the defendant go over to his friends and be overtaken by a mass of jumping, giggling, back-slapping, bear-hugging, and crying. I wondered if two of them lived in the Jones’ neighborhood after all. Tears came to my eyes and my hands were shaking. One of the friends looked over to us and said, “You guys did good today. Real good.” I looked down, too overcome to look at them any more.

When I got home, the first thing I did was to look up The Wire’s web page and find out who plays D’Angelo Barksdale. It’s an actor named Larry Gilliard, Jr. Feeling apprehensive, I went to Gilliard Jr.’s bio. When it came up, I squinted at the small picture in disbelief and enlarged it.

The character D’Angelo Barksdale looks nothing like the defendant. Nothing. NO. THING. I actually laughed out loud as I stared at the picture. I just couldn’t stop laughing. Sure, they are both young black men with slight builds. But their faces are totally different. The defendant’s face was defined, in my opinion, by large eyes with very heavy lids that I never saw reveal more than half of his eyeballs. He also had a very broad nose and well-defined cheekbones. Larry Gilliard, Jr. has light lids over his fully-visible eyes, and a more oval, smoother face. It’s hard for me to describe how little they look like each other. I even went and looked at a picture of Gilliard Jr. as he appears in the tv show, in case I was thrown off by the preppy sweater and smile he wore in his actor profile. No, even in a picture of him playing a street punk he looked nothing like the defendant. For Mrs. Coons to describe the defendant as looking just like D’Angelo Barksdale would be like her describing, say, Audrey Tatou as looking just like Natalie Portman because they’re both young, slender white women with short brown hair. I mean, it’s totally ridiculous. It’s the kind of mistake you’d make if, for example, you were a Mozambican living in the bush who really didn’t have any interaction with white people at all, and only saw them occasionally on other people’s tvs when the electricity was working.

Looking at this picture made me feel more confident that we had done the right thing as a jury. There was clearly an element of racism in the conviction, although it seemed unconscious. The witnesses had obviously seen a real burglary and the real burglar. But they were eager to help their neighbor, and were unfamiliar enough with black men in their every day lives. So much so that they were able to convince themselves that this young black man with suspicious goods in his pocket and sweat on his shirt was in fact the very same young black man they had seen robbing their friend’s house. The police really don’t have enough resources to thoroughly investigate every burglary, and didn’t bother to look too hard for evidence to fill in the gaps after getting the positive ID from the neighbors. No one was lying. No one was trying to mislead anyone. But people make mistakes and oversights out of a conviction of something. But they weren’t able to convince us with their conviction due to a lack of real, hard evidence. Although the defendant had very likely robbed somebody that day, suspicion alone could not convince us of the link between the defendant and this particular burglary. In my firm belief now, after the trial, we the jury were able to make the right decision to not send him to jail. To my surprise, the system of American justice—at least in this one case—worked as designed.

Your Vote Needed!

Hi folks

There is a call for submissions on a new site called Carnival of Evolution, which publicizes good original writing on evolution in the blogosphere. I think I'd like to send something over.

What is the best evolution-related post so far on this blog, in your opinion? Leave your vote in the comments.

Thanks!